WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
wokes being able to say absurd extreme things without repercussion is not what a defeated movement looks like (…) an entire city being festooned with the flags of a particular ideology at the city council's behest is not what a defeated ideology looks like
But then we're back to equating between "woke" as in "the anti-free-speech cancellation machine" (which needed to be defeated) and "woke" as in "people holding left-wing opinions at all, however respectfully" (which there is no particular justification to expect to be 'defeated' overnight, any more than any mainstream belief system held by hundreds of millions of people).
They might claim to be uncomfortable with the concept, but their revealed preferences would tell a very different story.
Even if we grant this point for the sake of argument, that still leaves "phrases like good genes are taboo" as a bona fide leftist shibboleth that the American Eagle ad campaign would have been stepping on the toes of. The question then is whether they did so out of ignorance, or if they considered that left-wingers would be offended and decided that being seen to mildly upset SJWs suited their PR purposes just fine. I have no fixed belief, but the latter is plausible, and it would mean the woke brouhaha about the ad was by no means "crazy" in ascribing hostile intent to the ad, even if it was still something of an overreaction.
Well, that wasn't the point I was making at all.
Then why just list "debatably-crazy things lefties are still allowed to say" rather than "debatably-crazy things righties still aren't allowed to say" as the watermark? That's really what gave me that impression. It's difficult to take your aside about Pride Month as anything else than "Pride Month celebrations should end", as distinct from "Conservatives should be allowed to have equally-extravagant celebrations".
If it meant the latter, there would be literally no one on the planet who didn't qualify as a eugenicist
Not so. Radical progressives would be very uncomfortable with the sheer phrase "good genes" - the belief that some genes are in any objective sense better than others is viewed as a dangerous slippery slope to proactive eugenicism. Certainly no one would deny that there are, biologically, genes for particular eye colors or cranial structures, but the far-left view is that attractiveness is subjective, and Sydney Sweeney genes are in no objective sense "better" than Danny DeVito genes, it just happens to be the case that more people are into Sweeney-like body-types/it's more socially acceptable to express attraction to Sweeney-like body-types.
Talking about "good" and "bad" genes, with the possible exception of medical conditions, is, precisely as I said, a "slightly naughty" reference to a widely-held opinion that's benignly, but significantly at odds with the maximally progressive view. It doesn't mean you're secretly advertising to Hitler, but I think it's fair to take it as a signal that you are less than maximally concerned with the opinions of the radical left; as a signal that you are addressing normal people, not Tumblr keyboard warriors. It's not especially sinister, but the keyboard warriors weren't entirely wrong to think that the ad was winkingly espousing a worldview antithetical to their own.
WandererintheWilderness
17hr ago
That may be, but the problem is that conservatives are not allowed to state their beliefs; not that progressives are allowed to do so. And your post sounded a lot more like you thought it was a problem that progressives were allowed to voice their beliefs at all.
(I also wouldn't describe the American Eagle thing as "obviously insane". The pun is pretty obvious, and "good genes" is, you know, literally the etymological meaning of the word "eugenics", so it's hard to argue that the ad wasn't playing with garden-variety eugenics-adjacent ideas, the question is just how deliberate, how consciously politically-motivated the reference was. I don't believe it was intended as some sort of pointed dogwhistle or propaganda, rather than a slightly naughty reference to low-grade wrongthink which they correctly reckoned to be widely held by their target audience; and I don't particularly think that whiteness was on the makers' minds, just ordinary non-race-specific, non-systematized folk eugenics. But it's a question of degree rather than of kind.)
WandererintheWilderness
22hr ago
Sure, I don't have to pretend to agree that American Eagle is covertly promoting white supremacy, and I won't get into trouble for denying that it is – but woke people can still explicitly state that and face no career repercussions of any kind (…)
Heaven forbid anyone be allowed to hold and express political or ethical opinions that clash with yours! Where would American democracy be then?
