SSCReader
3d ago
Right, one of the issues with keeping the Red Tribe going is they are (or were) supporters of their kids going to college. I've mentioned before how miners and steel workers in small town America don't necessarily want their kids to do those jobs because they know how dangerous and back breaking they can be. Now I think they're more interested in the perceived benefits of getting a degree (better, easier, less body destroying jobs) but they are to sn extent the architect of their own destruction, by buying into that part of the American dream. If you send your kids off to college in bigger towns and cities, some of them will get assimilated, and stay and some will choose to stay for those better jobs. So even before neoliberalism crushed the steel and mining sectors, they were on a slow steady road to decline.
SSCReader
4d ago
Your corner (and in fact many or most corners) may be reasonable but a large enough chunk of it is not reasonable that it causes real problems and for those of us who have seen it - .....well burning everything to the ground doesn't sound terribly unreasonable.
That's fair! But if it is many or most corners that are reasonable, then presumably it makes sense for people in those corners to oppose you burning down the whole thing, even if they don't think you should be treated the way you are.
If it's 80% bad and 20% good that is one thing overall but if it is 20% bad and 80% good then that is entirely another. Whether you're in the bad or good part it's hard to tell which overall world we are actually living in.
SSCReader
4d ago
If we're going by this analogy, I'd say it's far more accurate to say that wokeness is a sort of autoimmune disease on the antibody
Sure I can see that as being a workable analogy. We could probably argue about how much is positive or negative, but I can absolutely see there are at least some negative parts. A mutation of the antibodies which means it attacks not only what it is supposed to attack but also other parts of the body maybe.
Like, even if you have an auto-immune disease, your immune system is still doing some useful things, it's just also attacking your gut or brain or whatever.
SSCReader
4d ago
Over the last several thousand years society has developed an insufficient but ultimately extant immune system for dealing with overreach by religions. That's an infectious memeplex that leads to lack of introspection and hypocrisy and all kinds of bad outcomes. We are reasonably good at dealing with that.
I don't think this is exactly true really. There are still large swathes of America who haven't rejected the older infectious memeplexes in your terminology. Wokeness is a reaction to that memeplex and is part of the antibody response to further your analogy, it's actually part of the dealing with the overreach. That those antibodies continue to attack the infection is exactly what they should do (from the point of view of the antibody). The infection is perhaps contained somewhat but it isn't from the point of view of an immune response actually eradicated. It's not even really like shingles in that is dormant. It's still actively influencing the host.
And this is where the analogy breaks I think, because it's not possible for wokeness to "win" completely. At some point it will push too far and ebb. That may or may not be already starting to happen. And whatever immune response forms to fight that, will rise and then push too far, then ebb and so on and so forth.
Would it be better to have a kind of symbiosis instead of this push and pull mechanic? Probably, but I don't really see a path to that.
SSCReader
4d ago
guess what I'm getting at is that there seems to be an assumption that certain good attributes are definitionally associated with woke politics and the greater left as far as some are concerned, and some of that drifts into beliefs of competence and descriptions of such. Likewise bad attributes can never apply to team blue.
I think that is just a failure state of all belief systems, like when I came "out" as an atheist, I heard a lot of "but you're a good person, how can you want to be an atheist" and the like, and many Christians say they don't think atheists can be moral people at all. That is basically the same argument you are getting.
If I think my values are good (and I must otherwise I would not hold them) then someone holding different, especially opposite values must be bad, otherwise they would hold my values instead. It's a failure state, I would agree, but a very common one. I elected not to reveal I was an atheist when I moved to a small Red town to avoid that exact scenario.
It's more of a problem for you because your industry is by the sound of it very Blue and one where we expect people to actually care. If you are pattern matched to a group that is seen to care about (for example) gay people less, then it doesn't take much of a push to expect you to treat some people worse than others. Because historically some people in your grouping have treated gay people badly. Even if of course, you personally would not.
Everyone wants to think they are good, therefore anyone who disagrees is at that the very least not good and at the worst actually bad. This is exacerbated by tribal politics and can grow from even small disagreements. See my own homeland where even two sects of Christians ended up murdering and discriminating against each other, even though to any outside view their differences in religion are much smaller than their similarities. Even though both their faiths say do not murder. They can rationalize it away, because they're bad Fenians or bad Prods.
