site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   34007 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

8
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Whatever happened to MeToo? In 2017 it seemed unstoppable and like it was going to really change quite a bit of the social dynamics between the genders. It’s since gone very quiet, has there been any more major celebrities or persons getting MeToo’d? The last person i remember getting destroyed is Cuomo.

It feels like there’s been basically zilch since then, although I could be wrong. Is this because men are finally treating women like sexless persons deserving of respect or is it merely that it was a passing fad?

Whatever happened to MeToo? In 2017 it seemed unstoppable and like it was going to really change quite a bit of the social dynamics between the genders. It’s since gone very quiet.

A combination of two factors i think, at least part of it comes down to what @Crowstep said about outrage being exhausting but i think the bigger factor is that it was intended to be a weapon to be weilded against Trump (see the whole "grab 'em by the pussy" thing) but once democrats and media execs realized that the people most vulnerable to metoo were democrats and media execs it was quietly shelved.

like it was going to really change quite a bit of the social dynamics between the genders.

It totally did this. Insane rape/sexual harassment scaremongering is one of the main features driving young women so far left. Pundits would prefer to either rant about the female nature or general wokeness instead of addressing the overactive fearmongering about sexual harassment.

Really? Young women have leaned further left since women’s lib, if not earlier.

Not like they do today, they haven’t. Polls show that young women started becoming dramatically more liberal around ten years ago, and only now are the numbers starting to show a return to normal (but who knows if this is a temporary blip or the start of a long-term trend). Googling “women becoming more liberal” will pull up plenty of articles and graphs discussing this phenomenon, though I’m pretty sure it’s been discussed here as well.

Polls show that young women started becoming dramatically more liberal around ten years ago

2013-14 was the heydey of whatever that wave of feminism was. It's when Scott wrote his most hard-hitting anti-feminist posts, the ones he's been coasting on ever since. Feminism was the first movement of the Great Awokening, followed shortly by Black Lives Matter, and the legalization of same-sex marriage and resulting ascendant LGBT movement.

If I were going to write a book about wokeness, and were a conservative grifter, I'd call it "The Second Term of Obama." This sounds vaguely ominous and gestures subtly at "The Second Coming," appealing to the "Obama is the antichrist" people who presaged the "Trump is Hitler" people. But I really do think something very bad happened in Obama's second term, progressives lost hope after they elected a Black Man to the White House and the color of the building didn't change.

(Well, not permanently.)

I can't escape also the possibility that the civil service under Obama just poked the bear. Things like the Dear Colleague letter did a lot to institutionally support major planks of grassroots feminism. Obergefell came down in 2015. And then when Trayvon Martin died and Obama cried on national TV...

It was just an era where the left got very angry, and the right got even angrier. And what do you know, we got a very angry, very unappealing-to-feminists president after that, and everything skyrocketed from there.

It won…

On thing going against it is that the victims just aren’t that sympathetic to normal Americans. Most of these people are elites with more money than most median Americans will ever have and they’re upset, basically about something that had been known long before these particular women decided to show up. The “casting couch” had been a known feature of Hollywood film and TV since long before most of us were born. It’s not like they were surprised it happens, it’s been a thing since the 1930s or earlier, maybe going all the way back to the early days of stage. It’s something that anyone considering a career in movies, TV, or music would absolutely be aware of going in and likely decided beforehand was a reasonable price to pay to be famous for acting and live in a mansion.

Other movements were a bit more sympathetic simply because they were the normal everyday people who worked normal jobs for normal pay and were expected to put up with bad male behavior. Sleeping with your secretary as a condition of her either getting promoted or keeping her job is worlds different because that person isn’t making a choice to follow a dream of fame and thinking “well if I want to be a secretary, I’ll have to sleep with the boss, but the deal is just too good to pass up.”

It still exists, but I think there are fewer cases that go super viral, because there are less Toxoplasma of Rage ones. The ones that went super viral were the debatable ones- usually ones where the left were going "You should believe all women!" and the right was going "Hold on, the evidence of this is entirely he said, she said", then they'd argue back and forth for weeks about which position was better. It really came down to, what % likely someone committed rape is the minimum to cancel them, although few people thought about it in probabalistic terms. The right might feel you should be at least 90% confident, the left would feel you only need to be like 20% confident(which I sympathize with- if I was an employer, I'd fire anyone who isn't a rockstar employer if I thought had a 20% chance of being that toxic. But as a member of society, I wouldn't want to imprison anyone with a 20% chance of rape).

I think it ended when Joe Biden got MeTooed with one of those accusations that had a ~20% likelihood of being true, and then all the left suddenly went "oh hold on actually we probably do need stronger evidence and cannot just Believe All Women".

We've likely reached the peak of unrest sometime in the last few years. The woke movements are still bubbling, but the first derivative of their energy has turned negative.

Man if Noah Smith says something I'm reflexively going to believe it is the actual inverse of the truth.

It'd be 'easy' to "call the top" after the intense violence that marked the summer of 2020, but I don't for a second buy that the factors that enabled that sort of violence have changed much, or that there's not sufficient energy simmering under the surface for it to happen again.