The salient characteristic of "wokeness" that right-wingers had a legitimate case against - the thing that needed, needs, to be wiped out - is cancel culture. It was the unprecedented defection from American norms around freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and peaceful coexistence with people from the other side of the aisle. If there are still wokes out there cancelling people, that's one thing. But the fact that people still hold beliefs of the kind that wokeness sought to enforce by illegitimate means, that is not relevant. It's normal. It's the equivalent of non-murderous German nationalists, who do not deserve to automatically be tarred with the Nazi brush just because they pursue similar aims to those that the Nazis committed horrific crimes in pursuit of.
It's like trying to make sure all kids are above average
That's putting it too strongly. Making all kids above average is a logical impossibility even if you had a literal magic wand. There would, on the other hand, be nothing logically or scientifically impossible about ordering society so that every (family of) citizen(s) is guaranteed a house, though barring space colonization it may require population caps once all available land has been tiled with houses.
Regardless, if we agree houses are superior to apartments, I maintain that demolishing houses to make room for apartments should be regarded as a product of dire straits, an extremely regrettable thing to do, to be undertaken only when the humanitarian concerns are overwhelming. To do otherwise is sheer Repugnant Conclusion stuff - depriving people of an actually good life for the sake of making some other people's sucky lives fractionally less sucky. 1,000,000 happy house-owners and 500,000 disgruntled apartment-owners is preferable to 1,500,000 slightly-less-disgruntled, but still fundamentally unfulfilled and frustrated apartment owners.
(And all this is without going into my objection to demolishing living spaces at all; I think it's deeply regrettable that we live in a society where living in the same house from birth to death, over multiple generations, has become abnormal; I suspect that we're like fish not seeing water with regards to widespread psychological issues caused by a majority of the population being cut off from their childhood homes in adulthood. Humans did not use to live like this. We're not built for it.)
Apartments are a necessarily evil but are considerably worse for human flourishing than even small houses, and if there are ways to address the failure of the housing market without building more of them, we should take them even at a significant premium, for the sake of our species' dignity. Backyards should be the default for any family with children, not a luxury. I'm a very literal NIMBY in this sense. Humans need greenery in their lives, little humans need space to run and play and goof around.
(No, public parks don't make up for this. Even if you live very close by, a trip to the park is a whole thing, you need to get the kid dressed, drive or walk them, and then watch them the whole time. Going more than once a week is a tall order. The mental health benefits for the kid, and peace-of-mind benefits for the parents, don't remotely compare to the availability of a private garden that they can run out into at ~any hour of the day or night if they're going a bit stir-crazy in their bedroom.)
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
the majority of them are just because people drive now
I mean, isn't that the point? That we want to end food deserts so that fewer people need cars. Not especially relevant to the NYC case, of course.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Is it because you want them to be less obese and more healthy? Well good news, we have a solution for that, they are called GLP-1s.
It may work to bluntly reduce obesity, but that's just fiddling with calories. It doesn't replace an actually healthy diet with fewer harmful additives, more varied vitamins and proteins, etc.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
I'm not saying what he did was, on any theory, lawful (nor was it a nice thing to do). But it seems to me that the salient quality of vandalism is deliberately ruining something that was fine before you got there, or at least, fine in whatever aspect you decided to wreck. Breaking the window of a car with a flat tire - sure, that's vandalism. Poking another hole in the already-flat tire… I dunno. I guess I sort of think of "vandalism", in its vernacular if not its legal sense, as requiring an intent to deface which is moot if you're only worsening damage to something that already visibly needed replacing.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Your argument
For the record it's not my argument, just my interpretation - not even much of a steelman - of those people's argument. Overall I'm very much with you on biting the bullet that all sorts of manual jobs should just be paid better, and that there is a degree of snobbery to rejecting that class of solutions to labor shortages.
That being said, I don't think we can dismiss out of hand the idea that there may be some socially-necessary jobs so unpleasant that even high salaries would not be sufficient to fill the vacancies. Historically, the question didn't really arise; some degree of coercion (whether by force, or simply by threat of starvation) was always on the table. Whether you can in fact hire sufficient quantities of sewage workers etc. in a humane, liberal, affluent society where even if you choose to remain unemployed rather than take the job, you'll get enough to eke out a living - that is not a trivial question. I'm not saying the answer is definitely no - I don't think it's no for truckers, certainly - but it's worth thinking about seriously.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
I'm not saying they don't want the pool to fail; I'm saying they want the pool to fail because its failure could be held up as evidence of Trump's incompetence. Why else would they care? (I agree they wouldn't particularly care to fix it if it were up to them and there was no political dimension to it at all; but I don't think we'd be seeing the same jeering enthusiasm for watching it falling apart.)
