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Notes -
American cultural exports | First Toil, then the Grave
(I can't embed the images in a comment, or link to them because of the character limit. Click on the link above for the full experience.)
Seen on the /r/ireland subreddit: Libraries issued with instructions for securing buildings as protesters try to remove LGTBQ+ books for young people. I don’t really have much to say about the article itself: it’s quite even-handed and avoids direct editorialising (although it isn’t hard to deduce which side of the debate the paper takes, given that the article concludes with the cover artwork and synopses of three of the books being targeted). While I have specific misgivings about LGBTQ activism in Ireland, I think that calling the guards on a library because it’s carrying a YA novel featuring a gay couple is a hysterical overreaction. I agree with pretty much everyone that, if you’re concerned about your child being exposed to content you find unseemly or distasteful, the most effective solution is to simply not buy them a smartphone.
What I want to talk about is the comments on the article on Reddit. The commenters are united in the contempt in which they hold these activists, which is hardly surprising, but cast your eye over them and you’ll notice another recurring theme:
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The consensus seems to be that these activists have simply imported their concerns, opinions and tactics from the United States, via American social media. I mean, I don’t disagree - they have. Were it not for the influence of social media, it would never have occurred to any of these activists to set foot in a library hunting for “objectionable” YA books. But this phenomenon is not peculiar to them. One commenter comes a lot closer to the mark:
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I have a simple question: before Facebook was introduced to Ireland (December 11, 2005), did you ever hear of an Irish teenager describing themselves as “non-binary”?
Perhaps you’ll say that there were always non-binary people in Ireland, and access to social media just succeeded in “raising awareness” of a phenomenon which has always existed since the dawn of time. I don’t buy it. When I was in secondary school, there were openly gay, lesbian and bisexual students; there was not a single one who called themselves non-binary. The Enoch Burke saga is rather farcical and something of a storm in a teacup, but amidst all the thousands of column inches expended on journalists wringing their hands about a teacher refusing to address a student by they/them pronouns, very few that I’ve seen have asked the obvious question - why does the student in question want to be addressed by they/them pronouns? How did they arrive at the idea that they would happier being addressed as such?
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To return to some examples from an earlier post: is it just coincidence that, of all the protest-worthy events that occurred outside of Ireland in 2020, the only one which prompted protests in Dublin, Galway and Cork was one which took place in the US (the murder of George Floyd)? This isn’t a “whataboutism” thing - I’m not saying “why are people so incensed about the murder of George Floyd when the Uyghurs are literally having their organs harvested on an industrial scale in Xinjiang?” I’m just asking why, of all the objectionable things that happened around the world in 2020 (and there were no shortage), the only one to spark nationwide protests in Ireland was a murder which took place in the US (and during a nationwide lockdown which many of the protesters enthusiastically supported, no less)? Sure, you can say that support for Black Lives Matter is just “common decency” or “being a good person” - but why did so many people in Ireland happen to unite around this one specific US-centric definition of “common decency”? Aren’t you at all curious about that?
Likewise, is it just a coincidence that George Nkencho’s brother described the police officer who killed his brother as a “fed”? That someone organised a “Not My Taoiseach” protest outside Leinster House? That Trinity College conducted a “privilege walk” on campus? That Sally Rooney’s (a Trinity alumnus) novels are stuffed to the gills with self-flagellating recriminations about her characters’ “unearned cultural privilege of whiteness”?
No one talked like this when I was in primary school, or in secondary school. These concepts and the fashion in which they are discussed were imported wholesale from the US, via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Every Irish person who spends a sufficient amount of time on American social media inevitably ends up adopting the language, concerns and opinions of one or other side of the American culture war.
I’m pleased to have recently encountered hard data to back up my intuition. You may have seen charts like these before, analysing the frequency with which words like “racism”, “sexism” and “transphobia” appear in the New York Times:
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About a month ago, David Rozado published a similar analysis on media outlets outside of the US, conclusively demonstrating that the so-called “Great Awokening” is not confined to the US. And wouldn’t you know it:
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Again, I just have to ask the obvious question. Around 2013-4, American left-leaning journalists became fixated on identity politics, resulting in a massive spike in the rate at which they used words like “racism”, “white supremacy”, “transphobia” and so on. Almost immediately, journalists writing for the Times and the Independent started doing exactly the same thing. Is this a coincidence? Did the “awokening” in US news media cause Irish journalists to view their culture in a different light, making them aware of important issues like racism, sexism and transphobia to which they’d been thitherto ignorant (the interpretation of the woke themselves would presumably endorse)?
