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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6742 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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You may remember racism being declared a public health emergency during the height of Covid. So now the new HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy is declaring antisemitism a "spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues". Since it's a malady and he promised to Make America Healthy Again Health and Human Services will be working with other departments to fight this sick sick wrongthing.

I'm thinking that Trump administration isn't "defeating wokeness", just updating it to their funhouse mirror version.

My rules > your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly

Your rules, unfairly: Public health covers non-health things like gun control and environmental justice but cannot be used to push back against the woke.

Your rules, fairly: Public health covers non-health things, but at least both sides can use it.

My rules: Public health has to do with health.

Glaring self-serving asymmetry there. The true ordering is: my rules, unfairly > my rules, fairly > your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly. Can also be generalized: my bailey > my motte > your motte > your bailey.

Ok, but why is foreign country of Israel one of the two sides? Also, if Republicans want fair rules they can pass them right now, they hold all the branches of government, pretty much.

Roughly as many jews live in the U.S. as do in Israel.

Nobody's protesting American jews being jewish in universities, America enabling Israel's treatment of Gaza (and Lebanon, Syria to some extent) is what's being protested.

Ah yes, that's why they're smashing up jewish-owned businesses [1], [2], [3], [4], are going after the main jewish student services organization on college campuses - hillel - and yell at protests things like "go back to Europe" and "go back to Poland."

EDIT: But even if the protests were immaculately limited to the Gaza conflict, the fact that we have a substantial diaspora population here means that it will have a political impact, just as there were conflicts between different factions of Ethiopian immigrants/diaspora in the U.S. over the recent Tigray War, there were big Armenian protests in LA over Artsakh, the Cuban expat community has long-exercised outsize influence over the U.S.'s Cuba policy, etc.

The protestors often don't make fine distinctions like that. American Jews have been targeted.

I'm thinking that Trump administration isn't "defeating wokeness", just updating it to their funhouse mirror version.

The realignment means the Republican party is now the political home for people with conspiratorial mindsets, whether Left-wing or Right-wing. JD Vance informs us:

https://x.com/JDVance/status/1884695947327758491

Ah, well, the costs of compromising with the left to get elected...

The idea that HHS has any reason to be involved here is bizarre.

Personally I'd rather them consider anti-semitism a plague than gun ownership, but objectively both are wrong.

One may recall the before-times; when one Geirge Carlin was considered a philosopher and social commentator par excellence. One particular insight of his, which today seems less likely to be considered insightful by those aligned with his politics, was that "Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.". It was always dumb, if one abhors war to such an extent, one never wages even a defensive one, one will eventually lose to those who are willing to wage even aggressive ones. And the latter will be the only ones remaining.

If one were to, in the face of an ideology championing idpol, employ liberalism, think of how small the coalition would be and how tempted each group would be to switch, given the promises of racially and sexually preferential treatment. Liberalism is a sort of disarmament, only works if ones enemies follow suit.

Can the genie of idpol be put back into the bottle? It seems not as it preys on the base instincts of the masses of prefering preferential accomodations, over meritocracy, as in the latter they the vast majority won't make. But if the game is rigged, if nepotism is tolerated, then success isn't a matter of innate excellence, which is outside of ones control, but of correct connections, which one can at least in theory work to establish.

"Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity."

To which some wiseacre responded "You have a better way of making more virgins?".

Can the genie of idpol be put back into the bottle? It seems not as it preys on the base instincts of the masses of prefering preferential accomodations

Here's the problem: Jews are a very small minority. Anti-semitism being of central concern in the Western mind is not like preferences for the Indian lower castes or black Americans, it's a product of ideology and/or elite power.

One doesn't have to do this for democratic reasons and one could argue it's not even good for Jews to do this.

Here's the problem: Jews Cubans/Irish are a very small minority. Anti-semitismCastroism/Orangism being of central concern in the Western mind is not like preferences for the Indian lower castes or black Americans, it's a product of ideology and/or elite power.

Or it's that geographically-concentrated diaspora groups are pretty good at organizing and affecting policy, like any other politically-serious interest group.

If you want a good non-Jewish example, Cuban exiles in the swing state of Florida have prevented normalization of relations with Cuba against all rational geopolitical interest for the last 40 years.

So there can either be pro-black or pro-jewish identity politics? Majority of US who are neither are shit out of luck.

Yeah, I've heard the term "woke right" bandied about in the last few months and I'm only starting to get it now.

The funniest part is that this is the opposite of what the people who came up with it meant.

What did the people who came up with it mean?

There's a lot of motte and bailey around it, but they meant it as a catchall term for the illiberal right, and/or factions of the right that stray too far from the (lowercase "l") liberal consensus. I think "anti-semitism" / skepticism of Israel would put you firmly in that category, given that the term's owner went on some bizarre "imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims, if ISIS set off a nuke"-esque rant about Epstein.

I think it was originally used in reference to "white identity politics," i.e. a perceived desire for white preferential treatment in a similar vein as affirmative action, DEI, etc.

There's something funny in a through-the-looking-glass sort of way about the way the term "woke" has evolved the past decade or so. In entering the mainstream, it became a way to describe old-school racism/sexism/bigotry/etc., just in a "progressive" direction, using a term that sounded nice, in a way that would be palatable to people who liked to think of themselves as against old-school racism/sexism/bigotry/etc. But it quickly became identified with that underlying thing it was describing, and now it's being used to describe the old old-school racism/sexism/bigotry/etc. in the traditional direction, as a way to denigrate it. Perhaps because terms like "racism," "sexism," etc. lost their edge due to constantly being used to describe completely innocuous and often virtuous things, while terms like "woke" kept being used to describe things that were traditionally called "racist," "sexist," etc.

I've quoted Shakespeare before, that a rose by any other name smells just as sweet, and shit by any other name stinks just as foul. Observing this real-time shuffling of words around meanings has been fascinating. It seems that activists who helped to popularize the term "woke" have a real, good faith belief that changing the words we use really, truly, actually changes the underlying thing in some real way - they get high off their own supply, so to speak.

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