LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
No bio...
User ID: 657
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
This is because of Toxic Masculinity and because The Patriarchy Hurts Men Too.
This part of feminist theory always amuses me. Like apparently men specifically set up society to benefit themselves by oppressing women but I guess men were so shit at it they created a society that also harms themselves so no one really benefits. This is supposed to make sense apparently.
I agree with this advice.
From my own experience, you can mostly disregard the calls for woke signaling as long as you do not do it overtly at all. Do not explicitly disagree with anyone on woke-related issues (it can end REALLY badly if you do, keep your mouth shut and know when to pick your battles), just simply ignore their requests. If it comes to it, feign ignorance but never follow through with their requests. You can just ignore the email telling you to use pronouns and just don't put them in your email. Specifically in my case in Australia, I also avoid putting any 'Acknowledgement of Country' in any of my work as much as I can get away with.
You do have to be careful around true believers, who will notice your lack of participation and will try to ostracize you, and you might not even realize it. It probably heavily depends on your specific context, but just avoid them at all costs.
The plus side of this strategy is that fellow covert conscientious dissenters will likely notice your lack of participation and will hopefully network with you.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Well, Jews and some Asian ethnicities are smarter on average than white people. I, a white person, hold no ill will towards them.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Are the 'Moralists' even a sizable group, and not, say a tiny minority of woke social media obsessed football fan who simply claim to be speaking for a larger group?
I assume the median English football fan is a low to low-middle class man who couldn't give a shit about LGBT issues.
I'm reminded of the English team's halfarsed moral grandstanding with the Qatar World Cup.
Another day, another 'wokeness is in decline' post. People have been making this claim for the last decade.
What always gets me about these articles, including this one by al-Gharbi, is that there is no actual critical analysis of what 'wokeness' actually is (which presumably would aid in such an analysis if it were actually in decline). There is no mention of ideology or the underlying philosophical beliefs. The impression you're left with when reading al-Gharbi's article and many like it, is that wokeness is just a cultural fad that's had it's day in the sun (according to the author). That wokeness really is nothing more that a bunch of 'crazy kids on college campuses who will grow out of it', but somehow the entirely of Anglo and even Western society has become those crazy college kids. But still, it'll just pass like any other cultural fad... right? We'll all just go back to being good liberals at the end of history.
The woke winning a bit less doesn't mean they're not continuing to win. And they don't have to win as much anymore, because in a large sense they've already won. They have dominated almost every instituion that matters - academia and education, government institutions (bureaucracy), corporations, media and more. Even ostensibly 'conservative' institutions like religion and churches are falling victim to wokeness (mostly under the auspices of 'liberation theology'). In some sense, they have succeeded in Marcuse's goal of creating a 'New Sensibility', albeit a couple generations of ideology removed from his work. It's virtually impossible to deinstutionalise the woke in our present circumstances. Sure, some DEI workers got made redundant because of what seems to be for purely economic reasons and not ideological disagreement. But can you actually imagine DEI departments actually being complete axed and being openly criticised for not just being useless, but actively harmful ideological commissars? Here in Australia, I can't imagine someone actually trying to remove the profession of faith that is the 'Acknowledgement of Country' that preceeds every meeting and event in every institution, succeeding and not just being dismissed as a bigot. Why does every website now have an input for your 'pronouns' that are totally 'optional'?Where are the people telling workers they have to take down their LGBT flags they've put up around the office and yes, they do count as political/ideological declarations.
When these institutionalised woke presences are being actively hunted and removed and openly mocked, then yes, I will agree wokeness is in decline.
Bare link posts without any submission statement should be banned honestly.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Even if I thought your ideas did generally provide the correct outcome, you basically just entirely ignore the actual practical implementation of such policies. How are exactly are you going to engage and destroy the liberal memeplex, which already controls most of media and cultural institutions, and win?
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
the falling fertility rate will eventually stabilize to a lower population but a richer one
Until you hit the demographic crisis where you're counting on the labour of one grandchild to sustain four grandparents.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Fertility is a wicked problem, and I'm not sure what you're asking is even possible, as I think the underlying social/cultural issue can't really be solved by a lone conservative head of state/government in an otherwise hostile liberal democratic global culture though executive political action. But I will attempt to answer the question as a thought experiment nonetheless.
Firstly, I'm going to constrain any potential actions to something that is 1) practical 2) politically feasible and 3) sustainable (so it can't just be easily overturned/revoked as so as you're out of office).
