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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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I keep noticing people using the word "democratic" in place of "socially left". E.g.: if a middle eastern country, after elections and with parliamentary majority, passes a law forcing women to wear hijabs or whatever, that is democratic. If Slovenia votes in 3 separate referendums that they don't want gay marriage, and it still legalized, that is undemocratic. Yet people use the opposite labels to describe such events.

I don't like Roe and am glad it was overturned, but it seems legitimate to call its reversal undemocratic because overturning Roe was unpopular according to polls.

(It is also fine to call Roe itself undemocratic for the reason you give. This is no more contradictory, in theory, than when Congress wants to defer its authority to Executive Department bureaucrats.)

In my experience, undemocratic is only used for its literal meaning, but it's also only used to show negative valence and primarily used by the left, so undemocratic right wing moves get called "undemocratic" but undemocratic left wing moves don't get that descriptor applied.

This is a roundabout way of saying that the grandparent to this comment doesn't match my experience. The media would portray the Slovenian Court decision positively, but it wouldn't call the decision "democratic".

It would be cool if the Supreme Court had the ability to initiate national referendums on court cases or to convene citizens' assemblies via sortition.

That one was just farcical. I can only guess that people just call SC decisions they don't like "undemocratic" on a knee jerk reflex, and didn't bother to actually think this one through. I'm not sure how else you can call that decision "undemocratic" without deliberately misusing the word for propaganda purposes.

I’m following your Slovene example, but not the hijab one. It seems to be both democratic and socially right-wing. It’s not at all a cause adopted by the American right, but mandatory dress standards are pretty classically conservative.

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the soft bigotry of low expectations -- it's minimally acceptable for Muslims to mandate the hijab because they're a poor oppressed group and they don't expect much from them, but if Europeans try the littlest of little socially conservative policies it's terrible, because they should know better.

Sometimes it feels to me like a perceived lack of agency is one of the biggest prizes that can be had. Not so good if it's real, but then again, people are people, and I have my doubts about how much agency can truly vary among (healthy) humans. If it isn't real/is exaggerated, then in extremis it amounts to permission to do whatever you want and everybody just has to accommodate you, because you don't have a choice how to behave.

But that presumes sympathy on the part of the accommodators, which is probably the real prize, in which case this is just one way it manifests.

I do want to chime in and point out that the exact same people who pitch a fit about religious institutions expecting basic modesty standards if those institutions are Christian are happy to rant about the need to accommodate Islamic dress codes. So definitely a double standard, probably from pure tribalism.

Mandated hijab wearing is still something American liberals are not entirely ok with. It was one of the things played up back during the invasion of Afghanistan. American liberals generally support the protests in Iran right now over the woman who died in custody for a hijab violation. On the other hand they will overwhelming support the wearing of it if it's framed as empowering the woman from her choice rather than mandated upon her. Sort of like Asians and White privilege.

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One could argue that there exists a leftist case for school uniforms, namely that they prevents rich kids from showing off.

Also widely practiced for exactly that reason in socialist/communist countries. Used to be mandatory in socialist Hungary too.

Furthermore, "uniforms: yes or no" isn't the main dividing line, but what the uniform's goal is, what it expresses and represents. The classic conservative (aristocratic etc.) uniforms would express one's social standing and position in the social hierarchy. The leftist, communist uniforms had the opposite goal, to erase those old class markers and make everyone look like an equal comrade.

That's not a "one could argue". That's a very popular argument, which I heard from pretty much every school uniform supporter I talked to. Whether they were leftist or not is another matter.

Like "liberal" it is one of those words that have lost all inherent meaning and can only be employed contextually.

In practice and in mouths such as VDL's both of these (sometimes together) mean friend, as opposed to enemy, of the Globalist American Empire.

Poland is a very firm ally of the GAE and functionally the enforcement arm in Eastern Europe- and they’re still being referred to as undemocratic for not being onboard with the gays.

Yeah, Warsaw hoped that, being the eastern vanguard and one of the biggest spenders-helpers on Ukraine they would receive something in exchange from Bruxelles-Washington

Nothing happened, and Bruxelles continued to go on

Gays are more important than NATO.

EU's (formal) line has always been that it's problem is the rule of law in Poland, such as the Polish government's court-packing plan. The gays and abortion stuff might be culture-war grist for the media mills, but it has never directly been the main onus of EU's viewpoint against Poland.

As such, if EU decided to now do a volte-face explicitly due to Polish militancy against Russia, it would just make EU's entire position hollow and destabilize the Union; "no, we don't care about that rule-of-the-law stuff after all, we explicitly just care about how zealous we are about the other things" (and, indeed, the Polish position regarding Russia is probably not all that aligned with EU's general line but is rather far more militant and aggressive than what Germany and France, for instance, are ready to countenance.)

Are they? I had the sense that since Ukraine started, all the focus (at least in the German press) on their internal politics evaporated, and generally Hungary (whose ruler is flirting with Russia or at least trying to dangle the spectre of it for concessions) is being singled out now. Of course this could be simply a stroke of opportunity, as Poland may have stopped playing tag team with Hungary and deadlocking the "all-versus-one" punishment mechanisms in the EU - perhaps as punishment for the Russia-flirting, demonstrating conversely that at least for Poland, NATO is more important than not-Gays.

Thing is, the "Bruxelles-Washington" can afford both the NATO and the gays in Poland, they aren’t really forced to choose

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