Isn't Greenwald kind of cool? Like, he's really edgy and anti-establishment. Indeed: anti-establishment seems to be the main coherent thread in his politics. Is he not cool because he just does everything too earnestly?
Reddit isn't cool. YA fiction isn't cool. The DSA certainly isn't cool.
What is cool? I hope that what is cool is hanging out, having a good time, and not reading the news or having strong political opinions. The teenagers I see in real life, rather than on the internet, seem to have a much better understanding of this.
It seems ironic to accuse the host of myopia and then anoint Twitter as the place where "all the networking journalists, academics, and business leaders" do their shopping. I've never used Twitter. Don't even read it, just barely know it exists. The same can be said for everybody above me in the corporate chain to the CEO. (Our company altogether employs about 6,000 and has offices in 14 countries).
We know Twitter exists, and a bunch of weird cultural flamefests occupy it, and it's possible if you have bad luck to be featured in one of them. But shop there for actionable insight? Never. As far as business goes, it's as relevant (i.e. not at all) as Saturday Night Live was to Exxon/Mobil's long-term strategy in the 1980s, or the Sunday funnies were to how FDR prosecuted the Second World War.
Of course, I would certainly think different if I were in the business of punditry, or news, or entertainment (if there's a difference), but I'm not, and most American business is not.
Twitter is horrible because the post-length limit is just long enough for tribal signaling, but not long enough for substance. It would be a very different place with a 500 character minimum and no quote-tweet function.
It's being plugged into a hivemind, and a hivemind that only wants the most shallow thoughts promulgated, and nodes in the hivemind are desperately afraid of being targeted for removal from the hivemind for wrongthink, and the best way to not get targeted for wrongthink (in the very short term) is to be the one doing the targeting.
There is the possibility that the initial post length has shaped the type of site it has become i.e. if it had always been 280 characters or longer, maybe twitter discourse would have evolved differently. Not saying I have a strong positive position on this, but its worth considering.
honest to jesus could you please shut the fuck up. you are singlehandedly the most obnoxious individual in this or any other comments section. i don't for the life of me know why scott continues to allow your festering presence, even low-moderation communities usually ban gimmick accounts like yours once the joke wears off
oh no, please br'er marxbro1917, don't leave us for that briar patch. whatever would we do without your obsessive demands for scott to apologize for inane shit that you, and only you, are bothered by; or your constant chinese water torture of dippy dribblings straight from soc.politics.marxism faq's so fucking boring that even the faq authors themselves couldn't manage to actually read them all the way through. truly, your out-and-out postmodernly-awful campaign of trolling terror holds a mighty mirror up to we so-called rationalists, and in the dazzling light of that ghastly reflection we can only weep at the hypocrisies and inconsistencies that define our humble horrid human selves.
I wasn't a big John McCain fan, but I always thought the most statesmanlike thing he did was play a sizable role in the early 1990s rapprochement between Washington and Hanoi. It was precisely because he had strong personal reasons for disliking his former captors who had beaten him frequently that made this impressive.
Anyway, McCain didn't get in trouble for using a racial epithet against his torturers because he was famous for having been tortured, and already in the early 1990s he had risen above his feelings in the national interest.
Do most people actually intend that they refer to the Vietnam POW conspiracy theory? My impression was that the people who used them mostly just wanted to show generic patriotism & respect for the military.
Disagree. I'm a left of center Democrat who worked for the Federal Government for 20 years specifically out of a sense of patriotism. I'm a computer scientist; I would have made a lot more in the private sector.
Which side is "the aggressor side"? The people who tried to get Intelligent Design into schools, or the New Atheists? Harvey Weinstein or the people who brought suit against him? Derek Chauvin or the protestors in the streets?
> "Cancel culture" does not refer to getting TV shows cancelled. It refers to weaponized culture war antagonism to destroy individuals
I think his point is that, while "cancel culture" is used to refer to all of these, TV shows being cancelled is most annoying to the typical not-very-politically-engaged person & so complaints about it are more influential.
The coup de grace for #MeToo believe-women feminism came after Tara Reade's rape accusation against Joe Biden in March 2020. It was ebbing down already, but at that point it's almost like something clicked in a few editorial rooms across the US and the movement lost its last source of clout.
Arguably, something else happened in March 2020, but that something took its time to percolate into the newsrooms...
(I do believe that cancel culture lost its sharpest tooth with the end of #MeToo. Cancellation in 2016 on allegations of sexual assault would make people shunned and break families apart, while cancellation in 2020 merely ruins careers and politically charged friendships.)
Exactly, but it kicked the system into the basin of another attractor. Right now there is no interest in pushing the topic back into the mainstream (probably because a critical mass of "stakeholders" have gotten their hands burned), and it's not considered avantgarde any more, so I don't think it will come back in foreseeable time.
I think the gradual leftward movement (Scott has written about this elsewhere as "Moloch always swims leftward") happens because, every time we get increases to productivity from new tech or management techniques, we spend it on raising the amount of compassion for others we can afford to have. This spending is mostly not directly observable spending of money, but the continual imposition of new overhead costs, and the elimination of negative incentives on people to act in socially-beneficial ways. The potential problem is that we can spend all our dividends on re-distributing the pie, and never on making the pie bigger.
The USA and western societies have in general become a lot more leftist over time with increasing wealth, e.g. modern America is certainly much further to the left than it was in the era of the Wild West.
I think this mostly explains trends like increasing gay rights and conservative acquiescence to it. Gay rights are possible because of the welfare state. It's not like society spontaneously woke up one day and decided for no reason that although for all of human history homosexuality was strongly taboo, today would be different. What changed was the welfare state become firmly established and displaced the family/children as the primary caregivers in old age. If you live in a small village and everyone needs to sprog 5 times to ensure 2-3 children who can build a house for you to live in when you're old, being gay is practically an old-age death sentence because you won't have children, AND a huge affront to your whole community who really NEEDS those extra hands in the fields on to man the ramparts, and can't afford a stagnant population level. Then throw in "gay culture" with its general objections to being conspicuously manly and what that means in a world filled with warring tribes and the reasons to create a taboo get even stronger. The suppression in turn causes enormous uncertainty about how many of these people exactly there are, making it circular - everyone is afraid that if the taboo falls it'll turn out that 25% of men are gay and suddenly everything falls apart.
But now if you live in a massive country of tens of millions of people surrounded by a countryside filled with robot tractors and warfare is fought online, and you have lots of research telling you that the gay population is stable and relatively small, and old people don't need children anymore because the state will put them in a care home, well, suddenly the need for the taboo is gone and over time it's natural that it'd fade away.
There is a dark side to all this, namely, is the welfare state actually long term sustainable. The taboo against homosexuality fell slowly partly because the welfare state is quite new and because every so often a story about state pension schemes being bankrupt somehow sneaks through the leftist media. We should expect near blanket media suppression about bankrupt welfare schemes given the socialist tendencies of journalists and general disinterest in fiscal conservatism amongst modern conservative parties, so it's very hard to understand how stable the current situation is. If anything bad happens to the welfare state, however hard it is to imagine now, gay rights will be the first thing that gets the chop.
I think the "left/right" distinction only makes sense at certain moments in history, so using it to think about long-term trends leads to confusion. Here's a different way to think about it, which I made up just now, so caveat emptor:
Instead of left/right, use the 2-dimensional phase space of identity / diversity on one dimension, and perceived safety on the other. With "identity / diversity" I'm contrasting people who believe in "perfection", and therefore that history is progressing (in the Hegelian sense) toward an endpoint at which all people will be identical (e.g., Platonists, Christians, Marxists, Nazis, Social Justice), versus people who believe that societies are complex mechanisms which operate more efficiently with many different types of parts, and so diversity (perhaps even of wealth) and division-of-labor are beneficial. We might equally well call this dimension "identity / liberty"; diversity and liberty aren't the same thing, but liberty maximizes diversity more than any centrally planned system can.
On the low end of "safety" we have societies threatened with extinction. These are usually communal and anti-individualistic, emphasizing social cooperation and stability over all else. (Today we call people who feel this way "conservatives", though that term actually means "people who take Chesterton's fence seriously", which is quite different.)
Increasing safety, technology, and wealth are all a kind of surplus. Societies on the "identity" end of identity/diversity invest that surplus in making the members of society more identical, eliminating imbalances of wealth and power. Ancient Sparta would be an example. Sparta was the original inspiration for an entire lineage of ideologies which believe in "perfection", and was a direct inspiration for many of those thinkers or ideologies, including Plato, Rousseau, and the Nazis. It got its wealth surplus in the form of the conquest and enslavement of its neighbors, and exploited those slaves to free every Spartan citizen from work, both in order to train as soldiers, to eliminate wealth disparities, and to go through a long, government-controlled educational process of indoctrination into Spartan ideology.
These "identity" cultures move thru these different focuses of ideology as their surplus increases:
Strict communitarian focus on survival =>
Making all people within their culture identical (early Christianity, French Revolution, Marxism, Nazism) =>
Making all people in the world identical (Roman Christianity, International Marxism, Social Justice)
Societies on the "diversity" end, like Athens, invest that surplus in increasing liberties. They move thru these different ideological focuses as wealth increases:
Strict communitarian focus on survival =>
Currency, commerce, trade, individual wealth (Venice, the late middle ages in Italy and the Netherlands) =>
Individual liberties (Athens, the Renaissance, American Revolution, libertarianism) =>
Basic research and other re-investment => (industrial revolution, science)
Do cool stuff (put a man on the Moon, the Culture)
(But beware of using the Culture as an example. Remember it's fictional, and tries to combine both "identity" and "diversity" values, in a way I don't believe is possible.)
Interesting take. Not going to argue against it, but Social Justice being anti-diversity while (implied) anti-SJ would be pro-diversity was pretty funny feature arising from that setup. It seems to kinda make sense in your framework though and I think I have a sense of what you are pointing at. That idea of striving for perfection seems to capture it for me.
To rephrase my confusion: I thought it strange, that when society gains wealth through time, it translates into society also having and using more resources for empathy towards a wider range of people, but when an individual gains wealth, it seems to diminish their range of empathy.
I realize that there is a cynical (probably Marxist) way to view this: that "societal compassion" isn't really compassion at all – it is just capitalism widening the consumer base to reap more profits. So the confusion would arise from, well, confusing the two "emotions" to be the same and having similar effects, when in fact, society as an entity has no such, nor any other kind of, emotions.
"But the individuals of said society still do have such emotions!", I might object, "and to view their empathy as mere selfish profit seeking renders the all the concepts of empathy, compassion and unselfishness totally useless and meaningless".
I don’t know, and I’m getting sidetracked. What I’m still left wondering is, inspired by your concept of striving towards perfection, that if society is becoming more homogeneous by some meaningful metric, taken with the tendency to create schism via the “Narcissism of small differences”, it would seem that when people are expelled from the in-group, people from the fringes of society are assimilated in to accommodate that space. I’m visualizing flows that resemble what’s going on in magnetic fields.
But now it’s probably good time to get some sleep.
Er, what I should have said in my previous comment after "The potential problem" is that, every time we make the pie bigger, we use some of that extra pie to pay costs some individuals would otherwise have born which would have served as incentives, and the loss of those incentives shrinks the pie, or adds "bad stuff" to the pie. Or, we use that extra pie to pay the cost of implementing and obeying some new regulation which is supposed to prevent some harm, but which also introduces some harm, so we're spending our pie growth to produce net social harm. The pie of net total social goods - bads might still be growing, or might be shrinking. I think we can point to some clear cases where spending in order to reduce harm usually increases harm by that mechanism, such as medical insurance and medical regulation.
> I think New Atheism petered out because it basically won. Religion is much less influential today than it was 20 years ago.
I don't think New Atheism had too much effect on this. Surveys have shown that "atheist" and "no religion" affiliations have bee nsteadily declining for many decades, and New Atheism didn't really cause a blip at the time, but it obviously has some long-term effects contributing to the decline in all the books and everything that are now available.
The decline in religious affiliation are similar across countries. It actually seems more plausible that the rise of New Atheism as a movement was a *result* of declining interest in religion and a growing interest in secularism, rather than the result, ie. we only heard about this movement because this existing trend created a market where once there was none.
Your original claim: "Surveys have shown that "atheist" and "no religion" affiliations have bee nsteadily declining for many decades" Did you write "atheist" for "religious"?
The weakest part of this fact-free speculation about "linguistic kill shots" is that "politically correct" has followed the same pattern as "woke." It started out being used unironically among the left, then became identified with intra-left snark, and then conservatives picked up on the snarky usage, which blew it up into the mainstream. Using "woke" as a pejorative is already starting to fall out of favor on the far-left now that conservative legislators and think tank flacks are using it to describe things like minimum wage hikes and free child care.
The first person I can recall using the term "politically correct" was rock star Joe Strummer in the early 1980s. He was laughing that The Clash's leftist fans were always complaining that The Clash wasn't "politically correct" enough, but he felt The Clash had done plenty for the left.
My impression from the Strummer interview was that "politically correct" meant in early 1980s Britain adherence to the Labour/Stalinist line of Arthur Scargill, head of the National Union of Mineworkers, rather than the more cultural angle it now implies.
The Stalinist roots are undeniable. Actually, in the Soviet Union, as late as the late 1980's, the term was in use. I recall reading about a Soviet conservative figure praising an anti-Glasnost article in the Soviet press as "politically correct", meaning it was correct according the party line.
I am much less sure about the expression "politically correct" having been given wide currency in the 1980s and early 1990s' Western non-Marxist Left. Which leftist figure back then was praised as being politically correct (say, McGovern or Jesse Jackson) as opposed to Republicans or squarer leftists (say, Blue Dog Democrats)? Has anyone ever said Gary Hart was not politically correct enough?
Is there any evidence that "politically correct" was ever said as a complement by *anyone*, left, right, Soviet, or even Stalinist? I can't remember this usage from my childhood in the US in the 80s--90s.
I first remember hearing the word associated with my dad's (then) right-centrist politics around 1990. Then by the time _PCU_ came out in 1994, everyone was aware of the word, although my sense at the time was it was mostly a badge of group identification for the kind of conservatives who define themselves by being anti-whatever the Democrats are doing.
Drucker recalled Stalinists and Nazis using it in the pre-WW II days, but he did not present quotes.
In the early 1990s, I remember conservatives complaining about leftiets' political correction. I do not recall leftists praising each other back in the for being "politically correct".
Ah, good point. I misunderstood your OP and assumed you meant the "Soviet conservative figure" was only damning with faint praise and not delivering a true compliment. Very American of me, I'm sure.
No, in my middle-class daily-local-paper-reading remembrance of the 80s/90s, (mainstream) leftists never used the term "politically correct" except occasionally to deride conservatives' worldview.
I don't think that someone using a term that is translated as "politically correct" is quite the same thing as the actual phrase "politically correct" being used (I assume that Soviet figure writing in the Soviet press would not be using English).
According to Google's Ngram, the term "politically correct" appeared occasionally in books in the 1930s, then was largely forgotten until the late 1980s, when it exploded in usage up until the mid-1990s. My impression is that its usage was spread by neoconservatives with personal or scholarly memory of 1930s Stalinism, but it was mostly applied by them to the rising postmodernist cultural left in the English Lit departments influenced by Derrida and Foucault rather than to the fading modernist economic left.
The early 1990s battles over political correctness were surprisingly literary in subject matter. My vague recollection is that the mandarins largely won the arguments at that time (in, say, the New York Times Magazine) because they had better taste in literature than did the French theorists. The big guns of the American novel back then, with the exception of Toni Morrison, were unenthusiastic about political correctness: Updike, Roth, Wolfe, McCarthy, Bellow, De Lillo, Pynchon etc. For example, Philip Roth's fine 2000 novel "The Human Stain" begins with an aged professor getting canceled for inadvertent political correctness that reads exactly like it was ripped from the headlines of a 2021 whoop-tee-doo (then the book goes off in an unexpected direction).
But far fewer people care as much these days about literary quality as they did back then.
I think the phrase 'political correctness' mostly got going from French communists attacking 'premature anti-fascists' who fought the Germans through the Hitler-Stalin pact. So it's always been a little gamy, a little ironic.
FWIW I remember "politically correct" being used in conversation among leftists in the late 80s/early 90s in precisely this way—first unironically, then more & more often ironically.
This film wasn't well received and doesn't seem well remembered, but was spoofing PC culture on college campuses back in 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCU_(film)
Earlier - "politically correct" was very common among my cohort in the mid 70's, said cohort being radical activists and hippies. It was so common it was usually abbreviated to just "PC". We had sufficient rad cred we could counter-signal by making fun of its silly excesses - my favorite joke was to refer to San Francisco's Fisherperson's Wharf.
I think "cancel culture" even moreso. Even the "left not liberal" types don't use that anymore because it's associated with Ted Cruz and the sort. "Woke" I think still has some legs. I do see cool irony bros using it. (i.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvVhCCWPgaI)
What do conservatives mean when they complain about someone or some institution being woke? I haven’t been able to nail it down.
Some object to the idea that any but a tiny minority are racist. I note Tim Scott being pulled over 7 times in six years, being detained for impersonating a US Senator, etc. and they agree that happens. So it’s more than a tiny minority? No and they get all huffy. I don’t really understand where they are coming from.
You identified something important: aesthetic. But what you fail to realise is that it's your fault for giving so much weight to aesthetics. Right wingers (yes, even center-right) are obsessed with 'anti-aesthetics', they hate elites who care too much about their appearance, they hate puritans who care about crafting ideal images of their personality. I'm not going to speculate why this might be, lest I get a 'not all conservatives!' from you, but it's quite clear the right hates aesthetics in a disproportionate amount. Maybe they are the 'have nots' when it comes to looking good?
I would, and I'm "elite" (as far as income/education goes) and live on the west coast of the US. I am always impressed by someone who takes first-class care of his machinery. It bespeaks a pride in one's work that further suggests reliability, trustworthiness, and self-discipline -- very valuable character traits. In my experience people who treat their tools with disrespect also treat their friends and colleagues that way, too.
"Aesthetics" or "theatrics"? I'd like to make that distinction as it's not that difficult to adopt an archetypal persona simply to attract attention and thus votes. Groups with different preferences will take different sorts of appearances as insincere, likely due to projection. The problem with that is, of course, that it's easiest to make a political career if you have no personal convictions, disregard any premise of personal authenticity and become willing to just follow the social desirability bias wherever that leads you.
Yeah, at least Marxists were tautologically right in the sense that owning the means of production gives you power that can, and often has, been used for oppression. But the above kind of essentialism is dangerous because of its closeness to racism, sexism and others forms of prejudice.
Are you for what criteria someone could use to conclude that an institution is woke?
Generalize the question. Under what conditions would we describe an institution as a Christian institution (school, business, club), an Islamist institution, a communist institution?
If it mandates its members be informed of its tenants, and those tenants are put forward as being not merely a set of tenants but the correct set of tenants (so excludes a course on comparative religions). It disciplines or expels members of the institution who compromise the integrity of those tenants with acts or statements of disbelief.
I love Grumpy Grandpa. He is very relatable to me: come down out of your solitude, everyone is an idiot panicking over stupid crap, just let me have my extensive selection of delicious dishes in peace, why are you two idiot lovebirds canoodling under my nose instead of teaching your idiot baby disciple? I do love the scenes where he shows up, goes "You're an idiot, and you're an idiot, and *you're* an *especially big* idiot" and then kicks their asses for them 😀
We need the people here to hurry up and start working for Substack via their advertised vacancies in order to implement our secret agenda of taking over the world - that is, of making commenting much more user-friendly and including features like editing, formatting, adding images, adding links and so forth.
Meh, nowadays I think tenants works. In fact tenets get in the way when people point out the hypocrisies, the tenants are always from the same pool and will never change.
I think they mean the institution has put "social justice" above its original purpose as an institution. A prime example would be Gillette running a cringeworthy feminist ad that alienated a lot of their customers.
If you believe Gillette was acting against its original purpose in creating that add, I have a bridge to sell you. Companies go woke in pursuit of not in spite of their original purpose, making profits.
I think they mean that an institution is not advocating wokeness because it's correct, but only because it's popular, i.e. they have zero scruples and would gladly burn the intellectual commons to see a few more likes or retweets or a quarter point stock increase or whatever the hell such people care about these days. I think most conservatives would acknowledge, at least in private, that women/minorities/etc have legit gripes with the system.
"I think most conservatives would acknowledge, at least in private, that women/minorities/etc have legit gripes with the system."
There was a time when there were legit gripes. Most conservatives, at least in private, would acknowledge that. There are no legit gripes now. As a matter of fact, the pendulum has swung quite a far bit the opposite direction, and you can see the proof of abominable and overwhelming statistical data in the behavior of black americans to asian americans. And that is but one example.
There is behavioral rot among women/minorities/etc that has set in now, such that these cultural behaviors are victimizing, not hallmarks of vicitimization.
It is obviously not true that most conservatives believe this, the median reTHUGlican thinks there is between "a lot" and "a moderate amount" of discrimination against blacks.
I’m not sure about that. If you point out Tim Scott’s experience they are will agree that Til Scott has been the victim of discriminatory behavior by the police. And they will agree when presented with any other individual case. But when taken in total all those individual cases can never mean there is a systemic problem.
Its also possible that Sen Scott is a particularly bad driver, which is statistically true of Black men in general. DWB isn't so much a real "discrimination" phenomena, as a "yes they are speeding more than other drivers" phenomena. See, e.g. the New Jersey turnpike study.
He claims that he, in the vast majority of cases, was not speeding. So your post simply comes down to disputing the factual assertions. You might as well say "It's also possible he's making the whole thing out of whole cloth, and he wasn't even stopped to begin with".
Anecdotes don't make anecdata, no. What you'd need to look at would be things like "how often does a member of this minority shoot at police" vs "how often are they shot by police"; "how often are they pulled over" vs "how overrepresented are they in actual criminality"; "how often and easily are they hired or accepted into university" vs "how well do they perform relative to other groups on a variety of metrics before/after being hired/accepted", etc.
Statistics, in other words; and not in isolation, but in relevant contexts.
Each statistic can be used in versus method to create a different picture.
“Frequency of hiring” vs “representation in crime” for example. All of the issues you’ve alluded to have a plethora more factors. E.g., “amount invested in education” or “number of parents in household”.
I believe that such conduct as using the term "reTHUGlican" should garner social reproach. This is not kind, necessary, or communicating an objective truth.
I think part of where the disagreement comes in is that the woke seem to view any disparities at all in outcomes as prima facie evidence of systemic racism/sexism/generic-isms and that any institution that produces these disparate outcomes is thus illegitimate and fair game for being torn down or radically altered to produce equal outcomes. The problems with this stance should be obvious.
I think everyone should agree that disparities of any sort are prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination.
The problem is the next step, in saying that prima facie evidence counts as ultima facie evidence that automatically justified tearing down or radically altering systems. Everyone *should* agree that once you have prima facie evidence of a problem, you should investigate further, and if you discover enough corroborating evidence of the problem, you should act to fix it.
But that idea doesn't appeal either to conservatives that want to preserve every structure, regardless of the evidence, or to radicals that want to transform everything as soon as they see even one piece of evidence.
There's definitely some of that on the right. I would say that on the left, though, there are a similar number of people who feel there is no need to investigate further or corroborate anything, instead jumping to the rather absurd conclusion that if there is any disparity at all in demographic outcomes, it must be attributable to animus, bigotry, oppression, etc.
There are also people on the left who believe that racism is a disparity of racial outcomes (ie that is what they define racism to be) and that this needs correcting in and of itself, regardless of whether it is caused by animus, bigotry, oppression, etc.
For some, that is the primary meaning of racism. This is why they get blank when someone starts talking about the causes to disprove that they are racist - the cause is relevant when you want to resolve the differential outcome, but the differential outcome is racist because that's what racism means - it means differential outcomes.
I’m not convinced that disparities of any sort are prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination. Disparities could be the result of Poisson clumping after random distribution. Or they could be the result of just chaotic social forces. Do you want to say that the fact that 75% of NBA players are Black is prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination?
Yes. "Prima facie" just means "on first glance". It's the sort of thing that warrants a look, but is nowhere near definitive proof. It absolutely *could* be something else.
People routinely mistake the meaning of "random." They think it means "uniform" when a far better definition would be "has fluctuations on every length scale." Uniform is a very *nonrandom* outcome, and almost always means some constraint is at work.
Exempli gratia, if *every* lion herd ever observed had exactly 7 males for every female, we would rightly suspect some constraint on lion behavior, genetic or environmental, that produced that strangely uniform result. If I flipped a coin 1000 times and it came up H T H T H T.... et cetera, I would immediately know it was not a "fair" coin.
Likewise, if in every human occupation the ratio of races or sexes (or any other random feature) were *exactly* the same as that ratio among all humans, it would be pretty strong evidence for powerful constraints on human behavior -- it would be highly nonrandom.
Any time you divide people into groups the groups will tend to be somewhat different along every conceivable axis. We should routinely expect to see disparities of some sort everywhere we look merely due to different groups having different skills, cultural attributes, physical attributes and interests.
In fact if we *didn't* find disparities of any sort then *that* is what should constitute "prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination".
I suspect there's something more specific and quantitative we can say here, about what effect size we should expect to see, with values quite a bit larger or smaller than that being prima facie evidence of something systemic.
It is prima facie evidence. I believe there has been plenty of investigation. I believe that they've found the situation is complicated, and depends a lot on the particular role on the team.
I may have lost track of the terminology, but I think prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination is the obvious and explicit systems of discrimination, e.g. Jim Crow laws. And they have to be obvious, because if they aren't then too many people won't remember who they are supposed to discriminate against.
Absent such, disparities of outcome between different cultures should be treated as prima facie evidence of cultures optimized for achieving different outcomes. Then, as you say, you start looking for something more conclusive.
"I think everyone should agree that disparities of any sort are prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination."
This attitude assumes that no group has any intrinsic differences. It also adds the term "systemic" for no reason. And finally, even if you establish that there was discrimination somewhere in the chain of causality, that doesn't establish that the institution currently under consideration engages in discrimination. If the black people are underrepresented at a college, that doesn't point to the college being racist, that points to racism affecting pre-college education.
I say that it is a defeasible null hypothesis that intrinsic differences among groups would amount to small effects, rather than large effects, so that if we see a large effect, that is prima facie evidence (but not in any way conclusive evidence) that something more than just intrinsic differences are at work.
When I say "systemic discrimination", I think I mean the same thing as what you're saying - we don't know if any particular individual at any point in the chain has discriminatory attitudes, or if the effect is the result of interactions among multiple parts of the system. We don't know if it's the employer or the university or social attitudes or neighborhood funding of schools or historic wealth gaps or something else.
The point is that we don't need to accuse any individual of harboring evil attitudes - discrimination can be the result of the system, and that means we may be able to address it at the systemic level without having to call anyone a bad person.
It's not so much about the idea of individual racism, most people accept that individuals can be racist. I think the animus is towards the idea of "systemic racism", the idea that we're all complicit in racism for historical reasons. Accepting systemic racism means its not enough to be "not-racist", you have to be actively anti-racist or you're perpetuating racial inequity, and actively opposing all existing social structures definitely sounds demanding and difficult.
In theory we all agree that the government should treat all citizens equally. But when the police focus on young black men at the expense of tiny elderly Asian ladies some say that only makes sense. Of course the police should focus on those who are more likely to commit crimes. Of course the TSA should focus more on 22 year old Pakistani guys and less on frail 85 year old widows.
Ok. But then how would you feel as a 22 black accountant or sitting US Senator being stopped at rates vastly higher than you white co-workers?
Honestly not sure how I'd feel if I were black, but my current politics would attribute that kind of treatment to a combination of individual bigotry and stereotypes about what low-income people look like. You could definitely describe that as systemic racism and I probably would describe it as such, my point was that the "woke" understanding of race is very inconvenient to accept.
I was mostly trying to explain why people might object to the woke framing of this as "systemic racism". It's not that I don't think it's not true, but John McWorter describes my own views on the limitations of attributing complex social problems to "systemic racism" pretty well - the solution isn't just "less racism".
How often would Tim Scott & co have to be pulled over by different people at different times before you’d agree that there was something systemic going on?
Based on that, I agree that systemic racism exists, in this case and many others. My point was just that that doesn't actually solve anything or help anyone.
Acknowledging a problem doesn't solve it. And we should be distrustful of anyone who claims that they know how to solve a problem as difficult as systemic racism. I don't see why any of that means we should stop talking about and thinking about systemic racism.
Ideally, we'd be working off high-quality statistical data rather than anecdotes about individuals, but I admit we don't always have the luxury.
If we *are* gonna judge by Tim Scott, the manner in which he was selected matters quite a lot. I'd be very surprised if my sister won a million dollars in the lottery- that's really rare! I would *not* be surprised if *someone* one a billion dollars in the lottery- there are a *lot* of "someones."
Also...
I've heard Tim Scott's name a couple of times. As politicians go, I have no strong feelings about him, but that antecedent is doing *a lot* of work.
My prior here is that various kinds of dishonesty are absolutely crucial to making it as a high-level national politician, at least in the US. I used to say that a politician saying something was evidence that they wanted you to believe it, but immaterial to the question of whether it was true. I stopped saying it when I realized how much of politics-speak consists not only of lies, but lies which are not intended by the speaker to be believed. High-simulacra statements which are intended less as truth-claims than as moves in a rhetorical game.
So, when I google "Tim Scott pulled over," google seems to give me articles reporting that [politician] is making claims. When I google "Tim Scott pulled over evidence," I get what looks to be more of the same. It's totally possible google is failing me, but I don't *currently* see any reason to think Scott's claim is true.
I want to be clear that my logic here *isn't* "Scott's claim is implausible, so probably he's lying." It's "Scott is a [high-level, USian] politician, so almost certainly a habitual liar, and so we shouldn't update on his claims without an *explicit theory* for why they're valid evidence which *does not* rely on [politician] being truth-tracking generally."
(I feel some social obligation to nod at the possibility that Scott is an exception to the rule, but it's mostly formality at this point. I don't think you *could* make it that far in politics if you were honest, and I *doubly* don't think you could without making waves I'd hear about.)
OK I'm going to jump on your use of Systemic here. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a black man getting pulled over due to the color of his skin an example of normal racism as opposed to Systemic racism? Wouldn't systemic racism mean something less direct like cops in general hang out in poor neighborhoods that are disproportionately black?
I think the thought is something like this: it's systemic racism if he, the individual black man, would have been pulled over less (or would have been very very likely to have been pulled over less), in a world without biases against black men at a whole society level.
If a police officer can pull a black person over for no reason one day and still be a police officer the next, then the police officer's racism is being aided by the system. And if lots of police officers are doing it, then it is systemic.
Shouldn't the answer to that question depend on how often Tim Scott is driving recklessly or aggressively and where he's doing it? Is it possible he drives more aggressively than most people due to his privilege - knowing he's rich and powerful, maybe even knowing that getting pulled over would be good for his brand?
> The group has to collectively work to remedy it.
Are you saying you believe in collective responsibility? if people with blue eyes rob more banks, Do you believe I have a responsibility to monitor other blue-eyed people to remedy this situation?
> This stereotype is not the fault of the larger community.
There are a billion ways to subdivide the population. and get correlations. We use colour and gender because our brains are lazy, but there's no particularly good reason we should simply accept those particular neural inadequacies when they harm harm millions of people.
"However, this stereotype is not the fault of the larger community."
It absolutely is. Even if we assume that there is a statistical trend that matches the stereotype (which there often isn't), that doesn't justify a stereotype. A stereotype is, by definition, when individuals are assumed to have a particular trait. That assumption is being done by the larger community, and so the larger community is at fault. The idea that the group can change the larger community's attitude, let alone that it is their responsibility to do so, is reprehensible victim blaming.
"Ok. But then how would you feel as a 22 black accountant or sitting US Senator being stopped at rates vastly higher than you white co-workers?"
People assuming your criminality based on skin color/sex/age and people assuming your culpability in the oppression of people base on your skin color/sex/age probably has some parallels worth exploring to help each side grok each other's grievances here. It does not feel good, it feels like there is a huge inhuman system that isn't even so kind as to be indifferent to your suffering but actually uses it as a bar to measure progress.
Why are you "supposed to accept" this? Who is saying that?
This is feminism 101, that existing gender systems oppress men too. This is the point of "privilege" talk, so that we can understand both male privilege and female privilege, and how they are different from each other, and both are signs of an underlying system that causes problems for everyone.
Bringing up the concept of female privilege nearly always results in refusal to accept it, if not anger. The ideology is manichean, where it can be accepted that men oppress other men, which is nearly always how they mean the phrase that men get oppressed too, but not that there is systemic oppression by women against men or even that men can get treated worse by men (or systems supposedly controlled by men) than women get treated by men (or systems supposedly controlled by men).
Can you find a mainstream feminists that accepts/argues that systemic misandry in policing is worse than systemic racism in policing? After all, men get policed harsher compared to women, then blacks compared to whites, if you ignore crime rates, or if you don't. Of course, a common rebuttal is to recognize the disproportionate criminality of men, but not of black people.
PS. I think that you should always ask feminists for specifics when they claim that men are oppressed too, because this seems to often be a way to rebut the claim that they are misandrist, without a honest admission that the extent and way in which they believe that men are oppressed is quite a bit different from the way in which they believe that women are oppressed.
If we model oppression or enforcement of gender norms as a set of interactions between individuals (to keep it simple), there are four possible combinations:
a) men oppress men,
b) men oppress women,
c) women oppress women,
d) women oppress men.
The most simplistic interpretation of feminism would be {b}. All men are oppressors, all women are victims, the situation is perfectly black and white. This is obviously NOT what modern feminists believe... and they express it by saying things like patriarchy hurts men too, or admitting that women can also be complicit in enforcing the norms of patriarchy.
The things that I said in previous paragraph still allow two possible interpretations: is our society {a,b,c,d} or is it {a,b,c}? Note that in both options it is true that women sometimes support patriarchy (option c) and that men can be victims of patriarchy (option a), so just repeating these two will not help us distinguish between {a,b,c,d} and {a,b,c}.
My model of society is {a,b,c,d}. I suspect that many feminists believe {a,b,c}, but you see how difficult it is to communicate the difference. I believe that even if they admit that both men and women are complicit in enforcing gender norms, and that men can be also hurt by patriarchy, they still assume that those men are only hurt by the... uhm... male half of the patriarchy.
I think if you ask people explicitly about this, almost all feminists will admit it's {a,b,c,d}, and once you put it like this, they'll even be able to very quickly come up with examples of d (women teasing men about being weak if they cry in public, or refuse to sign up for war).
The problem is that the automatic associations people have don't naturally trigger thoughts of d unless they stop and explicitly think about it.
This may be "not what modern feminists believe" - but it is closely correlated to how modern feminists *act*, and what *policies* powerful feminists encourage to be enforced.
Which means , given that feminism is such a powerful force it's virtually unassailable in polite company - means that there's option e) all oppression in the future is caused by groups of women.
Also importantly, "systemic racism" is an essentialist term, meaning that the American system is /in its eternal Platonic essential nature/ racist. All those adjectives mean that it is racist not in its mechanisms or behavior, but in its animating /soul/. It can thus never be reformed, or even analyzed; it can only be destroyed and replaced.
That's how it's used. "Systemic racism" is used to stop inquiries into where the racism lies and what's causing it, just as essentialism has always been used to stop inquiry, from "God did it" to "dormative properties". By saying that racism is distributed throughout the entire system, it discourages the idea that we can identify problems within the system and fix them.
The "systemic racism" answer isn't the "god did it" answer. It's a functionally equivalent answer. If it actually took the idea of structure seriously, it would allow people to examine the structure and propose possible ways to change the structure, just like we've done since the Constitution was ratified. To do that, you'd have to define racism, measure a particular instantiation of it numerically, then do something like a factor analysis on the system you measured, attributing different fractions of it to different inputs to that system. I know a guy who was kicked out of a conference because he tried to do that in a blog post that had nothing to do with the conference.
That's not what "systemic racism" means. Rather, it means the institutional procedures in place are biased against a certain race, even though such bias is not explicitly expressed by the rules.
At risk of being naive, has anyone read/listened to Isabel Wilkerson’s “Castes”? Phenomenologically I hear something very important about her excavating/restoring the racial equality question to its “proper roots/place” in the realm of Caste Systems if you want to have a more “rigorous” interpretation of the issue. Apologies if her works on “race” have already been explicated elsewhere in this realm…
"Accepting systemic racism means its not enough to be "not-racist", you have to be actively anti-racist or you're perpetuating racial inequity, and actively opposing all existing social structures definitely sounds demanding and difficult."
I mean, isn't that just obvious? Some racism is done not by individuals, but by the interaction of sets of rules built into structures. People who just follow those rules are perpetuating racial inequality, even if they are not doing anything individually racist. I'm not sure where the "you have to be" comes about - no one should think it's *possible* for basically *anyone* to be *completely* non-racist. One has to pick one's battles and all that, and I think it's better to focus on *improving* social structures rather than *opposing* them.
Most people reject anything that sounds like too much work or suggests that they're not a good person as obviously false, so no, it isn't obvious. Most people may be willing to accept they're "a little bit racist", but that doesn't necessarily imply that they need to do anything more than not express those opinions in an upsetting way.
For what it's worth, I don't reject social justice, and definitely not because I think it's too demanding. I've got a triple whammy of Christianity, Effective Altruism and low self esteem here, so I'm perfectly fine with accepting that I'm a horrible person perpetuating all kinds of injustice just by living my life. The difficult question for me is how to actually make the world a better place rather than just wallowing in pessimism, and I'm working on that.
Every race prefers their own except liberal Whites. Polling has shown this repeatedly and beyond question.
Anti-racism is nothing more than holding Whites to a standard that no other race is held to. If Blacks prefer other Blacks, Asians prefer other Asians, and Hispanics prefer other Hispanics, why is it suddenly immoral for Whites to prefer other Whites. I’ll answer - it isn’t.
That's not what we're talking about. The notion of "anti-racism" isn't that whites shouldn't prefer whites. It's that whites who do nothing racist at all are still racist unless they're actively fighting racism.
I think it's obviously related, though. If the stronger claim "whites preferring whites is okay" is supported, the weaker claim "not actively fighting racism is okay" probably is too.
But it's obvious that if you aren't actively fighting for transgender rights (or even if you are!) and you are working for an organization that keeps trans people out of something, then you are perpetuating some trans inequality.
And if you aren't actively working to protect the environment (or even if you are!) and you're throwing out lots of plastic, then you're perpetuating environmental harm.
And if you aren't actively fighting crime (or even if you are!) and you work for an organization that commits crimes, then you are perpetuating some crime.
I'm not talking about anyone's mental state. I'm just talking about what they're doing. And you can be fighting X with one set of actions while still continuing to perpetuate X with others, regardless of whether you personally feel pro or anti X.
Perhaps the problem is that the language used tends to be interpreted, and not without reason, to refer to mental states. "I support X" is not often taken to mean "my actions inadvertently may perpetuate X".
Yes, I think that is the source of the biggest problems here. People naturally slide between consequences and intentions, and even when the movement shifts intentionally towards talking about consequences, people both pro and anti the movement end up sliding back to thinking that it's about intentions.
Valid as far as it goes, but there's a neglected term here.
1. People deliberately doing evil (eg Hitler)
2. People actively trying to do good
3. People indirectly making things worse
...
4. But people *also* indirectly make things better!
On a long enough timeline, (2 & 4) are gonna completely swamp (1 & 3). We deliberately intend only a small subset of our actions, and those tend to be pretty time-limited while the unintended consequences just. keep. coming.
My intuition is that, for most people, the sum of (intentional & unintentional good) outweighs the set of (intentional & unintentional bad). Aggregating like this is tricky, but if I imagine, say, that I hear a random stranger got fatally struck by lightning, and then I check to see whether I intuitively expect the world to get better or worse as a result. If someone's existence is net-positive to the world, that seems like another way of saying their (direct + indirect good) outweighs their (direct + indirect bad).
I kinda feel like some people are trying to have this one both ways. (I don't know if this is you; you're *here*, so maybe not.) To most Americans, "racist" implies *something* about the disposition or intent of the person it's being applied to- there's a *very* strong connotation. It's also quite emotionally charged. It's thus a very poor choice of descriptor if you're *not* trying to talk about intent or mental states. I think, for some people, the connotations are a feature. "This isn't about intent, we're looking at objective impact" is a *really good* motte, but if all the people who make the claim really meant it we'd be collectively *much better* at *actually measuring* impact by this point.
I think the idea is that some time in the past few decades, the people most concerned with racism had the realization that the unintentional effects of most people's actions are much bigger than the intentional effects, and they naturally therefore said that the concept they were interested in should include the unintended effects as well. But the broader public has always been much more interested in the intentions than in the unintended effects, and keeps insisting on misreading things in that way.
At a certain point they tried to introduce new terminology, like "privilege" that tries as hard as possible to get away from intentions and character traits, and from ranking people on a single-dimensional axis. But the public (on all sides of the issue) keeps bringing the terminology back to intentions and evaluations of character.
As I said in another thread, it all comes back to the clash between consequentialism and deontology.
Imagine someone you know is absolutely obsessed with tap water quality. To them, just about every single problem in the world can be traced back to the quality and cleanliness of the local tap water. If you ever try to suggest that maybe there are some other important factors involved, they (truthfully!) bring up Flint and lead contamination in general, (truthfully!) point out how much of the world doesn't have access to clean tap water, and (...truthfully...?) accuse you of being complicit in perpetuating the problem.
Now imagine that instead of one person you know, it's most of your social circle and also THE ENTIRE MAINSTREAM MEDIA that has to talk about tap water quality at every single available opportunity.
At least to me (and I guess I count as "conservative" at this point), that's what the problem with "wokeness" is. It's not that I think racism doesn't exist. It's not even that I think structural racism doesn't exist. It's just that I don't think it's the most powerful force in the universe or the root of all evils in the world, and a lot of people seem to be loudly proclaiming exactly that.
To me, to the nearest approximation, wokeness and it’s detractors only exist online. Like I have literally never heard someone use that term in real life. If you think it’s as common as you claim, you’re spending way too much time online.
You say "only exist online" as if we're talking about rogue AIs floating around cyberspace instead of, y'know, real people expressing their opinions to each other over the most wide-reaching communication network ever created. And also as if online culture hadn't been a major driver of offline culture this past two decades or so.
Going to disagree with you here. I encountered “wokeness” and “anti-wokeness” in two fairly large institutional contexts: Residential Life at college and fundamentalist christian church respectively, both of which I have been involved in in a non-trivial manner
The problem is that I we all know people IRL who spend too much time online. (I know a guy who's about 70 years old and he used the term "cultural Marxism", the internet is ruining everything.)
The usual form of progressive criticism (e.g. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism ) is to present a weakman, such as the belief that progressives are literal Marxists, or else to observe that the term resembles the Nazis' Kulturbolschewismus & is occasionally used in a similar way by modern neo-Nazis & assert that therefore everyone who uses it must be a neo-Nazi. The way it appears to actually be used by reasonable people is to describe modern progressives' zero-sum thinking, their tendency to reject formal equality by explicitly defining policies as justified or not based on whether they benefit or harm the groups they think of as oppressed or oppressing, & their willingness to quickly adopt new fashionable ideas even if they contradict their previous beliefs (sources: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/10/leninthink & https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/202103/cultural-marxism-far-right-anti-semitic-conspiracy-theory ). I think that the last of these objections is somewhat exaggerated — modern progressives are nowhere near as willing to quickly change their opinions based on fashion as the described Bolsheviks were — & the latter source errs in assuming that these ways of thinking came to predominate by means of consistent supporters of them intentionally infiltrating academia &c. rather than by gaining popularity among the existing cultural elite.
Often these debates don't talk about specifics, just a general cultural issue which is hard to prove or disprove. Have you seen Slow Boeing's example? It's definitely happening offline: https://www.slowboring.com/p/tema-okun
On the other hand, I don't have a strong position on how important it is.
It's fair that you did say to the nearest approximation, not that it wasn't happening at all. I've seen adjacent ideas personally offline but I've generally agreed with those, the extreme stuff I've never run into.
Wokeness is thriving in grade schools. A few weeks ago someone (a white lady) read a letter accusing our school of institutional racism because although we have a super diverse staff, we don't have enough black teachers and we didn't issue a Black Lives Matter statement. (Apparently, lots of schools did). Offering social justice curriculum workshops is a booming business right now. Teachers and students are eating this stuff up, and offering an opposing viewpoint is very dangerous because everyone is looking for closet racists to crucify.
It actually does appear to exist in real life at this point, although I can't guess at the extent.
My first encounter of the term outside private online conversation was while onboarding at my present company (one of this decade's megacorporations), in January. They used the "woke" term unironically in their inclusiveness material.
The material actually triggered my fight-or-flight reflexes (since I associated so much of it with toxic discussions online), but thankfully, my fears were been laid to rest by conversations with my team and manager, and also by just logically thinking through what they were trying to achieve in their particular case.
Gotta say they're really good people - I'm not willing to judge them on a few possibly poorly chosen words. Though whenever I think back to the inclusiveness training I'm still a little weirded out by it. (I realise it's partly a legal requirement in some of the many countries this company straddles, and there are no doubt plenty of people who would behave badly without it, but it also just really doesn't help with anxiety levels of a scrupulous person...)
N=1, but my experience has been quite different. My meatspace social circle was using the phrase "stay woke" before it got picked up as something of a pejorative term, and although most of them don't care much about political or social issues there's definitely a few that fit the woke culture warrior stereotype.
Oh wow, haven't heard this one since at least 2016. I didn't think the old "it's just some crazies online!" argument could possibly be sustained in a world where the president, NYT, and Coca-Cola are explicitly woke.
In a world where Hillary Clinton before election wrote an article about the frog Pepe, I am no longer sure the distinction between online and offline is meaningful.
Note that this can go the other way : when you're trying to point out that we have water quality issues, but a lot of people deny it because "there is no way that our water isn't the purest in the world, how dare you !" or something.
And then when you have literal ex-generals writing an open letter about the increasing threat of civil war and that in the near future the military might have to intervene (by seizing power ?!), they're being treated like if they were the character above.
Also, for water I think it literally happened : weren't some biologists complaining that it was hard to raise awareness about water being contaminated by hormone-affecting chemicals because they were then equated to Alex Jones ?
I would say "wokeness" is wildly exaggerating some real problem.
An example I happen to be interested in: sexism in the tech industry. Most computer programmers are not women. The woke perspective is that this is a huge problem with the tech industry caused by widespread sexism in the industry. My perspective is that the tech industry is not unusually sexist, and the main reason for the gender gap is that women are less interested in programming. James Damore got fired and viciously attacked (e.g. https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788) for expressing this view in 2017.
I think this is hard to discuss because it's very subjective how big problems are. In my example: How big is sexism in the tech industry? (obviously there is some) How big is people complaining about sexism in the tech industry? Is one of these things unreasonably bigger than the other? How could two people who disagree measure these things in a way they could both agree on?
I think a better theory as to why most programmers are not women is not that women aren't interested in programming, but that the tech industry is downstream of sexism that plays out in childrearing at home, in schools, and in child/teen pop culture - where women are discouraged systematically from taking interest in programming and programming adjacent things for nearly a decade before they even get to college and declare a major.
That's not a very helpful generalization. I know quite a few excellent female programmers. They are interested in people and yet they can still code. Go figure.
That's a very helpful generalization if you want to understand why some fields are male-dominated and others female-dominated. I'm not talking about "not interested" and "interested", I'm talking about more and less interested.
"Women and men are statistically interested in different things" is an extremely-helpful generalisation if it avoids a futile and harmful social attempt to force all careers to 50:50 participation.
It is not very helpful when giving career advice to any individual person, but I don't think Guy was suggesting it be used as such.
I work in early childhood education, and I regularly walk into meetings with 40 women and me (man). People are not preaching about narrowing the gender gap either.
While I'm sympathetic to you're point, I generally find comparisons between social dynamics in humans and chimpanzees unhelpful and uninformative. Bonobos are as closely related to us, and very closely related to chimps, but chimps and bonobos have very different social behaviours in many ways. I just don't think any parallel, or lack thereof, between humans and any ape tells us much. The genetic differences are big enough that we should expect any social consequences of the genetic similarities to be lost in noise.
I think the right way to phrase this to get it read as a statistical statement about the numbers of interested people rather than a statement about the intensity of interest is "more women are interested in people, more men are interested in things".
Also, I'm not at all sure that is true. I think it depends on the things. For instance, historical accuracy in films? You'd think it was men, but period accuracy for clothing in historical dramas? Definitely women. And they get just as geeky on details of seam types and how sleeves are connected to bodies as any guy talking about different loading mechanisms on a gun.
I don't know how much is cultural, but I think it's more than we'd like to admit.
"I think the right way to phrase this to get it read as a statistical statement about the numbers of interested people rather than a statement about the intensity of interest is "more women are interested in people, more men are interested in things"."
It's both. Bell curves with different means.
"Also, I'm not at all sure that is true. I think it depends on the things."
Sure, but the claim is not about specific things, it's about whether people are more interested in things in general, as a category. It's sort of like if I said men are larger than women, and then you said "that's not true, what about breasts?"
Evidence against this theory: the representation of women in computer programming before the early eighties was much higher than it is now, so a good chunk of the phenomenon seems to clearly be unrelated to the people/things idea.
I think it has more to do with programming being an easy way to make good money without going to lots of grad school.
The prevalence of 'interested in computer programing' before the early 80s was much lower than it is now. The people who were so interested were extreme outliers, and the population characteristics have reverted to the mean once a greater fraction of the population got involved in the pursuit.
I don't think this refutes my point? If the only people sufficiently interested were extreme outliers then you'd expect it to be even *more* heavily dominated by men. (This is what you'd get if the interest curve was/is a normal distribution – are you saying the people/things thing isn't a normal distribution?)
It can also be seen as countries with poorer economies having more - for the reason that material outcomes frequently trump preferences, and if you want to have to rely less on others' goodwill, you'll pursue a better paying career that might also give you a better chance of leaving the country. In Europe, you can make a decent living with any profession, in third-world countries you will have to get over yourself if you're seeking any kind of success and want to raise your children in an environment that actually suits.
One way is to broaden the survey to look at other fields, too: are girls discouraged systematically from taking interest in any other fields, or just programming? How is representation different in those other fields? I don't think the "discouraged systematically from taking interest" theory holds up.
One problem with your theory Jonathan is the wildly varying representation of women in the field over the decades. Clearly there is something else other than some kind of innate interest happening here.
Scott wrote a big blog post, "Contra Grant on exaggerated [gender] differences]", that spent some time looking at the male/female ratio in comp sci in industry, grad school, college, high school, junior high, and elementary school, and found that it was constant, so that any such pressure would need to have been applied before some time in elementary school. Also, he made good arguments that women were discouraged in ALL fields, yet are now the majority in many of those fields. Other considerations also come up there, including a discussion of a big study of gender differences, and some minute picking-apart of its conclusions.
Something which is underestimated is the role of assault/abuse in restricting the thinking power that women can bring to bear on STEM fields. I’ve known several women who were advancing in STEM and then experienced rape or sexual assault and found it very difficult to continue to work at the mental level required in STEM fields. This is not to say they were assaulted by STEM colleagues. But if 1/3 women experience assault or some similar statistic, it’s quite plausible that some fraction of women who would otherwise do STEM are choosing other fields out of necessity. There is also a “violence targets outliers” dynamic in which some high-performing women are somewhat targeted (I think, I can’t prove that.) There is a glass ceiling that lives in the bedroom (yes, evil.)
Actually, I've always been curious about this in the context of the old Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences post just mentioned.
We know that women are who are assaulted are mostly assaulted by people they know, and that men are more likely to be harassers than women. So if you had a field that was very male at high school and then college level, wouldn't you expect the % of women to go down in that field, because of a higher rate of harassment, even if the men in the field were no more likely to be harassers or assaulters than men in other fields, simply because more men amongst the people a woman meets=more chance to meet a harasser or assaulter? And yet, I remember that post having fairly convincing citations showing that % of women in comp sci is both low *and* steady from high school through college to employment...
I have to look at the Contra Grant post, thank you for mentioning it. I had read something recently that had a very broad definition of STEM, dental hygienist was included and that surprised me. I will have to look at the computer science stats though. And see what counts as “computer science.”
I had a minute to look at Contra Grant. I think your point about who is or might be perpetrating the assault/harassment is very insightful. If harassment is happening, is it by colleagues, acquaintances or other roles?
In terms of Contra Grant I agree that a surveillance society is too high a price, or the wrong price, to pay for “gender parity.” I am not sure it works either, the percent women in CS did decline starting in the 80s and hmm, what does that coincide with but the rise of surveillance-as-justice.
In the workplace harassment scenes I’ve been in there was one harasser guy with some authority, his right-hand woman, and then women targets and men who were either unaware or unable to do anything about it. This last segment of males is the target group for the allyship dynamic but I think there are limits to its success; sometimes the nice guys can assist but not always. The situation where the nice guys drown in guilt while the 1 in 100 male harasser has 50 victims instead of 80 is ...not optimal.
I’m not sure the “steady” part of the comp sci pipeline stats holds up, it will take me more time.
A dynamic I recall from undergrad is the lone female math faculty member playing the battle-axe role and running off female potential majors as sort of not tough enough to lift Thor’s hammer type thing. Also the other end of the scale from harassment is who is rewarded and I think Scott’s analysis of the wider opportunities available to women leading to a drop in them choosing CS is interesting. When I get a minute I will dig for research on women who didn’t pursue graduate STEM and what they give as their reasons.
Anyway to recap the harassment which theoretically handicaps a woman from pursuing STEM well might be not primarily occurring in the workplace even if it is acquaintance based.
One data point in favor of this is the fact that while cis women are underrepresented, trans women are overrepresented. Whatever is causing the gender gap in programming and related technical professions doesn't seem to affect trans women, and one obvious difference is that most trans women were born with a Y chromosome and raised as boys. You see this in other stereotypically geeky things, I follow the video game speedruning community, and trans women outnumber cis women there by a large margin.
And yet in the most free, egalitarian societies (e.g. Sweden), the differences between gender are the greatest. In the most oppressive societies (Arab world), the differences are least (many female engineers).
This is not a refutation of the theory as sexism can play out differently in different cultures, and this data point suggests that female participation in engineering is in fact driven by cultural and not biological factors.
I'm not sure it's a meaningful statement to say it is "driven by cultural and not biological factors". If you lock all the women in cages then none of them will get STEM degrees. If you force them to study STEM on pain of death then lots will get STEM degrees. No one thinks that cultural factors can't influence STEM participation by women.
But if currently MORE women are in STEM than want to be, the correct social change would be to make it possible for LESS women to be in STEM, not to discriminate against men in hiring or something.
Let's back up and be clear about a few things. Even if "currently MORE women are in STEM than want to be" that does not mean that the correct social change is necessarily for less women to be in STEM. For example, it might be that fewer women WANT to be in STEM due to sexism they experience in STEM fields but if that sexism wasn't there, then MORE would want to be in STEM, not less.
And you cannot just take some blanket notion of gender equality across all dimensions and assume that applies equally to STEM in all nations. It is quite possible that western nations have a particular cultural sexism that expresses itself in STEM fields for women, but less sexism overall.
In fact, this is precisely one of several criticisms made of the original study and the inference that you are basing your entire argument on.
"From cradle to classroom, a wealth of research shows that the environment has a major influence on girls’ interest and ability in math and science. Early in school, teachers’ unconscious biases subtly push girls away from STEM. By their preteen years, girls outperform boys in science class and report equal interest in the subject, but parents think that science is harder and less interesting for their daughters than their sons, and these misconceptions predict their children’s career choices.
Later in life, women get less credit than men for the same math performance. When female STEM majors write to potential PhD advisors, they are less likely to get a response. When STEM professors review applications for research positions, they are less likely to hire “Jennifer” than “John,” even when both applications are otherwise identical—and if they do hire “Jennifer,” they pay her $4,000 less. Women of color face even greater challenges as racial and gender biases intersect.
These findings make it clear that women in Western countries are not freely expressing their lack of “interest” in STEM. In fact, the best predictor of college women’s choice of major is the amount of gender discrimination they perceive in that major, not how “math”-y or “science”-y it is. Cultural attitudes and discrimination are shaping women’s interests in a way that is anything but free, even in otherwise free countries."
Perhaps there are cultural factors other than/in addition to sexism which influence choice of career for both men and women. If a daughter is going to be sent to school, she better make it good and be an engineer or doctor, is the way I understand it. I googled "most common degrees for women saudi arabia" and good ol' wikipedia says women at the university level view lectures from male professors through monitors and ask questions via telephone, since they are not allowed to attend lectures in person. Women are allowed into libraries to study only at certain times and with a male guardian present. Yeah if they are going to go to all that trouble it needs to be very $ worth it. Also are women allowed to study the Quran? If not, there goes history, politics, philosophy and most humanities.
Also, in practical terms, the way for women's university attendance to be logistically reasonable in that setting is for a sister to tag along with a brother, or female cousin with male cousin, so she can just do what he does and have the guardian be him. I can't prove this but it seems that women would have an incentive to study whatever the brother/cousin was studying in these cases.
It depends on what you consider "sexist." Openly derogatory to women? No, that would probably get you fired. Inconsiderate to women? Very much so. The programming bro culture at a company can be very off-putting to a woman. For some reason, certain people always assume that women are less interested in programming because of something inherent in women's brains. If that's the case, then why did the percentage of women in computer science start dropping in the 80s, and why has it recently started going back up? Did women's brains change? No, the culture changed. For example, there have been recent efforts by many large companies to hire and train female programmers in a welcoming environment and they have no problem finding interested candidates. It could be such a simple thing as there being other female programmers already at the job that could make a woman feel more comfortable and welcome.
> I have worked in that industry all my life and never once have I encountered a "bro."
I have to agree. The vast majority of programmers exist on a continuum between "nerd" and "perfectly normal white-collar professional". The "programmer bro" that makes women uncomfortable by constantly crushing empty brewskis against his backwards-cap-wearing forehead seems to be a fictitious creature that exists only because it's more socially acceptable for women to say "I can't stand all these programmer bros" than to say "I can't stand all these nerds".
I think this is one of those things where someone's entire perception of the issue is informed by the 1-5 companies that they've happened work at. Company cultures vary enormously, and people generally self select into cultures they're comfortable in. It wouldn't be that strange for programmer bros to exist, and for someone not to have encountered them in the unrepresentative sample of companies that they've worked for.
"bro" is one of those things when I heard it I went through two phases:
1: how stupid, bros suck, lol
2: wtf, I get accused of being a bro by people who know absolutely nothing about me
Scott has a classic post about people ending up having to defend other distasteful people because otherwise they end up backed into a corner as "well, you're one of the Jews"
"Bro" is a pretty imprecise term these days. Some people seem to just use it to mean 'any sexist man', without the connotations of machismo and binge drinking and anti-intellectualism it originally had.
Yes, that is what I meant (obvious to me, but clearly not to others). I did not mean a jock-type character. I meant a socially inept guy who does not think a woman could be his intellectual equal.
It's the culture of startups that were run by people in their 20s. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley occupies this tremendously outsized portion of the public imagination in computing and software and the Internet thinks this represents "tech" when the vast majority of companies involved in making software have perfectly boring and ordinary corporate cultures identical to what you would find if you worked in any other industry.
The more ridiculous thing is if you look at a breakdown by within-industry sectors, web development of the type so predominant in Silicon Valley is overwhelmingly the most female heavy. Enterprise software, aerospace, defense, where you won't find a bro in sight are way lower in percentage of women, and electrical and mechanical engineering are lower than any form of software engineering.
I worked at a hedge fund before starting in software and was an armor officer (tank commander) in the Army before that. I had never worked with a single woman before going into software, and five of six direct supervisors I've had since there were women. My dad was a plumber for 40 years. Never worked with a single woman his entire life. His dad was an aluminum worker. 0 female coworkers. His dad was a stonemason. 0% female. This wasn't just an artifact of the time. Industrial metalwork and stonemasonry are still roughly 0% female. Nobody disputes that women just don't want to do those jobs.
"If that's the case, then why did the percentage of women in computer science start dropping in the 80s"
More careers started opening up for women beyond just "secretary" and "teacher". Programming was initially considered as a kind of secretarial work, I think.
"why has it recently started going back up?"
Has it?
"they have no problem finding interested candidates"
AFAIK women are still way less than 50% of software engineers at all large companies
How can we tell the difference between "women are less interested in programming" and "programming culture is offputting to women"?
Ok, I am not making the claim that if you eliminate all cultural obstacles to women becoming programmers, that 50% of programmers will be women. I am making the claim that the percentage of women programmers will be much higher than it is now.
How do tell the difference between women's interest in programming and cultural roadblocks? The culture is moving in the right direction, so I guess by the next generation we will have a clearer picture.
In many ways, obviously yes. The 1970s was a period when both major political parties had the Equal Rights Amendment as part of their platform, and bisexuality was cool among celebrities. In the 1980s, Republicans ended their support for the ERA and gays started going back into the closet.
It wasn't as a dramatic a reversal as the one from the 1920s to the 1930s, but it was clear that there was one.
The 80s was the time when movement conservatives first controlled the presidency. Opposition to feminism was a big thing for a lot of them (especially the evangelicals.)
I'm not certain about the timeline, but remember how computer was an almost women-only job before they were replaced by machines ? It would make sense that some fraction of them would have ended by graduating to "programmer", while today there's no such option.
I find this argument strange whenever it pops up. Programming itself has gone through numerous huge changes over the years. Programming today doesn't really resemble programming in the 80s, or the 00s. The discrimination/bad culture argument really needs to try harder to contend with law quickly integrating, I'm a software engineer with a couple of lawyer friends and, at least in my area, lawyers seem to have all the possible "bro culture" problems that supposedly plague software jobs are much higher rates.
I don't think it makes much sense to treat lawyers and engineers as a similar systems as the largest law firm has only 10K lawyers and it drops off with a power law distribution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_law_firms_by_revenue) which will allow much more self sorting of culture and it is easier to find a different job as a lawyer rather than leaving the profession. From my limited observations as an engineer, some parts of the culture are/were toxic and bad teams really do push people out (including out of neighboring teams).
Law is a broad field. I think you would need to specify which type of law. The lawyers that go into family law are different from the lawyers that practice corporate law, for example, and would have very different cultures.
Has this same charity be extended to software engineers? Architects, web devs, systems engineers, full stack and that's just the technical differences. Software engineers work in basically every type of company and smaller team's will have their culture dictated more by the type of company their imbedded in more than by the work they're doing.
> For some reason, certain people always assume that women are less interested in programming because of something inherent in women's brains. If that's the case, then why did the percentage of women in computer science start dropping in the 80s, and why has it recently started going back up? Did women's brains change? No, the culture changed.
If the distinction in interests (which can be described approximately as: more women than men are interested in work related to people, more men than women are interested in work related to objects) was between men in general and women in general without substantial exceptions, then it would indeed be harder to determine whether there is any biological cause or it's entirely cultural. On the other hand, if women who had abnormally high levels of male sex hormones during development are more likely to have male-typical interests in a way correlated to their level of male sex hormones (as https://www.pitt.edu/~bertsch/CAH%20and%20jobs.pdf found), then that provides some evidence that biology — specifically, the effects of sex hormones on brain development — does contribute to the difference.
"why did the percentage of women in computer science start dropping in the 80s"
I've heard that "computer science" prior to the early 1980's had little resemblance to what computer science is now. I'm not sure what the content of a 1970's computer science major was, but I'd like to.
Computer Science as a distinct course of study offered by universities barely existed before 1980. A few schools offered it, but most still had it as a sub-discipline beneath Electrical Engineering or Mathematics. Heck, MIT still only offers EECS and not CS by itself.
Carl's link is funny. Makes me think of Alan Turning programming the bombe by physically rewiring the circuits. None of that pansy machine code and punch cards that coddled kids get these days.
Well...I was at MIT in 1980, and worked a little on Multics, and there was a massive interest in programming among my classmates. 6.001 was incredibly oversubscribed. It's true the CS degree was subsumed within Course 6 itself, but historically that makes a lot of sense, since the roots of the place placed a very high premium on "hands on" education. If you don't understand the hardware, how can you be a good programmer? etc. It may be different now for all I know, given that close-to-the-metal stuff like new OS or HLL design is no longer the rage.
Anyway, there were plenty of people getting programming degrees and doing very serious work (and research) in the late 60s and 70s. Not nearly as many as now, of course, and I certainly agree that further down from the best engineering schools the degree was less available.
I'd say more "inconsiderate, period". Singling out inconsideration to women (or minorities, or majorities) really doesn't help do anything besides advance a pre-decided thesis.
Saying that Fords break down more often than Hondas because they get rained on doesn't really answer anything without pulling in even more circular logic (the chemical structure of rain is anti-Ford; Ford owners are laughed at for trying to keep their cars dry; mechanics aren't trained to recognize rain as an issue with Fords; whatever) - the answer isn't to go spelunking for deeper crazy logic, the solution is to maybe consider a different thesis.
> why did the percentage of women in computer science start dropping in the 80s
In part because the field got larger, in part because computer science was very, very different in nature before the microcomputer revolution, in part because other job prospects opened up (especially in Services) that women preferred more.
> why has it recently started going back up
Partially because the field has once again shifted (towards larger and larger teams valuing non-confrontational interpersonal contributions) and partially Affirmative Action, whether explicit or implicit.
If the only drive-throughs nearby are all McDonalds, I'll eat a lot of Big Macs. If a Burger King opens up, I switch to Whoppers. It's not because I changed my mind or because McDonalds was rude to me or made me feel unwelcome or because I didn't see enough preachy advertisements showing that even I could find a lunch opportunity at McDonalds, it's because I find whole leaf lettuce and full-ring onions far more palatable than the chopped and diced varieties.
If McDonalds starts offering Big Macs at $1, I may then start going back to McDonalds. I find them "more welcoming" only in the sense that it's less of a struggle to part with $1 than to part with $5.
I gotta say, I am very surprised by the responses to my simple comment. I expected something along the lines of "yes, male programmers should try to be more considerate towards women." I didn't think it would be controversial. Instead, there are, what appears, at least to me, a lot of defensive responses arguing why there is no such problem in the field. I don't know how much of this is just the natural contrarianism of the readers of this blog, how much of it is a rebellion against perceived oppressive social engineering at their companies (I would love to hear about specific examples if that is the case), and how much of it is some kind of psychological defensiveness spurned by the fear of loss of social status if more women enter the field.
You "didn't think it would be controversial" to demand that people change their natural behavior and to accuse a group of men that are traditionally seen as off-putting to everyone (hence bullying) to be specifically inconsiderate to women?
You could just as easily argue that gays are driving straight men out of fashion and that the gay men should try to be more considerate to straight men, for example, by being less gay.
But that would be obviously discriminatory. That your discrimination is socially acceptable, doesn't make it less discriminatory.
Definitely yes, but that's the part you're supposed to think and not say if you want to remain in polite circles. Why I'm glad ACX prioritizes accuracy over politeness.
In practice it means "is left of me or my audience" in an extremely general way. A steelmanned version would be something about performative social signalling of progressive ideals without meaningful underlying behaviors
I'm not a conservative, I'm one of those SJW/Woke critical Liberals, but how I'd always define these things, and to me Woke and SJW are essentially the same thing, but I'd define it as a combination of two things. The first is a belief in strict identity-based monodirectional power dynamics with a oppressor/oppressed dichotomy. The second is a belief that social power should be used to enforce belief in this model.
That's not to say that I think racism doesn't exist. In fact, I even think various forms of systematic racism exist. But systemic, in my mind means something more something akin to everywhere. I think the nature of bigotry and bias as a whole vary wildly from place to place, and sometimes it can change directions.
The core problem I have with the Woke model, is that I think the monodirectional nature of it freezes out analysis other facets of bias and power, especially social and socioeconomic. And I happen to think a lot of racism is assumptions about socioeconomic status.
> What do conservatives mean when they complain about someone or some institution being woke?
Basically: that the institution's leadership or structure supports current progressive ideas about social justice issues (previously feminism of the sort described by Scott, now BLM as interpreted through a "white fragility"/"systemic racism" paradigm), that they use these as a reason to spread these ideas among their members/customers/&c. & encourage their implementation while attacking (by personal attacks, removal of privileges within the institution, firing, &c.) people who are too critical of them, & that they promote these ideas in their public messaging/branding/advertising (the leftist criticism of "woke capital" tends to include the idea that the institution does not actually care about the idea & is cynically using it to gain popularity among progressives, but this is often false).
“Unlike traditional approaches to civil rights, which favor incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory calls into question the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and the neutral principles of constitutional law.”
From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, first edition (2001), by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, p. 3.
“Crits [Critical Race Theorists] are highly suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely, rights.”
From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, first edition (2001), by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, p. 23.
James Lindsay is a liberal, and moreover not a troll. His essay is well-researched and backed by footnotes. It is far easier to smear a man than to make logical arguments against him.
Moreover, making logical arguments is explicitly rejected by Critical Theory, as noted above. No wonder name-calling was the weapon of first resort.
“Unlike traditional approaches to civil rights, which favor incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory calls into question the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and the neutral principles of constitutional law.”
From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, first edition (2001), by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, p. 3.
“Crits [Critical Race Theorists] are highly suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely, rights.”
From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, first edition (2001), by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, p. 23.
Where did this obsession with "critical race theory" come from? It's only one movement out of dozens that are part of the broader academic left/proto-woke ecosystem, but now people are using it to stand in for everything.
It's the one that's Disney is implementing as part of their corporate training. I think it's important, people need to know what it is and what it believes, and come to understand how extraordinarily dangerous it is.
If you can have people who disagree with you or questions your narrative silenced, you aren't oppressed.
Specifically, the worrying thing for me was not that it exists (everything exists somewhere on the internet), but the attacks I received by otherwise seemingly reasonable people after I pointed out that it has nothing to do with actual math.
I'm conservative, and one of the difficult problems that exists is that if a tiny minority is racist, they can still exert a disproportionate amount of power.
Say only 1% of Americans are racist, definitely a tiny minority. What if a disproportionate of racists become cops? Seems likely, cops are drawn from a pool where racists are more prevalent, and it is probably attractive to a racist to be able to harass minorities with few repercussions. These numbers are pulled out of my ass, but I could see 1% turning into 10% for these reasons.
Next, how many cops drive by someone in 7 years? Certainly more than 70, probably closer to 700. So this means that we could be living in a country where only 1% of people are racist, but that one percent do so much damage, that something needs to be done. I think that's mine and most conservative views, which is where the bad cop narrative comes from.
This is a good take, but before theorizing about the cause of a problem, you need to make sure it actually exists. Blacks are underrepresented in fatal police shootings relative to their crime rates and their rates of killing police (see graph)
Why would cops be a priori more racist? Of beat cops and sergeants in the LAPD, for example, 29% are white, 9.8% are black, 52% are Hispanic, and 8.7% are Asian. Wouldn't it be hard among that kind of "band of blue brothers" -- and they do think of themselves that way -- to be an outright racist? I mean, unless you hate on Samoans or or some other rare category you don't trust with your life every working day.
High testosterone is one factor that would push in that direction. Empirically higher T men are more right wing and more "racist" and more likely to become cops.
This probably derives from the fact that, until relatively recently in archaeological terms, the standard practice was for the winning tribe to kill all the men of the losing tribe and take their women as slaves. The men had more to lose from an invasion, genetically.
Hmm. But free testosterone levels are on average higher in black men than white[1]. Does this mean blacks are more likely to be racist than whites? That certainly inverts the narrative...
This shows that the average black has more racial in-group-bias than even the average white conservative. It also shows how white liberals are the only race x politics group in the survey with a net ethnomasochism instead of net ethnocentrism. Zach Goldberg made this chart from the survey data cited at the bottom.
3. (weaker evidence because it's not comparing US whites to US blacks directly, but it should still update a bit if you think we're not blank slates) an international survey showing white countries were a lot less racist than black countries. (via WaPo)
"Woke" and my concerns with it definitely has little to do with actual racism. I've heard people use the n-word unironically in casual conversation, I know there are racists out there. I also agree that things like redlining 60 years ago has an effect on housing today - even if there are no direct links between choices made today and racism.
I see a couple of issues with "woke" that throw me off.
First, is very much about approach. Some here have called it authoritarian or totalitarian, and that comes pretty close to my concerns. I've been in favor of free speech since that was a leftist supported ideology, and still am. I'm a believer in discourse, discussion, and polite disagreement (probably why I like ACX). The idea that some ideas are not allowed to be aired (even if a lot of people, a majority, or even ALL people share that idea) is self-defeating and can only exist by using institutional power in ways that I am against.
Second, there's an underlying philosophical issue with the idea of "equity" - meaning equality of outcomes. If two people with vastly different skill sets must end up with the same [income, housing, material goods] in order to satisfy the premises, then it's never going to happen. No matter how hard we strive to make that happen, it is physically impossible. Even if we gave everyone a house and an income, some would use it wisely and some would waste it. Some would choose to do something different, with disparate results.
A society would have to be fully totalitarian to try to prevent that, and I think they would still fail miserably. Whether that's an unrealized outcome or an intentional outcome to force people to continually struggle with it, I don't know.
Third, the attempt to create "equity" will have many foreseen and unforeseen consequences, as it did in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. It seems likely to me that a sincere attempt at "equity" will result in an overall reduction in standard of living, quite possibly to the point where current poor people are worse off than now. The most likely scenario of such a push is that people currently well off or moderately well off end up with significantly lower standards of living, with little to no improvement for those it's intended to help.
Is it just me, who is not a native speaker, that reacts to equating “equity” with “equality of outcomes”? It is something I have seen in many places, and often used as something of a cause to be critical of woke-ish ideas.
Obviously any philosophical word such as equity or equality will have multiple possible definitions and related theories (cf justice). Outcomes would be one thing to look at; but equality of opportunity or process etc would also be possible. In general I have understood the word to mean something like “fairness”. Do we have a good reason to believe that naive equal outcomes is what people mean when they use the word equity?
Because if they mean fairness then a lot of what you seem to worry about here is not a problem. In this case we would look at equal outcomes as a measure of how fair our processes or social situations are, when compared to expected deviations and variance. If everyone started at an equal level, and there were no unfair interactions or systems etc - then whatever outcomes they got would still be fair.
However you yourself noted some cases where historical artefacts and biases would not allow for fairness, and affects the outcomes - this is what I think someone arguing for equity is most concerned with.
Looking at outcomes can be a useful guide to determine where potential unfairness exists though. Eg, given that we don’t agree with old-timey racists, the inherent difference in abilities between different colours of people is fairly small; so we would expect that very little of the difference in outcome is explained by this - assuming that we see a larger difference than expected, some of it may be due to unfairness; which we should try to ameliorate.
I don’t see how this would cause unforeseen totalitarian consequences.
The word is designed to be seen as potentially either, and has positive connotations. It's clearly used for that reason, even if it only mean's one thing. I'm not sure if there's a "woke spokesperson" who can define that for all, but I've regularly and consistently heard that "equity" means equality of outcome in this context. I've heard that from both left leaning and right leaning sources, including high level corporate and government individuals defining it (meant to be in positive terms, not a gotcha hit piece).
If it means "equality of opportunity" then that's fine with me. Even if that stretches to mean "make up for past failings and poor upbringings through resources designed to help struggling individuals escape their past" I'm pretty cool with it, depending on details. I think, for example, offering to pay for all college for individuals who had a very poor K-12 education is simply a dumb idea. We would be much better off trying to correct the K-12 system these kids went through than to throw money away trying to educate them in a college setting when they are woefully unprepared. That's a detail question though. I am pretty open to paying for college for students who are fairly to well prepared for study, intelligent enough, but who otherwise could not afford it. Someone getting a 600 on the SAT and a free ride is not good policy.
I do think we need to be careful making an assumption that any difference in outcomes must be a result of racism or previous racist policies. That might be true, but we really can't prove it's true,. There are plenty of poor whites who do terrible on standardized tests and live in crummy communities full of crime. Poverty and poverty-related outcomes are far more complex than saying "there's a difference, must be racism!" This affects our approach and expectations. If there is a third factor between "racism" and "genetics" to explain some or most of the disparities between individuals or groups, then trying to force equality of outcome is going to be both hard and counterproductive (in my mind, similar to giving free rides to college for the 600 SAT scorers). Even saying "100% racism" as cause doesn't mean every black kid can or should go to college, just like every white person doesn't and shouldn't go to college. This is starting to get in the weeds, so I'll stop there. Obviously I'm thinking of other programs beyond paying for college as well, just using that as one example.
Just as an aside, I think it's poor policy and unnecessarily divisive to offer services and catch-up programs based on race. A backwater Alabama family might be in need of help whether they are white or black or any other race. Inasmuch as past wrongs have resulted in reduced material conditions for black individuals, they will be overrepresented in any program that tries to correct the reduced material conditions.
Of course the concept will be used in different ways by different people in different contexts; I was just thinking that if we want to be believers in discourse and discussion that we should try to use the strongest version of the "opponents" (wokies?) arguments. Especially when trying to apriori reason about the possibility of something like pushing for equity causing totalitarianism/authoritarianism. Ascribing the naive interpretation of the words equality of outcome is likely not very helpful; most people I think would have deeper philosophy regarding what is fair, and come with unstated assumptions about the existence and causes of inequality.
I think I have seen the concept applied in a "to each according to their need" sense as well, in addition to the ones you mentioned (eg regarding support for people with disabilities).
I don't know about your education example; am not american - I couldn't tell if it is a real proposal (600sat free rides that is) and a common position of the woke crowd you are mentioning. Where I'm from university degrees are paid for by taxes; distributed (via some panels I think) by the state. Afaiu this pays for itself in the long run (but we also have higher taxes for those earning more). It does not mean that anyone would go (only those motivated), and there is still competition for most places, based on eg standardized test scores. I think this promotes fairness in that it allows anyone increased social mobility (eg poor people getting a higher-paying job). The left crowd around here I think very much would be for getting more resources to schools in poorer areas (probably while trying to limit profitability of starting private ones that do not offer support for disabilities). My feeling is that they would use mostly consequentialist arguments for any advantage given to disadvantaged groups; rather than justice based ones. (However I think they very much think that racism etc cause most of the discrepancies in outcomes from otherwise equal starting points - that people are very much similar despite colour).
I don't think woke people just assume that racism exists and that there is no possible proof of this - rather I think they feel they have collected plenty of evidence; empirical and theoretic, qualitative and quantitative. (In many cases you can do direct studies of such phenomena, eg by hiding or replacing names/images in applications to banks or employers).
It is a bit silly though that I am explaining what I am guessing woke people think - it's just that I think that we should try to deal with the strongest version of the arguments we disagree with. Summarizing a complex topic as a three letter phrase and proving that this has to lead to totalitarianism with a simple thought-experiment just rubbed me the wrong way.
Regarding alabama - wouldn't a more productive approach be to try and convince the wokes that supporting those disadvantaged groups would also be equitable; rather than trying to disprove the concept of equity.
If that's an accurate statement of their beliefs, then I think what I wrote follows. If that's not accurate (or less Woke people agree with it than I think), then what I'm saying doesn't follow. Assuming it's a true belief, do you disagree with my conclusions?
I actually like the system you are mentioning, where college is free but getting in is gated by proving competency. It allows skilled and capable individuals to go, regardless of their ability to pay. The current system in the US is somewhat broken, as it allows anyone to go, as long as they can pay for it (not all schools will admit you, but someone will). It's more broken because between loans and grants, just about anyone can pay for it* as well. A suggestion frequently made on the left is to make college free, but not to add testing requirements that would limit who goes. In fact, many would argue that testing requirements is drastically and specifically non-woke.
I'm not sure what you mean in the middle about assuming racism exists. That's an area that I agree, at least to an extent, with them about. Racism does exist. There's plenty of evidence for it.
On the Alabama question: One of the issues I have with woke ideology is the creation of overarching racial groups. Saying that all white people are X and all black people are Y is generalizing to absurdity. I would like to have a discussion about helping disadvantaged people of all races, but there's a very visible strain of wokeness that says all white people are oppressors and hold power, and no black people are oppressors or hold power. I'm not sure how you argue for "helping all disadvantaged people" when someone on the other side of the argument/conversation disagrees with the idea that a white person is or can be disadvantaged. Of course, not everyone on the left feels that way, so there's plenty of room for discussion with the non-woke on general ways to help those in poverty. Even if I disagree on the detail questions, there's at least room to talk. I may be overgeneralizing on wokeness, but that's definitely the impression that I get regarding power and oppression. Maybe they would agree Barack Obama has/had power, but probably not too many others.
*-Because they pay for it through loans, they owe it back. This is bad for those who fail out of school or who are unable to leverage their time in school/degree productively after. If it causes prices to rise, which I believe it does, then it's bad for everyone except college employees.
This was also in her tweet: "...It's about giving people the resources and the support they need - so that everyone can be on equal footing - and then compete on equal footing..." - which I take to mean more of equal opportunity, rather than enforcing what people make of those opportunities. I don't think I am reading into it too hard? I very much think that no-one is actually about to enforce outcomes in any authoritarian way - at worst they will use it as targets and redistribute support for it in ways we find slightly suboptimal. I think pretty much no-one would take issue to the outcomes if they were 100% chosen in a fair system, but that situation is so far away and unrealistic that it is not worth mentioning for most people.
Sorry about the middle; was responding to "I do think we need to be careful making an assumption that any difference in outcomes must be a result of racism or previous racist policies. That might be true, but we really can't prove it's true." with the idea that we probably can have some fairly accurate approximations for the effect of at least some policies, and some biases. But yeah, stuff is complicated and proving it completely is difficult.
So you must have had worse luck than me when speaking to wokies; or perhaps it is that much worse in the americas. To me the claims you attribute to them read more like what I get from memes sent to me from decidedly non-woke people making fun of (or fear-mongering about) wokeness - rather than what I get from talking to someone who I would consider woke. Sometimes they do use words in idiosyncratic ways; where there is some conversation needed before I can understand where they are coming from - eg what it would mean for a poor white person to still have some privilege.
Admittedly race is a much smaller topic here, and much of the discussion imported I think - we have a different history here. The similar issue they care a lot for might be xenophobia instead.
Very well put. Most people in America really don't understand how appealing and just Communism looked on paper, back in the day.
Also, they don't understand that Communism was predicated on changing human nature, and that necessitates totalitarianism. The end result was death and misery among the very stratum of the society Communism declared as protected.
Maybe he's a shitty driver or likes to beat his last time to the office. I was pulled over far more than 7 times in the first 6 years I was driving. If the officer had always been a different race than me I might've drawn angry conclusions[1], but he wasn't, so I figured my tendency to see speed limit signs as merely advisory was more to blame.
Which is to say, part of the trouble with racism as currently defined is that it can explain too much. Every time an encounter between black and white doesn't go well, or one of the parties resents it (or somebody resents it on their behalf), we can jump to racism as the explanation. And it fits, by God. It *does* explain things. The problem is, there might well be more parsimonious explanations that *also* fit, and if we're a little bit intellectually lazy we don't always take Occam's Razor to heart.
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[1] Which has always struck me as the best argument for integration and some amount of affirmative action.
I’m by no means a conservative but to steelman a little, I think complaints of wokeness object to institutions that take pro-social justice ideological positions either in excess of effectiveness/need or in a way that contradicts the institutions core message.
An example of this would be people complaining about changing the physical fitness standards of the military in response to the inclusion of female soldiers. This would be characterized as “woke” because it’s seen as changing a standard in a way that contradicts the institutions objectives.
This becomes a point of conflict when the two sides disagree on the goal of institutions (e.g. should schools prepare students for jobs and life or should they teach values) or when there’s conflict about the size of the problem and/or solution (e.g. arguments over whether racialized police violence violence is a major issue and whether proposed solutions solve the problem).
I feel that this captures both the broad variety of complaints about “wokeness” and what kind of agreement the two sides would have to reach to form common ground on these issues.
Google Trends data normalizes over the relevant interval, so for many of them no. I'm not sure how I feel about the additional level of normalization of e.g. atheism v. feminism - they're not so far apart that the comparison is meaningless, but it does complicate any narrative that proposes a transfer of attention by consistently-sized groups.
The comparison kind of ignores the comparisons Scott is making, but I don't think that's a bad thing. It's *definitely* worth noting that racism at its most salient does only a little better than planets on a slow space news day.
"Racist" and "racism" are separate terms, as are associated phrases like "black lives matter", and one could plausibly use one without using another. In fact, "racist" is substantially higher than "racism". There's nothing similar for "Mars" ('Martian' doesn't even register, except for a little bit when 'the Martian' came out).
The 'racism' graph ends at what would be an all-time high with the exception of the spike. The spike is even higher by a factor of x4, and normalized would drown out the other data. Compared to the other topics, it *is* so far apart the comparison is meaningless.
(Other charts in this post show plenty of similar spikes, but usually multiple around significant events. "The George Floyd protests are the only time racism has truly broken into the popular consciousness" is a very odd take, but it's supported by the Google trends data and is probably best explored as a separate topic.)
That's substantially different. If you squint at it, you can see how Scott's graphs show something similar, because atheism does fall at about the time feminism rises. But Scott's graphs are adjusted to similar visual heights, so when you look at them it looks like the loss from atheism is similar to the rise from feminism, and makes it seem plausible that people just changed subjects. With graphs with a labelled Y axis, that no longer seems plausible.
It seems strange to me that the biggest success of the feminist moment, the #metoo movement, occurred *after* it had already been replaced by race in this story.
Also, I feel like the discourse around trans issues has been heating up in recent years, much more so than it ever was in the Gamergate era (even if the Rationalist community was already becoming aware of a growing trans population at the time - I think Rationalists have been ahead of the curve on several of these things, because I remember distinctly in 2016, when Clinton made her speech about the alt right, thinking "Rationalists are taking over so much that even their bad guys are becoming the real world bad guys").
My read at least is that "new feminism" (angry, cool, online only) is what was replaced by "new antiracism" at that point - metoo came out of what had then become mainstream feminism. There were a few people worrying it might go too far, but it wasn't too controversial by then.
"Biggest success" in this case is several high profile prosecutions, and probably the removal of several dozen serial predators from certain positions of community power. It remains to be seen whether the culture has changed in a way that will prevent more from getting into those positions, and whether this will have a noticeable impact for the average person, or if it just impacts those who spend a lot of time in these particular communities.
I would guess that high-profile douchebags would be less confident in their douchebaggery. Average women though? No idea. I would like to hope that some of the appalling behaviour of twenty-something men towards women is reined in a little. Small steps.
A friend of mine just hung out with an ex, who came onto her too strongly, didn't communicate, just pushed. She was texting for help from her own bathroom b/c she's high trauma and isn't confident that her "no" will be respected.
I'm like, 1000% on board with people not having experiences like this, but I'm also high confidence that there's no way to get humans to stop being pushy about sex. Women are pushy about sex, too, just less in physically violent ways.
When I see like, this idea that people should have a sense of safety, I just... I don't think that's possible. The world isn't a safe place, and it's never going to be a safe place. Fear helps us to keep ourselves safe. Humans are wired for fearfulness, and teaching people that they should get to feel safe and comfortable all of the time seems like it's making them hyper vigilant towards threats.
If the goal is to engender a sense of safety, I think this "punish evildoers" thing is going to be a failed strategy, because there will always be 17 year olds with hard ons who don't empathy good.
I have a feeling trans issues are less controversial these days. Things were more violent in the "gender/feminism era" as Scott describes it. I remember a lot of people (including me at the time) lump in trans/nonbinary/genderqueer and make a bigger issue out of it than it actually was. "Now these people want to be called different pronouns? Where do we stop!?" and other such alarmist rhetoric. I see it less now, except from TERFs (another indication of the decline of internet feminism?). Being trans in 2021 feels (from an outside perspective) a lot more like being gay was in 2011 - socially acceptable, normal, with the understanding that not everyone is on the same page about that and may need to be brought up to speed. Transphobia isn't endearing now or anything, but I don't see people really upset about it (that is to say, upset enough to write articles about it) unless it's on an institutional scale, like denying people legal access to medicine or therapy or whatever.
This might be a matter of me sliding between different filter bubbles, rather than a genuine change in attitude.
I think that trans rights/issues will get more mainstream at least in liberal circles and culture. Even though trans/gender queer people make up such a small percent of the population that trans rights won't create the type of online movement like feminism or anti-racism did, there's a lot more communities online (don't know how that was in 2011) where trans people are accepted. So my guess is that gender fluidity will become more accepted but without the sort of upheaval that internet feminism had, more like gradual change and understanding especially for future generations.
The wave of all the anti-trans laws is almost entirely conservatives floundering since their platform for support has been destroyed after Trump was de-platformed. Same with TERFs: it's their attempt to claim #MeToo alliance and their "womanhood" but without what they consider to be too woke and scary for them.
In my opinion, transsexual activists have lost their war. I've seen several organizations say they won't give hormones or even hormone blockers to minors.
Thanks. I just looked it up, and if I understood correctly, Karolinska’s policy is now to not give puberty blockers without court permission, and Tavistock’s is now to not give puberty blockers without parental consent.
Avoiding giving hormones to minors is probably for the best. There are people for whom it legitimately is "just a phase" - I know this for a fact, since I was one - and iatrogenic harms are something best avoided.
I’m expecting the “Dutch protocol” to go the way of lobotomies. Ten or twenty years from now, lawsuits will bring it to an end. That, or some neo-Bezmenov will defect from FSB, saying that transgender ideology was all a nefarious Russian plot to subvert liberal democracy.
I feel like the fact that that's where the bar is set for losing suggests trans-activists have won the war.
Like, if you told me 10 years ago trans-activists had been so successful that they were now focusing their efforts on making hormone treatments accessible to pre-teens, I'd be pretty amazed that they'd gotten so far so quickly.
(or 20 years ago, if you told me the high-water mark for Gay Rights had been that they failed to leagally force people to make wedding cakes for gay ceremonies, I certainly wouldn't think they'd "lost the war")
Trans issues certainly feel pretty mainstream to me. I work for a very large employer and I'd estimate that ~30% of people have their pronouns in their email signatures. (All of them are cis as far as I'm aware.)
I think a rise in transgender awareness comes from their actually being more transgender and genderfluid people. It's contoversial, but there's a a lot of evidence that the abundance of synthetic endocrine disruptors is having effects of this sort on people and animals.
Unfortunately this very serious ecological problem is kind of a taboo subject because it will predicatably be weaponized by anti-trans conservatives (the are unnatural) and also doesnt fit with the (very confusing) popular trans politics which sort of say gender is purely a social construct.
I definitely see trans discourse as a new wave. Never heard about it five years ago, started encountering it all the time online 3-4 years ago, have total normie not at all online people talking to me about it recently (mostly as it invades their professional spheres, ie they're getting talks at work about needing to direct obvious men to the women's bathroom).
It also sort of follows the pattern described in this post - there was gay rights, and then that went sufficiently mainstream that gays are now attacked online for being bigoted cisgays, eg Fred Sargent being banned from twitter.
The Rationalist bad guys are neoreactionaries, which isn't the same as alt-right. Neoreactionaries tend to be in favor of monarchy, states run by corporations, and stuff like that. Richard Spencer calls himself a "white identitarian". I once talked to a neoreactionary who dismissed his movement as being essentially more identity politics BS.
MeToo was an IRL phenomenon that hinged on a small number of public accusations and charges being laid (which snowballed into more accusations). It was not a movement generated through internet activism and it involved some of the biggest celebrities in the country.
Also, I seem to recall that when that chart of NYTimes mention charts first came out, there was some important discussion about whether the data it contained were accurate, or whether someone with a grudge manufactured a bunch of data. But after staring at it for a few minutes I couldn't find whatever the things were that had been mentioned as red flags when it came out a few years ago.
My general feeling is this essay is too optimistic
There's a fashion element to it yes, but unlike fashion these belief systems come with associated demands. Atheism has demands, new atheism has demands, feminism has demands, critical race theory has demands. How often and to what extent these movements have their demands met. What does it mean to meet their demands? When the fashionable thought changes what will the new demands mean?
"It was really hard to say "I don’t like feminists", because the invariable retort was "feminism is just the belief that women are people, how can you be against that?". It was even harder to say something like "I'm against the vague category of thing including feminism, anti-racism, and LGBT activism" Remember that at this point all of this was internal to geeky internet culture, and everyone involved was more or less a liberal Democrat who agreed that all those concepts were in theory good. "
"Feminism and anti-racism had always been lumped together as "social justice", but for the first few years feminism was the big sister and anti-racism the tag-along little brother. "
I know this is a post-mortem of the recent internet phenomena but I really find lines like these jarring given the history of the last idk 150-200 or so years
Because both Feminism and anti-racism as causes have been around far far longer than 20 years and indeed so has the phrase social justice. Even if you just go back to the 60s and 70s people were already attacking bleeding heart liberals for the basic trio of feminism, anti-racism, and LGBT activism, although at that point LGBT activism was a lot more niche and radical. You could argue that the pattern of feminism and anti-racism see-sawing back and forth in terms of importance has actually lasted for a lot longer, eg pre-civil war female literacy campaigns were arguably bigger than abolitionism for a while, but then anti-racism built up and became memetically dominant for decades until suffragism made a big comeback and so on.
Regarding 4chan's tonal shift, 4chan's userbase shifted dramatically and often based on news cycle spikes. Big jumps occurred with Gamergate and the Trump campaign. Both brought a permanent and substantial increase in usership, and also contained far more mobile users than desktop, which most consider to be a sign of a newer and less tech-savvy browsers. While the tone of older users may have shifted a large amount of credit goes to newfriends who simply overshadowed the old userbase rather than lurking and assimilating.
Google images "4chan traffic history" for graphs, don't know how to include images in a substack reply.
/new/ (the /pol/ predecessor) and /pol/ have always been far right. What really changed is /pol/ becoming by far the most active board on 4chan ( that and /b/ losing relevance and not having stuff like Project Chanology anymore).
I don't feel like non-politcal boards like /sp/ have changed much in tone in the last +10 years.
I think some have drifted a lot closer to /pol/, like /tv/. But then there have been new boards that certainly border politics like /his/ that have always been firmly anti-/pol/.
Yeah, I was there during the early days of 4chan, and it was mostly apolitical. It was originally founded as an English version of the Japanese site 2chan, and it was focused mainly on anime and various types of Japanese porn. If anything, they were against the GOP due to it being a pro-censorship party that emphasized "Christian values."
They still despise the GOP, only now it's for being a party full of morons whose role in American politics is to legitimatize leftism through a series of "gallant" defeats on whatever the issue of the day is.
All those words, and yet nothing about New Transgenderism. Nothing about the push for "Black Trans Lives Matter" as a new slogan. Nothing about the linguistic contortions of "People Who Give Birth Day".
Of course, that phenomenon is still in progress, so it may be one of those Things You Can't Say ( http://paulgraham.com/say.html ).
At the risk of inflaming a culture war thing, what's this "People Who Give Birth Day" thing? There's all sorts of documents that want to focus on "people who give birth" rather than "mothers" when talking in the context of giving birth. But I have not encountered anyone who wants to replace "Mother's Day" by disowning adoptive mothers (whether straight or lesbian, cis or trans) or to incorporate trans fathers who happened to give birth to their children into that day.
But yes, the fact that there is a big culture war around trans issues at the moment suggests that it has at least somewhat dissociated from the feminist/anti-feminist moment of 2010-2015.
Huh? I said that when we talk about people giving birth, we should call them "people who give birth". But the holiday yesterday was *not* about people who give birth - it was about *mothers* (some of whom give birth and some of whom don't).
It's not about confusion. It's about precision. If you care about people dying in childbirth, talk about people who are giving birth. If you're celebrating female parents, talk about "mothers". This whole thread claimed that someone was trying to cancel "Mother's Day" by turning it into a different holiday that ignores adoptive mothers. And Cori Bush isn't doing that.
If you want us to ignore trans men who die in childbirth, just say that - don't accuse her of doing something else.
That's nothing to do with mothers day which is what the question was about. You're just pointing at vaguely related things you dislike and extrapolating a trend towards something that more people will agree is bad
So while before I would have said "Are you mentally troubled? there is no way terms like "Mother's Day" will be replaced or rejigged", I'm less certain of that now. I suppose trans men are happy with Father's Day, but I certainly wouldn't put it past someone to start agitating over "men get pregnant too, day celebrating parents who give birth should be inclusive term!"
Except this is *exactly* what I was saying! People talking about the difficulties of childbirth are fixing their terminology to make it be about all and only people who are birthing children. This has no effect on holidays that are explicitly about female parents, and that has *never* been about birthing (since adoptive mothers have always been included).
The problem with this sort of thing is that you can point at any isolated instance of something and say "it's starting to happen". Missing out the step where you prove that this is likely to evolve into a wider trend. You can construct a potentially infinite number of possible futures to be worried about but its not a very productive use of time
> Nothing about the linguistic contortions of "People Who Give Birth Day".
Can you find me a single example of that being used unironically by a left wing person? Genuine question. Because looking for variations on the phrase online I've only seen it used by "anti-woke" right wing commentators. Who seem to have invented it whole cloth to be mad about
That was my first reaction. "Nor has some some other gender discourse arisen to replace them." - wait, WHAT?!? Bill C-16, ROGD, Caitlyn Jenner 'Woman of the Year', the J.K. Rowling cancel campaigns, medical schools scrambling to remove references to biological sex from their teaching materials... but nah, no new gender discourse in sight. I hope that was just some very generous "rounding down to 0" on Scott's part.
For the record, the first time I became aware of the term "transphobia" was when it was listed in the core demands of "Atheism+" - the SJW faction whose emergence started the end of internet atheism. Atheism+ focused mostly on feminism, but it seems that in the long run, trans activists had the better hand in victimology poker.
Well, since feminism again and again tends to emerge a winner in big culture war engagements it's clearly worthwhile to define precisely what the "femin-" part refers to. And it's obvious that plain old ciswomen are no longer fit to be standard-bearers in the current intersectional opression olympics paradigm, as Rowling and the other TERFs weren't too happy to discover I'm sure.
It's amusing that the hot current outrage is about unconvincing "female athlete protection" attempts by conservatives, when segregated female sports itself was once a feminist pursuit. It's the first time I've been struck by a stark example of Cthulhu's leftward progress.
I'm not aware that it was the segregation that ever was the feminist pursuit. It was women's participation in sport that feminists wanted.
If you go back to the before times on that, then women were just banned from a whole bunch of sports. Like - in 1966 and 1967 officials tried to stop women (Roberta Gibb and Kathrine Switzer) from running in the Boston Marathon.
Some sports did just say that women can compete on equal terms with the men (e.g. horseracing and motorsports) and most feminists were satisfied with that, even though they remain overwhelmingly male sports. Women, it seems, prefer to see an occasional Danica Patrick compete with the men than to have an entirely separate event. But most sports organisations preferred to establish separate events for men and women than to integrate their sport.
Now, having created separate events for men and women, would feminists be satisfied with replacing those with a single event open to all? No, I suspect not - but I think that's path-dependent.
But the first female-only motorsport series was the 2019 W Series and that produced lots of feminist opposition, not support.
Well, of course they didn't outright demand it to be segregated, they demanded the right to "equal participation". And yes, there were were plenty (and still are some) sexists willing to deny entry to them, but the main reason few women were ever willing to compete was that in pretty much any contest of endurance, strength or nimbleness they had no hope to defeat the best men. So, to ensure any significant participation in practice, segregation is unavoidable, then as now.
It tells us - if the above evidence is any guide - that once you've hit 'peak' something the Overton Window is already shifted significantly enough that the elite subset creating 'peak' something have already moved much further down the path. Purity spirals gonna purity spiral.
So as someone who's been around for pretty much ALL of this, (No seriously, I was commenting on Pandagon way back when, although I always thought Shakesville was too socially political for my tastes) my argument is that we're due for what I'm calling a "Clearpilling" event. That's my argument. I've seen it before in individuals, where they realize that the Woke/SJW/Progressive/Whatever stuff for whatever reason really isn't all it's cracked up to be, and certainly it's not what they support.
The one thing that I feel is missing from this mostly accurate historical record on this, is the WHY. Or at least, I think it's missing a big part of the picture. To put it bluntly, I think it all revolves around social status competitions and hierarchy. I think that was the whole thing behind the Internet Feminism stuff talked about, yeah, low status men DON'T get to do the same things everybody else can do. That's just the way it is and people need to learn their place. (Not healthy at all). But even more so, I do think that the pivotal moments were surrounding Atheism+ and GamerGate, where social status hierarchy was directly threatened in reverse: Both, to a degree, had an element of do high-status people get held to the same rules as everybody else? And the high-status people, in both cases, lost their crap in the face of this.
But moving forward, I think there's a certain point where the SJW/Woke/Progressive culture is going to start demanding that people actually give up status. It's one thing to demand people to donate or say the right thing or whatever. It's another thing when they start asking for people to give up their jobs/material status symbols (houses)/etc. Even if it's not on an individual basis, I could see for example a sort of anti-NIMBY law working in this way. (Even though frankly this is something I, as a liberal critic of Pop Progressivism as I call it, support) That I think is what is going to make this stuff fall apart. People as a rule don't set themselves on fire to keep other people warm, and one of the strengths of that Pop Progressive culture is that it doesn't ask the in-group to. The costs are relegated to outsiders. But I don't think that strength can last forever. And the second the Clearpill starts to spread, and clear divisions pop up between this Pop Progressivism and more traditional Liberalism, I think it's over for the Pop Progressives. They almost instantly lose the moral authority, those ideas and concepts come up for scrutiny, and I don't think it survives that.
Regarding status, there is an interesting proto culture war going on on Twitter right now between two different groups who both could have been described as geek feminists a while ago: "antis" and "anti-antis". Right now it's more or less limited to fandom spaces, but I have seen it spill out from time to time.
"Antis" are your usual woke-scolding bullies who rally their friends to try to cancel you for drawing characters in a sexy way or finding specific Bad things hot. They mostly use the same rhetoric as the online SJWs of old. "Anti-antis" are another set of former Tumblr feminists who don't think fictional characters have rights, are against censorship, bullying and cancel culture; I'm not sure they have realised it yet, but what they are fighting against is online performative wokeness. I just hope the movement will keep its momentum.
"Antis" aren't about fighting "objectification", they're about Saving The Children - although unusually for a group with that purpose, a lot of them are The Children.
There's some overlap in "this fictional relationship is a bad role model, it encourages abuse/rape", but they focus much more on "a child could theoretically encounter this porn", "beware of adults grooming kids online", "this character is child-coded so we know the author must be a pedo", etc
Something that occurred to me recently: after "political correctness" ran its course, we got lots of mainstream things that were openly anti-PC.
Bill Maher had a TV show called *Politically Incorrect*, of course, but there were lots of other things like this. South Park, Eric Cartman, Sonic the Hedgehog, and others were "cool but rude." People made fun of earnestly PC habits (e.g. this song - https://genius.com/The-toasters-modern-world-america-lyrics).
So will we get that this time around? We probably have it already with some comedians. But how about anti-woke cartoon characters?
People can react with amusement or disgust at the behaviour of the politically correct, but this is sort of like the conflict you might see if roman catholics of 1500 AD were exposed to apostolic christians of 200 AD.
Extreme political correctness is just the logical outgrowth of beliefs and assumptions that have been impossible to contradict for decades prior to the widespread knowledge of terms like PC or woke.
"We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal"
If this is what everyone who isn't a vile monster believes, sincerely and absolutely, then modus vivendi liberals like Maher who make fun of the politically correct or others who insist on being left alone are just hypocrites and shirkers. From the woke perspective their the only ones who take the idea seriously.
> this is sort of like the conflict you might see if roman catholics of 1500 AD were exposed to apostolic christians of 200 AD.
How so? I don't understand what you're trying to say here.
> "We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal" If this is what everyone who isn't a vile monster believes, sincerely and absolutely, then modus vivendi liberals like Maher who make fun of the politically correct or others who insist on being left alone are just hypocrites and shirkers.
Except that when this was written & for most of the time since then, it meant not that all people or groups of people were equal in every important way, but only that all people are similar enough that they should be treated equally by the political system. Cf. Hobbes, who (IIRC) this is partly based on (Leviathan ch. 13, at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm#link2HCH0013 ):
> Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe.
> And as to the faculties of the mind, (setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon generall, and infallible rules, called Science; which very few have, and but in few things; as being not a native faculty, born with us; nor attained, (as Prudence,) while we look after somewhat els,) I find yet a greater equality amongst men, than that of strength. For Prudence, is but Experience; which equall time, equally bestowes on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto. That which may perhaps make such equality incredible, is but a vain conceipt of ones owne wisdome, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the Vulgar; that is, than all men but themselves, and a few others, whom by Fame, or for concurring with themselves, they approve.
>I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal - equal in “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
>How so? I don't understand what you're trying to say here.
In the sense that on the one side you have the consistent but impractical and the other side you have the worldly but inconsistent.
> On the Declaration
Jefferson wrote that statement but in his private writings he obviously didn't believe it. Other thinkers, contemporary or past, were likely similar. Lincoln also did not believe in that kind of equality based on his writings. It seems like after world war 2 (for obvious reasons) people started to take this statement literally, as a scientific fact about our species.
More to the point, interpreting it literally allowed ambitious types to campaign for the power needed to redress the resulting inequalities. This has always been the essence of leftism.
You're right; he wasn't. But in the U.S. he had "attitude" and in the UK was kind of an anti-hero. I was thinking of "cool but rude" characters and he popped into my head.
Yeah, I guess this is the difference between Bart Simpson ("cool but rude") and Eric Cartman (anti-PC). And while South Park never really has us sympathize with Cartman himself, it does take an anti-PC line of its own.
I've seen woke folk who are against South Park. I want to say it started around the time they started making fun of social justice, but that's confirmation bias.
Yeah. I was a very early contributor to talk.origins and a mentor in biology and philosphy on physicsoforums.com, where we hosted debates with creationists back in 2002. I feel pretty in tune with the recent history of atheism, especially as it pertains to Richard Dawkins and the debunking of irreducible complexity arguments for intelligent design that dominated the legal discourse of curriculum battles in the 90s and 00s.
I had never heard of this "euphoria" thing and indeed have never been on Twitter (do go to Reddit sometimes but only hobbyist subs for Rust programming or building a homelab or the television show Dark, not genpop).
To be fair, Scott put "online" culture in the title of his post, but this is barely if at all a meaningful reflection of the actual history, even the very recent history, of atheism, feminism, and anti-racism. These are still real-world movements with long and rich histories that you can't reduce to the proclivities of how 17 year-olds are behaving on Reddit and 4Chan.
Short-time reader, first time commenter here. I really like this. I'm 23 years old, but I was a precocious enough pre-teen to be into Dawkins and co. while they were still cool. But I would actually say my real political awakening was with feminism and today I'm a white man who sometimes writes about white people. So I've been invested in the three of the progressive-leaning trends you write above, and I have to say I think I come out with a more positive view of all of them than you do.
Maybe this is a product of only really joining the blogosphere in the last year, but my experience is that the real impact of these movements comes from their compassionate, empathetic spokespeople and not from their more puritanical bases. Political change is obviously very hard, but in general I think people are more skeptical, more respectful, and more self-aware than they were when I was growing up, and it's hard not to thank these people for it. Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry, Caitlin Moran, Roxane Gay, and Natalie Wynn are all both more admirable and more consequential than most of their fans. Maybe you can say the same about Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, I don't know.
I don't want to say that online hate mobs don't do damage, but it seems pretty apparent to me that a lot of good has come from reading these things with charity. If you're a blogger you see the blogosphere, so you get exposed to the worst parts of every movement you oppose. But do we really want to go back to Ahmed the Dead Terrorist or whatever? I don't think so.
As a fan of Natalie Wynn's videos, I think you can say the same about Jordan Peterson. He's much more thoughtful and insightful than most takes on him give him credit, which is probably why he's achieved begrudging respectability. He won't stop talking about Soviet atrocities and tends to express simple truths in grandiose ways, but sometimes I like being told that keeping my room tidy embodies the primordial struggle against Tiamat, the Mesopotamian dragon-goddess of Chaos, because in a very real sense it does.
I think the best part of the internet is being exposed to a wide range of different opinions, at any other time in history I'd either be really bored or burned as a heretic for asking too many questions.
Ahaha that's a fair point about the bedroom thing! And yeah, I think you're right about the internet exposing people to different ideas. In some ways, my favourite thing about the feminist/race critical stuff is precisely that it is a challenge to my perspective, so it's good that there's some back and forth about it all.
Peterson's clean room analogy is subtly nefarious. I clean my room often, he's right, it makes me incredibly well-prepared for the days ahead. But he's not telling you that because he wants you to go out and do whatever you want, he really wants you to stop criticising people, he wants you to ignore external problems, he wants you to think the individual is more important than the collective, hence all the rhetoric about 'clean your room before you criticise others'. The parallels to his ideology are stark, and it explains why he cares so much for individual improvement in form but not in substance.
I wouldn't exactly say he preaches individualism. He talks a lot about responsibilities to other people, and as a clinical psychologist and self-help guru he's hardly immune to criticising others!
I think a fairer characterisation of Peterson is that he believes you have to start small if you want to improve the world, starting with yourself and then moving on the people around you - it's not that the collective isn't important, it's that you're an individual and your influence and understanding are limited, so it's very unlikely that you know how to solve all of the world's problems. You could reasonably say that this discourages political engagement, Peterson would probably argue that political engagement killed millions of people last century through war and genocide - as I said, he's big on Soviet atrocities.
I'm less conservative than Peterson, but I do think it's important to keep in mind that deep down we all secretly think that the world would be a better place if only we could send all our enemies to the Gulag, and temper our political ambitions accordingly.
The individual IS more important than the collective, for individual lives. Have you ever heard leftist rhetoric along the lines of "no one but rich people can save money" or "why bother planning for retirement when climate change will kill us all?" I think the "clean your room" line is a rebuttal to that. Climate change and the economy may indeed be problems, but they're problems that individual action can do very little about. Much better to build a good life for yourself (and yeah, being competent is also a prerequisite for any effective action on social problems, but let's not kid ourselves—even effective action by a competent actor does very little on big problems.).
This is also something that undermines people attempting to do real good in the world; so many of the most socially-conscious people I know also seem to be mentally and materially hanging by a thread. This is probably why they gravitated towards movements that are all about being non-judgemental and accepting whatever they can give. But the key bone my conservative relatives have to pick with the woke crowd isn’t about gender pronouns; it’s “why should these people, who seem on the brink of falling apart, get to tell me how to live?” I can’t come up with a great answer, since I’m very much a “clean your room to defend against chaos” person myself.
All you're saying is that you are liable to be swept up by charismatic speakers and writers, and that that is more important than the actual truth value of whichever statement is being proposed by said speaker. This is sophism at its best and worst.
What is sorely lacking in online debate is a shared epistemological and ethical framework that can be used to judge the actual meaning of whichever debate is taking place. The only subculture I have found that is willing to discuss the method of debate (aka the ethical and epistemological framework in which the debate takes place) above and beyond the contents of debate are the rationalists.
I absolutely despise the reduction of debate to hero-worship, which is exactly what your comment does. Ideas should be judged for their content. You seem to judge ideas by their proponents. This is bad epistemology.
Ok ok, I'll bite. I didn't mean to suggest that if a good person has a bad idea, that makes it a good idea. I think the people I listed had better arguments and ideas than most of what you see in the blogosphere, and that those ideas and arguments would be good whoever was making them. But I think, and indeed ACX says in the post, that it matters how an idea is put forth. You can be generous and empathetic or not, and if you're not, you will probably end up with worse ideas.
I think ACX is saying that many of, say, the geek feminists, were not just incorrect, but also vituperative and lazy in a way that made them more likely to be incorrect over time. My contention, to put it crudely, is that those bad arguers were less impactful than the good arguers I listed, making the trends which gave rise to both a net good.
I don't know much about those other people but describing Caitlin Moran as some paragon of compassionate and empathetic debate is pretty weird. She's a classical angry feminist of the 2010 era variety:
"When statistics come in saying that only 29% of American women would describe themselves as feminist ... [I think] were you just DRUNK AT THE TIME OF THE SURVEY?"
ironically, she also said: "My rules for social media are exactly like my rules for feminism: women are equal to men, everyone is equal to everybody, and don’t be a dick"
That's a fair point. She is a comedic writer and that can lend itself to snark or dismissiveness, and I think that quote is a good example of that. On the other hand, that same comedic lightness on her part was what really made feminism appealing to me at the time - it allows for tension and honesty in a way that really comes through in her book. I can't speak to her Twitter stuff as much, but in general I would just say that everyone is a worse version of themselves on Twitter.
> Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry, Caitlin Moran, Roxane Gay, and Natalie Wynn are all both more admirable and more consequential than most of their fans. Maybe you can say the same about Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, I don't know.
This is typical for people with followings though, right? Fandoms select themselves based on who finds the output valuable, and that's pretty consistently going to be people who find the topics meaningful but couldn't easily reproduce the work on their own.
There's obviously a divergence when the following promotes virtues we find repugnant, but IME that's much rarer than e.g. followings built around repugnant values with an unobjectionable virtue gradient.
I unfortunately don't know what a virtue gradient is, so hopefully I'm not misunderstanding you, but yeah, my argument does rest on the idea that the ideas being put forward by Dawkins, Wynn, etc. are not fundamentally wrong or bad.
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Again, I'm still getting to know ACX, but my understanding from this post is that he's not against feminism, etc. per se, but just believes that the movements established in their name were harmful and promoted the worst aspects of those ideologies. My point is that if you want a better view of what "new feminism" or whatever has actually produced, you're better off looking at the good ideas and attitudes of the people I listed.
This stuff reminds me of the 'generator/filter' pattern, with the american left acting as a 'cultural generator' and the american right acting as a 'cultural filter' - the left spits out tons of ideas, and the right accepts some of these, quietly, while complaining all the way.
Perhaps effective challenges to new ideas can't come from the filter, because the filter reject everything; effective challenges to new ideas have to come from _even newer_ ideas.
And, because people gonna people, what you "can't' do is say 'gee wouldn't any sane person have some combination of a generator and a filter? Aren't both of these necessary for healthy cognition." - because to the filter people you look like you've bought into the insane new ideas. And to the generator people, you look like you're judgemental, which is the _worst_ thing you can be.
Also, I'd reject the claim, "wouldn't any sane person have some combination of a generator and a filter?" I would say, any sane person should live in a society, and every society should have a generator and a filter, but there's no reason for the individual to have that all internally, any more than we each have to individually chop our own wood and mill our own flour.
Someone mills the flour and someone else bakes bread from it, but it would be dangerous if people who mill the flour completely forgot that its ultimate purpose is to be a part of a meal. Even worse, if they were actively opposed to the idea of using their flour for food. They might e.g. try to make it less safe to eat.
If the goal is to come up with *good* ideas, then if you separate the generators from filters too much, so much that the generators will identify as anti-filters, and filters will identify as anti-generators, the good ideas will be unlikely to happen, because the generators will create only obviously crazy things, and the filters will make sure to also remove the good ideas.
What, specifically, is being generated differentially by these subgroups? It seems to me that both groups are generating ideas and trying to spread them while filtering and trying to stop the ideas from the outgroup.
The right really doesnt come up with ideas, it just holds on to ideas that have existed for a long time and seem like they are on the way out. the right is usually reactionary, also in the sense that it reacts to the left. it may come up with witty criticisms of the left but it doesnt generally come up with new things. if im wrong think of one new thing that isnt a reaction to something from the left.
I mean, wanting to conserve the old ways rather than replace them with new ones is pretty much the definition of "conservative", isn't it? That is, assuming that "right" and "left" are more or less aliases for "conservative" and "progressive", holding on to old ideas instead of promoting new ones is what *defines* the right as the right.
Left and right originated during the French Revolution, and yes the right was the conservative faction that wanted to preserve as much of pre-revolutionary France as possible. Burke refined this into conservatism, which is exactly the filter role described above.
*Puts helmet on* The right has been losing ground for centuries because the traditional orientation of the right towards society - top-down authoritarianism - is wrong. We used to believe the micro proceeded from the macro, when evidence shows the macro proceeds from the micro. In other words, a bottom-up approach to society is more often correct when subjected to an evidentiary test. The "right" (a proto-right that seemed natural and which the actual right tries to conserve) basically got it wrong thousands of years ago and has been losing ground for the past 500 as knowledge of this error has spread.
Not to mince words, the name for this top-down error is "god".
The left began to overcorrect after the Russian revolution because left vanguards assumed the top-down position, just with a different agenda. They made the state into god, and committed all the old errors. I say this only because correcting left over-reach *is* a valid purpose of the right. There is a place and a meaningful precedent for it.
Liberalism, pluralism, and bottom-up approaches are usually better because their model of society more accurately reflects reality. That's why it appears society is steadily becoming more liberal as knowledge spreads.
If the right were to be proactive about ideas, pluralism is where they should hang their hat. Not only because a political monoculture would exclude the right, but also because pluralism is the basis for market economics, limited government, and even nationalism. One aspect of pluralism is choosing to tolerate inefficiency in exchange for resiliency. Some people on the right have been murmuring about this re economic matters, but the tougher sell of defending nationalism and parochialism (given that war is inevitable with those) as a form of human redundancy has yet to be articulated to my knowledge.
“The left began to overcorrect after the Russian revolution”
The French Revolution very quickly became top-down and was very concerned with wiping out ancient traditions, replacing them with “Reason”, and consolidating political and ideological power in the center.
One could give other historical examples of this phenomenon, say the various radical Protestant revolutions, but the French Revolution is a clearer example, since modern leftists are more willing to identify it.
I don't think you really understand what the right believes. They (we) believe that old ideas are just as good as new ideas. And by "old" I mean back to the start of history and into prehistory. Over thousands of years, there have been only a few really good ideas. The ideas of the Founding Fathers and of the Industrial Revolution are some of those really good ideas, and they're also quite new, compared to the span of history.
From this viewpoint, it's a little strange to expect a good idea to be advanced more than every couple hundred years or so.
The people on the right who aren't busy fighting SJW wars tend to be busy creating new technologies and companies, which are very much full of new ideas. What you mean is explicitly social ideas, and that's because the obvious next step from having had a grand idea for remaking society is "and the government should force everyone to agree with me". The right reject this kind of power-based approach as illegitimate, so it's inevitably the case that they invest more effort into technology and business-based progress than government-imposed "social" progress.
Broken-windows policing, federalism ("50 laboratories of democracy"), airline deregulation in the 1970s, repeal of Glass-Steagall, Paul Volcker breaking the back of inflation in the 1980s, balanced budgets. That's off the top of my head. I am sure hundreds of additional examples could be given with a little research.
The left always promotes itself as the people with the new ideas, in part to insulate themselves against the charge of being reckless idiots. The right promotes itself as the people who forestall folly, in part to insulate themselves against the charge of being idiots incapable of grasping the concept of progress. It would be a mistake to take either of these self-characterizations as historically accurate.
I think you need to add in something else to your analysis here. The culture wars are a subset of the overall attention economy, and that explains perfectly why one culture war topic would be replaced by another. Attention is a finite resource, and there are only so many clicks or minutes available to apply to it. We are already seeing many publications which wouldn't vary from Woke for a hot second in 2020 while staring down Trump flip over to testing the waters with anti-woke editorials to see if they get clicks. (even Vox) The question I see is twofold.
(1) Will a version of Anti-Woke crystalize that has a coherent message and a brand? I think this is quite possible, and there's good science saying that it's happening right now:
(2) Will something else come along to impact the overall portion of the attention economy that's devoted to culture war? I think Fortnite gave them a run for their money, and whatever follows it may carry Gen Z into a place where culture war is simply not as important in the overall media metabrain.
I think that some on the socialist left take the side of anti-wokeness (which was talked about briefly here) since it covers up for the evils of corporations and other entities and makes us that much more likely to side with them and with the people who line their pockets. Not sure if that's what you mean, but it's a flip side to the trumpian coin of wokeness and populism.
Yep! I see a growing number of people who identify as "Liberal Socialists" (myself included), who generally think class culture and material conditions are the important underlying determiner of outcomes, that we should do something about it via progressive taxation and redistributionary policies, and that a lot of woke ideas (like "cultural appropriation") are kind of dumb and missing the point.
I'm seeing something different, that Scott is probably very insulated from because of his position in the rationalists. I'm seeing a lot of people coming out and saying, "well shit, if we're going to be forced to adopt something as a guiding force, and my options are Wokeism or nothing, maybe religion isn't so bad after all."