Or is it conceivable that, as I’ve repeatedly argued, Irish journalists spend so much time on American social media and consuming American journalism that they’ve subconsciously come to believe that they actually live in the US, or that the issues which are important in the US must by necessity also be important in Ireland? That they’ve simply ported this worldview wholesale from one operating system to another, and are straining mightily to ignore or explain away the bugs and glitches that inevitably result from doing so without iterating on it or conducting any QA testing?
It’s a real “fish don’t notice the water they swim in” situation. Left-leaning Irish urbanites (including journalists) are so steeped in the modern culture war that they don’t realise their progressive opinions are just as much of an American cultural export as the conservative reactions to those opinions.
And look: this isn’t to say that the woke worldview is wrong - the fact that it originated in the US and was imported into Ireland has no bearing on whether or not it’s true or ethically sound. It will come as no surprise to you that I think it’s fundamentally flawed in many aspects both descriptive and normative, but I welcome disagreement on this point. I would hope that Irish people who are themselves woke might at least grudgingly concede that the woke worldview was invented in a specific country with a specific culture and history, and hence can’t be assumed to be equally relevant or applicable in other countries with different cultures and histories.
But please: at least have the self-awareness to recognise that, while the Irish people harassing librarians about “grooming” did not arrive at their anti-woke worldview entirely independently, neither did you. You absorbed it through cultural osmosis: by spending time on social media networks which have an obvious American slant (by virtue of having been founded there); by consuming American films, TV shows and journalism; by working for US-based multinationals like Facebook, Pfizer or JP Morgan, for whom the culture and worldview of the upper management is bound to trickle down to their overseas outposts; by completing woke-influenced Arts courses in UCD or TCD (this stuff started in the academe before spreading out into the wider world). Your thoughts, beliefs, opinions, even vocabulary are not entirely your own. (Nor are mine, obviously.)
“Pfft, those right-wingers get all their opinions from Americans on Twitter!” scoffs the “aromantic genderfluid” Redditor who has their pronouns in their email signature, shares black squares on Instagram and complains about how “toxic” and “problematic” their parents are.
Physician, heal thyself!
This seems like an anti-American take dressed up in anti-woke trenchcoat. "Don't like modern wokism? Well guess what! It's all America's fault!!!"
This piece does a lot of finger-pointing showing how European leftists occasionally say stuff that only makes sense in America, but a lot less thorough of an examination of how wokism is a uniquely American product... because it isn't. The source theory of modern identity politics is European. A lot of the left-leaning economic critiques of the US come directly from Europe as well, comparing the country unfavorably to places like Denmark.
America takes up a huge amount of the mindshare of the collective West since it has the biggest population of any Western country by a significant amount. Americans mix their opinions with Europeans over the Internet constantly so there's going to be a ton of cross-contamination no matter what topic is looked at. American might be the first place you notice particular trends manifesting since America is inherently signal-boosted, but calling those trends themselves "American cultural exports" is disingenuous. Only BLM stuff is uniquely American since no European countries have >10% of their populations being black like the US does, but other things like idpol feminism (which crested before BLM happened, mind you) was sourced from both sides of the Atlantic, as was LGBT stuff, and stuff like Islamophobia has more of a European tint to it.
Counterargument: Before Spotify was introduced to the USA, did you ever hear of an American teenager describe themselves as "non-binary"?
You could make some objections to this comparison, but I would contend that both arguments are nonsense. Europe has fewer multinational companies (especially tech ones) because Europe is a free-rider continent that has lower rates of business innovation than America. But in any case, companies don't take on left-leaning culture out of nowhere; it happens as a bottom-up process as motivated employees push their agenda with nobody willing enough to stop them for fear of reprisal. Those employees got their opinions from broader society, forged from both American and European arguments interchangeably.
As I explicitly stated in the article, the fact that I believe wokeness originated in the US (and perhaps some components originated elsewhere) has nothing to do with the object-level question of whether wokeness is factually or normatively true. In the counterfactual universe where wokeness was indigenous to Ireland, I would find it exactly as distasteful as I do in this universe.
