I also think doctrinaire blank-slateism as you describe it is a bit of a strawman.
Strawman or the bailey?
If that view is a strawman then what is 'all sex-specific social expectations and privileges are also "natural" and can never be changed because duh, biology doesn't change'. How many American conservatives explicitly state this belief?
Most of the instances I'm aware of sound more like (entirely reasonable) calls for for agnosticism or at least extreme skepticism about the precise extent to which biology determines culture (since everyone opining has serious skin in the game and we're certainly not at the point of making controlled experiments that could falsify our guesses).
If it was mere agnosticism or even skepticism people like James Damore wouldn't be anathematized for trying to provide empirical evidence that challenged the blank slateist ideology.
Yes, everyone knows the caveats to the statement "men and women are the same". But it's hardly my fault that we continually allow some people to turn the ratchet in one direction until we're now arguing about men in women's sports. If there was any example even blank slateists should laugh off...it used to be this. But, seemingly, what one generation knows but considers too obvious or impolite to say somehow stops being common knowledge and you have to fight about it.
"Everyone knows" is true until it's not. The slope is slippery. I don't consider it a weakness of my argument so much as the point itself.
Moreover, liberal modernity certainly works much better with fully interchangeable workers/citizens
As @ArjinFerman asks: in what sense? It certainly has certain Darwinian implications. The liberal societies that have adopted this viewpoint are facing the basic problem of being unable to reproduce themselves - which probably won't be helped by telling men and women they can swap sex and dope themselves to make it stick. The flight may feel smoother but the plane hasn't landed yet.
My other retort is that this view is simply just false, and it only appears not-false insofar as people employ a bunch of hotfixes and participate in the very sort of doctrinaire "see no evil" blank slateism you're writing off as strawmen.
There are plenty of places where it's clear people are not interchangeable widgets and we solve it by various forms of redistribution that are intended to push them to look and act more alike (enforcing equal parental leave in European countries) and the deployment of a vast bureaucracy to root out sexual "bias" or "discrimination" across both employment and education and the burning of a witch every so often that points out this truth.
As a child of this period, it's hard to escape the view that this is much preferable to the alternative (certainly it's in my interests when we come to the racial version of it) but it's hard to argue it doesn't impose all sorts of costs.
So at a societal level I can fully understand advocating for periodic centrally-enforced sex-stereotype detoxes or elimination diets, just to reset to minimal levels.
Even if I accepted this as some worthy goal, I don't see how what's happening is some sort of stereotype of rationalist ChiCom planning with ten year plans to tap and reduce standard sex stereotyping (you'd think, if people were interchangeable widgets such totalitarianism would be unneeded).
Some of the tools used are products of the center but I don't see any retrenchment. Just various groups of people seizing Title IX or this or that handle of a ratchet and taking us further and further.
There's no, as far as I can see, cultural movement in the center that goes "maybe we don't need female Marines so leave standards as-is" or "maybe get male Secret Service agents, cause we're all fucked if the bullet skips past someone's 5'6 head into their principal's chest". Nope, some moral entrepreneur will find some new thing to be the first to diversify, and then we go from mere detox to imposing things like gender identity on schools.
Tanista
2mo ago
But "blue is for boys and pink is for girls" is an accident of certain western cultures.
Yes. That would be the fallacious version.
As someone who has become deeply radicalized (and the truscum types lost anyway so who cares?) I'm not sure that their position is attractive either.
Gender dysphoria existing doesn't necessarily justify turning everyone into, essentially, a care provider to people with that condition by affirming their identity. Or being forced to deal with the inevitable externalities that come with allowing such changes to their perceived sex. They simply aren't women, even if they have a condition that makes them want to be and acknowledging it is dangerous.
Arguably the attractiveness of the "truscum" position is partly because it coincided of both low visibility of transpeople and also just a lower level of ability in legally enforcing their claims. One of these is intrinsic, the other contingent.
And, of course, there's the argument that the sort of society that wants to Be Kind^(tm) in this way simply will not/cannot maintain that sort of sharp distinction.
We only have a couple of examples but...
Historically, the distinction was "gender"= social norms for manhood and womanhood, while "sex"= biological X/Y/ gamete status. A child raised in a distant lab by sexless robot aliens, with absolutely no conception of human society, might not have a "gender"; but they would still have a "sex."
If blank slateism is true, yes.
That's kind of the problem. The ideological fortress is of use to larger groups than just the trans activist segment that captured it so now people don't have a way to disentangle themselves from ridiculousness like Tickle without losing their motte entirely. And they haven't found it because
That version of gender did have real uses as a rhetorical countermove against the sex-determinist appeal-to-nature fallacy
If they were only attacking the fallacious version of that argument then trans activists would have a thinner wedge to work with. You can accept that it's ludicrous to assume static or totalizing gender roles without accepting that gender has nothing to do with sex (which is where we are) or the sort of doctrinaire blank slateist/anti-sex-based role position that came to dominate.
It also only has to hold for a couple of months
(Before someone says that Kamala is no Obama)
Tanista
2mo ago
Admirable goals. But if you can't actually pay for your rumspringa yourself some pragmatism has to seep in.
Maybe two years of fornicating and drinking and less debt to worry about is a good compromise.
Tanista
2mo ago
Yes. This is the standard response I get, and it seems plausible (though one wonders why less "woke"/diverse nations don't simply institute IQ tests).
I guess the only real response is "I said 'most viable', not 'easy'". Yes, cutting away whatever makes businesses unwilling to do straight IQ testing and starving the large administrative sector attached to colleges is not going to be easy. And huge swathes of the educated populace are not in favor of it for both self-interested and ideological reasons.
But, if the government is going to be involved in backing and forgiving loans, there has to be rationing. Much stricter rationing.