SSCReader
4d ago
What appearance and demographics if you would you mind sharing? I'm a straight white, relatively tall, big blonde/red bearded white man and I've never perceived anything like that. The default assumption is anyone here is Blue as far as I can tell. (Which is an issue but a slightly different one, I think)
Now as soon as I open my mouth its clear I'm British not American and that often surprises people. And when I do talk about my history and my family being essentially rednecks it surprises them more because they seem to have the idea all Europeans are quasi-communists.
SSCReader
4d ago
Hmm, No, as I don't think he was a perfect exemplar, just the closest we have here in a specifically online unusual space. Just because most Blues don't want to farm, doesn't mean none of them do, they are still Blues even if unusual.
None of my neighbors have ever mentioned Hobbes for example. But their fundamental ideas seem to match his reasonably well even if he backs his up with more of a philosophical bent.
You don't have to know anything about Hobbes to have ideas that match. Whether it's because you worked it out yourself or the culture you were brought up in taught you something similar without ever talking about Enlightenment philosophy specifically. I don't know that many Blues outside of academia would know much about Mill either.
My grandfather didn't know Hobbes from Paine from Locke but his thoughts on human nature and people being selfish and violent if not restrained mesh pretty well.
Philosophers do not have exclusivity on making observations about people. They just write about it more. As opposed to my grandfather who kept a shotgun under his bed and wrote very little that wasn't accounting for his farm.
He'd probably have thought Hobbes should have got a real job, and that he was making basic observations sound fancier than they were. But he would roughly have agreed about the fundamental nature of men.
Having said that, he wasn't against learning. He asked my father who was a maths teacher to help him with his books and towards the end of his life, investments because he said an educated man doesn't have to break his back. He left money to help pay for my kids to go to university. He valued useful knowledge.
I don't know if I would call it anti-intellectual as much as pro-practical. And of course generalizing elides that people are varied even between cultures or tribes.
Does that make more sense?
SSCReader
4d ago
The frustration I think everyone's feeling with this discussion is that while what you're saying is true in a certain way and for certain sample of people, it applies to almost no one here.
Because most people here are not actually Red Tribe conservatives. We're mostly Blue Tribers and Blue Tribe dissidents (or Grey Tribe). Hlynka's conservatism was closer to the Red Tribe people I know in person than to most of the conservatives we have here I think, (particularly in being hostile to HBD), but he was pretty unusual compared to the median Motte poster.
Not really, I'm from Northern Ireland, and I lived in England for a long while, so those are the places I know best. My insight into the South of Ireland is likely to be slightly superficial. I was raised Protestant so I don't have a lot of close links south of the border.
Dublin, I know is expensive and its likely immigration is contributing to that, and I think the Irish government much like the English has been reasonably pro-immigration for some time, so I'd imagine its the same pressures driving resentment as elsewhere. The Gardai don't to my knowledge have much of a reputation for unnecessary brutality, but they are part of the establishment and its very easy for an us vs them mentality to result in overreaction. To see the mass of people not the individuals.
@FtttG may have more local knowledge.
I appreciate your kind words by the way.
SSCReader
4d ago
I think you explained better here and in other posts, what you meant, but I think using resentful and ignorant was probably a poor choice, because it's not exactly what you seem to be saying.
I think we are largely on the same page aside from that. Given the ideological skew of this place, Making sure you are signaling that you do indeed know what you are talking about is going to be useful, for example when talking about atheism, I now make a point to say that I was in fact raised in a Christian household and was Christian until I became an atheist, which is helpful in that it means we can skip the "Do you really know what Christianity is" and similar tangents. So probably making sure to highlight your direct experience with the Red Tribe (as I did also) up front will be helpful here.
SSCReader
4d ago
means changing to the Blue Tribe side so you are no longer counted as Red Tribe (so people like you can then go on to sneer about the ignorant Reds because look, all the educated people are Blues in thought and behaviour).
