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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28781 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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” There were employees who said, ‘This goes against my values, and I am upset that you would be seen as a company supporting abortion,’ ” Carter says. “A lot of clients said, ‘We thought we did the right thing. But now these people are upset.’ ”

I just want to highlight this, because it’s possibly a (partial)datapoint against the Hanania thesis that woke is just civil rights law.

The people pushing this stuff literally thought they were doing something broadly popular and were shocked when there were people upset with it. That bears repeating, because lots of us here seem to be cynical about it. This pushes towards corporate progressive platitudes originating with true believers, who might intellectually know that not everyone agrees with them but are shocked when they run into it irl.

Now obviously Hanania falls into the group of people who broadly hold progressive stances on cultural issues, he just doesn’t agree with woke, so it’s understandable that he tends towards an explanation of wokeness as realpolitik. After all, these people are his neargroup, so they must have logical reasons for doing things he disagrees with. But I think we underweight the idea that lots of corporate admin really believes in something in the general direction of this crap, doesn’t quite grok that it’s unpopular among people who aren’t literal cave trolls, and that it isn’t about a practical purpose at all.

The people pushing this stuff literally thought they were doing something broadly popular

They are. Lots of things are broadly popular (in the sense that 60%+ of the population support them) but where a large minority are sufficiently fanatical in opposition that being publically associated with them is a net negative. "Normal-ass employer-provided health insurance includes employer-paid abortions" is a prime example where you should do the popular thing quietly in order to avoid a damaging row with pro-lifers. Anodyne expressions of pro-LGBT sentiment like participating in Pride Month are similar - normies expect you to do it, but shouting about it draws unwelcome attention. The supporters of all these things know that there is a noisy minority of haters.

This applies more to companies which sell to consumers than companies that sell to other businesses. The universe of people who consoom product has a lot more Red Tribers in it than the universe of people who are able and willing to take corporate jobs.

Race-based affirmative action is the rare case where you are probably right - I think supporters genuinely don't grok just how unpopular it is with normies because they have successfully silenced opponents in their own spaces.

But I think we underweight the idea that lots of corporate admin really believes in something in the general direction of this crap, doesn’t quite grok that it’s unpopular among people who aren’t literal cave trolls, and that it isn’t about a practical purpose at all.

This can be true, but it also ignores how a modern well run corporation (and admittedly not all of them are) works. There are many different factions, each with their own motivations, and it's not a straightforward matter to simply arbitrarily impose one's preferences on others.

Imposing more "training" requirements can't be done arbitrarily. The head of customer support has a spreadsheet which tracks the time taken to onboard a new agent, there's a cell which multiplies this by the number of agents they need to hire to deal with churn, and there's another cell which multiplies by agent wages. The net result is $cost. The head of customer support gets paid more if he makes this go down. He understands the value of diversity, but also maybe HR could tone it down and push some of the training into month 7 (average tenure of agent: 6 months) a bit and save the company $M?

Similarly, the head of backend engineering has a spreadsheet tracking time his devs spend on interviews. He also has a spreadsheet showing that he's hired 5 engineers/15 candidates from scraping github for cool repos and 0 engineers/75 candidates from HR's new diversity in eng program full of black people with an amazon certification (most of whom failed at technical screening). He totally supports diversity, so vitally important to have diverse perspectives on latency and uptime, but maybe HR could target this program better?

If HR can push back with "but lawsuits can cost $M", HR wins more of these arguments.

At a well run company, everyone is forced to produce such spreadsheets and justify them to their bosses. As the anti-empirical thread in modern wokeness (measuring stuff is raaacist) hints at, quantitative measurement more or less nukes most woke arguments.

But it’s something they’ve sort of deliberately created for themselves. Conservatives have known for a long time that success in PMC and white colar work means being rather closeted about things coded conservative. It actually somewhat starts in college where expressing even mild disagreement with the ideas of modern progressive ideology is going to get you shunned and if you’re dumb enough to turn in a paper that expresses a conservative opinion you get worse grades. In the workplace, almost any such expression will be seen as negative and possibly get you reported to HR. As such, modern conservatives in the modern workplace, or at least the modern, urban respectable workplace are as closeted as gays were in the 1990s. You thought long and hard before telling people in your social circle and probably didn’t tell people in your professional circle because even though it’s officially tolerated, it would be risky.

As such, even though there are probably people in their social circles who are conservative, those people have learned to clam up. They were in the room when the “right” — pro-abortion— move was made. They just didn’t want the blowback from being the conservative in the room. I guarantee (especially given that the Budweiser part of InBev is in the midwestern largely Catholic city of St. Louis) that someone in that room knew the Mulvaney cans were a terrible idea that would cause backlash. They said nothing because being anti-trans is dangerous to their career.