Typical sort linear thinking, draw the line on the graph, circle the high point, and assert that things couldn't possibly go higher than that!

You could make the same argument about inflation, actually, claiming that because it peaked under Covid conditions it is unlikely to ever get so high again because those conditions have passed.

Typical sort linear thinking, draw the line on the graph, circle the high point, and assert that things couldn't possibly go higher than that!

This is uncharitable, bordering on a strawman of what he said. He didn't claim it with strong certainty, just that there was a good chance that unrest had peaked. Given the retreat of woke (e.g. Harris' campaign platform) this is seeming more and more prescient now. Quoting directly from the article:

Now of course, interest might die down and then surge again even bigger than before, as it did for BLM and QAnon in 2020. But as of right now, all of these movements seem to be less in the public eye.

On the other hand, there have now been two separate attempts on Trump's life. Clearly a sign of lowering temperatures!

Globally, unrest seems to be ticking up regularly!

We just had riots in Ireland and England over their migrant situation. Also in Venezuela over an election. And in the U.S. Pro-palestine protestors are still kicking around. There was an actual shooting involving one recently.. We've had multiple (three that I know of, as another one occurred this past weekend) individuals who have literally burned themselves to death as a political statement.

I'd wager the main reason things are holding a bit steady is the pending election, where both sides think they have a shot a victory. I will happily bet against anyone who thinks unrest won't immediately spike up inside of six months if Trump manages to win the election.

Like, the whole argument seems to hinge on the idea that people are becoming more satisfied with the status quo, less prone to lash out. Which seems blatantly untrue to me?

Anything he’s obviously gotten wrong in the past?

Just curious so I can update my mental model.

And here he goes doing it in just the past couple days:

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1836065799406280838

Claiming that China somehow possesses capacity to detonate electronic devices at will... in the U.S.

Without a single suggestion as to the means they could do it. Like, there's almost zero reason to believe this is true.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1835718296047653161

Here he is giving Kamala credit for increases in U.S. energy production that By the very graphs he posted obviously and clearly began during Trump's term.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1835388262464286853

Here he references data that cuts off in 2022 to dismiss claims about the number of migrants in Springfield in 2024. Then later admits that the number could still be higher and indeed plenty of people post various sources to back up the claim of 20k. Note that you can easily check and see that there was dramatic devolution of the situation in Haiti that might have caused a large uptick in refugees since then!

This is the guy who writes a column claiming to analyze facts and give reasonable conclusions based on those facts.

I don't use the term hack as a trivial thing, but I genuinely believe Noah Smith is a hack.

The one that really, really got me to reject him as a source of useful insight was this INTENSE insistence, during Covid times, that every state, every country absolutely HAD to implement a "Test and Trace" protocol before lockdowns could be lifted.

He actually changed his twitter handle to include "Test and Trace." He wrote articles about it. Its not that he was suggesting the idea itself, per se, that bugged me it was more the complete conviction he decided to take on the position which seemed extremely unwarranted by the actual information on hand at the time.

And of course I think he abruptly stopped mentioning it at all sometime in 2021, and so hasn't grappled at all with whether it actually proved effective vs. other methods (or simply doing nothing) and re-evaluated his once strongly-held beliefs.

Granted, he's just one of many people and institutions who torched credibility in my eyes during that period of time.

Another example, he (a Jewish man) was apparently quite blind to antisemitism on the Left until October 2023, and he OF COURSE insists this wasn't due to his own ideological leanings. He's not the only one, but my lord does his obliviousness seem particularly terminal.

Finding a blind spot THAT massive should inspire some epistemic humility, but he earns his keep by writing pieces about how people should understand and act in the world so that would mean he'd have to find some other line of work, too.

Here he is 2022 calling for a troop buildup in Poland and in other NATO countries. not sure where he thinks those troops are coming from, or what his actual expertise on military matters is. Or whether he's gone back and checked if this was a good idea in light of the past two years of fighting.

The main reason I haven't really lost even an ounce of respect for Scott Alexander, by comparison, is Scott's willingness to actively re-examine his past beliefs (which he often posts in form of odds-based predictions anyway!) to see if he did anything particularly wrong. Noah simply does not do this, and as mentioned probably can't afford to if he wants to keep his job.

Test and trace certainly seemed like it could be good early on, before it became clear that COVID was too easily spread and would never be effective. He dropped the push for test and trace after a few months.

Reinforcing east-flank NATO countries is a good idea given Russia's aggression. Previously, NATO had mostly only kept tripwire forces near Russia to avoid "provoking" them. Rescinding that policy to at least some degree was a good choice.

None of these seem like horrible miscalculations by any stretch unless I'm missing other context.

Reinforcing east-flank NATO countries is a good idea given Russia's aggression.

Again, with what troops? What second-order effects are there from doing so? Why does it assume U.S. troops rather than Europeans stepping into the gap?

