And that also isn’t a good reason to say religion is unimportant. Just because Southern Baptists, Anglicans, and Greek Orthodox Christians are all Christians, that doesn’t mean they’re identical or interchangeable in obvious ways.
The people who use the "social construction" deepity are ironically the people who take the thesis the least seriously.
Imagine if every human disappeared and alien scientists had to puzzle out the purpose of these giant buildings and steel veins that dot the landscape. Why some buildings on a certain coast are built to different specifications, why standards vary across climes.
These things are clearly artificial but no archaeologist or historian worth his salt would start and stop at "people made this, so they just made it up because".
It really is just a blank slateist motte-and-bailey.
Tanista
15d ago
How many smart people like Matty Y are out there who are Republicans but just haven't realized it yet?
He isn't.
Everyone is a "policy wonk" or "class-first leftist" until they have to actually cast off their progressive social beliefs. Then you see how they really prioritize them. See also DeBoer, Freddie.
Tanista
17d ago
My sense is that blacks are going to take this loss extremely personally, and that it will sting them to no end.
Joy Reid, Van Jones and co will (because their status depends on it) but will most?
Do we have turnout figures, because that can be as/more telling. It feels like there was a lack of enthusiasm even as the usual black pundits lined up behind Kamala making the expected noises.
And not in the Obama "we don't think he can win" sort of way.
I think migration also felt existential, for reasons Elon laid out to Rogan. People just fundamentally don't like the idea that the government is just going to dump migrants on them and respond "deal with it". I personally thought the Haitian pet-eating story was too ridiculous to land but maybe not. Regardless the general discontent remained.
The lawfare simply failed, like all other tactics did. Partly because Trump seems to have the miraculous ability to make his opposition even more ridiculous than he is so some of those cases were absurd and partly cause people had bigger concerns like the above.
Tanista
17d ago
Harris is an awful candidate no one would have picked? She was not just personally awful at anything that requires charisma and communication, she was tied specifically to Biden's policy failures and the inherent cleavages they caused (e.g. Gaza) and lacked an ability to pivot away from them given she has no independent profile. Or, at least, not one she'd want to stand behind.
Nor could she explain why she shouldn't be held responsible for hiding Biden's condition, something that made him unpopular enough to drop out
In hindsight it doesn't seem that mysterious: Trump was supposed to win when it was Biden.
We were all just caught up in the media exuberance around Harris because Democrats went from a seemingly certain loss to having a chance and that breeds some Joy^(tm). Then the sugar rush ended.
For a while now, I've had this growing knot in my guts whenever these types of things happen and the bad guys end up being women. I hate the knot because my brain says it's stupid to think women are somehow to blame for the increased pressure to root out anyone who's doing something wrong somewhere. But the knot keeps growing. I can't resolve the conundrum.
As just so theories go "women tend to eschew direct physical conflict in favor of other, less risky forms of social combat" isn't one I'd be particularly afraid to lose money on.
I feel no guilt in admitting that violence crime is a burden mostly-males impose on society, one that it can "unleash" through unwise policy. Unless women are a higher evolved being they'll have their means of wreaking havoc that we shouldn't encourage.
Tanista
23d ago
the social conservatives have been thrown under the bus on abortion
Trump gave them the best win they could get from a President: removing the Supreme Court's federal restriction on pursuing their politics. If they can't win on a state level and abortion likely ends up codified like in every other industrialized nation (albeit with more restrictions) then maybe that's on them?
On gay marriage: okay, the party seems to have totally folded there.
Trump is probably a net drain now that he's broken the consensus. But Dobbs is a huge confounder here. The GOP was projected to gain in midterms even with Trump and the result of standard conservative maneuvering for the last few decades seems to have interfered.
Trump is notably less gung-ho on the pro-life issue than many in the party.
Tanista
23d ago
The "conservative" movement was about to fold on immigration after Romney, so one wonders what movement would have remained after another round of amnesty or civil war as they tried to force their base to accept this. Trump was drawing on something real after all.
Tanista
23d ago
The charitable take is that those people are just cynical about the ability of the media to falsify enough consensus to let their allies entrench their wins.
Which does happen. After seeing people go along with X or Y long enough you can easily believe that they can just make something true if they all stick to the same line.
But I don't know what to say: they've just manifestly failed at locking Trumpism out of the Overton Window. Whatever their ability to nudge things, it's not infinite and they've bottomed out here.
The decline of the journalism and its ability to support itself is a long term trend, so it's hard to judge the value of a more centrist WaPo. Especially if combined with a shift of a lot of educated voters to the Democrats.
But having another Democrat-aligned outlet with a slightly more prestigious name also has dubious benefits for Bezos. It's arguably a more certain road to irrelevance.
The people who want that (and are cancelling as a result) are operating on a cargo cult mentality about what makes an institution prestigious and valuable themselves. They seem to imagine that these outlets simply saying things while being who they are makes those things consensus. This is just a justification for entryists to seize these orgs and draw down any credibility they have for what are often silly causes.
Maybe this would be fine if it guaranteed victory at the cost of the business. But it clearly does not in certain cases. Whatever the power of elite journalist consensus to hobble Trump, we've long hit diminishing returns (and they've only been so destructive because Trump can't help himself). You're paying a premium for an influence operation that's just doing what everyone else is doing to no avail if you're Bezos.
It might even harm the party's chances by putting their elites in a bubble. This might not matter to the freeloaders who believe the organization is there to serve their interests but I imagine it matters to the person funding the enterprise.
So I can see why Bezos just ducked beneath the endorsement issue and is pushing back.
I think it comes down to Beyonce doesn't want to do it.
