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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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Act unsympathetic enough, and your support will dry up no matter your ESG score.

Maybe I am misunderstanding you but are you saying that if a group that progressives are sympathetic towards acts unsympathetic enough their support will dry up, or is the "your" in your statement pointing at something else?

If you are referring to groups acting badly, that I think you're very wrong. What about the long term homeless? It's hard to imagine a group that could act more unsympathetically, and yet progressive zeal for protecting them could not be stronger. If anything, the worse their behavior, the more intense the progressive sympathy towards them appears to be.

@Spookykou has it more or less right. I was thinking of organizations like PETA, but it definitely applies to individuals.

I'm interested, I replied to spookykou, can you tell me if I am misinterpreting you? https://www.themotte.org/post/780/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/168128?context=8#context

The idea of a technology stack like the OSI model or a web ecosystem is funny (and more defensible), but no, it's not what I had in mind. At least on this site, the term is usually used as a hierarchy. That's how the parent posts were using it to describe

re-ranked inside DEI orthodoxy

I assumed the "your" there was an individual. The normal way I see the 'progressive stack' being brought up is to discuss the fall out from a specific event with specific people trying to compare their 'status'. If a gay person loses the court of public opinion in some sort of conflict with a Hispanic person, people on here will ask questions like 'Does this mean gay people are lower on the progressive stack now?'. I tend to agree with netstack here that this is not a very useful model. The 'progressive stack' is at best a useful heuristic that might improve your ability to predict the fall out from such events slightly, but is very far from a consistent of systematized reality.

If a gay person loses the court of public opinion in some sort of conflict with a Hispanic person, people on here will ask questions like 'Does this mean gay people are lower on the progressive stack now?'.

I think that the progressive stack is not so much about who wins, but how strong certain arguments are considered to be and in what situations they can be used. For example, a black person can use "I'm being discriminated against" even in some situations where they themselves messed up and are simply held accountable, while a white person who is actually being discriminated against, can't use that same argument unless the discrimination is very extreme indeed.

In social combat between woke people, you can expect them to use arguments that work for their identity in the situation. But that still doesn't mean that a black person can always just defeat a white person in social combat. The former just has more options.

I assumed the "your" there was an individual. The normal way I see the 'progressive stack' being brought up is to discuss the fall out from a specific event with specific people trying to compare their 'status'. If a gay person loses the court of public opinion in some sort of conflict with a Hispanic person, people on here will ask questions like 'Does this mean gay people are lower on the progressive stack now?'.

Interesting, that's fair. That isn't what I've assumed that term means. I'm going to use software as an example to describe the different concepts and keep them in the same domain (plus I assume that RAT terms are often informed by software given their demographics)

You're saying the "progressive stack" is referring to an implicit hierarchy of groups in order. That's fair and is implied by the term stack. Metaphorically similar to the stack as a software data structure.

I've always interpreted it be referring a selection of active beliefs. Not implying a hierarchy, simply a set of useful tools being used by for a purpose. Metaphorically similar to a set of software tools that are being used by a company. eg one software engineer asking another "What stack does your company use" - "Oh, we use MEAN: Mongo, Express, Angular, Node.js"

The second usage, the one I have assumed, being used to imply that the beliefs held by progressive are primarily determined by their heuristic usefulness, instead of their logical compatibility. And also not implying hierarchy.

I may be really misinterpreting here, I'll look at how it's used more carefully.

The long-term homeless are unsympathetic to you. The progressive movement considers them far more acceptable than Hobby Lobby or Chick-Fil-A, so long as they're far enough away that they don't get robbed personally, and sometimes not even then (insert bike comic here).

The behavior is more common at an individual level... that then spreads to groups.

The long-term homeless are unsympathetic to you. The progressive movement considers them far more acceptable than Hobby Lobby or Chick-Fil-A, so long as they're far enough away that they don't get robbed personally, and sometimes not even then (insert bike comic here).

That's true but not an argument against what I said, unless I misunderstood the comment I was replying to.

The comment above me said this

Identity politics is and always has been a tangle of relative snap judgments. Not just as a matter of multiple axes, but because those judgments change day to day and with the charisma and decisions of the groups being judged. Act unsympathetic enough, and your support will dry up no matter your ESG score.

My read on that was that it implied that if a group acted badly, "unsympathetically", then the progressives would stop supporting them. If "unsympathetic" is referring to what the progressives think is unsympathetic then the above statement I was replying to is tautological, right?