Can't just magick up these solutions because you think they sound good. Perfect example with the test and trace. He didn't bother to think about feasibility (or, as he might put it "state capacity") given the actual situation on the ground, and just pushed for an idea because in theory it might be a great solution! But what does that count for?

He seems to be incompetent on geopolitical matters, and I've had a few Gell-Mann moments where he talks about topics I'm actually familiar with and he gets things badly wrong, or misses some important extra variable.

Like, it is unclear why you'd choose him for your analysis over any other random pundit, other than he's pretty good at couching his observations as if they're detached and 'objective' in some ways. But as with the leftist antisemitism issue, he appears to be so heavily detached that he's not really engaged with base reality enough to pontificate!

The guy I've been currently listening to for insights is Peter Zeihan, and he seems to be MUCH, MUCH better at the "levelheaded examination of objective facts on the ground and delving into implications" game.

So the value that Noah contributes to the discourse, even if it isn't negative (I think it is, he clouds issues more than he clarifies!) is probably not enough to justify listening to him over someone like, say, Nate Silver or even Eliezer Yudkowsky with Demonstrated expertise and a track record for honesty and accuracy. And again, Scott Alexander is great on the meta level for figuring out why we make certain errors in thinking.

Again, with what troops?

With troops from NATO member states? There's been a steady drumbeat of articles over the past few years of countries doing exactly this. By the way you're framing this you're seeming to imply there's some huge problem here, but you're not really saying what that is. I also don't recall this being a topic that Noah has returned to much. Did he write an article about it? You posted a single tweet he made as your evidence that he has no idea what he's talking about, on a thing that did end up happening and was (I would argue) a good idea. Is there more to this that I'm missing? This just seems extremely thin to me.

Zeihan triggers the same "bullshit artist" alarm to me that you're getting from Noah, although for me it's probably somewhat lesser here. I've only read a few of his takes and I haven't been particularly impressed, as he has the age-old pundit problem of overconfidence. His book is a good example, where it's stated as a prediction rather than a highly unlikely worst-case scenario. Funnily enough, Noah had the same critique as I did.

I also read Nate Silver and Scott Alexander and think they're great overall. They run into issues sometimes, nobody is perfect after all. But they're better than the pack which is the important part. I'm less enthused about Yud, as he's sounded more and more like a detached luddite lunatic.

Went over Noah's recent twitter posts and he's as bad as I remember. Recounted here:

https://www.themotte.org/post/1160/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/250998?context=8#context

He's just all over the place. He wants to comment on cyberwarfare capabilities in China, but I doubt he has knowledge in that area.

Then on U.S. energy production policy.

Then on Haitian migrants in Ohio.

But makes glaring errors in each comment, and that's just the ones I semi-randomly picked as examples.

This is the stuff you GENERALLY don't get from Zeihan, Silver, or Scott, they wouldn't make STRONG claims well outside their area of expertise and then fail to back up any of it.

Yud, well, his whole thing is that AGI is likely to kill off humanity and he's seeing more and more signs he feared might arise and yet few people seeming to care, it must be a bit of a living nightmare for the guy.

His book is a good example, where it's stated as a prediction rather than a highly unlikely worst-case scenario. Funnily enough, Noah had the same critique as I did.

I also read Zeihan's book and skimming that review I'm not even sure Noah understand the arguments. He makes the following statement:

There’s also the strong possibility that China — the only state capable of overthrowing U.S. power by force — will choose to cooperate with the U.S. to keep the sea lanes open, simply because of the catastrophic consequences to China of not doing so (which Zeihan vividly describes). Ultimately, Zeihan’s predictions of global anarchy rely on countries collectively making decisions that are utterly disastrous for themselves.

But he earlier grants that "The first of these [demographic collapse] is probably unavoidable." So he's accepting the premise that Zeihan uses there!

And Zeihan's whole point is that China is in such rapid, terminal demographic decline that they will collapse entirely on their own, with or without U.S. keeping the sea lanes open, so unless you can explain why a Chinese collapse WON'T happen, then 'U.S.-Chinese Cooperation' is not a viable solution because there won't be any China to cooperate with.

I don't know how a guy can miss or ignore points this badly without it being intentional. the reason countries will collectively make decisions that are disastrous for themselves is that they won't have much choice once the demographics collapse forces their hand!

More comments

MeToo platformed high-status women and gave them a voice to speak out about the corruption in the upper echelons of show business. It completely ignored the everyday people who have been victims of sexual assault, as well as the marginalized. It didn't do anything (or did the bare minimum) to help cis or trans men who were raped, prisoners who are raped, victims of human trafficking, victims who are poor and/or uneducated, or victims of child sexual abuse.

cis [...] men who were raped

In the woke mindset, men are the oppressors, helping them is at best a distraction from the fight of structural oppression. Almost all rapists are men, and any man who rapes other men is a sexual minority. Now, if you are a high status, handsome, gay man of a known-to-be-oppressed ethniciy, and your rapist was some creepy, fat, powerful, bisexual white dude, then that might be enough that fighting for you would be fighting against structural oppression, but anything less does not fit the narrative.