It's a lot harder to switch than this though. If you grew up rurally with a family with a pick up truck watching NASCAR then you are almost certainly Red Tribe and will remain so even if you change political views. Becoming Blue Tribe would mean rewriting not just your political views (there are after all Red Tribe Democrats and Blue Tribe Republicans) but also your preferences for food and entertainment and dress. And not just at the surface level (that would just be "passing") but at the level where you actually preferred football ("soccer") to NASCAR and a hybrid compact to a truck and avocado toast to a steak and so on and so forth.
Red Tribe and Blue Tribe are cultural groups that overlap heavily with political groups but the Tribal markers remain, absent significant effort to remove them.
SSCReader
4d ago
and the way they are treated is about even with how old school racists treated Blacks.
I've never seen anything similar to that at all. Heck when I lived in a small Red town, I had my Blue colleagues over for bbqs alongside my Red neighbors and there was never any kind of problem.
I will say students seem to be more performatively anti-conservative than the faculty by a long way. So while I haven't seen them socially censuring conservative students, that wouldn't exactly surprise me. Our faculty is (or at least appears to be) more politically diverse than our students I would say. But it is a very Blue city.
SSCReader
4d ago
And yes, I was there in the 80s and 90s, and local governments were absolutely running cover just as much back then.
Beat bobbies in the 80's were calling Pakistanis Paki scum and much worse things. They were not running cover for them. That didn't start until it got up to the political levels (as you point out). "Paki-bashing" was still common through the 1980s. The "anti-racism" of not wanting to incriminate Pakistani communities was a direct reaction to that behavior. I was in the Midlands in the 80s working with the police (albeit in adult social care not children's). My first wife is from that working class background. I saw exactly the treatment those girls got from their own families and communities, let alone anyone else.
There is simply no widespread movement (even now!) to help these girls. Whether it is to protect them from prostitution gangs, to protect them from county line gangs or often their own families.
I'm not covering for anyone. I am telling you WHY even after all the revelations the reaction from Brits is still pretty muted. If they wanted to protest over it in numbers they could. If they wanted to make it a huge deal they could, just like Brexit. For Brexit, Labour strongholds who hated the Tories with the burning passion of a million flaming Maggie Thatcher's torching mining unions with a flamethrower were willing to flip. But for these girls? Barely a peep.
The average middle class liberal will talk about how its just awful, but will they actually be willing to pay more taxes to help these girls? No. Will they adopt troubled young "chav" girls in care homes? No. Actions speak louder than words, and the actions of the Great British public shows us exactly where these girls come in the hierarchy of care.
Believe me I have my own issues with Pakistani communities particularly in the Midlands, and I have no love for them. But we cannot ignore our own failings to protect these vulnerable girls and how that is even more widespread, simply due to demographics. If we do, we are failing these girls even harder than we already did and are.
By all means lock up every Pakistani grooming gang member and throw away the key. I won't shed a tear. Want to zero immigration from Pakistan? I'm all on board. In fact, I recommended that in the 1990s, when I joined central government. Condemn anti-racists for running cover? Go off King! (or whatever the kids of today say).
But if we do not pair that with staring into the face of own monsters, with our own biases and apathy, well the men grooming and drugging and raping these girls might then be white, but I don't think that is much comfort personally.
The demand for underage kids is ubiquitous whether we are talking Rotherham, Glasgow, Belfast, Epstein Island or Diddy parties. There will always be predators. Protecting the prey better, protects them against all predators whether wolves, foxes or coyotes. Otherwise you'll come back from hunting the wolves to discover the foxes ate your chickens.
I am not saying not to hunt the wolves. I am saying putting up a chicken coop is part of the solution. And observing people don't care about doing that, gives us information about what those people actually care about.
SSCReader
4d ago
The problem is there can be no permanent victory. For you or for them. You tried, they tried, there is no reason to think it will work better than last time. And I agree there is no reason for either you or them to concede defeat and see your values lose.
So now we've agreed on that, and setting aside heat if we can, what does that tell us? If neither of you should surrender, and neither can win, are there any other options?
And the answer may be no! An ongoing pendulum swinging so we kind of average out over time to moderation may be the best we can hope for. But we can at least think around the topic, without committing to unilateral disarmament.
SSCReader
4d ago
To be clear the anti-racist stuff was certainly the reason those particular gangs were able to last longer than they should.
