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This is a small question, not a huge discussion topic.
Is there a term for groups or factions hiding behind their name as a shield, as opposed to what their group actually does? As an example, feminists will say that all women should be in favor of feminism, because feminism just means "supporting women's choices" or something benign. But in actuality, feminism really means supporting specific women in specific ways - many women don't like abortion advocacy, sexual liberation, and all of the things that actually goes along with feminism. I used to joke that I am a "goodist", which is in support of things that are good. And when people donate to goodism, we'd use it to fund very specific libertarian or anti feminist causes, or something.
I remember thinking about this concept back in my anti-sjw heyday of 2014 a lot, but I can't remember if there is a term for it. This is related to, but not entirely described by "motte and bailey", such that I think it should have it's own name, if it doesn't.
This is coming up for me now, because I'm seeing people post things like a meme that says "do you realize how insane it is to publicly announce that you don't want diversity, equity, and inclusion?" in response to Trump
Relevant.
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Related is emotive conjugation or commonly "Russel Conjugation" (popularised by a piece in Edge by Eric Weinstein).
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That term is "politics". (Of course, it's better to not have a name at all; that's why it took so long to label the current supremacist movements as "woke".)
Remember: it's not a supremacy movement if you can convince everyone it's the natural order of things- where given X, not-Xes are naturally subhuman and thus subjugation is a blessing for both them and everyone else.
A large contingency of Americans in the 19th century really did believe that slavery was a global maximum, just like how 21st century Americans really do think men are lesser than women and everyone's better off if we treat them accordingly.
Those same 21st century Americans will then look back at the 19th century ones and go "haha how stupid; naturally they were all hateful and just wanted to say the Swear Words [and think that's the height of racism]- we're different, because
we tell ourselvesit's done out of love, not hate".Feminists follow this pattern. They're gynosupremacists. Few are capable of realizing (it's an instinct), fewer still are capable of doing anything about it, fewer still are able to survive the subsequent debanking. If the US doesn't win WW2, Jim Crow remains the law of the land- it is the economic boom that enables people to survive being kicked out of "reputable establishments" because the demand for their work is so high that society literally cannot stop them. The supremacists of the time stopped being powerful enough to suppress anti-supremacist activity; white supremacy fell apart, heterosupremacy fell apart (usually, but inaccurately, referred to as the sexual revolution). Now everyone's poorer- the music has stopped, so to speak- and whichever group was on top at the time naturally became the new supremacy movement. Which is why, today, wealth transfers from young to old and men to women.
Do you realize how insane it is to publicly announce that whites and blacks should share the same water fountains in a milieu where them sharing the fountains would Explode Polite Society? Yeah, neither do the LARPers.
This has always been my read on history, most of the libertine and progressive ideals that we hold are essentially the fruits of the labor of the more anti-progressive people built. But the problem is that a bad idea or a set of them can destroy the prosperity that allowed them to flourish in the first place. I would consider the fall of heteronormativity and the traditional family structure to be degenerative— those norms produced children who could flourish in society, were generally well adjusted, and were ready to build whatever came next. Modern kids raised by daycares and public schools are a mess. And since we’re now two generations from the era when mom raised the kids as a norm, we now see the fallout as kids raised in daycares and public school turn more and more feral. Eventually the good times stop and the libertine excesses are revoked by a society that has no patience for those things.
The "decline in heteronormativity" is a consequence, not a cause.
The traditional family structure stopped being economically competitive once we stopped [for a variety of reasons] being able to grant average men an economic niche as easily as we could average women (perhaps most visible in South Korea, where women believe that the slice of the pie the government grants to men though their draft rightfully belongs to them, and not unreasonably by men's own standards). And thanks to women being the lower-variance gender the chance they'll be average is higher.
Given how human attraction naturally works, that's completely backwards, and is thus a contributor to the destruction of families that could have been preserved had we paid attention to sociobiology. Now you need the daycares and the public schools, which grants the women in them outsized amounts of political power in an industry inherently incapable of being held to account (something also true of the HR department). The incentives to raise a son correctly are only aligned when a mother raises him herself, for if they fail they are held to account by virtue of being financially interdependent.
The result of that is that
whiteswomen start to think they earned that societal station naturally just because they arewhitewomen (much like how men do when there's no economic niche for the average woman). Which then goes to their head, which is then trivially abusable by those who can manipulate that sentiment the most effectively, ironically against their interests (which is how it's still logically consistent that a raging gynosupremacist could insist on men in women's places so long as they're wearing womanface; does Uncle Ruckus believe Michael Jackson is in white heaven?).Power still corrupts when it rests with the demos; the problem with democracies is, that unlike oligarchies and kingships, you have to persuade many more people that they're in the wrong. (Stating the demos can even be corrupt in the first place is the key feature of constitutionalism, but I digress.)