A lot of my connections are rediscovering religion as a way to calm the chaos.
1) I think the main reason young people didn't go right wing, as you were predicting in 2014, was internet censorship. Before 2016, the internet was basically a free market of ideas. I once put together data on prominent twitter bans, not very scientific but I'm sure the story is correct. I couldn't find anything before 2015, and then there was an avalanche of bannings after Trump's election.
People like Stefan Molyneux and Alex Jones used to be huge on YouTube. Now they're both gone, as is Milo himself. Often, the most extreme figures serve as a kind of vanguard and give energy to a movement. If the far right gets its most extreme elements purged every once in a while, the natural process from which you go "edgy -> slightly less edgy -> mainstream -> lame" gets interrupted. If you look at the most shared posts on Facebook today, data that's collected on a daily basis, it's dominated by Ben Shapiro, who is pretty much the edgiest right wing person allowed a Facebook account. And Ben Shapiro can never be cool.
2) I also think it's important to consider real world events. The decline of socialism seems intimately related to the fact that Bernie Sanders lost to Biden, and Biden ended up beating Trump. Not only that, but Biden beat Sanders with overwhelming black support; in a time of fanatical anti-racism, that took the wind out of the sails of the socialists. As for New Atheists, they need to be understood as a reaction to the politics of the Bush era. Republicans nominating the irreligious McCain in 2008, and the Mormon Romney in 2012, changed popular perceptions of what Republicans were. This was also the time of the Tea Party movement, which focused on economic rather than social issues, and the decade after 9/11. So New Atheism fell as the religious right declined and memories of 9/11 faded (the rise of ISIS briefly brought terrorism back into the headlines, but by then the decline was well on its way). So the new atheists didn't really have much to rail against by 2012, and eventually went away.
Spencer was banned from Youtube and was also financially ruined (along with many other alt-right activists) by massive, elite-funded lawsuits after Charlottesville.
There have been massive purges of alt-right and otherwise-dissident right people going on since 2016, getting more intense over time and extending deeper into the tech stack. The type of people who were losing their twitter accounts three years ago are now being denied bank accounts. Right-wing alternatives to Twitter (Parler, Gab), created in response to the deplatforming, have been "banned" by other tech companies in much the same way that their users were banned on Twitter.
I've never seen this substantiated; I think it's a myth. It is however certainly true that social media has been increasingly giving the alt-right the ISIS treatment, and the definition of exactly who qualifies as alt-right has been expanding.
There might've been a reason Twitter never banned Spencer, such as having politics they'd rather draw WNs on the site towards than the people they'd banned (he endorsed Biden and everything!), or just making a fool out of himself too often.
It was all fun and games when they were banning the right, but now the same tactic is beginning to be used against the left. You didn't hear about it? Yes, because their voices are being silenced. Chapotraphouse anyone?
Everything they did to Alex Jones, they'll do to you. It's about power now.
"Republicans nominating the irreligious McCain in 2008, and the Mormon Romney in 2012, changed popular perceptions of what Republicans were."
I can't speak for everyone, but none of that changed my perception that the religious right was a dominant force in the Republican party. Heck, the Republicans may well have elected an atheist in 2016, and it only proved that the religious right was as dominant as ever...
> "Did anyone ever figure out a nonthreatening way to ask women out? Is it just "swipe right on Tinder"? Was that the solution this whole time?"
Yes, and yes. I'm probably exactly the right age for this to be the case, and to have narrowly escaped the awful period. But I have never asked out a woman I didn't know without very strong prior context. The reason is exactly because I internalized all of this "creepiness" messaging, heard all the stories from my female friends about guys hitting on them when it was unwanted and it making them feel uncomfortable, and never wanted to do that. Prior to 2016 I had only ever gotten into relationships with people I had known for more than a year, and probably had spent hours talking to.
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. Dating apps are a godsend, because you don't have to worry about whether or not a girl who also swiped right on you is maybe interested in going on a date, or at least getting to know you with that context in mind. They are, and it's in the subcontext.
Dating apps have their own slew of problems, but at least as far as I can see in my social bubble, asking out randos in bars or clubs, or other public spaces is deader than dead. Long live Tinder.
Yeah, I dunno how much "hitting on woman in bar" was about finding a mate to marry and have kids with as it was about getting the shift (and maybe a bit more if you were lucky).
No, I think quite the opposite. It's becoming less acceptable in the places where it was least likely to result in a relationship (bars, clubs, the gym, randomly on the street). It's still very acceptable in places that are the most likely: community spaces (college dorms, parties with friends of friends, being set up by your social network).
It didn't happen in 90% of those spaces for 90% of history. It's only in the late 20th century that urban third spaces became a place where people sought their own romance.
On the first point, I'm just saying that if we take a step back, this isn't some major shift.
On the second, I want to be more precise. I don't think seeking romance has been "banned" from most spaces (though there are many corporations that have had official anti-nepotism policies, some for several decades, that may well go too far). I think it's generally a good thing to have rules banning superiors from initiating relationships with subordinates (and to have further rules about re-organizing hierarchies where relevant and possible). It's probably a good thing that people are more hesitant about propositioning random strangers in the street than they used to be (and there's probably still more progress to be made on that front), though I think it would be a bad thing if people stopped asking out people they were having conversations with at bars or coffeeshops.
More importantly, I think it's a *super* good thing that there are now GPS-enabled online spaces that give people a designated space for seeking romance, so that people can do most of it in a context where it's mutually agreed that this is the type of conversation one might want here, and that conversations in physical space can have this come up much less often (though it's probably best that this still be non-zero).
I said *bans* aren't happening. I said it's a good thing that there's less of the activity happening that you claim is being banned. It's important, as always, to be precise about this kind of thing. (Otherwise you're one of those people complaining about "lockdowns" because people are wearing masks, or complaining about "cancel culture" because someone didn't like something you said.)
On the "atomized loneliness" thing, I think that's been a multi-decade trend, that grew up with the Boomer generation, between the fall of fraternal societies and bowling leagues and the growth of the suburbs. You're right that the move from in-person asking-out to online dating could well be one more step of this same sort. But for many people, it's also claimed that this move makes in-person spaces better as spaces for friend socialization, and helps ease the loneliness.
As for whether I, personally, would feel comfortable asking a co-worker out on a date, you're barking up the wrong tree. I'm one of those older millennials who never felt comfortable asking anyone out on a date. I imagine I would feel comfortable asking a colleague or work-related friend out, if we had gotten to know each other well and it seemed like our relationship was developing in that direction, and I do think that at least some people are pushing against even that sort of thing. So I don't disagree that there's at least some overboard prudishness here.
I just don't think it's as intense as you seem to be suggesting, with all your talk of "bans".
The timeline that you think is significant here is the same as Nike.
The grandparents of most people on here were born well before the "workplace romance" was a common trope and indeed, your own grandparents probably never asked anyone out at work.
There clearly isn't zero relation. Part of the reason the marriage rate and birth rate have both gone down recently is people are marrying later due to longer school and work commitments, but this doesn't indicate lifelong singleness and childlessness, just staying single longer and having fewer children by the time you're done.
Those two don't conflict - they show that 10% of all current couples in the study met online, but 19% of the couples who met in the 2010s met online, 9% of those who met in the 2000s met online, 1% of those who met in the 1990s met online, and some weirdly non-zero percentage of those who met in earlier decades met online. If current couples in the study are evenly split between meeting in the 2010s, meeting in the 2000s, and meeting earlier than 2000, then the numbers basically work out.
*within younger age groups. I definitely suggest the book "Dataclysm" if you want more interesting data of this sort. Definitely dating apps are not without their problems, and I'm excited to see different apps try to address these issues in different ways. (The throttling introduced by Coffee Meets Bagel is particularly interesting)
However, I do think that particular problem is just reflective of the underlying reality. 20-30yo women DO have more selective power in many cities than 20-30yo men. This has been true for quite some time before dating apps. Isn't it preferable that women get to simply swipe left a bunch and men simply see fewer matches, than a cute woman gets asked out 100 times at random during the day and 99-100 men get rejected in person?
Yea, I can buy that dating apps introduce some weird distributional effects. Tbh I do think both methods are broken. The IDEAL IDEAL is people live in small, Dunbar-sized communities where everyone knows everyone, and people can scope each other out beforehand through gossip and other means. How relationships work on college campuses seems a little bit more functional and both men and women I talk to seem to miss it. (obviously many conflating factors there)
I attended a lovely event recently called "Date My Friend.ppt" where we took turns presenting on our single friends, and saying why they are great. I definitely hope to see more like this
"Scope each other out beforehand through gossip and other means" is extremely far away from ideal ideal.
IDEAL IDEAL IDEAL, fight me, is a fucking AI that can see the future and figure out exactly whom everybody should be with and introduces us to each other.
"Practically achievable ideal, in that it is has been implemented and shown to work fairly well already."
I THINK the community-based thing I suggest works better than arranged marriage (the closest real analogue to what you're describing), but I could be convinced otherwise.
"There’s data from these apps that women rate 80% of the men as below average."
So what would be the proper proportion of "terrible/average/wonderful"? If we're using "average" as "the majority of people who are not outstandingly ugly/crazy or handsome/supersmart", how many should be "average"?
Also, if it's a dating app, who are the users: people who can't otherwise get a date? That seems to have been the case at the start, but now if it's the 'new normal' way to find a date (rather than asking people out in random situations in real life) that is going to make a difference.
Really outstanding people are not going to find it hard to get a date, be it by just walking up to someone or via a dating app. So I do imagine that leaves a lot of "average" people using apps, whatever we mean by "average" and I don't think that means, or should mean, "loser" but "okay kind of person, normal, ordinary guy or girl".
"Really outstanding people are not going to find it hard to get a date" -- Really outstanding women, sure. But really outstanding men can have all kinds of problems if they lack confidence or knowledge of where to find receptive women or how to ask them out.
You know, I did pretty well on dating apps, and I think I'm pretty average. Smarter than normal, but otherwise - middle class income, overweight but not overly so, 5' 10", reasonably funny and interesting. But I wasn't on them long. Maybe six months. I wonder if the 80% below average thing reflects a "survivorship bias" for the guys who have to spend longer looking, whereas your average marriageable guy finds his girl in a tolerable amount of time and exits.
I suppose it could be that kind of vicious circle: the longer you are on a dating app (or other dating sites) without getting a match, the more likely you are to be rejected or otherwise sifted out of the range of possible partners.
I don't really think it's a vicious cycle, more a selection bias. Fwiw I used dating apps regularly over about 4 years, and got steadily better at using them over that time, and had an easier time getting dates over time. (Writing a good profile, taking good pics, being not awkward over text, figuring out what type of girl I like and what type likes me, etc)
Though to be fair, being male and aging probably helped too. (See Dataclysm or other data on these dynamics) Life is rough for the west coast 25yo guys out there.
I think yes, but also there is DEFINITELY a learning curve on figuring out how to make a good profile and use apps well, and the population who uses them has been growing, meaning they are front loaded with people at the start of that learning curve.
There's survivorship bias, entryship bias, and also people just being shitty at taking photos of themselves and looking worse on a profile than they do in person. You'd expect somewhere 50% below average across the entire population if we assume a symmetric distribution, but not necessarily just among the photographs of people on dating apps.
I see no reason a priori to assume attractiveness actually is symmetrically distributed. I'm not going to put in much more time trying to find this information via web search than the 20 I just wasted given the baggage of how weighted the topic is and the low quality of resulting research, but the first few results are just seem to assume it's a normal distribution. For one, age is not symmetrically distributed. The last I was regularly trying to date, partly on websites (before smart phones and native mobile apps were a thing) was around 2002 to 2006 and I remember the people being a lot more attractive back then, but that's because they were in their early 20s and now they're in their early 40s. Most of us go downhill pretty quickly.
So strike while you can, I guess. For what it's worth, I did meet my current wife on the Internet, but around primarily social features and I knew her for six years before we happened to move to the same city and decided to meet. My other two wives from before I met in college and grad school. Internet dating was kind of an exciting thing early on. I met two somewhat formerly famous actresses back before Web 2.0's version of Eternal September when the market got so flooded that a reasonably attractive woman's inbox gets so flooded as to be about as useful as my SMS these days with 40 people a day claiming they heard from a friend of a friend I'm interesting in unloading a house.
The attractiveness of women (according to men) on dating apps actually IS symmetrically distributed. Both sexes only message hot people, but men seem to be aware that's what they're doing.
Do you intend for your "really outstanding" category to only include people who ignore the entire "creepiness" meme that Carson was referring to a few comments up the tree? As far as I can tell, and I think this aligns with his comment, it's not possible to "get a date" in those ways without violating the emergent "rules" of non-"creepiness" being produced by modern social justice culture.
Exception for full transparency: I asked out 3 different girls in my grad program. In one case I had both known the girl for years AND matched with her on Tinder, in one we had spent hours of alone time together as friends prior (both those two said yes), and in one we had mostly only hung out in groups before and she said no, but I think it was very chill after. Still nowhere close to the 0-context hit-on-a-girl-at-a-bar.
Right. I think I'm around the same age as Carson and it frankly scares me to see my generation accept these changes as inevitable or in any way positive. Not only does it breed superficiality and hyper selectivity in women, while removing any semblance of the accountability that might prevent the top 5%(or less) of men from monopolizing all the available women in an area, it also changes young people's relationship to risk. I also wonder what effect it has on social spaces, especially once-popular culture catches up to the new norm, and an even strong taboo is cemented around meeting new people.
It's really quite a sad state of affairs. Especially because the end result is a kind of atavistic "I keep to my people" mentality where the act of talking to strangers, (especially if the act is unmediated by inebriation) is off-limits, and thus only done by somewhat crazy people, which then only lends momentum to the feedback loop that makes meeting new people taboo.
I can only hope that actually pulling off a gym/bar/public meeting with a stranger remains so impressive and high-status that this effect is somewhat counterbalanced.
I find it odd you say you've simply become more "pro-immigration" when immigration is comprised of people of so many different cultures and backgrounds. I can't even think of examples of cultures that would plainly make for immigrants that were open to being approached. However, I can think of many that are much less open to meeting strangers even than Americans. I think the effect you're talking about is mainly due to a boost in status you get in the eyes of women from some poorer country's, simply for the fact of your being American.
Have women become more superficial than men? My impression of straight culture has been that men have always been extremely superficial. (This is how they are depicted in popular media.) Women have historically been more interested in deeper traits. But it sounds like you think the apps have equalized this more?
Well, it's weird. I think a lot of people are very superficial. But an interesting side effects of dating apps is because selective power is perhaps more obviously I'm women's hands, many women don't bother to put any info on their profiles, so you, as a straight male, have no choice but to be superficial. I've sat side-by-side swiping with several female friends, and straight male profile or lesbian profile quality is WAY higher than straight woman profile quality. Better pics, more details about life, more about what they're looking for.
So you could argue that straight women are being more _selective_, but I think more _superficial_ is a much more difficult claim. There's also the post-match chatting period, which is decidedly less superficial. And like, come on, how is walking up to a random cute girl at a bar not superficial? Perhaps the takeaway is that whoever is doing the initial selection of "I'm going to talk to you" will be superficial by nature. That used to be men, but now it's a collaboration of both.
Basically, yes. Though I also think female superficiality is, for obscure reasons, underrepresented in media until very recently with the rise of shows like Sex and the CIty, and a great many female performers who talk openly about filtering men on looks, height, and income. Not that this in itself is unnatural or even bad per se, just that it gets kind of out of control on dating apps because of how much competition there is between male profiles. Not just because of a change in the way women select and behave, but because the nature of the apps allow a small group of men to go on three dates a day if they want to.
I think they have. Most men won't openly and seriously announce that they have minimum standards for boob size, for example. At most you might get jokes when they're drunk, but usually not even then, it's quite the taboo.
In contrast women will quite seriously put minimum heights into their dating profiles - saw that a lot back when I was trying to use Tinder, thank god I met a fantastic woman the old fashioned way instead. And of course statements like, "I wouldn't date a man who was earning less than X per year" are considered completely anodyne. And ah yes, don't forget the political filtering. "Would never kiss a Tory" and the like.
I do think there's a quiet rejection of a lot of this stuff, at least where I live (not the USA). The sort of women who get conspicuously angry about being chatted up in bars make for terrible partners. Basically every man agrees with that. No man wants to be married to a committed feminist because even if somehow you make it through their personal dating gauntlet, they'll spend the rest of your life telling you how men are terrible and it's all your fault. And good luck having one take good care of you, or sacrificing their low earning career to start a family.
My social circle developed different approaches to dealing with this but one was to focus on eastern Europeans/Russians, others to go to dedicated events for meeting people in bars, another to find girlfriends in unconventional places. Dating sites - no. Very poor hunting grounds.
"No man wants to be married to a committed feminist"
I don't want to be married to somebody who isn't a committed feminist.
Can you think of a quantifiable way of saying what you're saying in this last paragraph? I'd say that, other things being equal, some amount of feminism is considered attractive.
Speaking as a liberal feminist, I don't think all brands of feminism are the same. To be specific, I don't think you could be in a healthy relationship with someone who believes in a strict oppressor/oppressed gender dichotomy. And I should say this goes in both directions, speaking from personal experience here as a man who internalized that gender dichotomy, and it made my relationship a whole lot harder than it had to be, possibly even unhealthy. (I'm getting better)
Some feminism, I do believe is optimal. But I think there's certain land mines in the water that need to be avoided.
Quantifiable? Well, no, not really, what sort of quantity are you thinking of here?
I can't say I know any men who find feminism attractive but perhaps you're using a different definition to us. Do men like women who are smart, can be gainfully employed in a good job, etc? Sure but obviously that's not the same thing. I think Karmakin sums it up pretty well. A woman who is convinced her or her 'sisters' are oppressed is just unpleasant to be around. For one, it's simply not true for most women in the office/middle class workplace today, quite the opposite where companies are falling over themselves to privilege women, so to have these beliefs implies a pretty big disconnect from the world we find ourselves in. If you don't think your partner is perceiving the world properly then you can't respect them, and a relationship without respect cannot survive.
>In contrast women will quite seriously put minimum heights into their dating profiles
Yep. Very, very common. On the other hand...
>And of course statements like, "I wouldn't date a man who was earning less than X per year" are considered completely anodyne.
Don't think I've ever once seen this among literally over 10,000 women's dating profiles. For whatever reason, in the cultures I've been exposed to, it's taboo to make demands about people's money and most physical attributes with height being a glaring exception. (I've also pretty much never seen a "No bald guys, please" demand.) I do very occasionally see complaints in women's dating profiles of "Guys stop boasting on your profiles about how good of a job you have or how much money you make, I really don't care".
Saying things like "Trump supporters swipe left please" is extremely common.
I think maybe a lot of this is determined by geographic/cultural differences. From your comment I pick up that you're British; I've only ever used dating apps in the US and Italy.
To clarify, I've not seen statements like that in dating profiles either. I have however heard women admit having effective income requirements in personal conversations quite a few times. And of course, this preference is extremely easy to spot out in the real world.
It's I think a lot more reasonable than putting height requirements in a dating profile. A lot of guys want to have kids and then the income really matters. Income requirements are a practical matter, whereas height is purely physical.
"Feminist" is a very vague word these days. Certainly many people who identify as feminists won't "spend the rest of your life telling you how you're terrible" or whatever, that's practically sociopathic behavior.
Personally I think the only sane position is that there ARE still a lot of ways that men are advantaged over women, and also a handful of ways women are advantaged over men, and it's interesting to talk about all of them, but at the end of the day you have to treat your partner like an individual. Yea, a black and white "oppressor/oppressed" narrative doesn't work for me, but stark ideological lines of any kind don't work. I def need someone who can appreciate the subtleties and grey areas of life and society. I think my gf would probably say she's a feminist if asked, but she's pretty open-minded, and understands that societal forces aren't caused by individuals being evil. (That said there's a lot of shitty behavior out there, and a lot of it is unfortunately men, neither all men nor exclusively men.)
One thing to keep in mind is that people on dating apps are very much not representative of the population at large. Dating apps heavily overrepresent people who, for some reason or another, cannot form or remain in a long term relationship. Even if everyone used dating apps, the ones who were the worst at dating would stay the longest.
But I'm repeatedly told that dating apps are the only way people in the modern, developed world ever arrange sexual or romantic relationships, that meeting in bars or at work or church or being set up by your friends is just *so* 20th century. So presumably in another generation or so, people on dating apps *will* be representative of the population at large.
I'm not claiming that people who have ever used dating apps are weird, I'm claiming that people who currently use dating apps (at some particular given time) are weird. I think that the inspection paradox bites hard here. Consider gathering together a random sample of 1000 young, urban, tech savvy people. If you dismissed everyone who had never used a dating app, I think you would still be left with a reasonable and representative sample. If you dismissed everyone who was not currently active on a dating app, I think you would be left primarily with people who were bad at pairing off. Because the people who are good at dating pair off quickly and stop being on dating apps. If you want to know things about people who have ever used dating apps, you need to make sure you're asking the first room, and not the second. With the caveat that if you're just browsing through profiles, you're inherently looking at the second room.
If Tinder is your source of prospects, I don't see how you can't be superficial. You're presented with 40 people at a time with photos and a few words. Even if you'd like to deeply know them before making a judgment, you can't.
Yes, nobody talks to strangers any more, we're all completely denied the ability to hear and engage with a range of views outside our... wait a second...
Dude there's no way I'm top 5% and I married a girl I met on an app. In fact, I can think of several other guys I know who probably wouldn't crack an objective top 5% who did the same. Measuring in terms of attractiveness and income, I assume. Mostly I'm talking about friends of mine, and obviously I think my friends are great, but I don't think any of us would crack the sort of implied criterion here.
I see what you mean but I see arranged marriage systems as being a lot more egalitarian because, in the end, everyone ends up with a partner who is more or less roughly equivalent in looks, class, background, etc. Except in polygamist cultures where the rich men can afford to wed all five of the pretty women in a given village, I don't see how the negative effects mirror each other.
I'm shy around groups of strangers, and awkward in party situations. Dating apps let me find a wife and have a family. Maybe there's some sort of dystopian theoretical downsides, but in the real world I'm very glad of them.
I mean, they've been around for a couple of decades. What ways of horrible wrongness are particularly concerning? If it's that likely, we should have some results by now.
As a man who has always had pretty severe neuroses about initiating anything with women, significantly exacerbated by the pervasiveness of "creepiness" discourse in the first half of the 2010's when I found myself single for the first time as an adult, I can attest to having turned to swipe-right-style dating apps as my only real means of getting the nerve to ask a woman out. They're also a godsend during a pandemic that keeps people from physically meeting anyway. As I contemplate post-pandemic life, I marvel at how I've made practically zero progress in gaining confidence at the idea of asking someone out in person, when you have no idea if they're interested in you (or, in some cases, if they're even single -- and let's face it, most people in my age group that I feel attracted to are generally not going to be), despite the creepiness discourse having drastically receded, because I've let dating app technology carry me all this time.
I'm neurotic as hell about this. I'm also neither pretty nor rich, and kind of unlikely to become so. I think I have real things to offer, maybe pretty important things, but they anticorrelate with the commonly cited selection heuristics. (And it's not hard to see why. Looks and money are very easy to verify up front; it would make sense to use them as an early filter.)
(Long term I'm more interested in mate search than getting laid, short term I'd like to convince my brain interaction with the opposite sex is even an option.)
I consider my adventures with dating apps a story in progress, and if you ask me that question again in a year or two, I might have more to say. For now, I'll just say that my use of dating apps since early 2020 has broken me a long way out of my shell and made me significantly more confident and less intimidated by most aspects of the dating realm, although none of my matches have gotten very far and I still have a very long way to go in terms of confidence / overcoming fears and inhibitions. There's just something incredibly liberating about knowing that the person you're talking to is definitely single and at least *interested* in you as a potential date/partner (even if unsure or not necessarily crazy about you) and that moving the conversation in a "let's go out on a date" or "I find such-and-such about you attractive" direction isn't going to be seen as creepy or inappropriate.
There are things I find more strenuous about meeting someone you only talked to online before -- a one-on-one meeting with a total stranger for several hours can feel overwhelming. But for me, the advantages still outweigh the disadvantages in terms of relieving stress: it helps to know that, however badly things may go, since this person was a total stranger it's probably not going to have any further social ramifications.
I'm speaking from the experience of using dating apps in an American big-city area. (I have previous experience trying this in a European big city and barely getting anywhere; online dating, at least several years ago, is much more limited and still slightly more stigmatized in continental Europe.) I don't know if you also live in a fairly densely populated area in the US, but if you do, I imagine that even being "neither pretty nor rich" these apps (OKCupid and Bumble are my favorites) could bring you matches given a reasonable amount of time and energy from your end. If you're anything like me, just getting some "dating practice" this way is worth it even if it doesn't turn up a permanent mate anytime soon.
Thing is... asking someone out offline carries more risk but can also net you a better looking/matching partner as you might meet someone who would never swipe on you normally or who doesn't use apps in the first place. So by only using apps you're effectively lowering the quality of woman you could potentially meet. I know, I know, looks shouldn't matter, but if they do to you, you might be missing out.
I got kicked out of a lot of the spaces where this sort of thing was happening, in no small part based on my responses to such things. Now I wonder... did all those people just stop talking about it shortly thereafter, abandoning all the positions I still ascribe to them and their social circles in the absence of any further interaction with them? Did most of the people I know now never see this phenomenon in action for what might have been a relatively short period of prominence, and that's why you think I'm crazy for being so impacted by it? Are they and their friends who did these things experiencing selective amnesia about just how unreasonablethey were for those many months or few years?
The description here of Amanda Marcote's response to Scott Aaronson sounds like an only slightly caricaturized version of arguments and vilifications that I spent at least a few years experiencing and now a decade being exiled for, and that are still among the largest influences on my fears of interacting with people.
The rise of the “IDW” and long form podcasting is probably significant enough to get a section - Joe Rogan in particular as the archetype non-woke everyman liberal. Also the center-left flight to Substack is an interesting trend. It definitely feels like something significant is happening around all of that, with rejection of new Leftist orthodoxy as a unifying theme
Nitpick re. this: "For whatever reason, the early Internet was a place for polite but insistent debate, and early websites centered around the needs of a debating community. The most obvious example was TalkOrigins' massive alphabetized database of arguments against creationist claims, with the explicit goal of helping people win debates with creationists." What you call the most-obvious example of debate culture is an obvious example of echo culture. Otherwise, it would have also listed creationist arguments against evolutionist claims.
But the point is that it was written in expectation that it would either be found by religious people, or by people who were confronted by religious people in a debating context. In the modern echo world, these things don't happen so much.
It was a resource for people to use in debates, but the debates themselves were hosted elsewhere, often in person at live venues but at some point those shifted to press-covered events and then web forums.
"...it would have also listed creationist arguments against evolutionist claims."
Erm, it very much did indeed list *every* single meaningful creationist argument. And then countered it. Would you require that they left certain arguments unaddressed?
I'm just relying on Scott's description, but it sounds like it listed them only to rebut them, always giving evolutionists the last word. That is, the site itself took a position. I was expecting "debate culture" to mean a neutral ground.
See the following quote near the end of the article:
"But out of respect to a great number of people whom I hold in very high regard, I will no longer use the term that has caused such discomfort. I deeply regret any pain I have caused . . . I apologize and renounce all language that is bigoted and offensive.
The New York Times usage graphs represent what is being pushed on the public by the mainstream news media's apex predator, while the Google Trends graphs represent what is being pulled by the public in Google Searches.
By the way, Google's Ngram database of word usage in books has recently been updated through 2019. Keep in mind that there is often a lag of a few years between word usage in newspapers and word usage in published books. My Ngram preference is to set "smoothing" to zero when examining the Great Awokening since it is so recent.
Cancel Culture recently (as in, this Saturday) razed through a perfectly mundane online collectible game I play (so simple it barely deserves the name 'game'), with the site admins completely removing game content made by a previous staff member without any prior warning to the users, and aggressively shutting down conversation about it, forbidding all conversation. The change by itself isn't a big deal (I mean, if I'd have been viewing it in isolation, I would have been angry at the destroyed content on a private site that I have no control over, but moved on), but it also legit terrified me - if *this* kind of site is now willing to cancel people, no matter the fallout (which in this case hurt the people who were playing much more than the ex-staff member who hadn't even been active there in nearly a decade), what does that mean about its proliferation through society? It just had this... ashen taste of book burning to me. I realise there are differences, but I find it difficult to emotionally separate it from book burning enough not to be terrified for the future of society.
(The good news is that other players of the site I've been speaking to in private all at least understand the fear or outright share it. Several of these people I haven't had prior contact to, so it's not even my pre-selected social bubble. That gives me some hope.)
Anyway, there's no real telling if it's a symptom of a greater problem from my very limited point of view, as my fears suggest. But even if it is - I hope it's just a cycle.
Does anyone have a good sense of how the rolling average google trends data works? I have not read any documentation but have always been curious. Like is it calculating deltas based on the number of searches per period? or is calculating delta based on the percentage of all searches that a term is per period. I.e., does it adjust for the growth in total search quantity through time?
I believe the first time "Cancel Culture" became a thing was #CancelColbert. I don't remember anybody calling an internet mob "Cancelling" before that. In that case, they were trying to cancel a show, but they put a person's name in it because...well...it was in the name of the show.
#CancelColbert was so obviously a classic case of "pc culture run amok" because he was being hounded for anti-racist satire by people who didn't get a joke that it became a focal point for mockery.
Lindsay Ellis posits a different origin of the modern usage of "cancel" as being yet another term appropriated from AAVE, near the beginning of her "Masks Off" YouTube video (seriously is there no way to put hyperlinks in Substack comments?). But my perception of its origins has also been that it began with #CancelColbert.
I was wondering specifically about directly hyperlinking bits of text so that I don't have to interrupt a comment with a web address, but I suppose being able to put in a link web address is still helpful.
> SJWs aren't bad because they get basic facts wrong, quash free speech, bully their opponents, or make unfair generalizations across diverse groups. They're bad because sometimes they get your favorite TV show cancelled.
I think there is a sense in which this represents a good dynamic (at least, in some cases): People object to an ideology or cultural movement when it harms them personally, not when it bothers them ideologically.
To defend why this is a good thing - ideologies are often messed-up or wrong about important things, which is why people follow them off a cliff. people objecting to things that bother them personally has a lot of inadequate equilibria, but it at least has the basic thing right that people will argue against things that bother them personally (so it can't be too misaligned with them), and will argue harder against things that bother them more (so there's some proportionality).
The main downside of this is that it's moderated by status. You can complain about your favourite TV show being cancelled, because everyone watched TV and it's not low status to admit to liking the Mandalorian. If you complain about being bullied by an SJW there's an implication there that you're low status enough for someone disagreeing with you to shut you down, so both your argument becomes low-status, and you're more likely to make it if you're genuinely low-status, so this argument is unlikely to gain traction.
I think the "men hitting on women" scenario is the worst of all worlds for this: In person, a lot of women I know have told me how they wish more men would approach them. But they'd never say this in public (it comes off as low-status), and if they did not many people would listen. Meanwhile if you're the type of super-attractive woman that gets hit on all the time, you're a lot more likely to be high-status and have a lot of people listen to your complaint. And the same thing happens with men - if you're a man who complains about it being hard to approach women, you're broadcasting low status, and high-status men are much less likely to have this problem in the first place.
Re: "But they'd never say this in public (it comes off as low-status), and if they did not many people would listen."
Are you sure that's their reasoning? I think the desire to not indicate their true approachability and thus receive more attention than they feel comfortable handling would be a bigger contributor.
This looks like a decent place to flog my pet dead horse: things can feel more intense now than ever before because more people now care about [things we care about now] than ever before. People used to care less about [things we care about now], so past times feel like they were less intense. But actually, people used to care *a whole lot* about [things people used to care about], which we don't care nearly as much about now. So people back then would have felt like things were uniquely intense, and would look at modern disagreements about [things we care about now] and not really get it.
This is all very tautological and makes the very dry statistical bias obvious, but requires confronting that things we used to care about aren't the things we care about now, and almost certainly won't be the things we care about in the future. It is not easy to accept that the answer to "who will win this culture war?" will very possibly be "you won't care". Oh, you'll still have an opinion all right, but *this* fire in your belly will fade faster than you thought possible. As it will for nearly everyone else. This too shall pass.
Not sure if you’re responding to something Scott said. I don’t think he mentioned trying to win a culture war, just that he hopes it will fizzle out and has guesses of how it might not.
" If I had to guess, I’d say wokeness outgrew the Internet fashion cycle. Unlike its predecessors, it took over mainstream institutions."
Or you could cite the thing you actually did cite... I.e. the video of George Floyd being murdered by a cop. That was international news. It was unambiguous. Now the death of one person from police violence in the abstract is not a worse problem than the deaths of hundreds from inadequate access to healthcare, for example, but socialist causes didn't have a viral video.
There had been black people killed by police approximately as badly and unfairly for forever. Some of them also had videos. I don't want to completely discount that the Floyd video might have had features that made it especially outrageous (I have a weak stomach and didn't watch) but I would think there would have to be a lot of tinder for that spark to create as much of a fire as it did.
It was particularly egregious. It was several minutes long and George Floyd said he was in distress and he was very clearly not a threat and then you get to see in real time as he dies. Bystanders are filming, bystanders are telling the cops (not in a confrontational way, just you know, "he's down, put him in cuffs and let him breathe) and the 3 other cops are watching and preventing anyone from interfering.
There was a lot of tinder... but I feel like the feminism and atheism bits of this piece have a bit of "this is all just the parochial concerns of mostly nerdy privileged people so the currents of fashion could sweep them away."
Also, though not as impactful as George Floyd, I think the Eliot Rodger murder of 6 people in 2014 probably gave the feminist movement a bit of support that helped it carry on for longer.
I didn't think so. Floyd was on drugs; it was reasonable to restrain him. In any case, that doesn't explain why virtually everyone prominent except Trump was overtly pro-looting a year ago.
"Restrain" and "kneel on someone's neck while they say they can't breathe and do that for two more minutes after they stop moving or speaking" are not synonyms.
He was restrained pretty quickly.. making sure he'd never move or speak again took some time.
People everywhere weren't pro looting. Biden condemned it as did Obama. Within extremely online left circles condemning looting was seen as hurting the side. It was like Churchill's comment about having a nice thing to say about the devil if Hitler invaded Hell.
He wasn't really restrained that quickly, was he? If you watch the whole video (I have a stronger stomach and did), the guy was complaining he couldn't breathe when he was standing up, before the cops even did anything to him. That's probably why they didn't take him seriously when on the ground - he was trying to get away from being arrested, was on drugs and was saying "I can't breathe" whilst standing up and bellowing at the top of his voice. Additionally, feeling unable to breathe being apparently a known side-effect of the drugs he was on. This has been re-spun as "killer cop suffocates innocent guy" but it's clear from the video that Floyd's breathing difficulties (real or perceived) pre-dated his neck restraint.
It's so sad that no one has invented a method of restraint that doesn't restrict the airway. I'd only the cops had carried some sort chain that they could put around his hands... Alas they had no choice but to choke someone already complaining of trouble breathing.
The show "Cops" is no longer on, but it ran for about 50 years. I can remember an episode where a cop kneeled on a guy's neck and the guy said "I can't breathe" and the cop responded "If you couldn't breathe, you couldn't talk." It looked like abuse to me, but that guy presumably didn't die and the show aired it like it was just another day in the life of cops. I'm not honestly sure what the Floyd video showed that that episode of Cops didn't.
George was saying he couldn't breathe before they started kneeling on him. In fact, the reason he was lying on the ground was because he asked to be able to do that while in distress in the backseat of the police vehicle.
Because the guy in cops didn't die? Like they didn't air a man's death. The issue with the knee on the neck in Floyd's case was that it was done with reckless disregard for the health of the suspect.
Anti-racism is exactly the kind of parochial thing metropolitan elites care about enough to displace their crusade against paper straws and single use plastics
For what it's worth, the crusade against plastic straws is just as big on the "Redneck Riviera" of Orange Beach, AL. I think it's a movement that really caught on in places that care about litter, because it's one of the old-school "environmental" movements that's mainly about doing something small and visible, rather than addressing the systems of the climate.
I believe you mean plastic straws, but this is a particularly weird bugaboo because it was a movement started by a 9 year-old that was easy for corporate do-gooders to get behind, and then the closest thing to a "woke" response was a backlash because it disproportionately impacts poor disabled people who can't afford metal straws and can't use paper straws, which are actually good for the environment, because they're too flimsy. But they need to use straws because MS results in poor lip dexterity and liquid falls out of your mouth otherwise.
At best, metropolitan elites are following way behind on whatever the vanguard of these various shifts are actually doing.
>there would have to be a lot of tinder for that spark to create as much of a fire as it did.
Much of the "lot of tinder" was that people had been cooped up in their homes with little excuse to get out and interact with other people for several months. I believe this was a significant factor. But yeah, the video was also particularly egregious -- the most cut-and-dry-presenting video of a police killing that I've ever been aware of.
>Also, though not as impactful as George Floyd, I think the Eliot Rodger murder of 6 people in 2014 probably gave the feminist movement a bit of support that helped it carry on for longer.
Yes. I was surprised this wasn't even mentioned in the post. My memory is of the aftermath in the discourse being HUGE, leading to hashtags like #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen and acronyms like NAMALT that are still occasionally referenced today. From my point of perception, the feminist "creepiness" discourse actually reached its zenith in early summer 2014 for this reason, and the surge in it that I personally had the most trouble coping with. (Happily, it happens to have been the exact same time that I discovered Scott, SSC, and the online rationalist movement.)
Re: your first point, I think that was by far the most significant reason things blew up to the degree that they did after Floyd's death. People, especially young people living in small apartments in dense cities, were desperate to get outside and do something after months cooped up in isolation. Lots of those people were also unemployed and feeling lost. The constant drumbeat of quarantine shaming had made a lot of left-leaning young people fearful of the social repercussions of breaking covid rules even while they became increasingly desperate for some kind of social interaction. Protesting police violence suddenly gave them a reason to break quarantine without having to look like they were going against the rules that had become so precious to their tribe. Never underestimate the degree to which virtue signaling (or more importantly fear of social shaming) drives people's behavior during our present age of partisanship and internet-driven moral panics.
I think part of it is simple repetition. If this was 2014 or 2012 (Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin), you don't have this reaction. But after 2014 we've had seven years of having something like this on the regular. It's like in advertising. It's not the first commercial that builds your brand loyalty to Coke. It takes time. It takes reps. We've had years of reps, so when we had a particularly egregious case (and really, we had two), for a minute, we had a blow up.
There's a reason (or should I say rea$$$on) the story of Floyd's murder became "racist cops killing black people" and not "classist cops killing struggling poor people", even though police murders of whites follow much the same pattern.
I think there's a good explanation of this as being about phone camera penetration. That is, a 17 year old black girl who was not from any kind of wealthy background could afford to have a phone with a camera and video recording capability sufficient to create a video of a high enough quality that everyone could see what was going on.
While a camera of that quality (and enough storage to hold 10 minutes of video) has been available for a few years, it's not all that many, and available to enough people (particularly poor black people, as the ones most likely to see that sort of policing) that someone does capture an event like that? Maybe only a year or two at that point.
What about the death of zero persons from police violence? Rodney King was just beaten up on camera, not killed. And he was beaten up at a time when #BLM wasn't a thing, when the internet was barely a thing. But *sixty-three people died* in the resulting riots. I don't think all the violence in all the #BLM protests/riots/whatever adds up to even half that. Then Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were killed, and there was some protesting and rioting but nothing like Rodney King, then we got a dozen or two more incidents that were all over the map in terms of both video quality and egregiousness of injustice and we got levels of protest/rioting that were all over the map but uncorrelated with the cause, then we got George Floyd and for some reason we got more rioting that we'd seen since Rodney King (but not even close to that).
This defies any simple explanation of the form, "but this injustice was really bad so the riots were really bad" or "this video was really graphic so the riots were really bad". It really does look to be as inscrutably quasi-random as "internet fashion, go figure". If there's some hidden order to it and someone can figure it out and explain it in a manner that has real predictive utility, that would be helpful. Just-so stories to explain the last cycle, not so helpful.
I think it was about pandemic cabin fever more than anything else. Young people have been socialized into a manichaean political worldview while at the same time being taught to live in fear of public shaming. Social isolation is unnatural for humans and lots of young people got stuck alone or in tiny apartments with roommates for months on end. Add that to the constant refrain from left wing media about how anyone who socialized or even stepped outside their home was a monster and you get a whole lot of desperately lonely young people, who aren't actually very afraid of a virus that's highly unlikely to kill them, feeling guilty about their desire to break the rules to go see friends and family. Suddenly protests start happening and now going outside and seeing friends is not only okay, it's virtuous! It's your civic duty in the fight against systemic racism! The Floyd video was stomach-turning but not really all that different from the many instances of police violence we've all seen in recent years, except that it occurred at a time when young left-leaning Americans (read: the group most likely to protest at any given time) were perhaps the most desperate they've ever been for a reason to leave the house.
I think Scott is a bit too pessimistic about Socialism as the ascendant invasive ideology. Sure, CTH isn't so trendy these days, and the appeal of Sanders and Corbyn has dimmed. But pretty much every cool 18-21 year old student in my classes these days expresses some variant of 'fuck capitalism' every fourth sentence.
This is a fairly new phenomenon for me (last five years) and I think we're still in its early stages. Even if socialism (in the co-ops, unions, ownership of the means of production sense) has peaked in the current meme cycle, I think more general anti-capitalism is probably ascendant in trendy spaces. I don't know what form it'll take. Probably something that mentions socialism but is deliberately vaguer and more viral in its focus.
I doubt this will be anti-woke per se; if anything probably the opposite (perhaps something like "capitalism is cis culture" could be a suitable slogan?). But despite being nominally pro-woke, it'll shift the center of narrative gravity from race and gender to the dream of wholesale reform of institutions and our way of life.
That'll helpfully dovetail with the persistence of racial and gender gaps and inequalities even in the face of the current aggressive political and institutional efforts to reduce them. "We were right to identify racism and sexism are serious problems," the new creed will intone, "But we can't tackle them head on, as is evident from the persistence of social inequalities. Clearly, these issues are too hopelessly deep and bound up with our modern capitalism consumerist society to be tractable without root-and-branch reform of our institutions."
There won't be many practical remedies suggested by the new anti-capitalist faith, let alone any that involve the wholesale destruction of capitalism. It'll mostly be signaling, as usual. But there might be some interesting conversations to be had in this space, e.g., ways in which capitalist systems create 'problematic choice architectures', which is just another way of saying inadequate equilibria, except for conventionally cool people.
Right, that's why I say there won't be practical remedies suggested. Clout-chasing young people will continue to buy $600 Apple headphones while deploring capitalist institutions. "There's no ethical consumption under capitalism anyway, so fuck it, who cares, let's focus on bringing down the system." I expect a lot of theory, a lot more navel gazing, and a lot of LARPing. Maybe along with some more focused attacks on things like Big Tech?
I agree about the general point, though. Ideologies are starkly limited by the costs of commitment and their legibility. If there's a clear and painful dividing line between true believers and mere clout-chasers, you can't go viral. You see this with animal welfare activism, insofar as all that seriously in the relevant spaces unless you're at least vegetarian. But that involves a genuine difficult commitment, and puts off the trendseekers. And you can't go viral if you're restricted to true believers.
The same with climate activism. With Greta leading the way, it's very risky to fly to Europe for your summer vacation if you've spent the last year excoriating the carbon footprint of the airline industry. And who's going to make that sacrifice? Not a trendy 19 year old girl chasing clout, or the 21 year old men chasing her.
And there's also inherent limits to how people can be true to their beliefs in their actions by the strictures and the structure of society. Socialists can try to justify paying for those headphones, for example, by saying that in their ideal universe they wouldn't have the cultivated desire to buy the headphones, and besides they still have to pay for some things they'd rather not (healthcare, etc.) but you can't just completely disregard that structure if you want to live.
Same for Greta Thunberg; it's going to be really difficult for her (and other climate activists) to be true to their beliefs considering the state of the world--and the climate and the economy.
Anti-racism and feminism don't affect people's lives? You don't think people who feel the effects of individual or systemic discrimination would be affected by those changing?
I think the point is that if X takes up the cause, it's not going to affect X's lifestyle very much. It does affect other people - both positively and negatively - but that's not much discouragement to X.
"People go along with this anti-racism and feminism stuff because it doesn’t really affect their lives very much."
Plainly ridiculous.
"I think you’d get a lot more resistance to a movement that wanted to totally change the economy or even raise people’s taxes by a significant amount."
Is Biden getting much resistance for his (in my view, obscene) capital gains tax proposal?
Well, it is ridiculous. Crime has risen in the inner cities massively. Democratic states are going all out in gutting public schools. A wide swathe of people were affected by the Obama administration's campus sexual assault guidance.
>it affects only people with $1 million+ in annual income
Those are all who have to directly pay it, but it will affect many others (possibly to a greater degree); tax incidence is unrelated to who has to write a check, and I doubt it'll be the 0.3% whose consumption will diminish as a result.
How is this "plainly ridiculous?" Being super woke costs me nothing in the near term, and with my liberal circle, it might actually help me socially. People will fight those capital gains taxes, even if they have to do it quietly.
> But pretty much every cool 18-21 year old student in my classes these days expresses some variant of 'fuck capitalism' every fourth sentence.
That's been around for 50 years, except that the really cool kids didn't have to say it every fourth sentence because it implicitly permeated their work. "Fuck capitalism" has been the creed of punk, goth and much of rock and metal. Almost every nerd goes through a "fuck capitalism" phase. There isn't much harm to it unless it becomes a mass religion. Once the axe hits the foundations underneath capitalism (meritocracy, individualism, the strife to be better and prove things to the world), that's where it really gets unhealthy.
Wasn't familiar with it. From its frontpage, it does *not* seem to be against striving and meritocracy -- maybe some of its hard core is, but the frontpage is full of memes about capitalism, bullshit jobs and underpayment. (Low quality memes mostly -- if someone told me that some moderately popular subreddits were fully populated by an AI and I had to guess which, this one would be my candidate.)
On the topic of rock, can't help but think of Won't Get Fooled Again. The most frustrating thing in all of this is that no one learns anything and we keep repeating the same mistakes with a different aesthetic, but there's a calm in accepting that and just trying to be a good person anyway, I guess.
As my eighty year old relative who was very, very involved in socialist movements back in the day put it, everyone's a socialist in their twenties unless they have no heart and a capitalist in their forties unless they have no brain.
That, and skin-deep anti-capitalism is fully compatible with many professions in the arts and in academia. You don't even need to grow out of it if you live that life and keep your intrinsic motivation alive.
"But pretty much every cool 18-21 year old student in my classes these days expresses some variant of 'fuck capitalism' every fourth sentence."
That sounds like Woke Socialism in the same sense as Woke Capitalism. And when those students graduate and go out into the wonderful world of work? Some of this is plain trendiness that will fade away - when I was young, the student activists were all wearing keffiyehs. Need I say that none of them were remotely Middle Eastern?
Trendy Marxism/Marxist-Leninist/Maoism has long been a staple of college students. Some of them will go on to the DSA or whatever, but most of them will just mouth the platitudes while scrabbling for jobs in the capitalist economic system.
But I think the point Scott was making is that there's a major strain of *anti*-woke socialism (Chapo Trap House and Jacobin being the paradigms, but everyone who was ever accurately called a "Bernie Bro" being part of it as well).
(Whether or not these people are actually socialists is another question. Just as, I suppose, it's a question whether the "woke capitalists" are actually capitalists.)
I have to jump in and disagree with Scott here. How much are these people willing to defy anyone on the identitarian left? I get the impression that most of these Jacobin people might be willing to venture that we ought to be talking about the depredations of capitalism instead of white collective guilt for slavery and colonialism, but almost none of these people would be willing to, say, tell Ibram Kendi that he might actually be wrong about something. It's a clown show.
I recall having this weird sense in 2016 that the Clinton/Sanders divide had some weird lining up where people in my social circles who were members of exactly one oppressed group (gay white men, straight white women, straight black men) were more likely to support Clinton, while people who were members of either 0 (straight white men) or two or more, were more likely to support Sanders. (I never actually did a survey to verify this, or figure out whether this affected the majorities within each group or just some slight statistical trend).
This sounds very plausible — even if as others point out it wouldn’t be very new or original. In favor of this thesis, anti-capitalism is popular but hasn’t reached celebrities or corporations yet, and has the benefit of being extra hard to turn corporate since, y’know, businesses are pretty capitalist.
That's been the case for at least a few hundred years, not five. The early Marxist revolutionaries all got into it very young. Marx's ideas were fixed in his twenties, he was never forced to abandon them because he never really worked (lived off his friend Engels and his family). Lenin was radicalized when he was expelled from university. Mao joined the Xinhai Revolution at 18.
It's probably related to the effects of the school system. Combination of absolute authority, every question having a clear answer, no real debate of any meaningful form despite what teachers may claim, teachers themselves usually being state employees with attendant politics, etc.
A couple people mentioned this above, but in what sounded to me like a very take-sides sort of way, so let me say as neutrally as possible: it would be interesting to add the rise of intense debates over trans issues to this analysis. (While Scott said "gender" issues, he didn't mean trans issues, but sexism issues; trans issues are a different set, as far as culture-wars goes.) My no-N-grams-to-back-it-up sense is that World War T has been heating up for several years with no signs of a slowdown. But it'd be interesting to see some real numbers on this if anyone has the chops. And then to figure out how this integrates, or doesn't, into the above analysis.
Are there enough trans people around for that to blow up as a big issue? I don't think censuses are collecting good data yet but I doubt there are as many trans people in America as there are ethnic minorities (c. 25%) or gay/bi people (5-10%?).
It doesn't take a lot of people to get an acrimonious culture battle. How many unarmed black people are killed by police, like 10 a year? Never stopped anyone from yelling about it.
As always, follow the money. Trans activist groups have an absurd amount of money for the proportion of the population they represent. There are trans billionaires funding a lot of activism, not to mention pharma companies pouring money into trans causes because gender dysphoria treatment has the potential to become a multi-billion-dollar industry if it isn't already. Before anyone accuses me of being a conspiracy theorist: all of this is public information. On the one hand I think it's a positive for transgender people to get access to appropriate medical care and to be accepted by mainstream society. On the other hand, anyone who has spent any time with teenagers recently can see that there is clearly a social contagion going on that's leading American teens to see gender transition as a magical cure for the angst and bodily alienation of puberty and they're being given access to permanent, life-altering medical treatment with essentially zero questions asked. Some of the doctors who were early experts in transgender health care have spoken out on this and have lost their jobs over it.
I must question your Google Trends methodology. The decreasing frequency of the word "feminism" doesn't imply decreasing obsession with the cause of feminism; it just reflects changes in what terminology is in fashion. Today, they are more likely to use the words "misogyny" and "patriarchy" than "feminism" or "sexism." And of course the word "intersectional" bundles grievances alleging both racism and sexism and various other isms into one toxic brew.
Re. this: "A lot of early feminist culture centered around various terms and concepts and witty in-jokes that basically boiled down to "annoying people sometimes come into our spaces and argue with us, and we hate it".
Fan-fiction contains some fandoms where the fics are written almost entirely by women (Trek, Twilight, most TV shows for adults, everything on Archive Of Our Own, which was explicitly feminist in inception), and a few where they're written almost entirely by men (Naruto, My Little Pony, Transformers). (I'll note in passing that it seems women like shows for adults, and men like shows for children.)
All of the fan-fiction communities dominated by women are extremely critical of criticism. None of them provide any means of downvoting or disliking a fic, and people in those cultures were outraged when academics began writing about fan-fiction and critiquing it. They wrote, IIRC, that fanfics were personal expressions, not public property; and that holding them to someone's (arbitrary) standards of Art was a kind of personal violence. Whereas the My Little Pony fanfic community, dominated by men, was the first fanfic community to allow downvotes or numeric ratings on fics, and has a culture in which expectation of constructive criticism is the default, and anyone who complains about reasoned criticism is looked down on. Equestria Daily, the top-tier publication site, was infamous for the brutality of its story critiques. Long critiques are commonplace and institutionalized (there are several MLP-fic critiquing organizations that are large enough, old enough, and respected enough by fanfic standards to be called institutions, eg., the Royal Canterlot Library, Seattle's Angels, the Vault, some now-defunct criticism group on some website like 4chan, and https://writeoff.me, a website for story competitions, which is nearly dead now but used to routinely get a hundred entries per competition). MLP fic fans often hold fic competitions with prizes, sponsored by websites or by individuals. Whereas female-dominated fandoms find the concept of fic competitions offensive.
I may be perpetuating a false narrative. During the firestorms over academics critiquing fanfic, a lot of women from Archive Of Our Own (AO3) wrote essays & blog posts claiming that it had been founded as a feminist site, and that "Our" meant "Women's". But my recollection was that, when AO3 was started, its public face was gender-neutral, and never said anything about being by and for women.
Okay, something odd happened there with a comment double-posting and then deleting both when trying to delete one. Trying this again.
I remember AO3 being founded in the wake of the Fanfiction.net purge of "mature" content https://fanlore.org/wiki/FanFiction.Net%27s_NC-17_Purges:_2002_and_2012, where they promised no censorship. I don't remember anything about being feminist or founded on the premise of feminism, but then again I'm not surprised by any claims that are made.
Modern fandom is different from Ye Olde Tymes. Certainly *now* I see a lot of "only positive engagement" and "no concrit" from "content creators" who come with a laundry list of expectations for readers/consumers of fanworks; it's not enough to lurk, you must comment, it's not enough to like, you must reblog, and it all has to be positive and encouraging and phrased in a certain way (even "I don't generally like [this trope] but your story was great" is not welcome commentary). Frankly, I think this is because of much younger fans coming along (well duh, everything grows and changes) and having their experience of online interaction shaped by social media, particularly Twitter. Now they are much less open to the kinds of thing you list, but I don't think this is a male/female divide (plenty of majority or solely women fanfic sites were open to concrit and flat-out saying 'this is terrible' and things like review whoring were frowned upon), as it is old fan/new fan.
This is a point to consider. But G4 MLP fandom didn't begin until late 2011, after the Trek & Twilight fandoms were well into their declines, and AO3 was 3 years old. I don't have broad enough or long enough familiarity with fan-fiction to talk about much beyond those fandoms.
Transformers fanfic is mostly written by women, in my experience. There is a stereotypical male side of the fandom but I don't think I've seen them write any fanfic.
I think you're right about the male-dominated fandoms being more open to criticism, but
Deiseach is right about this being relatively recent. I think the female-dominated fandoms tend to all mesh together (a lot of people write fic for whatever shows they're atching and stop once the shows end) while the the male-dominated fandoms are their own separate ecosystems. That said I can't really see a male majority space getting as sensitive as modern ao3 or tumblr.
> and a few where they're written almost entirely by men (Naruto, My Little Pony, Transformers)
I'm pretty sure this isn't accurate at all. At best these are the fandoms that are "a tiny bit less than completely dominated by women writers" - when the AO3 did their demographic survey in 2013, it was 80% female, 5% male, with more respondents picking "genderqueer" (6%) than "male".
I'm sure *some* fandom has more male writers than female, but it's almost necessarily going to be something fairly niche, so I doubt it's one of these big name ones.
(And I can say for sure, if anecdotally, that the Naruto fandom is not male dominated - the Naruto/Sasuke shippers were like an entire demographic of their own for awhile)
Sorry; I was guessing irresponsibly about Naruto based on VERY limited data, and mostly guessing about Transformers--all the talk I've seen about Transformers was by males, but that was in a biased sample. But the new, MLP Gen4 fandom is called "bronies" because it's mostly male. (Fans of G1-G3 are nearly all female.) G4 fandom has had many large surveys, and is consistently about 90% male. A 2017 survey of 1800+ MLP fanfiction readers came out 92.0% male and 6.1% female; and that asked for "gender identity", not "sex". It would come out even more male if it asked for "birth sex".
AO3 is probably biased in the other direction, given the number of AO3 members who've called it a site for women.
Somewhere here the by-now-old observation needs to be made that American institutions -- which is to say, all who are invested in the corporate economy -- have a lot to potentially lose from socialism but not so much to lose from repeating Woke (read: trendy socially leftist) shibboleths. The megacorps are happy to speak the shibboleths, and to give their megabucks to people who repeat the shibboleths, but not so happy to give megabucks and attention to people who talk about constraining the wealth and power of the megacorps.
One viral and memetic moment that didn't get brought up in Scott's survey: Occupy Wall Street. What happened to them? How come JP Morgan didn't have a pavilion supporting them but it does field a gay pride float every year?
One way to model the change here is that the left had gained too much memetic/cultural power by 2008, for a lot of reasons, and so the establishment somewhat chose and was somewhat compelled to take a hard turn left, and by joining the left it was better able to steer the left. Since rightists and Republicans are still actual things that exist, they provide useful enemies and foils that put a damper on leftist infighting and allow the more powerful and better funded party, the anti-socialists, to largely steer the ship, if only by vetoing one particular line of discourse while allowing pretty much any other new idea to fly.
Inequality's also much, much worse now than in 2008, and most of what's being discussed are mild tweaks that won't restore 2008 levels let alone pre-Reagan ones.
I think you are assuming facts not yet in evidence. Joe Biden was certainly not elected on his economic platform (if any). So our first chance to see whether his current economic ideas are popular or not will come in November of 2022. Assuming as seems moderately likely COVID continues to fade, and bearing in mind the huge disruptions in the past year, it would not surprise me to find economic issues front and center next year.
I agree with these points, and would also add that the US corporate tax rate, while not irrelevant, isn't the most important thing to multinational companies. Flow profits through Ireland, do everything you can to not show a US profit, take advantage of whatever other loopholes or incentives exist (and anyone who assigns a high probability to a tax bill passing that doubles the corporate tax rate without creating lots of new ways to avoid those taxes is kidding themselves).
Meanwhile, for example, Biden made it clear very early that restructuring healthcare is basically off the table. And I haven't heard anyone say a word about how much cash UnitedHealth has generated during Covid while not really being much involved in helping beat it. But I do hear people talking about transsexual high school athletes and January 6 and racism, racism, racism.
I'm not really even complaining so much as observing. I'm a long-term holder of UNH stock, and it has made me a lot of money.
Corporate tax rates are not important at all to a multinational, yes, or anyone else who has platoons of lawyers on staff to structure everything cleverly. But small businesses are the backbone of the economy, and the biggest engine for innovation and job growth, and what is the consequences for them? I can easily imagine that you put ceilings on the ability of little mom-n-pop or a couple of college friends operations to grow bigger -- because after they can no longer take advantage of entrepreneurship incentives, and running it all off their personal 1040s, but they are not big enough to hire all the lawyers to finangle it the way Monsanto or Apple does, they're stuck. In many cases I can imagine they *could* see their way to growing, but the ruinous tax hit and/or additional compliance requirements turn it into a fuck it moment, as in, to hell with hiring 20 new people and getting 4x the revenue, let's just have an extra nice vacation this year.
> Joe Biden was certainly not elected on his economic platform (if any).
I'm not so sure that's clear. Certainly Ossoff and Warnock were very clearly elected on the $2000 checks idea. And the entire set of covid relief bills showed a cross-the-political-spectrum shift towards the idea of giving out free money.
Though it's hard to evaluate how any issues in particular figured into elections during a pandemic year, particularly with a figure as "colorful" as Trump on one side.
Well, I'm not counting "free money" as an economic platform, but lumping it under the COVID pandemic response -- which clearly factored hugely in Biden's win (or more correctly Trump's loss, since I think it's more correct to characterize the 2020 election as "Trump loses to Biden" then "Biden beats Trump."
Exactly. It's much easier to attract the cultural left with your BLM sign than to actually acquiesce to any of the propositions of the economic left; they'd gain power from the former and lose it from the latter. They (the American institutions) see the left as the rising political/cultural force and so they try to weasel their way into the left's mind by claiming to be on their side, when in fact they stand in direct opposition to their goals.
I was going to bring this up too- I think Scott missed the time in the late 2000's and early 2010's when everything was about inequality (though maybe this was just in my economist corner of the internet?)
I am certain that New Feminism was also partially undone by another splintering you seem to have overlooked: the end of "vanilla"-feminism's uneasy alliance with queerdom.
In fact, I think may in fact be the new underdog on the rise. Consider: when I came to the part of your essay concerning the rise of the "white feminist" meme, I was puzzled at not recognising the stereotype by that name, but it sounded very, very familiar from the discourse *I* am involved in. But the hip name for the same broad archetype is no longer "white feminist": it is "TERF".
I can even go one meta-level above: the up-and-coming social-justice meme these days, on Tumblr and the like, is "trans women of colour". Is this New Anti-Racism coopting queerdom? While I can imagine someone thinking so, I think it might be the opposite. After all, anti-racism predated widespread Internet interest in the trans experience.
What seems to be going on is that "mainstream" intersectionality is now too uncool, and the hip new thing to show you *really* care, is to focus not only on women or on POCs, not only on women of colour, but on *trans* women of colour. I would go further: I would say that queerdom is in the process of trying to infiltrate and ultimately take over "New Anti-Racism". Note how the latest lasting outrage in leftist Twitter has been over that anti-transgender Texas bill: "a law passed in Texas provokes widespread outrage from Blue Tribe types", three years ago, would have been guaranteed to concern a law accused of being thinly-veiled institutional racism, or something of the sort. Now it's trans kids who are the victims; the story's remained the same, the concern has changed.
I should highlight that, as a queer person with a trans sibling, I am not particularly unhappy with this development. Less selfishly, I think SJWs moving on to trans and otherwise-queer people as their preferred victims-to-be-defended, should be a cause for optimism among the crowd of people whom wokeness annoys. Unlike women or POCs, trans people do not actually comprise a significant percentage of the world's population. A world where SJWs spend their time defending trans folks is a world where trans folks will get nice things, and the overwhelming majority of "normies" can largely move on with their lives as normal without much fear of accidentally becoming a target for the SJWs for the simple reason that most people do not meet trans people.
Another interesting feature of New Queer Advocacy is that, as a relatively new social phenomenon, transgender-ness doesn't come with as many preexisting opinions as "women" or "non-white people" or "the existence of God". Most people as yet untouched by queerdom do not have any biases or opinions on the subject of trans people because they are likely not really aware that they exist. Again, my experience is different, but I have the hope that for ordinary cis people, being told about the new party line by the queer-advocate SJWs will be an experience along the lines of strange people telling you what opinion it is moral to have about the struggles of mauve zogleblicks. You will shrug, say "sure, I guess if mauve zogleblicks exist then I sympathise with their suffering from the strange condition known as dysphgerrgregrefligia", and that will be that.
> Most people as yet untouched by queerdom do not have any biases or opinions on the subject of trans people because they are likely not really aware that they exist
Unfortunately while trans people may not be common, lots of people have opinions about gender norms in general, and the degree to which they ought to be compulsory. And arguing about trans people is used as a synecdoche for that. If you look at conservative anti trans commentary there's very little discussion of hormones, surgery and legal recognition, but a lot about blurring of existing gender roles, and a fear that they will be dismantled. Even the stuff about bathrooms and sports isn't so much about the actual trans people, but the idea that these dividing lines that are supposedly immutable will be blurred
Arguably — but then, it is too oft ignored that by definition, transness relies on the assumption that "gender" is a very strong and deeply-rooted feature of people's brains, not just a weird social construct to be fought and abolished.
I am not so naive as not to see why this has failed to happen, but in theory, trans folks should by and large be natural allies to "gender norms are important!" types. The last thing a trans person wants is to blur the distinction between male and female, or else transitioning would be meaningless; a trans man actively wants to be perceived socially as "a man", not for everybody to be perceived the same regardless of gender! I think this holds even for non-binary types (and mind you, *they* are a minority within a minority), who are quite insistent that *they personally* feel neither feminine nor masculine, not that "feminity" and "masculinity" are social constructs that everybody could and should break away from.
"A world where SJWs spend their time defending trans folks is a world where trans folks will get nice things, and the overwhelming majority of "normies" can largely move on with their lives as normal without much fear of accidentally becoming a target for the SJWs for the simple reason that most people do not meet trans people."
Which I would have agreed with up to recently, until I received my first work email from an agency my workplace deals with, that had "preferred pronouns" of the (cis het) person listed in the signature line. The email was nothing to do with trans issues, we have nothing to do with trans issues, the agency has nothing to do with trans issues (apart from being part of all the other anti-discrimination regulations it operates under) and while I knew this was something happening in the USA, I never expected to see it in my own little corner of the world, or at least not for a good while yet.
Trans people may be a tiny fraction of a percentage of the population, but there are wider repercussions. Many activists, organisations and others are taking it upon themselves to include such issues as part of a broader agenda. And since 'mission creep' is real, then things like "it would be nice but completely voluntary on your part to include your pronouns" can indeed become "you must, whether you want to or not, include your pronouns in work communications".
Nine and nine-tenths times out of ten, I don't care what is the sex/gender of the person on the other end of the email communication chain, I care that we can get this topic sorted out and acted upon. I don't want or need to know if you're girl, boy, both, neither, whatever. I don't particularly want to explicitly tell you that I'm girl, boy, both, neither, whatever (you should be able to figure it out from my name and honestly it won't matter a damn to the work I'm doing). But these *are* the kinds of minor but pertinent interventions that "normies" will encounter, and will become caught up in - "hey Bill/Bertha, why didn't you include your pronouns as set out in the last company communiqué?" or even worse, the words everyone dealing with the public dreads, "We've had a complaint by a client that..."
Been seeing that more too (in the US). I’m optimistic though that the majority of my coworkers have no interest in sharing pronouns and it’ll die off or stay to certain circles. Similar to pushes for ze/zir usage it just doesn’t click unless you’re already woke.
I might be wrong, but aren't pronoun fields on official forms (and in email signatures) pretty much the standard in the US by now ? I am self-employed, but some of our clients are large megacorps, and all their official mass emails have pronouns. Every time I've had to fill out a paper form recently (e.g. at the doctor's office or an insurance claim), it had a pronoun field on there (in case of the doctor, this was in addition to "sex"). I realize that I'm just one data point, but still...
I have seen official mass emails with pronouns, which doesn’t surprise or worry me much. Also seen a few optional pronoun fields which are fine. But no mass adoption by common folk or forced adoption via management which would make me uncomfortable and nervous about getting woke checked.
It's still pretty uneven from what I've seen. I live in a Trump +40 county, and the only time I've seen it locally is the principal at one of the grade schools, who recently started and moved in from a big city, and it caused a stir, though no determined effort to fire her. But I observed that most people here were puzzled and didn't understand what this was, I had to explain pronouns to a lot of people in 2020.
But I do business with lots of companies on the coasts, and I'd still say I see it on significantly less than 50% of signatures.
In the case of multinational megacorps, I think that's more to avoid people in other countries having to guess the gender of someone called Nikita, Akhona, Bilba or Qiang than driven by trans people.
I live in a major American metro and work for a company headquarted in Cupertino that was just acquired by a company headquartered in Germany, on a cross-vendor program for the Air Force that involves hundreds of uniformed personnel, DoD civilians, and contractors from all over the country and basically every major industry player in enterprise FOSS IT solutions and cloud service hosting. I have never seen this. I don't often visit medical facilities these days, but don't believe there was a place to put a pronoun on my Covid vaccine intake for Dallas County, and neither the email communication nor the people at the facility ever referred to me by pronoun (of course second person pronoun is always gender neutral in English anyway).
Of course, I wouldn't agree that this is any sort of a serious material impact on anyone even if it did start to universally happen.
I mean, I don't want to come off as rude, but this is a very strange perspective to me. Quite unrelated to trans issues, I find putting pronouns on the modern equivalent of people's business cards to be a very good idea. You might not care, but many people get understandably upset if they're a woman and you begin your formal email to them with "Sir". It gets things off on the wrong foot. And names are not always an obvious telltale.
Pronouns in bios are *convenient* and, I think, a minimal annoyance unless you are actively annoyed *by the connection to transness itself*, as opposed to by the thing itself. And again, I don't think there's much of a reason for anyone to be actively against transness even if they cannot find it in their hearts to be actively in favour.
I support pronoun specification as an optional clarification — for trans people, ambiguously named people, and others who just want to provide cover for trans people. But I don’t want to feel pressured to do it myself. The reason is similar to why I don’t want a “in this house...” sign on my lawn: it signals something like “I enjoy and support this strongly identity focused culture we’re in, and please ask me for my opinions on it.” Identity politics is usually toxic, and even if this proposal is a good idea when treated optionally I expect the majority of its use to be signaling and would interpret mass usage of it at my work to be excessive and ideologically motivated.
A follow up: practically speaking I’d think pronoun specification could go like this: 1. If you start with no trans or ambiguously named people in your work department then no need for pronouns. 2. Trans person joins, and they are either A. Passing so well you don’t know they’re trans and then pronouns are still unnecessary, or B. They pass less than 100% and would be wise to use pronouns. Others can join to make them feel supported.
But when we’re at 1 and people are specifying pronouns it’s a bit like, what? Why? It’s just a signal. It’s like if no one at work were Muslim but you had a Mecca prayer room. Like, just wait until there’s actually a need.
But how do you define "ambiguously-named people"? It's all in the eye of the beholder. You don't know whether your *customers*/partners/whoever you're sending emails to will get confused. Similarly, in addition to ambiguous names, there's always cis people who happen to be androgynous-looking.
(Also, your alternatives in 2. overlook the matter of e.g. non-binary people, or people who don't identify as trans but are explicitly fine with "they" as an alternative to whatever their assigned-at-birth gender-pronouns are. But I'm nitpicking.)
Overall, since there are cases in which explicit statements of pronouns are useful, or which trans folks aren't an obvious majority — the way I see it, explicitly-stated pronouns are a net-good social norm. Minimal effort (you just insert them into the kinds of profile where you're already including basic information about yourself; it's always dull, and always fairly quick), can only help people, has no discernible way in which it could be harmful.
I guess you're worried about giving the impression that you're intentionally giving strong identity-politics signal, even though you don't want to be pegged as a "cares about identity politics" kinda guy? But that only applies to if it's your own initiative. We're talking about pronouns becoming a company-wide normal — if it's normalised to this extent it will *cease* to be seen as a personal, meaningful political statement altogether.
(Incidentally, I said "guy" earlier, but I'm genuinely uncertain of your own gender/pronouns, and online usernames are much more frequently gender-neutral than legal names, so that is at least a fairly obvious reason why pronouns in *online bios* should become standard for reasons entirely unrelated to trans folks in particular.)
"You just insert them into the kinds of profile where you're already including basic information about yourself; it's always dull, and always fairly quick"
But email signatures don't include that kind of information past "Juniper Smith, Accounts Manager", so it's like "Juniper Smith, she/her, blue eyes, left-handed, likes pizza with pineapple, Accounts Manager" levels of unnecessary information.
I myself don't have any of those online (or offline) bios that include "five foot two, eyes of blue, so on and so forth" and I don't see any reason why it's anybody's goddamn business when it is some random stranger on the Internet browsing my Twitter or whatever. The only reason to do that is "I am Exquisitely Woque" signalling, and maybe I'll stick in some rainbow flags on the latest iteration of re-inventing the rainbow while I'm at it.
(I am *not* a rainbow or other type of flag person).
People who do that also like to stick in that they're trans, bi, pan, whatever (don't mind me, I may be prejudiced from reading a recent ridiculous Tumblr post assigning gender and sexual orientations to a range of characters from a particular TV web serial: can anyone inform me of the difference between bi-, pan- and omni-sexual?) so the "she/her" stuff is just pure swank, and I have little tolerance for swank.
Re: "guy" as a general gender-neutral term of address for unknown or mixed-company, I don't mind that! "Hey guys!" is not, to me, an offensively gendered term that must never be used in the presence of female or you have no idea if they're female-identifying people (where I went to school, in an all-girls school, we routinely used "hey lads!" when greeting each other in groups). I think people who get their knickers in a twist over that have very little to occupy them otherwise.
Well as long as we’re proposing new social norms, here’s my counter proposal that solves the problems you mention from a different angle: anyone who doesn’t want their gender mistaken can specify, anyone who doesn’t care doesn’t need to. Then if someone mistakes my gender because I didn’t specify, it’s entirely on me if I’m offended. This should satisfy everyone: misgendering stops being taboo if the gender was never provided, and people who don’t care like me can take responsibility for any confusion we cause. Would this be just as good in your opinion?
(For my online identity I actually enjoy the ambiguity :P And I mention as such if anyone feels bad about misgendering me, because they shouldn’t feel bad, I did it on purpose.)
Personally, I don't care about the gender of random coworkers, unless it is somehow medically important. When I receive e.g. a commit notification from "jsmith@company.com", it doesn't matter to me whether it's "John Smith" or "Jeanne Smith" or "Juniper Smith whose pronouns are they/them"; what matters is that jsmith broke the task scheduler pipeline and needs to fix it ASAP. Making pronouns mandatory (either by official policy or unspoken lore) signals to me that I must now care about this additional piece of information at all times; essentially, it's a way to conscript me into the culture war against my will.
(1) Emails are a less formal method of standard communication than business letters. Were I to email you, I'd probably start off "Hello, Hadron" rather than "Dear Sir or Madam"
(2) I don't know if you are male, female, or whatever you like. I don't need to know. Maybe for the purpose of *this* specific, particular comment thread, it would be pertinent were you to go "well actually I am trans and I wish to be addressed using these pronouns" as it bears on the subject. If you're sending me an email about "Hey everyone, the Annual National Fluff Picking Awards are coming up, if you want to nominate a body in the industry for one of these, see entry form below!" it doesn't matter a single damn if you are male, female, or a cunningly automated AI bot sending out mass emails
(3) I have, in the course of my work, encountered names that are unfamiliar to me, including foreign names. What I do in that instance is to hit up Google and see if this is an Indian male name, Arab female name, African country whatever name. You can usually get a good indication there. The only reason I have needed to know if "applicant on form" is male, female, etc. is to work out family relationships (e.g. married or partnered, mother or father of dependent child, sex of dependent children and so on) and if I am going to be sending a letter addressed to Mr [Name] or Ms. [Name]. Otherwise, again, I don't need to know.
(4) Since any available figures on "proportion of global population that is trans" are rubbish, let's be exceedingly generous and say that a whopping 5% of people could be trans. I don't know how that breaks down to trans male and trans female - is it 50/50, are there more trans females, whatever. However, let's go with "any random person could be 5%".
Fine. That still leaves 95% of the population where, if we're not meeting each other face-to-face, we can probably tell by name who is what. Yes, there are the ambiguous unisex names like Robyn, Sam, Pat, etc. but I think that you have to make allowances there - "many people get understandably upset if they're a woman and you begin your formal email to them with "Sir" - if this is the first time they got an email from you, the reasonable reaction is "Okay, they don't know by my name 'Robin Samson' that I am she, not he" and to politely inform them of that in the follow-up email.
(6) Given that 95% of our correspondents are going to be cis, then the "she/her" type info is not doing anything other than signalling. It may be intended virtuously! I have seen the explanation that making it commonplace to mention pronouns makes it easier so that trans people who are not out, or who don't want to always be saying 'by the way I'm trans', can slip their preferred pronouns in without standing out as unusual. And that's okay, except...
... if you're a trans woman and you're sending me an email and we've never met face-to-face or spoken on the phone and you sign off as "Laura Prettygirl", I'm gonna assume you're a woman without you needing to put in "she/her".
.... here's where we charge straight into the area of offence being given/taken, but if you're a trans woman who can convincingly pass for female and we speak on the phone or meet face-to-face and you introduce yourself as "Hi, I'm Laura Prettygirl", once again, I'm going to assume you're a woman without needing the "she/her" pronoun dance.
... if you're a trans woman who *can't* convincingly pass for female, we meet face-to-face or speak on the phone and/or you introduce yourself with the unisex name as "Hi, I'm Sam Thompson", then I might slip up and use "he/him", in which case we *do* need to do the "Hi, I'm Laura Prettygirl or Sam Thompson, she/her" dance. But that last case blows the "normalising the use of pronouns makes it easier for trans people to not stand out" because it is necessary because the trans person *does* already stand out as trans.
Frankly, I think that it's an affectation at present; this post is about "wokeness" and that term was lifted from AAVE by the exact kind of white allies who want to show off how sympathetic to the cause they are and how involved they are and how up on the correct terms they are. It's become mostly about white people rather than the BIPOC people who originated the term. And the people who make a big insistence out of putting their pronouns out there are mostly cis people showing off what good allies they are.
I do expect it to become normalised eventually, but the best I can see for it working is "okay, that bloke in a dress wants to be called 'she/her' and the other bloke in a dress wants to be called 'he/him'" so that normal people will be able to keep the terms of address straight and not get called the equivalent of murderers for using 'deadnames' or 'misgendering' people.
I don't need you to be generous with the numbers for trans people, as in point of fact part of my argument relies on how rare they are. My argument is purely that while not *very* useful to either cis or trans people, a social normsl for putting pronouns produces 0 downsides and the occasional good consequences for either cis of trans people; thus, it is an example of a social norm which, if it actually became a social norm (as opposed to a form of movement-specific signalling), would be a generally good thing.
The reason I spent some time on this example is that I think it exemplifies how queer activism would, I think, on balance, improve the lives of cis and straight people — in a way that you can't say the current breed of anti-racist SJWism is beneficial to the daily lives of white folks, and you certainly can't say that Internet Feminism was beneficial to the daily lives of men.
(At least, as concerns straights and cisfolk who are not *actively* trans- or homophobic. If one is transphobic in the literal sense of being made uncomfortable by the thought of trans people existing/having to interact with "non-passing" or non-binary people… well, I sympathise with you in theory, but I don't think coulrophobia should have any impact on whether people are allowed to be clowns.)
Oh, and for the record, since you mentioned it: I do not consider myself to be trans, as I am fine both with my body, and with the way in which most people interpret it, so I have no intent to socially transition. However, in some abstract sense I might be called genderfluid, and accordingly am equally fine with "he/him", "they/them" or "she/her". Also, I am not technically 'white', although I have fair skin and usually pass as such.
" My argument is purely that while not *very* useful to either cis or trans people, a social norm for putting pronouns produces 0 downsides and the occasional good consequences for either cis of trans people"
Right now, since we're in the in-between period of "this is not even a thing" and "widely adopted", insisting on using "she/her" or "he/him" pronouns where there is no necessity for it evokes the suspicion that "hm, maybe this person is trans?" because who else needs to insist that "I am a lady!" other than when it's plain that they're not?
And that is a downside for the whole argument about "normalising this allows trans people to pass without remark and be treated like everyone else".
I don't have much animus about it, other than some eye-rolling when people attempt to arm-twist me about it (like you with your trans and homophobia snideness. Oh goodness me, might I be transphobic? Oh well that is a Mortal Sin of Wokeness and surely I don't want to be mistaken for a horrible conservative by the nice people, do I? Oh wait, I *am* a horrible conservative!)
It'll probably become widespread eventually, just like "Ms" did. But it's nothing to do with "here's a nice convenient social change that benefits everyone" and a lot to do with "we can make you do this" so, eh. Still can't make me believe that a biological male that is not intersex is "really" a woman, but if they want to wear dresses and spike heels and huge hoop earrings and comport themselves as one of my sex, go ahead, knock yourself out.
"Also, I am not technically 'white', although I have fair skin and usually pass as such."
So you're Caucasian? All whites are Caucasian, though all Caucasians are not White 😀 I'm quite happy to include North Africans in the "Caucasian" racial grouping alongside myself, so hey brother, how ya doing?
I'd agree that we are in a transitional period where the marginal usefulness of cis people using bio pronouns is low. But my thinking is… sure, a dam half built means you neither have a proper lake, not a usable river; but that doesn't mean you should leave the dam half built. Either hurry up and finish the dam, or actively work to tear down the half-built dam if there's still time, but dragging one's feet just makes things worse.
I did not mean any personally-directed snideness, by the way. My sympathy for people who find "men in dresses" gross — people who are in a genuine sense "transphobic", as opposed to the common meaning it has taken on of "trans-skeptic" or "trans-hater" — is quite genuine, I just find that the moral weight of the distress of trans people forbidden from transitioning exceeds *their* distress in a trolley-problem sense. In ideal world I'd go the Archipelago route and give people who want to the opportunity to live in Strictly Cis gated communities the opportunity (and vice-versa).
I certainly have no beef with you either if your position is "you do you, I don't believe you're 'really' a woman but I'm not going to be a prat about it if you're playing an elaborate lifelong LARP of pretending to be a woman". I disagree with you on epistemological grounds, but I disagree with plenty of people on epistemological grounds without deeming them to be horrible about it. I think belief in God, for example, is a much more harmful epistemologically-incorrect-by-my-reckoning sort of belief to hold, and yet I am not of the opinion that anyone who expresses belief in God should be excluded from society/never be listened to — and I am certainly not of the opinion that this makes believers "horrible people".
So is it with you! I have no wish to make a fight of this, and I much prefer the genial tone of that last paragraph to the, I assure you, quite unfounded accusation of sideness/arm-twisting. Speaking of which last paragraph: well, where does your terminology of Caucasiannitude fall when it comes to mixed-race types? I am extremely mixed. I am a preposterous cocktail; one with significant, but not exclusive, amounts of Caucasian ancestry (some of which is from North Africa, some of which is from boring ol'Western Europe).
Yeah, but how convenient are those pronouns when the guy's name is John, David, Larry, etc? Not very; then it just becomes an exercising in signalling. My counter signal is eye-rolling.
What's really annoying, from my perspective, though, is not the act of stating pronouns per se, but made-up pronouns, like ze, zir, zim, whatever. I can barely remember people's names to begin with; it is, quite frankly, a serious imposition to ask me (and everyone else) to remember to use a set of suis generis pronouns to refer to you by. To some degree, it strikes me as plain narcissistic to expect people to expect this of people.
Yeah… I think neopronouns will probably fade out over time. He, she and they will mostly do the trick. If people want to get creative, they can feel free to have more personalised neopronouns that friends and loved ones will use if they want to be extra-nice; but the norm should be that strangers can *always* stick with "they".
I think as it stands one should probably use them for those who request them out of politeness; but this *is* an unusual imposition on your gentlemanly disposition on their part, and if they otherwise give you offence, your obligation to politeness is not unbounded.
I don't see why there is any harm to pronouns in a signature. Even if we ignore the existence of trans people entirely there's always going to be names you're unfamiliar with, or gender neutral names, where embarrassing confusion is possible. And which names are obvious to you aren't necessarily going to be obvious to other people. So a norm of including them accounts for those cases and makes it easier for people in the edge cases
Yeah, it'll probably come, the same way that "Ms." got accepted as standard usage. I do see the convenience when you don't know if Mary Smith is Mrs Smith or Miss Smith. I don't care one way or another about "Ms.", even though I couldn't really see the huge point about "Men don't have reveal their married or single status!". I do actually kind of care about this because I am very much NOT married, but I still get letters from hospital appointments and such like using "Mrs [Deiseach real name]".
Now, even though this does matter to me and even though in the past I have corrected people on this, I have a few choices here:
(1) Stand in the middle of reception and make a big screaming demonstration at the receptionist or secretary or other poor divil dealing with the public about how YOU ARE GETTING MY TITLE WRONG, I INSIST YOU CORRECT IT RIGHT NOW
(2) Shrug, go "eh, it's not going to affect the reason I'm here one iota" if it's for a medical appointment
(3) If it does have an effect on the reason I'm filling up the form or visiting the office (e.g. single versus married status for tax returns), make a point of getting the correct status but without the big screaming demonstration about THIS IS MISTITLING ME THIS IS VIOLENCE HELP HELP I AM BEING OPPRESSED
Personally, I will go for 2 or 3 here, because having been on the other end of "dealing with the public", I know that big screaming demonstrations at low-level drones, where it is probably a clerical error with no malice or deliberation behind it, achieve nothing.
That's how I feel about the pronouns stuff - I don't see the point of it, I do see that eventually it probably will get adopted, and people who make big screaming demonstrations over being misgendered are not helping themselves, their cause, or doing anything else other than pissing people off at them.
As someone who uses ve/vis/ver pronouns for verself, #2 and #3 are my kind of reactions, too.
That said, I'm a bit of a mutant, I guess - I use ve/vis/ver pronouns as a matter of honesty about who I am; I don't even expect anyone else to use them (although I'm very happy when they do)! I recognise it's a cognitive load for people to remember that I have different pronouns; if we just passingly interact and I have no reason to believe they're deliberately *trying* to be mean, why would I hold it against them? Even if they keep getting it wrong but clearly don't mean me any harm, why would I hold it against them? Would I be less of a person if I were a woman? Would I be less of a person if I were a man? Why would it offend me if someone mistook me as a woman or man? (Both has happened, although due to my biological circumstances, the latter has only happened online in my adult life.) I don't know what they associate with those labels. It might be a compliment. (Note: This is how *I* feel about my pronouns. I know it's a bigger deal for some people. I'm not going to demand they feel the same way. I'm just saying I do, and why.)
Anyway, as long as it's clear to others they're talking about me, I don't mind at all, much like I don't mind at all if people who only meet me for one or a couple of interactions mispronounce my name.
The whole habit in online culture war discourse of shouting at each other is very unpleasant to me. Sometimes I feel really embarrassed about queerness being associated with the shouting, like I have to slip in a disclaimer "no, no, don't worry! I am not at *all* like that, please relax, don't worry about slipping up, you're a good person; don't apologise, it's fine, I absolutely pinky promise! <3".
And I do slip in that disclaimer occasionally, just in case.
It's bad form to get upset at being deadnamed/misgendered in error, and I think most trans people (those who don't live and breathe by Twitter) realise. Certainly my trans sibling does, and while this may be rare, they also agree that there's no sense either in blowing up at someone who visibly doesn't really *understand* transgenderness, and whom you have neither the time nor inclination to educate right there and then
The "evil" kind of misgendering/deadnaming is when you have informed someone clearly of your preference and they ignore it on purpose to be annoying/"make a point". Picture yourself going with option 3 on the "Mrs" thing; except the government drone gives you an acidic smile and continues calling you "Mrs" emphatically because "a woman your age *should* be married".
"except the government drone gives you an acidic smile and continues calling you "Mrs" emphatically because "a woman your age *should* be married".
But that *is* normal society! Think Valentine's Day and the huge commercialised extravaganza that has become, and it is all centred around the assumption that gay, straight, trans or cis, you are and *should be* partnered up, because Love, Sex, Romance makes us human/makes the world go round/is normal and natural and desirable.
(I have a whole separate aro-ace rant about that). But if you want a funny anecdote on this, and don't mind second-hand embarrassment, lemme tell you about my gynaecological appointment where it took me a good twenty minutes to convince the gynaecologist that there was no sexual history to take, then he tried to "tactfully" (Narrator: it was not tactful) ask me if I was a lesbian 🤦♀️ And then ask me if I was *sure* I had never had penetrative sex (with helpful accompanying hand gestures) 🤦♀️🤦♀️ Because y'know, maybe I thought I was making jam or knitting a tea cosy but I was really having sex.
Yeah. Society *does* assume "a woman your age *should* be married" (or at least partnered up in some way). I've stopped getting upset about it because who has that much energy to spare on constantly being outraged?
Most people think you *should* be. However, moderately polite or considerate people do not keep belaboring the point if you've made your feelings on the matter clear. Or, rather: they might try to convince you that you are *wrong* to remain celibate: but they will generally not insist that "c'mon, you *must* be married and only joshing, and I will continue to treat you as if you were in fact married".
This isn't that analogous to pronouns, but it certainly applies to deadnames. If my trans sibling tells someone to write down their chosen name on a mailing list, and the record-keeper insists on using their deadname instead, that is sheer bloody-mindedness that achieves nothing. A somewhat *reasonable* trans-skeptical record-keeper might try to *argue* with my sibling that transness is fake and they should think about detransitioning. But if they insist on using the deadname right there and then, even though everyone else in the community objectively knows my sibling by their chosen name and is unaware of their deadname — then that is not going to yield anything productive for *either* party of the conversation. The trans-skeptical record-keeper is at best being a weird Kantian virtue-ethicist, and at worst, being pointlessly petty.
That appointment with the infuriating gynæcologist is a fairly good comparison, in fact. I'm sure many trans people would envy your ability to "stop getting upset", but the fact is that especially where actually, psychiatrically-diagnosed dysphoria is involved, whether or not one gets upset is not something one can control. Yes — quoth my sibling — getting inwardly hurt every time someone called them by their deadname, back when they were in the closet, did get incredibly wearying. That is in fact a further reason to not want to get deadnamed.
"Start with Quentin Bell's theory of fashion-as-signaling. Bell says: cool people keep trying to come up with some external signal they can use to identify themselves as cool. Uncool people keep trying to copy the signal so they can look cool too. After a while, so many uncool people are using the signal that it's no longer a good identifier of coolness, and so cool people need to switch to a new signal. Thus the fashion cycle and its constant changes."
...This is nothing less that the abbreviated version of the core argument in Norbert Elias' (1897-1990) treatise "The civilizing process": the part of the book that deals with the never-ending signals-arms-race between the old aristocracy and the upcoming bourgeoisie. (The side-effect of this arms race is ever-more refined tastes, intellectual as well as sensual.) The internet has put this signalling-logic on steroids, but the logic itself is recognizable. The book is worth a review, if there is a "classics" section.
....Norbert Elias is number four in the social science pantheon of elder-Gods by the way; he is sort-of what Maria Magdalena is to the trinity (Marx, Weber and Durkheim).
Apart from that: Impressive cultural Fingerspitsengefühl in this blog post.
If "the new-1970s" is what's in store, it would be...interesting.
I've been wondering if the 1960s/70s was the result of television culture eventually percolating into the broader discourse, and if what we're going through is the faster version with social media.
I think this vastly undervalues the demise of Gawker after being taken out by Peter Thiel in 2016. Gawker was not just one site, but many sites cross referencing each other in a hipster cacophony of pseudo-anti-capitalist ilk that only Ivy league educations can provide. The main beneficiary for all of the years leading up to 2016 was Jezebel, the feminist(ish) newsblog, that is one of the few remaining veterans of the Nic Denton side of the war. They were amplified by all the other Gawker sites fighting the man (I guess) and mentioning each other's stories, all in the heart of the NYC in a news world that was still reeling from the fact that online blogs were actually competing and putting out new content (gasp) hourly, not just daily. They clearly didn't care about fact checking that much, and had no qualms about being two-faced; so scruples were right out the window. And for all of the preceding years this article mentions, not coincidentally around the same time as Gawker's supremacy, gender as a topic, indeed, did rule the roost.
But Gawker was soundly defeated in March of 2016, and the writing was on the wall months and months before that. So the entire organization was already crumbling with the reporting jumping ship long before the final verdict of 100 kagillion in damages (might as well have been) actually came down. Jezebel was in disarray; defanged, declawed, and completely neutered. There was much less cross-referencing, much less money to go after even basic stories, a new implementation of selling face creams or some other product after every 2 articles for some reason, and less competent reporters to do write ups.
But more than all of that, the defeat of Gawker was the end of a kind of boldness. Denton had a massive fund to pay the legal bills and the first amendment to help him out. His basic strategy was to run up your legal bills while running out the clock. It's no wonder it took another billionaire to defeat him. The giant, slain, nobody is willing to go out on a limb like that anymore, not that that's a bad thing. It's much like being amazed at the crazy stuff your alcoholic friend gets up to and what a life of the party he is until he inevitably dies in the car crash.
The media landscape still hasn't recovered. Go look at Jezebel now. It's just sad. You want to pinch one of the writers' cheeks and say, "Aw, yes you are. You're a good little journalist, aren't you? You're not just a child blogger with a total at 18 semester hours in women's studies." And people figured out that Marcotte's anger is a schtick, cause a huge amount of your posts should be joyous and celebrations. And on and on. There's just no infrastructure today to amplify those voices like their was for those brief Gawker years. And I think that can't be overstated when considering why gender, at such a monumental time of a possible female presidency, failed to materialize as a genuine factor and gave way to race as the ascendant obsession.
What about The Root, Gawker's New Anti-Racism "vertical"? Just as strident and nasty as Jezebel, and only became more prominent in the post-Denton era.
But after the verdict and the Denton-verse demise, there just wasn't the infrastructure and the same cultural cache that existed previously. Because of their speed of posting (facts and the human heart being of little consequence), before the verdict, they drove the news-cycle often. In a real way, it was the world coming to terms with dealing with an often malicious but always voracious blogging class that made waves, backed by real money that would often beat struggling print media that was just learning the rules of the online game, and would, more importantly, often set the standard for what "should be" a story (again, facts only mattering so much). It was the infrastructure that drove that machine that makes the difference. It isn't there anymore. There isn't real money that will risk its neck because they saw what happened to the last guy. And old media has largely figured out the game, pushing back against the low skilled blogger class. The Root and Jezebel still exist, but during the Denton years, the Root was next to nothing, an up and coming part of their brand, while the bread and butter was celebrities of all races and stripes getting into hot water. Perhaps if the Root had been better developed at the time, it would have more cache both then and now; but now, it's too late. Things are different. That whole platform is seen as something anyone of any political stripe takes only so seriously, not least of which is because of the new management (ubercapitalists) and the Goop-like ads that are hocked constantly on the sites. In the new media landscape, there is just nothing that can push old school feminist and class themes in the same way. That leaves race, the everpresent animator in society, to rise to the top. *Note: I think this article is pretty on point about the white girl feminism that was kind of sidelined by it's inability to adequately deal with race, but I would also note that same feminism was kind of blindsided by the rise of trans-discussion. Modern feminism still isn't good at talking about trans issues, as they struggle with what centering and inappropriately stepping on toes in the movement now means.
What happened to Slate.com? I assume it still exists, but it went from being the center of the online universe to... my not being sure it still exists since nobody links to it anymore.
I remember how about 7 years ago, making an absurd, contrarian "Slate pitch" a trend on Twitter. Does "Slate pitch" = "Euphoric!" = "Woke"?
Writers at Slate have been rather explicit that they aren't like the old Slate. Much like the NYT, they decided it was morally obligatory to become righteous crusaders.
"And although early internet feminists had been limited to gnashing their teeth, once your movement controls the New York Times it turns out you can just arrange for things you don't like to disappear. 'Cancel culture' entered the vocabulary."
I think this is actually a legitimate way to use "movement" as an adjective, eg "movement socialists" mean "socialists of the sort who are in a movement".
Generally this focuses on trends online and ignores broader societal context.
Also, trying to define socialists as anti-SJW is completely wrong because while some are, SJW thinkers (the ones who actually produce the ideas) are to a person anti-capitalist.
I think the point is that in recent years there has been a prominent subgroup of anti-SJW self-described socialists, whether or not most or any self-described socialists are pro- or anti-SJW.
FWIW, in my experience, socialists really want the populist straight-white-males on their side, whereas SJW aren't playing for them. For instance, the socialists are happy to win over Trump voters.
The waves may come and go, but the ground keeps rotting. I'd worry less about the current ideological mascots of the day staying on their pedestals for too long (it seems trans is already on its way out in Europe; I suspect this will take some 5 more years in the US), and more about the perspective that new pieties will emerge every five years, with an ever-worsening political climate, an ever-lessening tolerance for dissent and ever-progressing institutional corruption.
As an academic, I'm worried about campus in particular, and things like https://www.thefire.org/largest-ever-free-speech-survey-of-college-students-ranks-top-campuses-for-expression/ are making me sit on suitcases. It's not like academia is otherwise in good shape: what is the last innovation you can attribute to a university? (My previous one recently got into the news for pushing badly concealed security holes into Linux, for science of course.) No one believes in journalism any more (the opinion columns have moved to Substack, but that's the easy part); the FDA and the CDC have become laughing stocks; the CIA has decided that the C stands for Cringe (I know, a lot of you never trusted it in the first place, but quite a few people in the Russian intelligentsia were hoping for some institutional support); the kayfabe of American elections has been shattered (arguably a bipartisan success). If 10 years from now, the cool kids decide that black lives don't actually matter lol, the damage from years of authoritarian praxis won't magically disappear. The based right wing winning the conversation won't automatically fix our democratic institutions either, at least not by intention.
Culturally, the anti-elite movement does seem to be regaining steam -- that, or the progressives are losing theirs. The most intellectually satisfying thing I've seen on the internet in the last year was Niccolo Saldo's gonzo interview with Anna Khachiyan. Curtis Yarvin might have been the best writer in the last couple years. I don't take the policy ideas of either of these authors seriously and neither do they -- which is itself a political idea, perhaps one of their best. Almost every mainstream media outlet, while diligently policing the opinions of Twitter randos with 5 followers, can't help methodically destroying progressive holy cows in articles that end up among their most shared ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/smith-college-race.html , https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/05/liberals-covid-19-science-denial-lockdown/618780/ just to mention the first two that came to my mind). Hard to argue with click rates, it seems. This all doesn't compare remotely to the cultural explosion of the 60s, but is anything moving at all on the other side?
Of course, cultural renaissance does not guarantee political power in the future (otherwise, Weimar Germany would have become a liberal utopia), and it is more likely to give our existing institutions a coup de grace than to save them; but beggars can't be choosers and it's not like there's much to choose from these days...
"I don't take the policy ideas of either of these authors seriously and neither do they -- which is itself a political idea, perhaps one of their best."
Funny, I still remember a time when conservatives believed (or said they did) ideas have consequences.
>Niccolo Saldo's gonzo interview with Anna Khachiyan
I'm a milquetoast liberal, and the intellectual breath of this interview made me feel like a monkey scratching at an alien monolith. Where can learn more about what the hell they are talking about?
@annakhachiyan is fun on twitter (@progrockfarmer not so much; I generally find him rather disappointing outside of his interviews). I'm too lazy to listen to Red Scare but I suspect there's some good stuff on there too.
I'm sure there are places to read up on this, but I don't think that's anywhere near the right way to approach it. Enjoy the trolling, don't be a lolcow and ignore the foreign policy bullshit (it's easy to love Russia from three countries away). Don't bother reading every book they're namedropping; chances are they haven't either. How much Buddha has the average 70s hippie read? This isn't a literary school; the commonality is just a refreshing willingness to smash the Overton window and have some fun outside. If you find the ISIS-style Red Scare sweatshirt hilarious, you are grokking it.
"The second milestone was Jordan Peterson, who was an obvious step up in respectability beyond Milo. There was a really interesting period in 2016 when the media was trying to decide whether to unite in character-assassinating Peterson the same way it had character-assassinated all previous people in this space, or treat him as some sort of interesting and potentially sympathetic phenomenon, and it decided on the interesting phenomenon angle. After that, being anti-SJW lost about 90% of its stigma, to the point where people would roll their eyes instead of freaking out."
Reading this makes me feel like I fractured off into a different world than Scott around this time.
I don't think the media decided to treat Peterson as a "interesting and potentially sympathetic phenomenon", I think they tried to find ways to character assassinate him but he's so milquetoast and his messages that aren't convoluted literary analysis are so inoffensive that nothing beyond general sneering was ever going to stick. Really putting him on the same continuum as Milo feels wrong, you don't add respectability to milo and end up with Peterson.
Yes, I agree. That interview with Cathy Newman should probably be preserved for posterity as Exhibit A in what character assassination looks like. And also why trust in the media declined. I thought my trust in the MSM was basically rock bottom, and yet I could barely believe my eyes and could only laugh at what I was seeing in real time.
My memory of it:
Peterson: "So men and women, not always, but often tend to be different in certain specific and scientifically verifiable ways."
Newman: "So what I'm hearing you say is that women are dirt that is not fit for men's feet to tread upon..."
But the result was basically comical because, as you said, he was so milquetoast and careful with his words. Newman's schtick would have worked reasonably well against a more abrasive personality, even if he was trying to communicate essentially the same message.
I love that interview. I'm not a Peterson acolyte and he has many opinions that I disagree with but I think back to that interview when I need inspiration to stay calm in the face of someone being utterly ridiculous or accusing me of something I didn't do.
The media played softball with a conspiratorial minded crackpot. I'm of the opinion that Peterson is of the same calibre as Yiannopolous. The only difference is that Peterson crafts a veneer of credibility while Yiannopolous simply does not care.
Care to substantiate the conspiratorial minded crackpot accusation Mr. Butts? The best I can think of is his weird meat thing but that's less conspiracy and more weird belief. Maybe your opinion of Yiannopolous is far higher than mine but I just don't see the comparison. A Positive opinion piece by a NYT token conservative isn't really that damning to me.
His whole schtick seems to be that post-modern neo-Marxists have invaded academia and therefore BAD THINGS. Maps of Meaning is exactly the sort of unfocused drivel that high-minded crackpots have been writing since the dawn of time.
This is a pretty conspiratorial and crackpot thing to genuinely believe.
Yiannopolous is a trickster. It's clear he's not honest from the very beginning and that he's just saying things to be very famous. Peterson is the exact same way, however, he has a veneer of credibility in that Peterson genuinely believes the nonsense that comes out of his mouth.
Red Skull in the latest Captain America is based off Peterson. They've turned him into a literal Super Nazi.
Tim Dillon started his recent interview with Peterson saying that he read less negative press about Osama Bin Laden than Peterson. It was a joke, but at the same time...
I very much agree. There were protests all over campuses to not invite him in, to call him nazi and to destroy/cancel him. It just didn't work. Everyone just waited until he said something so unacceptable that the public would turn against him, but no. He did hundreds hour-long speeches and nobody could discredit him. He would very much love the hot take that he actually became the hero who stood up with his shoulders back against the mobs and won.
But I guess if you consider the whole culture as one entity as Scott does here, this is just an internal fight and the culture in the end shifted to the direction of treating him as an interesting phenomenon instead of a literal nazi who needs to be cancelled. Of course there are Literal Nazi takes, but they're increasingly irrelevant.
The reference to John McCain is factually incorrect. He said it in 2000, not 2008. Second, he also made it very clear he was referring solely to the prison guards.
The other big phenomenon to watch right now in terms of class overtaking race is the turn of a lot of centrist Democratic thinkers away from centering race based on political expediency - see David Shor, Matt Yglesias, Jonathan Chait etc
You could approach this in one of two totally distinct ways, which Scott hasn't specified.
1. The total society-wide amount of internet conversation on these topics.
2. The internal conversations of a small subset of those people, the "vanguard' of internet conversation.
Scott's describing a bulk shift in conversation from atheism, to sexism, to racism. This is the society-wide version of a dinner table conversation changing topics. Each topic gets about the same volume of conversation at its peak, then gives way to some other subject.
However, Scott hasn't actually shown us that data. He shows us the way these topics build and peak within themselves, but doesn't compare their total volume.
If he did, it would show that racism > feminism > atheism, virtually always, since 2004. These proportions are mimicked in the number of NY Times articles mentioning these words from 2010-present (~13,000, 4,500, and 500, respectively).
"LGBTQ" was less popular than "feminism" until 2019, and has been significantly more popular since then.
"Transgender" has been more popular than all of these since 2014, with the exception of the Trump-Biden race era when racism was far and away the most popular.
What I see isn't a shift in conversation topic. It's a permanent interest in racism and sexual orientation/gender issues. Google Trends can't capture any such shift among the internet vanguard (which seems like an outdated concept now).
From this perspective, New Atheism and feminism look like they just found a moment in the spotlight because they tied themselves to those persistent issues (New Atheism by beating up on Islam, feminism by offering a political theory to sort-of explain LGBTQ issues). They're weird anomalies, not at all comparable in terms of scale or persistence of societal interest.
Juxtaposing the tiny scale of atheism with Scott's huge interest in it makes me think that he's mostly interested in the shifting interests of his niche internet communities. This is fine, it just makes me think that Google Trends isn't a good way to study or interpret those changes.
I think your counter-analysis is very good in general but wrong in the specifics. I cannot believe that the extent to which "transgender" is more popular than the other terms captures anything real. It just seems vastly more niche than racism. Also note that "LGBT" is more popular than LGBTQ, and "gay" dwarfs any of the others.
I think that there's a constant amount of search traffic from eg school reports (if I didn't do the rolling average, you would see all of these peak around finals time and crash in the summer), and that what I'm trying to capture is the additional social interest in these topics. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/01/working-with-google-trends/ for more of the way I think about this.
The graphs you used are very-very misleading though. I got the impression that e.g. atheism was more popular on Google Trends in the past and got superseded by feminism. That was never the case. You seem to be overlaying graphs with different Y axes.
As someone who wasn't on the internet until 2016, this was a useful framing of the culture war thankyou :)
Also I would have imagined this being written for a left or apolitical audience, but it doesn't seem to be coded with those tribe signals. Was this a deliberate choice?
Perhaps I'm not cool enough to have noticed the change in usage, but complaining about "cancel culture" is still coded unambiguously right-wing as far as I can tell. That is, raging about cancel culture seems to be something conservatives love to do, and I don't think I've encountered any examples of someone on the left sneering at woke people for "cancel culture." (Quite the contrary, it seems that many on the left are scared to call out "cancel culture," and that whenever they do so, they make sure to call it by a different name and clarify that they're not obsessed with "cancel culture" like those low-status reds.)
Was that a trend that was starting in 2019 when Scott first drafted the post, but which has since been derailed? I'm feeling pretty perplexed.
(The same mostly goes for "woke" -- looking up the term on Twitter, the complaints about woke people seem to come almost exclusively from the right. But I've indeed seen a few examples of people on the left using "woke" critically, so I could more easily imagine that there's a trend here I haven't picked up on.)
My sense is definitely that liberal/center-left types feel pretty free to complain about cancel culture, or at least the excesses of "cancel culture", in a way they don't for "political correctness" or "SJW-ism".
I think this is consistent with anti-cancel culture being right-coded. That is, I'm not saying that people on the left never criticize cancel culture, but I am claiming that people on the left who do criticize cancel culture will be perceived as further to the right than those who don't.
The sort of thing that would be inconsistent with anti-cancel culture being right-coded is if you could demonstrate how ardent a leftie you are by being really vocally concerned about cancel culture.
(and to be clear, it sounded to me like Scott *was* claiming this latter state of affairs, that complaining about cancel culture branded you as a left-wing-socialist-type, which is what I'm confused about)
That's because, until recently, cancel culture was a weapon used by the left against the right. It was all fun and games then. Now that leftists are getting cancelled too, suddenly it's not a joke any more.
I don't know how to evaluate cancel culture in a rigorous way. If we're going by anecdotes, Colin Kaepernick is surely the most salient counterpoint this cycle. A previous cycle might instead point to the Dixie Chicks and their comments on the Iraq War.
It's a weapon a hundred times more lethal in the hands of the left than when the right feebly attempts to wield it. We never hear of most of the people who are harmed, fired, and blackballed for crimethink. For every James Damore, there are a thousand Aaron Kindsvatters.
I'm not going to just take you at your word. That's the kind of argument that's very easy to sling about, but I've never seen a satisfactory examination in detail. A hundred times more lethal? A thousand times as many example? I find it very hard to believe those numbers are evidence-based.
If it's the New 70s, it won't be psychedelics. It'll be the variants on "Mother's little helper", heroin (are we due for a heroin chic revival, somebody remind me?) or cocaine. And actually the normalisation of being on Adderall etc. *is* this era's version of "Mother's little helper".
The Alt Right didn’t organically die. It was decapitated from the top down, by powers much stronger than it. All of its leading figures were banned, deplatformed, or outright politically persecuted by the media and legal systems.
That’s completely ridiculous. The online right lost literally dozens of its main content creators to bans between 2017-2020.
Most big tech companies now have terms of service that make it essentially illegal to hold anything other than mainstream leftist positions of issues or race and gender.
For having sat on this for a year I'd hope you had have caught all the typos! But of course this is a longer one so fine, I forgive you.
>While this angle wasn't exactly ignored, it took obvious back burner to a massive and coverage-dominating debate over the possibility that Trump might be racist, based mostly on his position about immigration plus a few ambiguous remarks that he later denied _meaning_.
Think you mean that he later denied 'saying' or maybe denied the meaning behind the literal words that he said but the current phrasing is, ironically, ambiguous.
>I think if it fails, it will be because _every_ time they open their mouths, younger and cooler people will just roll their eyes and say "Woke!"
That word's just missing, I would also suggest deleting the comma after 'fails'
>I think "woke" and "cancel culture" encode ideas that have been _presence_ in anti-social-justice discourse from the beginning.
Scott, what do you think will happen when everyone has access to polygenic scores that accurately predict their educational achievement and other socioeconomic outcomes? When everyone can see that it’s not privilege or oppression that determined their outcomes, but innate genetic factors that affect intelligence and personality traits? And that “bad environments” are just places filled by people with unfavorable polygenic scores? I know you can already glean that from heritability data, but that's not very digestible for most people.
People with good polygenic scores will be successful regardless of prejudice, Ashkenazi Jews for instance. Anyway, I'm really only interested in hearing what serious people like Scott think about my question, not explaining things to woke SJWs. Please respect my preferences, lived experiences and deeply held beliefs, thank you.
As stated, I'm not an SJW, I just don't think they're entirely wrong.
This blog is a place for people to argue about things. I don't think you get to curate whether people express disagreement with you.
Prejudice does affect outcomes. To take an extreme example, Jews who died in the Holocaust didn't have successful outcomes afterwards. This couldn't have been predicted from their genes.
People who inherit money and status may not keep it for themselves or in their families indefinitely, but they do better as a result for a while.
You started by insulting me, so I decided I wasn't going to respect your preferences all that much.
Disagree all you want, I'm just not interested in answering a million questions which have been discussed to death already.
"Jews who died in the Holocaust didn't have successful outcomes afterwards. This couldn't have been predicted from their genes."
They had bad outcomes *after* they died? What do you know that I don't?
Serious answer: this blogpost is about movements concerning racism and sexism in specific times and places, so I think the scope of my comment was implicitly not about the entire history of the world. Is there a group with high polygenic scores that's not successful in the US today? Not as far as I know.
Less than you might think, since being considered a Jew by the Nazis only took one Jewish grandparent.
Also, to the extent that the argument from Guy is that prejudice doesn't matter (he makes a fair point that he meant moderate prejudice doesn't matter), we're talking about an abstract world where historical conditions don't matter.
Anyway, I think your argument is circular. You're saying prejudice affects outcomes. But how do I know what is "prejudice" and what is merely the quotidian buffeting we all receive in a pluralistic society? Let me guess: if it affects outcomes in a way that isn't predictable from the inherent character of people, it's prejudice -- and the circle is complete.
It would seem an odd coincidence that the people who are innately less talented happen to cluster in areas that have historically been given the least resources. To the extent that there are probably some genetic elements to intelligence they're going to be swamped by environmental factors most of the time. So the idea of coming up with some objective fitness score that people can use to predict outcomes is an interesting science fiction premise, rather than a likely outcome
"It would seem an odd coincidence that the people who are innately less talented happen to cluster in areas that have historically been given the least resources."
Some areas have magic dirt and other areas have tragic dirt.
To some extent I'm not kidding: Belgium, Iowa, the Nile, and the Valley of Mexico have better soil for agriculture than do Chad and the Australian outback.
On the other hand, Australia's lush east coast has much better soil for agriculture than the Australian Outback, and yet we find that the Australian Aborigines of the Darling Downs got no further down the tech tree than those of Outer Woop Woop.
> It would seem an odd coincidence that the people who are innately less talented happen to cluster in areas that have historically been given the least resources
I'm not sure if you're talking century-by-century on a global scale or decade-by-decade on a local scale.
On a global scale, it's not really clear that areas with more resources wound up more advanced than areas with less resources; I mean yes, I've read Jared Diamond but am not convinced.
On a local scale, it's not at all surprising that people who are innately more talented tend to cluster in areas with more resources, that's where the expensive real estate is.
The problem with that argument is that what are "resources" and what are useless features of the landscape is normally only readily apparent after the fact.
Who knew that a river the flooded each spring was a resource and not just a God-damned annoyance? Only people who figured out the silt was good for growing plants, and how to time their planting according to the rising of Sirius.
Who knew that a shit-ton of magnetite next to two shit-tons of coal was a valuable resource and not just a bunch of funny-colored rock? Only people who figured out how to smelt iron in large quantities and use it to build railroads across a continent.
Who knew that neodymium could do much more than color glass? Nobody, until GM and Sumitomo discovered you could make really powerful really small magnets with the stuff.
In short, for all we know, when we observe "resources" where the rich people hang out, and "garbage" where the poor people do, it's merely because talented people have...well, a talent for seeing "resource" where ordinary people see "garbage."
Making the jump to seeing that something is a resource is done by only a few people in a genetic group, and taking that vision into making the resource useful takes a larger group which is still small compared to the whole group.
Yes, and "talented/lucky" people are always a minority. That's why there's even a moral argument here -- if 80% of the people in the world could be classified as "talented/wealthy/lucky" then why would we be up in arms about any injustice? We'd just say "oh well looks like anyone can do well if he tries, but we have this unlucky/dumb/lazy 20% over here to whom we should provide charity or better education, et cetera."
Although honestly I'm not sure what you're trying to say, since what I intepret you saying is a truism, and it seems probable you had something less trivial in mind.
So let me get this right. You believe that environmental differences are significant enough to explain why some societies achieved advanced industrial civilization while others never progressed beyond a rudimentary hunter gather lifestyle.....and yet amazingly these necessarily enormous environmental differences manage to not be significant enough to provide any meaningful difference in selective pressures between these populations? Really?
Nobody will ever figure this out. It's easy to do PGS that "accurately predicts" in the sense of explaining 5% of variance, very hard to do it in a way where people would actually common-sensically notice that it's right or wrong. There are especially difficult problems around doing PGS well across different races, I believe right now nobody can do this correctly, but even if someone learned to do it correctly, there will be enough methodological issues that people could always plausibly claim they did it incorrectly, and so no controversial results that it produces will ever become impossible-to-deny common knowledge if people would prefer that they not be.
(someone who knows more about genetics can correct me if I'm wrong)
They're at 16% of variance in educational achievement now. With large samples of whole genomes there's no reason most heritability can't be pinned down. Eventually there will be large genetic databases of all races.
How are people going to be able to deny it on based methodological issues if they can see that the results are accurate? How would you deny that DNA tests can identify your relatives for example? Even the "ethnicity estimates" are gradually getting more accurate and people who say they're nonsense aren't convincing that many it's seems to me.
"How are people going to be able to deny it on based methodological issues if they can see that the results are accurate?"
They will be able to deny it with ease.
For example, tons of people have been claiming that Race Does Not Exist ever since Clinton's rose garden ceremony for the Human Genome Project in 2000. That an entire industry has grown up since then to determine your racial ancestry from your DNA has had almost zero effect on this new orthodoxy.
Human beings are really good at not noticing empirical evidence that would make their beliefs appear ignorant.
"That an entire industry has grown up since then to determine your racial ancestry from your DNA has had almost zero effect on this new orthodoxy."
Those tests don't mention race in their results though, they're "ethnicity estimates". How many people who've done a test like that still think ethnicity isn't reflected in your genes?
Ethnicity is a matter of culture, it can't be detected via genes. Germans & French are genetically indistinguishable currently, even though they've been quite culturally distinct for a long time.
Maybe they should call it "Ancestry Estimates" instead to avoid that semantic discussion.
Anyway, the big DNA tests nowadays break down results to specific country regions, so you can see if you have ancestry from Saxony or Normandy or whatever.
Not at all. Genotyping can distinguish between individuals, right? (DNA tests in criminology, et cetera.) The problem thus reduces to figuring out what SNPs this or that group has in common. Classic big-data segmentation problem. All they need is a sufficiently large sample set for training up their segmentation algorithm.
One could certainly argue that just because, say, most people currently living in St. Lo have this-and-such genetic pattern, which can be distinguish from most people currently living in Baden Baden, does *not* imply that when customer X's great-great-great-great-grandparents were living in Europe those very same patterns were associated with the very same resident populations. That it does is clearly an assumption (although in principle they could do a little checkpointing by persuasing some museums to let them take snippets of preserved corpses ha ha). It is probably not a *terrible* assumption, since until the 20th century it was pretty rare for populations to mix thoroughly over continent-sized length scales.
I would be skeptical personally. The genetic markers could easily be correlating with education through non-brain mechanisms. You can explain educational variance just by measuring skin tone alone. E.g.
But if you did successfully convince me that you found the genes, I think my response would be "cool, if we're sure we know what they do, now we can get started on editing the genes", it wouldn't be to just passively accept that disparities are okay.
In other words, if something like facial features and skin tone correlate (which they do), then why shouldn't genes, which produce facial features and skin tones, also correlate? You have to at least show some kind of mechanism right?
"You can explain educational variance just by measuring skin tone alone."
Yes, but if you control for genetic admixture skin color doesn't explain anything. In other words skin color is not causal. The genes in polygenic scores are expressed in the brain.
"cool, if we're sure we know what they do, now we can get started on editing the genes"
Sure, but unless that works on people who already have fully formed brains disparities will be with us for a long time.
"it wouldn't be to just passively accept that disparities are okay."
The whole justification for why these disparities are precisely so unacceptable and for constructing an enormous state apparatus to remedy these disparities has been on the basis that it is a result of "privilege" and historical disadvantage, and the whole reason its expected these gaps can be bridged (without outright wealth redistribution) is on the basis that it isn't determined by heritable factors.
As of 2018, Lee et al's GWAS study of educational attainment across 1.1 million people was up to 11% of variance, which isn't that much, but it was still enough that people in the top quintile were five times more likely to be a college graduate than people in the bottom quintile.
My prediction is that as geneticists pile up more and more evidence that, yeah, genetics do play a role in IQ and the like, then the climate will become ever more hostile to free speech and science, all the while claiming to Follow the Science. That has been the trend since Arthur Jensen's Harvard Education Review article in 1969, and I don't see why it would be likely to reverse just because of additional empirical findings.
All this studies are too inaccurate to be taken seriously. There definitely is a genetical component to the intelligence, but it is too early to tell how big or small it is.
1. Intelligence doesn't have a genetic component, it has a heritability which can vary by time and place.
2. The problem faced by people like Jensen is that the standard of evidence to demanded demonstrate that the heritability of IQ > 0% keeps getting shifted every time evidence for the alternative hypothesis is found.
How can you be so sure it doesn't have a genetic component? My prior is that it should have. And it is supported by the statistics. That can be misleading, but coupled with the prior is good enough for me.
Maybe I'm being too strict in the language. "Component" sort of implies that for a given individual you can say *how much* of their intelligence is genetics and how much is environment. An organism is better thought of as genes expressed in an environment.
Even in an absolute egalitarian system genetics would have to play some role in human intelligence insofar as it's responsible for the structure of your nervous system but differences in biological inheritance between people would not have any explanatory power over differences in intelligence.
Scott what kind of evidence would it take to convince you that blacks aren't genetically dumber than whites. When biologists, including prominent professors like Graham Coop almost universally reject HBD you imply that everyone is just terrified because something something Kolmogorov. When biologists do point out the gaping holes in cold winter theory, evopsych, over-interpreting PGSes or point out the massive fraud committed by Lynn, Burt and the like you write about "isolated demands for rigor". When a respected professor like Shalizi writes about how g doesn't make fucking sense (hint: just because your factor analysis yields a factor doesn't mean you uncovered a fundamental tenet of the human mind) you complain about getting "Eulered".
You reject the opinions of mainstream scientists with published papers but you casually converse with Sailer, nod at Murray and have Razib Khan in your blog roll, none of them being qualified in the least in what they opine about. What do they have in common? Gosh, they believe in HBD. Sorry if I'm seeing a pattern here.
Seriously, what would it take to convince you that HBD isn't real and blacks aren't genetically dumber. I'm asking in good faith because it seems arguments have been drawn out for a long, long time and despite your explicit admission that you don't know anything about this subject you still don't seem to want to renege on a set of utterly bizarre beliefs about everyone being terrified of the truth about the IQ of black people. Other people would call you racist and so on but I'm just asking for a standard of evidence that would change your mind.
Would you be willing to bet against genetic data scientists?
Scientists will soon be able to predict whether or not an person can do simple arithmetic division from their genetic polygenic scores.
As a test, if 1000 people's genomes were randomly selected, and of that number, 10 were identified as people who could not do simple arithmetic division, would you be willing to bet the scientists were wrong and a majority of subjects would come up with the correct answer?
