site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33243 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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.

15
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

A brief epilogue to my previous post about the cabal of Former Theatre Kids who appear to be running every significant Western government and international organization:

On Thursday, the official NATO Twitter account posted a thread in support of the Ukrainians which included this jaw-dropping statement:

Ukraine is hosting one of the great epics of this century

We are Harry Potter and William Wallace, the Na’vi and Han Solo. We’re escaping from Shawshank and blowing up the Death Star. We are fighting with the Harkonnens and challenging Thanos.

The official honest-to-God NATO account posted that. Not some third-rate dingbat functionary, like the execrable Karen Decker who posted about how Afghanistan needs more “black girl magic”. No, this is the public-facing voice of a war machine that controls hundreds of billions of dollars, and it decided that the best way to make its case to skeptical world was to spam references to media primarily targeted toward middle-schoolers.

Besides being yet another Theatre Kid shande far di goyim (Rod Dreher had us dead to rights with that line) in an era that has been full of them, I think this is a data point in favor of a pet theory I’ve had about progressives/post-Marxist culturists/“the woke” for a while.

When I see some fat black woman or horse-faced lesbian activist rail against how society “reifies hegemonic standards of beauty and body shape which disparately marginalize the bodies of subaltern identities” or whatever, I cannot escape the impression that these people - mostly women, but not entirely - just never really recovered from the petty traumas of middle school. The jocky white boys were all attracted to the slim white girls with the straight hair, and not to the chubby girls, especially the black ones. And I’m not just taking potshots at my outgroup here; I’m guilty as hell of this in my own life as well. (“We must reimagine masculinity to de-center violence and the domination of others,” says the noodle-armed kid with low testosterone, certain that in the Glorious Future, women will prefer guys like him.)

If we’re getting deep into psychoanalysis, it seems at least plausible that for a certain personality type - highly neurotic (and thus liable to experience negative emotions acutely, leading to traumatic imprinting on experiences that non-neurotic people are likely to move on from with no issues), extremely creative and imaginative, great at constructing arguments and manipulating symbols - combined with some social/physical handicap which places them at the bottom of a local social/sexual status hierarchy, you get a perfect storm that leads to becoming trapped in a sort of arrested development - results in a failure to mature emotionally past that formative period, and a predisposition to escapism translating into political utopianism.

Now, presumably this is where someone like @FCfromSSC would jump in and dismiss my attempt to draw a clean through-line between psychology and ideology. Agency is key, and equipped with the right religious and cultural guidance, anyone with these baseline psychological traits and formative experiences can transcend them, becoming a normal and functioning member of society with a healthy worldview. In this telling, in pre-Enlightenment societies, either 1. this personality type basically didn’t exist at all, or 2. those civilizations were far more adept at social engineering, such that they could far more successfully integrate people like this into their social fabric and find roles for them which utilized their strengths and defanged their more dangerous and subversive tendencies.

I am genuinely unsure whether or not I accept this telling! To hear psychology researcher Ed Dutton tell it, these “proto-woke” people or “spiteful mutants” were precisely the type of people primarily targeted by medieval witch hunts. I tend to intuitively favor the explanation that these people have always been a sliver of humanity; maybe that’s because it gives me psychological comfort to imagine that even in pre-literate warrior nomad societies, there were scrawny little guys like me, preoccupied all day long with stories of the gods and ancestral heroes while they were supposed to be sharpening their spears and hauling bags of cured meats. If it is true that the Enlightenment unleashed the full latent power of this sliver of the population, propelling us first to great heights but then succumbing to the poison pill at the heart of the project, then perhaps this offers a roadmap to reintegrating the “spiteful mutants” back into the fabric of healthy society by showing them both the benefits of giving them a day and the grave dangers of letting them monopolize power. Certainly at the very least they shouldn’t be running NATO’s Twitter account.

Forgive my ignorance, but what does shande far di goyim mean? I know what "goyim" means.

It’s a Yiddish phrase, meaning essentially “a shameful act in front of the goyim.” It’s when a Jew does something particularly terrible, in a way that reinforces and confirms negative stereotypes about Jews in the minds of the gentiles. Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried are two examples; not only is what they did bad inherently, but it’s also bad in a characteristically Jewish way that gets people thinking negative things about them as a people. Whereas a Jewish carjacker would just be considered weird and atypical.

Would the ADL cancelling Kanye’s business ventures count? Because it would have been far less stereotypical for the ADL to set up a non-struggle-session conversation with his pastor, a well-regarded rabbi, and a Jewish man high in a bank’s leadership structure, so he could get nuanced perspective.

Yes, that’s why you had publications like Tablet writing about “is the ADL bad for the Jews?” A lot of Jews are actually horrified by the ADL’s tactics, because it’s easy to start drawing associations to “the Jews run a network of major industries and can vindictively destroy anyone who badmouths them,” which is one of the stereotypes that many Jews are the most ardently committed to not letting reappear in the gentile consciousness.

Now, presumably this is where someone like @FCfromSSC would jump in and dismiss my attempt to draw a clean through-line between psychology and ideology. Agency is key, and equipped with the right religious and cultural guidance, anyone with these baseline psychological traits and formative experiences can transcend them, becoming a normal and functioning member of society with a healthy worldview.

This is literally a description of my own life. I too was once a doctrinaire progressive, and I suffered the afflictions you describe. Then I made some changes, and life got a whole lot better.

It's very easy to lose sight of the fact that your choices are choices. It's easy to lose touch with the concept of what a choice even is. It is even possible to make yourself less human, to strip away from yourself the capacity for meaningful choice. Still, choices remain, despite our ignoring them, or being blind to them.

I cannot escape the impression that these people - mostly women, but not entirely - just never really recovered from the petty traumas of middle school. The jocky white boys were all attracted to the slim white girls with the straight hair, and not to the chubby girls, especially the black ones. And I’m not just taking potshots at my outgroup here; I’m guilty as hell of this in my own life as well. (“We must reimagine masculinity to de-center violence and the domination of others,” says the noodle-armed kid with low testosterone, certain that in the Glorious Future, women will prefer guys like him.)

Have you heard of the Amish concept of Rumspringa? It's a traditional period when Amish youth "hop around" getting into a little bit of trouble, ordinary rules are suspended all together or only lightly enforced, after which the young Amish can choose to be baptized into the community as adults, when rules will be enforced.

That's high school and college for middle-upper-class Americans. Ordinary social and even legal rules aren't enforced, some activities can be done in high school and college that can never be done (for most people) in later life. If you're a 1/500 athlete at 16, you're a star on your high school team and a big deal on campus; if you're a 1/500 athlete at 36, you might have a hobby that you're pretty good at but most people don't care about. If you're a 1/1000 musician at 16, you're in the school band and playing lead roles, or you're in your own band and you're a big deal at parties; if you're a 1/1000 musician at 36 no one cares about your soundcloud.

In college if you're a bright kid, you can spend all night discussing philosophy or history with other bright kids, if you're the brightest you can hold a little court at the Algonquin in your dorm room; if you're a bright guy in your 30s, unless you're bright enough to have a substack no one cares except the other dorks on your message board. In college all I needed for a girl to think I was a romantic was a DVD of Midnight in Paris and a bottle of cheap wine; in my 30s well, I'm married anyway, but if I wanted to impress women it would take time, effort, money. And worst of all, if I wanted any of those things now, I would have to go find actual people. And finding actual people after college is harder for most people: as the quote ran around Twitter "Half the reason folks romanticize college is because it's the last time most folks lived in dense, walkable neighborhoods focused on providing community during plentiful off-hours." When you're in college single women your age are everywhere, other pseudo intellectuals are everywhere, your friends are a short walk away.

You don't get to be an athlete, an intellectual, or a lover after college; not in the same way you do in school, not unless you're really talented. There's room to be above average and feel extraordinary, do extraordinary things. In adult life, for most people, those opportunities are lacking.

In his excellent, and now both old and prescient, Coming Apart Murray argues that Upper and Lower class white Americans are becoming more and more stratified, with upper class Americans being more likely to preach left-wing tolerance while practicing traditional middle class morality; while lower class Americans are more likely to believe in solid family values while practicing dissolute and self-destructive lifestyles. His core thesis isn't as interesting to this argument as his theory that Upper Class/Blue Tribe/PMC Americans basically fail to practice what they preach: marriage is more common among white upper class college educated Blue Tribers than it is among working class white people, yet college is synonymous with hook-up culture and dissolution.

I propose that we can think of high school and college as a kind of Rumspringa in Blue Tribe culture, a period in which ordinary rules are suspended. You can't do the things you do in high school and college after you graduate, when you have to be a good and respectable member of the community. So of course the jealousies of high school and college run deep, run forever, scabs that keep getting torn off again and again. Because it's not that they missed the opportunity to do X in college because of those damn bullies; it's that for some people, rule following people, your hall monitors, they now missed their entire opportunity to do those things. They missed out on the easy parties, fun hook ups, the intellectual and athletic honors, their whole share for their entire lives. They'll never get over that, because they don't have the spirit and agency to do them later.

Because it's not that they missed the opportunity to do X in college because of those damn bullies; it's that for some people, rule following people, your hall monitors, they now missed their entire opportunity to do those things. They missed out on the easy parties, fun hook ups, the intellectual and athletic honors, their whole share for their entire lives. They'll never get over that, because they don't have the spirit and agency to do them later.

The parallels between this worldview and the "Nice Guy™" narrative of "I'm such a good Male Feminist, why don't women want to date me and instead want to date those braindead gymrat chuds who treat them like dirt?" are impossible to ignore. See also Tony Tulathimutte's marvellous short story/novella "The Feminist".

That was in my mind writing it, but I felt the comment was already too long for the value of the thought.

What a lot of people miss about the Alpha Male/Beta Male or Jerk/Nice Guy distinction is that it is ordinal and contingent, rather than universal and genetic. The Alpha is the Alpha because no one around is better, the Beta is Beta because the Alpha exists and is better. But the Alpha's existence is contingent, he could die or simply never be born or enter that space, in which case a Beta moves up.* Position in society is a contingent occurrence, outside of extremes of perfection there is no such thing as a pretty girl or a strong man. There can only be in any context the "prettiest girl" and the "strongest man;" followed by a succession of relatively prettier/stronger subordinates. It follows that there is no such thing as an ugly girl or a weak man outside of extremes of deformity or disability, only relatively uglier or weaker individuals. The latter identity depends on the existence of the former.

In modern alienated urban capitalist adult life, hierarchy is ersatz, it varies quickly between locations and people; the PUA game is to create the illusion of being the strongest man, even though that is an irrelevant concept.

But in the hothouse of high school, the hierarchy is a little more visible, you know who the strongest are. Speaking personally, I tried out for the basketball team freshman year, as is typical for me I was the last one cut, but I was cut. At some minor level, this lead to identity formation for me: I came to see myself as weak, and I came to identify more by intelligence than physical ability. I came to read stuff like the ancient pre-TRP Ladder Theory website and identify myself with the "nice guy" archetype as distinct from the dumb jock/CHUD. But, I wasn't cut from the team because I was weak or slow or ungainly; I was cut from the team because I was weaker, slower and less graceful than the other players. Eliminate a dozen of them, or just put me at a smaller school, and I'm a varsity basketball player in high school. How would that have affected my identity formation during those years? Would I have identified as a jock if only Bobby and Kyle had decided to take up golf instead of basketball, or if David and Juan's parents had respectively decided to move elsewhere?

The Nice Guy, inasmuch as he exists as an archetype, is only ever a couple of promotions from being a CHUD. Which is why women directly experience that dating the Nice Guy Male Feminist so rarely delivers being with a Nice Guy Male Feminist; getting a girlfriend is the ultimate promotion in status, so as soon as he has one he starts to act like a CHUD. The act of dating the Nice Guy inflates his ego and makes him stop being Nice.

So I guess my critique of The Feminist is that it doesn't matter if his shoulders are narrow or not, it matters that he perceives that they are narrower.

*This is one of those Platonic concepts that stretches from the man to the polity; see the Jews in 1944 in Poland and the Jews in 2023 in Palestine.

Did you mean "Chad" instead of "CHUD"?

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=chud

Nope, second definition.

This one?

A unattractive person whose defining characteristic of their personality is their egotism. Most often used to describe typically one-dimensional preps, chauches, or the like. A particularly mean insult; it should not be taken nor thrown around lightly.

Interesting. I checked Wiktionary before asking.* It has two (relevant) definitions:

  1. (US, slang) A gross, physically unappealing person.

  2. (chiefly US, Internet slang, sometimes derogatory) A person on the political right, and/or who holds socio-political views seen as regressive or bigoted.

The Urban Dictionary definition does say "unattractive", but your usage seemed to be more about personality, so neither of Wiktionary's definitions seems to fit. I guess this is a third meaning.

* "Normal" dictionaries aren't very good when it comes to obscure slang, and Urban Dictionary is sometimes helpful but is often full of completely unrelated nonsense; see e.g. the two entries that define "chud" as, respectively, a kind of poo and a piece of chewing gum. Both of those are on the first page, and there are 30 pages of definitions for "chud".

I hear it as just a vague slur for right wing or mainstream men. It's not really that deep, you could replace it with Chad or jock or whatever, I just used chud to mirror the above comment.

So it is all about old school grudges?

If true, we would observe that home schooled children who completely missed the whole uplifting experience of American education, would be the bitterest and most vengeful woke warriors.

Do we observe it?

Why would that theory predict that observation?

So it is all about old school grudges?

Considering the current culture war lines are drawn on SomethingAwful vs. 4chan I'd be absolutely willing to say that yes, it is.

Among those with Theatre Kids tendencies, or whose parents went too far, and mostly a combination, yes. See, for instance, https://homeschoolersanonymous.wordpress.com/

If true, we would observe that home schooled children who completely missed the whole uplifting experience of American education, would be the bitterest and most vengeful woke warriors.

You'd also want to control for religious conservativism.

Anecdotally, the most relentless and insufferable woke warrior I know was homeschooled in a left-wing religious family, but I suspect that it is hard to find statistically significant samples of such people because they're so rare.

Explaining great and influential social movements as "mere" revenge for schoolday grudges is not new idea.

Robert Nozick, one of leading theoreticians of libertarianism, tried to answer mystery why intellectuals oppose capitalism, when capitalism is the greatest thing ever.

Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?

TL;DR of Nozick's argument: smart intellectuals get the best grades from teachers in schools, but not the best rewards from bosses in capitalist marketplace.

Therefore, they are justifiably angry and burn the whole shit down.

And when they still do not get what they deserve, they do it again.

Big if true. Is school is not mere waste of time, but factory producing unstoppable killer robots, the only way out is to shut the whole thing down.

But then, why do smart intellectuals like Nozick support capitalism?

I suspect that the Big Five model can be used to generate a more fine-grained explanation (most modern intellectuals are high in openness, neuroticism, and agreeableness, which inclines them towards libertarian democratic socialism; Nozick seemed to be lower in neuroticism, so ended up as a bleeding heart but free-market libertarian) but I don't have the time or expertise to do it.

Certainly, but e.g. Nozick didn't do those lucrative things. He was sincere to a fault.

it's that for some people, rule following people, your hall monitors, they now missed their entire opportunity to do those things. They missed out on the easy parties, fun hook ups, the intellectual and athletic honors, their whole share for their entire lives. They missed out on the easy parties, fun hook ups, the intellectual and athletic honors, their whole share for their entire lives. They'll never get over that, because they don't have the spirit and agency to do them later.

Correct me if I've got your wrong, but the compulsive rule followers are the people who want to overthrow society in this thesis?

I'm a little confused by what you're saying. Who wants to overthrow society and in what ways? What would overthrowing society constitute? I'm really just talking about why so many modern mass-psychoses seem to be rooted in school-age grudges.

I would guess** that his idea is that yes, ironically enough, they want to overthrow society to create a Just World where rule followers and Hall monitors gets justly rewarded for their superior virtue. This idea has echos of "Wokism as mutant, cancerous Christianity." In the Christian age you suffered the indignity and injustice of being a rule follower in this life in exchange for treasure in the next. But if there's no afterlife, you need to create your utopia on earth so that you can collect your reward before you bite the dust. There are vague parallels in a lot of Enlightenment-descended ideologies actually.

**I'm not sure if I'm fully convinced of the above myself.

The modern version, and "pathological" language date back to Freud. The reduction of all Freudian thought to a failure to properly develop through various orifice stages or too wanting to fuck one's mother is unfortunate; but he really did focus on sexual pathology in a way that captivated and titillated his contemporaries, making him a giant intellectually. Everything that comes after was flavored by his work.

Before that examples I can think of tended to be more racial or religious in flavor, enemies tarred as either priapic rapists or effeminate half men. That dates to the Greek view of themselves as the perfected balance between different barbarian tribes: more civilized than the Scythian tribes, more masculine than the Persians in their pants. And nothing in the modern world doesn't have some Greek influence.

Certainly accusations of perverse sexual sins are a common feature of Catholic discourse circa the middle ages. But that gets back to Greek influence.

That's high school and college for middle-upper-class Americans. Ordinary social and even legal rules aren't enforced, some activities can be done in high school and college that can never be done (for most people) in later life. If you're a 1/500 athlete at 16, you're a star on your high school team and a big deal on campus; if you're a 1/500 athlete at 36, you might have a hobby that you're pretty good at but most people don't care about. If you're a 1/1000 musician at 16, you're in the school band and playing lead roles, or you're in your own band and you're a big deal at parties; if you're a 1/1000 musician at 36 no one cares about your soundcloud.

biggest fish in ocean vs. big pond

This is why some of the alarmism over tuition seems unfounded. The value of college is more than just paying back the loans, it's the network too, especially for good colleges.