It's easier to highlight incorrect or misguided ideas than it is to identify correct ones so I'll do that first. Economic solutions and incentives do not work. This is not to say they don't have any impact (it can slightly increases it), but they are not going to remedy what is a long term social and cultural issue. As I've pointed out before, the fertility rate of the US was higher under the worst period of the Great Depression than it is today.
Specifically, child care support/subsidies is a complete red herring. While I have no hard evidence to support this (it's not something anyone has ever bothered to study), but I strongly suspect child care support might counter-intuitively have negative effect of fertility rate. I believe that child care support actually encourages women who already have children to start or restart working, and thus lower their long term fertility (have one or two kids, go back to work), rather than the often stated goal of encouraging or helping working women to have kids. In other words, child care support is more aimed at getting young mothers to work (and become 'economically productive') rather helping working women become mothers.
Okay, now for policies that improve fertility and are feasible
- An aggressive campaign remove any form of female affirmative action and similar policies, particularly in education and employment.
This is potentially politically feasible because it's theoretically possible by using the liberal ideology against itself. The most obvious example of this is Title XI lawsuits in the USA used by men to stop women-biased policies and affirmative action (though I must say this is an extremely uphill battle). It's sustainable because it exists within the liberal legal framework already. It's not trivial to overturn a Supreme Court ruling. Though this will heavily depend on the given country's political system. Also, while I say it's feasible, that doesn't mean it's easy or likely. Fighting against gamma bias is extremely difficult. Going any further than this (e.g. actively discriminating against women) is completely unfeasible and any suggestions about this are pointless.
An even more aggressive approach would be to somehow take back control of the education system and academia from woke stranglehold, but I'm not even sure how you would go about it, short of burning the whole thing to the ground and rebuilding, but I don't think that's feasible.
- Destroy and disrupt social media as much as possible, especially dating apps.
This is less about improving the fertility rate, but actively halting what I think is a massive compounding factor to its decline. Social media, especially dating apps, are not at all conducive to the formation of traditional family life, no matter how many people say they found the love of their life on Tinder. Social media more generally is also a vector for political and social ideas that are not at all helpful to the goal, to put it lightly.
The most practical way to go about it would probably be to invoke anti-trust/anti-monopoly laws and attempt to break up the social media/tech companies and extremely weaken their networking effects that way. But this would be a huge effort. It could probably would be possible through playing on existing left-liberal fears of social media and tech companies. The best bit is that there is already a push to regulate dating apps to 'protect women' but this mostly just means to put more burden on to men (usually wanting men to have to provide id to sign up to dating apps), because who would actually want to stop the meaningless casual sex? It would be possible to turn this into just straight destroying the dating apps though in the name of protecting women.
- For certain parts of the world, actively promote religious organizations (especially Catholic Church) and weaken the separation of church and state.
This is only feasible certain parts of the world (for example, Latin America and some parts of Eastern Europe), and presents a double edge sword (or even a Faustian bargain if you're so inclined). Weakening the separation of church and state will result in a whole host of other non-fertility related problems, but is a potential strategy for the question being asked. Churches remain some of the only prominent conservative cultural institutions left, so obviously promoting their influence and status would work towards the goal. The big caveat is that even churches are not immune left-liberal cultural take over, and that includes even the Catholic Church. Not sure about long term sustainability.
I might think of some more ideas later.
Ultimately, I think what's needed is a new traditionalist-conservative vision that leads to a new conservative movement, one that isn't tied to right-liberation ideology (thanks America). I have some vague sense about what it might include, and I think it will happen at some point, but I think it's impossible to know it until it happens. I think it will necessarily have to acknowledge and rebuke both all the liberal and post-modern leftist arguments (post-post-modernism?). In essence, something along the lines of 'yes, we have heard all your arguments about how society should be and found them lacking. The stable traditional family and lifestyle remains the contested champion of the basis to build a functioning, just, prosperous society'.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
DEI has always been about pushing an ideology that the DEI workers were "taught" in colleges and subverting the institutions they embed themselves in. (Of course, self interested grifters like operating via a subversive ideology too).
The 'positive press', avoiding discrimination lawsuits (which are now often pursued by other adherents of this ideology, i.e. racketeering), and my personal favourite "'diversity' is a actually good for business productivity, we swear" are just tactics to get corporate executives and naive liberals on board.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Start at the beginning and work you way up.
You can't go wrong with Plato's The Republic. It's honestly one of my favourite books, period. It's quite readable and in relatively plain English (depending on your translation) unlike a lot of early modern and modern philosophical texts which can have a lot of jargon. It basically assumes no prior technical understanding of philosophy. It's actually surprisingly funny.