I have summarized a bunch of arguments and retorts and I have clearly stated what it would take to convince me that blacks are genetically dumber than whites on average. How is that in bad faith? Is it because I clearly stated the implication ("blacks are genetically dumber than whites on average") instead of resorting to euphemisms like "forbidden truth", "HBD" or "genetic component in group differences"? Is that what makes you wince? I'm sorry, but from a purely dispassionate point of view, simply looking at the logic of the statements, how is using one different from the other?
I’m commenting on your question tone because it comes across as accusing someone of being a full blown racist. And I don’t think that’s a good faith way to ask a question.
It comes across as whatever you like but I never called him a racist. An HBD proponent would retort that knowing "the truth" isn't being racist anyway. I purposefully avoided the word "racist" which is vague emotionally charged, I purposefully avoided hip euphemisms like HBD or "group differences" that just serve to muddy the waters, and presented only the actual meat of the facts: either black people are genetically dumber than average than whites, or they're not. And again, I have stated why I believed they were not, what it would take to convince me of the contrary. How am I acting in bad faith?
He did a video on eugenics technology and stuff. He criticized the Nazis for going too far. I observe that this is a criticism of magnitude but not a criticism of direction. In other places he criticized Nazis for things most people would criticize Nazis for, but with... I think "below average intensity" is a fair description.
I'm not saying "he has policy preferences I disagree with, therefore his factual statements are incorrect", just... you may want to know where he's coming from.
(Encyclopedia Dramatica has some colorful things to say about him as well.)
This idea that the "experts" all dismiss race is completely ignorant. It's vastly more complicated than that, especially because of the threats to career and even physical safety that come with endorsing a HDB position. The rejection of HDB is also mostly a western thing. In countries without this demented egalitarian race ideology, things are more like they were in the west prior to WW2, because remember, the big shift happened for strictly ideological reasons, not scientific ones. There was no egalitarian breakthroughs that occurred in the 40s or 50s that can possibly account for this shift.
The general intelligence factor has widespread acceptance amongst actual intelligence experts. The fact that one guy opposes it means nothing. People have been trying to refuture it for as long as its existed but it has persisted because it is correct. Seriously, the entire field of intelligence research has developed around the validity and empirical robustness of the general intelligence factor, and you think some uninformed clown changes that?
HBD has made vastly more correct predictions over the past 100 years than egalitarianism. Egalitarianism has been forced to come up with ever more byzantine rationalisations for why egalitarianism cannot make any correct predictions about race, and none of them are scientific.
Even without methodological issues, the methods for predicting IQ etc from genetic data will always be so opaque to the general public that there will always be room for denial. Most people just don't get multivariate analysis.
However, we already have so much obvious evidence that poverty-related environmental factors negatively impact childhood development and lifetime achievement (ranging from fetal drug exposure to abuse-related head trauma to lead exposure to run-of-the-mill childhood trauma), society will never be in a position of needing to choose between genetics vs. environment when it comes to understanding why some people have worse outcomes than others. The most we can ever say is "genetics explains x% of the variance".
You might be born with great genes, but if you're exposed to alcohol in the womb and flogged daily by your stepdad just for fun, you'll end up with cognitive impairments and a shrunken overactive amygdala, and you'll be more likely to repeat the cycle with your own children. The nature vs. nurture debate is an artifice of a bygone era before we knew the answer was "both".
My understanding is that while you might be right about fetal alcohol, getting beat up is a different story. Humans evolved to be more robust than that.
Depends on the circumstances. Sure, plenty of children tolerate corporal punishment under circumstances when they don't seriously believe they are in danger. I was using the beating-via-stepdad illustration as a general example to represent more serious psychiatric trauma (situations when the child seriously feels seriously endangered and gets stuck in fight or flight mode as a result), which results in measurable brain changes. Those brain changes are probably an evolutionary adaptation and probably helped our ancestors. But they don't help kids win at school.
I'm skeptical of that notion of "psychiatric trauma". Part of it is Judith Harris' research on shared-environment effects, from which she concluded that the reason not to abuse a child is the same as the reason not to abuse an adult. Part of it is that I've been reading Greg Cochran for a while:
"Most people just don't get multivariate analysis. "
They don't have to, they just have to go "hey, this site predicted my GPA and my height and that I'm not interested in STEM, cool/creepy!"
"exposed to alcohol in the womb and flogged daily by your stepdad just for fun"
As I said, “bad environments” are just places filled by people with unfavorable polygenic scores. Even the stepdad example implies parental negligence.
It's likely some negative traits will collect in society's lower strata; I've met far more schizophrenics on the poor side of town, and their children are more likely to stay on the poor side of town. But that's not the whole story.
Fetal drug exposure and ACEs beget brain changes that beget more fetal drug exposure and ACEs. However predictive genotype may be, ACEs etc are predictive too. Not absolving stepdad of his negligence, but in all probability he had a combination of aggressive traits and ACEs, not one or the other alone. Early childhood environment will always be an indispensable variable. And as long as that's true, the nature vs. nurture tug-of-war will probably continue.
Neuroscience makes twin studies unnecessary for demonstrating that ACEs affect brain development and behavior. Repeated activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis results in measurable brain changes that correlate with long-term behavioral and mental health outcomes. In other words, ACE's stimulate a fight-or-flight response, and excessive stimulation of fight-or-flight results in structural and functional changes to the amygdala (responds to threats), hippocampus (encodes memory), and prefrontal cortex (makes decisions). Here is a review of neurobiology related to ACEs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6428430/
Neuroscientists repeatedly published papers with spurious results from multiple comparisons until Bennet did that FMRI of a dead salmon. Scott has written about the baseless research program on 5-HTTLPR. Daniel Kahneman wrote that we "have no choice" but to accept priming studies recently felled by the replication crisis. And those priming studies are at least RCTs rather than observational studies. So, no, I don't think twin-adoption studies are unnecessary. Nurturists continue to simply assume outcomes of interest are caused by shared environment rather than actually doing the studies which would be necessary to show this is the case:
The lack of studies necessary to prove these cause outcomes of interest is not itself proof that they don't cause said outcomes, but it also means we should treat the literature as being as unreliable as all those critiqued by Judith Harris & Steve Pinker for failing to control for genetic influence.
PS- While admirable research groups are busy finding new ways to quantify the predictive power of ACEs, my point is far simpler: the impact of stress hormones etc on the brain offers undeniable evidence that environment counts. I think it counts for a lot, but that's not really the point. As long as environment counts at all, the hypothesis that poverty is nothing more than a high concentration of low-performing genotypes is invalid. This frames the greater argument as one of weighted variables and magnitude of influence, where nobody really gains ground without massive amounts of data and at least some consideration for all the variables.
Quantity matters. Academic journals select for publishable results, and the result we observe is funnel plots where the effect size is just enough to be "significant"/publishable (and the largest effect sizes are found with the smallest, least reliable samples).
My default presumption is that the environment counts for a lot. I usually start off assuming that nature and nurture each account for about half.
My rough guess, inspired by James Flynn's discovery of the Flynn Effect, is that the environment often matters more across time than across space, which makes it harder to research because few researchers can wait around for a new historic era to see if that matters.
To take one example, we can study identical and fraternal twins raised apart in space. Usually, the results of twin studies suggest nature matters more than the conventional wisdom would suggest and nurture matters less.
But ... until cloning comes along, we can't study twins raised apart in time. My suspicion at this point is that it does matter what historical epoch you are nurtured in. But I don't know how to test that.
"As long as environment counts at all, the hypothesis that poverty is nothing more than a high concentration of low-performing genotypes is invalid."
I don't think I specifically said poverty, I'm sure there's people in relative poverty who nevertheless make good environments. Maybe Amish or ultra-orthodox Jews would qualify.
Anyway, the claim is not so much that environment doesn't count, but that your environment is caused by the genotypes of the people around you.
By the way, there was a study floating around recently that objective measures of trauma(things proven in court) wasn't really predictive of anything, but subjective measures of trauma(self-report) was, so it may be more how you take things than what happens to you.
This is nonsense. Nobody says alcohol exposure in the womb doesn't matter. Heritability is the proportion of OBSERVED variation in a trait explained by OBSERVED variation in genetics (and conversely, in environmental influences). If things like alcohol exposure explained most of the variation in IQ, *then heritability estimates would necessarily be low accordingly*. Yes, fetal alcohol exposure leads to worse outcomes. So what? It's not common enough to explain a meaningful proportion of the difference, which is what matters. Not what "can" have an impact.
People like you always act as though it has never occurred to intelligence researchers to consider the impact of things like poverty. Of course it has, and it doesn't explain most of the variation. As far as the kind of poverty experienced in western countries by any meaningful number of people, this cannot possibly explain most of the variance. I mean, poor white and asian kids do significantly better at school than rich black kids. There's no getting around the brute facts of reality.
I work (under duress) with PGSes and they're utterly useless for complex traits. PGS are just a bunch of associations lumped into a single number, nothing more, and most of the time the association isn't very strong or indicative of anything. People have been piling up GWAS after GWAS for "educational attainment" for almost 10 years now and we still don't have the slightest hint of a genetic mechanism behind all that "heritability" beyond very obvious hanging fruit like Mendelian diseases that among other symptoms trigger intellectual disability. PROTIP: if raw associations aren't enough and someone has to bin scores into "deciles" or similar ranked score magic to make a point they're usually trying to fool you. The only effect these PGSes have had was boosting up a bunch of grifting startups for rich fools who want the best "genes" for their child (note that we still have no idea what those genes are) and giving false ammunition to people like Sailer or gwern who really wanted to make a point about the IQ of black people on the internet, but as far as our scientific understanding of cognitive ability is concerned we are still at square one. And we will remain at square one in the near future until people get some sense in their head and actually start to analyze the "genetics" behind all those claims of "X is genetics", and so far I've seen none of that from the GWAS crowd.
Also, I don't know how many times this bears repeating but heritability doesn't imply the existence of a genetic mechanism, holy shit.
And environmental differences don't imply ~the lack~ of a genetic mechanism either. Practically every trait in any organism developed outside of extreme environments is a mixture of the two. You can argue about the proportions(5%/95%! 20/80! 50/50! whatever! even the smallest effect sizes seem enough to explain most of the interpersonal differences), you can argue about the current methodology(yep, polygenic scores are easily confounded - for instance looking for factors of intelligence at the very least you'd get some metabolic optimizations that affect the entire body in the mix), but you sound like you're dead set on the conclusion that it's impossible to causally untangle the environmental contribution from the genetic contribution and the genetic factors responsible for the choice of a comfortable environment.
For any species capable of modifying or choosing its surroundings, you'll expect mutually shaping effects - it's just what evolution happens to be. For humans, we'd get the case of gene-culture coevolution on top of that.
Should we stop trying to trace evolution in other species? After all, what if we didn't have a genetically causal explanation for the shapes of Darwin's finches' beaks?
In other words, the problem is that it sounds like you don't want to know, god of the gaps-style. In order to find the genetic component, you have to be actively looking for one, rather than discourage the search - even if the current methods are flawed as they show noisy statistical rather than direct causal associations - for moral reasons. Which actually might be harmful in a utilitarian way, especially if you're seeking to reshape society in order to rectify an issue that may not even be caused by what you believe it to be caused by. Ignorance can easily cause suffering just as well.
>you sound like you're dead set on the conclusion that it's impossible to causally untangle the environmental contribution from the genetic contribution and the genetic factors responsible for the choice of a comfortable environment.
Pretty much, and it's not a particularly controversial opinion either. The genetic/environmental dichotomy only exists in the mind of psychologists whose understanding of genetics is stuck in the 80s.
>Should we stop trying to trace evolution in other species? After all, what if we didn't have a genetically causal explanation for the shapes of Darwin's finches' beaks?
We remember Darwin's nice storytelling but we don't remember every single person who put forward a wrong explanation for a trait they'd thought of because they still believed in adaptationism.
>In other words, the problem is that it sounds like you don't want to know, god of the gaps-style.
No, the problem is that I don't like bullshit science. I'm not virtue signaling, I don't have any social media presence, I don't live in the US, I'm completely outside of the culture wars thingy. Even if someone did came up and conclusively showed a genetic mechanism by which black people turned out to be dumber than whites on average, the worst thing that'd happen to me is that I'd lose an argument on the ACX comment section, the horror.
What I do see is a bunch of people doing PGSes and wasting colossal amounts of money on GWAS papers involving ever bigger cohorts and authorship listing spanning five pages just so they can brag about finding a minuscule association with a complex trait that's not even well-defined to begin with, and whose association doesn't even translate to other cohorts, and the added value of the paper in the discussion section is "uuuh some of the snps are associated with brain development so I guess this is big". What I do see is that for the better part of a decade people have been desperately looking for "the genes for X" without doing a single genetics experiment until we get to the magical conclusion "uuh every snip contributes a tiny amount" and no one still has the slightest idea what the genes actually do. What I do see is startups launching a bunch of grifts about giving your kid the best snip correlations and people buy it up with money that could be spent doing actual genetics research or funding actually useful biotech startups. What I do see is that a bunch of people on this website are taking seriously the opinions and "research" of marginal people like gwern, Kierkegaard, Sailer, Khan, the scientific output of which is pretty much nil, while still claiming to speak in the name of science and rationality.
Yes, yes, I know, sometimes expertise is fallible, sometimes plucky eccentrics have right when the scientific establishment is wrong, sometimes academia is rotten, and so on. But why are these points always and ever invoked when it comes to justifying one's opinion about the IQ of black people? Do you not see how distorted this kind of thinking is, the length by which one is ready to go and reconfigure all of one's reasoning process just so as not to alter the cardinal premise about black people being genetically dumber? See this relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1731/
> Pretty much, and it's not a particularly controversial opinion either. The genetic/environmental dichotomy only exists in the mind of psychologists whose understanding of genetics is stuck in the 80s.
It isn't a dichotomy, it's, I don't know...a dialectic? Genetics influences what can be expressed, the environment provides the upper and lower boundaries and some degree of noise, then the phenotype modifies or chooses the environment it's further expressed in and the already existing environment dictates whether the phenotype is successful at perpetuating itself further.
That doesn't mean you can't distinguish between the contributions of each. Twin studies are an easy example. What you're advocating for looks to me like learned helplessness over methodology, which tends to become more and more able to handle complexity over time. At some point we didn't even take population stratification into account.
I'll even say that the bevy of flawed studies just happen because of academic incentives combined with the fact that it's easier to apply a methodology rather than to build a new one, rigor takes effort - but that goes for all scientific discovery! At the very least we still keep generating data we might be able to use to falsify or refine further results.
Accumulating knowledge ~even~ over SNPs can eventually direct attention to the exploration of the relevant causal mechanisms, as many traits are formed additively(evolution likes stable yet variable configurations), then we can trace what phenotypes they correspond to on a cellular and tissue level, voila, the gaps and the guesswork gets smaller proportionally to the amount of work done unless you just label the entire system irreducibly complex which reminds me of a certain other strain of thought.
> We remember Darwin's nice storytelling but we don't remember every single person who put forward a wrong explanation for a trait they'd thought of because they still believed in adaptationism.
Yes, and you sound like we shouldn't ever try to trace evolution because what if we're temporarily wrong with any given individual explanation? Might as well stop with selection and breeding, maybe huskies arose purely by chance, since we don't know the exact causality of dog breed traits on a cellular level.
The fact of the matter is: science works through parsimony, evolutionary explanations are parsimonious even if drift factors in and we can gradually narrow down the sets of these until we arrive at the ones that fit causally the best as mentioned.
>and no one still has the slightest idea what the genes actually do
I'm, err, sorry but, what? Yes, the topic is complex, maybe on a human level we don't have the full picture, but there's an infinite number of studies that use practical methods such as simply knocking genes out in order to study simpler model organisms. Overexpress a protein in a nematode to observe how misfolding may occur. Shut off a circadian clock related gene in a drosophila and see what happens with its behavior. The difference is that for humans, it takes work on tissue cultures and with enough accumulated knowledge you get to extrapolate the effect bottom up.
I'll agree on one thing: optimizing for specific SNPs without causal knowledge can give rather unpredictable results as it's imitation without a true understanding, but what are you going to do, restrict reproductive freedoms over it? What about a world in which all the causal information had been extracted and it's possible to optimize for specific outcomes even at the level of "oh this one 'model' of a subtype of a dopamine receptor and this specific average concentration of dopamine produced within this chain, it'll mean a greater ability to focus and less likelihood of having psychotic breakdowns due to XYZ", I somehow bet you'd still be against the idea, and even possibly the steps that led to that sort of knowledge even if it gave other people the ability to build drugs that would modify the same causal chain without forcing modification.
I feel like a good part of this isn't about how it may validate some sort of racism - nobody should be held responsible for their biology because nobody happens to choose being born any specific way, and if you feel like you're unhappy with yours, you should be able to modify it - but rather about how unnatural and "impure" it may feel to live in a world where biology had been effectively shown to be a sort of a stochastic programming language. Life shouldn't be a lottery, especially as far as genuine medical conditions are concerned(I'm biased here as my relatives happen to suffer due to an inborn condition) - and those are the larger part of understanding genetic causality even if it could be used for personality traits and intelligence, all those are inextricably bound.
> Yes, yes, I know, sometimes expertise is fallible, sometimes plucky eccentrics have right when the scientific establishment is wrong, sometimes academia is rotten, and so on. But why are these points always and ever invoked when it comes to justifying one's opinion about the IQ of black people?
I'm guessing that part of this is anti-cancel-culture people who see this as one of the worst cases of political bias in academia, & that another part of it is that people who have come to the conclusion that the IQ difference is genetic are more likely to come here because they are unwelcome in most places (the usual problem that a forum without witch hunts will have a disproportionate number of witches).
You see, that's where you're wrong. People don't "come to the conclusion" that blacks are genetically dumber than whites on average, they have always had that conviction and looked for "science" to support their results. Jensen was known for his bad opinions all the way in the sixties, such as asserting that black people had "no grammar" (thereby showing that he was as inept in linguistics as he was in genetics), ditto for Lynn, Murray, the whole clique.
There is no single instance of a person who, at first, genuinely believed blacks weren't dumber than whites, then "looked at the evidence" and wrung their hands in despair, until they had to "come to the conclusion" that blacks are genetically dumber than whites on average. This is a fictionalized portrayal of HBD proponents but it doesn't match the past behavior of people who have championed these opinions.
"People don't "come to the conclusion" that blacks are genetically dumber than whites on average, they have always had that conviction and looked for "science" to support their results."
What's the explanation for those guys looking for "science" to show that East Asians are smarter than Europeans?
This is an early take before I've read other people's comments.
Is it possible that a significant number of people are getting bored and/or tired of Social Justice? The emotional demands are considerable. Also, a new thing is fresh when it's new, and then it gets sedimented and repetitive.
One other possible angle is that more Social Justice people are realizing that taking the brakes off anger and malice wasn't actually a good idea. I haven't seen anyone frame it that way, but some of them are coming to realize that they've got a problem with twitter mobs and such.
There might be some Chesterton's Fence involved.
I'm pleased to see that "Helicopter Story" (previously "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter") is on the Hugo Ballot, but there are probably people who have given up on writing fiction and/or publishing it because they don't want to face harassment.
Consider also Donald Trump's opponents who, according to Scott, had a laser focus on his "hard to prove" racism while largely ignoring his blatant sexism held one of the largest protests in US history following his election. It was called the Women's March. For Women. On account of how awful Trump's sexism is.
Consider finally that Scott is maybe writing some ahistorical and poorly reasoned drivel here.
Ideology has a coercive and a voluntary component. There is some level of freedom for people to control their relationship with ideology over the course of their lives. But social justice also imposes itself on them, whether they like it or not.
In general, I'd guess that as people get older, they gain more of a sense of control and perspective. Their participation in an ideology becomes more voluntary, less coerced - even if that ideology remains as inherently coercive and prevalent as it was before.
The older I get, (though I'm not too old), the more it seems that political pressures are mainly a phenomenon of the young coercing the young, with the help of some older enablers.
If true, then people might not be getting bored/tired of SJ. They might just be getting free of all the coercions they faced in their youth. I could even imagine that this will lead to a lasting involvement with a more mature version of SJ activism, and that ultimately it might turn out to be a healthy multigenerational force for good.
Re: PUA's - I don't think they actually disappeared, but rather that culture transitioned to Tinder in such a way that it became mainstream and accepted practice. Modern swiping dating apps enable everyone to take that sort of numbers/rejection driven approach to dating that the PUA scene were initially proponents of.
Tinder culture may have absorbed some elements of the PUA mindset. But it dropped the wider systems and ontology (to use a slightly overdramatic term) as those tended to be contaminated with explicitly misogynistic, or just plain bizarre, assumptions about how men and women behave, often based on very misunderstood evopsych
I think tinder style dating culture has most in common with things like instagram, which are explicitly and openly about constructing an image of yourself you present to others, in a deliberately curated way. That has some similarity to the PUA stuff about making yourself interesting (peacocking, etc) but is different in that its heavily online and much more open about the fact that what is seen is a curated thing. The precisely posed instagram feed isn't meant to be natural, its working within the accepted forms of that genre.
Now that you don't have to meet women in real life, what need is there for most of what PUAs taught? "The opener" "Indications of interest" "How to open a set" all of them obsolete with Tinder.
This sounds somewhat right, but I think that PUA peaked before Tinder, while Tinder accelerated its decline and made its message less relevant than the more bar-driven culture where it was invented.
PUA probably belongs at least partly in the category of "self-help fad", except somewhat more underground, and aimed exclusively at men (I think women are the main consumers of self-help overall). Like all self-help fads, it failed to deliver on most of its promise ("Any schlub can be the alpha that gets all the girls!"), and where it worked best it was mostly just repackaging ancient advice.
But there's also always a market for advice on pursuing the opposite sex, and PUA ideas and language were influential enough that I think they, in turn, will continue to be repackaged for a long time to come.
Plenty of people aside from pick up artists advocated the numbers/rejection driven approach. That didn't seem like the defining characteristic to me. It was more taking a cue from Tony Robbins and sales conference culture and pushing neuro-linguistic programming pseudoscience as a way of subliminally influencing your way into a woman's pants. This sort of thing peaked with Tom Cruise's Frank Mackey character in Magnolia (respect the cock, tame the cunt) back when it was selling out hotels way before it ever moved into the realm of mom's basement bloggers spreading the ideas to sad losers on the Internet who weren't even paying for the advice. They seemed to go beyond pure pick up artistry, too, combining it with those bizarre Spur Posse like scoring systems.
I feel like Chad/Stacy ontology thing is totally different, too. That was the reaction of Incels against pick up artistry. It wasn't pushed by the actual pick up artists themselves.
One elephant in the room here is that most of the things described in this post have also happened to "Internet rationalism".
I don't consider that an indictment of rationalism, though. As the post implies, it seems like the Internet has become less hospitable to serious talk in general (civil or not, though the civil stuff was the first to go). Most of the memetic bandwidth these days goes toward irony, in the form of either performative silliness ("gamestonks!") or overt consumerist artificiality ("please like and subscribe!").
My anecdotal impression, backed up by Google Trends results for "LessWrong", is that interest peaked around 2014-2015. I'm agnostic as to the reason but going mainstream and getting overtaken by other trends both seem like plausible contributing factors.
Checking Google Trends (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0_yl8cn), it appears to me that searches for "LessWrong" peaked in 2011 & then declined, was approximately stable from 2014 to early 2020 (except for a single large peak in May 2020), & have been rising since then to about the level of the first peak.
Interesting, I was looking at "lesswrong" (no caps) and saw different results. Looks like I should have been more careful in my methodology and the data overall doesn't support my conclusion.
Did Internet rationalism and LessWrong ever "go mainstream?" Do you just mean some of the early major figures grew up and got real jobs, and being somewhat smart people, in some cases got pretty good jobs?
I wouldn't consider Google Trends volume a good comparison point. I'm thinking in terms of influence, which is less about the raw numbers and more about the way ideas get propagated to those in power. SSC/ACX at least seems to have the ear of influential commentators like Ross Douthat on the center-right and Matt Yglesias on the center-left, and concepts like "ingroup" that were popularized here and circulated among rationalist blogs are now much more common currency.
I only went to Google Trends because you cited Google Trends and I noted that it doesn't actually show any numbers on the Y-axis, so all you get searching for a single term is how popular it is at any given time compared to the most popular it has ever been, but you have no way of knowing if "most popular it's ever been" is 17 searches in a day or 17 million. At least picking some other topic people might care about at random can show relative prevalence.
There have been some comparatively high profile mentions since Scott's run-in with the New York Times, which is maybe the best publicity the LessWrong set has ever gotten.
Scott didn't come up with the ingroup/outgroup dynamic. That was Henri Tajfel in 1974: https://web.archive.org/web/20120106002030/http://ssi.sagepub.com/content/13/2/65.full.pdf. It's been a common thread in social psychology for a long time. I was first exposed to this idea in 2003 in a fairly interesting university course offered by the Cultural Anthropology department but not explicitly studying humans but rather apes, examining all of the ways in which chimpanzee social behaviors mirror those of humans. This was based on some of the early work from Frans de Waal in the 90s.
My perspective is more top down: that the Great Awokening emerged out of the strategic needs of the Democratic Party (and its allied media) to assemble and keep together a "Coalition of the Margins" who personally identify with the marginalized of historical America, as opposed to the Republican Party, which tends to represent voters who identify with the "Core" of American history such as married straight white men (e.g., the more you are like George Washington, the more likely you are to be a Republican).
The obvious problem with the Democratic strategy is the likelihood of the disparate Coalition of the Fringes turning on each other in internecine strife, which can explain why the Democratic-aligned media stokes so much hatred against straight white men as the one unifying thing the Democratic coalition can agree upon.
Spotted Toad coined the term "The Great Awokening" around 2016 for the late Obama age development. It's a clever play on the "The Great Awakening," a religious revival among American colonist Protestants in the 1730s-40s.
The main fronts of the The Great Awokening have been feminism, racism, and transgenderism, with transgenderism eventually undermining feminism.
The first three years of the Obama Administration were largely quiet on these fronts, with the court push for gay marriage being the main activity.
Obama, personally, is not enthusiastic about feminism: his big complaints about his life are that he didn't have his dad around and that his single mother chose to emphasize her career over caring for him. In the 150,000
In early 2012 the Obama Administration revived feminism, which had been largely dormant since feminist organizations stood by Bill Clinton during his sexual harassment scandal, as part of its re-election campaign (e.g., The Life of Julia).
Black anger at whites re-emerged about the same time with the first of the BLM martyrs, Trayvon Martin, which Obama then chose to validate with his "son I never had" comment. (Of course, it turned out that George Zimmerman was a tri-racial Hispanic who looked rather like the son Obama might have had with his half-white / half-Japanese 1980s girlfriend if she hadn't twice turned down his proposals.)
I didn't see transgenderism coming until May 2013, when I first noticed the mounting drumbeat of New York Times articles pushing transgender rights, such as the right of MMA fighter Fallon Foxx to beat up women for money.
Eventually, from Ferguson onward, blacks pushed women out of the starring role in the Great Awokening, while transgenders undermined lesbian feminists.
#MeToo, with its Clintonite arch-villain Harvey Weinstein, was due to Hillary losing in 2016. But most of the #MeToo bad guys have turned out to be Democrats, which isn't good for the Democrats, so the narrative has sputtered. In contrast, cops are assumed to be straight white men (even when they aren't), so BLM's narrative has been valued for its on-the-noseness.
On the other hand, the huge increase in murders and looting during the racial reckoning since George Floyd's death is alienating components of the Democratic coalition, such as Hispanics and urban gay male shop owners. After Biden's huge success with white suburban parents fall, the transgender movement is perhaps beginning to pose problems for soccer moms and dads, although that is more speculative.
In general, politics tends toward 50-50 splits (with contemporary Israel, where perhaps more talent goes into electoral politics than in any other country, being an amusing example: four elections in a row without a clear winner). So, the Democratic strategy, while it has enjoyed some successes, is also generating its own downsides.
Lots and lots of stuff emerges online. Most of it more or less stays there. Whether the mainstream media obsesses over it or not has much to do with perceived needs in the War on Republicans.
Was the 1990s-2000s Democratic Party really prone to dysfunctionality? The Democratic shift to wokeness largely hurt them among the working class, and I doubt it helped them among the college-educated. I do not believe it serves the interests of the Democratic Party as an institution, except insofar as it helps them gain corporate donations. The Trump era has also led to racial depolarization and Democratic gains with "core" suburban college Whites (as in Shelby County, AL, Hamilton County, IN, etc.), which is contrary to what your theory predicts. Transgenders are also a largely unanimously Democratic and irrelevant voting bloc. I generally agree your observations are prescient, Steve, but you have it wrong here. The tail really is wagging the dog, rather than the dog wagging the tail.
Mainstream Democrats like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden have been celebrating the end of America's white majority since the 1990s. One party or the other was inevitably going to step up to exploit demographic change. My feeling is that the big problem is that the GOP is largely banned from pointing out that it is rather sleazy for the Democrats to use immigration to win elections. Instead, the media has sanctified immigration, which coincidentally enough is in the interest of the Demorcats as Who We Are etc etc, Diversity Is Our Greatest Strength, etc etc.
So there is little in the way of countervailing forces. Tucker Carlson finally got around to pointing out what the Democrats are up to to win elections and the media went berserk with rage at him. Not too many other major figures are as brave as he is.
Immigrants are by no means predestined to be Democratic voters - at least, not unless the Republicans make an active project out of loudly announcing how immigration is terrible and immigrants are filthy Democrat voters who don't share the values of Real Americans.
I seem to recall that before Trump, there was lots of talk about how Hispanics were "natural conservatives" and how Cuban immigrants in Florida could become the Republican bulwark in that state.
And Trump did better with Hispanics in 2020 than Romney did in 2012.
The Democrats deciding in 2020 that Latinos were to be called "Latinx" and blacks were to be called "Blacks" probably didn't help Biden win Latino votes.
A certain writer whose name you know and who also lives in California pointed out that the policies implemented in states like California which are also solidly blue do very little to increase democratic share of the electorate in California or the nation as a whole.
Also, I find it ridiculous how you chalk 4Chan becoming right wing to “irony gone wrong”. What actually happened is that our society has become openly and rabidly anti-White, pro-LGBT, and pro-feminism. 4Chan was the board where people could discuss this openly and without censorship. Thus, it became right wing.
Any place that isn’t censored will become right wing on race and gender issues, because we’re RIGHT.
>Any place that isn’t censored will become right wing on race and gender issues, because we’re RIGHT.
Probably more a "you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches" situation, though I actually disagree with his appraisal of 4chan as right wing. /pol/, sure, is heavily right wing - but is /b/? /int/? /tg/? Not really. People talk about, frex, orcs not being racist on /tg/, or complain about some stupid PC crap fucking up MTG, but if you bring out any actually right wing talking points about women being unable to fight, people will insult you for being a /po/tard.
4chan is online. 4chan, in general, is not super right wing. To the extent it is right wing, I hold it is more the "witch refugee crisis" effect than anything related to debates.
4chan in general obviously is quite right-wing and has been for a while (at least since i began browsing it in 2012). And in any case it has always been fairly amoral, and what primarily determines today whether someone is left-wing or right-wing is whether they support the moral pieties of the left or not.
It is not, "obviously quite right wing." It is anti-culture war stuff, but that cuts both ways, whether it's fa/tg/uys insulting you for saying orcs represent black people or for trying to give female characters a -4 Strength in your games. For example, a quick check of every board archived on desuarchive for uses of "/pol/tard" and "libtard" finds that "/pol/tard" gets used significantly more - as of this writing on May 11, the tenth page of results for /pol/tard has its earliest result on May 3, while the tenth page of results for libtard has its earliest result on April 27. (Earlier date meaning less frequent use, to be clear.) This simple test actually suggests a (mild) left-wing tilt.
I think that's a very poor measure of the political leaning of 4chan. One very obvious reason why the us of poltard is greater is that there are many more user of /pol/ on 4chan (it is and has for a while been the most popular board by quite a margin) than there are left-wingers. Mocking /pol/ also doesn't inherently imply a left political leaning, most right-wingers would probably dislike quite a lot of the things said on /pol/.
I find it profoundly bizarre that you think a society where white people are in the vast majority of positions of political and economic power "anti white".
It's like how mainstream Democrats are "pro-civility," unlike those dastardly Bernie Bros, unless it's KHive swatting people, people on their side smearing their opponents as sexual predators, etc. It's all aesthetics layered on the same old same old.
The people in positions of significant political and economic power are a tiny, tiny fraction of all the people. That they might adopt a policy of hostility towards teeming millions of ordinary schmoes, who happen to have the same skin color, in order to advance their own personal interests is no more surprising than that the leaders of Vichy France gave up French Jews to the Nazis to save their own skins.
Your argument might have more force if it could be reasonably assumed that people always look out for the skin-color tribal group first, before their own personal interests.
This argument would make sense if 4Chan was *just* "right-wing", but they also talk a lot about gassing the Jews, which I think is very much not right at all.
An obvious example of irony-game -> true believers is The Flat Earth Society. In 2008, 99,9% of those who claimed they believed in a Flat Earth were trolling. By 2017, there were probably more than a million true believer Flat Earthers in the USA. It's hard to imagine the rather-dumb true believers would have gotten interested in Flat Earth ideas were it not for the rather-smart trolls creating the online community.
>Maybe it was even partly due to naivete - a lot of people hadn't really met anyone who thought differently from them before, and assumed that changing people’s minds would be really easy.
"It also tracks whether you like NASCAR, football, SUVs, meth, and country music, vs. Broadway musicals, artisanal cupcakes, Priuses, marijuana, and local journalism."
But what if I dislike all these, or at least most of them? I don't much like country music but I also don't much like Broadway musicals. NASCAR, SUVs and meth? No, but equally artisanal cupcakes, Priuses and marijuana no.
"A naive prediction: our cultural obsession with race has a time limit. At some point, like our obsessions with religion and gender before it, it will become so overdone and pathetic that people will switch to a new hobbyhorse."
This makes sense for me of the new emphasis on trans activism/trans rights/trans issues. We've had sex (feminism, men vs. women) and class and race, now the new cycle is going to be about gender, from "please put your preferred pronouns in this email signature line" to "banning puberty blockers for minors" and trans athletes (mostly trans women competing in women's sports at the moment, but I'm sure there are trans men athletes out there as well and I expect to hear more about them). The trend(iness) is the one thing that explains to me "how the heck did we get here from there in so short a time?" about these issues.
I feel I should write something aggrieved about erasure of my lived experience or the likes 😁☘ "Reclaim St. Patrick's Day! Stop green beer! IT'S NOT PATTY'S DAY YOU MONSTERS!!!!!"
I'm American and like all of those things except Broadway and Priuses. You seem to have this really bubbly notion of blue tribe values. I'm solidly urban. Grew up in Los Angeles. Union family, solid Democrats as far back as forever. I have two master's degrees. I love American football. Everyone I know loves it. It's probably the most widely popular cultural phenomenon and form of entertainment everywhere in the US. And there are teams in every major city. And all of the major universities have teams as well and corporate CEOs and engineers alike are regularly wearing their gear to work and gloating when their alma mater beats someone else's. I still gloat whenever Army beats Navy. And that's another thing. I was in the Army. I love guns. I own guns. All the other officers, just as urbane, just as educated, also liked guns. They're not nearly as fun to shoot as cannons, but still pretty fun.
Some people just actually like things and don't need every preference they ever express to be some kind of tribal shibboleth (which specific sports team you like is definitely a tribal shibboleth, but not in any related to larger politics culture war nonsense).
I had the same "Huh, I guess this is trendy now" thought about the sudden popularity of trans issues. I think it probably started as a cultural trend after same-sex marriage went national and the older LGBT talking points fizzled out. But then our political parties discovered a fun new wedge issue for dividing the electorate and getting people angry enough to vote.
Conservatives across the US are introducing bills in the state legislatures this year targeting bathroom use, hormones for teens, etc. I'm sure some are serious about it, but I think they're also baiting their liberal opponents into opposing them on the issue because it's an easy one for them to spin. In the next election, we'll hear a lot of "My competitor voted to let boys use girl's bathrooms" from conservatives and "My competitor is anti-trans, therefore anti-LGBT, therefore anti-everything-you-care-about" from liberals.
Full disclosure: my partner is trans and we're a little jaded with all of it.
Don't get me wrong - he's not wrong about this trajectory of fashion. What he keeps leaving out is that there are things that simply aren't affected by fashion, have no interest in it. Here's the thing that really, truly killed New Atheism:
Islam.
"What's the motto of the American Atheist? There is no god but Allah." Hip, posturing young people discovered that if they wanted to stand against religion, they might actually have to take some risk, do something that wasn't signaling. And that was the end of that.
(Poor Christopher Hitchens. He actually thought all that stuff about solidarity and internationalism was believed. He really thought his audience was capable of standing for something.)
This article treats the subject of Islam as though it's another trend - people can talk about it or not, whatever. Tell it to the Yazidi. Tell it to the Nigerian Christians who were subject to another massacre two days ago. Tell it to the UK teacher who is now under fear of his life for showing a cartoon of you-know-who.
So there is an oppressive orthodoxy on the rise that will take over most or all of the cultural institutions you know - and it won't be mocked or shamed out of power, because anyone who tries has a good chance of a cut throat.
There really are forces in this world that are unaffected by fashion or trends.
You don't think that an utter unwillingness to confront a specific religion might have some deleterious effect on a movement whose whole reason for being is to confront religion?
I'm kind of baffled by this - I don't think a single American atheist has been harmed by Muslims in the past ten years (I could be wrong about "not a single", but it's definitely very low). I sometimes face a decision of whether to blog about atheism, and I had never even considered that Muslim violence might be a relevant factor to think about.
I mean, it's probably true that some Muslim somewhere has harmed some American atheist somewhere. The point is that there hasn't been any significant threat posed by militant Islam to American atheists qua atheists. (Note that whatever happened at Pulse, it wasn't someone seeking out an atheist nightclub.)
The OP's assertion is that there has been no threat because they stopped provoking Muslims. Charlie Hebdo revealed what would happen if they poked the bear.
Scott, can I ask, then, that you read my post on the subject?
And, well, you don't write about Islam. It's the one blind spot in an otherwise exemplary epistemic clarity. It's the same thing for the rest of the 'atheist' movement, especially in America. It's why I make that joke about its motto.
I think the threat isn't physical violence from Muslim extremists, but rather the labeling of criticism of Islam as "Islamophobia" and bigotry. So if an American atheist criticizes Islam, it's extremely unlikely that they'd be murdered by a terrorist, but it's more likely that they'd be labeled as a bigot, "cancelled", fired from their job, etc.
This seems right, but the big figureheads had the "job" of selling books, and being "cancelled" is usually a huge boon for an author, because you can sell on the backlash to the backlash.
I don't think a lot of left wing people in the west are afraid to criticize Islam because they are afraid of violence from Muslims. I think they afraid to criticize Islam either because that will make them look racist. Or they are worried that criticizing Islam would lead to discrimination or violence against Muslims.
Yeah, that's why the Muslim grooming gangs were able to get away with raping so many young girls for such a long time - left wing people would rather allow it than prosecute them and admit that the right had a point about something.
The Pakistani grooming gangs seem to to be an uniquely British issue. I think class was a big part of it, the raped white girls were very much underclass.
There's no plausible mechanism for it. You can't just walk in to a police chief's office with a briefcase full of money and say "please overlook my crimes", and the subculture in question does not appear to have had the resources or the access to make this sort of thing work.
The risk would be implausibly high. Bribing a police chief to overlook the sort of crime the general public would find particularly heinous is going to require an extraordinarily level of trust, in both the person offering the bribe and in the fellow police officers who will need to join in the corruption. Particularly for an operation of this scale, which would require many policemen and independently many social workers to keep quiet.
And there's no evidence for it. The presumption that whenever a government official isn't doing what we think he ought to it is because they are being outright bribed, is a simplistic fantasy. We have a whole body of research and scholarship in Public Choice Theory, and it doesn't generally point to bribery. That claim requires specific evidence.
We do have some evidence, in the form of statements by social workers in Rotherham, that fear of being accused of racism was at least part of the problem. We have no evidence of bribery. That's just wishful thinking by someone who wants an easy answer.
"We have a whole body of research and scholarship in Public Choice Theory, and it doesn't generally point to bribery. That claim requires specific evidence."
Imagine ignoring about the entire history of organized crime favour of pretending that Public Choice Theory is equivalent to reality.
In reality, the ongoing crime had much more to do with gross police negligence. This is partially to do with class and partially do to with the fact that any crime network that exists for that long and in that size will have officers willing to cover for them. Indeed, even white victims were repeatedly ignored by police
"In 1997 Rotherham Council created a local youth project, Risky Business, to work with girls and women aged 11–25 thought to be at risk of sexual exploitation on the streets.[48][49] Jayne Senior, awarded an MBE in the 2016 Birthday Honours for her role in uncovering the abuse, began working for Risky Business as a coordinator around July 1999.[50][51] The users were overwhelmingly white girls: of the 268 who used the project from March 2001 to March 2002, 244 were white, 22 were British-Asian, and 2 were black.[52]"
"According to Senior, Risky Business ended up with so much information about the perpetrators that the police suggested she start forwarding it to an electronic dropbox, "Box Five", on the South Yorkshire Police computer network. They reportedly told her this would protect the identity of Risky Business's sources.[59] She learned later that the police had not read the reports she had left there, and it apparently could not be accessed by other forces.[54][60]. Risky Business was seen as a "nuisance"[61][62] and shut down by the council[63][64] in 2011."
The easy answer here is the police and UK government claiming that not wanting to appear racist. This is incredibly convenient because the Tory government gets to hammer away at the opposition for an ideology that prolonged the abuse of hundreds to thousands of underage children while at the same time the police force gets to save face and pretend that they were being touchy-feely when all along they were doing the thing police always do: ignoring marginalized communities while select members skim proceeds and favours off the top.
Nothing like this ever happened in the US. I don't think Europeans realize the difference in our patterns of immigration. We get the best off, most educated people from overseas, former engineers and medical doctors of Iraq and the former Soviet Republics, and refugees and asylum seekers from Central America. We aren't getting flooded by the refugees of Syria. Not all people are the same because they nominally practice a religion practiced by two billion people.
I agree that fears of being labeled "Islamophobic" were relevant and part of the problem for New Atheism, but atheism combined with materialism -- that is to say, the total of denial of the supernatural and the soul -- just isn't ever a winning idea. It only appeals to a certain sort of atypical, more often male, mind. Most people intuitively believe in the supernatural and are interested in exploring it. While they might have an axe to grind against Christianity and might agree with the atheists up to a point, they don't care for the idea that there's no such thing as fortune, karma, Providence, or an afterlife, nor that the creation of the world and the universe were entirely natural events without the involvement of will, intellect, or intent. So while early on they enjoy some of the jabs against Christianity, sooner or later, most people get annoyed with the atheists and want to cut them off.
Also Muslims aren't the only important demographic that's big on religion. It's all well and good when atheists are dunking on the religious white outgroup, but blacks for example are plenty Christian as well.
I feel like this is a major US/Europe difference. Islam is a minor, piddling, almost completely irrelevant force here. Christianity is utterly pervasive. There is simply no reason for American atheists to give a crap about Islam, let alone to fear it. Say what you will about what Patriot Act has done for civil liberties, but the FBI and IC don't fuck around if they so much as catch the slightest whiff you might be sympathetic to any sort of Islamic organization that might have ever helped fund a terrorist act. As a movement atheist myself, who lived most of his earlier life in the epicenter of immigration to the US, which received the bulk of the influx from the collapse of the Soviet Union and instability in the Middle East and South Asia, I never gave the slightest second thought to Islam, and had a whole lot of friends coming from Muslim majority regions, who tended to more often than not become ex-Muslims once here if they were under 40.
This is true, but I thought the bigger point was that white leftists decided they wanted to back Islam (i.e. brown people) more than they wanted to back militant atheists (i.e. mostly white male nerds) and it was white leftists that threw New Atheism under the bus. Though as I posted above, I think that New Atheism had more popularity problems than just Islam.
But the white leftist concern about Islamophobia is more about optics than numbers -- it's about the image of a nerdy white guy making nerdy white arguments about why a brown person's traditional culture is bad and wrong. It's not terribly relevant that there aren't many Muslims in the US, or that US Islam is more assimilated than European Islam. Just as it doesn't matter that there aren't all that many transsexuals.
Try what? I have loudly denounced Islam in public at a university forum where several were trying to convince us they weren't that bad. Nothing happened. But granted, I was purely debating them on the facts of their inaccurate claims about the innocence of their own doctrine, I wasn't intentionally making a mockery of a sacred tenet just to be a dick. I have also fought a war in a Muslim country attempting to subvert the Taliban's attempt at instituting a theocracy. But again, I certainly wasn't trying to tell anyone there they shouldn't be Muslim themselves or their traditions are worthy of being made fun of. There are better and shittier ways of going about this.
At least in the comedian, Bill Maher has been quite vocal about denouncing Muslims and bringing apologists who whine about Islamaphobia onto his show pretty regularly for over 25 years to call them to task, and nothing like this has happened.
I'm sorry that 1 out of 330 million Americans has had to deal with death threats, as if you never receive those from any other dedicated cult like movement.
You can make anything appear like a trend by selectively citing examples. Your Google Trend data isn't this and is worth discussing on its own terms, but a lot of this post is just you overweighing on your personal experiences, whatever caught your interest at the time, etc.
A bunch of people have already pointed out your date error on McCain. George Allen's "macaca" comment got lot of attention in his 2006 Senate race so it wasn't that the media was just uninterested in racist comments around this time. There were specific reasons "gook" wasn't a big issue for McCain in 2008.
As for the IDW and anti-sjws: you cite one article from 2014 and one article from 2018 on a completely different topic (are any of the IDWers even members of the manosphere?) and say there's been some major change. I don't buy it. The core idea of the NYT IDW article--that liberals are suppressing discussion of important ideas by invoking social justice concerns--has been a common one in the media for as long as I can remember. Here's a NYT anti-sjw article from 2014 to pick just one of many examples: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/16/opinion/egan-the-commencement-bigots.html
There is no way to discuss things besides data and personal experience. I use both here. I think the personal experience is a useful supplement to the data, for exactly the reason you point out - it's possible to find single data points that support a false narrative, but living through something gives you a better perspective on it.
I don't disagree in principle. But in this particular argument you are trying to support a big narrative off a very limited collection of data points and your narrow personal experiences (sometimes meaning memories of things it seems you weren't closely involved in) plus lots of speculation and it's just not enough. And my criticism wasn't merely abstract--I gave examples where I think there are additional data points you missed and that change the story substantially.
FWIW, I think that this post contains a lot of assertions that I can't verify from the information provided.
One type of evidence that you use, "here is a google trends graph for a few things, out of the millions of things I could have graphed," seems really flawed. This method doesn't show relative popularity between terms.
I don't think you can put together a History of What Was Popular on the Internet (which is essentially what you're doing, no?) from data as sparse as this. I question a lot of the details, as well as the overall picture.
This view of "wokeness as fashion" would explain the otherwise non-obvious role of Hollywood in the wokeness and feminism trends. If anything, the job of Hollywood actors is to be "cool".
What do you see as the role of Hollywood here? My impression is that Hollywood came to the feminism game late - they got dragged into it with #metoo in 2018.
Did no corporations threaten states that wrote Intelligent Design into their high school curricula? As I recall, that was the most prominent actual political struggle of the New Atheists.
I think this is entirely a function of Internet power increasing over time; New Atheism dominated the Internet, but people cared less about the Internet then. Nowadays if you dominate the Internet that makes you really important.
Maybe. But atheism was never as "causey" as anti-racism. It wasn't considered a moral failing to be a christian per se (and a moral virtue to be an atheist), so there's not a lot of signalling that can be done with it. With anti-racism, this is considered a moral issue at its very heart, replete with villains that demand scorn ('racists') and victims requiring compassion ('victims of racism' or non-whites generally), which gives corporations something to work with. What exactly would corporate adoption of atheism look like?
No reason beyond being a nice round number. Looking at it now, I realize that it doesn't sound round when we measure time in years, but on my spreadsheet, ten cells felt like a nice round number of cells to average.
New Atheism had a lot to do with the born-again George W. Bush's victories in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Also, after 9/11 it was a way to be anti-Islam while claiming to be anti-religion or anti-Christian.
I was very interested and involved with Israel advocacy/politics during the late oughts. I feel like I observed the seeds of what became the "great awokening" much earlier than it entered most people's world. Frankly, I feel like opposition to Israel was one of the first flash points for this development. Fortunately, I believe (likely with 2016 creating new battle grounds) Israel lost its salience in the "anti-Western" fight.
From a similar time period, I really thought the mindset behind the Occupy Wall Street would be more enduring and it really fizzled out. When I think of the people I know who were sympathetic to the movement, in 2021 - I think they would all hold similar views, but the priority has definitely been overtaken by an infinite number of woke-related causes. Of course, the great post-recession economic growth likely had a lot to do with this.
For what it's worth - I think we've already reached peak "woke". I think people often look at recent trends and extrapolate too quickly. I believe we are in the process of starting a new equilibrium on these issues. The spread of a lot of this rhetoric could only grow when people weren't familiar with it. To be specific, nobody wants to be seen an soft on racism or injustice, so there was a long period of time where those unacquainted with the movement would be silent or go along with it because they thought it was innocuous. By 2021, every single person, no matter how "online" they are, is familiar with wokism. I am not trying to express my personal thoughts - I truly believe most people in the West do not support most of the popular Woke talking points and have started responding accordingly.
I think it's also definitely likely that much of the outpouring of support for Black Lives Matter in 2020 was at least in part influenced by sublimated tension from the pandemic living situations we were all in (and probably much of the backlash has this same source). Over the next year, as most people in the rich world move out of pandemic mode, a lot of this force will weaken.
Interesting to note that the Great Awokening seems to have pushed not only Occupy Wall Street but also anti-Israel sentiment out of left-wing activism at around the same time. I hadn't realised that this had happened.
Someone more conspiratorially-minded than myself would see this as Not A Coincidence, and evidence that the Great Awokening was engineered by a certain group of people who are fans of both Israel and international finance.
There is also the phenom of young pro-Israel activist adopting woke language (“the establishment of israel was an act of radical decolonization and the first successful movement of an indigenous people reclaiming their land“)
I’ve seen those attempts but their success will be limited because Jews white and Palestinians POC. I know it’s more complicated than that in the real world, but the people this kind of rhetoric are trying to reach do not care.
I think there’s also a huge difference between pro-BLM and anti-police corruption/brutality sentiments. I think the latter made the former appear bigger than it was.
Very interesting but I think I disagree with the final section. Social fashion doesn't work like the mechanism of a clock and things like covid, Floyd and measurement issues as young and old use different social media (and we are no longer young).
As far as invading traditional institutions, that mostly misses the point. It's not about the people. The NYT reporting staff hasn't turned over thaf much in the past 15 years and I bet the new hires for feminism are now reporting on racial issues. I don't know what the next fashion will be but I'm skeptical you retain cultural dominance just because you got some people in a few positions of leadership places. They were never loyal to the idea anyway and will change allegiance with the next big thing.
Progressives' willingness to use social power to punish opponents within institutions they control, & a resulting reluctance on the part of such opponents to openly speak out, might persist much longer in the political culture war, even if the specific ideas the progressives treat as unquestionable change from time to time.
Your point on 4chan feels spot on to me. My gut is that we underweight the impact that the ooze of 4chan memes and ideas has had on the last decade of geopolitics. I really don't think we get a Trump victory without 4chan.
The Goons IMO have more influence than the Chans, in the parlance. I don't think we get a Trump victory without the Goon memes and ideas either. I think it's a combination of the two. Or I guess, more specifically, the battle between the hierarchy and the anon created the environment that allowed Trump to win. (Without Goon culture, I think the Clinton campaign is run better, does more to win the swing states and less to create an us vs. them culture war climate)
I've always thought the perfect example of the so-called "power" of internet feminism was Donglegate. A woman at a tech conference got annoyed with the guys in front of her constantly making dick jokes (during a presentation at a professional conference), and used the method established by the convention to ask for help (the convention, for some godforsaken reason, had made the ONLY way of doing this was to send them a tweet). Other people saw this tweet, starting mocking the men, and they basically became the whipping boys of the internet for a few weeks. Almost certainly made them miserable for a while, but they also had thousands of people commiserating and supporting them, and they suffered absolutely zero real-world consequences because of it. Their companies proudly came out and said they stood behind their employees.
The woman who started all this with that original tweet, though? She was fired, explicitly because of this, and nobody would hire her again, because she was too 'controversial'. Remember, all she did was follow the explicitly laid out rules of the convention, and her life was utterly ruined. Not just that, the whole incident was used, for YEARS, as proof of how ridiculous internet feminists were, how they were mad with power. Scott himself even used it in his old blog as an example of how they used internet outrage to solve their problems and try to get other people fired, a pretty prime case of irony, since this was almost the exact opposite of that, in every respect.
Wow, people are still fighting donglegate after all these years?
Two innocent men whose only crime was offending a feminist with stupid jokes about “forking” and “‘big’ dongles.” Is this something to freak out about? What they did wasn't a crime, and what she did was a wild overreaction. It perfectly encapsulated the feminist philosophy of being humorless bullies. Don't believe me? Her own words:
"They started talking about “big” dongles. I could feel my face getting flustered.
Was this really happening?
How many times do I have to deal with this?
I was telling myself if they made one more sexual joke, I’d say something.
The it happened….The trigger."
A feminist was triggered. That's what it was all about.
Nothing you said here denies anything that the previous person claimed.
The point is just that evaluations of "cancellations" seem to be very unreliable. All three people involved in this story seem to have suffered, but none of the three was as clearly materially harmed as anyone claims.
Nobody ends up suffering from this stuff. James Damore is doing perfectly well as a senior engineer at a startup. Justine Sacco is Chief Marketing Officer at a Fortune 500. Brendan Eich is CEO of Brave. You get fired from one job and you move on, which happens to a ton of people for a ton of reasons.
The only ones suffering permanent consequences are actual criminals like Epstein, Crosby, and Weinstein.
Celebrities are a different story. They've disappeared from public view almost overnight due to various scandals for as long as celebrities have existed, totally independent of any larger cultural fervor for cancelling people. Though they still usually make comebacks. Even Mel Gibson is getting work again.
And Dalton Trumbo had dozens of screenwriting gigs in the 1950s, so nobody really suffered from that silly "Hollywood Blacklist", right? Much ado about nothing.
I have no clue who that is, but looked him up and apparently he had to work under assumed names in secret for the rest of his career. How on earth is that equivalent to getting promoted to a better job at a better company in public under your real name? Shit, Justine Sacco was hired back by another property of the same parent company. And sorry, apparently she is Chief Communications Officer of the Match Group, not Chief Marketing Officer.
If you think this is terrible nonetheless, fine, but people in this thread and many others are running around seemingly terrified that their careers and lives are going to be totally over. I keep seeing the word "destroyed." Suffering public embarrassment for a few months and losing one job is not having your life destroyed. It's not the equivalent to French revolutionaries pulling out the guillotines that you people are acting like it is.
Quit your job right now, and commit to not working for pay for the next six months. Then you'll have earned the credibility to be taken seriously on this. And you'll have had a nice long vacation.
Otherwise, stop being so damn arrogant and obnoxious.
From what I can gather people who are already famous and have a platform do okay with personal cancellation for the reasons Kenny points out. However, less famous people tend to be screwed. I bet they benefit from anonymity, though.
Among other things, this post really clarified for me the character arc of Stormfront in the TV show The Boys. (Spoilers ahead for those who haven’t seen the show, though how spoilery can it really be when a character is literally named STORMFRONT?) I was initially confused about why the show introduced a hip, ultra-woke young feminist (we like those, right...?) but then made her not only the number one bad guy but an actual 100% swastikas-and-great-race-theory Nazi! But that choice makes so much sense in the context of the shift in Internet attention/obsession from feminism to “white feminism” to racism. My guess is this makes perfect sense to an audience of a certain age/cultural affiliation in today’s time, but will be unintelligible to audiences in 10-20 years. And now I’m wondering if I’ve seen other character portrayals in popular media from other eras that reveal analogous cultural norm shifts and just completely missed the context...
Do you think the writers of the boys were saying something about social movements (woke = nazi-ism? Or woke -> nazi-ism? Or nazi-ism -> woke?)?
My impression was that she just knew how to adapt with the times because she was relatively smart. Jump on the current social trend to motivate her own. She could have been a woke maoist or woke pro-england-anti-american or woke pro-ending-the-world, or woke pro-big oil, but woke pro-nazi was the easiest enemy to have.
The internet and mainstream are more mixed up now. The mainstream absorbs internet culture much faster, and also tries to control and influence it (through pressure on companies that centralize the discourse). So something has to give. Either the mainstream starts to change faster and also follows the next trend away from wokeness, or people flock away from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and all of these "platforms" that mainstream controls more and more and thinks of them as representative of internet culture. Or not. Meh
Alternatively, maybe new atheism, new feminism, new socialism, new anti racism actually won?
Not won in the sense that they demolished their enemy and drove them to the hills, that obviously hasn't happened. But won in the sense that they managed to shift social norms considerably and ran against diminishing returns. I remember Dawkins arguing that being an atheist was considered a greater fault than just about anything else. That isn't the case anymore. The wage gap certainly exists, but cat calling mostly does not, neither does slut shaming. UBI is seriously talked about in political and economical circles. And, you know, a cop actually got convicted of killing someone on the job.
Cat calling and slut shaming absolutely still exist (at least, in places where construction work has resumed and women are walking in the street without masks).
And yes, UBI is talked about (but still not done) and one cop got convicted (but how many others?)
I mean, it's not a very strangely selected set of descriptions. What major demographic categories that people talk about are left out here, other than majority ones like "white" or "christian"?
But yes, the point that cat calling is immune to this particular set of cultural pressures shows that the movements didn't win as much as that person had thought.
Most cat calling that is tolerated appears to be intersectional cat-calling. That’s not changing anytime soon. In my view none should be tolerated, though as always we get into definitional issues. Of course, the existence of the wage gap beyond possibly $5 in either direction depending on the field is very much in dispute.
Re: 4chan, I never have really bought the "ironic racism -> true racism" pipeline, and have been thinking about it a bit. I do post on forums with actual, sincere racists, and ironic racist jokes, and there are two major factors here that lead me to believe that this is not the actual effect in play:
1. If you post on these kinds of boards, you can *very very easily* tell the difference between the ironic racism and the regular racism. I post regularly on a fairly high-traffic, very low-moderation board with an active userbase (as in, users online at any one time) in the hundreds. Some people make racist posts that are unironic (I remember vividly one Australian complaining about aboriginals huffing gas fumes causing them to change the mix and raise gas prices) and some people make "racist" posts that are clearly not representing any actual racial animus (referring to an upper manager praising their "heroic" finance department as a "chinese jew woman boss"). If you have experience with these posts, it is very very easy to differentiate the person lolling at a trans man who, post-HRT, can no longer bear to ask his female friends "is your sister coming" and getting a ten minute rambling digression that doesn't answer the question, and the person who is saying "I want to slam a pickaxe into a woman's head".
2. I *have* seen a similar infection play its course in communities that very clearly are not about ironic racism: r/stupidpol is literally a left-wing Marxist sub for people who are basically anti-SJW, and it has a major right wing infection that they try to compensate for but continues because it's one of the few subreddits where you can talk about culture war issues without the subreddit being shut down or being banned by mods for wrongthink.
I think the *actual* effect mechanism is a long-term witch refugee crisis. If you like forums which are low moderation environments, where you can pretty much shoot the shit without worrying about the moderators coming in because you call the route to properly take valuable materials in a video game the "Jewperhighway", then you will inevitably have the lunatic right wingers ("gas the Jews" types, as you put it elsewhere) come in because they have been banned from every other fucking website on the internet, and even if they are on those other websites, they will not post about being lunatic right wingers on them (because it is against the rules), only on your website (because, even if you don't like racists, you think it is more important to maintain the low moderation environment than to get rid of the racists).
4chan, also, isn't *that* right wing. /pol/ is, but people on the other boards hate them. For example, on /tg/, the term "/pol/tard" gets used about twice as often as the term libtard, and at a quick skim of recent posts via desuarchive (compare https://desuarchive.org/tg/search/text/%2Fpol%2Ftard/ and https://desuarchive.org/tg/search/text/libtard), the uses of /pol/tard are much more hostile than libtard.
I don't have experience in those forums, so I trust your overall impression that it's easy to tell apart the real racist comments to the ironic ones. From my experience in subreddits where people from opposing tribes coexist, it does happens very often it happens that I (and others), can't tell if a comment is just extremely stupid but earnest, or ironic - unless it has a "/s" mark on it. When I read Scott, these were the type of racist comments I was picturing (or worse, just trolling comments where the objective is to get someone to react and take it seriously for no other reason than to mess with people, the more real you sound the better, regardless of what you really believe.)
I definitely know what you're talking about, but I suspect the only reason that ambiguity doesn't exist on echo chamber subreddits is the same "ironic/extremely stupid" post is just obviously ironic/extremely stupid, since there are no right/left-wingers there. If it wasn't posted on r/politics, "BRO come on now; the UV lamps were to detect the secret Trump watermarks. Not the bamboo." might be a completely plausible right-wing idiot posting, but because it's in an echo chamber the prior for it being a left-winger making fun of right-wingers has an extremely high prior.
> Some people make racist posts that are unironic (I remember vividly one Australian complaining about aboriginals huffing gas fumes causing them to change the mix and raise gas prices)
Oh, I fully believe that it's true; I have no particular reason to doubt the specific story. However, it was fairly clear from the posts in question that he believed that the Aboriginals in question should have been allowed to die so that he could continue to pay lower gas prices, because he does not like Aboriginals. So, it was racist.
I would agree, though I think the more typical opinion is that STATING that this group is more likely to make this type of bad decision is itself racist, even if in fact true. Which would put the speaker in the weird position of effectively having to KILL members of a racial group in order to NOT be racist against them.
Maybe if being old was cooler than being young, the cycles would stop. Now, the new cooler young people adopt whatever ideas and causes to signal their coolness. But after some years, the ideas get sticky and become part of identities, and brains harden. If being older was the cooler thing to be, older people still wouldn't be constantly changing, and younger people would catch up (instead of saying stuff like "ok, boomer" to signal that older people know nothing because they are old or something).
Humm, isn't it cooler to be older at least the many first years of school? I wonder if anything would be significantly different if kids thought the older kids were less cool than themselves, and the kids one year below were cooler.
I do need to say this about Richard Spencer - he and his collection of tiki-torch carrying nitwits aren't scary, not to anyone who's seen the real thing. Real Nazis - yes, they are still around, please google "Herbert Schweiger" - would eat this guy for breakfast.
Did you consider that another reason why a particular issue might fall out of fashion is because one side obtains total victory? Female suffrage is no longer a remotely salient `culture war' issue. Nor is gay marriage. Might some of your examples fall in this category?
It's understood that you don't say anything against feminism, including suggesting that there might be false accusations of sexual assault, and keep your white collar job. Same for opposing Black Lives Matter, or Pride. It's understood that there is nowhere you can ask women out (unless you're Chad); you just swipe on Tinder and (unless you're Brad, Pitt that is) pray someone accidentally mis-swipes right on you. You certainly don't mention blacklisting; they may blacklist you but you can't use the term, it's Just Wrong. Oh and best keep all those pronouns straight, it's just common decency after all.
Obergefell isn't everything that gay and bi activists could possibly want but it was their biggest, most legible goal. Moreover, the opposition conceeded in a way that didn't happen with cases like Roe vs Wade.
Re argument culture versus echo culture, something was lost in the transition. I remember forums before then, where atheists and Christians could argue over politics in one thread and then bond over their shared love for whatever hobby or cultural artifact in another. Despite all the viciousness you could still see people on the other side as human beings.
Now echo culture is universal, and if someone disagrees with you on an important issue they're irredeemably evil and should be banned. And this applies even to groups discussing apolitical topics. SSC/ACX is one of the few places where diverse views are welcome, and you can talk to someone on the other side of the divide at all. (At least, someone who admits to being on the other side... there are probably a lot of problematic people hiding their views to stay in the good graces of their hosts elsewhere.)
Maybe social media platforms where your account follows you around everywhere accelerated this shift from the days of independent forums, although LiveJournal was around in those days and it wasn't this bad.
I think it's the rise of single-use discussion areas.
In older days, you would see the same people in the hobby boards, the politics boards, the technical boards. A BBS would grow a community like this.,
Reddit has all those topics, but it is so huge that you don't encounter people on multiple subreddits. Even moderately popular subreddits you can't really recognize people because the population noticeably changes throughout the day.
I was a movement atheist deep into evolutionary biology and debate forums in 2004 and ended up in a four-year relationship with a girl who was both Catholic and believed in Astrology. When we first met, we had endless email threads I can still find in my achives going back and forth on our reasoning, days, weeks, with no insults thrown, no hard feelings, and we stayed together all the way until she moved away to try and become a primatologist of all things. Debate all day. Fuck all night. Whatever happened to the world, right?
I think you're right about half of this: the left is trying to outcompete itself on adopting the most extreme views to signal the most care for the most marginalized people. I don't entirely hate this: there are worse things to compete about than empathy. But like with all cliques it becomes more and more exclusionary until it's no longer about whatever it's about, it's just about keeping up with the Joneses. counter-signaling becomes valuable.
The part where I think you're wrong - dangerously so, is in the response. It's not that MRAs appeared to combat feminism, the whole thing culminated in Gamergate, and when feminism lost mainstream credibility, MRAs faded too.
It's that there is a group of disaffected, idle, unemployable (or at least un-advanceable), unmarriageable young men in this country. They flit from reactionary ideology to reactionary ideology, searching for a way to give their lives meaning. They mainly want to get a rise, or at least get *noticed* by mainstream culture.
So they join MRA/PUA groups - until 90% of them realize that the leadership of those groups just truly, deeply hates women and literally wants them to die. They don't want to be part of that so they go on to join Gamergate. When the doxxing and the threats start having significant consequences, 90% of them eff off. Then they move on to Milo and his shared appearances with Spencer. They think it's fun to get a rise out of the overly sanctimonious by appropriating nazi symbolism. Then Charlottesville happens and they suddenly realize that they've joined an actual white supremacist movement. They leave in droves: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/brotherhood-of-losers/544158/
They support Trump because he angers people but then people storm the Capitol and the boys back off. But every day some of them become radicalized - by Q, or by Spencer before him, or by redpill before that.
Internet culture is two groups - one looking to control all discourse, and the other looking to be heard by any means necessary. And more and more this fight isn't taking place online.
But I think it's amusing to note that this comment says "feminism lost mainstream credibility", while just a few comments up someone says that feminism has achieved total victory, because "It's understood that you don't say anything against feminism, including suggesting that there might be false accusations of sexual assault, and keep your white collar job."
My impression is that the truth is somewhere in between. Feminism has continued muddling on in the same sort of semi-prestige semi-disrepute that it has had for the entire past century.
Probably an inelegant way of saying what I was trying to say which was more like: "people got sick of folks talking about feminism and stopped listening to them or discussing them, even though they continued to hold significant power." Less "feminism lost credibility" than "talking about feminism got old, and don't we all mostly agree anyway?"
It's been almost 20 years. I have trouble believing these are the same people. Surely most of them eventually grew up and got real jobs and even got married. How unfuckable can you seriously be? Toothless methheads living out of Wal-Mart parking lots are still filling up trailers with babies.
I swear I've seen data on the epidemic of unemployed or underemployed, depressed, angry (20-something in 2010, 30-something today) men in the U.S. but I can't seem to dig it up now, so I'll just snark: The methheads go outside sometimes.
Scott wrote that there was less antiracism content online when fewer black people had good Internet connections, so it would make sense if there would be less of that content today if not as many of them had good Internet connections.
I buy entirely the notion that these waves follow the same laws as fashion in clothing. In his novel, "The Joke", Milan Kundera describes the passion for socialism among youth in Czechoslovakia as having been nothing more than the fashion of the times. Eventually, the fad passes, and people who used to care passionately about socialism no longer do because it falls out of fashion.
But if political fashions follow the same psychological laws, so to speak, as for fashion in clothes, shouldn't we give up on trying to predict what's next? The trendsetters will set the trends, but those trendsetters will be young people we haven't heard of yet. Seems the best we could do is spot the next trend early in its development, as opposed to predicting it before it starts.
There's something similar in this comment to Karl Popper's claim in "The Poverty of Historicism". We can't predict the future of society, because the future of society depends on developments in science, and if we could predict the developments in science, it wouldn't be science any more. But similarly, the future of society depends on developments in fashion, and if we could predict the developments in fashion, it wouldn't be fashion any more. (But the reason it wouldn't be science if it could be predicted and the reason it wouldn't be fashion if it could be predicted are somewhat different. Both require novelty though.)
I've discovered this blog quite recently so missed your writing on these subjects before, but I really find your summary of the feminist blogs of that time seems to not really get where they were even coming from.
Virtually all of your summaries of their points seem loaded and not really accurate (for instance, I see "Sealioning" as having more to do with relentlessly and tediously pursing an unwelcome argument and feeling that your civil tone entitles you to do that, and JAQing off as the bad faith tactic of packaging opinions you don't want to outright defend in questions).
I also don't think the concept of creepy sexual approaches is that hard to understand even if it's hard to articulate concrete rules, and it mostly just has to do with making an effort to and being able to gauge when a woman will welcome it. Which is hard for some men, and that sucks, but I guess most dating is on apps now that make it much simpler.
There may have been lots wrong with those blogs and lots of overreaching as there tends to be on the internet, but this post reads like you got so invested in these arguments you're not able to even present the other side in a way that it would recognize as an accurate depiction of its views, which seems like a real departure from your usual style. Either that or you and they were really talking past each other and you don't get their point of view at all.
I haven't really seen "sealioning" in the wild (except indirectly from people criticizing the comic), but "JAQing off" is fairly common in conspiracy/anti-conspiracy-theory debates to describe that type of bad-faith tactic - "I'm not *saying* that the world is run by lizard people, I'm just asking, isn't it strange how so many members of the royal family look like lizards?"
I think the problem with the Internet Creep Debate was pretty simple.
1) Women writing on the internet had an ascertainment bias towards negative experiences getting approached by men (and much of the writing was vague and stuff probably got lost in translation, meaning it was harder to glean useful information from those accounts.)
2) Men reading on the internet had an ascertainment bias towards negative stories written by women about those approaches (and some of them probably also had a confirmation bias when reading.)
(By the way, such a bias is pretty common, which is why when you read Google reviews of a hospital or a doctor they have tons of horror stories. Only the angry people write about stuff.)
---
The end result was that a lot of very online men internalized the idea that women do not like being approached period.
I think there might genuinely have been a stage in the late 2010s when there was a genuine increase in the amount of creepy hit-on attempts. This was the golden age of PUA and "game" blogs, many of which tended to promote messages like "It's a numbers game, just go and ask out as many women as you can" and "You gotta work on your day game, man! Go to the supermarket and approach ten women this afternoon! Don't be afraid of rejection!"
A few tens of thousands of low-status males, unafraid of rejection, suddenly asking out ten women a day regardless of the appropriateness of the situation is probably enough to significantly change the number of inappropriate pick-up attempts going on.
I knew some guys into this PUA stuff, I actually don't think PUA was ever that big a deal. Furthermore the majority of these men just read some stuff and sat on their computers...not approaching anybody at all! Kind of sad actually.
I actually don't blame feminists for the "internet creep debates." I knew quite a few normie women, even conservative women, who would (IRL) complain about creeps. Some of the accounts they gave involved genuinely creepy men. Other accounts...the men may indeed have been creepy, but the accounts didn't convey that.
I don't think I have ever heard an account of a woman being neutral or happy with being approached.
>A few tens of thousands of low-status males, unafraid of rejection, suddenly asking out ten women a day regardless of the appropriateness of the situation is probably enough to significantly change the number of inappropriate pick-up attempts going on.
This simply doesn't ring true. Pretty much by definition low-status males are not going to be unafraid of rejection. They are going to fear it the most. To be clear, we are not talking about status among middle-aged men where career success accounts for a lot, we are talking about young men whose status in the dating market is mostly determined by their confidence with women, so it is basically a tautology that only relatively high-status males are unafraid of rejection.
Nor are pick-up techniques a "numbers game". It's about learning to flirt in a manner that women actually like. That's the whole point.
The "creeps" were almost never the PUAs but the shy guys with low self-esteem who lacked the aplomb to come off smoothly but instead, upon finally working up the courage to ask a woman out, come off as creepy, meek losers.
You could say that there was a Mathew Effect in a lot of feminist writing about guys who made socially awkward pick-up attempts. Those men who start off with confidence are more successful with women and as a result gain more confidence with them, whereas the losers have bad experiences, their self-esteem falls further and along with it their odds of success. All the socially awkward pick up attempts that feminists liked to write about, like elevatorgate, were the meek attempts of those in the latter group.
The irony is that the feminists should have probably recommended that men read more PUA blogs so they could learn how to interact with women in a less creepy manner.
"How did the counterculture eventually win, and the patriotic/Christian amalgam civil religion of the 1950s - 1990s eventually collapse?"
French intellectuals mostly believe the counterculture won the culture war way back in 1968 and what has followed is a working out of the implications of 1968. For example, in America, feminism was reborn in 1969, as was gay liberation, environmentalism, affirmative action and much else.
But then, what caused 1968?
The most striking suggestion I've seen is that it was the result of Vatican II in the early 1960s. In 1960, the Catholic Church was riding high doing what it had long done, with an Irish Catholic even being elected President of the United States. Suddenly, the new Pope launched a conclave to modernize the Church, what my correspondent labeled in tennis terminology an "unforced error" on the part of the Vatican.
By removing the chief institutional weight in favor of reaction, Vatican II shifted the balance point of everything to the left. For example, Hollywood had long been intimidated by the power of the Catholic clergy to order their parishioners to boycott movies of which they disapproved: thus the saying that American movies of the mid-20th Century were made by Jews about Protestants for Catholics.
Catholic censorship soon vanished after Vatican II and movies had changed dramatically by the end of the 1960s.
"I'm not sure when racial issues completely eclipsed gender-related ones, but it must have happened by 2016."
The 2017 Women's march was the largest single day protest in US history. It seems weird to not even mention it here and doesn't fit this timeline very well. I do think that by the end of the Trump admin the 'torch had been passed', but I think the early Trump era was still very much about gender issues.
What did they march for? I don't know and neither do you.
I do find it humorous that shortly thereafter the pussy hats were banned due to SJWism. So those women who marched wearing the hats were retroactively all bigots.
My brief history of Feminism's rise and fall and rise etc etc.
Feminism was a powerful force in the English-speaking Protestant world 110 years ago, winning two huge triumphs right after WWI: women's suffrage and prohibition. The former didn't have much immediate effect, but the latter was seen as a huge mistake, especially artists, immigrants, Catholics, and Jews. The culturally dominant intellectuals and entertainers of the mid-20th Century, such as H.L. Mencken, blamed women for prohibition, so feminism became unfashionable for about a half century.
Finally, feminism came roaring back in 1969 along with so many other post-1968 movements. This time it was hugely and rapidly successful at opening up jobs to women, so much so that by the late 1970s it had largely won.
At that point, feminism slowly, quietly declined in fashion, until it was revived in October 1991 by Democrats to keep Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court in the Anita Hill brouhaha.
But as I pointed out in December 1992, if sexual harassment is to be defined as making any unwanted advances, surely President Elect Bill Clinton will eventually run into a sexual harassment scandal even though, from all I've heard from people in Arkansas, a strikingly high percentage of his advances turned out to be wanted.
Indeed, Paula Jones' sexual harassment suit against Clinton led him to lie under oath about Monica Lewinsky (for which he was disbarred), which led to his impeachment. At that point, organized feminism backed Clinton for reasons. But it was all pretty humiliating to feminists and they were not very fashionable up through 2011, especially under Obama, who resented his single mother choosing her career over taking care of him. In general, the first three years of Obama's first term were rather conservative, other than the gay marriage push. As I predicted in my 2008 book on Obama, he would play it safe on social issues until his second term.
But then in early 2012, the Obama re-election campaign re-launched feminism, arguing that Republicans would ban contraception and promoting their Life of Julia ad about how being a single mother married to the state was cool.
With Obama safely re-elected and Democrats feeling triumphalist over how the growth of diversity would permanently crush Republicans, the Obama Administration and the prestige press launched various Great Awokening campaigns. For example, in 2013 the White House, Democrats in Congress, and the New York Times worked together to promote a moral panic over Rape on Campus. This led, among much else, to the 2014 Rolling Stone hate hoax about fraternity initiation ritual gang rape on broken glass, because who could possibly doubt such a story that confirmed everything we'd been hearing from the White House and the press for the last two years?
But feminism got squeezed by BLM wanting blacks to be the undisputed top dog among the diverse. And while #MeToo was big for awhile, eventually it was noticed that most of the bad guys it was exposing, like Harvey Weinstein, were Democrats.
And transgenderism emerged from 2013 onward and undercut traditional lesbian feminism, telling tomboys that the problem was less that men were unfair to women than that they were really men.
So, feminism has gone thru a rough patch recently. But now the Democrats have control of the White House again and the media is more party lineish than ever. So it would hardly be surprising if feminism makes yet another comeback, probably under black female leadership.
I've seen a lot of feminists who have no problem using "Patriarchal" standards to their benefit. Most often, the idea that men have a moral obligation to protect and support women, and the idea that men who talk about their issues are whiny, possibly even dangerous.
Sometimes this is coming from feminists who also claim to be fighting for men and/or against "toxic masculinity". EG http://archive.is/8YDUI , or feminists defending that surreal Gillette ad.
I think Anita Bryant and the Republicans's reversal on the ERA was a much louder and more sudden death for feminism in the late 70s/early 80s than your version of the story mentions. And the discussion of the past decade or two seems not to line up with my experience.
Feminist groups online have generally pivoted to focus on trans issues. I think this is the missing part of the analysis. I was a reader of the feminist website The Toast until it was shut down. The commentariat migrated to a group Slack. The Slack focused on all women's issues at first, but, as time went on, it became more and more focused on trans issues. Eventually, it got to the point where members were forbidden from using terms as trivial as "lady parts" to refer to their own body parts, to saying more weighty things such as "cis women are oppressed differently from trans women, and their experiences are not always equivalent." A lot of women fled the group. It eventually tore itself to pieces over moderation disputes. I have not found any feminist spaces in the last few years that do not center trans issues. Groups that do focus on cis women's issues are often banned from their platforms. I think this is why you see the decline in the use of feminism terms.
That is the conspicuous absence from this essay; it's not that feminism went away, but that it got colonized (along with gay & lesbian movements) by transgender activists who insist that everything center on them. They're even colonizing the anti-racist movement too (there are "Black Trans Lives Matter" rallies). The feminists who refuse to go along with that are now slurred as "TERFs", and the fights there are some of the hottest battles of the culture wars now.
The Reddit TERFs fled to https://saidit.net/s/LGBDropTheT/ when they were banned. Saidit is a free speech Reddit clone. In an act of supreme irony, the moment they arrived on the new site...they immediately implemented a censorship regime and state so clearly in the sidebar. There was a lovely kerfluffle with the admins after that. They weren't in favor of free speech, only their own speech.
I admire your stamina in attempting to analyze each of these rage-fads on its own merits. I certainly wouldn't have that energy. These all strike me as epiphenomena, sparks thrown off by our millenarial culture -- we're *always* discovering some new epic urgent Manichaen struggle and flinging ourselves into it. It's been going on for 2+ centuries. Once we burn a few witches we get over it (until the next burningly urgent crusade presents itself).
What your describing sounds a lot like the premise of the book The Rebel Sell. Back then the big thing was corporate globalism rather than racism, but I'm sure that will come back eventually too.
I think the reason we aren't seeing a new movement replacing New Racism is because the energy that would have gone to New Replacement is instead going to corona virus related battles. Since everybody from the left believes it is a temporary thing, it isn't able to replace New Racism. But it can suck some of the energy from it and it's replacements. But I think it can count as a cultural war since it shows the same dogmaism the other cultural wars have. It seems it is not enough to follow just the letter and spirit of the rules from health officials, but you need to default to liking the lockdown as well. You can get away from it with a well-crafted post that shows you're still on the right team, but forgetting to do that is going to draw criticism.
I noticed in Canada that the left jumped immediately criticizing the right for refusing to wear masks, thinking it's a hoax, thinking it is an elaborate scheme to implement socialism. I also noticed, that this happened before the Canadian right adopted the ideas. They did get there a month or two later, but initially the Canadian right did go along with government guidance. It was only after it was clear that this was going to be a political issue in Canada two that they began denying it.
That looks like culture war to me.
(Less speculative stuff)
> And so I predicted that hip young people would go far-right
> ...
> But overall I was wrong.
Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations which he talks about in The Righteous Mind has become my hammer to all political nails.
I think it should have led this prediction to seem unlikely since hip young people would still prioritize the care/harm moral and thus you should expect them to come up with some new leftist thing. Of course, I never came to that conclusion when reading your Right is the New Left post. I think I was just hopeful it could be true and that some sort of bleeding-heart-libertarian thing could be next.
I wonder if this cycle of culture wars is due to how singly focus the US left is on care/harm. This might be a surprise to those who haven't read the book (it was a surprise to me) but Haidt states that the US left is the most extreme rhetorically: they focus on care/harm to the exclusion of other values moreso than the left in the rest of The West. I wonder if they are pushing so hard on just care/harm that things start to get weird. I think this is similar to how if you pushed on just utilitarianism, things start to get weird.
Yeah, covid is the culture war for now, but I don't see how it can sustain itself once America is mostly immune.
I daresay that everyone trying to make their preferred issue the next CW is looking for ways in which the pandemic vindicates their worldview. The socialists have the most obvious route here with concepts like 'k-shaped recovery'.
Thank you for being civil on the internet since at least 2010.
But as for the alleged rise and fall of online culture, or the Social Justice manifestation thereof, I don't see how you can do this sort of analysis without also including LGBT activism. The simple model is that LG activism had its own time in the sun, as big in its day as atheism and not too far behind feminism and antiracism, and than now transgender activism is working up steam to become the Next Big Socially Just Thing when antiracism runs its course. Transgender activism gives Social Justice another four years as Champions of the Oppressed, which should be enough time to figure out what comes next. I can only guess as to what that will be.
The simple model is almost certainly wrong, but it also almost certainly isn't made up out of thin air and to be ignored as irrelevant. It has certainly played a significant role in the recent past of Social Justice, and may play a role in its future, so I want to think some more about that before I just write off Social Justice on the grounds that people have gotten bored with atheism and feminism and are getting bored with antiracism so that's the end of it. And, being selfish and lazy, "I want to think some more" comes with a big side order of "I want you to think some more and write it up".
I think "woke" might be nearing the end of its lifespan. I see it in the Wall Street Journal almost every day, usually by middle-aged conservatives griping about some trivial culture war issue. It's gotten to the point where I reflexively roll my eyes every time I see or hear the word.
Well, I tried to read all the comments but at a certain point I can use the time to finish reading them or write a response. So apologies if someone mentioned this (Steve didn't, which surprised me).
So first--and this is probably obvious, but no one has mentioned it--there's a whole hell of a lot to online culture, and this is just a tiny piece of it. It's a tiny piece that now has taken over elite discourse, which for years it hadn't, but it's still a tiny bit.
I've been online for 24 years, and for most of that time I was blissfully unaware of all of this. I was in Political Internet, and there was almost no overlap. You could be happily in political internet and never know about gamergate, atheism, or all the various histories mentioned here. Hell, you could be in Knitter Internet or Cat Video Internet or Adopting Korean Children Internet and you wouldn't have to care the tiniest bit about any of this. I've been reading Steve Sailer for years with all the HBD stuff and we never touched any of this crap. Kevin Drum. National Review. Salon and Slate, back when they existed. In fact, the reason that a lot of newspaper media sites ended comments was because people segmented the threads into what they were interested in, and there were approximately a billion sites that were blissfully clueless about all this crap.
I don't have a narrow focus. I read a lot of random stuff even if I don't converse on it. And yet I didn't learn of many of the things here until relatively recently. (It is utterly hysterical, not in a good way, that Scott Aaronson wrote all that nonsense, that Marcotte savaged him, that Aaronson then went in and edited his nonsense endlessly, and that Scott Alexander is still pissed off about it years later. My god, people.) All throughout the Internet were tons of people discussing things that had nothing to do with this. The stuff mentioned here wasn't central, wasn't more important. It was just your stuff.
What changed recently, of course, is that the elite media has become obsessed with it too, and the asymmetrical nature of cancellations is forcing other areas to follow suit. So now it's hard in certain venues to talk politics or knitting or cat videos without some idiot coming in and making it all about transgender or race. There's been plenty of talk about this switch and I won't belabor it.
But I will mention the fact that it's only certain venues.
Because for all that Scott used the word "race" a zillion times, he neglects to mention that every single issue he wrote about is a White People Thang. Yes, even race.
All of this debate is taking place entirely within the media world, and that's mostly white world. This site is an overwhelmingly white site.
At the same time, you ignore the fact that if you take out non-whites from your data, it turns out you were right. 53% of white kids 18-29 voted for Trump. And when you consider that there is next to no overlap in "cool" by race (some by class, but not much), it *did* become "hip" for the young in the only audience Scott writes for to become Republican.
Take the "no Hispanics think of themselves as Latinx" datapoint and multiply it by a million. Everything under discussion here is of primary interest to white people. They are, still, the ones who set the discourse in America.
So debating things in terms of woke and not-woke is a white people thing. Ask blacks about issues, and they're more likely to be "George Floyd was killed" majority vs "It's time these knuckleheads stopped resisting arrest" skeptics and "close down Stuyvesant because it's all for Asians" vs "kids should do their damn homework" and there's just no big conversation about transgender. I really wish there was more talk among African Americans about immigration, because they are hurt badly by it, but oh well.
Ask Asians about issues and the longer they've been in the US the more they'll track like whites. Same with Hispanics. Both groups are too large to capture in a few debates (South Asians are almost entirely ignored, really, in comparison to East Asians, while we really don't yet know the full impact of all the South Americans coming here as opposed to Central as opposed to Mexico)l.
Anyway. No real point to make other than that most of you are so.....white. And that's so true of most people right and left in this debate. They all live and think in whitey mcwhite world, marshmallow land. Even when presumably they have some, you know, nonwhites they go to lunch with and stuff.
Hell, you could be in Knitter Internet or Cat Video Internet or Adopting Korean Children Internet and you wouldn't have to care the tiniest bit about any of this.
Hmmm...is not this blog, as well as the woke/non-woke & culture-war discussions, more a class thing than a white thing. More specifically, the high-on-cultural-and-education capital part of the lower-upper middle class way of talking about the world.
These phenomena are (so far) correlated to the color of people's skin, but not necessarily more than that.
4chan is more pluralistic than I think most people give it credit for. I think it’s weird to treat it like a monoculture the same way it would be weird to treat twitter or reddit that way. My understanding is that the *really* edgy trolls and alt-right thinking is mostly isolated to the /b/ and /pol/ boards.
/b/ and /pol/ are also the only communities which regularily spill over into the mainstream culture, which is the only reason for 4chan's relevance. Nobody cares about book or anime geeks' anonymous discussions, especially if most of them aren't overt nazis.
Sure, and I don't really blame anyone for conflating those boards with all of 4chan. I was just hoping to inform people who've been writing off the whole website as a right-wing political forum. I've had few interactions with it but they've usually been of some value to me, I'd hate for people to miss out just because of a popular misconception.
Well, that's an issue as old as 4chan itself. Because of its outsize influence, /b/ and 4chan were synonymous for the uninitiated long before anybody heard about alt-right.
I think that, with enough charity, this post is pretty fair to all the sides involved. However, the tone clearly shows that Scott identifies with the New Atheism faction and not with the New Feminism or New Antiracism factions. That's not a bad thing, and almost every critique in the article of New Feminism or New Antiracism I agree with.
But a lot of introspection on my part has resulted in my realization that there's a lot of good in these movements, and I hope that we can take a lot from them even as fashion discards them. Society isn't nearly as secular as I would like it to be in the wake of New Atheism, and I doubt society will be as feminist as I would like it to be in the wake of New Feminism, and while it's too soon to tell for New Antiracism, I doubt that will fix our problems either.
The other side of it is that of course these movements are filled with bullies. New Atheism was probably also filled with bullies, but I don't remember them because those bullies never targeted me. I never saw their behavior. I never was part of forums where their behavior was discussed.
I think that taking the outside view here is important. We -- rationalists -- may not always be a part of the dominant social movement. We may even be the targets of it. But being a rationalist means being able to look at the person screaming at you for being a creep hitting on girls and think, "What is the strongest form of their argument? Huh, maybe there is a societal problem where women cannot determine whether or not a stranger hitting on them is a threat, and that it might be rational to be afraid of being hit on even if there's only a 1 in 100 chance of suffering reprisal."
I'm still working through that with New Antiracism. The stuff they say seems obviously, crazily wrong. But I will try to understand their perspective before dismissing their conclusions.
"Watch this YouTuber DESTROY SJWs using FACTS and LOGIC". Once the very idea of trying to use facts or logic to disprove a movement becomes cringeworthy, how can it fail?
Well, Wokism really does reject facts and logic. The essay "No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why" explains why.
Bailey’s point is clear: the usual tools by which we identify provisional truths and settle scholarly disagreements are part of the hegemonically dominant system that, by definition, cannot be sufficiently radical to create real revolutionary change (a “third-order” change, as Dotson has it). That is, they can’t reorder society in the radical way they deem necessary. The belief, as both scholars explain in different ways, is that to play by the existing rules (like conversation and debate as a means to better understand society and advance truth) is to automatically be co-opted by those rules and to support their legitimacy, beside one deeper problem that’s even more significant.
The deeper, more significant aspect of this problem is that by participating in something like conversation or debate about scholarly, ethical, or other disagreements, not only do the radical Critical Social Justice scholars have to tacitly endorse the existing system, they also have to be willing to agree to participate in a system in which they truly believe they cannot win. This isn’t the same as saying they know they’d lose the debate because they know their methods are weak. It’s saying that they believe their tools are extremely good but not welcome in the currently dominant system, which is a different belief based on different assumptions. Again, their game is not our game, and they don’t want to play our game at all; they want to disrupt and dismantle it.
Their analysis would insist that their methods aren’t weak; it’s that the dominant system treats them unfairly. By being forced to participate in the dominant system, they therefore believe, they’re being cheated of the full force of their cause. To them, if we set the legitimization of the system part aside, to engage in scholarly conversation or debate is like a boxer stepping into an MMA match in which kicks, punches, throwing, and grappling are all on the table for the MMA fighter whereas gloved punches are the only thing the boxer is allowed to use, only far worse.
Debate and conversation, especially when they rely upon reason, rationality, science, evidence, epistemic adequacy, and other Enlightenment-based tools of persuasion are the very thing they think produced injustice in the world in the first place. Those are not their methods and they reject them. Their methods are, instead, storytelling and counter-storytelling, appealing to emotions and subjectively interpreted lived experience, and problematizing arguments morally, on their moral terms. Because they know the dominant liberal order values those things sense far less than rigor, evidence, and reasoned argument, they believe the whole conversation and debate game is intrinsically rigged against them in a way that not only leads to their certain loss but also that props up the existing system and then further delegitimizes the approaches they advance in their place. Critical Social Justice Theorists genuinely believe getting away from the “master’s tools” is necessary to break the hegemony of the dominant modes of thought. Debate is a no-win for them.
Therefore, you’ll find them resistant to engaging in debate because they fully believe that engaging in debate or other kinds of conversation forces them to do their work in a system that has been rigged so that they cannot possibly win, no matter how well they do. They literally believe, in some sense, that the system itself hates people like them and has always been rigged to keep them and their views out. Even the concepts of civil debate (instead of screaming, reeeee!) and methodological rigor (instead of appealing to subjective claims and emotions) are considered this way, as approaches that only have superiority within the dominant paradigm, which was in turn illegitimately installed through political processes designed to advance the interests of powerful white, Western men (especially rich ones) through the exclusion of all others. And, yes, they really think this way.
For adherents to Critical Social Justice Theory, then, there’s just no point to engaging in conversation or debate with people with whom they disagree. They reject the premise that such a thing is possible at all, because what is discussed or debated are, if changeable, in some sense matters of opinion. They don’t see the world this way at all, though. “Racism is not a matter of opinion” is, after all, one of their thought-stopping mantras. For them, disagreements across a stratifying axis of social power are a matter of being, experience, reality, and even life and death. These are not matters to be debated; they’re far too important for that.
This way of thinking is a time machine back to important intellectual tenets within the 1970s counterculture, if you substitute "race" with "class". It fizzled out during the 1980s, though.
"They literally believe, in some sense, that the system itself hates people like them and has always been rigged to keep them and their views out."
Yes, that's by design.
"Their methods are, instead, storytelling and counter-storytelling, appealing to emotions and subjectively interpreted lived experience, and problematizing arguments morally, on their moral terms."
This framework in fact predates the "Enlightenment-based system" by many millenia. Those are the tools of religions, and they are correct of course both about that religious persuasion can be powerful and that Enlightment ideals fundamentally oppose them.
Those ideal proved to be fruitful in many disciplines, but they did fail to establish broadly accepted rational foundation for ethics. This is one area in which religions still claim mostly undisputed authority, so it makes sense that new challengers continue to appear to challenge traditional ones, with the same age old "these are not matters to be debated" attitude.
I'm going to keep a copy of this next to my local copy of that 'what is whiteness" poster, and a reminder of why I am correct in despising wokism. Their own best defenses expose their failings and brokenness better than any attack by their enemies can.
"The other relevant phrase is "cancel culture". SJWs aren't bad because they get basic facts wrong, quash free speech, bully their opponents, or make unfair generalizations across diverse groups. They're bad because sometimes they get your favorite TV show cancelled."
- In its best forms (e.g. Elizabeth Bruenig at her best), objection to cancel culture is, above all, objection to the idea of cancelling *people*. This is the kind of opposition to cancel culture I'm most interested in. When CC does, for example, what it did to Scott A, that really accepts me- and not even on a political level, just on a fundamental human level. When I say I'm against cancel culture I'm primarily against cancelling people. I believe you are the same in this regard.
"Why did the hope that New Socialism would slay wokeness fail? If I had to guess, I’d say wokeness outgrew the Internet fashion cycle. Unlike its predecessors, it took over mainstream institutions. Mainstream institutions are sticky. You can take control of them by being cool. But once you have control of them, you don’t need to stay cool."
I have a different hypothesis. Socialism wasn't allowed to beat wokeness, like feminism beat atheism and anti-racism beat feminism, because unlike the latter conflicts, the powers that be actually had a stake, and they used their control over things like legacy publications, news media etc. to pump up wokeness as a shield against socialism.
Forgive me if I now sound bitter. I shouldn't, of course, be bitter, since it's exactly what I would expect to happen based on my broadly Marxist outlook. Why get angry at the object falling under the power of gravity, as it always had to?
I think we as a world still haven't properly understood what "cancel culture" is. What it did to Scott Aaronson was really cruel, and so is what it does to anyone else, right or left. But it also usually has much less negative material impact on its victims than people think (in fact, its "victims" often get rich off the backlash to the backlash). All of this means that I definitely don't know what to think about it, especially because people aren't usually very precise in defining precisely what it is.
The two errors of types "we harmed the wrong person" and "we attempted to harm the right person but it helped them instead" don't cancel each other out.
They definitely, definitely don't cancel each other out. But I think sometimes people say that it's bad because it leads to people getting fired, and sometimes people say it's bad because it leads to people getting their feelings hurt. I suspect the former is often a mistake (because at least many people end up getting better jobs and/or pay as a result) but the latter is often very under-appreciated. (I think the ContraPoints video about J.K. Rowling is one of the few attempts to get this right.)
I agree. Part of what's aggravating about social justice is the idea that if they attack someone, their feelings don't matter, only money matters, but if social justice favors someone or a group, their feelings are of the highest importance.
I'm always, always confused about this argument, honestly. It reads like "Hey, there's a guy who goes around stabbing people with an infected syringe - he's trying to kill them with blood borne diseases. But sometimes it doesn't take and they just get a free high - I don't see why you all are freaking out about this.".
Extreme utilitarianism. If I shoot you in the course of a home robbery, and the months of rehab cause you to become closer to your wife, re-evaluate your workaholic habits, and ultimately become a much happier person -- why am I going to jail, huh? I'm some kind of freaking savior, when you look at the long-term outcomes.
The other qualifier here is when we ask "hey, why do these cancelled people do so well?" and take a look it's usually because the people who are very, very concerned with cancellation drive it.
So you get this weird circular thing - the implied ask is that you be less concerned with cancellation because it doesn't work, but since the reason it doesn't work is people ARE very concerned, if you do what's asked of you cancellation starts working again.
I want to conflate it to something like getting a population to adopt condom use - you have this STD that's tearing up a population, so everyone gets freaked out and starts wearing the condoms. The next year the STD transmission rate is way, way down and not nearly as big of a threat so it's declared that the STD isn't that bad and the condoms aren't needed anymore. This might make sense if you can show that the stock of people with this particular STD has all died off.
In the real world, this dying-off of infection-havers would be something like "people got out of the habit of cancelling in a way where they were unlikely to get back into it". But that clearly hasn't happened here - we can see people trying to still cancel people.
Re. '"Woke" was originally a black slang term for an independent thinker aware of the world around them.': The 18th-century Puritans had Great Awakenings. The Nazis used the slogan "Deutschland, erwachen!" (Germany, awakening!). But the Buddha one is still oldest and best.
"Feminist bloggers talked about how they didn't like being approached in a sexual way (eg asked on dates) by creepy guys, and tried to make this a shameful sort of thing to do. Some men countered that in order for the human race to continue to a new generation, presumably some men had to ask some women on some dates sometime, and the feminists were condemning basically every possible way of approaching a woman as creepy, without giving any suggestions for alternate non-creepy ways to do this."
This is not a good-faith description of what actually happened. There is a difference in how men and women experience the same situation. Women started writing about this difference, and explained that being proposed to have sex when stuck in an elevator, alone, with a man, can be a scary situation for women. Instead of just acknowledging this simple reality, and changing their behaviors, many men instead decided that women's recounting of their subjective experience was not true.
"This intensified because a lot of feminists seemed to focus on nerdy guys or nerdy activities in particular"
A lot of the women who initially started writing about this were nerdy women themselves, which is how they came to write blogs in the first place. They wrote about their own experiences.
I was admittedly fairly distant from this stuff but it seemed to me that there was both:
A) Women complaining about wildly inappropriate passes made at them- like being cold propositioned in an elevator. This behavior was, at very best, utterly oblivious, and often down right intimidation and/or lechery.
B) Women complaining about men "shooting their shot" in a way that was not clearly inappropriate.
And often these two classes were mixed in- along with debatable examples- in a way that treated them as if they were the same. I agree that the majority probably was class A, but there definitely were some B's, and I can understand why that would make some straight men, particularly shy and awkward straight men worried. I do agree though that Scott somewhat exaggerates the situation. I think that might be out of sympathy for his friend Scott Aaronson, who was clearly attacked by a very bad actor.
It's like with #Metoo. The majority of prominent accusations were of pretty awful behavior, with a fair bit of evidence backing them up, but many people are chilled by-and rightly so- the handful of cases where either the accusation wasn't that bad in hindsight, or had a dubious evidence base.
I like this and feel the same way about most of it.
But there's a critical mistake embedded in this analysis. The analysis seems to imagine "trends" against... some kind of blank slate backdrop, as if the author were a quant working for JP Morgan in a world of unlimited money printing and GME memes. Like there are no fundamentals. Like the Internet is the real thing, and all the little people are there to make it run. Like gender and race and socialism are fungible "cool" things that could have equally trended in any order--like trends of this type are universal to all nations and peoples throughout history.
We're not living in a video game made to teach children data analytics. This stuff is real. If someone predicted that young people would go far right in 2014, I'd have loved to take whatever betting odds they were offering at the time.
People ride trends just to have a cause. But it's the facts of the cause that determine what happens.
Let's look at New Atheism. The writeup describes New Atheism as "failing" or going out of style. New Atheism did not fail. I deconverted from evangelical Christianity during New Atheism--it might've been destined to happen eventually, but it happened at that time because the climate made it impossible to stop thinking about the issues until they were resolved. Christianity has been in catastrophic free-fall in America since then. When you say it failed, you mean "it stopped being a hot Internet topic," which happened because it succeeded, which made it no longer necessary. And it succeeded because Christianity is (on any factually-based reading of the term) not true.
New Atheism was also not an "Internet" thing. Talkorigins.org was online since 1998, almost 10 years before I got on the bus and saw ads by Richard Dawkins telling me not to believe in God.
What about New Feminism? Anyone who watched it like a meme stock, wondering if it would go up forever or crash, was not living in the real world. New Feminism had to crash (and it still has more crash to go), because it was impossible. It had scientifically false beliefs, mutually exclusive goals, no way of winning by demographics since half the population is always born male, anti-correlated with fertility, and more. An enduring animosity between the sexes is absurd. It only seems possible to detached and non-heteronormative people.
Race and socialism are not the same kind of thing. Those can keep trending up forever, until the circumstances are altered such that you won't be around to whimsically blog about it.
Further, The Blind Watchmaker was published in 1986 and Skeptic Magazine first came out in 1992, not technically before there was an Internet but certainly before most people were using it. talk.origins itself was a usenet group that also came out in 1986 well before it went onto the web. On the other side, Michael Denton published Evolution: A Theory in Crisis in 1985 and Michael Behe published Darwin's Black Box in 1996. Much of "new atheism" was originally biologists and professional skeptics attempting to refute this outgrowth of a "new creationism" that attempted to provide intellectually rigorous cover once the notion of true Young Earth Creationism became so flatly ridiculous that no respectable person believed in it any longer.
For whatever reason, this kind of thing happened in the shadows ignored by larger culture for decades, even though it was having fairly significant legal and policy results (heck, going back to the Scopes trial in 1925 really). The same people who finally became Internet celebrities for when Twitter was invented and introduced these ideas to normies were the people fighting these fights in the 70s and 80s, way before anyone gave a crap about Islam in the west.
Of course they won the battle on the intellectual front. And for whatever reason, this seems to be all Scott sees. His friends are almost all atheists now and it's no longer taboo to openly say that in intellectual circles. But they absolutely did not win the cultural and political battles. Forces like the moral majority, Focus on the Family, the 700 Club, everything in the 80s and 90s that turned American evangelicalism increasingly political largely got both Bush and Trump elected, continue to push creationism at local curriculum levels, to say nothing of the larger culture war type topics that I don't think New Atheists (at least the original ones) really care about but Evangelicals definitely do, like abortion policy.
Do these things really run in clean, reversible cycles, or is society irrevocably changed with each cycle ? From what I see right now, it seems like wokeness has won; we do live in a world where "a repressive orthodoxy has taken over the government, the media, and big business, and set itself up as the arbiter of morality".
Currently, all new media in any format (movies, video games, books, etc.) has to include some woke elements -- the more the better, but at least enough to get past the censors. A purge against old and therefore un-woke cultural touchstones is gaining speed. Saying un-woke things is grounds for cancellation (and, if you're employed, possible termination), and is becoming fairly routine (to the point where it hardly makes the news). Major financial institutions and hosting providers have implemented at some form of woke gatekeeping policy.
Sure, in about 30..40 years, we might see a partial reversal, but I don't think it's happening anytime soon; nor do I think that any active opposition has a chance of victory. Shoveling back the tide might be fun, but it's not generally productive.
I mean, the same is true of the past. 1910s feminism won in that we're not getting rid of women's suffrage. Mid-century New Dealism won in that we're not getting rid of Medicare and Social Security. 1960s anti-racism won in that we're not getting rid of black people voting. 1970s gay rights and feminism won, in that sexual harassment will remain a crime and being gay won't be called a mental illness. The show "The Good Place" shows that New Atheism, New Feminism, and Woke-ism all won, in that those are just the assumed cultural starting point for a network TV comedy.
What I find fascinating in all this is the total absence of the center right. I'm not sure if it's just Scott's well known filter bubble against normie conservatives, or if it just is the case that due to age polarization the center right played no major role in defining the culture wars of the 2010s.
I should be clearer. I don't mean center in terms of policy, I mean central to the Republican political coalition. People who watch Hannity, listen Glen Beck, like Boingino on Facebook. Even Shapiro and Crowder are way closer than 4-chan or Milo to the Fox News core of th epistemological ecosystem of normie red-tribers. These people have massive audiences and institutional clout, and yet they're just total non-actors in this post.
Is this just Scott having a blindspot to normie conservatives or are they genuinely non factors in online culture wars?
It's a huge blindspot. The timeline Scott proposes matches up with his own personal experiences and is buoyed by a few search trend datapoints.
Scott has a lot of personal involvement writing and participating in communities which discuss (or discussed) atheism, feminism, and race. He doesn't know anyone who cares strongly about Dan Bongino so he is entirely blind to the fact that fully 26% of the entire internet has devolved into a forum for screeching about whatever Dan Bongino thought today. It's extremely telling that gun rights and mass shootings are completely off Scott's 'culture war' radar.
When reality contradicts Scotts personal experience, he will do whatever lack of research necessary to sustain his personal experience as truthful. I am not sure why this is the case but it needs to be kept in mind whenever reading his work. His blind spots are frequent and large. Example: his personal experience is that Donald Trump is probably not racist. He has reiterated this idea many times, most recently in this very article. A tiny amount of research would highlight that on two separate occasions Donald Trump has been court ordered to stop being racist.
I would guess among the most surprised by that fact is Joe Biden. The man has been running for President for approximately 40 years, he's like the Wile E. Coyote of Presidential aspirants. Now he's finally caught the Road Runner.
There's probably a parallel discussion to be had about how the mainstream culture war about anti-Islam and anti-anti-Islam played out completely in parallel and separate from the online culture war about New Atheism.
The thing I don't understand ...not just about you specifically, but about the general category of "people who are EA and rationalist and agree with me on pretty much everything except on whether social justice is good or bad"... is why you are able to feel so benevolent towards new atheism and are willing to say "okay it has its pointy edges and bad personalities, but overall, they were good"...but you're not willing to extend the same kind of mindset to feminism, anti-racism, etc.
Even though the central message is just as important than the message of atheism. Why not?
Why when talking about new atheism type stuff, does it feel important to defend the right of being able to have your lovable weirdos warts and all as long as the central message is correct, but when talking about social justice, you are mostly motivated to focus on the potential harms and overreaches?
To me, the new atheists were the people who said that it's okay to admit that religion is insane, and that I didn't need to keep making excuses for them. It sounds like that's what they are to you too.
To me the social justice warriors were the only people with the moral clarity to say that when I got bullied physically by my teachers and other kids and pushed around in a hundred subtler ways, it was in fact wrong and bad, and that I didn't need to keep making excuses for them. I guess they can't be that to you. But is that really not a reason to see the good in it?
Outside of the bay area bubble, racism and sexism was the norm, you know. We actually got beaten. This next generation never gets beaten. I went to my old middle school, my sister goes there now. I asked the kids. No one gets beaten up anymore.
So, I don't care how uncool it makes me in my rationalist/EA social circle. I'm glad that someone was shrill about it. I think they should be more shrill about it. Three cheers for shrill social justice warriors.
> The thing I don't understand ...not just about you specifically, but about the general category of "people who are EA and rationalist and agree with me on pretty much everything except on whether social justice is good or bad"... is why you are able to feel so benevolent towards new atheism and are willing to say "okay it has its pointy edges and bad personalities, but overall, they were good"...but you're not willing to extend the same kind of mindset to feminism, anti-racism, etc.
This is a good question. I think the big difference is one of conduct, not of content.
One of the most salient features of internet rationalism is their willingness to consider just about any position, as long as it is presented in a civil and rational sort of way. In the internet atheism debate days, although I'm sure everyone was far from perfect, there was a tendency for actual reasonable debates to break out where people genuinely tried to engage in constructive discussion (or at the very least to PWN the other side with FACTS and LOGIC).
This is missing from the "social justice" wars. The "social justice" side isn't interested in any kind of logical argument or discussion with the other side; they refuse to acknowledge that the other side might possibly have any kind of point to make at all. Everyone who disagrees with them is Literally Hitler and they need to be punched, not debated. Favourite weapons aren't facts and logic, they're shaming, mischaracterisaiton, name-calling, getting people fired, and bicycle locks to the head.
This does not convince me, because it's a fully general counter-argument. You can always find factions within any group who is not interested in discourse. Also online internet atheists would do similar tactics, like "deplatform" creationists from public curriculum if they could. Every group has certain topics which they think are just too stupid to consider giving realistic consideration to. And if you think the atheists should've been less aggressive too, I'll just note that my public middle school still teaches creationism as a "perspective" to everyone whereas you need a special note to learn about evolution. So maybe new atheists should have been louder. In contrast, I think bullying has genuinely been reduced.
Which brings me back to my original contention - I notice the choice to focus on the reasonable people when it's something like atheism while ignoring the others as just passionate, and I notice the choice to paint social justice as unreasonable, even though there are similar dynamics in both.
""deplatform" creationists from public curriculum "
That's not what deplatforming means. Not being permitted to have one's views spread by teachers in the classroom is not the same as not being permitted to express them. Nobody tried to SWAT someone for being a creationist, or tried to get them fired from a job totally unrelated to creationism, or tried to get someone's Usenet provider to drop him as a customer because he's a creationist.
Inb4 "cherry picking" I agree - the point is that anyone can pick cherries. Being a creationist has always (rightly) been something that will get you laughed out of academia, even outside of the field of biology.
You might disagree with the object level - you might think being racist or sexist is not like being a creationist - but on the meta level all three movements are aiming to push their ideological opponents outside the pale of respectability, such that they can't hold positions of power and influence that enable them to exert their values and viewpoints on others.
Being a fossil hunter is clearly relevant to creationism. The teacher taught his creationism in class, so it was relevant. And the NASA scientist, according to claims, was proselytizing his creationism at work, not on his own time on Facebook.
The NYT I don't know, but the NYT is scum anyway. I think that if 3 out of 4 of your examples are bad, it can't possibly be widespread.
One possible reason is that new atheism was anti-authoritarian, while new feminism and new anti-racism are extremely authoritarian, seeking to win primarily not by convincing people, but by making the opposition unable to express themselves in public forum.
I just don't think that is true. New Atheism, "new feminism", and "anti-racism all are the same in the extent to which primarily want to prevent their ideological opponents from achieving platform in educational institutions and workplaces whenever possible.
In the case of atheism, no creationism in schools, for example. New Atheists also tried to attack the Catholic church on pedophilia charges, tried to retroactively tear down beloved figures such as Mother Theresa, and spoke out against the practice of proselytizing and religious conversion especially when coupled with humanitarian aid. And many explicitly opposed tolerance of religious practices like burqa or circumcision. Many of them equated religious indoctrination itself to child abuse.
This isn't a list of charges against new atheism, this is just an assertion that it's roughly the same as the other things - fundamentally correct message with varying degrees of intensity.
I think I want clarification here to an extent - are you comfortable with saying "all three are bad"? I'm not sure if your goal is to get Scott to say new atheism is bad or that anti-racism and new-feminism are good.
I would say that all three are good on net in their intentions. I would also say that anti-racism and anti-sexism internet activism in practice successfully shifted the overton window on their respective issues and that this is Good. Sadly, I'm not so sure that new atheism succeeded in that. I wish that they had, but it seems to have come to nothing.
I would also say that any social movement that gets anything done has bad elements. And you can tell something about a person's overall stance by the pattern of when they choose to pick on bad elements and relatively ignore the good, vs. when they choose to praise the good elements and wave away the bad, and this article really highlights that disparity.
I feel like you dodged the question a bit - maybe not in the sense that you were deceptive, but in the sense that I care. I'm sure there are good elements in all three, but ignoring the balance of good and bad in them to focus purely on the good strikes me as something just as motivated/telling as what you accuse Scott of by implication (being a racist misogynist, or similar).
I don't like any of the three, mostly, but I think I like new atheism the most despite it aiming the most squarely at hurting me/my interests (I'm Christian). The reason for this is that it was ineffective, for the most part; it's a lot easier to have warm fuzzies for a movement that I disagree with if it never made any headway towards getting fiat powers to hurt me at will, as opposed to one that did.
It's not about focusing purely on the good, it's about how you allocate scarce attention. If you believe racism is a bigger problem than the over-reaches of the anti-racist movement, you would (or maybe the right word is "rationally speaking, should") be more motivated to allocate more time and attention towards combatting racism than you do towards critiquing overreaches of anti-racist movements.
(But yeah, it would be perhaps disingenuous to base an entire argument on that, I also disagree with some of the the object level criticisms that Scott makes.)
New feminism and anti-racism are all extremely anti-authoritarian. Remind me which groups protest police use of violence? Remind me which groups cheered the state assaulting reporters?
"seeking to win primarily not by convincing people, but by making the opposition unable to express themselves in public forum."
If this is their actual goal then they have failed miserably and can be safely dismissed as toothless.
Police, by definition, are supposed to be violent. Opposing that does not make someone anti-authoritarian. Cops doing their job is not inherently authoritarianism.
I also don't recall seeing very many conservatives or "anti-Woke" folks cheering on "the state assaulting reporters". If any. At all.
And people can still do a lot of damage even if they don't achieve their desired goals.
"Police, by definition, are supposed to be violent."
Good lord no. Police, by definition, are supposed to protect the public from criminals and apprehend people who violate laws. Sometimes violence is part of this. But our understanding of crime is that the most effective techniques are the ones which employ no violence at all. Any cop that needs to be violent is one dealing with a failure in the system that started years, possibly decades prior.
"Cops doing their job is not inherently authoritarianism."
There are reams of evidence showing that police use of force is commonly used when it shouldn't be and quite often it's use is deployed unjustly against minority groups.
It is the very definition of authoritarian to use force to control people who have done nothing wrong.
"I also don't recall seeing very many conservatives or "anti-Woke" folks cheering on "the state assaulting reporters". If any. At all."
You weren't looking very hard then. No surprises there.
I'm referring to their support for censorship on the biggest internet platforms and support for hate-speech laws. And they have been quite succesful in increasing censorship on the biggest internet platforms, many anti-sjws have been completely banned off of most large internet platforms.
"And they have been quite succesful in increasing censorship on the biggest internet platforms"
Have they? I think the biggest internet platforms, which were things that did not exist in the early 2000s, have done an excellent job of protecting their own self-interests.
That extremist groups say and do extremist things that get them banned from corporate monoliths is very much a different thing from coordinated SJW organizations getting people they don't like banned. The end result may look similar. But the process is quite different. Equally extreme SJWs have all met their own bans.
Your incorrect thinking may come from assuming there is an equality that does not exist. Alex Jones is not an equivalent speaker to Nathan J. Robinson (though the latter was 'banned' for joking about US aid to Israel). There is a very clear and easy to understand reason why Alex Jones is not allowed on Youtube but Nathan J. Robinson still is.
This is me speaking for myself. I don't know what Scott is thinking, though I'm going to guess a little.
It's a matter of sides and enemies. I loathe Social Justice while feeling it's not wrong about everything. The reason I loathe it is because it seems to frame matters as that no decent person should care what happens to me because I'm definitionally not marginalized enough. Not only that, but if I want to be a decent person, I shouldn't care what happens to me.
So I'm aware that the American justice system is biased against black people and I care about it and about the justice system mistreating the public generally (except that I'm not supposed to care when the justice system abuses or murders white people), but I will not side with people who hate me. They'll say they don't hate me, but the way I see it is that they want me to feel bad all the time. Everything good in my life, including and especially my peace of mind is stolen from more worthy people.
They don't want me to follow their orders-- framing orders is too much like work-- they just want me to figure out what they want and do it without being told.
A big hook for black people and trans people and so on is that Social Justice portrays itself as the only thing which is on the side of marginalized groups. Sometimes people in marginalized groups get a surprise when Social Justice turns against them.
As I understand Scott, religion isn't a big deal for him, so he can be kind to the New Atheists. He's a more or less heterosexual man-- at least wants relationships with women-- so when Social Justice portrays heterosexual men as fundamentally abusers of women, so he sees (or saw?) Social Justice as an attack.
I don't think this is charitable to Scott. I don't want to reduce his viewpoint to "I don't like this, because I'm a straight white man, and whatever this is is clearly against the interests of straight white men". Even if that's in part what is going on, it's too close to the genetic fallacy for me to feel comfortable going forward assuming that this is the issue. There is an ideal to be aspired to where you are supposed to try to take an objective view on things and not just side with whatever your race and gender demographic is, and I would like to assume that Scott also aspires to that ideal.
>Sometimes people in marginalized groups get a surprise when Social Justice turns against them.
Well, I agree, sometimes they do. This goes back to the uneven standards really. "Social justice" isn't a magic word that makes everyone good, Humans are going to turn against each other. People are going to use social justice to make each other feel guilty, exploit each other, achieve their own ends. This happens with everything. I've seen it happen with EA/rationalism, I don't want to start digging up links and receipts but if you're in the community then you know full well that there have been abusers in the community who have used the logic of EA/rationalism to be abusive. None of that means that EA/rationalism isn't one of the best social movements for doing good in the world.
Frankly, I'm just not afraid of social justice. The psychological harms that you cite social justice can do to the people that it "turns against" are, for lack of a better word "microaggressions" and I'm not really afraid of them. If people on the internet want to say words that feel bad to me, they can go right ahead. I'm prepared, I'm not afraid. I've experienced worse.
What I care about is not being hit with actual fists, and having access to food, shelter, and medical care. Racism and homophobia are potential reasons that I or others have gotten beat up. Social justice will never be a reason that I'm denied access to food/shelter/medical care or beaten up. (inb4 "but they punch nazis", just how many punches do you suppose have actually been thrown?)
So actual physical harm social justice folks do doesn't matter because people haven't committed enough of it compared to racism and homophobia? You know some of these folks have tried to commit murder, right? Take the Alexandria shooting. Or the many times antifa have smuggled clubs into protests. Or the time they gave Andy Ngo brain damage, which means they could've easily killed him.
Social justice folks were arguably reluctant to talk about apparently-racist attacks on Asians until a prominent attack by a white guy. Probably because the other ones were heavily by black people.
If nothing else, you should be opposing the bad eggs because they make it harder for everyone else to actually progress. They're millstones, albatrosses.
It might be. Is there evidence that illegal behavior by women is likely to be let slide or blamed on men?
The American justice system probably over-punishes people. How do punishments for men compare to punishments for women for the same crime?
Just being accused can be extremely destructive, considering what happens to people who can't afford bail. If men are falsely accused at a higher rate than women, then that's a serious injustice and would also add to the imprisonment rate.
Yes, or actually I have some answers. I don't merely have disparities, there are serious procedure problems, like prosecutors concealing exculpatory evidence.
You might check into Radley Balko's work. He's written a lot about bad practice in the American justice system. He believes there's a lot that done badly in general and also that there's racism.
Yes, I'm familiar with Balko, and I agree he is a cogent and talented writer. I'm glad *somebody* is taking seriously the rights of the accused, inasmuch as the conventional American attitude is often once you're accused -- you're just worthless, a nonhuman. Deeply regrettable in a republic supposedly founded on the concept of individual rights.
I'm not sure I recall Balko asserting the system is institutionally biased against blacks, or that individual elements of it are, but alas either way an appeal to his authority isn't persuasive to me, much as I respect the man.
Nor do I want to actually debate the question: for what it's worth, the precis of my a priori opinion is that -- it's complicated. To some extent I think the system *is* biased against blacks, but not for the reasons one might suppose (because everyone hates blacks), but because it is not well-suited to the typical social culture of blacks (or of men, for that matter). Roughly speaking, instead of prompt and modest and sustained correction for beginning a path of wrongdoing, it waits far too long doing nothing and then delivers killing blows, which are disastrous patterns when dealing with males in general (as anyone who's reared boys can tell you), and even worse when it comes up against black male culture.
But anyway, my main point is just to hope that if you believe the system is prejudiced against blacks, it stems from the examination of, and rejection of, more parsimonious explanations that have to do with the difficulty of cleanly interpreting a top-line number like rates of incarceration.
I think this is how a lot of people feel. Scott is great on lots of things, but seems to have his missteps when it comes to issues of race and gender. His insights are still worth reading, even when I see these problems though.
I know. It just makes me a bit sad. These ideas are ultimately pretty influential in my social circle and my workplace. A bunch of people who I like and admire end up taking significant cues from these types of ideas.
