Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2hr ago
I haven't seen any evidence that puberty blocker hormone prescriptions are down or anything of the sort.
Is there any data on this anywhere? The way you're wording this is a bit sus, making a claim without evidence, but implicitly demanding evidence of a specific kind for any rebuttal.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
13hr ago
While there are still serious concerns about how wishy-washy Trump is on Russia, that's a separate issue from "Russiagate" which was related to specific coordination possibly through blackmail. It might seem like any criticism of Trump's position on Russia is synonymous with "Russiagate", but when properly disambiguated I'd say not many Dems really believe in the crazier takes (e.g. Trump is a KGB plant).
I also think you're not really understanding what I (or the writers I linked) mean by "crank". A crank isn't just anyone who believes in stuff that isn't supported by science or evidence, it's specifically conspiratorial views like QAnon or "Bill Gates is microchipping us through vaccines" or "global elites want open borders to genocide white people". It's distrust of amorphous undefined "elites", who are perceived to have a secret evil agenda. Someone who believes in religion or astrology is wrong, obviously, but I wouldn't call them a crank.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
14hr ago
Do you have any evidence that wokeness is still peaking, or has not yet peaked in the short to moderate term? I've gotten a lot of pushback from people on this site claiming how ridiculous it is to think wokeness has peaked... yet they kind of just handwave that as an assumption. By contrast, people like Noah have pretty good evidence in articles like this (non paywalled version available here)
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
19hr ago
People have at least discussed this, although I don't know how much it's been internalized yet. Matt Yglesias had an article about the crank realignment, Hanania had an article about voters who see conspiracies everywhere, and Meskhout had this article.
In short, both sides have become dominated by delusional partisans screaming in echo chambers. The left have become experts in infiltrating institutions and corrupting them to woke ends, while the right have become eternal dissidents who are great at critiquing the left but terrible at actually building better replacement institutions. The left was a bit ahead of the right when it came to radicalizing, but it's also deradicalizing now in a way that will likely happen to the right in a few years. Around 2020 was "peak woke" after which things slowly calmed down. Now we're approaching the summit of "peak crank" on the right, which will also hopefully calm down.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
From an economic perspective, low doctor productivity is a huge issue. The Baumol effect means an ever growing amount of money needs to be devoted to medicine to make up for the shortfall. It really doesn't have to be like this, but nobody in the field wants to disrupt the gravy train, and/or regulations make it too difficult to change anyways.
I feel like a lot of what doctors do could be done algorithmically by chatbots. From what I've seen, most doctors just respond to simple cues as to what the problem is. Testing could be done at outpatient facilities, then the meatspace doctors would only need to come in as a last resort.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
Last week there was a discussion on the motte about Trump’s cabinet picks, in particular about Rubio who is something of a hawk. This goes against what many of Trump’s isolationist supporters want. It’s almost certain that Trump is making these picks extremely haphazardly, deciding on names after a bare modicum of thought and prioritizing vibes, “loyalty”, and Fox news appearances over any other concerns. The NYT has documented this extensively, and it’s entirely in keeping with the chaotic nature of his first term.
One of the goofier explanations given by those on the right was that nominating Rubio was actually a 5D chess move to get Rubio out of the Senate, which is apparently extremely necessary for some unexplained reason…? As opposed to Trumpian loyalists like Murkowski. It was just a silly idea altogether.
Why do I bring it up again? Well, because it might have actually worked! Just… on the wrong person. Trump nominated Gaetz for Attorney General, and Gaetz almost immediately resigned from the House when the news broke. This is a bit unusual, as most people stay in their seats until their confirmation is done. There was the looming release of an ethics report on Gaetz which will likely damage his reputation somewhat, so there’s a chance that Gaetz was always planning to resign, although I somewhat doubt it. In any case, Trump yanked the nomination when it was clear that there was bad press coming from it, and now Gaetz has said he won’t come back to Congress even though he probably technically could.