Cynically, if you want people to care about (male) prison rapes, what you should do is claim some 90% of all prison rapes are White Nazis raping some poor Black kid.

Of course, from what I remember most of MeToo was never about violent rape. Instead, it was more about coercion, from 'have sex with me and you will get the role' to 'senior colleague is hitting on a younger colleague, who feels their collaboration might be in danger if she rejects him'.

Feminist concern about rape is, just in general, targeted at women of concern to feminists, because(wait for it) feminism is a class interest movement and not a general woman's interest movement. Witness the level of concern feminists have over rape on campus vs the part of the uniform code of military justice allowing commanders to dismiss rape accusations summarily. This is because functionally all of the women mainstream feminism is concerned about go to college, and not a lot of them enlist in the military. The difference is class, not in the sense of money(although functionally all working class jobs which pay well skew very male) but in terms of social strata. Likewise, very few of the women in this class go to prison, and very few of them grow up in the circumstances where CSA is a legitimate and major concern.

As said already, Neil Gaiman was MeToo'd recently. So individual cases are still happening.

As for the wider 'movement', I think it's just the fact that outrage is exhausting, particularly if your goal (no sexual misconduct or hurt feelings ever again, anywhere, but people still couple up somehow) is impossible. Noahpinion has written about this quite a lot. Basically, the Great Awokening (God bless whoever came up with that designation) is winding down, as it was always destined to do. Humans can't do permanent revolution.

Scott has also written about this. New Atheism got replaced by pop-feminism which got replaced by Kendi-style antiracism as the very online left-wing topic of choice. Not sure what will come next, or if anything will come next.

Basically, the Great Awokening (God bless whoever came up with that designation) is winding down

It's winding down because it won. It has been installed as law. Every society requires a certain set of baseline social and ethical rules to function, and many of these rules require no extra "energy" to enforce. No one needs to be reminded not to go outside naked, for example; it's simply understood. You don't need a permanent revolution to uphold your strictures when your strictures have been integrated into the foundational social fabric itself.

Outside of all but the most deep Red social contexts, its simply taken for granted now that a man who claims to be a woman must be treated as a woman, and that non-whites are to be privileged in hiring, school admissions, and media representation. The revolution was successful. Everyone got the memo. We're not going back.

its simply taken for granted now that a man who claims to be a woman must be treated as a woman... We're not going back.

I dunno if I'd go that far. Male convicts serving their sentences in women's prisons was controversial enough to take down two consecutive Scottish first ministers, and the current sitting Labour prime minister in the UK recently stated that it's just common sense that men have penises and women vaginas. The suspicion that a male-bodied athlete may have been allowed to compete in a female Olympic sporting event was controversial enough to become the dominant culture war topic in the Olympics. All across Europe, access to "gender-affirming care" for minors is being heavily restricted.

This does not look like a society that takes for granted that any man who claims to be a woman must be treated as such, aside from a minority of conservative hangers-on.

I think that this is a bit of an exaggeration. I live in a city that overwhelmingly votes for the Democratic Party, and I know almost no-one who is actually Red tribe, yet I know many people, including a few coworkers, who don't agree that a man who claims to be a woman must be treated as a woman or that non-whites should be privileged. Of course part of that is that I am more likely to become friends with people who are not turbo-woke than with people who are, but my point is that I regularly see this woke dogma challenged outside of a deep Red social context.

That said, I do think that there is one sense in which you are right that wokism has "become law" - confrontation against the woke. I know very few people, even unwoke ones, who would deny a transgender person's self-identification face-to-face offline, or who would strongly push back against a black's person's demand to be privileged face-to-face offline, unless they happened to know that transgender person or that black person pretty closely. With relative strangers, there is a fear of confrontation and perhaps even violence in doing so. I am probably relatively brave compared to most unwoke people I know offlline in this department, but even I know not to pick intellectual fights against either dogmatic religious zealots and/or people who are too stupid to understand my arguments, especially given that I have a sense that authority figures and in general, people who do not know me, are likely to assume that I am the guilty party if they become aware of the confrontation.

So in a sense, we are living in a mild Soviet-style thought regime. It is not quite Havel's greengrocer, but it has shades of it. In most Blue areas, one can freely go around questioning woke dogma in most civilized well-mannered contexts outside of some woke jobs and probably university campuses as well, and generally speaking nothing bad will happen. But at the same time, one cannot go around pushing back against woke dogma face-to-face too hard against woke people whom one does not know closely, even if the woke person is the one who brings up the issue, unless one is willing to risk the other person exploding in anger and causing a scene, a situation that carries some risk of drawing other people in, who are likely to immediately assume that you are the guilty party.

And of course, there is also the matter of anarchotyranny. Democratic policies are hampering the operation of law enforcement and are aiding violent criminals. We are used to it that there are some parts of cities where one just knows not to go, some people one just knows not to interact with, and so on. And this has in a sense "become law" in that while technically being a violent scumbag is illegal, civil authority is letting such things continue even though the state could easily crack down on all the scumbags and thugs and destroy them in a matter of months if it really had the will.