That being said, I do think many components of wokeness did originate in the US rather than Europe. The term "intersectionality" was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw, an American academic. Modern queer theory draws hugely on the writings of Judith Butler, an American academic (last semester my girlfriend did a "gender justice" module in an Irish university and had to read Butler). Radical feminism draws heavily on Andrea Dworkin. The whole concept of the "progressive stack" came from the Occupy Wall St protests.
And more than ideology, the language Irish people use betrays its origins, like George Nkencho's brother demanding that the "fed" that shot George be "terminated". If it was Europe that dominated the cultural hegemony, he could have demanded that the "gendarme" or "bobby" be terminated, either of which would have been just as inaccurate as calling him a "fed" - but he didn't.
In any case you concede the point that, whatever the origins of wokeness, it isn't indigenous to Ireland, so it is hypocritical for Irish progressives to mock Irish conservatives for importing their values and tactics from overseas.
The analogy doesn't work. Facebook was founded by Americans and was first made available in elite American universities; it retained remnants of the culture of elite American universities long after expanding into the wider world. In December 2020, about one-third of their staff were still based in the US. While Spotify was founded in Sweden, it's not like they started off exclusively hosting Swedish artists and podcasters before expanding into international artists - Anglophone music and podcasts have been their bread and butter since day one. Look at their most-streamed artists by year (and streaming stats follow a power law distribution, so the most popular artists actually accrue a huge majority of total streams): there's exactly one Swedish artist in the top 5 of any given year (Avicii, and his lyrics are exclusively in English) and only five artists from non-Anglophone nations (Avicii [lyrics in English], Daft Punk [lyrics in English], J Balvin, Bad Bunny, BTS). The rest are artists from Anglophone nations, chiefly the US. I can't find comparable stats for podcasting, but their most popular podcast is The Joe Rogan Experience. I also can't remember a single instance in which Spotify waded into a Sweden-specific culture war (though I'm open to correction), but they loudly and conspicuously waded into several American ones. Hell, most of their employees are based in the US, more than twice as many as are based in Sweden.
To the extent that Spotify influences the broader political and social climate at all, it's just a really efficient delivery mechanism for Anglophone (chiefly the US, Canada and the UK to a lesser extent) culture, which incidentally happened to have been founded in Sweden. It is not chiefly (and never has been) a delivery mechanism for Swedish culture, or non-Anglo European culture.
This is a classic Motte and Bailey. In the original post, wokeness was described as an "American cultural export", or that it was "imported wholesale". Now it's drawn down to "many components of wokeness originated in the US", which I wouldn't disagree with. Looking at the wiki pages for many woke topics like radical feminism will indeed show many Americans, but it will also show people like Julie Bindel, Monique Wittig, and Germaine Greer. Again, almost all of critical theory traces its roots to the Frankfurt School and people like Foucalt. I'm not countering by saying that wokeness is uniquely European, rather I'm saying its a joint venture between both sides of the Atlantic. For a more nuanced take, I'd say that the general groundwork skews German, while the modern implementation of wokeness skews to the Anglosphere. Fundamentally, it's just wrong to describe wokeness as uniquely American, or even disproportionately American when accounting for population levels and scholarly output.
I wasn't using Spotify as a genuine example, I was using it to show "correlation doesn't imply causation", specific to examples you used like Pfizer somehow being a critical component of wokeness advancing in Europe.
Well, you absolutely agreed with me that BLM is as American as apple pie, and has no European antecedents. Likewise the term "intersectionality", coined by an American academic. I do think most of modern gender ideology can be traced directly to Judith Butler. When I talk about wokeness in Ireland, I'm primarily talking about BLM, the concept of white privilege, gender ideology, and the nomenclature associated with the ideology. I think it's reasonable to say that, to the extent that wokeness has caught on in Ireland, concepts and paradigms which were invented in the US have had an outsized influence. Maybe it was hyperbolic to say that wokeness was "imported wholesale" from the US, but not extremely so.
Sure, but wokeness didn't actually catch on in Ireland during the lifetime of Foucault or members of the Frankfurt school - it caught on in 2013-4. Maybe American critical theorists were just rephrasing concepts which originated with the Frankfurt school, but I still think they deserve a significant amount of credit for translating it in a way that made it palatable to a young and international audience. Elvis Presley may have been heavily inspired by Chuck Berry, but that doesn't change the fact that it was Elvis who became the King of rock n roll.