I guarantee (especially given that the Budweiser part of InBev is in the midwestern largely Catholic city of St. Louis) that someone in that room knew the Mulvaney cans were a terrible idea that would cause backlash. They said nothing because being anti-trans is dangerous to their career.

I'll tell you what they were thinking. They were thinking, "we need to sell beer to children without getting in trouble." The Beer Institute (the beer industry self-regulatory organization) has a rule that beer advertising can only appear in media where 73.6% of the audience is 21 years of age or older. Do you think that Dylan Mulvaney's Instagram following is more or less than 26.4% under 21? They were hoping that they'd be able to get away with it because no organization wants to be seen as transphobic.

deleted

73.6% looks like the percentage of the US population that is over 21. In other words, brewers won't advertise in media whose audience skews too-young-to-drink.

This is an incredibly interesting take that I haven't heard before. If it's right they misjudged their audience badly but there is still a certain cleverness to it

Ted Cruz posted (a less fleshed out version of)that theory to twitter IIRC, and trying to corner the underaged drinking market is the most logical explanation.

I guarantee (especially given that the Budweiser part of InBev is in the midwestern largely Catholic city of St. Louis) that someone in that room knew the Mulvaney cans were a terrible idea that would cause backlash.

I honestly think the Mulvaney promotional can was the genius idea of the marketing lady - or rather the ad/marketing agency she hired - who had been put in charge of revitalising the brand, and that there wasn't much oversight. I don't know who her immediate boss was/is, but she was given the task "get the brand selling again" and that means "get young people drinking it" and she thought "where are the kids today hanging out? oh yeah TikTok and Instagram" and she went for "who's the big influencer name?" and here we go.

If there had been "people in the room" I do hope somebody would have gone "but what about our existing client base?" but I don't think there was even a room. She was going on in the interview about how she had been handed the task and I do think it was her and a couple others and she had the last say on what they'd do:

At work, Alissa Heinerscheid is the Vice President of Bud Light, tasked with evolving and elevating an iconic brand that was in decline — and she’s the first woman to lead Bud Light in the brand’s 40 year history.

terrible idea

said nothing

I see at least one or two bad to terrible ideas a week. I don't have the political capital, emotional energy, or fucks to give to say something for every bad idea. At best I can prevent the ones that impact me, my team, and my immediate manager.

There's often no reward for the prevention of failure of others.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

After lurking here, I find myself relatively confused. You're the first person I've seen attempt to disambiguate between progressivism and wokeness. What is the difference between wokeness and progressivism, in your mind?

Basically what @hydroacetylene said. The thing that defines "progressives" is a belief in capital-P Progress. While the woke/identitarian types are almost always progressive, progressives are not necessarily woke.

Basically what @hydroacetylene said. The thing that defines "progressives" is a belief in capital-P Progress.

Well, then progressivism is dead.

Any visions of bright future belong to the past and cheesy yoghurt commercials, the only promised things are various versions of apocalypse and only motives left are fear, hatred and revenge.

Usually, "woke" just resolves to meaning "Progressive expect too much".

It's more that some people are very invested in the concept not having a label, because once it's identified it's unpopularity becomes impossible to deny.

This is why all the self applied labels from "Cultural Marxism" to "woke" are quickly abandoned when the opposition gets a hold of them, and are refraamed as slurs that are supposed to mean "you just don't like the left", or in this case " progressives expect too much".

All woke is progressive but not all progressives are woke, and many are slightly confused by it.

I tend to see really focusing on oppression categories, critical theory, and victimhood as a big differentiating factor. To use the abortion example that kicked this off, nonwoke progressives think banning abortion is bad for women, but don’t hold the idea that there’s an actual literal patriarchy pushing it.

Progressivism is the ideology of the PMC centre-left in the Anglosphere. You can see a certain commonality of thought, as well as an unbroken lineage of individual progressives, back to the turn-of-the-century capital-P Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Bob La Follette. The key constant ideas as I see it are:

  • Society is improving over time both materially and morally because of technocratic elites making correct decisions. We should strive to be on the right side of history.

  • Planning is possible and desirable.

  • Educated people should rule. Decisions which can be reduced to technical questions should be left to appropriately-qualified technical experts, decisions which have an unavoidable political component should be made by people with a broad education in morally correct thinking.

  • Education is good. More education is better.

  • There is too much economic inequality in the US c. 1900 or 2000. Slightly less economic inequality would be better, but not so much equality that the upper-middle-class can no longer enjoy an upper-middle-class lifestyle. 1950s US or modern Scandinavian levels of inequality are fine.