Now of course, violent crime is down compared to the early 90s, and there have always been places one knows not to go, and people one knows not to interact with - I mean, probably half of Westerns are based on that kind of concept. But with modern technology and social organization, we are now at the point where violent crime could be down much more if the left stopped thinking of violent criminals as pets or children who need to be hugged and gently treated. We have the state capacity, this is not the Wild West or 1920s Chicago, but some people are preventing us from using it.

I regularly see this woke dogma challenged outside of a deep Red social context.

I do too, but I mostly see those challenges being whispered in quiet rooms, or muttered between a small group of men at the bar. I don't see anyone openly challenging the woke workplace rules, James Damore-style. I tried to complain, once, when they converted the mens room at my (small, male-dominated) office into a gender neutral room, because that meant that only one person could use it at a time and it caused long lines. I was given cold glances and a stern warning.

It really doesn't seem like this is true, outside of specific contexts. Roe is dead. AA is gone. DEI is declining. Trump is openly calling for a blood-soaked deportation campaign and nobody really cares (although maybe people realize he's just full of shit at this point). Even leftists like Matt Yglesias are calling for more immigration restrictions. Harris is sprinting away from woke as fast as she can. Ctrl+f for "trans" on her campaign platform brings up only 2 results, both of which deal with "transnational criminal organizations".

AA is gone.

The Harvard admission statistics for 2024-5 strongly suggest otherwise.

DEI is declining.

  • The Democratic nominee for president brags about tripling federal government loans specifically to non-whites.
  • Her Vice Presidential nominee, as Governor of Minnesota, signed into law mandatory racial quotas for bodies disbursing state health and community welfare grants. (e.g. MN Statutes secs. 145.9285, Subd. 3; 145.987, Subd. 1). Of course, this already builds on existing "Ethnic Councils" established in 2017, explicitly charged to "work for the implementation of economic, social, legal, and political equality for its constituency" by lobbying the governor and legislature for set-asides, exercising oversight over proposed legislative and administrative changes, promoting racially-affiliated interest groups, and disbursing contracts. (MN Statutes sec. 15.0145)
  • Approximately one in five academic jobs requires an ideological litmus test of allegiance to DEI.
  • The Department of Education (pdf warning) spends a significant amount of effort on collecting detailed statistics on the racial and gendered breakdown of suspensions, expulsions, and law-enforcement referrals in schools, heavily-hinting that this is racial discrimination...but then tucks the tables with student offenses at the very end, and doesn't provide any details on who's actually doing the offending. In that report, by the way, the Department cites a 2014 "Dear Colleague" letter that threatened loss of federal funding if schools didn't punish black and brown kids less, regardless of their actual behavior, which is apparently still active.
  • The Department of Agriculture just doled out over a billion dollars in reparations-style payments to black farmers specifically.

Yeah, I'm going to say DEI is doing problematically fine.

Trump is openly calling for a blood-soaked deportation campaign

As opposed to the blood-soaked results of the fetishization of open immigration?

Even leftists like Matt Yglesias are calling for more immigration restrictions.

Ah yes, Matt "I think fighting dishonesty with dishonesty is sometimes the right thing to do" Yglesias. Clearly he is being fully open and honest about his views, which have changed based on evidence which has convinced him to foreswear his most recent book, "One Billion Americans." (I am being sarcastic; I do not believe for a second that Matt is being honest).

Harris is sprinting away from woke as fast as she can. Ctrl+f for "trans" on her campaign platform brings up only 2 results, both of which deal with "transnational criminal organizations".

Ahhh, but remember - "her values have not changed."

Yeah, I'm going to say DEI is doing problematically fine.

Plus there's the big one that you didn't even mention- that Harris was pretty obviously picked for DEI reasons. EG: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/875000650/pressure-grows-on-joe-biden-to-pick-a-black-woman-as-his-running-mate

No one has been willing to publicly push back on that at all, except for Trump (kinda) when he questioned her blackness. It's insane.

As opposed to the blood-soaked results of the fetishization of open immigration?

Why just one case?

You should use a statistic when making an argument like this.

(Hopefully one that doesn’t fall into the base rate fallacy..)

Why just one case?

At least I provided a case, unlike the original, completely unsupported assertion.

You should use a statistic when making an argument like this.

Respectfully, no. Societal cohesion and solidarity is a fragile, fickle thing that we barely understand and do not know how to sustain across lengthy periods. Slapping a number on something doesn't necessarily mean that you're using the right statistic, or that the thing you're trying to measure is even actually legible with the methods and information at hand.

Statistics around illegal immigrants are notoriously unreliable, because many jurisdictions do not cooperate with federal immigration efforts, and illegal immigrants (for completely understandable reasons) are disproportionately likely to use falsified identity documents and avoid getting involved with state agencies, including law enforcement. We don't even actually know how many there are in the country - the media has been using the same number for appx. thirty years, across high and low migration periods alike.

Reasoning from examples has flaws, but at least we can draw direct lines from immigration to particular incidents, like that one.

