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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26711 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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Neoreactionary internet denizen Jim has an old post where he coined the term "generational loss of hypocrisy", and I wish it was used more widely. His given example sucks, which is probably why. I'll try to convey some other examples without waging the culture war or consensus building, and feedback is welcome if I fall short:

  • As described in your post, where Soviet politicians give lip service to things because they're expected to, and the newer generation of politicians believe them sincerely.
  • Jim's example is people expressing shock that a female prison guard would aid the escape of male prisoners she was sleeping with. He claims "everyone knew women were like this". Personally, I find the leap from "women like bad boys" to "women will break their bad boys out of prison" too large, and that's why I'm sad that there isn't a better defense of the concept somewhere.
  • Trends of work and play preferences for men and women. Boys and girls play differently (paywall bypass), but after a generation of trying to remove the stigma of boys playing with dolls, Damore got fired for his memo. Set aside the arguments of the actual culture war issues and look at the "generational loss of hypocrisy": The belief that "boys shouldn't play with dolls" is very dated, and its believers are mostly in retirement homes now. While the Baby Boomers will (broadly) approve of letting children play with whatever toy they want, they also (broadly) believe that there are gendered preferences, and going against those is abnormal. They just don't say that last part out loud. By the time we're to Generation X, there's significant support for equity as defined by the social justice movement, and expressing the unsaid beliefs of the Baby Boomers creates a hostile work environment to the point where you will be fired.
  • Some climate change scientists and activists present short timelines for catastrophic destruction. There's a history of extreme claims from environmentalists since, for example, Earth getting destroyed after whales go extinct gets more donations and support than statistics, charts, and threats of "loss of biodiversity" that most people just won't internalize. People in power pay climate change lip service and make a donation, but generally don't behave as if the world actually is going to suffer these catastrophic effects any time soon. Buying houses at sea-level is an example of this hypocrisy. Greta Thunberg took the proclamations at face value and is upset that people in power aren't backing up their talk with action. Criticisms of AOC's Green New Deal include plenty in the category of "You're taking climate change too seriously": if the more catastrophic predictions are correct then it would make sense to take significant economic loss now in order to prevent it.
  • Police/prison reform. Though I'm not very knowledgeable on the history of these movements, I think a lot of the older generation knows that some people are just anti-social criminals who shouldn't be free (related study), but the newer members of the movements has been pushing for the actual abolition of prisons and police.

Yes, that's basically the main thing I was trying to get at, at least as far as the US political class and the Brahmin class is concerned - admittedly whatever parallels with the USSR are to be found here aren't that clear-cut in my opinion.*

Jim's example is people expressing shock that a female prison guard would aid the escape of male prisoners she was sleeping with. He claims "everyone knew women were like this". Personally, I find the leap from "women like bad boys" to "women will break their bad boys out of prison" too large, and that's why I'm sad that there isn't a better defense of the concept somewhere.

I'm not a regular reader of Jim and not that familiar with his views, so I won't try defending them, but I would point out that his fundamental argument does still stand in this case. That is, the ruling class in bygone days all "politely pretended women were not like this", but they also put all sorts of social, legal, religious etc. mechanisms in effect to curb women's opportunities to be like this, so that no naive man ever realized that they are like this. One of the decisions this entailed was not permitting women to serve as guards in men's prisons, because duh, not all of them will end up helping some prisoners escape due to sexual attraction, but some of them will. Those mechanisms are long dismantled by now, but the polite pretension still lingers on, which is why there are prisoners successfully escaping with the help of their sex partner female guards.

In basically the same way, I'm sure the ideology of feminism, women's liberation and gender equality used to be propagated and continued for decades mostly by powerful men who, by today's feminist standards, were objectively sexists, rapists and phonies. But this state of affairs was never going to last; eventually the true believers gain power.

Other than this, I agree with your points.

*Gorbachev and his supporters were, I guess, true believers as well in the sense that they all grew up in late-stage socialism (heh), and thought it's stable and mature enough for it to be reformable and to be able to evolve.

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