  • Separately from the inequality issue, real material deprivation (starvation/homelessness etc.) is very, very bad and we should try to eliminate it, first in our own countries and then globally.

  • Political violence (including war between countries) is very, very bad and we should try to eliminate it. (Lots of intra-progressive disagreement about the best way to do this)

  • Highbrow art is a public good and should be subsidised. Lowbrow art and the preferred intoxicants of the working class are corrupting and should be banned if possible. (Also lots of intra-progressive disagreement about what is possible)

  • Traditional religion is bad.

  • Bigotry is bad. (Lots of intra-progressive disagreement over which discrimination is bigoted and which is justified - pre-WW2 progressives being pro-eugenics is the most famous example)

  • These ideas are culturally universal and good people all over the world are already American progressives, even if they don' t know it yet.

Because Marxist socialism never managed to build a mass working-class movement in the Anglosphere, Marxism in the Anglosphere is a weird sub-sect of progressivism. (This isn't true in Continental Europe, where most countries had nominally Marxist parties with mass working-class memberships organised through the unions.) There is clearly a correlation between weird sectarian progressivism (including, but not limited to, being a Marxist in the Anglosphere) and weird lifestyle experimentation such that Orwell as able to say, correctly, that

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England

and still be mostly correct a century later. (He also includes teetotallers and vegetarians in the list in other writings). But most progressives wear suits to their boring middle-management job and listen to NPR/Radio 4 while commuting from their suburban homes where they raise 1.6 children in a monogamous traditional family.

Wokism is the specific hobby-horse that organised progressivism has taken up in the 2010's.

Categories in politics tend to be very ambiguous with very loose boundaries, so this is definitely tough to disambiguate. I don't blame anyone for just using "progressive" and "woke" as shorthands for each other. I personally do try to disambiguate, as someone who considers himself a progressive but who is also very much anti-woke, and not in the "they're just taking good ideas too far" sense but rather in the "their ideas are fundamentally broken and few costs are too high to stop them" sense.

I'd say it comes down to what I consider to be the core of "progressivism," which is, pithily and too reductively, the drive for "progress." Which obviously means different things for different people in different contexts, but I think most people would agree that it means moving forward, not just moving in some direction. But it's also incredibly easy to accidentally, despite all of one's best well-meaning good faith efforts, to move in some direction one finds convenient or attractive for whatever reason, and then just convince oneself that it's "forward." History is littered with examples of people causing immense amounts of pain, suffering, and misery while doing just that.

So for progressivism to actually live up to its name and not cause disaster as has been seen throughout history by many movements, it has to have and encourage the use of tools and methods and such to help reorient itself constantly, making sure that the direction we're pushing for is actually "forward" in some meaningful sense. Given what we've learned through science throughout human history and especially the past few centuries, it seems obvious to me that one of the most important tools for accomplishing this is open dialogue with oppositional forces - encouraging the people who hate my ideas to do their darndest to actually counter them using the strongest tools at their disposal. And to always emphasize my own skepticism when I find myself convinced that those people's ideas are evil or stupid or have been debunked, because I'm susceptible to biases as much as everyone else, and that bias is basically the easiest one to fall into. Only then, can we see what remains standing as the ideas and direction we can go to while being at the very least not completely unconfident (actual confidence is possibly always out of reach in this context) that we're moving "forward."

"Wokeness" goes directly counter to such tools, not just not encouraging them, but often actively suppressing them, deeming such speech as "harmful" and both pre-emptively shutting down such speech and retroactively punishing people who have engaged in such speech. In my mind, one cannot achieve meaningful progress through such methods except by dumb luck, and the odds of achieving meaningful progress through dumb luck seem very low.

All wokeness is "progressive*", but not all progressives are woke.

*regressive

Not the OP. But if I have to make a clear distinction - oppression olympics and victim mentality. Aka crybullying.

The people pushing this stuff literally thought they were doing something broadly popular and were shocked when there were people upset with it.

This is just "I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon" all over again, or the Russian joke about the blank pamphleteer. The media being homogenously left provides them with a significant electoral advantage, but an even larger confusion problem when they don't win.

the Russian joke about the blank pamphleteer.

I don't think I know that one, but I can kind of guess as to the punchline.

Some play on this:

"A man named Rabinovitch who was distributing pamphlets in Red Square. In a matter of minutes, the KGB had found him and taken him to headquarters. Only there did the agents realize that the sheets of paper were completely blank. “But there’s nothing written here,” one of them said. Rabinovitch said: “They know quite well what I mean.”"

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