Pretty bad response. In any group of millions you can find examples of anything you want.

As we all know, cardiologists are horrible, horrible people.

Sounds like an isolated demand for rigour to me

“Oh, you don’t want your nation flooded with Haitian refugees? Got a source on why that’s bad? A peer reviewed, published government source?”

More comments

From her campaign website:

Protect Civil Rights and Freedoms

Vice President Harris and Governor Walz believe many fundamental freedoms are at stake in this election. They will fight to ensure that Americans have the opportunity to participate in our democracy by passing the John Lewis Voting Rights and the Freedom to Vote Acts — laws that will enshrine voting rights protections, expand vote-by-mail and early voting, and more. Her Administration will also continue to protect Americans from discrimination, building on her work to secure $2 billion in funding for Offices of Civil Rights across the federal government. And as President, she’ll always defend the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride. In 2004, she officiated some of the nation’s first same-sex marriages and as Attorney General, she refused to defend California’s anti-marriage equality statewide referendum. As President, she’ll fight to pass the Equality Act to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQI+ Americans in health care, housing, education, and more into law.

The Equality Act explicitly adds protection against discrimination based on gender identity to existing federal anti-discrimination laws (titles II, III, IV, VI, VII, IX). That hardly seems like "sprinting away as fast as she can".

This mostly just seems to be about gay marriage, which even most Republicans are on board with by this stage.

Companies are closing their DEI departments, affirmative action has been overturned, and there's no longer a full offensive from the entire media and every sports league, etc., when a red state passes a bathroom bill, the way there was when such things first came up.

Companies are closing their DEI departments but the function is entirely integrated into HR. Affirmative action in college admissions has been "overturned" but the colleges are still doing it. The media/protest complex is cooling it to try to get Harris elected, that's all.

The people pushing MeToo didn't really understand the situation.

The first sexual harassment was in 1974. By the 90s lawsuits we common enough that Michael Crichton's Disclosure (1994) featured a fake sexual harassment complaint as part of a conspiracy.

Business men protected themselves through a mix of better behaviour, legal strategies, and other techniques to avoid trouble.

However since the lawyers involved were strongly left wing, liberal strongholds like Hollywood and the Media were given a pass and ignored. This was compounded by the fact that those industries attract a lot of pretty girls, have powerful men at the top, and look down on traditional sexual rules.

This wasn't well understood on the left, and they all insisted on believing that Republican businessmen are the worst people ever and much worse about things that MeToo covers.

So activists pushed MeToo hard. Then they noticed that all the big fish going down were on their side. So they sort of stopped talking about the whole thing.

The administration of the Democratic mayor of Indianapolis is currently suffering from a MeToo witch hunt: https://www.indystar.com/story/news/investigations/2024/09/10/everything-to-know-about-hogsett-administration-sexual-harassment-crisis/75148395007/

The city's human resources department is also conducting six other investigations into current and former staff, officials confirmed to IndyStar.

The mayor himself has not been implicated, but Republicans are calling on Democrats to call for his resignation. "Your rules applied fairly."

I think there is something to the idea that Democrats assumed Republicans would be the hotbed of sexual exploitation and that they would come out of MeToo relatively unscathed. I wonder if they will ever have a "Physician, heal thyself moment."

I wonder if they will ever have a "Physician, heal thyself moment."

Biden was metooed in 2020. It made no difference.

Kamala even said she believed the accuser, but that didn’t stop her from becoming his VP

Isn't it strange that #MeToo took down Al Franken, but not Biden? Is it really just as simple as "Biden had the potential to be an effective opponent to Trump, Franken didn't, ergo Biden's accuser was smeared and discredited while Franken's career was destroyed"?

It's not even special-case usefulness.

Shot, Chaser.

The first era of sexual harassment lawsuits was often about (a) complaints from married women, who started returning to white collar workplaces after marriage (as secretaries, clerks and then increasingly in actual professional roles) from the mid-70s in ways they hadn’t before, and (b) was often about financial compensation and protection (for the women) from being fired for reporting these things to management. It practically never resulted in criminal charges being brought (or any police involvement at all) against accused men, since mostly it was considered bad workplace behavior (like being racist to an employee or firing a woman for getting pregnant were at the time) rather than a crime, often even in the most egregious cases of violent sexual assault.

This explains why MeToo didn’t happen in Hollywood in the 80s and 90s. Firstly because the legal employer relationship between a producer and an actress is completely different to that between a boss and an an employee on Wall Street (where many leading early claims were brought), and secondly because this first era of sexual harassment complaints almost never dealt with the implicit quid pro quo of the casting couch variety. Legally, there was widely considered to be a difference between “Mr Smith groped, stuck his tongue down the throat of, and slapped Mrs Wilkinson (devoted mother of two, longstanding accounts receivable clerk at Walker and Company) at a company party and three people saw and watched her walk away and cry after trying to push him away” and “Miss 21-year-old Hollywood starlet got drunk with producer and went up to his hotel room, and two months later got casted in a major role (WITH a smutty sex scene btw) and only four years later did she say he groped her and then told her to suck his dick for the part”.