Which, whatever, obviously I'm going to simply ignore it and keep working to make sure these bed nets and vaccines get distributed, it's just disappointing.
To the extent that there's a central message of social justice, maybe these rationalists don't think it's correct. But they find it easier and/or socially safer to talk about overreaches than core disagreements.
I really doubt it. EAs/rationalists/Scott obviously believes that all people are approximately equal in terms of being moral patients. That much is pretty clear from their words and actions. If they have implicit biases that contradict this, that isn't intentional.
On its own, "all people are approximately equal in terms of being moral patients" gets you to something closer to EA/utilitarianism than to SJ. SJ is also committed to some substantive interpretations of equality (collectivist/group-based), and predominantly sees problems through a conflict-theoretic lens.
>"all people are approximately equal in terms of being moral patients" gets you to something closer to EA/utilitarianism than to SJ
I mostly agree with this. I'm an EA/utilitarian. I would say that both SJ and EA are both deeply committed to this premise, but that EAs tend to be more successful in taking said premises to their logical conclusions.
>SJ is also committed to some substantive interpretations of equality (collectivist/group-based), and predominantly sees problems through a conflict-theoretic lens.
I disagree with this. SJ has both strong collectivist and anarchist-libertarian streaks. I don't think SJ is committed to "conflict-theory" in the Karl Marx sense. Or if you mean the slatestarcodex definition of "conflict theorist vs. mistake theorist", I take that as fancy jargon for "unreasonable person who feels attacked all the time" which I don't think is unusually characteristic of SJ more than others.
SJ is definitely culturally collectivist, even the anarchists - its standard interpretation of equality is that oppressed groups are culturally equal to dominant ones, and anything contrary to this is injustice. For example, I've heard defenses of corporal punishment of children on the grounds that it's an African-American practice and that it's wrong and inegalitarian for whites to criticize it. You can dismiss this as an overreach, but I think this form of analysis is typical of SJ, regardless of the conclusion it reaches.
> I take that as fancy jargon for "unreasonable person who feels attacked all the time" which I don't think is unusually characteristic of SJ more than others.
It means more than that. The standard SJ line is that dominant groups benefit from their privilege, so their objections should be seen as them trying to keep the gains they've unjustly accrued or maintain their higher positions on a zero-sum status/economic ladder.
I think the quote at the end captures my feelings pretty well on this,
"I would much prefer the world where Francis Fukuyama had been right and liberalism had won so completely that freedom no longer needed any defending."
I am first and foremost a liberal, and I have regularly heard explicitly anti-liberal rhetoric from new social justice to a degree totally unmatched by my interaction with new atheism. So while I can be broadly on board with a lot of new social justice goals I am really not willing to compromise on the liberalism front, and it not being a terminal value is a glaring red flag for me.
The way someone processes the meta-level tone of rhetoric changes depending on their relationship to the object-level aims of that rhetoric. I am not sure if someone who had a vested interest in religious power continuing to hold sway over the nation would agree with your notion of new-atheism being very tolerantly liberal.
I don't think new-atheism is very tolerantly liberal in their goals, and I was responding to your framing which might make this confusing. Ultimately I disagree with new-atheism but they did not, for the most part, attempt to destroy liberal norms in the way that social justice has. I think the illiberal tools of oppression are fundamentally incompatible with a 'good end' even when wielded with noble aims, and so I think people arguing for terrible things within a liberal framework are less dangerous than those trying to destroy the framework, I believe as long as the framework is maintained, good outcomes and progress will follow.
The short answer is that there are more than two alternatives, even if only those two were present in your environment. That the racists are *wrong* doesn't mean that the SJers are *right*. Where you were from, the SJers may have been the only ones standing up to the racists; but they are not in fact the only people opposed to racism, and them getting that one thing right (racism is bad) does not imply that their further claims are correct.
The correct answer to racism and sexism, IMO, is liberal individualism. SJ is (generally speaking) illiberal and group-based. The problem with the SJers isn't that they're shrill, it's that their *illiberal*. Although these are not unrelated -- attempting to shout people down rather than make actual arguments is a common component of both shrillness and illiberalism. Note that this isn't just a problem of object-level wrongness, but of meta-level process; this sort of illiberalism breaks the negative feedback loop that keeps you in touch with reality, and dooms you to tribal dynamics and increasing wrongness, although in what direction is not a priori predictable.
One must focus on what's actually correct, not just finding people who are opposing what's wrong. Because most of the time, the people visibly opposing one wrong thing are themselves wrong as well. Actually getting things *right* is hard! And there are infinitely many ways to be wrong...
Y'know, I'm not making a statement about what the objectively correct ideology is in the abstract (hint it is effective altruism, obviously). I'm making a statement about which social movement actually got what accomplished. The fact that the majority of people didn't see any "liberal individualism" social movements reckoning with these issues or making any traction on them is sufficient to exclude them from this conversation.
Having a pretty theoretical framework is easy. Having a pretty social movement, involving imprecise, difficult to control masses of people, harder.
It seems to me that liberals aren't doing a lot to oppose racism and sexism. I don't like it, but it seems like the easiest way to organize people to do something which isn't obviously fun is to organize them to oppose other people.
I think it's easier to like irrelevant groups compared to powerful ones.
I will admit that I am charmed by eg Jewish mystics. They are wrong about everything, and if they ever got the reins of power they would probably make terrible decisions based on the gematria value of the name of the bill they had to support or reject, but liking them is cheap because they don't matter.
New Atheism had about as much power as Jewish mystics. Social justice has more power than most countries, which makes it scarier.
I'm surprised that social justice warriors were the only people saying it was bad for your teachers to bully you. This is the kind of thing I've always felt they were really bad at - rejecting the actual power relations in a situation in favor of something where whichever person is a member of a more preferred group is "in the right".
I think (and please correct me if you think I'm wrong) that the differences in our perspectives comes from the fact that you're assuming an environment where the conclusions of social justice are already a given, when you talk about who is in the "more preferred group".
I work a job in the EA community, so I have spent enough time in rationalist/EA social circles to imagine what social bubble you probably inhabit. I'm guessing that in your life, everyone knows "OF COURSE you should not be racist", tries their best not to be racist, and then social justice people keep bringing up pointless nitpicking about diversity and inclusion, or spend the bulk of their time criticizing people who are plausibly well intentioned but perhaps say racist or sexist things by accident, or stirring up drama over what is essentially nothing. It's not that I can't sympathize with being annoyed with this - I mean I don't love fielding the same out-of-context question about "diversity" over and over again either. But unlike the way that you sometimes seem to portray it I don't see it as a particularly important or bothersome phenomenon in the big picture. And I still see it as someone who is fundamentally trying to do the right thing.
In other words, you live in a social-justice-literate bubble. By analogy, when you live in a science-literate bubble, it is easy to get annoyed with the people who just drone on about "correlation is not causation" and "the sample size is not high enough" every time you try to publish something. But those students, they're applying lessons that are important, the fact that the students even know that much is a testament to the success of the science meme and is a good sign.
It's important to not be parochially interested only in your local bubble. The world that most (American) people live in is filled with creationists who don't even know what a correlation is, and people who vote for Trump and want to "build a wall". Your bubble might have a clear "more preferred group", but in other social circles the hierarchy works very differently and the criteria of who is "in the right" is not the same.
These are some real life examples of teachers bullying me. I list them to demonstrate that they are not subtle, it's not something that should require nuance to condemn.
- Calling me "Mohammed" or "Ishmael" in order to humiliate me
(my real name is of not Muslim but Hindu origin, and cannot realistically be confused for these, there was no one named Mohammed or Ishmael in my class). I know it wasn't just an accident because the same teacher also grabbed me by my hair and dragged me into a corner when I was talking out of turn, he hated me for no clear reason.
- Unnecessary "joke" references to my skin color. Deliberately embarrassing me to see if they could see me blushing through my skin color.
- Always referring back to me whenever the curriculum was talking about "cow worship" or anything weird sounding about Hindus, again with a "joke" tone.
I also saw other kids (e.g. black, mexican) getting treatment like this.
No one at the time, including me, thought that any of this was "not allowed". Obviously we all knew being "racist" was bad, but only in the trivial sense that knowing that "being mean" is bad doesn't change anything. Few people thinks of themselves as racist, or bullies, or anything of the sort.
I didn't tell anyone because it was normal. Sometimes I laughed with the "joke" versions of abuse. I knew that laughing along would lead to less social ostracization, so I convinced myself it was funny and ok. The other kids saw it and they thought it was funny. Other teachers saw the hair pulling thing and didn't say anything. Also the kids did similar stuff to me in front of the teachers (e.g. constant "terrorist" jokes, while I had to laugh with them in order to save face. They also did the more generic "punching and kicking" sort of bullying, although that was out of the teacher's sight).
What I am trying to explain was that there was no broader context or higher authority to condemn these things. The social consensus was that this stuff was genuinely acceptable. If it wasn't acceptable, then maybe it was just a little naughty, on the order of saying "fuck" out loud, not grounds for moral condemnation.
What social justice has achieved is that there a certain "sanity waterline" for specific types of abuse as outside the pale of moral acceptability. In areas where social justice has "won", the behaviors that I just mentioned above will get someone fired if they can be fired, and socially ostracized if they can't. Once you've been exposed to social justice ideas the fact that these things is wrong becomes just obvious. But for most of the world, and for most of America, it is not obvious that this stuff is wrong. Maybe that is hard to imagine, typical mind fallacy and all that.
In your world, the "more preferred group" is obviously the person who didn't just commit race-based child abuse. You see it as trivial for someone to score social points by condemning this behavior. But that's not the world I grew up in. I grew up in the world where half the people vote Republican, where lots of people were creationists and the curriculum reflected that, where being a "slut" was unironically a mark of bad character, and where being dark skinned makes you weird and a target. You did not score social points by going against these things. I suppose you might be thinking that I lived in some terrible hellhole, no I did not, my immigrant parents intentionally chose where we lived based on the higher quality of the school district given what they could afford at the time ...this is what middle class American culture look like.
And now I've grown up, and I'm a polyamorous EA rationalist who went to grad school. I've left the places and social circles of my childhood behind and I'm in your bubble now living a relatively charmed life where no one ever bullies me. And I'm meeting people like you who are *natives* of this bubble. And most of y'all would never do these terrible things, you'd recognize them as outside the pale, you've never seen anyone doing these things, maybe you think that "reasonable people" wouldn't do those sorts of things (but they would)!
So your association with "social justice" is probably "people who talk very loudly about problems which aren't actually happening, and arbitrarily punish well intentioned people for making mistakes, and sometimes punish people who haven't even made a mistake". I don't deny that a little bit of this happens, I mean nothing is perfect. And in a social circle where there is way less racism, obviously whoever is still complaining about racism is getting increasingly nitpicky.
But I come from a different context, one in which the ambient levels of "oppression" are much higher. so my association with the social justice movement is more like "oh my god, oh my god, people are finally speaking out, people are finally listening, people are finally stopping that behavior, people are afraid to bully people like me now because nowadays there might actually be real consequences to doing so, oh my god thank you". And I wish I could open the bubble-native's eyes to the fact that that my childhood context is much closer to the one that matters, the one that most people live in, and that social justice is absolutely the sort of thing that makes sense to spread as a society wide meme in that context.
(Sorry for the wall of text, if I had more time I would've edited it into something more concise)
I'm sad that you were consistently mistreated and very pleased that the school has cleaned up its act in regards to (some types of?) bullying. This is important because I keep hearing claims that it's impossible to do anything about bullying.
I'm also doing some updating about the range of Social Justice, though I've heard a number of times that SJs doing practical work are much more wholesome than those who are loud on the internet.
However, my issue isn't exactly about SJs dumping rage about trivia, it's about them building up prejudice against white people. Also against men, and especially against white men, but prejudice against white people is more of an issue for me because I'm more of a target. I'm light-skinned and Jewish, and that's quite enough to be hated.
I get told they don't mean me in particular, and they don't. It's systemic. I've reached the point where I wonder whether white children are harassed for being white at that school-- certainly not something you're obliged to keep track of.
One of the hooks for Social Justice is that they present themselves as the only ones who are on various people's side. Sometimes it's true. But part of SJ ideology is a strong belief in punishment (I blame this on it being a movement that started in the US), and they can turn against people rather easily. In some contexts, Asian Indians get defined as white.
I understand this and I'm sorry you had to go through it.
I think I would make the same argument here I did in Part IX of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ . If you're in Iran or Saudi Arabia or somewhere, Islam is the most important opponent of human rights and human flourishing, and you should be fighting against the Islamic religion with all your heart and energy. If you are in California, and still opposing Islam with a level of ferocity suitable for Saudi Arabia, then you're making a mistake, and if you're doing this by destroying mosques and screaming at young Muslim kids or something, then I think you are just a random thug.
One way to look at this is that we have to find the right "balanced" level of Islamophobia that best helps the needy people in Saudi Arabia without harming the needy people in California too badly. I am not sure this is right. The fight against Islam in Saudi Arabia, and against Islamophobia in California, are branches of the same fight, which is the fight against thugs and bullies who get power from enforcing whatever local social norms let them bully people the most.
One reason I am focusing on the Internet versions of these phenomena is that I think they are less defensible than the offline versions. All of this stuff about making white students confess their white supremacy before taking classes or whatever isn't contiguous with preventing teachers from bullying dark-skinned students. It feels almost parasitic on it. I agree that we have to do a little bit of the "balancing" thing but I would be nervous about overestimating it, same as I would with the Saudi Arabia example.
I agree with this perspective on the meta level, but on an object level I think that I have a rather different view of your audience than you do.
Let's pretend I grew up in Pseudo Arabia, which is mostly like Saudi Arabia except it has a sizeable population of non-Muslim minorities descended from foreign migrant worker populations and isn't quite so suffocating that anything-but-Sunni-Islam movements hasn't been squished out by threats of death penalties. In Pseudo Arabia pretty much all native born people adhere to a strict Sharia law type ideology while pretty much all immigrants do not, and there is a stark divide between the two groups that often plays out in violence.
And let's pretend you grew up in Tofurky. Tofurky is mostly like Turkey, except their non-Muslim minority population can be distinguished by cues such as last name or cultural manner or facial appearance. That is to say, you can probably tell whose grandparents were Muslim because they're named things like Farah Kahn and Ibraheem Qureshi, but, while there is a clear correlation, you can't always figure out someone's ideology from their background (Just like you can't tell who is a Republican by looking at who is white). So they're more tolerant than Pseudo Arabia, and they have a significant tradition of secularism but also a prominent religious wing. Maybe a third of them support stuff like gay rights. There are some social bubbles in Tofurky that would not be out of place in Pseudo Arabia, as well as some social bubbles that would not be out of place in California, and everything in between. The poles of these two social bubbles are often opposed.
Anyway nowadays we both live somewhere in Tofurky where everyone believes in secular norms and we are on the same internet. We both agree about Pseudo Arabia norms being terrible, secular norms being good. But since you grew up on Tofurky, maybe you're not particularly worried about a backslide into Islamic norms. Maybe you think you're speaking to an entirely secular audience, who has now swung from simple epistemic atheism into being anti-religion in an unproductive way. Whereas I who experienced Pseudo Arabia am much more skeptical and spend more of my time thinking about how Tofurky hasn't gone far enough into secular norms. Ok, different life experiences, different perspectives, fine.
You say "We should tolerate all religious opinions, including Islamic conservatives, because of free speech" and I agree. You say "Islamic opinions may even have some good points" and I agree. You say "Maybe there really are parasites in pork and we shouldn't eat pork" and I concede, sure, maybe, it's an empirical question. You say "maybe men and women really differ in disposition and aptitudes, we shouldn't throw that idea out just because Islam went too far with it". I mean, as long as we agree that they have the same rights, I'm not closed off to the hypothesis. "Let's steelman the Shia view, maybe genetic distance from Mohammed means something"…ok, I'm happy to entertain politically uncomfortable topics as long as no one starts being rude. At this point though I am quietly noting the high number of males with Muslim-origin names in the room, a fact which previously didn't mean anything to me but now gives me pause.
"It's important that we do not shun people for saying all of the above, out loud, we should not prevent them from being university professors". And still I can't quite bring myself to outright disagree with you, but at this point I can't help but notice how much time you're putting into advocating for tolerance of Islamists, relative to the amount of time you're putting into arguing for secular-liberal norms. While we speak, a politician who is unusually anti-secular and pro-Sharia is elected. "Obviously we all know he's terrible," you say "but we must tolerate his supporters". At this point, I'm noticing now a crowd of new people gathering around our shared social circle. They tend to downvote everything pertaining to radical secularism and tolerance of other religions. Also I caught a few of them crying out things like "Allulah Akbar!" when they thought we weren't looking. "I don't endorse them, I just tolerate them" you say, and I genuinely believe you. Surely I should tolerate tolerance, even if that means tolerating tolerance of intolerance?
But then..."The movement against Islamic oppression is getting pretty Shrill , isn't it?" you say. The aforementioned crowd starts cheering. "Yes! Shrill! Exactly!" The tone of the whole group has shifted. If I or anyone else starts saying "okay but remember, religious fundamentalism is still bad, also that time when Tofurky shut down the gay club was a dangerous slide towards religious fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism is still a problem, yes even in this country, yes sometimes even in this very social circle" etc. then it's "Obsessed with religion!" "Divisive and awful!" Soon your ideas get cited as justification, sometimes by the Sharia-wing of Tofuturkish politics, sometimes even by people who are clearly living in Pseudo Arabia.
And this is when I start really getting frustrated. Because I'm still pretty sure Tofuturkish Scott is honestly on the side of secular-liberalism, broadly speaking. But somehow I still feel like if you could see the bigger picture, if you could spend a day in Pseudo Arabia, something about your tone would surely change. Something about which story you emphasized and which story you tucked away would change.
I don't wish to hold you responsible for your audience…but since you did invoke your article about Russell Brand and his responsibility towards his viewers as part of your argument, if you're okay with being held responsible for that, then… I am not sure that you always see the big picture about who your audience is, and what the effect you are having on them is. You criticize Russel Brand being angrier at Fox News than ISIS while talking to liberals who all hate Fox News anyway. But I'm feeling the way that you would if Russel Brand spent all his time criticizing Fox News as worse than ISIS in front of a mixed audience that contains everyone from anarcho-communists to white nationalists to a few actual ISIS thought leaders who are happily nodding about how bad Fox News America is… yet determinately pressing on with the idea that everyone in the audience was a Conservative and he was just giving them the antidote they needed.
In closing (sorry this got so long, if you've read this far), at the end of the day arguments about context and tone fall apart and what's really important is being correct. At the end of the day I think anti-theism and anti-patriarchy and anti-racism, whatever their tone and tactics, are ultimately correct in their fundamental premises, have chosen a real issue which does real harm, and have enacted social change in a manner that has shifted attitudes on the issue in a way that has made real people's lives better. I guess if you don't necessarily believe that this has in fact occurred, then all of the above is moot.
I've gone back to that same school where all of the events I described happened btw, because my younger sister attends the same place. It's totally different. And she thinks that every single thing I told her is the sort of thing that definitely would get you fired, AND that if a student did it they would be socially ostracized or reprimanded. She also said that she and every student has been actively exposed to anti-bullying programming and seminars, and that she has never even heard of anyone getting punched. She said that calling someone a "slut" unironically or making fun of them for being gay would receive social condemnation today. She and her friends seem to know what is "polyamorous" and "asexual' and all these other jargons. This is the same school I went to where calling someone "gay" was a hilarious insult. Something has progressed. Something has changed. I don't know how much internet social justice contributed, but I suspect that it really did.
BUT, I've also spoken to other people, who live in different, worse places and contexts. (For example, the kind of contexts where some of the kids have been to prison). And they report that this sort of stuff is still happening, they still get abused by teachers for much the same reasons. The wave of new thinking has not penetrated everywhere.
“ think it's easier to like irrelevant groups compared to powerful ones” - this is good short version of “I can tolerate everything except the outgroup”. It describes most of relations in the post. Democrats can’t hate islamists because they are not worried about USA turning into Sunny theocracy, but they are worried about Rs getting more power and imposing their will on them. Grey tribe types are more tolerant to the right than to Blues because right were in political retreat lately, they are not afraid of them. But power don’t have to be real just believed. Nazis weren’t worried about Japan conquering them but they believed in powerful Jewish conspiracy. Xenophobia exists on its own but political fears fuel it to unprecedented levels.
- I think a good deal of the dysfunction of left-wing culture is a mixture of lots of people being vaguely on board with the project of "make the culture nicer for people from X demographic" with utter cluelessness on what the new norms should be, and a small minority of people from X demographic being crazy; I expect conflict to die down as the new norms get hammered out
on feminism/TERFism
- I think trans rights being a scissor statement among feminists and feminism being associated with transphobia is kind of a factor in the decline in the relevance of feminism.
one is reminded of the wars among atheism around e.g. feminism and islamophobia.
some of this is people directing the same misandric rhetoric against trans women as was done against men in the mid 2010s and promptly finding themselves persona non grata, which is both kinda sad and kinda amusing
and some of it is that something like 60% of trans people are uncomfortable with 2010s era feminist spaces which do these very unnuanced and negative generalisations about men, which is kinda tricky to square with inclusivity
on "cancel culture"
- isn't "cancelling" someone supposed to be a synonym for an online campaign to ostracise/harass someone famous for being insufficiently woke? it's good that opposition to this is what's killing the crazier side of left wing culture.
"- isn't "cancelling" someone supposed to be a synonym for an online campaign to ostracise/harass someone famous for being insufficiently woke? it's good that opposition to this is what's killing the crazier side of left wing culture."
Originally. Now it's often used - by both the left and right - to mean harassing or criticizing some rando who went viral through no fault of their own. Some people use it to mean "getting someone fired and/or otherwise punished for being unwoke".
IMO, the person being 'cancelled' often didn't even do the thing they were accused of. People got mad at Chris Pratt because they *assumed* he was homophobic and anti-Biden, to the point they did the same "let's not use his name and pretend he doesn't exist" unpersoning nonsense that happened to Minecraft's Notch and Rowling.
When I was an edgy teen I was really into the New Atheism scene, especially on YouTube. I watched people like Thunderf00t, Amazing Atheist and Rapz0rian (? i couldn't find that last one anymore). I remember in around 2012/2013 there being a noticeable shift away from these YouTubers as they hyper-focused on anti-feminist rhetoric. The whole FACTS and LOGIC thing got played out and it seemed uncool. What is interesting in retrospect is that it felt like there was a hole in this particular YouTube subculture until the rise of "Leftist YouTube" with people like ContraPoints, Lindsay Ellis, Philosophy Tube and others. This kind of cultural hole of waiting for the next thing seems to be rare.
I found one aspect of this interesting and thought-provoking post irritating. It's a particular bugbear of mine and this essay has the irritant in spades. It's the common conflation of American culture and English speaking internet culture.
More than 50 countries in the world have English as an official language and barely a quarter of English speakers are American. But this article seemingly treats all internet culture as if it only pertains to culture in the US, which is bizarre. It starts off with a graph about word usage in an American newspaper and the second sentence says ".. America is becoming increasingly obsessed with racism and sexism." So one might expect the post to be about American culture and the 'current cultural moment' of the subtitle to be a moment in America.
But the very next paragraph asks "What does google trends have to say?", as if that referred to American culture. It doesn't - it refers to anyone in the world using the internet in English. So you have trends influenced by usage in Wales, Australia, New Zealand, England (etc etc etc) and yet the impression given is that it only has to do with one country where 4% of the worlds population live.
The post really is about America - a paragraph beginning "After Ferguson.. " simply won't make any sense to people living anywhere else in the world - in the UK most people would think it referred to the ex football manager Alex Ferguson. But the references to the internet phenomena are obviously to the whole English speaking world, and to me this is painfully jarring. It's as if Scott thinks anyone writing on the internet in English must be American and that internet culture is somehow subsumed within the wider culture of America. And this is most odd because Scott is an American who actually has a passport and has seen some of the 96% of the world that is not America.
Ah, the endless sport of non-Americans complaining that Americans are actually doing something. You'll notice that these people never do anything themselves - they just wait for the Americans to do it and then complain.
I've read this same comment hundreds of times. "Pay attention to me when you're doing something!" Followed by a complete lack of doing anything by the whiner.
I've learned a lot about anti-Americanism in the last 20 years. To a lot of people, it just feels good to complain.
> But the very next paragraph asks "What does google trends have to say?", as if that referred to American culture. It doesn't - it refers to anyone in the world using the internet in English.
To be fair, Google Trends can show you data by country. See here on feminism worldwide:
And it looks to me that Scott did indeed use the US data. Not immediately obvious at a glance, but when you apply the same 10 month averaging it becomes clearer.
CW internet culture *is* subsumed within the wider culture of America. (Scott should have noted that)
As far as either side of the culture war is concerned, 'other countries' are just a sort of flavour text backstory that turns up sometimes in discussions about immigrant groups.
You see it in the debate about cultural appropriation: the people who complain about white americans wearing kimonos do not live in Japan. Or when people forget that the idea of being native has very different implications in Europe.
That said, we ought to keep an eye on Labour right now as a weathervane of where the left wing might go.
Fair points. I do think, though, that CW stuff happens in other countries with their own idiosyncrasies attached. The renaming of David Hume Tower didn't owe
anything (as far as I know) to American culture.
I'm assuming the left in Britain (should I say England?) will realise that Starmer is as unelectable as Corbyn was and that getting a plausible PM is an essential starting point.
I'm just confused about the claim that only a quarter of English speakers being American. I think that 240 million Americans have English as their native language, and over 300 million speak English. I've seen numbers claiming over a billion people who speak English in some form, but I don't think I've seen anything claiming over 400 million native speakers.
The majority of native speakers of English are in the United States, and probably close to a third of English speakers of any sort are in the United States.
I saw figures of 1.35 billion English speakers, but I think you are correct that the majority of people who have English as their native language live in the States. My enthusiasm led me to conflate the two.
If Scott's hypothesis was wrong, how would things look any differently? (Or rather, if some particular hypothesis of the many that are in this post were wrong, how would thins look any different?)
Suppose that shifting from the word "SJW" to "woke" was just linguistic drift and had no significance whatsoever in terms of people's beliefs. How would you tell the difference between that scenario and this one? In other words, is this evidence, or is it a just-so story?
Also, the reason people complain prominently about the woke getting TV shows cancelled is that a *lot* of people watch a particular TV show and even a relatively low anger rate can result in enough complaints to be prominent.
To start, Scott's timeline seems to overlook extremely large and successful feminist campaigns which occurred in 2017. Things like the Women's March and #MeToo, for example.
Honestly, the article ought to be disqualified for claiming to cover online feminism and only mentioning #MeToo in a passing sentence.
First of all, great essay. Psychiatry and culture war posts are I think my favorite here. I have an idea to add though:
I think that it makes less sense for socialism to go mainstream because in contrast to feminism and race issues which can be stripped of all their economic facets (which is the part that really matter) and mainstream-ed as woke capitalism. Socialism on the other hand, is nearly all economic and no product-selling-aesthetics. Yes there are Che Guevara t-shirts or red star caps or whatever but there won't be a Fortune 500 company trying to sell products via socialism (or I'm not imaginative enough). Will Coca Cola advertise they decided they'll make every employee a shareholder or something? That doesn't make sense.
I'm not from USA so maybe the culture I'm in are following things from a bit behind (I wasn't this much aware of feminism becoming the little sister of the woke siblings); but from what I see it's the LGBTIQ+ that's next. Them having a beef with feminists is also an indicator of this I guess?
I don't want to make a definitive point because I'm not in a place to do so, but socialism going mainstream doesn't make much sense to me, and the new elites that's running the show would also prefer the discussions about prepuberty gender change operations etc to keep the masses busy rather than, you know, a socialist revolt or something.
I'm glad all the way to the bottom of the hundreds of comments here so as not to repeat this. It seems trivially obvious to me that true socialism is the only thing that can't be mainstreamed into corporate culture. The owners are not just going to divest their shares willingly and reorganize companies as worker-run coops. That has never happened anywhere that I know. Socialism has always tried to seep into pop culture going at least as far back as Woody Guthrie, but the message gets watered down at best or more likely ignored. How many children grow up thinking "This Land is My Land" is about an optimistic vision of manifest destiny and American assimilationism? Scott and friends write longingly about the possibility of private cities as if they've never existed, seemingly ignoring the long history of real-life company towns and private police mowing down union organizers with machine guns and law enforcement completely ignoring it (if not helping).
I probably sounds like a pinko commie myself saying all this and I'm really not. I'm a perfectly standard professional managerial class yuppie spending two grand a week on Amazon, and I grew up in the 80s extremely steeped in anti-Soviet sentiment I doubt I'll ever overcome. But I'm at least aware enough to see that.
That said, I can certainly see a near future in which a push for UBI and universal healthcare become popular enough in the US to actually succeed, but calling this "socialism" seems like a ridiculous misnomer. Various "let the government collectively provide some essential things" seems widely accepted by both the left and the right in virtually every "US-like" country in the world except the US. It seems as inevitable as gay marriage that these will eventually happen, but nowhere near plausible that real socialism is ever going to.
There definitely is an increasingly vocal subset of real socialists on the Internet, but certainly not the damn Jacobin. They don't have anywhere the feeling of historical inevitability behind them as slavery abolition, women's suffrage, gay marriage, academic acceptance of atheism, or the successful prosecution of actual rapists and murderers.
Personally, I don't think I want to make any other predictions. Basic trans rights stuff might be the next success story, but I feel a little too deep on the other side of that after effectively giving up on Facebook for good when friends started blackballing me for believing in the scientific validity of the existence of human sexual dimorphism and the persistence of musculo-skeletal changes in response to puberty. Past advocacy movements that succeeded seem to me that they tended to at least have the basic factual accuracy of the scientific part of their arguments in order, and it just took time for cultural values to catch up. This feels very different. And I don't think socialism can have anything particularly scientific on its side at all thanks to the seeming impossibility of rigorous empirical macroeconomics (RCTs on a country don't seem feasible). It's easy to get the kids on your side, but much harder to keep them without any verifiable factual basis. Even I believed in UFOs and astral projection as a teenager. Those never became cool and never will.
There seems to be a possible emerging consensus of "Billionaire-friendly socialism" in the form of Universal Basic Income.
UBI means that billionaires get to live on their luxury sky yachts enjoying the fruits of their robot-operated companies while everybody else gets to live in pods enjoying a healthy textured-protein diet and occasionally spending their surplus money on a new hat for their avatar or something.
UBI or something like that seems like a possible shield for capitalism from socialism, at one point the rising inequality of the last few decades will cause the very very top to own everything, and the rest not being able to buy their products. UBI or similar schemes would be a way to prevent that, like you said.
But would they be successful in spinning this as a kind of socialism? I hope not but I don't know.
Bowie put it nicely... "Fashion, turn to the left / Fashion, turn to the right / Ooh-bop, fashion / We are the goon squad and we're coming to town / Beep-beep... beep-beep."
thinking to the start of george floyd protests, its crazy how rapidly watered down the discourse grew among the protests. A socialist-anarchist trend containing both hyper race and class awareness demanding the dismantling of the state's monopoly on violence faded into institutions pledging support for diversity and removing signs and symbols historically associated with racism. A burgeoning link between this socialist-anarchist movement and 2nd amendment libertarian activists essentially demanding the same thing, dismantling the state, was relentlessly sabotaged by the same institutions that co-opted the narrative into a woke capitalist one of diversity. Mainstream institutions co-opted what they could live with into a new liberal consensus and the countercultural trends that seemed so close to linking up into something quite large and tangible have again shattered. There was always tension between internet socialists over how much focus race should get vs class. Chapo is now uncool for being too annoying and being too class reductionist. Socialist groups equally contemptuous of woke capitalism and yet equally as entranced by race as it have reached a point of self-parody with groups like Black Hammer Org. The 2nd amendment activists have gone back to being primarily associated with nazis, especially after January 6th.
If you want to look for where a new cool trend might arise from; I'd say look for Accelerationism. It's misunderstood by the general populace, has an obscure pantheon of modern philosophers behind the theory, and proports to explain all the malaise found in left wing circles about the total inability to stop capitalism's relentless march and subversion of the left despite the left's string of cultural victories. In other words its a good foundation for trendsetters to spread from.
> When was the last time you heard people argue about "creeps", "nice guys", or "friendzoning"?
Well, technically #meetoo went viral in late 2017, and has a wikipedia page more than twice the length than the one on philosophy, as far as that counts for anything.
And when #metoo came to a screeching halt the moment Joe Biden was credibly accused of rape by Tara Reade. Suddenly those untrustworthy women would lie about anything, especially about being raped by a powerful man.
I'm pretty sure that #metoo had already been fading by mid-2019, and it is still continuing in some form (look at Andrew Cuomo and Scott Stringer, as well as whatever is going on with the French literary establishment at the moment). "Screeching halt" seems to entirely mis-represent what happened. It had a spike in 2017, and a gradual fade since then (though not a fade to zero - just a fade to a normal medium level).
If I were to lamely throw a critique in there, the role of 'events' is a little mysterious (Adams is slightly unclear as to whether 'events' stand out in the public consciousness *because* of the atmosphere created by fashion, or whether it causes the shift in fashion).
Speaking of events (and a huge one, at that), I think the covid situation has helped a newish concept to emerge that has a slippery quality to it (not quite a 'left signal'?) - 'Safety'. Everyone wants to be safe, right? I think you can easily get from 'safety' to all of the major woke talking points and arrive at 'safety socialism' where the government is now responsible for our safety and immediately guilty if unsafe events occur to anyone at any time.
You and I remember the 2016 election runup quite differently. I'd personally have characterized criticism of Trump as something like 80% mysoginy based and 20% racist based.
This is the correct characterization. It is very telling that his election victory was followed by the absolutely massive "Women's March" and not an absolutely massive "Minority March".
Fukuyama is a hilarious character to bring up, because he himself more or less denounced his own work - so the evidence for why he (might) have been wrong seems hard to ignore. The kernel of all these struggles older folks have in trying to understand internet culture and what it means for building future ideal systems can be more or less explained by the exact people you make fun of, the SJWs et al, but most of them are terrible at explaining, and most other people don't want to listen.
What I mean by this is anti-woke people are terrible at abstraction. The tunnel vision is real. Look for the bigger picture of 'cancel culture', i mean the actual scientific roots, you'll find they are economic instability. Instability goes both ways - having too many resources makes you just as unstable as having too few. the coastal elite with too many resources commands the space of discourse, while he with too few resources fills the space with legitimate criticism. But everyone thinks SJWs are just crazy for constantly bringing up class, racism and sexism's relationship to capitalism, etc. Well, what must we do? Not our fault then if you don't listen. The culture marches on.
I think this misses a bit that the transgender topic rose around the time where feminism interest declined, and feminism does have a bit of a actual philosophical conflict with some of the ideas of that movement.
It's worth looking at how tolerant of strange bedfellows these different alliances are.
AFAICT conservatives will happily use terf talking points (not sure if vice versa?) like 'protecting [cis] women'. Once could argue that New Atheism was an alliance between people who dislike Islam and people who dislike Christianity.
There are also accusations that the other sides alliances are hypoctitical, like when socialists talk about 'woke capital' or the right talks about gender roles in Islam.
To be fair, I think all of these conflicts are about deontologists taking over terminology invented for consequentialist reasons. (Every argument about "privilege" seems to have this form.)
This is a good observation and arguments about "privilege" actually DO seem to have this form, I will keep this in mind next time such an argument shows up before me. I will also use this to justify my anger about deontology, so thanks.
When in doubt, look to New York Times management and workers--especially when they conflict. The focus on feminism coincided with Jill Abramson's reign.
Dean Baquet is black but also an old school liberal. 24/7 anti-Trump was a marketing decision disguised as principle.
He has said with Trump out, the new ficus is race. But they also hired a bunch of "nontraditional" ie digital young journalists who are overthrowing classic journalism.
They got James Bennet fired be saying Cotton's op ed was a physical threat to their personal safety. Donald O'Neil was hosed for using the n-word in a discussion about the n-word.
The claim was no white person should ever use the n-word--as demanded by NYT staff. The reality was he was an cranky old boomer up for the Pulitzer for his covid coverage.
This young staff has a bunch of demands about racial hiring/management/assignment quotas. That's the core.
I really don’t think it was a marketing decision. I lived through the Nixon era and Nixon was awful but Trump made Nixon look like a model of civic responsibility by comparison. Please don’t say I only think that because I read the NYT. I do, but I actively sought out other sources during the Trump presidency. If I think that Nixon was awful any word I use to describe my take on Trump is going to sound like hyperbole. Let me just say I don’t like him because he no lacks human decency. That is about as modulated I can be on the topic.
The rise of 4chan is actually an interesting story of its own. A large chunk of the early user base came from another site called somethingawful.com. As you may expect from the name, somethingawful was a place where a mixture of ironic and maybe-not-ironic terrible things could be said for comedy sake. If you're immature and like edgy humor, it was a great place to be. (The site probably exists still, but as a shadow of it's former edge hilarity, as internet culture caught up with it's redeemable qualities and it became a cesspool).
Up until 2008, there was a strong mix of both left and right posters, and the site didn't have much of an ideological slant. It was happy to make fun of the failings of both left and right culture. The Obama/McCain election ended up breaking that down, because a significant number of posters bet that they would accept permanent banning from the site if their candidate lost. Since Obama won, a big chunk of the conservative/right posters were banned. Many/most ended up on 4chan and set the seed for more right-leaning ironic humor, which is what the site became known for.
Somethingawful's forums instantly became more left-leaning and folded into a lot of the left blogging culture.
Yeah, it was a weird in-culture thing to do on the site. There were two levels of banning, one which required you to pay to reactivate your account ($10 to post on the forums!), and then permabanning, which was intended to be permanent. Both sides bet a permaban on winning the election.
So I was wondering, what are possible contenders for the next big trends, once the current ones are at least as thoroughly over as atheism vs religion is?
I feel like two future candidates are intelligence (how relevant is it for life outcomes and should we make it matter less?) and attractiveness (ditto).
I can certainly imagine lots of heated debates. But maybe it's just too much part of the human condition and elephant in the room?
' once your movement controls the New York Times it turns out you can just arrange for things you don't like to disappear.'
Quick sanity check on this: The following people write for the NYT: LePen endorsing, conservative Catholic Ross Douthat (I think his general politeness and personal niceness seems to confuse people about how reactionary he actually is, since people assume reactionaries must be haters), old-style moderate country club Republican Bret Stephens, vaguely right-coded former Repub centrist David Brooks (or is he still a never Trump Repub?), and pro-life Catholic socialist Liz Breunig, who reliably drives the sort of feminist who you don't like nuts more than anyone else on Earth (heretics being more offensive than people who are far group, to put it in the terminology of this blog.) If Social Justice Feminist control is or has been so total, how come all these people have never been purged? Hell, I know Weiss left, and probably isn't that hostile to feminism anyway, but she wrote her positive stuff about the Intellectual Dark Web *for the NYT*.
It is undoubtedly true that the NYT is a liberal paper, where social justice/woke ideas have a lot of influence, and effect how it reports the news. But the idea that there's some kind of total rigid control is wide of the mark I think.
They are willing to give some of the more educated conservatives some column space, but they exert no influence on the paper as a whole. The NYT editorial staff that makes the important decisions is dominated by woke liberals.
Even if that's true, Scott didn't just say that they ran the paper, but that they could disappear anything they don't like automatically. Given that they in fact do publish people like Douthat and Stephens (this are regular columnists too, it's not like they just chip in occasionally) either they *can't* in fact disappear everything they don't like, and what Scott said was just false, or they are actually not as intolerant as all that, and the tone of the attack was a bit misleading.
They wanted to move the Overton window and disappear people who are outside it. They hadn't yet moved it so far that every single person to the right of them is a target for disappearing.
'They wanted to move the Overton window and disappear people who are outside it. They hadn't yet moved it so far that every single person to the right of them is a target for disappearing.'
1) Who are "they" here? Like, I know some imprecision in talking about broad trends is necessary, but right now we are talking about the internal culture of a large organization. So which people within it do you have in mind? Most staff? Most journalists? All the non-conservative journalists? Most of the non-conservative journalists? Most of the female journalists? Just a few people at the very top of the hierarchy.
2) What's your evidence for the claim? I don't think it's an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence, but what specific evidence for it do you have? I've cited very obvious public evidence for my claim, namely that the NYT actually publishes multiple regular opinion columnists who are not particularly woke and whom woke feminists dislike. What's your equivalent evidence about the motives of people at the NYT? (Note: this isn't a rhetorical question and I wouldn't be surprised if you did have good evidence, it's just I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't either.)
3) Are the even any woke feminist regular columnists at the NYT by now? (To be fair, Scott did arguably put their point of dominance in the recent past rather than present.) I feel like there must be some, but I can't think of anyone prominent. A quick check at today's opinions revealed a Jessica Valenti piece, and I assume she counts-though I'm not that familiar with her stuff-but she's apparently a "guest columnist". I check the NYT opinion page quite often, and the only female names that leap to my mind as appearing all the time are Maureen Dowd and Liz Breunig, neither of whom really counts I don't think. Certainly in the case of the latter they don't given her pro-life views. Perhaps Ezra Klein counts, but he's more a of fellow traveller than someone for whom it is their main thing.
Scott actually binds himself into a contradiction in this article without realizing. He claims that, briefly, they ran the NYT and could disappear anything they don't like automatically.
But then, during the exact same time period, he claims that "they" tried to disappear Jordan Peterson before giving up and deciding to treat him as a novel zoo exhibit. Indeed, it was the NYT itself that spearheaded this reluctant acceptance, and effusive praise of Peterson.
If the editorial staff is dominated by woke liberals and they have the power to cancel people then why didn't they?
Either woke liberals never had this power to begin with or woke liberals were never interested in removing Peterson from the discourse entirely. Which do you believe is the case?
Leftist, not liberal. The left hijacked the label liberal, something they have never been. After they ruined and destroyed the meaning they moved on to "progressive". Leftists hate liberals, just ask them.
How do you tell the difference between liberals and leftists? Easy. Liberals believe in freedom of speech. They might disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.
Leftists, on the other hand, freely use censorship as a weapon of first resort. Their own positions are so weak that if people are allowed to point out the many problems, they would collapse.
The word "liberal" has so many different meanings, it's hard to say whether you're right or wrong about this. "Leftist" isn't perfect here either, because most people who define themselves as "left" regard it as an economic position, and many of the woke feminists don't care very much about economics: a fair number supported Clinton over Sanders after all: that's partly the source of their hatred of the Bruenigs.
I think a lot of people in this community have trouble understanding that the NYTimes has this complexity to it - many assumed that there was some institutional decision to attack Scott, when it's more like the big machine didn't notice that it was running over someone's foot.
To be clear, I think you're talking about the original decision to doxx him, right? I would agree with you there. But the decision to then turn the article into a transparently hostile smear was almost certainly a vindictive punishment for him rebelling against the doxxing, and one or more senior people at the paper must have made the call.
Oh, I didn't think it was a "transparently hostile smear". It had problems, sure. And I think it misrepresented some things for sure, in negative ways. But I don't think there was anything that made it a "transparently hostile smear", though it's easy to feel that way when a big instrument of the establishment happens to be pointed at our weird little group.
I went ahead and re-read it, and you might have a point, it didn't seem as smear-y to me this time as when I first read it. I could see the case that this is just "if it bleeds, it leads" journalism, going negative because that makes for the most juicy story. And I also think the journalist probably didn't understand well enough what Scott was about to be able to make a good story out of a more balanced article.
Though to be sure, I only feel tangentially linked to this group, as I don't share most of the core values aside from the intellectual curiosity and pursuit of truth in a cordial environment. But I do admit to having a heavy bias against the NYT.
I mean, the "smear" bit essentially came down to one in passing comment about Murray that was, yes, unfair, but on the other hand, Scott really is somewhat sympathetic to Murray's views on race, and the entirely accurate reporting of the fact that Scott doesn't like the feminist movement and is not shy about it.
I would say that the mainstreaming of online dating was what killed the nerds vs feminism discourse. People who couldn't pick up on social cues got a very clear means of asking women to date them where they knew in advance that the women were willing to be asked.
My own life has improved immeasurably since I stopped giving a shit about any of this. Meaning not policy and ideology or even things like theism, but these meta-discussions around “are atheists/feminists/[any other involved group] annoying/evil/etc?”
This is downstream of technology. I’m glad socialism (and for that matter plenty of things under the tremendously unhelpful “woke” label) are getting more popular, but they’re going to be intellectually and morally hamstrung to the extent that public thinking takes place through the worst medium ever invented, Twitter. I’ve seen so many people of many different ideologies who are thoughtful and kind in a slower medium degenerate into their worst selves when they enter that space. The conversation will improve when people move on from it and no sooner, I’m pretty convinced.
Don't hold your breath. I remember when the Internet was going to save us from the mindless sound-bitism and hyped-up caricaturization of everybody and everything that was broadcast TV.
"I can just ignore them! By the way, I agree with most of what they say anyway" doesn't mean that you are able to ignore them because they don't hurt anyone. It just means that you are able to ignore them because they're hurting someone, but not you.
"who was caught on tape saying he liked to "grab [women] by the pussy"
This is the inaccurate spin that some media put on it, but the actual tape doesn't say that. It's phrased in the imperative as a hyperbole and not as a preference, not as a description of any actual past or future events. I'd rate the claim 3 pinnochios out of 5.
Another one that got lied about a lot was the one where he allegedly claimed "all mexicans are rapists", which deserves about 4 pinnochios since there was no "all" and it was referring to people who leave mexico for the US, not all mexicans.
So what he said was something along the lines of - I won’t put it in quotes because I’m just going off my recollection - When you’re a star you can get away with it. Grab them by the pussy”. So even from my imprecise memory it wasn’t an exact quote. And you are correct he never said all Mexicans are rapists but I never heard anyone make that attribution to him. What strikes me as off kilter is someone pointing out a misquote that is a little off and complaining about the lies told about a man that took lying to entirely new level. You have to admit the Pinocchios earned by 45 were in a class of their own.
Well I guess you don’t have to admit it. But really, what do you think of his relationship with the truth?
He lied a lot, as do all elected politicians. Maybe more than most, but hard to quantify that without massive selection bias about which quotes to fact-check. When I listened to a democratic debates there were at least two blatant lies per minute.
What was remarkable about Trump's lies wasn't so much that he lied all the time, it was how brazen, obvious, and not-slick the lies were, to the point of being pointless and embarrassing, starting with the whole inauguration attendance thing. I have a very low opinion of politicians, but I've never been embarrassed *for* a politician and his lies before or since. For a moment I wondered if perhaps it would turn out better to have a politician who's terrible at lying as opposed to one who's really good at it, except then I watched people who should know better repeatedly cover for and make excuses for all the terrible and obvious lies, and now it seems clear the whole thing has been poison for the Republican Party.
I pretty much agree with this. It put the party in an unwinnable position, because weak men are superweapons. But also the media were over-eager to prove him wrong and fucked up on occasions such as the tale of Russia paying bounties in Afghanistan (which never had any publicly available evidence for it, and now the CIA finally publicly admits to low confidence in it). Glenn Greenwald's substack has some great posts on that.
I remember picking an example from just after the election. There's something I call the "politician's lie" - where you make a claim that is factually true, but most people listening end up believing you said something false.
For instance, someone in Trumpworld (might have been Sean Spicer) defended the claim that Trump had won the election in a landslide by saying he'd won more electoral votes than any Republican since Reagan was President. This is technically true - he won more than the various losing candidates, more than George W Bush did in either of his two famously narrow victories, and Reagan was President on the election day when George HW Bush won in 1988. He got less than Obama or (Bill) Clinton, but they're both Democrats.
Trump then repeated the claim in an interview (you may remember he did lots of interviews in 2017 and then realised they were pointless and stopped). Except he didn't include all the qualifications and just said he'd got more electoral votes than anyone since Reagan.
The statement by maybe-Spicer was a politician's lie. It sounds like it means a lot - Reagan was a long time ago now - but actually doesn't. The Trump version was just a lie. It was the lie that the maybe-Spicer version was meant to make you believe.
Politicians and journalists are accustomed to this, and to looking at a statement like the maybe-Spicer one, spotting the hidden qualifications, and saying "that's true, zero Pinocchios", but also noting that it didn't say as much as it seemed to. Occasionally a journalist would break something down and say "yeah, but that's not saying all that much", but generally, they were entirely content playing this game with the truth,
Trump's lies, though, were straight up, don't bother torturing the words, lies. Sometimes someone would tell him a politician's lie and he couldn't remember all the fancy qualifications and would turn it into a proper lie.
And the fact-checkers hated that. If you included a bunch of technical qualifications, they'd happily mark you as telling the truth. Trump didn't, and I think that professionally offended them. It wasn't that he was lying. It was that he was bad at it.
Remember the Obama line about "if you like your insurance you can keep your insurance"? He'd done that a bunch of times before where he'd said something like "if you have good insurance that you like, you can keep that insurance" - and he defined "good" insurance as "insurance that fulfills the minimum criteria set by the regulations under the Affordable Care Act". So the fact checkers were ruling it "true". And then he slipped up on his words once, and suddenly it was the biggest lie of the year.
Because they're both lies, but fact-checkers see their job as not being about catching when politicians mislead people, but spotting when they tripped up on the words that hide their lies. And Trump didn't bother hiding his lies, which really offended them.
It's a status and cult-of-personality thing. Making people pretend to believe lies demonstrates your superior status, and to the extent that the lies are obvious to third parties it locks in their loyalty because they'll have preemptively burned their credibility with anyone they could defect to. Most neurotypical humans will go along with this, in accordance with their (lack of) status. And yes, basically all politicians do this, in accordance to their status.
Almost all first-world politicians limit themselves to at least semi-plausible lies, because they either don't have or don't believe they have the status to make people sign on to blatantly obvious lies, and because they are trying to build coalitions with people who aren't willing to burn their bridges for the sake of joining. Trump was a serious and worrisome escalation in that regard. Not quite to the "Kim Jong Un never poops" level, but closer than anyone should be comfortable with.
And it worked for him, at least to the extent of enabling him to take control of the Republican party at just the right moment. Fortunately, most Americans weren't willing to go along with it - but we could still use a credible Republican party, and Trump's brand of lying means that's going to take a lot of rebuilding.
As a psychological phenomenon, I think this captures some truth, but mainly with regards to Republican politicians and operatives, not so much the voters. Though I can't tell if you're implying that Trump did this intentionally, which I don't believe is true. The man is basically Mr. Magoo meets Daffy Duck, not Mephistopheles, Prince of Lies.
I'm reminded of that remark about Cold War Communist propaganda from a while back that got passed around a lot (maybe from Dalrymple?), that the ineptitude and obvious falseness of the propaganda was part of the point, which never rung true to me. I think Hanlon's Razor generally applies here, and propaganda works much better if it's actually convincing. But sometimes the facts aren't good and the leadership isn't capable enough to reshape them into something both positive and believable.
So why did Trump generate the popularity he did? It's mostly the Daffy Duck in him: his blustering, arrogant superiority complex made all the alternatives look like Neville Chamberlain. The obvious lies were mostly a side effect of his arrogance (combined with his incuriousness and lack of verbal agility), not the main point.
Ah, yes, the time when he said the far-right should be "condemned totally", which was completely ignored so people could turn sentence fragments into endorsement.
I have argued with people who *still* defended the Narrative even after I told them. One claimed that everyone there was far right, therefore Trump was endorsing the far right, even if by accident, so it still counted.
I think this entire piece reflects a very particular series of internet social bubbles, some of which I myself was barely aware of, but there’s nothing wrong with Scott speaking from personal experience. But I had to look up several references here and I’m about the same age he is.
Apropos our ages, one possible conclusion about why things changed that I think deserved more weight is that the user base in question simply *got older*. We may not have changed personally in any fundamental way, but life experiences and priorities quietly shift as you move from 20 to 30 and beyond. 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. Sexism as we used to experience it maybe didn’t change or fizzle but merely sank below our own personal horizons.
No doubt younger people face their own issues when it comes to attraction and dating, but they grew up with a different internet and different rules IRL. How much of a ~40 year old’s experiences online or off still apply to them at all is speculative. Neither of us is going to engage the way people did in 2010, and I suspect for the older people whatever younger folks are dealing with is partially unintelligible, while the old issues we dealt with have largely become out-of-sight, out-of-mind.
I think there's an elephant in the room here: sex versus gender. Feminism became uncool when transgender started to become cool, because at least the radfem side kept pointing out that women had traditionally been oppressed on the basis of sex and no-one ever asked them how they identified. Michfest and bathroom bills fit into this somewhere, I'm sure. I get the impression that apart from race, people are still talking about trans issues a lot online? It seems that nowadays, being a feminist but not publicly declaring how trans-inclusive your feminism is makes you almost as unwelcome as an anti-feminist, at least in universities.
A big difference in the current situation is how wokeness has captured the educational establishments all the way down to elementary schools in many places. How children will carry this into their lives--or resist it as teenagers--will decide the direction of future electorates.
Scott, basically everything you wrote about the "feminist era" drips with contempt for all feminist concerns everywhere. You don't have to like Amanda Marcotte to acknowledge that a lot of women were targeted for a massive wave of harassment and abuse during GamerGate. You don't have to forgive Gawker to understand the concept of privilege, or the value of self-care. I had to stop reading after that section; it demonstrates far too clearly that your analysis in this post is based on your personal history and emotional affinity and haven't done the work to ground it out empirically.
Even according to Anti-GG narrative, there were about three women significantly "targeted". Quinn, Wu, and Sarkeesian. I saw more women claiming to be scared by the threat than evidence of actual harassment. From the discussions I saw, GG was targeting game and mainstream journalists, most of whom were men.
I've read the FBI also cleared Gamergate. Oh, and the cops said the death threat Sarkeesian cancelled a talk over wasn't credible, but she self-martyred anyway.
My company wants us to print out a Woke slogan, take a selfie with it, and post it to our internal social media account. There is a preprinted "I pledge to: " section and room to write.
I briefly considered writing "Judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin" but quickly decided I would get canceled as racist.
So that's the kind of "we need volunteers to do this - you, you and you, you've volunteered" attitude in your workplace? I suppose if it is "we'd love if you did this, but it's all up to you if you want to or not (but if you don't, we'll ask questions as to why you hate niceness and goodness and puppies and apple pie)" kind of request, the least worst thing is to find the most anodyne "I pledge to smile at people" kind of blah you can get away with that fits with the Wokeness and do that. "I pledge to fight hate!", that sort of vague platitude. No need to be too explicit about what kind of hate or haters.
Thanks for the overview of internet culture. As someone who gets exposed to a lot of discourse nowadays about how wokeism is bad and it's going to take over our institutions forever, I appreciate the outside view (as both internet atheism and internet feminism both kind-of-died in their own turns).
Also internet culture history is a *very* under-explored area (it doesn't even have a section in Wikipedia that gives an overview). I'm a Wikipedia contributor, so if someone can point out some less-blatantly-COI-y sources that also go over this I'll probably write about it somewhere there.
I had the inside view of this as a racially-aware influencer that peaked in high 4-figure twitter followers before being banned. (they didn't specify any particular post, so I guess it was that the entire enterprise of promoting hatefacts was misconstrued as promoting hatred.)
Originally circa 2015 the alt-right was a much broader label with a few genuinely bad apples using it (1% nazi larpers and klantards) and then it got Worst Argument In The Worlded by HC and the media in similar fashion to New Atheists talking about Westboro Baptist Church a lot. (Richard Spencer was unheard of among us until after corporate media chose him to be the face of the movement). So then there was a cycle of more moderate types dropping the label until the stigmatization became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the movement fizzled. Its former inhabitants tried various other labels to distance itself from spencer types, but none of them really stuck.
It was also unfortunate that we (insert label for loose, diverse movement that no longer has a name) had such poor political representation in Trump. It put us in the position of needing to defend the indefensible (ala Weak Men are Superweapons), while getting almost nothing from Trump in terms of substantive immigration policy. The system is still dispossessing us of our ancestral homeland as fast as ever. Trumpism was also premature. We had a lot of work to do in changing minds before reaching for real political representation that would put a target on our backs and lead to increased censorship and repression of us. False racial blank-slatism has a bigger moat than false religion because it stigmatizes differences of opinion more than religion has any time in the last couple of centuries. (Which makes it even more epistemically unvirtuous than religion, I suppose, since only evidence, and not social pressure, is a valid reason to update). Trump just made the moat deeper.
Anyway, the whole OP describing all the ways people chose their beliefs for reasons of social context and social signaling rather than evidence is extremely depressing and should give me a lower prior on the likelihood that the general trend of society is towards truth, except in hard sciences.
I agree there were communities like that, but I'm skeptical of the "alt-right was less bad before the white supremacists took it over" perspective because Richard Spencer invented the term alt-right. There were probably some communities that were borderline politically-incorrect but otherwise okay until the white supremacists took them over, but given the Spencer connection I think it makes more sense to think of the alt-right as always being white supremacists, then gradually expanding its connotation to include other people.
I propose a skewed inverted U, where usage of 'alt-right' started narrowly in 2008, broadened a lot sometime between 2008-2016, and then narrowed rapidly after mid-2017.
Inventing a term in 2008 doesn't make him a central example of the category in 2016 (decades later in internet time). That would seem similar to defining sunni vs. shia as a disagreement over the rightful caliph (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/). Valorie Solanas probably invented terms that feminists still use today, which, if the media were feeling uncharitable towards feminists, they could use to tar feminists by association to the S.C.U.M Manifesto and its plan to exterminate all men. Similarly, one could uncharitably define the democratic party by its first president Andrew Jackson and his trail of tears. SPLC does exactly this sort of thing in relation to any rightwing rallying flags they can find dirt on.
There were quite a lot of edgy young people with frog avatars on twitter in 2016, who would have described themselves as alt-right, but who knew little to nothing about Richard Spencer and were not ideologically adjacent to him and his weird neo-imperialism. They opposed all 21st century US wars, which probably makes them about as far from RS as it is possible to be on foreign policy. As for domestic policy, the median would have favored the status quo, but with better enforcement of the existing immigration laws and a large reduction in legal immigration from the third world and toning down feminism a bit. Some would have supported incentives for repatriation of troublesome minorities like the somalis in minnesota. Very few advocated expulsions and none advocated genocide.
Then and now Richard Spencer's weird views are an outlier among the "far-right". I can't name a single other person who wants to resurrect European empires. In toxoplasma of rage style, his outrageousness got him more air time than the relatively anodyne, more reasonable, more popular, better-educated and longer-established spokesmen like Jared Taylor or John Derbyshire. Jared Taylor is the Vegan Outreach to Richard Spencer's PETA.
I strongly suspect that Alex Jones' audience was built up in a similar Toxoplasma fashion, by corporate media repeatedly talking about the latest outrageous thing he did. I knew a lot of conservatives but only one of them ever mentioned Alex Jones before he became the media's favorite pinata and favorite weak-man-superweapon to use against antiestablishment conservatives. I checked Socialblade for his old Youtube Channel and it shows a huge spike (2-3x the normal monthly) of subscribers in Nov-Dec 2016 when the media started talking about fake news all the time, so that seems to support my theory.
The situation in Germany might add an interesting data point to your piece. Fashions (cloths and otherwise) from the US arrive here with a lag. Still, the culture war is raging, though on a lower level and with slightly different topics. On this background Sarah Wagenknecht, a famous far- left politician from the party “Die Linke” (The Left”, with positions somewhere between socialism and Marxism) published a controversial book. Its main thesis: The identity politics of the left (small letter), is self- indulgent. A group of middle class people are virtue signaling, with the poor being left out in the cold.
Since Wagenknecht is a Marxist (or at least strongly influenced by Marxist ideas) this does not appear too surprising on the surface. Her party however has been on its way into the trenches of identity politics and is now debating this critique from the left.
This is not a change in the internet level of discourse, but in the direction you are talking about. Can other Germans with better inside into the debate tell me what they think? Do you think we are seeing the high watermark of SJWs and are returning to a more class based discourse?
I think you're missing the class angle: for something to go 'corporate' it needs to not be dangerous to the interests of the people running the corporations. Feminism, anti-racism, LGBT activism, can all be harnessed in such a way that the rich and powerful can appear as progressive as they like. This simply isn't true of socialism, which is fundamentally pitted against the interests of capitalists.
I've been various shades of socialist/social-democratic since the start of the period you're talking about and the way I see it there's always been a struggle between those on 'the left' who just want to go on Pride Parades, wear tattoos, and complain about men, and those who care more about how the means of production are controlled and how wealth is distributed.
I think you underestimate the creativity of corporations.
For example, feminists complain that women make less money than men, and one of the reasons is that men are more likely to ask for a salary raise. So there was one corporation (I forgot its name) that fought against sexism by adopting a company policy that NO employee is allowed to ask for a raise, thereby making genders more equal. Obviously self-serving, but was celebrated in media.
Similarly, a corporation could embrace the idea of "socialism" and translate it as paying its employees less. You could simply go with "to each according to their needs" and let HR determine the needs. :) Alternatively, you could decide that everyone gets the same salary, which just happens to be lower than the median employee was making before. (The top management would also get the same "equal salary", and that would be celebrated in media, but in addition they would also get bonuses or whatever, so their total compensation would actually remain the same.) And people objecting openly against this interpretation of "socialism" would get the same treatment Damore got when he proposed how to make the Google workplace more friendly to women.
The internet has diminished my language parser abilities such that Parts IV and V wound up confusing me because of the nested discussion of irony... Suddenly, I can't figure out Scott's true intentions. Why does he want tribal-intellectual cycle to speed up?
I thought that the next big contender should be the climate change awareness, but google trends show it's peak popularity was somewhere way back in the 2000's. With all the chaotic weather and wildfires all around the world lately, I expected much higher popularity. What am I missing? Is this some kind of collective denial?
Perhaps it is not identity-driven enough. If this is about fashion and being one of the cool people, then "I am an Atheist", "I am a Feminist", "I am an Anti-Racist", are strong statements about personal identity. "I am an Environmentalist" could be, except there's nobody on the other side. Many are happy to say "I am a Christian", "I am an MRA", "I am a Race Realist"... whereas few people will say "I am Pro-Global Warming" (Although there is at least one famous regular on this site who I believe is.)
I think a more likely candidate is "I am a Vegetarian" because there's plenty of people to take the other identity-side of that.
Your focus is on the shift from feminism to anti racism here, but I think you miss a rather obvious drift of online feminism: the gender discourse has almost entirely been consumed by the transgender discourse. I’d really like to see the detailed comparison (rather than just the tiny plots starting in 1970) over the last 20 years of “feminism” and “gay rights” to various trans terms. In college in the mid Oughts, trans issues were barely on the radar, and now they dominate discussions.
The gays won the gay marriage wars and then transgender rights became the next frontier, pulling in interest (and not a small dose of toxoplasma) from both gender discussions and sexuality discussions. Plenty of ground for spicy debate with both conservatives and TERFs to fuel the fire.
The geeky internet feminists didn’t disappear, they just declared themselves non-binary.
I've been heavily invested in posting on 4chan for a bit over ten years now, and I think I can answer the question of how it became legitimately racist instead of ironically racist. The first answer is that it's never been wholly ironic. Stormfront posters have pretty much always been around, and /pol/ was deleted for a time for being too racist, long before 2016.
But beyond that, it did seem to pick up in 2016, and I think it's simply because 4chan is the contrarian site to whatever the mainstream opinion is in these culture wars. It's a town that takes in witches, regardless of what the modern definition of witch is. It was the first place I saw online atheists referred to as Fedoras. It's where Gamergate really began, before getting booted off to go start their own imageboard. And when the cultural dialogue started shifting towards race, it's where people began furiously and sincerely posting FBI crime statistics. (Side note, it's also, I believe, the origin of Chad and Virgin replacing alpha and beta).
This was particularly exacerbated on /pol/ because Trump was such an amusing candidate that he swiftly became the favorite in the debate watching threads, and once they had latched on to him as theirs, it was inevitable that the discourse would shift to whatever he was most heavily criticized for, which was, as you pointed out, race.
From what I've seen, though, race as a focal point is losing its power right now. /pol/ will undoubtedly continue to be racist, but it really was racist before. Every board has its particular brand of witch, but what is distressing is when they spread beyond their natural borders. Right now, that fight is about the trans culture war. I think if I've learned anything over the last decade, it's that culture is always changing, and what you are angry about today is not what you will be angry about in five years. But regardless, you will probably be angry.
Regarding the greater volume of Google Search queries for "is Donald Trump racist" than "is Donald Trump sexist". I think the likely answer is that the search volume doesn't reflect the importance of the question, rather it reflects the mismatch in how obvious the answer was.
As Scott points out, there was a lot of evidence that Donald Trump was sexist, so people didn't feel the need to Google it. On the other hand, his attitudes on race were more ambiguous, leading to more Google searches.
"We think [people of African ancestry]...are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States."
--- Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Roger B. Taney
I think the "grab 'em by the pussy" tapes are much more salacious and legible to the average American than court orders, so I think Americans had much more explicit evidence about his sexism than his racism. Supporting evidence: there was a huge Women's March organised during his inauguration, not a huge racial identity march. People seemed much more concerned about his sexism than his racism.
(I'm just talking about his bigotries _as perceived by the people who get their political opinions from Google Search_, not his actual bigotries)
The obvious next cycle of screaming internet arguments is trans rights. You have the liberal pro-trans version, the conservative anti-trans version, the socialist anti-SJW (ie class is more important) version and, as an extra bonus complication, the feminist "terf" version (ie, trans women should not be treated as women).
The attack on Caitlyn Jenner - a trans woman - for not being sufficiently pro-trans (because she says that trans women shouldn't be allowed to compete in womens' sports) is a sign that this is getting to the "burning people for saying one word out of line" stage.
Just to add: my read of the evidence is that trans women who have had levels of testosterone and estrogen typical of cis women for an extended period of time do not have advantages in sport over women. But I can certainly see how a trans woman who was elite in (male) sports before she transitioned would believe otherwise.
Every trans woman I know who has transitioned after puberty has commented on the very noticeable drop in hand-grip strength and lifting ability (ie upper body strength) within a few months of starting on HRT. There's no serious doubt that trans women are much more like (cis) women than men on muscle-mass and cardiovascular fitness and endurance. Studies on the general population show that you can't tell trans women from cis women by doing fitness tests; you get the same distribution.
The open question from research is whether a trans woman who was already in a high-level exercise regimen before transitioning can retain more muscle mass (in particular) than a cis woman (or indeed the same trans woman, if she lost it) could build. Getting an adequate sample for this (which would require getting considerable pre-transition data and then continuing the study over a number of years) seems like a difficult and expensive proposition.
In addition, there's the base fact that trans women have been allowed into the Olympics since 2005 and none of them have ever competed because they all failed to qualify. There are two or three who are trying to qualify this year and I think one has achieved the required standards and may go to Tokyo. This does rather suggest that any problem is theoretical rather than practical, which means that taking some time to study it should be harmless enough.
"Getting an adequate sample for this (which would require getting considerable pre-transition data and then continuing the study over a number of years) seems like a difficult and expensive proposition."
You may be able to get that data in future; there's currently a minor kerfuffle over a New Zealand trans female weightlifter named Laurel Hubbard https://www.bbc.com/sport/weightlifting/57013419
I liked this as a description of how external criticism of cruel excess and narrow focus eventually pushes a movement over the relevance cliff, but it ignored the simultaneous internal pull. For the average person on the inside, the cycle looks like a long need that is suddenly met and then sated - not materially, but expressively and intellectually, which is pretty much all internet culture can do for most people.
I deeply appreciated that (white, heh) feminist wave. Me Too felt like a miracle. Explaining “mansplaining” to my boomer mother was delightful, because she was so delighted to find a word for those little social erosions and realize they are a shared experience. But there are a limited number of Solnit ideas (or Hitchens or Kendi) that can be generated in a short time to speak that kind of truth to a large number of people, and after we joyfully squawked over them together and beat them over the heads of our enemies-in-this, we moved on. It’s not that we lost interest or won more than a couple bones. All the pain and rage and real-world problems are still grinding on in real-world negotiations. But the moment on the internet - from the inside - was mass shock-of-recognition and catharsis.
"So an alternate prediction is to expect the world of the 1970s. A repressive orthodoxy has taken over the government, the media, and big business, and set itself up as the arbiter of morality, able to blacklist anyone who disagrees."
An obstacle to that scenario is that wokeness is a revolutionary, hate-based movement. It can't survive without hate, and it can't survive without some revolutionary action. Its situation today is like that of the Nazis in 1933. They purged Jews from government, universities, & schools; undermined the legal system by making it clear that "the law is what is good for Germany" rather than what the books say; and turned the educational system into indoctrination. Analogs of all 3 of these things are happening in America today.
But what to do after that? Say "The Jews are gone; we're done here"? They had to start a war in order to hold the hate together.
Key parts of the Nazis' success included choosing a weak scapegoat, and recruiting among the police and Army. The woke have declared that the police and the military are their enemies, and chose as scapegoats half of America. So their situation is more like that of the French Revolutionaries, who declared the army and the Church their enemies, and by attacking the Church, made most of the peasantry their enemies. They had a civil war that was basically urban vs. rural, called the Vendee (seldom mentioned now), compared to which the Terror was trivial and humane. The urbanites won because they'd taken over the army by then, which, though greatly outnumbered, was MUCH better at war than unarmed peasants were.
Then they had to have a war against the rest of Europe to distract the French from how they'd screwed up the economy while they were totally focused on ideology and power struggles among themselves.
Can the woke keep power without starting an urban/rural civil war? To deliver on immigration, they'd have to open our southern border. This would destabilize the border states and likely lead them to mobilize their National Guard to close the border, in open defiance of the federal government's orders. To deliver on their education programs (and achieve successful herd immunity to wrongthink), they risk outraging parents of all parties and races (not much about Native Americans, Hispanics, or Asians in the 1619 project!), and may need to outlaw home schooling and private schools. To deliver on the Green New Deal, they'll have to tax rural workers to pay for urban public transit systems. (Also, wreck the economy.) To deliver on college tuition, they'll need to tax rural workers in order to widen the pay gap and the power gap between urban and rural areas. To prevent the Supreme Court from finding their various racist programs in violation of the Civil Rights Amendment, they'll have to pack the Supreme Court. To deliver on the abolition of gender, they'll have to destroy rural culture entirely.
To deliver on gun control, they'll have to ban military-style rifles--and that's a red line that can't be crossed without starting a war. Maybe 5 million Americans own AR-15s, most of them rural. Maybe a quarter of them will give them up peacefully. The NRA-ish line that gun control is a leftist plot to make the population helpless against a leftist takeover was a wacky conspiracy theory 6 years ago, but has since become an obvious reality.
(And who buys a $1000+ rifle? People who have invested years in training with its big brother, the M-16, in the US military.)
How many of the woke even want to avoid civil war? Certainly not all of them. I myself don't even know anymore whether I'm more afraid of having a civil war, or of not having one.
I have a slightly different perspective on the death of New Atheism. For a bit of background, I was heavily involved in the religious debate sphere online for maybe 10 years, only "retiring" last year. A lot of this was on reddit, some also on discord and youtube and so on.
Over the years, I've definitely seen a lot of people transition out of that debate to the debate on "social justice", more around race and economics than gender. But that probably only accounts for half of the New Atheists which I've seen transition. The others have gone a different direction: they moved from New Atheism to "old" Atheism.
Broadly, among philosophers of religion, New Atheism is not looked upon favourably. Dawkins and Hitchens and so on are great at scoring rhetorical points, but their arguments shallow. It doesn't take a very intelligent Christian to dismantle New Atheist arguments. Of course, the New Atheists weren't targeting intelligent Christianity, they were targeting what they saw as dangerous fundamentalism, which isn't very intellectual. But the eager teenager wading into online debate forums found themselves unequipped to deal with Christian responses to New Atheist arguments.
So these people over time have become more philosophically literate. They've abandoned Dawkins and Hitchens for more careful and rigorous defenders of atheism, like Graham Oppy or Alex Malpass. These guys still make arguments against religion, but they are sophisticated and thoughtful arguments, which intelligent Christians actually have to respond to.
Anecdotally, half of the people I've seen cease being New Atheists have become interested in a more sophisticated and philosophical atheism, which means moving out of the shallow rhetoric of New Atheism. I've also seen a handful convert, but that isn't the majority.
Where can I find the arguments that intelligent Christians would use to refute New Athiest talking points? I've searched and searched but almost all Christian web content is intended for other Christians, which is likely another indirect result of that particular culture war more or less ending.
It's definitely a large body of work although I can't really remember specific arguments. It's mostly "well, you can't prove God DOESN'T exist", the weirdness of Christianity's origins, and an appeal to morality and intuition.
Ultimately, I feel it comes down to whether or not you want to believe in God and not to the evidence on either side since that's pretty lacking.
Two examples relating specifically to Dawkins would be McGrath's The Dawkins Delusion and Hart's Atheist Delusions. You can see where they got the idea for those names!
If there's a specific argument that the New Atheists make that you are interested in responses to, I can recommend some works. Let me know what it is!
Well, honestly I was kind of hoping for a big, all-encompassing, well-written book intended to convert atheists to believers. You'd think something like that would be easy to find, but even after asking several religious friends, I've not had any luck.
As for specific arguments, I suppose the glaring lack of any moral order to the world would be one I would like to see respond to in clear terms. This seems by far the biggest hurdle for emotionally gratifying belief in a personal god; that so many children starve, and good people die in misery, and evil people flourish seems to render even an existent god completely irrelevant in terms of any individual's understanding of and relationship to the world. Basically, our Universe's lack of a discernible and in any way just moral order renders the distinction between a godded world and a godless world meaningless.
I don't know why you think something like that would be easy to find. These are extremely large and complex topics, which have been discussed by very intelligent people for thousands of years. It's not likely that there would be a simple handbook for creating theists out of atheists. But note that what you are asking for here is a positive argument for the truth of theism, whereas (I thought) what you originally were interested in was a refutation of New Atheism. A refutation of New Atheism doesn't have to conclude that theism is true, only that the New Atheist arguments fail. Plenty of "regular" atheists also think that the New Atheist arguments fail.
In your second paragraph, you are broadly talking about a problem of evil. The most plausible form of the problem of evil these days is the evidential problem of evil, it's pretty much agreed by everyone that Plantinga conclusively refuted the logical problem of evil decades ago.
There are many ways that Christians respond to problems of evil. These can be divided into two camps: theodicies, and (poorly named) skeptical theism. A theodicy is an attempt to explain why God would permit such suffering, and try to give a positive reason. Skeptical theism is an approach of questioning why we would expect to know such reasons if they did exist, and skeptical theist arguments block the inference from "I don't see reasons" to "There are no reasons".
Some examples of theodicies are libertarian free will, soul-building, or natural law arguments. There are dozens of books written on each of these theodicies, from both believers and atheists. Richard Swinburne is probably the canonical example of an author engaging in theodicy, but if this is specifically what you are interested in I am happy to give some more recommended reading.
Skeptical theism is in my opinion more likely to be successful. Perrine and Wykstra have written numerous joint papers on the topic which are very accessible, and so has Daniel Howard-Snyder. Atheist Paul Draper has made some good responses to them, so has the Christian Trent Dougherty. This discussion is very broad and technical, and if this is specifically what you are interested in, I am again happy to give some recommended reading.
Speaking from the point of view of a dyed in the wool empiricist, intelligent design is the worst argument for the existence of God I've ever heard, truly laughable, and nobody defending Christian faith seriously should use it.
The *best* argument is more or less an extension of the faith Carl Sagan had in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence: in a Universe as large as ours[1] it would be incredible if we were the *only* intelligent species to have ever arisen, or indeed (if you believe evolution sufficient to produce men from protozoa, which I do) were this planet and this era the *only* planet anywhere since the Big Bang on which life itself got started. That's asking a lot from chance.
So that's what makes Carl Sagan believe there absolutely must be intelligent extraterrestials, somewhere. But if we have intelligent ETs, what limit can there be on *how* intelligent and sophisticated they are in a practically infinite universe? Unless there is some fundamental physical law limitation on intelligence (like what?) then it is again asking a lot of chance for H. sapiens to be *the* smartest and most capable species that has ever arisen. Much more plausible would be that we are among the dumbest and least capable, since our distance from dogs and planaria is fairly modest and measureable -- that is, there's an almost infinity of possibility to our upside, while very modest room downside.
So the idea that there could exist somewhere in a staggeringly huge universe beings with intelligence and capability as far beyond ours as ours are beyond those of a housefly or segmented worm doesn't seem especially crazy. Indeed, you'd need to make a lot of special pleading about unknown limitations of physics (or the efficiency of evolution, including chemical evolution) to make the case that the best the universe can do is, say, Mr. Spock compared to we billions of Dr. McCoys. a species with an IQ maybe 25% higher than ours.
But beings super duper far ahead of us could easily seem, and pretty much functionally be, God as far as we're concerned. They would have unfathomable motives and concerns, would find us utterly transparent and predictable, and could presumably start life on Earth as easily as we synthesize amino acids in chem lab.
So that gets you God the Creator. (He, or They, aren't *mathematically* omnipotent, or omniscient, but they certainly can be for any practical human purpose. Only philosophers would carp that beings that can create life or remodel planets at will, live for trillions of years, or cause any number of things we find miraculous *aren't* God because, by gum, they can't contravene natural law or create a stone so heavy they can't lift it.)
Unfortunately, this does zip to get you the personal God, or the existence of souls, still less the immortality of souls and God's concern for them, moral or otherwise. I have never heard an effective logical argument for those things.
However, a soul might be defined as something ineffable, again something too far beyond our ken to be susceptible of proof to our minds -- perhaps the evidence would be obvious ("Just look around you! Geez! Dumb humans!") if we were smart enough, in the same way *we* notice patterns in the natural world that are completely incomprehensible to a gerbil. You can point to a hawk sitting patiently on pole and yell at the gerbil, and it will still wander out and get eaten. Even if you spoke gerbil it wouldn't help, the gerbil can't comprehend the pattern.
That is, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But what *could* be evidence of existence? The only thing that comes to mind is intuition. It is the case that sometimes intuition is correct, for reasons we cannot decipher. Is this blind chance or the rare accidental comprehension of patterns that are too subtle for us to detect normally? (I adduce the description of the Bene Gesserit reading of physical "micro-signals" and minutiae in Frank Herbert's "Dune" series, in which highly-trained women could "read" human thoughts and emotions in tiny body motions, movements, et cetera, so well that people thought they could read minds -- nobody else could see the patterns they had trained themselves to see. This is what I mean by the possible perception of patterns that we are normally too dumb to see.)
So if someone were to claim: I had an insight, a flash intuition, I thought there was this...pattern to my existence which demonstrated to me incontrovertibly that I have a soul, and it's immortal -- well, I don't have a great argument to say that's flatly impossible, because it's clearly not, and yet it can't be subjected to repetition and confirmation, so....there's nothing on which empiricism can bite down on, from that point of view, it's undecideable. But "undecideable" is a long way from "wrong." So there's that, for what it's worth.
And of course if both souls exist, and Creators exist, there's no obvious reason why they might not be aware of ours (souls that is) and take some interest in them. Why not? We have pets. Maybe They would even make some arrangement for our souls after death, in the way we might arrange to retire our pet horses to nice green fields out of mild kindness.
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[1] The observable universe is ~10^23 stars x 15 billion years, but if you believe in inflation the entire universe descended from the Big Bang is some 10^80 times bigger.
"The woke stranglehold on corporations, governments, and now the CIA is stronger than ever."
I'll believe that the CIA is genuinely "woke" when they stop funding a battalion of Ukrainian Neo-Nazis that uses SS runes in its insignia and was founded by a man who is on record saying that he believes that it is the destiny of the Ukrainian people to "lead the white races of the world in a final crusade for their survival against the Semite-led Untermenschen." https://therealnews.com/the-us-is-arming-and-assisting-neo-nazis-in-ukraine-while-congress-debates-prohibition Just to name the most obvious bit of incongruity between the CIA's work and "wokeness."
Similarly, I'll believe that all of those big corporations have been taken over by "woke infiltrators" when they start cutting Uyghur slave labor camps out of their production chains, or otherwise taking actions that actually significantly impact their bottom line. It's weird how this supposedly radical ideology still allows the Powers That Be to do what they already wanted to do anyway, isn't it?
As for the argument that anti-racism stuck around because it "captured mainstream institutions," that would necessarily mean that previous waves failed to do the same, but didn't we see a lot of the exact same things happening with pop feminism being supported by mainstream institutions only a couple of years ago? The "Fearless Girl" statue put up by a large Wall Street firm was an especially cringeworthy example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fearless_Girl), and as late as 2018 Jordan Peterson seemed to get into a lot mroe arguments about feminism, on mainstream shows and talking with mainstream news people, than he did about anything related to race. But all of that previous institutional backing failed to stop this movement from receding with astonishing speed, to the point that Planned Parenthood recently put out a publci apology for being "a Karen." Seriously. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/17/opinion/planned-parenthood-margaret-sanger.html
Looking at the article in general, I'm very disappointed in the failure to mention Occupy Wall Street, or notice that the Google Trends graphs of feminism and racism both start trending up right around when OWS was starting to get momentum, or mention the opportunistic use of identity politics against the Sanders campaign in both the 2016 and 2020 primaries. At this point, I think the theory that at least some of this stuff has been a divide-and-conquer attempt by...someone or someones with power should at least be mentioned, if only to attempt to rebut it.
Other very conspicuous omissions include the wholesale adoption of anti-"Cancel Culture" rhetoric by Republican politicians and conservative media, the Republican anti-"Critical Race Theory" campaign that is resulting in legislation getting passed by state legislators as we speak, and in general that fact that what used to be primarily online culture wars are very much going mainstream. This really feels like an unprecedented development to me, as even during the most hysterical parts of the Trump years the online culture stuff was at most a sideshow while the main attention was on longstanding mainstream political issues such as immigration and trade policy.
I'm also really skeptical of the idea that New Atheism even belongs in the same category as the other two. Maybe it was really big in your corner of the internet, but my impression is that even back during the Aughts a lot of people online just found the debate annoying and not worth paying attention to, which is precisely why so many forums segregated that topic off into its own section. And the broader normie public didn't notice it much to begin with, with the possible exception of that time that Sam Harris got in an argument with Ben Affleck on Bill Maher.
Which brings up another point: the disappearance of Islam and its compatibility with the West and so on and so forth as a topic in the culture wars in the last few years, which was if anything even more sudden and complete than the fading away of 2010s pop feminism. Look at the Twitter feed of anyone who was a high profile "critic of Islam" in 2015 and 2016, and it seems like there's a better-than-even chance that they'll mostly be talking about wokeness nowadays (admittedly at the time of this writing on May 11, 2021, you may have to scroll down a bit to before the recent events in Israel/Palestine). I would argue that this is especially important because some major events in the ongoing early 2020s online culture wars, such as the defection of Glenn Greenwald to the "anti-woke" side, are hard to imagine happening if that shift hadn't taken place.
I could go on, but I think I've made my point: it feels like this essay either overlooks or leaves out out a lot of important stuff, so I'm less inclined to put any stock in its analysis and conclusions.
It always amuses me greatly that the Fearless Girl statue got shifted to another location after its fifteen minutes of fame was up, while the Charging Bull still charges to this day.
If I was the sort of modern feminist whose hopes depended on Grrl Power of the statue type, I think I'd be rather crushed that even having Elizabeth Warren having her photo took with the Girl wasn't enough to make it in any way relevant or meaningful as anything other than a PR stunt, but since I'm half an old-fashioned feminism sort, I'm not 😀
Lenny Bruce had a line, "Marijuana will be legal someday, because the many law students who now smoke pot will one day be Congressmen."
That was either incredibly insightful and correct or incredibly naive and wrong and years later I have no idea which.
I think it comes down to trendline vs. timing.
There are a lot of trends where it's easy to solve for the equilibrium, but when you really zoom in it's all chaotic and squiggly. Arbitrary precision looks random.
Someone made a comment in another thread about how some of the best returns from the 20th century weren't from tech companies, but from dying industries with dividends, like cigarettes, that everyone had already divested from. They died slower than anyone expected, so they generated massive returns if you were the last to jump ship.
Timing recessions, the death of legacy industries, some political and geopolitical trends. Even though you know they're coming, it's hard to say when, or pinpoint the catalyst.
Re: "I think [4chan] irony-ed themselves so hard that they accidentally ended up as Nazis."
I think this is correct; it's always been my stance on the issue. When I first heard the term "alt-right", ie the "racist political movement from 4chan", I insisted that it was not a real thing, and everybody saying so was just confused by mainstream media that had, and *always* had, completely misunderstood 4chan irony.
But, in line with previous events in 4chan's history, the joke got taken to be truth, and either people came in and cynically used the irony as a springboard for real hate, or amoral types who just want to wallow in darkness and destruction pretended to be joking but used the reality of it for their own amusement (these people also seem to be common in online kink discussion areas; replace the concept of "humorous irony" with "kink"), or outsiders who just didn't know there was ever irony flooded in and replaced the people who had been joking.
That kind of dynamic, I think, also happened with "Anonymous", the supposed "hacker group" that was really just a 4chan in-joke until the media thought it was a real thing. I don't know if 4chan ever became a legitimate hangout for real blackhat security wizards, but it sure did gain that reputation among laypeople on the internet.
I read a lot of this asking myself if you were living on a different Internet than me… I haven’t really seen anything fade… Some things may be louder but nothing has faded. I sort of thought maybe some elaborate troll was coming at the end. I think your main point at the end about institutionalization is good, but the idea that anything has tamped down he is a little ridiculous to me.
It’s also a bit tin-eared to think the DSAs are especially culturally different. They snipe a little and vote a bit differently but the differences are mild. The venn diagram has huge overlap.
One thing you should keep in mind is Google Trends results are all relative. So if something else became much louder that doesn’t mean the things that look smaller aren’t now just as loud as they were.
'Very Online' would be my candidate for the next fault-line. We're long past the point where existing online is any positive status marker, and the preachily disconnected are growing in number.
On the other hand, a movement of disconnected people already contains the seeds of its own demise, so maybe they won't get anywhere.
I'm also intrigued by 'trad wife', as carving out conservative territory while maintaining some shielding from feminism
One peril of getting too meta is you miss object level insights.
An insight of feminism is that if you’re organization doesn’t randomly exclude half the qualified candidates you get better candidates and a stronger organization.
An insight of new socialism is that most things are controlled by huge piles of money and that things which challenge this control are actively and competently opposed by smart highly paid people working for giant piles of money.
The object level of new socialism predicts its meta level. It says that new feminism can go mainstream because the giant piles of money just hire consultants to give trainings on feminism and the consultants work at firms owned by the giant piles of money.
It says new race consciousness can go mainstream for the exact same reason.
But it predicts that socialism will face more resistance because the consequences of socialism are not hiring a few consultants from a firm you have a stake in; the consequences of socialism are becoming a slightly less giant pile of money. And that is absolutely unacceptable.
The author so confidently and casually pushing the "The racism on 4chan was originally ironic!" myth and the notion that the geneses of the alt-right and anti-SJW movements were completely separate, among many other inaccuracies that are blatant to anyone personally familiar with the history involved (including a generally but less describably distorted sense of much of the timeline/culture), is definitely giving me a Gell-Man amnesia vibe about everything he's ever written.
This post is definitely the perspective of someone who hasn't spent much time genuinely interacting with the "seedy underbelly" (that is, even the part of it as tame as 4chan) of the Web and obviously has mostly spent the last 10 years in what might be called the "Quokkaverse", which their prior blog was of course the center of for many years. As such they have missed many nuances.
Can you share your experience about racism on 4chan? The "first you fake it, than you make it" theory seems very likely to me but maybe I'm missing some evidence?
That's a very interesting topic. And it makes me sad me do not have proper memetic studies. Culture wars seems to me as a great example of huge memeplexes fighting and developing adaptations against each other to reproduce better.
It's funny how both right and left memplexes developed general arguments against talking with the other side. Meanwhile there is some "cross-pollination" between them. If I remember correctly the oppression and unfairness of the world narratives was used mostly by the left, while the right used to make fun of them for it and calling them snowflakes. Meanwhile now right memeplex narrative shifted from posing to be strong to "we are the real victims here"
>Meanwhile now right memeplex narrative shifted from posing to be strong to "we are the real victims here"
I mean, it shifted to recognizing the genuine structure of power relations in society. Thinking you're oppressed because you're a victim of "fat shaming" or "colorism" or structural this and that, unfalsifiable nonsense that can hardly really be measured, is a bit different than having solid proof that you are being forcibly censored on most outlets and ideologically suppressed, are far more likely to be fired from almost any job for your political alignment, etc. Attempting to equate the two to score a faux-studied "Aha! Horseshoe theory!" point is the stalest, dimmest, and most cliched take possible.
Mind you, that I neither equated the validity of narratives nor invoked the horseshoe theory.
Anyway, thanks for a great example of what I'm talking about. "Recognizing the genuine structure of power relations in society" has always been left-wing narrative and now right-wing has adopted it as well. What happened to "If you don't like the game - don't play and stop crying about it"? Was this meme less successful than thorough analysis of power dynamics? Did people who actually believed it silently accepted the new status quo and left the discourse? Do we have a left analogue of this meme? Something like "When you used to be privileged, equality may feel to you like oppression, so stop crying, you crybaby!" This one seems to be a little more complex as it also includes good old "Their problems are not real, unlike our problems", which the right wing has already accepted into its memeplex as you have shown in your reply.
Isn't it genuinely exciting? We can see the memetic evolution in live action. People have always believed that spreading ideas can change others minds and it's indeed true. But, moreover, we can see how two incompatible narratives can borrow successful memes from each other without actually changing the core beliefs of the narrative.
>What happened to "If you don't like the game - don't play and stop crying about it"?
That applied when "the game" was voluntary relations between individuals that leftists didn't particularly like, not the involuntary subversion and coercion of the entirety of society. Again, your entire point is based on false equivalences and mindless square peg in round hole "gotchas", a style of argumentation that I might describe as "rationalist nothings" since I mostly see it coming from those types.
Also, analyzing power structures has never been exclusively leftist. It's the foundation of politics.
This is a really interesting article and I really like/agree with many of aspects of it. I especially liked the 'argument culture' to 'echo culture' theme, and the intellectual fashion compared to regular fashion section.
However, I feel like Scott has understimated how much people still talk about gender in online spaces. I think it may have been overshadowed by race somewhat but I regularly hear the terms 'not all men', 'mansplaining' and 'creep' on group chats and Instagram. And the discourse around Trump and gender was pretty much as big as the racial component (for context, I lived in the UK and had mostly UK friends when he was elected but lived in the USA for a period during his presidency).
Also, to the extent that some of those gender buzzwords and phrases have died out (e.g. MRA), they have been replaced by other signifiers such as 'incel'. Similarly, the way Scott uses the phrase 'new feminism' is very similar to how people use 'intersectional feminism' to distinguish themselves from 2nd and 3rd wavers.
I wonder if this has a lot to do with the internet spaces he inhabits? (For context: I am a 25 year-old woman and the vast majority of my friends are left-wing and 'woke'. I feel like that is somewhat relevant to the kind of content I see online.)
Vaguely similar mini-fads from the early 80's: the anti-teen-suicide fad, the ant-anorexia fad, and the "just say no to drugs" campaign. All of them seemed to actually feed the phenomena that they aimed to fight. The anti-suicide fad struck me as especially dreary and tedious. Then as now, I'm baffled to see how so many people seem to actually enjoy the monotonous sloganeering.
I'm sure that this possibility has been discussed before, but it seems to me that the New Atheist movement was mostly killed by a taboo against saying anything negative about Islam...
That's an interesting case study. The left narrative is that New Atheist movement become less intelectual and more "make fun of people we perceive as stupid" for Moloch'y reasons. When you are dealing with something as ridiculous as religion you've left, it's enough to simply apply your common sense, you won't hear much new arguments which require you to evaluate your beliefs. And if you don't need to make a thorough analysis of an opponents belief, eventually you are left to mock it. So optimization for clicks motivated to produce the most mocking content possible.
Then as there were less and less things to mock about religion, atheist community find another target that felt off for their common sense - feminism and other social justice issues. And then the great divide happened. Atheist community was splitted on its left and right parts which adopted for their surroundings. The left part become more pro-islam, while the right more pro-chistianity - there was some story about ex-sceptics becoming born again christians or at least starting appreciate christian values.
I guess both narratve are compatible? While creating more and more mocking content Atheist Community started trolling islam and muslims very hard. Social Justice Crowd detected some bigotry in it, which may or may not be the case. When you are trying to mock someone as hard as you can, you may easily start getting inspiration in some deep xenophobic instincts. Atheist Community felt betrayed and started mocking social justice and here we are.
Actually, I now see that this was already discussed. There's reason to think the New Atheist movement was *not* undone by PC pro-Islamic attitudes:
"As for where it went, I asked that question last year and got various responses. The most popular was that 9/11 made religion-bashing segue into Islam-bashing, which started to look pretty racist. But 9/11 happened in 2001, The God Delusion wasn’t published until 2006, and New Atheism didn’t peak until the early 2010s."
God bless you, Scott. I've been trapped in an ever-worsening personal hell for practically all of my adult life, and this is the first thing I've seen in at least four years to actually give me any hope. It's like a miracle. You've written a miracle.
"... the main complaint the anti-SJWs had was that they couldn't talk about how much they hated SJWs. Once they could, their case kind of lost relevance, which is probably one reason the search term is trending down these days and nobody talks about the IDW anymore."
This is a huge trivialization of the anti-SJWs complaints. The complaints are about freedom of speech, diversity being a euphemism for racist and sexist hiring policies and university admissions and other things.
Also, you still can't talk about how much you hate SJWs if you want to keep your job in tech, hollywood, academia or anywhere, really.
I think there's a more meaningful (and more cheering) lesson to be taken from the failure of rightwing politics to become hip. The barber-pole analysis is interesting and seems to have some explanatory power. But maybe politics isn't 100% percent about in-group signaling for 100% of people 100% of the time.
Doesn't the in-group's take (often, at least) converge toward a serious, reasonable criticism of existing cultural structures? For example. Compared to 2016, we spend less time now waving pitchforks at C-list celebrities for border-case weaseliness on a date several years earlier. But, anecdotally, I've found the average person is less tolerant of sexual harassment than they used to be.
It's probably meaningful that internet culture is driven by children. Maybe they just grow up and get enough real world experience to contextualize the gripes they used to treat as toys. That kinda fits with the periodicity you're describing.
The race equivalent to those pre-2010 early feminist blogs you referenced would be Angry Black Woman. NK Jemisin was posting on that long long ago before she became a hot commodity like the feminist bloggers.
Here's my hypothesis for why the manosphere is resurfacing:
Many people feel like lockdown is ending, they're noticing they've gotten pretty horny, and they also notice that they've lost a lot of social skills during over a year of hardly meeting anyone. PUA culture with it's promise of "get laid without actually being an interesting person" probably profits from this.
WRT Atheism, I think that faded because the battle was won. The Christian Right exploded in the early 80s and maintained a massive presence until ~2008 with Bush's disgrace and his intended successor losing handily to The Future. It was so relevant that a lot of people started assuming a suffixed "Right" whenever "Christian" was mentioned at all. Opposition to it ran on inertia until about 2012 after Obama's re-election. Today, all the Leftist demons (racism, sexism, anti-LGBT) that used to be associated with "fundies" or "bible thumpers" are today associated with secular, competing versions of leftism ("TERFs").
I wonder if a part of this -- the failure of the prediction of coolness going far right -- might be generational. Gen X's POV was to turn away from whatever institutions promoted, but Millenials and whatever we're up to now seem more cooperative. They seem ready to listen to what institutions, parents, whatever, promote. Gen X thought a previous-generation endorsement was a reason to dismiss, with exasperated looks.
Long-time admirer, occasional reader, first time commenter.
I know Strauss-Howe generational theory has at least come up in comments before (like here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/02/book-review-ages-of-discord/), and I'm guessing you've run across it before, so I'm a bit nervous posting about it, but it seems like the 80-year cycles of societal stability and chaos they propose fits exactly what you're pointing to.
I remember back in the heyday of New Atheism, Adam Carolla was discussing people like that who would tell him, "You ought to come to our meeting," and he was like, "I don't want to go to meetings. I don't want to belong to a group, I'm just atheist." That was the true reason for their downfall in my mind: the people who founded the club were kind of intellectually interesting people, but once they started with the membership drives, the only kind of people who wanted to join were spazzes and guys with negative charisma.
As to the question of what happens when a certain dominant culture takes hold in our institutions, that actually reminds me of The Simpsons, and the question of why it quit being funny. Whether they intended it to be or not, it was a parody of this ridiculous American obsession with pretending it was the 1950s. And I know, I was there, a large portion of the population just insisted that the 60s, 70s, and 80s basically didn't happen, and their main vehicle for doing that was the television show. Being grounded in this bygone Americana, where everything was set up like it was Leave it to Beaver, but everyone acted like a jackass that turned it into a farce, made it funny. By the time Homer was learning to use the internet, it just didn't work anymore.
And finally, the one thing I think this article misses is right-wing comedy and popular right-wing personalities with young people. If you only look at urban areas where 4 out of 5 people are already quite liberal, and then go, "Oh, I guess the young people are still very liberal, just listen to those Brooklyn high schoolers, they'll tell you," then of you're only going to find more liberalism. Conservatives like Steven Crowder are quite successful and I'm sure have plenty of high school viewers living across the Midwest and South. When you go to places where 4 out of 5 people voted Trump, you'll hear about a lot more cool conservative media than you realized there was. And generally liberal comedians like Ryan Long, who just reject the premise, are way cooler than the guys in Chapo Trap House, even though they're much cooler than those tools on Pod Save America.
I don't think the institutional wokeism will survive for 50 years, because unlike people from 1960 to 2000, there is a viable alternative you can vote for who will start tearing down the far-leftist structures. Unlike say in 1992 when we voted in a Democratic administration and first thing you knew the Vice President's wife was like, "Rap music, let's get rid of it." Though that may make being woke seem less awful, since awful conservatives keep hating on it.
Anyway, I don't know if anybody will read this, but I appreciated the article!
I'm late to the party on this discussion, but I never saw the Bernie Bros as being particularly anti-woke; I think they flirted with some ironic communism, and Wokeness' Marxist elements allowed them to take it over even faster than they did to atheism, which meant the Dirtbag Left Bernie Bros either went woke or got thrown into the Gamergate slimepit with everyone else. The Bernie Bros were more socially canny than the geeks, who split between 1. autistically sticking to their guns or 2. Desperately simping for female approval.
I know this is an old post, but I just want to drop in to point out that there was in fact a specific name for "new feminism". It was called "Fourth Wave Feminism".
One thing I noticed about hard core feminists, SJWS, whatever 10 to 15 years ago who I knew personally, they had very rough childhoods and probably Cluster B personality disorders, BPD in particular. Observe behavior common to each. Hyper emotionalism. Not the most rational people, often bad at high school math. Black and white thinking. BPD is characterized by vulnerable narcissism. You put people in the racist bucket or the sexist bucket or not because you can't process more complexity than that, hence the notorious difficulty in processing nuance.
This doesn't not explain the whole SJW phenomena, but seems a reliable association even outside of my experience. Lookup what Robin diAngelo has said about her past. She's open about not being that good at math. One may recall that lady who said she's afraid of all men including her teenage sons in NYT several years ago. Her other pieces have talked about abuse and worse in her younger days.
Rise of narcissism should be part of the story even if it doesn't explain everything. Seems there's growth in mental health problems over the last several years.
Isn't Greenwald kind of cool? Like, he's really edgy and anti-establishment. Indeed: anti-establishment seems to be the main coherent thread in his politics. Is he not cool because he just does everything too earnestly?
Leftists who criticize the left are the worst kind of traitors and are as cool as black socks and loafers at the beach. See: Jimmy Dore.
He has a kind of cool in a certain community. But Greenwald and Taibbi definitely don't have the cultural relevance that they did 5 or 10 years ago.
Reddit isn't cool. YA fiction isn't cool. The DSA certainly isn't cool.
What is cool? I hope that what is cool is hanging out, having a good time, and not reading the news or having strong political opinions. The teenagers I see in real life, rather than on the internet, seem to have a much better understanding of this.
It turns out that the twitter character limit (which has been raised to 280 characters) matters much less than you might think.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/twitters-doubling-of-character-count-from-140-to-280-had-little-impact-on-length-of-tweets/
People are spreading out a little, and there's probably more use of threaded tweets.
It seems ironic to accuse the host of myopia and then anoint Twitter as the place where "all the networking journalists, academics, and business leaders" do their shopping. I've never used Twitter. Don't even read it, just barely know it exists. The same can be said for everybody above me in the corporate chain to the CEO. (Our company altogether employs about 6,000 and has offices in 14 countries).
We know Twitter exists, and a bunch of weird cultural flamefests occupy it, and it's possible if you have bad luck to be featured in one of them. But shop there for actionable insight? Never. As far as business goes, it's as relevant (i.e. not at all) as Saturday Night Live was to Exxon/Mobil's long-term strategy in the 1980s, or the Sunday funnies were to how FDR prosecuted the Second World War.
Of course, I would certainly think different if I were in the business of punditry, or news, or entertainment (if there's a difference), but I'm not, and most American business is not.
Twitter is horrible because the post-length limit is just long enough for tribal signaling, but not long enough for substance. It would be a very different place with a 500 character minimum and no quote-tweet function.
It's being plugged into a hivemind, and a hivemind that only wants the most shallow thoughts promulgated, and nodes in the hivemind are desperately afraid of being targeted for removal from the hivemind for wrongthink, and the best way to not get targeted for wrongthink (in the very short term) is to be the one doing the targeting.
The post length was doubled, but very few people use it.
Also, it's possible to do longer texts by linking tweets, but, again, this isn't done very commonly.
I don't know whether twitter could be somewhat defanged just be having a half hour wait between sending a post and having it become visible.
There is the possibility that the initial post length has shaped the type of site it has become i.e. if it had always been 280 characters or longer, maybe twitter discourse would have evolved differently. Not saying I have a strong positive position on this, but its worth considering.
honest to jesus could you please shut the fuck up. you are singlehandedly the most obnoxious individual in this or any other comments section. i don't for the life of me know why scott continues to allow your festering presence, even low-moderation communities usually ban gimmick accounts like yours once the joke wears off
oh no, please br'er marxbro1917, don't leave us for that briar patch. whatever would we do without your obsessive demands for scott to apologize for inane shit that you, and only you, are bothered by; or your constant chinese water torture of dippy dribblings straight from soc.politics.marxism faq's so fucking boring that even the faq authors themselves couldn't manage to actually read them all the way through. truly, your out-and-out postmodernly-awful campaign of trolling terror holds a mighty mirror up to we so-called rationalists, and in the dazzling light of that ghastly reflection we can only weep at the hypocrisies and inconsistencies that define our humble horrid human selves.
If he lets fucking racist creeps like Steve Sailer hang around, I don't see why Marxbro is a problem.
What’s wrong with Steve? I find Marxbro repetitive or predictable at times but i often benefit from his input.
Give Steve's Wikipedia entry a read. If you don't find anything in that objectionable, we really don't have anything to discuss.
I’m familiar with who he is. I guess you’re just declaring all HBD facts off-limits then?
That you refer to them as "facts" tells me everything I need to know.
Surely creating an account to harass and completely off-topic insult a specific user is against community guidelines?!
There is room for criticism obviously, but I don’t think this is it?
In this case ‘bro even has a good point; what do these brain-mush-clones refer to really, aside from being mean rhetoric?
Agreed.
I wasn't a big John McCain fan, but I always thought the most statesmanlike thing he did was play a sizable role in the early 1990s rapprochement between Washington and Hanoi. It was precisely because he had strong personal reasons for disliking his former captors who had beaten him frequently that made this impressive.
Anyway, McCain didn't get in trouble for using a racial epithet against his torturers because he was famous for having been tortured, and already in the early 1990s he had risen above his feelings in the national interest.
But do remember--those POW/MIA dolchstosselegend flags are still flying everywhere.
Do most people actually intend that they refer to the Vietnam POW conspiracy theory? My impression was that the people who used them mostly just wanted to show generic patriotism & respect for the military.
Generic patriotism is considered equivalent to nazism in this woke age. Anyone in favor of the irredeemably racist USA must be The Other.
Disagree. I'm a left of center Democrat who worked for the Federal Government for 20 years specifically out of a sense of patriotism. I'm a computer scientist; I would have made a lot more in the private sector.
Which side is "the aggressor side"? The people who tried to get Intelligent Design into schools, or the New Atheists? Harvey Weinstein or the people who brought suit against him? Derek Chauvin or the protestors in the streets?
Cuomo and Scott Stringer still had #MeToo s.
If Cuomo _really_ had a #MeToo he would be unemployed right now.
He's an elected official. He can only be fired by voters and isn't up for reelection until next year.
New York does not have a recall like California? Pity.
Hello from the future. This has not aged well. It turns out you can be forced to resign without a vote or a recall.
> "Cancel culture" does not refer to getting TV shows cancelled. It refers to weaponized culture war antagonism to destroy individuals
I think his point is that, while "cancel culture" is used to refer to all of these, TV shows being cancelled is most annoying to the typical not-very-politically-engaged person & so complaints about it are more influential.
The coup de grace for #MeToo believe-women feminism came after Tara Reade's rape accusation against Joe Biden in March 2020. It was ebbing down already, but at that point it's almost like something clicked in a few editorial rooms across the US and the movement lost its last source of clout.
Arguably, something else happened in March 2020, but that something took its time to percolate into the newsrooms...
(I do believe that cancel culture lost its sharpest tooth with the end of #MeToo. Cancellation in 2016 on allegations of sexual assault would make people shunned and break families apart, while cancellation in 2020 merely ruins careers and politically charged friendships.)
I think that's just more a case of "don't bite the hand that feeds you"
Exactly, but it kicked the system into the basin of another attractor. Right now there is no interest in pushing the topic back into the mainstream (probably because a critical mass of "stakeholders" have gotten their hands burned), and it's not considered avantgarde any more, so I don't think it will come back in foreseeable time.
I think the gradual leftward movement (Scott has written about this elsewhere as "Moloch always swims leftward") happens because, every time we get increases to productivity from new tech or management techniques, we spend it on raising the amount of compassion for others we can afford to have. This spending is mostly not directly observable spending of money, but the continual imposition of new overhead costs, and the elimination of negative incentives on people to act in socially-beneficial ways. The potential problem is that we can spend all our dividends on re-distributing the pie, and never on making the pie bigger.
Interesting. That certainly feels right to me, but it makes me to think leftism would correlate with wealth, when indeed the opposite is true.
The USA and western societies have in general become a lot more leftist over time with increasing wealth, e.g. modern America is certainly much further to the left than it was in the era of the Wild West.
I think this mostly explains trends like increasing gay rights and conservative acquiescence to it. Gay rights are possible because of the welfare state. It's not like society spontaneously woke up one day and decided for no reason that although for all of human history homosexuality was strongly taboo, today would be different. What changed was the welfare state become firmly established and displaced the family/children as the primary caregivers in old age. If you live in a small village and everyone needs to sprog 5 times to ensure 2-3 children who can build a house for you to live in when you're old, being gay is practically an old-age death sentence because you won't have children, AND a huge affront to your whole community who really NEEDS those extra hands in the fields on to man the ramparts, and can't afford a stagnant population level. Then throw in "gay culture" with its general objections to being conspicuously manly and what that means in a world filled with warring tribes and the reasons to create a taboo get even stronger. The suppression in turn causes enormous uncertainty about how many of these people exactly there are, making it circular - everyone is afraid that if the taboo falls it'll turn out that 25% of men are gay and suddenly everything falls apart.
But now if you live in a massive country of tens of millions of people surrounded by a countryside filled with robot tractors and warfare is fought online, and you have lots of research telling you that the gay population is stable and relatively small, and old people don't need children anymore because the state will put them in a care home, well, suddenly the need for the taboo is gone and over time it's natural that it'd fade away.
There is a dark side to all this, namely, is the welfare state actually long term sustainable. The taboo against homosexuality fell slowly partly because the welfare state is quite new and because every so often a story about state pension schemes being bankrupt somehow sneaks through the leftist media. We should expect near blanket media suppression about bankrupt welfare schemes given the socialist tendencies of journalists and general disinterest in fiscal conservatism amongst modern conservative parties, so it's very hard to understand how stable the current situation is. If anything bad happens to the welfare state, however hard it is to imagine now, gay rights will be the first thing that gets the chop.
I think the "left/right" distinction only makes sense at certain moments in history, so using it to think about long-term trends leads to confusion. Here's a different way to think about it, which I made up just now, so caveat emptor:
Instead of left/right, use the 2-dimensional phase space of identity / diversity on one dimension, and perceived safety on the other. With "identity / diversity" I'm contrasting people who believe in "perfection", and therefore that history is progressing (in the Hegelian sense) toward an endpoint at which all people will be identical (e.g., Platonists, Christians, Marxists, Nazis, Social Justice), versus people who believe that societies are complex mechanisms which operate more efficiently with many different types of parts, and so diversity (perhaps even of wealth) and division-of-labor are beneficial. We might equally well call this dimension "identity / liberty"; diversity and liberty aren't the same thing, but liberty maximizes diversity more than any centrally planned system can.
On the low end of "safety" we have societies threatened with extinction. These are usually communal and anti-individualistic, emphasizing social cooperation and stability over all else. (Today we call people who feel this way "conservatives", though that term actually means "people who take Chesterton's fence seriously", which is quite different.)
Increasing safety, technology, and wealth are all a kind of surplus. Societies on the "identity" end of identity/diversity invest that surplus in making the members of society more identical, eliminating imbalances of wealth and power. Ancient Sparta would be an example. Sparta was the original inspiration for an entire lineage of ideologies which believe in "perfection", and was a direct inspiration for many of those thinkers or ideologies, including Plato, Rousseau, and the Nazis. It got its wealth surplus in the form of the conquest and enslavement of its neighbors, and exploited those slaves to free every Spartan citizen from work, both in order to train as soldiers, to eliminate wealth disparities, and to go through a long, government-controlled educational process of indoctrination into Spartan ideology.
These "identity" cultures move thru these different focuses of ideology as their surplus increases:
Strict communitarian focus on survival =>
Making all people within their culture identical (early Christianity, French Revolution, Marxism, Nazism) =>
Making all people in the world identical (Roman Christianity, International Marxism, Social Justice)
Societies on the "diversity" end, like Athens, invest that surplus in increasing liberties. They move thru these different ideological focuses as wealth increases:
Strict communitarian focus on survival =>
Currency, commerce, trade, individual wealth (Venice, the late middle ages in Italy and the Netherlands) =>
Individual liberties (Athens, the Renaissance, American Revolution, libertarianism) =>
Basic research and other re-investment => (industrial revolution, science)
Do cool stuff (put a man on the Moon, the Culture)
er, those last 2 lines should say:
Basic research and other re-investment (industrial revolution, science) =>
Do cool stuff (put a man on the Moon, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, the Culture)
(But beware of using the Culture as an example. Remember it's fictional, and tries to combine both "identity" and "diversity" values, in a way I don't believe is possible.)
Interesting take. Not going to argue against it, but Social Justice being anti-diversity while (implied) anti-SJ would be pro-diversity was pretty funny feature arising from that setup. It seems to kinda make sense in your framework though and I think I have a sense of what you are pointing at. That idea of striving for perfection seems to capture it for me.
To rephrase my confusion: I thought it strange, that when society gains wealth through time, it translates into society also having and using more resources for empathy towards a wider range of people, but when an individual gains wealth, it seems to diminish their range of empathy.
I realize that there is a cynical (probably Marxist) way to view this: that "societal compassion" isn't really compassion at all – it is just capitalism widening the consumer base to reap more profits. So the confusion would arise from, well, confusing the two "emotions" to be the same and having similar effects, when in fact, society as an entity has no such, nor any other kind of, emotions.
"But the individuals of said society still do have such emotions!", I might object, "and to view their empathy as mere selfish profit seeking renders the all the concepts of empathy, compassion and unselfishness totally useless and meaningless".
I don’t know, and I’m getting sidetracked. What I’m still left wondering is, inspired by your concept of striving towards perfection, that if society is becoming more homogeneous by some meaningful metric, taken with the tendency to create schism via the “Narcissism of small differences”, it would seem that when people are expelled from the in-group, people from the fringes of society are assimilated in to accommodate that space. I’m visualizing flows that resemble what’s going on in magnetic fields.
But now it’s probably good time to get some sleep.
Er, what I should have said in my previous comment after "The potential problem" is that, every time we make the pie bigger, we use some of that extra pie to pay costs some individuals would otherwise have born which would have served as incentives, and the loss of those incentives shrinks the pie, or adds "bad stuff" to the pie. Or, we use that extra pie to pay the cost of implementing and obeying some new regulation which is supposed to prevent some harm, but which also introduces some harm, so we're spending our pie growth to produce net social harm. The pie of net total social goods - bads might still be growing, or might be shrinking. I think we can point to some clear cases where spending in order to reduce harm usually increases harm by that mechanism, such as medical insurance and medical regulation.
> I think New Atheism petered out because it basically won. Religion is much less influential today than it was 20 years ago.
I don't think New Atheism had too much effect on this. Surveys have shown that "atheist" and "no religion" affiliations have bee nsteadily declining for many decades, and New Atheism didn't really cause a blip at the time, but it obviously has some long-term effects contributing to the decline in all the books and everything that are now available.
"Surveys have shown that "atheist" and "no religion" affiliations have bee nsteadily declining for many decades"
Cite? Or did you misspeak?
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/godzooks/2020/05/religious-affiliation-decline-united-states-survey-atheism/
The decline in religious affiliation are similar across countries. It actually seems more plausible that the rise of New Atheism as a movement was a *result* of declining interest in religion and a growing interest in secularism, rather than the result, ie. we only heard about this movement because this existing trend created a market where once there was none.
Your original claim: "Surveys have shown that "atheist" and "no religion" affiliations have bee nsteadily declining for many decades" Did you write "atheist" for "religious"?
Ah, sorry, I meant steadily increasing, not declining. Or equivalently, yes, "religious affiliation has been declining".
The weakest part of this fact-free speculation about "linguistic kill shots" is that "politically correct" has followed the same pattern as "woke." It started out being used unironically among the left, then became identified with intra-left snark, and then conservatives picked up on the snarky usage, which blew it up into the mainstream. Using "woke" as a pejorative is already starting to fall out of favor on the far-left now that conservative legislators and think tank flacks are using it to describe things like minimum wage hikes and free child care.
The first person I can recall using the term "politically correct" was rock star Joe Strummer in the early 1980s. He was laughing that The Clash's leftist fans were always complaining that The Clash wasn't "politically correct" enough, but he felt The Clash had done plenty for the left.
My impression from the Strummer interview was that "politically correct" meant in early 1980s Britain adherence to the Labour/Stalinist line of Arthur Scargill, head of the National Union of Mineworkers, rather than the more cultural angle it now implies.
Peter F. Drucker's historical account of political correctness is in line with your recollection of its Stalinist roots. https://books.google.com/books?id=81nUZ-eoYusC&pg=PA99&lpg=PA99&fbclid=IwAR3FwtweSIC-9ra5e_uSlw0R6QmCMfiIeQEmeZvGr7huxi2i_MxkxbQ5FeM#v=onepage&q&f=false
Thanks.
The Stalinist roots are undeniable. Actually, in the Soviet Union, as late as the late 1980's, the term was in use. I recall reading about a Soviet conservative figure praising an anti-Glasnost article in the Soviet press as "politically correct", meaning it was correct according the party line.
I am much less sure about the expression "politically correct" having been given wide currency in the 1980s and early 1990s' Western non-Marxist Left. Which leftist figure back then was praised as being politically correct (say, McGovern or Jesse Jackson) as opposed to Republicans or squarer leftists (say, Blue Dog Democrats)? Has anyone ever said Gary Hart was not politically correct enough?
Is there any evidence that "politically correct" was ever said as a complement by *anyone*, left, right, Soviet, or even Stalinist? I can't remember this usage from my childhood in the US in the 80s--90s.
I first remember hearing the word associated with my dad's (then) right-centrist politics around 1990. Then by the time _PCU_ came out in 1994, everyone was aware of the word, although my sense at the time was it was mostly a badge of group identification for the kind of conservatives who define themselves by being anti-whatever the Democrats are doing.
As I said, there is evidence for use in the late Soviet Union. Example: https://books.google.com.br/books?id=BXoxAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA205&dq=%22Nina+andreyeva%22+%22politically+correct%22&hl=pt-BR&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiUxMLhysTwAhXBrJUCHWLmCmcQ6AEwAHoECAAQAw#v=onepage&q=%22Nina%20andreyeva%22%20%22politically%20correct%22&f=false
Drucker recalled Stalinists and Nazis using it in the pre-WW II days, but he did not present quotes.
In the early 1990s, I remember conservatives complaining about leftiets' political correction. I do not recall leftists praising each other back in the for being "politically correct".
Ah, good point. I misunderstood your OP and assumed you meant the "Soviet conservative figure" was only damning with faint praise and not delivering a true compliment. Very American of me, I'm sure.
No, in my middle-class daily-local-paper-reading remembrance of the 80s/90s, (mainstream) leftists never used the term "politically correct" except occasionally to deride conservatives' worldview.
I don't think that someone using a term that is translated as "politically correct" is quite the same thing as the actual phrase "politically correct" being used (I assume that Soviet figure writing in the Soviet press would not be using English).
According to Google's Ngram, the term "politically correct" appeared occasionally in books in the 1930s, then was largely forgotten until the late 1980s, when it exploded in usage up until the mid-1990s. My impression is that its usage was spread by neoconservatives with personal or scholarly memory of 1930s Stalinism, but it was mostly applied by them to the rising postmodernist cultural left in the English Lit departments influenced by Derrida and Foucault rather than to the fading modernist economic left.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=politically+correct&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3
The early 1990s battles over political correctness were surprisingly literary in subject matter. My vague recollection is that the mandarins largely won the arguments at that time (in, say, the New York Times Magazine) because they had better taste in literature than did the French theorists. The big guns of the American novel back then, with the exception of Toni Morrison, were unenthusiastic about political correctness: Updike, Roth, Wolfe, McCarthy, Bellow, De Lillo, Pynchon etc. For example, Philip Roth's fine 2000 novel "The Human Stain" begins with an aged professor getting canceled for inadvertent political correctness that reads exactly like it was ripped from the headlines of a 2021 whoop-tee-doo (then the book goes off in an unexpected direction).
But far fewer people care as much these days about literary quality as they did back then.
I think the phrase 'political correctness' mostly got going from French communists attacking 'premature anti-fascists' who fought the Germans through the Hitler-Stalin pact. So it's always been a little gamy, a little ironic.
FWIW I remember "politically correct" being used in conversation among leftists in the late 80s/early 90s in precisely this way—first unironically, then more & more often ironically.
this is what I remember as well.
This film wasn't well received and doesn't seem well remembered, but was spoofing PC culture on college campuses back in 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCU_(film)
And, of course, there is Roger Ebert on PBS calling political correctness the "fascism of the 90s": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__L9DzZIkwI
PCU used to run on Comedy Central almost every day. Can you even imagine that now! Jeremy Piven ftw
Earlier - "politically correct" was very common among my cohort in the mid 70's, said cohort being radical activists and hippies. It was so common it was usually abbreviated to just "PC". We had sufficient rad cred we could counter-signal by making fun of its silly excesses - my favorite joke was to refer to San Francisco's Fisherperson's Wharf.
I think "cancel culture" even moreso. Even the "left not liberal" types don't use that anymore because it's associated with Ted Cruz and the sort. "Woke" I think still has some legs. I do see cool irony bros using it. (i.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvVhCCWPgaI)
What do conservatives mean when they complain about someone or some institution being woke? I haven’t been able to nail it down.
Some object to the idea that any but a tiny minority are racist. I note Tim Scott being pulled over 7 times in six years, being detained for impersonating a US Senator, etc. and they agree that happens. So it’s more than a tiny minority? No and they get all huffy. I don’t really understand where they are coming from.