One might ask why Trump would want to get rid of Gaetz from the House. Well, Gaetz was instrumental in paralyzing Congress over the last term, so perhaps Trump wanted to avoid that. The issue with that explanation is that Gaetz is a fiercely pro-Trump, so it seems weird that Trump would promise something to an ally, and then leave them high and dry. The word “backfired” might be a more accurate description in such a case.
My guess is that Gaetz will probably come back to the Trump White House in some form that doesn’t require a Senate confirmation, after the news dies down.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
6d ago
The economic opportunity per capita in the West is higher than it is in the East,
What do you mean by this? South Korea is above average in terms of GDP per capita (PPP) compared to Europe, or even just Western Europe according to IMF estimates.
If by "economic opportunity", you instead mean something like "competition for jobs is much more fierce", then that mostly just goes back to zero-sum status competitions being particularly bad in conformist countries in East Asia.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
6d ago
As the other people correctly guessed, my strikethrough was just a typo born of using two ~ symbols. I've fixed it now.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
South Korea has a surplus of people relative to the economic opportunity that can be found there;
This doesn't seem right to me, as South Korea's fertility problems, and indeed those of most of East Asia's, are far more severe than in the West.
I'm partial to the explanation by Hanania that East Asians are hyper-conformists. This explains why their education system is a hellscape by those who experience it. Education is a zero-sum status competition, and practically everyone in their societies are competing. This also helps to explain why they stopped having kids, as cutthroat educational competition explains part, and then once a lot of people aren't having kids, the entire society decides it's OK to forgo doing so since none of their neighbors are doing it.
Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so. It's almost a tautology. Humanity will not go extinct; but if it does, it'll be because it deserved to, and there won't have been anything you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way.
This moral argument here is just-world fallacy. I also doubt that evolution would just trivially solve this issue. In this framework, why would cities and urbanization, which have always decreased fertility quite severely, still be a thing? If evolution could impact human behavior like this, people who refuse to live in cities would presumably gradually rise as a proportion of the population until cities were effectively irrelevant. But instead the opposite has happened.
I highly doubt humans will go extinct due to fertility issues alone, but even a roughly 30% decrease in population could cause a lot of problems. A decrease of ~90% (which I personally find unlikely, but is still in the realm of possibility) starts to make industrialized society itself look dicey, which means a huge loss in standards-of-living for humanity.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
9d ago
The descriptions of 4B make it sound a lot like MGTOW.
This is a very good point.
When women join in South Korea, are they operating from painful personal experiences, or are they reacting to a consensus that tells them that any self-respecting woman in their situation should be bitter?
It's probably a little of the former mixed with a lot of the latter. The best insight I've had into Korean gender norms came from this AAQC, which I've added to the OP. Almost anyone who dates will encounter heartbreak at some point. That, mixed with a media environment that aggressively highlights every instance of male misbehavior like men murdering their partners, could easily lead to the belief that men as a group are terrible overall.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
9d ago
I'll bite. I don't have a lot of priors on this particular incident since I haven't studied it that much.
What evidence do you have that it's a false flag?
How about some man-bashing to start your weekend, fresh from Korea?
My take: I think it's pretty clear that gender is a bigger divide than race. Men of all races voted for Trump in larger shares than women did, with Hispanic men even preferring him on-net. Feminism used to be the huge culture war wedge back in the early years of the great awokening (2012-2017 or so). It kind of just deflated as people moved to talking about race instead, but none of the issues were ever really resolved, so there's a decent chance it could make a resurgence.
My best insight into Korean gender dynamics came from this AAQC a while back, which might be worth reading for background.
Here's the article:
No Sex, No Dating, No Babies, No Marriage: How the 4B Movement Could Change America
When I sit down at a bar in Brooklyn with my cousin — a recent college grad from Korea who is visiting America for the first time — I have one burning question: How’s your love life? She keeps her ballcap pushed down low and presses her lips into a tight line.
“I’m not interested,” she says. “I just don’t trust men. You don’t know what they’re thinking these days — whether they’re one of the guys with misogynistic thoughts. It’s so normalized. Why would I even risk it?” she says.