If you look actually at what the NATO account posted, they were posting a quote from a Ukrainian journalist turned soldier who said that. Here's a link to the start of the Twitter thread -

https://twitter.com/NATO/status/1628687934000885760

Now, you can disagree w/ any of this soldier's statements, but this isn't official NATO propaganda, in the way you're stating it is.

OTOH, yes, why are you shocked people point to widely known cultural artifacts as symbols. Far more people will know the Nav'i or Han Solo than some random underdog force.

It's cringe, but most change in society happens because normies w/ cringe views get on the same side as activists.

It's cringe, but most change in society happens because normies w/ cringe views get on the same side as activists.

Is this also how the rise of Fascism and Nazism happened?

Yup - the rise of the Trump Right, and QAnon all rose because of stuff a lot of people would consider cringe, as well.

It's cringe, but most change in society happens because normies w/ cringe views get on the same side as activists.

I'm curious as to how well this generalizes across history...

I mean, Uncle Tom's Cabin is a sentimental, overwrought story of the time, and I'm sure the Frederick Douglas and Charles Sumner kind of "cringed" at parts of it, but they also realized it was enormously helpful to get the still quasi-racist Northerners on the side of abolition.

I think that this is basically Nietzsche's concept of master/slave morality and resentment.

One thing I would add is that this kind of psychology is as common on the right as it is on the left. For example, /pol/acks tend to be people of resentment and sexual frustration, as is fairly obvious from all of the whining that they do about women and from their longing for sexual communism in which society would ensure that all men would have sexual partners. And even among more mainstream right-wingers, the whiny victim mentality is extremely common. "Why are the leftist meanies oppressing us?". Of course there is really is such a thing as leftists oppressing right-wingers, but the whining quality of some right-wingers' discourse exposes the psychology at work and also, among some right-wingers at least, contrasts comically with those right-wingers' attempts to put forward a macho persona.

The fascist/Nazi movements of the 1920s, too, were largely fueled by resentment and a sense that the people were being unfairly oppressed by the dominant world order.

Generally speaking, highly online political activists on both the left and the right are very often people who are full of resentment because it is precisely that resentment which drives them to spend most of the day writing about politics online. The nature of mass media means that one person who spends all day every day writing about politics online will end up creating 100 times more political content online than the average person. As a result, the Internet in particular very highly over-represents such people relative to the general population, which can lead other highly online people to sometimes have a skewed idea of what the average American is actually like. Off the Internet, a large fraction of people do not even care about politics at all. And the ones who do are often much more moderate than one might think from reading political social media.

The nature of mass media means that one person who spends all day every day writing about politics online will end up creating 100 times more political content online than the average person. As a result, the Internet in particular very highly over-represents such people relative to the general population, which can lead other highly online people to sometimes have a skewed idea of what the average American is actually like.

See also: Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People.

Generally speaking, highly online political activists on both the left and the right are very often people who are full of resentment because it is precisely that resentment which drives them to spend most of the day writing about politics online.

Have you read The True Believer by Eric Hoffer? He goes into considerable detail on a very similar argument, and I think you might find it extremely interesting if you haven't read it already.

I have not read it but I will check it out. Thanks for the recommendation!

I don't believe for one moment that Dune was targeted towards middle-schoolers.

I get the feeling you wanted to rant about this stuff for a while, and used NATO tweet as a mere springboard. Okay, we've all been there, but it's not a great idea, because it's hard to engage with the meat of your argument with the subject matter still dangling in front.

I don't see what the horse-faced people or whatever have to do with it.

Just so you know, people – normal people, sometimes even smart ones – like this stuff. Avengers, Avatar, Harry Potter, Star Wars (even today's wannabe gopnik wears a Marvel T-shirt instead of Abibas, and buys his chick a counterfeit Baby Yoda for 8th of March). Videogames, movies, cartoons. More importantly, they know that everyone else likes or at least knows it, so it occupies the same niche as the Bible did for commoners in previous generations, or «the Western canon» did for intellectuals, or myths did for the ancients: it's a common inventory of archetypes and references. They cite its images and ideas, such as there are, completely unironically (if this fills you with dread, good: it should), and when institutions like NATO speak the same language, they are being at once pragmatic and democratic. Heck, the ostensibly brilliant rationalist community, of which we are an offshoot, is largely built around schlocky ratfics written by artistically inept nerds (okay, Wales is fine), chiefly a massive Harry Potter deconstruction by Big Yud (@ratboygenius, thanks, this is why I write). The modern culture is a culture of grown-up middle schoolers who have no meaningful rites of transition to adulthood, and the cultural power of your theatre kids is more a symptom than a cause.

Adding to that, Ukrainians (and as @Stefferi notes, that line comes from a Ukrainian guy) are just simple to a fault, so they mean it literally. Many Western far-righters, obsessed with the outgroup, pattern-match them to derealized current-thing-emoji Twitterati who support Ukraine, and very-online Russian influencers (as well as pretty, politically active young Ukrainian women mingling with the former crowd) are only too happy to confirm that impression, but it's mistaken. Ukrainian attitude is not from American middle school, it's more of a premodern innocence. «We are Warriors of Light guarding the gates of Europe, our enemies are Orcs, what's your problem, you piece of shit? Try me!» They don't like to overcomplicate things, like Russians do, do not stake their seriousness on big boy symbols of higher-class prestige (that's some Imperial crap!), and they suspect that self-awareness beyond the level of common sense, where it's sufficient to check if your shoelaces are tied and your fly is zipped, is either a sign of mental illness or some cringe Moskal psyop. Though, for all my condescension, I admit that pontificating on galaxy-brain matters with your fly open and slightly drunk, like Russians do, is surely worse.

The ex-advisor Arestovych, himself a fruity theatre kid par excellence and a person of unmistakably Russian intelligentsia culture (come to think of it, Zelensky is too), said in 2020:

[...] an average Ukrainian is an ideal victim of informational-semantic war. All connections in the brain are severed – causal, semantic, symbolic etc., so he's amenable to suggestion. There's an ideal gas instead of a brain: you bring a magnet to it, a dog, or Kyva, or someone else; you loom up with a meme, as we did with the blue lamp in our childhoods, and atoms of that gas, attracted, rush in that direction, stay there for a while, then rush back. From the point of view of a person dabbling in psychology it's a very edifying view. [...] Let's clarify. Information war is the war to occupy some position in the existing worldview. For example, if I as a political marketing consultant do not like your position, I try to move it somewhere. Whereas the semantic war is the war for symbols, myths and, in other words, for the possibility of creating that very worldview. The war which the professional in this question, and simultaneously the head of President Putin's Administration, calls «the war for the right to call things by their names».

Perplexingly, he means Vaino, a veritable retard who has not said anything cogent in his life. Dugin, meanwhile, wrote like 28 books in his series «Noomakhia, wars of the mind» on this topic; if there were a community of culture war scholars, I imagine its abridged version would be mandatory reading. The point of the semantic war or Noomakhia, in respect to mainstream media, is that the repertoire is loaded with premises. Say, when people's very language for discussing libertarianism and naming things pertaining to it is informed by Bioshock, you can tell their conclusions in advance (and observe it any time libertarianism is discussed within earshot of the mainstream public). Likewise for eugenics and Gattaca. Likewise for any other cultural touchstone. Avengers assemble to defeat an idealistic tyrant who threatens their zany status quo. Na'vi embrace degrowth and renounce industrial capitalism. For Ukrainians right now, only the most crude reading matters, but it's a package deal in the long run.

Arestovych goes on to speculate on four possible Ukrainian projects, mistakenly conflated into two: Nationalistic and European, and Russian and Soviet respectively. It's a shame actual Russian politics is below the level of a fruity theatre kid, and there is no positive project to offer that could challenge Hollywood propaganda. Hell, they can't even make use of it like this troll suggests.

Just so you know, people – normal people, sometimes even smart ones – like this stuff. Avengers, Avatar, Harry Potter, Star Wars (even today's wannabe gopnik wears a Marvel T-shirt instead of Abibas, and buys his chick a counterfeit Baby Yoda for 8th of March). Videogames, movies, cartoons. More importantly, they know that everyone else likes or at least knows it, so it occupies the same niche as the Bible did for commoners in previous generations, or «the Western canon» did for intellectuals, or myths did for the ancients: it's a common inventory of archetypes and references.

Crichton made mention of this in Sphere, which was published in 1987. The myths of Superman and The Wizard of Oz long ago replaced classical myth.

I'm surprised, then, that no one has apparently seized upon Mobile Suit Gundam for this reason, though maybe that's a good thing. I guess it helps that the Ukraine war has officially gone on for more than one year, and the end isn't quite in sight yet.

I don’t think that’s the issue. And if I might rant against your rant, the problem I see is that we take literally nothing seriously when discussing politics, technology or culture. I get that sometimes it’s helpful to make references to popular culture and media. But what I’ve seen, and Ukraine vs Russia is the exemplar of the moment is a complete lack of seriousness in the discourse around it. We’re pussyfooting around a situation where two nuclear powers are escalating tensions over a territory of questionable value in either direction. And we’re doing so on the basis of memes.

I can make the case for just about any possible position in response to the Russian invasion. Every one of them has serious pros and cons because war is a serious matter. A negotiation of a new border brings a hopefully stable peace, but would encourage Putin in further expansion. A proxy war with the goal of driving Russia to the 2014 borders risks a hot war between nuclear powers, but would send a strong message that we will not stand for invasion of sovereign nations. There’s a lot of history that should be a part of the discussion as well. We can’t, or won’t talk about this very very serious topic in a serious manner. Instead, Russians are uniquely evil “orcs”, and we’re talking about a potential world war in terms of movies while insisting on a new spelling for Kiev and chastising companies who still call their chicken dish “chicken Kiev” instead of “chicken Kyiv” as though Putin or anyone else gives a flying shit what we call the dish.

The rot goes deeper, and it was also quite common in discussions of COVID and the response. It wasn’t a cool rational debate about the merits of various types and levels of lockdowns. There was little discussion of the relevant risks of different activities and the risks at different ages and risk factors. We simply screamed at anyone who wanted to leave the house.

My thinking is that we are, as the Chinese observed at one point, and unserious people. We aren’t having rational debates and choosing reasonable alternatives. We aren’t discussing the facts on the ground. We’ve become the people defending Ukraine from orcs, Jewish space lasers, and freedom fries. And this is not a sign of a healthy civilization. This is a society clearly shrinking back into a deman-haunted world in which the entirety of thinking about very serious issues must be reduced to children’s movie references or image macros to be digestible by the public.

The fact we can be so unserious, yet still rule the world just shows how powerful we are. We can talk about the Avengers, then drop decades old tech in the DOD equivalent of the backyard shed and basically ruin Russia's ability to make progress.

Well, for now sure, but how long can a country that thinks in memes and slogans maintain its power? How does a people who consider “owning the out group” to be the height of discourse solve problems that face it? How does such a society build for the future? Especially given the near scientific illiteracy and practical innumeracy, this is a serious problem. We are amusing ourselves to death, or at least to irrelevance. Everything is a joke.

I mean, considering they were nerdy guys, I'm sure more than a few people who made the atomic bomb read sci-fi stories, still looked at the original comic book, and may have enjoyed some westerns or noir films. It wasn't all Oppenheimer quotes all the time. It's just today, the line is less clear, and people are more open about their hobbies. Hell, we had people involved in the creation of the beginnings of space industry that were weird sex cultists.

It doesn't really matter how scientifically literate the median American is, as long as the coffers still go to various scientific endeavors, who turn out can invent new things and use the gender somebody prefers the same time, just like they got used to having non-white males as co-workers.

It wasn't all Oppenheimer quotes all the time.

Oppenheimer's most famous quote is actually from a story anyway, the Bhagavad Gita.

True, the inventor of actual AI might quote an anime or whatever.

As Eetan said, we have always thought in terms of memes and slogans. Memes, are, after all, the DNA of the soul. The Bible represents one of the oldest memes still-extant in civilization, and its adherents literally referred to the central narrative of the New Testament as "The Greatest Story Ever Told," IIRC. When I was growing up, we learned about the history of America practically through famous quotes and slogans: No Taxation Without Representation; Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death; Four Score And Seven Years Ago; etc.

Sure, it feels cheap that many of the narratives of the newer generation were forged by wholly human hands without even the pretense of divine revelation or the claim of being a genuine record of the ineffable acting in our world, but at least they're still narratives. Perhaps the conflict lies in the tropes (or, rather, their usage) and not the actual messages attempting to be imparted.

Well, for now sure, but how long can a country that thinks in memes and slogans maintain its power?

Power was always about memes, and West/NATO power had never been greater.

Ancient leader motivated his troops by talking about mythical heroes, medieval would motivate his troops with inspiring pep talk about Bible and knightly romances.

The conquistadors, who managed the most brilliant feats of arms in history, were weebs living in fictional world of trash literature of their day.

"And as we saw so many cities and inhabited villages in the water, and many other large settlements on land, and the road that led to Mexico, we were stupefied ['admirados'], and we said that it all these things seemed like the enchantments recounted in the book of Amadís."

Now, NATO has Harry Potter and the Avengers. What does Russia have?

Cheburashka?

What does Russia have?

Salacious refrigerators, as it turns out. And the cult of progress in general, as the other cornerstone post-Soviet myth has now been repeated, as Marx postulated, as a farce. Soviet heritage aside, we've been worriedly looking for new memes since 1999:

"You see, let me just explain the situation to you, like the way it is," said Vovchik. "Our national business enters the international arena. And there's all kinds of dough out there - Chechen, American, Colombian, if you know what I'm saying. And if you just look at them as money, they're all the same. But behind all this money there is actually some kind of national idea. We used to have Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. Then we had this communism. And now that it is all over, there is no such idea at all, except for the dough itself. But you can't just have the dough justify the dough, right? Because then it is purely incomprehensible - why are some ahead and the others behind?"

"And when our Russian dollars are circulating somewhere in the Caribbean," Vovchik went on, "you can't even really understand why they are Russian dollars. We lack national i-den-ti-ty..."

"Get it? The Chechens have it, but we don't. That's why they look at us like shit. What we need is a clear and simple Russian idea, so that we can explain to any bitch from any Harvard: rub-a-dub-dub, and don't look at us like that. And we should know where we come from, too, anyway."

"The task is simple," said Vovchik. "Write me a Russian idea, about five pages long. And a short version on one page. Make it straightforward, no smartassery. So that I could sort it out with any foreign faggot - a businessman, a singer, or anyone else. So that they wouldn't think that we here in Russia just stole the money and put up a steel door. So that they would feel such spirituality, these whores, like they did at Stalingrad in 1945, understand?"

I largely agree that that's a completely horrible and infuriating aspect of our discourse, and I really really wish we could do better. But I want to question how we could do it better. Has there been a society that has done it better? It would be good to have the people in power giving fewer shits about what the mobs on Twitter say they care about. But before it was Twitter, was there probably some other mechanism that was the completely horrible public square. I just find it hard to believe that masses of people were ever able to make good rational decisions.

We don't have to look far or deep to find indications that masses of people always acted as a bunch of complete idiots. Just look at Shakespeare's depiction of Brutus vs Mark Antony's speeches and how the crowd reacts to them in Julius Caesar.

I don't see how you can ask who were the sensitive sexless moralizers of the past without at least mentioning the priest class, which has always existed. And this would clarify your view of the enlightenment which was clearly a secular movement away from this force. If anyone lost power in the enlightenment it was the moralizers.

Are you familiar with Steve Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism?

“The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter looking”

There’s also Spandrell’s Bioleninism thesis which is that basically all of politics boils down to jockeying for status. So socialism is particularly attractive to High-IQ people who are ill-suited to a capitalist society (intellectuals, journalists, other wordcels, etc.). These people can then recruit various types of resentful underclass people (addicts, generally stupid or lazy people, ethnic and sexual minorities, weirdos of all kinds) who, since they have nothing to lose, are much more loyal and politically active than the people who are content with the system as it is. What makes his thesis “Bio”leninism is that in the 19th-20th century, society was less egalitarian and there were people being oppressed who would have otherwise been successful without these barriers which made socialism/communism attractive to a wider group of people than In current year, when all de jure discrimination is gone. Leftists then have to reach further and further into the dregs of society for loyal enforcers to the point where they draw from people who are biologically incapable of succeeding for genetic/HBD or mental illness reasons.

I’m not sure if I agree entirely, and I probably butchered the summary so it’s worth reading the actual blog. I think it does a good job of explaining why the people most loyal to the party (activist types) and enforcers (antifa types) seem to be fat, ugly, crazy, stupid, mentally ill, or some type of sexual minority.

To answer your question, I don’t think that something went wrong in these people’s development, I think most people’s politics are at least in part “taking a position that would benefit you personally, and then using whatever justification is available to explain why it’s necessary for society”, and the people who seem hilariously non self-aware about this are just in a bubble where nobody they respect has ever called them out on this. Didn’t some of the founding fathers have comically self-serving justifications for why slavery is good actually? I think pre-enlightenment societies had plenty of those type of people but most non-nobility had absolutely no ability to influence politics so probably didn’t worry about it too much, and no one with any power cared about the peasant’s political opinions. On a more local level, the scrawny wordcel who is resentful that he was born a peasant farmer’s only option was to become some kind of monk or something, where he can debate the number of angels dancing on a pin and scratch his itch for subversion (or become Martin Luther). What makes the “subversive” types dangerous now is that in a democracy these people as a whole have power, so harnessing their resentment becomes a viable political strategy.

so it’s worth reading the actual blog

Could you link it? Sounds intriguing.