Philosophy-wise, you can find elements of all modern political philosophical schools running through Plato's ideal city state. Liberalism, fascism, socialism. Along with asking some pretty foundational philosophical questions derived from first principles (what is justice? Why should we value it?). Socrates and Plato having the title of father(s) of Western philosophy is well earned.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Yes, that's what scares me.
This line on Russia also seems a bit paradoxical: the demand seems to be that the US treat Russia as an equal (it wasn't; they lost) but also that the US is responsible for Russia's economic and political malaise , as if it was a vassal or occupied state like Japan or South Korea (which, btw, didn't just uncritically bow to neoliberal policy- if a small Asian country could forge a smarter path...)
It's not paradoxical because I never used the word equal. As with all the other times, I commented on this issue on the Motte, I will say that Russia is and can only ever be a regional power in its current state. I used the word 'partnership' which does not require equal status. This is contrast to 'hegemony' which this absolutely the approach the US has taken in this region and many others. As to the issue of America's responsibility to the current political and economic status of Russia, I strongly recommend reading "Russia's Road to Corruption" a US Congressional report on the issue from the year 2000. At best, you can say this was the result of gross incompetence by the Clinton administration and their economic advisors. At worst, it wouldn't be remiss to believe that that Clinton administration's policies were actively malicious. At some level, it's hard to distinguish between the two.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
What they were supposed to do?
Not fuck up Russia in the first place with the Clinton administration's disasterious attempt to 'reform' a post-Soviet Russia and seek partnership instead of hegemony? Agree to a healthy buffer zone in Eastern Europe? Not create and amplify the various revolutions in Eastern Europe, including the various 'Color Revolutions', and more recently and relevantly the heavy American involvement in Euromaidan and Ukrainian politics generally? Not deliberately antagonize Russia by constantly demanding Ukraine and Georgia should be admitted into NATO (despite their questionable strategic value) the same way the US would never tolerate a country in their immediate sphere (Monroe Doctrine) to ally with a hostile power (e.g. China or Russia) let alone one on their border?
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
I mean, I agree with your point about Putin but I'm not sure why people are insistent or implying that the US has been actively seeking peace in contrast. The foreign policy of the US for the last thirty or so years (at the very least in this region) has be pursing unreleting, antagonistic hegemony.
So sure, maybe the US was not actively seeking war, but at best they weren't really taking efforts to ensure peaceble relations either.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
I don’t think the US can be exhausted.
I would just say Iraq and Afghanistan.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
What Orban says keeps me up at night simply because he’s right. And what’s really scary is that I don’t think either side can back down.
Sadly, I strongly suspect this will end up as an extremely extended case of sunken cost fallacy. It will drag on and on with both sides refusing to make any concessions towards peace until it's years later, countless lives lost, billions of dollars spent, destruction everywhere. Only then will both sides be so exhausted that they will be forced into negotiating a peace that makes no one happy, when they could have negotiated a similiar diplomatic postion prior to the invasion with far less cost to everyone.
Late, and there are some pretty good answers/theories from other commentors, but I will give my own highly abridged explanation. I have some more lengthly explanations I posted on Reddit that hopefully I can dig up later.
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The failure and the atrocities that arose and were revealed to the West in the latter half of the 20th century. Especially the Cultural Revolution in China, Khrushchev's Secret Speech and other USSR atrocities. This dampened a lot of support for orthodox Marxism and its derivatives.
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Liberal/social democracies actually did a pretty good job of give their workers a decent quality of life, especially when compared to USSR (i.e. Marx was wrong). Which made economic/orthodox Marxism and revolution unattractive to the working class.Marcuse in particular complained about this constainly as a barrier to revolution (and influenced the pivot from the workers to the students, academia and the disaffected social groups as the new vanguard of the revolution.
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Frankfurt School and neo-Marxists, including figures like Marcuse (who was an academic rockstar), Horkheimer etc grew incredibly popular in academia as an alternative to orthodox Marxism (the foundation of the New Left).
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Social liberalism is far easier to subvert with "social Marxism" than economic liberalism is to subvert with economic Marxism. Aided by the postmodern revolution in academia and the obssession with manipulating language.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Yes and no. It's a good rule of thumb, but there's no hard and fast distinction between third and second wave feminism. Third wave intersectional feminism is most directly a descendant of second wave black feminism (mixed with queer theory etc). The issue with describing contemporary TERFs as second wave radical feminst holdouts is that often TERFs subscribe to other parts of temporary woke/intersectional ideology (e.g. CRT). It is only specifically trans ideology they oppose.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
I addressed most of your points in my original post. Ukraine isn't of real important to US interests, but the US has made it important to them for some (ideological) reason.