As the progressives are wont to say, you can have
a stable gynosupremacyclimate sustainability now orface the biological reality of androsupremacy[1] and/or be completely destroyeddegrowth imposed by reality later. Guess I was a progressive all along.[1] Men won't go to war for a society they don't believe will ever offer them an opportunity to purchase at least an average woman, or if they already trivially have that opportunity (economic booms create the Vietnam effect); therefore the interests of men must, in a society under normal socioeconomic conditions that will survive a war, supersede the interests of women.
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No they're not. Feminists are a class interest movement for a certain kind of person- typified by hyperurbanization, very high education levels, extremely late marriage, high status career, etc. This person is mostly female.
Feminists mostly don't care very much about advocating on behalf of, say, women enlisted, or stay at home moms. Portraying mainstream today feminism as being pro-the broader set of women is a mistake, to the point that it's more concerned with the interests of its class peer males than it is with those of women who don't fit the mold it envisions.
Indeed. They're the same picture, and that's what makes it supremacy: it's not enough that their group succeeds, everyone else must fail.
Why would you expect a white supremacist to advocate on behalf of a race traitor? Being enlisted or a stay at home mom implies you've rejected supremacy- it's as disgusting as miscegenation is to a white supremacist, for the same reasons it's disgusting to them. Which is why the only outreach gynosupremacists do to this group is mostly just encouraging them to be more gynosupremacist (hence the occasional thinkpieces about "cheating is Good, Actually").
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Perhaps feminists will advocate more for interests that better correlate with those of blue-tribe women, but they'll still advocate more for women as a whole than men, and especially for women as a whole against men—military women against military men, stay-at-home mothers against their breadwinner husbands. And, of course, there are the usual Who? Whom? considerations.
A white stay-at-home mother who made a childless female yuppie five minutes late to work on Monday because she held up the line at Starbucks a bit while ordering for her four kids is an infuriating breeder who needs to get on birth control ASAP. The same stay-at-home mother who made a childless male yuppie five minutes late to work on Tuesday ordering at McDonalds for her kids is an overworked, underappreciated hero performing the emotional and physical labor of feeding her family. He should have some Empathy and should had left for work fifteen minutes earlier if he didn't want to be late.
The same stay-at-home mother is a poor victim of her toxic, entitled, chauvinistic husband who treats her like a broodmare and handmaid, saddling her with four kids and neglecting to split household chores 50/50. She is a racist Karen for calling the police on a group of black teens or "teens" for jumping her gated community's fence to have a pool party.
Feminists aren't advocating for blue tribe women, they're advocating for elite women- while the blue tribe probably has higher incomes than the red tribe, I doubt the difference comes out that big in purchasing power, and the median blue triber is still pretty far from being elite. I have read feminist thinkpieces reminiscing on all-girls elk hunting trips at luxury hunting lodges with kill fees and professional guides; this is an elite activity, but not a blue coded one. Or feminist focusing on female fighter pilots, but not the woman sergeant maintaining that jet(or woman air traffic controllers, either).
Enlisted women have many challenges facing them, and feminists ignore them all to focus on largely invented problems for elite classes. They don't even have to be problems for elite class women, as long as they can be spun to have a gender valence.
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That is precisely what the motte and bailey term means. Feminism is one of the specific examples Scott Alexander cited in his essay on the term, as I recall.
Yeah, I guess it was in his original post. I was thinking of the motte and bailey more being argument-based, for example “reality is socially constructed” or "God is just another name for the beauty and order in the Universe", and less about identifying with an ideology directly.
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I pretty much just use motte and bailey for the specific concept. Not sure why it's not entirely described by it. Most people do it.
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Yeah, I don't know if this has a name. Perhaps we could call it nominative argumentation.
Whatever it is, it has a long history. For example, objectivism. Rationalism. The Patriot Act. Surely, you can't vote against the Patriot Act!?
The problem is that, like anything, when you spam an argument too hard for too long, it gets really lame. Virtual signalling is so last year. Today, it's all about vice signalling. So when Will Stancil asks, incredulously, "surely you're not against inclusion", he immediately gets quote-tweeted by 1000 rugged masculine types posting "Yes, chad" or that Normal Rockwell meme.
Words that once had a positive meaning can gain a negative meaning as the fashion barber pole turns. I cringe when I hear someone use the word "equity" unironically. Immediately, it conjures to mind a very specific, contemptible, and completely unfuckable person. In 10 years, the word will be so toxic that no one will use it, and people will deny ever having used it. But there will be a different word that means basically the same thing. Maybe goodism?
I would assume this person to be referring to something like a business partnership where it still has a neutral, anodyne meaning. I don't think I've ever heard someone IRL use it as a reference to woke BS.
There are lots of people like me. I don't think it'll go the way of 'social justice' because woke will pick a different word before the 'equity or equality' meaning filters to us.
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