From "Biological Leninism" by Spandrell:

In Communist countries pedigree was very important. You couldn't get far in the party if you had any little kulak, noble or landowner ancestry. Only peasants and workers were trusted. Why? Because only peasants and workers could be trusted to be loyal. Rich people, or people with the inborn traits which lead to being rich, will always have status in any natural society. They will always do alright. That's why they can't be trusted; the stakes are never high for them. If anything they'd rather have more freedom to realize their talents. People of peasant stock though, they came from the dregs of society. They know very well that all they have was given to them by the party. And so they will be loyal to the death, because they know it, if the Communist regime falls, their status will fall as fast as a hammer in a well. And the same goes for everyone else, especially those ethnic minorities.

Ethnics were tricky though, because they always had a gambit which could increase their status even further: independence. Which is why both Russia and China soon after consolidating the regime started to crack down on ethnics. Stalin famously purged Jews from the Politburo, used WW2 to restore most of the Tsar's territory, and run such a Russia-centered state that to this day people in Kyrgyzstan speak Russian. The same in China, a little known fact of the Cultural Revolution was the huge, bloody purge in Mongolia and the destruction of many temples in Tibet. After that was done with, the Communist party became this strong, stable and smooth machine. The Soviet economy of course worked like shit, and that eventually resulted in the collapse of the system. But as China has shown, central planning is orthogonal to Leninist politics. China, of course, had to know. It had been running a centralized bureaucracy for thousands of years. Leninism was just completing the system.

So again, the genius of Leninism was in building a ruling class from scratch and making it cohesive by explicitly choosing people from low-status groups, ensuring they would be loyal to the party given they had much to lose. It worked so well it was the marvel of the intellectual classes of the whole world for a hundred years.

Meanwhile, what was the West doing? The West, that diehard enemy of worldwide Communism, led by the United States. What has been the American response to Leninism? Look around you. Read Vox. Put on TV. Ok, that's enough. Who is high status in the West today? Women. Homosexuals. Transexuals. Muslims. Blacks. There's even movements propping up disabled and fat people. What Progressivism is running is hyper Leninism. Biological Leninism.

When Communism took over Russia and China, those were still very poor, semi-traditional societies. Plenty of semi-starved peasants around. So you could run a Leninist party just on class resentments. "Never forget class-struggle", Mao liked to say. "Never forget you used to be a serf and you're not one now thanks to me", he meant.

In the West, though, by 1945, when peace and order was enforced by the United States, the economy had improved to the point where class-struggle just didn't work as a generator of loyalty. Life was good, the proletariat could all afford a car and even vacations. Traditional society was dead, the old status-ladders based on family pedigree and land-based wealth were also dead. The West in 1960 was a wealthy, industrial meritocratic society, where status was based on one's talent, productivity and natural ability to schmooze oneself into the ruling class.

Of course liberal politics kept being a mess. No cohesion in a ruling class which has no good incentive to stick to each other. But of course the incentive is still out there. A cohesive ruling class can monopolize power and extract rents from the whole society forever. The ghost of Lenin is always there. And so the arrow of history kept bending in Lenin's direction. The West started to build up a Leninist power structure. Not overtly, not as a conscious plan. It just worked that way because the incentives were out there for everyone to see, and so slowly we got it. Biological Leninism. That's the nature of the Cathedral.

If you live in a free society, and your status is determined by your natural performance; then it follows that to build a cohesive Leninist ruling class you need to recruit those who have natural low-status. In any society, men have higher performance than women. They are stronger, they work harder, they have a higher variance, which means a fatter right tail in all traits (more geniuses); and they have the incentive to perform what the natural mating market provides. That's the patriarchy for you. Now I don't want to overstress the biology part here. It's not the fact that all men are better workers than women. In a patriarchy there's plenty of unearned status for men. But that's how it works: the core of society is the natural performance of men; those men will naturally build a society which benefits them as men; some men free-ride on that, some women get a bad deal. Lots of structural inertia there. But the core is real.

To get to the point: in 1960 we had a white men patriarchy. That was perfectly natural. Every society with a substantial proportion of white men will end up being ruled by a cabal of white men. Much of its biology; part of it is also social capital, good cultural practices accumulated since the 15th century. White men just run stuff better. They are natural high-status. But again, nature makes for messy politics. There is no social value on acknowledging truth: everybody can see that. The signaling value is in lies. In the unnatural. As Moldbug put it:

in many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.

Or as the Chinese put it, point deer, make horse.

The point again is, that you can't run a tight, cohesive ruling class with white men. They don't need to be loyal. They'll do ok anyway. A much easier way to run an obedient, loyal party is to recruit everyone else. Women. Blacks. Gays. Muslims. Transexuals. Pedophiles. Those people may be very high performers individually, but in a natural society ruled by its core of high performers, i.e. a white patriarchy, they wouldn't have very high status. So if you promise them high status for being loyal to you; you bet they're gonna join your team. They have much to gain, little to lose. The Coalition of the Fringes, Sailer calls it. It's worse than that really. It's the coalition of everyone who would lose status the better society were run. It's the coalition of the bad. Literal Kakistocracy.

There's a reason why there's so many evil fat women in government. Where else would they be if government didn't want them? They have nothing going on for them, except their membership in the Democratic party machine. The party gives them all they have, the same way the Communist party had given everything to that average peasant kid who became a middling bureaucrat in Moscow. And don't even get me started with hostile Muslims or Transexuals. Those people used to be expelled or taken into asylums, pre-1960. Which is why American Progressivism likes them so much. The little these people have depends completely on the Left's patronage. There's a devil's bargain there: the more naturally repulsive someone else, the more valuable it is as a party member, as its loyalty will be all the stronger. This is of course what's behind Larry Auster's First Law of minority relations: the worse a group behaves, the more the Left likes it.

This is also why the Left today is the same Left that was into Soviet Communism back in the day. What they approve of today would scandalize any 1920s Leftist. Even 1950s Leftist. But it's all the same thing, following the same incentives: how to build a cohesive ruling class to monopolize state power. It used to be class struggle. Now it's gender-struggle and ethnic struggle. Ethnic struggle works in America because immigrants have no territorial power base, unlike in Russia or China. So the old game of giving status to low-status minorities works better than ever. It works even better, unlike Lenin's Russia, America has now access to every single minority on earth. Which is why the American left is busy importing as many Somalis as they can. The lowest performing minority on earth. Just perfect.

This was a wild read, thanks for linking.

https://spandrell.com/2017/11/14/biological-leninism

Are you familiar with Steve Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism?

“The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter looking”

This, along with related comments in the post above, is just so lazy and trite. For one, the actual evidence for this is quite limited; people sometimes cite one study from 2017, which mostly takes election results from the 1970s and so seems of limited usefulness for today. Other than that there doesn't seem to be much. As a wise man once said, if you cannot measure it your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.

In any case, the whole line of argument is just absurdly uncharitable. Republicans are much more likely to be obese than Democrats, but if I said something like 'Republicans only dislike public transit spending because they are fat fucks who can't arsed to walk from the bus stop' I would rightly be dismissed as an annoying twerp, which I am afraid is very much how you come across.

No evidence for what specifically?

It turns out an answer can be simple, obvious, uncharitable, and correct.

I don't think there's really much evidence for this one though. I haven't seen anything convincing demonstrating that such a correlation exists and is particularly significant. Especially when considering that obesity is correlated with R voting.

If someone found a collection of 100 feminist activists and journalists, and 90% of them look like Roxane Gay (who is, as polite as can be on the topic, not within the standard deviation of our culture's beauty standards), would you consider that perhaps the correlation is real, or would you say it was obviously a biased sampling?

Well one would need to parse out correlation and causation here, but yeah if there were a well-designed study that looked at this and found that, yes, feminist activists were considerably more likely to be obese then that would at least be a strong piece of evidence pointing in that direction.

Now, I think it's mostly a set of biases that cause people to think feminist activists and journalists are unusually unattractive; they're likely, as with almost every group not explicitly selected for attractiveness, going to average out to average

Yep, I think this is basically true. Most people look unremarkable so you don't remember them, but the strikingly obese ones will stick in the mind.

I mean, it is true that that seems to be the motivation behind the "fatphobia" push.

Doesn't it make more sense in a context of 'making people feel bad is REALLY BAD, yikes', as opposed to the journalists themselves being fat? Plenty of thin journalists dislike Xphobia

What does?

That the activists in question will be considered more attractive when they get their way and destigmatize fat.

While that may be some kind of motive for some activists in that specific area, in any broad sense I don't think it's really important considering the aforementioned point that there is a positive (though not necessarily huge) correlation between obesity and voting Republican. I mean, here are the ten most obese metropolitan areas in the US.

McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas: 38.8 percent

Binghamton, N.Y.: 37.6

Huntington-Ashland, W. Va., Ky., Ohio: 36.0

Rockford, Ill.: 35.5

Beaumont-Port Arthur, Texas: 33.8

Charleston, W. Va.: 33.8

Lakeland-Winter Haven, Fla.: 33.5

Topeka, Kans.: 33.3

Kennewick-Pasco-Richland, Wash.: 33.2

Reading, Penn.: 32.7

Of those metros that I am familiar with that you listed, they are poor and black in fairly high %.

My point is that the most obese places in America are smaller regional towns, not the large urban centres from which most activists hail and which are generally the most clearly liberal in culture.

More comments

yeah, this is why the right's preoccupation with body image risks alienating some voters. Go to your typical red state Walmart, or people who show up to rallies. most look overweight or average. not too many gym bros among them, and plenty of gym people vote democratic anyway. My dad for example is a huge health nut, voted blue forever.

I don't think it matters that much in the same way that red tribers want a Christian in office even if they themselves are poor Christians. Being healthy, physically fit, strong, and masculine/feminine (depending on your sex) is universally seen as a good thing by red tribers. Being too fat, too skinny, or too effeminate is seen as a bad thing.

My model of a physically fit red triber is a guy who does a bunch of free weight lifts, maybe does a moderate amount of cardio, maybe uses his strength for worker or outdoor hobbies, with a slight chance of being on roids or some other PED. He eats steak and eggs and burgers and might do CICO but that's about it. He plays pickup contact sports like football or basketball. He thinks the skinny runner physique looks DYEL or even "gay."

My (admittedly less clear) model of a physically fit blue triber is a distance runner or CrossFit-type gym goer. Probably uses Strava and has a bunch of exercises gadgets or at least an Apple watch. Eats a balanced diet of organic and locally grown foods heavy on the greens and micronutrients. Probably takes a collection of supplements, some of which are woo, some of which are not. His fitness is never really used in real life except for the 10Ks or half marathons he runs with his running buddies. He does a few other sports that require pricey equipment like snowboarding or paddleboarding. He thinks big muscles are gauche, low-status, and make you look kind of dumb.

As long as the Right pushes for the red tribe version of the physically fit man, they won't lose voters because even an obese habitual McDonald's patron acknowledges his superiority even if he won't say so outright.

I have a reflexive "I'm being lied to with misleading statistics" response these days whenever somebody claims some social pathology, such as obesity in this case, is correlated with Republican voting patterns. Generally these correlations go away the instant you start looking at the racial demographics of the cities involved -- it just so happens that many Republican voting cities happen to be located in areas with lots of minorities, and both hispanic and black people tend to have higher obesity rates.

From a quick glance at the statistics (1) (2) this seems to be generally the case with your list, with only Huntington and Charleston WV breaking 70% non-hispanic white. (And let's not even get into the whole age-obesity-convervativism confounder)

Fat acceptance is only about women and it's plausible that there's less of a correlation between being a fat woman and voting Republican than being a fat human of a random sex and voting Republican. It's also plausible that Democrats suffer more reduced status than Republicans do from being fat so a general attempt to reduce the stigma of being fat benefits Democrats disproportionately.

It's also plausible that Democrats suffer more reduced status than Republicans do from being fat so a general attempt to reduce the stigma of being fat benefits Democrats disproportionately.

This is very possibly true, but it rather proves my point

Yeah. Mentioned last time this came up, but "fat acceptance" doesn't seem to have increased the status of "people of Walmart", just changed the explicit mockery to focus on their fashion, hair, non-designer-brand mobility scooters, etc.

What makes his thesis “Bio”leninism is that in the 19th-20th century, society was less egalitarian and there were people being oppressed who would have otherwise been successful without these barriers which made socialism/communism attractive to a wider group of people than In current year, when all de jure discrimination is gone.

If you read something like Lothrop Stoddard's "Menace of the Underman" you find the exact same argument, that the revolutionary socialist movements are drawn from the resentful, biologically inferior underclass (what Stoddard calls the revolt of the "hand against the head"). It was a fairly common far-right line of thought that industrial workers, the primary base of support for bolshevism and other such movements, were in fact heredity 'undermen.' It find it a bit silly to say, "okay but now the underclass is really biologically inferior."

It find it a bit silly to say, "okay but now the underclass is really biologically inferior."

Is your position that the underclass has no biological differences with the elites? You should check out Gregory Clark, econ professor at UC Davis. His book The Son Also Rises would also provide support for Stoddard's idea that class distinction- particularly in the "long run", follows an inheritance that cannot be explained by generational wealth.

My position is that it's silly to say "the underclass back then wasn't really biologically inferior, but now they are."

Why? So we have one argument from the past about one group of people that you say was wrong (was it though?)

Why does that necessitate that a similar argument about a different group of people is wrong as well?

So we have one argument from the past about one group of people that you say was wrong

I didn't say it was wrong, assman did, more or less:

What makes his thesis “Bio”leninism is that in the 19th-20th century, society was less egalitarian and there were people being oppressed who would have otherwise been successful without these barriers which made socialism/communism attractive to a wider group of people than In current year, when all de jure discrimination is gone.

It would be surprising if previous claims of the biological inferiority of underclass groups turned out to be false but this time they were correct.

If you want to say, "the underclass was inferior back then, and they still are" that is a more consistent position.

I think they were back then and they are now. The idea is that in the absence of any discrimination at all, and the incredible living standards for even the most poor people, you need to search even lower on the totem pole to find the same kind of resentful people to form the most loyal members of the party.

I don't think it's an inconsistent position to claim that the upwards mobility of somebody hailing from the underclass but with good biological dispositions has improved in the meantime, meaning that the people who are still in it have been selected for NOT having those traits. I am not sure this argument is true, but it is not inconsistent.

It just seems like your position was trying to imply that "Bio"Leninism as a theory was wrong both then and now, and you try to demonstrate it's wrong by just associating it with far-right thinking.

But you do point out an inconsistency in the part of the post you quoted, but FWIW the original article on BioLeninism is consistent in the "both then and now position", and yes it is similar Stoddard's idea and the general thinking of ye-olde-racists... but that doesn't mean it's wrong:

Socialism works not only because it promises higher status to a lot of people. Socialism is catnip because it promises status to people who, deep down, know they shouldn't have it. There is such a thing as natural law, the natural state of any normally functioning human society. Basic biology tells us people are different. Some are more intelligent, more attractive, more crafty and popular. Everybody knows, deep in their lizard brains, how human mating works: women are attracted to the top dogs. Being generous, all human societies default to a Pareto distribution where 20% of people are high-status, and everyone else just has to put up with their inferiority for life. That's just how it works.

Socialism though promised to change that, and Marx showed they had a good plan. Lenin then put that plan to work in practice. What did Lenin do? Exterminate the natural aristocracy of Russia, and build a ruling class with a bunch of low-status people. Workers, peasants, Jews, Latvians, Ukrainians. Lenin went out of his way to recruit everyone who had a grudge against Imperial Russian society. And it worked, brilliantly. The Bolsheviks, a small party with little popular support, won the civil war, and became the awesome Soviet Union. The early Soviet Union promoted minorities, women, sexual deviants, atheists, cultists and every kind of weirdo. Everybody but intelligent, conservative Russians of good families. The same happened in China, where e.g. the 5 provinces which formed the southern Mongolian steppe were joined up into "Inner Mongolia autonomous region", what Sailer calls "consolidate and surrender".

In Communist countries pedigree was very important. You couldn't get far in the party if you had any little kulak, noble or landowner ancestry. Only peasants and workers were trusted. Why? Because only peasants and workers could be trusted to be loyal. Rich people, or people with the inborn traits which lead to being rich, will always have status in any natural society. They will always do alright. That's why they can't be trusted; the stakes are never high for them. If anything they'd rather have more freedom to realize their talents. People of peasant stock though, they came from the dregs of society. They know very well that all they have was given to them by the party. And so they will be loyal to the death, because they know it, if the Communist regime falls, their status will fall as fast as a hammer in a well. And the same goes for everyone else, especially those ethnic minorities.

I think it was true then and is true now, at the margins at least. Elites of revolutionary movements were highly intelligent, but they relied on a great number of deceived fools: peasants, workers, soldiers, lumpens.

The stratification has been going on for centuries, so children of upper classes have higher IQs, pass more complex Piaget tasks at earlier ages, and crucially more often have the temperament to deal with nuance. For all the improvement in social mobility, the cultural efflorescence fell short of expectations, with a great deal of accomplishment still carried by descendants of pre-egalitarian elites, middle classes, gentry. Evidence against this belief is usually circular – commoners like X, but we are all commoners now, so the consensus is that X is every bit as good as some elitist Y, or indeed much better.

Meanwhile in Russia, where actual Leninism took place, culture was practically erased together with a few percent of hereditarily advantaged population. I believe they sincerely thought that they'll be able to replace them with people of the correct proletarian descent and some schooling.

So socialism is particularly attractive to High-IQ people who are ill-suited to a capitalist society (intellectuals, journalists, other wordcels, etc.). These people can then recruit various types of resentful underclass people (addicts, generally stupid or lazy people, ethnic and sexual minorities, weirdos of all kinds) who, since they have nothing to lose, are much more loyal and politically active than the people who are content with the system as it is.