Calling Russia an existential threat to the US is ridiculous. How are they an exetential threat exactly? The only way I can see this as realistic is Russia a nuclear power - but then war and antagonism only increases the likelihood of nuclear exchange, not decreases it.
If Russia did not exist, the USA would try to create a Russia.
This is a good point, but this pivots the argument from "beating up Russia is good because Russia is an actual serious threat" to "beating up Russia is good because it's a scare tactic to keep the Europeans under American influence". It also basically concedes the point that Russia is an enemy of the US's own making. Although, I'm not really sure how important keeping the Europeans on tight American leash is given that the future geopolitical battle ground is primarily East and South-East Asia.
As for their cooperation with China, that is already occurring
Yes, but it wasn't occuring 25 years ago, but began occuring as a result of the deliberate antagonism towards Russia from the US over this period. That was my point - there is easily an alternate reality where Russia and China are instead regional rivals rather them cooperating as they are now.
I strongly disagree. This position presupposes that the Russians are/were a siginificant geopolitical threat to American interests, and ignores the decades of prior American foreign policy that led to this postion in the first place i.e. in some sense, the US is just 'solving' a foreign policy crisis it created in the first place.
The first is an issue because Russian geopolitical interests since the crisis of the 90s have been strictly regional, limit to Eastern Europe (and not even all of it), Central Asia and not much else. These are areas of relatively little interest or importance to the US, other than the mostly ideological (but not much else) goal of "democratising" the former Iron Curtain. Even if the idea is to somehow stop the "domino effect" of a resurgent Russia controlling Eastern Europe (a pretty unlikely scenario relying on some questionable assumptions) the reality is that Russia is not capable of excerting global influence even if it were to gain control of much of the former Soviet Union/Russian Empire. It's economy is weak, population dwindling, technology stagnant. It would take many decades of miracles for Russia to ever develop the power and influence to be a serious global player as it once was. The US has spent a lot of time, money, manpower and lives that could be been used elsewherte.
Second, the US has deliberately (or at least intentionally failed to avoid) developing an antagonistic relationship with Russia in the first place after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the first place. There was originally a real sense of optimism in the 90s for reconciliation between Russia and the US which was ultimately sabotaged (intentionally or not) by US actions which I have described in a previous comment on the Motte. US economic foreign policy towards Russia in the 90s is partially responsible for the creation of Putin's Russia in the first place. So it can be argued that the US, even if they are enjoying a geopolitical success with Ukraine, mostly just solving a problem they contributed to.
Third, even if Russia is weakened or neutralised by Ukrainian victory (whatever that entails), it's not exactly clear to me that will result in geopolitical success in the long term. The elephant in the room is China. A weakened Russia will almost certainly turn to Chinese patronage for support and protection, which would be a disaster for the US, give that China is that actual global geopolitical rival, not Russia. Even before this war, US antagonism towards Russia caused strange bedfellows as it pushed Russia and China together, two countries who have competing interests in Central Asia and would probably be weakly competing rather than weakly cooperating as they are now. If the concern is that the USA shouldn't cooperate/should be antagonistc to Russia on (liberal democratic) principle, fair enough, though I will point out that's not an issue with other counties and allies, most obviously Saudi Arabia. There are so a lot of actual really bad outcomes that could result from Russian collapse, including but no limited to: the rise of an extremist ideology in Russia, nukes being used (either by current Russia or successor state) the increase of global terrorism, including Islamic terrorism, based in Russian territory.
Lastly, it's not even clear if the US has gained any clear long term economic advantage. Yes, other countries have become more dependent on US gas exports, which is good for US gas industry, but this ignores the huge damage the supply chain and economic disruption has caused to the global economy, including the US (broken window fallacy?). Maybe the US gains a relative economic advantage over China (probably not significantly if at all), even if US citizens have to suffer for it. Increased dependency on US gas might also be short lived, because the lack of cheap Russian gas has renewed efforts in Europe and elsewhere to seek alternative forms of energy, though it remains to be seen how that plays out.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
"African-American history" != "critical studies."
I would disagree. While it's theoretically possible (and has existed in the past) for an African-American History course to not be taught from a critical theory persective, the reality is that they have become synonymous in practice. Gender studies, queer studies, indigenous studies etc are all so deeply intertwined with critical theory (I would argue by design) that there is really no distinction to be made in contemporary academia.