She does not want to date. She feels no need to get married. Her ideal life is to form a tight-knit community with other single women. “It’s not just me,” she says. “All my friends rarely date these days for that reason. These issues are all we talk about when we get together.”
My cousin and her friends are not alone. Across Korea, young women are swearing off men, influenced by the 4B movement, a radical feminist campaign that originated in Korea in the late 2010s. The four Bs stand for bi-hon (no marriage), bi-yeonae (no dating), bi-chulsan (no birthing) and bi-sex (no sex).
The movement formed in response to growing gender inequality and violence against women: Korea has one of the largest gender pay gaps in the world, and brutal murders of women — in subway stations, on rooftops and in their own homes, often at the hands of men they were dating — headline news shows daily. Amid so much political turmoil and bloodshed, 4B activists say the only way to make women safe — and convince society to take their safety seriously — is to swear off men altogether until something changes.
And now, in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection, 4B is going viral on U.S. social media among women who are furious with the men who helped the former president clinch a win. On TikTok alone, top videos have gained millions of views, and one widely shared tweet about the 4B movement post-election now has 450,000 likes and 21 million views at time of writing.
It’s too soon to say if the 4B movement is here to stay in the United States. But even if it isn’t, the surge in interest says something about the social forces unleashed by the 2024 presidential election. An uptick in misogyny has already been evident — just look at the “your body, my choice” comments by men online — similar to what’s been seen in Korea, suggesting that this kind of feminist reaction could take hold. And even if women don’t explicitly take on the 4B label en masse, the movement’s message of bodily autonomy, and the anger that drove the conversation in the first place, could have a major impact not just on American politics, but on American life overall — just as it has in Korea.
Think of the movement as a labor strike, says Soha, a Korean feminist who provided only her online nickname for fear of being harassed for supporting feminism. She says it’s about rejecting the additional work women put in to appeal to men, maintain a household and follow patriarchal values — the kind of work that is more widespread in South Korea’s more socially conservative society. It’s the type of labor all women can identify with and push back against with one powerful voice. Many women eschew the 4B label, often in fear of harassment, but still live by its principles. My cousin describes it as an act of survival, a way to shield women from rapidly rising violence, avoid toxic conversations with misogynistic men and resist an anti-feminist government that is actively trying to roll back women’s rights.
Just as gender has become a political predictor in Korea, it’s shaping elections in the United States. The turnout demographics from the U.S. presidential election are still being sorted out, but a few things are crystal clear. The Republican ticket used male identity and gender grievances as a successful political tool, courting the “bro” vote and attributing Kamala Harris’ success to her identity. Young men helped Donald Trump win the election. Many young women are distraught. It’s an acceleration of the already widening gender gap in American politics, including an increasing number of young men rejecting feminism. An NBC News poll found that 57 percent of women backed Harris, compared to 40 percent of men — with women sprinting to the left while men flirt with the right.
Some U.S. women are seeking both revenge and relief from the consequences of a Republican trifecta, including a rollback of reproductive rights and a broader cultural acceptance of sexist rhetoric. For some online, the answer is right in front of them: the 4B movement from South Korea.
Like the U.S., South Korea’s gender divide played a striking role in South Korea’s most recent presidential election. Yoon Suk Yeol, then the conservative candidate, secured a victory in 2022 by catering to young men who felt left behind during a rapid push for gender equality, especially after the country’s #MeToo reckoning in 2018 tanked the careers of several actors and politicians. Young men cheered on Yoon’s declarations of being an “anti-feminist,” saying that “structural discrimination based on gender” does not exist, despite the fact that the country regularly ranks near the bottom in the World Economic Forum’s gender equality index. To this day, young men perceive that discrimination against men is more serious than against women, even though 50 percent of women between the ages of 19-29 say they’ve experienced sexual discrimination at work, compared to 30 percent of their male peers. From 2021 to 2023, female sexual assault victims saw a 15 percent rise. Many American women fear the same could happen here.