You identified something important: aesthetic. But what you fail to realise is that it's your fault for giving so much weight to aesthetics. Right wingers (yes, even center-right) are obsessed with 'anti-aesthetics', they hate elites who care too much about their appearance, they hate puritans who care about crafting ideal images of their personality. I'm not going to speculate why this might be, lest I get a 'not all conservatives!' from you, but it's quite clear the right hates aesthetics in a disproportionate amount. Maybe they are the 'have nots' when it comes to looking good?
I would, and I'm "elite" (as far as income/education goes) and live on the west coast of the US. I am always impressed by someone who takes first-class care of his machinery. It bespeaks a pride in one's work that further suggests reliability, trustworthiness, and self-discipline -- very valuable character traits. In my experience people who treat their tools with disrespect also treat their friends and colleagues that way, too.
"Aesthetics" or "theatrics"? I'd like to make that distinction as it's not that difficult to adopt an archetypal persona simply to attract attention and thus votes. Groups with different preferences will take different sorts of appearances as insincere, likely due to projection. The problem with that is, of course, that it's easiest to make a political career if you have no personal convictions, disregard any premise of personal authenticity and become willing to just follow the social desirability bias wherever that leads you.
Yeah, at least Marxists were tautologically right in the sense that owning the means of production gives you power that can, and often has, been used for oppression. But the above kind of essentialism is dangerous because of its closeness to racism, sexism and others forms of prejudice.
Are you for what criteria someone could use to conclude that an institution is woke?
Generalize the question. Under what conditions would we describe an institution as a Christian institution (school, business, club), an Islamist institution, a communist institution?
If it mandates its members be informed of its tenants, and those tenants are put forward as being not merely a set of tenants but the correct set of tenants (so excludes a course on comparative religions). It disciplines or expels members of the institution who compromise the integrity of those tenants with acts or statements of disbelief.
For the sake of clarity: "tenets".
Bah! I feel dumb now. Thanks.
Hardly! Rejoice, for you are slightly less ignorant than you were an hour ago. :-)
Oh don't feel any more dumb than the usual run of people; everybody does it!
Irrelevant to this conversation but I wish I was YeBaiYi too.
I love Grumpy Grandpa. He is very relatable to me: come down out of your solitude, everyone is an idiot panicking over stupid crap, just let me have my extensive selection of delicious dishes in peace, why are you two idiot lovebirds canoodling under my nose instead of teaching your idiot baby disciple? I do love the scenes where he shows up, goes "You're an idiot, and you're an idiot, and *you're* an *especially big* idiot" and then kicks their asses for them 😀
Oh, I’d love to be able to edit my own typos!
We need the people here to hurry up and start working for Substack via their advertised vacancies in order to implement our secret agenda of taking over the world - that is, of making commenting much more user-friendly and including features like editing, formatting, adding images, adding links and so forth.
Meh, nowadays I think tenants works. In fact tenets get in the way when people point out the hypocrisies, the tenants are always from the same pool and will never change.
I think they mean the institution has put "social justice" above its original purpose as an institution. A prime example would be Gillette running a cringeworthy feminist ad that alienated a lot of their customers.
If you believe Gillette was acting against its original purpose in creating that add, I have a bridge to sell you. Companies go woke in pursuit of not in spite of their original purpose, making profits.
Can you come up with any plausible cost-benefit analysis for that ad?
I think they mean that an institution is not advocating wokeness because it's correct, but only because it's popular, i.e. they have zero scruples and would gladly burn the intellectual commons to see a few more likes or retweets or a quarter point stock increase or whatever the hell such people care about these days. I think most conservatives would acknowledge, at least in private, that women/minorities/etc have legit gripes with the system.
"I think most conservatives would acknowledge, at least in private, that women/minorities/etc have legit gripes with the system."
There was a time when there were legit gripes. Most conservatives, at least in private, would acknowledge that. There are no legit gripes now. As a matter of fact, the pendulum has swung quite a far bit the opposite direction, and you can see the proof of abominable and overwhelming statistical data in the behavior of black americans to asian americans. And that is but one example.
There is behavioral rot among women/minorities/etc that has set in now, such that these cultural behaviors are victimizing, not hallmarks of vicitimization.
“ There are no legit gripes now.”
None, none at all....
"There are no legit gripes now."
It is obviously not true that most conservatives believe this, the median reTHUGlican thinks there is between "a lot" and "a moderate amount" of discrimination against blacks.
I’m not sure about that. If you point out Tim Scott’s experience they are will agree that Til Scott has been the victim of discriminatory behavior by the police. And they will agree when presented with any other individual case. But when taken in total all those individual cases can never mean there is a systemic problem.
Its also possible that Sen Scott is a particularly bad driver, which is statistically true of Black men in general. DWB isn't so much a real "discrimination" phenomena, as a "yes they are speeding more than other drivers" phenomena. See, e.g. the New Jersey turnpike study.
He claims that he, in the vast majority of cases, was not speeding. So your post simply comes down to disputing the factual assertions. You might as well say "It's also possible he's making the whole thing out of whole cloth, and he wasn't even stopped to begin with".
Anecdotes don't make anecdata, no. What you'd need to look at would be things like "how often does a member of this minority shoot at police" vs "how often are they shot by police"; "how often are they pulled over" vs "how overrepresented are they in actual criminality"; "how often and easily are they hired or accepted into university" vs "how well do they perform relative to other groups on a variety of metrics before/after being hired/accepted", etc.
Statistics, in other words; and not in isolation, but in relevant contexts.
Everyone of your examples lacks relevant context.
Each statistic can be used in versus method to create a different picture.
“Frequency of hiring” vs “representation in crime” for example. All of the issues you’ve alluded to have a plethora more factors. E.g., “amount invested in education” or “number of parents in household”.
I believe that such conduct as using the term "reTHUGlican" should garner social reproach. This is not kind, necessary, or communicating an objective truth.
It's funny though, which is the secret fourth option
I think part of where the disagreement comes in is that the woke seem to view any disparities at all in outcomes as prima facie evidence of systemic racism/sexism/generic-isms and that any institution that produces these disparate outcomes is thus illegitimate and fair game for being torn down or radically altered to produce equal outcomes. The problems with this stance should be obvious.
I think everyone should agree that disparities of any sort are prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination.
The problem is the next step, in saying that prima facie evidence counts as ultima facie evidence that automatically justified tearing down or radically altering systems. Everyone *should* agree that once you have prima facie evidence of a problem, you should investigate further, and if you discover enough corroborating evidence of the problem, you should act to fix it.
But that idea doesn't appeal either to conservatives that want to preserve every structure, regardless of the evidence, or to radicals that want to transform everything as soon as they see even one piece of evidence.
There's definitely some of that on the right. I would say that on the left, though, there are a similar number of people who feel there is no need to investigate further or corroborate anything, instead jumping to the rather absurd conclusion that if there is any disparity at all in demographic outcomes, it must be attributable to animus, bigotry, oppression, etc.
There are also people on the left who believe that racism is a disparity of racial outcomes (ie that is what they define racism to be) and that this needs correcting in and of itself, regardless of whether it is caused by animus, bigotry, oppression, etc.
For some, that is the primary meaning of racism. This is why they get blank when someone starts talking about the causes to disprove that they are racist - the cause is relevant when you want to resolve the differential outcome, but the differential outcome is racist because that's what racism means - it means differential outcomes.
I’m not convinced that disparities of any sort are prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination. Disparities could be the result of Poisson clumping after random distribution. Or they could be the result of just chaotic social forces. Do you want to say that the fact that 75% of NBA players are Black is prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination?
Yes. "Prima facie" just means "on first glance". It's the sort of thing that warrants a look, but is nowhere near definitive proof. It absolutely *could* be something else.
People routinely mistake the meaning of "random." They think it means "uniform" when a far better definition would be "has fluctuations on every length scale." Uniform is a very *nonrandom* outcome, and almost always means some constraint is at work.
Exempli gratia, if *every* lion herd ever observed had exactly 7 males for every female, we would rightly suspect some constraint on lion behavior, genetic or environmental, that produced that strangely uniform result. If I flipped a coin 1000 times and it came up H T H T H T.... et cetera, I would immediately know it was not a "fair" coin.
Likewise, if in every human occupation the ratio of races or sexes (or any other random feature) were *exactly* the same as that ratio among all humans, it would be pretty strong evidence for powerful constraints on human behavior -- it would be highly nonrandom.
Any time you divide people into groups the groups will tend to be somewhat different along every conceivable axis. We should routinely expect to see disparities of some sort everywhere we look merely due to different groups having different skills, cultural attributes, physical attributes and interests.
In fact if we *didn't* find disparities of any sort then *that* is what should constitute "prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination".
I suspect there's something more specific and quantitative we can say here, about what effect size we should expect to see, with values quite a bit larger or smaller than that being prima facie evidence of something systemic.
Is the prevalence of blacks in football and basketball prima facie evidence of systemic racism against whites?
You can't make an argument that they are oppressed with all the multimillion-dollar salaries.
What's good for the goose should be good for the gander.
Should we start investigating further?
It is prima facie evidence. I believe there has been plenty of investigation. I believe that they've found the situation is complicated, and depends a lot on the particular role on the team.
Football is a crippling sport, which makes having a chance to play it a little more complicated.
I may have lost track of the terminology, but I think prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination is the obvious and explicit systems of discrimination, e.g. Jim Crow laws. And they have to be obvious, because if they aren't then too many people won't remember who they are supposed to discriminate against.
Absent such, disparities of outcome between different cultures should be treated as prima facie evidence of cultures optimized for achieving different outcomes. Then, as you say, you start looking for something more conclusive.
"I think everyone should agree that disparities of any sort are prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination."
This attitude assumes that no group has any intrinsic differences. It also adds the term "systemic" for no reason. And finally, even if you establish that there was discrimination somewhere in the chain of causality, that doesn't establish that the institution currently under consideration engages in discrimination. If the black people are underrepresented at a college, that doesn't point to the college being racist, that points to racism affecting pre-college education.
I don't think we actually disagree.
I say that it is a defeasible null hypothesis that intrinsic differences among groups would amount to small effects, rather than large effects, so that if we see a large effect, that is prima facie evidence (but not in any way conclusive evidence) that something more than just intrinsic differences are at work.
When I say "systemic discrimination", I think I mean the same thing as what you're saying - we don't know if any particular individual at any point in the chain has discriminatory attitudes, or if the effect is the result of interactions among multiple parts of the system. We don't know if it's the employer or the university or social attitudes or neighborhood funding of schools or historic wealth gaps or something else.
The point is that we don't need to accuse any individual of harboring evil attitudes - discrimination can be the result of the system, and that means we may be able to address it at the systemic level without having to call anyone a bad person.
It's not so much about the idea of individual racism, most people accept that individuals can be racist. I think the animus is towards the idea of "systemic racism", the idea that we're all complicit in racism for historical reasons. Accepting systemic racism means its not enough to be "not-racist", you have to be actively anti-racist or you're perpetuating racial inequity, and actively opposing all existing social structures definitely sounds demanding and difficult.
I’m not sure about that.
In theory we all agree that the government should treat all citizens equally. But when the police focus on young black men at the expense of tiny elderly Asian ladies some say that only makes sense. Of course the police should focus on those who are more likely to commit crimes. Of course the TSA should focus more on 22 year old Pakistani guys and less on frail 85 year old widows.
Ok. But then how would you feel as a 22 black accountant or sitting US Senator being stopped at rates vastly higher than you white co-workers?
Honestly not sure how I'd feel if I were black, but my current politics would attribute that kind of treatment to a combination of individual bigotry and stereotypes about what low-income people look like. You could definitely describe that as systemic racism and I probably would describe it as such, my point was that the "woke" understanding of race is very inconvenient to accept.
I was mostly trying to explain why people might object to the woke framing of this as "systemic racism". It's not that I don't think it's not true, but John McWorter describes my own views on the limitations of attributing complex social problems to "systemic racism" pretty well - the solution isn't just "less racism".
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/can-we-please-ditch-the-term-systemic
How often would Tim Scott & co have to be pulled over by different people at different times before you’d agree that there was something systemic going on?
Significantly more than average?
Based on that, I agree that systemic racism exists, in this case and many others. My point was just that that doesn't actually solve anything or help anyone.
Acknowledging a problem doesn't solve it. And we should be distrustful of anyone who claims that they know how to solve a problem as difficult as systemic racism. I don't see why any of that means we should stop talking about and thinking about systemic racism.
You can’t fix a problem unless you admit it’s a problem.
Ideally, we'd be working off high-quality statistical data rather than anecdotes about individuals, but I admit we don't always have the luxury.
If we *are* gonna judge by Tim Scott, the manner in which he was selected matters quite a lot. I'd be very surprised if my sister won a million dollars in the lottery- that's really rare! I would *not* be surprised if *someone* one a billion dollars in the lottery- there are a *lot* of "someones."
Also...
I've heard Tim Scott's name a couple of times. As politicians go, I have no strong feelings about him, but that antecedent is doing *a lot* of work.
My prior here is that various kinds of dishonesty are absolutely crucial to making it as a high-level national politician, at least in the US. I used to say that a politician saying something was evidence that they wanted you to believe it, but immaterial to the question of whether it was true. I stopped saying it when I realized how much of politics-speak consists not only of lies, but lies which are not intended by the speaker to be believed. High-simulacra statements which are intended less as truth-claims than as moves in a rhetorical game.
So, when I google "Tim Scott pulled over," google seems to give me articles reporting that [politician] is making claims. When I google "Tim Scott pulled over evidence," I get what looks to be more of the same. It's totally possible google is failing me, but I don't *currently* see any reason to think Scott's claim is true.
I want to be clear that my logic here *isn't* "Scott's claim is implausible, so probably he's lying." It's "Scott is a [high-level, USian] politician, so almost certainly a habitual liar, and so we shouldn't update on his claims without an *explicit theory* for why they're valid evidence which *does not* rely on [politician] being truth-tracking generally."
(I feel some social obligation to nod at the possibility that Scott is an exception to the rule, but it's mostly formality at this point. I don't think you *could* make it that far in politics if you were honest, and I *doubly* don't think you could without making waves I'd hear about.)
There is no "how often." You can't prove something is *systemic* by noting what is happening to an *individual*. The two are opposites.
OK I'm going to jump on your use of Systemic here. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a black man getting pulled over due to the color of his skin an example of normal racism as opposed to Systemic racism? Wouldn't systemic racism mean something less direct like cops in general hang out in poor neighborhoods that are disproportionately black?
I think the thought is something like this: it's systemic racism if he, the individual black man, would have been pulled over less (or would have been very very likely to have been pulled over less), in a world without biases against black men at a whole society level.
If a police officer can pull a black person over for no reason one day and still be a police officer the next, then the police officer's racism is being aided by the system. And if lots of police officers are doing it, then it is systemic.
Shouldn't the answer to that question depend on how often Tim Scott is driving recklessly or aggressively and where he's doing it? Is it possible he drives more aggressively than most people due to his privilege - knowing he's rich and powerful, maybe even knowing that getting pulled over would be good for his brand?
Anything is possible. If it were a privilege issue other senators would have a simiar experience. They haven’t.
Stereotypes are largely statistically correct, but often wrong with respect to individuals.
If you belong to a group that has a negative stereotype in the wider community, tough luck, and my sympathies.
However, this stereotype is not the fault of the larger community. The group has to collectively work to remedy it.
> The group has to collectively work to remedy it.
Are you saying you believe in collective responsibility? if people with blue eyes rob more banks, Do you believe I have a responsibility to monitor other blue-eyed people to remedy this situation?
> This stereotype is not the fault of the larger community.
There are a billion ways to subdivide the population. and get correlations. We use colour and gender because our brains are lazy, but there's no particularly good reason we should simply accept those particular neural inadequacies when they harm harm millions of people.
Are you certain that's how you want to make the case for antiracism?
A PCA of the overall population might well find a component of the evolutionary environment as a predictor of, say, crime. And then what?
It's better to be against racism in a way that doesn't condone racism if the data comes out one particular way.
"However, this stereotype is not the fault of the larger community."
It absolutely is. Even if we assume that there is a statistical trend that matches the stereotype (which there often isn't), that doesn't justify a stereotype. A stereotype is, by definition, when individuals are assumed to have a particular trait. That assumption is being done by the larger community, and so the larger community is at fault. The idea that the group can change the larger community's attitude, let alone that it is their responsibility to do so, is reprehensible victim blaming.
"Ok. But then how would you feel as a 22 black accountant or sitting US Senator being stopped at rates vastly higher than you white co-workers?"
People assuming your criminality based on skin color/sex/age and people assuming your culpability in the oppression of people base on your skin color/sex/age probably has some parallels worth exploring to help each side grok each other's grievances here. It does not feel good, it feels like there is a huge inhuman system that isn't even so kind as to be indifferent to your suffering but actually uses it as a bar to measure progress.
> But then how would you feel as a 22 black accountant or sitting US Senator being stopped at rates vastly higher than you white co-workers?
As a man, I'm already supposed to accept having a far higher chance to get stopped, shot, jailed, etc than a woman.
So either I want 'systemic misandry' to be a thing, or for people to chill out on the systemic racism stuff.
They can't have it both ways, in my view.
Why are you "supposed to accept" this? Who is saying that?
This is feminism 101, that existing gender systems oppress men too. This is the point of "privilege" talk, so that we can understand both male privilege and female privilege, and how they are different from each other, and both are signs of an underlying system that causes problems for everyone.
Bringing up the concept of female privilege nearly always results in refusal to accept it, if not anger. The ideology is manichean, where it can be accepted that men oppress other men, which is nearly always how they mean the phrase that men get oppressed too, but not that there is systemic oppression by women against men or even that men can get treated worse by men (or systems supposedly controlled by men) than women get treated by men (or systems supposedly controlled by men).
Can you find a mainstream feminists that accepts/argues that systemic misandry in policing is worse than systemic racism in policing? After all, men get policed harsher compared to women, then blacks compared to whites, if you ignore crime rates, or if you don't. Of course, a common rebuttal is to recognize the disproportionate criminality of men, but not of black people.
PS. I think that you should always ask feminists for specifics when they claim that men are oppressed too, because this seems to often be a way to rebut the claim that they are misandrist, without a honest admission that the extent and way in which they believe that men are oppressed is quite a bit different from the way in which they believe that women are oppressed.
If we model oppression or enforcement of gender norms as a set of interactions between individuals (to keep it simple), there are four possible combinations:
a) men oppress men,
b) men oppress women,
c) women oppress women,
d) women oppress men.
The most simplistic interpretation of feminism would be {b}. All men are oppressors, all women are victims, the situation is perfectly black and white. This is obviously NOT what modern feminists believe... and they express it by saying things like patriarchy hurts men too, or admitting that women can also be complicit in enforcing the norms of patriarchy.
The things that I said in previous paragraph still allow two possible interpretations: is our society {a,b,c,d} or is it {a,b,c}? Note that in both options it is true that women sometimes support patriarchy (option c) and that men can be victims of patriarchy (option a), so just repeating these two will not help us distinguish between {a,b,c,d} and {a,b,c}.
My model of society is {a,b,c,d}. I suspect that many feminists believe {a,b,c}, but you see how difficult it is to communicate the difference. I believe that even if they admit that both men and women are complicit in enforcing gender norms, and that men can be also hurt by patriarchy, they still assume that those men are only hurt by the... uhm... male half of the patriarchy.
I think this is really helpful.
I think if you ask people explicitly about this, almost all feminists will admit it's {a,b,c,d}, and once you put it like this, they'll even be able to very quickly come up with examples of d (women teasing men about being weak if they cry in public, or refuse to sign up for war).
The problem is that the automatic associations people have don't naturally trigger thoughts of d unless they stop and explicitly think about it.
This may be "not what modern feminists believe" - but it is closely correlated to how modern feminists *act*, and what *policies* powerful feminists encourage to be enforced.
Which means , given that feminism is such a powerful force it's virtually unassailable in polite company - means that there's option e) all oppression in the future is caused by groups of women.
Also importantly, "systemic racism" is an essentialist term, meaning that the American system is /in its eternal Platonic essential nature/ racist. All those adjectives mean that it is racist not in its mechanisms or behavior, but in its animating /soul/. It can thus never be reformed, or even analyzed; it can only be destroyed and replaced.
That's how it's used. "Systemic racism" is used to stop inquiries into where the racism lies and what's causing it, just as essentialism has always been used to stop inquiry, from "God did it" to "dormative properties". By saying that racism is distributed throughout the entire system, it discourages the idea that we can identify problems within the system and fix them.
The "systemic racism" answer isn't the "god did it" answer. It's a functionally equivalent answer. If it actually took the idea of structure seriously, it would allow people to examine the structure and propose possible ways to change the structure, just like we've done since the Constitution was ratified. To do that, you'd have to define racism, measure a particular instantiation of it numerically, then do something like a factor analysis on the system you measured, attributing different fractions of it to different inputs to that system. I know a guy who was kicked out of a conference because he tried to do that in a blog post that had nothing to do with the conference.
That's not what "systemic racism" means. Rather, it means the institutional procedures in place are biased against a certain race, even though such bias is not explicitly expressed by the rules.
At risk of being naive, has anyone read/listened to Isabel Wilkerson’s “Castes”? Phenomenologically I hear something very important about her excavating/restoring the racial equality question to its “proper roots/place” in the realm of Caste Systems if you want to have a more “rigorous” interpretation of the issue. Apologies if her works on “race” have already been explicated elsewhere in this realm…
"Accepting systemic racism means its not enough to be "not-racist", you have to be actively anti-racist or you're perpetuating racial inequity, and actively opposing all existing social structures definitely sounds demanding and difficult."
I mean, isn't that just obvious? Some racism is done not by individuals, but by the interaction of sets of rules built into structures. People who just follow those rules are perpetuating racial inequality, even if they are not doing anything individually racist. I'm not sure where the "you have to be" comes about - no one should think it's *possible* for basically *anyone* to be *completely* non-racist. One has to pick one's battles and all that, and I think it's better to focus on *improving* social structures rather than *opposing* them.
Most people reject anything that sounds like too much work or suggests that they're not a good person as obviously false, so no, it isn't obvious. Most people may be willing to accept they're "a little bit racist", but that doesn't necessarily imply that they need to do anything more than not express those opinions in an upsetting way.
For what it's worth, I don't reject social justice, and definitely not because I think it's too demanding. I've got a triple whammy of Christianity, Effective Altruism and low self esteem here, so I'm perfectly fine with accepting that I'm a horrible person perpetuating all kinds of injustice just by living my life. The difficult question for me is how to actually make the world a better place rather than just wallowing in pessimism, and I'm working on that.
Every race prefers their own except liberal Whites. Polling has shown this repeatedly and beyond question.
Anti-racism is nothing more than holding Whites to a standard that no other race is held to. If Blacks prefer other Blacks, Asians prefer other Asians, and Hispanics prefer other Hispanics, why is it suddenly immoral for Whites to prefer other Whites. I’ll answer - it isn’t.
That's not what we're talking about. The notion of "anti-racism" isn't that whites shouldn't prefer whites. It's that whites who do nothing racist at all are still racist unless they're actively fighting racism.
I think it's obviously related, though. If the stronger claim "whites preferring whites is okay" is supported, the weaker claim "not actively fighting racism is okay" probably is too.
How is your response to this supposed problem "we ought not be held to this standard" rather than "everyone ought to be held to this standard?"
If you put up those "It's ok to be white" stickers you are clearly seen as racist.
I always thought that you should judge a statement by reversing the races and seeing how it sounds then.
"no one should think it's *possible* for basically *anyone* to be *completely* non-racist"
On the contrary, I'm pretty sure almost all Americans believe they are not racist.
Isn't it obvious that if you aren't actively fighting for transgender rights, you hate trans people?
Isn't it obvious that if you aren't actively working to protect the environment, you're anti-environment?
Isn't it obvious that if you aren't actively fighting crime, you're pro-crime?
Isn't it obvious that if you aren't actively suppressing QAnon, you support QAnon?
No.
But it's obvious that if you aren't actively fighting for transgender rights (or even if you are!) and you are working for an organization that keeps trans people out of something, then you are perpetuating some trans inequality.
And if you aren't actively working to protect the environment (or even if you are!) and you're throwing out lots of plastic, then you're perpetuating environmental harm.
And if you aren't actively fighting crime (or even if you are!) and you work for an organization that commits crimes, then you are perpetuating some crime.
I'm not talking about anyone's mental state. I'm just talking about what they're doing. And you can be fighting X with one set of actions while still continuing to perpetuate X with others, regardless of whether you personally feel pro or anti X.
Perhaps the problem is that the language used tends to be interpreted, and not without reason, to refer to mental states. "I support X" is not often taken to mean "my actions inadvertently may perpetuate X".
Yes, I think that is the source of the biggest problems here. People naturally slide between consequences and intentions, and even when the movement shifts intentionally towards talking about consequences, people both pro and anti the movement end up sliding back to thinking that it's about intentions.
Valid as far as it goes, but there's a neglected term here.
1. People deliberately doing evil (eg Hitler)
2. People actively trying to do good
3. People indirectly making things worse
...
4. But people *also* indirectly make things better!
On a long enough timeline, (2 & 4) are gonna completely swamp (1 & 3). We deliberately intend only a small subset of our actions, and those tend to be pretty time-limited while the unintended consequences just. keep. coming.
My intuition is that, for most people, the sum of (intentional & unintentional good) outweighs the set of (intentional & unintentional bad). Aggregating like this is tricky, but if I imagine, say, that I hear a random stranger got fatally struck by lightning, and then I check to see whether I intuitively expect the world to get better or worse as a result. If someone's existence is net-positive to the world, that seems like another way of saying their (direct + indirect good) outweighs their (direct + indirect bad).
I kinda feel like some people are trying to have this one both ways. (I don't know if this is you; you're *here*, so maybe not.) To most Americans, "racist" implies *something* about the disposition or intent of the person it's being applied to- there's a *very* strong connotation. It's also quite emotionally charged. It's thus a very poor choice of descriptor if you're *not* trying to talk about intent or mental states. I think, for some people, the connotations are a feature. "This isn't about intent, we're looking at objective impact" is a *really good* motte, but if all the people who make the claim really meant it we'd be collectively *much better* at *actually measuring* impact by this point.
I think that you meant to say that 3) and 4) has a higher impact than 1) and 2) ?
I think the idea is that some time in the past few decades, the people most concerned with racism had the realization that the unintentional effects of most people's actions are much bigger than the intentional effects, and they naturally therefore said that the concept they were interested in should include the unintended effects as well. But the broader public has always been much more interested in the intentions than in the unintended effects, and keeps insisting on misreading things in that way.
At a certain point they tried to introduce new terminology, like "privilege" that tries as hard as possible to get away from intentions and character traits, and from ranking people on a single-dimensional axis. But the public (on all sides of the issue) keeps bringing the terminology back to intentions and evaluations of character.
As I said in another thread, it all comes back to the clash between consequentialism and deontology.
Not only it is not obvious, but it is also illogical and wrong
On top of it, it is completely possible to dislike trans people, but not hate them
The animus against systemic racism is because there is no such thing in reality.
Ideologies based on lies usually produce atrocious results, especially towards people they profess to protect. Communism is a great illustration.
There is systemic racism against Asians. Their standards for college admissions are much higher than any other race.
Imagine someone you know is absolutely obsessed with tap water quality. To them, just about every single problem in the world can be traced back to the quality and cleanliness of the local tap water. If you ever try to suggest that maybe there are some other important factors involved, they (truthfully!) bring up Flint and lead contamination in general, (truthfully!) point out how much of the world doesn't have access to clean tap water, and (...truthfully...?) accuse you of being complicit in perpetuating the problem.
Now imagine that instead of one person you know, it's most of your social circle and also THE ENTIRE MAINSTREAM MEDIA that has to talk about tap water quality at every single available opportunity.
At least to me (and I guess I count as "conservative" at this point), that's what the problem with "wokeness" is. It's not that I think racism doesn't exist. It's not even that I think structural racism doesn't exist. It's just that I don't think it's the most powerful force in the universe or the root of all evils in the world, and a lot of people seem to be loudly proclaiming exactly that.
To me, to the nearest approximation, wokeness and it’s detractors only exist online. Like I have literally never heard someone use that term in real life. If you think it’s as common as you claim, you’re spending way too much time online.
Always was.
I think Yglesias explicitly apologized for suggesting "it's just on college, don't worry", but he wipes his Twitter regularly so I can't find it.
Especially after last summer.
You say "only exist online" as if we're talking about rogue AIs floating around cyberspace instead of, y'know, real people expressing their opinions to each other over the most wide-reaching communication network ever created. And also as if online culture hadn't been a major driver of offline culture this past two decades or so.
(Won't deny that I'm Extremely Online, though.)
Going to disagree with you here. I encountered “wokeness” and “anti-wokeness” in two fairly large institutional contexts: Residential Life at college and fundamentalist christian church respectively, both of which I have been involved in in a non-trivial manner
clarifying point that Residential Life refers to the organization that runs the colleges dorms
The problem is that I we all know people IRL who spend too much time online. (I know a guy who's about 70 years old and he used the term "cultural Marxism", the internet is ruining everything.)
“Cultural Marxism” codes internet conservative. Are there more substantial criticisms of the term? Perhaps you prefer Frankfurt-Schulbewegung?
The usual form of progressive criticism (e.g. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism ) is to present a weakman, such as the belief that progressives are literal Marxists, or else to observe that the term resembles the Nazis' Kulturbolschewismus & is occasionally used in a similar way by modern neo-Nazis & assert that therefore everyone who uses it must be a neo-Nazi. The way it appears to actually be used by reasonable people is to describe modern progressives' zero-sum thinking, their tendency to reject formal equality by explicitly defining policies as justified or not based on whether they benefit or harm the groups they think of as oppressed or oppressing, & their willingness to quickly adopt new fashionable ideas even if they contradict their previous beliefs (sources: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/10/leninthink & https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/202103/cultural-marxism-far-right-anti-semitic-conspiracy-theory ). I think that the last of these objections is somewhat exaggerated — modern progressives are nowhere near as willing to quickly change their opinions based on fashion as the described Bolsheviks were — & the latter source errs in assuming that these ways of thinking came to predominate by means of consistent supporters of them intentionally infiltrating academia &c. rather than by gaining popularity among the existing cultural elite.
Often these debates don't talk about specifics, just a general cultural issue which is hard to prove or disprove. Have you seen Slow Boeing's example? It's definitely happening offline: https://www.slowboring.com/p/tema-okun
On the other hand, I don't have a strong position on how important it is.
Is it happening offline in any real sense? It seems 95% of it exists as an online meme.
It's fair that you did say to the nearest approximation, not that it wasn't happening at all. I've seen adjacent ideas personally offline but I've generally agreed with those, the extreme stuff I've never run into.
Matt R just linked to a blog post about something that is actually used by a number of governments & non-profit organizations.
Wokeness is thriving in grade schools. A few weeks ago someone (a white lady) read a letter accusing our school of institutional racism because although we have a super diverse staff, we don't have enough black teachers and we didn't issue a Black Lives Matter statement. (Apparently, lots of schools did). Offering social justice curriculum workshops is a booming business right now. Teachers and students are eating this stuff up, and offering an opposing viewpoint is very dangerous because everyone is looking for closet racists to crucify.
Scott's Eighth Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo ( http://web.archive.org/web/20131229232838/http://squid314.livejournal.com/329561.html ) was pretty much on point.
When you say "very dangerous" are you talking about career-wise for the teachers, or are you also talking about kids being subjected to violence?
It actually does appear to exist in real life at this point, although I can't guess at the extent.
My first encounter of the term outside private online conversation was while onboarding at my present company (one of this decade's megacorporations), in January. They used the "woke" term unironically in their inclusiveness material.
The material actually triggered my fight-or-flight reflexes (since I associated so much of it with toxic discussions online), but thankfully, my fears were been laid to rest by conversations with my team and manager, and also by just logically thinking through what they were trying to achieve in their particular case.
Gotta say they're really good people - I'm not willing to judge them on a few possibly poorly chosen words. Though whenever I think back to the inclusiveness training I'm still a little weirded out by it. (I realise it's partly a legal requirement in some of the many countries this company straddles, and there are no doubt plenty of people who would behave badly without it, but it also just really doesn't help with anxiety levels of a scrupulous person...)
N=1, but my experience has been quite different. My meatspace social circle was using the phrase "stay woke" before it got picked up as something of a pejorative term, and although most of them don't care much about political or social issues there's definitely a few that fit the woke culture warrior stereotype.
Oh wow, haven't heard this one since at least 2016. I didn't think the old "it's just some crazies online!" argument could possibly be sustained in a world where the president, NYT, and Coca-Cola are explicitly woke.
In a world where Hillary Clinton before election wrote an article about the frog Pepe, I am no longer sure the distinction between online and offline is meaningful.
I mean, the *term* I haven't either. The people can be found at your local tertiary institution, or in lower concentrations at a few other places.
There was a movie about that :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KvgtEnABY
Note that this can go the other way : when you're trying to point out that we have water quality issues, but a lot of people deny it because "there is no way that our water isn't the purest in the world, how dare you !" or something.
And then when you have literal ex-generals writing an open letter about the increasing threat of civil war and that in the near future the military might have to intervene (by seizing power ?!), they're being treated like if they were the character above.
Also, for water I think it literally happened : weren't some biologists complaining that it was hard to raise awareness about water being contaminated by hormone-affecting chemicals because they were then equated to Alex Jones ?
Funnily enough, where I come from, the expression for this translates to "this even flows from the tap"
I would say "wokeness" is wildly exaggerating some real problem.
An example I happen to be interested in: sexism in the tech industry. Most computer programmers are not women. The woke perspective is that this is a huge problem with the tech industry caused by widespread sexism in the industry. My perspective is that the tech industry is not unusually sexist, and the main reason for the gender gap is that women are less interested in programming. James Damore got fired and viciously attacked (e.g. https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788) for expressing this view in 2017.
I think this is hard to discuss because it's very subjective how big problems are. In my example: How big is sexism in the tech industry? (obviously there is some) How big is people complaining about sexism in the tech industry? Is one of these things unreasonably bigger than the other? How could two people who disagree measure these things in a way they could both agree on?
I think a better theory as to why most programmers are not women is not that women aren't interested in programming, but that the tech industry is downstream of sexism that plays out in childrearing at home, in schools, and in child/teen pop culture - where women are discouraged systematically from taking interest in programming and programming adjacent things for nearly a decade before they even get to college and declare a major.
Woman are more interested in people, men are more interested in things. It's the same for chimpanzees.
That's not a very helpful generalization. I know quite a few excellent female programmers. They are interested in people and yet they can still code. Go figure.
That's a very helpful generalization if you want to understand why some fields are male-dominated and others female-dominated. I'm not talking about "not interested" and "interested", I'm talking about more and less interested.
If you want to "understand" why some fields are male-dominated, or if you want to "justify" why some fields are male-dominated?
A generalization.is not the same as universal rule, and is useful as long as it's correct most of the time.
"Women and men are statistically interested in different things" is an extremely-helpful generalisation if it avoids a futile and harmful social attempt to force all careers to 50:50 participation.
It is not very helpful when giving career advice to any individual person, but I don't think Guy was suggesting it be used as such.
I work in early childhood education, and I regularly walk into meetings with 40 women and me (man). People are not preaching about narrowing the gender gap either.
I think the problem of the underrepresentation of women in garbage collection is far more acute.
A valid generalization is not disproved by anecdote. But if anecdote is what you want, Megan McArdle can code. And yet...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-08-09/as-a-woman-in-tech-i-realized-these-are-not-my-people
And as we know human and chimpanzees intellectual and social behavior is indistinguishable
The point is that it's not cultural, but universal among humans and our closest relatives.
While I'm sympathetic to you're point, I generally find comparisons between social dynamics in humans and chimpanzees unhelpful and uninformative. Bonobos are as closely related to us, and very closely related to chimps, but chimps and bonobos have very different social behaviours in many ways. I just don't think any parallel, or lack thereof, between humans and any ape tells us much. The genetic differences are big enough that we should expect any social consequences of the genetic similarities to be lost in noise.
This kind of categorizing is little more than astrology tbh
I think the right way to phrase this to get it read as a statistical statement about the numbers of interested people rather than a statement about the intensity of interest is "more women are interested in people, more men are interested in things".
Also, I'm not at all sure that is true. I think it depends on the things. For instance, historical accuracy in films? You'd think it was men, but period accuracy for clothing in historical dramas? Definitely women. And they get just as geeky on details of seam types and how sleeves are connected to bodies as any guy talking about different loading mechanisms on a gun.
I don't know how much is cultural, but I think it's more than we'd like to admit.
"I think the right way to phrase this to get it read as a statistical statement about the numbers of interested people rather than a statement about the intensity of interest is "more women are interested in people, more men are interested in things"."
It's both. Bell curves with different means.
"Also, I'm not at all sure that is true. I think it depends on the things."
Sure, but the claim is not about specific things, it's about whether people are more interested in things in general, as a category. It's sort of like if I said men are larger than women, and then you said "that's not true, what about breasts?"
Evidence against this theory: the representation of women in computer programming before the early eighties was much higher than it is now, so a good chunk of the phenomenon seems to clearly be unrelated to the people/things idea.
I think it has more to do with programming being an easy way to make good money without going to lots of grad school.
The prevalence of 'interested in computer programing' before the early 80s was much lower than it is now. The people who were so interested were extreme outliers, and the population characteristics have reverted to the mean once a greater fraction of the population got involved in the pursuit.
I don't think this refutes my point? If the only people sufficiently interested were extreme outliers then you'd expect it to be even *more* heavily dominated by men. (This is what you'd get if the interest curve was/is a normal distribution – are you saying the people/things thing isn't a normal distribution?)
How could we distinguish your theory and my theory?
One problem with your theory is AFAIK countries with better gender equality have fewer women programmers.
I've made that argument as well, but it's worth grappling with arguments against that:
https://slate.com/technology/2020/02/women-stem-innate-disinterest-debunked.html
Note the reply to the supposed objections too.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797620904134
It can also be seen as countries with poorer economies having more - for the reason that material outcomes frequently trump preferences, and if you want to have to rely less on others' goodwill, you'll pursue a better paying career that might also give you a better chance of leaving the country. In Europe, you can make a decent living with any profession, in third-world countries you will have to get over yourself if you're seeking any kind of success and want to raise your children in an environment that actually suits.
One way is to broaden the survey to look at other fields, too: are girls discouraged systematically from taking interest in any other fields, or just programming? How is representation different in those other fields? I don't think the "discouraged systematically from taking interest" theory holds up.
One problem with your theory Jonathan is the wildly varying representation of women in the field over the decades. Clearly there is something else other than some kind of innate interest happening here.
I think both your theories are wrong :)
Scott wrote a big blog post, "Contra Grant on exaggerated [gender] differences]", that spent some time looking at the male/female ratio in comp sci in industry, grad school, college, high school, junior high, and elementary school, and found that it was constant, so that any such pressure would need to have been applied before some time in elementary school. Also, he made good arguments that women were discouraged in ALL fields, yet are now the majority in many of those fields. Other considerations also come up there, including a discussion of a big study of gender differences, and some minute picking-apart of its conclusions.
Something which is underestimated is the role of assault/abuse in restricting the thinking power that women can bring to bear on STEM fields. I’ve known several women who were advancing in STEM and then experienced rape or sexual assault and found it very difficult to continue to work at the mental level required in STEM fields. This is not to say they were assaulted by STEM colleagues. But if 1/3 women experience assault or some similar statistic, it’s quite plausible that some fraction of women who would otherwise do STEM are choosing other fields out of necessity. There is also a “violence targets outliers” dynamic in which some high-performing women are somewhat targeted (I think, I can’t prove that.) There is a glass ceiling that lives in the bedroom (yes, evil.)
Actually, I've always been curious about this in the context of the old Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences post just mentioned.
We know that women are who are assaulted are mostly assaulted by people they know, and that men are more likely to be harassers than women. So if you had a field that was very male at high school and then college level, wouldn't you expect the % of women to go down in that field, because of a higher rate of harassment, even if the men in the field were no more likely to be harassers or assaulters than men in other fields, simply because more men amongst the people a woman meets=more chance to meet a harasser or assaulter? And yet, I remember that post having fairly convincing citations showing that % of women in comp sci is both low *and* steady from high school through college to employment...
I have to look at the Contra Grant post, thank you for mentioning it. I had read something recently that had a very broad definition of STEM, dental hygienist was included and that surprised me. I will have to look at the computer science stats though. And see what counts as “computer science.”
I had a minute to look at Contra Grant. I think your point about who is or might be perpetrating the assault/harassment is very insightful. If harassment is happening, is it by colleagues, acquaintances or other roles?
In terms of Contra Grant I agree that a surveillance society is too high a price, or the wrong price, to pay for “gender parity.” I am not sure it works either, the percent women in CS did decline starting in the 80s and hmm, what does that coincide with but the rise of surveillance-as-justice.
In the workplace harassment scenes I’ve been in there was one harasser guy with some authority, his right-hand woman, and then women targets and men who were either unaware or unable to do anything about it. This last segment of males is the target group for the allyship dynamic but I think there are limits to its success; sometimes the nice guys can assist but not always. The situation where the nice guys drown in guilt while the 1 in 100 male harasser has 50 victims instead of 80 is ...not optimal.
I’m not sure the “steady” part of the comp sci pipeline stats holds up, it will take me more time.
A dynamic I recall from undergrad is the lone female math faculty member playing the battle-axe role and running off female potential majors as sort of not tough enough to lift Thor’s hammer type thing. Also the other end of the scale from harassment is who is rewarded and I think Scott’s analysis of the wider opportunities available to women leading to a drop in them choosing CS is interesting. When I get a minute I will dig for research on women who didn’t pursue graduate STEM and what they give as their reasons.
Anyway to recap the harassment which theoretically handicaps a woman from pursuing STEM well might be not primarily occurring in the workplace even if it is acquaintance based.
And to add I am so glad I spent zero time online in the cultures Scott describes.
One data point in favor of this is the fact that while cis women are underrepresented, trans women are overrepresented. Whatever is causing the gender gap in programming and related technical professions doesn't seem to affect trans women, and one obvious difference is that most trans women were born with a Y chromosome and raised as boys. You see this in other stereotypically geeky things, I follow the video game speedruning community, and trans women outnumber cis women there by a large margin.
That support biological differences just as well, since trans women have a Y chromosome.
And yet in the most free, egalitarian societies (e.g. Sweden), the differences between gender are the greatest. In the most oppressive societies (Arab world), the differences are least (many female engineers).
This is not a refutation of the theory as sexism can play out differently in different cultures, and this data point suggests that female participation in engineering is in fact driven by cultural and not biological factors.
I'm not sure it's a meaningful statement to say it is "driven by cultural and not biological factors". If you lock all the women in cages then none of them will get STEM degrees. If you force them to study STEM on pain of death then lots will get STEM degrees. No one thinks that cultural factors can't influence STEM participation by women.
But if currently MORE women are in STEM than want to be, the correct social change would be to make it possible for LESS women to be in STEM, not to discriminate against men in hiring or something.
Let's back up and be clear about a few things. Even if "currently MORE women are in STEM than want to be" that does not mean that the correct social change is necessarily for less women to be in STEM. For example, it might be that fewer women WANT to be in STEM due to sexism they experience in STEM fields but if that sexism wasn't there, then MORE would want to be in STEM, not less.
And you cannot just take some blanket notion of gender equality across all dimensions and assume that applies equally to STEM in all nations. It is quite possible that western nations have a particular cultural sexism that expresses itself in STEM fields for women, but less sexism overall.
In fact, this is precisely one of several criticisms made of the original study and the inference that you are basing your entire argument on.
"From cradle to classroom, a wealth of research shows that the environment has a major influence on girls’ interest and ability in math and science. Early in school, teachers’ unconscious biases subtly push girls away from STEM. By their preteen years, girls outperform boys in science class and report equal interest in the subject, but parents think that science is harder and less interesting for their daughters than their sons, and these misconceptions predict their children’s career choices.
Later in life, women get less credit than men for the same math performance. When female STEM majors write to potential PhD advisors, they are less likely to get a response. When STEM professors review applications for research positions, they are less likely to hire “Jennifer” than “John,” even when both applications are otherwise identical—and if they do hire “Jennifer,” they pay her $4,000 less. Women of color face even greater challenges as racial and gender biases intersect.
These findings make it clear that women in Western countries are not freely expressing their lack of “interest” in STEM. In fact, the best predictor of college women’s choice of major is the amount of gender discrimination they perceive in that major, not how “math”-y or “science”-y it is. Cultural attitudes and discrimination are shaping women’s interests in a way that is anything but free, even in otherwise free countries."
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/countries-with-less-gender-equity-have-more-women-in-stem-huh/
Perhaps there are cultural factors other than/in addition to sexism which influence choice of career for both men and women. If a daughter is going to be sent to school, she better make it good and be an engineer or doctor, is the way I understand it. I googled "most common degrees for women saudi arabia" and good ol' wikipedia says women at the university level view lectures from male professors through monitors and ask questions via telephone, since they are not allowed to attend lectures in person. Women are allowed into libraries to study only at certain times and with a male guardian present. Yeah if they are going to go to all that trouble it needs to be very $ worth it. Also are women allowed to study the Quran? If not, there goes history, politics, philosophy and most humanities.
Also, in practical terms, the way for women's university attendance to be logistically reasonable in that setting is for a sister to tag along with a brother, or female cousin with male cousin, so she can just do what he does and have the guardian be him. I can't prove this but it seems that women would have an incentive to study whatever the brother/cousin was studying in these cases.
It depends on what you consider "sexist." Openly derogatory to women? No, that would probably get you fired. Inconsiderate to women? Very much so. The programming bro culture at a company can be very off-putting to a woman. For some reason, certain people always assume that women are less interested in programming because of something inherent in women's brains. If that's the case, then why did the percentage of women in computer science start dropping in the 80s, and why has it recently started going back up? Did women's brains change? No, the culture changed. For example, there have been recent efforts by many large companies to hire and train female programmers in a welcoming environment and they have no problem finding interested candidates. It could be such a simple thing as there being other female programmers already at the job that could make a woman feel more comfortable and welcome.
> I have worked in that industry all my life and never once have I encountered a "bro."
I have to agree. The vast majority of programmers exist on a continuum between "nerd" and "perfectly normal white-collar professional". The "programmer bro" that makes women uncomfortable by constantly crushing empty brewskis against his backwards-cap-wearing forehead seems to be a fictitious creature that exists only because it's more socially acceptable for women to say "I can't stand all these programmer bros" than to say "I can't stand all these nerds".
I think this is one of those things where someone's entire perception of the issue is informed by the 1-5 companies that they've happened work at. Company cultures vary enormously, and people generally self select into cultures they're comfortable in. It wouldn't be that strange for programmer bros to exist, and for someone not to have encountered them in the unrepresentative sample of companies that they've worked for.
https://twitter.com/s_r_constantin/status/1391332103535669250
"bro" is one of those things when I heard it I went through two phases:
1: how stupid, bros suck, lol
2: wtf, I get accused of being a bro by people who know absolutely nothing about me
Scott has a classic post about people ending up having to defend other distasteful people because otherwise they end up backed into a corner as "well, you're one of the Jews"
Found it: ‘weak men are superweapons’ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
"Bro" is a pretty imprecise term these days. Some people seem to just use it to mean 'any sexist man', without the connotations of machismo and binge drinking and anti-intellectualism it originally had.
Yes, that is what I meant (obvious to me, but clearly not to others). I did not mean a jock-type character. I meant a socially inept guy who does not think a woman could be his intellectual equal.
It's the culture of startups that were run by people in their 20s. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley occupies this tremendously outsized portion of the public imagination in computing and software and the Internet thinks this represents "tech" when the vast majority of companies involved in making software have perfectly boring and ordinary corporate cultures identical to what you would find if you worked in any other industry.
The more ridiculous thing is if you look at a breakdown by within-industry sectors, web development of the type so predominant in Silicon Valley is overwhelmingly the most female heavy. Enterprise software, aerospace, defense, where you won't find a bro in sight are way lower in percentage of women, and electrical and mechanical engineering are lower than any form of software engineering.
I worked at a hedge fund before starting in software and was an armor officer (tank commander) in the Army before that. I had never worked with a single woman before going into software, and five of six direct supervisors I've had since there were women. My dad was a plumber for 40 years. Never worked with a single woman his entire life. His dad was an aluminum worker. 0 female coworkers. His dad was a stonemason. 0% female. This wasn't just an artifact of the time. Industrial metalwork and stonemasonry are still roughly 0% female. Nobody disputes that women just don't want to do those jobs.
Of course you haven't. "Programming bro" is an oxymoron, an absurd joke that brings together two opposites.
"If that's the case, then why did the percentage of women in computer science start dropping in the 80s"
More careers started opening up for women beyond just "secretary" and "teacher". Programming was initially considered as a kind of secretarial work, I think.
"why has it recently started going back up?"
Has it?
"they have no problem finding interested candidates"
AFAIK women are still way less than 50% of software engineers at all large companies
How can we tell the difference between "women are less interested in programming" and "programming culture is offputting to women"?
Ok, I am not making the claim that if you eliminate all cultural obstacles to women becoming programmers, that 50% of programmers will be women. I am making the claim that the percentage of women programmers will be much higher than it is now.
How do tell the difference between women's interest in programming and cultural roadblocks? The culture is moving in the right direction, so I guess by the next generation we will have a clearer picture.
Did culture get more sexist in the 80s? The same decade when female participation in the workforce increased the most?
In many ways, obviously yes. The 1970s was a period when both major political parties had the Equal Rights Amendment as part of their platform, and bisexuality was cool among celebrities. In the 1980s, Republicans ended their support for the ERA and gays started going back into the closet.
It wasn't as a dramatic a reversal as the one from the 1920s to the 1930s, but it was clear that there was one.
The 80s was the time when movement conservatives first controlled the presidency. Opposition to feminism was a big thing for a lot of them (especially the evangelicals.)
Then why is it the case that gender equality positively correlates with *fewer* women in tech?
Note the challenge to that claim above: https://slate.com/technology/2020/02/women-stem-innate-disinterest-debunked.html
Do countries with less "cultural obstacles" to women have much more women programmers?
Yes. Sweden, for example.
I'm not certain about the timeline, but remember how computer was an almost women-only job before they were replaced by machines ? It would make sense that some fraction of them would have ended by graduating to "programmer", while today there's no such option.
Punching cards was no longer needed.
Same with math. Lots of women were working in math as calculators. That does not mean they were proving theorems en masse.
I find this argument strange whenever it pops up. Programming itself has gone through numerous huge changes over the years. Programming today doesn't really resemble programming in the 80s, or the 00s. The discrimination/bad culture argument really needs to try harder to contend with law quickly integrating, I'm a software engineer with a couple of lawyer friends and, at least in my area, lawyers seem to have all the possible "bro culture" problems that supposedly plague software jobs are much higher rates.
I don't think it makes much sense to treat lawyers and engineers as a similar systems as the largest law firm has only 10K lawyers and it drops off with a power law distribution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_law_firms_by_revenue) which will allow much more self sorting of culture and it is easier to find a different job as a lawyer rather than leaving the profession. From my limited observations as an engineer, some parts of the culture are/were toxic and bad teams really do push people out (including out of neighboring teams).
I don't think it is easier to find a different job as a lawyer without leaving the profession at all. The opposite, in fact, by a mile.
Law is a broad field. I think you would need to specify which type of law. The lawyers that go into family law are different from the lawyers that practice corporate law, for example, and would have very different cultures.
Has this same charity be extended to software engineers? Architects, web devs, systems engineers, full stack and that's just the technical differences. Software engineers work in basically every type of company and smaller team's will have their culture dictated more by the type of company their imbedded in more than by the work they're doing.
> For some reason, certain people always assume that women are less interested in programming because of something inherent in women's brains. If that's the case, then why did the percentage of women in computer science start dropping in the 80s, and why has it recently started going back up? Did women's brains change? No, the culture changed.
If the distinction in interests (which can be described approximately as: more women than men are interested in work related to people, more men than women are interested in work related to objects) was between men in general and women in general without substantial exceptions, then it would indeed be harder to determine whether there is any biological cause or it's entirely cultural. On the other hand, if women who had abnormally high levels of male sex hormones during development are more likely to have male-typical interests in a way correlated to their level of male sex hormones (as https://www.pitt.edu/~bertsch/CAH%20and%20jobs.pdf found), then that provides some evidence that biology — specifically, the effects of sex hormones on brain development — does contribute to the difference.
That's a really interesting study. Thanks for sharing!
"why did the percentage of women in computer science start dropping in the 80s"
I've heard that "computer science" prior to the early 1980's had little resemblance to what computer science is now. I'm not sure what the content of a 1970's computer science major was, but I'd like to.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
Plot twist : "Mel" was short for "Melanie".
Computer Science as a distinct course of study offered by universities barely existed before 1980. A few schools offered it, but most still had it as a sub-discipline beneath Electrical Engineering or Mathematics. Heck, MIT still only offers EECS and not CS by itself.
Carl's link is funny. Makes me think of Alan Turning programming the bombe by physically rewiring the circuits. None of that pansy machine code and punch cards that coddled kids get these days.
Well...I was at MIT in 1980, and worked a little on Multics, and there was a massive interest in programming among my classmates. 6.001 was incredibly oversubscribed. It's true the CS degree was subsumed within Course 6 itself, but historically that makes a lot of sense, since the roots of the place placed a very high premium on "hands on" education. If you don't understand the hardware, how can you be a good programmer? etc. It may be different now for all I know, given that close-to-the-metal stuff like new OS or HLL design is no longer the rage.
Anyway, there were plenty of people getting programming degrees and doing very serious work (and research) in the late 60s and 70s. Not nearly as many as now, of course, and I certainly agree that further down from the best engineering schools the degree was less available.
> Inconsiderate to women? Very much so.
I'd say more "inconsiderate, period". Singling out inconsideration to women (or minorities, or majorities) really doesn't help do anything besides advance a pre-decided thesis.
Saying that Fords break down more often than Hondas because they get rained on doesn't really answer anything without pulling in even more circular logic (the chemical structure of rain is anti-Ford; Ford owners are laughed at for trying to keep their cars dry; mechanics aren't trained to recognize rain as an issue with Fords; whatever) - the answer isn't to go spelunking for deeper crazy logic, the solution is to maybe consider a different thesis.
> why did the percentage of women in computer science start dropping in the 80s
In part because the field got larger, in part because computer science was very, very different in nature before the microcomputer revolution, in part because other job prospects opened up (especially in Services) that women preferred more.
> why has it recently started going back up
Partially because the field has once again shifted (towards larger and larger teams valuing non-confrontational interpersonal contributions) and partially Affirmative Action, whether explicit or implicit.
If the only drive-throughs nearby are all McDonalds, I'll eat a lot of Big Macs. If a Burger King opens up, I switch to Whoppers. It's not because I changed my mind or because McDonalds was rude to me or made me feel unwelcome or because I didn't see enough preachy advertisements showing that even I could find a lunch opportunity at McDonalds, it's because I find whole leaf lettuce and full-ring onions far more palatable than the chopped and diced varieties.
If McDonalds starts offering Big Macs at $1, I may then start going back to McDonalds. I find them "more welcoming" only in the sense that it's less of a struggle to part with $1 than to part with $5.
I gotta say, I am very surprised by the responses to my simple comment. I expected something along the lines of "yes, male programmers should try to be more considerate towards women." I didn't think it would be controversial. Instead, there are, what appears, at least to me, a lot of defensive responses arguing why there is no such problem in the field. I don't know how much of this is just the natural contrarianism of the readers of this blog, how much of it is a rebellion against perceived oppressive social engineering at their companies (I would love to hear about specific examples if that is the case), and how much of it is some kind of psychological defensiveness spurned by the fear of loss of social status if more women enter the field.
Real Principal Skinner moment there.
"Am I wrong...? ...no, everybody who's telling me I'm wrong and explaining why and how I'm wrong is just defensive."
One day we will be able to post memes in substack
You "didn't think it would be controversial" to demand that people change their natural behavior and to accuse a group of men that are traditionally seen as off-putting to everyone (hence bullying) to be specifically inconsiderate to women?
You could just as easily argue that gays are driving straight men out of fashion and that the gay men should try to be more considerate to straight men, for example, by being less gay.
But that would be obviously discriminatory. That your discrimination is socially acceptable, doesn't make it less discriminatory.
"What do conservatives mean when they complain about someone or some institution being woke?"
They mean it's anti-straight white male.
Definitely yes, but that's the part you're supposed to think and not say if you want to remain in polite circles. Why I'm glad ACX prioritizes accuracy over politeness.
In practice it means "is left of me or my audience" in an extremely general way. A steelmanned version would be something about performative social signalling of progressive ideals without meaningful underlying behaviors
To conservatives it means "someone who will parrot left/woke dogma uncritically"
I'm not a conservative, I'm one of those SJW/Woke critical Liberals, but how I'd always define these things, and to me Woke and SJW are essentially the same thing, but I'd define it as a combination of two things. The first is a belief in strict identity-based monodirectional power dynamics with a oppressor/oppressed dichotomy. The second is a belief that social power should be used to enforce belief in this model.
That's not to say that I think racism doesn't exist. In fact, I even think various forms of systematic racism exist. But systemic, in my mind means something more something akin to everywhere. I think the nature of bigotry and bias as a whole vary wildly from place to place, and sometimes it can change directions.
The core problem I have with the Woke model, is that I think the monodirectional nature of it freezes out analysis other facets of bias and power, especially social and socioeconomic. And I happen to think a lot of racism is assumptions about socioeconomic status.
This is an insightful comment. Thank you.
Yeah, hence "New Socialism".
> What do conservatives mean when they complain about someone or some institution being woke?
Basically: that the institution's leadership or structure supports current progressive ideas about social justice issues (previously feminism of the sort described by Scott, now BLM as interpreted through a "white fragility"/"systemic racism" paradigm), that they use these as a reason to spread these ideas among their members/customers/&c. & encourage their implementation while attacking (by personal attacks, removal of privileges within the institution, firing, &c.) people who are too critical of them, & that they promote these ideas in their public messaging/branding/advertising (the leftist criticism of "woke capital" tends to include the idea that the institution does not actually care about the idea & is cynically using it to gain popularity among progressives, but this is often false).
Here is a quick rundown of the tenets of Wokeness:
https://newdiscourses.com/2021/04/critical-race-theory-two-page-overview/
“Unlike traditional approaches to civil rights, which favor incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory calls into question the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and the neutral principles of constitutional law.”
From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, first edition (2001), by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, p. 3.
“Crits [Critical Race Theorists] are highly suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely, rights.”
From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, first edition (2001), by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, p. 23.
By rightwing troll James Lindsay. Read something else if you actually want to learn anything.
James Lindsay is a liberal, and moreover not a troll. His essay is well-researched and backed by footnotes. It is far easier to smear a man than to make logical arguments against him.
Moreover, making logical arguments is explicitly rejected by Critical Theory, as noted above. No wonder name-calling was the weapon of first resort.
Here's a shorter summary of Critical Theory, to share with your uncles on Facebook: https://newdiscourses.com/2021/04/critical-race-theory-two-page-overview/
“Unlike traditional approaches to civil rights, which favor incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory calls into question the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and the neutral principles of constitutional law.”
From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, first edition (2001), by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, p. 3.
“Crits [Critical Race Theorists] are highly suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely, rights.”
From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, first edition (2001), by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, p. 23.
Don't be absurd.
I don't waste my time on bullshit but you can read a thorough takedown of Lindsay here: https://conceptualdisinformation.substack.com/p/james-lindsay-v-critical-race-theory
Or a broader overview of the right-wing smear campaign here: https://bostonreview.net/race-politics/david-theo-goldberg-war-critical-race-theory
The Woke are the new Communists. You know, communism was very good on paper, back in the day.
Ended up causing lots of deaths and enormous suffering. Unrestrained, the Woke will repeat the path.
Where did this obsession with "critical race theory" come from? It's only one movement out of dozens that are part of the broader academic left/proto-woke ecosystem, but now people are using it to stand in for everything.
It's the one that's Disney is implementing as part of their corporate training. I think it's important, people need to know what it is and what it believes, and come to understand how extraordinarily dangerous it is.
If you can have people who disagree with you or questions your narrative silenced, you aren't oppressed.
I started to worry about it after reading this: https://equitablemath.org/
Specifically, the worrying thing for me was not that it exists (everything exists somewhere on the internet), but the attacks I received by otherwise seemingly reasonable people after I pointed out that it has nothing to do with actual math.
I'm conservative, and one of the difficult problems that exists is that if a tiny minority is racist, they can still exert a disproportionate amount of power.
Say only 1% of Americans are racist, definitely a tiny minority. What if a disproportionate of racists become cops? Seems likely, cops are drawn from a pool where racists are more prevalent, and it is probably attractive to a racist to be able to harass minorities with few repercussions. These numbers are pulled out of my ass, but I could see 1% turning into 10% for these reasons.
Next, how many cops drive by someone in 7 years? Certainly more than 70, probably closer to 700. So this means that we could be living in a country where only 1% of people are racist, but that one percent do so much damage, that something needs to be done. I think that's mine and most conservative views, which is where the bad cop narrative comes from.
Exactly.
This post is really well-put and succinct without being smarmy. Thank you for making it.
This is a good take, but before theorizing about the cause of a problem, you need to make sure it actually exists. Blacks are underrepresented in fatal police shootings relative to their crime rates and their rates of killing police (see graph)
https://imgur.com/a/WyyKVKc
If anything, the data supports a view that the anti-white racists outnumber the anti-black racists.
Why would cops be a priori more racist? Of beat cops and sergeants in the LAPD, for example, 29% are white, 9.8% are black, 52% are Hispanic, and 8.7% are Asian. Wouldn't it be hard among that kind of "band of blue brothers" -- and they do think of themselves that way -- to be an outright racist? I mean, unless you hate on Samoans or or some other rare category you don't trust with your life every working day.
High testosterone is one factor that would push in that direction. Empirically higher T men are more right wing and more "racist" and more likely to become cops.
This probably derives from the fact that, until relatively recently in archaeological terms, the standard practice was for the winning tribe to kill all the men of the losing tribe and take their women as slaves. The men had more to lose from an invasion, genetically.
Hmm. But free testosterone levels are on average higher in black men than white[1]. Does this mean blacks are more likely to be racist than whites? That certainly inverts the narrative...
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[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4327897/
On average blacks are indeed more racist than whites in several measurable ways.
1. committing more hate-crimes per capita
https://imgur.com/a/KmjDjRQ
https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2017/topic-pages/offenders
2. attitude thermometer surveys
https://imgur.com/a/PkWBYxH
This shows that the average black has more racial in-group-bias than even the average white conservative. It also shows how white liberals are the only race x politics group in the survey with a net ethnomasochism instead of net ethnocentrism. Zach Goldberg made this chart from the survey data cited at the bottom.
3. (weaker evidence because it's not comparing US whites to US blacks directly, but it should still update a bit if you think we're not blank slates) an international survey showing white countries were a lot less racist than black countries. (via WaPo)
https://imgur.com/a/0iMuaEu
Didn't Roland G. Fryer prove that this premise is statistically incorrect, and cops are not racist? Why speculate otherwise?
"Woke" and my concerns with it definitely has little to do with actual racism. I've heard people use the n-word unironically in casual conversation, I know there are racists out there. I also agree that things like redlining 60 years ago has an effect on housing today - even if there are no direct links between choices made today and racism.
I see a couple of issues with "woke" that throw me off.
First, is very much about approach. Some here have called it authoritarian or totalitarian, and that comes pretty close to my concerns. I've been in favor of free speech since that was a leftist supported ideology, and still am. I'm a believer in discourse, discussion, and polite disagreement (probably why I like ACX). The idea that some ideas are not allowed to be aired (even if a lot of people, a majority, or even ALL people share that idea) is self-defeating and can only exist by using institutional power in ways that I am against.
Second, there's an underlying philosophical issue with the idea of "equity" - meaning equality of outcomes. If two people with vastly different skill sets must end up with the same [income, housing, material goods] in order to satisfy the premises, then it's never going to happen. No matter how hard we strive to make that happen, it is physically impossible. Even if we gave everyone a house and an income, some would use it wisely and some would waste it. Some would choose to do something different, with disparate results.
A society would have to be fully totalitarian to try to prevent that, and I think they would still fail miserably. Whether that's an unrealized outcome or an intentional outcome to force people to continually struggle with it, I don't know.
Third, the attempt to create "equity" will have many foreseen and unforeseen consequences, as it did in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. It seems likely to me that a sincere attempt at "equity" will result in an overall reduction in standard of living, quite possibly to the point where current poor people are worse off than now. The most likely scenario of such a push is that people currently well off or moderately well off end up with significantly lower standards of living, with little to no improvement for those it's intended to help.
Is it just me, who is not a native speaker, that reacts to equating “equity” with “equality of outcomes”? It is something I have seen in many places, and often used as something of a cause to be critical of woke-ish ideas.
Obviously any philosophical word such as equity or equality will have multiple possible definitions and related theories (cf justice). Outcomes would be one thing to look at; but equality of opportunity or process etc would also be possible. In general I have understood the word to mean something like “fairness”. Do we have a good reason to believe that naive equal outcomes is what people mean when they use the word equity?
Because if they mean fairness then a lot of what you seem to worry about here is not a problem. In this case we would look at equal outcomes as a measure of how fair our processes or social situations are, when compared to expected deviations and variance. If everyone started at an equal level, and there were no unfair interactions or systems etc - then whatever outcomes they got would still be fair.
However you yourself noted some cases where historical artefacts and biases would not allow for fairness, and affects the outcomes - this is what I think someone arguing for equity is most concerned with.
Looking at outcomes can be a useful guide to determine where potential unfairness exists though. Eg, given that we don’t agree with old-timey racists, the inherent difference in abilities between different colours of people is fairly small; so we would expect that very little of the difference in outcome is explained by this - assuming that we see a larger difference than expected, some of it may be due to unfairness; which we should try to ameliorate.
I don’t see how this would cause unforeseen totalitarian consequences.
The word is designed to be seen as potentially either, and has positive connotations. It's clearly used for that reason, even if it only mean's one thing. I'm not sure if there's a "woke spokesperson" who can define that for all, but I've regularly and consistently heard that "equity" means equality of outcome in this context. I've heard that from both left leaning and right leaning sources, including high level corporate and government individuals defining it (meant to be in positive terms, not a gotcha hit piece).
If it means "equality of opportunity" then that's fine with me. Even if that stretches to mean "make up for past failings and poor upbringings through resources designed to help struggling individuals escape their past" I'm pretty cool with it, depending on details. I think, for example, offering to pay for all college for individuals who had a very poor K-12 education is simply a dumb idea. We would be much better off trying to correct the K-12 system these kids went through than to throw money away trying to educate them in a college setting when they are woefully unprepared. That's a detail question though. I am pretty open to paying for college for students who are fairly to well prepared for study, intelligent enough, but who otherwise could not afford it. Someone getting a 600 on the SAT and a free ride is not good policy.
I do think we need to be careful making an assumption that any difference in outcomes must be a result of racism or previous racist policies. That might be true, but we really can't prove it's true,. There are plenty of poor whites who do terrible on standardized tests and live in crummy communities full of crime. Poverty and poverty-related outcomes are far more complex than saying "there's a difference, must be racism!" This affects our approach and expectations. If there is a third factor between "racism" and "genetics" to explain some or most of the disparities between individuals or groups, then trying to force equality of outcome is going to be both hard and counterproductive (in my mind, similar to giving free rides to college for the 600 SAT scorers). Even saying "100% racism" as cause doesn't mean every black kid can or should go to college, just like every white person doesn't and shouldn't go to college. This is starting to get in the weeds, so I'll stop there. Obviously I'm thinking of other programs beyond paying for college as well, just using that as one example.
Just as an aside, I think it's poor policy and unnecessarily divisive to offer services and catch-up programs based on race. A backwater Alabama family might be in need of help whether they are white or black or any other race. Inasmuch as past wrongs have resulted in reduced material conditions for black individuals, they will be overrepresented in any program that tries to correct the reduced material conditions.
Of course the concept will be used in different ways by different people in different contexts; I was just thinking that if we want to be believers in discourse and discussion that we should try to use the strongest version of the "opponents" (wokies?) arguments. Especially when trying to apriori reason about the possibility of something like pushing for equity causing totalitarianism/authoritarianism. Ascribing the naive interpretation of the words equality of outcome is likely not very helpful; most people I think would have deeper philosophy regarding what is fair, and come with unstated assumptions about the existence and causes of inequality.
I think I have seen the concept applied in a "to each according to their need" sense as well, in addition to the ones you mentioned (eg regarding support for people with disabilities).
I don't know about your education example; am not american - I couldn't tell if it is a real proposal (600sat free rides that is) and a common position of the woke crowd you are mentioning. Where I'm from university degrees are paid for by taxes; distributed (via some panels I think) by the state. Afaiu this pays for itself in the long run (but we also have higher taxes for those earning more). It does not mean that anyone would go (only those motivated), and there is still competition for most places, based on eg standardized test scores. I think this promotes fairness in that it allows anyone increased social mobility (eg poor people getting a higher-paying job). The left crowd around here I think very much would be for getting more resources to schools in poorer areas (probably while trying to limit profitability of starting private ones that do not offer support for disabilities). My feeling is that they would use mostly consequentialist arguments for any advantage given to disadvantaged groups; rather than justice based ones. (However I think they very much think that racism etc cause most of the discrepancies in outcomes from otherwise equal starting points - that people are very much similar despite colour).
I don't think woke people just assume that racism exists and that there is no possible proof of this - rather I think they feel they have collected plenty of evidence; empirical and theoretic, qualitative and quantitative. (In many cases you can do direct studies of such phenomena, eg by hiding or replacing names/images in applications to banks or employers).
It is a bit silly though that I am explaining what I am guessing woke people think - it's just that I think that we should try to deal with the strongest version of the arguments we disagree with. Summarizing a complex topic as a three letter phrase and proving that this has to lead to totalitarianism with a simple thought-experiment just rubbed me the wrong way.
Regarding alabama - wouldn't a more productive approach be to try and convince the wokes that supporting those disadvantaged groups would also be equitable; rather than trying to disprove the concept of equity.
Here's Kamala Harris saying that "equity" means "we all end up in the same place" is the correct interpretation. Take that for what you will. https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/1322963321994289154?s=20
If that's an accurate statement of their beliefs, then I think what I wrote follows. If that's not accurate (or less Woke people agree with it than I think), then what I'm saying doesn't follow. Assuming it's a true belief, do you disagree with my conclusions?
I actually like the system you are mentioning, where college is free but getting in is gated by proving competency. It allows skilled and capable individuals to go, regardless of their ability to pay. The current system in the US is somewhat broken, as it allows anyone to go, as long as they can pay for it (not all schools will admit you, but someone will). It's more broken because between loans and grants, just about anyone can pay for it* as well. A suggestion frequently made on the left is to make college free, but not to add testing requirements that would limit who goes. In fact, many would argue that testing requirements is drastically and specifically non-woke.
I'm not sure what you mean in the middle about assuming racism exists. That's an area that I agree, at least to an extent, with them about. Racism does exist. There's plenty of evidence for it.
On the Alabama question: One of the issues I have with woke ideology is the creation of overarching racial groups. Saying that all white people are X and all black people are Y is generalizing to absurdity. I would like to have a discussion about helping disadvantaged people of all races, but there's a very visible strain of wokeness that says all white people are oppressors and hold power, and no black people are oppressors or hold power. I'm not sure how you argue for "helping all disadvantaged people" when someone on the other side of the argument/conversation disagrees with the idea that a white person is or can be disadvantaged. Of course, not everyone on the left feels that way, so there's plenty of room for discussion with the non-woke on general ways to help those in poverty. Even if I disagree on the detail questions, there's at least room to talk. I may be overgeneralizing on wokeness, but that's definitely the impression that I get regarding power and oppression. Maybe they would agree Barack Obama has/had power, but probably not too many others.
*-Because they pay for it through loans, they owe it back. This is bad for those who fail out of school or who are unable to leverage their time in school/degree productively after. If it causes prices to rise, which I believe it does, then it's bad for everyone except college employees.
This was also in her tweet: "...It's about giving people the resources and the support they need - so that everyone can be on equal footing - and then compete on equal footing..." - which I take to mean more of equal opportunity, rather than enforcing what people make of those opportunities. I don't think I am reading into it too hard? I very much think that no-one is actually about to enforce outcomes in any authoritarian way - at worst they will use it as targets and redistribute support for it in ways we find slightly suboptimal. I think pretty much no-one would take issue to the outcomes if they were 100% chosen in a fair system, but that situation is so far away and unrealistic that it is not worth mentioning for most people.
Sorry about the middle; was responding to "I do think we need to be careful making an assumption that any difference in outcomes must be a result of racism or previous racist policies. That might be true, but we really can't prove it's true." with the idea that we probably can have some fairly accurate approximations for the effect of at least some policies, and some biases. But yeah, stuff is complicated and proving it completely is difficult.
So you must have had worse luck than me when speaking to wokies; or perhaps it is that much worse in the americas. To me the claims you attribute to them read more like what I get from memes sent to me from decidedly non-woke people making fun of (or fear-mongering about) wokeness - rather than what I get from talking to someone who I would consider woke. Sometimes they do use words in idiosyncratic ways; where there is some conversation needed before I can understand where they are coming from - eg what it would mean for a poor white person to still have some privilege.
Admittedly race is a much smaller topic here, and much of the discussion imported I think - we have a different history here. The similar issue they care a lot for might be xenophobia instead.
Very well put. Most people in America really don't understand how appealing and just Communism looked on paper, back in the day.
Also, they don't understand that Communism was predicated on changing human nature, and that necessitates totalitarianism. The end result was death and misery among the very stratum of the society Communism declared as protected.
The Woke are moving along the same path.
Why would Tim Scott being pulled over 7 times in six years be poof of more than a tiny minority of racists?
Maybe he's a shitty driver or likes to beat his last time to the office. I was pulled over far more than 7 times in the first 6 years I was driving. If the officer had always been a different race than me I might've drawn angry conclusions[1], but he wasn't, so I figured my tendency to see speed limit signs as merely advisory was more to blame.
Which is to say, part of the trouble with racism as currently defined is that it can explain too much. Every time an encounter between black and white doesn't go well, or one of the parties resents it (or somebody resents it on their behalf), we can jump to racism as the explanation. And it fits, by God. It *does* explain things. The problem is, there might well be more parsimonious explanations that *also* fit, and if we're a little bit intellectually lazy we don't always take Occam's Razor to heart.
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[1] Which has always struck me as the best argument for integration and some amount of affirmative action.
I’m by no means a conservative but to steelman a little, I think complaints of wokeness object to institutions that take pro-social justice ideological positions either in excess of effectiveness/need or in a way that contradicts the institutions core message.
An example of this would be people complaining about changing the physical fitness standards of the military in response to the inclusion of female soldiers. This would be characterized as “woke” because it’s seen as changing a standard in a way that contradicts the institutions objectives.
This becomes a point of conflict when the two sides disagree on the goal of institutions (e.g. should schools prepare students for jobs and life or should they teach values) or when there’s conflict about the size of the problem and/or solution (e.g. arguments over whether racialized police violence violence is a major issue and whether proposed solutions solve the problem).
I feel that this captures both the broad variety of complaints about “wokeness” and what kind of agreement the two sides would have to reach to form common ground on these issues.
can you label those charts y axis?
Google Trends data normalizes over the relevant interval, so for many of them no. I'm not sure how I feel about the additional level of normalization of e.g. atheism v. feminism - they're not so far apart that the comparison is meaningless, but it does complicate any narrative that proposes a transfer of attention by consistently-sized groups.
how is there a "higher than you can imagine" value then?
Here's the source of Scott's graph, if you want to see & poke around yourself: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=racism
why is 100% 'higher than i can imagine' ? would we use that to describe this chart as well? https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=mars
the "higher than you can imagine" seems to be about the baseline of 'mars' https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=racism,mars
The comparison kind of ignores the comparisons Scott is making, but I don't think that's a bad thing. It's *definitely* worth noting that racism at its most salient does only a little better than planets on a slow space news day.
Disclaimer: I am totally a shill for Big Aerospace.
i'm throwing random words in, and nearly everything has a 4x multiplier from high to low (though nothing with as high a derivative as racism)
"Racist" and "racism" are separate terms, as are associated phrases like "black lives matter", and one could plausibly use one without using another. In fact, "racist" is substantially higher than "racism". There's nothing similar for "Mars" ('Martian' doesn't even register, except for a little bit when 'the Martian' came out).
The 'racism' graph ends at what would be an all-time high with the exception of the spike. The spike is even higher by a factor of x4, and normalized would drown out the other data. Compared to the other topics, it *is* so far apart the comparison is meaningless.
(Other charts in this post show plenty of similar spikes, but usually multiple around significant events. "The George Floyd protests are the only time racism has truly broken into the popular consciousness" is a very odd take, but it's supported by the Google trends data and is probably best explored as a separate topic.)
is it supported? only a few topics were examined, and i'm not familiar enough with what google trends broadly look like to know... for example this mars trends has the same multiplier https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=mars
Pandagon seems to have a similiar spike, but is not given the "higher than you can imagine" treatment.
Scott also seems to be overlaying 2 independently normalized datasets. Here is google on atheism vs feminism: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=atheism,feminism
That's substantially different. If you squint at it, you can see how Scott's graphs show something similar, because atheism does fall at about the time feminism rises. But Scott's graphs are adjusted to similar visual heights, so when you look at them it looks like the loss from atheism is similar to the rise from feminism, and makes it seem plausible that people just changed subjects. With graphs with a labelled Y axis, that no longer seems plausible.
The thing is that each word is taken as a representative of a group of words which probably follow the same trend.
It seems strange to me that the biggest success of the feminist moment, the #metoo movement, occurred *after* it had already been replaced by race in this story.
Also, I feel like the discourse around trans issues has been heating up in recent years, much more so than it ever was in the Gamergate era (even if the Rationalist community was already becoming aware of a growing trans population at the time - I think Rationalists have been ahead of the curve on several of these things, because I remember distinctly in 2016, when Clinton made her speech about the alt right, thinking "Rationalists are taking over so much that even their bad guys are becoming the real world bad guys").
My read at least is that "new feminism" (angry, cool, online only) is what was replaced by "new antiracism" at that point - metoo came out of what had then become mainstream feminism. There were a few people worrying it might go too far, but it wasn't too controversial by then.
Success in what terms, is the question. Does the average woman feel safe? Does she even feel safer?
"Biggest success" in this case is several high profile prosecutions, and probably the removal of several dozen serial predators from certain positions of community power. It remains to be seen whether the culture has changed in a way that will prevent more from getting into those positions, and whether this will have a noticeable impact for the average person, or if it just impacts those who spend a lot of time in these particular communities.
I would guess that high-profile douchebags would be less confident in their douchebaggery. Average women though? No idea. I would like to hope that some of the appalling behaviour of twenty-something men towards women is reined in a little. Small steps.
A friend of mine just hung out with an ex, who came onto her too strongly, didn't communicate, just pushed. She was texting for help from her own bathroom b/c she's high trauma and isn't confident that her "no" will be respected.
I'm like, 1000% on board with people not having experiences like this, but I'm also high confidence that there's no way to get humans to stop being pushy about sex. Women are pushy about sex, too, just less in physically violent ways.
When I see like, this idea that people should have a sense of safety, I just... I don't think that's possible. The world isn't a safe place, and it's never going to be a safe place. Fear helps us to keep ourselves safe. Humans are wired for fearfulness, and teaching people that they should get to feel safe and comfortable all of the time seems like it's making them hyper vigilant towards threats.
If the goal is to engender a sense of safety, I think this "punish evildoers" thing is going to be a failed strategy, because there will always be 17 year olds with hard ons who don't empathy good.
I have a feeling trans issues are less controversial these days. Things were more violent in the "gender/feminism era" as Scott describes it. I remember a lot of people (including me at the time) lump in trans/nonbinary/genderqueer and make a bigger issue out of it than it actually was. "Now these people want to be called different pronouns? Where do we stop!?" and other such alarmist rhetoric. I see it less now, except from TERFs (another indication of the decline of internet feminism?). Being trans in 2021 feels (from an outside perspective) a lot more like being gay was in 2011 - socially acceptable, normal, with the understanding that not everyone is on the same page about that and may need to be brought up to speed. Transphobia isn't endearing now or anything, but I don't see people really upset about it (that is to say, upset enough to write articles about it) unless it's on an institutional scale, like denying people legal access to medicine or therapy or whatever.
This might be a matter of me sliding between different filter bubbles, rather than a genuine change in attitude.
> I have a feeling trans issues are less controversial these days.
My impression has been that transgender issues have become *more* frequent subjects of controversy lately; for examples see https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/connecticut-female-athletes-will-appeal-judges-dismissal-of-trans-sports-dispute/ (CW: deliberate misgendering) & https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/hhs-interpretation-of-discrimination-based-on-sex-shows-urgency-of-defeating-equality-act/ from conservatives opposed to transgenderness generally, https://quillette.com/2021/04/02/when-sons-become-daughters-parents-of-transitioning-boys-speak-out-on-their-own-suffering/ & https://quillette.com/2021/05/04/gaslighting-the-concerned-parents-of-trans-children-a-psychotherapists-view/ from SJ-skeptical liberals who think transgenderness is overdiagnosed & criticism thereof unfairly suppressed, & https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/sports/transgender-athletes-bills.html & https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/opinion/transgender-children.html from a mainstream progressive perspective. However, that might just indicate that transgenderness is more commonly accepted to the point of being the subject of a progressive-vs-conservative culture war battle rather than an intra-progressive dispute. (I'm not sure when it started to be accepted among Internet feminists.)
I think that trans rights/issues will get more mainstream at least in liberal circles and culture. Even though trans/gender queer people make up such a small percent of the population that trans rights won't create the type of online movement like feminism or anti-racism did, there's a lot more communities online (don't know how that was in 2011) where trans people are accepted. So my guess is that gender fluidity will become more accepted but without the sort of upheaval that internet feminism had, more like gradual change and understanding especially for future generations.
The wave of all the anti-trans laws is almost entirely conservatives floundering since their platform for support has been destroyed after Trump was de-platformed. Same with TERFs: it's their attempt to claim #MeToo alliance and their "womanhood" but without what they consider to be too woke and scary for them.
In my opinion, transsexual activists have lost their war. I've seen several organizations say they won't give hormones or even hormone blockers to minors.
Which organizations?
Many states have legislation in various stages. I think Alabama and Arkansas have now passed laws with these restrictions.
Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden.
And the UK's decision in Bell vs. Tavistock, which apparently was part of Karolinska's decision.
Thanks. I just looked it up, and if I understood correctly, Karolinska’s policy is now to not give puberty blockers without court permission, and Tavistock’s is now to not give puberty blockers without parental consent.
Avoiding giving hormones to minors is probably for the best. There are people for whom it legitimately is "just a phase" - I know this for a fact, since I was one - and iatrogenic harms are something best avoided.
I’m expecting the “Dutch protocol” to go the way of lobotomies. Ten or twenty years from now, lawsuits will bring it to an end. That, or some neo-Bezmenov will defect from FSB, saying that transgender ideology was all a nefarious Russian plot to subvert liberal democracy.
I feel like the fact that that's where the bar is set for losing suggests trans-activists have won the war.
Like, if you told me 10 years ago trans-activists had been so successful that they were now focusing their efforts on making hormone treatments accessible to pre-teens, I'd be pretty amazed that they'd gotten so far so quickly.
(or 20 years ago, if you told me the high-water mark for Gay Rights had been that they failed to leagally force people to make wedding cakes for gay ceremonies, I certainly wouldn't think they'd "lost the war")
Trans issues certainly feel pretty mainstream to me. I work for a very large employer and I'd estimate that ~30% of people have their pronouns in their email signatures. (All of them are cis as far as I'm aware.)
I think a rise in transgender awareness comes from their actually being more transgender and genderfluid people. It's contoversial, but there's a a lot of evidence that the abundance of synthetic endocrine disruptors is having effects of this sort on people and animals.
Unfortunately this very serious ecological problem is kind of a taboo subject because it will predicatably be weaponized by anti-trans conservatives (the are unnatural) and also doesnt fit with the (very confusing) popular trans politics which sort of say gender is purely a social construct.
I definitely see trans discourse as a new wave. Never heard about it five years ago, started encountering it all the time online 3-4 years ago, have total normie not at all online people talking to me about it recently (mostly as it invades their professional spheres, ie they're getting talks at work about needing to direct obvious men to the women's bathroom).
It also sort of follows the pattern described in this post - there was gay rights, and then that went sufficiently mainstream that gays are now attacked online for being bigoted cisgays, eg Fred Sargent being banned from twitter.
Remains to be seen how it will play out...
The Rationalist bad guys are neoreactionaries, which isn't the same as alt-right. Neoreactionaries tend to be in favor of monarchy, states run by corporations, and stuff like that. Richard Spencer calls himself a "white identitarian". I once talked to a neoreactionary who dismissed his movement as being essentially more identity politics BS.
MeToo was an IRL phenomenon that hinged on a small number of public accusations and charges being laid (which snowballed into more accusations). It was not a movement generated through internet activism and it involved some of the biggest celebrities in the country.
Also, I seem to recall that when that chart of NYTimes mention charts first came out, there was some important discussion about whether the data it contained were accurate, or whether someone with a grudge manufactured a bunch of data. But after staring at it for a few minutes I couldn't find whatever the things were that had been mentioned as red flags when it came out a few years ago.
My general feeling is this essay is too optimistic
There's a fashion element to it yes, but unlike fashion these belief systems come with associated demands. Atheism has demands, new atheism has demands, feminism has demands, critical race theory has demands. How often and to what extent these movements have their demands met. What does it mean to meet their demands? When the fashionable thought changes what will the new demands mean?
Nice to get a long culturewar post from scott again
"It was really hard to say "I don’t like feminists", because the invariable retort was "feminism is just the belief that women are people, how can you be against that?". It was even harder to say something like "I'm against the vague category of thing including feminism, anti-racism, and LGBT activism" Remember that at this point all of this was internal to geeky internet culture, and everyone involved was more or less a liberal Democrat who agreed that all those concepts were in theory good. "
"Feminism and anti-racism had always been lumped together as "social justice", but for the first few years feminism was the big sister and anti-racism the tag-along little brother. "
I know this is a post-mortem of the recent internet phenomena but I really find lines like these jarring given the history of the last idk 150-200 or so years
I am confused by the furtive eyebrow waggling of this comment. Can you explain why these lines are jarring?
Because both Feminism and anti-racism as causes have been around far far longer than 20 years and indeed so has the phrase social justice. Even if you just go back to the 60s and 70s people were already attacking bleeding heart liberals for the basic trio of feminism, anti-racism, and LGBT activism, although at that point LGBT activism was a lot more niche and radical. You could argue that the pattern of feminism and anti-racism see-sawing back and forth in terms of importance has actually lasted for a lot longer, eg pre-civil war female literacy campaigns were arguably bigger than abolitionism for a while, but then anti-racism built up and became memetically dominant for decades until suffragism made a big comeback and so on.
Regarding 4chan's tonal shift, 4chan's userbase shifted dramatically and often based on news cycle spikes. Big jumps occurred with Gamergate and the Trump campaign. Both brought a permanent and substantial increase in usership, and also contained far more mobile users than desktop, which most consider to be a sign of a newer and less tech-savvy browsers. While the tone of older users may have shifted a large amount of credit goes to newfriends who simply overshadowed the old userbase rather than lurking and assimilating.
Google images "4chan traffic history" for graphs, don't know how to include images in a substack reply.
/new/ (the /pol/ predecessor) and /pol/ have always been far right. What really changed is /pol/ becoming by far the most active board on 4chan ( that and /b/ losing relevance and not having stuff like Project Chanology anymore).
I don't feel like non-politcal boards like /sp/ have changed much in tone in the last +10 years.
I think some have drifted a lot closer to /pol/, like /tv/. But then there have been new boards that certainly border politics like /his/ that have always been firmly anti-/pol/.
/his/ seems mostly like a battle grounds. the few times i browse it there's always are race science post there
Yeah, I was there during the early days of 4chan, and it was mostly apolitical. It was originally founded as an English version of the Japanese site 2chan, and it was focused mainly on anime and various types of Japanese porn. If anything, they were against the GOP due to it being a pro-censorship party that emphasized "Christian values."
They still despise the GOP, only now it's for being a party full of morons whose role in American politics is to legitimatize leftism through a series of "gallant" defeats on whatever the issue of the day is.
All those words, and yet nothing about New Transgenderism. Nothing about the push for "Black Trans Lives Matter" as a new slogan. Nothing about the linguistic contortions of "People Who Give Birth Day".
Of course, that phenomenon is still in progress, so it may be one of those Things You Can't Say ( http://paulgraham.com/say.html ).
At the risk of inflaming a culture war thing, what's this "People Who Give Birth Day" thing? There's all sorts of documents that want to focus on "people who give birth" rather than "mothers" when talking in the context of giving birth. But I have not encountered anyone who wants to replace "Mother's Day" by disowning adoptive mothers (whether straight or lesbian, cis or trans) or to incorporate trans fathers who happened to give birth to their children into that day.
But yes, the fact that there is a big culture war around trans issues at the moment suggests that it has at least somewhat dissociated from the feminist/anti-feminist moment of 2010-2015.
Some woke morons refuse to say "Mother's Day" for unclear reasons, por ejemplo https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/1391357882549948417
Are you saying Ben Shapiro is a "woke moron"?
I'm pretty sure he's an anti-woke type that is pretending that there's someone out there who's saying this, but hasn't pointed to a single example.
iz joke
Half right, anyway.
As far as I can tell its an entirely invented thing for online conservatives to be mad about, like attack helicopeter memes and Biden banning meat
Huh? I said that when we talk about people giving birth, we should call them "people who give birth". But the holiday yesterday was *not* about people who give birth - it was about *mothers* (some of whom give birth and some of whom don't).
It's not about confusion. It's about precision. If you care about people dying in childbirth, talk about people who are giving birth. If you're celebrating female parents, talk about "mothers". This whole thread claimed that someone was trying to cancel "Mother's Day" by turning it into a different holiday that ignores adoptive mothers. And Cori Bush isn't doing that.
If you want us to ignore trans men who die in childbirth, just say that - don't accuse her of doing something else.
That's nothing to do with mothers day which is what the question was about. You're just pointing at vaguely related things you dislike and extrapolating a trend towards something that more people will agree is bad
This is one of those things that I was inclined to laugh about, as in "oh come on, this is War on Christmas stuff, it's not happening" except that it's starting to happen https://www.bsuh.nhs.uk/maternity/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2021/01/Gender-inclusive-language-in-perinatal-services.pdf
So while before I would have said "Are you mentally troubled? there is no way terms like "Mother's Day" will be replaced or rejigged", I'm less certain of that now. I suppose trans men are happy with Father's Day, but I certainly wouldn't put it past someone to start agitating over "men get pregnant too, day celebrating parents who give birth should be inclusive term!"
Except this is *exactly* what I was saying! People talking about the difficulties of childbirth are fixing their terminology to make it be about all and only people who are birthing children. This has no effect on holidays that are explicitly about female parents, and that has *never* been about birthing (since adoptive mothers have always been included).
Sure, normal people instead switch to whatever terminology is approved by their "thought leaders", often subconsciously.
The problem with this sort of thing is that you can point at any isolated instance of something and say "it's starting to happen". Missing out the step where you prove that this is likely to evolve into a wider trend. You can construct a potentially infinite number of possible futures to be worried about but its not a very productive use of time
So iiuc, the woke view on mother's day is that it celebrates people that identify as woman and raised / are raising a child, right?
That would be my guess, but I obviously don't speak for a whole movement.
> Nothing about the linguistic contortions of "People Who Give Birth Day".
Can you find me a single example of that being used unironically by a left wing person? Genuine question. Because looking for variations on the phrase online I've only seen it used by "anti-woke" right wing commentators. Who seem to have invented it whole cloth to be mad about
All that is in response to a congresswoman actually using that phrase in congress.
If you're referring to the one linked above, that's talking about natal healthcare not mothers day. Which are obviously different things
That was my first reaction. "Nor has some some other gender discourse arisen to replace them." - wait, WHAT?!? Bill C-16, ROGD, Caitlyn Jenner 'Woman of the Year', the J.K. Rowling cancel campaigns, medical schools scrambling to remove references to biological sex from their teaching materials... but nah, no new gender discourse in sight. I hope that was just some very generous "rounding down to 0" on Scott's part.
For the record, the first time I became aware of the term "transphobia" was when it was listed in the core demands of "Atheism+" - the SJW faction whose emergence started the end of internet atheism. Atheism+ focused mostly on feminism, but it seems that in the long run, trans activists had the better hand in victimology poker.
Well, since feminism again and again tends to emerge a winner in big culture war engagements it's clearly worthwhile to define precisely what the "femin-" part refers to. And it's obvious that plain old ciswomen are no longer fit to be standard-bearers in the current intersectional opression olympics paradigm, as Rowling and the other TERFs weren't too happy to discover I'm sure.
It's amusing that the hot current outrage is about unconvincing "female athlete protection" attempts by conservatives, when segregated female sports itself was once a feminist pursuit. It's the first time I've been struck by a stark example of Cthulhu's leftward progress.
I'm not aware that it was the segregation that ever was the feminist pursuit. It was women's participation in sport that feminists wanted.
If you go back to the before times on that, then women were just banned from a whole bunch of sports. Like - in 1966 and 1967 officials tried to stop women (Roberta Gibb and Kathrine Switzer) from running in the Boston Marathon.
Some sports did just say that women can compete on equal terms with the men (e.g. horseracing and motorsports) and most feminists were satisfied with that, even though they remain overwhelmingly male sports. Women, it seems, prefer to see an occasional Danica Patrick compete with the men than to have an entirely separate event. But most sports organisations preferred to establish separate events for men and women than to integrate their sport.
Now, having created separate events for men and women, would feminists be satisfied with replacing those with a single event open to all? No, I suspect not - but I think that's path-dependent.
But the first female-only motorsport series was the 2019 W Series and that produced lots of feminist opposition, not support.
Well, of course they didn't outright demand it to be segregated, they demanded the right to "equal participation". And yes, there were were plenty (and still are some) sexists willing to deny entry to them, but the main reason few women were ever willing to compete was that in pretty much any contest of endurance, strength or nimbleness they had no hope to defeat the best men. So, to ensure any significant participation in practice, segregation is unavoidable, then as now.
It tells us - if the above evidence is any guide - that once you've hit 'peak' something the Overton Window is already shifted significantly enough that the elite subset creating 'peak' something have already moved much further down the path. Purity spirals gonna purity spiral.
So as someone who's been around for pretty much ALL of this, (No seriously, I was commenting on Pandagon way back when, although I always thought Shakesville was too socially political for my tastes) my argument is that we're due for what I'm calling a "Clearpilling" event. That's my argument. I've seen it before in individuals, where they realize that the Woke/SJW/Progressive/Whatever stuff for whatever reason really isn't all it's cracked up to be, and certainly it's not what they support.
The one thing that I feel is missing from this mostly accurate historical record on this, is the WHY. Or at least, I think it's missing a big part of the picture. To put it bluntly, I think it all revolves around social status competitions and hierarchy. I think that was the whole thing behind the Internet Feminism stuff talked about, yeah, low status men DON'T get to do the same things everybody else can do. That's just the way it is and people need to learn their place. (Not healthy at all). But even more so, I do think that the pivotal moments were surrounding Atheism+ and GamerGate, where social status hierarchy was directly threatened in reverse: Both, to a degree, had an element of do high-status people get held to the same rules as everybody else? And the high-status people, in both cases, lost their crap in the face of this.
But moving forward, I think there's a certain point where the SJW/Woke/Progressive culture is going to start demanding that people actually give up status. It's one thing to demand people to donate or say the right thing or whatever. It's another thing when they start asking for people to give up their jobs/material status symbols (houses)/etc. Even if it's not on an individual basis, I could see for example a sort of anti-NIMBY law working in this way. (Even though frankly this is something I, as a liberal critic of Pop Progressivism as I call it, support) That I think is what is going to make this stuff fall apart. People as a rule don't set themselves on fire to keep other people warm, and one of the strengths of that Pop Progressive culture is that it doesn't ask the in-group to. The costs are relegated to outsiders. But I don't think that strength can last forever. And the second the Clearpill starts to spread, and clear divisions pop up between this Pop Progressivism and more traditional Liberalism, I think it's over for the Pop Progressives. They almost instantly lose the moral authority, those ideas and concepts come up for scrutiny, and I don't think it survives that.
Regarding status, there is an interesting proto culture war going on on Twitter right now between two different groups who both could have been described as geek feminists a while ago: "antis" and "anti-antis". Right now it's more or less limited to fandom spaces, but I have seen it spill out from time to time.
"Antis" are your usual woke-scolding bullies who rally their friends to try to cancel you for drawing characters in a sexy way or finding specific Bad things hot. They mostly use the same rhetoric as the online SJWs of old. "Anti-antis" are another set of former Tumblr feminists who don't think fictional characters have rights, are against censorship, bullying and cancel culture; I'm not sure they have realised it yet, but what they are fighting against is online performative wokeness. I just hope the movement will keep its momentum.
My impression is that "you should [not] imagine the fictional children fucking" has been tumblr/ex-tumblr twitter discourse for years.
"Antis" aren't about fighting "objectification", they're about Saving The Children - although unusually for a group with that purpose, a lot of them are The Children.
There's some overlap in "this fictional relationship is a bad role model, it encourages abuse/rape", but they focus much more on "a child could theoretically encounter this porn", "beware of adults grooming kids online", "this character is child-coded so we know the author must be a pedo", etc
Something that occurred to me recently: after "political correctness" ran its course, we got lots of mainstream things that were openly anti-PC.
Bill Maher had a TV show called *Politically Incorrect*, of course, but there were lots of other things like this. South Park, Eric Cartman, Sonic the Hedgehog, and others were "cool but rude." People made fun of earnestly PC habits (e.g. this song - https://genius.com/The-toasters-modern-world-america-lyrics).
So will we get that this time around? We probably have it already with some comedians. But how about anti-woke cartoon characters?
People can react with amusement or disgust at the behaviour of the politically correct, but this is sort of like the conflict you might see if roman catholics of 1500 AD were exposed to apostolic christians of 200 AD.
Extreme political correctness is just the logical outgrowth of beliefs and assumptions that have been impossible to contradict for decades prior to the widespread knowledge of terms like PC or woke.
"We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal"
If this is what everyone who isn't a vile monster believes, sincerely and absolutely, then modus vivendi liberals like Maher who make fun of the politically correct or others who insist on being left alone are just hypocrites and shirkers. From the woke perspective their the only ones who take the idea seriously.
> this is sort of like the conflict you might see if roman catholics of 1500 AD were exposed to apostolic christians of 200 AD.
How so? I don't understand what you're trying to say here.
> "We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal" If this is what everyone who isn't a vile monster believes, sincerely and absolutely, then modus vivendi liberals like Maher who make fun of the politically correct or others who insist on being left alone are just hypocrites and shirkers.
Except that when this was written & for most of the time since then, it meant not that all people or groups of people were equal in every important way, but only that all people are similar enough that they should be treated equally by the political system. Cf. Hobbes, who (IIRC) this is partly based on (Leviathan ch. 13, at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm#link2HCH0013 ):
> Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe.
> And as to the faculties of the mind, (setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon generall, and infallible rules, called Science; which very few have, and but in few things; as being not a native faculty, born with us; nor attained, (as Prudence,) while we look after somewhat els,) I find yet a greater equality amongst men, than that of strength. For Prudence, is but Experience; which equall time, equally bestowes on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto. That which may perhaps make such equality incredible, is but a vain conceipt of ones owne wisdome, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the Vulgar; that is, than all men but themselves, and a few others, whom by Fame, or for concurring with themselves, they approve.
& Lincoln's interpretation of this passage in the Declaration (https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1857-abraham-lincoln-dred-scott-decision-and-slavery/):
>I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal - equal in “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
>How so? I don't understand what you're trying to say here.
In the sense that on the one side you have the consistent but impractical and the other side you have the worldly but inconsistent.
> On the Declaration
Jefferson wrote that statement but in his private writings he obviously didn't believe it. Other thinkers, contemporary or past, were likely similar. Lincoln also did not believe in that kind of equality based on his writings. It seems like after world war 2 (for obvious reasons) people started to take this statement literally, as a scientific fact about our species.
More to the point, interpreting it literally allowed ambitious types to campaign for the power needed to redress the resulting inequalities. This has always been the essence of leftism.
I don't think I understand; in what sense was Sonic the Hedgehog anti-PC?
You're right; he wasn't. But in the U.S. he had "attitude" and in the UK was kind of an anti-hero. I was thinking of "cool but rude" characters and he popped into my head.
We all know that it is in fact Raphael who is "cool but rude".
I'm just glad someone was brave enough to say his name.
Gimme a break
Yeah, I guess this is the difference between Bart Simpson ("cool but rude") and Eric Cartman (anti-PC). And while South Park never really has us sympathize with Cartman himself, it does take an anti-PC line of its own.
We got it three years ago from SNL, of all places: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adPXDTvADD0
I've seen woke folk who are against South Park. I want to say it started around the time they started making fun of social justice, but that's confirmation bias.
"and anybody who did was a fedora-wearing euphoric loser"
Euphoric? Think this may be a typo? This image makes total sense to me except for the "euphoric" part. Am I missing something?
It's not a typo, "euphoric" was a famous meme associated with Internet atheism for a while. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-this-moment-i-am-euphoric
Huh, did not know about this. Thanks!
Thanks - that was a term that Scott mentioned several times that I didn't recall ever hearing in this context.
This is my first exposure to it, too.
Likewise. I guess I got involved with that just a bit late and became an atheist via Razib Khan & Overcoming Bias.
Me too, but then again, I am exceedingly un-hip.
I was a moderator of the largest atheism community on Google+ and I also don't recall ever seeing the word "euphoric" being used to describe atheists.
Yeah, I'd never heard it until reading this post either.
This is the biggest problem with this piece; Scott seems to be either overestimating or exaggerating how universal his personal bubble is.
Yeah. I was a very early contributor to talk.origins and a mentor in biology and philosphy on physicsoforums.com, where we hosted debates with creationists back in 2002. I feel pretty in tune with the recent history of atheism, especially as it pertains to Richard Dawkins and the debunking of irreducible complexity arguments for intelligent design that dominated the legal discourse of curriculum battles in the 90s and 00s.
I had never heard of this "euphoria" thing and indeed have never been on Twitter (do go to Reddit sometimes but only hobbyist subs for Rust programming or building a homelab or the television show Dark, not genpop).
To be fair, Scott put "online" culture in the title of his post, but this is barely if at all a meaningful reflection of the actual history, even the very recent history, of atheism, feminism, and anti-racism. These are still real-world movements with long and rich histories that you can't reduce to the proclivities of how 17 year-olds are behaving on Reddit and 4Chan.
"Euphoric" wasn't popular among atheists. It was popular among people who made fun of atheists.
Doesn't change that if you weren't on a very specific subset of the young person social Internet, you never heard about this.
I was a moderator of the largest atheism community on Google+ and I also don't recall ever seeing the word "euphoric" being used to describe atheists.
Short-time reader, first time commenter here. I really like this. I'm 23 years old, but I was a precocious enough pre-teen to be into Dawkins and co. while they were still cool. But I would actually say my real political awakening was with feminism and today I'm a white man who sometimes writes about white people. So I've been invested in the three of the progressive-leaning trends you write above, and I have to say I think I come out with a more positive view of all of them than you do.
Maybe this is a product of only really joining the blogosphere in the last year, but my experience is that the real impact of these movements comes from their compassionate, empathetic spokespeople and not from their more puritanical bases. Political change is obviously very hard, but in general I think people are more skeptical, more respectful, and more self-aware than they were when I was growing up, and it's hard not to thank these people for it. Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry, Caitlin Moran, Roxane Gay, and Natalie Wynn are all both more admirable and more consequential than most of their fans. Maybe you can say the same about Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, I don't know.
I don't want to say that online hate mobs don't do damage, but it seems pretty apparent to me that a lot of good has come from reading these things with charity. If you're a blogger you see the blogosphere, so you get exposed to the worst parts of every movement you oppose. But do we really want to go back to Ahmed the Dead Terrorist or whatever? I don't think so.
As a fan of Natalie Wynn's videos, I think you can say the same about Jordan Peterson. He's much more thoughtful and insightful than most takes on him give him credit, which is probably why he's achieved begrudging respectability. He won't stop talking about Soviet atrocities and tends to express simple truths in grandiose ways, but sometimes I like being told that keeping my room tidy embodies the primordial struggle against Tiamat, the Mesopotamian dragon-goddess of Chaos, because in a very real sense it does.
I think the best part of the internet is being exposed to a wide range of different opinions, at any other time in history I'd either be really bored or burned as a heretic for asking too many questions.
Ahaha that's a fair point about the bedroom thing! And yeah, I think you're right about the internet exposing people to different ideas. In some ways, my favourite thing about the feminist/race critical stuff is precisely that it is a challenge to my perspective, so it's good that there's some back and forth about it all.
Peterson's clean room analogy is subtly nefarious. I clean my room often, he's right, it makes me incredibly well-prepared for the days ahead. But he's not telling you that because he wants you to go out and do whatever you want, he really wants you to stop criticising people, he wants you to ignore external problems, he wants you to think the individual is more important than the collective, hence all the rhetoric about 'clean your room before you criticise others'. The parallels to his ideology are stark, and it explains why he cares so much for individual improvement in form but not in substance.
I wouldn't exactly say he preaches individualism. He talks a lot about responsibilities to other people, and as a clinical psychologist and self-help guru he's hardly immune to criticising others!
I think a fairer characterisation of Peterson is that he believes you have to start small if you want to improve the world, starting with yourself and then moving on the people around you - it's not that the collective isn't important, it's that you're an individual and your influence and understanding are limited, so it's very unlikely that you know how to solve all of the world's problems. You could reasonably say that this discourages political engagement, Peterson would probably argue that political engagement killed millions of people last century through war and genocide - as I said, he's big on Soviet atrocities.
I'm less conservative than Peterson, but I do think it's important to keep in mind that deep down we all secretly think that the world would be a better place if only we could send all our enemies to the Gulag, and temper our political ambitions accordingly.
The individual IS more important than the collective, for individual lives. Have you ever heard leftist rhetoric along the lines of "no one but rich people can save money" or "why bother planning for retirement when climate change will kill us all?" I think the "clean your room" line is a rebuttal to that. Climate change and the economy may indeed be problems, but they're problems that individual action can do very little about. Much better to build a good life for yourself (and yeah, being competent is also a prerequisite for any effective action on social problems, but let's not kid ourselves—even effective action by a competent actor does very little on big problems.).
This is also something that undermines people attempting to do real good in the world; so many of the most socially-conscious people I know also seem to be mentally and materially hanging by a thread. This is probably why they gravitated towards movements that are all about being non-judgemental and accepting whatever they can give. But the key bone my conservative relatives have to pick with the woke crowd isn’t about gender pronouns; it’s “why should these people, who seem on the brink of falling apart, get to tell me how to live?” I can’t come up with a great answer, since I’m very much a “clean your room to defend against chaos” person myself.
All you're saying is that you are liable to be swept up by charismatic speakers and writers, and that that is more important than the actual truth value of whichever statement is being proposed by said speaker. This is sophism at its best and worst.
What is sorely lacking in online debate is a shared epistemological and ethical framework that can be used to judge the actual meaning of whichever debate is taking place. The only subculture I have found that is willing to discuss the method of debate (aka the ethical and epistemological framework in which the debate takes place) above and beyond the contents of debate are the rationalists.
Yes, that is exactly what I was saying. Thank you for your generous and thoughtful response to my comment.
I absolutely despise the reduction of debate to hero-worship, which is exactly what your comment does. Ideas should be judged for their content. You seem to judge ideas by their proponents. This is bad epistemology.
Ok ok, I'll bite. I didn't mean to suggest that if a good person has a bad idea, that makes it a good idea. I think the people I listed had better arguments and ideas than most of what you see in the blogosphere, and that those ideas and arguments would be good whoever was making them. But I think, and indeed ACX says in the post, that it matters how an idea is put forth. You can be generous and empathetic or not, and if you're not, you will probably end up with worse ideas.
I think ACX is saying that many of, say, the geek feminists, were not just incorrect, but also vituperative and lazy in a way that made them more likely to be incorrect over time. My contention, to put it crudely, is that those bad arguers were less impactful than the good arguers I listed, making the trends which gave rise to both a net good.
Specifically, it's the genetic fallacy.
I don't know much about those other people but describing Caitlin Moran as some paragon of compassionate and empathetic debate is pretty weird. She's a classical angry feminist of the 2010 era variety:
"When statistics come in saying that only 29% of American women would describe themselves as feminist ... [I think] were you just DRUNK AT THE TIME OF THE SURVEY?"
ironically, she also said: "My rules for social media are exactly like my rules for feminism: women are equal to men, everyone is equal to everybody, and don’t be a dick"
That's a fair point. She is a comedic writer and that can lend itself to snark or dismissiveness, and I think that quote is a good example of that. On the other hand, that same comedic lightness on her part was what really made feminism appealing to me at the time - it allows for tension and honesty in a way that really comes through in her book. I can't speak to her Twitter stuff as much, but in general I would just say that everyone is a worse version of themselves on Twitter.
> Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry, Caitlin Moran, Roxane Gay, and Natalie Wynn are all both more admirable and more consequential than most of their fans. Maybe you can say the same about Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, I don't know.
This is typical for people with followings though, right? Fandoms select themselves based on who finds the output valuable, and that's pretty consistently going to be people who find the topics meaningful but couldn't easily reproduce the work on their own.
There's obviously a divergence when the following promotes virtues we find repugnant, but IME that's much rarer than e.g. followings built around repugnant values with an unobjectionable virtue gradient.
I unfortunately don't know what a virtue gradient is, so hopefully I'm not misunderstanding you, but yeah, my argument does rest on the idea that the ideas being put forward by Dawkins, Wynn, etc. are not fundamentally wrong or bad.
.
Again, I'm still getting to know ACX, but my understanding from this post is that he's not against feminism, etc. per se, but just believes that the movements established in their name were harmful and promoted the worst aspects of those ideologies. My point is that if you want a better view of what "new feminism" or whatever has actually produced, you're better off looking at the good ideas and attitudes of the people I listed.
This stuff reminds me of the 'generator/filter' pattern, with the american left acting as a 'cultural generator' and the american right acting as a 'cultural filter' - the left spits out tons of ideas, and the right accepts some of these, quietly, while complaining all the way.
Perhaps effective challenges to new ideas can't come from the filter, because the filter reject everything; effective challenges to new ideas have to come from _even newer_ ideas.
And, because people gonna people, what you "can't' do is say 'gee wouldn't any sane person have some combination of a generator and a filter? Aren't both of these necessary for healthy cognition." - because to the filter people you look like you've bought into the insane new ideas. And to the generator people, you look like you're judgemental, which is the _worst_ thing you can be.
+
This is great.
Also, I'd reject the claim, "wouldn't any sane person have some combination of a generator and a filter?" I would say, any sane person should live in a society, and every society should have a generator and a filter, but there's no reason for the individual to have that all internally, any more than we each have to individually chop our own wood and mill our own flour.
Someone mills the flour and someone else bakes bread from it, but it would be dangerous if people who mill the flour completely forgot that its ultimate purpose is to be a part of a meal. Even worse, if they were actively opposed to the idea of using their flour for food. They might e.g. try to make it less safe to eat.
If the goal is to come up with *good* ideas, then if you separate the generators from filters too much, so much that the generators will identify as anti-filters, and filters will identify as anti-generators, the good ideas will be unlikely to happen, because the generators will create only obviously crazy things, and the filters will make sure to also remove the good ideas.
What, specifically, is being generated differentially by these subgroups? It seems to me that both groups are generating ideas and trying to spread them while filtering and trying to stop the ideas from the outgroup.
The right really doesnt come up with ideas, it just holds on to ideas that have existed for a long time and seem like they are on the way out. the right is usually reactionary, also in the sense that it reacts to the left. it may come up with witty criticisms of the left but it doesnt generally come up with new things. if im wrong think of one new thing that isnt a reaction to something from the left.
I mean, wanting to conserve the old ways rather than replace them with new ones is pretty much the definition of "conservative", isn't it? That is, assuming that "right" and "left" are more or less aliases for "conservative" and "progressive", holding on to old ideas instead of promoting new ones is what *defines* the right as the right.
Left and right originated during the French Revolution, and yes the right was the conservative faction that wanted to preserve as much of pre-revolutionary France as possible. Burke refined this into conservatism, which is exactly the filter role described above.
*Puts helmet on* The right has been losing ground for centuries because the traditional orientation of the right towards society - top-down authoritarianism - is wrong. We used to believe the micro proceeded from the macro, when evidence shows the macro proceeds from the micro. In other words, a bottom-up approach to society is more often correct when subjected to an evidentiary test. The "right" (a proto-right that seemed natural and which the actual right tries to conserve) basically got it wrong thousands of years ago and has been losing ground for the past 500 as knowledge of this error has spread.
Not to mince words, the name for this top-down error is "god".
The left began to overcorrect after the Russian revolution because left vanguards assumed the top-down position, just with a different agenda. They made the state into god, and committed all the old errors. I say this only because correcting left over-reach *is* a valid purpose of the right. There is a place and a meaningful precedent for it.
Liberalism, pluralism, and bottom-up approaches are usually better because their model of society more accurately reflects reality. That's why it appears society is steadily becoming more liberal as knowledge spreads.
If the right were to be proactive about ideas, pluralism is where they should hang their hat. Not only because a political monoculture would exclude the right, but also because pluralism is the basis for market economics, limited government, and even nationalism. One aspect of pluralism is choosing to tolerate inefficiency in exchange for resiliency. Some people on the right have been murmuring about this re economic matters, but the tougher sell of defending nationalism and parochialism (given that war is inevitable with those) as a form of human redundancy has yet to be articulated to my knowledge.
“The left began to overcorrect after the Russian revolution”
The French Revolution very quickly became top-down and was very concerned with wiping out ancient traditions, replacing them with “Reason”, and consolidating political and ideological power in the center.
One could give other historical examples of this phenomenon, say the various radical Protestant revolutions, but the French Revolution is a clearer example, since modern leftists are more willing to identify it.
I don't think you really understand what the right believes. They (we) believe that old ideas are just as good as new ideas. And by "old" I mean back to the start of history and into prehistory. Over thousands of years, there have been only a few really good ideas. The ideas of the Founding Fathers and of the Industrial Revolution are some of those really good ideas, and they're also quite new, compared to the span of history.
From this viewpoint, it's a little strange to expect a good idea to be advanced more than every couple hundred years or so.
The people on the right who aren't busy fighting SJW wars tend to be busy creating new technologies and companies, which are very much full of new ideas. What you mean is explicitly social ideas, and that's because the obvious next step from having had a grand idea for remaking society is "and the government should force everyone to agree with me". The right reject this kind of power-based approach as illegitimate, so it's inevitably the case that they invest more effort into technology and business-based progress than government-imposed "social" progress.
Broken-windows policing, federalism ("50 laboratories of democracy"), airline deregulation in the 1970s, repeal of Glass-Steagall, Paul Volcker breaking the back of inflation in the 1980s, balanced budgets. That's off the top of my head. I am sure hundreds of additional examples could be given with a little research.
The left always promotes itself as the people with the new ideas, in part to insulate themselves against the charge of being reckless idiots. The right promotes itself as the people who forestall folly, in part to insulate themselves against the charge of being idiots incapable of grasping the concept of progress. It would be a mistake to take either of these self-characterizations as historically accurate.
I think you need to add in something else to your analysis here. The culture wars are a subset of the overall attention economy, and that explains perfectly why one culture war topic would be replaced by another. Attention is a finite resource, and there are only so many clicks or minutes available to apply to it. We are already seeing many publications which wouldn't vary from Woke for a hot second in 2020 while staring down Trump flip over to testing the waters with anti-woke editorials to see if they get clicks. (even Vox) The question I see is twofold.
(1) Will a version of Anti-Woke crystalize that has a coherent message and a brand? I think this is quite possible, and there's good science saying that it's happening right now:
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/science-says-sam-harris-is-alt-right
(2) Will something else come along to impact the overall portion of the attention economy that's devoted to culture war? I think Fortnite gave them a run for their money, and whatever follows it may carry Gen Z into a place where culture war is simply not as important in the overall media metabrain.
https://medium.com/handwaving-freakoutery/can-fortnite-rescue-humanity-from-the-attention-economy-war-b58028cf11cd
I think that some on the socialist left take the side of anti-wokeness (which was talked about briefly here) since it covers up for the evils of corporations and other entities and makes us that much more likely to side with them and with the people who line their pockets. Not sure if that's what you mean, but it's a flip side to the trumpian coin of wokeness and populism.
Yep! I see a growing number of people who identify as "Liberal Socialists" (myself included), who generally think class culture and material conditions are the important underlying determiner of outcomes, that we should do something about it via progressive taxation and redistributionary policies, and that a lot of woke ideas (like "cultural appropriation") are kind of dumb and missing the point.
I'm seeing something different, that Scott is probably very insulated from because of his position in the rationalists. I'm seeing a lot of people coming out and saying, "well shit, if we're going to be forced to adopt something as a guiding force, and my options are Wokeism or nothing, maybe religion isn't so bad after all."
A lot of my connections are rediscovering religion as a way to calm the chaos.
Great post. Two comments
1) I think the main reason young people didn't go right wing, as you were predicting in 2014, was internet censorship. Before 2016, the internet was basically a free market of ideas. I once put together data on prominent twitter bans, not very scientific but I'm sure the story is correct. I couldn't find anything before 2015, and then there was an avalanche of bannings after Trump's election.
https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-twitter-treats-conservatives-more-harshly-than-liberals/
People like Stefan Molyneux and Alex Jones used to be huge on YouTube. Now they're both gone, as is Milo himself. Often, the most extreme figures serve as a kind of vanguard and give energy to a movement. If the far right gets its most extreme elements purged every once in a while, the natural process from which you go "edgy -> slightly less edgy -> mainstream -> lame" gets interrupted. If you look at the most shared posts on Facebook today, data that's collected on a daily basis, it's dominated by Ben Shapiro, who is pretty much the edgiest right wing person allowed a Facebook account. And Ben Shapiro can never be cool.
2) I also think it's important to consider real world events. The decline of socialism seems intimately related to the fact that Bernie Sanders lost to Biden, and Biden ended up beating Trump. Not only that, but Biden beat Sanders with overwhelming black support; in a time of fanatical anti-racism, that took the wind out of the sails of the socialists. As for New Atheists, they need to be understood as a reaction to the politics of the Bush era. Republicans nominating the irreligious McCain in 2008, and the Mormon Romney in 2012, changed popular perceptions of what Republicans were. This was also the time of the Tea Party movement, which focused on economic rather than social issues, and the decade after 9/11. So New Atheism fell as the religious right declined and memories of 9/11 faded (the rise of ISIS briefly brought terrorism back into the headlines, but by then the decline was well on its way). So the new atheists didn't really have much to rail against by 2012, and eventually went away.
My SWAG as to why young people didn't go right wing after 2014 is because of Donald Trump. The man is Kryptonite to most people under 40.
Stuff that would have been Way Out There a few years ago is now mainstream orthodoxy, simply because Trump is seen as being against it.
Good point
Doubt it. Richard Spencer never got banned.
"The decline of socialism"
I'm not seeing it.
New Atheism declined due to takeover by SJWs.
Spencer was banned from Youtube and was also financially ruined (along with many other alt-right activists) by massive, elite-funded lawsuits after Charlottesville.
Hm, true. I still don't think the ban wave was the primary reason, though there was no doubt it happened (starting with the banning of Milo).
There have been massive purges of alt-right and otherwise-dissident right people going on since 2016, getting more intense over time and extending deeper into the tech stack. The type of people who were losing their twitter accounts three years ago are now being denied bank accounts. Right-wing alternatives to Twitter (Parler, Gab), created in response to the deplatforming, have been "banned" by other tech companies in much the same way that their users were banned on Twitter.
I've never seen this substantiated; I think it's a myth. It is however certainly true that social media has been increasingly giving the alt-right the ISIS treatment, and the definition of exactly who qualifies as alt-right has been expanding.