Though I'll note cops in the 80s and 90s were not running cover and it still happened thats why it isn't the whole picture.
The problem is no-one actually wants to hang around the schools these girls go to and protect them from Pakistanis or anyone else. Are you going to hang out in schools and care homes in Stoke on Trent? In run down city centres with drug addicts shooting up around the corner and breaking into your car? And the local alkies shambling around? You're going to be there all day everyday? You won't and nor will anyone else, is the point. Regardless of Pakistani grooming gangs, no-one cares enough to start vigilante gangs. The odd attempt to burn down a mosque is the best you're going to get.
I want to be really clear, I worked in city government in the Midlands and large numbers of Pakistani immigrants are a huge problem for multiple reasons, over-representation in child prostiution gangs being one among many. But class attitudes towards lower and underclass girls are a huge part of why they are victims all across the country and people don't care.
You ask why the average Brit won't riot to protect these girls? Because to most of them they are just as much the outgroup as Pakistanis. Worse even because they should know better. Even with the cops blessing there aren't going to be lynch mobs over this. Not until most of the victims are nice middle class girls.
SSCReader
4d ago
Theres always reasons why it is different. But there are reasons why the Democrat coalition looks like it does. In the US for example being black or gay is very predictive of political persuasion at somewhere around 90% voting Democrat. That can change over time but currently it is not orthogonal to political persuasion.
SSCReader
4d ago
They didn't, because 1) They don't in general see a DEI statement as being analagous to supporting Trump or a wall.They see being anti-racist as something any decent person should do. They would see the fact conservatives won't do that as evidence they hold sexist or racist attitudes. They do not see that as being left wing and thus filtering out conservatives. They see it as being decent people and if conservatives aren't decent people that says more about conservatives and not them. That is the of power of "its just the right thing to do" framing.
- DEI statements aren't as common as you might think, I am a straight white man in academia and i've never had to write one. We have a couple of "out" Trump voters (admittedly in the economics department which is the most conservative in general I think), and while it does skew left overall, there isn't a lot of antipathy to the Red Tribe, because they don't really think of them at all. We're in a Blue city so its not like they come across that many in any case. They are steeped in Blue culture and Blue ideas. They're not even thinking about building walls to keep them out. Too busy fighting for grant money or hating dumb students of today and their short attention spans.
Now I don't work for an an Ivy League school or indeed any of the top ranked schools so maybe its more common and problematic there. But I think people have skewed ideas about academia as a whole, by looking at say Harvard or Columbia.
As for farmers, they have their own ways of enforcing social pressure. Its just not going to be a written statement. A Catholic farmer back home might find all of his neighbors equipment is mysteriously not available for him to rent come harvest time. Or an ex neighbor of mine in rural PA talked about how they charged hippies more for calves because they didn't know any better and were just going to go under anyway.
All communities enforce behaviors and beliefs, they just do it in different ways.
SSCReader
5d ago
The events in Rotherham could never have happened to a society that hadn't had its ability to hate stripped from it. Hate is an essential part of society's immune system, and while it must be controlled, it should never be discarded<
This is untrue. There was plenty of hate for Pakistani muslims in the 80s and 90s when this started. So that cannot be the whole story. The first reason it wasn't stopped and why white prostitution gangs still operate in the same way is that no-one really cares about the victims. Underclass girls who drink and do drugs and are from broken homes or in care are seen as a problem, as scum. I've heard the cops say it, in towns just down the road from Rotherham. Their own families barely care for them let alone anyone else.
That is the true and ongoing failure here. Condemned by conservatives for loose morals and sin and condemned by liberals for being chavvy and ill educated and low class.
They will continue to be victimised by one group or another for these reasons. Its Russian gangs in London, Sectarian ones in Northern Ireland, but the victims remain the same.
A lack of hate is not the issue by far. There is more than enough of that. It's not enough compassion. Not enough love.
Child prostitution is popular because there are always men who will pay for it. Always. Lock up the offenders of course, but just like with drug dealers, a new one will be along in a minute. You have to want to protect the victims not just punish the guilty. You have to want to see them not as a problem but as broken girls from broken homes who need help and treatment. But they aren't easy to work with or help so even the most compassionate of social workers or police officers becomes a jaded burned out cynic soon enough. I've seen it happen in my days working in social care. So then the cops treat the girls as prostitutes and drug addicts not as vulnerable children. No humans involved as the saying goes.