As to the original claim being made that these are essentially just left wing conspiracy theories, I agree with that claim though I agree that the poster didn't substantiate their claim with evidence. However, I will offer a piece of evidence - one of the tenants (and there are a lot of conspiratorial ones) of CRT is that liberalism and the Civil Rights Movement basically amounts to a psyop (they wouldn't word it as such) by the White supremacist society to make Black folx think they are no longer oppressed and are equal to Whites but in reality this is just a cover story so Whites can continue to oppress Blacks.
I cite Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic for this.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Japan did very well on its own, adopting and adapting many Western ideas and institutions
Where does the Perry Expedition fit into this? "On its own" kind of ignores how the Americans forced Japan open to the West and to adopt Western idea.
Re: all the "The Motte is not that smart" comments.
As an Australian, I semi-frequently see people say some variation of "Australia is a horribly racist country" in the MSM, social media, in person or elsewhere. While this is often just a leftwing shibboleth, it's said frequently enough even among moderate voices that it has become part of the cultural conciousness.
When I hear this, I often think to myself, "what the hell are you talking about? Australia is an incredibly unracist country by any comparison. It would be hard to find any country less racist than Australia - maybe a couple in Europe or something (although even that's changing very fast) or maybe New Zealand, but that's about it. China? Japan? Brazil? Saudi Arabia? Nigeria? Italy? All more horribly racist than Australia by any meaningful standard.
The real issue is that Australia is not horribly racist (by any relative standard) but that Australia, being a Western liberal democracy among other reasons, is hypersensitive to racism. Whenever any racist incident does occur (and they will always occur to some degree), it blasted accross the media as an example of how bad we all and how much we still have to improve, even if such incidents are relatively rare and unrepresentitive (I'm sure American and Canadian readers can relate). Ironically, it is precisely because Australia is so unracist that we percieve ourselves as racist.
I feel the same way about this bashful comments about the Motte being really not all that smart. Are you crazy? By any reasonable, necessarily relative standard, the Motte is full of very smart people writing interesting posts and comments on a wide range of topics from a very varied perspectives. This is matched by few other places on the internet. Even if people are wrong (and people are often wrong), they're still wrong in the right kind of way, the way that's illuminating like when you argue an absurd postition to its fullest extent just for the hell of it.
And yes, as per the original topic of this thread, the Motte could be more intelligent. Yes, there are hyper-geniuses doing their third PhD in astro-quantum-biomechanical-neuroscience engineering, or whatever else who are not on the Motte and probably don't use the internet all the much. But by any reasonable standard, the Motte is pretty smart. We just are hypersensitive to our own intellectual inferiority specifically because this is a community build around casual intellectualism and full of people smart enough to realise there are people smarter than them who are not the Motte.
Rationally according to what? Yeah, I get it, they're 'rationally' maximising their economic potential. But who decided that this was a goal worth pursing in the first place? What makes it rational? Because based on the societal outcomes we're now all staring down at, it doesn't seem rational it all. Least (most?) of all because it seems to be making most women actually miserable (and men, but no one gives a shit about them).
I seriously wonder if the rise of 'bullshit jobs' and 'imposter syndrome' is directly and primarily related to the mass entry (and in many cases, favourable entry) of women into the workforce. Mass female participation into the workforce has caused an overwhelming surplus in low-level white collar and clerical work, and necessitated the creation of large amounts of bullshit jobs of no or negative economic value that simply exist to soothe women's egos (and men to a lesser extent). After all, feminism and liberal society told women at large that they should be entering the workforce and become economically self-sufficient (family? who needs that) if at least for their own benefit (because being mutually dependent with your husband is oppression!) . But what do you do if you don't actually really need all those women in the workforce? Even today we see the huge glut of communications and arts graduates dominated by women.
It's also not obvious to me that this arrangement is at all economically optimal on a macro, societal scale. Women being primarily homemakers does have macro economic value, it's just hard to quantify (I wonder if anyone actually has tried to quantify it from an objective, non-feminist-screed 'men are stealing women's labour!' perspective). It's amazing about how parents (single or otherwise) will go to work, only to spend a huge amount of their income to pay someone else to look after their kid... so they can go to work. Childcare and schools are struggling both financially and functionally in large part because they are expected to parent children in place of now busy parents. Wage stagnation may be (partially) caused by in huge influx of labour this is essentially doubling your available labour. To say nothing of the second and third order effects, like from not having a declining fertility rate, children having a more stable upbringing, fostering a better sense of community, mental wellbeing, healthy homecooking etc.
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