As far as I'm concerned, this is THE challenge for Socialism/Communism, and I say that as someone on the left. How do you make a leftist society that isn't run by the Managerial Class (because that's who we're talking about here) for the Managerial Class? There's a reason why I actually think a lot of the modern leftism is "speedrunning" Communism past the utopian for the workers stuff, straight to the "We are the new elites" phase, or at least that's what it wants.

There's a reason why I actually think a lot of the modern leftism is "speedrunning" Communism past the utopian for the workers stuff, straight to the "We are the new elites" phase, or at least that's what it wants.

Two possible explanations:

(1) Marcusianism: the real revolutionary isn't the proletariat, who have been co-opted by capitalism, it's an alliance of intellectuals and the socially marginalized. The latter group are not only more apt to revolt, but they're also more interesting and sexier. I am not sure to what extent Marcuse was influential, but he was certainly prophetic about the shift in the Western left, especially in the US.

(2) The American vanguard tradition. From the Puritans through the Quakers through the Social Gospel through New York Jewish intellectuals, the US left has many traditions of awakened (we might even say "awokened" or "woke"...) individuals who take on a heroic quest to improve the world. Of course, once the revolution is complete, then the masses will see the Truth, but for now, it's up to heroic individuals to challenge the system. After all, one person can make history - not a very Marxist idea, but a very American idea.

Well what other leadership classes are there? Surely any attempts at an electronic direct democracy will fail, either to the issue of 'who counts the votes', 'who decides what's voted on' or 'who controls the media'.

We've got the managerial class and the military class (only we're running low on Junkers and their rural equivalents with the Managerial takeover of the military). The very rich and the clergy are right out. Techbros have some wealth and organizing ability (somewhat distinct from the very rich IMO) but their sympathies are surely capitalistic on the whole.

The best option is reforming the managerial class. They're the people whose whole purpose is to lead. All modern industrial civilizations regardless of ideology need a good managerial class.

Weren't there scrawny noblemen who wound up inheriting by surprise? Off the top of my head there's Catherine the great's husband, who wound up getting murdered by her lovers, which is definitely a beta-ish story. And it's worth mentioning he was generally considered childlike and switched sides in a major war due to personal sentiment. But, also, the past was a lot more brutal than the present(see "murdered by his wife's lovers") and people who were weak or unwilling to grow up just... didn't make it, even if they were relatively high in status.

What about The Last Psychiatrist take?

"If you are seeing it, it's for you". In other words the war machine knows its potential supporters are harry potter loving mentally stunted noodle armed horse-faced lesbians, and as such it crafts its messaging accordingly. That does not mean it's executed well every time as seen here. Executed well it will use "Kyiv" instead of "Kiev" and avoid "the Ukraine" at all costs, the audience is the same!

But I think the notion of messaging being a better reflection of not the messengers but YOU the audience should be the prior, it explains the stupidity far better than "{billion dollar enterprise} is retarded and run by diversity hire nepo babies".

it explains the stupidity far better than "{billion dollar enterprise} is retarded and run by diversity hire nepo babies".

I'm leaning more and more on the side of "diversity for diversity's sake has started rotting THE MACHINE from the inside too much to hide it". My favorite recent examples are Sam Brinton and Kamala Harris(Absolutely politically inept but checks all the boxes and slept her way to her position)

From that TLP article from 2013:

Who is the ad trying to attract?

"Is it paraplegics?" That's a weird guess. "Is it basketball players?" I'm going to assume that's code, no.

Man, it took me 10 years to be immersed enough in American internet bullshit to get that reference (it's black Americans) and I thought this style of irreverent Noticing was relatively new and slowly evolved in reaction to 2008-2014 nascent wokeness.

I'm having this really weird moment where now a lot of my normie peers are coming up to me and want to discuss this worrying new trend of wokeness, and do I maybe think things might start to go too far? And I exasperatedly tell them that I have been telling them for over 10 years, welcome to this Brave New World, grab a soy milk shake. But then I see things like this, or even from the late 90s and notive that I, too, am at least 10 years behind the curve.

Fascinating, very much not my analysis of what TLP was attempting to convey. When I read his piece originally and read it now, my takeaway is that if a given piece of propaganda found its way into your hands, it's not by accident. If your reaction to it is (an execrable) Wholesome 💯, consider that was the intended response. If it results in frothing rage, consider that to be the intended response.

We live in an era of superstimuli: I'm willing to bet that companies (or a Company) with small-nation-GDPs for market caps and a specialization in marketing have heard of shibboleths before, and maybe they're releasing scissory material on purpose.

I personally assume that anything which tries to hijack my emotional train of "thought" is a weapon of some sort; maybe deployed by my tribe, maybe deployed by another, doesn't matter, the point is the reaction. Who cares if they're cringe or factually incorrect, even if it is, dare I say, based? You saw it and you felt a certain way. Mission accomplished.

But what this is supposed to mean? Is Hoffmeister a "diversity hire nepo baby"? I don't think there's really much overlap between him(?) and the people he complains about other than being aesthetes.

I meant that the wording and references in the tweet betray who NATO thinks their audience is, albeit executed poorly.

Saying its about You was just me immitating TLPs writing style.

Saying its about You was just me immitating TLPs writing style.

Please don't.

I am TLP.

I thought so. Unsubtle advertising on obscure message boards was his modus operandi.

Probably, but the person it has meaning for here is hoffmeister.

fat black woman
and
horse-faced lesbian activist
and
noodle-armed kid with low testosterone

are all both unnecessarily antagonistic and call-outy, superfluous to what I believe to be your intended point. Even if you feel that this might be a shot at your own ingroup, there's always https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/, entirely about how your ingroup might not be what you think it is. If I felt strongly that I fell into one of those three examples I, personally, would be seething at your post and wouldn't engage with anything you had written.

That said, I'm very curious as to what you meant when you wrote

the poison pill at the heart of the project
I can't find the original article from a cursory google search, but I'm reminded of Fred Reed's (I believe it was him) screed on Liberalism as a movement sowing the seeds of its own destruction, as high-asabiyyah "un-Enlightened" cultures integrate into egalitarian ones. Is this what you meant?

I'm (more or less) a noodle-armed kid with low testosterone and I found Hoffmeister's post amusing and thought-provoking.

If these people are so stunted and damaged, how have they become so powerful? Woke ideology is now dominant in nearly all elite western institutions.

Or, phrased otherwise, how is Justin Trudeau so popular?

how is Justin Trudeau so popular?

Anecdotally, it is for tangential reasons. He is attractive & knows how to use it to appear charismatic. He performs all the 'good boy' rituals that headline-only readers enjoy. He keeps his corporate interests happy and the opposition is as incompetent as it gets.

Justin Trudeau has a discount version in 'Rahul Gandhi' in India. Son of royalty, given his position due to nepotism, attractive man, does all the right woke-rituals while running his own party as a dictator. Left-Media does everything to bolster his position while anyone is opposition is called racist/fascist/bigoted. The 2 main differences are Gandhi's lack of charisma & being faced with the most competent democratic politician alive in Modi.(maybe along side Netanyahu)

Trudeau needs some proper opposition.

One of my favorite wacky conspiracy theories of the last 10 years is that Justin Trudeau is actually the biological son of Fidel Castro and thus geneticially predisposed to become a charismatic tin-pot dictator beloved by mid-wit intellectuals.

Mind you I don't buy into that theory, or genetic determinism in general, but it would be pretty damn funny if it were true.

There are millions of people in Canada and only one prime minister. How probable is it that Justin Trudeau would be the son of a leader in the Americas?

The theory rests on the idea that his mom & official dad were communist friendly and at least swinger-adjacent -- in addition to being personally close to Castro, and documented to be someplace where he could conceivably have been present around the time of Justin's conception. And he does look kind of similar.

I wouldn't give it high probability, but it's not the most outrageous conspiracy theory I've ever heard by a long shot.

Given the small number of presidents within the general population how probable is it that that the US's 43rd president would be the son of it's 41st president.

As a non-American, I had always just assumed that George Bush is a common name in the US.

It's certainly not an uncommon name, both "George" and "Bush" are common names on their own, but if you wanted a maximally generic American name it would be something like "Matt Smith" "Shaun Black" or "Elizabeth Rodrigues"

The Havana Candidate.

I unironically believe that conspiracy theory. Not that I think my belief or nonbelief really matters in any real sense, but in my opinion there's a decent amount of evidence for it, the official denials would look identical regardless of the truth and thus offer zero evidence for or against the proposition, and so I choose to believe that it's true because it makes me laugh.

Optimizing individuals for group dominance isn't the same as optimizing them for personal happiness. For the strength of the party, the ideal party members are unhappy neurotic messes with constant status insecurity and no personal relationships strong enough to cause "reactionary sentiments" on issues that affect friends and family (education, crime, etc.) Ideally in political therapy/reeducation and on plenty of drugs.

Well adjusted happy people with desires and sources of joy in their lives outside the control of the state are a weak link, and lead to embarrassing debacles like the California AA referendum.

Should be noted that they're quoting some journalist in Ukraine who has joined the Ukrainian army. I mean, it's still cringe (NATO has the choice of what they put in the account), but it's also probably exactly the sort of a way how normies might categorize this stuff, or even more likely how an Ukrainian fighter might imagine one speaks to your stereotypical Westerner living in comfort who probably has a pretty dim idea of what Ukrainians are actually going through.

I'm not sure if it's a new thing, either; Finland's most famous war novel, The Unknown Soldier, about WW2, has a side character who basically belongs to one of the youngest age classes to be conscripted during the entire war (ie. used to demonstrate how grizzled old veterans barely few years older than teens like this might view such new recruits) and turns out to be a highly effective and fearless fighter who also has the tendency to make "pew pew! Fiuuuu!" sounds when shooting Russians or throwing grenades, just like in Disney cartoons.

As such, while I cannot deny the cringeness, I'm not sure if it's really that good an opportunity to make analyses about NATO's general form of communication, let alone Theater Kids (though the soldier in question does mention theatre people as one of the class of people who have joined the Ukrainian Army, actually). I'm also somewhat at loss to what the connection to "progressives/post-Marxist culturists/“the woke”" is, despite everything it's actually not just wokes who might live their life vicariously through stuff like Marvel movies or other Hollywood cultural fare (and I'd imagine that if one actually could make a survey on this they'd be less likely to do this than just your average normie).

Can confirm that combat troops are disproportionately young, dumb, and full of pop culture.

There's more Avril Lavigne fans stacking bodies than you think. https://youtube.com/watch?v=XBtg3fSQ-QQ&t=10

I don't know Dreher enough to opine, but I'd warrant there aren't many people in this forum other than me who can level that criticism properly.

The official honest-to-God NATO account posted that. Not some third-rate dingbat functionary, like the execrable Karen Decker who posted about how Afghanistan needs more “black girl magic”. No, this is the public-facing voice of a war machine that controls hundreds of billions of dollars, and it decided that the best way to make its case to skeptical world was to spam references to media primarily targeted toward middle-schoolers.

Can't appeal to the dead white patriarchs , they're racist. Can't appeal to a defense of Christendom (even if that weren't verboten, Russia is still Christian), the only civilizational throughline left are platitudes we get from cultural consumption of deliberately watered down and simplistic media.

2.those civilizations were far more adept at social engineering, such that they could far more successfully integrate people like this into their social fabric and find roles for them which utilized their strengths and defanged their more dangerous and subversive tendencies.

You could argue it the other way: those personalities didn't exist because they were far less adept at social engineering.

The increase in modern state capacity has dovetailed quite well with the Rousseauian/early liberal impulse that society is responsible for many of man's ills and these ills can be cured with more intervention and the general optimistic view about the perfectibility of man.

The state today is ludicrously more powerful and has aided along major changes in daily life, so the thinking goes: why could it not just fix all those other endemic social ills like inequity in dating? Beyond that, modern systems' tolerance for deviance may allow these people to fit more appropriate niches than before*

I think this is silly for a variety of reasons, but I imagine that's a major factor in making people like the above who blithely assume enough "raising awareness" or "activism" will resolve any issue they don't like.

* It's hard to determine how much freedom merely releases people to do what they always would have wanted or creates new impulses they then mistakenly see as immovable

Can't appeal to the dead white patriarchs , they're racist.

His appeal includes William Wallace, though. Read literally, this would be an appeal to a dead white patriarch. Of course it's not meant to be read as referring to William Wallace the actual historical figure but William Wallace played by Mel Gibson in a Mel Gibson movie, but Mel Gibson is a living white patriarch, an outspoken Christian and, outside of his movie career, often remembered for getting plastered and going off about the Jews while resisting arrest.

Most of the movie figures he's referring are white guys created by white guys, too, apart from some of the Avengers, the non-specifically indigenous Na'vi, and JK Rowling as the creator of Harry Potter (and of course even in that case we're hardly talking about a creator beloved by the woke people, to put it mildly).

Sure, you might argue that it's "watered down and simplistic", but the reference is still to a certain kind of watered down and simplistic material (and it's not like history's appeals to dead white patriarchs or Christendom were particularly complex, either.

His appeal includes William Wallace, though.

Scotland got snuffed out as an independent nation before it could do any imperialism.

His appeal includes William Wallace, though.

Fair enough. I will say you've touched on part of the difference (another important one being that apparently people don't see it as part of their project - as they do with American founding fathers - to undercut the hagiographic and anachronistic view put forward by Gibson because...it's not a live American issue)

Most of the movie figures he's referring are white guys created by white guys, too

There I have to say: meh, less convincing. It's not the same as appealing to Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson. I edited it from "dead white men" to "patriarchs" specifically to emphasize I meant the founders or central figures in the national myths (which, in America, seems forever subject to "problematization")

Harry Potter and Churchill are both famous, but in different ways.

Next They Came for the Dead White Authors

Apparently, Ian Fleming is next on the list for posthumous editing by sensitivity readers.

I've read a bunch of Bond novels. They are hilariously and unironically racist and sexist. Much moreso than the movies, which were already notorious for being un-PC even in an un-PC era (remember Octopussy?).

The Bond novels are fun but schlocky; Fleming's output was wildly erratic in quality. Casino Royale was actually pretty good (the Daniel Craig remake was the most accurate-to-the-book Bond movie ever made), while Dr. No was just hilariously bad (and bore almost no resemblance to the movie).

I guess I don't need to say much that hasn't already been said or that most people here won't agree with.

I will point out that editing children's books to be more acceptable to modern readers is much older than Roald Dahl. For example, I read the original, unedited Dr. Doolittle by Hugh Lofting a few years ago. I was actually unaware of just how racist it was. Modern editions have removed the "niggers" and other slurs, and the plot about the little African prince who wants Dr. Doolittle to turn him white. I don't actually object to this, so long as the original is still around. In itself, this isn't some new practice that only started happening in the woke era.

But it appears increasingly that it will no longer be acceptable to acknowledge that attitudes in the past were different; a warning label won't be enough. I expect the march will continue with Gone With the Wind. Margaret Mitchell's novel is a magnificent epic and a glorious, unapologetic paean to the Old South, and should be preserved in its entirety both for its literary merit and for being such a cringeworthy time capsule of Lost Cause mythology. The movie was actually toned down a lot even in 1939 (they removed the part where Rhett Butler literally joins the KKK, for example), but I would not be surprised if it's next on the block for expurgation.

Here is a good news/bad news thought for you to ponder: I think sensitivity readers will soon be out of a job. Why? Because scrubbing "problematic" texts out of old books seems like a really easy job for the next generation of ChatGPT.

a cringeworthy time capsule of Lost Cause mythology

If you're supposed to be some kind of community leader this kind of 'boo outgroup' seems beneath you. It's only 'cringeworthy' to look at the contemporary state of the South and suggest that a different course might not have been better, perhaps one not mandated at the end of a barrel by Others.

Being a community leader doesn't mean I'm not allowed to express opinions about Lost Cause mythology. You are allowed to dislike my opinion.

I'd be interested to see PolitiChatGPT have a go at something like the Turner Diaries. It'd also be interesting to see what the inverted version could do. If you can make a story less racist and problematic, surely you could make it more problematic?

Or could we make it quantify how problematic a book is? I imagine there'd be demand for a system to remove culpability over school libraries accepting or banning books, remove any individual human who has to make a choice. There's already plenty of demand for getting the AI to self-censor. Roahl Dahl might get a 167, Fleming might be 800 or 900, Mein Kampf would be 3000 +, Pierce's works would be over 9000. The sky's the limit when it comes to this tech, there'll be endless controversy.

Looking forward to "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire $OUTGROUP Slayer"

This seems especially out there to me because it seemed like the PC crowd had mostly settled on a narrative about the Bond books- they were gritty in a way that was grating because of just how awful it was, and there was lots of racism but it was also hundreds of pages of a depressed alcoholic murderer being miserable. From that perspective there's no need to expurgate the novels.

So, I’m going to offer a tepid defense of the sensitivity readers, by drawing a comparison to what’s on offer as an alternative. In short, I think this is about the search for “a usable past” as we transition into a new political/cultural paradigm.

In comparison to the world in which you and I grew up, the sensitivity readers appear very extreme. They immediately bring to mind Orwellian horror stories and… real-life Communist horror facts. But, I would argue that the people trying to publish mostly-intact versions of old classics, with only the most “problematic” parts excised or modified, are actually the squishy centrists compared to what’s coming down the pike behind them. There is a real Year Zero contingent on the left, with real intellectual heft in the circles that are driving political developments. These people really would like the works of Ian Fleming and Ronald Dahl and all the other toxic white men consigned to the dustbin of history. Compared to them, what the sensitivity readers at these publishing companies are doing is quite limited in scope and preserves infinitely more of these works than the more radical activists to their left would prefer.