I can see employers get more legal leeway on IQ tests and other disparate impact bait before you actually roll back women in the workplace or actually pay to fully compensate people for their perceived economic loss they suffer when they have kids
Tanista
2mo ago
Sure. But even cutting a lot of degrees down to 2-years would be a not-insignificant gain.
And I'm unconvinced that certain non-technical fields especially need a long stint in college.
Putting aside deeply illiberal solutions that both sides refuse to even consider, it seems like the most viable solution suggested by your post is to simply cut down on college as a necessary rite of passage.
How many people really need to spend four years (and an increasingly large amount of money) on a degree, if we're being honest?
Tanista
3mo ago
He said this before getting Man of Steel:
Everyone says that about [Christopher Nolan’s] Batman Begins. ”Batman’s dark.” I’m like, okay, ”No, Batman’s cool.” He gets to go to a Tibetan monastery and be trained by ninjas. Okay? I want to do that. But he doesn’t, like, get raped in prison. That could happen in my movie. If you want to talk about dark, that’s how that would go.
So did the producers push him in that direction or did they find the man for the job?
My intuition was that Batman vs Superman was a studio mandate to rush the shared universe, Snyder tried to do some comic grimdark/Frank Miller inspired stuff and couldn't pull it off.
Just as, iirc, a lot of Watchmen fans argue he didn't get Watchmen either. There were a lot of complaints about Snyder insisting on the violence and gore itself being cool for their own sake so this isn't even new. But obviously far more people feel invested in Batman and Superman than Watchmen so they didn't make as much of an impact.
Ironically it even managed to ruin gravitas by proxy in making the DC films, Snyder and all that copy him double down on seriousness to insane degrees.
Nothing about Snyder's work before DCEU implies that he had to take a turn to go where he did. I think that's just who he is. I sometimes even appreciate his clear disdain for certain allegedly immovable parts of DC canon
And who he is is someone who should never have been given control of an entire cinematic universe. Zach Snyder being allowed to act as some sort of auteur or writer-director when his best works like 300 were mainly strong on visuals and he needs at least two tries to make a decent superhero movie is one of the more amazing coups in Hollywood
He really must just be a great guy to be around.
I said she wasn't stupid. Which is what's implied by wondering how an econ student could make these basic mistakes.
She's not making mistakes, she's pandering. We know this because of how she treats something she has even more experience with. She was openly contemptuous of a (very stupid imo) left-wing view up until it suited her politically. Whatever else she is, she wasn't stupid enough to believe that view when she actually had to enforce the law and practicality mattered. She simply doesn't care now that her job is different.
aren't you somewhat responsible for greatly strengthening the existing circuitry that links that visual cue to a state of arousal and sexual reward?
It may be true but most men won't perceive it that way because our perception is that abstaining will just make you more distracted. This is actually the most common advice: fast long enough that you redirect the inevitable energy towards something useful. The idea of retaining your sexual energy has taken on a life of its own amongst the porn-saturated via NoFap but seems to predate it so the idea was out there.
It's unlike chocolate, so I think the condemnation might actually be stronger from the other direction: you're going to feel arousal anyway. The problem is you're associating sexual arousal with an ultimately fraudulent reward and powerlessness, which heightens the anxiety that comes with feeling sexual desire.
She was also a prosecutor and actually did that job for years and actively mocked left-wing views on crime before turning around when BLM was big and downplaying her experience.
It's not a mystery and she's not stupid, just a weathervane.
Tanista
3mo ago
Just neurotic people looking for something to be neurotic about.
I guess them larping as Saudi women at least spares the video game and rock industries their tender mercies.
Just the opposite of any recent progressive justice system "reform" like the NY bail reform (that let those migrants who got in a brawl with the cops or people arrested with body parts out) that would be a start. The knob was turned in one direction and made things worse, they can turn it in the other.
Yeah, he was asked specifically about Elon and pivoted to talking about "keyboard warriors" in general. People just ran with it because he didn't explicitly admit there was little he could do.
Which would be accurate but kind of unproductive and humiliating when you're trying to discipline the kids who're still gonna be in school next semester.
Tanista
3mo ago
There was a post recently about how Elon is a "reply guy" (meaning not really creating imaginative content and more just reposting and adding minimal commentary).
And it's true.
And yet, the bluntest, least original things can be funny if you have the right target.
Tanista
3mo ago
There are people who still desperately cling onto the notion that crime is directly a result of poverty.
Except sex crime of course.
And why would your first solution to "there's a refugee problem" be "stabilize that entire country"?
Tanista
3mo ago
Contra @Amadan and @100ProofTollBooth, I'll say that I pretty much agree with the core of this post and I don't think it's content-free.
I can't deny that this video of Kara Swisher writing off Elon for moral reasons before being reminded that Elon actually does try to build things that matter to actual people immediately came to my mind reading that post. It's definitely a thing, though the level of generalization and invective may be against Motte rules.
Tanista
3mo ago
We can abandon the category. I'm just skeptical that one particular cultural preference -"liking diversity" - can explain everyone moving in one direction on this.
Even if we say there is no real "red tribe" surely some elites just don't give a fuck? If it was just ideological you'd also expect people like Johnson to exploit the anti-immigration sentiments of the populace to great acclaim and glory. Yet they start that way and either don't do anything or make it worse.
Especially since they can get more than enough people for their class while cutting down on the huge numbers.
Speaking of hotfixes:
I used to take this for granted too but then you look at something like student loans where women hold more debt and take longer to pay it off and student loan forgiveness is argued for specifically as a salve for women and I wonder.
If all of these jobs better fit a woman's temperament why can't they just pay their loans?
Male roles may have been liquidated by modernity but not necessarily just because the inevitable march of technology making lifting things and whacking people less useful. The modern liberal state may have given us a little push.
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