4B messaging is already echoing on U.S. social media. One X user advertises the 4B movement as a way to “take control of your life under him.” Another user writes, “We need to start considering the 4B movement … We can’t let these men have the last laugh … we need to bite back.” One TikToker has posted she’s joining the 4B movement after breaking up with her Republican boyfriend.
“When I saw the movement go viral in the U.S., I thought, even U.S. women must be at their limit,” says Yeonhwa Gong, a Korean 4B follower who has written on the topic. “But I don’t feel too bad that it has come to this point — if anything, I think of it as a necessary action that had been pushed back for a while and is now finally happening.”
For women who adopt the 4B mindset, not even men who claim to be on the same political spectrum can provide a safe space. With so many men opposing feminism, and even a video on how pro-Trump men could hide their political beliefs from the women they date going viral, how do you know if he’s telling the truth? “A lot of women are just tired of men, and worrying about ‘what if?’” my cousin told me. “I had thought at some point I’d want to find a good man, no matter how hard that would be. At this point now though, I don’t feel that need.”
The 4B movement might seem too radical to get far in the U.S., but the fact that it’s gained traction suggests that at least a number of young women feel more vulnerable since the reelection of Donald Trump than they did before it. The 4B discourse in the U.S. “prompts us to reflect on how much society has taken for granted or overlooked the rights and the freedoms that women rightly deserve,” says Hyejin Jeon, a University of Maryland doctorate student from Korea who is currently analyzing her country’s feminism movements.
If the movement takes hold, it could potentially lead to some of the same outcomes as have been seen in Korea, where women are reconsidering dates with men out of suspicion and lack or trust, young people are marrying and having children at lower rates, and both men and women are expressing deep loneliness. Politicians could take advantage of the divide for their own gains, leaning harder into gender-divide politics, and even outright sexist rhetoric. And even women may turn against one another; American women are already arguing about the inclusivity of the movement, with some saying that women with male partners have no part in 4B. Such discourse has long fractured feminist groups in Korea, according to Minyoung Moon, a Clemson University lecturer who published a report about the backlash against feminism in South Korea. Married women are seen as “serving the needs of men,” she says, alienating the group from what could be a more inclusive movement.
And then there’s the danger of backlash from the right. “The long-term effect I see is very negative, because they chose the radical strategy, giving men and anti-feminists reason to hate them even more,” Moon says. “And when I look at the 4B movement … on YouTube, I already see the conservative party people bashing against liberal women.”
Still, at least for now, the movement appears on the upswing in both countries as women say that the model of life they’d expected — dating, marriage, house, kids — looks, increasingly, like a trap set by men who don’t see them as equals. And women like my cousin want alternatives.
“To live with friends that are close to me, to have the ability to live on my own — living like that is my dream,” she says.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
9d ago
Did you check the link I posted up above? Democrats were saying the same thing in 2020 about Selzer in Iowa, with similarly flimsy arguments, and were simply dead wrong. Comparing Selzer's reputation (before this election) with Smollett is just silly. I agree most "bombshell" polls aren't usually worth much, but if there was one person who had consistently proved her critics wrong it was Selzer.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
10d ago
FWIW he did withdraw from Syria over the (bad) advice from his generals, but he allowed them to delay endlessly on Afghanistan. If he had been re-elected it's very likely he would have delayed again. Only when Biden came in did the foot get put down.
Blaming the generals is not an excuse. The buck stops with the President as Commander in Chief, as Biden showed less than a year after taking office.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
10d ago
It's just that afterwards they can still be friends / work together, and arguably the fight helps to facilitate that to begin with.
OK, I did misinterpret that a bit, but I don't think it changes much. "Fighting it out" then working together later isn't how Trumpworld works, as Trump is quick to hold grudges. Sometimes if figures are particularly powerful like McConnell then Trump restrains himself somewhat, but usually Trump becomes very bitter when he thinks someone has "betrayed" him (with a very loose definition of "betrayal").