Why? I don't know. Speculation? They don't see themselves as circus clowns for whatever the Democratic candidate of the day is. They truly believe in themselves as black royalty. (Which others, like the NFL, seem to agree with)
When it comes to the black elite, it's them and...people allied to them. There's no hostile Elon Musk-style billionaires on the other side. They're the top of the layer cake and have a monopoly on "celebrities who can mobilize black voters" or, more cynically, "celebrities white female staffers believe can mobilize black voters".
They might be willing to take a somewhat deferential stance towards Barack Obama, but he actually was the first black president and actually did win his elections before retiring to make enough money to be in their tax bracket. He can be primus inter pares.
Kamala Harris is no Obama.
Beyonce doesn't actually need to dance around for her and it's somewhat demeaning for there to be an expectation that she has to (for a person that doesn't even deign to give interviews anymore, so certain is she in her cultural cachet) so Kamala can salvage a campaign event. She's Queen Bey after all, her laying hands on Kamala should achieve the goal of telling her people who to vote for. She did Kamala - and the Democrats - a favor already.
There's nothing odd about this: Anne Hathaway and Scarlett Johannsen support Democrats but don't have to do soliloquys for whoever the Democrats randomly picked to lead them. They give an endorsement and the party is happy to get that much.
Leave that the dancing bear behavior to the Meg Thee Stallions of the world. She's still hungry and climbing the ladder.
Tanista
27d ago
Seriously people, how hard is it to get Beyonce to perform?
As hard as Beyonce wants it to be. She sets her own price.
How are homosexuals "confused about the binary of sex?"
The only thing I can think is the gender non-conforming behavior of some homosexuals, who perform the gender/sex roles of a sex they're not (studs, femme male homosexuals). I don't know that "confusion" is the right word there. They're not confused like transpeople who claim to be women, they're deliberately non-conforming.
If you remove medicalization the boundaries get much fuzzier, because there's really no sharp dividing line between these things and "trans". They're all just varying levels of gender non-conforming behavior with more or less psychological instability thrown in.
It seems to me that the homosexual lobby and the transgender lobby can be at odds with each other.
Seriously asking as someone who doesn't pay much attention to LGBT foundation myths:has it been that way historically? A transwoman didn't throw the first brick but does anyone deny that they were part of the same club of non-conformists (along with drag queens and studs and so on) that we now call the "LGBT movement"? I've not seen anyone debate Marsha P.'s membership, just his centrality (or self-identification)
Tanista
30d ago
For reasons I don't understand, sexuality seems far less susceptible to social contagion than gender identity. Sure, the proportion of Gen Zs identifying as "bisexual" or "queer" has skyrocketed, but hasn't translated into elevated levels of same-sex sexual activity in that generation.
I can't do the math now, but you could probably say the same about "gender identity". It only appears otherwise because we're comparing different things.
"Gender identity" is to "medical transition" what "identifying as 'queer" is to actual homosexuality.
Plenty of people can get a buzz cut or change names without actually going through with the procedure. Meanwhile, unlike gay sex, even a small amount of people in absolute terms getting "medical treatments" can set off alarm bells in sensible organizations if the rise is high in percent terms. Which is what happened in Europe.
Tanista
30d ago
We signed a death warrant on Science the moment we thought it could be a "neutral" way of resolving political disputes.
In the absence of a shared religion or culture you need something. Seemed like a smart idea at the time.
It's hard to think of a more toxic ideology if one actively wanted to turn off parents.
Maybe some sort of justification for tutelary pedophilia, I don't know
Tanista
1mo ago
Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.
Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.
Tanista
1mo ago
Maybe the right should be against it but I can't imagine going back a decade and telling people Trump's brand is incompatible with bland consumerism.
They don't want to let it get to the "funny pic of Gaddafi or Putin shirtless on a horse" stage. They want it to stay at the "ominous devil figure" stage. The former implies some fatalism.
They've never made their peace with the fact that their country can elect someone like Trump and they don't want anyone else to either. Ironically, it's the "where my country gone?" meme they mocked for so long.
The reporting is very unclear. Apparently they just randomly came upon him trying to maneuver above ground yesterday? Strange.
Tanista
1mo ago
The justification for allowing immigration for humanitarian reasons is arguably stronger than the justification for the Culture's rampant interference in everyone's business (to often disastrous ends). It certainly fits an individualist ethos better; the individual is choosing to accept the Culture instead of unaccountable Minds enforcing their will on their entire society through often covert means.
It's "in character" in the sense that it's how I expect a utopian leftist who wants to preserve a certain,um, culture to frame things to escape their discomfort with being able to solve everyone's problems but not being willing to sacrifice the specific character of his own society (you see this today with claims of "brain drain").
I'm just uncertain how seriously to take it as a purely principled position.
Tanista
1mo ago
I honestly don't even see how it's in America's interest to enforce this current status quo on Europe. Would America have blinked if Merkel never changed her mind on Syrian refugees? My impression is that most Americans don't really care and even the atlanticists have other concerns.
It doesn't seem that different from the same tangle of laws and ideology that makes solving the homeless problem in the US so intractable, which certainly can't be blamed on America's hegemon.
Tanista
1mo ago
Although the acceptance of "life will be better if I can move myself over there" without necessary direct evidence
What makes you think there isn't direct evidence?
It'd be one thing if we were talking about middle class Indians piling into an inordinately expensive and crowded Toronto apartment and a shitty mall degree. But I think most asylum seekers to Europe are probably right that it's a better deal.
It's just a motte-and-bailey, because "race realists" would be quite happy to carve up races further for precision (and do ime) but their opponents have no interest in that task at all.
Admitting that the colloquial definition of "Asian" isn't fit for purpose and maybe we should speak of "East Asians" and so on has never, AFAICT, won someone over to some sort of race realist view. If anything, people just seem to ignore it altogether and go back to attacking the model that has like five races.
The classification based in the idea of notable biological differences itself is the sin.
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