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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27720 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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Men and women are both interested in politics if you ask about the actual issues in my opinion. But I’d concede that women are much more susceptible to “it’s called being a GOOD PERSON, GET IT?” reasoning. Women don’t want to be left out of the tribe, women are more willing to show fealty to high status ideas (a man will become a sycophant, will bow to his betters, but internally he is more likely to chafe at this; he won’t do it unless he is certain it’s absolutely necessary).

That’s not surprising since it tracks with extensive research about men much more frequently engaging in almost all riskier behavior. Heterodox politics are part of that.

If the prophesied end of men ever comes, the leaders will have to maintain a small population of autists and disagreeable assholes as a final sanity check against good ideas. Like the oracles of yore.

Leaders have no real interest in doing that, though.

The male failure role is probably the risk of taking a boutique contrarian opinion simply to "stick one's head out of the herd" or whatever.

Or they're sticking their head out because they're failures (or on the verge).

Is Elon Musk a failure?

Men stick their necks out because it's in their nature to do so.

If we're going to go full armchair evolutionary biologist, risk-taking makes sense when most men don't reproduce and a few lucky ones have dozens of children. That was our ancestral environment. The risk-taking genes have been tempered from thousands of years of civilization. But they're still there.

I don't think that Musk is particularly a contrarian figure. He has drifted to a certain viewpoint and crowd - 'alt-lite', for the lack of a better word - and rarely seems to take an opinion that doesn't fit to that mold. (Indeed, he's already a meme for not taking a firm opinion on stuff where he seems to be doing so at all - "Interesting", "Looking into this" and so on.)

An actual contrarian in the sense that I'd mean would be someone like Michael Tracey, who has a tendency to drift into a certain crowd and instantly start taking viewpoints contrary to the ideas of that crowd, just to challenge them. Ie. when Tracey seems too close to the right he starts shitting on them, when Tracey got too appreciated by pro-Russians he started saying Russia is not right about everything, so on.

I think you're right that it's natural but I don't think Elon Musk is Elon Musk because he took "boutique contrarian opinions" to stand out. He is an asshole but, AFAICT, his crazy stances are driven by passion, an apparently justified belief in a hole in the market and a concern for outsized (even by his standards) rewards.

After he got one success like Paypal he no longer needed to make himself notable.

The sort of guy who takes a stance purely to distinguish themselves (to the point where they risk a real failure) seems like a more desperate thing, same with other such bold and risky moves (like the Hock)

I think this is why bare contrarianism is considered off-putting.

Women don’t want to be left out of the tribe, women are more willing to show fealty to high status ideas

This is one of the more important points that indicates to me that the causality identified above re redirected maternal instincts is slightly inaccurate. Save for muslims, the vocal women (invariably childless and usually 'queer' feminist allies) who advocate loudly and repeatedly for Palestine are also virulent progressives who support LGBT+ and anti-men behaviors. These women are always progressive in outlook, and the progressive orthodoxy is oppositional to extant western (white male) power dynamics. Support for Palestine maps cleanly into opposition against western govts/institutions that clearly do not support the palestinian cause, mainly because the Palestinians themselves keep saying they want Hamas. Not that this point ever registers for western progressive women: ask them what the Palestinians want and its always some basic 'they just want peace' with insipid talking points interspersed. At no point will they ever listen to what the Palestinians themselves say they want, and they will engage in DAVRO to spin it around to the fault of the jews. Justification of Arab violence, if it is even acknowledged to occur, is always rationalized by reversing the causality: the cause must be made even more pure hearted to justify all resistance against those that deny it. All of this of course stands in full denial of the well documented atrocities that Palestinians proudly published themselves and the ownself stated desires of the Palestinians. I showed footage of Palestinians spitting on Shani Louks body to progressive female friends and they immediately said it was fake because Palestinians would never do something that bad, and they keep saying that Israel lied about 40 beheaded babies so clearly Palestinians have never committed any crimes.

I am generally agree with the many posters above (below?) that misplaced maternal instinct is the reason for most of the extant female support for Palestine, but specific to the nutters blasting off on social media the support is 'enemy of my enemy' rather than 'kindred spirit'.

I am generally agree with the many posters above (below?) that misplaced maternal instinct is the reason for most of the extant female support for Palestine,

I think the coverage of the war by the liberal media/NGO complex plays at least as much of a role as maternal extinct. If the NYT, CNN etc started actually showing clips of Hamas stealing aid and shooting at their own emaciated civilians you'd probably see fewer women attributing the images of starving Gazan children to supposed Israeli malevolence.

The media is itself the culprit in this case. Barely a frame of the videos uploaded by Hamas themselves where they executed teenage girls and slaughtered children and whole families in between whoops of joy, but unlimited rehashes of crowded hospitals filmed by Hamas themselves. I still find it disgusting that the media does not give any coverage to the Darfur massacres, Perhaps it is because Hamas is a 'legitimate authority' so attribution can be satisfied, even though Hamas lies more than North Korea does.

I still find it disgusting that the media does not give any coverage to the Darfur massacres, Perhaps it is because Hamas is a 'legitimate authority' so attribution can be satisfied, even though Hamas lies more than North Korea does.

Arabs and blacks seem to occupy equal positions on the progressive stack, so most journalists aren't particularly animated by the former massacring the latter.

Support for Palestine maps cleanly into opposition against western govts/institutions that clearly do not support the palestinian cause, mainly because the Palestinians themselves keep saying they want Hamas.

We don't see the same people being against the Western-institution-led Ukraine war, for example. If anything, Ukraine skepticism is male coded.

Also, as a minor point, Hamas was allegedly unpopular even in Gaza before October 7. Presumably they remain so today, except in an enemy-of-my-enemy way. On the other hand, support for killing Jews is widespread, though how much sounds hard to measure. For a while it was a common sophistry on NPR, that because Gazans don't much like Hamas they condemn O7. But there are a lot of folks who oppose Hamas, and think attacking Israel was the best thing they ever did. I don't know when or why this story became less popular.

The fact that being anti-Ukraine is male/right coded is itself the reason for the lack of female objection to Ukraine. While it is still icky white people dying, Trump hates Ukraine while Biden loves it, so theres no clear father figure to rebel against. Meanwhile, Trump would glass Gaza and so would Biden (at least in the progressive imagination). Every potential manifestation of western patriarchy is opposed to Palestine, so it animates these women.

In their mind, the progressives believe (still) that Islam is just evil out of opposition to the same forces the progressives fight against. Once the evil white oppressor is destroyed a righteous and clean Islam will emerge, letting all these oppressed minorities cuddle under the guising bosom of the morally righteous progressive.

Being really really pro-Ukraine (ie. above the usually required level in Western societies) is pretty male-coded too, though, in my experience. Most NAFOids don't seem to be female.

True, men are largely more aware of what a real threat Russia poses. Women really seem to not give a shit about icky white people dying, and I maintain that progressives broadly hate Ukraine because it focuses support onto white people instead of blacks or gays: Jayapal pushing for Biden to force Ukraine to the negotiating table in Oct 2022 strikes me as what the social justice wing thinks of white people (even slavs): a distraction from the true cause. The only thing making progressives give a slight shit in favor of Ukraine is the fact that trump hates Ukraine, but the progressives hold their nose when decrying Russia because the beneficiary is white.

It seems like ‘progressives’ are not a unified group on this question.

Eh, fair. Progs tend to hate Russia rightly for it being a socially regressive dictatorship, but tankies love Russia because it still opposes the evil west. I till now cannot understand the intersection of tankies, trannies and racial inferiorization (this is specific to whites who are the only group were a subset - white liberals- display out-group preference), and I honestly find tankie and tranny discords more baffling than nazi ones... which is quite the achievement.

(sidenote: why are there so many femboys and furries, non overlapping, on right wing spheres? its nuts)

Say whatever one will about the very online right, the Longhouse is a useful lens on politics.

I've come across the term "Longhouse" a lot. Could someone please explain it to me in a straightforward way.

Comes from this peice https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/02/what-is-the-longhouse

Coincidentally, the author was just doxxed by The Guardian which has been a bit of a news thing for the past few days.

That piece is explicitly talking about it as a pre-existing term that was already in use.

Men and women are both interested in politics if you ask about the actual issues in my opinion. But I’d concede that women are much more susceptible to “it’s called being a GOOD PERSON, GET IT?” reasoning. Women don’t want to be left out of the tribe, women are more willing to show fealty to high status ideas (a man will become a sycophant, will bow to his betters, but internally he is more likely to chafe at this; he won’t do it unless he is certain it’s absolutely necessary).

I have noticed that older women are sometimes extremely skilled at exploiting this tendency to try and fulfil expectations in younger women. I recently talked with someone doing her second PhD (an obvious masochist) and she said that, while her first supervisor (an older woman) had been able to run rings around her emotionally, she now found that female academics were less able to "emotionally manipulate" (her words) her.

The most terrifying chief I ever met was a woman who was mommy, sister, and mentor all at the same time to her direct subordinates and the ladies in other departments. The other would take all their cues from her, and if she ever flexed she could tilt the power dynamic in any direction she wanted. She was fucking shitty at her actual job but she could get anyone to do anything for her and honestly it was kind of inspiring, in that 'I see what you are doing and I cannot replicate it' way. The Mother Hen at full evolution reaches something cult-like in its power and it is kind of impressive to see.

One on occasion encounters women who have at various stages been jezebel (less successfully ‘maiden’), mother and matriarch and it is indeed very impressive, a unique social role because it requires a series of experiences that are (cumulatively) very rare among women.

Would you say that is because the physical presentation of the three archetypes are distinctly different? Physical presenteeism maps pretty cleanly into each archetype, moreso than behavior, and to pull off all three in the same body requires a sort of amorphous age presenteeism. The chief I mentioned and a few other women I know who pull that off all have a sort of 'maybe 20 maybe 40' look to them, mainly due to excellent skincare regimes (which was difficult enough). Matriarch seems to ironically be the easiest to pull off regardless of age, bossy women can be big sister or grandmother to her juniors. I've seen a tiny thai woman boss around girls older than them simply by force of will.

Yes, I think so. To be all three requires a lot of genetic luck, being born beautiful likely into a wealthy family, being intelligent, having the right education, and being both confident and self-aware / humble enough to know when to pivot to the next role or to change your personality. You need to be a very lucky and socially adroit sociopath.

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