That is to say, non-Americans may have significantly contributed to woke ideology, but I think the specific flavour of woke ideology which caught on in Ireland retains a specifically American flavour, even in cases where this makes no obvious sense. Woke people are pretty good at adapting the overarching tenets of the ideology to local parochial concerns (e.g. land acknowledgements for aboriginals in Oz and NZ) but that really hasn't happened here: Irish progressives get far more bent out of shape about alleged racist incidents against Ireland's vanishingly small black population than they do about discrimination against Irish Travellers.
I think Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer are uniquely bad examples to illustrate how non-Americans contributed to the rise of wokeness, given that woke people despise these two women for their TERF opinions. In fact, Greer was enormously popular with the second wave of feminists in Ireland and the UK in the 1980s: the rise of wokeness caused a steep decline in her popularity to the point that she's effectively persona non grata in many British universities. Bindel writes for Unherd, for Christ's sake.
True, I can only prove that the cultural dominance of wokeness coincided with the rise of social media, I can't prove a causation. But I do think that social media played a significant role in disseminating and popularizing woke paradigms and concepts. I don't think it's a coincidence that Facebook was originally only accessible on American college campuses, quickly became the biggest social media platform in the world, and shortly afterwards an ideology which was invented (or refined, or perfected, whatever) on American college campuses became culturally dominant in the Anglophone world.
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There is absolutely nothing simple about this. Would you require that your child be shunned an outcast when all of their friends are communicating through Snapchat or Whatsapp or any other application that you need a smartphone for? Would you deny them a camera, or require them to carry both flip phone and digital camera separately?
Nothing simple at all.
Also, none of your images are embedded or linked.
I know there are large downsides that come with not buying your children a smartphone. My point is, if you already have, your child already has access to more pro-LGBTQ content, woke propaganda, creepy pornography etc. than they could consume in ten lifetimes. Complaining about a few books in a library when you've already bought them a smartphone is trying to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted.
I'm not a parent, but if I was, I think I'd actively prefer my children not to have access to a digital camera until they're of age. It greatly reduces the risk of their disseminating pornographic images of themselves without understanding the ramifications thereof.
Counterpoint, as a child I happily consumed plenty of "age-inappropriate" material with absolutely no negative ramifications, and I consider the whole thing to be an overblown moral panic, even leaving aside my anecdata.
I'm within 2-5 years of having a kid of my own (Jesus time flies), and I fully intend to let them do whatever the fuck they like on the internet, as long as it isn't spending my money on gacha games and lootboxes.
They'll get smartphones, tablets, PCs and VR as soon as they can use them, assuming I can wrangle their potential mother into agreement. The only reason I'd ever withhold access to any of them is because they've demonstrated that they can't help but abuse them.
Also, the odds of any child born after today ever having to worry about leaked nudes is minuscule verging on nonexistent, given the existence of deepfakes as plausible deniability, let alone panopticon surveillance for child porn if they're young enough. That's completely leaving aside that I expect the world to be nigh unrecognizable in 10 years or so, if we're even alive to see it.
Well, count yourself lucky. (that is, if you know you can count yourself lucky. Do you wake up with morning erections regularly, like you should at your age ? No problems having sex ? No problems with anhedonia, lack of motivation, flat emotions ?)
Tens of millions of people aren't.
The question is how much of that is attributable to the consumption of "age-inappropriate media". It's not that hard to find tens of millions of people suffering from most things that vague, in a population of 8 billion after all.
I am clinically depressed, but that was only an issue after high school, and if I go a few days without jerking off, I'm as randy as a goat.
You didn't answer the question.
It's very likely related as there are no other good explanations for why people with these symptoms suffer withdrawal symptoms associated with psychological dependence.
Or, you know, lack morning erections entirely, which means either severe depression or serious lack of testosterone.
You asked plenty of questions, to answer them.
Yes I have morning wood, thanks for asking.
No to the latter.
I already said I'm clinically depressed, but that the circumstances behind it have no bearing to your hypothesis.