There might've been a reason Twitter never banned Spencer, such as having politics they'd rather draw WNs on the site towards than the people they'd banned (he endorsed Biden and everything!), or just making a fool out of himself too often.
That is because Richard Spencer is extremely ineffectual. They banned all non-mainstream right-wingers who are actually effectual.
It was all fun and games when they were banning the right, but now the same tactic is beginning to be used against the left. You didn't hear about it? Yes, because their voices are being silenced. Chapotraphouse anyone?
Everything they did to Alex Jones, they'll do to you. It's about power now.
"Republicans nominating the irreligious McCain in 2008, and the Mormon Romney in 2012, changed popular perceptions of what Republicans were."
I can't speak for everyone, but none of that changed my perception that the religious right was a dominant force in the Republican party. Heck, the Republicans may well have elected an atheist in 2016, and it only proved that the religious right was as dominant as ever...
> "Did anyone ever figure out a nonthreatening way to ask women out? Is it just "swipe right on Tinder"? Was that the solution this whole time?"
Yes, and yes. I'm probably exactly the right age for this to be the case, and to have narrowly escaped the awful period. But I have never asked out a woman I didn't know without very strong prior context. The reason is exactly because I internalized all of this "creepiness" messaging, heard all the stories from my female friends about guys hitting on them when it was unwanted and it making them feel uncomfortable, and never wanted to do that. Prior to 2016 I had only ever gotten into relationships with people I had known for more than a year, and probably had spent hours talking to.
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. Dating apps are a godsend, because you don't have to worry about whether or not a girl who also swiped right on you is maybe interested in going on a date, or at least getting to know you with that context in mind. They are, and it's in the subcontext.
Dating apps have their own slew of problems, but at least as far as I can see in my social bubble, asking out randos in bars or clubs, or other public spaces is deader than dead. Long live Tinder.
Yeah, I dunno how much "hitting on woman in bar" was about finding a mate to marry and have kids with as it was about getting the shift (and maybe a bit more if you were lucky).
No, I think quite the opposite. It's becoming less acceptable in the places where it was least likely to result in a relationship (bars, clubs, the gym, randomly on the street). It's still very acceptable in places that are the most likely: community spaces (college dorms, parties with friends of friends, being set up by your social network).
Everything is a crime, but enforcement is selective.
Sounds like a return to clan-based mating patterns, the apotheosis of which is the Jane Austen world of everyone marrying his second cousin.
It didn't happen in 90% of those spaces for 90% of history. It's only in the late 20th century that urban third spaces became a place where people sought their own romance.
On the first point, I'm just saying that if we take a step back, this isn't some major shift.
On the second, I want to be more precise. I don't think seeking romance has been "banned" from most spaces (though there are many corporations that have had official anti-nepotism policies, some for several decades, that may well go too far). I think it's generally a good thing to have rules banning superiors from initiating relationships with subordinates (and to have further rules about re-organizing hierarchies where relevant and possible). It's probably a good thing that people are more hesitant about propositioning random strangers in the street than they used to be (and there's probably still more progress to be made on that front), though I think it would be a bad thing if people stopped asking out people they were having conversations with at bars or coffeeshops.
More importantly, I think it's a *super* good thing that there are now GPS-enabled online spaces that give people a designated space for seeking romance, so that people can do most of it in a context where it's mutually agreed that this is the type of conversation one might want here, and that conversations in physical space can have this come up much less often (though it's probably best that this still be non-zero).
I said *bans* aren't happening. I said it's a good thing that there's less of the activity happening that you claim is being banned. It's important, as always, to be precise about this kind of thing. (Otherwise you're one of those people complaining about "lockdowns" because people are wearing masks, or complaining about "cancel culture" because someone didn't like something you said.)
On the "atomized loneliness" thing, I think that's been a multi-decade trend, that grew up with the Boomer generation, between the fall of fraternal societies and bowling leagues and the growth of the suburbs. You're right that the move from in-person asking-out to online dating could well be one more step of this same sort. But for many people, it's also claimed that this move makes in-person spaces better as spaces for friend socialization, and helps ease the loneliness.
As for whether I, personally, would feel comfortable asking a co-worker out on a date, you're barking up the wrong tree. I'm one of those older millennials who never felt comfortable asking anyone out on a date. I imagine I would feel comfortable asking a colleague or work-related friend out, if we had gotten to know each other well and it seemed like our relationship was developing in that direction, and I do think that at least some people are pushing against even that sort of thing. So I don't disagree that there's at least some overboard prudishness here.
I just don't think it's as intense as you seem to be suggesting, with all your talk of "bans".
The timeline that you think is significant here is the same as Nike.
The grandparents of most people on here were born well before the "workplace romance" was a common trope and indeed, your own grandparents probably never asked anyone out at work.
How old do you think this site's users are? 12?
Outside of the very obvious post-WWII extreme blip, US birth rates have been steadily collapsing for a very long time. Here is the last 220 years, almost entirely a steady downward trend: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-us-1800-2020/
This is much different than marriage rates, which have mostly been stable, though also decreased at a much slower rate after the post-war blip: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/marriage_rate_2018/marriage_rate_2018.htm.
There clearly isn't zero relation. Part of the reason the marriage rate and birth rate have both gone down recently is people are marrying later due to longer school and work commitments, but this doesn't indicate lifelong singleness and childlessness, just staying single longer and having fewer children by the time you're done.
I'd like to see some analysis of where they're meeting, which Stanford seems to have released a decent dataset on, but I don't want to spend my time independently analyzing it and this guy's two articles seem to conflict with each other: https://flowingdata.com/2019/03/13/how-people-meet-their-partners/ (shows small minority online); https://flowingdata.com/2019/03/15/shifts-in-how-couples-meet-online-takes-the-top-spot/ (shows majority online by 2010s). That is confusing because it's same person analyzing the same dataset, and also he shows a nonzero percent meeting online in the 1970s.
Those two don't conflict - they show that 10% of all current couples in the study met online, but 19% of the couples who met in the 2010s met online, 9% of those who met in the 2000s met online, 1% of those who met in the 1990s met online, and some weirdly non-zero percentage of those who met in earlier decades met online. If current couples in the study are evenly split between meeting in the 2010s, meeting in the 2000s, and meeting earlier than 2000, then the numbers basically work out.
That makes a lot of sense, thanks. I wasn't considered that obviously people who met in past decades are largely still alive and being counted.
*within younger age groups. I definitely suggest the book "Dataclysm" if you want more interesting data of this sort. Definitely dating apps are not without their problems, and I'm excited to see different apps try to address these issues in different ways. (The throttling introduced by Coffee Meets Bagel is particularly interesting)
However, I do think that particular problem is just reflective of the underlying reality. 20-30yo women DO have more selective power in many cities than 20-30yo men. This has been true for quite some time before dating apps. Isn't it preferable that women get to simply swipe left a bunch and men simply see fewer matches, than a cute woman gets asked out 100 times at random during the day and 99-100 men get rejected in person?
Yea, I can buy that dating apps introduce some weird distributional effects. Tbh I do think both methods are broken. The IDEAL IDEAL is people live in small, Dunbar-sized communities where everyone knows everyone, and people can scope each other out beforehand through gossip and other means. How relationships work on college campuses seems a little bit more functional and both men and women I talk to seem to miss it. (obviously many conflating factors there)
I attended a lovely event recently called "Date My Friend.ppt" where we took turns presenting on our single friends, and saying why they are great. I definitely hope to see more like this
"Scope each other out beforehand through gossip and other means" is extremely far away from ideal ideal.
IDEAL IDEAL IDEAL, fight me, is a fucking AI that can see the future and figure out exactly whom everybody should be with and introduces us to each other.
"Practically achievable ideal, in that it is has been implemented and shown to work fairly well already."
I THINK the community-based thing I suggest works better than arranged marriage (the closest real analogue to what you're describing), but I could be convinced otherwise.
"There’s data from these apps that women rate 80% of the men as below average."
So what would be the proper proportion of "terrible/average/wonderful"? If we're using "average" as "the majority of people who are not outstandingly ugly/crazy or handsome/supersmart", how many should be "average"?
Also, if it's a dating app, who are the users: people who can't otherwise get a date? That seems to have been the case at the start, but now if it's the 'new normal' way to find a date (rather than asking people out in random situations in real life) that is going to make a difference.
Really outstanding people are not going to find it hard to get a date, be it by just walking up to someone or via a dating app. So I do imagine that leaves a lot of "average" people using apps, whatever we mean by "average" and I don't think that means, or should mean, "loser" but "okay kind of person, normal, ordinary guy or girl".
"Really outstanding people are not going to find it hard to get a date" -- Really outstanding women, sure. But really outstanding men can have all kinds of problems if they lack confidence or knowledge of where to find receptive women or how to ask them out.
You know, I did pretty well on dating apps, and I think I'm pretty average. Smarter than normal, but otherwise - middle class income, overweight but not overly so, 5' 10", reasonably funny and interesting. But I wasn't on them long. Maybe six months. I wonder if the 80% below average thing reflects a "survivorship bias" for the guys who have to spend longer looking, whereas your average marriageable guy finds his girl in a tolerable amount of time and exits.
I suppose it could be that kind of vicious circle: the longer you are on a dating app (or other dating sites) without getting a match, the more likely you are to be rejected or otherwise sifted out of the range of possible partners.
I don't really think it's a vicious cycle, more a selection bias. Fwiw I used dating apps regularly over about 4 years, and got steadily better at using them over that time, and had an easier time getting dates over time. (Writing a good profile, taking good pics, being not awkward over text, figuring out what type of girl I like and what type likes me, etc)
Though to be fair, being male and aging probably helped too. (See Dataclysm or other data on these dynamics) Life is rough for the west coast 25yo guys out there.
I think yes, but also there is DEFINITELY a learning curve on figuring out how to make a good profile and use apps well, and the population who uses them has been growing, meaning they are front loaded with people at the start of that learning curve.
There's survivorship bias, entryship bias, and also people just being shitty at taking photos of themselves and looking worse on a profile than they do in person. You'd expect somewhere 50% below average across the entire population if we assume a symmetric distribution, but not necessarily just among the photographs of people on dating apps.
I see no reason a priori to assume attractiveness actually is symmetrically distributed. I'm not going to put in much more time trying to find this information via web search than the 20 I just wasted given the baggage of how weighted the topic is and the low quality of resulting research, but the first few results are just seem to assume it's a normal distribution. For one, age is not symmetrically distributed. The last I was regularly trying to date, partly on websites (before smart phones and native mobile apps were a thing) was around 2002 to 2006 and I remember the people being a lot more attractive back then, but that's because they were in their early 20s and now they're in their early 40s. Most of us go downhill pretty quickly.
So strike while you can, I guess. For what it's worth, I did meet my current wife on the Internet, but around primarily social features and I knew her for six years before we happened to move to the same city and decided to meet. My other two wives from before I met in college and grad school. Internet dating was kind of an exciting thing early on. I met two somewhat formerly famous actresses back before Web 2.0's version of Eternal September when the market got so flooded that a reasonably attractive woman's inbox gets so flooded as to be about as useful as my SMS these days with 40 people a day claiming they heard from a friend of a friend I'm interesting in unloading a house.
The attractiveness of women (according to men) on dating apps actually IS symmetrically distributed. Both sexes only message hot people, but men seem to be aware that's what they're doing.
Do you intend for your "really outstanding" category to only include people who ignore the entire "creepiness" meme that Carson was referring to a few comments up the tree? As far as I can tell, and I think this aligns with his comment, it's not possible to "get a date" in those ways without violating the emergent "rules" of non-"creepiness" being produced by modern social justice culture.
Exception for full transparency: I asked out 3 different girls in my grad program. In one case I had both known the girl for years AND matched with her on Tinder, in one we had spent hours of alone time together as friends prior (both those two said yes), and in one we had mostly only hung out in groups before and she said no, but I think it was very chill after. Still nowhere close to the 0-context hit-on-a-girl-at-a-bar.
Ah yes, long live the capitalization of our romantic and sexual lives! Let the algorithm decide your reproductive future for you!
I mean seriously, you can't see any way this might go horribly wrong?
Right. I think I'm around the same age as Carson and it frankly scares me to see my generation accept these changes as inevitable or in any way positive. Not only does it breed superficiality and hyper selectivity in women, while removing any semblance of the accountability that might prevent the top 5%(or less) of men from monopolizing all the available women in an area, it also changes young people's relationship to risk. I also wonder what effect it has on social spaces, especially once-popular culture catches up to the new norm, and an even strong taboo is cemented around meeting new people.
It's really quite a sad state of affairs. Especially because the end result is a kind of atavistic "I keep to my people" mentality where the act of talking to strangers, (especially if the act is unmediated by inebriation) is off-limits, and thus only done by somewhat crazy people, which then only lends momentum to the feedback loop that makes meeting new people taboo.
I can only hope that actually pulling off a gym/bar/public meeting with a stranger remains so impressive and high-status that this effect is somewhat counterbalanced.
I find it odd you say you've simply become more "pro-immigration" when immigration is comprised of people of so many different cultures and backgrounds. I can't even think of examples of cultures that would plainly make for immigrants that were open to being approached. However, I can think of many that are much less open to meeting strangers even than Americans. I think the effect you're talking about is mainly due to a boost in status you get in the eyes of women from some poorer country's, simply for the fact of your being American.
I think what he’s talking about is that metropolitan white women are a huge pain in the ass
Have women become more superficial than men? My impression of straight culture has been that men have always been extremely superficial. (This is how they are depicted in popular media.) Women have historically been more interested in deeper traits. But it sounds like you think the apps have equalized this more?
Well, it's weird. I think a lot of people are very superficial. But an interesting side effects of dating apps is because selective power is perhaps more obviously I'm women's hands, many women don't bother to put any info on their profiles, so you, as a straight male, have no choice but to be superficial. I've sat side-by-side swiping with several female friends, and straight male profile or lesbian profile quality is WAY higher than straight woman profile quality. Better pics, more details about life, more about what they're looking for.
So you could argue that straight women are being more _selective_, but I think more _superficial_ is a much more difficult claim. There's also the post-match chatting period, which is decidedly less superficial. And like, come on, how is walking up to a random cute girl at a bar not superficial? Perhaps the takeaway is that whoever is doing the initial selection of "I'm going to talk to you" will be superficial by nature. That used to be men, but now it's a collaboration of both.
Basically, yes. Though I also think female superficiality is, for obscure reasons, underrepresented in media until very recently with the rise of shows like Sex and the CIty, and a great many female performers who talk openly about filtering men on looks, height, and income. Not that this in itself is unnatural or even bad per se, just that it gets kind of out of control on dating apps because of how much competition there is between male profiles. Not just because of a change in the way women select and behave, but because the nature of the apps allow a small group of men to go on three dates a day if they want to.
I think they have. Most men won't openly and seriously announce that they have minimum standards for boob size, for example. At most you might get jokes when they're drunk, but usually not even then, it's quite the taboo.
In contrast women will quite seriously put minimum heights into their dating profiles - saw that a lot back when I was trying to use Tinder, thank god I met a fantastic woman the old fashioned way instead. And of course statements like, "I wouldn't date a man who was earning less than X per year" are considered completely anodyne. And ah yes, don't forget the political filtering. "Would never kiss a Tory" and the like.
I do think there's a quiet rejection of a lot of this stuff, at least where I live (not the USA). The sort of women who get conspicuously angry about being chatted up in bars make for terrible partners. Basically every man agrees with that. No man wants to be married to a committed feminist because even if somehow you make it through their personal dating gauntlet, they'll spend the rest of your life telling you how men are terrible and it's all your fault. And good luck having one take good care of you, or sacrificing their low earning career to start a family.
My social circle developed different approaches to dealing with this but one was to focus on eastern Europeans/Russians, others to go to dedicated events for meeting people in bars, another to find girlfriends in unconventional places. Dating sites - no. Very poor hunting grounds.
"No man wants to be married to a committed feminist"
I don't want to be married to somebody who isn't a committed feminist.
Can you think of a quantifiable way of saying what you're saying in this last paragraph? I'd say that, other things being equal, some amount of feminism is considered attractive.
Speaking as a liberal feminist, I don't think all brands of feminism are the same. To be specific, I don't think you could be in a healthy relationship with someone who believes in a strict oppressor/oppressed gender dichotomy. And I should say this goes in both directions, speaking from personal experience here as a man who internalized that gender dichotomy, and it made my relationship a whole lot harder than it had to be, possibly even unhealthy. (I'm getting better)
Some feminism, I do believe is optimal. But I think there's certain land mines in the water that need to be avoided.
Quantifiable? Well, no, not really, what sort of quantity are you thinking of here?
I can't say I know any men who find feminism attractive but perhaps you're using a different definition to us. Do men like women who are smart, can be gainfully employed in a good job, etc? Sure but obviously that's not the same thing. I think Karmakin sums it up pretty well. A woman who is convinced her or her 'sisters' are oppressed is just unpleasant to be around. For one, it's simply not true for most women in the office/middle class workplace today, quite the opposite where companies are falling over themselves to privilege women, so to have these beliefs implies a pretty big disconnect from the world we find ourselves in. If you don't think your partner is perceiving the world properly then you can't respect them, and a relationship without respect cannot survive.
>In contrast women will quite seriously put minimum heights into their dating profiles
Yep. Very, very common. On the other hand...
>And of course statements like, "I wouldn't date a man who was earning less than X per year" are considered completely anodyne.
Don't think I've ever once seen this among literally over 10,000 women's dating profiles. For whatever reason, in the cultures I've been exposed to, it's taboo to make demands about people's money and most physical attributes with height being a glaring exception. (I've also pretty much never seen a "No bald guys, please" demand.) I do very occasionally see complaints in women's dating profiles of "Guys stop boasting on your profiles about how good of a job you have or how much money you make, I really don't care".
Saying things like "Trump supporters swipe left please" is extremely common.
I think maybe a lot of this is determined by geographic/cultural differences. From your comment I pick up that you're British; I've only ever used dating apps in the US and Italy.
To clarify, I've not seen statements like that in dating profiles either. I have however heard women admit having effective income requirements in personal conversations quite a few times. And of course, this preference is extremely easy to spot out in the real world.
It's I think a lot more reasonable than putting height requirements in a dating profile. A lot of guys want to have kids and then the income really matters. Income requirements are a practical matter, whereas height is purely physical.
"Feminist" is a very vague word these days. Certainly many people who identify as feminists won't "spend the rest of your life telling you how you're terrible" or whatever, that's practically sociopathic behavior.
Personally I think the only sane position is that there ARE still a lot of ways that men are advantaged over women, and also a handful of ways women are advantaged over men, and it's interesting to talk about all of them, but at the end of the day you have to treat your partner like an individual. Yea, a black and white "oppressor/oppressed" narrative doesn't work for me, but stark ideological lines of any kind don't work. I def need someone who can appreciate the subtleties and grey areas of life and society. I think my gf would probably say she's a feminist if asked, but she's pretty open-minded, and understands that societal forces aren't caused by individuals being evil. (That said there's a lot of shitty behavior out there, and a lot of it is unfortunately men, neither all men nor exclusively men.)
One thing to keep in mind is that people on dating apps are very much not representative of the population at large. Dating apps heavily overrepresent people who, for some reason or another, cannot form or remain in a long term relationship. Even if everyone used dating apps, the ones who were the worst at dating would stay the longest.
But I'm repeatedly told that dating apps are the only way people in the modern, developed world ever arrange sexual or romantic relationships, that meeting in bars or at work or church or being set up by your friends is just *so* 20th century. So presumably in another generation or so, people on dating apps *will* be representative of the population at large.
I'm not claiming that people who have ever used dating apps are weird, I'm claiming that people who currently use dating apps (at some particular given time) are weird. I think that the inspection paradox bites hard here. Consider gathering together a random sample of 1000 young, urban, tech savvy people. If you dismissed everyone who had never used a dating app, I think you would still be left with a reasonable and representative sample. If you dismissed everyone who was not currently active on a dating app, I think you would be left primarily with people who were bad at pairing off. Because the people who are good at dating pair off quickly and stop being on dating apps. If you want to know things about people who have ever used dating apps, you need to make sure you're asking the first room, and not the second. With the caveat that if you're just browsing through profiles, you're inherently looking at the second room.
There's nothing special about dating apps here though: this is a true statement about single people in general.
If Tinder is your source of prospects, I don't see how you can't be superficial. You're presented with 40 people at a time with photos and a few words. Even if you'd like to deeply know them before making a judgment, you can't.
Yes, nobody talks to strangers any more, we're all completely denied the ability to hear and engage with a range of views outside our... wait a second...
Dude there's no way I'm top 5% and I married a girl I met on an app. In fact, I can think of several other guys I know who probably wouldn't crack an objective top 5% who did the same. Measuring in terms of attractiveness and income, I assume. Mostly I'm talking about friends of mine, and obviously I think my friends are great, but I don't think any of us would crack the sort of implied criterion here.
I mean, in many ways it's closer to the traditional system of families arranging marriages than to the brief post-war blip of dating culture.
I see what you mean but I see arranged marriage systems as being a lot more egalitarian because, in the end, everyone ends up with a partner who is more or less roughly equivalent in looks, class, background, etc. Except in polygamist cultures where the rich men can afford to wed all five of the pretty women in a given village, I don't see how the negative effects mirror each other.
I'm shy around groups of strangers, and awkward in party situations. Dating apps let me find a wife and have a family. Maybe there's some sort of dystopian theoretical downsides, but in the real world I'm very glad of them.
I mean, they've been around for a couple of decades. What ways of horrible wrongness are particularly concerning? If it's that likely, we should have some results by now.
As a man who has always had pretty severe neuroses about initiating anything with women, significantly exacerbated by the pervasiveness of "creepiness" discourse in the first half of the 2010's when I found myself single for the first time as an adult, I can attest to having turned to swipe-right-style dating apps as my only real means of getting the nerve to ask a woman out. They're also a godsend during a pandemic that keeps people from physically meeting anyway. As I contemplate post-pandemic life, I marvel at how I've made practically zero progress in gaining confidence at the idea of asking someone out in person, when you have no idea if they're interested in you (or, in some cases, if they're even single -- and let's face it, most people in my age group that I feel attracted to are generally not going to be), despite the creepiness discourse having drastically receded, because I've let dating app technology carry me all this time.
Does it work?
I'm neurotic as hell about this. I'm also neither pretty nor rich, and kind of unlikely to become so. I think I have real things to offer, maybe pretty important things, but they anticorrelate with the commonly cited selection heuristics. (And it's not hard to see why. Looks and money are very easy to verify up front; it would make sense to use them as an early filter.)
(Long term I'm more interested in mate search than getting laid, short term I'd like to convince my brain interaction with the opposite sex is even an option.)
I consider my adventures with dating apps a story in progress, and if you ask me that question again in a year or two, I might have more to say. For now, I'll just say that my use of dating apps since early 2020 has broken me a long way out of my shell and made me significantly more confident and less intimidated by most aspects of the dating realm, although none of my matches have gotten very far and I still have a very long way to go in terms of confidence / overcoming fears and inhibitions. There's just something incredibly liberating about knowing that the person you're talking to is definitely single and at least *interested* in you as a potential date/partner (even if unsure or not necessarily crazy about you) and that moving the conversation in a "let's go out on a date" or "I find such-and-such about you attractive" direction isn't going to be seen as creepy or inappropriate.
There are things I find more strenuous about meeting someone you only talked to online before -- a one-on-one meeting with a total stranger for several hours can feel overwhelming. But for me, the advantages still outweigh the disadvantages in terms of relieving stress: it helps to know that, however badly things may go, since this person was a total stranger it's probably not going to have any further social ramifications.
I'm speaking from the experience of using dating apps in an American big-city area. (I have previous experience trying this in a European big city and barely getting anywhere; online dating, at least several years ago, is much more limited and still slightly more stigmatized in continental Europe.) I don't know if you also live in a fairly densely populated area in the US, but if you do, I imagine that even being "neither pretty nor rich" these apps (OKCupid and Bumble are my favorites) could bring you matches given a reasonable amount of time and energy from your end. If you're anything like me, just getting some "dating practice" this way is worth it even if it doesn't turn up a permanent mate anytime soon.
Yeah, I think so! Thanks for the recs, I was gonna ask.
Thing is... asking someone out offline carries more risk but can also net you a better looking/matching partner as you might meet someone who would never swipe on you normally or who doesn't use apps in the first place. So by only using apps you're effectively lowering the quality of woman you could potentially meet. I know, I know, looks shouldn't matter, but if they do to you, you might be missing out.
I got kicked out of a lot of the spaces where this sort of thing was happening, in no small part based on my responses to such things. Now I wonder... did all those people just stop talking about it shortly thereafter, abandoning all the positions I still ascribe to them and their social circles in the absence of any further interaction with them? Did most of the people I know now never see this phenomenon in action for what might have been a relatively short period of prominence, and that's why you think I'm crazy for being so impacted by it? Are they and their friends who did these things experiencing selective amnesia about just how unreasonablethey were for those many months or few years?
The description here of Amanda Marcote's response to Scott Aaronson sounds like an only slightly caricaturized version of arguments and vilifications that I spent at least a few years experiencing and now a decade being exiled for, and that are still among the largest influences on my fears of interacting with people.
The rise of the “IDW” and long form podcasting is probably significant enough to get a section - Joe Rogan in particular as the archetype non-woke everyman liberal. Also the center-left flight to Substack is an interesting trend. It definitely feels like something significant is happening around all of that, with rejection of new Leftist orthodoxy as a unifying theme
Nitpick re. this: "For whatever reason, the early Internet was a place for polite but insistent debate, and early websites centered around the needs of a debating community. The most obvious example was TalkOrigins' massive alphabetized database of arguments against creationist claims, with the explicit goal of helping people win debates with creationists." What you call the most-obvious example of debate culture is an obvious example of echo culture. Otherwise, it would have also listed creationist arguments against evolutionist claims.
But the point is that it was written in expectation that it would either be found by religious people, or by people who were confronted by religious people in a debating context. In the modern echo world, these things don't happen so much.
Okay, I see that now. It was "debate culture" compared to what we have today. But it sounds like it wasn't a place for debates to take place.
It was a resource for people to use in debates, but the debates themselves were hosted elsewhere, often in person at live venues but at some point those shifted to press-covered events and then web forums.
"...it would have also listed creationist arguments against evolutionist claims."
Erm, it very much did indeed list *every* single meaningful creationist argument. And then countered it. Would you require that they left certain arguments unaddressed?
I'm just relying on Scott's description, but it sounds like it listed them only to rebut them, always giving evolutionists the last word. That is, the site itself took a position. I was expecting "debate culture" to mean a neutral ground.
Correction--McCain made the comment in 2000, not 2008 as you imply. See: https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/McCain-Criticized-for-Slur-He-says-he-ll-keep-3304741.php
Thanks, I've corrected that.
Correction--McCain apologized a month after making the comments: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/2000-02/28/071r-022800-idx.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_26
See the following quote near the end of the article:
"But out of respect to a great number of people whom I hold in very high regard, I will no longer use the term that has caused such discomfort. I deeply regret any pain I have caused . . . I apologize and renounce all language that is bigoted and offensive.
The New York Times usage graphs represent what is being pushed on the public by the mainstream news media's apex predator, while the Google Trends graphs represent what is being pulled by the public in Google Searches.
By the way, Google's Ngram database of word usage in books has recently been updated through 2019. Keep in mind that there is often a lag of a few years between word usage in newspapers and word usage in published books. My Ngram preference is to set "smoothing" to zero when examining the Great Awokening since it is so recent.
Cancel Culture recently (as in, this Saturday) razed through a perfectly mundane online collectible game I play (so simple it barely deserves the name 'game'), with the site admins completely removing game content made by a previous staff member without any prior warning to the users, and aggressively shutting down conversation about it, forbidding all conversation. The change by itself isn't a big deal (I mean, if I'd have been viewing it in isolation, I would have been angry at the destroyed content on a private site that I have no control over, but moved on), but it also legit terrified me - if *this* kind of site is now willing to cancel people, no matter the fallout (which in this case hurt the people who were playing much more than the ex-staff member who hadn't even been active there in nearly a decade), what does that mean about its proliferation through society? It just had this... ashen taste of book burning to me. I realise there are differences, but I find it difficult to emotionally separate it from book burning enough not to be terrified for the future of society.
(The good news is that other players of the site I've been speaking to in private all at least understand the fear or outright share it. Several of these people I haven't had prior contact to, so it's not even my pre-selected social bubble. That gives me some hope.)
Anyway, there's no real telling if it's a symptom of a greater problem from my very limited point of view, as my fears suggest. But even if it is - I hope it's just a cycle.
Does anyone have a good sense of how the rolling average google trends data works? I have not read any documentation but have always been curious. Like is it calculating deltas based on the number of searches per period? or is calculating delta based on the percentage of all searches that a term is per period. I.e., does it adjust for the growth in total search quantity through time?
That's not what I thought "cancel culture" meant. I thought it referred to the cancellation of _people_.
I believe the first time "Cancel Culture" became a thing was #CancelColbert. I don't remember anybody calling an internet mob "Cancelling" before that. In that case, they were trying to cancel a show, but they put a person's name in it because...well...it was in the name of the show.
#CancelColbert was so obviously a classic case of "pc culture run amok" because he was being hounded for anti-racist satire by people who didn't get a joke that it became a focal point for mockery.
Lindsay Ellis posits a different origin of the modern usage of "cancel" as being yet another term appropriated from AAVE, near the beginning of her "Masks Off" YouTube video (seriously is there no way to put hyperlinks in Substack comments?). But my perception of its origins has also been that it began with #CancelColbert.
> seriously is there no way to put hyperlinks in Substack comments?
You need to write out the URL, & Substack will add a hyperlink. (Thus: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cancel)
I was wondering specifically about directly hyperlinking bits of text so that I don't have to interrupt a comment with a web address, but I suppose being able to put in a link web address is still helpful.
> SJWs aren't bad because they get basic facts wrong, quash free speech, bully their opponents, or make unfair generalizations across diverse groups. They're bad because sometimes they get your favorite TV show cancelled.
I think there is a sense in which this represents a good dynamic (at least, in some cases): People object to an ideology or cultural movement when it harms them personally, not when it bothers them ideologically.
To defend why this is a good thing - ideologies are often messed-up or wrong about important things, which is why people follow them off a cliff. people objecting to things that bother them personally has a lot of inadequate equilibria, but it at least has the basic thing right that people will argue against things that bother them personally (so it can't be too misaligned with them), and will argue harder against things that bother them more (so there's some proportionality).
The main downside of this is that it's moderated by status. You can complain about your favourite TV show being cancelled, because everyone watched TV and it's not low status to admit to liking the Mandalorian. If you complain about being bullied by an SJW there's an implication there that you're low status enough for someone disagreeing with you to shut you down, so both your argument becomes low-status, and you're more likely to make it if you're genuinely low-status, so this argument is unlikely to gain traction.
I think the "men hitting on women" scenario is the worst of all worlds for this: In person, a lot of women I know have told me how they wish more men would approach them. But they'd never say this in public (it comes off as low-status), and if they did not many people would listen. Meanwhile if you're the type of super-attractive woman that gets hit on all the time, you're a lot more likely to be high-status and have a lot of people listen to your complaint. And the same thing happens with men - if you're a man who complains about it being hard to approach women, you're broadcasting low status, and high-status men are much less likely to have this problem in the first place.
Re: "But they'd never say this in public (it comes off as low-status), and if they did not many people would listen."
Are you sure that's their reasoning? I think the desire to not indicate their true approachability and thus receive more attention than they feel comfortable handling would be a bigger contributor.
This looks like a decent place to flog my pet dead horse: things can feel more intense now than ever before because more people now care about [things we care about now] than ever before. People used to care less about [things we care about now], so past times feel like they were less intense. But actually, people used to care *a whole lot* about [things people used to care about], which we don't care nearly as much about now. So people back then would have felt like things were uniquely intense, and would look at modern disagreements about [things we care about now] and not really get it.
This is all very tautological and makes the very dry statistical bias obvious, but requires confronting that things we used to care about aren't the things we care about now, and almost certainly won't be the things we care about in the future. It is not easy to accept that the answer to "who will win this culture war?" will very possibly be "you won't care". Oh, you'll still have an opinion all right, but *this* fire in your belly will fade faster than you thought possible. As it will for nearly everyone else. This too shall pass.
This seems like a good explanation of a lot of this.
Not sure if you’re responding to something Scott said. I don’t think he mentioned trying to win a culture war, just that he hopes it will fizzle out and has guesses of how it might not.
Remember a few years ago, people were literally terrified of ISIS. Yes, things change, but they can leave a legacy of weird laws and norms.
" If I had to guess, I’d say wokeness outgrew the Internet fashion cycle. Unlike its predecessors, it took over mainstream institutions."
Or you could cite the thing you actually did cite... I.e. the video of George Floyd being murdered by a cop. That was international news. It was unambiguous. Now the death of one person from police violence in the abstract is not a worse problem than the deaths of hundreds from inadequate access to healthcare, for example, but socialist causes didn't have a viral video.
There had been black people killed by police approximately as badly and unfairly for forever. Some of them also had videos. I don't want to completely discount that the Floyd video might have had features that made it especially outrageous (I have a weak stomach and didn't watch) but I would think there would have to be a lot of tinder for that spark to create as much of a fire as it did.
It was particularly egregious. It was several minutes long and George Floyd said he was in distress and he was very clearly not a threat and then you get to see in real time as he dies. Bystanders are filming, bystanders are telling the cops (not in a confrontational way, just you know, "he's down, put him in cuffs and let him breathe) and the 3 other cops are watching and preventing anyone from interfering.
There was a lot of tinder... but I feel like the feminism and atheism bits of this piece have a bit of "this is all just the parochial concerns of mostly nerdy privileged people so the currents of fashion could sweep them away."
Also, though not as impactful as George Floyd, I think the Eliot Rodger murder of 6 people in 2014 probably gave the feminist movement a bit of support that helped it carry on for longer.
"It was particularly egregious."
I didn't think so. Floyd was on drugs; it was reasonable to restrain him. In any case, that doesn't explain why virtually everyone prominent except Trump was overtly pro-looting a year ago.
"Restrain" and "kneel on someone's neck while they say they can't breathe and do that for two more minutes after they stop moving or speaking" are not synonyms.
He was restrained pretty quickly.. making sure he'd never move or speak again took some time.
People everywhere weren't pro looting. Biden condemned it as did Obama. Within extremely online left circles condemning looting was seen as hurting the side. It was like Churchill's comment about having a nice thing to say about the devil if Hitler invaded Hell.
He wasn't really restrained that quickly, was he? If you watch the whole video (I have a stronger stomach and did), the guy was complaining he couldn't breathe when he was standing up, before the cops even did anything to him. That's probably why they didn't take him seriously when on the ground - he was trying to get away from being arrested, was on drugs and was saying "I can't breathe" whilst standing up and bellowing at the top of his voice. Additionally, feeling unable to breathe being apparently a known side-effect of the drugs he was on. This has been re-spun as "killer cop suffocates innocent guy" but it's clear from the video that Floyd's breathing difficulties (real or perceived) pre-dated his neck restraint.
It's so sad that no one has invented a method of restraint that doesn't restrict the airway. I'd only the cops had carried some sort chain that they could put around his hands... Alas they had no choice but to choke someone already complaining of trouble breathing.
The show "Cops" is no longer on, but it ran for about 50 years. I can remember an episode where a cop kneeled on a guy's neck and the guy said "I can't breathe" and the cop responded "If you couldn't breathe, you couldn't talk." It looked like abuse to me, but that guy presumably didn't die and the show aired it like it was just another day in the life of cops. I'm not honestly sure what the Floyd video showed that that episode of Cops didn't.
George was saying he couldn't breathe before they started kneeling on him. In fact, the reason he was lying on the ground was because he asked to be able to do that while in distress in the backseat of the police vehicle.
Because the guy in cops didn't die? Like they didn't air a man's death. The issue with the knee on the neck in Floyd's case was that it was done with reckless disregard for the health of the suspect.
Anti-racism is exactly the kind of parochial thing metropolitan elites care about enough to displace their crusade against paper straws and single use plastics
For what it's worth, the crusade against plastic straws is just as big on the "Redneck Riviera" of Orange Beach, AL. I think it's a movement that really caught on in places that care about litter, because it's one of the old-school "environmental" movements that's mainly about doing something small and visible, rather than addressing the systems of the climate.
I believe you mean plastic straws, but this is a particularly weird bugaboo because it was a movement started by a 9 year-old that was easy for corporate do-gooders to get behind, and then the closest thing to a "woke" response was a backlash because it disproportionately impacts poor disabled people who can't afford metal straws and can't use paper straws, which are actually good for the environment, because they're too flimsy. But they need to use straws because MS results in poor lip dexterity and liquid falls out of your mouth otherwise.
At best, metropolitan elites are following way behind on whatever the vanguard of these various shifts are actually doing.
And lots of people were able to see it as wrong; it was harder to make excuses for his death and his restraint.
>there would have to be a lot of tinder for that spark to create as much of a fire as it did.
Much of the "lot of tinder" was that people had been cooped up in their homes with little excuse to get out and interact with other people for several months. I believe this was a significant factor. But yeah, the video was also particularly egregious -- the most cut-and-dry-presenting video of a police killing that I've ever been aware of.
>Also, though not as impactful as George Floyd, I think the Eliot Rodger murder of 6 people in 2014 probably gave the feminist movement a bit of support that helped it carry on for longer.
Yes. I was surprised this wasn't even mentioned in the post. My memory is of the aftermath in the discourse being HUGE, leading to hashtags like #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen and acronyms like NAMALT that are still occasionally referenced today. From my point of perception, the feminist "creepiness" discourse actually reached its zenith in early summer 2014 for this reason, and the surge in it that I personally had the most trouble coping with. (Happily, it happens to have been the exact same time that I discovered Scott, SSC, and the online rationalist movement.)
Re: your first point, I think that was by far the most significant reason things blew up to the degree that they did after Floyd's death. People, especially young people living in small apartments in dense cities, were desperate to get outside and do something after months cooped up in isolation. Lots of those people were also unemployed and feeling lost. The constant drumbeat of quarantine shaming had made a lot of left-leaning young people fearful of the social repercussions of breaking covid rules even while they became increasingly desperate for some kind of social interaction. Protesting police violence suddenly gave them a reason to break quarantine without having to look like they were going against the rules that had become so precious to their tribe. Never underestimate the degree to which virtue signaling (or more importantly fear of social shaming) drives people's behavior during our present age of partisanship and internet-driven moral panics.
I think part of it is simple repetition. If this was 2014 or 2012 (Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin), you don't have this reaction. But after 2014 we've had seven years of having something like this on the regular. It's like in advertising. It's not the first commercial that builds your brand loyalty to Coke. It takes time. It takes reps. We've had years of reps, so when we had a particularly egregious case (and really, we had two), for a minute, we had a blow up.
There's a reason (or should I say rea$$$on) the story of Floyd's murder became "racist cops killing black people" and not "classist cops killing struggling poor people", even though police murders of whites follow much the same pattern.
I think there's a good explanation of this as being about phone camera penetration. That is, a 17 year old black girl who was not from any kind of wealthy background could afford to have a phone with a camera and video recording capability sufficient to create a video of a high enough quality that everyone could see what was going on.
While a camera of that quality (and enough storage to hold 10 minutes of video) has been available for a few years, it's not all that many, and available to enough people (particularly poor black people, as the ones most likely to see that sort of policing) that someone does capture an event like that? Maybe only a year or two at that point.
What about the death of zero persons from police violence? Rodney King was just beaten up on camera, not killed. And he was beaten up at a time when #BLM wasn't a thing, when the internet was barely a thing. But *sixty-three people died* in the resulting riots. I don't think all the violence in all the #BLM protests/riots/whatever adds up to even half that. Then Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were killed, and there was some protesting and rioting but nothing like Rodney King, then we got a dozen or two more incidents that were all over the map in terms of both video quality and egregiousness of injustice and we got levels of protest/rioting that were all over the map but uncorrelated with the cause, then we got George Floyd and for some reason we got more rioting that we'd seen since Rodney King (but not even close to that).
This defies any simple explanation of the form, "but this injustice was really bad so the riots were really bad" or "this video was really graphic so the riots were really bad". It really does look to be as inscrutably quasi-random as "internet fashion, go figure". If there's some hidden order to it and someone can figure it out and explain it in a manner that has real predictive utility, that would be helpful. Just-so stories to explain the last cycle, not so helpful.
I think it was about pandemic cabin fever more than anything else. Young people have been socialized into a manichaean political worldview while at the same time being taught to live in fear of public shaming. Social isolation is unnatural for humans and lots of young people got stuck alone or in tiny apartments with roommates for months on end. Add that to the constant refrain from left wing media about how anyone who socialized or even stepped outside their home was a monster and you get a whole lot of desperately lonely young people, who aren't actually very afraid of a virus that's highly unlikely to kill them, feeling guilty about their desire to break the rules to go see friends and family. Suddenly protests start happening and now going outside and seeing friends is not only okay, it's virtuous! It's your civic duty in the fight against systemic racism! The Floyd video was stomach-turning but not really all that different from the many instances of police violence we've all seen in recent years, except that it occurred at a time when young left-leaning Americans (read: the group most likely to protest at any given time) were perhaps the most desperate they've ever been for a reason to leave the house.
Kinda sorta apropos, but mostly just funny:
https://janeclarejones.com/2018/11/13/the-annals-of-the-terf-wars/
I think Scott is a bit too pessimistic about Socialism as the ascendant invasive ideology. Sure, CTH isn't so trendy these days, and the appeal of Sanders and Corbyn has dimmed. But pretty much every cool 18-21 year old student in my classes these days expresses some variant of 'fuck capitalism' every fourth sentence.
This is a fairly new phenomenon for me (last five years) and I think we're still in its early stages. Even if socialism (in the co-ops, unions, ownership of the means of production sense) has peaked in the current meme cycle, I think more general anti-capitalism is probably ascendant in trendy spaces. I don't know what form it'll take. Probably something that mentions socialism but is deliberately vaguer and more viral in its focus.
I doubt this will be anti-woke per se; if anything probably the opposite (perhaps something like "capitalism is cis culture" could be a suitable slogan?). But despite being nominally pro-woke, it'll shift the center of narrative gravity from race and gender to the dream of wholesale reform of institutions and our way of life.
That'll helpfully dovetail with the persistence of racial and gender gaps and inequalities even in the face of the current aggressive political and institutional efforts to reduce them. "We were right to identify racism and sexism are serious problems," the new creed will intone, "But we can't tackle them head on, as is evident from the persistence of social inequalities. Clearly, these issues are too hopelessly deep and bound up with our modern capitalism consumerist society to be tractable without root-and-branch reform of our institutions."
There won't be many practical remedies suggested by the new anti-capitalist faith, let alone any that involve the wholesale destruction of capitalism. It'll mostly be signaling, as usual. But there might be some interesting conversations to be had in this space, e.g., ways in which capitalist systems create 'problematic choice architectures', which is just another way of saying inadequate equilibria, except for conventionally cool people.
Right, that's why I say there won't be practical remedies suggested. Clout-chasing young people will continue to buy $600 Apple headphones while deploring capitalist institutions. "There's no ethical consumption under capitalism anyway, so fuck it, who cares, let's focus on bringing down the system." I expect a lot of theory, a lot more navel gazing, and a lot of LARPing. Maybe along with some more focused attacks on things like Big Tech?
I agree about the general point, though. Ideologies are starkly limited by the costs of commitment and their legibility. If there's a clear and painful dividing line between true believers and mere clout-chasers, you can't go viral. You see this with animal welfare activism, insofar as all that seriously in the relevant spaces unless you're at least vegetarian. But that involves a genuine difficult commitment, and puts off the trendseekers. And you can't go viral if you're restricted to true believers.
The same with climate activism. With Greta leading the way, it's very risky to fly to Europe for your summer vacation if you've spent the last year excoriating the carbon footprint of the airline industry. And who's going to make that sacrifice? Not a trendy 19 year old girl chasing clout, or the 21 year old men chasing her.
And there's also inherent limits to how people can be true to their beliefs in their actions by the strictures and the structure of society. Socialists can try to justify paying for those headphones, for example, by saying that in their ideal universe they wouldn't have the cultivated desire to buy the headphones, and besides they still have to pay for some things they'd rather not (healthcare, etc.) but you can't just completely disregard that structure if you want to live.
Same for Greta Thunberg; it's going to be really difficult for her (and other climate activists) to be true to their beliefs considering the state of the world--and the climate and the economy.
Anti-racism and feminism don't affect people's lives? You don't think people who feel the effects of individual or systemic discrimination would be affected by those changing?
I think the point is that if X takes up the cause, it's not going to affect X's lifestyle very much. It does affect other people - both positively and negatively - but that's not much discouragement to X.
"People go along with this anti-racism and feminism stuff because it doesn’t really affect their lives very much."
Plainly ridiculous.
"I think you’d get a lot more resistance to a movement that wanted to totally change the economy or even raise people’s taxes by a significant amount."
Is Biden getting much resistance for his (in my view, obscene) capital gains tax proposal?
> plainly ridiculous
Id appriciate if we raise the level of conversation above "no u"
Well, it is ridiculous. Crime has risen in the inner cities massively. Democratic states are going all out in gutting public schools. A wide swathe of people were affected by the Obama administration's campus sexual assault guidance.
>it affects only people with $1 million+ in annual income
Those are all who have to directly pay it, but it will affect many others (possibly to a greater degree); tax incidence is unrelated to who has to write a check, and I doubt it'll be the 0.3% whose consumption will diminish as a result.
Citations are table stakes, when you're trying to convince someone who hasn't already bought in.
“ Democratic states are going all out in gutting public schools”
Wow, I missed this. I know what you mean about crime, but what is this a reference to?
How is this "plainly ridiculous?" Being super woke costs me nothing in the near term, and with my liberal circle, it might actually help me socially. People will fight those capital gains taxes, even if they have to do it quietly.
Isn't it dead on arrival? Is that infinite resistance, or none?
> But pretty much every cool 18-21 year old student in my classes these days expresses some variant of 'fuck capitalism' every fourth sentence.
That's been around for 50 years, except that the really cool kids didn't have to say it every fourth sentence because it implicitly permeated their work. "Fuck capitalism" has been the creed of punk, goth and much of rock and metal. Almost every nerd goes through a "fuck capitalism" phase. There isn't much harm to it unless it becomes a mass religion. Once the axe hits the foundations underneath capitalism (meritocracy, individualism, the strife to be better and prove things to the world), that's where it really gets unhealthy.
Are you familiar with the "r/antiwork" subreddit? They're pretty explicitly against striving and related activities.
Wasn't familiar with it. From its frontpage, it does *not* seem to be against striving and meritocracy -- maybe some of its hard core is, but the frontpage is full of memes about capitalism, bullshit jobs and underpayment. (Low quality memes mostly -- if someone told me that some moderately popular subreddits were fully populated by an AI and I had to guess which, this one would be my candidate.)
""Fuck capitalism" has been the creed of punk, goth and much of rock and metal."
Amen. And since Scott already mentioned Joe Strummer and The Clash, time to Rock The Casbah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ9r8LMU9bQ
On the topic of rock, can't help but think of Won't Get Fooled Again. The most frustrating thing in all of this is that no one learns anything and we keep repeating the same mistakes with a different aesthetic, but there's a calm in accepting that and just trying to be a good person anyway, I guess.
As my eighty year old relative who was very, very involved in socialist movements back in the day put it, everyone's a socialist in their twenties unless they have no heart and a capitalist in their forties unless they have no brain.
That, and skin-deep anti-capitalism is fully compatible with many professions in the arts and in academia. You don't even need to grow out of it if you live that life and keep your intrinsic motivation alive.
I'd change that to "a capitalist in their forties unless they have no healthcare".
"But pretty much every cool 18-21 year old student in my classes these days expresses some variant of 'fuck capitalism' every fourth sentence."
That sounds like Woke Socialism in the same sense as Woke Capitalism. And when those students graduate and go out into the wonderful world of work? Some of this is plain trendiness that will fade away - when I was young, the student activists were all wearing keffiyehs. Need I say that none of them were remotely Middle Eastern?
Trendy Marxism/Marxist-Leninist/Maoism has long been a staple of college students. Some of them will go on to the DSA or whatever, but most of them will just mouth the platitudes while scrabbling for jobs in the capitalist economic system.
Until they realize the workers are too concerned about doing well within the capitalist framework and embrace vanguardism.
But I think the point Scott was making is that there's a major strain of *anti*-woke socialism (Chapo Trap House and Jacobin being the paradigms, but everyone who was ever accurately called a "Bernie Bro" being part of it as well).
(Whether or not these people are actually socialists is another question. Just as, I suppose, it's a question whether the "woke capitalists" are actually capitalists.)
I have to jump in and disagree with Scott here. How much are these people willing to defy anyone on the identitarian left? I get the impression that most of these Jacobin people might be willing to venture that we ought to be talking about the depredations of capitalism instead of white collective guilt for slavery and colonialism, but almost none of these people would be willing to, say, tell Ibram Kendi that he might actually be wrong about something. It's a clown show.
I recall having this weird sense in 2016 that the Clinton/Sanders divide had some weird lining up where people in my social circles who were members of exactly one oppressed group (gay white men, straight white women, straight black men) were more likely to support Clinton, while people who were members of either 0 (straight white men) or two or more, were more likely to support Sanders. (I never actually did a survey to verify this, or figure out whether this affected the majorities within each group or just some slight statistical trend).
This sounds very plausible — even if as others point out it wouldn’t be very new or original. In favor of this thesis, anti-capitalism is popular but hasn’t reached celebrities or corporations yet, and has the benefit of being extra hard to turn corporate since, y’know, businesses are pretty capitalist.
That's been the case for at least a few hundred years, not five. The early Marxist revolutionaries all got into it very young. Marx's ideas were fixed in his twenties, he was never forced to abandon them because he never really worked (lived off his friend Engels and his family). Lenin was radicalized when he was expelled from university. Mao joined the Xinhai Revolution at 18.
It's probably related to the effects of the school system. Combination of absolute authority, every question having a clear answer, no real debate of any meaningful form despite what teachers may claim, teachers themselves usually being state employees with attendant politics, etc.
https://pics.me.me/you-guys-cant-envision-the-final-collapse-of-capitalism-incredible-1423829.png
A couple people mentioned this above, but in what sounded to me like a very take-sides sort of way, so let me say as neutrally as possible: it would be interesting to add the rise of intense debates over trans issues to this analysis. (While Scott said "gender" issues, he didn't mean trans issues, but sexism issues; trans issues are a different set, as far as culture-wars goes.) My no-N-grams-to-back-it-up sense is that World War T has been heating up for several years with no signs of a slowdown. But it'd be interesting to see some real numbers on this if anyone has the chops. And then to figure out how this integrates, or doesn't, into the above analysis.
Yes, this was my thought as well. The word "TERF" wasn't something I was aware of during Gamergate.
Are there enough trans people around for that to blow up as a big issue? I don't think censuses are collecting good data yet but I doubt there are as many trans people in America as there are ethnic minorities (c. 25%) or gay/bi people (5-10%?).
It doesn't take a lot of people to get an acrimonious culture battle. How many unarmed black people are killed by police, like 10 a year? Never stopped anyone from yelling about it.
As always, follow the money. Trans activist groups have an absurd amount of money for the proportion of the population they represent. There are trans billionaires funding a lot of activism, not to mention pharma companies pouring money into trans causes because gender dysphoria treatment has the potential to become a multi-billion-dollar industry if it isn't already. Before anyone accuses me of being a conspiracy theorist: all of this is public information. On the one hand I think it's a positive for transgender people to get access to appropriate medical care and to be accepted by mainstream society. On the other hand, anyone who has spent any time with teenagers recently can see that there is clearly a social contagion going on that's leading American teens to see gender transition as a magical cure for the angst and bodily alienation of puberty and they're being given access to permanent, life-altering medical treatment with essentially zero questions asked. Some of the doctors who were early experts in transgender health care have spoken out on this and have lost their jobs over it.
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/40620231/BERHANU-SCHOLARLYPROJECT-2016.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/lgbt/2016/1/20/which-chicago-billionaire-is-giving-big-for-transgender-stud.html
https://www.thecut.com/2016/02/fight-over-trans-kids-got-a-researcher-fired.html
I must question your Google Trends methodology. The decreasing frequency of the word "feminism" doesn't imply decreasing obsession with the cause of feminism; it just reflects changes in what terminology is in fashion. Today, they are more likely to use the words "misogyny" and "patriarchy" than "feminism" or "sexism." And of course the word "intersectional" bundles grievances alleging both racism and sexism and various other isms into one toxic brew.
Today, they are more likely to use the words "misogyny" and "patriarchy"
Far more common nine years ago than today.
Not according to the Google Trends or Google Ngram measures.
Re. this: "A lot of early feminist culture centered around various terms and concepts and witty in-jokes that basically boiled down to "annoying people sometimes come into our spaces and argue with us, and we hate it".
Fan-fiction contains some fandoms where the fics are written almost entirely by women (Trek, Twilight, most TV shows for adults, everything on Archive Of Our Own, which was explicitly feminist in inception), and a few where they're written almost entirely by men (Naruto, My Little Pony, Transformers). (I'll note in passing that it seems women like shows for adults, and men like shows for children.)
All of the fan-fiction communities dominated by women are extremely critical of criticism. None of them provide any means of downvoting or disliking a fic, and people in those cultures were outraged when academics began writing about fan-fiction and critiquing it. They wrote, IIRC, that fanfics were personal expressions, not public property; and that holding them to someone's (arbitrary) standards of Art was a kind of personal violence. Whereas the My Little Pony fanfic community, dominated by men, was the first fanfic community to allow downvotes or numeric ratings on fics, and has a culture in which expectation of constructive criticism is the default, and anyone who complains about reasoned criticism is looked down on. Equestria Daily, the top-tier publication site, was infamous for the brutality of its story critiques. Long critiques are commonplace and institutionalized (there are several MLP-fic critiquing organizations that are large enough, old enough, and respected enough by fanfic standards to be called institutions, eg., the Royal Canterlot Library, Seattle's Angels, the Vault, some now-defunct criticism group on some website like 4chan, and https://writeoff.me, a website for story competitions, which is nearly dead now but used to routinely get a hundred entries per competition). MLP fic fans often hold fic competitions with prizes, sponsored by websites or by individuals. Whereas female-dominated fandoms find the concept of fic competitions offensive.
Not proof of anything, but suggestive.
I may be perpetuating a false narrative. During the firestorms over academics critiquing fanfic, a lot of women from Archive Of Our Own (AO3) wrote essays & blog posts claiming that it had been founded as a feminist site, and that "Our" meant "Women's". But my recollection was that, when AO3 was started, its public face was gender-neutral, and never said anything about being by and for women.
Okay, something odd happened there with a comment double-posting and then deleting both when trying to delete one. Trying this again.
I remember AO3 being founded in the wake of the Fanfiction.net purge of "mature" content https://fanlore.org/wiki/FanFiction.Net%27s_NC-17_Purges:_2002_and_2012, where they promised no censorship. I don't remember anything about being feminist or founded on the premise of feminism, but then again I'm not surprised by any claims that are made.
Modern fandom is different from Ye Olde Tymes. Certainly *now* I see a lot of "only positive engagement" and "no concrit" from "content creators" who come with a laundry list of expectations for readers/consumers of fanworks; it's not enough to lurk, you must comment, it's not enough to like, you must reblog, and it all has to be positive and encouraging and phrased in a certain way (even "I don't generally like [this trope] but your story was great" is not welcome commentary). Frankly, I think this is because of much younger fans coming along (well duh, everything grows and changes) and having their experience of online interaction shaped by social media, particularly Twitter. Now they are much less open to the kinds of thing you list, but I don't think this is a male/female divide (plenty of majority or solely women fanfic sites were open to concrit and flat-out saying 'this is terrible' and things like review whoring were frowned upon), as it is old fan/new fan.
This is a point to consider. But G4 MLP fandom didn't begin until late 2011, after the Trek & Twilight fandoms were well into their declines, and AO3 was 3 years old. I don't have broad enough or long enough familiarity with fan-fiction to talk about much beyond those fandoms.
There’s a good blog article I read a while back which goes into this idea, ever since I read it I’ve been seeing it everywhere:
https://josephg.com/blog/war-over-being-nice/
Transformers fanfic is mostly written by women, in my experience. There is a stereotypical male side of the fandom but I don't think I've seen them write any fanfic.
I think you're right about the male-dominated fandoms being more open to criticism, but
Deiseach is right about this being relatively recent. I think the female-dominated fandoms tend to all mesh together (a lot of people write fic for whatever shows they're atching and stop once the shows end) while the the male-dominated fandoms are their own separate ecosystems. That said I can't really see a male majority space getting as sensitive as modern ao3 or tumblr.
> and a few where they're written almost entirely by men (Naruto, My Little Pony, Transformers)
I'm pretty sure this isn't accurate at all. At best these are the fandoms that are "a tiny bit less than completely dominated by women writers" - when the AO3 did their demographic survey in 2013, it was 80% female, 5% male, with more respondents picking "genderqueer" (6%) than "male".
I'm sure *some* fandom has more male writers than female, but it's almost necessarily going to be something fairly niche, so I doubt it's one of these big name ones.
(And I can say for sure, if anecdotally, that the Naruto fandom is not male dominated - the Naruto/Sasuke shippers were like an entire demographic of their own for awhile)
Sorry; I was guessing irresponsibly about Naruto based on VERY limited data, and mostly guessing about Transformers--all the talk I've seen about Transformers was by males, but that was in a biased sample. But the new, MLP Gen4 fandom is called "bronies" because it's mostly male. (Fans of G1-G3 are nearly all female.) G4 fandom has had many large surveys, and is consistently about 90% male. A 2017 survey of 1800+ MLP fanfiction readers came out 92.0% male and 6.1% female; and that asked for "gender identity", not "sex". It would come out even more male if it asked for "birth sex".
AO3 is probably biased in the other direction, given the number of AO3 members who've called it a site for women.
Somewhere here the by-now-old observation needs to be made that American institutions -- which is to say, all who are invested in the corporate economy -- have a lot to potentially lose from socialism but not so much to lose from repeating Woke (read: trendy socially leftist) shibboleths. The megacorps are happy to speak the shibboleths, and to give their megabucks to people who repeat the shibboleths, but not so happy to give megabucks and attention to people who talk about constraining the wealth and power of the megacorps.
One viral and memetic moment that didn't get brought up in Scott's survey: Occupy Wall Street. What happened to them? How come JP Morgan didn't have a pavilion supporting them but it does field a gay pride float every year?
One way to model the change here is that the left had gained too much memetic/cultural power by 2008, for a lot of reasons, and so the establishment somewhat chose and was somewhat compelled to take a hard turn left, and by joining the left it was better able to steer the left. Since rightists and Republicans are still actual things that exist, they provide useful enemies and foils that put a damper on leftist infighting and allow the more powerful and better funded party, the anti-socialists, to largely steer the ship, if only by vetoing one particular line of discourse while allowing pretty much any other new idea to fly.
Biden tends to favor a higher corporate tax rate and capital gains tax rate. The economic right is much less powerful now than in 2008.
Inequality's also much, much worse now than in 2008, and most of what's being discussed are mild tweaks that won't restore 2008 levels let alone pre-Reagan ones.
On what data are you basing that claim? I've seen the opposite claimed recently, such as: https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2021/04/inequality-mirage.html
I think you are assuming facts not yet in evidence. Joe Biden was certainly not elected on his economic platform (if any). So our first chance to see whether his current economic ideas are popular or not will come in November of 2022. Assuming as seems moderately likely COVID continues to fade, and bearing in mind the huge disruptions in the past year, it would not surprise me to find economic issues front and center next year.
I agree with these points, and would also add that the US corporate tax rate, while not irrelevant, isn't the most important thing to multinational companies. Flow profits through Ireland, do everything you can to not show a US profit, take advantage of whatever other loopholes or incentives exist (and anyone who assigns a high probability to a tax bill passing that doubles the corporate tax rate without creating lots of new ways to avoid those taxes is kidding themselves).
Meanwhile, for example, Biden made it clear very early that restructuring healthcare is basically off the table. And I haven't heard anyone say a word about how much cash UnitedHealth has generated during Covid while not really being much involved in helping beat it. But I do hear people talking about transsexual high school athletes and January 6 and racism, racism, racism.
I'm not really even complaining so much as observing. I'm a long-term holder of UNH stock, and it has made me a lot of money.
Corporate tax rates are not important at all to a multinational, yes, or anyone else who has platoons of lawyers on staff to structure everything cleverly. But small businesses are the backbone of the economy, and the biggest engine for innovation and job growth, and what is the consequences for them? I can easily imagine that you put ceilings on the ability of little mom-n-pop or a couple of college friends operations to grow bigger -- because after they can no longer take advantage of entrepreneurship incentives, and running it all off their personal 1040s, but they are not big enough to hire all the lawyers to finangle it the way Monsanto or Apple does, they're stuck. In many cases I can imagine they *could* see their way to growing, but the ruinous tax hit and/or additional compliance requirements turn it into a fuck it moment, as in, to hell with hiring 20 new people and getting 4x the revenue, let's just have an extra nice vacation this year.
> Joe Biden was certainly not elected on his economic platform (if any).
I'm not so sure that's clear. Certainly Ossoff and Warnock were very clearly elected on the $2000 checks idea. And the entire set of covid relief bills showed a cross-the-political-spectrum shift towards the idea of giving out free money.
Though it's hard to evaluate how any issues in particular figured into elections during a pandemic year, particularly with a figure as "colorful" as Trump on one side.
Well, I'm not counting "free money" as an economic platform, but lumping it under the COVID pandemic response -- which clearly factored hugely in Biden's win (or more correctly Trump's loss, since I think it's more correct to characterize the 2020 election as "Trump loses to Biden" then "Biden beats Trump."
Exactly. It's much easier to attract the cultural left with your BLM sign than to actually acquiesce to any of the propositions of the economic left; they'd gain power from the former and lose it from the latter. They (the American institutions) see the left as the rising political/cultural force and so they try to weasel their way into the left's mind by claiming to be on their side, when in fact they stand in direct opposition to their goals.
I was going to bring this up too- I think Scott missed the time in the late 2000's and early 2010's when everything was about inequality (though maybe this was just in my economist corner of the internet?)
I am certain that New Feminism was also partially undone by another splintering you seem to have overlooked: the end of "vanilla"-feminism's uneasy alliance with queerdom.
In fact, I think may in fact be the new underdog on the rise. Consider: when I came to the part of your essay concerning the rise of the "white feminist" meme, I was puzzled at not recognising the stereotype by that name, but it sounded very, very familiar from the discourse *I* am involved in. But the hip name for the same broad archetype is no longer "white feminist": it is "TERF".
I can even go one meta-level above: the up-and-coming social-justice meme these days, on Tumblr and the like, is "trans women of colour". Is this New Anti-Racism coopting queerdom? While I can imagine someone thinking so, I think it might be the opposite. After all, anti-racism predated widespread Internet interest in the trans experience.
What seems to be going on is that "mainstream" intersectionality is now too uncool, and the hip new thing to show you *really* care, is to focus not only on women or on POCs, not only on women of colour, but on *trans* women of colour. I would go further: I would say that queerdom is in the process of trying to infiltrate and ultimately take over "New Anti-Racism". Note how the latest lasting outrage in leftist Twitter has been over that anti-transgender Texas bill: "a law passed in Texas provokes widespread outrage from Blue Tribe types", three years ago, would have been guaranteed to concern a law accused of being thinly-veiled institutional racism, or something of the sort. Now it's trans kids who are the victims; the story's remained the same, the concern has changed.
I should highlight that, as a queer person with a trans sibling, I am not particularly unhappy with this development. Less selfishly, I think SJWs moving on to trans and otherwise-queer people as their preferred victims-to-be-defended, should be a cause for optimism among the crowd of people whom wokeness annoys. Unlike women or POCs, trans people do not actually comprise a significant percentage of the world's population. A world where SJWs spend their time defending trans folks is a world where trans folks will get nice things, and the overwhelming majority of "normies" can largely move on with their lives as normal without much fear of accidentally becoming a target for the SJWs for the simple reason that most people do not meet trans people.
Another interesting feature of New Queer Advocacy is that, as a relatively new social phenomenon, transgender-ness doesn't come with as many preexisting opinions as "women" or "non-white people" or "the existence of God". Most people as yet untouched by queerdom do not have any biases or opinions on the subject of trans people because they are likely not really aware that they exist. Again, my experience is different, but I have the hope that for ordinary cis people, being told about the new party line by the queer-advocate SJWs will be an experience along the lines of strange people telling you what opinion it is moral to have about the struggles of mauve zogleblicks. You will shrug, say "sure, I guess if mauve zogleblicks exist then I sympathise with their suffering from the strange condition known as dysphgerrgregrefligia", and that will be that.
> Most people as yet untouched by queerdom do not have any biases or opinions on the subject of trans people because they are likely not really aware that they exist
Unfortunately while trans people may not be common, lots of people have opinions about gender norms in general, and the degree to which they ought to be compulsory. And arguing about trans people is used as a synecdoche for that. If you look at conservative anti trans commentary there's very little discussion of hormones, surgery and legal recognition, but a lot about blurring of existing gender roles, and a fear that they will be dismantled. Even the stuff about bathrooms and sports isn't so much about the actual trans people, but the idea that these dividing lines that are supposedly immutable will be blurred
Arguably — but then, it is too oft ignored that by definition, transness relies on the assumption that "gender" is a very strong and deeply-rooted feature of people's brains, not just a weird social construct to be fought and abolished.
I am not so naive as not to see why this has failed to happen, but in theory, trans folks should by and large be natural allies to "gender norms are important!" types. The last thing a trans person wants is to blur the distinction between male and female, or else transitioning would be meaningless; a trans man actively wants to be perceived socially as "a man", not for everybody to be perceived the same regardless of gender! I think this holds even for non-binary types (and mind you, *they* are a minority within a minority), who are quite insistent that *they personally* feel neither feminine nor masculine, not that "feminity" and "masculinity" are social constructs that everybody could and should break away from.
"A world where SJWs spend their time defending trans folks is a world where trans folks will get nice things, and the overwhelming majority of "normies" can largely move on with their lives as normal without much fear of accidentally becoming a target for the SJWs for the simple reason that most people do not meet trans people."
Which I would have agreed with up to recently, until I received my first work email from an agency my workplace deals with, that had "preferred pronouns" of the (cis het) person listed in the signature line. The email was nothing to do with trans issues, we have nothing to do with trans issues, the agency has nothing to do with trans issues (apart from being part of all the other anti-discrimination regulations it operates under) and while I knew this was something happening in the USA, I never expected to see it in my own little corner of the world, or at least not for a good while yet.
Trans people may be a tiny fraction of a percentage of the population, but there are wider repercussions. Many activists, organisations and others are taking it upon themselves to include such issues as part of a broader agenda. And since 'mission creep' is real, then things like "it would be nice but completely voluntary on your part to include your pronouns" can indeed become "you must, whether you want to or not, include your pronouns in work communications".
Nine and nine-tenths times out of ten, I don't care what is the sex/gender of the person on the other end of the email communication chain, I care that we can get this topic sorted out and acted upon. I don't want or need to know if you're girl, boy, both, neither, whatever. I don't particularly want to explicitly tell you that I'm girl, boy, both, neither, whatever (you should be able to figure it out from my name and honestly it won't matter a damn to the work I'm doing). But these *are* the kinds of minor but pertinent interventions that "normies" will encounter, and will become caught up in - "hey Bill/Bertha, why didn't you include your pronouns as set out in the last company communiqué?" or even worse, the words everyone dealing with the public dreads, "We've had a complaint by a client that..."
Been seeing that more too (in the US). I’m optimistic though that the majority of my coworkers have no interest in sharing pronouns and it’ll die off or stay to certain circles. Similar to pushes for ze/zir usage it just doesn’t click unless you’re already woke.
I might be wrong, but aren't pronoun fields on official forms (and in email signatures) pretty much the standard in the US by now ? I am self-employed, but some of our clients are large megacorps, and all their official mass emails have pronouns. Every time I've had to fill out a paper form recently (e.g. at the doctor's office or an insurance claim), it had a pronoun field on there (in case of the doctor, this was in addition to "sex"). I realize that I'm just one data point, but still...
I have seen official mass emails with pronouns, which doesn’t surprise or worry me much. Also seen a few optional pronoun fields which are fine. But no mass adoption by common folk or forced adoption via management which would make me uncomfortable and nervous about getting woke checked.
It's still pretty uneven from what I've seen. I live in a Trump +40 county, and the only time I've seen it locally is the principal at one of the grade schools, who recently started and moved in from a big city, and it caused a stir, though no determined effort to fire her. But I observed that most people here were puzzled and didn't understand what this was, I had to explain pronouns to a lot of people in 2020.
But I do business with lots of companies on the coasts, and I'd still say I see it on significantly less than 50% of signatures.
In the case of multinational megacorps, I think that's more to avoid people in other countries having to guess the gender of someone called Nikita, Akhona, Bilba or Qiang than driven by trans people.
I live in a major American metro and work for a company headquarted in Cupertino that was just acquired by a company headquartered in Germany, on a cross-vendor program for the Air Force that involves hundreds of uniformed personnel, DoD civilians, and contractors from all over the country and basically every major industry player in enterprise FOSS IT solutions and cloud service hosting. I have never seen this. I don't often visit medical facilities these days, but don't believe there was a place to put a pronoun on my Covid vaccine intake for Dallas County, and neither the email communication nor the people at the facility ever referred to me by pronoun (of course second person pronoun is always gender neutral in English anyway).
Of course, I wouldn't agree that this is any sort of a serious material impact on anyone even if it did start to universally happen.
I mean, I don't want to come off as rude, but this is a very strange perspective to me. Quite unrelated to trans issues, I find putting pronouns on the modern equivalent of people's business cards to be a very good idea. You might not care, but many people get understandably upset if they're a woman and you begin your formal email to them with "Sir". It gets things off on the wrong foot. And names are not always an obvious telltale.
Pronouns in bios are *convenient* and, I think, a minimal annoyance unless you are actively annoyed *by the connection to transness itself*, as opposed to by the thing itself. And again, I don't think there's much of a reason for anyone to be actively against transness even if they cannot find it in their hearts to be actively in favour.
I support pronoun specification as an optional clarification — for trans people, ambiguously named people, and others who just want to provide cover for trans people. But I don’t want to feel pressured to do it myself. The reason is similar to why I don’t want a “in this house...” sign on my lawn: it signals something like “I enjoy and support this strongly identity focused culture we’re in, and please ask me for my opinions on it.” Identity politics is usually toxic, and even if this proposal is a good idea when treated optionally I expect the majority of its use to be signaling and would interpret mass usage of it at my work to be excessive and ideologically motivated.
A follow up: practically speaking I’d think pronoun specification could go like this: 1. If you start with no trans or ambiguously named people in your work department then no need for pronouns. 2. Trans person joins, and they are either A. Passing so well you don’t know they’re trans and then pronouns are still unnecessary, or B. They pass less than 100% and would be wise to use pronouns. Others can join to make them feel supported.
But when we’re at 1 and people are specifying pronouns it’s a bit like, what? Why? It’s just a signal. It’s like if no one at work were Muslim but you had a Mecca prayer room. Like, just wait until there’s actually a need.
But how do you define "ambiguously-named people"? It's all in the eye of the beholder. You don't know whether your *customers*/partners/whoever you're sending emails to will get confused. Similarly, in addition to ambiguous names, there's always cis people who happen to be androgynous-looking.
(Also, your alternatives in 2. overlook the matter of e.g. non-binary people, or people who don't identify as trans but are explicitly fine with "they" as an alternative to whatever their assigned-at-birth gender-pronouns are. But I'm nitpicking.)
Overall, since there are cases in which explicit statements of pronouns are useful, or which trans folks aren't an obvious majority — the way I see it, explicitly-stated pronouns are a net-good social norm. Minimal effort (you just insert them into the kinds of profile where you're already including basic information about yourself; it's always dull, and always fairly quick), can only help people, has no discernible way in which it could be harmful.
I guess you're worried about giving the impression that you're intentionally giving strong identity-politics signal, even though you don't want to be pegged as a "cares about identity politics" kinda guy? But that only applies to if it's your own initiative. We're talking about pronouns becoming a company-wide normal — if it's normalised to this extent it will *cease* to be seen as a personal, meaningful political statement altogether.
(Incidentally, I said "guy" earlier, but I'm genuinely uncertain of your own gender/pronouns, and online usernames are much more frequently gender-neutral than legal names, so that is at least a fairly obvious reason why pronouns in *online bios* should become standard for reasons entirely unrelated to trans folks in particular.)
"You just insert them into the kinds of profile where you're already including basic information about yourself; it's always dull, and always fairly quick"
But email signatures don't include that kind of information past "Juniper Smith, Accounts Manager", so it's like "Juniper Smith, she/her, blue eyes, left-handed, likes pizza with pineapple, Accounts Manager" levels of unnecessary information.
I myself don't have any of those online (or offline) bios that include "five foot two, eyes of blue, so on and so forth" and I don't see any reason why it's anybody's goddamn business when it is some random stranger on the Internet browsing my Twitter or whatever. The only reason to do that is "I am Exquisitely Woque" signalling, and maybe I'll stick in some rainbow flags on the latest iteration of re-inventing the rainbow while I'm at it.
(I am *not* a rainbow or other type of flag person).
People who do that also like to stick in that they're trans, bi, pan, whatever (don't mind me, I may be prejudiced from reading a recent ridiculous Tumblr post assigning gender and sexual orientations to a range of characters from a particular TV web serial: can anyone inform me of the difference between bi-, pan- and omni-sexual?) so the "she/her" stuff is just pure swank, and I have little tolerance for swank.
Re: "guy" as a general gender-neutral term of address for unknown or mixed-company, I don't mind that! "Hey guys!" is not, to me, an offensively gendered term that must never be used in the presence of female or you have no idea if they're female-identifying people (where I went to school, in an all-girls school, we routinely used "hey lads!" when greeting each other in groups). I think people who get their knickers in a twist over that have very little to occupy them otherwise.
Well as long as we’re proposing new social norms, here’s my counter proposal that solves the problems you mention from a different angle: anyone who doesn’t want their gender mistaken can specify, anyone who doesn’t care doesn’t need to. Then if someone mistakes my gender because I didn’t specify, it’s entirely on me if I’m offended. This should satisfy everyone: misgendering stops being taboo if the gender was never provided, and people who don’t care like me can take responsibility for any confusion we cause. Would this be just as good in your opinion?
(For my online identity I actually enjoy the ambiguity :P And I mention as such if anyone feels bad about misgendering me, because they shouldn’t feel bad, I did it on purpose.)
Personally, I don't care about the gender of random coworkers, unless it is somehow medically important. When I receive e.g. a commit notification from "jsmith@company.com", it doesn't matter to me whether it's "John Smith" or "Jeanne Smith" or "Juniper Smith whose pronouns are they/them"; what matters is that jsmith broke the task scheduler pipeline and needs to fix it ASAP. Making pronouns mandatory (either by official policy or unspoken lore) signals to me that I must now care about this additional piece of information at all times; essentially, it's a way to conscript me into the culture war against my will.
(1) Emails are a less formal method of standard communication than business letters. Were I to email you, I'd probably start off "Hello, Hadron" rather than "Dear Sir or Madam"
(2) I don't know if you are male, female, or whatever you like. I don't need to know. Maybe for the purpose of *this* specific, particular comment thread, it would be pertinent were you to go "well actually I am trans and I wish to be addressed using these pronouns" as it bears on the subject. If you're sending me an email about "Hey everyone, the Annual National Fluff Picking Awards are coming up, if you want to nominate a body in the industry for one of these, see entry form below!" it doesn't matter a single damn if you are male, female, or a cunningly automated AI bot sending out mass emails
(3) I have, in the course of my work, encountered names that are unfamiliar to me, including foreign names. What I do in that instance is to hit up Google and see if this is an Indian male name, Arab female name, African country whatever name. You can usually get a good indication there. The only reason I have needed to know if "applicant on form" is male, female, etc. is to work out family relationships (e.g. married or partnered, mother or father of dependent child, sex of dependent children and so on) and if I am going to be sending a letter addressed to Mr [Name] or Ms. [Name]. Otherwise, again, I don't need to know.
(4) Since any available figures on "proportion of global population that is trans" are rubbish, let's be exceedingly generous and say that a whopping 5% of people could be trans. I don't know how that breaks down to trans male and trans female - is it 50/50, are there more trans females, whatever. However, let's go with "any random person could be 5%".
Fine. That still leaves 95% of the population where, if we're not meeting each other face-to-face, we can probably tell by name who is what. Yes, there are the ambiguous unisex names like Robyn, Sam, Pat, etc. but I think that you have to make allowances there - "many people get understandably upset if they're a woman and you begin your formal email to them with "Sir" - if this is the first time they got an email from you, the reasonable reaction is "Okay, they don't know by my name 'Robin Samson' that I am she, not he" and to politely inform them of that in the follow-up email.
(6) Given that 95% of our correspondents are going to be cis, then the "she/her" type info is not doing anything other than signalling. It may be intended virtuously! I have seen the explanation that making it commonplace to mention pronouns makes it easier so that trans people who are not out, or who don't want to always be saying 'by the way I'm trans', can slip their preferred pronouns in without standing out as unusual. And that's okay, except...
... if you're a trans woman and you're sending me an email and we've never met face-to-face or spoken on the phone and you sign off as "Laura Prettygirl", I'm gonna assume you're a woman without you needing to put in "she/her".
.... here's where we charge straight into the area of offence being given/taken, but if you're a trans woman who can convincingly pass for female and we speak on the phone or meet face-to-face and you introduce yourself as "Hi, I'm Laura Prettygirl", once again, I'm going to assume you're a woman without needing the "she/her" pronoun dance.
... if you're a trans woman who *can't* convincingly pass for female, we meet face-to-face or speak on the phone and/or you introduce yourself with the unisex name as "Hi, I'm Sam Thompson", then I might slip up and use "he/him", in which case we *do* need to do the "Hi, I'm Laura Prettygirl or Sam Thompson, she/her" dance. But that last case blows the "normalising the use of pronouns makes it easier for trans people to not stand out" because it is necessary because the trans person *does* already stand out as trans.
Frankly, I think that it's an affectation at present; this post is about "wokeness" and that term was lifted from AAVE by the exact kind of white allies who want to show off how sympathetic to the cause they are and how involved they are and how up on the correct terms they are. It's become mostly about white people rather than the BIPOC people who originated the term. And the people who make a big insistence out of putting their pronouns out there are mostly cis people showing off what good allies they are.
I do expect it to become normalised eventually, but the best I can see for it working is "okay, that bloke in a dress wants to be called 'she/her' and the other bloke in a dress wants to be called 'he/him'" so that normal people will be able to keep the terms of address straight and not get called the equivalent of murderers for using 'deadnames' or 'misgendering' people.
I don't need you to be generous with the numbers for trans people, as in point of fact part of my argument relies on how rare they are. My argument is purely that while not *very* useful to either cis or trans people, a social normsl for putting pronouns produces 0 downsides and the occasional good consequences for either cis of trans people; thus, it is an example of a social norm which, if it actually became a social norm (as opposed to a form of movement-specific signalling), would be a generally good thing.
The reason I spent some time on this example is that I think it exemplifies how queer activism would, I think, on balance, improve the lives of cis and straight people — in a way that you can't say the current breed of anti-racist SJWism is beneficial to the daily lives of white folks, and you certainly can't say that Internet Feminism was beneficial to the daily lives of men.
(At least, as concerns straights and cisfolk who are not *actively* trans- or homophobic. If one is transphobic in the literal sense of being made uncomfortable by the thought of trans people existing/having to interact with "non-passing" or non-binary people… well, I sympathise with you in theory, but I don't think coulrophobia should have any impact on whether people are allowed to be clowns.)
Oh, and for the record, since you mentioned it: I do not consider myself to be trans, as I am fine both with my body, and with the way in which most people interpret it, so I have no intent to socially transition. However, in some abstract sense I might be called genderfluid, and accordingly am equally fine with "he/him", "they/them" or "she/her". Also, I am not technically 'white', although I have fair skin and usually pass as such.
" My argument is purely that while not *very* useful to either cis or trans people, a social norm for putting pronouns produces 0 downsides and the occasional good consequences for either cis of trans people"
Right now, since we're in the in-between period of "this is not even a thing" and "widely adopted", insisting on using "she/her" or "he/him" pronouns where there is no necessity for it evokes the suspicion that "hm, maybe this person is trans?" because who else needs to insist that "I am a lady!" other than when it's plain that they're not?
And that is a downside for the whole argument about "normalising this allows trans people to pass without remark and be treated like everyone else".
I don't have much animus about it, other than some eye-rolling when people attempt to arm-twist me about it (like you with your trans and homophobia snideness. Oh goodness me, might I be transphobic? Oh well that is a Mortal Sin of Wokeness and surely I don't want to be mistaken for a horrible conservative by the nice people, do I? Oh wait, I *am* a horrible conservative!)
It'll probably become widespread eventually, just like "Ms" did. But it's nothing to do with "here's a nice convenient social change that benefits everyone" and a lot to do with "we can make you do this" so, eh. Still can't make me believe that a biological male that is not intersex is "really" a woman, but if they want to wear dresses and spike heels and huge hoop earrings and comport themselves as one of my sex, go ahead, knock yourself out.
"Also, I am not technically 'white', although I have fair skin and usually pass as such."
So you're Caucasian? All whites are Caucasian, though all Caucasians are not White 😀 I'm quite happy to include North Africans in the "Caucasian" racial grouping alongside myself, so hey brother, how ya doing?
I'd agree that we are in a transitional period where the marginal usefulness of cis people using bio pronouns is low. But my thinking is… sure, a dam half built means you neither have a proper lake, not a usable river; but that doesn't mean you should leave the dam half built. Either hurry up and finish the dam, or actively work to tear down the half-built dam if there's still time, but dragging one's feet just makes things worse.
I did not mean any personally-directed snideness, by the way. My sympathy for people who find "men in dresses" gross — people who are in a genuine sense "transphobic", as opposed to the common meaning it has taken on of "trans-skeptic" or "trans-hater" — is quite genuine, I just find that the moral weight of the distress of trans people forbidden from transitioning exceeds *their* distress in a trolley-problem sense. In ideal world I'd go the Archipelago route and give people who want to the opportunity to live in Strictly Cis gated communities the opportunity (and vice-versa).
I certainly have no beef with you either if your position is "you do you, I don't believe you're 'really' a woman but I'm not going to be a prat about it if you're playing an elaborate lifelong LARP of pretending to be a woman". I disagree with you on epistemological grounds, but I disagree with plenty of people on epistemological grounds without deeming them to be horrible about it. I think belief in God, for example, is a much more harmful epistemologically-incorrect-by-my-reckoning sort of belief to hold, and yet I am not of the opinion that anyone who expresses belief in God should be excluded from society/never be listened to — and I am certainly not of the opinion that this makes believers "horrible people".
So is it with you! I have no wish to make a fight of this, and I much prefer the genial tone of that last paragraph to the, I assure you, quite unfounded accusation of sideness/arm-twisting. Speaking of which last paragraph: well, where does your terminology of Caucasiannitude fall when it comes to mixed-race types? I am extremely mixed. I am a preposterous cocktail; one with significant, but not exclusive, amounts of Caucasian ancestry (some of which is from North Africa, some of which is from boring ol'Western Europe).
Yeah, but how convenient are those pronouns when the guy's name is John, David, Larry, etc? Not very; then it just becomes an exercising in signalling. My counter signal is eye-rolling.
What's really annoying, from my perspective, though, is not the act of stating pronouns per se, but made-up pronouns, like ze, zir, zim, whatever. I can barely remember people's names to begin with; it is, quite frankly, a serious imposition to ask me (and everyone else) to remember to use a set of suis generis pronouns to refer to you by. To some degree, it strikes me as plain narcissistic to expect people to expect this of people.
Yeah… I think neopronouns will probably fade out over time. He, she and they will mostly do the trick. If people want to get creative, they can feel free to have more personalised neopronouns that friends and loved ones will use if they want to be extra-nice; but the norm should be that strangers can *always* stick with "they".
I think as it stands one should probably use them for those who request them out of politeness; but this *is* an unusual imposition on your gentlemanly disposition on their part, and if they otherwise give you offence, your obligation to politeness is not unbounded.
I don't see why there is any harm to pronouns in a signature. Even if we ignore the existence of trans people entirely there's always going to be names you're unfamiliar with, or gender neutral names, where embarrassing confusion is possible. And which names are obvious to you aren't necessarily going to be obvious to other people. So a norm of including them accounts for those cases and makes it easier for people in the edge cases
I think pronouns in the signature field are probably better than the older practice of having some quote from a sci-fi book in your signature field.
Yeah, it'll probably come, the same way that "Ms." got accepted as standard usage. I do see the convenience when you don't know if Mary Smith is Mrs Smith or Miss Smith. I don't care one way or another about "Ms.", even though I couldn't really see the huge point about "Men don't have reveal their married or single status!". I do actually kind of care about this because I am very much NOT married, but I still get letters from hospital appointments and such like using "Mrs [Deiseach real name]".
Now, even though this does matter to me and even though in the past I have corrected people on this, I have a few choices here:
(1) Stand in the middle of reception and make a big screaming demonstration at the receptionist or secretary or other poor divil dealing with the public about how YOU ARE GETTING MY TITLE WRONG, I INSIST YOU CORRECT IT RIGHT NOW
(2) Shrug, go "eh, it's not going to affect the reason I'm here one iota" if it's for a medical appointment
(3) If it does have an effect on the reason I'm filling up the form or visiting the office (e.g. single versus married status for tax returns), make a point of getting the correct status but without the big screaming demonstration about THIS IS MISTITLING ME THIS IS VIOLENCE HELP HELP I AM BEING OPPRESSED
Personally, I will go for 2 or 3 here, because having been on the other end of "dealing with the public", I know that big screaming demonstrations at low-level drones, where it is probably a clerical error with no malice or deliberation behind it, achieve nothing.
That's how I feel about the pronouns stuff - I don't see the point of it, I do see that eventually it probably will get adopted, and people who make big screaming demonstrations over being misgendered are not helping themselves, their cause, or doing anything else other than pissing people off at them.
As someone who uses ve/vis/ver pronouns for verself, #2 and #3 are my kind of reactions, too.
That said, I'm a bit of a mutant, I guess - I use ve/vis/ver pronouns as a matter of honesty about who I am; I don't even expect anyone else to use them (although I'm very happy when they do)! I recognise it's a cognitive load for people to remember that I have different pronouns; if we just passingly interact and I have no reason to believe they're deliberately *trying* to be mean, why would I hold it against them? Even if they keep getting it wrong but clearly don't mean me any harm, why would I hold it against them? Would I be less of a person if I were a woman? Would I be less of a person if I were a man? Why would it offend me if someone mistook me as a woman or man? (Both has happened, although due to my biological circumstances, the latter has only happened online in my adult life.) I don't know what they associate with those labels. It might be a compliment. (Note: This is how *I* feel about my pronouns. I know it's a bigger deal for some people. I'm not going to demand they feel the same way. I'm just saying I do, and why.)
Anyway, as long as it's clear to others they're talking about me, I don't mind at all, much like I don't mind at all if people who only meet me for one or a couple of interactions mispronounce my name.
The whole habit in online culture war discourse of shouting at each other is very unpleasant to me. Sometimes I feel really embarrassed about queerness being associated with the shouting, like I have to slip in a disclaimer "no, no, don't worry! I am not at *all* like that, please relax, don't worry about slipping up, you're a good person; don't apologise, it's fine, I absolutely pinky promise! <3".
And I do slip in that disclaimer occasionally, just in case.
Yes, this sounds fair to me.
It's bad form to get upset at being deadnamed/misgendered in error, and I think most trans people (those who don't live and breathe by Twitter) realise. Certainly my trans sibling does, and while this may be rare, they also agree that there's no sense either in blowing up at someone who visibly doesn't really *understand* transgenderness, and whom you have neither the time nor inclination to educate right there and then
The "evil" kind of misgendering/deadnaming is when you have informed someone clearly of your preference and they ignore it on purpose to be annoying/"make a point". Picture yourself going with option 3 on the "Mrs" thing; except the government drone gives you an acidic smile and continues calling you "Mrs" emphatically because "a woman your age *should* be married".
"except the government drone gives you an acidic smile and continues calling you "Mrs" emphatically because "a woman your age *should* be married".
But that *is* normal society! Think Valentine's Day and the huge commercialised extravaganza that has become, and it is all centred around the assumption that gay, straight, trans or cis, you are and *should be* partnered up, because Love, Sex, Romance makes us human/makes the world go round/is normal and natural and desirable.
(I have a whole separate aro-ace rant about that). But if you want a funny anecdote on this, and don't mind second-hand embarrassment, lemme tell you about my gynaecological appointment where it took me a good twenty minutes to convince the gynaecologist that there was no sexual history to take, then he tried to "tactfully" (Narrator: it was not tactful) ask me if I was a lesbian 🤦♀️ And then ask me if I was *sure* I had never had penetrative sex (with helpful accompanying hand gestures) 🤦♀️🤦♀️ Because y'know, maybe I thought I was making jam or knitting a tea cosy but I was really having sex.
Yeah. Society *does* assume "a woman your age *should* be married" (or at least partnered up in some way). I've stopped getting upset about it because who has that much energy to spare on constantly being outraged?
Most people think you *should* be. However, moderately polite or considerate people do not keep belaboring the point if you've made your feelings on the matter clear. Or, rather: they might try to convince you that you are *wrong* to remain celibate: but they will generally not insist that "c'mon, you *must* be married and only joshing, and I will continue to treat you as if you were in fact married".
This isn't that analogous to pronouns, but it certainly applies to deadnames. If my trans sibling tells someone to write down their chosen name on a mailing list, and the record-keeper insists on using their deadname instead, that is sheer bloody-mindedness that achieves nothing. A somewhat *reasonable* trans-skeptical record-keeper might try to *argue* with my sibling that transness is fake and they should think about detransitioning. But if they insist on using the deadname right there and then, even though everyone else in the community objectively knows my sibling by their chosen name and is unaware of their deadname — then that is not going to yield anything productive for *either* party of the conversation. The trans-skeptical record-keeper is at best being a weird Kantian virtue-ethicist, and at worst, being pointlessly petty.
That appointment with the infuriating gynæcologist is a fairly good comparison, in fact. I'm sure many trans people would envy your ability to "stop getting upset", but the fact is that especially where actually, psychiatrically-diagnosed dysphoria is involved, whether or not one gets upset is not something one can control. Yes — quoth my sibling — getting inwardly hurt every time someone called them by their deadname, back when they were in the closet, did get incredibly wearying. That is in fact a further reason to not want to get deadnamed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code
Oh wow, I had totally forgotten about that, but I think I did try that in my e-mail signature in high school for a period!
"Start with Quentin Bell's theory of fashion-as-signaling. Bell says: cool people keep trying to come up with some external signal they can use to identify themselves as cool. Uncool people keep trying to copy the signal so they can look cool too. After a while, so many uncool people are using the signal that it's no longer a good identifier of coolness, and so cool people need to switch to a new signal. Thus the fashion cycle and its constant changes."
...This is nothing less that the abbreviated version of the core argument in Norbert Elias' (1897-1990) treatise "The civilizing process": the part of the book that deals with the never-ending signals-arms-race between the old aristocracy and the upcoming bourgeoisie. (The side-effect of this arms race is ever-more refined tastes, intellectual as well as sensual.) The internet has put this signalling-logic on steroids, but the logic itself is recognizable. The book is worth a review, if there is a "classics" section.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Civilizing_Process
....Norbert Elias is number four in the social science pantheon of elder-Gods by the way; he is sort-of what Maria Magdalena is to the trinity (Marx, Weber and Durkheim).
Apart from that: Impressive cultural Fingerspitsengefühl in this blog post.
If "the new-1970s" is what's in store, it would be...interesting.
I've been wondering if the 1960s/70s was the result of television culture eventually percolating into the broader discourse, and if what we're going through is the faster version with social media.
I think this vastly undervalues the demise of Gawker after being taken out by Peter Thiel in 2016. Gawker was not just one site, but many sites cross referencing each other in a hipster cacophony of pseudo-anti-capitalist ilk that only Ivy league educations can provide. The main beneficiary for all of the years leading up to 2016 was Jezebel, the feminist(ish) newsblog, that is one of the few remaining veterans of the Nic Denton side of the war. They were amplified by all the other Gawker sites fighting the man (I guess) and mentioning each other's stories, all in the heart of the NYC in a news world that was still reeling from the fact that online blogs were actually competing and putting out new content (gasp) hourly, not just daily. They clearly didn't care about fact checking that much, and had no qualms about being two-faced; so scruples were right out the window. And for all of the preceding years this article mentions, not coincidentally around the same time as Gawker's supremacy, gender as a topic, indeed, did rule the roost.
But Gawker was soundly defeated in March of 2016, and the writing was on the wall months and months before that. So the entire organization was already crumbling with the reporting jumping ship long before the final verdict of 100 kagillion in damages (might as well have been) actually came down. Jezebel was in disarray; defanged, declawed, and completely neutered. There was much less cross-referencing, much less money to go after even basic stories, a new implementation of selling face creams or some other product after every 2 articles for some reason, and less competent reporters to do write ups.
But more than all of that, the defeat of Gawker was the end of a kind of boldness. Denton had a massive fund to pay the legal bills and the first amendment to help him out. His basic strategy was to run up your legal bills while running out the clock. It's no wonder it took another billionaire to defeat him. The giant, slain, nobody is willing to go out on a limb like that anymore, not that that's a bad thing. It's much like being amazed at the crazy stuff your alcoholic friend gets up to and what a life of the party he is until he inevitably dies in the car crash.
The media landscape still hasn't recovered. Go look at Jezebel now. It's just sad. You want to pinch one of the writers' cheeks and say, "Aw, yes you are. You're a good little journalist, aren't you? You're not just a child blogger with a total at 18 semester hours in women's studies." And people figured out that Marcotte's anger is a schtick, cause a huge amount of your posts should be joyous and celebrations. And on and on. There's just no infrastructure today to amplify those voices like their was for those brief Gawker years. And I think that can't be overstated when considering why gender, at such a monumental time of a possible female presidency, failed to materialize as a genuine factor and gave way to race as the ascendant obsession.
What about The Root, Gawker's New Anti-Racism "vertical"? Just as strident and nasty as Jezebel, and only became more prominent in the post-Denton era.
But after the verdict and the Denton-verse demise, there just wasn't the infrastructure and the same cultural cache that existed previously. Because of their speed of posting (facts and the human heart being of little consequence), before the verdict, they drove the news-cycle often. In a real way, it was the world coming to terms with dealing with an often malicious but always voracious blogging class that made waves, backed by real money that would often beat struggling print media that was just learning the rules of the online game, and would, more importantly, often set the standard for what "should be" a story (again, facts only mattering so much). It was the infrastructure that drove that machine that makes the difference. It isn't there anymore. There isn't real money that will risk its neck because they saw what happened to the last guy. And old media has largely figured out the game, pushing back against the low skilled blogger class. The Root and Jezebel still exist, but during the Denton years, the Root was next to nothing, an up and coming part of their brand, while the bread and butter was celebrities of all races and stripes getting into hot water. Perhaps if the Root had been better developed at the time, it would have more cache both then and now; but now, it's too late. Things are different. That whole platform is seen as something anyone of any political stripe takes only so seriously, not least of which is because of the new management (ubercapitalists) and the Goop-like ads that are hocked constantly on the sites. In the new media landscape, there is just nothing that can push old school feminist and class themes in the same way. That leaves race, the everpresent animator in society, to rise to the top. *Note: I think this article is pretty on point about the white girl feminism that was kind of sidelined by it's inability to adequately deal with race, but I would also note that same feminism was kind of blindsided by the rise of trans-discussion. Modern feminism still isn't good at talking about trans issues, as they struggle with what centering and inappropriately stepping on toes in the movement now means.
What happened to Slate.com? I assume it still exists, but it went from being the center of the online universe to... my not being sure it still exists since nobody links to it anymore.
I remember how about 7 years ago, making an absurd, contrarian "Slate pitch" a trend on Twitter. Does "Slate pitch" = "Euphoric!" = "Woke"?
Writers at Slate have been rather explicit that they aren't like the old Slate. Much like the NYT, they decided it was morally obligatory to become righteous crusaders.
"I have not heard anything from the manosphere in like five years."
Here you go: http://theredquest.wordpress.com. A book, too!
Minor, uncertain nitpick:
"And although early internet feminists had been limited to gnashing their teeth, once your movement controls the New York Times it turns out you can just arrange for things you don't like to disappear. 'Cancel culture' entered the vocabulary."
Google Trends seems to say it didn't become a part of the lexicon until 2019, which more closely matches my memory: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=cancel%20culture (Or maybe it was a more niche term that's only blown up recently and that swamps the pre-2019 data?)
(Forgot to say, but that quote is from the 200?–2014 section, which is why the term being invisible pre-2019 on google trends is relevant)
I think #CancelColbert is the origination point of Cancel Culture.
CORRECTION: "very serious movement white supremacist" should be "very serious white supremacist movement"
I think this is actually a legitimate way to use "movement" as an adjective, eg "movement socialists" mean "socialists of the sort who are in a movement".
oh yeah fair enough
are google trends results over time complicated by increased use of social media platforms ovr search engines?
Generally this focuses on trends online and ignores broader societal context.
Also, trying to define socialists as anti-SJW is completely wrong because while some are, SJW thinkers (the ones who actually produce the ideas) are to a person anti-capitalist.
I think the point is that in recent years there has been a prominent subgroup of anti-SJW self-described socialists, whether or not most or any self-described socialists are pro- or anti-SJW.
FWIW, in my experience, socialists really want the populist straight-white-males on their side, whereas SJW aren't playing for them. For instance, the socialists are happy to win over Trump voters.
To clarify, I should say the Socialism Firsters are a different group from the SJW who are also anti-capitalist
So it has come to it.
https://xkcd.com/1022/
Yes, it has come to that.
Bless you two, made me smile.
So it has come to that.
To be honest, I have always suspected it would come to that, eventually.
The waves may come and go, but the ground keeps rotting. I'd worry less about the current ideological mascots of the day staying on their pedestals for too long (it seems trans is already on its way out in Europe; I suspect this will take some 5 more years in the US), and more about the perspective that new pieties will emerge every five years, with an ever-worsening political climate, an ever-lessening tolerance for dissent and ever-progressing institutional corruption.
As an academic, I'm worried about campus in particular, and things like https://www.thefire.org/largest-ever-free-speech-survey-of-college-students-ranks-top-campuses-for-expression/ are making me sit on suitcases. It's not like academia is otherwise in good shape: what is the last innovation you can attribute to a university? (My previous one recently got into the news for pushing badly concealed security holes into Linux, for science of course.) No one believes in journalism any more (the opinion columns have moved to Substack, but that's the easy part); the FDA and the CDC have become laughing stocks; the CIA has decided that the C stands for Cringe (I know, a lot of you never trusted it in the first place, but quite a few people in the Russian intelligentsia were hoping for some institutional support); the kayfabe of American elections has been shattered (arguably a bipartisan success). If 10 years from now, the cool kids decide that black lives don't actually matter lol, the damage from years of authoritarian praxis won't magically disappear. The based right wing winning the conversation won't automatically fix our democratic institutions either, at least not by intention.
Culturally, the anti-elite movement does seem to be regaining steam -- that, or the progressives are losing theirs. The most intellectually satisfying thing I've seen on the internet in the last year was Niccolo Saldo's gonzo interview with Anna Khachiyan. Curtis Yarvin might have been the best writer in the last couple years. I don't take the policy ideas of either of these authors seriously and neither do they -- which is itself a political idea, perhaps one of their best. Almost every mainstream media outlet, while diligently policing the opinions of Twitter randos with 5 followers, can't help methodically destroying progressive holy cows in articles that end up among their most shared ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/smith-college-race.html , https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/05/liberals-covid-19-science-denial-lockdown/618780/ just to mention the first two that came to my mind). Hard to argue with click rates, it seems. This all doesn't compare remotely to the cultural explosion of the 60s, but is anything moving at all on the other side?
Of course, cultural renaissance does not guarantee political power in the future (otherwise, Weimar Germany would have become a liberal utopia), and it is more likely to give our existing institutions a coup de grace than to save them; but beggars can't be choosers and it's not like there's much to choose from these days...
"I don't take the policy ideas of either of these authors seriously and neither do they -- which is itself a political idea, perhaps one of their best."
Funny, I still remember a time when conservatives believed (or said they did) ideas have consequences.
>Niccolo Saldo's gonzo interview with Anna Khachiyan
I'm a milquetoast liberal, and the intellectual breath of this interview made me feel like a monkey scratching at an alien monolith. Where can learn more about what the hell they are talking about?
@annakhachiyan is fun on twitter (@progrockfarmer not so much; I generally find him rather disappointing outside of his interviews). I'm too lazy to listen to Red Scare but I suspect there's some good stuff on there too.
I'm sure there are places to read up on this, but I don't think that's anywhere near the right way to approach it. Enjoy the trolling, don't be a lolcow and ignore the foreign policy bullshit (it's easy to love Russia from three countries away). Don't bother reading every book they're namedropping; chances are they haven't either. How much Buddha has the average 70s hippie read? This isn't a literary school; the commonality is just a refreshing willingness to smash the Overton window and have some fun outside. If you find the ISIS-style Red Scare sweatshirt hilarious, you are grokking it.
I would prefer not to use Twitter. In fact, I hope my family honor kills me if I open an account. Are there any other ways I can participate?
I don't have an account either; I just have some of the most fun tweeters bookmarked and look them up when bored.
wokeness strength is its usefulness in office politics
feminism took over the government and the corporations through the HR departments
wokeness is using the DIE officer to do the same
and like prohibition and communism it is here to stay until it runs out of other peoples money
"The second milestone was Jordan Peterson, who was an obvious step up in respectability beyond Milo. There was a really interesting period in 2016 when the media was trying to decide whether to unite in character-assassinating Peterson the same way it had character-assassinated all previous people in this space, or treat him as some sort of interesting and potentially sympathetic phenomenon, and it decided on the interesting phenomenon angle. After that, being anti-SJW lost about 90% of its stigma, to the point where people would roll their eyes instead of freaking out."
Reading this makes me feel like I fractured off into a different world than Scott around this time.
How is your world different?
I don't think the media decided to treat Peterson as a "interesting and potentially sympathetic phenomenon", I think they tried to find ways to character assassinate him but he's so milquetoast and his messages that aren't convoluted literary analysis are so inoffensive that nothing beyond general sneering was ever going to stick. Really putting him on the same continuum as Milo feels wrong, you don't add respectability to milo and end up with Peterson.
Yes, I agree. That interview with Cathy Newman should probably be preserved for posterity as Exhibit A in what character assassination looks like. And also why trust in the media declined. I thought my trust in the MSM was basically rock bottom, and yet I could barely believe my eyes and could only laugh at what I was seeing in real time.
My memory of it:
Peterson: "So men and women, not always, but often tend to be different in certain specific and scientifically verifiable ways."
Newman: "So what I'm hearing you say is that women are dirt that is not fit for men's feet to tread upon..."
But the result was basically comical because, as you said, he was so milquetoast and careful with his words. Newman's schtick would have worked reasonably well against a more abrasive personality, even if he was trying to communicate essentially the same message.
I love that interview. I'm not a Peterson acolyte and he has many opinions that I disagree with but I think back to that interview when I need inspiration to stay calm in the face of someone being utterly ridiculous or accusing me of something I didn't do.
The media played softball with a conspiratorial minded crackpot. I'm of the opinion that Peterson is of the same calibre as Yiannopolous. The only difference is that Peterson crafts a veneer of credibility while Yiannopolous simply does not care.
"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opinion/jordan-peterson-moment.html"
Care to substantiate the conspiratorial minded crackpot accusation Mr. Butts? The best I can think of is his weird meat thing but that's less conspiracy and more weird belief. Maybe your opinion of Yiannopolous is far higher than mine but I just don't see the comparison. A Positive opinion piece by a NYT token conservative isn't really that damning to me.
His whole schtick seems to be that post-modern neo-Marxists have invaded academia and therefore BAD THINGS. Maps of Meaning is exactly the sort of unfocused drivel that high-minded crackpots have been writing since the dawn of time.
This is a pretty conspiratorial and crackpot thing to genuinely believe.
Yiannopolous is a trickster. It's clear he's not honest from the very beginning and that he's just saying things to be very famous. Peterson is the exact same way, however, he has a veneer of credibility in that Peterson genuinely believes the nonsense that comes out of his mouth.
Agreed; it seems far more like MSM got tired of failing to take Peterson down, rather than deciding that he was interesting.
Red Skull in the latest Captain America is based off Peterson. They've turned him into a literal Super Nazi.
Tim Dillon started his recent interview with Peterson saying that he read less negative press about Osama Bin Laden than Peterson. It was a joke, but at the same time...
Maybe if Peterson stopped rehashing Nazi-era conspiracies people would stop denigrating him?
I very much agree. There were protests all over campuses to not invite him in, to call him nazi and to destroy/cancel him. It just didn't work. Everyone just waited until he said something so unacceptable that the public would turn against him, but no. He did hundreds hour-long speeches and nobody could discredit him. He would very much love the hot take that he actually became the hero who stood up with his shoulders back against the mobs and won.
But I guess if you consider the whole culture as one entity as Scott does here, this is just an internal fight and the culture in the end shifted to the direction of treating him as an interesting phenomenon instead of a literal nazi who needs to be cancelled. Of course there are Literal Nazi takes, but they're increasingly irrelevant.
The reference to John McCain is factually incorrect. He said it in 2000, not 2008. Second, he also made it very clear he was referring solely to the prison guards.
The other big phenomenon to watch right now in terms of class overtaking race is the turn of a lot of centrist Democratic thinkers away from centering race based on political expediency - see David Shor, Matt Yglesias, Jonathan Chait etc
The only thing this piece is missing is the rise of transgender ideology since 2013.
This analysis doesn't fit the data.
You could approach this in one of two totally distinct ways, which Scott hasn't specified.
1. The total society-wide amount of internet conversation on these topics.
2. The internal conversations of a small subset of those people, the "vanguard' of internet conversation.
Scott's describing a bulk shift in conversation from atheism, to sexism, to racism. This is the society-wide version of a dinner table conversation changing topics. Each topic gets about the same volume of conversation at its peak, then gives way to some other subject.
However, Scott hasn't actually shown us that data. He shows us the way these topics build and peak within themselves, but doesn't compare their total volume.
If he did, it would show that racism > feminism > atheism, virtually always, since 2004. These proportions are mimicked in the number of NY Times articles mentioning these words from 2010-present (~13,000, 4,500, and 500, respectively).
"LGBTQ" was less popular than "feminism" until 2019, and has been significantly more popular since then.
"Transgender" has been more popular than all of these since 2014, with the exception of the Trump-Biden race era when racism was far and away the most popular.
Source: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=racism,feminism,atheism,transgender,LGBTQ
What I see isn't a shift in conversation topic. It's a permanent interest in racism and sexual orientation/gender issues. Google Trends can't capture any such shift among the internet vanguard (which seems like an outdated concept now).
From this perspective, New Atheism and feminism look like they just found a moment in the spotlight because they tied themselves to those persistent issues (New Atheism by beating up on Islam, feminism by offering a political theory to sort-of explain LGBTQ issues). They're weird anomalies, not at all comparable in terms of scale or persistence of societal interest.
Juxtaposing the tiny scale of atheism with Scott's huge interest in it makes me think that he's mostly interested in the shifting interests of his niche internet communities. This is fine, it just makes me think that Google Trends isn't a good way to study or interpret those changes.
I think your counter-analysis is very good in general but wrong in the specifics. I cannot believe that the extent to which "transgender" is more popular than the other terms captures anything real. It just seems vastly more niche than racism. Also note that "LGBT" is more popular than LGBTQ, and "gay" dwarfs any of the others.
What do you mean by "anything real?"
I think that there's a constant amount of search traffic from eg school reports (if I didn't do the rolling average, you would see all of these peak around finals time and crash in the summer), and that what I'm trying to capture is the additional social interest in these topics. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/01/working-with-google-trends/ for more of the way I think about this.
The graphs you used are very-very misleading though. I got the impression that e.g. atheism was more popular on Google Trends in the past and got superseded by feminism. That was never the case. You seem to be overlaying graphs with different Y axes.
As someone who wasn't on the internet until 2016, this was a useful framing of the culture war thankyou :)
Also I would have imagined this being written for a left or apolitical audience, but it doesn't seem to be coded with those tribe signals. Was this a deliberate choice?
Perhaps I'm not cool enough to have noticed the change in usage, but complaining about "cancel culture" is still coded unambiguously right-wing as far as I can tell. That is, raging about cancel culture seems to be something conservatives love to do, and I don't think I've encountered any examples of someone on the left sneering at woke people for "cancel culture." (Quite the contrary, it seems that many on the left are scared to call out "cancel culture," and that whenever they do so, they make sure to call it by a different name and clarify that they're not obsessed with "cancel culture" like those low-status reds.)
Was that a trend that was starting in 2019 when Scott first drafted the post, but which has since been derailed? I'm feeling pretty perplexed.
(The same mostly goes for "woke" -- looking up the term on Twitter, the complaints about woke people seem to come almost exclusively from the right. But I've indeed seen a few examples of people on the left using "woke" critically, so I could more easily imagine that there's a trend here I haven't picked up on.)
My sense is definitely that liberal/center-left types feel pretty free to complain about cancel culture, or at least the excesses of "cancel culture", in a way they don't for "political correctness" or "SJW-ism".
I think this is consistent with anti-cancel culture being right-coded. That is, I'm not saying that people on the left never criticize cancel culture, but I am claiming that people on the left who do criticize cancel culture will be perceived as further to the right than those who don't.
The sort of thing that would be inconsistent with anti-cancel culture being right-coded is if you could demonstrate how ardent a leftie you are by being really vocally concerned about cancel culture.
[continuation of the parent comment]
(and to be clear, it sounded to me like Scott *was* claiming this latter state of affairs, that complaining about cancel culture branded you as a left-wing-socialist-type, which is what I'm confused about)
Here are a couple of notable people on the left who have serious issues with canceling even if they aren't completely against it.
Natalie Wynne (Contrapoints)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8&vl=en
https://www.contrapoints.com/transcripts/canceling
Lindsay Ellis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7aWz8q_IM4&ab_channel=LindsayEllis
That's because, until recently, cancel culture was a weapon used by the left against the right. It was all fun and games then. Now that leftists are getting cancelled too, suddenly it's not a joke any more.
I don't know how to evaluate cancel culture in a rigorous way. If we're going by anecdotes, Colin Kaepernick is surely the most salient counterpoint this cycle. A previous cycle might instead point to the Dixie Chicks and their comments on the Iraq War.
It's a weapon a hundred times more lethal in the hands of the left than when the right feebly attempts to wield it. We never hear of most of the people who are harmed, fired, and blackballed for crimethink. For every James Damore, there are a thousand Aaron Kindsvatters.
I'm not going to just take you at your word. That's the kind of argument that's very easy to sling about, but I've never seen a satisfactory examination in detail. A hundred times more lethal? A thousand times as many example? I find it very hard to believe those numbers are evidence-based.
I thought Milo Yiannopoulos had a million attempted left-wing cancellations, but didn't really disappear until his right-wing cancellation.
The left-wing folks who tried to cancel him before were all up in that too. It wasn't solely a right-wing thing.
In fact, it may have been mostly a left-wing thing. My memories are hazy.
I just hope the next cultural obsession is NOT psychedelics. We don't need another Timothy Leary ruining everything.
If it's the New 70s, it won't be psychedelics. It'll be the variants on "Mother's little helper", heroin (are we due for a heroin chic revival, somebody remind me?) or cocaine. And actually the normalisation of being on Adderall etc. *is* this era's version of "Mother's little helper".
This article from the time was worried about abuse of heroin, amphetamines and marijuana https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.61.6.1225
With the push for legalised marijuana, can the resurgence of amphetamines be far behind for the New 70s?
The Alt Right didn’t organically die. It was decapitated from the top down, by powers much stronger than it. All of its leading figures were banned, deplatformed, or outright politically persecuted by the media and legal systems.
It died because it tied itself to Trump, and Trump didn't deliver on anything. Deplatforming had little to do with it.
That’s completely ridiculous. The online right lost literally dozens of its main content creators to bans between 2017-2020.
Most big tech companies now have terms of service that make it essentially illegal to hold anything other than mainstream leftist positions of issues or race and gender.
This is more a consequence of many alt-right positions being inherently violent than any coordinated blacklisting.
Signal detected
radical feminists would probably disagree with that assessment
For having sat on this for a year I'd hope you had have caught all the typos! But of course this is a longer one so fine, I forgive you.
>While this angle wasn't exactly ignored, it took obvious back burner to a massive and coverage-dominating debate over the possibility that Trump might be racist, based mostly on his position about immigration plus a few ambiguous remarks that he later denied _meaning_.
Think you mean that he later denied 'saying' or maybe denied the meaning behind the literal words that he said but the current phrasing is, ironically, ambiguous.
>I think if it fails, it will be because _every_ time they open their mouths, younger and cooler people will just roll their eyes and say "Woke!"
That word's just missing, I would also suggest deleting the comma after 'fails'
>I think "woke" and "cancel culture" encode ideas that have been _presence_ in anti-social-justice discourse from the beginning.
'present', obv.
Scott, what do you think will happen when everyone has access to polygenic scores that accurately predict their educational achievement and other socioeconomic outcomes? When everyone can see that it’s not privilege or oppression that determined their outcomes, but innate genetic factors that affect intelligence and personality traits? And that “bad environments” are just places filled by people with unfavorable polygenic scores? I know you can already glean that from heritability data, but that's not very digestible for most people.
Why do you think there's no prejudice involved?
People with good polygenic scores will be successful regardless of prejudice, Ashkenazi Jews for instance. Anyway, I'm really only interested in hearing what serious people like Scott think about my question, not explaining things to woke SJWs. Please respect my preferences, lived experiences and deeply held beliefs, thank you.
Lol Nancy isn't an SJW. Unless you're kidding/making a joke in which case it worked, I laughed!
As stated, I'm not an SJW, I just don't think they're entirely wrong.
This blog is a place for people to argue about things. I don't think you get to curate whether people express disagreement with you.
Prejudice does affect outcomes. To take an extreme example, Jews who died in the Holocaust didn't have successful outcomes afterwards. This couldn't have been predicted from their genes.
People who inherit money and status may not keep it for themselves or in their families indefinitely, but they do better as a result for a while.
You started by insulting me, so I decided I wasn't going to respect your preferences all that much.
I wasn’t really sympathetic to the prejudice argument until you pointed out the extreme case.
I wonder how one can measure prejudice in a meaningful way (and not like that silly implicit bias test)
Disagree all you want, I'm just not interested in answering a million questions which have been discussed to death already.
"Jews who died in the Holocaust didn't have successful outcomes afterwards. This couldn't have been predicted from their genes."
They had bad outcomes *after* they died? What do you know that I don't?
Serious answer: this blogpost is about movements concerning racism and sexism in specific times and places, so I think the scope of my comment was implicitly not about the entire history of the world. Is there a group with high polygenic scores that's not successful in the US today? Not as far as I know.
Kind of a curious example, given that their genes are *exactly* what could predict who would die in Treblinka in 1942.
Less than you might think, since being considered a Jew by the Nazis only took one Jewish grandparent.
Also, to the extent that the argument from Guy is that prejudice doesn't matter (he makes a fair point that he meant moderate prejudice doesn't matter), we're talking about an abstract world where historical conditions don't matter.
You did grasp the irony, I hope?
Anyway, I think your argument is circular. You're saying prejudice affects outcomes. But how do I know what is "prejudice" and what is merely the quotidian buffeting we all receive in a pluralistic society? Let me guess: if it affects outcomes in a way that isn't predictable from the inherent character of people, it's prejudice -- and the circle is complete.
"Anyway, I'm really only interested in hearing what serious people like Scott think about my question, not explaining things to woke SJWs."
This kind of jackassery we could do with less of.
It would seem an odd coincidence that the people who are innately less talented happen to cluster in areas that have historically been given the least resources. To the extent that there are probably some genetic elements to intelligence they're going to be swamped by environmental factors most of the time. So the idea of coming up with some objective fitness score that people can use to predict outcomes is an interesting science fiction premise, rather than a likely outcome
Because they produce the least resources.
"It would seem an odd coincidence that the people who are innately less talented happen to cluster in areas that have historically been given the least resources."
What resources does Korea have?
Some areas have magic dirt and other areas have tragic dirt.
To some extent I'm not kidding: Belgium, Iowa, the Nile, and the Valley of Mexico have better soil for agriculture than do Chad and the Australian outback.
On the other hand, Australia's lush east coast has much better soil for agriculture than the Australian Outback, and yet we find that the Australian Aborigines of the Darling Downs got no further down the tech tree than those of Outer Woop Woop.
Good point...and made me chuckle
> It would seem an odd coincidence that the people who are innately less talented happen to cluster in areas that have historically been given the least resources
I'm not sure if you're talking century-by-century on a global scale or decade-by-decade on a local scale.
On a global scale, it's not really clear that areas with more resources wound up more advanced than areas with less resources; I mean yes, I've read Jared Diamond but am not convinced.
On a local scale, it's not at all surprising that people who are innately more talented tend to cluster in areas with more resources, that's where the expensive real estate is.
The problem with that argument is that what are "resources" and what are useless features of the landscape is normally only readily apparent after the fact.
Who knew that a river the flooded each spring was a resource and not just a God-damned annoyance? Only people who figured out the silt was good for growing plants, and how to time their planting according to the rising of Sirius.
Who knew that a shit-ton of magnetite next to two shit-tons of coal was a valuable resource and not just a bunch of funny-colored rock? Only people who figured out how to smelt iron in large quantities and use it to build railroads across a continent.
Who knew that neodymium could do much more than color glass? Nobody, until GM and Sumitomo discovered you could make really powerful really small magnets with the stuff.
In short, for all we know, when we observe "resources" where the rich people hang out, and "garbage" where the poor people do, it's merely because talented people have...well, a talent for seeing "resource" where ordinary people see "garbage."
Making the jump to seeing that something is a resource is done by only a few people in a genetic group, and taking that vision into making the resource useful takes a larger group which is still small compared to the whole group.
Yes, and "talented/lucky" people are always a minority. That's why there's even a moral argument here -- if 80% of the people in the world could be classified as "talented/wealthy/lucky" then why would we be up in arms about any injustice? We'd just say "oh well looks like anyone can do well if he tries, but we have this unlucky/dumb/lazy 20% over here to whom we should provide charity or better education, et cetera."
Although honestly I'm not sure what you're trying to say, since what I intepret you saying is a truism, and it seems probable you had something less trivial in mind.
So let me get this right. You believe that environmental differences are significant enough to explain why some societies achieved advanced industrial civilization while others never progressed beyond a rudimentary hunter gather lifestyle.....and yet amazingly these necessarily enormous environmental differences manage to not be significant enough to provide any meaningful difference in selective pressures between these populations? Really?
Nobody will ever figure this out. It's easy to do PGS that "accurately predicts" in the sense of explaining 5% of variance, very hard to do it in a way where people would actually common-sensically notice that it's right or wrong. There are especially difficult problems around doing PGS well across different races, I believe right now nobody can do this correctly, but even if someone learned to do it correctly, there will be enough methodological issues that people could always plausibly claim they did it incorrectly, and so no controversial results that it produces will ever become impossible-to-deny common knowledge if people would prefer that they not be.
(someone who knows more about genetics can correct me if I'm wrong)
They're at 16% of variance in educational achievement now. With large samples of whole genomes there's no reason most heritability can't be pinned down. Eventually there will be large genetic databases of all races.
How are people going to be able to deny it on based methodological issues if they can see that the results are accurate? How would you deny that DNA tests can identify your relatives for example? Even the "ethnicity estimates" are gradually getting more accurate and people who say they're nonsense aren't convincing that many it's seems to me.
"How are people going to be able to deny it on based methodological issues if they can see that the results are accurate?"
They will be able to deny it with ease.
For example, tons of people have been claiming that Race Does Not Exist ever since Clinton's rose garden ceremony for the Human Genome Project in 2000. That an entire industry has grown up since then to determine your racial ancestry from your DNA has had almost zero effect on this new orthodoxy.