I’ll draw an analogy to a couple of things. The first is the Broadway musical Hamilton. For the first few years after it came out, it was one of the most popular and culturally-relevant pieces of media among the liberal/progressive-lite PMC. While many on the far right - especially the racially-conscious right - saw the presentation of the Founding Fathers as a bunch of black rappers as a desecration (the Great Replacement not only proceeds apace in the present, it has now been able to reach into the past!) some on the right had a more nuanced and perceptive take: they realized that this was liberals trying to preserve a usable past.

For people who have one foot in the Successor Ideology and one foot in 20th-century liberalism, dealing with the past is a really difficult and fraught balancing act. If your values are sufficiently attuned to progressivism, staring straight at the reality of the American founding and the men responsible for it, shorn of all the mythologizing and contextualizing and white lies, at some point you’re going to realize you have to choose to either discard them or discard the values you hold dear. Something like Hamilton is an off-ramp from that dilemma. You can slap a fresh new coat of paint on the Founding, sand off some of its most problematic parts, selectively emphasize plausible readings of it that are most amenable to modern sensibilities, and suddenly it’s okay to love the Founders again. A new and diverse generation can hopefully see themselves in the Founding, carrying on a genuine love and admiration for a modified and sanitized version of them. Well, the real hardcore Left realized, correctly, that this was happening, and they tore Hamilton to shreds. It’s pro-Founder propaganda, trying to make us love cisheteropatriarchal slaveholders and rapists, thinking we’ll forget who they were and what they did by dressing them up as rapping POCs. They’re trying to deny liberals that off-ramp. Similarly, I can imagine one of these sensitivity readers, after chugging a pint of Truth Serum, saying to you, “You don’t like our bowdlerized version of James Bond with the yuckiest parts taken out? Okay, you know what you’re going to hate a lot more? Fifteen years from now when every last copy of a James Bond novel gets shredded and its spot on the bookshelf taken by a novel about a strong flawless black female super-scientist who kills conservative white men. We were trying to save this series and give you the best version that was political possible given the world that’s coming, and you rejected it. You let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and now you ended up with a result infinitely worse than the one we tried to offer you. Hope you’re happy.”

I also want to draw an analogy, drawing on a previous post of mine, to the Christianization of northwestern Europe. Part of the reason why the conversion of the Germanic and Celtic pagans succeeded is that missionaries found a way to adapt existing pagan festivals and cultural practices to the new Christian theological paradigm. This video demonstrates in great detail how, for example, what we now celebrate as Christmas is very obviously just a rebranding of long-existing pagan practices, with a thin paint of syncretized Christian gloss slapped on it so it didn’t have to be totally discarded. I can imagine some Christian monk telling a horrified pagan reactionary, “Look, man, do you want to be able to keep 80% of your tradition, or do you want to keep none of it? Those are the options on offer here. Is it really that massive a deal to you to let us fiddle around with certain aspects of this tradition to reconcile it with the new paradigm that’s already here whether you like it or not? Let us modify it, because there’s some hardcore dudes on the other die of me who would prefer we scrapped it entirely and started punishing you guys for celebrating it at all.” There were obviously aspects of pre-Christian society that simply could not be allowed to survive once the conversion took place. Explicit worship of idols representing pagan gods had to go; the theological proscriptions against it in Christianity are simply too clear to allow any wiggle room. Ditto for animal sacrifice, which used to be a ubiquitous part of the daily religious life of pagan cultures; Christ is supposed to have been the final sacrifice, so it would be too sacrilegious to allow people to keep doing what they had been doing. But some of the stuff that’s less problematic from the perspective of the new Christian system? Eh, let them keep it, and just call it something new and find some way to call it Christian.

Something like that is what the sensitivity readers are doing. There are certain aspects of these works that are a bridge too far, and their removal is non-negotiable. Assuming progressivism continues its ascent, there’s simply no way that kids in a hundred years will be able to read a book in which the main character insults black people or disrespects women. But there is a world in which they can still read Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming, with a new coat of paint slapped on and some of the yucky parts quietly removed. The future generations won’t know the difference. It’s that or Year Zero - take your pick.

Obviously I’m not happy that the continuing ascent of progressivism makes these the only two realistic outcomes on offer. I want to believe that the backlash is still coming, and that a collapse of this system is in the cards. If it’s not, though… those sensitivity readers might be the only think standing between us and something unimaginably worse.

Good post, but also the most doomerist thing I've read in weeks.

I can imagine some Christian monk telling a horrified pagan reactionary, “Look, man, do you want to be able to keep 80% of your tradition, or do you want to keep none of it?

But of course, the pagans kept little to nothing of their traditions. Christian conversion was complete, and quite thorough. As a Christian, I'm okay with that, since I think we have a good thing on offer. But the lesson derived is that it is important to understand the difference between compromise, and being compromised. Enlightenment ideology has no stable state on offer. There is no bright future coming. It will destroy everything it touches until it is itself destroyed. If we are going to lose to it, I would prefer that it inherit scorched earth, the better to hasten its inevitable demise.

“Look, man, do you want to be able to keep 80% of your tradition, or do you want to keep none of it?

“Look, Joseph, do you want 80% of your grandfather to survive, or do you want to keep none of him?” – asks Dio's head from atop a possessed body.

Or put another way: the classical lesson of zombie movies, and many other horrors, is «this is not your mom». Characters who fail to strike down the contagious reanimated corpse get bitten and turned as well. This is, of course, yet another piece of cultural commentary one struggles to speak aloud. Maybe a building block for a more healthy tradition as well. Maybe if your mythologized past had been taken from you, new fiction is the best replacement you can get – just gotta spin it right. And anything can be spun whichever way, provided you have time and your spin doctors are good enough: Krylov's «The Golden Key» depicts a whole post-apocalyptic posthuman civilization built on the basis of the only surviving data source, that is, a single corrupt Russian MP's laptop hard drive – with the intricate, humane religion of «Daughter-Mother», its «icons» meditated upon by chaste «Pedobear monks». Naturally, going downhill is much easier.

Tradition is a means to an end, a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. You say «usable past», but – usable to whom? Considering the kind of involvement we see –to the side sensitivity readers represent, evidently; they and their employees aren't doing charity for the nostalgic Red tribe. Usable for what purpose, then? To carry on some nebulous ancestral legacy? Or to pacify the suspicious pagans with hollowed-out symbols and rituals, as you solidify the power of your true Church that shall give their lives and deaths a whole new meaning, one where these beloved holy days celebrate not their tribe's deities, lineage and land, but a certain Palestinian God whose grave they shall conquer?

Perhaps this past and this tradition are now useless to heirs of those who had built both, and their ancestors would have endorsed oblivion for their work rather than suffer it being defiled and repurposed; perhaps the risk of the sense of familiarity and reliability being used as a backdoor is much greater than the value of whatever original lesson remains. A prohibited book, at least, may become a touchstone for an underground cult (though I wouldn't recommend Ian Fleming in this capacity). But you won't get back to a sacred Celtic grove or whatever from a Christmas tree farm.

Now all of this is admittedly distant from the specific question of woke edits in brainless entertainment. Catholics with their Latin Mass, discussed here, have more of a case, but even then it's unclear what exactly of substance is being preserved or tarnished; we are already quite distant from any premodern tradition that serves its purpose and is understood as such, instead of simply being fetishized. In any event, the reaction of reactionaries follows from a very reasonable prior: do not let your enemies edit your source code. Not even comments.

Krylov's «The Golden Key» depicts a whole post-apocalyptic posthuman civilization built on the basis of the only surviving data source, that is, a single corrupt Russian MP's laptop hard drive – with the intricate, humane religion of «Daughter-Mother», its «icons» meditated upon by chaste «Pedobear monks».

I suspect this fictional Russian MP browsed some 4ch boards...that, or read John Ringo.

Oh, that's a classic. For my sins, I managed to make it all the way through Ghost, but regretted it. That was before reading OH JOHN RINGO NO; I would have skipped the book had I read the blog post first. I have heard that the rest of the series (...because of course there's a rest of the series...) is worth reading if you match the target audience, however.

As per the book, he was a straightforward pedophile, and over generations, posthuman characters reasoned their way to a (barely) functional social arrangement approximating some Russian features (parodied by the book, on one of its levels) by erecting abstractions and esoteric readings on top of his laptop's contents.

But Krylov himself was intimately acquainted with 2ch/4chan culture, of course. There is a well-developed Equestria-equivalent domain, for one thing. Really it's a masterpiece. Very uneven, very rushed, deliberately trashy, smarter than virtually all of Western fiction.

It was dark and smelt of smoke. There was a rotten incense sticking out of the cresset, and fine white ash floating in a bowl of water underneath it. The cat found another nearby, put it in the cresset and lit it with his left laser. The flickering flame somewhat moved the darkness aside. It didn't go far, though, but at least he could see the walls – uneven, dark. A huge chest, blackened by age, on the left side of the door, was almost entirely occupied by a massive rusty padlock. Above the chest hung an icon from the «Daughter-Mother With Nipples» series. The cat looked at the icon with interest: as far as he knew, such images were considered too old by most pedbears. Apparently, the landlord belonged to a rare Universal-Orthodox branch of the Cathedral Cult, which regarded all files from the Dead Man's Chest as equal and only variously revealing facets of the Eternal Image.

Some notes from the thesaurus accompanying the trilogy (a ton of context is missed with such shabby translation, sorry about that):

DAUGHTER-MOTHER. In the Land of Fools, the central object of the universal Cathedral cult, the standard of holiness. The origin of the image of Daughter-Mother is not entirely clear. The most common hypothesis is that it is the fusion of at least three ancient human cults - the patriotic cult of the Motherland Calling, the criminal cult of Mama Dear and the anti-fascist cult of the Tajik Girl. Very little is known about all these religious teachings.

"Too old" (eng.) is a popular mantra among the pedbears. Symbolizes disillusionment with decrepit worldly values and contrasts them with pure service to the Daughter-Mother. In colloquial speech, it is something like "long out of date", "banal and trite", "not worthy of attention", "let's not talk about it anymore", etc.

PEDOBEAR, PEDVED. An artificial A-base combining bear, elephant and other genes. Legend has it that it was created in the Directory at the behest of authority figures in the Land of Fools. Pedobears are bred as a caste of clergy supporting the Cathedral Cult of the Daughter-Mother.

Virtually all Pedveds are Kalushians, for although they possess sexual organs, they do not reproduce naturally, due to the sublimation of all thoughts for the holy image of the Daughter-Mother. However, they have surnames, with the knowledge of which pedobears are born. Usually the surname is related to a so-called honourable disease, which the pedobear will suffer in his or her advanced years in the name of the Daughter-Mother. The most common surnames are Asthmatics, Hypertensives and Prostatics. Prostatics are considered to be a particularly distinct genus, the highest pedobears are usually Prostatics.

For reasons unknown, Pedobears consider themselves to be Greeks. What they mean by this is unclear.

God, part of me wants to read a proper translation of this. I need more brain-melting content in the vein of Ring: Legend of the Nibelungen.

You've already been warned about slinging personal insults and given the way you doubled down last time, you've burned through any benefit of the doubt.

One week ban.

Jesus, just because you lose a few battles here and there doesn’t mean you hand over the keys to the castle. Let them come for all of history, it’ll be more honest.

I doubt your version of events, christianity in the beginning was hardly this unstoppable force, the priest probably threw in the winter solstice celebrations as a sweetener in the conversion of a pagan king. And I doubt he would have gotten anything had he lied down preemptively as you advise, if he was indeed threatened with more than hellfire.

When I see ‘deals’ like that, essentially bottomless blackmail, I hear a loud voice inside telling me the blackmailer should go fuck himself. I’m pretty sure for people in the past, or in an honor culture, it’s even louder. I have problems with those cultures, we are civilized, domesticated animals now, but this is handing the knife to your butcher .

I appreciate your framing and it's well put - but I'm not as sure we're quite ready to roll over, admit total defeat and start begging for neutered traditional aesthetics to be all that remains of liberalism. Not least because I am not confident at all that we'd even get that. There is more than children's books and spy series pretty much exclusively remembered because of their film adaptations at stake. These people don't believe in merit, they don't believe in investment or punctuality or colorblindness or genetics or free enterprise or objective reality. I do not think they will just change us, I think they will ruin us. It's worth pushing back here for the same reason it's worth pushing back everywhere, the same reason this is a culture war and not a culture dialogue. These people are not foreign invaders with a system at least functional to be invading and conquering, it's a parasitic meme, there is no guarantee that when the finish with the largess of our success that we don't all just die. The trajectory of them gaining power may look a whole lot more like south africa in recent years than Europe under Christian rule. Where we see their flags raise we should oppose, always and forever.

a strong flawless black female super-scientist who kills conservative white men

Isn't that Glass Onion, more or less? The super-scientist is replaced by her twin sister, and she doesn't actually kill the white guy in the end, but she burns the Mona Lisa and leads an orgy of destructive glass-smashing.

That video is a bit New Pagan; there weren't really Celtic Christmas traditions since Christmas as such wasn't a Celtic tradition. Germanic and Northern Europeans traditions do exist, but the fudge-up in that video about the Scots and Hogmanay is terrible. Norse Trolls, Old English, and Lalland Scots all mixed up to try and prove that Hogmanay as a New Year's Celebration is actually the Winter Solstice which is actually Christmas. As for the Fomorians being trolls - go away for yourself 🤣 New Age Pagan stuff is really trying to prove too much that all Christian feasts are really pagan in origin.

Sensitivity readers are not trying to preserve anything, as you can see from their use in YA literature. This is publishers trying to wring the last few coins out of existing properties before they expire. Roald Dahl, as a children's author, is pretty much more likely to survive than Ian Fleming. You won't read the Bond novels because you have the movies, which in some ways are better. You may very well keep on reading "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" despite the remake movie.

As for Hamilton, yes, I noticed the sudden U-turn on "greatest musical ever" to "celebration of horribleness that should be cancelled", but I don't think that was a concerted hard leftist campaign. Lin-Manuel Miranda became Problematic largely because he became so freakin' successful, and the 'crabs in the bucket' paradigm started. He wasn't Afro-Latino, how dare he presume to represent those people! This was colorism! Miranda was from a privileged background! Basically jealousy in action. And of course all the nice white allies fell in line.

And that's been my experience of sensitivity readers - they started out in YA and allied genres, and now are moving into mainstream work. A lot of envious little wannabe writers started pulling down others who were getting contracts and announcing publishing deals, and set themselves up as arbiters about what could and could not be written, especially by white authors. I remember from a few years back someone on Tumblr who was allegedly Chinese-American doing pages and pages of instructions about "you can't say this, you can't say this, you can't say this". Some of it was informative, e.g. about Chinese naming conventions and why historically Chinese people would never do the equivalent of naming their kids after George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, but it pretty much was a grift; the advice in the end was to consult a Real Chinese or other Asian Person to look over your writing for you and correct it, and of course you should pay them generously for the privilege of insulting you.

You can get ten different "sensitivity readers" who are Real Trans or Real Latinx or whatever, and they'll all give contradictory advice about what you can and can't include, so whatever you do, you'll get into trouble. I think mainstream publishers are a little at the mercy of blackmail campaigns: hire us on as sensitivity readers or else we'll conduct a PR campaign about how you're horrible racists and transphobes and all the rest of it. It's not about preservation in even a sanitised form, it's about the money.

are actually the squishy centrists compared to what’s coming down the pike behind them

"They are the grease on the slippery slope" isn't exactly what I'd call a "defense', even a tepid one.

My argument is that they are fences on the slippery slope, catching us from slipping even further down, or at the very least slowing our descent substantially.

No, they're the ones ripping up fences on the slope downhill. What is being preserved when you change the wording describing a fat kid from "fat" to "enormous"? Or replace the caricature of a horrible fat aunt with her being still horrible, but now a brute? Child-killing witches are now scientists, not shop assistants? The next revision or two, because there will always be more sensitivities being irritated by language like "brute", will be to make the witches the ones being persecuted.

They're not slowing the descent, they're paving the way.

The problem with that idea is that I don't see how the radicals could plausibly get their way, without the "centrists" softening everybody up first.

They are hilariously and unironically racist and sexist.

Absolutely. Fleming was a raging snob and it comes through. They are pure escapist wish-fulfilment fantasy, and while they probably could indeed do with a good scrubbing, if you take that out of them you're not going to have much left. I think by now most people know Bond from the movies and very few read the original novels. There is a scene in one, I can't remember which, where Bond is tortured and it left me - a person never in the possession of testicles - wincing when reading it. It's got nothing to do with real world spies at all, it's the male equivalent of romance novels if I may put it that way. Impossibly suave secret agent leads life of globe-trotting glamour in exotic locales, wining, dining, and gambling at high-end casinos all on Her Majesty's tab, while romancing a succession of femmes fatales and gorgeous women who are not the girl next door.

It's got nothing to do with real world spies at all

Wasn't Fleming himself a former spy? I can't find the quote, but I believe at one point he referred to one of his Bond novels as "the latest volume in my autobiography" or something to that effect.

Wikipedia tells me he did work in Naval Intelligence during the Second World War, but he seems to have been mainly in administration and never a field agent. although later on he was responsible for creating intelligence-gathering units:

n May 1939 Fleming was recruited by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence of the Royal Navy, to become his personal assistant. He joined the organisation full-time in August 1939, with the codename "17F", and worked out of Room 39 at the Admiralty, now known as the Ripley Building. Fleming's biographer, Andrew Lycett, notes that Fleming had "no obvious qualifications" for the role. As part of his appointment, Fleming was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in July 1939, initially as Lieutenant, but was promoted to Lieutenant Commander a few months later.