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
10d ago
"Past peak" only means the first derivative has turned negative, not that there will be no new examples.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11d ago
It's one more iota of evidence that we're past peak woke.
I was a little worried after the election that leftists would see it as vindication that moderation doesn't work, given how Harris had pivoted to the center. But overall that doesn't seem to be the case. Thank goodness.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11d ago
they still have to deal with the fact that they're on the same team.
They do this by being cordial publicly, but ridiculing Trump privately. Most R senators think Trump is a buffoon, but they do what he wants since he has a long track record of crusading against Republicans who defy him. A good example is how R senators all voted against the Trump candidate for Senate Majority Leader, but they only did so because it was a private ballot and Trump can't accurately retaliate against any of them.
Vance was oppose him originally and now he's his VP?
While Trump can hold grudges, they're not permanent since he gets distracted easily. He's willing to go further on grudges than almost anything else, but even that has a limit of 1-3 years, by which point Trump's either usually succeeded or failed at harming them. Vance's transgressions in 2016 likely don't paint him well in Trump's eyes, but it's sufficiently long enough ago that he can portray it as ancient history.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11d ago
The casual scamming is really doing a number on perceptions of India like you say, and Kitboga is at least a little uncomfortable that people are noticing all his targets are Indians. I can't believe an entire country is so relaxed about being known as casual scammers, and will lash out at you if you criticize this behavior with whataboutisms or saying white people deserve it. It's like the country has taken the worst aspects of the left (obsession with race, hatred of whites, constant indignation) and the right (hypernationalism, also constant indignation) into a horrible synthesis.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11d ago
That sort of thing (tough publicly, cordial privately) happened back in the Reagan years between the two parties, but mostly died after Clinton to my knowledge. It might have happened to intra-party disputes between different factions afterwards, but it's definitely not the modal outcome when dealing with Trump. He's very concerned with personal honor and his obsession with "loyalty" is thinly coded for "does what I want". If any R goes against Trump, he'll privately construe them (in his head, and to his aides) that they're disloyal traitors. Trump has been more obsessed with heresy-purging than actually winning against the Ds. All of this is a recipe for genuine dislike between the actors.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11d ago
Read the link I posted a few replies above. Hanania explains it quite eloquently.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11d ago
Sure, but voters are bad at punishing politicians for specific transgressions in the best of times. If Desantis really wanted to snub Trump he could likely get away with it if he staged it correctly, and didn't go too far like nominating a Democrat. That's not to say that that's likely to happen, just that it's a possibility, which is part of why it's implausible that Trump has some 4D plan in his head. It's far more likely that one of Trump's advisors put Rubio's name forward, Trump went "oh yeah, that guy, he's alright, he didn't vote to impeach me" and that was it.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11d ago
She's followed quite a similar arc that RFK Jr. has, initially being a Democrat but being very out of step with any major faction. She also has a big thing for conspiracies, like claiming the Syrian gas attack was a false-flag by the British, or being very worried about "biolabs" in Ukraine that Putin was using as fodder for innuendo that the US was creating a supervirus to mass-murder Slavs. The Gribble faction loves stuff like this.
The relevant line from Noah is here:
This all seems broadly correct to me. The Gallup chart he posts indicates the left really did become much more pro-immigration during Trump's presidency, likely due to thermostatic equilibrium. They're WAY more pro-immigration than, for instance, the 90s as you say. And while not all people who oppose immigration (like me) oppose it on racial grounds, there are many (including on this very site!) who do.
While some schools may still be quite woke, the first derivative on DEI efforts overall is negative. The NYT published a very long hit piece on UMichigan's DEI efforts, for instance. There will still be some schools that are holdouts, but that's to be expected given academia is where wokeness was born and where its staunchest advocates came from.
I think of wokeness today like I think of evangelical Christians in the late '00s or early '10s. They still have some residual power, but they're losing on every front. Your perspective from academia is like someone from a megachurch telling me nothing has changed to evangelicals.
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