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
There is, in short, a whole class of people who are cheering for decay, they want to see things break because they get to gloat when it happens, and when it does happen they will deny any responsibility as they cheered it on. (…) I am now receiving a lecture in incompetence from those people.
I don't see the contradiction. These people aren't cheering for the decay of the pool because they have a fetish for badly-maintained pools; they are cheering to make fun of Trump's incompetence. Now without a doubt, they enjoy having reasons to dunk on Trump so much that they "want" him to fail so they can keep on jeering. That's not a great attitude. But bringing up incompetence isn't an inexplicable last-minute about-face, it's been the point from the start. ‘Har-har, look at Ozymandias up there, the great public works he's so stupidly proud of are falling apart before our eyes, the Emperor has no clothes.’
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Is breaking a window of a car with a flat tire the right comparison? Pulling up a bit of lining that was already torn seems more like walking by a house that's already collapsed, and picking up a handful of rubble on a whim. You could uncharitably describe the latter as "pulling bricks right out of the wall", but vandalism seems a stretch.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
What they are saying in effect is that people who do {dirty job} do not deserve to be compensated in such a way that someone would work {dirty job}
I don't think this is is quite a fair summary; the implication is that it is impossible to compensate someone enough that they will work {dirty job} - either literally impossible, or at the very least economically infeasible to do at scale.
I think it's pretty explicit in the rest of his post that most people who make that gamble are big winners.
The starting point has to be considered, though. I lead a pretty comfortable life. Getting a billion dollar would still be life-changing - but I value my current life enough that I wouldn't play Russian roulette for a 5/6 chance at a billion. If you're already doing fine, how big a win does it have to be to justify taking even a small chance of ending up like Tyler? I don't think free college tuition cuts it.
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
Yes? That seems like another example of what I was talking about. I don't understand what point you're trying to make.
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
Sure, they don't tend to believe that Gaza is currently a bastion of progressivism; but @4bpp was talking about a wishful belief that "with sufficient reparations and contrition", Muslims will eventually "flip to running a pluralistic rainbow-coloured paradise", not the untenable proposition that they're already doing so.
That is, people who delude themselves into believing variations of the idea that the claim that an independent Palestine would be an oppressive, misogynistic, Islamo-fascist regime is just Israeli slander; that left to its own devices, Palestinians might very well become an enlightened liberal democracy, and it's racist to believe otherwise when they haven't been given the chance. In my experience, it's what a lot of Queers For Palestine types claim to believe when pushed, and I don't really doubt their relative sincerity. It'd be psychologically challenging to cheer for people who you actually believed would behead you if they got the chance.
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
I'll take your word that they don't exist in Ireland, but haven't you seen "rainbow Hamas" types on social media?
I think Clayton and Swinson might have correctly anticipated that if they give the inflammatory, partisan answer, follow-up questions will be asked. The safest way to avoid backing yourself into a "What makes you so sure?"-shaped corner is to simply not answer the first time. Come to that, I think ignorance can also be in play even with insincere people. I don't know about Clayton in particular, but it's easy to imagine someone who, regardless of their own beliefs, would more confidently answer "Trump" if they've memorized a suitable Gish gallop of alleged voter-fraud evidence that they can rattle off upon request, than if the only answer they could give to "why do you believe that?" was just "because Trump told me to". Thus, the embarrassment can result from an awareness of one's personal inability to defend the claim, not necessarily self-consciousness about the innate ludicrousness of the claim.
(Also, re: the specific "woman" scenario, a crucial detail IMO is that the slogan everybody learned by heart was "trans women are women", not "the word woman means XYZ". "What does the word 'woman' mean in you head, anyway?" is itself the awkward follow-up question: "when you chant trans women are women, what do you mean by that word?".)