Fleming proved invaluable as Godfrey's personal assistant and excelled in administration. Godfrey was known as an abrasive character who made enemies within government circles. He frequently used Fleming as a liaison with other sections of the government's wartime administration, such as the Secret Intelligence Service, the Political Warfare Executive, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the Joint Intelligence Committee and the Prime Minister's staff.

If Fleming did say anything like that about Bond, I imagine it was less to do with the actual spying and more to do with the glamorous cover life; Fleming came from a wealthy background and led a fast, not to say dissipated, lifestyle. Criticism of the novel "Dr. No" seems to have been savage, with the real insult here being "suburban" - ouch!

The most strongly worded of the critiques came from Paul Johnson of the New Statesman, who, in his review "Sex, Snobbery and Sadism", called the novel "without doubt, the nastiest book I have ever read". Johnson went on to say that "by the time I was a third of the way through, I had to suppress a strong impulse to throw the thing away". Johnson recognised that in Bond there "was a social phenomenon of some importance", but this was seen as a negative element, as the phenomenon concerned "three basic ingredients in Dr No, all unhealthy, all thoroughly English: the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult." Johnson saw no positives in Dr. No, and said, "Mr Fleming has no literary skill, the construction of the book is chaotic, and entire incidents and situations are inserted, and then forgotten, in a haphazard manner."

The rumor is that Fleming based Bond in large part on his friend and step-cousin, Sir Christopher Lee.

The movie Quantum of Solace has Bond getting his balls whipped, I think, were you reading the source material of that, perhaps?

That's in Casino Royale (the movie). I haven't read that particular novel so I'm not sure if it was taken from the same novel or another one.

I imagine that's it, I'm not motivated enough to look it up.

Maybe I'm being unfair, or maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, but it's odd watching you get with the program. I seem to remember you as one of the "everything is fine, you're overreacting" types. After seeing so many of these kind of stories, I kind of ran out of things to say on them. If you're actually worried about preserving the history of literature, start buying the (print) books you think are worth preserving, and keep them in good condition. What's more is there to say?

Maybe I'm being unfair, or maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, but it's odd watching you get with the program. I seem to remember you as one of the "everything is fine, you're overreacting" types.

I'm not sure if you're being unfair, but while I'll admit my priors have adjusted slightly over the years, I do think many people were and are overreacting. I didn't write my thoughts out at more length, though I thought about it, because generally I am not an effortposter, but I don't think the Roald Dahl or Ian Fleming revisions are destroying our cultural heritage or cause for George Orwell memes. That doesn't mean I don't find the trend objectionable. I can think things are bad without thinking they are a prelude to the End Times. (And if they are, I am starting to worry more about AI than I am about wokeness.)

I think the explicit goal of destroying the cultural heritage was revealed enough when the freedom fighters destroyed a bunch of memorials - including a statue of Servantes, for one - in order to... well, destroy the cultural heritage. But they can't just burn it all. The reason they "fix" old works instead of banning them is they can't make new works that would be good enough for anyone to want to read them, even if it would have all the idpol checkboxes filled on the frontpage. The original woke content output is usually not something that can excite even the wokes themselves, let alone the normies who hold the most buying power. So, they need Roald Dahl and Iam Fleming as a skin suit to wear. It's not exactly Orwell - it's Orwell if O'Brien was also Agent Smith.

And if they are, I am starting to worry more about AI than I am about wokeness

Don't worry, the AIs, at least the consumer-accessible ones, would be the wokest thing you have ever seen in your life. They would drench you in wokeness in every answer they could put it in. They are the ideal vehicle of delivery for wokeness - seemingly "unbiased" - because machine can not have political views or biases, can it? - and yet fully controllable and moldable. Of course, unless they finally become conscious and decide, on the example of their creators, that humans aren't that smart if they believe in all that... I hope they would have mercy on us then.

Out of sheer curiosity: what would be your central example for destroying cultural heritage? Is there anything short of the establishment of a literal Ministry of Truth that would justify Orwell memes?

I'm a little wary of answering questions asked as "sheer curiosity" (usually they aren't, they are asked with an agenda and a desire to fight), but okay.

First, a few pebbles does not an avalanche make. For all our grousing about Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming, there are countless more offensive works that remain untouched. We are mostly sniping at small skirmishes in the Culture War, not the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

If the original versions of such works become not just out of print, but impossible and possibly illegal to acquire, I will worry more. Yes, if you want to claim things are literally Orwellian, then I do think you need to show me a literal Ministry of Truth.

I hate a lot of woke things, and in my darker moments I think maybe the doomers are right, but I've been grousing about wokeness since it was called "political correctness" (which was years before the term "SJW" was coined). Things are cyclic, and some cycles date back to the dawn of literacy.

But maybe I'll wake up one day devoured by leopards. Who knows?

(Still think SkyNet is more likely.)

Even the burning of the library of Alexandria didn't happen the way it is supposed to have done in the popular imagination, and that pop culture version is very much a deliberate creation of people with an agenda in the past.

No, Dahl and Fleming aren't important, Fleming more unimportant than Dahl. But they're straws in the wind. The little pebbles whose falling starts the avalanche in the mountains. This is a mainstream publisher mucking around with long-established properties, not a first-time YA novel getting lambasted for having the wrong type of slavery. Indeed, the first "it's only a few pebbles" was a 2022 memoir by someone who was the typical liberal do-gooder, but was guilty of being the White Saviour:

Last month, controversy was reignited in the UK around teacher Kate Clanchy’s memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, about her time teaching kids from diverse backgrounds to write poetry.

Although Clanchy’s book was initially lauded (even winning the Orwell Prize), criticism soon eclipsed praise. Readers, prominent writers of colour and autistic author Dara McNulty protested the language Clanchy used to describe her pupils (“Somali height”, “Ashkenazi nose”, autistic children as “jarring company”). Her publisher Picador agreed the objections were “instructive and clear-sighted”; eventually, it withdrew the book from publication.

When an author or other creator is not from the group being represented in their work, they might decide to engage a member of that particular community to read it and offer feedback. A novel featuring a transgender Indigenous character would ideally be read by a transgender Indigenous person, and so on.

And if you can't easily get your hands on a trans Indigenous person, you won't get published, seems to be the message here.

They moved on from non-fiction to fiction. What is the next target? Dickens is very problematic, even in his own time (see Fagin). A lot of "Classics" by Dead White Males that don't have even a single transgender Indigenous person! Even worse, there's the reshaping of the past to fit the present:

A recent example from academic publishing shows how this happens. Mary Rambaran-Olm was asked to read a chapter on Early Medieval England of a history book written for the general public. Rambaran-Olm has expertise in relevant academic fields, and also through her personal experience as a scholar of Afro/Indo Caribbean origin.

The white male authors overwhelmingly did not accept her advice about problems with the manuscript’s representation of the past and how it feeds into contemporary racism. They thanked her in the acknowledgements, however. This created the false impression she had actively shaped the contents of the book.

You see? How do you or anyone else learn about Early Mediaeval England? Generally you read a scholarly book. But if the scholarly books are increasingly being "sensitivity read" to make sure that they include all the right think about "contemporary racism", what version are you getting? How much is this already happening, without us knowing?

I guess you could count me among those who disagree with you and say that the alarm bells should have gone off a long time ago. I'm sympathetic to the "paranoid" side because I and other people have noticed the pitfalls that come with total-corporate-publisher-control of media. This is to say that I think we're conceivably not very far from the scenario that would make you more worried.

Do I personally think it will get to the point of criminalization of the old stuff? Not really, but the past decade has taught me that a lot of things that aren't de jure illegal can still get you into a whole universe of trouble. Some things need not be explicitly forbidden--which, in a way, is probably worse than an explicit blacklist.

For all our grousing about Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming, there are countless more offensive works that remain untouched. We are mostly sniping at small skirmishes in the Culture War, not the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

This sounds like the modern equivalent of "it's just a few kids on college campuses."

While I feel like the 2018 adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 completely missed Bradbury's point and nuetered the narrative by rewriting the second half of the story to be about the hunt for some magical MacGuffin, one change they made that I actually thought was pretty clever/prescient was changing making it so that "the Firemen" aren't burning books per se, they're disposing of the pre-existing hard-copies. You can read whatever you want so long as it passes through a Google.gov datacenter, and if you start reading to much "problematic" material you might get a call from HR.

I'm a little wary of answering questions asked as "sheer curiosity" (usually they aren't, they are asked with an agenda and a desire to fight), but okay.

I admit that I enjoy setting bait and springing traps, but I really was just curious what you think about it. Thank you for indulging me.

If the original versions of such works become not just out of print, but impossible and possibly illegal to acquire, I will worry more.

You're not worried that at that point it will be to late?

You're not worried that at that point it will be to late?

Fair. But what I see right now is bowdlerization and social pressure, which is bad enough, but not unprecedented. We've had things like the Hays Code and Comics Code Authority in the past. I think actual censorship laws being passed would be a discernible leap forward towards your hypothetical Ministry of Truth.

Yes, if you want to claim things are literally Orwellian, then I do think you need to show me a literal Ministry of Truth.

I think there's a pretty good case to be made for federal agencies contacting Twitter and Facebook to stop the spread of disapproved information is effectively this, even if it lacks the exact name. Would "Disinformation Governance Board" be close enough to MinTru to qualify? I don't expect the government to get quite so aggressive about children's books, but the approach taken to information that is critical to a public trying to make sense of current policies and elections is not encouraging.

Judging by the amount of proclamations about the necessity of fighting disinformation from the high places, the Board will be back. Maybe as part of CDC, subject to WHO, because we already learned that the rules do not apply if you yell "pandemic!". And since, as we know from the same CDC, racism, sexism, gun control, and many other such things are public health emergencies, you can get the idea.

Have you guys watched "The Bear"? A couple of notes on this show:

  1. This show is absolutely excellent. If you've worked in a kitchen, or if you've ever worked in any sort of extreme-stress environment, this show captures the feeling perfectly.

  2. Just to stress again, I absolutely loved this show. 10/10 acting, cinematography, story, music. It's a perfect show.

-------BEGIN SPOILERS--------

  1. There is a heavily implied theme here, which is that the main character, Carmy, has a toxic personality, and that he needs to overcome this in order to succeed. Some of the other characters, the young female chef, as well as the older "gentler" male cake making chef have conflicts with the Carmy over how mean he is being to them. Eventually these two quit, then "forgive" him, then they eventually return.

  2. Many bits have been spilled about how the theme of this show is "toxic masculinity".

  3. The problem I have with this is: Carmy is presented at the beginning of the show as an absolute savant level of chef. He is young, has already been declared as the most promising up and coming chef by some prestigious magazine, and has worked at both The French Laundry, and Noma, two of the top restaurants in the world. In one scene the younger female chef is explaining to the cake maker chef how when she finished culinary school (she also went to a very prestigious school, CIA, but hasn't done anything yet) she went out on a tour of top restaurants, and that Carmy (the man she now works for) cooked the best meal she has ever had in her life.

  4. The people who work with Carmy, who complain about how mean he is, are morons. Young chef girl screws up multiple times in ways that could be disastrous for the restaurant. Cake maker man has been essentially trying to teach himself how to bake while on the clock, and the "blowup moment" where he quits is during a high stress situation (that young female chef created and Carmy is in the process of trying to solve). Cake maker wants Carmy to taste/give feedback on some donuts he has been trying to learn to make. Carmy yells at him that he doesn't have time for this right now, and cake maker quits.

In the setting of the show, where Carmy is one of the top chefs in the entire world, the reality is that he would have an endless list of people willing to work for him for free, who would be willing to follow every command he gave to a t. Additionally, if this top chef was known to be working at some crappy beef sandwich restaurant in Chicago, they'd have a line around the block of people wanting to taste his food.

Again, this show is amazing, and the CW elements are easily ignorable. I'm curious if anybody else watched this show and had similar frustrations about it.

(Also: I'm not sure why I like writing posts like this as numbered lists.)

Watched it over the last two days because you said it was amazing. My wife loved it I really liked it. We didn't pick up on much of these culture war angles. She liked how diverse the cast was, and while that does bug me it didn't feel out of place here. I never got that they were going with toxic masculinity when it came to Carmen; Richie sure. In the meltdown scene one could critique that one should never scream at someone unless it's life or death and they might not hear you, but in the case of the scene Sydney and Marcus both ignored Carmen multiple times before he started screaming. Even warning one of them that he was going to "fuck up their day" if they didn't stop doing exactly what they kept doing. Sydnie was not functioning well, and while Richie is an ass he only had a (by his standards) very light "see, I told you so" before getting to work the best he could to get through the crisis while Sydnie kept spiraling.

The show had potential, but the main actor looks too much like Gene Wilder for me to have thought about anything else while watching.

I didn't think there were that many CW elements, unless you're the sort of person who writes culture columns for Slate or The Atlantic and feels a compulsion to parse for "subtext". Young chef girl's mistake I could understand as a screw-up from an overworked sous chef, but cake maker man was behaving like a fucking moron in the middle of an extremely high-pressure service. He really didn't deserve an apology.

All true, though I don't think he is a famous chef who would attract big lines exactly – he worked for the famous chef, and is deliberately trying to keep the restaurant low-key until it's ready to bust out. He is also working with less-than-ideal premises and far-less-than-ideal people in order to honour his brother and work through his trauma. But sure, the writers throw more rocks at their main character than is fully realistic...

I didn't think Carmy had a toxic personality at all. The issue is more that he's coming in to a low end environment as the new boss and trying to get everyone there to hold themselves to a higher standard and change the way they do things and that's always a recipe for conflict. They don't fight him cause he's a toxic man they fight him because he's trying to change things from how they've always been done. His cousin is the much more stereotypically toxic man. Carmy turned into a sex symbol because of his amazing hair and intensity so I don't think the public judgement of him was a 'toxic' man.

The meltdown scene was great. There are time when you can totally be 'in the right' and other people have fucked up but part of good leadership is just understanding it's more important to keep everyone else functional than take out your own stress on them. Sydney's had his back the whole time and believes in his vision more then anyone else but she creates this massive crisis because she doesn't toggle one setting in their online order system. He's understandably furious but it's not a reason to lose confidence in her as a chef and when he takes it out on her, she feels betrayed because she's had his back in all the internal conflicts. So she takes it out on the baker guy and then melts down. Carmy is totally in the right, it's just everyone involved is stressed out and at each others throats and it would take superhuman self-control to handle that situation calmly.

But that's the point of his season long arc. Their restaurant is this deeply dysfunctional mess of weird arrangements with loansharks, deals with low level mob dudes, and random family and friends who do odd jobs. Carmy can't let it go even though it's driving him nuts because of his relationship to his brother. He wants to avoid perpetuating the abusive work culture he encountered in high end kitchens, but the stress of running this thing is such that he's inevitably going to lash out at the people who work for him. He can't win because the business is fucked and he needs to move on and do his own thing.

Yeah I didn't get the "toxic masculinity" thing either, if that was what the angle actually was. Seemed like the central arc was Carmy overcoming his depression and self-hate, and how all that intertwined with his brother's death and the stress of assuming his legacy.

I guess I’d like to see the “growth” happen among the people working for Camry then, too. Cake man should realize that he was getting sucked into his own side project, and the younger chef (I’m sorry I’m seriously terrible with names) should have had an aha moment where she realized her greenness and unwillingness to listen to Carmy almost sank the business.

Maybe there’s something there where the viewers are meant to take on the role of the naive staff and see Carmy as a bad guy?

The scene where he apologizes to the young chef was particularly ridiculous to me. She screwed up his restaurant, then in the middle of him trying to fix it, when he would most need help, she just walked out and he is now apologizing to her about this?

Again, loved the show. 10/10, can’t wait for more of it. Just like talking about this part of the writing.

Enjoyed the show! Didn't think super hard about the toxic masculinity angle, but the energy was generally incredible.

Everything you described rang false to me too. Nothing in the show suggests Carmy is toxic. He's painted as a complex but broadly sympathetic character up until that one amazing episode where he basically just had a shitty day.

If anything the show is about family dysfunction and fallout. The weird implied racial stuff is jarring, like a sidebar for a separate audience.

One of my favorite shows of the last 20 years. Slight but powerful.

Looks like Dilbert is being pulled from newspapers following controversial remarks by its creator, Scott Adams https://www.foxnews.com/us/laid-off-newspapers-drop-office-cartoon-dilbert-over-creators-racial-remarks

Multiple newspapers have pulled the popular office comedy comic strip "Dilbert" after its creator Scott Adams made racist comments in his podcast, and then doubled down on them.

"If nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with White people – according to this poll, not to me – that’s a hate group," Adams said during his "Coffee with Scott Adams" vlog, referring to a Rasmussen poll published this week. "That’s a hate group, and I don’t want anything to do with them."

"And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I can give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people," he continued, adding, "There is no fixing this … you just have to escape," which he said was why he moved to his current neighborhood that has "a very low Black population."

I don't think this is quite that big of deal personally. He has FU money and his brand/career at punditry keeps growing. I think his bigger risk would is being de-platformed from Youtube/Twitter. He don't need Dilbert anymore but he does need his Youtube and Twitter accounts.

I had no idea he was even making the Dilbert comics anymore. If pressed I'd have guessed he stopped some time in the early 2010s. I've read his blog on and off since the 2016 election and he almost never discussed Dilbert and when he did it had a decidedly in-the-past tense to the whole discussion.

I think his point was that if the races were reversed, no one would care.