If a lot of the MeToo actresses had gone to police they’d have said there was no case and no evidence, and if they had gone (and many did) to lawyers who deal in civil sexual harassment suits, they’d have said that the case had little chance of victory. In addition, most actresses want to be famous and the award in a civil suit would likely be quite small, coupled with a complete blacklisting in Hollywood. By contrast if you were a young female trader on Wall Street in 1987 and you won a sexual harassment lawsuit against your boss at Morgan Stanley, you were likely making enough money to retire. So again, the dynamics were very different.

What legal strategies protect a boss from sexually assaulting employees?

I was trying to find the right words to capture a bunch of different things. I was thinking of having the lawyers explain to the bosses that making passes at subordinates endangers the company and they will be fired, while also making sure that they are aware that there are a lot of ways to use money and status to get sex outside of the office.

The Graham/Pence rules, glass doors to conference rooms, that sort of thing.

Until very recently, someone who felt that they had been sexually assaulted by a prominent person could not just go online and instantly broadcast it to millions of people. And it is very hard to definitively prove that such a sexual assault has happened, given that bosses who commit sexual assaults are usually smart enough to do it when no-one else is around. Before modern social media that has made it relatively easy for anyone to do one-to-many broadcasting, and before the modern political culture in which it is pretty easy to find people who sympathize with your claim of sexual assault, I think it was probably a very different story. It was less likely that a boss who got accused of sexual assault, but without there being any concrete proof of it, would get forced out of his position by the force of public opinion and bad PR. In some ways, maybe Monica Lewinsky / Bill Clinton was the first major sign of the shifting attitudes about such things, and ironically the Republicans were the ones supporting a sort of MeToo in that case. Or maybe that's just the first one that I remember, I am not sure.

I think you are running together MeToo the movement and MeToo as a type of event (as in: "he's been me-tooed"). The fact that MeToo events are no longer occuring with regular frequency doesn't mean the movement has sizzled out! On the contrary, the fact that new creases are no longer forming only means that you've finally broken into a pair of shoes!

Why would it change the social dynamics? The suggestion that men would start living in fear was always a bogeyman.

Anyway, the Trump/Carroll lawsuit probably counts.

"The suggestion that men would start living in fear was always a bogeyman."

Can it be a mere boogeyman if it's an explicit progressive goal? Here's Ezra Klein's infamous statement on the matter:

"No Means No” has created a world where women are afraid. To work, “Yes Means Yes” needs to create a world where men are afraid.

For that reason, the law is only worth the paper it’s written on if some of the critics’ fears come true.

Klein doesn't make policy, of course, but the people that read him do. His writing is deep inside the progressive Overton window (and when he steps outside it, it's usually because he's making more right-coded points), so I'm inclined to think something close to his vision animates the people writing sexual harassment legislation and policies.

You can make the argument that they have been ineffective or argue that these efforts are unnecessary to make men fearful, like Ozy Brennan did, but that's a big project. To be fair, making the positive claim would be a big project too, to establish that efforts to create a world where men are afraid were effective. But those efforts were not phantasmal.

Meanwhile, half of young men between the ages of 18-25 say they have never approached women for dates in person.

It did change the social dynamics. It's just that nobody with power cares about what it did change.

I’d be willing to bet

in person

is doing most of the heavy lifting there. But there’s plenty of possible confounders. The existence of dating apps, sure, but also the general rise of social media, the ubiquity of smartphones, and the overall economic situation.

If this is the data you have in mind, I think it’s supposed to come from here. That author specifically denies that MeToo is at fault, though I find his justification shaky; his theory of generational risk aversion is compatible with an increased threat.

But I digress. None of his data shows change over time. Without that, I don’t think you can suggest cause and effect.

That's the one I had in mind. But fair enough, it doesn't prove the causal link.

They didn’t stop approaching because they were scared of being arrested for harassment, they stopped approaching because of a combination of apps allowing for a lower-fear experience (walking up to a girl with her friend is scary, on the apps you only match with people who have already expressed some interest in you) and the entire rest of society’s distraction mechanisms, like tiktok and video games, making people less interested in real life.

They didn’t stop approaching because they were scared of being arrested for harassment

The beauty of the whole system is that you now suffer the consequences even without even ever being arrested. A woman can make a social media post about you and you get all of the social stigma of being guilty without any of the due process. Most people who suffer from this are simply thankful that only their social life, career, or both were destroyed and that they aren't in jail.

That's not quite my experience but I may know too many people whose lives have been destroyed by lies, surely we can test this?

How many otherwise attractive, charming, confident and single young straight men with good social skills (ie not social anxiety) do you know who chose remain celibate for fear they’ll commit a MeToo?

That some megachads still approach women does not mean this phenomenon -- men being afraid to approach women for fear of serious consequences -- does not exist. If the point of the whole movement was just to stiffen up the filters so that women only receive approaches from megachads... well, mission fucking accomplished.