That is the almost insumountable problem. Anyone who wants to help is set against an almost unending torrent of misery and exposed to the sordid underbelly of human desire. Not many come out of it with their compassion intact. But that is what is needed, not more hate.
SSCReader
5d ago
His description of having to hide who he really is, could nearly word for word be from a gay man in the not so distant past. That he is discriminated against from a black man in the 50s and 60s and so on and so forth.
SSCReader
5d ago
I think it's fair to say that the right-wing culture which is suspicious of academia and other "not real work" kind of jobs is their own fault. But there are other factors here which aren't their fault.
Setting aside the word fault. If you have a culture that is suspicious of academia and other not real work, then it is likely the people in those positions are going to react and to be suspicious of you in return. I don't think it is either sides fault. Its the chicken or the egg. I think it is the outcome of the structural and systemic differences in value sets between tribes. Blues mock Reds for being dumb hicks and Reds mock Blues for being effete intellectuals. The result is any space that leans slightly one way or the other is going to cascade. Whether anyone is deliberately planning it or not.
90% of farmers are Republicans and that is ok. It is ok for your values and preferences to determine that some areas will be dominated by one tribe or the other. At scale individual choices are overtaken by systemic differences. There likely isn't any way to have a 50/50 split in academia for Reds and Blues short of changing what Reds want and hence what Reds are. Likewise with farming and Blues.
The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance.
This is fundamentally untrue I think and close to boo outgroup (Edit - I think you explain below what you mean somewhat better). Red Tribers have a great deal of use for knowledge. It's just usually directly applicable knowledge. Half my family are redneck equivalents and they prize knowledge. The type of practical knowledge that lets them run a successful farm or build houses. My uncle has forgotten more about small hold farming than I ever knew. My grandfather could eke a living out of poor soil and hilly terrain with a knowledge of local weather and rainfall patterns that rivaled anything the Met Office can put out. They possess a great deal of knowledge in the Red Tribe. I lived in a small Red town in the US for a number of years and this is just not a good description of Red Tribe folk even at the most general level.
It's true they don't generally want to become an anthropologist or what have you, but academia is only a subset of knowledge generation. An important one! But not the only one by far.
What is true I think is that almost definitionally Red Tribers in general don't want to sit in offices and decide on funding for hypothetical research, which means it is going to be up to the small number of conservative Blue Tribers to do that. It also explains why so often Republican politicians are more left then their base. Because they are usually Blue Tribers who are conservative, again because almost definitionally Red Tribers don't want to live in a big city and sit in meetings and give speeches for a living. But Blue Tribe conservatives are not identical to Red Tribe conservatives, we can see the spat with Musk and Vivek about H-1B visas as an example.
I don't think the Red Tribe could ever be 50% of academia there simply not enough of them who would want to do that. The whole point of different tribes is they do have different values and preferences. Just like farmers or lumberjacks or oil workers are never going to be 50% Blue Tribe.
For the Red Tribe to pull its weight in academia or politics you have to convince salt of the earth people like my uncle to go and sit in meetings and give speeches or go to school for 4 years so he can get a degree, and then teach people or research at a university, when that is the last thing he wants to do. He would rather be out in his fields.
But don't think that means he is ignorant. He knows exactly how to skin and butcher a carcass, he knows what his fields need and can diagnose a multitude of livestock illnesses. He also knows exactly what the price of feed and crops need to be before he breaks even. All without finishing school at all.
I think Red's do undervalue the kind of academic knowledge that can be transformative, but equally I think Blue's do undervalue practical day to day useful knowledge. We need both in order for societies to advance.
SSCReader
6d ago
A Celtic woman is often the equal of any Roman man in hand-to-hand combat. She is as beautiful as she is strong. Her body is comely but fierce. The physiques of our Roman women pale in comparison.
I can't find an attribution either, beyond unidentified Roman soldier. I did come across it in some book about Rome (hence why i knew roughly how it went so I could Google it), but I can't remember which, or whether it was attributed there or not.