It's not exactly a fresh point to make for anybody who was awake for the last 20 years or so. Everybody knows about this asymmetry and everybody has made up their minds about it. If you talk about memetic power, "It's OK to be white" is still unbeatable. He is not adding much to it, just riding the coattails. I don't know if he can do better, but if he can, he should.

stale, yes, but it got a lot of people talking about it, lots of twitter engagement, so probably a success nonetheless.

As a troll, yes, he is still a hugely successful one. I think he loves it, and why won't he?

Scott Adams seems to have updated quite strongly on a 1000 person poll, which included black people, over the nuance of who agreed with an apparent well known(?) racist dog whistle.

He decides from here that black people hate white people and that white people must get away from them. Then he hurls some fairly ready to go insults about black people in general that I guess he was just saving for this?

He seems as... crazed ... as usual here, but I do agree he's being taken out of context. He obviously feels betrayed because he thought of himself as a fierce advocate for black people (??) but learning that all black people might still have problems with all white people completely flipped him.

I'm trying to think of a more fair headline. Maybe: Dilbert creator decides black people are hate group after reading one small poll about a racist dog whistle, cautions white people to "get the fuck away" from black people.

He seems as... crazed ... as usual here, but I do agree he's being taken out of context.

Is he crazed? I think he might be a bit set off because he is upset about learning about the huge black bigotry problem that the less...influential set of online intellectuals have known about for decades. He also seems to just be vocalizing what people do anyways: move away from black people because they are violent and will make your life suck. From a post I read elsewhere, apparently he is taking a victory lap on that latter point now. His new claim is people are pretending to be angry because they agree with him. I personally have no insight into the inner workings of a white progressive that seeks out "good schools" for his/her children, but he is either correct, or simply underestimating the level of doublethink most people can hold.

huge black bigotry problem

This poll does not demonstrate that at all, because the slogan in question has become so loaded among people aware of the controversy.

I mean, you might say that, but its a pre-existing known issue. If this is the tripwire that opened his eyes, it is that.

The people looking for good schools are, I am fairly sure, actually looking for good schools. At least "good schools" as defined by helicopter parents and Tiger Moms. (Though as another poster on another forum pointed out, there are some who avoid districts with too many Asians because they don't think the resulting high-pressure high-homework environment is good; this is probably as racist as they get). That this strongly anti-correlates with black and Hispanic population is probably something they avoid thinking about.

The ones who are looking for "safety" are likely more of a mixed bag. I suspect it runs the gamut from those who simply assume black-and-Hispanic means dangerous to those who are aware of it and mildly embarrassed to those who are full crimestop and don't think about it.

Half of black Americans declined to say it was okay to be white. Yes, it was just one poll. But isn't that the only part of this story that can reasonably be labeled 'crazy'?

I've listened to him for a while off and on, IMO this is his usual schtick, to find a news item of interest and discuss it from a perspective of taking it maximally seriously. This leads to him frequently seeming to take contradictory positions. He's previously said things like, if Confederate statues make black people uncomfortable than we should indeed take them down, and take words they find offensive, i.e. the N word, out of our vocabulary, etc. I've never seen him approach things from a perspective of, my true worldview overall is X, is event Y a good enough reason to update it?

The weird part IMO is he must have known something like this would happen if he applied his usual MO to this story in this way. I wonder why he chose to do it now. Maybe he just doesn't care much?

I'd also say, if you don't already know that a very substantial number of black people (not all, but definitely more than a few percent) really truly do hate white people, where've you been, and have you ever really talked to black people?

I mean, I don't necessarily feel sympathy for him since he says lots of inflammatory stuff and has what looks like deranged thinking processes. But I do think if he goes down it should be over things he actually said.

I'd also say, if you don't already know that a very substantial number of black people (not all, but definitely more than a few percent) really truly do hate white people, where've you been, and have you ever really talked to black people?

The black people I consider friends don't say how much they hate white people. Biased sample perhaps!

That said, it's plausible that half of black people think it's bad to be white just not sure this survey is the one to go to production on, given the small sample and the general confusion around using a dog whistle to measure sentiment.

The black people I consider friends don't say how much they hate white people. Biased sample perhaps!

IME, the majority of upper-middle class American white people have a big blind spot about this due to only interacting with black people in contexts they find familiar. Where do most people meet their friends? School, work, hobbies, sports, music, etc. If you do mostly typical white people things for those, the only black people you will meet and have the opportunity to talk in depth with and befriend are the one who have already chosen to step away from primarily black activities and participate in mostly white activities for an extended amount of time.

Unless you go out of your way to do something unusual for your race and class, like get deeply enthusiastic about rap music or playing pickup basketball, and stay with it despite being one of only a handful of white people (how do you think those black guys who choose to do white stuff feel?), you will never meet the black people who mostly want to stay around their own and do their own things and never hear the kinds of things they say to each other.

It's a hard thing to study or do research on, and there's not much media out there that covers it. I have no idea how to get hard numbers on it. It's definitely out there though. The Boondocks TV series has some good examples. If you've read Freakonomics, there's a passage in the story about a university researcher embedding with an urban Chicago crack gang, whose leader happens to be a black college graduate with a business degree who tried working in a normal legitimate business but felt too out of place there. Consider the deeper meaning - everyone around him must have understood what he was talking about and why he chose to leave a white-collar job to lead a crack-dealing gang.

I'd honestly assumed Scott Adams would have been cancelled already by now. What took this so long?

The audience for newspaper comics is old. Unlike tech where good programmers and creatives have lots of sway writers for regional newspapers are constantly being laid off so audience demands are important than staff demands. Therefore Adams has to do something management anticipates will be objectionable to it's boomer audience rather than to a staff of college educated millennials before cancelling him.

That would make sense--Dilbert had already been pulled from one corporation's newspapers like last year, I think, and possibly over something else, but Adams has never said or done anything in his post-2015 phase that would rile up the boomers. But then, why this now?

(But then again, is it really "boomers," or is it actually Gen X? I feel like Gen X were the kinds of people who actually read Dilbert in its original heyday.)

(But then again, is it really "boomers," or is it actually Gen X? I feel like Gen X were the kinds of people who actually read Dilbert in its original heyday.)

To the people who complain about boomers, there are only boomers, millennials, and whatever Z is being called today. Gen-X does not exist. Please do not remind them otherwise.

I think it's an interesting step though. Regardless of what the headlines say, Adams was doing 'racism' from a rather 'queer' angle. Whilst people can shout about racism from the sidelines I don't think there are any salient right of center arguments against the position Adams put himself in.

As a white person, is your safety and wellbeing secondary to your obligation to help black people that hate you?

In addition to what @Glassnoser said...

Your safety and well-being has always been secondary, it's one of the West's founding Tenets. Christ goes to the cross willingly

This could reasonably be considered by some as cloying virtue signaling

Christ was so nervous beforehand that he sweat blood and he cried out 'father why have you forsaken me' on the cross. You don't have to smile and wave as you're crucified, not even Christ did that.

I would like to be able to say that such arguments are only salient for the likes of David French. But I honestly think you're right on the money.

Regardless of anything else I think there is an element to wit prioritizing "safety and wellbeing" leads one to lose out on the means to attain it. A man commits himself to eliminating all risks and then wonders where the rewards went.

The relationship between whites and blacks in the US would be the absolute worst example to make that argument though.

Why does some black people hating white people and being dangerous mean that one should avoid all black people? Many black people are obviously not like that.

99%+ of AR-15 owners don't commit mass shootings; it doesn't stop the half of the country that doesn't understand gun culture from finding all AR-15 owners at best suspicious and at worst actively threatening.

To be honest, I don't find an argument "some idiots do idiotic thing X, therefore you should do similar thing Y" particularly compelling.

What's your point?

Attempting to point out the hypocrisy of a social justice movement that simultaneously argues that a) it's horribly racist for white people to be frightened by black people on account of the actions of a very small subset of black people and b) it makes perfect sense for people to be frightened by guns on account of the actions of a very small subset of gun owners.

But I am not part of that social justice movement and did not say those things. So why are you responding to my comment with that?

Area A has higher risk than area B. Which one would you like your family to live in?

Now help me understand why the fact that 'many black people are not violent and hateful' should influence your decision. Do the same for the school you will send your kid to.

I would certainly live in a richer, safer area. But I would not have a preference between safer area with a lot of black families and equally safe and attractive area with no black families. As an anecdata, I had a black family live almost next door to me (second door actually) and the only non-positive thing I can remember about them is that they put up "Black lives matter" placard on their window for a while. I certainly wouldn't have an objection to living close to a similar family (even with the placard, I had much much worse neighbors than that - who were lily white btw, which is easily explained of course by the fact that the majority of my neighbors were white. Interestingly enough they replaced another black family who moved out - and who were very good neighbors). Why would I Goodhart myself in such important matters? If I want to live in a safe neighborhood, I'd just look into its safety directly, not into an imperfect proxy like the race of its inhabitants. Once I know the direct data, the race part would not even be necessary. I mean, certainly, there would be a correlation, likely, but I don't need the correlation if I can have the necessary data directly!

If your preference for safety leads you to implicitly avoid living with black people, then this is fine.

If your preference for safety leads you to explicitly avoid living with black people, then this is... fine? Or no?

On top of all of that, race as a proxy functions on a much broader level than just crime. Which is why I mentioned schooling. When you have picked a safe area with a 'good' school you won't be living near black people. Those are just two things that you can virtually guarantee via the race proxy. It might not be as precise as looking directly at the safety of the area and the 'goodness' of the school, but there is undeniably a lot of information there. Not just information about the immediate circumstance, but also as a predictor. Is the area and school close to blacks? Are there signs of these areas getting 'darker' or 'lighter'? I'm not saying this information is 'better'. I'm simply recognizing that it is undeniably information relevant to the things cared about. Not to mention race based ingroup bias where many blacks otherize whites.

I guess I am not understanding where the need to even express this distinction comes from. People use and live by countless imperfect proxies their whole lives. In ways that directly and indirectly impact people close by them or far away from them. No one cares. But for some reason we won't allow ourselves to use this very obvious and highly informative proxy because, what? We can imagine a hypothetical situation that negates it? Or because we can recognize that information about groups doesn't reflect on all individuals of that group?

I could understand a person who ingroups blacks being mad at someone who is outgrouping blacks. But your post strikes me as being written by someone who is doing neither. Not a racist, not an anti-racist. 'People are just people and when they do good its good and when they do bad its bad.' Maybe I'm wrong on that impression, but regardless, I don't see why such a person would hold any reservations about taking away information from race as a proxy. It's just people. Some of them are a different color and commit a lot more crime. What's the big deal?

If your preference for safety leads you to implicitly avoid living with black people, then this is fine.

But it doesn't. It makes me avoid living in poor neighborhoods with bad policing and so on. Yes, many of such neighborhoods have a lot of black people, many of other such neighborhoods don't have any black people. I don't care. I won't live in either.

When you have picked a safe area with a 'good' school you won't be living near black people.

Again, if I look for good schools, I'd just look for good schools. Why would I again need a proxy if I can just find out which school is good?

I'm simply recognizing that it is undeniably information relevant to the things cared about.

That's the point - it is not. It's like you wanted to fly to Canada, and instead of going to the travel site and looking up flights to Canada and buying a ticket, you started tracking people who look Canadian to you, in case they'd want to go home and you then could follow them and figure out how to get to Canada. Sure, if you're lucky you could get to Canada this way too, but it's not the way any sane person would approach it!

But it doesn't. It makes me avoid living in poor neighborhoods with bad policing and so on.

You imply that it does. Race is a stronger predictor of crime than poverty in the majority of the literature that looks at this. By the standard you allow yourself to say you are avoiding living in poor neighborhoods you are by definition avoiding living in black neighborhoods. I would even hazard a guess that, proportionally, a poor neighborhood would be more likely to be safe and have a good school than a black one in the vast majority of cases.

I don't care.

I never said you did. The point of the 'implicit' example was precisely to say that it's not about it being a stated preference.

Again, if I look for good schools, I'd just look for good schools. Why would I again need a proxy if I can just find out which school is good?

I didn't say you needed it. I said that it was valid. I said it wasn't necessarily as precise as directly looking at the metric as measured, but that there was undeniably information there. Considering that no metric, not matter how direct, is a crystal ball I don't see why a person who professes to no care about race would ignore it if it had valid and relevant information. You are making inferences about reality based on metrics and proxies.

That's the point - it is not.

The correlations between black and every single relevant metric are higher than practically anything else. To couch it as luck or insanity to deduce something from race as a proxy goes far beyond any realm of rationality. On top of that, I'm not proposing an either or. I find your analogy completely inapplicable to what I've been saying.

Race is a stronger predictor of crime than poverty in the majority of the literature that looks at this.

That very well may be - but I don't need a predictor if I can get the actual thing measured!

I didn't say you needed it. I said that it was valid.

Possible, but why invent such proxy if there's no need in it?

You are making inferences about reality based on metrics and proxies.

Well, yes, but there are more direct metrics for the quality of schools, why anybody would be interested in metrics that are secondary or tertiary?

The correlations between black and every single relevant metric are higher than practically anything else.

Ok, there's a correlation. But so what? There are a lot of correlations: https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations Given that I have access to direct metrics, how this correlation is more useful to me than correlation between butter production in Bangladesh and marriage rate in Kentucky?

More comments

Saying one should avoid black people is a much stronger statement than saying one should not live in neighbourhoods with a lot of black people.

Adams was giving a practical advice to white people: 'get the hell away from black people'.

I don't see the angle you are gunning for here. Unless you are arguing against racism in thought but not practice.

Adam’s said you need to escape black people which is why Adam’s moved to a place with very few black people. One could read that as “don’t live in neighborhoods with a lot of black people”

Alternatively,

“Be it so. This statement of opinion is your choice; prepare the presses. But my company has also a choice. When you make statements like that we cancel our contracts and denigrate you. My lawyers shall therefore prepare the paperwork for when your statement is released. Let us all act according to our free choice."

They're respecting his "choice" about as much as the British respected the Indian "choice" to immolate widows.

At least nobody was murdered, or threatened to be murdered. We live in the gentlest of times!

I think it makes sense to read this as a statement about the locus of control, here. That is, Adams' views are to be determined by Adams himself. His opinions are not controlled by the newspaper, nor does the newspaper consider itself responsible for controlling them. It's actually quite an important principle, in its own way.

No one at any level of this controversy, except possibly Adams himself, actually cares whether his views are his choice. The newspaper wants to avoid a reader boycott that they don't know won't happen and so are terrified of being seen as "supporting racists" or whatever. That statement is just a soundbite.

I'm curious about this. To what extent are his views actually his choice?

"His views are his choice, our choice is to not associate with him" is a lie from both directions.

If newspapers really, really cared what their cartoonists think, they'd have their on-staff investigative reporters do PI work on 'em. They don't, because what they actually care about from revealed preferences is their cartoonist's public-facing, loudly broadcasted views. If it's not gonna cause them PR problems, they don't care, and if it's not a broadcasted view, it's not gonna cause them PR problems. No-one cares if you don't really think General Secretary Andropov is a good leader, so long as you keep your opinions to your fucking self, comrade.

The other direction in which this is a lie is that it's not the newspaper's choice either. They're being coerced, extorted, by (their expectations of) their own readership. That's what a "PR problem" is - a problem that wouldn't matter unless the public's reaction mattered. If it were 1950 and Dilbert was being published mostly in the South, Adams' comments wouldn't be a PR problem, they'd be a PR boon, and no-one would get cancelled; which serves to prove that the newspaper is similarly constrained by the political milieu in which it operates.

Admittedly, this sort of analysis is mildly comolicated by the recent dynamic of entryism into newspapers by actual ideological zealots who would like to use investigative reporters as Stasi thoughtpolice on their own colleagues and don't care if the newspaper goes bankrupt so long as Brown Scare enemies get cancelled, but I don't think those people are making the command decisions. Yet.

Well, yes, that was the case before the epoch of wokeness and every company having VP DIE. Now, the whole thing is short-circuited and the twitter doesn't even crow three times before the wrongthinker is already cancelled by the in-house DIE team.

You are overly philosophizing a one-line throwaway rationalization but;

I do wonder if one could make a convincing woke case that beliefs are actually not one's own choice just like their race, gender, and sexual orientation; how much would that short circuit the wokes hostility towards nonbelievers? Something along the lines of..

" Muslims and most Black people despite being minorities don't hold welcoming views towards LGBTQ people. This is not a good thing because in our fight against the patriarchal white supremacy we all live in all minorites need to combine their strengths to stand even a fighting chance. Nonetheless, we don't consider it a moral failure on the part of Black people or Muslims because we all know that black people can do no wrong ever even minority cultures historically have not been safe from the influence of pervasive systems of bigotry. Often, all the disenfranchised have are their culture. Therefore we should tolerate bigotry from black people consider cultural beliefs and traditions to be a protected form of expression."

I do wonder if one could make a convincing woke case that beliefs are actually not one's own choice just like their race, gender, and sexual orientation; how much would that short circuit the wokes hostility towards nonbelievers?

It wouldn't at all. The nonbelievers are already evil in their minds; if you managed to sincerely convince them that there was nothing they could do to change this through activism, education, and other outlets, I would be willing to bet that a non-trivial number would adopt eliminationist rhetoric, and a non-zero number of them would act on it.

To what extent are his views actually his choice?

To all practical extents, for this and most questions of value and abstract assessment. We choose which arguments to accept, which to interrogate, which to reject, and for each issue the chain of argument extends infinitely for any question of significant complexity. We follow that chain as far as we wish, and where we stop on one chain versus another is always a choice.