At least three, more if you loosen the criteria. One of em is a boxer whose brother did years in prison after being accused of raping a girl he never met.

But it's only my own sample of course.

How was he convicted of raping a girl he never met? In almost every false rape conviction the sex was consensual, without a rape kit/DNA match at all it’s almost impossible to get a conviction without witnesses or very compelling circumstantial evidence. How were charges brought if there was zero evidence he ever encountered her?

I should say jail, not prison. He wasn't convicted (that I know of). There was no possibility of bail and justice is excruciatingly slow.

In France detention without conviction can last up to three years depending on the severity of the crime you're accused of.

Not familiar with the details of the case I will say, there may have been some circumstantial evidence, I know he did get his way in the end.

They didn’t stop approaching because they were scared of being arrested for harassment

Who said anything about being arrested?

Your explanation for why apps are lower-fear is exactly why they'd be a shield against metoo.

Fear of reporting vs. fear of rejection.

But sure, both are probably less threatening on dating apps. That’s just not enough to show causation, or even a trend.

Yeah, but "fear of being reported" does not boil down to being reported to the police. When MeToo was at it's peak, we've had progressives unrinonically argue that no one should ever hit on a woman at work, to the utter shock and horror of our local Europeans, for whom it's it would imply lowering the birthrate from "dangerously low" to "extinction level".

Sure. The study IGI was looking at said HR complaints were ~half of reports. Police rarely came into it.

I’m saying I expect MeToo takes a distant back seat compared to the traditional dating woes of insecurity and embarrassment.

This is the equilibrium state for those participating in the game of white feminist culture; either you are a safe sexless gay, or a toxically masculine Tate supporter. See declining rates of sexual activity in the later generations for fear of cancellation and #MeToo. Nobody, other than degenerate sexual deviants who think with their dick, would stake their career or social reputation just to get lucky, especially given the erosion of values such as loyalty and monogamy amongst white women and white culture at large - especially when safer alternatives such as porn and parasocial relationships exist.

Don't hate the player, hate the game, and the incentive structure it encourages people to follow and obey.

degenerate sexual deviants who think with their dick

You rang?

The me too moverment didn't understand statstics.

Most men don't hit on many women, some men sometimes hit on woman. Some men hit on thousands of women each year. Those guys have a personality disorder. Women's experiences with men are skewed by a small group of men who are highly overrepresented. I have met feminists who think that there are lots of hidden rapists becasue "everyone knows a victim but nobody knows a rapist". What they are forgetting is that there are far more rape victims than rapists. The left likes broad measures that don't really work but are implemented against an entire population instead of identifying the culprits and dealing with them. Pretty much all bad behaviour is the fault of a small number of people. If the 1% of the population that does the most drunk driving was stopped, drunk driving rates would fall substantially.

The me too movement made it hard for ordinary non and well meaning guys to talk to a girl at the gym, at the office or in the grocery store. It will not stop the guys with the personality disorders. This worsens the relations between the genders as women's experiences of men become increasingly skewed to psychopaths and bipolar men.

On another note there seems to be a feminist fantasy of men being really passive and girly but being so attractive that women can't resist them despite their behaviour.

On another note there seems to be a feminist fantasy of men being really passive and girly but being so attractive that women can't resist them despite their behaviour.

No there's not, there's a pervasive female fantasy that men can read their minds to be able to pursue them without ever being disrespectful or pressing on boundaries. The feminist version uses the words 'sexual harassment' a lot, but it's not really an appreciation for men being passive- see 'nice guys'.

Pretty much all bad behaviour is the fault of a small number of people

The most hilarious episode of the metoo kerfuffle was a PMC woman doing a hidden cam walking through shitty areas of NYC and getting cat called mostly by low status black men. And the ensuing backpedaling and gnashing of teeth. She was so, so ready, so thirsty to slander an entire sex, when the culprits turned out to be one of her favorite protected class the twitter drama was delicious.

On another note there seems to be a feminist fantasy of men being really passive and girly but being so attractive that women can't resist them despite their behaviour.

I think this is a misunderstanding. The fantasy is not of men actually being passive and girly. It is of men demonstrating their masculinity by being performatively passive and girly in order to amuse the women, when they desire to be so amused. It is no more than a spin on the traditional "He makes me laugh.".

The final paragraph is what feminists claim but revealed preference suggests women actually like men.

Nobody, other than degenerate sexual deviants who think with their dick, would stake their career or social reputation just to get lucky

As a proud "degenerate sexual deviant", I feel seen.

But on a more serious note, you never know what sublime things your dick might lead you to. Many a loving, intimate relationship started with a couple of people who were originally thinking with their sexual beings but then found something deeper in common.

But on a more serious note, you never know what sublime things your dick might lead you to. Many a loving, intimate relationship started with a couple of people who were originally thinking with their sexual beings but then found something deeper in common.

If I may indulge in a little evopsych, that may be some of what thinking with your dick is FOR.

No disagreement there my good man. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes the dick is actually wiser than the rest of you.

Neil Gaiman comes to mind.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats