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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33253 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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If you're claiming that they've stopped hammering down nails that stick up, and as evidence show that there's not much hammering happening, you also need to show that there's still nails sticking up.

  1. they cannot hammer all of them down. it's an optimalization problem. Hammering down too many would mean losing legitimacy and support, like the backlash to re-writing/censoring Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl books.

  2. they are still hammering nails but in the private sector , like social media or work, stuff which gets less media attention than highly visible targets. Going after highly visible targets incurs risk, so they cannot do it that often.

like the backlash to re-writing/censoring Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl books.

But this is a backlash that occurred primarily on Twitter, lasted about 48 hours, and resulted in no changes. No firings, no policy changes, not even an apology. Pretty weak tea I think.

they cannot hammer all of them down.

...We're talking about academia specifically, right? Which academic nails are sticking up, currently?

My assumption is that within academia, within the corporate world, most places run on procedure and the manipulation of procedural outcomes, they absolutely can hammer down every nail there is. I've seen pretty much nothing that leads me to think otherwise in the last seven or so years. And sure, they get pushback sometimes, on specific issues. Usually this pushback doesn't even stop them on the specific issue in question, much less roll back previous wins; most commonly, there's simply a week or two of grumbling and then people give up. Seuss and Dahl are still censored. The "pushback" lacked any meaningful substance.

they are still hammering nails but in the private sector , like social media or work, stuff which gets less media attention than highly visible targets. Going after highly visible targets incurs risk, so they cannot do it that often.

"that often" is a flexible term. it seems to me that they can do it often enough to consolidate their gains in preparation for the next push. Again, the policy/procedure/rules changes aren't rolling back. What they got, they keep, what they failed to get, they'll be back for soon enough.

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