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
I think there's a missing possibility in your bullet-point categorization of what a floundering response to a gotcha question might signal: sheer ignorance, rather than cowardice, i.e. the respondent might simply have been parroting a slogan with no actual understanding of why it's held to be true by their ingroup. It's not that they don't believe in the slogan, necessarily, but they've simply memorized it as an article of faith without even stopping to ask why. "Trans women are women" is true because gender studies experts say so and they wouldn't say so without good reason; "the election was stolen" is true because Trump says so and he ought to know. Crucially, good arguments are assumed to exist, it's just that the respondent never bothered to learn them.
Of course, there's nothing necessarily wrong with this. Most people accept both scientific and moral truths ("nothing can travel faster than light", "rape is morally wrong") as claims from authority, without personally seeking to rederive the conclusions. But it's a bad look when a person in a position of authority is shown to have no actual idea what they're talking about. Mouthing along to the Nicene Creed is all that Christiniaty has ever asked of random laypeople, but being unable to articulate a biblical argument for the Trinity would not reflect well on the Pope.
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
In addition to FtttG's reply, "Trump" as an answer to the election question does raise a lot of follow-up questions in its own way, e.g. "Does the respondent think that government actions enacted under Biden were invalid?". (The funniest is of course "then wouldn't Trump have been ineligible in the last election?").
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
In reality I don't see any evidence that Democratic politicians are more moral than Republican politicians. Why would it be the case?
One obvious reason it might be the case that one party's politicians are more moral than the other's is if one party's platform is itself genuinely morally superior to the other. If any decent person feels in their heart that e.g. abortion is a human right, then by definition only evil or, at best, amoral people will become conservative candidates. (A conservative could, of course, make the symmetrical argument: only a morally-degenerate person would support cancellation campaigns or gay rights, therefore no righteous person is ever going to touch the DNC with a ten-foot pole.)
WandererintheWilderness
25d ago
Does saying "I will do X but first I will check if it's legal, and if it's illegal I won't do it" actually count as "threatening to do X", legally?
As far as I can see, both meanings are in use, and indeed, are often subject to a motte-and-bailey that the current convo seems to illustrate. It's used both to mean "the abnormally illiberal political-correctness movement that began somewhere in the 90s", and "the grab-bag of left-wing opinions that the people in the illiberal movement subscribe to", which is to say, "any and all meaningfully left-wing opinions".
It seems to me that a discussion about whether or not wokeness has been "defeated" only really makes sense in the context of the latter - of the recent and unprecedented threat which fundamentally cannot coexist with American democracy as it had been practiced for the preceding 250 years. If we try to parse the statement using "wokeness" to mean "leftism", it honestly sounds deranged. Leftism-is-general is, again, not going to be "defeated" overnight - hundreds of millions of Blues are not going to suddenly change their minds about their most fundamentally-held social and moral beliefs. The Culture War is just not the kind of conflict where one Tribe can "defeat" the other on the scale of a few decades, unless it were to turn into some sort of actual boots-on-the-ground armed conflict, which has, at the very least, clearly not happened yet.
But compare HBD. I'm always banging the drum that "blacks are, on average, biologically lower-IQ and more aggressive than whites", if taken as a true scientific fact, still doesn't inherently justify moral claims like "blacks should be second-class citizens" or "it's okay for whites to make fun of blacks with minstrel shows" - in short, still doesn't justify white supremacy as an ideology. But in practice, if you see someone trying to signal-boost HBD, it's unlikely that they're just spreading awareness of interesting scientific trivia which they regard as having no political ramifications whatsoever. A progressive who accuses a HBD-promoter of trying to put white supremacy back into the Overton window is, on average, not being irrationally paranoid, even if there may be a few false positives.
The leftist position on the American Eagle ad is that this is very similar. Making value-judgements on genes has been declared taboo to keep the evils of eugenicism at bay, and although it's conceivable for someone to try to put them back into the Overton window for benign reasons, there is going to be a heavy suspicion that they don't think the full package is that bad either. (Heck, the HBD hypothetical would be a stronger case, because "racial IQ differences exist" really is, at a base level, a neutral factual claim about the world. In the "good genes" case, the problematic element isn't a factual claim, but a taboo value judgement.)
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