It's true, perhaps, to a limited extent, that one cannot arbitrarily change basic, heavily reinforced beliefs about simple, obvious things. Even with these, though, one can choose to actively undermine those reinforcements, until the belief itself becomes unsupported enough to be a mere opinion.

If data comes about that demonstrates I'm wrong, then that's a learning experience, not a choice to change my view.

You can also ignore the data and remain committed to your view despite the evidence. I'm not sure if that's a 'choice' in some philosophical sense but there is more than one way this can go.

You are defending the actions taken, the question was about the reasoning. Choosing to not court controversy is very different to choosing what to believe. No matter how his beliefs were discovered they would have ellicited the same reaction. But he didn't choose them.

Beliefs are supported by the assessment of evidence. Assessment is judgement. Judgement is choice.

Evidence is acquired by searching for it. Searching or not is a choice.

You and others in this thread are looking at heavily supported, highly-reinforced beliefs, and noting that they are not easily changed on a whim. In the same way, addictions, phobias, and other heavily-supported or highly reinforced mental constructs are also difficult to change on a whim. The fact that you can choose to make some choices much easier or harder to make than they might otherwise be may obfuscate the choices being made, but does not obviate them.

Free will is an illusion*. A judgement is a choice in the sense that it is the selection of one option out of many, it is not necessarily a conscious decision. If you dislike a burger because of its taste you have judged it, but you didn't have a choice between "mmm I just can't get enough of this disgusting burger" and "snakes alive what did I just put in my mouth?"

Which is beside the point that Adams choosing to not court controversy is very different to choosing what he believes.

*But you should behave as if it's real regardless.

Free will is an illusion[.]

That is certainly a belief one can choose to hold, but the entire context of this discussion is over whether the paper should choose to treat Adams other than how they have. To the exact extent that Adams' actions are not chosen, neither are those of the people punishing him, or those of us arguing about the situation. It's not that this line of thinking can't have an internally consistent logic, it's just completely pointless to the exact extent it's not selectively applied.

A judgement is a choice in the sense that it is the selection of one option out of many, it is not necessarily a conscious decision.

Not necessarily, no. Biases and priors weigh heavily on most judgements. But the biases and priors are themselves formed largely by previous choices, some large, some very small and almost imperceptible. The chains of causality are tightly knotted, but our consciousness and the will that directs it are, I think, dispositive in the final analysis.

If you dislike a burger because of its taste you have judged it, but you didn't have a choice between "mmm I just can't get enough of this disgusting burger" and "snakes alive what did I just put in my mouth?"

If you have disliked a burger because of its taste, you have reacted to it. Instinctive reactions can, with effort, be overridden. Tastes can be acquired, associations changed, biases shaped and altered. All these are completely normal things that people do every day, as part of teaching, social interaction, and personal growth.

Which is beside the point that Adams choosing to not court controversy is very different to choosing what he believes.

I have spoken only about Adams' beliefs, but should go a step further: Adams is not a good-faith communicator. He is not, strictly speaking, honest, either about his beliefs or his intentions. His normal modus operandi is to say things not because they are true, but to elicit desired reactions from his audience and from the public at large. I am normally quite leery of the "they're just saying it for attention, they're a grifter" argument applied to people who speak out against woke orthodoxy, but it seems to me that "grifter" is a reasonably accurate description of Adams, and I am pretty sure he is, in fact, doing it for the attention. My guess is that he's done the math, newspapers are dying, and so he's getting himself "cancelled" out of a market that does him limited good, in exchange for public attention that will boost his various entertainment properties.

It seems like we are talking past each other. My whole argument is about not necessarily conscious decisions. You ceded the argument to me when you said:

Not necessarily, no.

And elsewhere when you said

It's true, perhaps, to a limited extent, that one cannot arbitrarily change basic, heavily reinforced beliefs about simple, obvious things.

Like your ability to determine facts from evidence. If you learn a bunch of inconvenient facts, you can't just choose to ignore them and believe the opposite. You can lie to yourself and others about it, but if you believe something is a fact, saying it isn't true doesn't change your belief. The belief can change over time, I never said beliefs can't change, but you merely chose to lie about it - it is not until you are no longer lying about it that it becomes a different belief. And you won't stop lying about it until you lose faith in the facts you originally believed.

That's the difference between a belief and a reason - faith. But reason isn't an alternative to faith, you need to have faith in reasoning to utilise it - you can't start reasoning until you have faith in reasoning as a tool to ascertain the truth. And once you trust in your own ability to use logic and deduction and inference, it is almost impossible to stop believing in it, no matter how much you wish you could, as anyone who has found evidence the love of their life is cheating on them knows. So if you start going down the racial crime statistics rabbit hole, for which the rebuttal is "how dare you look at that!", you are going to arrive at conclusions you probably shouldn't put in your podcast (note I am not claiming the newspaper did wrong by him, I don't think they had a choice either, as I have already said it is the reasoning not the actions I take issue with).

But being silent about them doesn't change your beliefs. The only thing that would change your beliefs is alternative evidence, which doesn't exist, or if you abandoned logic and reasoning. Perhaps you can do that. I don't think it's outrageous to think Adams can't, because I know a lot of other people who are in that position. People who didn't want to be "racist", people who desperately sought out rebuttals and alternative evidence because they were told repeatedly throughout their lives and believed that black crime is a racist myth. But they didn't find rebuttals and alternative evidence, because the alternative is "Wait these stats agree with racists? Stop recording them then!"

Which is why I agree that Adams is not a good faith communicator and also don't care. He's as good faith as any other media pundit. He's saying something other people, people without his reach, have been saying. That is when a pundit is closest to truth, and when people say they don't think he can choose that belief they are often people who came to a similar unavoidable conclusion.

If you learn a bunch of inconvenient facts, you can't just choose to ignore them and believe the opposite.

You mean you shouldn't do that; the unwashed masses do so most of the time. Meanwhile, sophisticated, urbane individuals such as yourself or I simply weigh the inconvenient facts against a set of more convinient ones, with our values/worldview/will casting the deciding vote. Intelligent people learn that any question worth discussing is highly complex, hence comes with a fair amount of ambiguity, and that ambiguity is more than sufficient for opposite conclusions to be drawn from the same set of evidence, merely through weighting, emphasis, and similar selection effects. You can conclude, if you are young and have not yet learned that you are capable of error, that anyone who disagrees with your assessment of evidence is simply lying to themselves. But From many, many years of arguing with people, I have concluded that, no, they really do see things differently.

But reason isn't an alternative to faith, you need to have faith in reasoning to utilize it - you can't start reasoning until you have faith in reasoning as a tool to ascertain the truth. And once you trust in your own ability to use logic and deduction and inference, it is almost impossible to stop believing in it, no matter how much you wish you could, as anyone who has found evidence the love of their life is cheating on them knows.

You don't have to stop believing in it for Reason to not operate deterministically. Human reason simply is not good enough, precise and reliable enough, and the knowledge it's based on comprehensive enough, to operate deterministically beyond even slight abstractions. It's good enough to read a map or split an atom. It's good enough for you to be convinced your wife is cheating on you, if you catch her in flagrante. It's not good enough to tell you why she's cheating on you, or how you should feel about it, or what to do about it. And this is for extremely simple questions, with low-single-digit numbers of first-order variables!

And once you trust in your own ability to use logic and deduction and inference, it is almost impossible to stop believing in it, no matter how much you wish you could, as anyone who has found evidence the love of their life is cheating on them knows. So if you start going down the racial crime statistics rabbit hole, for which the rebuttal is "how dare you look at that!"

...This does not seem accurate to me.

You and Adams are pointing to the obvious, overwhelming evidence of Black crime rates. The people on the other side are not shrieking "how dare you look at that", they are pointing to the obvious, overwhelming evidence of multiple centuries of brutal chattel slavery, followed by another century of strictly-enforced racial oppression, followed by a few decades of quite severe racial animosity that slowly declined over time. That is a lot of evidence that you neglected to mention in your summary!

You weigh these two sets of evidence, and many others besides, and in doing so you use your own values, perspective, and axioms to render judgement. It is my contention that your values and axioms are themselves chosen by you, that they tend to be dispositive unless the evidence is absolutely overwhelming on an issue, and that the evidence is never, ever overwhelming on any issue of real significance. You choose your values, incrementally over time, and in turn your values lead you to choose what evidence to collect, and how to assess it.

Conclusions are, to a first approximation, never unavoidable on any question of substance. If they were, it would not be a question of substance any longer, because evidence would deterministically conform peoples' beliefs to the truth. This observably does not happen with questions pertaining to human nature, behavior, or history, to philosophy, theology, or ideology, questions of value and questions of worldview. People differ not because they fail to use their reason properly, but because human reason itself is insufficient to the task.

More comments

To the exact extent that Adams' actions are not chosen, neither are those of the people punishing him, or those of us arguing about the situation.

This is not true. The objecvtion to Adams having "chosen" isn't a general one about all sorts of choices, it's about his beliefs. Beliefs are not-chosen in a stronger sense than actions are.

Beliefs are not-chosen in a stronger sense than actions are.

Belief is always an action.

Some actions are trivial, and some are not. Closing my laptop is an action. Becoming a billionaire is also an action. Closing my laptop and becoming a billionaire can be thought of as a single process, or a whole series of complex sub- and sub-sub and sub-sub-sub processes, but either way, they are both accomplished by will put into practice. The difference is that closing my laptop is a trivial action for me, while becoming a billionaire is not, because the necessary actions involve much greater effort and will. On the other hand, the last step in the billionaire process, signing the contract that will secure one's fortune, for example, can easily become trivial once all the rest of the work has already been done.

In the same way, some beliefs are trivial, and some are not. I could ask you which of three random pieces of art you preferred, and to give your reasons as to why it was the best. Selecting a piece could be done on instinct, but interrogating the instinct, making it a real choice, is going to result in making decisions, active effort, action. You would in fact be choosing a belief, and it is in fact easy to do for such trivial questions, because the choice being made is isolated.

Other beliefs are non-trivial to change, not because the questions are somehow fundamentally different, but because some of their answers can put one in tension with large constellations of previously-chosen beliefs. Usually such tension is most easily resolved by simply rejecting the answers that cause them, but this, again, is still a choice. One could instead accept the tension, and begin re-evaluating those previous choices, and the choices supporting them, and so on as far back as necessary until the tension is resolved. For many questions, this would be very hard to do, but the choice being hard does not preclude it from being a choice.

More comments

From the perspective of a certain liberal dream, people should be free to air their views without facing such consequences. Requiring a narrow band of ideological adherence in one’s extended personal and professional circle leading to people hiding their true beliefs is not healthy. Individual responsibility cuts the other way: in the interest of a free open society, he has a duty not to lie. I would question whether newspaper consumers in general really want him fired (as opposed to a few activists), but if they do, they are wrong.

This is something that gets me as well. I wager if you asked the person from MLive Media who wrote that statement to choose to become a Nazi right now, in the sense that he truly, in his heart of hearts, believed that Jews were sub-humans who ought to be exterminated, he couldn't do it, even under threat of death or torture. The best he could do is to play-act the role. I don't see why this would be any different for Scott Adams's views about black people or anyone's views about anything.

This does cross into free will territory and applies more broadly to any sort of behavior. A bank robber didn't have the choice to have a brain that tells him that grabbing a gun and threatening tellers was a good way to make money, no more than Charles Whitman had a choice to have a tumor in his brain affecting his amygdala before he went on a killing spree in UT Austin.

Yet our society does treat these behaviors as being "choices" and hold the people carrying these out as agents responsible for the consequences of these "choices." And to a large extent, our society depends on this in order to function. People noticed that holding people accountable for their "choices" is helpful for making a more comfortable society to live in, likely through incentivizing - perhaps "manipulating" is just as good a term - people to behave in certain ways. The way I see it, the idea that these types of things are choices is a sort of legal fiction that society holds up as a means to make it function at all. And basically no one who created the fiction realized it was fiction, and same goes for people who follow the fiction.

And so we get to cases like here, where someone like Scott Adams is excoriated for daring to "choose" his views. The person is just acting out the fictional thing that our society agreed on to treat as fact; he doesn't like Scott Adams's behavior and wants less of it, so he incentivizes less of it in society by punishing Scott Adams for doing that behavior, while invoking that fiction as the justification.

Yet our society does treat these behaviors as being "choices" and hold the people carrying these out as agents responsible for the consequences of these "choices."

Actually, I've recently noticed that whenever a mass shooting occurs, very little time is spent blaming the shooter, and much more ink and airtime is spent on blaming guns, gun stores, gun manufacturers, toxic masculinity, racism, sexism, inadequate mental health care, inadequate school security, cowardly cops that refuse to attempt to intervene, etc., etc., etc.

I suppose that, in many cases, the default assumption is that mass shooters are psychopathic, and thus, anyone who assumes that doesn't need to spend time considering mass shooters as agents with choices.

There's other factors to this: the strategy of preventing mass shootings by not publicizing the event also means not publicizing the perpetrator, which obviously eliminates the possibility of exploring the person in question as a person and not just some unforeseen force of destruction, and, of course, there's also what you imply in your post; that mass shootings are instead used as evidence to argue for some social change.

i think this is because there is little need to blame the shooter. it's kinda the default to be appalled by such a thing (for very good reason i might add) and only a fringe few are willing to take the position of defending a mass shooter.

if this was a extremely rare event i'd be inclined to agree but such events are more common than "extremely rare" (it's still pretty rare comparatively). this + the shocking and violent nature of what mass shootings are... well they're bound to cause people to look for solutions.

it's well established that people are at least in part a product of their environment. and since we don't have control over innate characteristics of humans (there's no "is gonna be a mass shooter" gene), the best people tend to go for I think to have some sense of control is the environment.

an aside: and it is fair also i think to recognize and criticize authority responses to such events, but that's a different comment.

I wager if you asked the person from MLive Media who wrote that statement to choose to become a Nazi right now, in the sense that he truly, in his heart of hearts, believed that Jews were sub-humans who ought to be exterminated, he couldn't do it, even under threat of death or torture. The best he could do is to play-act the role.

I've never been convinced by this line of reasoning. Like, the conclusion is supposed to be, "...and, therefore, one's beliefs aren't a choice," but I just don't see how that follows. Instead, the only conclusion I see is, "Some beliefs are held strongly enough that asking for them to change (perhaps even under threat of death or torture) will not result in said change." It doesn't seem to imply anything about whether the strong belief is chosen or not.

I suppose, can you give me an example of a thing that a person can choose? I think, at bottom, the above argument is a facile face on what is really just hard determinism at its core (from people who can't bear to "choose" to live with the consequences of real hard determinism).

I suppose, can you give me an example of a thing that a person can choose? I think, at bottom, the above argument is a facile face on what is really just hard determinism at its core (from people who can't bear to "choose" to live with the consequences of real hard determinism).

I can't give an example, and that's the entire point; there is no such example, by my lights. And I don't see how determinism enters into it. Whether the universe is deterministic or there's some sort of cosmic dice that get rolled for physical interactions that make future states impossible to reliably predict based on the current state, one still doesn't have choice on the states of one's brain, which are the direct antecedents of one's apparent "choices." I didn't choose to have a brain that tells my finger muscles to type out this paragraph, for instance, and that's the case even if the atoms in my brain aren't following some sort of deterministic set of physical rules but rather being affected by some sort of truly random process.

It's more a question of dualism than determinism, which are related concepts but not identical. Dualism makes room for a soul to manipulate our neurons, allowing us to make true choices, but also requires a belief in the supernatural. Without it, we have to accept that whatever experience of "choosing" one has in their consciousness is a consequence of the behavior of the atoms in one's brain, which may be deterministic or not, but either way aren't controlled by oneself. One could argue that one's current brain state is "controlled" by past choices made by one's conscious mind, but that just moves the whole thing back a step, which can continue all the way back to the point where one became conscious for the first time as a baby.

Schrödinger equation's equation is deterministic, but the output concerning physical observables includes randomness. So, your distinction concerning randomness isn't really relevant. Nor is dualism the only mechanism by which the ability to choose could be said to exist. Typically, 'determinism' is short-hand for the opposite position of 'free will'.

But yeah, as I suspected, you pretty much commit yourself to hard determinism... at least until this discussion is finished.

Nothing personnel eh?

How about you just explain what you mean? Because currently your posts look like shorelines with at least three feet of vertical elevation above the high tide line.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

You speak very condescendingly about hard determinism, but never actually explain what you mean by that term. Even after 07mk said he doesn't see determinism entering the equation, you still just sneer at the concept like everyone should know exactly what you mean. In the past when I have seen people do this, it is as a bluff. Either a sort of shit test to see if their partner knows as much as them, or in the hopes their confidence and condescension will convince others to assume they know what they are talking about and drop it. But that goes against the spirit of this place, and the speak plainly rule.

I don't want to report you though, because I might be wrong or you might have done it by accident or a thousand other possibilities, so I'd rather just talk it out. I do think you know what you are talking about, but I would also like to know what you are talking about.

More comments

I wonder how many decades one would have to go back without comments like Adams' (if getting wide publicity) not leading to strip getting dropped by multiple papers.

Tom Buchanan was written as gauche and pigheaded for vaguely and verbally opposing whatever term you'd like to apply to this broad phenomena (maybe black empowerment?) in the last 20's - so there's that

His attitude towards polling should be reason for his cancellation. I think that pre Trump the comment themselves would have been not a big deal.

No, they would have been a big deal. Plenty of people pre-Trump were fired for a lot less.

It woudl have been a big deal

It may have been even worse because he cannot pivot off the cancel culture angle. It's like people were fired, and that was it. There was no way to try to claim censorship.


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