We have some attributed quotes which say roughly the same thing, though of course how much is based upon them actually seeing Celtic women vs hearing stories is difficult to determine.
“The women of the Gauls are not only like men in their great stature, but they are a match for them in courage as well.” — Diodorus Siculus
“A whole band of foreigners will be unable to cope with one [Gaul] in a fight, if he calls in his wife, stronger than he by far and with flashing eyes; least of all when she swells her neck and gnashes her teeth, and poising her huge white arms, begins to rain blows mingled with kicks, like shots discharged by the twisted cords of a catapult.” — Ammianus Marcellinus
I think the evidence does suggest Celts were on average a couple of inches taller than Romans so probably Celtic women were taller than Roman women in the same way. Whether or not there was a besotted Roman soldier who wrote about Celtic Muscle Mommies compared to the small boring Roman women with that specific quote is unclear. I would heavily suspect that even if that is an actual quote the average Celtic woman was not actually as strong as any Roman man.
SSCReader
6d ago
Perhaps the most common example was Major Kira fighting, and while I can definitely believe that a trained and experienced guerrilla can disarm a random idiot with a hand weapon in close quarters, by the time they get to "mostly holding her own while surrounded by three Klingon warriors" it's clear that plot armor knows no gender.
Ah that is because she uses the most powerful technique known to any race. The double fist punch. She uses it like 15 times in that 1 minute clip.
SSCReader
6d ago
- But perhaps we can also admit that not every Conan story spent equal time fluffing the physical valor of a woman who was to be Conan's equal.
Absolutely. Belit throws herself at his feet, Valeria is certainly not his equal, this version of Red Sonja does save a European warrior giant who is fighting the Ottomans, but while she can overpower the "average" male warrior with strength she isn't shown to be a strength match to Gottfried directly and can't lift him out of a moat in his full armor on her own, she can only half lift him, though that is probably still reasonably impressive as he is in full armor, soaking wet and fully armed.
Celtic history and myths do have some warrior women as well:
From a Roman soldier:
“A Celtic woman is often the equal of any Roman man in hand-to-hand combat. She is as beautiful as she is strong. Her body is comely but fierce. The physiques of our Roman women pale in comparison.”
You can find others in Celtic myth cycles like:
"Aife also known as Aoife in modern Irish, was Scáthach's rival and by most accounts, her sister, or even twin. She was reportedly fierce in battle, shattering Cú Chulainn’s sword with one of her blows when the two went head to head in an epic fight. The mighty Cú Chulainn had to resort to trickery to defeat her"
But usually they are portrayed as being unusual examples of womanhood in and of themselves.
As for modern media it's certainly more common I'd agree, but as long as they do the work I don't mind it. i.e. Buffy being explicitly powered by magic, Black Widow being augmented by a shadowy Red Room especially in a world where a man with apparently only peak human strength can hold down a helicopter. They are our modern version of the mythologies of the past (or as with Wonder Woman, the actual past mythologies), reinvented.
It's a little more jarring in more grounded pieces I agree but even there they have a tendency to show one man being able to beat 5 men at the same time or what have you, so they are obviously juicing everybody up for the sake of looking bad-ass. I imagine having to show a guy just about win a fight with an equal but be exhausted then sit around healing for a month from his cracked ribs, concussion and shattered knuckles isn't exactly conducive to a fast based entertainment product. So almost every character in an action series or movie is effectively superhuman for unspecified reasons.
I have met a single woman who was as strong as I was but she was a fit 6'2 black ex D1 basketball player. And I am a 5'11 schlubby gamer, and a decade older than she was. So I don't have any illusions about average strength comparisons. A woman needs very very significant size and fitness advantages in order to match male strength. My first wife was 5' even and 90lbs and there was no possible way she could overpower me hand to hand, even if she were trained by ninjas.
Yeah, and it is a useful distinction, even if its not a perfect set of descriptors. Which is why I often try and oush back towards Scott's formulation. Even if that is a losing battle.
And there's nothing wrong with being a Blue Tribe conservative, but in general that conservatism is not exactky like Red Tribe conservatism so we're missing a pretty important part of America's "voice".
More options
Context Copy link