Human beings are really good at not noticing empirical evidence that would make their beliefs appear ignorant.
"That an entire industry has grown up since then to determine your racial ancestry from your DNA has had almost zero effect on this new orthodoxy."
Those tests don't mention race in their results though, they're "ethnicity estimates". How many people who've done a test like that still think ethnicity isn't reflected in your genes?
Ethnicity is a matter of culture, it can't be detected via genes. Germans & French are genetically indistinguishable currently, even though they've been quite culturally distinct for a long time.
Maybe they should call it "Ancestry Estimates" instead to avoid that semantic discussion.
Anyway, the big DNA tests nowadays break down results to specific country regions, so you can see if you have ancestry from Saxony or Normandy or whatever.
Not at all. Genotyping can distinguish between individuals, right? (DNA tests in criminology, et cetera.) The problem thus reduces to figuring out what SNPs this or that group has in common. Classic big-data segmentation problem. All they need is a sufficiently large sample set for training up their segmentation algorithm.
One could certainly argue that just because, say, most people currently living in St. Lo have this-and-such genetic pattern, which can be distinguish from most people currently living in Baden Baden, does *not* imply that when customer X's great-great-great-great-grandparents were living in Europe those very same patterns were associated with the very same resident populations. That it does is clearly an assumption (although in principle they could do a little checkpointing by persuasing some museums to let them take snippets of preserved corpses ha ha). It is probably not a *terrible* assumption, since until the 20th century it was pretty rare for populations to mix thoroughly over continent-sized length scales.
I would be skeptical personally. The genetic markers could easily be correlating with education through non-brain mechanisms. You can explain educational variance just by measuring skin tone alone. E.g.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0731121415580026?journalCode=spxb#:~:text=Previous%20research%20on%20skin%20color,and%20Murguia%201990%2C%201992).
But if you did successfully convince me that you found the genes, I think my response would be "cool, if we're sure we know what they do, now we can get started on editing the genes", it wouldn't be to just passively accept that disparities are okay.
In other words, if something like facial features and skin tone correlate (which they do), then why shouldn't genes, which produce facial features and skin tones, also correlate? You have to at least show some kind of mechanism right?
"You can explain educational variance just by measuring skin tone alone."
Yes, but if you control for genetic admixture skin color doesn't explain anything. In other words skin color is not causal. The genes in polygenic scores are expressed in the brain.
"cool, if we're sure we know what they do, now we can get started on editing the genes"
Sure, but unless that works on people who already have fully formed brains disparities will be with us for a long time.
"it wouldn't be to just passively accept that disparities are okay."
The whole justification for why these disparities are precisely so unacceptable and for constructing an enormous state apparatus to remedy these disparities has been on the basis that it is a result of "privilege" and historical disadvantage, and the whole reason its expected these gaps can be bridged (without outright wealth redistribution) is on the basis that it isn't determined by heritable factors.
As of 2018, Lee et al's GWAS study of educational attainment across 1.1 million people was up to 11% of variance, which isn't that much, but it was still enough that people in the top quintile were five times more likely to be a college graduate than people in the bottom quintile.
My prediction is that as geneticists pile up more and more evidence that, yeah, genetics do play a role in IQ and the like, then the climate will become ever more hostile to free speech and science, all the while claiming to Follow the Science. That has been the trend since Arthur Jensen's Harvard Education Review article in 1969, and I don't see why it would be likely to reverse just because of additional empirical findings.
All this studies are too inaccurate to be taken seriously. There definitely is a genetical component to the intelligence, but it is too early to tell how big or small it is.
1. Intelligence doesn't have a genetic component, it has a heritability which can vary by time and place.
2. The problem faced by people like Jensen is that the standard of evidence to demanded demonstrate that the heritability of IQ > 0% keeps getting shifted every time evidence for the alternative hypothesis is found.
How can you be so sure it doesn't have a genetic component? My prior is that it should have. And it is supported by the statistics. That can be misleading, but coupled with the prior is good enough for me.
Maybe I'm being too strict in the language. "Component" sort of implies that for a given individual you can say *how much* of their intelligence is genetics and how much is environment. An organism is better thought of as genes expressed in an environment.
Even in an absolute egalitarian system genetics would have to play some role in human intelligence insofar as it's responsible for the structure of your nervous system but differences in biological inheritance between people would not have any explanatory power over differences in intelligence.
Scott what kind of evidence would it take to convince you that blacks aren't genetically dumber than whites. When biologists, including prominent professors like Graham Coop almost universally reject HBD you imply that everyone is just terrified because something something Kolmogorov. When biologists do point out the gaping holes in cold winter theory, evopsych, over-interpreting PGSes or point out the massive fraud committed by Lynn, Burt and the like you write about "isolated demands for rigor". When a respected professor like Shalizi writes about how g doesn't make fucking sense (hint: just because your factor analysis yields a factor doesn't mean you uncovered a fundamental tenet of the human mind) you complain about getting "Eulered".
You reject the opinions of mainstream scientists with published papers but you casually converse with Sailer, nod at Murray and have Razib Khan in your blog roll, none of them being qualified in the least in what they opine about. What do they have in common? Gosh, they believe in HBD. Sorry if I'm seeing a pattern here.
Seriously, what would it take to convince you that HBD isn't real and blacks aren't genetically dumber. I'm asking in good faith because it seems arguments have been drawn out for a long, long time and despite your explicit admission that you don't know anything about this subject you still don't seem to want to renege on a set of utterly bizarre beliefs about everyone being terrified of the truth about the IQ of black people. Other people would call you racist and so on but I'm just asking for a standard of evidence that would change your mind.
> what would it take to convince you that blacks aren't genetically dumbe
> I'm asking in good faith
Amazing.
Sorry, is that *not* what HBD being true and what most HBD proponents imply?
Would you be willing to bet against genetic data scientists?
Scientists will soon be able to predict whether or not an person can do simple arithmetic division from their genetic polygenic scores.
As a test, if 1000 people's genomes were randomly selected, and of that number, 10 were identified as people who could not do simple arithmetic division, would you be willing to bet the scientists were wrong and a majority of subjects would come up with the correct answer?
“I’m asking in good faith” isn’t just a disclaimer you can add to an otherwise dick-ish tone and expect engagement.
Your comment is just an accusation masked as a bad faith question.
I have summarized a bunch of arguments and retorts and I have clearly stated what it would take to convince me that blacks are genetically dumber than whites on average. How is that in bad faith? Is it because I clearly stated the implication ("blacks are genetically dumber than whites on average") instead of resorting to euphemisms like "forbidden truth", "HBD" or "genetic component in group differences"? Is that what makes you wince? I'm sorry, but from a purely dispassionate point of view, simply looking at the logic of the statements, how is using one different from the other?
I actually don’t have the first clue what HBD is.
I’m commenting on your question tone because it comes across as accusing someone of being a full blown racist. And I don’t think that’s a good faith way to ask a question.
It comes across as whatever you like but I never called him a racist. An HBD proponent would retort that knowing "the truth" isn't being racist anyway. I purposefully avoided the word "racist" which is vague emotionally charged, I purposefully avoided hip euphemisms like HBD or "group differences" that just serve to muddy the waters, and presented only the actual meat of the facts: either black people are genetically dumber than average than whites, or they're not. And again, I have stated why I believed they were not, what it would take to convince me of the contrary. How am I acting in bad faith?
"When a respected professor like Shalizi writes about how g doesn't make fucking sense"
One professor vs the most replicated fact in psychology?
Are you familiar with expert surveys on race and IQ by the way? https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2020/04/expert-opinion-on-race-and-intelligence/
How do you subscribe to Emil's blog? Very unique content here.
I don't know, but you can subscribe to his Youtube channel.
He did a video on eugenics technology and stuff. He criticized the Nazis for going too far. I observe that this is a criticism of magnitude but not a criticism of direction. In other places he criticized Nazis for things most people would criticize Nazis for, but with... I think "below average intensity" is a fair description.
I'm not saying "he has policy preferences I disagree with, therefore his factual statements are incorrect", just... you may want to know where he's coming from.
(Encyclopedia Dramatica has some colorful things to say about him as well.)
This idea that the "experts" all dismiss race is completely ignorant. It's vastly more complicated than that, especially because of the threats to career and even physical safety that come with endorsing a HDB position. The rejection of HDB is also mostly a western thing. In countries without this demented egalitarian race ideology, things are more like they were in the west prior to WW2, because remember, the big shift happened for strictly ideological reasons, not scientific ones. There was no egalitarian breakthroughs that occurred in the 40s or 50s that can possibly account for this shift.
https://thealternativehypothesis.org/index.php/2016/07/18/what-the-experts-really-think-about-race-realism-and-white-nationalism-or-at-least-ideas-pertaining-to-it/
The general intelligence factor has widespread acceptance amongst actual intelligence experts. The fact that one guy opposes it means nothing. People have been trying to refuture it for as long as its existed but it has persisted because it is correct. Seriously, the entire field of intelligence research has developed around the validity and empirical robustness of the general intelligence factor, and you think some uninformed clown changes that?
HBD has made vastly more correct predictions over the past 100 years than egalitarianism. Egalitarianism has been forced to come up with ever more byzantine rationalisations for why egalitarianism cannot make any correct predictions about race, and none of them are scientific.
Even without methodological issues, the methods for predicting IQ etc from genetic data will always be so opaque to the general public that there will always be room for denial. Most people just don't get multivariate analysis.
However, we already have so much obvious evidence that poverty-related environmental factors negatively impact childhood development and lifetime achievement (ranging from fetal drug exposure to abuse-related head trauma to lead exposure to run-of-the-mill childhood trauma), society will never be in a position of needing to choose between genetics vs. environment when it comes to understanding why some people have worse outcomes than others. The most we can ever say is "genetics explains x% of the variance".
You might be born with great genes, but if you're exposed to alcohol in the womb and flogged daily by your stepdad just for fun, you'll end up with cognitive impairments and a shrunken overactive amygdala, and you'll be more likely to repeat the cycle with your own children. The nature vs. nurture debate is an artifice of a bygone era before we knew the answer was "both".
My understanding is that while you might be right about fetal alcohol, getting beat up is a different story. Humans evolved to be more robust than that.
Depends on the circumstances. Sure, plenty of children tolerate corporal punishment under circumstances when they don't seriously believe they are in danger. I was using the beating-via-stepdad illustration as a general example to represent more serious psychiatric trauma (situations when the child seriously feels seriously endangered and gets stuck in fight or flight mode as a result), which results in measurable brain changes. Those brain changes are probably an evolutionary adaptation and probably helped our ancestors. But they don't help kids win at school.
I'm skeptical of that notion of "psychiatric trauma". Part of it is Judith Harris' research on shared-environment effects, from which she concluded that the reason not to abuse a child is the same as the reason not to abuse an adult. Part of it is that I've been reading Greg Cochran for a while:
https://twitter.com/gcochran99/status/1390106834904571906
"Most people just don't get multivariate analysis. "
They don't have to, they just have to go "hey, this site predicted my GPA and my height and that I'm not interested in STEM, cool/creepy!"
"exposed to alcohol in the womb and flogged daily by your stepdad just for fun"
As I said, “bad environments” are just places filled by people with unfavorable polygenic scores. Even the stepdad example implies parental negligence.
It's likely some negative traits will collect in society's lower strata; I've met far more schizophrenics on the poor side of town, and their children are more likely to stay on the poor side of town. But that's not the whole story.
Fetal drug exposure and ACEs beget brain changes that beget more fetal drug exposure and ACEs. However predictive genotype may be, ACEs etc are predictive too. Not absolving stepdad of his negligence, but in all probability he had a combination of aggressive traits and ACEs, not one or the other alone. Early childhood environment will always be an indispensable variable. And as long as that's true, the nature vs. nurture tug-of-war will probably continue.
Quantify the predictive power of ACEs using data from twin-adoption studies.
Neuroscience makes twin studies unnecessary for demonstrating that ACEs affect brain development and behavior. Repeated activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis results in measurable brain changes that correlate with long-term behavioral and mental health outcomes. In other words, ACE's stimulate a fight-or-flight response, and excessive stimulation of fight-or-flight results in structural and functional changes to the amygdala (responds to threats), hippocampus (encodes memory), and prefrontal cortex (makes decisions). Here is a review of neurobiology related to ACEs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6428430/
Neuroscientists repeatedly published papers with spurious results from multiple comparisons until Bennet did that FMRI of a dead salmon. Scott has written about the baseless research program on 5-HTTLPR. Daniel Kahneman wrote that we "have no choice" but to accept priming studies recently felled by the replication crisis. And those priming studies are at least RCTs rather than observational studies. So, no, I don't think twin-adoption studies are unnecessary. Nurturists continue to simply assume outcomes of interest are caused by shared environment rather than actually doing the studies which would be necessary to show this is the case:
https://russellwarne.com/2020/05/11/forty-years-squandered-by-iq-environmentalists/
The lack of studies necessary to prove these cause outcomes of interest is not itself proof that they don't cause said outcomes, but it also means we should treat the literature as being as unreliable as all those critiqued by Judith Harris & Steve Pinker for failing to control for genetic influence.
PS- While admirable research groups are busy finding new ways to quantify the predictive power of ACEs, my point is far simpler: the impact of stress hormones etc on the brain offers undeniable evidence that environment counts. I think it counts for a lot, but that's not really the point. As long as environment counts at all, the hypothesis that poverty is nothing more than a high concentration of low-performing genotypes is invalid. This frames the greater argument as one of weighted variables and magnitude of influence, where nobody really gains ground without massive amounts of data and at least some consideration for all the variables.
Quantity matters. Academic journals select for publishable results, and the result we observe is funnel plots where the effect size is just enough to be "significant"/publishable (and the largest effect sizes are found with the smallest, least reliable samples).
My default presumption is that the environment counts for a lot. I usually start off assuming that nature and nurture each account for about half.
My rough guess, inspired by James Flynn's discovery of the Flynn Effect, is that the environment often matters more across time than across space, which makes it harder to research because few researchers can wait around for a new historic era to see if that matters.
To take one example, we can study identical and fraternal twins raised apart in space. Usually, the results of twin studies suggest nature matters more than the conventional wisdom would suggest and nurture matters less.
But ... until cloning comes along, we can't study twins raised apart in time. My suspicion at this point is that it does matter what historical epoch you are nurtured in. But I don't know how to test that.
"As long as environment counts at all, the hypothesis that poverty is nothing more than a high concentration of low-performing genotypes is invalid."
I don't think I specifically said poverty, I'm sure there's people in relative poverty who nevertheless make good environments. Maybe Amish or ultra-orthodox Jews would qualify.
Anyway, the claim is not so much that environment doesn't count, but that your environment is caused by the genotypes of the people around you.
By the way, there was a study floating around recently that objective measures of trauma(things proven in court) wasn't really predictive of anything, but subjective measures of trauma(self-report) was, so it may be more how you take things than what happens to you.
This is nonsense. Nobody says alcohol exposure in the womb doesn't matter. Heritability is the proportion of OBSERVED variation in a trait explained by OBSERVED variation in genetics (and conversely, in environmental influences). If things like alcohol exposure explained most of the variation in IQ, *then heritability estimates would necessarily be low accordingly*. Yes, fetal alcohol exposure leads to worse outcomes. So what? It's not common enough to explain a meaningful proportion of the difference, which is what matters. Not what "can" have an impact.
People like you always act as though it has never occurred to intelligence researchers to consider the impact of things like poverty. Of course it has, and it doesn't explain most of the variation. As far as the kind of poverty experienced in western countries by any meaningful number of people, this cannot possibly explain most of the variance. I mean, poor white and asian kids do significantly better at school than rich black kids. There's no getting around the brute facts of reality.
Nothing. People are infinitely talented at rationalizing away any data they don't want to grok.
I work (under duress) with PGSes and they're utterly useless for complex traits. PGS are just a bunch of associations lumped into a single number, nothing more, and most of the time the association isn't very strong or indicative of anything. People have been piling up GWAS after GWAS for "educational attainment" for almost 10 years now and we still don't have the slightest hint of a genetic mechanism behind all that "heritability" beyond very obvious hanging fruit like Mendelian diseases that among other symptoms trigger intellectual disability. PROTIP: if raw associations aren't enough and someone has to bin scores into "deciles" or similar ranked score magic to make a point they're usually trying to fool you. The only effect these PGSes have had was boosting up a bunch of grifting startups for rich fools who want the best "genes" for their child (note that we still have no idea what those genes are) and giving false ammunition to people like Sailer or gwern who really wanted to make a point about the IQ of black people on the internet, but as far as our scientific understanding of cognitive ability is concerned we are still at square one. And we will remain at square one in the near future until people get some sense in their head and actually start to analyze the "genetics" behind all those claims of "X is genetics", and so far I've seen none of that from the GWAS crowd.
Also, I don't know how many times this bears repeating but heritability doesn't imply the existence of a genetic mechanism, holy shit.
And environmental differences don't imply ~the lack~ of a genetic mechanism either. Practically every trait in any organism developed outside of extreme environments is a mixture of the two. You can argue about the proportions(5%/95%! 20/80! 50/50! whatever! even the smallest effect sizes seem enough to explain most of the interpersonal differences), you can argue about the current methodology(yep, polygenic scores are easily confounded - for instance looking for factors of intelligence at the very least you'd get some metabolic optimizations that affect the entire body in the mix), but you sound like you're dead set on the conclusion that it's impossible to causally untangle the environmental contribution from the genetic contribution and the genetic factors responsible for the choice of a comfortable environment.
For any species capable of modifying or choosing its surroundings, you'll expect mutually shaping effects - it's just what evolution happens to be. For humans, we'd get the case of gene-culture coevolution on top of that.
Should we stop trying to trace evolution in other species? After all, what if we didn't have a genetically causal explanation for the shapes of Darwin's finches' beaks?
In other words, the problem is that it sounds like you don't want to know, god of the gaps-style. In order to find the genetic component, you have to be actively looking for one, rather than discourage the search - even if the current methods are flawed as they show noisy statistical rather than direct causal associations - for moral reasons. Which actually might be harmful in a utilitarian way, especially if you're seeking to reshape society in order to rectify an issue that may not even be caused by what you believe it to be caused by. Ignorance can easily cause suffering just as well.
>you sound like you're dead set on the conclusion that it's impossible to causally untangle the environmental contribution from the genetic contribution and the genetic factors responsible for the choice of a comfortable environment.
Pretty much, and it's not a particularly controversial opinion either. The genetic/environmental dichotomy only exists in the mind of psychologists whose understanding of genetics is stuck in the 80s.
>Should we stop trying to trace evolution in other species? After all, what if we didn't have a genetically causal explanation for the shapes of Darwin's finches' beaks?
We remember Darwin's nice storytelling but we don't remember every single person who put forward a wrong explanation for a trait they'd thought of because they still believed in adaptationism.
>In other words, the problem is that it sounds like you don't want to know, god of the gaps-style.
No, the problem is that I don't like bullshit science. I'm not virtue signaling, I don't have any social media presence, I don't live in the US, I'm completely outside of the culture wars thingy. Even if someone did came up and conclusively showed a genetic mechanism by which black people turned out to be dumber than whites on average, the worst thing that'd happen to me is that I'd lose an argument on the ACX comment section, the horror.
What I do see is a bunch of people doing PGSes and wasting colossal amounts of money on GWAS papers involving ever bigger cohorts and authorship listing spanning five pages just so they can brag about finding a minuscule association with a complex trait that's not even well-defined to begin with, and whose association doesn't even translate to other cohorts, and the added value of the paper in the discussion section is "uuuh some of the snps are associated with brain development so I guess this is big". What I do see is that for the better part of a decade people have been desperately looking for "the genes for X" without doing a single genetics experiment until we get to the magical conclusion "uuh every snip contributes a tiny amount" and no one still has the slightest idea what the genes actually do. What I do see is startups launching a bunch of grifts about giving your kid the best snip correlations and people buy it up with money that could be spent doing actual genetics research or funding actually useful biotech startups. What I do see is that a bunch of people on this website are taking seriously the opinions and "research" of marginal people like gwern, Kierkegaard, Sailer, Khan, the scientific output of which is pretty much nil, while still claiming to speak in the name of science and rationality.
Yes, yes, I know, sometimes expertise is fallible, sometimes plucky eccentrics have right when the scientific establishment is wrong, sometimes academia is rotten, and so on. But why are these points always and ever invoked when it comes to justifying one's opinion about the IQ of black people? Do you not see how distorted this kind of thinking is, the length by which one is ready to go and reconfigure all of one's reasoning process just so as not to alter the cardinal premise about black people being genetically dumber? See this relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1731/
> Pretty much, and it's not a particularly controversial opinion either. The genetic/environmental dichotomy only exists in the mind of psychologists whose understanding of genetics is stuck in the 80s.
It isn't a dichotomy, it's, I don't know...a dialectic? Genetics influences what can be expressed, the environment provides the upper and lower boundaries and some degree of noise, then the phenotype modifies or chooses the environment it's further expressed in and the already existing environment dictates whether the phenotype is successful at perpetuating itself further.
That doesn't mean you can't distinguish between the contributions of each. Twin studies are an easy example. What you're advocating for looks to me like learned helplessness over methodology, which tends to become more and more able to handle complexity over time. At some point we didn't even take population stratification into account.
I'll even say that the bevy of flawed studies just happen because of academic incentives combined with the fact that it's easier to apply a methodology rather than to build a new one, rigor takes effort - but that goes for all scientific discovery! At the very least we still keep generating data we might be able to use to falsify or refine further results.
Accumulating knowledge ~even~ over SNPs can eventually direct attention to the exploration of the relevant causal mechanisms, as many traits are formed additively(evolution likes stable yet variable configurations), then we can trace what phenotypes they correspond to on a cellular and tissue level, voila, the gaps and the guesswork gets smaller proportionally to the amount of work done unless you just label the entire system irreducibly complex which reminds me of a certain other strain of thought.
> We remember Darwin's nice storytelling but we don't remember every single person who put forward a wrong explanation for a trait they'd thought of because they still believed in adaptationism.
Yes, and you sound like we shouldn't ever try to trace evolution because what if we're temporarily wrong with any given individual explanation? Might as well stop with selection and breeding, maybe huskies arose purely by chance, since we don't know the exact causality of dog breed traits on a cellular level.
The fact of the matter is: science works through parsimony, evolutionary explanations are parsimonious even if drift factors in and we can gradually narrow down the sets of these until we arrive at the ones that fit causally the best as mentioned.
>and no one still has the slightest idea what the genes actually do
I'm, err, sorry but, what? Yes, the topic is complex, maybe on a human level we don't have the full picture, but there's an infinite number of studies that use practical methods such as simply knocking genes out in order to study simpler model organisms. Overexpress a protein in a nematode to observe how misfolding may occur. Shut off a circadian clock related gene in a drosophila and see what happens with its behavior. The difference is that for humans, it takes work on tissue cultures and with enough accumulated knowledge you get to extrapolate the effect bottom up.
I'll agree on one thing: optimizing for specific SNPs without causal knowledge can give rather unpredictable results as it's imitation without a true understanding, but what are you going to do, restrict reproductive freedoms over it? What about a world in which all the causal information had been extracted and it's possible to optimize for specific outcomes even at the level of "oh this one 'model' of a subtype of a dopamine receptor and this specific average concentration of dopamine produced within this chain, it'll mean a greater ability to focus and less likelihood of having psychotic breakdowns due to XYZ", I somehow bet you'd still be against the idea, and even possibly the steps that led to that sort of knowledge even if it gave other people the ability to build drugs that would modify the same causal chain without forcing modification.
I feel like a good part of this isn't about how it may validate some sort of racism - nobody should be held responsible for their biology because nobody happens to choose being born any specific way, and if you feel like you're unhappy with yours, you should be able to modify it - but rather about how unnatural and "impure" it may feel to live in a world where biology had been effectively shown to be a sort of a stochastic programming language. Life shouldn't be a lottery, especially as far as genuine medical conditions are concerned(I'm biased here as my relatives happen to suffer due to an inborn condition) - and those are the larger part of understanding genetic causality even if it could be used for personality traits and intelligence, all those are inextricably bound.
> Yes, yes, I know, sometimes expertise is fallible, sometimes plucky eccentrics have right when the scientific establishment is wrong, sometimes academia is rotten, and so on. But why are these points always and ever invoked when it comes to justifying one's opinion about the IQ of black people?
I'm guessing that part of this is anti-cancel-culture people who see this as one of the worst cases of political bias in academia, & that another part of it is that people who have come to the conclusion that the IQ difference is genetic are more likely to come here because they are unwelcome in most places (the usual problem that a forum without witch hunts will have a disproportionate number of witches).
You see, that's where you're wrong. People don't "come to the conclusion" that blacks are genetically dumber than whites on average, they have always had that conviction and looked for "science" to support their results. Jensen was known for his bad opinions all the way in the sixties, such as asserting that black people had "no grammar" (thereby showing that he was as inept in linguistics as he was in genetics), ditto for Lynn, Murray, the whole clique.
There is no single instance of a person who, at first, genuinely believed blacks weren't dumber than whites, then "looked at the evidence" and wrung their hands in despair, until they had to "come to the conclusion" that blacks are genetically dumber than whites on average. This is a fictionalized portrayal of HBD proponents but it doesn't match the past behavior of people who have championed these opinions.
"People don't "come to the conclusion" that blacks are genetically dumber than whites on average, they have always had that conviction and looked for "science" to support their results."
What's the explanation for those guys looking for "science" to show that East Asians are smarter than Europeans?
This is an early take before I've read other people's comments.
Is it possible that a significant number of people are getting bored and/or tired of Social Justice? The emotional demands are considerable. Also, a new thing is fresh when it's new, and then it gets sedimented and repetitive.
One other possible angle is that more Social Justice people are realizing that taking the brakes off anger and malice wasn't actually a good idea. I haven't seen anyone frame it that way, but some of them are coming to realize that they've got a problem with twitter mobs and such.
There might be some Chesterton's Fence involved.
I'm pleased to see that "Helicopter Story" (previously "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter") is on the Hugo Ballot, but there are probably people who have given up on writing fiction and/or publishing it because they don't want to face harassment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_Attack_Helicopter
For what it's worth, RaceFail (when Social Justice came to sf fandom in 2009) started out being about race with feminism added later.
Oh right, RaceFail was several years earlier than Gamergate! That does make this tidy story of directional shifts seem a bit more complex.
Consider #MeToo blew up in 2017.
Consider also Donald Trump's opponents who, according to Scott, had a laser focus on his "hard to prove" racism while largely ignoring his blatant sexism held one of the largest protests in US history following his election. It was called the Women's March. For Women. On account of how awful Trump's sexism is.
Consider finally that Scott is maybe writing some ahistorical and poorly reasoned drivel here.
> "Helicopter Story" is on the Hugo Ballot
Does it imply it's available online?
http://archive.is/oXDEt
Thanks for the link. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Ideology has a coercive and a voluntary component. There is some level of freedom for people to control their relationship with ideology over the course of their lives. But social justice also imposes itself on them, whether they like it or not.
In general, I'd guess that as people get older, they gain more of a sense of control and perspective. Their participation in an ideology becomes more voluntary, less coerced - even if that ideology remains as inherently coercive and prevalent as it was before.
The older I get, (though I'm not too old), the more it seems that political pressures are mainly a phenomenon of the young coercing the young, with the help of some older enablers.
If true, then people might not be getting bored/tired of SJ. They might just be getting free of all the coercions they faced in their youth. I could even imagine that this will lead to a lasting involvement with a more mature version of SJ activism, and that ultimately it might turn out to be a healthy multigenerational force for good.
Re: PUA's - I don't think they actually disappeared, but rather that culture transitioned to Tinder in such a way that it became mainstream and accepted practice. Modern swiping dating apps enable everyone to take that sort of numbers/rejection driven approach to dating that the PUA scene were initially proponents of.
Tinder culture may have absorbed some elements of the PUA mindset. But it dropped the wider systems and ontology (to use a slightly overdramatic term) as those tended to be contaminated with explicitly misogynistic, or just plain bizarre, assumptions about how men and women behave, often based on very misunderstood evopsych
I think tinder style dating culture has most in common with things like instagram, which are explicitly and openly about constructing an image of yourself you present to others, in a deliberately curated way. That has some similarity to the PUA stuff about making yourself interesting (peacocking, etc) but is different in that its heavily online and much more open about the fact that what is seen is a curated thing. The precisely posed instagram feed isn't meant to be natural, its working within the accepted forms of that genre.
Now that you don't have to meet women in real life, what need is there for most of what PUAs taught? "The opener" "Indications of interest" "How to open a set" all of them obsolete with Tinder.
This sounds somewhat right, but I think that PUA peaked before Tinder, while Tinder accelerated its decline and made its message less relevant than the more bar-driven culture where it was invented.
PUA probably belongs at least partly in the category of "self-help fad", except somewhat more underground, and aimed exclusively at men (I think women are the main consumers of self-help overall). Like all self-help fads, it failed to deliver on most of its promise ("Any schlub can be the alpha that gets all the girls!"), and where it worked best it was mostly just repackaging ancient advice.
But there's also always a market for advice on pursuing the opposite sex, and PUA ideas and language were influential enough that I think they, in turn, will continue to be repackaged for a long time to come.
Plenty of people aside from pick up artists advocated the numbers/rejection driven approach. That didn't seem like the defining characteristic to me. It was more taking a cue from Tony Robbins and sales conference culture and pushing neuro-linguistic programming pseudoscience as a way of subliminally influencing your way into a woman's pants. This sort of thing peaked with Tom Cruise's Frank Mackey character in Magnolia (respect the cock, tame the cunt) back when it was selling out hotels way before it ever moved into the realm of mom's basement bloggers spreading the ideas to sad losers on the Internet who weren't even paying for the advice. They seemed to go beyond pure pick up artistry, too, combining it with those bizarre Spur Posse like scoring systems.
I feel like Chad/Stacy ontology thing is totally different, too. That was the reaction of Incels against pick up artistry. It wasn't pushed by the actual pick up artists themselves.
One elephant in the room here is that most of the things described in this post have also happened to "Internet rationalism".
I don't consider that an indictment of rationalism, though. As the post implies, it seems like the Internet has become less hospitable to serious talk in general (civil or not, though the civil stuff was the first to go). Most of the memetic bandwidth these days goes toward irony, in the form of either performative silliness ("gamestonks!") or overt consumerist artificiality ("please like and subscribe!").
I have no idea what you mean about "internet rationalism" - maybe explain?
My anecdotal impression, backed up by Google Trends results for "LessWrong", is that interest peaked around 2014-2015. I'm agnostic as to the reason but going mainstream and getting overtaken by other trends both seem like plausible contributing factors.
Checking Google Trends (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0_yl8cn), it appears to me that searches for "LessWrong" peaked in 2011 & then declined, was approximately stable from 2014 to early 2020 (except for a single large peak in May 2020), & have been rising since then to about the level of the first peak.
Interesting, I was looking at "lesswrong" (no caps) and saw different results. Looks like I should have been more careful in my methodology and the data overall doesn't support my conclusion.
*a single large peak in May 2018
Did Internet rationalism and LessWrong ever "go mainstream?" Do you just mean some of the early major figures grew up and got real jobs, and being somewhat smart people, in some cases got pretty good jobs?
As a point of comparison, here is LessWrong being consistently dwarfed by Julie Andrews for the past 20 years, well after her last major role in Princess Diaries: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0_yl8cn,julie%20andrews
I wouldn't consider Google Trends volume a good comparison point. I'm thinking in terms of influence, which is less about the raw numbers and more about the way ideas get propagated to those in power. SSC/ACX at least seems to have the ear of influential commentators like Ross Douthat on the center-right and Matt Yglesias on the center-left, and concepts like "ingroup" that were popularized here and circulated among rationalist blogs are now much more common currency.
I only went to Google Trends because you cited Google Trends and I noted that it doesn't actually show any numbers on the Y-axis, so all you get searching for a single term is how popular it is at any given time compared to the most popular it has ever been, but you have no way of knowing if "most popular it's ever been" is 17 searches in a day or 17 million. At least picking some other topic people might care about at random can show relative prevalence.
There have been some comparatively high profile mentions since Scott's run-in with the New York Times, which is maybe the best publicity the LessWrong set has ever gotten.
Scott didn't come up with the ingroup/outgroup dynamic. That was Henri Tajfel in 1974: https://web.archive.org/web/20120106002030/http://ssi.sagepub.com/content/13/2/65.full.pdf. It's been a common thread in social psychology for a long time. I was first exposed to this idea in 2003 in a fairly interesting university course offered by the Cultural Anthropology department but not explicitly studying humans but rather apes, examining all of the ways in which chimpanzee social behaviors mirror those of humans. This was based on some of the early work from Frans de Waal in the 90s.
I think this is also true for EA. I’d guess their moment has come and gone.
My perspective is more top down: that the Great Awokening emerged out of the strategic needs of the Democratic Party (and its allied media) to assemble and keep together a "Coalition of the Margins" who personally identify with the marginalized of historical America, as opposed to the Republican Party, which tends to represent voters who identify with the "Core" of American history such as married straight white men (e.g., the more you are like George Washington, the more likely you are to be a Republican).
The obvious problem with the Democratic strategy is the likelihood of the disparate Coalition of the Fringes turning on each other in internecine strife, which can explain why the Democratic-aligned media stokes so much hatred against straight white men as the one unifying thing the Democratic coalition can agree upon.
Spotted Toad coined the term "The Great Awokening" around 2016 for the late Obama age development. It's a clever play on the "The Great Awakening," a religious revival among American colonist Protestants in the 1730s-40s.
The main fronts of the The Great Awokening have been feminism, racism, and transgenderism, with transgenderism eventually undermining feminism.
The first three years of the Obama Administration were largely quiet on these fronts, with the court push for gay marriage being the main activity.
Obama, personally, is not enthusiastic about feminism: his big complaints about his life are that he didn't have his dad around and that his single mother chose to emphasize her career over caring for him. In the 150,000
In early 2012 the Obama Administration revived feminism, which had been largely dormant since feminist organizations stood by Bill Clinton during his sexual harassment scandal, as part of its re-election campaign (e.g., The Life of Julia).
Black anger at whites re-emerged about the same time with the first of the BLM martyrs, Trayvon Martin, which Obama then chose to validate with his "son I never had" comment. (Of course, it turned out that George Zimmerman was a tri-racial Hispanic who looked rather like the son Obama might have had with his half-white / half-Japanese 1980s girlfriend if she hadn't twice turned down his proposals.)
I didn't see transgenderism coming until May 2013, when I first noticed the mounting drumbeat of New York Times articles pushing transgender rights, such as the right of MMA fighter Fallon Foxx to beat up women for money.
Eventually, from Ferguson onward, blacks pushed women out of the starring role in the Great Awokening, while transgenders undermined lesbian feminists.
#MeToo, with its Clintonite arch-villain Harvey Weinstein, was due to Hillary losing in 2016. But most of the #MeToo bad guys have turned out to be Democrats, which isn't good for the Democrats, so the narrative has sputtered. In contrast, cops are assumed to be straight white men (even when they aren't), so BLM's narrative has been valued for its on-the-noseness.
On the other hand, the huge increase in murders and looting during the racial reckoning since George Floyd's death is alienating components of the Democratic coalition, such as Hispanics and urban gay male shop owners. After Biden's huge success with white suburban parents fall, the transgender movement is perhaps beginning to pose problems for soccer moms and dads, although that is more speculative.
In general, politics tends toward 50-50 splits (with contemporary Israel, where perhaps more talent goes into electoral politics than in any other country, being an amusing example: four elections in a row without a clear winner). So, the Democratic strategy, while it has enjoyed some successes, is also generating its own downsides.
Your idea is wrong because it fails to fit with the facts. Wokeness did not emerge within the institutional Democratic Party, it emerged online.
Lots and lots of stuff emerges online. Most of it more or less stays there. Whether the mainstream media obsesses over it or not has much to do with perceived needs in the War on Republicans.
Was the 1990s-2000s Democratic Party really prone to dysfunctionality? The Democratic shift to wokeness largely hurt them among the working class, and I doubt it helped them among the college-educated. I do not believe it serves the interests of the Democratic Party as an institution, except insofar as it helps them gain corporate donations. The Trump era has also led to racial depolarization and Democratic gains with "core" suburban college Whites (as in Shelby County, AL, Hamilton County, IN, etc.), which is contrary to what your theory predicts. Transgenders are also a largely unanimously Democratic and irrelevant voting bloc. I generally agree your observations are prescient, Steve, but you have it wrong here. The tail really is wagging the dog, rather than the dog wagging the tail.
Mainstream Democrats like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden have been celebrating the end of America's white majority since the 1990s. One party or the other was inevitably going to step up to exploit demographic change. My feeling is that the big problem is that the GOP is largely banned from pointing out that it is rather sleazy for the Democrats to use immigration to win elections. Instead, the media has sanctified immigration, which coincidentally enough is in the interest of the Demorcats as Who We Are etc etc, Diversity Is Our Greatest Strength, etc etc.
So there is little in the way of countervailing forces. Tucker Carlson finally got around to pointing out what the Democrats are up to to win elections and the media went berserk with rage at him. Not too many other major figures are as brave as he is.
Immigrants are by no means predestined to be Democratic voters - at least, not unless the Republicans make an active project out of loudly announcing how immigration is terrible and immigrants are filthy Democrat voters who don't share the values of Real Americans.
I seem to recall that before Trump, there was lots of talk about how Hispanics were "natural conservatives" and how Cuban immigrants in Florida could become the Republican bulwark in that state.
And Trump did better with Hispanics in 2020 than Romney did in 2012.
The Democrats deciding in 2020 that Latinos were to be called "Latinx" and blacks were to be called "Blacks" probably didn't help Biden win Latino votes.
A certain writer whose name you know and who also lives in California pointed out that the policies implemented in states like California which are also solidly blue do very little to increase democratic share of the electorate in California or the nation as a whole.
Also, I find it ridiculous how you chalk 4Chan becoming right wing to “irony gone wrong”. What actually happened is that our society has become openly and rabidly anti-White, pro-LGBT, and pro-feminism. 4Chan was the board where people could discuss this openly and without censorship. Thus, it became right wing.
Any place that isn’t censored will become right wing on race and gender issues, because we’re RIGHT.
Bingo.
>Any place that isn’t censored will become right wing on race and gender issues, because we’re RIGHT.
Probably more a "you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches" situation, though I actually disagree with his appraisal of 4chan as right wing. /pol/, sure, is heavily right wing - but is /b/? /int/? /tg/? Not really. People talk about, frex, orcs not being racist on /tg/, or complain about some stupid PC crap fucking up MTG, but if you bring out any actually right wing talking points about women being unable to fight, people will insult you for being a /po/tard.
I obviously meant an ONLINE place.
4chan is online. 4chan, in general, is not super right wing. To the extent it is right wing, I hold it is more the "witch refugee crisis" effect than anything related to debates.
4chan in general obviously is quite right-wing and has been for a while (at least since i began browsing it in 2012). And in any case it has always been fairly amoral, and what primarily determines today whether someone is left-wing or right-wing is whether they support the moral pieties of the left or not.
It is not, "obviously quite right wing." It is anti-culture war stuff, but that cuts both ways, whether it's fa/tg/uys insulting you for saying orcs represent black people or for trying to give female characters a -4 Strength in your games. For example, a quick check of every board archived on desuarchive for uses of "/pol/tard" and "libtard" finds that "/pol/tard" gets used significantly more - as of this writing on May 11, the tenth page of results for /pol/tard has its earliest result on May 3, while the tenth page of results for libtard has its earliest result on April 27. (Earlier date meaning less frequent use, to be clear.) This simple test actually suggests a (mild) left-wing tilt.
I think that's a very poor measure of the political leaning of 4chan. One very obvious reason why the us of poltard is greater is that there are many more user of /pol/ on 4chan (it is and has for a while been the most popular board by quite a margin) than there are left-wingers. Mocking /pol/ also doesn't inherently imply a left political leaning, most right-wingers would probably dislike quite a lot of the things said on /pol/.
I find it profoundly bizarre that you think a society where white people are in the vast majority of positions of political and economic power "anti white".
It's like how mainstream Democrats are "pro-civility," unlike those dastardly Bernie Bros, unless it's KHive swatting people, people on their side smearing their opponents as sexual predators, etc. It's all aesthetics layered on the same old same old.
Oh look, someone who thinks politicians are anything other than figureheads.
Warning that non-productive comments like this will eventually result in bans.
The people in positions of significant political and economic power are a tiny, tiny fraction of all the people. That they might adopt a policy of hostility towards teeming millions of ordinary schmoes, who happen to have the same skin color, in order to advance their own personal interests is no more surprising than that the leaders of Vichy France gave up French Jews to the Nazis to save their own skins.
Your argument might have more force if it could be reasonably assumed that people always look out for the skin-color tribal group first, before their own personal interests.
This argument would make sense if 4Chan was *just* "right-wing", but they also talk a lot about gassing the Jews, which I think is very much not right at all.
the use of the second "right" here is confusing. Like gassing Jews is wrong, but it's also very "right wing"
Pretty sure he means it sounds like left wing trolling.
An obvious example of irony-game -> true believers is The Flat Earth Society. In 2008, 99,9% of those who claimed they believed in a Flat Earth were trolling. By 2017, there were probably more than a million true believer Flat Earthers in the USA. It's hard to imagine the rather-dumb true believers would have gotten interested in Flat Earth ideas were it not for the rather-smart trolls creating the online community.
>Maybe it was even partly due to naivete - a lot of people hadn't really met anyone who thought differently from them before, and assumed that changing people’s minds would be really easy.
cf. Demosthenes & Locke
"the New Atheists probably could have done without the Malachi 2:3-related-merchandise"
Shoulda gone with Ezekiel 23:20 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel%2023&version=ESV
"It also tracks whether you like NASCAR, football, SUVs, meth, and country music, vs. Broadway musicals, artisanal cupcakes, Priuses, marijuana, and local journalism."
But what if I dislike all these, or at least most of them? I don't much like country music but I also don't much like Broadway musicals. NASCAR, SUVs and meth? No, but equally artisanal cupcakes, Priuses and marijuana no.
"A naive prediction: our cultural obsession with race has a time limit. At some point, like our obsessions with religion and gender before it, it will become so overdone and pathetic that people will switch to a new hobbyhorse."
This makes sense for me of the new emphasis on trans activism/trans rights/trans issues. We've had sex (feminism, men vs. women) and class and race, now the new cycle is going to be about gender, from "please put your preferred pronouns in this email signature line" to "banning puberty blockers for minors" and trans athletes (mostly trans women competing in women's sports at the moment, but I'm sure there are trans men athletes out there as well and I expect to hear more about them). The trend(iness) is the one thing that explains to me "how the heck did we get here from there in so short a time?" about these issues.
"But what if I dislike all these, or at least most of them?"
You're Irish, you don't count.
I feel I should write something aggrieved about erasure of my lived experience or the likes 😁☘ "Reclaim St. Patrick's Day! Stop green beer! IT'S NOT PATTY'S DAY YOU MONSTERS!!!!!"
I'm American and like all of those things except Broadway and Priuses. You seem to have this really bubbly notion of blue tribe values. I'm solidly urban. Grew up in Los Angeles. Union family, solid Democrats as far back as forever. I have two master's degrees. I love American football. Everyone I know loves it. It's probably the most widely popular cultural phenomenon and form of entertainment everywhere in the US. And there are teams in every major city. And all of the major universities have teams as well and corporate CEOs and engineers alike are regularly wearing their gear to work and gloating when their alma mater beats someone else's. I still gloat whenever Army beats Navy. And that's another thing. I was in the Army. I love guns. I own guns. All the other officers, just as urbane, just as educated, also liked guns. They're not nearly as fun to shoot as cannons, but still pretty fun.
Some people just actually like things and don't need every preference they ever express to be some kind of tribal shibboleth (which specific sports team you like is definitely a tribal shibboleth, but not in any related to larger politics culture war nonsense).
I had the same "Huh, I guess this is trendy now" thought about the sudden popularity of trans issues. I think it probably started as a cultural trend after same-sex marriage went national and the older LGBT talking points fizzled out. But then our political parties discovered a fun new wedge issue for dividing the electorate and getting people angry enough to vote.
Conservatives across the US are introducing bills in the state legislatures this year targeting bathroom use, hormones for teens, etc. I'm sure some are serious about it, but I think they're also baiting their liberal opponents into opposing them on the issue because it's an easy one for them to spin. In the next election, we'll hear a lot of "My competitor voted to let boys use girl's bathrooms" from conservatives and "My competitor is anti-trans, therefore anti-LGBT, therefore anti-everything-you-care-about" from liberals.
Full disclosure: my partner is trans and we're a little jaded with all of it.
I think the Texas legislator (which meets every OTHER year) spent most of their time on trans bills.
Republicans think the trans issues are a slam dunk for them.
I've written extensively about the Death of Atheism - see here https://skepticink.com/prussian/2018/12/08/the-death-of-atheism/ - and it's dispiriting that Scott still seems Not To Get It.
Don't get me wrong - he's not wrong about this trajectory of fashion. What he keeps leaving out is that there are things that simply aren't affected by fashion, have no interest in it. Here's the thing that really, truly killed New Atheism:
Islam.
"What's the motto of the American Atheist? There is no god but Allah." Hip, posturing young people discovered that if they wanted to stand against religion, they might actually have to take some risk, do something that wasn't signaling. And that was the end of that.
(Poor Christopher Hitchens. He actually thought all that stuff about solidarity and internationalism was believed. He really thought his audience was capable of standing for something.)
This article treats the subject of Islam as though it's another trend - people can talk about it or not, whatever. Tell it to the Yazidi. Tell it to the Nigerian Christians who were subject to another massacre two days ago. Tell it to the UK teacher who is now under fear of his life for showing a cartoon of you-know-who.
So there is an oppressive orthodoxy on the rise that will take over most or all of the cultural institutions you know - and it won't be mocked or shamed out of power, because anyone who tries has a good chance of a cut throat.
There really are forces in this world that are unaffected by fashion or trends.
"Islam."
Completely wrong. Atheism is destroying Islam, Islam had no part in destroying atheism.
Please read my linked post on the subject, or, alternatively, google 'blind assertion fallacy'
Yes, Dawkins wrote the "Dear Muslima" comment, but Elevatorgate and Bunnygate were about feminists, not about Islam.
You don't think that an utter unwillingness to confront a specific religion might have some deleterious effect on a movement whose whole reason for being is to confront religion?
I don't remember any unwillingness. FreeThoughtBlogs had at least 2 ex-Muslim bloggers.
I think the European far right has put pressure on Muslims more than New Atheism has
I'm kind of baffled by this - I don't think a single American atheist has been harmed by Muslims in the past ten years (I could be wrong about "not a single", but it's definitely very low). I sometimes face a decision of whether to blog about atheism, and I had never even considered that Muslim violence might be a relevant factor to think about.
The Orlando Nightclub massacre was in 2016.
I mean, it's probably true that some Muslim somewhere has harmed some American atheist somewhere. The point is that there hasn't been any significant threat posed by militant Islam to American atheists qua atheists. (Note that whatever happened at Pulse, it wasn't someone seeking out an atheist nightclub.)
The OP's assertion is that there has been no threat because they stopped provoking Muslims. Charlie Hebdo revealed what would happen if they poked the bear.
Did Sam Harris stop? He was the main American atheist that I know of focusing on anti-Islam. (Hitchens too, despite being British, but he died early.)
I haven't heard him speak on it in the last few years for sure.
Scott, can I ask, then, that you read my post on the subject?
And, well, you don't write about Islam. It's the one blind spot in an otherwise exemplary epistemic clarity. It's the same thing for the rest of the 'atheist' movement, especially in America. It's why I make that joke about its motto.
I think the threat isn't physical violence from Muslim extremists, but rather the labeling of criticism of Islam as "Islamophobia" and bigotry. So if an American atheist criticizes Islam, it's extremely unlikely that they'd be murdered by a terrorist, but it's more likely that they'd be labeled as a bigot, "cancelled", fired from their job, etc.
This seems right, but the big figureheads had the "job" of selling books, and being "cancelled" is usually a huge boon for an author, because you can sell on the backlash to the backlash.
I don't think a lot of left wing people in the west are afraid to criticize Islam because they are afraid of violence from Muslims. I think they afraid to criticize Islam either because that will make them look racist. Or they are worried that criticizing Islam would lead to discrimination or violence against Muslims.
Physical cowardice or moral cowardice, that's the question, I'll happily concede.
Yeah, that's why the Muslim grooming gangs were able to get away with raping so many young girls for such a long time - left wing people would rather allow it than prosecute them and admit that the right had a point about something.
The Pakistani grooming gangs seem to to be an uniquely British issue. I think class was a big part of it, the raped white girls were very much underclass.
I've also never for a moment bought that the police didn't investigate because they "were afraid of being called racist".
Cops are called racist all the time and it doesn't stop them from doing things that are actually racist.
Seems much more likely that a few relevant individuals were in on the take.
I don't believe that's plausible in this case.
There's no plausible mechanism for it. You can't just walk in to a police chief's office with a briefcase full of money and say "please overlook my crimes", and the subculture in question does not appear to have had the resources or the access to make this sort of thing work.
The risk would be implausibly high. Bribing a police chief to overlook the sort of crime the general public would find particularly heinous is going to require an extraordinarily level of trust, in both the person offering the bribe and in the fellow police officers who will need to join in the corruption. Particularly for an operation of this scale, which would require many policemen and independently many social workers to keep quiet.
And there's no evidence for it. The presumption that whenever a government official isn't doing what we think he ought to it is because they are being outright bribed, is a simplistic fantasy. We have a whole body of research and scholarship in Public Choice Theory, and it doesn't generally point to bribery. That claim requires specific evidence.
We do have some evidence, in the form of statements by social workers in Rotherham, that fear of being accused of racism was at least part of the problem. We have no evidence of bribery. That's just wishful thinking by someone who wants an easy answer.
"We have a whole body of research and scholarship in Public Choice Theory, and it doesn't generally point to bribery. That claim requires specific evidence."
Imagine ignoring about the entire history of organized crime favour of pretending that Public Choice Theory is equivalent to reality.
In reality, the ongoing crime had much more to do with gross police negligence. This is partially to do with class and partially do to with the fact that any crime network that exists for that long and in that size will have officers willing to cover for them. Indeed, even white victims were repeatedly ignored by police
"In 1997 Rotherham Council created a local youth project, Risky Business, to work with girls and women aged 11–25 thought to be at risk of sexual exploitation on the streets.[48][49] Jayne Senior, awarded an MBE in the 2016 Birthday Honours for her role in uncovering the abuse, began working for Risky Business as a coordinator around July 1999.[50][51] The users were overwhelmingly white girls: of the 268 who used the project from March 2001 to March 2002, 244 were white, 22 were British-Asian, and 2 were black.[52]"
"According to Senior, Risky Business ended up with so much information about the perpetrators that the police suggested she start forwarding it to an electronic dropbox, "Box Five", on the South Yorkshire Police computer network. They reportedly told her this would protect the identity of Risky Business's sources.[59] She learned later that the police had not read the reports she had left there, and it apparently could not be accessed by other forces.[54][60]. Risky Business was seen as a "nuisance"[61][62] and shut down by the council[63][64] in 2011."
The easy answer here is the police and UK government claiming that not wanting to appear racist. This is incredibly convenient because the Tory government gets to hammer away at the opposition for an ideology that prolonged the abuse of hundreds to thousands of underage children while at the same time the police force gets to save face and pretend that they were being touchy-feely when all along they were doing the thing police always do: ignoring marginalized communities while select members skim proceeds and favours off the top.
That's much less of an issue in the UK, where cops aren't usually armed, and the country has a much higher amount of white people.
Some claim the cops here tend to lean left, even by Euro standards - or at least their bosses do.
IMO, it kinda beggars belief that only a few individuals could cover for dozens of alleged assailants, over years.
Actually, similar rape gangs are now all over Europe. Google "Les Tournantes" if you can possible stomach it.
All I get are results relating to the 1988 film.
Nothing like this ever happened in the US. I don't think Europeans realize the difference in our patterns of immigration. We get the best off, most educated people from overseas, former engineers and medical doctors of Iraq and the former Soviet Republics, and refugees and asylum seekers from Central America. We aren't getting flooded by the refugees of Syria. Not all people are the same because they nominally practice a religion practiced by two billion people.
I agree that fears of being labeled "Islamophobic" were relevant and part of the problem for New Atheism, but atheism combined with materialism -- that is to say, the total of denial of the supernatural and the soul -- just isn't ever a winning idea. It only appeals to a certain sort of atypical, more often male, mind. Most people intuitively believe in the supernatural and are interested in exploring it. While they might have an axe to grind against Christianity and might agree with the atheists up to a point, they don't care for the idea that there's no such thing as fortune, karma, Providence, or an afterlife, nor that the creation of the world and the universe were entirely natural events without the involvement of will, intellect, or intent. So while early on they enjoy some of the jabs against Christianity, sooner or later, most people get annoyed with the atheists and want to cut them off.
Also Muslims aren't the only important demographic that's big on religion. It's all well and good when atheists are dunking on the religious white outgroup, but blacks for example are plenty Christian as well.
I feel like this is a major US/Europe difference. Islam is a minor, piddling, almost completely irrelevant force here. Christianity is utterly pervasive. There is simply no reason for American atheists to give a crap about Islam, let alone to fear it. Say what you will about what Patriot Act has done for civil liberties, but the FBI and IC don't fuck around if they so much as catch the slightest whiff you might be sympathetic to any sort of Islamic organization that might have ever helped fund a terrorist act. As a movement atheist myself, who lived most of his earlier life in the epicenter of immigration to the US, which received the bulk of the influx from the collapse of the Soviet Union and instability in the Middle East and South Asia, I never gave the slightest second thought to Islam, and had a whole lot of friends coming from Muslim majority regions, who tended to more often than not become ex-Muslims once here if they were under 40.
This isn't Niger.
All I can say is, well, try it. Go ask Molly Norris - the mind behind "Everyone Draw Muhammad Day". See the way Ayaan Hirsi Ali lives.
This is true, but I thought the bigger point was that white leftists decided they wanted to back Islam (i.e. brown people) more than they wanted to back militant atheists (i.e. mostly white male nerds) and it was white leftists that threw New Atheism under the bus. Though as I posted above, I think that New Atheism had more popularity problems than just Islam.
But the white leftist concern about Islamophobia is more about optics than numbers -- it's about the image of a nerdy white guy making nerdy white arguments about why a brown person's traditional culture is bad and wrong. It's not terribly relevant that there aren't many Muslims in the US, or that US Islam is more assimilated than European Islam. Just as it doesn't matter that there aren't all that many transsexuals.
Try what? I have loudly denounced Islam in public at a university forum where several were trying to convince us they weren't that bad. Nothing happened. But granted, I was purely debating them on the facts of their inaccurate claims about the innocence of their own doctrine, I wasn't intentionally making a mockery of a sacred tenet just to be a dick. I have also fought a war in a Muslim country attempting to subvert the Taliban's attempt at instituting a theocracy. But again, I certainly wasn't trying to tell anyone there they shouldn't be Muslim themselves or their traditions are worthy of being made fun of. There are better and shittier ways of going about this.
At least in the comedian, Bill Maher has been quite vocal about denouncing Muslims and bringing apologists who whine about Islamaphobia onto his show pretty regularly for over 25 years to call them to task, and nothing like this has happened.
I'm sorry that 1 out of 330 million Americans has had to deal with death threats, as if you never receive those from any other dedicated cult like movement.
You can make anything appear like a trend by selectively citing examples. Your Google Trend data isn't this and is worth discussing on its own terms, but a lot of this post is just you overweighing on your personal experiences, whatever caught your interest at the time, etc.
A bunch of people have already pointed out your date error on McCain. George Allen's "macaca" comment got lot of attention in his 2006 Senate race so it wasn't that the media was just uninterested in racist comments around this time. There were specific reasons "gook" wasn't a big issue for McCain in 2008.
As for the IDW and anti-sjws: you cite one article from 2014 and one article from 2018 on a completely different topic (are any of the IDWers even members of the manosphere?) and say there's been some major change. I don't buy it. The core idea of the NYT IDW article--that liberals are suppressing discussion of important ideas by invoking social justice concerns--has been a common one in the media for as long as I can remember. Here's a NYT anti-sjw article from 2014 to pick just one of many examples: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/16/opinion/egan-the-commencement-bigots.html
There is no way to discuss things besides data and personal experience. I use both here. I think the personal experience is a useful supplement to the data, for exactly the reason you point out - it's possible to find single data points that support a false narrative, but living through something gives you a better perspective on it.
I don't disagree in principle. But in this particular argument you are trying to support a big narrative off a very limited collection of data points and your narrow personal experiences (sometimes meaning memories of things it seems you weren't closely involved in) plus lots of speculation and it's just not enough. And my criticism wasn't merely abstract--I gave examples where I think there are additional data points you missed and that change the story substantially.
FWIW, I think that this post contains a lot of assertions that I can't verify from the information provided.
One type of evidence that you use, "here is a google trends graph for a few things, out of the millions of things I could have graphed," seems really flawed. This method doesn't show relative popularity between terms.
I don't think you can put together a History of What Was Popular on the Internet (which is essentially what you're doing, no?) from data as sparse as this. I question a lot of the details, as well as the overall picture.
"living through something gives you a better perspective on it."
This is not necessarily true.
This view of "wokeness as fashion" would explain the otherwise non-obvious role of Hollywood in the wokeness and feminism trends. If anything, the job of Hollywood actors is to be "cool".
What do you see as the role of Hollywood here? My impression is that Hollywood came to the feminism game late - they got dragged into it with #metoo in 2018.
Interesting to note that of the movements you mention, only new atheism has failed to garner corporate endorsement.
Did no corporations threaten states that wrote Intelligent Design into their high school curricula? As I recall, that was the most prominent actual political struggle of the New Atheists.
I think this is entirely a function of Internet power increasing over time; New Atheism dominated the Internet, but people cared less about the Internet then. Nowadays if you dominate the Internet that makes you really important.
Maybe. But atheism was never as "causey" as anti-racism. It wasn't considered a moral failing to be a christian per se (and a moral virtue to be an atheist), so there's not a lot of signalling that can be done with it. With anti-racism, this is considered a moral issue at its very heart, replete with villains that demand scorn ('racists') and victims requiring compassion ('victims of racism' or non-whites generally), which gives corporations something to work with. What exactly would corporate adoption of atheism look like?
Zach Goldberg does a lot of quantitative studies of word usage during the Great Awokening:
https://twitter.com/zachg932?lang=en
The New York Times usage graphs in this article come from another scholar, but I'm not sure if he wants a high profile or not at the present.
why was 10 months chosen?
No reason beyond being a nice round number. Looking at it now, I realize that it doesn't sound round when we measure time in years, but on my spreadsheet, ten cells felt like a nice round number of cells to average.
it is not an ideal choice if you want to smooth for seasonal variation. For example, imgaine a search history for 'xmas', or 'super bowl'.
New Atheism had a lot to do with the born-again George W. Bush's victories in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Also, after 9/11 it was a way to be anti-Islam while claiming to be anti-religion or anti-Christian.
I was very interested and involved with Israel advocacy/politics during the late oughts. I feel like I observed the seeds of what became the "great awokening" much earlier than it entered most people's world. Frankly, I feel like opposition to Israel was one of the first flash points for this development. Fortunately, I believe (likely with 2016 creating new battle grounds) Israel lost its salience in the "anti-Western" fight.
From a similar time period, I really thought the mindset behind the Occupy Wall Street would be more enduring and it really fizzled out. When I think of the people I know who were sympathetic to the movement, in 2021 - I think they would all hold similar views, but the priority has definitely been overtaken by an infinite number of woke-related causes. Of course, the great post-recession economic growth likely had a lot to do with this.
For what it's worth - I think we've already reached peak "woke". I think people often look at recent trends and extrapolate too quickly. I believe we are in the process of starting a new equilibrium on these issues. The spread of a lot of this rhetoric could only grow when people weren't familiar with it. To be specific, nobody wants to be seen an soft on racism or injustice, so there was a long period of time where those unacquainted with the movement would be silent or go along with it because they thought it was innocuous. By 2021, every single person, no matter how "online" they are, is familiar with wokism. I am not trying to express my personal thoughts - I truly believe most people in the West do not support most of the popular Woke talking points and have started responding accordingly.
I think it's also definitely likely that much of the outpouring of support for Black Lives Matter in 2020 was at least in part influenced by sublimated tension from the pandemic living situations we were all in (and probably much of the backlash has this same source). Over the next year, as most people in the rich world move out of pandemic mode, a lot of this force will weaken.
Interesting to note that the Great Awokening seems to have pushed not only Occupy Wall Street but also anti-Israel sentiment out of left-wing activism at around the same time. I hadn't realised that this had happened.
Someone more conspiratorially-minded than myself would see this as Not A Coincidence, and evidence that the Great Awokening was engineered by a certain group of people who are fans of both Israel and international finance.
There is also the phenom of young pro-Israel activist adopting woke language (“the establishment of israel was an act of radical decolonization and the first successful movement of an indigenous people reclaiming their land“)
I’ve seen those attempts but their success will be limited because Jews white and Palestinians POC. I know it’s more complicated than that in the real world, but the people this kind of rhetoric are trying to reach do not care.
I think there’s also a huge difference between pro-BLM and anti-police corruption/brutality sentiments. I think the latter made the former appear bigger than it was.
Very interesting but I think I disagree with the final section. Social fashion doesn't work like the mechanism of a clock and things like covid, Floyd and measurement issues as young and old use different social media (and we are no longer young).
As far as invading traditional institutions, that mostly misses the point. It's not about the people. The NYT reporting staff hasn't turned over thaf much in the past 15 years and I bet the new hires for feminism are now reporting on racial issues. I don't know what the next fashion will be but I'm skeptical you retain cultural dominance just because you got some people in a few positions of leadership places. They were never loyal to the idea anyway and will change allegiance with the next big thing.
Progressives' willingness to use social power to punish opponents within institutions they control, & a resulting reluctance on the part of such opponents to openly speak out, might persist much longer in the political culture war, even if the specific ideas the progressives treat as unquestionable change from time to time.
Your point on 4chan feels spot on to me. My gut is that we underweight the impact that the ooze of 4chan memes and ideas has had on the last decade of geopolitics. I really don't think we get a Trump victory without 4chan.
The Goons IMO have more influence than the Chans, in the parlance. I don't think we get a Trump victory without the Goon memes and ideas either. I think it's a combination of the two. Or I guess, more specifically, the battle between the hierarchy and the anon created the environment that allowed Trump to win. (Without Goon culture, I think the Clinton campaign is run better, does more to win the swing states and less to create an us vs. them culture war climate)
I've always thought the perfect example of the so-called "power" of internet feminism was Donglegate. A woman at a tech conference got annoyed with the guys in front of her constantly making dick jokes (during a presentation at a professional conference), and used the method established by the convention to ask for help (the convention, for some godforsaken reason, had made the ONLY way of doing this was to send them a tweet). Other people saw this tweet, starting mocking the men, and they basically became the whipping boys of the internet for a few weeks. Almost certainly made them miserable for a while, but they also had thousands of people commiserating and supporting them, and they suffered absolutely zero real-world consequences because of it. Their companies proudly came out and said they stood behind their employees.
The woman who started all this with that original tweet, though? She was fired, explicitly because of this, and nobody would hire her again, because she was too 'controversial'. Remember, all she did was follow the explicitly laid out rules of the convention, and her life was utterly ruined. Not just that, the whole incident was used, for YEARS, as proof of how ridiculous internet feminists were, how they were mad with power. Scott himself even used it in his old blog as an example of how they used internet outrage to solve their problems and try to get other people fired, a pretty prime case of irony, since this was almost the exact opposite of that, in every respect.
Pretty much every claim relevant to evaluating the situation here is inaccurate.
1) The conference provided multiple avenues for contacting staff regarding these and other issues, none of which were "tweet a picture of the offenders at them": https://web.archive.org/web/20130531065904/https://us.pycon.org/2013/about/code-of-conduct/
2) One of the two people pictured was fired, which is not "absolutely zero real-world consequences".
I think your facts might be a generous towards the feminist.
Employers don’t love candidates who have a history of complaint writing over trivial matters.
Maybe this is a good case to demonstrate that cancel culture can cut both ways.
Wow, people are still fighting donglegate after all these years?
Two innocent men whose only crime was offending a feminist with stupid jokes about “forking” and “‘big’ dongles.” Is this something to freak out about? What they did wasn't a crime, and what she did was a wild overreaction. It perfectly encapsulated the feminist philosophy of being humorless bullies. Don't believe me? Her own words:
"They started talking about “big” dongles. I could feel my face getting flustered.
Was this really happening?
How many times do I have to deal with this?
I was telling myself if they made one more sexual joke, I’d say something.
The it happened….The trigger."
A feminist was triggered. That's what it was all about.
Nothing you said here denies anything that the previous person claimed.
The point is just that evaluations of "cancellations" seem to be very unreliable. All three people involved in this story seem to have suffered, but none of the three was as clearly materially harmed as anyone claims.
Nobody ends up suffering from this stuff. James Damore is doing perfectly well as a senior engineer at a startup. Justine Sacco is Chief Marketing Officer at a Fortune 500. Brendan Eich is CEO of Brave. You get fired from one job and you move on, which happens to a ton of people for a ton of reasons.
The only ones suffering permanent consequences are actual criminals like Epstein, Crosby, and Weinstein.
Celebrities are a different story. They've disappeared from public view almost overnight due to various scandals for as long as celebrities have existed, totally independent of any larger cultural fervor for cancelling people. Though they still usually make comebacks. Even Mel Gibson is getting work again.
And Dalton Trumbo had dozens of screenwriting gigs in the 1950s, so nobody really suffered from that silly "Hollywood Blacklist", right? Much ado about nothing.
I have no clue who that is, but looked him up and apparently he had to work under assumed names in secret for the rest of his career. How on earth is that equivalent to getting promoted to a better job at a better company in public under your real name? Shit, Justine Sacco was hired back by another property of the same parent company. And sorry, apparently she is Chief Communications Officer of the Match Group, not Chief Marketing Officer.
If you think this is terrible nonetheless, fine, but people in this thread and many others are running around seemingly terrified that their careers and lives are going to be totally over. I keep seeing the word "destroyed." Suffering public embarrassment for a few months and losing one job is not having your life destroyed. It's not the equivalent to French revolutionaries pulling out the guillotines that you people are acting like it is.
Stop being so damn scared.
Quit your job right now, and commit to not working for pay for the next six months. Then you'll have earned the credibility to be taken seriously on this. And you'll have had a nice long vacation.
Otherwise, stop being so damn arrogant and obnoxious.
From what I can gather people who are already famous and have a platform do okay with personal cancellation for the reasons Kenny points out. However, less famous people tend to be screwed. I bet they benefit from anonymity, though.
Among other things, this post really clarified for me the character arc of Stormfront in the TV show The Boys. (Spoilers ahead for those who haven’t seen the show, though how spoilery can it really be when a character is literally named STORMFRONT?) I was initially confused about why the show introduced a hip, ultra-woke young feminist (we like those, right...?) but then made her not only the number one bad guy but an actual 100% swastikas-and-great-race-theory Nazi! But that choice makes so much sense in the context of the shift in Internet attention/obsession from feminism to “white feminism” to racism. My guess is this makes perfect sense to an audience of a certain age/cultural affiliation in today’s time, but will be unintelligible to audiences in 10-20 years. And now I’m wondering if I’ve seen other character portrayals in popular media from other eras that reveal analogous cultural norm shifts and just completely missed the context...
Do you think the writers of the boys were saying something about social movements (woke = nazi-ism? Or woke -> nazi-ism? Or nazi-ism -> woke?)?
My impression was that she just knew how to adapt with the times because she was relatively smart. Jump on the current social trend to motivate her own. She could have been a woke maoist or woke pro-england-anti-american or woke pro-ending-the-world, or woke pro-big oil, but woke pro-nazi was the easiest enemy to have.
The internet and mainstream are more mixed up now. The mainstream absorbs internet culture much faster, and also tries to control and influence it (through pressure on companies that centralize the discourse). So something has to give. Either the mainstream starts to change faster and also follows the next trend away from wokeness, or people flock away from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and all of these "platforms" that mainstream controls more and more and thinks of them as representative of internet culture. Or not. Meh
Alternatively, maybe new atheism, new feminism, new socialism, new anti racism actually won?
Not won in the sense that they demolished their enemy and drove them to the hills, that obviously hasn't happened. But won in the sense that they managed to shift social norms considerably and ran against diminishing returns. I remember Dawkins arguing that being an atheist was considered a greater fault than just about anything else. That isn't the case anymore. The wage gap certainly exists, but cat calling mostly does not, neither does slut shaming. UBI is seriously talked about in political and economical circles. And, you know, a cop actually got convicted of killing someone on the job.
There has absolutely been progress on all these things. But not as much as you suggest.
Being an atheist is still the thing that Americans are most likely to say they will vote against you for (apart from being a socialist): https://news.gallup.com/poll/285563/socialism-atheism-political-liabilities.aspx
Cat calling and slut shaming absolutely still exist (at least, in places where construction work has resumed and women are walking in the street without masks).
And yes, UBI is talked about (but still not done) and one cop got convicted (but how many others?)
> Being an atheist is still the thing that Americans are most likely to say they will vote against you for (apart from being a socialist)
Out of a very strangely selected set of descriptions where "socialist" is the only one that is actually a political description.
I mean, it's not a very strangely selected set of descriptions. What major demographic categories that people talk about are left out here, other than majority ones like "white" or "christian"?
Cat calling and slut shaming is associated with the lower class and the lower class is immune from much of what the SJWs can do.
Slut shaming occurs at all class levels.
But yes, the point that cat calling is immune to this particular set of cultural pressures shows that the movements didn't win as much as that person had thought.
Most cat calling that is tolerated appears to be intersectional cat-calling. That’s not changing anytime soon. In my view none should be tolerated, though as always we get into definitional issues. Of course, the existence of the wage gap beyond possibly $5 in either direction depending on the field is very much in dispute.
Re: 4chan, I never have really bought the "ironic racism -> true racism" pipeline, and have been thinking about it a bit. I do post on forums with actual, sincere racists, and ironic racist jokes, and there are two major factors here that lead me to believe that this is not the actual effect in play:
1. If you post on these kinds of boards, you can *very very easily* tell the difference between the ironic racism and the regular racism. I post regularly on a fairly high-traffic, very low-moderation board with an active userbase (as in, users online at any one time) in the hundreds. Some people make racist posts that are unironic (I remember vividly one Australian complaining about aboriginals huffing gas fumes causing them to change the mix and raise gas prices) and some people make "racist" posts that are clearly not representing any actual racial animus (referring to an upper manager praising their "heroic" finance department as a "chinese jew woman boss"). If you have experience with these posts, it is very very easy to differentiate the person lolling at a trans man who, post-HRT, can no longer bear to ask his female friends "is your sister coming" and getting a ten minute rambling digression that doesn't answer the question, and the person who is saying "I want to slam a pickaxe into a woman's head".
2. I *have* seen a similar infection play its course in communities that very clearly are not about ironic racism: r/stupidpol is literally a left-wing Marxist sub for people who are basically anti-SJW, and it has a major right wing infection that they try to compensate for but continues because it's one of the few subreddits where you can talk about culture war issues without the subreddit being shut down or being banned by mods for wrongthink.
I think the *actual* effect mechanism is a long-term witch refugee crisis. If you like forums which are low moderation environments, where you can pretty much shoot the shit without worrying about the moderators coming in because you call the route to properly take valuable materials in a video game the "Jewperhighway", then you will inevitably have the lunatic right wingers ("gas the Jews" types, as you put it elsewhere) come in because they have been banned from every other fucking website on the internet, and even if they are on those other websites, they will not post about being lunatic right wingers on them (because it is against the rules), only on your website (because, even if you don't like racists, you think it is more important to maintain the low moderation environment than to get rid of the racists).
4chan, also, isn't *that* right wing. /pol/ is, but people on the other boards hate them. For example, on /tg/, the term "/pol/tard" gets used about twice as often as the term libtard, and at a quick skim of recent posts via desuarchive (compare https://desuarchive.org/tg/search/text/%2Fpol%2Ftard/ and https://desuarchive.org/tg/search/text/libtard), the uses of /pol/tard are much more hostile than libtard.
I don't have experience in those forums, so I trust your overall impression that it's easy to tell apart the real racist comments to the ironic ones. From my experience in subreddits where people from opposing tribes coexist, it does happens very often it happens that I (and others), can't tell if a comment is just extremely stupid but earnest, or ironic - unless it has a "/s" mark on it. When I read Scott, these were the type of racist comments I was picturing (or worse, just trolling comments where the objective is to get someone to react and take it seriously for no other reason than to mess with people, the more real you sound the better, regardless of what you really believe.)
I definitely know what you're talking about, but I suspect the only reason that ambiguity doesn't exist on echo chamber subreddits is the same "ironic/extremely stupid" post is just obviously ironic/extremely stupid, since there are no right/left-wingers there. If it wasn't posted on r/politics, "BRO come on now; the UV lamps were to detect the secret Trump watermarks. Not the bamboo." might be a completely plausible right-wing idiot posting, but because it's in an echo chamber the prior for it being a left-winger making fun of right-wingers has an extremely high prior.
> Some people make racist posts that are unironic (I remember vividly one Australian complaining about aboriginals huffing gas fumes causing them to change the mix and raise gas prices)
Uhh, you know that's true, right? Well, they claim the government subsidized it and they didn't raise prices, but all the rest is true. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4016072/
Just because something is true doesn't stop the fact that it's racist to say it.
What’s the racist part? Resenting aboriginals for causing a change in the petrol?
Wow I haven’t heard someone actually say that openly before. First time for everything.
Oh, I fully believe that it's true; I have no particular reason to doubt the specific story. However, it was fairly clear from the posts in question that he believed that the Aboriginals in question should have been allowed to die so that he could continue to pay lower gas prices, because he does not like Aboriginals. So, it was racist.
I would agree, though I think the more typical opinion is that STATING that this group is more likely to make this type of bad decision is itself racist, even if in fact true. Which would put the speaker in the weird position of effectively having to KILL members of a racial group in order to NOT be racist against them.
Maybe if being old was cooler than being young, the cycles would stop. Now, the new cooler young people adopt whatever ideas and causes to signal their coolness. But after some years, the ideas get sticky and become part of identities, and brains harden. If being older was the cooler thing to be, older people still wouldn't be constantly changing, and younger people would catch up (instead of saying stuff like "ok, boomer" to signal that older people know nothing because they are old or something).
Humm, isn't it cooler to be older at least the many first years of school? I wonder if anything would be significantly different if kids thought the older kids were less cool than themselves, and the kids one year below were cooler.
Coolness is probably most closely correlated to sexual attractiveness, so early twenties are probably "peak cool"?
I do need to say this about Richard Spencer - he and his collection of tiki-torch carrying nitwits aren't scary, not to anyone who's seen the real thing. Real Nazis - yes, they are still around, please google "Herbert Schweiger" - would eat this guy for breakfast.
His European counterparts are a lot more serious. The US’s far right is disorganized and fairly tame as far right movements go
This is another America/Europe difference. Our Nazis have always been laughable pansies. It's the KKK that is legitimately terrifying.
Did you consider that another reason why a particular issue might fall out of fashion is because one side obtains total victory? Female suffrage is no longer a remotely salient `culture war' issue. Nor is gay marriage. Might some of your examples fall in this category?
Which examples have gotten everything they want?
It's understood that you don't say anything against feminism, including suggesting that there might be false accusations of sexual assault, and keep your white collar job. Same for opposing Black Lives Matter, or Pride. It's understood that there is nowhere you can ask women out (unless you're Chad); you just swipe on Tinder and (unless you're Brad, Pitt that is) pray someone accidentally mis-swipes right on you. You certainly don't mention blacklisting; they may blacklist you but you can't use the term, it's Just Wrong. Oh and best keep all those pronouns straight, it's just common decency after all.
People claim in here they can tell the difference between parody and serious on 4Chan, but I can't even tell if this is parody.
Obergefell isn't everything that gay and bi activists could possibly want but it was their biggest, most legible goal. Moreover, the opposition conceeded in a way that didn't happen with cases like Roe vs Wade.
So, you're basically saying that the only ones who can put us out of SJW misery are socialists?
*proceeds to scream incoherently for ten minutes*
Re argument culture versus echo culture, something was lost in the transition. I remember forums before then, where atheists and Christians could argue over politics in one thread and then bond over their shared love for whatever hobby or cultural artifact in another. Despite all the viciousness you could still see people on the other side as human beings.
Now echo culture is universal, and if someone disagrees with you on an important issue they're irredeemably evil and should be banned. And this applies even to groups discussing apolitical topics. SSC/ACX is one of the few places where diverse views are welcome, and you can talk to someone on the other side of the divide at all. (At least, someone who admits to being on the other side... there are probably a lot of problematic people hiding their views to stay in the good graces of their hosts elsewhere.)
Maybe social media platforms where your account follows you around everywhere accelerated this shift from the days of independent forums, although LiveJournal was around in those days and it wasn't this bad.
I think it's the rise of single-use discussion areas.
In older days, you would see the same people in the hobby boards, the politics boards, the technical boards. A BBS would grow a community like this.,
Reddit has all those topics, but it is so huge that you don't encounter people on multiple subreddits. Even moderately popular subreddits you can't really recognize people because the population noticeably changes throughout the day.
I was a movement atheist deep into evolutionary biology and debate forums in 2004 and ended up in a four-year relationship with a girl who was both Catholic and believed in Astrology. When we first met, we had endless email threads I can still find in my achives going back and forth on our reasoning, days, weeks, with no insults thrown, no hard feelings, and we stayed together all the way until she moved away to try and become a primatologist of all things. Debate all day. Fuck all night. Whatever happened to the world, right?
I think you're right about half of this: the left is trying to outcompete itself on adopting the most extreme views to signal the most care for the most marginalized people. I don't entirely hate this: there are worse things to compete about than empathy. But like with all cliques it becomes more and more exclusionary until it's no longer about whatever it's about, it's just about keeping up with the Joneses. counter-signaling becomes valuable.
The part where I think you're wrong - dangerously so, is in the response. It's not that MRAs appeared to combat feminism, the whole thing culminated in Gamergate, and when feminism lost mainstream credibility, MRAs faded too.
It's that there is a group of disaffected, idle, unemployable (or at least un-advanceable), unmarriageable young men in this country. They flit from reactionary ideology to reactionary ideology, searching for a way to give their lives meaning. They mainly want to get a rise, or at least get *noticed* by mainstream culture.
So they join MRA/PUA groups - until 90% of them realize that the leadership of those groups just truly, deeply hates women and literally wants them to die. They don't want to be part of that so they go on to join Gamergate. When the doxxing and the threats start having significant consequences, 90% of them eff off. Then they move on to Milo and his shared appearances with Spencer. They think it's fun to get a rise out of the overly sanctimonious by appropriating nazi symbolism. Then Charlottesville happens and they suddenly realize that they've joined an actual white supremacist movement. They leave in droves: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/brotherhood-of-losers/544158/
They support Trump because he angers people but then people storm the Capitol and the boys back off. But every day some of them become radicalized - by Q, or by Spencer before him, or by redpill before that.
Internet culture is two groups - one looking to control all discourse, and the other looking to be heard by any means necessary. And more and more this fight isn't taking place online.
I think they’re just being angsty young men.
The problem of how societies deal with angsty young men has been around for awhile. It’s not going away.
Much of this seems right.
But I think it's amusing to note that this comment says "feminism lost mainstream credibility", while just a few comments up someone says that feminism has achieved total victory, because "It's understood that you don't say anything against feminism, including suggesting that there might be false accusations of sexual assault, and keep your white collar job."
My impression is that the truth is somewhere in between. Feminism has continued muddling on in the same sort of semi-prestige semi-disrepute that it has had for the entire past century.
Probably an inelegant way of saying what I was trying to say which was more like: "people got sick of folks talking about feminism and stopped listening to them or discussing them, even though they continued to hold significant power." Less "feminism lost credibility" than "talking about feminism got old, and don't we all mostly agree anyway?"
It's been almost 20 years. I have trouble believing these are the same people. Surely most of them eventually grew up and got real jobs and even got married. How unfuckable can you seriously be? Toothless methheads living out of Wal-Mart parking lots are still filling up trailers with babies.
I swear I've seen data on the epidemic of unemployed or underemployed, depressed, angry (20-something in 2010, 30-something today) men in the U.S. but I can't seem to dig it up now, so I'll just snark: The methheads go outside sometimes.
Sounds like one way to tone down the current discourse around race would be to give black people worse Internet connections.
I don't understand the subtext of your comment. Would you care to elaborate?
Scott wrote that there was less antiracism content online when fewer black people had good Internet connections, so it would make sense if there would be less of that content today if not as many of them had good Internet connections.
Alternatively, if white people had worse internet connections that would work just fine too.
I buy entirely the notion that these waves follow the same laws as fashion in clothing. In his novel, "The Joke", Milan Kundera describes the passion for socialism among youth in Czechoslovakia as having been nothing more than the fashion of the times. Eventually, the fad passes, and people who used to care passionately about socialism no longer do because it falls out of fashion.
But if political fashions follow the same psychological laws, so to speak, as for fashion in clothes, shouldn't we give up on trying to predict what's next? The trendsetters will set the trends, but those trendsetters will be young people we haven't heard of yet. Seems the best we could do is spot the next trend early in its development, as opposed to predicting it before it starts.
There's something similar in this comment to Karl Popper's claim in "The Poverty of Historicism". We can't predict the future of society, because the future of society depends on developments in science, and if we could predict the developments in science, it wouldn't be science any more. But similarly, the future of society depends on developments in fashion, and if we could predict the developments in fashion, it wouldn't be fashion any more. (But the reason it wouldn't be science if it could be predicted and the reason it wouldn't be fashion if it could be predicted are somewhat different. Both require novelty though.)
I've discovered this blog quite recently so missed your writing on these subjects before, but I really find your summary of the feminist blogs of that time seems to not really get where they were even coming from.
Virtually all of your summaries of their points seem loaded and not really accurate (for instance, I see "Sealioning" as having more to do with relentlessly and tediously pursing an unwelcome argument and feeling that your civil tone entitles you to do that, and JAQing off as the bad faith tactic of packaging opinions you don't want to outright defend in questions).
I also don't think the concept of creepy sexual approaches is that hard to understand even if it's hard to articulate concrete rules, and it mostly just has to do with making an effort to and being able to gauge when a woman will welcome it. Which is hard for some men, and that sucks, but I guess most dating is on apps now that make it much simpler.
There may have been lots wrong with those blogs and lots of overreaching as there tends to be on the internet, but this post reads like you got so invested in these arguments you're not able to even present the other side in a way that it would recognize as an accurate depiction of its views, which seems like a real departure from your usual style. Either that or you and they were really talking past each other and you don't get their point of view at all.
I always just thought “creepy” got used a lot because it’s kinda the only word women can use about men that’s uniquely pejorative to their gender.
I haven't really seen "sealioning" in the wild (except indirectly from people criticizing the comic), but "JAQing off" is fairly common in conspiracy/anti-conspiracy-theory debates to describe that type of bad-faith tactic - "I'm not *saying* that the world is run by lizard people, I'm just asking, isn't it strange how so many members of the royal family look like lizards?"
I think the problem with the Internet Creep Debate was pretty simple.
1) Women writing on the internet had an ascertainment bias towards negative experiences getting approached by men (and much of the writing was vague and stuff probably got lost in translation, meaning it was harder to glean useful information from those accounts.)
2) Men reading on the internet had an ascertainment bias towards negative stories written by women about those approaches (and some of them probably also had a confirmation bias when reading.)
(By the way, such a bias is pretty common, which is why when you read Google reviews of a hospital or a doctor they have tons of horror stories. Only the angry people write about stuff.)
---
The end result was that a lot of very online men internalized the idea that women do not like being approached period.
I think there might genuinely have been a stage in the late 2010s when there was a genuine increase in the amount of creepy hit-on attempts. This was the golden age of PUA and "game" blogs, many of which tended to promote messages like "It's a numbers game, just go and ask out as many women as you can" and "You gotta work on your day game, man! Go to the supermarket and approach ten women this afternoon! Don't be afraid of rejection!"
A few tens of thousands of low-status males, unafraid of rejection, suddenly asking out ten women a day regardless of the appropriateness of the situation is probably enough to significantly change the number of inappropriate pick-up attempts going on.
I knew some guys into this PUA stuff, I actually don't think PUA was ever that big a deal. Furthermore the majority of these men just read some stuff and sat on their computers...not approaching anybody at all! Kind of sad actually.
I actually don't blame feminists for the "internet creep debates." I knew quite a few normie women, even conservative women, who would (IRL) complain about creeps. Some of the accounts they gave involved genuinely creepy men. Other accounts...the men may indeed have been creepy, but the accounts didn't convey that.
I don't think I have ever heard an account of a woman being neutral or happy with being approached.
I agree that "daygame" promoted cringe and frankly bizarre behavior. Accosting women in a grocery store is...odd.
But on the other hand, I remember a discussion with an avowed feminist who did not think it acceptable to be approached even at a bar or a club.
Odd people on all sides, it seems.
>A few tens of thousands of low-status males, unafraid of rejection, suddenly asking out ten women a day regardless of the appropriateness of the situation is probably enough to significantly change the number of inappropriate pick-up attempts going on.
This simply doesn't ring true. Pretty much by definition low-status males are not going to be unafraid of rejection. They are going to fear it the most. To be clear, we are not talking about status among middle-aged men where career success accounts for a lot, we are talking about young men whose status in the dating market is mostly determined by their confidence with women, so it is basically a tautology that only relatively high-status males are unafraid of rejection.
Nor are pick-up techniques a "numbers game". It's about learning to flirt in a manner that women actually like. That's the whole point.
The "creeps" were almost never the PUAs but the shy guys with low self-esteem who lacked the aplomb to come off smoothly but instead, upon finally working up the courage to ask a woman out, come off as creepy, meek losers.
You could say that there was a Mathew Effect in a lot of feminist writing about guys who made socially awkward pick-up attempts. Those men who start off with confidence are more successful with women and as a result gain more confidence with them, whereas the losers have bad experiences, their self-esteem falls further and along with it their odds of success. All the socially awkward pick up attempts that feminists liked to write about, like elevatorgate, were the meek attempts of those in the latter group.
The irony is that the feminists should have probably recommended that men read more PUA blogs so they could learn how to interact with women in a less creepy manner.
Internet Feminism is a sort of trigger for Scott. It's very hard for him to be objective about it.
"How did the counterculture eventually win, and the patriotic/Christian amalgam civil religion of the 1950s - 1990s eventually collapse?"
French intellectuals mostly believe the counterculture won the culture war way back in 1968 and what has followed is a working out of the implications of 1968. For example, in America, feminism was reborn in 1969, as was gay liberation, environmentalism, affirmative action and much else.
But then, what caused 1968?
The most striking suggestion I've seen is that it was the result of Vatican II in the early 1960s. In 1960, the Catholic Church was riding high doing what it had long done, with an Irish Catholic even being elected President of the United States. Suddenly, the new Pope launched a conclave to modernize the Church, what my correspondent labeled in tennis terminology an "unforced error" on the part of the Vatican.
By removing the chief institutional weight in favor of reaction, Vatican II shifted the balance point of everything to the left. For example, Hollywood had long been intimidated by the power of the Catholic clergy to order their parishioners to boycott movies of which they disapproved: thus the saying that American movies of the mid-20th Century were made by Jews about Protestants for Catholics.
Catholic censorship soon vanished after Vatican II and movies had changed dramatically by the end of the 1960s.
I think television caused 1968, just as social media caused the present moment.
"I'm not sure when racial issues completely eclipsed gender-related ones, but it must have happened by 2016."
The 2017 Women's march was the largest single day protest in US history. It seems weird to not even mention it here and doesn't fit this timeline very well. I do think that by the end of the Trump admin the 'torch had been passed', but I think the early Trump era was still very much about gender issues.
What did they march for? I don't know and neither do you.
I do find it humorous that shortly thereafter the pussy hats were banned due to SJWism. So those women who marched wearing the hats were retroactively all bigots.
Where were they "banned"? Or is this another instance of intentional inaccuracy for exaggerative effect?
My brief history of Feminism's rise and fall and rise etc etc.
Feminism was a powerful force in the English-speaking Protestant world 110 years ago, winning two huge triumphs right after WWI: women's suffrage and prohibition. The former didn't have much immediate effect, but the latter was seen as a huge mistake, especially artists, immigrants, Catholics, and Jews. The culturally dominant intellectuals and entertainers of the mid-20th Century, such as H.L. Mencken, blamed women for prohibition, so feminism became unfashionable for about a half century.
Finally, feminism came roaring back in 1969 along with so many other post-1968 movements. This time it was hugely and rapidly successful at opening up jobs to women, so much so that by the late 1970s it had largely won.
At that point, feminism slowly, quietly declined in fashion, until it was revived in October 1991 by Democrats to keep Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court in the Anita Hill brouhaha.
But as I pointed out in December 1992, if sexual harassment is to be defined as making any unwanted advances, surely President Elect Bill Clinton will eventually run into a sexual harassment scandal even though, from all I've heard from people in Arkansas, a strikingly high percentage of his advances turned out to be wanted.
Indeed, Paula Jones' sexual harassment suit against Clinton led him to lie under oath about Monica Lewinsky (for which he was disbarred), which led to his impeachment. At that point, organized feminism backed Clinton for reasons. But it was all pretty humiliating to feminists and they were not very fashionable up through 2011, especially under Obama, who resented his single mother choosing her career over taking care of him. In general, the first three years of Obama's first term were rather conservative, other than the gay marriage push. As I predicted in my 2008 book on Obama, he would play it safe on social issues until his second term.
But then in early 2012, the Obama re-election campaign re-launched feminism, arguing that Republicans would ban contraception and promoting their Life of Julia ad about how being a single mother married to the state was cool.
With Obama safely re-elected and Democrats feeling triumphalist over how the growth of diversity would permanently crush Republicans, the Obama Administration and the prestige press launched various Great Awokening campaigns. For example, in 2013 the White House, Democrats in Congress, and the New York Times worked together to promote a moral panic over Rape on Campus. This led, among much else, to the 2014 Rolling Stone hate hoax about fraternity initiation ritual gang rape on broken glass, because who could possibly doubt such a story that confirmed everything we'd been hearing from the White House and the press for the last two years?
But feminism got squeezed by BLM wanting blacks to be the undisputed top dog among the diverse. And while #MeToo was big for awhile, eventually it was noticed that most of the bad guys it was exposing, like Harvey Weinstein, were Democrats.
And transgenderism emerged from 2013 onward and undercut traditional lesbian feminism, telling tomboys that the problem was less that men were unfair to women than that they were really men.
So, feminism has gone thru a rough patch recently. But now the Democrats have control of the White House again and the media is more party lineish than ever. So it would hardly be surprising if feminism makes yet another comeback, probably under black female leadership.
It kind of sounds like you're saying feminism is a tool of the patriachy, which would be kind of wonderfully meta if true.
I've seen a lot of feminists who have no problem using "Patriarchal" standards to their benefit. Most often, the idea that men have a moral obligation to protect and support women, and the idea that men who talk about their issues are whiny, possibly even dangerous.
Sometimes this is coming from feminists who also claim to be fighting for men and/or against "toxic masculinity". EG http://archive.is/8YDUI , or feminists defending that surreal Gillette ad.
I think Anita Bryant and the Republicans's reversal on the ERA was a much louder and more sudden death for feminism in the late 70s/early 80s than your version of the story mentions. And the discussion of the past decade or two seems not to line up with my experience.
Feminist groups online have generally pivoted to focus on trans issues. I think this is the missing part of the analysis. I was a reader of the feminist website The Toast until it was shut down. The commentariat migrated to a group Slack. The Slack focused on all women's issues at first, but, as time went on, it became more and more focused on trans issues. Eventually, it got to the point where members were forbidden from using terms as trivial as "lady parts" to refer to their own body parts, to saying more weighty things such as "cis women are oppressed differently from trans women, and their experiences are not always equivalent." A lot of women fled the group. It eventually tore itself to pieces over moderation disputes. I have not found any feminist spaces in the last few years that do not center trans issues. Groups that do focus on cis women's issues are often banned from their platforms. I think this is why you see the decline in the use of feminism terms.
That is the conspicuous absence from this essay; it's not that feminism went away, but that it got colonized (along with gay & lesbian movements) by transgender activists who insist that everything center on them. They're even colonizing the anti-racist movement too (there are "Black Trans Lives Matter" rallies). The feminists who refuse to go along with that are now slurred as "TERFs", and the fights there are some of the hottest battles of the culture wars now.
The Reddit TERFs fled to https://saidit.net/s/LGBDropTheT/ when they were banned. Saidit is a free speech Reddit clone. In an act of supreme irony, the moment they arrived on the new site...they immediately implemented a censorship regime and state so clearly in the sidebar. There was a lovely kerfluffle with the admins after that. They weren't in favor of free speech, only their own speech.
I admire your stamina in attempting to analyze each of these rage-fads on its own merits. I certainly wouldn't have that energy. These all strike me as epiphenomena, sparks thrown off by our millenarial culture -- we're *always* discovering some new epic urgent Manichaen struggle and flinging ourselves into it. It's been going on for 2+ centuries. Once we burn a few witches we get over it (until the next burningly urgent crusade presents itself).
What your describing sounds a lot like the premise of the book The Rebel Sell. Back then the big thing was corporate globalism rather than racism, but I'm sure that will come back eventually too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_Sell
(This part is wild speculation)
I think the reason we aren't seeing a new movement replacing New Racism is because the energy that would have gone to New Replacement is instead going to corona virus related battles. Since everybody from the left believes it is a temporary thing, it isn't able to replace New Racism. But it can suck some of the energy from it and it's replacements. But I think it can count as a cultural war since it shows the same dogmaism the other cultural wars have. It seems it is not enough to follow just the letter and spirit of the rules from health officials, but you need to default to liking the lockdown as well. You can get away from it with a well-crafted post that shows you're still on the right team, but forgetting to do that is going to draw criticism.
I noticed in Canada that the left jumped immediately criticizing the right for refusing to wear masks, thinking it's a hoax, thinking it is an elaborate scheme to implement socialism. I also noticed, that this happened before the Canadian right adopted the ideas. They did get there a month or two later, but initially the Canadian right did go along with government guidance. It was only after it was clear that this was going to be a political issue in Canada two that they began denying it.
That looks like culture war to me.
(Less speculative stuff)
> And so I predicted that hip young people would go far-right
> ...
> But overall I was wrong.
Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations which he talks about in The Righteous Mind has become my hammer to all political nails.
I think it should have led this prediction to seem unlikely since hip young people would still prioritize the care/harm moral and thus you should expect them to come up with some new leftist thing. Of course, I never came to that conclusion when reading your Right is the New Left post. I think I was just hopeful it could be true and that some sort of bleeding-heart-libertarian thing could be next.
I wonder if this cycle of culture wars is due to how singly focus the US left is on care/harm. This might be a surprise to those who haven't read the book (it was a surprise to me) but Haidt states that the US left is the most extreme rhetorically: they focus on care/harm to the exclusion of other values moreso than the left in the rest of The West. I wonder if they are pushing so hard on just care/harm that things start to get weird. I think this is similar to how if you pushed on just utilitarianism, things start to get weird.
Yeah, covid is the culture war for now, but I don't see how it can sustain itself once America is mostly immune.
I daresay that everyone trying to make their preferred issue the next CW is looking for ways in which the pandemic vindicates their worldview. The socialists have the most obvious route here with concepts like 'k-shaped recovery'.
Thank you for being civil on the internet since at least 2010.
But as for the alleged rise and fall of online culture, or the Social Justice manifestation thereof, I don't see how you can do this sort of analysis without also including LGBT activism. The simple model is that LG activism had its own time in the sun, as big in its day as atheism and not too far behind feminism and antiracism, and than now transgender activism is working up steam to become the Next Big Socially Just Thing when antiracism runs its course. Transgender activism gives Social Justice another four years as Champions of the Oppressed, which should be enough time to figure out what comes next. I can only guess as to what that will be.
The simple model is almost certainly wrong, but it also almost certainly isn't made up out of thin air and to be ignored as irrelevant. It has certainly played a significant role in the recent past of Social Justice, and may play a role in its future, so I want to think some more about that before I just write off Social Justice on the grounds that people have gotten bored with atheism and feminism and are getting bored with antiracism so that's the end of it. And, being selfish and lazy, "I want to think some more" comes with a big side order of "I want you to think some more and write it up".
I think "woke" might be nearing the end of its lifespan. I see it in the Wall Street Journal almost every day, usually by middle-aged conservatives griping about some trivial culture war issue. It's gotten to the point where I reflexively roll my eyes every time I see or hear the word.
Well, I tried to read all the comments but at a certain point I can use the time to finish reading them or write a response. So apologies if someone mentioned this (Steve didn't, which surprised me).
So first--and this is probably obvious, but no one has mentioned it--there's a whole hell of a lot to online culture, and this is just a tiny piece of it. It's a tiny piece that now has taken over elite discourse, which for years it hadn't, but it's still a tiny bit.
I've been online for 24 years, and for most of that time I was blissfully unaware of all of this. I was in Political Internet, and there was almost no overlap. You could be happily in political internet and never know about gamergate, atheism, or all the various histories mentioned here. Hell, you could be in Knitter Internet or Cat Video Internet or Adopting Korean Children Internet and you wouldn't have to care the tiniest bit about any of this. I've been reading Steve Sailer for years with all the HBD stuff and we never touched any of this crap. Kevin Drum. National Review. Salon and Slate, back when they existed. In fact, the reason that a lot of newspaper media sites ended comments was because people segmented the threads into what they were interested in, and there were approximately a billion sites that were blissfully clueless about all this crap.
I don't have a narrow focus. I read a lot of random stuff even if I don't converse on it. And yet I didn't learn of many of the things here until relatively recently. (It is utterly hysterical, not in a good way, that Scott Aaronson wrote all that nonsense, that Marcotte savaged him, that Aaronson then went in and edited his nonsense endlessly, and that Scott Alexander is still pissed off about it years later. My god, people.) All throughout the Internet were tons of people discussing things that had nothing to do with this. The stuff mentioned here wasn't central, wasn't more important. It was just your stuff.
What changed recently, of course, is that the elite media has become obsessed with it too, and the asymmetrical nature of cancellations is forcing other areas to follow suit. So now it's hard in certain venues to talk politics or knitting or cat videos without some idiot coming in and making it all about transgender or race. There's been plenty of talk about this switch and I won't belabor it.
But I will mention the fact that it's only certain venues.
Because for all that Scott used the word "race" a zillion times, he neglects to mention that every single issue he wrote about is a White People Thang. Yes, even race.
All of this debate is taking place entirely within the media world, and that's mostly white world. This site is an overwhelmingly white site.
At the same time, you ignore the fact that if you take out non-whites from your data, it turns out you were right. 53% of white kids 18-29 voted for Trump. And when you consider that there is next to no overlap in "cool" by race (some by class, but not much), it *did* become "hip" for the young in the only audience Scott writes for to become Republican.
Take the "no Hispanics think of themselves as Latinx" datapoint and multiply it by a million. Everything under discussion here is of primary interest to white people. They are, still, the ones who set the discourse in America.
So debating things in terms of woke and not-woke is a white people thing. Ask blacks about issues, and they're more likely to be "George Floyd was killed" majority vs "It's time these knuckleheads stopped resisting arrest" skeptics and "close down Stuyvesant because it's all for Asians" vs "kids should do their damn homework" and there's just no big conversation about transgender. I really wish there was more talk among African Americans about immigration, because they are hurt badly by it, but oh well.
Ask Asians about issues and the longer they've been in the US the more they'll track like whites. Same with Hispanics. Both groups are too large to capture in a few debates (South Asians are almost entirely ignored, really, in comparison to East Asians, while we really don't yet know the full impact of all the South Americans coming here as opposed to Central as opposed to Mexico)l.
Anyway. No real point to make other than that most of you are so.....white. And that's so true of most people right and left in this debate. They all live and think in whitey mcwhite world, marshmallow land. Even when presumably they have some, you know, nonwhites they go to lunch with and stuff.
Hell, you could be in Knitter Internet or Cat Video Internet or Adopting Korean Children Internet and you wouldn't have to care the tiniest bit about any of this.
Incorrect! “Knitting is just so white. Let’s hope it gets better.” The full story, in three parts: https://quillette.com/2019/02/17/a-witch-hunt-on-instagram/
Hmmm...is not this blog, as well as the woke/non-woke & culture-war discussions, more a class thing than a white thing. More specifically, the high-on-cultural-and-education capital part of the lower-upper middle class way of talking about the world.
These phenomena are (so far) correlated to the color of people's skin, but not necessarily more than that.
"more a class thing than a white thing"
These are pretty strongly coupled for obvious historical reasons.
4chan is more pluralistic than I think most people give it credit for. I think it’s weird to treat it like a monoculture the same way it would be weird to treat twitter or reddit that way. My understanding is that the *really* edgy trolls and alt-right thinking is mostly isolated to the /b/ and /pol/ boards.
but 4chan is one of the few popular internet places where pro-white comments don't get someone banned
/b/ and /pol/ are also the only communities which regularily spill over into the mainstream culture, which is the only reason for 4chan's relevance. Nobody cares about book or anime geeks' anonymous discussions, especially if most of them aren't overt nazis.
Sure, and I don't really blame anyone for conflating those boards with all of 4chan. I was just hoping to inform people who've been writing off the whole website as a right-wing political forum. I've had few interactions with it but they've usually been of some value to me, I'd hate for people to miss out just because of a popular misconception.
Well, that's an issue as old as 4chan itself. Because of its outsize influence, /b/ and 4chan were synonymous for the uninitiated long before anybody heard about alt-right.
I think that, with enough charity, this post is pretty fair to all the sides involved. However, the tone clearly shows that Scott identifies with the New Atheism faction and not with the New Feminism or New Antiracism factions. That's not a bad thing, and almost every critique in the article of New Feminism or New Antiracism I agree with.
But a lot of introspection on my part has resulted in my realization that there's a lot of good in these movements, and I hope that we can take a lot from them even as fashion discards them. Society isn't nearly as secular as I would like it to be in the wake of New Atheism, and I doubt society will be as feminist as I would like it to be in the wake of New Feminism, and while it's too soon to tell for New Antiracism, I doubt that will fix our problems either.
The other side of it is that of course these movements are filled with bullies. New Atheism was probably also filled with bullies, but I don't remember them because those bullies never targeted me. I never saw their behavior. I never was part of forums where their behavior was discussed.
I think that taking the outside view here is important. We -- rationalists -- may not always be a part of the dominant social movement. We may even be the targets of it. But being a rationalist means being able to look at the person screaming at you for being a creep hitting on girls and think, "What is the strongest form of their argument? Huh, maybe there is a societal problem where women cannot determine whether or not a stranger hitting on them is a threat, and that it might be rational to be afraid of being hit on even if there's only a 1 in 100 chance of suffering reprisal."
I'm still working through that with New Antiracism. The stuff they say seems obviously, crazily wrong. But I will try to understand their perspective before dismissing their conclusions.
This seems like the best response here by far.
This guy gets it.
"Watch this YouTuber DESTROY SJWs using FACTS and LOGIC". Once the very idea of trying to use facts or logic to disprove a movement becomes cringeworthy, how can it fail?
Well, Wokism really does reject facts and logic. The essay "No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why" explains why.
Bailey’s point is clear: the usual tools by which we identify provisional truths and settle scholarly disagreements are part of the hegemonically dominant system that, by definition, cannot be sufficiently radical to create real revolutionary change (a “third-order” change, as Dotson has it). That is, they can’t reorder society in the radical way they deem necessary. The belief, as both scholars explain in different ways, is that to play by the existing rules (like conversation and debate as a means to better understand society and advance truth) is to automatically be co-opted by those rules and to support their legitimacy, beside one deeper problem that’s even more significant.
The deeper, more significant aspect of this problem is that by participating in something like conversation or debate about scholarly, ethical, or other disagreements, not only do the radical Critical Social Justice scholars have to tacitly endorse the existing system, they also have to be willing to agree to participate in a system in which they truly believe they cannot win. This isn’t the same as saying they know they’d lose the debate because they know their methods are weak. It’s saying that they believe their tools are extremely good but not welcome in the currently dominant system, which is a different belief based on different assumptions. Again, their game is not our game, and they don’t want to play our game at all; they want to disrupt and dismantle it.
Their analysis would insist that their methods aren’t weak; it’s that the dominant system treats them unfairly. By being forced to participate in the dominant system, they therefore believe, they’re being cheated of the full force of their cause. To them, if we set the legitimization of the system part aside, to engage in scholarly conversation or debate is like a boxer stepping into an MMA match in which kicks, punches, throwing, and grappling are all on the table for the MMA fighter whereas gloved punches are the only thing the boxer is allowed to use, only far worse.
Debate and conversation, especially when they rely upon reason, rationality, science, evidence, epistemic adequacy, and other Enlightenment-based tools of persuasion are the very thing they think produced injustice in the world in the first place. Those are not their methods and they reject them. Their methods are, instead, storytelling and counter-storytelling, appealing to emotions and subjectively interpreted lived experience, and problematizing arguments morally, on their moral terms. Because they know the dominant liberal order values those things sense far less than rigor, evidence, and reasoned argument, they believe the whole conversation and debate game is intrinsically rigged against them in a way that not only leads to their certain loss but also that props up the existing system and then further delegitimizes the approaches they advance in their place. Critical Social Justice Theorists genuinely believe getting away from the “master’s tools” is necessary to break the hegemony of the dominant modes of thought. Debate is a no-win for them.
Therefore, you’ll find them resistant to engaging in debate because they fully believe that engaging in debate or other kinds of conversation forces them to do their work in a system that has been rigged so that they cannot possibly win, no matter how well they do. They literally believe, in some sense, that the system itself hates people like them and has always been rigged to keep them and their views out. Even the concepts of civil debate (instead of screaming, reeeee!) and methodological rigor (instead of appealing to subjective claims and emotions) are considered this way, as approaches that only have superiority within the dominant paradigm, which was in turn illegitimately installed through political processes designed to advance the interests of powerful white, Western men (especially rich ones) through the exclusion of all others. And, yes, they really think this way.
For adherents to Critical Social Justice Theory, then, there’s just no point to engaging in conversation or debate with people with whom they disagree. They reject the premise that such a thing is possible at all, because what is discussed or debated are, if changeable, in some sense matters of opinion. They don’t see the world this way at all, though. “Racism is not a matter of opinion” is, after all, one of their thought-stopping mantras. For them, disagreements across a stratifying axis of social power are a matter of being, experience, reality, and even life and death. These are not matters to be debated; they’re far too important for that.
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres-why/
Please share the link.
This way of thinking is a time machine back to important intellectual tenets within the 1970s counterculture, if you substitute "race" with "class". It fizzled out during the 1980s, though.
"They literally believe, in some sense, that the system itself hates people like them and has always been rigged to keep them and their views out."
Yes, that's by design.
"Their methods are, instead, storytelling and counter-storytelling, appealing to emotions and subjectively interpreted lived experience, and problematizing arguments morally, on their moral terms."
This framework in fact predates the "Enlightenment-based system" by many millenia. Those are the tools of religions, and they are correct of course both about that religious persuasion can be powerful and that Enlightment ideals fundamentally oppose them.
Those ideal proved to be fruitful in many disciplines, but they did fail to establish broadly accepted rational foundation for ethics. This is one area in which religions still claim mostly undisputed authority, so it makes sense that new challengers continue to appear to challenge traditional ones, with the same age old "these are not matters to be debated" attitude.
I'm going to keep a copy of this next to my local copy of that 'what is whiteness" poster, and a reminder of why I am correct in despising wokism. Their own best defenses expose their failings and brokenness better than any attack by their enemies can.
Good essay- a few minor quibbles
"The other relevant phrase is "cancel culture". SJWs aren't bad because they get basic facts wrong, quash free speech, bully their opponents, or make unfair generalizations across diverse groups. They're bad because sometimes they get your favorite TV show cancelled."
- In its best forms (e.g. Elizabeth Bruenig at her best), objection to cancel culture is, above all, objection to the idea of cancelling *people*. This is the kind of opposition to cancel culture I'm most interested in. When CC does, for example, what it did to Scott A, that really accepts me- and not even on a political level, just on a fundamental human level. When I say I'm against cancel culture I'm primarily against cancelling people. I believe you are the same in this regard.
"Why did the hope that New Socialism would slay wokeness fail? If I had to guess, I’d say wokeness outgrew the Internet fashion cycle. Unlike its predecessors, it took over mainstream institutions. Mainstream institutions are sticky. You can take control of them by being cool. But once you have control of them, you don’t need to stay cool."
I have a different hypothesis. Socialism wasn't allowed to beat wokeness, like feminism beat atheism and anti-racism beat feminism, because unlike the latter conflicts, the powers that be actually had a stake, and they used their control over things like legacy publications, news media etc. to pump up wokeness as a shield against socialism.
Forgive me if I now sound bitter. I shouldn't, of course, be bitter, since it's exactly what I would expect to happen based on my broadly Marxist outlook. Why get angry at the object falling under the power of gravity, as it always had to?
I think we as a world still haven't properly understood what "cancel culture" is. What it did to Scott Aaronson was really cruel, and so is what it does to anyone else, right or left. But it also usually has much less negative material impact on its victims than people think (in fact, its "victims" often get rich off the backlash to the backlash). All of this means that I definitely don't know what to think about it, especially because people aren't usually very precise in defining precisely what it is.
The two errors of types "we harmed the wrong person" and "we attempted to harm the right person but it helped them instead" don't cancel each other out.
They definitely, definitely don't cancel each other out. But I think sometimes people say that it's bad because it leads to people getting fired, and sometimes people say it's bad because it leads to people getting their feelings hurt. I suspect the former is often a mistake (because at least many people end up getting better jobs and/or pay as a result) but the latter is often very under-appreciated. (I think the ContraPoints video about J.K. Rowling is one of the few attempts to get this right.)
I agree. Part of what's aggravating about social justice is the idea that if they attack someone, their feelings don't matter, only money matters, but if social justice favors someone or a group, their feelings are of the highest importance.
I'm always, always confused about this argument, honestly. It reads like "Hey, there's a guy who goes around stabbing people with an infected syringe - he's trying to kill them with blood borne diseases. But sometimes it doesn't take and they just get a free high - I don't see why you all are freaking out about this.".
Extreme utilitarianism. If I shoot you in the course of a home robbery, and the months of rehab cause you to become closer to your wife, re-evaluate your workaholic habits, and ultimately become a much happier person -- why am I going to jail, huh? I'm some kind of freaking savior, when you look at the long-term outcomes.
The other qualifier here is when we ask "hey, why do these cancelled people do so well?" and take a look it's usually because the people who are very, very concerned with cancellation drive it.
So you get this weird circular thing - the implied ask is that you be less concerned with cancellation because it doesn't work, but since the reason it doesn't work is people ARE very concerned, if you do what's asked of you cancellation starts working again.
I want to conflate it to something like getting a population to adopt condom use - you have this STD that's tearing up a population, so everyone gets freaked out and starts wearing the condoms. The next year the STD transmission rate is way, way down and not nearly as big of a threat so it's declared that the STD isn't that bad and the condoms aren't needed anymore. This might make sense if you can show that the stock of people with this particular STD has all died off.
In the real world, this dying-off of infection-havers would be something like "people got out of the habit of cancelling in a way where they were unlikely to get back into it". But that clearly hasn't happened here - we can see people trying to still cancel people.
Re. '"Woke" was originally a black slang term for an independent thinker aware of the world around them.': The 18th-century Puritans had Great Awakenings. The Nazis used the slogan "Deutschland, erwachen!" (Germany, awakening!). But the Buddha one is still oldest and best.
"Feminist bloggers talked about how they didn't like being approached in a sexual way (eg asked on dates) by creepy guys, and tried to make this a shameful sort of thing to do. Some men countered that in order for the human race to continue to a new generation, presumably some men had to ask some women on some dates sometime, and the feminists were condemning basically every possible way of approaching a woman as creepy, without giving any suggestions for alternate non-creepy ways to do this."
This is not a good-faith description of what actually happened. There is a difference in how men and women experience the same situation. Women started writing about this difference, and explained that being proposed to have sex when stuck in an elevator, alone, with a man, can be a scary situation for women. Instead of just acknowledging this simple reality, and changing their behaviors, many men instead decided that women's recounting of their subjective experience was not true.
"This intensified because a lot of feminists seemed to focus on nerdy guys or nerdy activities in particular"
A lot of the women who initially started writing about this were nerdy women themselves, which is how they came to write blogs in the first place. They wrote about their own experiences.
I was admittedly fairly distant from this stuff but it seemed to me that there was both:
A) Women complaining about wildly inappropriate passes made at them- like being cold propositioned in an elevator. This behavior was, at very best, utterly oblivious, and often down right intimidation and/or lechery.
B) Women complaining about men "shooting their shot" in a way that was not clearly inappropriate.
And often these two classes were mixed in- along with debatable examples- in a way that treated them as if they were the same. I agree that the majority probably was class A, but there definitely were some B's, and I can understand why that would make some straight men, particularly shy and awkward straight men worried. I do agree though that Scott somewhat exaggerates the situation. I think that might be out of sympathy for his friend Scott Aaronson, who was clearly attacked by a very bad actor.
It's like with #Metoo. The majority of prominent accusations were of pretty awful behavior, with a fair bit of evidence backing them up, but many people are chilled by-and rightly so- the handful of cases where either the accusation wasn't that bad in hindsight, or had a dubious evidence base.
In some ways our conversations have evolved. In other ways, we just keep repeating the same process, in some sort of Sisyphean torment. https://changeculture.substack.com/p/liberals-have-civil-unioned-the-race
I like this and feel the same way about most of it.
But there's a critical mistake embedded in this analysis. The analysis seems to imagine "trends" against... some kind of blank slate backdrop, as if the author were a quant working for JP Morgan in a world of unlimited money printing and GME memes. Like there are no fundamentals. Like the Internet is the real thing, and all the little people are there to make it run. Like gender and race and socialism are fungible "cool" things that could have equally trended in any order--like trends of this type are universal to all nations and peoples throughout history.
We're not living in a video game made to teach children data analytics. This stuff is real. If someone predicted that young people would go far right in 2014, I'd have loved to take whatever betting odds they were offering at the time.
People ride trends just to have a cause. But it's the facts of the cause that determine what happens.
Let's look at New Atheism. The writeup describes New Atheism as "failing" or going out of style. New Atheism did not fail. I deconverted from evangelical Christianity during New Atheism--it might've been destined to happen eventually, but it happened at that time because the climate made it impossible to stop thinking about the issues until they were resolved. Christianity has been in catastrophic free-fall in America since then. When you say it failed, you mean "it stopped being a hot Internet topic," which happened because it succeeded, which made it no longer necessary. And it succeeded because Christianity is (on any factually-based reading of the term) not true.
New Atheism was also not an "Internet" thing. Talkorigins.org was online since 1998, almost 10 years before I got on the bus and saw ads by Richard Dawkins telling me not to believe in God.
What about New Feminism? Anyone who watched it like a meme stock, wondering if it would go up forever or crash, was not living in the real world. New Feminism had to crash (and it still has more crash to go), because it was impossible. It had scientifically false beliefs, mutually exclusive goals, no way of winning by demographics since half the population is always born male, anti-correlated with fertility, and more. An enduring animosity between the sexes is absurd. It only seems possible to detached and non-heteronormative people.
Race and socialism are not the same kind of thing. Those can keep trending up forever, until the circumstances are altered such that you won't be around to whimsically blog about it.
Further, The Blind Watchmaker was published in 1986 and Skeptic Magazine first came out in 1992, not technically before there was an Internet but certainly before most people were using it. talk.origins itself was a usenet group that also came out in 1986 well before it went onto the web. On the other side, Michael Denton published Evolution: A Theory in Crisis in 1985 and Michael Behe published Darwin's Black Box in 1996. Much of "new atheism" was originally biologists and professional skeptics attempting to refute this outgrowth of a "new creationism" that attempted to provide intellectually rigorous cover once the notion of true Young Earth Creationism became so flatly ridiculous that no respectable person believed in it any longer.
For whatever reason, this kind of thing happened in the shadows ignored by larger culture for decades, even though it was having fairly significant legal and policy results (heck, going back to the Scopes trial in 1925 really). The same people who finally became Internet celebrities for when Twitter was invented and introduced these ideas to normies were the people fighting these fights in the 70s and 80s, way before anyone gave a crap about Islam in the west.
Of course they won the battle on the intellectual front. And for whatever reason, this seems to be all Scott sees. His friends are almost all atheists now and it's no longer taboo to openly say that in intellectual circles. But they absolutely did not win the cultural and political battles. Forces like the moral majority, Focus on the Family, the 700 Club, everything in the 80s and 90s that turned American evangelicalism increasingly political largely got both Bush and Trump elected, continue to push creationism at local curriculum levels, to say nothing of the larger culture war type topics that I don't think New Atheists (at least the original ones) really care about but Evangelicals definitely do, like abortion policy.
It's true that there's some continuity between '90s Skeptics and '00s New Atheists. But they're also distinct phases in this phenomenon.
Do these things really run in clean, reversible cycles, or is society irrevocably changed with each cycle ? From what I see right now, it seems like wokeness has won; we do live in a world where "a repressive orthodoxy has taken over the government, the media, and big business, and set itself up as the arbiter of morality".
Currently, all new media in any format (movies, video games, books, etc.) has to include some woke elements -- the more the better, but at least enough to get past the censors. A purge against old and therefore un-woke cultural touchstones is gaining speed. Saying un-woke things is grounds for cancellation (and, if you're employed, possible termination), and is becoming fairly routine (to the point where it hardly makes the news). Major financial institutions and hosting providers have implemented at some form of woke gatekeeping policy.
Sure, in about 30..40 years, we might see a partial reversal, but I don't think it's happening anytime soon; nor do I think that any active opposition has a chance of victory. Shoveling back the tide might be fun, but it's not generally productive.
I mean, the same is true of the past. 1910s feminism won in that we're not getting rid of women's suffrage. Mid-century New Dealism won in that we're not getting rid of Medicare and Social Security. 1960s anti-racism won in that we're not getting rid of black people voting. 1970s gay rights and feminism won, in that sexual harassment will remain a crime and being gay won't be called a mental illness. The show "The Good Place" shows that New Atheism, New Feminism, and Woke-ism all won, in that those are just the assumed cultural starting point for a network TV comedy.
What I find fascinating in all this is the total absence of the center right. I'm not sure if it's just Scott's well known filter bubble against normie conservatives, or if it just is the case that due to age polarization the center right played no major role in defining the culture wars of the 2010s.
Would love discussion of this.
As far as I'm aware, neither center right nor center left have existed for quite some time:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/
I should be clearer. I don't mean center in terms of policy, I mean central to the Republican political coalition. People who watch Hannity, listen Glen Beck, like Boingino on Facebook. Even Shapiro and Crowder are way closer than 4-chan or Milo to the Fox News core of th epistemological ecosystem of normie red-tribers. These people have massive audiences and institutional clout, and yet they're just total non-actors in this post.
Is this just Scott having a blindspot to normie conservatives or are they genuinely non factors in online culture wars?
It's a huge blindspot. The timeline Scott proposes matches up with his own personal experiences and is buoyed by a few search trend datapoints.
Scott has a lot of personal involvement writing and participating in communities which discuss (or discussed) atheism, feminism, and race. He doesn't know anyone who cares strongly about Dan Bongino so he is entirely blind to the fact that fully 26% of the entire internet has devolved into a forum for screeching about whatever Dan Bongino thought today. It's extremely telling that gun rights and mass shootings are completely off Scott's 'culture war' radar.
When reality contradicts Scotts personal experience, he will do whatever lack of research necessary to sustain his personal experience as truthful. I am not sure why this is the case but it needs to be kept in mind whenever reading his work. His blind spots are frequent and large. Example: his personal experience is that Donald Trump is probably not racist. He has reiterated this idea many times, most recently in this very article. A tiny amount of research would highlight that on two separate occasions Donald Trump has been court ordered to stop being racist.
Joe Biden is the president of the United States of America
I would guess among the most surprised by that fact is Joe Biden. The man has been running for President for approximately 40 years, he's like the Wile E. Coyote of Presidential aspirants. Now he's finally caught the Road Runner.
They're the incredibly uncool middle-aged not-online fargroup?
There's probably a parallel discussion to be had about how the mainstream culture war about anti-Islam and anti-anti-Islam played out completely in parallel and separate from the online culture war about New Atheism.
The thing I don't understand ...not just about you specifically, but about the general category of "people who are EA and rationalist and agree with me on pretty much everything except on whether social justice is good or bad"... is why you are able to feel so benevolent towards new atheism and are willing to say "okay it has its pointy edges and bad personalities, but overall, they were good"...but you're not willing to extend the same kind of mindset to feminism, anti-racism, etc.
Even though the central message is just as important than the message of atheism. Why not?
Why when talking about new atheism type stuff, does it feel important to defend the right of being able to have your lovable weirdos warts and all as long as the central message is correct, but when talking about social justice, you are mostly motivated to focus on the potential harms and overreaches?
To me, the new atheists were the people who said that it's okay to admit that religion is insane, and that I didn't need to keep making excuses for them. It sounds like that's what they are to you too.
To me the social justice warriors were the only people with the moral clarity to say that when I got bullied physically by my teachers and other kids and pushed around in a hundred subtler ways, it was in fact wrong and bad, and that I didn't need to keep making excuses for them. I guess they can't be that to you. But is that really not a reason to see the good in it?
Outside of the bay area bubble, racism and sexism was the norm, you know. We actually got beaten. This next generation never gets beaten. I went to my old middle school, my sister goes there now. I asked the kids. No one gets beaten up anymore.
So, I don't care how uncool it makes me in my rationalist/EA social circle. I'm glad that someone was shrill about it. I think they should be more shrill about it. Three cheers for shrill social justice warriors.
> The thing I don't understand ...not just about you specifically, but about the general category of "people who are EA and rationalist and agree with me on pretty much everything except on whether social justice is good or bad"... is why you are able to feel so benevolent towards new atheism and are willing to say "okay it has its pointy edges and bad personalities, but overall, they were good"...but you're not willing to extend the same kind of mindset to feminism, anti-racism, etc.
This is a good question. I think the big difference is one of conduct, not of content.
One of the most salient features of internet rationalism is their willingness to consider just about any position, as long as it is presented in a civil and rational sort of way. In the internet atheism debate days, although I'm sure everyone was far from perfect, there was a tendency for actual reasonable debates to break out where people genuinely tried to engage in constructive discussion (or at the very least to PWN the other side with FACTS and LOGIC).
This is missing from the "social justice" wars. The "social justice" side isn't interested in any kind of logical argument or discussion with the other side; they refuse to acknowledge that the other side might possibly have any kind of point to make at all. Everyone who disagrees with them is Literally Hitler and they need to be punched, not debated. Favourite weapons aren't facts and logic, they're shaming, mischaracterisaiton, name-calling, getting people fired, and bicycle locks to the head.
This does not convince me, because it's a fully general counter-argument. You can always find factions within any group who is not interested in discourse. Also online internet atheists would do similar tactics, like "deplatform" creationists from public curriculum if they could. Every group has certain topics which they think are just too stupid to consider giving realistic consideration to. And if you think the atheists should've been less aggressive too, I'll just note that my public middle school still teaches creationism as a "perspective" to everyone whereas you need a special note to learn about evolution. So maybe new atheists should have been louder. In contrast, I think bullying has genuinely been reduced.
Which brings me back to my original contention - I notice the choice to focus on the reasonable people when it's something like atheism while ignoring the others as just passionate, and I notice the choice to paint social justice as unreasonable, even though there are similar dynamics in both.
""deplatform" creationists from public curriculum "
That's not what deplatforming means. Not being permitted to have one's views spread by teachers in the classroom is not the same as not being permitted to express them. Nobody tried to SWAT someone for being a creationist, or tried to get them fired from a job totally unrelated to creationism, or tried to get someone's Usenet provider to drop him as a customer because he's a creationist.
You sure?
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17887101#:~:text=Now%2C%20the%20battle%20of%20evolution,Sean%20Corcoran%20has%20the%20story.
Inb4 "cherry picking" I agree - the point is that anyone can pick cherries. Being a creationist has always (rightly) been something that will get you laughed out of academia, even outside of the field of biology.
You might disagree with the object level - you might think being racist or sexist is not like being a creationist - but on the meta level all three movements are aiming to push their ideological opponents outside the pale of respectability, such that they can't hold positions of power and influence that enable them to exert their values and viewpoints on others.
More for you
https://www.nature.com/news/university-sued-after-firing-creationist-fossil-hunter-1.16281 (Archeologist)
https://www.businessinsider.com/ben-stein-i-was-fired-for-being-a-creationist-2009-8 (NYT writer)
https://ncse.ngo/creationist-teacher-ohio-be-fired (Teacher)
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2012/05/17/should-creationism-ever-be-a-firing-offense/ (Programmer for nasa)
I'm gonna stop now because I think the poitn is made
Being a fossil hunter is clearly relevant to creationism. The teacher taught his creationism in class, so it was relevant. And the NASA scientist, according to claims, was proselytizing his creationism at work, not on his own time on Facebook.
The NYT I don't know, but the NYT is scum anyway. I think that if 3 out of 4 of your examples are bad, it can't possibly be widespread.
One possible reason is that new atheism was anti-authoritarian, while new feminism and new anti-racism are extremely authoritarian, seeking to win primarily not by convincing people, but by making the opposition unable to express themselves in public forum.
I just don't think that is true. New Atheism, "new feminism", and "anti-racism all are the same in the extent to which primarily want to prevent their ideological opponents from achieving platform in educational institutions and workplaces whenever possible.
In the case of atheism, no creationism in schools, for example. New Atheists also tried to attack the Catholic church on pedophilia charges, tried to retroactively tear down beloved figures such as Mother Theresa, and spoke out against the practice of proselytizing and religious conversion especially when coupled with humanitarian aid. And many explicitly opposed tolerance of religious practices like burqa or circumcision. Many of them equated religious indoctrination itself to child abuse.
This isn't a list of charges against new atheism, this is just an assertion that it's roughly the same as the other things - fundamentally correct message with varying degrees of intensity.
I think I want clarification here to an extent - are you comfortable with saying "all three are bad"? I'm not sure if your goal is to get Scott to say new atheism is bad or that anti-racism and new-feminism are good.
I would say that all three are good on net in their intentions. I would also say that anti-racism and anti-sexism internet activism in practice successfully shifted the overton window on their respective issues and that this is Good. Sadly, I'm not so sure that new atheism succeeded in that. I wish that they had, but it seems to have come to nothing.
I would also say that any social movement that gets anything done has bad elements. And you can tell something about a person's overall stance by the pattern of when they choose to pick on bad elements and relatively ignore the good, vs. when they choose to praise the good elements and wave away the bad, and this article really highlights that disparity.
I feel like you dodged the question a bit - maybe not in the sense that you were deceptive, but in the sense that I care. I'm sure there are good elements in all three, but ignoring the balance of good and bad in them to focus purely on the good strikes me as something just as motivated/telling as what you accuse Scott of by implication (being a racist misogynist, or similar).
I don't like any of the three, mostly, but I think I like new atheism the most despite it aiming the most squarely at hurting me/my interests (I'm Christian). The reason for this is that it was ineffective, for the most part; it's a lot easier to have warm fuzzies for a movement that I disagree with if it never made any headway towards getting fiat powers to hurt me at will, as opposed to one that did.
It's not about focusing purely on the good, it's about how you allocate scarce attention. If you believe racism is a bigger problem than the over-reaches of the anti-racist movement, you would (or maybe the right word is "rationally speaking, should") be more motivated to allocate more time and attention towards combatting racism than you do towards critiquing overreaches of anti-racist movements.
(But yeah, it would be perhaps disingenuous to base an entire argument on that, I also disagree with some of the the object level criticisms that Scott makes.)
New atheists never pushed for internet censorship or hate speech laws in the way feminists and anti-racists have.
New feminism and anti-racism are all extremely anti-authoritarian. Remind me which groups protest police use of violence? Remind me which groups cheered the state assaulting reporters?
"seeking to win primarily not by convincing people, but by making the opposition unable to express themselves in public forum."
If this is their actual goal then they have failed miserably and can be safely dismissed as toothless.
Police, by definition, are supposed to be violent. Opposing that does not make someone anti-authoritarian. Cops doing their job is not inherently authoritarianism.
I also don't recall seeing very many conservatives or "anti-Woke" folks cheering on "the state assaulting reporters". If any. At all.
And people can still do a lot of damage even if they don't achieve their desired goals.
"Police, by definition, are supposed to be violent."
Good lord no. Police, by definition, are supposed to protect the public from criminals and apprehend people who violate laws. Sometimes violence is part of this. But our understanding of crime is that the most effective techniques are the ones which employ no violence at all. Any cop that needs to be violent is one dealing with a failure in the system that started years, possibly decades prior.
"Cops doing their job is not inherently authoritarianism."
There are reams of evidence showing that police use of force is commonly used when it shouldn't be and quite often it's use is deployed unjustly against minority groups.
It is the very definition of authoritarian to use force to control people who have done nothing wrong.
"I also don't recall seeing very many conservatives or "anti-Woke" folks cheering on "the state assaulting reporters". If any. At all."
You weren't looking very hard then. No surprises there.
I'm referring to their support for censorship on the biggest internet platforms and support for hate-speech laws. And they have been quite succesful in increasing censorship on the biggest internet platforms, many anti-sjws have been completely banned off of most large internet platforms.
"And they have been quite succesful in increasing censorship on the biggest internet platforms"
Have they? I think the biggest internet platforms, which were things that did not exist in the early 2000s, have done an excellent job of protecting their own self-interests.
That extremist groups say and do extremist things that get them banned from corporate monoliths is very much a different thing from coordinated SJW organizations getting people they don't like banned. The end result may look similar. But the process is quite different. Equally extreme SJWs have all met their own bans.
Your incorrect thinking may come from assuming there is an equality that does not exist. Alex Jones is not an equivalent speaker to Nathan J. Robinson (though the latter was 'banned' for joking about US aid to Israel). There is a very clear and easy to understand reason why Alex Jones is not allowed on Youtube but Nathan J. Robinson still is.
This is me speaking for myself. I don't know what Scott is thinking, though I'm going to guess a little.
It's a matter of sides and enemies. I loathe Social Justice while feeling it's not wrong about everything. The reason I loathe it is because it seems to frame matters as that no decent person should care what happens to me because I'm definitionally not marginalized enough. Not only that, but if I want to be a decent person, I shouldn't care what happens to me.
So I'm aware that the American justice system is biased against black people and I care about it and about the justice system mistreating the public generally (except that I'm not supposed to care when the justice system abuses or murders white people), but I will not side with people who hate me. They'll say they don't hate me, but the way I see it is that they want me to feel bad all the time. Everything good in my life, including and especially my peace of mind is stolen from more worthy people.
They don't want me to follow their orders-- framing orders is too much like work-- they just want me to figure out what they want and do it without being told.
A big hook for black people and trans people and so on is that Social Justice portrays itself as the only thing which is on the side of marginalized groups. Sometimes people in marginalized groups get a surprise when Social Justice turns against them.
As I understand Scott, religion isn't a big deal for him, so he can be kind to the New Atheists. He's a more or less heterosexual man-- at least wants relationships with women-- so when Social Justice portrays heterosexual men as fundamentally abusers of women, so he sees (or saw?) Social Justice as an attack.
I don't think this is charitable to Scott. I don't want to reduce his viewpoint to "I don't like this, because I'm a straight white man, and whatever this is is clearly against the interests of straight white men". Even if that's in part what is going on, it's too close to the genetic fallacy for me to feel comfortable going forward assuming that this is the issue. There is an ideal to be aspired to where you are supposed to try to take an objective view on things and not just side with whatever your race and gender demographic is, and I would like to assume that Scott also aspires to that ideal.
>Sometimes people in marginalized groups get a surprise when Social Justice turns against them.
Well, I agree, sometimes they do. This goes back to the uneven standards really. "Social justice" isn't a magic word that makes everyone good, Humans are going to turn against each other. People are going to use social justice to make each other feel guilty, exploit each other, achieve their own ends. This happens with everything. I've seen it happen with EA/rationalism, I don't want to start digging up links and receipts but if you're in the community then you know full well that there have been abusers in the community who have used the logic of EA/rationalism to be abusive. None of that means that EA/rationalism isn't one of the best social movements for doing good in the world.
Frankly, I'm just not afraid of social justice. The psychological harms that you cite social justice can do to the people that it "turns against" are, for lack of a better word "microaggressions" and I'm not really afraid of them. If people on the internet want to say words that feel bad to me, they can go right ahead. I'm prepared, I'm not afraid. I've experienced worse.
What I care about is not being hit with actual fists, and having access to food, shelter, and medical care. Racism and homophobia are potential reasons that I or others have gotten beat up. Social justice will never be a reason that I'm denied access to food/shelter/medical care or beaten up. (inb4 "but they punch nazis", just how many punches do you suppose have actually been thrown?)
So actual physical harm social justice folks do doesn't matter because people haven't committed enough of it compared to racism and homophobia? You know some of these folks have tried to commit murder, right? Take the Alexandria shooting. Or the many times antifa have smuggled clubs into protests. Or the time they gave Andy Ngo brain damage, which means they could've easily killed him.
Social justice folks were arguably reluctant to talk about apparently-racist attacks on Asians until a prominent attack by a white guy. Probably because the other ones were heavily by black people.
If nothing else, you should be opposing the bad eggs because they make it harder for everyone else to actually progress. They're millstones, albatrosses.
Is the American justice system biased against men? It imprisons men at 9 times the rate it imprisons women.
It might be. Is there evidence that illegal behavior by women is likely to be let slide or blamed on men?
The American justice system probably over-punishes people. How do punishments for men compare to punishments for women for the same crime?
Just being accused can be extremely destructive, considering what happens to people who can't afford bail. If men are falsely accused at a higher rate than women, then that's a serious injustice and would also add to the imprisonment rate.
Do you ask those same questions when confronted with the fact that blacks are imprisoned at higher rates than whites?
Yes, or actually I have some answers. I don't merely have disparities, there are serious procedure problems, like prosecutors concealing exculpatory evidence.
You might check into Radley Balko's work. He's written a lot about bad practice in the American justice system. He believes there's a lot that done badly in general and also that there's racism.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/radley-balko/
Yes, I'm familiar with Balko, and I agree he is a cogent and talented writer. I'm glad *somebody* is taking seriously the rights of the accused, inasmuch as the conventional American attitude is often once you're accused -- you're just worthless, a nonhuman. Deeply regrettable in a republic supposedly founded on the concept of individual rights.
I'm not sure I recall Balko asserting the system is institutionally biased against blacks, or that individual elements of it are, but alas either way an appeal to his authority isn't persuasive to me, much as I respect the man.
Nor do I want to actually debate the question: for what it's worth, the precis of my a priori opinion is that -- it's complicated. To some extent I think the system *is* biased against blacks, but not for the reasons one might suppose (because everyone hates blacks), but because it is not well-suited to the typical social culture of blacks (or of men, for that matter). Roughly speaking, instead of prompt and modest and sustained correction for beginning a path of wrongdoing, it waits far too long doing nothing and then delivers killing blows, which are disastrous patterns when dealing with males in general (as anyone who's reared boys can tell you), and even worse when it comes up against black male culture.
But anyway, my main point is just to hope that if you believe the system is prejudiced against blacks, it stems from the examination of, and rejection of, more parsimonious explanations that have to do with the difficulty of cleanly interpreting a top-line number like rates of incarceration.
I think this is how a lot of people feel. Scott is great on lots of things, but seems to have his missteps when it comes to issues of race and gender. His insights are still worth reading, even when I see these problems though.
I know. It just makes me a bit sad. These ideas are ultimately pretty influential in my social circle and my workplace. A bunch of people who I like and admire end up taking significant cues from these types of ideas.
Which, whatever, obviously I'm going to simply ignore it and keep working to make sure these bed nets and vaccines get distributed, it's just disappointing.
To the extent that there's a central message of social justice, maybe these rationalists don't think it's correct. But they find it easier and/or socially safer to talk about overreaches than core disagreements.
I really doubt it. EAs/rationalists/Scott obviously believes that all people are approximately equal in terms of being moral patients. That much is pretty clear from their words and actions. If they have implicit biases that contradict this, that isn't intentional.
On its own, "all people are approximately equal in terms of being moral patients" gets you to something closer to EA/utilitarianism than to SJ. SJ is also committed to some substantive interpretations of equality (collectivist/group-based), and predominantly sees problems through a conflict-theoretic lens.
>"all people are approximately equal in terms of being moral patients" gets you to something closer to EA/utilitarianism than to SJ
I mostly agree with this. I'm an EA/utilitarian. I would say that both SJ and EA are both deeply committed to this premise, but that EAs tend to be more successful in taking said premises to their logical conclusions.
>SJ is also committed to some substantive interpretations of equality (collectivist/group-based), and predominantly sees problems through a conflict-theoretic lens.
I disagree with this. SJ has both strong collectivist and anarchist-libertarian streaks. I don't think SJ is committed to "conflict-theory" in the Karl Marx sense. Or if you mean the slatestarcodex definition of "conflict theorist vs. mistake theorist", I take that as fancy jargon for "unreasonable person who feels attacked all the time" which I don't think is unusually characteristic of SJ more than others.
SJ is definitely culturally collectivist, even the anarchists - its standard interpretation of equality is that oppressed groups are culturally equal to dominant ones, and anything contrary to this is injustice. For example, I've heard defenses of corporal punishment of children on the grounds that it's an African-American practice and that it's wrong and inegalitarian for whites to criticize it. You can dismiss this as an overreach, but I think this form of analysis is typical of SJ, regardless of the conclusion it reaches.
> I take that as fancy jargon for "unreasonable person who feels attacked all the time" which I don't think is unusually characteristic of SJ more than others.
It means more than that. The standard SJ line is that dominant groups benefit from their privilege, so their objections should be seen as them trying to keep the gains they've unjustly accrued or maintain their higher positions on a zero-sum status/economic ladder.
I think the quote at the end captures my feelings pretty well on this,
"I would much prefer the world where Francis Fukuyama had been right and liberalism had won so completely that freedom no longer needed any defending."
I am first and foremost a liberal, and I have regularly heard explicitly anti-liberal rhetoric from new social justice to a degree totally unmatched by my interaction with new atheism. So while I can be broadly on board with a lot of new social justice goals I am really not willing to compromise on the liberalism front, and it not being a terminal value is a glaring red flag for me.
The way someone processes the meta-level tone of rhetoric changes depending on their relationship to the object-level aims of that rhetoric. I am not sure if someone who had a vested interest in religious power continuing to hold sway over the nation would agree with your notion of new-atheism being very tolerantly liberal.
Example: https://theconversation.com/why-the-arguments-of-the-new-atheists-are-often-just-as-violent-as-religion-95185
I don't think new-atheism is very tolerantly liberal in their goals, and I was responding to your framing which might make this confusing. Ultimately I disagree with new-atheism but they did not, for the most part, attempt to destroy liberal norms in the way that social justice has. I think the illiberal tools of oppression are fundamentally incompatible with a 'good end' even when wielded with noble aims, and so I think people arguing for terrible things within a liberal framework are less dangerous than those trying to destroy the framework, I believe as long as the framework is maintained, good outcomes and progress will follow.
The short answer is that there are more than two alternatives, even if only those two were present in your environment. That the racists are *wrong* doesn't mean that the SJers are *right*. Where you were from, the SJers may have been the only ones standing up to the racists; but they are not in fact the only people opposed to racism, and them getting that one thing right (racism is bad) does not imply that their further claims are correct.
The correct answer to racism and sexism, IMO, is liberal individualism. SJ is (generally speaking) illiberal and group-based. The problem with the SJers isn't that they're shrill, it's that their *illiberal*. Although these are not unrelated -- attempting to shout people down rather than make actual arguments is a common component of both shrillness and illiberalism. Note that this isn't just a problem of object-level wrongness, but of meta-level process; this sort of illiberalism breaks the negative feedback loop that keeps you in touch with reality, and dooms you to tribal dynamics and increasing wrongness, although in what direction is not a priori predictable.
One must focus on what's actually correct, not just finding people who are opposing what's wrong. Because most of the time, the people visibly opposing one wrong thing are themselves wrong as well. Actually getting things *right* is hard! And there are infinitely many ways to be wrong...
Y'know, I'm not making a statement about what the objectively correct ideology is in the abstract (hint it is effective altruism, obviously). I'm making a statement about which social movement actually got what accomplished. The fact that the majority of people didn't see any "liberal individualism" social movements reckoning with these issues or making any traction on them is sufficient to exclude them from this conversation.
Having a pretty theoretical framework is easy. Having a pretty social movement, involving imprecise, difficult to control masses of people, harder.
It seems to me that liberals aren't doing a lot to oppose racism and sexism. I don't like it, but it seems like the easiest way to organize people to do something which isn't obviously fun is to organize them to oppose other people.
I think it's easier to like irrelevant groups compared to powerful ones.
I will admit that I am charmed by eg Jewish mystics. They are wrong about everything, and if they ever got the reins of power they would probably make terrible decisions based on the gematria value of the name of the bill they had to support or reject, but liking them is cheap because they don't matter.
New Atheism had about as much power as Jewish mystics. Social justice has more power than most countries, which makes it scarier.
I'm surprised that social justice warriors were the only people saying it was bad for your teachers to bully you. This is the kind of thing I've always felt they were really bad at - rejecting the actual power relations in a situation in favor of something where whichever person is a member of a more preferred group is "in the right".
I think (and please correct me if you think I'm wrong) that the differences in our perspectives comes from the fact that you're assuming an environment where the conclusions of social justice are already a given, when you talk about who is in the "more preferred group".
I work a job in the EA community, so I have spent enough time in rationalist/EA social circles to imagine what social bubble you probably inhabit. I'm guessing that in your life, everyone knows "OF COURSE you should not be racist", tries their best not to be racist, and then social justice people keep bringing up pointless nitpicking about diversity and inclusion, or spend the bulk of their time criticizing people who are plausibly well intentioned but perhaps say racist or sexist things by accident, or stirring up drama over what is essentially nothing. It's not that I can't sympathize with being annoyed with this - I mean I don't love fielding the same out-of-context question about "diversity" over and over again either. But unlike the way that you sometimes seem to portray it I don't see it as a particularly important or bothersome phenomenon in the big picture. And I still see it as someone who is fundamentally trying to do the right thing.
In other words, you live in a social-justice-literate bubble. By analogy, when you live in a science-literate bubble, it is easy to get annoyed with the people who just drone on about "correlation is not causation" and "the sample size is not high enough" every time you try to publish something. But those students, they're applying lessons that are important, the fact that the students even know that much is a testament to the success of the science meme and is a good sign.
It's important to not be parochially interested only in your local bubble. The world that most (American) people live in is filled with creationists who don't even know what a correlation is, and people who vote for Trump and want to "build a wall". Your bubble might have a clear "more preferred group", but in other social circles the hierarchy works very differently and the criteria of who is "in the right" is not the same.
These are some real life examples of teachers bullying me. I list them to demonstrate that they are not subtle, it's not something that should require nuance to condemn.
- Calling me "Mohammed" or "Ishmael" in order to humiliate me
(my real name is of not Muslim but Hindu origin, and cannot realistically be confused for these, there was no one named Mohammed or Ishmael in my class). I know it wasn't just an accident because the same teacher also grabbed me by my hair and dragged me into a corner when I was talking out of turn, he hated me for no clear reason.
- Unnecessary "joke" references to my skin color. Deliberately embarrassing me to see if they could see me blushing through my skin color.
- Always referring back to me whenever the curriculum was talking about "cow worship" or anything weird sounding about Hindus, again with a "joke" tone.
I also saw other kids (e.g. black, mexican) getting treatment like this.
No one at the time, including me, thought that any of this was "not allowed". Obviously we all knew being "racist" was bad, but only in the trivial sense that knowing that "being mean" is bad doesn't change anything. Few people thinks of themselves as racist, or bullies, or anything of the sort.
I didn't tell anyone because it was normal. Sometimes I laughed with the "joke" versions of abuse. I knew that laughing along would lead to less social ostracization, so I convinced myself it was funny and ok. The other kids saw it and they thought it was funny. Other teachers saw the hair pulling thing and didn't say anything. Also the kids did similar stuff to me in front of the teachers (e.g. constant "terrorist" jokes, while I had to laugh with them in order to save face. They also did the more generic "punching and kicking" sort of bullying, although that was out of the teacher's sight).
What I am trying to explain was that there was no broader context or higher authority to condemn these things. The social consensus was that this stuff was genuinely acceptable. If it wasn't acceptable, then maybe it was just a little naughty, on the order of saying "fuck" out loud, not grounds for moral condemnation.
What social justice has achieved is that there a certain "sanity waterline" for specific types of abuse as outside the pale of moral acceptability. In areas where social justice has "won", the behaviors that I just mentioned above will get someone fired if they can be fired, and socially ostracized if they can't. Once you've been exposed to social justice ideas the fact that these things is wrong becomes just obvious. But for most of the world, and for most of America, it is not obvious that this stuff is wrong. Maybe that is hard to imagine, typical mind fallacy and all that.
In your world, the "more preferred group" is obviously the person who didn't just commit race-based child abuse. You see it as trivial for someone to score social points by condemning this behavior. But that's not the world I grew up in. I grew up in the world where half the people vote Republican, where lots of people were creationists and the curriculum reflected that, where being a "slut" was unironically a mark of bad character, and where being dark skinned makes you weird and a target. You did not score social points by going against these things. I suppose you might be thinking that I lived in some terrible hellhole, no I did not, my immigrant parents intentionally chose where we lived based on the higher quality of the school district given what they could afford at the time ...this is what middle class American culture look like.
And now I've grown up, and I'm a polyamorous EA rationalist who went to grad school. I've left the places and social circles of my childhood behind and I'm in your bubble now living a relatively charmed life where no one ever bullies me. And I'm meeting people like you who are *natives* of this bubble. And most of y'all would never do these terrible things, you'd recognize them as outside the pale, you've never seen anyone doing these things, maybe you think that "reasonable people" wouldn't do those sorts of things (but they would)!
So your association with "social justice" is probably "people who talk very loudly about problems which aren't actually happening, and arbitrarily punish well intentioned people for making mistakes, and sometimes punish people who haven't even made a mistake". I don't deny that a little bit of this happens, I mean nothing is perfect. And in a social circle where there is way less racism, obviously whoever is still complaining about racism is getting increasingly nitpicky.
But I come from a different context, one in which the ambient levels of "oppression" are much higher. so my association with the social justice movement is more like "oh my god, oh my god, people are finally speaking out, people are finally listening, people are finally stopping that behavior, people are afraid to bully people like me now because nowadays there might actually be real consequences to doing so, oh my god thank you". And I wish I could open the bubble-native's eyes to the fact that that my childhood context is much closer to the one that matters, the one that most people live in, and that social justice is absolutely the sort of thing that makes sense to spread as a society wide meme in that context.
(Sorry for the wall of text, if I had more time I would've edited it into something more concise)
I'm speaking for myself and not for Scott.
I'm sad that you were consistently mistreated and very pleased that the school has cleaned up its act in regards to (some types of?) bullying. This is important because I keep hearing claims that it's impossible to do anything about bullying.
I'm also doing some updating about the range of Social Justice, though I've heard a number of times that SJs doing practical work are much more wholesome than those who are loud on the internet.
However, my issue isn't exactly about SJs dumping rage about trivia, it's about them building up prejudice against white people. Also against men, and especially against white men, but prejudice against white people is more of an issue for me because I'm more of a target. I'm light-skinned and Jewish, and that's quite enough to be hated.
I get told they don't mean me in particular, and they don't. It's systemic. I've reached the point where I wonder whether white children are harassed for being white at that school-- certainly not something you're obliged to keep track of.
One of the hooks for Social Justice is that they present themselves as the only ones who are on various people's side. Sometimes it's true. But part of SJ ideology is a strong belief in punishment (I blame this on it being a movement that started in the US), and they can turn against people rather easily. In some contexts, Asian Indians get defined as white.
I understand this and I'm sorry you had to go through it.
I think I would make the same argument here I did in Part IX of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ . If you're in Iran or Saudi Arabia or somewhere, Islam is the most important opponent of human rights and human flourishing, and you should be fighting against the Islamic religion with all your heart and energy. If you are in California, and still opposing Islam with a level of ferocity suitable for Saudi Arabia, then you're making a mistake, and if you're doing this by destroying mosques and screaming at young Muslim kids or something, then I think you are just a random thug.
One way to look at this is that we have to find the right "balanced" level of Islamophobia that best helps the needy people in Saudi Arabia without harming the needy people in California too badly. I am not sure this is right. The fight against Islam in Saudi Arabia, and against Islamophobia in California, are branches of the same fight, which is the fight against thugs and bullies who get power from enforcing whatever local social norms let them bully people the most.
One reason I am focusing on the Internet versions of these phenomena is that I think they are less defensible than the offline versions. All of this stuff about making white students confess their white supremacy before taking classes or whatever isn't contiguous with preventing teachers from bullying dark-skinned students. It feels almost parasitic on it. I agree that we have to do a little bit of the "balancing" thing but I would be nervous about overestimating it, same as I would with the Saudi Arabia example.
I agree with this perspective on the meta level, but on an object level I think that I have a rather different view of your audience than you do.
Let's pretend I grew up in Pseudo Arabia, which is mostly like Saudi Arabia except it has a sizeable population of non-Muslim minorities descended from foreign migrant worker populations and isn't quite so suffocating that anything-but-Sunni-Islam movements hasn't been squished out by threats of death penalties. In Pseudo Arabia pretty much all native born people adhere to a strict Sharia law type ideology while pretty much all immigrants do not, and there is a stark divide between the two groups that often plays out in violence.
And let's pretend you grew up in Tofurky. Tofurky is mostly like Turkey, except their non-Muslim minority population can be distinguished by cues such as last name or cultural manner or facial appearance. That is to say, you can probably tell whose grandparents were Muslim because they're named things like Farah Kahn and Ibraheem Qureshi, but, while there is a clear correlation, you can't always figure out someone's ideology from their background (Just like you can't tell who is a Republican by looking at who is white). So they're more tolerant than Pseudo Arabia, and they have a significant tradition of secularism but also a prominent religious wing. Maybe a third of them support stuff like gay rights. There are some social bubbles in Tofurky that would not be out of place in Pseudo Arabia, as well as some social bubbles that would not be out of place in California, and everything in between. The poles of these two social bubbles are often opposed.
Anyway nowadays we both live somewhere in Tofurky where everyone believes in secular norms and we are on the same internet. We both agree about Pseudo Arabia norms being terrible, secular norms being good. But since you grew up on Tofurky, maybe you're not particularly worried about a backslide into Islamic norms. Maybe you think you're speaking to an entirely secular audience, who has now swung from simple epistemic atheism into being anti-religion in an unproductive way. Whereas I who experienced Pseudo Arabia am much more skeptical and spend more of my time thinking about how Tofurky hasn't gone far enough into secular norms. Ok, different life experiences, different perspectives, fine.
You say "We should tolerate all religious opinions, including Islamic conservatives, because of free speech" and I agree. You say "Islamic opinions may even have some good points" and I agree. You say "Maybe there really are parasites in pork and we shouldn't eat pork" and I concede, sure, maybe, it's an empirical question. You say "maybe men and women really differ in disposition and aptitudes, we shouldn't throw that idea out just because Islam went too far with it". I mean, as long as we agree that they have the same rights, I'm not closed off to the hypothesis. "Let's steelman the Shia view, maybe genetic distance from Mohammed means something"…ok, I'm happy to entertain politically uncomfortable topics as long as no one starts being rude. At this point though I am quietly noting the high number of males with Muslim-origin names in the room, a fact which previously didn't mean anything to me but now gives me pause.
"It's important that we do not shun people for saying all of the above, out loud, we should not prevent them from being university professors". And still I can't quite bring myself to outright disagree with you, but at this point I can't help but notice how much time you're putting into advocating for tolerance of Islamists, relative to the amount of time you're putting into arguing for secular-liberal norms. While we speak, a politician who is unusually anti-secular and pro-Sharia is elected. "Obviously we all know he's terrible," you say "but we must tolerate his supporters". At this point, I'm noticing now a crowd of new people gathering around our shared social circle. They tend to downvote everything pertaining to radical secularism and tolerance of other religions. Also I caught a few of them crying out things like "Allulah Akbar!" when they thought we weren't looking. "I don't endorse them, I just tolerate them" you say, and I genuinely believe you. Surely I should tolerate tolerance, even if that means tolerating tolerance of intolerance?
But then..."The movement against Islamic oppression is getting pretty Shrill , isn't it?" you say. The aforementioned crowd starts cheering. "Yes! Shrill! Exactly!" The tone of the whole group has shifted. If I or anyone else starts saying "okay but remember, religious fundamentalism is still bad, also that time when Tofurky shut down the gay club was a dangerous slide towards religious fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism is still a problem, yes even in this country, yes sometimes even in this very social circle" etc. then it's "Obsessed with religion!" "Divisive and awful!" Soon your ideas get cited as justification, sometimes by the Sharia-wing of Tofuturkish politics, sometimes even by people who are clearly living in Pseudo Arabia.
And this is when I start really getting frustrated. Because I'm still pretty sure Tofuturkish Scott is honestly on the side of secular-liberalism, broadly speaking. But somehow I still feel like if you could see the bigger picture, if you could spend a day in Pseudo Arabia, something about your tone would surely change. Something about which story you emphasized and which story you tucked away would change.
I don't wish to hold you responsible for your audience…but since you did invoke your article about Russell Brand and his responsibility towards his viewers as part of your argument, if you're okay with being held responsible for that, then… I am not sure that you always see the big picture about who your audience is, and what the effect you are having on them is. You criticize Russel Brand being angrier at Fox News than ISIS while talking to liberals who all hate Fox News anyway. But I'm feeling the way that you would if Russel Brand spent all his time criticizing Fox News as worse than ISIS in front of a mixed audience that contains everyone from anarcho-communists to white nationalists to a few actual ISIS thought leaders who are happily nodding about how bad Fox News America is… yet determinately pressing on with the idea that everyone in the audience was a Conservative and he was just giving them the antidote they needed.
In closing (sorry this got so long, if you've read this far), at the end of the day arguments about context and tone fall apart and what's really important is being correct. At the end of the day I think anti-theism and anti-patriarchy and anti-racism, whatever their tone and tactics, are ultimately correct in their fundamental premises, have chosen a real issue which does real harm, and have enacted social change in a manner that has shifted attitudes on the issue in a way that has made real people's lives better. I guess if you don't necessarily believe that this has in fact occurred, then all of the above is moot.
I've gone back to that same school where all of the events I described happened btw, because my younger sister attends the same place. It's totally different. And she thinks that every single thing I told her is the sort of thing that definitely would get you fired, AND that if a student did it they would be socially ostracized or reprimanded. She also said that she and every student has been actively exposed to anti-bullying programming and seminars, and that she has never even heard of anyone getting punched. She said that calling someone a "slut" unironically or making fun of them for being gay would receive social condemnation today. She and her friends seem to know what is "polyamorous" and "asexual' and all these other jargons. This is the same school I went to where calling someone "gay" was a hilarious insult. Something has progressed. Something has changed. I don't know how much internet social justice contributed, but I suspect that it really did.
BUT, I've also spoken to other people, who live in different, worse places and contexts. (For example, the kind of contexts where some of the kids have been to prison). And they report that this sort of stuff is still happening, they still get abused by teachers for much the same reasons. The wave of new thinking has not penetrated everywhere.
I've also noticed disabled kids in particular seem to get heaps of abuse from adults and other kids alike, even in the "better" contexts
“ think it's easier to like irrelevant groups compared to powerful ones” - this is good short version of “I can tolerate everything except the outgroup”. It describes most of relations in the post. Democrats can’t hate islamists because they are not worried about USA turning into Sunny theocracy, but they are worried about Rs getting more power and imposing their will on them. Grey tribe types are more tolerant to the right than to Blues because right were in political retreat lately, they are not afraid of them. But power don’t have to be real just believed. Nazis weren’t worried about Japan conquering them but they believed in powerful Jewish conspiracy. Xenophobia exists on its own but political fears fuel it to unprecedented levels.
Alex G17 min ago
here are some more optimistic takes
on social justice culture in general
- I think a good deal of the dysfunction of left-wing culture is a mixture of lots of people being vaguely on board with the project of "make the culture nicer for people from X demographic" with utter cluelessness on what the new norms should be, and a small minority of people from X demographic being crazy; I expect conflict to die down as the new norms get hammered out
on feminism/TERFism
- I think trans rights being a scissor statement among feminists and feminism being associated with transphobia is kind of a factor in the decline in the relevance of feminism.
one is reminded of the wars among atheism around e.g. feminism and islamophobia.
some of this is people directing the same misandric rhetoric against trans women as was done against men in the mid 2010s and promptly finding themselves persona non grata, which is both kinda sad and kinda amusing
and some of it is that something like 60% of trans people are uncomfortable with 2010s era feminist spaces which do these very unnuanced and negative generalisations about men, which is kinda tricky to square with inclusivity
on "cancel culture"
- isn't "cancelling" someone supposed to be a synonym for an online campaign to ostracise/harass someone famous for being insufficiently woke? it's good that opposition to this is what's killing the crazier side of left wing culture.
"- isn't "cancelling" someone supposed to be a synonym for an online campaign to ostracise/harass someone famous for being insufficiently woke? it's good that opposition to this is what's killing the crazier side of left wing culture."
Originally. Now it's often used - by both the left and right - to mean harassing or criticizing some rando who went viral through no fault of their own. Some people use it to mean "getting someone fired and/or otherwise punished for being unwoke".
IMO, the person being 'cancelled' often didn't even do the thing they were accused of. People got mad at Chris Pratt because they *assumed* he was homophobic and anti-Biden, to the point they did the same "let's not use his name and pretend he doesn't exist" unpersoning nonsense that happened to Minecraft's Notch and Rowling.
Linguistic Kill Shots, huh? Is the usage here the same as the term coined by Scott Adams?
It's a reference to people in the know to laugh at those who might freak out by our Scott A having said something similar to the evil Scott A.
When I was an edgy teen I was really into the New Atheism scene, especially on YouTube. I watched people like Thunderf00t, Amazing Atheist and Rapz0rian (? i couldn't find that last one anymore). I remember in around 2012/2013 there being a noticeable shift away from these YouTubers as they hyper-focused on anti-feminist rhetoric. The whole FACTS and LOGIC thing got played out and it seemed uncool. What is interesting in retrospect is that it felt like there was a hole in this particular YouTube subculture until the rise of "Leftist YouTube" with people like ContraPoints, Lindsay Ellis, Philosophy Tube and others. This kind of cultural hole of waiting for the next thing seems to be rare.
I found one aspect of this interesting and thought-provoking post irritating. It's a particular bugbear of mine and this essay has the irritant in spades. It's the common conflation of American culture and English speaking internet culture.
More than 50 countries in the world have English as an official language and barely a quarter of English speakers are American. But this article seemingly treats all internet culture as if it only pertains to culture in the US, which is bizarre. It starts off with a graph about word usage in an American newspaper and the second sentence says ".. America is becoming increasingly obsessed with racism and sexism." So one might expect the post to be about American culture and the 'current cultural moment' of the subtitle to be a moment in America.
But the very next paragraph asks "What does google trends have to say?", as if that referred to American culture. It doesn't - it refers to anyone in the world using the internet in English. So you have trends influenced by usage in Wales, Australia, New Zealand, England (etc etc etc) and yet the impression given is that it only has to do with one country where 4% of the worlds population live.
The post really is about America - a paragraph beginning "After Ferguson.. " simply won't make any sense to people living anywhere else in the world - in the UK most people would think it referred to the ex football manager Alex Ferguson. But the references to the internet phenomena are obviously to the whole English speaking world, and to me this is painfully jarring. It's as if Scott thinks anyone writing on the internet in English must be American and that internet culture is somehow subsumed within the wider culture of America. And this is most odd because Scott is an American who actually has a passport and has seen some of the 96% of the world that is not America.
Ah, the endless sport of non-Americans complaining that Americans are actually doing something. You'll notice that these people never do anything themselves - they just wait for the Americans to do it and then complain.
You seem to have misread my comment.
I've read this same comment hundreds of times. "Pay attention to me when you're doing something!" Followed by a complete lack of doing anything by the whiner.
I've learned a lot about anti-Americanism in the last 20 years. To a lot of people, it just feels good to complain.
If you're sensing anti-Americanism, perhaps it's your reading comprehension that's at fault? Perhaps you found your way to the wrong sunstack?
> But the very next paragraph asks "What does google trends have to say?", as if that referred to American culture. It doesn't - it refers to anyone in the world using the internet in English.
To be fair, Google Trends can show you data by country. See here on feminism worldwide:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=feminism
Vs only US:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=feminism
And it looks to me that Scott did indeed use the US data. Not immediately obvious at a glance, but when you apply the same 10 month averaging it becomes clearer.
If Scott used US data I think that squishes about 75% of my complaint; Thanks for pointing that out.
Probably three quarters of an apology is due, too..
CW internet culture *is* subsumed within the wider culture of America. (Scott should have noted that)
As far as either side of the culture war is concerned, 'other countries' are just a sort of flavour text backstory that turns up sometimes in discussions about immigrant groups.
You see it in the debate about cultural appropriation: the people who complain about white americans wearing kimonos do not live in Japan. Or when people forget that the idea of being native has very different implications in Europe.
That said, we ought to keep an eye on Labour right now as a weathervane of where the left wing might go.
Fair points. I do think, though, that CW stuff happens in other countries with their own idiosyncrasies attached. The renaming of David Hume Tower didn't owe
anything (as far as I know) to American culture.
I'm assuming the left in Britain (should I say England?) will realise that Starmer is as unelectable as Corbyn was and that getting a plausible PM is an essential starting point.
I'm just confused about the claim that only a quarter of English speakers being American. I think that 240 million Americans have English as their native language, and over 300 million speak English. I've seen numbers claiming over a billion people who speak English in some form, but I don't think I've seen anything claiming over 400 million native speakers.
The majority of native speakers of English are in the United States, and probably close to a third of English speakers of any sort are in the United States.
I saw figures of 1.35 billion English speakers, but I think you are correct that the majority of people who have English as their native language live in the States. My enthusiasm led me to conflate the two.
I did read that there are more English speakers in Nigeria than England.
If Scott's hypothesis was wrong, how would things look any differently? (Or rather, if some particular hypothesis of the many that are in this post were wrong, how would thins look any different?)
Suppose that shifting from the word "SJW" to "woke" was just linguistic drift and had no significance whatsoever in terms of people's beliefs. How would you tell the difference between that scenario and this one? In other words, is this evidence, or is it a just-so story?
Also, the reason people complain prominently about the woke getting TV shows cancelled is that a *lot* of people watch a particular TV show and even a relatively low anger rate can result in enough complaints to be prominent.
To start, Scott's timeline seems to overlook extremely large and successful feminist campaigns which occurred in 2017. Things like the Women's March and #MeToo, for example.
Honestly, the article ought to be disqualified for claiming to cover online feminism and only mentioning #MeToo in a passing sentence.
First of all, great essay. Psychiatry and culture war posts are I think my favorite here. I have an idea to add though:
I think that it makes less sense for socialism to go mainstream because in contrast to feminism and race issues which can be stripped of all their economic facets (which is the part that really matter) and mainstream-ed as woke capitalism. Socialism on the other hand, is nearly all economic and no product-selling-aesthetics. Yes there are Che Guevara t-shirts or red star caps or whatever but there won't be a Fortune 500 company trying to sell products via socialism (or I'm not imaginative enough). Will Coca Cola advertise they decided they'll make every employee a shareholder or something? That doesn't make sense.
I'm not from USA so maybe the culture I'm in are following things from a bit behind (I wasn't this much aware of feminism becoming the little sister of the woke siblings); but from what I see it's the LGBTIQ+ that's next. Them having a beef with feminists is also an indicator of this I guess?
I don't want to make a definitive point because I'm not in a place to do so, but socialism going mainstream doesn't make much sense to me, and the new elites that's running the show would also prefer the discussions about prepuberty gender change operations etc to keep the masses busy rather than, you know, a socialist revolt or something.
Counterpoint on socialism being cool: the champagne socialists of the Fabian society.
But maybe that was corporatism/tripartism and/or an attempt to compromise so as to avoid ending up up against the wall, come the revolution.
I meant acceptable to the interests of the rich, rather than cool.
I'm glad all the way to the bottom of the hundreds of comments here so as not to repeat this. It seems trivially obvious to me that true socialism is the only thing that can't be mainstreamed into corporate culture. The owners are not just going to divest their shares willingly and reorganize companies as worker-run coops. That has never happened anywhere that I know. Socialism has always tried to seep into pop culture going at least as far back as Woody Guthrie, but the message gets watered down at best or more likely ignored. How many children grow up thinking "This Land is My Land" is about an optimistic vision of manifest destiny and American assimilationism? Scott and friends write longingly about the possibility of private cities as if they've never existed, seemingly ignoring the long history of real-life company towns and private police mowing down union organizers with machine guns and law enforcement completely ignoring it (if not helping).
I probably sounds like a pinko commie myself saying all this and I'm really not. I'm a perfectly standard professional managerial class yuppie spending two grand a week on Amazon, and I grew up in the 80s extremely steeped in anti-Soviet sentiment I doubt I'll ever overcome. But I'm at least aware enough to see that.
That said, I can certainly see a near future in which a push for UBI and universal healthcare become popular enough in the US to actually succeed, but calling this "socialism" seems like a ridiculous misnomer. Various "let the government collectively provide some essential things" seems widely accepted by both the left and the right in virtually every "US-like" country in the world except the US. It seems as inevitable as gay marriage that these will eventually happen, but nowhere near plausible that real socialism is ever going to.
There definitely is an increasingly vocal subset of real socialists on the Internet, but certainly not the damn Jacobin. They don't have anywhere the feeling of historical inevitability behind them as slavery abolition, women's suffrage, gay marriage, academic acceptance of atheism, or the successful prosecution of actual rapists and murderers.
Personally, I don't think I want to make any other predictions. Basic trans rights stuff might be the next success story, but I feel a little too deep on the other side of that after effectively giving up on Facebook for good when friends started blackballing me for believing in the scientific validity of the existence of human sexual dimorphism and the persistence of musculo-skeletal changes in response to puberty. Past advocacy movements that succeeded seem to me that they tended to at least have the basic factual accuracy of the scientific part of their arguments in order, and it just took time for cultural values to catch up. This feels very different. And I don't think socialism can have anything particularly scientific on its side at all thanks to the seeming impossibility of rigorous empirical macroeconomics (RCTs on a country don't seem feasible). It's easy to get the kids on your side, but much harder to keep them without any verifiable factual basis. Even I believed in UFOs and astral projection as a teenager. Those never became cool and never will.
There seems to be a possible emerging consensus of "Billionaire-friendly socialism" in the form of Universal Basic Income.
UBI means that billionaires get to live on their luxury sky yachts enjoying the fruits of their robot-operated companies while everybody else gets to live in pods enjoying a healthy textured-protein diet and occasionally spending their surplus money on a new hat for their avatar or something.
UBI or something like that seems like a possible shield for capitalism from socialism, at one point the rising inequality of the last few decades will cause the very very top to own everything, and the rest not being able to buy their products. UBI or similar schemes would be a way to prevent that, like you said.
But would they be successful in spinning this as a kind of socialism? I hope not but I don't know.
Bowie put it nicely... "Fashion, turn to the left / Fashion, turn to the right / Ooh-bop, fashion / We are the goon squad and we're coming to town / Beep-beep... beep-beep."
thinking to the start of george floyd protests, its crazy how rapidly watered down the discourse grew among the protests. A socialist-anarchist trend containing both hyper race and class awareness demanding the dismantling of the state's monopoly on violence faded into institutions pledging support for diversity and removing signs and symbols historically associated with racism. A burgeoning link between this socialist-anarchist movement and 2nd amendment libertarian activists essentially demanding the same thing, dismantling the state, was relentlessly sabotaged by the same institutions that co-opted the narrative into a woke capitalist one of diversity. Mainstream institutions co-opted what they could live with into a new liberal consensus and the countercultural trends that seemed so close to linking up into something quite large and tangible have again shattered. There was always tension between internet socialists over how much focus race should get vs class. Chapo is now uncool for being too annoying and being too class reductionist. Socialist groups equally contemptuous of woke capitalism and yet equally as entranced by race as it have reached a point of self-parody with groups like Black Hammer Org. The 2nd amendment activists have gone back to being primarily associated with nazis, especially after January 6th.
If you want to look for where a new cool trend might arise from; I'd say look for Accelerationism. It's misunderstood by the general populace, has an obscure pantheon of modern philosophers behind the theory, and proports to explain all the malaise found in left wing circles about the total inability to stop capitalism's relentless march and subversion of the left despite the left's string of cultural victories. In other words its a good foundation for trendsetters to spread from.
> When was the last time you heard people argue about "creeps", "nice guys", or "friendzoning"?
Well, technically #meetoo went viral in late 2017, and has a wikipedia page more than twice the length than the one on philosophy, as far as that counts for anything.
And when #metoo came to a screeching halt the moment Joe Biden was credibly accused of rape by Tara Reade. Suddenly those untrustworthy women would lie about anything, especially about being raped by a powerful man.
I'm pretty sure that #metoo had already been fading by mid-2019, and it is still continuing in some form (look at Andrew Cuomo and Scott Stringer, as well as whatever is going on with the French literary establishment at the moment). "Screeching halt" seems to entirely mis-represent what happened. It had a spike in 2017, and a gradual fade since then (though not a fade to zero - just a fade to a normal medium level).
If I were to lamely throw a critique in there, the role of 'events' is a little mysterious (Adams is slightly unclear as to whether 'events' stand out in the public consciousness *because* of the atmosphere created by fashion, or whether it causes the shift in fashion).
Speaking of events (and a huge one, at that), I think the covid situation has helped a newish concept to emerge that has a slippery quality to it (not quite a 'left signal'?) - 'Safety'. Everyone wants to be safe, right? I think you can easily get from 'safety' to all of the major woke talking points and arrive at 'safety socialism' where the government is now responsible for our safety and immediately guilty if unsafe events occur to anyone at any time.
You and I remember the 2016 election runup quite differently. I'd personally have characterized criticism of Trump as something like 80% mysoginy based and 20% racist based.
This is the correct characterization. It is very telling that his election victory was followed by the absolutely massive "Women's March" and not an absolutely massive "Minority March".
Fukuyama is a hilarious character to bring up, because he himself more or less denounced his own work - so the evidence for why he (might) have been wrong seems hard to ignore. The kernel of all these struggles older folks have in trying to understand internet culture and what it means for building future ideal systems can be more or less explained by the exact people you make fun of, the SJWs et al, but most of them are terrible at explaining, and most other people don't want to listen.
What I mean by this is anti-woke people are terrible at abstraction. The tunnel vision is real. Look for the bigger picture of 'cancel culture', i mean the actual scientific roots, you'll find they are economic instability. Instability goes both ways - having too many resources makes you just as unstable as having too few. the coastal elite with too many resources commands the space of discourse, while he with too few resources fills the space with legitimate criticism. But everyone thinks SJWs are just crazy for constantly bringing up class, racism and sexism's relationship to capitalism, etc. Well, what must we do? Not our fault then if you don't listen. The culture marches on.
I think this misses a bit that the transgender topic rose around the time where feminism interest declined, and feminism does have a bit of a actual philosophical conflict with some of the ideas of that movement.
depends on which feminism
It's worth looking at how tolerant of strange bedfellows these different alliances are.
AFAICT conservatives will happily use terf talking points (not sure if vice versa?) like 'protecting [cis] women'. Once could argue that New Atheism was an alliance between people who dislike Islam and people who dislike Christianity.
There are also accusations that the other sides alliances are hypoctitical, like when socialists talk about 'woke capital' or the right talks about gender roles in Islam.
Protecting women has often been a genuine conservative value.
Indeed; given how long and hard feminists have fought for mixed-sex spaces, one might even say that TERFs have been adopting conservative viewpoints.
Patiently waiting for the Turchin cycle to reverse so that we can go back to being angry about AI and deontology instead.
To be fair, I think all of these conflicts are about deontologists taking over terminology invented for consequentialist reasons. (Every argument about "privilege" seems to have this form.)
This is a good observation and arguments about "privilege" actually DO seem to have this form, I will keep this in mind next time such an argument shows up before me. I will also use this to justify my anger about deontology, so thanks.
When in doubt, look to New York Times management and workers--especially when they conflict. The focus on feminism coincided with Jill Abramson's reign.
Dean Baquet is black but also an old school liberal. 24/7 anti-Trump was a marketing decision disguised as principle.
He has said with Trump out, the new ficus is race. But they also hired a bunch of "nontraditional" ie digital young journalists who are overthrowing classic journalism.
They got James Bennet fired be saying Cotton's op ed was a physical threat to their personal safety. Donald O'Neil was hosed for using the n-word in a discussion about the n-word.
The claim was no white person should ever use the n-word--as demanded by NYT staff. The reality was he was an cranky old boomer up for the Pulitzer for his covid coverage.
This young staff has a bunch of demands about racial hiring/management/assignment quotas. That's the core.
I don't think the NYTimes is as monolithic as you think on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/opinion/john-mcwhorter-n-word-unsayable.html
I really don’t think it was a marketing decision. I lived through the Nixon era and Nixon was awful but Trump made Nixon look like a model of civic responsibility by comparison. Please don’t say I only think that because I read the NYT. I do, but I actively sought out other sources during the Trump presidency. If I think that Nixon was awful any word I use to describe my take on Trump is going to sound like hyperbole. Let me just say I don’t like him because he no lacks human decency. That is about as modulated I can be on the topic.
This book is a an excellent consideration of all this: "Why Fish Don't Exist" by Miller
The rise of 4chan is actually an interesting story of its own. A large chunk of the early user base came from another site called somethingawful.com. As you may expect from the name, somethingawful was a place where a mixture of ironic and maybe-not-ironic terrible things could be said for comedy sake. If you're immature and like edgy humor, it was a great place to be. (The site probably exists still, but as a shadow of it's former edge hilarity, as internet culture caught up with it's redeemable qualities and it became a cesspool).
Up until 2008, there was a strong mix of both left and right posters, and the site didn't have much of an ideological slant. It was happy to make fun of the failings of both left and right culture. The Obama/McCain election ended up breaking that down, because a significant number of posters bet that they would accept permanent banning from the site if their candidate lost. Since Obama won, a big chunk of the conservative/right posters were banned. Many/most ended up on 4chan and set the seed for more right-leaning ironic humor, which is what the site became known for.
Somethingawful's forums instantly became more left-leaning and folded into a lot of the left blogging culture.
Wow, is that accurate? That people self-banned as part of a bet?
Yeah, it was a weird in-culture thing to do on the site. There were two levels of banning, one which required you to pay to reactivate your account ($10 to post on the forums!), and then permabanning, which was intended to be permanent. Both sides bet a permaban on winning the election.
So I was wondering, what are possible contenders for the next big trends, once the current ones are at least as thoroughly over as atheism vs religion is?
I feel like two future candidates are intelligence (how relevant is it for life outcomes and should we make it matter less?) and attractiveness (ditto).
I can certainly imagine lots of heated debates. But maybe it's just too much part of the human condition and elephant in the room?
Would love to hear your speculations
' once your movement controls the New York Times it turns out you can just arrange for things you don't like to disappear.'
Quick sanity check on this: The following people write for the NYT: LePen endorsing, conservative Catholic Ross Douthat (I think his general politeness and personal niceness seems to confuse people about how reactionary he actually is, since people assume reactionaries must be haters), old-style moderate country club Republican Bret Stephens, vaguely right-coded former Repub centrist David Brooks (or is he still a never Trump Repub?), and pro-life Catholic socialist Liz Breunig, who reliably drives the sort of feminist who you don't like nuts more than anyone else on Earth (heretics being more offensive than people who are far group, to put it in the terminology of this blog.) If Social Justice Feminist control is or has been so total, how come all these people have never been purged? Hell, I know Weiss left, and probably isn't that hostile to feminism anyway, but she wrote her positive stuff about the Intellectual Dark Web *for the NYT*.
It is undoubtedly true that the NYT is a liberal paper, where social justice/woke ideas have a lot of influence, and effect how it reports the news. But the idea that there's some kind of total rigid control is wide of the mark I think.
They are willing to give some of the more educated conservatives some column space, but they exert no influence on the paper as a whole. The NYT editorial staff that makes the important decisions is dominated by woke liberals.
Even if that's true, Scott didn't just say that they ran the paper, but that they could disappear anything they don't like automatically. Given that they in fact do publish people like Douthat and Stephens (this are regular columnists too, it's not like they just chip in occasionally) either they *can't* in fact disappear everything they don't like, and what Scott said was just false, or they are actually not as intolerant as all that, and the tone of the attack was a bit misleading.
They wanted to move the Overton window and disappear people who are outside it. They hadn't yet moved it so far that every single person to the right of them is a target for disappearing.
'They wanted to move the Overton window and disappear people who are outside it. They hadn't yet moved it so far that every single person to the right of them is a target for disappearing.'
1) Who are "they" here? Like, I know some imprecision in talking about broad trends is necessary, but right now we are talking about the internal culture of a large organization. So which people within it do you have in mind? Most staff? Most journalists? All the non-conservative journalists? Most of the non-conservative journalists? Most of the female journalists? Just a few people at the very top of the hierarchy.
2) What's your evidence for the claim? I don't think it's an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence, but what specific evidence for it do you have? I've cited very obvious public evidence for my claim, namely that the NYT actually publishes multiple regular opinion columnists who are not particularly woke and whom woke feminists dislike. What's your equivalent evidence about the motives of people at the NYT? (Note: this isn't a rhetorical question and I wouldn't be surprised if you did have good evidence, it's just I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't either.)
3) Are the even any woke feminist regular columnists at the NYT by now? (To be fair, Scott did arguably put their point of dominance in the recent past rather than present.) I feel like there must be some, but I can't think of anyone prominent. A quick check at today's opinions revealed a Jessica Valenti piece, and I assume she counts-though I'm not that familiar with her stuff-but she's apparently a "guest columnist". I check the NYT opinion page quite often, and the only female names that leap to my mind as appearing all the time are Maureen Dowd and Liz Breunig, neither of whom really counts I don't think. Certainly in the case of the latter they don't given her pro-life views. Perhaps Ezra Klein counts, but he's more a of fellow traveller than someone for whom it is their main thing.
Scott actually binds himself into a contradiction in this article without realizing. He claims that, briefly, they ran the NYT and could disappear anything they don't like automatically.
But then, during the exact same time period, he claims that "they" tried to disappear Jordan Peterson before giving up and deciding to treat him as a novel zoo exhibit. Indeed, it was the NYT itself that spearheaded this reluctant acceptance, and effusive praise of Peterson.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opinion/jordan-peterson-moment.html
If the editorial staff is dominated by woke liberals and they have the power to cancel people then why didn't they?
Either woke liberals never had this power to begin with or woke liberals were never interested in removing Peterson from the discourse entirely. Which do you believe is the case?
Leftist, not liberal. The left hijacked the label liberal, something they have never been. After they ruined and destroyed the meaning they moved on to "progressive". Leftists hate liberals, just ask them.
How do you tell the difference between liberals and leftists? Easy. Liberals believe in freedom of speech. They might disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.
Leftists, on the other hand, freely use censorship as a weapon of first resort. Their own positions are so weak that if people are allowed to point out the many problems, they would collapse.
I'm pretty sure that *any* self-described "leftist-not-liberal" will point to the NYTimes as a paradigm of "liberal-not-leftist" culture.
The word "liberal" has so many different meanings, it's hard to say whether you're right or wrong about this. "Leftist" isn't perfect here either, because most people who define themselves as "left" regard it as an economic position, and many of the woke feminists don't care very much about economics: a fair number supported Clinton over Sanders after all: that's partly the source of their hatred of the Bruenigs.
I think a lot of people in this community have trouble understanding that the NYTimes has this complexity to it - many assumed that there was some institutional decision to attack Scott, when it's more like the big machine didn't notice that it was running over someone's foot.
To be clear, I think you're talking about the original decision to doxx him, right? I would agree with you there. But the decision to then turn the article into a transparently hostile smear was almost certainly a vindictive punishment for him rebelling against the doxxing, and one or more senior people at the paper must have made the call.
Oh, I didn't think it was a "transparently hostile smear". It had problems, sure. And I think it misrepresented some things for sure, in negative ways. But I don't think there was anything that made it a "transparently hostile smear", though it's easy to feel that way when a big instrument of the establishment happens to be pointed at our weird little group.
I went ahead and re-read it, and you might have a point, it didn't seem as smear-y to me this time as when I first read it. I could see the case that this is just "if it bleeds, it leads" journalism, going negative because that makes for the most juicy story. And I also think the journalist probably didn't understand well enough what Scott was about to be able to make a good story out of a more balanced article.
Though to be sure, I only feel tangentially linked to this group, as I don't share most of the core values aside from the intellectual curiosity and pursuit of truth in a cordial environment. But I do admit to having a heavy bias against the NYT.
I know this is a bit patronizing, but well done for admitting you might have been wrong! It's really hard! Certainly, I am not very good at it.
I found the "transparently hostile smear" to be fairly on point.
I mean, the "smear" bit essentially came down to one in passing comment about Murray that was, yes, unfair, but on the other hand, Scott really is somewhat sympathetic to Murray's views on race, and the entirely accurate reporting of the fact that Scott doesn't like the feminist movement and is not shy about it.
They also quoted nice stuff from Kelsey Piper, right?
Oy. These long threads that stem from a deleted post give me a headache!
Maybe when a post is deleted the sub-threads should be automatically collapsed/hidden.
I would say that the mainstreaming of online dating was what killed the nerds vs feminism discourse. People who couldn't pick up on social cues got a very clear means of asking women to date them where they knew in advance that the women were willing to be asked.
If we ever get around to making fun of New Socialism, I think the term 'radicalized' will be the new 'woke'.
My own life has improved immeasurably since I stopped giving a shit about any of this. Meaning not policy and ideology or even things like theism, but these meta-discussions around “are atheists/feminists/[any other involved group] annoying/evil/etc?”
This is downstream of technology. I’m glad socialism (and for that matter plenty of things under the tremendously unhelpful “woke” label) are getting more popular, but they’re going to be intellectually and morally hamstrung to the extent that public thinking takes place through the worst medium ever invented, Twitter. I’ve seen so many people of many different ideologies who are thoughtful and kind in a slower medium degenerate into their worst selves when they enter that space. The conversation will improve when people move on from it and no sooner, I’m pretty convinced.
Don't hold your breath. I remember when the Internet was going to save us from the mindless sound-bitism and hyped-up caricaturization of everybody and everything that was broadcast TV.
"I can just ignore them! By the way, I agree with most of what they say anyway" doesn't mean that you are able to ignore them because they don't hurt anyone. It just means that you are able to ignore them because they're hurting someone, but not you.
"who was caught on tape saying he liked to "grab [women] by the pussy"
This is the inaccurate spin that some media put on it, but the actual tape doesn't say that. It's phrased in the imperative as a hyperbole and not as a preference, not as a description of any actual past or future events. I'd rate the claim 3 pinnochios out of 5.
Another one that got lied about a lot was the one where he allegedly claimed "all mexicans are rapists", which deserves about 4 pinnochios since there was no "all" and it was referring to people who leave mexico for the US, not all mexicans.
So what he said was something along the lines of - I won’t put it in quotes because I’m just going off my recollection - When you’re a star you can get away with it. Grab them by the pussy”. So even from my imprecise memory it wasn’t an exact quote. And you are correct he never said all Mexicans are rapists but I never heard anyone make that attribution to him. What strikes me as off kilter is someone pointing out a misquote that is a little off and complaining about the lies told about a man that took lying to entirely new level. You have to admit the Pinocchios earned by 45 were in a class of their own.
Well I guess you don’t have to admit it. But really, what do you think of his relationship with the truth?
He lied a lot, as do all elected politicians. Maybe more than most, but hard to quantify that without massive selection bias about which quotes to fact-check. When I listened to a democratic debates there were at least two blatant lies per minute.
Fair enough
What was remarkable about Trump's lies wasn't so much that he lied all the time, it was how brazen, obvious, and not-slick the lies were, to the point of being pointless and embarrassing, starting with the whole inauguration attendance thing. I have a very low opinion of politicians, but I've never been embarrassed *for* a politician and his lies before or since. For a moment I wondered if perhaps it would turn out better to have a politician who's terrible at lying as opposed to one who's really good at it, except then I watched people who should know better repeatedly cover for and make excuses for all the terrible and obvious lies, and now it seems clear the whole thing has been poison for the Republican Party.
I pretty much agree with this. It put the party in an unwinnable position, because weak men are superweapons. But also the media were over-eager to prove him wrong and fucked up on occasions such as the tale of Russia paying bounties in Afghanistan (which never had any publicly available evidence for it, and now the CIA finally publicly admits to low confidence in it). Glenn Greenwald's substack has some great posts on that.
I remember picking an example from just after the election. There's something I call the "politician's lie" - where you make a claim that is factually true, but most people listening end up believing you said something false.
For instance, someone in Trumpworld (might have been Sean Spicer) defended the claim that Trump had won the election in a landslide by saying he'd won more electoral votes than any Republican since Reagan was President. This is technically true - he won more than the various losing candidates, more than George W Bush did in either of his two famously narrow victories, and Reagan was President on the election day when George HW Bush won in 1988. He got less than Obama or (Bill) Clinton, but they're both Democrats.
Trump then repeated the claim in an interview (you may remember he did lots of interviews in 2017 and then realised they were pointless and stopped). Except he didn't include all the qualifications and just said he'd got more electoral votes than anyone since Reagan.
The statement by maybe-Spicer was a politician's lie. It sounds like it means a lot - Reagan was a long time ago now - but actually doesn't. The Trump version was just a lie. It was the lie that the maybe-Spicer version was meant to make you believe.
Politicians and journalists are accustomed to this, and to looking at a statement like the maybe-Spicer one, spotting the hidden qualifications, and saying "that's true, zero Pinocchios", but also noting that it didn't say as much as it seemed to. Occasionally a journalist would break something down and say "yeah, but that's not saying all that much", but generally, they were entirely content playing this game with the truth,
Trump's lies, though, were straight up, don't bother torturing the words, lies. Sometimes someone would tell him a politician's lie and he couldn't remember all the fancy qualifications and would turn it into a proper lie.
And the fact-checkers hated that. If you included a bunch of technical qualifications, they'd happily mark you as telling the truth. Trump didn't, and I think that professionally offended them. It wasn't that he was lying. It was that he was bad at it.
Remember the Obama line about "if you like your insurance you can keep your insurance"? He'd done that a bunch of times before where he'd said something like "if you have good insurance that you like, you can keep that insurance" - and he defined "good" insurance as "insurance that fulfills the minimum criteria set by the regulations under the Affordable Care Act". So the fact checkers were ruling it "true". And then he slipped up on his words once, and suddenly it was the biggest lie of the year.
Because they're both lies, but fact-checkers see their job as not being about catching when politicians mislead people, but spotting when they tripped up on the words that hide their lies. And Trump didn't bother hiding his lies, which really offended them.
Yes, this is an excellent explication of the phenomenon I was referring to.
It's a status and cult-of-personality thing. Making people pretend to believe lies demonstrates your superior status, and to the extent that the lies are obvious to third parties it locks in their loyalty because they'll have preemptively burned their credibility with anyone they could defect to. Most neurotypical humans will go along with this, in accordance with their (lack of) status. And yes, basically all politicians do this, in accordance to their status.
Almost all first-world politicians limit themselves to at least semi-plausible lies, because they either don't have or don't believe they have the status to make people sign on to blatantly obvious lies, and because they are trying to build coalitions with people who aren't willing to burn their bridges for the sake of joining. Trump was a serious and worrisome escalation in that regard. Not quite to the "Kim Jong Un never poops" level, but closer than anyone should be comfortable with.
And it worked for him, at least to the extent of enabling him to take control of the Republican party at just the right moment. Fortunately, most Americans weren't willing to go along with it - but we could still use a credible Republican party, and Trump's brand of lying means that's going to take a lot of rebuilding.
As a psychological phenomenon, I think this captures some truth, but mainly with regards to Republican politicians and operatives, not so much the voters. Though I can't tell if you're implying that Trump did this intentionally, which I don't believe is true. The man is basically Mr. Magoo meets Daffy Duck, not Mephistopheles, Prince of Lies.
I'm reminded of that remark about Cold War Communist propaganda from a while back that got passed around a lot (maybe from Dalrymple?), that the ineptitude and obvious falseness of the propaganda was part of the point, which never rung true to me. I think Hanlon's Razor generally applies here, and propaganda works much better if it's actually convincing. But sometimes the facts aren't good and the leadership isn't capable enough to reshape them into something both positive and believable.
So why did Trump generate the popularity he did? It's mostly the Daffy Duck in him: his blustering, arrogant superiority complex made all the alternatives look like Neville Chamberlain. The obvious lies were mostly a side effect of his arrogance (combined with his incuriousness and lack of verbal agility), not the main point.
The left should carefully consider themselves in the mirror.
Trump is very hyperbolic and a braggart. However, he was honest and direct in big things. Breaking taboos.
The left, on the other hand, lied big with impunity, supported by the press.
A Charlottesville lie is a good illustration.
Ah, yes, the time when he said the far-right should be "condemned totally", which was completely ignored so people could turn sentence fragments into endorsement.
I have argued with people who *still* defended the Narrative even after I told them. One claimed that everyone there was far right, therefore Trump was endorsing the far right, even if by accident, so it still counted.
He had no evidence, of course.
I interpreted the first one as saying it was consensual. "They let you do it".
He also said the Mexicans who Mexico was "sending" included "people with problems", and "good people".
I think this entire piece reflects a very particular series of internet social bubbles, some of which I myself was barely aware of, but there’s nothing wrong with Scott speaking from personal experience. But I had to look up several references here and I’m about the same age he is.
Apropos our ages, one possible conclusion about why things changed that I think deserved more weight is that the user base in question simply *got older*. We may not have changed personally in any fundamental way, but life experiences and priorities quietly shift as you move from 20 to 30 and beyond. 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. Sexism as we used to experience it maybe didn’t change or fizzle but merely sank below our own personal horizons.
No doubt younger people face their own issues when it comes to attraction and dating, but they grew up with a different internet and different rules IRL. How much of a ~40 year old’s experiences online or off still apply to them at all is speculative. Neither of us is going to engage the way people did in 2010, and I suspect for the older people whatever younger folks are dealing with is partially unintelligible, while the old issues we dealt with have largely become out-of-sight, out-of-mind.
I think there's an elephant in the room here: sex versus gender. Feminism became uncool when transgender started to become cool, because at least the radfem side kept pointing out that women had traditionally been oppressed on the basis of sex and no-one ever asked them how they identified. Michfest and bathroom bills fit into this somewhere, I'm sure. I get the impression that apart from race, people are still talking about trans issues a lot online? It seems that nowadays, being a feminist but not publicly declaring how trans-inclusive your feminism is makes you almost as unwelcome as an anti-feminist, at least in universities.
A big difference in the current situation is how wokeness has captured the educational establishments all the way down to elementary schools in many places. How children will carry this into their lives--or resist it as teenagers--will decide the direction of future electorates.
Scott, basically everything you wrote about the "feminist era" drips with contempt for all feminist concerns everywhere. You don't have to like Amanda Marcotte to acknowledge that a lot of women were targeted for a massive wave of harassment and abuse during GamerGate. You don't have to forgive Gawker to understand the concept of privilege, or the value of self-care. I had to stop reading after that section; it demonstrates far too clearly that your analysis in this post is based on your personal history and emotional affinity and haven't done the work to ground it out empirically.
Even according to Anti-GG narrative, there were about three women significantly "targeted". Quinn, Wu, and Sarkeesian. I saw more women claiming to be scared by the threat than evidence of actual harassment. From the discussions I saw, GG was targeting game and mainstream journalists, most of whom were men.
I've read the FBI also cleared Gamergate. Oh, and the cops said the death threat Sarkeesian cancelled a talk over wasn't credible, but she self-martyred anyway.
I'm not saying that's what happened there, but "unusual amount of hate at just a few people" is exactly the dark pattern people worry about.
It's *not* that everyone is being hit. It's that being hit is somewhat random and then out-of-scale once the mob finds someone safe to pick on.
My company wants us to print out a Woke slogan, take a selfie with it, and post it to our internal social media account. There is a preprinted "I pledge to: " section and room to write.
I briefly considered writing "Judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin" but quickly decided I would get canceled as racist.
So that's the kind of "we need volunteers to do this - you, you and you, you've volunteered" attitude in your workplace? I suppose if it is "we'd love if you did this, but it's all up to you if you want to or not (but if you don't, we'll ask questions as to why you hate niceness and goodness and puppies and apple pie)" kind of request, the least worst thing is to find the most anodyne "I pledge to smile at people" kind of blah you can get away with that fits with the Wokeness and do that. "I pledge to fight hate!", that sort of vague platitude. No need to be too explicit about what kind of hate or haters.
Thanks for the overview of internet culture. As someone who gets exposed to a lot of discourse nowadays about how wokeism is bad and it's going to take over our institutions forever, I appreciate the outside view (as both internet atheism and internet feminism both kind-of-died in their own turns).
Also internet culture history is a *very* under-explored area (it doesn't even have a section in Wikipedia that gives an overview). I'm a Wikipedia contributor, so if someone can point out some less-blatantly-COI-y sources that also go over this I'll probably write about it somewhere there.
> When was the last time you heard people argue about "creeps", "nice guys", or "friendzoning"? Mansplaining? #NotAllMen? MRAs and PUAs?
Swing and a miss. It was last month, on Hacker News, which is not exactly devoted to the topic.
I had the inside view of this as a racially-aware influencer that peaked in high 4-figure twitter followers before being banned. (they didn't specify any particular post, so I guess it was that the entire enterprise of promoting hatefacts was misconstrued as promoting hatred.)
Originally circa 2015 the alt-right was a much broader label with a few genuinely bad apples using it (1% nazi larpers and klantards) and then it got Worst Argument In The Worlded by HC and the media in similar fashion to New Atheists talking about Westboro Baptist Church a lot. (Richard Spencer was unheard of among us until after corporate media chose him to be the face of the movement). So then there was a cycle of more moderate types dropping the label until the stigmatization became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the movement fizzled. Its former inhabitants tried various other labels to distance itself from spencer types, but none of them really stuck.
It was also unfortunate that we (insert label for loose, diverse movement that no longer has a name) had such poor political representation in Trump. It put us in the position of needing to defend the indefensible (ala Weak Men are Superweapons), while getting almost nothing from Trump in terms of substantive immigration policy. The system is still dispossessing us of our ancestral homeland as fast as ever. Trumpism was also premature. We had a lot of work to do in changing minds before reaching for real political representation that would put a target on our backs and lead to increased censorship and repression of us. False racial blank-slatism has a bigger moat than false religion because it stigmatizes differences of opinion more than religion has any time in the last couple of centuries. (Which makes it even more epistemically unvirtuous than religion, I suppose, since only evidence, and not social pressure, is a valid reason to update). Trump just made the moat deeper.
Anyway, the whole OP describing all the ways people chose their beliefs for reasons of social context and social signaling rather than evidence is extremely depressing and should give me a lower prior on the likelihood that the general trend of society is towards truth, except in hard sciences.
I agree there were communities like that, but I'm skeptical of the "alt-right was less bad before the white supremacists took it over" perspective because Richard Spencer invented the term alt-right. There were probably some communities that were borderline politically-incorrect but otherwise okay until the white supremacists took them over, but given the Spencer connection I think it makes more sense to think of the alt-right as always being white supremacists, then gradually expanding its connotation to include other people.
I propose a skewed inverted U, where usage of 'alt-right' started narrowly in 2008, broadened a lot sometime between 2008-2016, and then narrowed rapidly after mid-2017.
Inventing a term in 2008 doesn't make him a central example of the category in 2016 (decades later in internet time). That would seem similar to defining sunni vs. shia as a disagreement over the rightful caliph (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/). Valorie Solanas probably invented terms that feminists still use today, which, if the media were feeling uncharitable towards feminists, they could use to tar feminists by association to the S.C.U.M Manifesto and its plan to exterminate all men. Similarly, one could uncharitably define the democratic party by its first president Andrew Jackson and his trail of tears. SPLC does exactly this sort of thing in relation to any rightwing rallying flags they can find dirt on.
There were quite a lot of edgy young people with frog avatars on twitter in 2016, who would have described themselves as alt-right, but who knew little to nothing about Richard Spencer and were not ideologically adjacent to him and his weird neo-imperialism. They opposed all 21st century US wars, which probably makes them about as far from RS as it is possible to be on foreign policy. As for domestic policy, the median would have favored the status quo, but with better enforcement of the existing immigration laws and a large reduction in legal immigration from the third world and toning down feminism a bit. Some would have supported incentives for repatriation of troublesome minorities like the somalis in minnesota. Very few advocated expulsions and none advocated genocide.
Then and now Richard Spencer's weird views are an outlier among the "far-right". I can't name a single other person who wants to resurrect European empires. In toxoplasma of rage style, his outrageousness got him more air time than the relatively anodyne, more reasonable, more popular, better-educated and longer-established spokesmen like Jared Taylor or John Derbyshire. Jared Taylor is the Vegan Outreach to Richard Spencer's PETA.
I strongly suspect that Alex Jones' audience was built up in a similar Toxoplasma fashion, by corporate media repeatedly talking about the latest outrageous thing he did. I knew a lot of conservatives but only one of them ever mentioned Alex Jones before he became the media's favorite pinata and favorite weak-man-superweapon to use against antiestablishment conservatives. I checked Socialblade for his old Youtube Channel and it shows a huge spike (2-3x the normal monthly) of subscribers in Nov-Dec 2016 when the media started talking about fake news all the time, so that seems to support my theory.
The situation in Germany might add an interesting data point to your piece. Fashions (cloths and otherwise) from the US arrive here with a lag. Still, the culture war is raging, though on a lower level and with slightly different topics. On this background Sarah Wagenknecht, a famous far- left politician from the party “Die Linke” (The Left”, with positions somewhere between socialism and Marxism) published a controversial book. Its main thesis: The identity politics of the left (small letter), is self- indulgent. A group of middle class people are virtue signaling, with the poor being left out in the cold.
Since Wagenknecht is a Marxist (or at least strongly influenced by Marxist ideas) this does not appear too surprising on the surface. Her party however has been on its way into the trenches of identity politics and is now debating this critique from the left.
This is not a change in the internet level of discourse, but in the direction you are talking about. Can other Germans with better inside into the debate tell me what they think? Do you think we are seeing the high watermark of SJWs and are returning to a more class based discourse?
I think you're missing the class angle: for something to go 'corporate' it needs to not be dangerous to the interests of the people running the corporations. Feminism, anti-racism, LGBT activism, can all be harnessed in such a way that the rich and powerful can appear as progressive as they like. This simply isn't true of socialism, which is fundamentally pitted against the interests of capitalists.
I've been various shades of socialist/social-democratic since the start of the period you're talking about and the way I see it there's always been a struggle between those on 'the left' who just want to go on Pride Parades, wear tattoos, and complain about men, and those who care more about how the means of production are controlled and how wealth is distributed.
I think you underestimate the creativity of corporations.
For example, feminists complain that women make less money than men, and one of the reasons is that men are more likely to ask for a salary raise. So there was one corporation (I forgot its name) that fought against sexism by adopting a company policy that NO employee is allowed to ask for a raise, thereby making genders more equal. Obviously self-serving, but was celebrated in media.
Similarly, a corporation could embrace the idea of "socialism" and translate it as paying its employees less. You could simply go with "to each according to their needs" and let HR determine the needs. :) Alternatively, you could decide that everyone gets the same salary, which just happens to be lower than the median employee was making before. (The top management would also get the same "equal salary", and that would be celebrated in media, but in addition they would also get bonuses or whatever, so their total compensation would actually remain the same.) And people objecting openly against this interpretation of "socialism" would get the same treatment Damore got when he proposed how to make the Google workplace more friendly to women.
> they get basic facts wrong, quash free speech, bully their opponents, or make unfair generalizations across diverse groups.
If you asked me what group this quote was meant to refer to, without context, I think my answer would be 'human beings'.
It's hard to meaningfully criticize a group along an axis that completely fails to differentiate them from every other group.
No one is perfect, but some people have "free speech" as a value, and some use it as a joke.
The internet has diminished my language parser abilities such that Parts IV and V wound up confusing me because of the nested discussion of irony... Suddenly, I can't figure out Scott's true intentions. Why does he want tribal-intellectual cycle to speed up?
I thought that the next big contender should be the climate change awareness, but google trends show it's peak popularity was somewhere way back in the 2000's. With all the chaotic weather and wildfires all around the world lately, I expected much higher popularity. What am I missing? Is this some kind of collective denial?
Perhaps it is not identity-driven enough. If this is about fashion and being one of the cool people, then "I am an Atheist", "I am a Feminist", "I am an Anti-Racist", are strong statements about personal identity. "I am an Environmentalist" could be, except there's nobody on the other side. Many are happy to say "I am a Christian", "I am an MRA", "I am a Race Realist"... whereas few people will say "I am Pro-Global Warming" (Although there is at least one famous regular on this site who I believe is.)
I think a more likely candidate is "I am a Vegetarian" because there's plenty of people to take the other identity-side of that.
I get the impression it's a bigger thing in Europe.
Your focus is on the shift from feminism to anti racism here, but I think you miss a rather obvious drift of online feminism: the gender discourse has almost entirely been consumed by the transgender discourse. I’d really like to see the detailed comparison (rather than just the tiny plots starting in 1970) over the last 20 years of “feminism” and “gay rights” to various trans terms. In college in the mid Oughts, trans issues were barely on the radar, and now they dominate discussions.
The gays won the gay marriage wars and then transgender rights became the next frontier, pulling in interest (and not a small dose of toxoplasma) from both gender discussions and sexuality discussions. Plenty of ground for spicy debate with both conservatives and TERFs to fuel the fire.
The geeky internet feminists didn’t disappear, they just declared themselves non-binary.
I've been heavily invested in posting on 4chan for a bit over ten years now, and I think I can answer the question of how it became legitimately racist instead of ironically racist. The first answer is that it's never been wholly ironic. Stormfront posters have pretty much always been around, and /pol/ was deleted for a time for being too racist, long before 2016.
But beyond that, it did seem to pick up in 2016, and I think it's simply because 4chan is the contrarian site to whatever the mainstream opinion is in these culture wars. It's a town that takes in witches, regardless of what the modern definition of witch is. It was the first place I saw online atheists referred to as Fedoras. It's where Gamergate really began, before getting booted off to go start their own imageboard. And when the cultural dialogue started shifting towards race, it's where people began furiously and sincerely posting FBI crime statistics. (Side note, it's also, I believe, the origin of Chad and Virgin replacing alpha and beta).
This was particularly exacerbated on /pol/ because Trump was such an amusing candidate that he swiftly became the favorite in the debate watching threads, and once they had latched on to him as theirs, it was inevitable that the discourse would shift to whatever he was most heavily criticized for, which was, as you pointed out, race.
From what I've seen, though, race as a focal point is losing its power right now. /pol/ will undoubtedly continue to be racist, but it really was racist before. Every board has its particular brand of witch, but what is distressing is when they spread beyond their natural borders. Right now, that fight is about the trans culture war. I think if I've learned anything over the last decade, it's that culture is always changing, and what you are angry about today is not what you will be angry about in five years. But regardless, you will probably be angry.
Regarding the greater volume of Google Search queries for "is Donald Trump racist" than "is Donald Trump sexist". I think the likely answer is that the search volume doesn't reflect the importance of the question, rather it reflects the mismatch in how obvious the answer was.
As Scott points out, there was a lot of evidence that Donald Trump was sexist, so people didn't feel the need to Google it. On the other hand, his attitudes on race were more ambiguous, leading to more Google searches.
Donald Trump has, on two separate occasions, been court ordered to stop being racist.
I am not sure if there is a higher standard than this to determine if an individual is racist.
"We think [people of African ancestry]...are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States."
--- Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Roger B. Taney
I think the "grab 'em by the pussy" tapes are much more salacious and legible to the average American than court orders, so I think Americans had much more explicit evidence about his sexism than his racism. Supporting evidence: there was a huge Women's March organised during his inauguration, not a huge racial identity march. People seemed much more concerned about his sexism than his racism.
(I'm just talking about his bigotries _as perceived by the people who get their political opinions from Google Search_, not his actual bigotries)
Seconding this.
The obvious next cycle of screaming internet arguments is trans rights. You have the liberal pro-trans version, the conservative anti-trans version, the socialist anti-SJW (ie class is more important) version and, as an extra bonus complication, the feminist "terf" version (ie, trans women should not be treated as women).
The attack on Caitlyn Jenner - a trans woman - for not being sufficiently pro-trans (because she says that trans women shouldn't be allowed to compete in womens' sports) is a sign that this is getting to the "burning people for saying one word out of line" stage.
Just to add: my read of the evidence is that trans women who have had levels of testosterone and estrogen typical of cis women for an extended period of time do not have advantages in sport over women. But I can certainly see how a trans woman who was elite in (male) sports before she transitioned would believe otherwise.
Every trans woman I know who has transitioned after puberty has commented on the very noticeable drop in hand-grip strength and lifting ability (ie upper body strength) within a few months of starting on HRT. There's no serious doubt that trans women are much more like (cis) women than men on muscle-mass and cardiovascular fitness and endurance. Studies on the general population show that you can't tell trans women from cis women by doing fitness tests; you get the same distribution.
The open question from research is whether a trans woman who was already in a high-level exercise regimen before transitioning can retain more muscle mass (in particular) than a cis woman (or indeed the same trans woman, if she lost it) could build. Getting an adequate sample for this (which would require getting considerable pre-transition data and then continuing the study over a number of years) seems like a difficult and expensive proposition.
In addition, there's the base fact that trans women have been allowed into the Olympics since 2005 and none of them have ever competed because they all failed to qualify. There are two or three who are trying to qualify this year and I think one has achieved the required standards and may go to Tokyo. This does rather suggest that any problem is theoretical rather than practical, which means that taking some time to study it should be harmless enough.
"Getting an adequate sample for this (which would require getting considerable pre-transition data and then continuing the study over a number of years) seems like a difficult and expensive proposition."
You may be able to get that data in future; there's currently a minor kerfuffle over a New Zealand trans female weightlifter named Laurel Hubbard https://www.bbc.com/sport/weightlifting/57013419
I liked this as a description of how external criticism of cruel excess and narrow focus eventually pushes a movement over the relevance cliff, but it ignored the simultaneous internal pull. For the average person on the inside, the cycle looks like a long need that is suddenly met and then sated - not materially, but expressively and intellectually, which is pretty much all internet culture can do for most people.
I deeply appreciated that (white, heh) feminist wave. Me Too felt like a miracle. Explaining “mansplaining” to my boomer mother was delightful, because she was so delighted to find a word for those little social erosions and realize they are a shared experience. But there are a limited number of Solnit ideas (or Hitchens or Kendi) that can be generated in a short time to speak that kind of truth to a large number of people, and after we joyfully squawked over them together and beat them over the heads of our enemies-in-this, we moved on. It’s not that we lost interest or won more than a couple bones. All the pain and rage and real-world problems are still grinding on in real-world negotiations. But the moment on the internet - from the inside - was mass shock-of-recognition and catharsis.
"So an alternate prediction is to expect the world of the 1970s. A repressive orthodoxy has taken over the government, the media, and big business, and set itself up as the arbiter of morality, able to blacklist anyone who disagrees."
An obstacle to that scenario is that wokeness is a revolutionary, hate-based movement. It can't survive without hate, and it can't survive without some revolutionary action. Its situation today is like that of the Nazis in 1933. They purged Jews from government, universities, & schools; undermined the legal system by making it clear that "the law is what is good for Germany" rather than what the books say; and turned the educational system into indoctrination. Analogs of all 3 of these things are happening in America today.
But what to do after that? Say "The Jews are gone; we're done here"? They had to start a war in order to hold the hate together.
Key parts of the Nazis' success included choosing a weak scapegoat, and recruiting among the police and Army. The woke have declared that the police and the military are their enemies, and chose as scapegoats half of America. So their situation is more like that of the French Revolutionaries, who declared the army and the Church their enemies, and by attacking the Church, made most of the peasantry their enemies. They had a civil war that was basically urban vs. rural, called the Vendee (seldom mentioned now), compared to which the Terror was trivial and humane. The urbanites won because they'd taken over the army by then, which, though greatly outnumbered, was MUCH better at war than unarmed peasants were.
Then they had to have a war against the rest of Europe to distract the French from how they'd screwed up the economy while they were totally focused on ideology and power struggles among themselves.
Can the woke keep power without starting an urban/rural civil war? To deliver on immigration, they'd have to open our southern border. This would destabilize the border states and likely lead them to mobilize their National Guard to close the border, in open defiance of the federal government's orders. To deliver on their education programs (and achieve successful herd immunity to wrongthink), they risk outraging parents of all parties and races (not much about Native Americans, Hispanics, or Asians in the 1619 project!), and may need to outlaw home schooling and private schools. To deliver on the Green New Deal, they'll have to tax rural workers to pay for urban public transit systems. (Also, wreck the economy.) To deliver on college tuition, they'll need to tax rural workers in order to widen the pay gap and the power gap between urban and rural areas. To prevent the Supreme Court from finding their various racist programs in violation of the Civil Rights Amendment, they'll have to pack the Supreme Court. To deliver on the abolition of gender, they'll have to destroy rural culture entirely.
To deliver on gun control, they'll have to ban military-style rifles--and that's a red line that can't be crossed without starting a war. Maybe 5 million Americans own AR-15s, most of them rural. Maybe a quarter of them will give them up peacefully. The NRA-ish line that gun control is a leftist plot to make the population helpless against a leftist takeover was a wacky conspiracy theory 6 years ago, but has since become an obvious reality.
(And who buys a $1000+ rifle? People who have invested years in training with its big brother, the M-16, in the US military.)
How many of the woke even want to avoid civil war? Certainly not all of them. I myself don't even know anymore whether I'm more afraid of having a civil war, or of not having one.
I have a slightly different perspective on the death of New Atheism. For a bit of background, I was heavily involved in the religious debate sphere online for maybe 10 years, only "retiring" last year. A lot of this was on reddit, some also on discord and youtube and so on.
Over the years, I've definitely seen a lot of people transition out of that debate to the debate on "social justice", more around race and economics than gender. But that probably only accounts for half of the New Atheists which I've seen transition. The others have gone a different direction: they moved from New Atheism to "old" Atheism.
Broadly, among philosophers of religion, New Atheism is not looked upon favourably. Dawkins and Hitchens and so on are great at scoring rhetorical points, but their arguments shallow. It doesn't take a very intelligent Christian to dismantle New Atheist arguments. Of course, the New Atheists weren't targeting intelligent Christianity, they were targeting what they saw as dangerous fundamentalism, which isn't very intellectual. But the eager teenager wading into online debate forums found themselves unequipped to deal with Christian responses to New Atheist arguments.
So these people over time have become more philosophically literate. They've abandoned Dawkins and Hitchens for more careful and rigorous defenders of atheism, like Graham Oppy or Alex Malpass. These guys still make arguments against religion, but they are sophisticated and thoughtful arguments, which intelligent Christians actually have to respond to.
Anecdotally, half of the people I've seen cease being New Atheists have become interested in a more sophisticated and philosophical atheism, which means moving out of the shallow rhetoric of New Atheism. I've also seen a handful convert, but that isn't the majority.
Where can I find the arguments that intelligent Christians would use to refute New Athiest talking points? I've searched and searched but almost all Christian web content is intended for other Christians, which is likely another indirect result of that particular culture war more or less ending.
It's definitely a large body of work although I can't really remember specific arguments. It's mostly "well, you can't prove God DOESN'T exist", the weirdness of Christianity's origins, and an appeal to morality and intuition.
Ultimately, I feel it comes down to whether or not you want to believe in God and not to the evidence on either side since that's pretty lacking.
Two examples relating specifically to Dawkins would be McGrath's The Dawkins Delusion and Hart's Atheist Delusions. You can see where they got the idea for those names!
If there's a specific argument that the New Atheists make that you are interested in responses to, I can recommend some works. Let me know what it is!
Well, honestly I was kind of hoping for a big, all-encompassing, well-written book intended to convert atheists to believers. You'd think something like that would be easy to find, but even after asking several religious friends, I've not had any luck.
As for specific arguments, I suppose the glaring lack of any moral order to the world would be one I would like to see respond to in clear terms. This seems by far the biggest hurdle for emotionally gratifying belief in a personal god; that so many children starve, and good people die in misery, and evil people flourish seems to render even an existent god completely irrelevant in terms of any individual's understanding of and relationship to the world. Basically, our Universe's lack of a discernible and in any way just moral order renders the distinction between a godded world and a godless world meaningless.
I don't know why you think something like that would be easy to find. These are extremely large and complex topics, which have been discussed by very intelligent people for thousands of years. It's not likely that there would be a simple handbook for creating theists out of atheists. But note that what you are asking for here is a positive argument for the truth of theism, whereas (I thought) what you originally were interested in was a refutation of New Atheism. A refutation of New Atheism doesn't have to conclude that theism is true, only that the New Atheist arguments fail. Plenty of "regular" atheists also think that the New Atheist arguments fail.
In your second paragraph, you are broadly talking about a problem of evil. The most plausible form of the problem of evil these days is the evidential problem of evil, it's pretty much agreed by everyone that Plantinga conclusively refuted the logical problem of evil decades ago.
There are many ways that Christians respond to problems of evil. These can be divided into two camps: theodicies, and (poorly named) skeptical theism. A theodicy is an attempt to explain why God would permit such suffering, and try to give a positive reason. Skeptical theism is an approach of questioning why we would expect to know such reasons if they did exist, and skeptical theist arguments block the inference from "I don't see reasons" to "There are no reasons".
Some examples of theodicies are libertarian free will, soul-building, or natural law arguments. There are dozens of books written on each of these theodicies, from both believers and atheists. Richard Swinburne is probably the canonical example of an author engaging in theodicy, but if this is specifically what you are interested in I am happy to give some more recommended reading.
Skeptical theism is in my opinion more likely to be successful. Perrine and Wykstra have written numerous joint papers on the topic which are very accessible, and so has Daniel Howard-Snyder. Atheist Paul Draper has made some good responses to them, so has the Christian Trent Dougherty. This discussion is very broad and technical, and if this is specifically what you are interested in, I am again happy to give some recommended reading.
Speaking from the point of view of a dyed in the wool empiricist, intelligent design is the worst argument for the existence of God I've ever heard, truly laughable, and nobody defending Christian faith seriously should use it.
The *best* argument is more or less an extension of the faith Carl Sagan had in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence: in a Universe as large as ours[1] it would be incredible if we were the *only* intelligent species to have ever arisen, or indeed (if you believe evolution sufficient to produce men from protozoa, which I do) were this planet and this era the *only* planet anywhere since the Big Bang on which life itself got started. That's asking a lot from chance.
So that's what makes Carl Sagan believe there absolutely must be intelligent extraterrestials, somewhere. But if we have intelligent ETs, what limit can there be on *how* intelligent and sophisticated they are in a practically infinite universe? Unless there is some fundamental physical law limitation on intelligence (like what?) then it is again asking a lot of chance for H. sapiens to be *the* smartest and most capable species that has ever arisen. Much more plausible would be that we are among the dumbest and least capable, since our distance from dogs and planaria is fairly modest and measureable -- that is, there's an almost infinity of possibility to our upside, while very modest room downside.
So the idea that there could exist somewhere in a staggeringly huge universe beings with intelligence and capability as far beyond ours as ours are beyond those of a housefly or segmented worm doesn't seem especially crazy. Indeed, you'd need to make a lot of special pleading about unknown limitations of physics (or the efficiency of evolution, including chemical evolution) to make the case that the best the universe can do is, say, Mr. Spock compared to we billions of Dr. McCoys. a species with an IQ maybe 25% higher than ours.
But beings super duper far ahead of us could easily seem, and pretty much functionally be, God as far as we're concerned. They would have unfathomable motives and concerns, would find us utterly transparent and predictable, and could presumably start life on Earth as easily as we synthesize amino acids in chem lab.
So that gets you God the Creator. (He, or They, aren't *mathematically* omnipotent, or omniscient, but they certainly can be for any practical human purpose. Only philosophers would carp that beings that can create life or remodel planets at will, live for trillions of years, or cause any number of things we find miraculous *aren't* God because, by gum, they can't contravene natural law or create a stone so heavy they can't lift it.)
Unfortunately, this does zip to get you the personal God, or the existence of souls, still less the immortality of souls and God's concern for them, moral or otherwise. I have never heard an effective logical argument for those things.
However, a soul might be defined as something ineffable, again something too far beyond our ken to be susceptible of proof to our minds -- perhaps the evidence would be obvious ("Just look around you! Geez! Dumb humans!") if we were smart enough, in the same way *we* notice patterns in the natural world that are completely incomprehensible to a gerbil. You can point to a hawk sitting patiently on pole and yell at the gerbil, and it will still wander out and get eaten. Even if you spoke gerbil it wouldn't help, the gerbil can't comprehend the pattern.
That is, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But what *could* be evidence of existence? The only thing that comes to mind is intuition. It is the case that sometimes intuition is correct, for reasons we cannot decipher. Is this blind chance or the rare accidental comprehension of patterns that are too subtle for us to detect normally? (I adduce the description of the Bene Gesserit reading of physical "micro-signals" and minutiae in Frank Herbert's "Dune" series, in which highly-trained women could "read" human thoughts and emotions in tiny body motions, movements, et cetera, so well that people thought they could read minds -- nobody else could see the patterns they had trained themselves to see. This is what I mean by the possible perception of patterns that we are normally too dumb to see.)
So if someone were to claim: I had an insight, a flash intuition, I thought there was this...pattern to my existence which demonstrated to me incontrovertibly that I have a soul, and it's immortal -- well, I don't have a great argument to say that's flatly impossible, because it's clearly not, and yet it can't be subjected to repetition and confirmation, so....there's nothing on which empiricism can bite down on, from that point of view, it's undecideable. But "undecideable" is a long way from "wrong." So there's that, for what it's worth.
And of course if both souls exist, and Creators exist, there's no obvious reason why they might not be aware of ours (souls that is) and take some interest in them. Why not? We have pets. Maybe They would even make some arrangement for our souls after death, in the way we might arrange to retire our pet horses to nice green fields out of mild kindness.
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[1] The observable universe is ~10^23 stars x 15 billion years, but if you believe in inflation the entire universe descended from the Big Bang is some 10^80 times bigger.
"The woke stranglehold on corporations, governments, and now the CIA is stronger than ever."
I'll believe that the CIA is genuinely "woke" when they stop funding a battalion of Ukrainian Neo-Nazis that uses SS runes in its insignia and was founded by a man who is on record saying that he believes that it is the destiny of the Ukrainian people to "lead the white races of the world in a final crusade for their survival against the Semite-led Untermenschen." https://therealnews.com/the-us-is-arming-and-assisting-neo-nazis-in-ukraine-while-congress-debates-prohibition Just to name the most obvious bit of incongruity between the CIA's work and "wokeness."
Similarly, I'll believe that all of those big corporations have been taken over by "woke infiltrators" when they start cutting Uyghur slave labor camps out of their production chains, or otherwise taking actions that actually significantly impact their bottom line. It's weird how this supposedly radical ideology still allows the Powers That Be to do what they already wanted to do anyway, isn't it?
As for the argument that anti-racism stuck around because it "captured mainstream institutions," that would necessarily mean that previous waves failed to do the same, but didn't we see a lot of the exact same things happening with pop feminism being supported by mainstream institutions only a couple of years ago? The "Fearless Girl" statue put up by a large Wall Street firm was an especially cringeworthy example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fearless_Girl), and as late as 2018 Jordan Peterson seemed to get into a lot mroe arguments about feminism, on mainstream shows and talking with mainstream news people, than he did about anything related to race. But all of that previous institutional backing failed to stop this movement from receding with astonishing speed, to the point that Planned Parenthood recently put out a publci apology for being "a Karen." Seriously. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/17/opinion/planned-parenthood-margaret-sanger.html
Looking at the article in general, I'm very disappointed in the failure to mention Occupy Wall Street, or notice that the Google Trends graphs of feminism and racism both start trending up right around when OWS was starting to get momentum, or mention the opportunistic use of identity politics against the Sanders campaign in both the 2016 and 2020 primaries. At this point, I think the theory that at least some of this stuff has been a divide-and-conquer attempt by...someone or someones with power should at least be mentioned, if only to attempt to rebut it.
Other very conspicuous omissions include the wholesale adoption of anti-"Cancel Culture" rhetoric by Republican politicians and conservative media, the Republican anti-"Critical Race Theory" campaign that is resulting in legislation getting passed by state legislators as we speak, and in general that fact that what used to be primarily online culture wars are very much going mainstream. This really feels like an unprecedented development to me, as even during the most hysterical parts of the Trump years the online culture stuff was at most a sideshow while the main attention was on longstanding mainstream political issues such as immigration and trade policy.
I'm also really skeptical of the idea that New Atheism even belongs in the same category as the other two. Maybe it was really big in your corner of the internet, but my impression is that even back during the Aughts a lot of people online just found the debate annoying and not worth paying attention to, which is precisely why so many forums segregated that topic off into its own section. And the broader normie public didn't notice it much to begin with, with the possible exception of that time that Sam Harris got in an argument with Ben Affleck on Bill Maher.
Which brings up another point: the disappearance of Islam and its compatibility with the West and so on and so forth as a topic in the culture wars in the last few years, which was if anything even more sudden and complete than the fading away of 2010s pop feminism. Look at the Twitter feed of anyone who was a high profile "critic of Islam" in 2015 and 2016, and it seems like there's a better-than-even chance that they'll mostly be talking about wokeness nowadays (admittedly at the time of this writing on May 11, 2021, you may have to scroll down a bit to before the recent events in Israel/Palestine). I would argue that this is especially important because some major events in the ongoing early 2020s online culture wars, such as the defection of Glenn Greenwald to the "anti-woke" side, are hard to imagine happening if that shift hadn't taken place.
I could go on, but I think I've made my point: it feels like this essay either overlooks or leaves out out a lot of important stuff, so I'm less inclined to put any stock in its analysis and conclusions.
It always amuses me greatly that the Fearless Girl statue got shifted to another location after its fifteen minutes of fame was up, while the Charging Bull still charges to this day.
If I was the sort of modern feminist whose hopes depended on Grrl Power of the statue type, I think I'd be rather crushed that even having Elizabeth Warren having her photo took with the Girl wasn't enough to make it in any way relevant or meaningful as anything other than a PR stunt, but since I'm half an old-fashioned feminism sort, I'm not 😀
Another knockout article.
> How did the counterculture eventually win
Lenny Bruce had a line, "Marijuana will be legal someday, because the many law students who now smoke pot will one day be Congressmen."
That was either incredibly insightful and correct or incredibly naive and wrong and years later I have no idea which.
I think it comes down to trendline vs. timing.
There are a lot of trends where it's easy to solve for the equilibrium, but when you really zoom in it's all chaotic and squiggly. Arbitrary precision looks random.
Someone made a comment in another thread about how some of the best returns from the 20th century weren't from tech companies, but from dying industries with dividends, like cigarettes, that everyone had already divested from. They died slower than anyone expected, so they generated massive returns if you were the last to jump ship.
Timing recessions, the death of legacy industries, some political and geopolitical trends. Even though you know they're coming, it's hard to say when, or pinpoint the catalyst.
Scott, I wonder what you think of the following proposition: "Social Justice killed New Atheism by labelling it Islamophobic."
To me this, not victory, feels like the real story. Did any major New Atheists escape that accusation?
It also seems to go quite well with your proposition: "Social Justice killed New Feminism by labelling it 'too white."
So predicting the future is just a matter of filling in the blank: "Social Justice killed New Antiracism by labelling it 'x'.
Too US-centric?
At least, that's what I'm hoping for!
Re: "I think [4chan] irony-ed themselves so hard that they accidentally ended up as Nazis."
I think this is correct; it's always been my stance on the issue. When I first heard the term "alt-right", ie the "racist political movement from 4chan", I insisted that it was not a real thing, and everybody saying so was just confused by mainstream media that had, and *always* had, completely misunderstood 4chan irony.
But, in line with previous events in 4chan's history, the joke got taken to be truth, and either people came in and cynically used the irony as a springboard for real hate, or amoral types who just want to wallow in darkness and destruction pretended to be joking but used the reality of it for their own amusement (these people also seem to be common in online kink discussion areas; replace the concept of "humorous irony" with "kink"), or outsiders who just didn't know there was ever irony flooded in and replaced the people who had been joking.
That kind of dynamic, I think, also happened with "Anonymous", the supposed "hacker group" that was really just a 4chan in-joke until the media thought it was a real thing. I don't know if 4chan ever became a legitimate hangout for real blackhat security wizards, but it sure did gain that reputation among laypeople on the internet.
Perhaps LGBTQ+ is the next big fashionable topic.
I read a lot of this asking myself if you were living on a different Internet than me… I haven’t really seen anything fade… Some things may be louder but nothing has faded. I sort of thought maybe some elaborate troll was coming at the end. I think your main point at the end about institutionalization is good, but the idea that anything has tamped down he is a little ridiculous to me.
It’s also a bit tin-eared to think the DSAs are especially culturally different. They snipe a little and vote a bit differently but the differences are mild. The venn diagram has huge overlap.
One thing you should keep in mind is Google Trends results are all relative. So if something else became much louder that doesn’t mean the things that look smaller aren’t now just as loud as they were.
'Very Online' would be my candidate for the next fault-line. We're long past the point where existing online is any positive status marker, and the preachily disconnected are growing in number.
On the other hand, a movement of disconnected people already contains the seeds of its own demise, so maybe they won't get anywhere.
I'm also intrigued by 'trad wife', as carving out conservative territory while maintaining some shielding from feminism
Did anybody else skim-read "posher" as [ˈpo͜ʊʃər], a portmanteau of "posh" and "kosher"?
One peril of getting too meta is you miss object level insights.
An insight of feminism is that if you’re organization doesn’t randomly exclude half the qualified candidates you get better candidates and a stronger organization.
An insight of new socialism is that most things are controlled by huge piles of money and that things which challenge this control are actively and competently opposed by smart highly paid people working for giant piles of money.
The object level of new socialism predicts its meta level. It says that new feminism can go mainstream because the giant piles of money just hire consultants to give trainings on feminism and the consultants work at firms owned by the giant piles of money.
It says new race consciousness can go mainstream for the exact same reason.
But it predicts that socialism will face more resistance because the consequences of socialism are not hiring a few consultants from a firm you have a stake in; the consequences of socialism are becoming a slightly less giant pile of money. And that is absolutely unacceptable.
The author so confidently and casually pushing the "The racism on 4chan was originally ironic!" myth and the notion that the geneses of the alt-right and anti-SJW movements were completely separate, among many other inaccuracies that are blatant to anyone personally familiar with the history involved (including a generally but less describably distorted sense of much of the timeline/culture), is definitely giving me a Gell-Man amnesia vibe about everything he's ever written.
This post is definitely the perspective of someone who hasn't spent much time genuinely interacting with the "seedy underbelly" (that is, even the part of it as tame as 4chan) of the Web and obviously has mostly spent the last 10 years in what might be called the "Quokkaverse", which their prior blog was of course the center of for many years. As such they have missed many nuances.
Can you share your experience about racism on 4chan? The "first you fake it, than you make it" theory seems very likely to me but maybe I'm missing some evidence?
That's a very interesting topic. And it makes me sad me do not have proper memetic studies. Culture wars seems to me as a great example of huge memeplexes fighting and developing adaptations against each other to reproduce better.
It's funny how both right and left memplexes developed general arguments against talking with the other side. Meanwhile there is some "cross-pollination" between them. If I remember correctly the oppression and unfairness of the world narratives was used mostly by the left, while the right used to make fun of them for it and calling them snowflakes. Meanwhile now right memeplex narrative shifted from posing to be strong to "we are the real victims here"
>Meanwhile now right memeplex narrative shifted from posing to be strong to "we are the real victims here"
I mean, it shifted to recognizing the genuine structure of power relations in society. Thinking you're oppressed because you're a victim of "fat shaming" or "colorism" or structural this and that, unfalsifiable nonsense that can hardly really be measured, is a bit different than having solid proof that you are being forcibly censored on most outlets and ideologically suppressed, are far more likely to be fired from almost any job for your political alignment, etc. Attempting to equate the two to score a faux-studied "Aha! Horseshoe theory!" point is the stalest, dimmest, and most cliched take possible.
Mind you, that I neither equated the validity of narratives nor invoked the horseshoe theory.
Anyway, thanks for a great example of what I'm talking about. "Recognizing the genuine structure of power relations in society" has always been left-wing narrative and now right-wing has adopted it as well. What happened to "If you don't like the game - don't play and stop crying about it"? Was this meme less successful than thorough analysis of power dynamics? Did people who actually believed it silently accepted the new status quo and left the discourse? Do we have a left analogue of this meme? Something like "When you used to be privileged, equality may feel to you like oppression, so stop crying, you crybaby!" This one seems to be a little more complex as it also includes good old "Their problems are not real, unlike our problems", which the right wing has already accepted into its memeplex as you have shown in your reply.
Isn't it genuinely exciting? We can see the memetic evolution in live action. People have always believed that spreading ideas can change others minds and it's indeed true. But, moreover, we can see how two incompatible narratives can borrow successful memes from each other without actually changing the core beliefs of the narrative.
>What happened to "If you don't like the game - don't play and stop crying about it"?
That applied when "the game" was voluntary relations between individuals that leftists didn't particularly like, not the involuntary subversion and coercion of the entirety of society. Again, your entire point is based on false equivalences and mindless square peg in round hole "gotchas", a style of argumentation that I might describe as "rationalist nothings" since I mostly see it coming from those types.
Also, analyzing power structures has never been exclusively leftist. It's the foundation of politics.
This is a really interesting article and I really like/agree with many of aspects of it. I especially liked the 'argument culture' to 'echo culture' theme, and the intellectual fashion compared to regular fashion section.
However, I feel like Scott has understimated how much people still talk about gender in online spaces. I think it may have been overshadowed by race somewhat but I regularly hear the terms 'not all men', 'mansplaining' and 'creep' on group chats and Instagram. And the discourse around Trump and gender was pretty much as big as the racial component (for context, I lived in the UK and had mostly UK friends when he was elected but lived in the USA for a period during his presidency).
Also, to the extent that some of those gender buzzwords and phrases have died out (e.g. MRA), they have been replaced by other signifiers such as 'incel'. Similarly, the way Scott uses the phrase 'new feminism' is very similar to how people use 'intersectional feminism' to distinguish themselves from 2nd and 3rd wavers.
I wonder if this has a lot to do with the internet spaces he inhabits? (For context: I am a 25 year-old woman and the vast majority of my friends are left-wing and 'woke'. I feel like that is somewhat relevant to the kind of content I see online.)
Vaguely similar mini-fads from the early 80's: the anti-teen-suicide fad, the ant-anorexia fad, and the "just say no to drugs" campaign. All of them seemed to actually feed the phenomena that they aimed to fight. The anti-suicide fad struck me as especially dreary and tedious. Then as now, I'm baffled to see how so many people seem to actually enjoy the monotonous sloganeering.
I'm sure that this possibility has been discussed before, but it seems to me that the New Atheist movement was mostly killed by a taboo against saying anything negative about Islam...
That's an interesting case study. The left narrative is that New Atheist movement become less intelectual and more "make fun of people we perceive as stupid" for Moloch'y reasons. When you are dealing with something as ridiculous as religion you've left, it's enough to simply apply your common sense, you won't hear much new arguments which require you to evaluate your beliefs. And if you don't need to make a thorough analysis of an opponents belief, eventually you are left to mock it. So optimization for clicks motivated to produce the most mocking content possible.
Then as there were less and less things to mock about religion, atheist community find another target that felt off for their common sense - feminism and other social justice issues. And then the great divide happened. Atheist community was splitted on its left and right parts which adopted for their surroundings. The left part become more pro-islam, while the right more pro-chistianity - there was some story about ex-sceptics becoming born again christians or at least starting appreciate christian values.
I guess both narratve are compatible? While creating more and more mocking content Atheist Community started trolling islam and muslims very hard. Social Justice Crowd detected some bigotry in it, which may or may not be the case. When you are trying to mock someone as hard as you can, you may easily start getting inspiration in some deep xenophobic instincts. Atheist Community felt betrayed and started mocking social justice and here we are.
Actually, I now see that this was already discussed. There's reason to think the New Atheist movement was *not* undone by PC pro-Islamic attitudes:
"As for where it went, I asked that question last year and got various responses. The most popular was that 9/11 made religion-bashing segue into Islam-bashing, which started to look pretty racist. But 9/11 happened in 2001, The God Delusion wasn’t published until 2006, and New Atheism didn’t peak until the early 2010s."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/
God bless you, Scott. I've been trapped in an ever-worsening personal hell for practically all of my adult life, and this is the first thing I've seen in at least four years to actually give me any hope. It's like a miracle. You've written a miracle.
"... the main complaint the anti-SJWs had was that they couldn't talk about how much they hated SJWs. Once they could, their case kind of lost relevance, which is probably one reason the search term is trending down these days and nobody talks about the IDW anymore."
This is a huge trivialization of the anti-SJWs complaints. The complaints are about freedom of speech, diversity being a euphemism for racist and sexist hiring policies and university admissions and other things.
Also, you still can't talk about how much you hate SJWs if you want to keep your job in tech, hollywood, academia or anywhere, really.
I think there's a more meaningful (and more cheering) lesson to be taken from the failure of rightwing politics to become hip. The barber-pole analysis is interesting and seems to have some explanatory power. But maybe politics isn't 100% percent about in-group signaling for 100% of people 100% of the time.
Doesn't the in-group's take (often, at least) converge toward a serious, reasonable criticism of existing cultural structures? For example. Compared to 2016, we spend less time now waving pitchforks at C-list celebrities for border-case weaseliness on a date several years earlier. But, anecdotally, I've found the average person is less tolerant of sexual harassment than they used to be.
It's probably meaningful that internet culture is driven by children. Maybe they just grow up and get enough real world experience to contextualize the gripes they used to treat as toys. That kinda fits with the periodicity you're describing.
The race equivalent to those pre-2010 early feminist blogs you referenced would be Angry Black Woman. NK Jemisin was posting on that long long ago before she became a hot commodity like the feminist bloggers.
How are you so stupid lmfao
The crux of your post rests on two google trends screencaps??
Here’s my ultra pessimistic take - the next fashionable/cool position with be breaking the taboo on political violence.
Here's my hypothesis for why the manosphere is resurfacing:
Many people feel like lockdown is ending, they're noticing they've gotten pretty horny, and they also notice that they've lost a lot of social skills during over a year of hardly meeting anyone. PUA culture with it's promise of "get laid without actually being an interesting person" probably profits from this.
WRT Atheism, I think that faded because the battle was won. The Christian Right exploded in the early 80s and maintained a massive presence until ~2008 with Bush's disgrace and his intended successor losing handily to The Future. It was so relevant that a lot of people started assuming a suffixed "Right" whenever "Christian" was mentioned at all. Opposition to it ran on inertia until about 2012 after Obama's re-election. Today, all the Leftist demons (racism, sexism, anti-LGBT) that used to be associated with "fundies" or "bible thumpers" are today associated with secular, competing versions of leftism ("TERFs").
I wonder if a part of this -- the failure of the prediction of coolness going far right -- might be generational. Gen X's POV was to turn away from whatever institutions promoted, but Millenials and whatever we're up to now seem more cooperative. They seem ready to listen to what institutions, parents, whatever, promote. Gen X thought a previous-generation endorsement was a reason to dismiss, with exasperated looks.
Long-time admirer, occasional reader, first time commenter.
I know Strauss-Howe generational theory has at least come up in comments before (like here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/02/book-review-ages-of-discord/), and I'm guessing you've run across it before, so I'm a bit nervous posting about it, but it seems like the 80-year cycles of societal stability and chaos they propose fits exactly what you're pointing to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory
Regarding wide consensuses seeming to cycle more quickly, Spiral Dynamics/Integral Theory lays out a model that I think is useful in describing this.
Internet Feminism disappeared because Hillary Clinton lost and found non-viable and "racism" will disappear when the same happens to Kamala Harris
I remember back in the heyday of New Atheism, Adam Carolla was discussing people like that who would tell him, "You ought to come to our meeting," and he was like, "I don't want to go to meetings. I don't want to belong to a group, I'm just atheist." That was the true reason for their downfall in my mind: the people who founded the club were kind of intellectually interesting people, but once they started with the membership drives, the only kind of people who wanted to join were spazzes and guys with negative charisma.
As to the question of what happens when a certain dominant culture takes hold in our institutions, that actually reminds me of The Simpsons, and the question of why it quit being funny. Whether they intended it to be or not, it was a parody of this ridiculous American obsession with pretending it was the 1950s. And I know, I was there, a large portion of the population just insisted that the 60s, 70s, and 80s basically didn't happen, and their main vehicle for doing that was the television show. Being grounded in this bygone Americana, where everything was set up like it was Leave it to Beaver, but everyone acted like a jackass that turned it into a farce, made it funny. By the time Homer was learning to use the internet, it just didn't work anymore.
And finally, the one thing I think this article misses is right-wing comedy and popular right-wing personalities with young people. If you only look at urban areas where 4 out of 5 people are already quite liberal, and then go, "Oh, I guess the young people are still very liberal, just listen to those Brooklyn high schoolers, they'll tell you," then of you're only going to find more liberalism. Conservatives like Steven Crowder are quite successful and I'm sure have plenty of high school viewers living across the Midwest and South. When you go to places where 4 out of 5 people voted Trump, you'll hear about a lot more cool conservative media than you realized there was. And generally liberal comedians like Ryan Long, who just reject the premise, are way cooler than the guys in Chapo Trap House, even though they're much cooler than those tools on Pod Save America.
I don't think the institutional wokeism will survive for 50 years, because unlike people from 1960 to 2000, there is a viable alternative you can vote for who will start tearing down the far-leftist structures. Unlike say in 1992 when we voted in a Democratic administration and first thing you knew the Vice President's wife was like, "Rap music, let's get rid of it." Though that may make being woke seem less awful, since awful conservatives keep hating on it.
Anyway, I don't know if anybody will read this, but I appreciated the article!
I'm late to the party on this discussion, but I never saw the Bernie Bros as being particularly anti-woke; I think they flirted with some ironic communism, and Wokeness' Marxist elements allowed them to take it over even faster than they did to atheism, which meant the Dirtbag Left Bernie Bros either went woke or got thrown into the Gamergate slimepit with everyone else. The Bernie Bros were more socially canny than the geeks, who split between 1. autistically sticking to their guns or 2. Desperately simping for female approval.
I know this is an old post, but I just want to drop in to point out that there was in fact a specific name for "new feminism". It was called "Fourth Wave Feminism".
One thing I noticed about hard core feminists, SJWS, whatever 10 to 15 years ago who I knew personally, they had very rough childhoods and probably Cluster B personality disorders, BPD in particular. Observe behavior common to each. Hyper emotionalism. Not the most rational people, often bad at high school math. Black and white thinking. BPD is characterized by vulnerable narcissism. You put people in the racist bucket or the sexist bucket or not because you can't process more complexity than that, hence the notorious difficulty in processing nuance.
This doesn't not explain the whole SJW phenomena, but seems a reliable association even outside of my experience. Lookup what Robin diAngelo has said about her past. She's open about not being that good at math. One may recall that lady who said she's afraid of all men including her teenage sons in NYT several years ago. Her other pieces have talked about abuse and worse in her younger days.
Rise of narcissism should be part of the story even if it doesn't explain everything. Seems there's growth in mental health problems over the last several years.