Who exactly are "these people"? I do not deny that porn addiction with concomitant problems is real, my assertion is that it's not meaningfully linked to Western prudishness about what is and isn't appropriate for kids.
Western prudishness about what is and isn't acceptable to kids is based on quite old concerns about compulsive masturbation, which was probably far less crippling and prevalent than pornography addiction.
I'd not be surprised if at some point knowingly giving access to pornography to minors was made a criminal offense within the next 20 years in some western country.
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The internet is a bit like the Wild West - partly because a lot of it is actually distant in terms of producers, even if it feels close. We expect actual physical locations near us managed by supposedly accountable adults (allegedly) of our culture paid for that task to behave differently.
Obviously what an "Instathot" can do on Tiktok is different from what we want to see at a McDonald's or in a classroom.
Part of the problem is precisely that those lines are ever blurrier.
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I wasn't able to fit them in with the character limit on comments. If you click on the link at the top of the comment you can see the article in full, including the images.
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Here's a somewhat phenomenological idea which I'm just going to throw out there: these people don't recognise anything American about their discourse because it's genuinely not quite the same until there are domestic right-wing American views to contrast with.
The experience of an Irish left-winger is of a civilised country which has shed itself of its own brand of backwards conservatism pointing and laughing at the most recent thing the insane Yanks have gotten up to. No one entertains the idea that there will be any disagreement about this so they voice it freely at work and the like. It's not until a domestic voice gives opposition that the re-enactment of America is complete, the conception of the normal Irish citizen just being a nice person is shifted into Americanised Irish left-winger vs Americanised Irish right-winger, a faithful re-enactment of America involves hating each other after all. It's no surprise that they accuse the right-winger of bringing American politics into it, until the right-winger started to play his role the fact that we were all just re-enacting America hadn't yet become clear.
The real original Irish discourse takes place between old school leftists and a newly minted radical right arguing over which side holds claim to the nationalist cause. This is the stuff that doesn't make any sense in an American context, Americans themselves aren't interested in it, and there is enough substantive thought (a benefit of having a revolution instigated by poets and playwrights educated in the Victorian style) that original debate can be had. It's where everything interesting in Irish political thought happens.
I find this pretty convincing.
Americans export awareness of our CW battle lines.
Some domestic occurrence looks vaguely like an American one
Domestic activists realize they can tap this giant well of cultural awareness
American hashtags on domestic media
The important bit is 3, where some journalist realizes the potential of appealing to an American export. It’s potent because it seeped into the domestic public before anyone was really defending against, as you said, those wacky Yanks. Tie it to the hashtag or slogan and even your enemies will know what you’re talking about. That’s a seductive feeling—and one that rewards the wielded with clicks and clout.
I'm sceptical of this hypothesis because there were large scale nationwide BLM protests in Ireland long before anything BLM-related actually happened here. After George Nkencho was shot dead by police officers in December 2020, I could almost detect a palpable sense of relief among Irish progressives - finally we have something that looks like a legitimate grievance, the accusations of tilting at windmills won't land quite as easily as they did before.
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I used to dislike the liberal media and the left wing journalists in Europe. Now I really miss them. The news in Scandinavia is increasingly becoming press-releases from American NGOs and google translated Washington post articles. The media used to reasonably critical of power, now they are basically reporting their press releases. Scandinavian journalists have barely any knowledge of foreign affairs, they report what the US military industrial complex reports. The perspective is becoming the perspective of Robert Kagan, often with perspectives that don't even make sense for a non-American. Even our public service media is increasingly ending its articles with "according to the Institute for the Study of War".
There seems to be a link between having values on foreign policy similar to John Bolton and being woke in Europe. I strongly believe the consumption of translated materials from Washington elites are behind both trends.
The people who threw rocks at cops during negotiations over free trade agreements 20 years ago and demonstrated against the war in Iraq are turning into major war hawks wanting to defend American liberal hegemony.
You ever seen an explanation of what's the reason for it ?
Internet killing press media, collapsing budgets, leading to talent leaving the profession?
Generational change, with spooks being better positioned now to groom younger generations of journalists properly ?
Race to the bottom. It’s faster and cheaper to copy a press release than to write an editorial. And once someone does that, switching costs are so low that they will snag all the viewers. So everyone else has to compete on similar terms.
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Probably the internet killing their budget. Just rewriting a press release is cheap.
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The "trusting the experts" narrative might have a role to play here. ISW succeeded in becoming "the experts" in many circles in the early months of the war. A more critical appraisal might go against the consensus of the "experts".
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If there is, it's not a strong one. At least here, being anti-US and anti-NATO still correlates mostly to being far-left, though there's a smallish far-right section with that view, too. Of course, one could argue that the anti-US far-left is not generally the wokest part of the left, but I know both anti-American woke and non-woke leftists with equivalent views on NATO/US/Ukraine.
However, at the moment, being pro-NATO, pro-Ukraine and concurrently pro-American is the view shared by the vast majority of the population, with NATO support being something like 80 % at the moment. Within this section, the most fervent nuke-Moscow crowd tends to be politically of centre-to-centre-right variety and not really particularly concerned with things like wokeness and non-wokeness.
This tends to more old left rather than the super woke left.
The center right tends to support liberal interventionism consistently. The center right was the most pro war in Iraq, Libya and Syria to then start complaining about the millions of migrants these wars yielded. In Israel-Palestine the conflict is between those who want Arabs to live where they have lived for generations and those who want them to move. The center right strongly supports large numbers of Arabs having to move. That the same people who wanted to spend trillions defending feminism in Afghanistan are pro war isn't surprising. That the center right supports the next military venture isn't surprising. The surprising part is that the people who used to be opposed to the foreign wars largely falling in line this time around.
This is all very much at the margins of political discourse here but at least in Britain anti-NATO sentiment, which there isn't really that much of anymore, seems to come as much from Sultana-esque young left-wingers as it does from older Galloway-esque ones.
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One part of this might just be that the super woke left just isn't particularly interested in geopolitics, or only interested in a perfunctory way. However, I, at least, myself know people who could probably be put on the "super woke left" and are pacifists, or anti-interventionists
At least here (and I don't think that there are any countries where the switch has happened as hard and fast as here), this is mainly just an effect of the fact that in Feb 2022 (not literally on that month, but in and around the months before and after the invasion), the entire society fell in line around a new foreign policy consensus that is pro-Ukraine, pro-NATO and pro-American. Basically the only people that didn't were the ones who had a really firm anti-NATO line before that month, and even many of them (like me) were affected.
However, even after that switch, the super-woke types don't tend to be the most eager NATO supporters; that, as said, is mostly the avenue of he center-to-center-right types who, with some expections, tended to already be pro-NATO before the invasion.
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Which opinions are we talking about, exactly?:
Condemnation of homosexuality has arisen spontaneously in multiple societies; it doesn't have to be imported from elsewhere.
There have always been Irish people who were morally opposed to homosexuality, there's nothing in itself new about that.
What's new is the fact that most of this current generation of conservative activists are not allied with the Catholic Church in any way, and they've incorporated a great deal of the specific concerns, terminology and tactics from American activists (panic about "groomers", going into libraries looking for books to root out). Ireland had a referendum on gay marriage 8 years ago, and I don't remember a single person who was opposed to gay marriage expressing concerns about "groomers". This specific strain of anti-LGBTQ activism is very new and seems to have been imported from the US.
Both sides of the debate spread via the internet - we all part of the information commons now and the epistemic challenges.
Unfortunately that means we have to work harder to understand the issues. Anti-LGBTQ activism is undoubtedly a thing (people who object against any and all of those) but the phrase betrays a lack of understanding of the actual issue-it is the wrong 'frame'.
In reality the T is in conflict with LGB because the definitional space that LGB exists in (biological sex) is being challenged by gender identity (self-asserted subjective sense of gender). This leads to the idea that a MtF who likes woman, is a lesbian and because the reality of biological sex is thrown out, this actually undermines the real identity of the original lesbian (a biological woman attracted to biological woman). It has got to the point where lesbians who do not want to have sex with biological males are called bigots and in some cases coerced into sex with these biological men.
Not to mention that the sociogenic idea of trans encourages gender non-conforming gay people (eg feminine boys and masculine girls) to think they might be the wrong sex. We know that many people who suffer from gender dysphoria and do not transition ultimately resolve their dysphoria, and that many of these people turn out to be gay.
So assuming that anyone speaking up against trans is Anti-LGBTQ is false.
Try this podcast - it's politically neutral and broadcasts a wide variety of guests and views.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://gender-a-wider-lens.captivate.fm/&ved=2ahUKEwjZr_3ThOf-AhVs8TgGHV5XDFEQFnoECBgQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1kmGb8mmfcBTPZA3ccinmH
I totally get what you're saying, and I don't think being opposed to certain components of trans activism (as I am) means that you're for instance opposed to gay marriage.
But that distinction doesn't apply in this case. These right-wing protesters were going into libraries trying to root young adult novels with gay characters. They appear to be firmly opposed to LGBT as a whole, not just the T.
Gotcha, yeah it's frustrating because they make it so easy for the arguments to get smeared as right-wing religious or whatever to the centre-left. It's also unfortunate because it seems homosexual acceptance has actually improved over the last decades.
But I do have some sympathy for the fears, in addition to gay books they were presumably also getting rid of the 'I am Jazz' stuff, which I do consider grooming. Because of the head start this ideology has, it's quite possible that your children are exposed at an early age to it without you even being aware. And libraries aren't neutral on this topic. A friend of mine tried to get some adult books telling the trans story from the critical side (ie books by Helen Joyce, Abigail Shrier etc) and all were turned down - of course you can't expect the library to accept a book request just because you send it, but it's notable how captured the public library is by gender ideology - there was a quick link to various books on how you can choose your gender etc, over all age groups on the website, yet you won't find any of the books critical of it. Indeed there is a prominent trans flag in the library, which, try as I might to not to 'morally panic' about, feels like living under an authoritarian regime.
That's enough to create a sense of urgency and rage for some people to take matters into their own hands. I don't agree with it personally, particularly when perfectly suitable books about being gay are included, or even trans stories which deserve to be told as any other for the right ages (though I think trans stories are prone to reinforcing misunderstandings about the nature of gender, identity and the self, overstate the empirical weight of their first person experience, and are contributing to the social contagion in the current environment, presenting it as a positive or transcendent lifestyle choice and glossing over the medical realities).
So I'm torn, I don't agree with censorship but I also welcome some active resistance to the authoritarian environment we're in and I'm clear on what's starting the whole chain-people are actually trying to influence young children with these ideas that don't make any sense, and may contribute non-negligibly to the risk of them getting medical treatment through contagious ideas (though obviously not without other factors in play).
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FYI, your (inteneded) image links seem to be broken.
I'm not able to link the images as I've nearly exceeded the character limit, but you can view them in the Substack article itself.
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I would, of course as someone who leans more progressive, argue that however cringe importing social fads from USA is, importing the reaction to said social fads from USA is even more cringe. You're just demonstrating that your own culture really isn't enough for those damn kids.
How do you tell whether "no wait, don't bring that crap here!" is importing a reaction from America, or whether it's a local product?
I had that thought while writing the post. Did Irish progressives import wokeness, then the conservatives followed suit? Or did Irish progressives import wokeness, then conservatives reacted against it, and it just happens to look very similar to the American conservative backlash against wokeness because of convergent evolution?
I don't really know one way or the other, but I'm leaning towards the former.
You have to start earlier than that, after all wokeness is a reaction itself.
Did the US have that "conservatism" imported from Europe, assimilated it, had elements react against and create wokeness, then re-export that AND the "conservative" reaction to wokeness again.
Much of the US's cultural information was imported to them. Its why the US is largely aligned with the Anglo world in the first place. Plus Ireland due to high immigration. If not for large amounts of Irish people bringing their cultural exports with them the Presidents wouldn't be touring Ireland so regularly and they wouldn't dye the rivers green (and the beer).
They are re-exporting to us as we once exported to them. Partly because thats what the global hegemon does and partly because of the close relationship.
Lots of funding came from the US for the IRA for example. The US was also a big part of the Good Friday Agreement happening at all.
You have US immigration in Dublin airport so you can fly into a domestic terminal when you reach the US!
The US has a big finger in the Irish pie so to speak (and vice versa) if you believe that nearly everyone i meet in the US after learning i am from Ireland tells me some story about their grandmother being from Meath or similar. Progressivism (or the reaction to it) is hardly only the most recent.
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When one uses specifically American right wing shibboleths, I dare say you are importing the reaction and not just saying "none of that here".
To be clear, the animosity may well be local, but the words they use to express it isn't always so.
I disagree. I'd buy it's importing the reaction if suddenly the Irish started talking about something actually specifically American, that has no bearing on what's happening to them at the moment, the same way progressives imported BLM to Europe wholesale.
Yeah, I'll buy that as an example of conservatives importing culture war. The depressing conclusion seems to be that whoever does it the most, wins.
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There was a similar small to-do in Finland about a planned screening of the Drag Kids documentary. It was basically stillborn since the cultural festival that had planned the screening quickly withdrew it from lists, citing threats sent. However, while the fracas was going on, much of the discussion basically consisted of both sides flinging "You're just importing American culture wars!" accusations to each other; pro-LGBTQ types saying that this is a copy of American conservatives tactically making up mountains from molehills over LGBTQ culture and conservatives retorting that the whole "drag kids" thing is just an American folly to begin with (even though the documentary appears to be Canadian, but that's not exactly a large difference from this side of the pond anyway).
Of course they're both correct, but it's like... of course this country is going to import culture, discussions and ideologies wholesale from some other country, in this case the most powerful country in the world, the undisputed global hegemon, with never-seen-before opportunities to broadcast its ideologies at scale everywhere. What else are we supposed to do, invent all the local ideologies and policy points ourselves? There's just 5,5 million of us.
The entire Finnish history consists of people importing ideologies from elsewhere. Christianity through Sweden and Russia, later Lutheranism from Germany, then nationalism from Germany (the founding father of Finnishness, J. V. Snellman, basically based his nationalist visions on Hegelianism), socialism from Germany, environmentalism from, yes, Germany... When one reads Social Democratic magazines from the start of the century they're already bashing each over basically over whether German Socialist 1 or German Socialist 2 was correct, and adjusting their own views on the basis of such debates elsewhere.
The biggest difference to past centuries is where the importation of ideology comes from, but that it's mostly imported from somewhere says.
Drag queens aren't a political ideology. They're a cultural particularity tied to an ideology. Like how afros can be associated with "woke" people (in the original sense of "progressive black person"). Would be odd if progressive Germans were sporting it.
Importing the basic idea of socialism and adapting it to local conditions is one thing. This is the equivalent of importing Chinese classical music and having culture wars over it.
The two can go together (Islam and Arabism overlap to say the least) but there are reasons to be suspicious of how certain ideologies manifest in different countries. There's nothing wrong with an anti-racism movement in the UK in theory, but why does it involve things like kneeling down which are tied to anti-black racism and police violence which should be lesser factors in the UK? Blacks aren't - or shouldn't be - the totemic minority in the UK. So it's suspicious.
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About the same as the number of Ashkenazi Jews in the US. That didn't stop them from having an enormously outsized influence on American culture and politics.
Finnish isn't a religion that predates the Western civilization.
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I'm sure multiple ideologies and political theories originate from polities even less populous than that.
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Valid point, and if Irish progressives could just be honest and admit that they've imported their politics from abroad, I wouldn't really care that much. But people get very defensive when you make that argument, and claim that to do so is "invalidating" their opinions or identities. I think it's a kind of reflexive assumption of Bulverism: even though I'm very careful to point out that, just because something is imported, doesn't make it morally or factually wrong, a lot of people seem to hear "you just got that from the US, therefore it can't be true".
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Yes? Otherwise why are you even using written Finnish instead of Swedish, or Latin (or Russian, I suppose)?
A large reason of why we're writing in Finnish is that a large group of Swedish-speaking gentry got enamored with the general European trend of national awakening and decided that such an awakening in Finland could only be done using the people's language (and, in Snellman's case, in large part due to his readings of Hegel), and because the Russian Empire happened to find it useful to foster such a movement. Of course it might have happened otherwise in other conditions. At the very least it must be noted that none of this happened in a vacuum.
According to Paul Hazard's history of european ideas intellectual began moving away from latin and greek at the end of the 1600s and therefore it is a precursor of the enlightenment rather than a consequence.
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A problem that can easily be solved by PsyOps, and forced assimilation.
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We've had that debate, and the anti-platforming side lost. The principle currently in effect is that all means of disrupting your opponents speech, including violence, are ok. So I'm not going to shed tears over a bunch of people this, until we restore the previous principles.
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