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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35658 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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This won’t be a long post but maybe it will be an area for people to post other political ads.

Here in S Florida I just saw an ad for a Latino State Senator who started the ad saying freedom 3 times. She then accused her opponent of being a socialists……drumroll…..socialists Maga Republican who will launch a dictatorship taking a womens right to choose.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Dem accuse GOP of being socialists (though politically there’s some support for that in maga today - Meloni supports a lot of family funding ).

In the past we’ve had Dixie Democrats. Now extinct. And Bill Clinton was forced to adopt Reagan’s Neoliberalism which is now considered a leftist politicial philosophy.

Now S Florida is a different place. I’m curious are there any other American political subcultures where they adopt the other teams language? I’m fairly certain no one will contest that it’s the right who accuses the left of socialism.

And Bill Clinton was forced to adopt Reagan’s Neoliberalism which is now considered a leftist politicial philosophy.

The fact that it is the predominant economic paradigm in America, with the consequence that it has many adherents within the Democratic party, does not make trickle-down neoliberalism a 'leftist political philosophy'. You would be laughed out of every economics faculty in existence if you claimed such a thing.

Sementics. Go to the neoliberal sub on Reddit it’s a Democrat establishment sub. I meant in the current American politics. The terms been co-opted by establishment Dems.

Go to the neoliberal sub on Reddit and they'll tell you themselves that they're 'economically centre-right'.

As a mod there -- some would? I think most would reject the dichotomy. Being against a corporate tax and for a land tax or carbon dividend, against most land use regulation, for some form of distribution and universal healthcare, against student loan forgiveness -- you'd lose a bit too much information to sum it up that pithily.

(referring here to the ideological core of the sub, i.e. the flaired DT regs -- the drift-in commenters commenting on random posts are obviously more diverse)

Pinochet support was a bannable offense on day 3 of the sub going live, if I recall correctly. To the extent the subreddit polarised against republicans since 2016 (which is true, and justifiable), that particular stance fell outside the sub's overton window from the start.

Hahaha. They ban anyone whose a Republican there. That’s not “economically right”

I agree the term neoliberal has been butchered. And the people now call themselves neoliberal are more like ordoliberal or neo-neoliberal.

But the people who use the neoliberal label today are in the American context center-left.

They are right of tankies.

I doubt they ban Republicans for being too much in favour of economic liberalisation.

They had a purge about 18 months ago. Banned anyone who gave away any signifier of not Biden voter.

It’s not like this hasn’t happened before. I consider myself a liberal but in the American context I’m not. Because in popular usage the term changed.

Huh. That probably says more about Reddit mods than it does about neoliberalism to be fair, though.

Think the popular definition of it has changed even outside Reddit. Now it just means establishment Dem who supports every spending bill out of the left.

Don’t get me wrong I’m old school Pinochet loving neoliberal.

More comments

I’m not extrapolating. And she was very Cuban or other South American running against the same.

The best other example would be in Chicago my alderman (Brendan Reilly) was a Democrat who on his Twitter bio lists himself as 26 year recovering GOP - clean and moderate.

But my point was are there any other interesting examples of local politicians using code words usually associated with the other side (socialism definitely counts, freedom is to a lesser extent coded red).

UPDATE:

  • Lots of ideas worth considering here. In the end, I just didn't wear the shirt. It turned it to be hugely overthought on my part because

a) 4 other people had no orange shirt, and 5 more had shirts of strategically (cowardly!) ambiguous orangeneity.

b) A kid GRIEVOUSLY injured himself in the shop class, which made everyone forget about Orange Shirt Day entirely. Apparently he's fine.

As an aside, I have come to doubt the sincerity of the people who are the public face of this stuff in schools. Twice now I have seen people go all in on this stuff, then 2 years later apply to become principals, fail to become principals, and then set it all aside. I believe I am seeing a third case now. For a day of grim solemnity, the video they used to Educate students was some instragram girl's "Top 5 questions about truth and reconciliation" [it's really called that here] but it was an actually an ad for her online feather-and-bead store. The bathos boggles the mind.

I need advice on what amounts to conduct in the Canadian culture war.

  1. For a little over a hundred years, indigenous (native/Indian/aboriginal) children in Canada attended boarding schools designed to drag them into the modern age. For about 40 of those years (a bit longer, depending on the area), attendance was compulsory, and at all times physical and sexual abuse were at least common, though not universal. A little less than half of all indigenous children who lived during that period attended these schools. 4100 deaths are known to have occurred at these schools, most of them from tuberculosis. While the death rate of the schools was not way higher than the death rate generally, it was higher and most of the children who died in the schools would not have died if they had not attended the schools.

  2. Indigenous people in Canada today are not well integrated into society. Many live on reserves (reservations, if you're American) and these reserves are isolated, sometimes accessible only by air. Almost no economic activity occurs on these reserves, so unemployment is widespread. The reserves are plagued by extreme substance abuse problems, sexual violence, parental neglect, lack of education/credentials and the shame that results from knowing that these problems are much less severe everywhere else. Even people who move away from the reserves are affected by these problems, or from having grown up surrounded by them.

  3. For the past 20 years or so, but especially following the George Floyd affair, there has been a major push by the people who set the cultural tone in Canada to establish that (2) is a direct result of (1), just as in the US there is a great yearning to prove that the problems faced by black Americans are the direct result of slavery. In Canada, this has led to strident narrative-crafting. It is commonly (but mistakenly) accepted that residential schools were a big secret, that children were murdered routinely in them, that attendance was always compulsory and, most recently, that there are hundreds of tiny graves hidden all around Canada concealing the remains of the victims of what all bien-pensants agree was a cultural genocide (Side note: While the culture is definitely damaged, there is much evidence to suggest that it was damaged before the imposition of the residential school policy, but this is a matter of historical debate, and no such debate is currently permitted in Canadian society). These graves are in some cases the confirmed rediscovery of previously marked graves in community cemeteries, but the most cited example is of 215 ground-penetrating radar hits near a former residential school in Kamloops, BC. 2 minutes on Google will explain that GPR cannot find human remains, it can only find disturbances, and that those disturbances must be investigated by excavation. No excavation is happening in Canada because it would be disrespectful to the spirits of the children.

  4. One former residential school student once received a special orange shirt for her first day of school, but this shirt was confiscated by the nuns when she arrived at the school and was made to wear a uniform. Therefore, orange shirts have become/been made a symbol of public regret (in a bizarre inversion of the American culture war they bear the slogan "every child matters"). Regret over what? Formerly, it was regret over the abduction of children by the state, though this was always the policy, but more and more they have become a symbol of regret that the Canadian government literally murdered children and hid their bodies and used residential schools as a way of making this possible.

  5. Ironically, schools are the main institutions pushing the new narrative, in many cases explicitly as a means of correcting the backward thoughts of the students, since they cannot correct the backward thoughts of their parents. This was precisely the rationale for residential schools.

  6. Advice time: I am a teacher. Tomorrow is my school's Orange Shirt Day. I have lived in the fly-in communities I described above. I have seen the mind-boggling material and moral squalor of reserves. I have lived in it. I do not see how anyone wearing an orange shirt will bring about one iota of improvement in the lives of the people I knew Thus, if I were to wear an orange shirt, it would only be to avoid the consequences of being literally the only member of a 60-person staff without one, but these consequences would be entirely social. Canadian teachers are virtually impossible to either reward or punish. I would be something like Havel's Schoolteacher, only worse, because of the much smaller threat.

-I could wear the shirt but inwardly resist acquiescence to the narrative. This is what Havel argues quite convincingly against.

-I could wear the shirt so my friends on the staff are not marred by their association with me, although the consequences would be entirely social.

-I could wear the shirt because, having argued against pretty much every hyper-compassionate wine-mom idea my fellow teachers have, I am now regarded as a mere contrarian, so if I don't have a shirt they'll just roll their eyes and whatever statement I think I'm making will fail.

However, if I were to wear an orange shirt, in addition to just feeling like I took an L, it would also greatly undermine every argument I have made to my students regarding the value and possibility of resisting conformism. I am not so naive as to think that any of this will be remembered a year after they graduate, but day-to-day we all have to look each other in the eye.

Not wearing the shirt incurs only social consequences, but I have been incurring them for years now, and it's getting tiring.

I don't want to wear the shirt, but I also don't want to make a scene, but I also want to be credible to the people I ask to believe me.

Someone talk me into the right course of action here.

Canadian here. I don't quite understand what you're objecting to? You say that certain specific claims about residential schools are false (e.g. 215 kids established as buried in Kamloops). And that (2) isn't fully a result of (1). But I've never been under the impression that wearing an orange shirt implies you think otherwise.

What it does imply is that you think aspects of residential schools (and Canada's historic treatment of indigenous people) were very bad. Do you disagree with this? If so, then wearing an orange shirt would be misleading for sure. Otherwise it might even be valuable to consider whether the suggestion that you're contrarian is on the mark - contrarianism is an easy trap to fall into without realising it. (I've certainly fallen into it.)

I'm too late to contribute anything on this, but I would just like to request that you post a follow up to this in the new Culture War thread for this week and let us know what choice you made and how it went.

To give an opposite option: If you really want to go down in flames, find a charity relating to the church burnings that happened in 2021 (there's gotta be one, either generally linked to churches that were burned or specifically trying to repair them). Put that on your shirt.

Order a custom orange shirt with an appropriate quote from Havel printed on it.

If you signal something, but nobody understands the signal, did you really signal?

I suggest a pink shirt -- then when people complain about your shirt, you can either pretend to be confused about which propaganda-shirt day it is -- or ask them whether they are bullying you because of the colour of your shirt.

Seriously though, glad to hear there is at least one teacher in the land who's actually thinking this stuff through -- your concerns echo mine.

If you do choose not to wear the shirt, the line I've been emphasizing lately is that there was plenty of real shit around the residential school system that was actually horrible, which has been well known at least since I was in high school in the 80s -- the real problems are cheapened when phony stories are emphasized. (the orange shirts I've seen around here last week mostly had explicit "never forget the 220 children we murdered" type messages on them, so this complaint is not out of place.

Best luck; fight on!

(and let us know how it goes either way, ofc)

This is the framework I'd start with; you might find it helpful.

There are two distinct but related concepts here--your character and your reputation.

Your character is the objective picture of your moral self. It's the accumulation of all the choices you've made, within the context of each of those choices. You have usually got the best access to what this picture looks like--the shiny spots and the black marks--but there are many varieties of self-deception that can produce a distorted view of yourself, either better or worse than accurate (or both, in different areas).

Your reputation is the socially-constructed external view of your moral self. While your character will constantly provide evidence of itself, contributing to your reputation, there are other factors: others' limited knowledge of you, unearned compliments, malicious rumors, etc. Your reputation may be better or worse than your character, or a mix in different areas, but while you can provide the most reliable evidence of your character through your actions--and therefore influence your reputation--the full social interpretation of your character is not within your control.

I think both are important, and you have some level of moral responsibility to maintain both, though not equally. Your choices are what define you in your character; your public choices have the biggest impact on defining your reputation. That's why compelled speech is so powerful--it affects both. The choice to comply or defy contributes to your character; how your choice is viewed by others contributes to your reputation. Other people don't have direct access to your actual character, either to know it or affect it. Only you can affect it, and your knowledge of it is usually the best available, if imperfect.

So, actual advice--I would start with considering your character. You're the one who has to live with yourself indefinitely; make the choice that will minimize your long-term regret in your own view of yourself. Second, consider how to implement that choice in a way that best preserves your reputation, starting with the people whose views you most value. For myself, I believe I would show up with a non-orange shirt, and if questioned, state that I oppose compelled social signaling, even in a good cause (...without specifying whether I think this is a good cause).

Good luck.

I always like the approach of, "actually try and do good to solve a real problem, and use the visibility others are creating to signal boost the solutions that you think are productive."

It sounds like it is tomorrow so maybe too late to prepare, but here is one thing:

  • get a white or grey or black shirt and have printed on it, in big orange block letters, information about organizations you trust and how people can legitimately give to them in some way.

  • prepare an elevator pitch for what you think are the enduring hardships and difficulties and why the organizations you referenced can actually directly help

  • people will notice the inversion of your shirt (orange letters on non-orange shirt) and ask about it. Excellent! Deliver your elevator pitch.

This is one way to turn this into an actually productive thing for something you care about, instead of only being performative as you noted. It also demonstrates to your students how to still be mildly contrarian but also productive for a thing you genuinely care about and want to make better.

It's one day, right?

Just call in sick. The only winning move is not to play.

It's so strange reading this because when I was in school (in the US) there was never any hint of a compulsory nature to these kinds of thing, which happened often enough (and I often partook).

There was always respect towards people's autonomy and personal feelings, and I never sensed or felt any judgement towards either decision people made.

I'd wear a different shirt for the sole reason of making kids who chose not to feel comfortable. It doesn't even matter what the cause is or how credible. A socially enforce uniform to determine "good person" status is basically an illiberal environment.

I feel like people used to understand this.

Students mostly don't participate. Dorks care, and the kids who are like 1/8 indigenous make a big deal about it. The teachers, secretaries, and ed assistants are in lock-step on it, though. It is very much a top-down movement.

My dad went to two Indian residential schools in his youth (he's white, just grew up in the north). Every now and then I mention it and it kind of breaks people's brains because they never consider it a possibility. Because 1947 was the end of mandatory attendance most of the indigenous people around where I live don't have parents who went to residential schools (or at least my three friends in high school didn't).

Though let me say I never use this as kind of a trump card or whatever. My dad's experience was fairly out of the norm and it doesn't really have any relevance to the years (mostly the 1890s-1910s) where the residential schools were pretty awful for students.

Do you have a dark yellow shirt or a red-orange shirt with a color ambiguous whether or not it is orange? If I were you I would wear a dark yellow shirt and tell people (truthfully) that it is the closest thing to orange I have in my wardrobe.

I can't really give you advice from experience: I mostly try to avoid these things by slinking about unnoticed and slipping through cracks. It's worked for me before - from what I have heard, there's an act of fealty I would ordinarily have to perform to satisfy my employer (it's a sort of thing anybody here has probably heard of), but through luck and by keeping a sufficiently low profile, this is a threat I believe I have passed under unnoticed.

I would not do it, but exactly because I'm chicken enough to prepare to slip underneath conflicts like this ahead of time that I think I would be in a not-so-noticeable position. I cannot speak to anything likely to involve confrontation.

This makes me think, while the bien-pensants proclaim that the state literally perpetrated genocide (regardless of whether it is true or not, they seem to believe it), they usually do not support restricting the abilities of the state to do such things again in any way. Moreover, the same category of people (generally speaking of course, there might be individual exceptions but I suspect if they exist, they are rare) they support things like forced vaccinations, lockdowns, school closures, blocking bank accounts of people who protest the government, widespread speech censorship and punishment for speaking against the government-approved narratives, equating dissent or doubt about the dogma with violence, etc. - all look like the things which while do not compare to a genocide, could be easily deployed to enable one if the government decides to do something like that again. A person with systemic thinking would use the opportunity of the dedicated day - shirt or no shirt - to discuss these things and maybe make the students start thinking about such matters, and may be how it is possible to make a society which would make things like that less like, and how to evaluate government actions with the lens of "can this also be used to oppress people?".

As for the shirt itself, wearing a non-orange shirt saying "this shirt is not orange, ask me why" would be heroic, in my opinion, but I understand not making a scene part. Taking a stand is usually very costly and only rare people can handle it. If you feel it'd be too much for you, just wear the shirt and try to do what you can to make it mean something you'd want to mean instead of meaningless guilt-absolution gesture. I think as a teacher you have a good opportunity to do so.

People's thinking about genocide generally starts and ends with "goodies in charge means no genocide, baddies in charge means genocide". I think the topic of the state infrastructure required to enable genocide will go over their heads.

You're right about lockdown-related state infrastructure also being indicative of what countries could carry out genocide. The infrastructure Canada used to carry out a political and social purge of unvaccinated people could trivially be pointed at ethnic minorities and used for genocide too. And there's certainly something in how China's covid surveillance infrastructure and Uighur surveillance infrastructure are the same infrastructure. But again, I think "If you can do lockdowns, you can also do genocide" is likely to go over people's heads (or, in Canada, mark you as one of the anti-vaxxers to be purged). OP is a teacher at a school, having to impress other teachers at that school, in a society that for the past two years has marked people who dissent on these matters as persona non grata. They'd be more likely to survive just outright ignoring the day than by trying to point out the connections between lockdowns and the oppression of ethnic groups, even if it's likely relevant to why Nunavut had the least stringent vaccine mandate policies.

I was going to accuse the New Zealanders of being more woke, on the basis of some of them refusing to use the European name for the island, but I realized Canada is already derived from a native language.

Fellow Canadian here. I do not believe you should wear a shirt if you are not comfortable with it. Problem with our society is we kneel on social matters that we do not agree with and stay quiet.If you think to be only person not wearing it would have serious consequences for your work you can either sue them but best middle ground would be to call in sick and not to go on that day. Also remeber that trans teacher with large boobs? I mean he did something outrageous. I dont think you should think too hard on whether wearing an orange shirt or not.

wear an orange shirt, and put some writing on it that expresses how you feel. Maybe something like "how does this shirt help indigenous people?". You can also put a QR code on it that goes to somewhere to donate money.

Simple suggestion: is there a charity whose work with indigenous Canadians you respect and think is valuable? If so, make a donation to them - maybe as little as $10. Do not wear the shirt. If anyone asks you, grumble that you feel there's too much performative politics, and instead you chose to mark this day by making a donation, as you think that's far more meaningful.

I think it comes down to a simple question. What do you value more, minor social consequences at work or your integrity?

I don't personally think wearing the orange shirt is that wrong (just kind of stupid), but it sounds like you do think it's wrong. And it sounds like you're going to face the same social consequences either way, because it sounds like the other staff think poorly of you already. So, maybe wearing this shirt will get you a brief reprieve, but it probably won't change anyone's opinion of you either way. With that in mind, it's really a question of what is more important to you here.

The pope recently went to Canada to apologize to the indigenous people for the treatment of kids in residential schools. I've been meaning to ask about this but this is a good opportunity. Is there any new discovery that prompted that pope visit? Because last time I've read about this stuff I got the impression that, as you say, these graves were just detected from the surface with some radar but there were no excavations, prompting suspicion that these may not actually be mass graves. Has this changed?

As for the question. I think it depends on how seriously you take this "mission". Because you are going against the mainstream here, if you simply don't wear the shirt, people won't be able to wrap their heads around why. Like are you actually so evil that you support the murder of indigenous children? Remember, most people, including teachers, probably know much less about the details and have read up on it much less than you have. Simply rejecting the narrative and symbolism won't change any minds, it just puts you into the "bad person" category in people's minds. If you want people to understand your resistance, make sure that you explain your rationale (this will be good towards ignorant normies, but it may attract the wrath of the already invested activists). If you don't trust yourself to keep calm and explain your reasoning over and over, then it's probably better to just wear it and shut up. Or maybe wear it but explain your reservations about the whole thing at watercooler conversations etc.

One thing that changed is that there has been an excavation of 33 GPR hits at a former hospital site in Camsell. It turned up zero actual bodies.

But that's probably not what prompted the pope's visit. The the best of my knowledge, no actual human remains have been found yet as a result of the GPR canvassing. Why risk it?

No, there were no new discoveries to prompt the pope visit. He’s just an octogenarian in poor health who does not speak English(notoriously, unlike JPII who spoke a mid-double digit number of languages and BXVI who spoke all the major European languages plus Latin, pope Francis speaks only Spanish and Italian, both natively, although he can read English and Latin aloud) and relies on one of the oldest and least efficient bureaucracies on earth to do everything for him.

The visit to Canada was controversial within Catholicism in part because the aforementioned inefficient bureaucracy wrote his speech with not totally up to date information.

Because last time I've read about this stuff I got the impression that, as you say, these graves were just detected from the surface with some radar but there were no excavations, prompting suspicion that these may not actually be mass graves. Has this changed?

No it has not. And per OP:

No excavation is happening in Canada because it would be disrespectful to the spirits of the children.

This means that there will be no excavations, and whoever doubts that these are the graves of children will be called a genocide denier. You may think "well, they've done pretty extensive excavations in other contexts, so why would this particular excavation be verboten?" It's because they know that if they excavated the entire thing would be exposed as a giant fraud.

My favorite part of Kamloops-gate is that Franz Boaz personally excavated on the school property and discovered lots of old corpses, which he writes were previously buried by the injuns. This is my favorite part because, first, it’s so interesting, second it’s completely ignored, but third it proves that the corpses might not even be TB victims who attended the school — they might have been buried dozens or hundreds of years before the school was founded. Another favorite part is that Indians have a higher rate of severity from TB, explaining most of the high mortality rate in residential schools.

The whole thing was, uh, bullshit. Canadian George Floyd but somehow even worse? It was a psy-ops tier event that ushered in church burnings.

Anyway to answer your question, wear an orange prison jump suit and talk about George Orwell or something.

The main problem I have with it is the motto for it: "Every Child Maters". That's the attitude that created this mess in the first place! The motto should be something like "Mind your own damn business". But I mean...how do you express that?

Not that I'm not sympathetic to the plight of far-rural communities, right? I think there's a real problem there. But I don't think there's any sort of good solution for it, unfortunately. The best I can do is suggest help for people who want to exit those circumstances...but this is seen as essentially genocide.

(The reason I say far-rural is my understanding that near-rural reservations are doing much better in these regards)

That's a great idea, a blm slogan for the grillpilled. How about "Your life matters" - with the motte being the concept of focusing on fixing personal issues and the bailey being that it is about positivity and opposing the feeling of futility which many people grapple with every day.

KulakRevolt's reply is solid, but I've a couple things to add:

Whatever you'd hope to convince people of by not wearing it, you'll be more able to convince them by wearing it and discussing your reservations. If you don't wear it, you appear attention seeking and damage your credibility.

  1. A shirt speaks to more people than one's words, in a setting like a school (or really, most RL settings). Hundreds of people will see a non-orange shirt in the course of a day, which is more than he'll speak to in person.

  2. He's caught between a rock and hard place re: credibility; if he wears the shirt and complains, he seems like a hypocrite.

(I wouldn't recommend a black or brown shirt, though, as when attention is drawn to shirt colour this is going to wind up with being called a fascist.)

One wonders how many of the great crimes in history have occured from the efforts of "Team players"

How one does one thing is how one does all things and With the first link the chain is forged.

This is OPs opportunity to either show their students that yes they can insist on being honest to the themselves and others, or no they must constantly lie to both and lead a life of shame.

I'd say OP is \obliged, for the sake of their own virtue, to live honestly EVEN IF IT WOULD COST THEM THEIR JOB.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Who you are right now is who you are choosing to be in your brief moment on the stage and who you will be for the rest of eternity as your actions echo down the endless halls of time.

You have a brief 80 years out of millions to make your change to the world... are you really going to spend that one chance you've got speaking another's words, doing another's work, living another's dream?

I guess you're right. I did love the orange prison suit option, though.

I'm going to be a contrarian (as I expect, in this place) and say just wear the damn shirt. Then tell all those students you taught the value of contrarianism that sometimes you can just put on your football team's jersey even if it doesn't help that team play football.

I do consider it "contrarian" to conform to social pressure and just go with the flow.

After all, in places so contrarian as this, conformity can be the most rebellious act.

I am reminded of the self-justifying politician in In the Loop, who justifies his decision not to resign over an unjust war, so he can keep making things better from the inside: "Isn't the braver thing to not resign?"

After reading this comment I feel like a star bellied sneetch who must immediately join the line for star removal.

For your own mental health, I suggest you employ the old trick of flipping a coin, then do whatever option you find yourself hoping for.

That said, I think it is the duty of those who are insulated from formal reprisal for non-conformity to non-conform. You are a teacher; you don't even need to fear being passed up for promotion. Of course, I am assuming you are an upstanding citizen in the non-culture war parts of your life. If you are a callous, uncharitable, self-absorbed, or god-forbid criminal person in other areas, non-conformity will not make you a saint, and I'd prefer you restrain your non-conformist streak, lest other non-conformists be so tarred.

The major price you'll pay is the scorn of peers who have already elliptically disclosed you have a low opinion of, and maybe being pilloried by activist students. Being pilloried with dignity is, likewise, a duty. There will be no reward.

Of course, I am assuming you are an upstanding citizen in the non-culture war parts of your life. If you are a callous, uncharitable, self-absorbed, or god-forbid criminal person in other areas, non-conformity will not make you a saint, and I'd prefer you restrain your non-conformist streak, lest other non-conformists be so tarred.

I thought this was a really good comment, except for this bit. Personally I think you are missing the point of non conformity a bit if you are worrying about the reputation of non conformists. Criminality is already associated with non conformity, and it always has been. When you don't have free speech or enfranchisement, non conformity is criminal. Callousness, lack of charity and self absorption are also already associated with non conformity, because many conformists can't understand people who refuse to conform and think "why would I refuse to conform? I would refuse if I was being callous or uncharitable or self absorbed, or if not refusing might get me arrested, so that's what motivates all non conformity".

I disagree with this. Your reputation is important when you are trying to convince others of things, especially in a setting like work with many repeated interactions.

Spend your contrarian points wisely @gog

During the height of the pandemic, a fairly well-known IDW figure tweeted something to the effect of "To be resistant to hive mind programming, you must either be autistic or an asshole." I agree with a weaker version of her sentiment. I'd say: To be resistant to hive mind programming, you must either be the sort who processes society's rules intellectually, not intuitively, or you must hate society and not find its opinion relevant.

This set of people obviously includes sociopaths, assholes, disagreeable misanthropes, and socially illiterate nitwits. But I don't agree that it's the entire set. Jesus Christ, MLK, and Buddha were in that set. They may have been "criminals" but only in a non-central way.

@gog should boycott if they are a non-central non-conformist. (AKA not criminal, self-absorbed, or an asshole.) That is the only sort of non-conformist who can set a positive example and start a preference cascade towards the end of moral panic. If they are a "central" non-conformist, they should not boycott, but will ignore moral advice in any case.

Yeah, I'm saying non conformists will always be perceived that way by conformists. And sometimes even non conformists it seems. Even though, as you say, Jesus, MLK and Buddha are non conformists, the perception remains.

You will be tarred by association regardless. That doesn't mean you should say 'fuck it, may as well crime it up', but it does mean you should stop caring about being called something by conformists.

Also I assume that you are a good person yeah? You are worried about society and other people's feelings certainly. So if someone called you a sociopath or a misanthrope, you would know they were wrong because you know who you are right? So why would you think they were right about anyone else? Isn't it more likely they are just using the same brush they used to tar you?

However, if I were to wear an orange shirt, in addition to just feeling like I took an L, it would also greatly undermine every argument I have made to my students regarding the value and possibility of resisting conformism. I am not so naive as to think that any of this will be remembered a year after they graduate, but day-to-day we all have to look each other in the eye.

I think you already know what you have to do, and from your other points I think it's what you want to do (otherwise you wouldn't point out that the consequences are only social). But also schools are a very conformist environment, everything about them is built towards that end. Which makes non conformity incredibly strong. Outrageously strong. Once they leave school your students will forget most of what happened, but that's because it is a blur of uniformity - everyone looks the same and does the same thing all day every day, what is there to remember? The instances where something different happened.

If I really wanted to be a dick to my co-workers about it, I would get my hands on a shirt with the indigenous Canadian flag on it. "Are you really going to roll your eyes at the flag? I should hook you up with my racist cousin, he does that all the time."

Tough call. You might be ignored or you might receive the Bret Weinstein treatment. I don't envy your position.

Integrity here suggests you don't wear the orange shirt. You've made the argument yourself and if you're looking for validation/affirmation, you now have it. Go forth, and fret no more.

Bart Simpson T-shirt

Just don't wear the damn shirt. Doesn't seem very complicated. You already know that you don't want to and the consequences are insignificant either way, so you may as well be true to yourself.

I just read a short article in an email newsletter that threw out this statistic with regards to automation in the food industry:

Between March and July 2022, an average of 760,000 people quit jobs in accommodation and food service

The article goes on to argue the point that due to all of the ‘quiet quitting’ and generally unsatisfied workers after the pandemic or over the last couple of years, automation will not be as big of a deal as we thought. I’ve seen this sentiment echoed a number of times recently where news outlets will talk about how all of the people worried about economic disruption from robotics and Artificial Intelligence don’t realize that it’ll actually be great because people hate working anyway.

I used to believe these claims when I was a disillusion young adult who hated working, but overtime I’ve gotten more and more skeptical. Many people I know take serious pride and work, and in fact for a lot of people their work is the most important thing in their life. I’m talking people who don’t even really need the money, or who claim that even if they had enough money to retire they would continue working just as much as they do now.

Is this recent trend of less engagement with work robust enough to offset the rise in automation of jobs? Is this just a cope from those who know their jobs will disappear soon? (Ie email newsletter writers)

Personally I’m surprised that artificial intelligence hasn’t gotten more flack than it has so far. I expected the lights to come out in full force and at least get some sort of ban on image generation (I know Getty or some other site has done this) but so far it seems that artificial intelligence is generally unopposed.

Any major salient examples of automation technology or artificial intelligence being banned to protect jobs?

Here's a historical chart of the monthly quit rate for accommodation and food service. It's unusually high, but only about half a point higher than 2006-2007, and unemployment was higher then. And it's headed downwards. It's possible that the spike we saw last year was just "filling in the hole" from 2020, as people who had been waiting for a good time to quit their jobs took advantage of the opportunity. Also, total employment in these industries is still rising. A lot of the people quitting those jobs are quitting for other jobs in the same industry.

Quiet quitting is just a new term for an old phenomenon. I remember seeing an article recently pointing to survey data showing that self-reported levels of engagement at work had decreased only slightly, so I think it's probably overhyped.

We've been here before with automats. Vending machines have not replaced restaurants or even fast food joints. At the moment, you still need people to cook the food and wash the dishes. Until automation succeeds to the point of replacing human cooks and kitchen staff, 'automation in the food industry' is not going to take that many jobs away.

The main reason people quit the hospitality industry is poor pay and bad conditions. During the pandemic, here in Ireland as well as elsewhere, a lot of places were compulsorily shut for the duration, which meant pubs and restaurants. A lot of staff were laid off while the business was shut down, and many of them found jobs elsewhere that they didn't quit and go back to their old job. Because better pay, established hours, and reliability meant that the new job was more attractive. A lot of employers complained "people don't want to work" (and so the government should stop paying social welfare payments to people who had been laid off, to force them to work) but the answer most people gave to that was "people don't want to work for cut-to-the-bone wages and abusive bosses".

Is automation in work coming? Sure, because if it is perceived as cutting costs, then employers will avail of it. Is automating away jobs like waiters and cleaners on the horizon? Not quite yet, and it might - ironically - be the white collar middle class jobs that are now at risk and not the pink and blue collar 'you need a human pair of hands to do this' jobs.

EDIT: I have seen some online protesting about AI art, and that's an example of what I said above; the jobs at risk here are either fandom-type artists who charge commissions for art from the public, or people who work in freelance jobs doing stock illustrations for magazine articles (or that awful Green Party poster mentioned below, which quite easily could be churned out by AI). Nobody is complaining that DALL-E etc. are taking the bread out of the mouths of hotel cleaning staff or landscapers trimming the hedges.

While cooks and bussers aren't threatened by automation just yet, waiters very much are. Not to the point of full elimination, but electronic ordering certainly would reduce the numbers of required waitstaff, and it's certainly catching up lately.

TBH I am not sure that the problem of "cut-to-the-bone wages" has a good solution - nobody is going to pay $100 for a medium-quality hamburger, and most of those "need two human hands" don't need much beyond - which means the pool of potential applicants is unlimited, and if you disrupt the market by coercion ("living wage", etc.) you'd either get law-free zones (e.g. hiring illegals or just ignoring the law), or shortages (yes, you'd get your minimum wage, you'd just be doing alone the work three people did before - hello "abusive bosses"), or elimination of low-and-medium scale food industry, due to the economy of it not being sustainable. The only stable resolution here would be to eliminate the contradiction - e.g. by automation.

‘Automation’ in low skill industries- order pulling, picking crops, fry cooking, etc.- is really just substituting a large quantity of low skill labor for a smaller quantity of high skill labor. For agriculture this trade off makes sense- machines can do the work of many, many humans while creating only limited amounts of work for mechanics. In food service it doesn’t because there’s a limited number of man-hours to replace in a typical restaurant; fully automated fryers exist, but don’t displace enough low skill labor to be worth the cost of the high skill labor to maintain and repair them.

Is automation in work coming? Sure, because if it is perceived as cutting costs, then employers will avail of it. Is automating away jobs like waiters and cleaners on the horizon? Not quite yet, and it might - ironically - be the white collar middle class jobs that are now at risk and not the pink and blue collar 'you need a human pair of hands to do this' jobs.

White collar jobs , as a category, will probably never be at risk because what is considered white collar work is always changing/evolving , and also population growth.

At the same time, why can't burger-flipping be done by robots? The entire industry of fast-food grew out of the premise that every store sells the exact same food items, prepared in the exact same manner. Most fast food comes in completely-disposable packaging that would be trivial for machines to close. I think it's more just that nobody's built a really good robot for it yet.

If there's one area where AI has struggled to make serious progress, it's in low-cost situated soft-robotics. The kind of robot that can work around existing human environments safely, do things like clean a grill or scrub a toilet or prepare a sandwich. I suspect that when we find workarounds to the current problems, progress in this area will be extremely fast, but we're not there yet. Consequently, the jobs of burger-flippers (and it's never just burger-flipping, it's all the ancillary tasks around that) will be relatively safe for the time-being.

My experience as a tradesman working on commercial appliances tells me that the work around will be $40,000 automated grills that still need a human pair of hands to do near constant maintenance and require a $2500 refit every six months, both by either semi or highly skilled technicians, and still need a minimum wage worker to refill the patty dispenser and be on hand to clear jams, and that the final product will still have to be assembled by a minimum wage worker.

To put another way, a lot of automating away low skilled labor is done via creating more demand for semi- and highly-skilled labor. Current skilled and semi skilled labor prices are sky high and the supply is shrinking steadily, which means that large capital investments in things like automated grills are going to be unlikely as long as low skill labor is still willing to work.

A robot that can replicate fine motor control of a burger flipper would be too expensive.

You don’t really need the fine motor control of a burger flipper, though. You’d just design the automated grill to not need to flip the patty(probably by cooking via a heated press, and yes, that is expensive and prone to breakdowns which requires very highly skilled labor to fix). I expect reliability, and the shortage of technicians who can fix such kinds of equipment, are bigger factors slowing adoption.

And to be clear, a lot of fast food kitchens are substantially automated already. This process will likely continue, but the loss of fast food worker jobs will be slow because if your automated soda fountain system goes down, you’ll need employees to fill cups manually until you can get a technician who can work on automated soda fountains(and to be clear, this is a tall order; skilled labor is already in shortage and the problem is getting worse. To make matter even worse, most of the equipment we’re talking about uses brand specific designs, so a technician needs to be trained on both the brand and type of appliance that’s broken).

There's a reason why 'work simulators' (whether some kinds of MMOs, certain strategy games, clickers, casual games etc..) are so popular, why people will spend 10 hours a day for weeks harvesting virtual wood for their virtual character's virtual house in an MMO even when - if they live in a Western country - they could do half a shift at the nearest McDonalds and buy it all through the in-game store. The satisfaction of the activity provides them purpose.

I'm sure most of these people are in low income countries . Maybe begging is the closest thing to that. My proposal would be to give homeless people unlimited booze and drugs provided they have to consume it in a safe area and void the right to medical care.

There are a lot of players of 'euro truck simulator' or 'farming simulator' in the US and western europe

Why ultra-pure, though? Why not laced with something that gives them heart attacks?

There's a big difference though. Allowing a person to kill oneself (by whatever means they chose) is not the same as murdering them. I know some people do not believe free will exist (and I understand - they just can't help it) but in the Western culture the whole system of law has this concept as one of its cornerstones. Whether allowing a person that we think is mentally unwell to kill oneself is moral is a tough question, I think, but equating it to murder makes no sense however you end up resolving it.

If Alice tortured Bob until he begged for death, then handed him a gun, I would think we agree that Alice murdered Bob; you can stop reading now if we don't.

If Alice hired Carol to torture Bob, with Alice only handing him the gun, I'd think we still agree.

Taking a third leap: Carol, of her own accord, tortures Bob. She gives Donald a gun and tells him that Bob will kill himself if he gets it. Donald chooses to give Bob the gun.

We could then swap out Carol for an uncaring universe and torture for suicidal depression.

I expect we differ either on whether Donald is a murderer, or whether we can make the analogy, and I'm curious about your reasoning either way.

If you deny somebody their free will entirely, and then give back a tiny bit of it, only enough to kill themselves and thus escape further torture - it's not an exercise of a free will. There's torture involved. Just as "your wallet or your life" is not exercise of free choice. If Alice tortured Bob, until he begged for death, then Bob got hold of a gun, shot Alice, escaped the torture chamber, and lived happily ever after - that would be a restoration of the free will.

torture for suicidal depression.

Torture is a willfull act. Depression isn't. If you have means to stop somebody's suicidal depression, by exercise of your own free will, then you should do it. But somebody getting sick is not a willful act of anybody. When it is a willful act (driving somebody to suicide by means of physical or psychological torture, or other means) then it is commonly regarded akin to murder. The difference is in the presence or absence of the willfull act, you can't just "substitute" it away, it changes the whole picture.

We could then swap out Carol for an uncaring universe and torture for suicidal depression.

Well, no, we can't, not without changing the situation enough that earlier moral intuitions may not apply.

Like I said, I expected that to be a point of contention. I'm looking for a reason why.

Carol seems morally irrelevant here. Donald has no influence over Carol's actions, and Carol only provides information and resources. Suicidal depression is like torturing someone until they beg for death insofar as it is causing pain for someone until they want to die, which seems like a morally equivalent swap. Where do we disagree?

I'd support that, but there is a difference between killing someone and letting them kill themselves.

Sure, in my hypothetical world I'd accept the risk of being killed if I became strung-out hobo junkie. As I'm confident I'll never be that, it's an acceptable risk.

even when - if they live in a Western country - they could do half a shift at the nearest McDonalds and buy it all through the in-game store

That is the Devil's temptation and should be shunned at all costs! It is way too easy and tempting to go "okay, I can wait four hours for the in-game coins to regenerate so I can get the items I need to advance, or I could buy in-game currency for what is only pennies of real world money" and the next thing you know, you've blown fifty spondulicks of real world dough on 'easy' purchases.

The games are cleverly balanced that way to entice you to buy currencies, since chopping wood etc. is so tedious and you want the immediate hit of advancing now when you are so close to it. Good time management and such casual games tilt the balance the other way; you do just enough work for it to feel like a real achievement when you hit the goal, but not so much that it becomes tedious or boring. Just mindless enough that you sit there stacking up tasks for your little workers to do, the kind of game where you want to kill some time but not anything involved or heavy, the equivalent of a popcorn for the brain movie. Solitaire style games are the same thing.

For a while I'd thought we'd automate mundane labor first. Nobody want to work in accommodation and food service, so why should they have to?

Instead, artists and writers are getting the first taste. General intelligence is moving fast enough that "how mentally challenging is it?" seems unlikely to be the critical factor, and we should instead look at "how hard is it to describe your job as a collection of inputs and outputs?". Which is, at least to me, mostly opaque for most industries.

So it won't be just the grunt work. The AI reaper will come for a scattershot of occupations across many social classes, with little respect for how much pride people take in their work, with little insight as to whether you'll be next.

I think there will be pushback. At least until the road to luxury space communism is made clear.

The jobs automated away will be ones replaced by equipment which does not have to be maintained or repaired, because the sorts of people who can maintain or repair equipment are in a large shortage, that shortage is getting worse, and they command a large wage premium.

An artist or writer can, once the software is there, be replaced by a computer which requires next to no maintenance. A janitorial robot would probably require weekly maintenance and quarterly tune ups performed by the sorts of people who are both scarce right now and are not getting less scarce.

AI will be a valuable tool for many artists who embrace it. They'll be able to pump out more content, and can actually make changes to the stuff AI pumps out. Seems like it'd be a great source for inspiration or overcoming creative block. It'll also allow more people to do art who don't have the skill. That may not necessarily be a bad thing. Just like tools allowing digital art to be created by people who can't draw or paint at a great level, but their digital art can still be amazing.

AI opens art up to more people.

Yeah, I'm in favor, but we're barely getting started and people are getting upset already. There's a lot more pointing fingers and claiming that someone somewhere will be upset, but there are some people actually upset.

If I had to steelman anti-AI-art, it'd be "neural nets are bad and every use of them we permit is more consumer opposition and entrenched financial interests we'll have to crush to avert AI X-risk".

Instead, artists and writers are getting the first taste. General intelligence is moving fast enough that "how mentally challenging is it?" seems unlikely to be the critical factor, and we should instead look at "how hard is it to describe your job as a collection of inputs and outputs?". Which is, at least to me, mostly opaque for most industries.

The popular notion that writers, artists will be replaced by AI seems overblown. Look how much $ Substack writers are making now. If anything, we in a writing boom. Who knows though...maybe there will be a scandal in which a top author is revealed as just a bot/AI that parses existing work. I think AI will have a hard time understanding the nuance of language, which is an important part of writing. When I talk about the left vs. right, how can an ai know if i am talking about ideology or driving directions? Or rationalism vs. rational?

I suspect substack is rather on the high end of writing. Readers go to substack because they like an author's analysis -- e.g. Scott Alexander is in no danger of being replaced with a neural net. The automation target is more mundane: news and reporting (and propaganda), marketing copy, pulp fiction / erotica, ghost writing, and other assorted filler text. Screenplays are still pretty bad but they're on the they're on the gradient descent roller coaster now and won't stay bad for long.

In the meantime, I give you GPT-3:

The car has drifted a bit to the left, so

you should turn the steering wheel to the right to correct it.

The news has drifted a bit to the left, so

they are looking for a conservative news source that is more trustworthy and less biased.

Presumably it won't be long before many substacks are just AI created content. Many could be already. Would we even know?

To be more specific, there's a lot of semi-skilled low end grunt work getting automated. Cashiers, for example. I order with a kiosk at McDonald's and check out with a self-checkout at Walmart.

Now the stockers at walmart and the cooks at mcdonald's are still not automated; and these were jobs it was always harder to staff because fewer people wanted to do them(and their salaries, while still unskilled labor level, reflected and still reflect that).

For a while I'd thought we'd automate mundane labor first. Nobody want to work in accommodation and food service, so why should they have to?

Because, again ironically, this is the kind of work that is hardest to automate. Unless you completely re-design restaurants so that you can fit in industrial robotics the way they do in car manufacturing, and maybe one day they'll solve that, you can't replace humans who can go up and down stairs, in and out of rooms, vacuum and dust and polish, etc.

'Intellectual' labour can be automated because you can break it down into steps that can be done by a computer programme. You can more easily automate the jobs of the accounts department than you can that of the contract cleaner who earns minimum wage emptying the bins and doing the vacuuming. Boston Robotics is still working on its Atlas robot, which to me right now still seems like a gimmick - it was supposed to do search-and-rescue work back in 2013 but I have no idea if it's ever been used in the field for real operations, as distinct from trials and tests. The reason I say "gimmick" is yeah, it can run a parkour course, big cheers, but would you trust it to clean your bathroom? (Sure, eventually they'll get it working, but it'll be a lot longer to replace grunt work labour than white collar desk jobs).

Applebee's is largely automated in that most of their food is mass-produced off-site and then heated in a microwave. People who go out do not want to dictate their order to a robot that they might have to outsmart, like I have to trick my washing machine and dishwasher into doing things.

The last mile will always be hard.

The tricky part is that some mundane work and some intellectual work is easy to automate, but in many cases it's hard to tell ahead of time just how hard it will be. You can predict trucking and data entry will die off, but what will it take to crack cooking or construction or hairdressing?

And the white-collar work will be equally scattershot at approximately the same time. "It's all on the computer so it should be easy to capture inputs and outputs right?" is the kind of assumption that makes a million AI researchers' foreheads hit the desk. We'll certainly get there eventually but in this case the specifics matter.

If all the grunt work went first, we could hope for a smooth transition to post-scarcity. Sorry, we automated away your job scrubbing toilets, but on the upside production is so cheap that you can survive off your 19 twitch subs as a league of legends vtuber. But if the robot revolution happens in patches more or less randomly, then there are people with real social power that they stand to lose, and that implies chaos.

--

Separately, new tech is always a gimmick, until it's not (though I agree most gimmicks are not new tech). I wouldn't have trusted Atlas to run a parkour course, until it did. Who's to say Boston Robotics will stop short of cleaning bathrooms? It seems unlikely there will be a fundamental limit in the tech that prevents that.

My experience is that the quality of customer service, the number and quality of employees, and the convenience and reliability of store hours have all gotten worse (nothing is open late; stores close sporadically). Also, things like self-checkout have pushed labor onto the customer. Personally, I like having the option, but it makes things worse when self-checkout is the default.

It's kind of like a reverse price gouging. Retail isn't colluding to fix prices, but rather seems to have unilaterally decided to not compete anymore on the customer experience front. It's just dropped off a cliff. I see more of this trend in our future, not automation. We're going to find out how poor of service Americans will tolerate before we reach a new equilibrium.

You can go back in history and find the same thing happening. Many retailers used to have all sorts of staff on hand to increase customer experience. Labour was cheap. As it gets more expensive, and consumers choose price over all else, we see great service slowly fade away.

Rich people can still afford that increased cost of labour in order to get better service, though.

My experience is that the quality of customer service, the number and quality of employees, and the convenience and reliability of store hours have all gotten worse (nothing is open late; stores close sporadically). Also, things like self-checkout have pushed labor onto the customer. Personally, I like having the option, but it makes things worse when self-checkout is the default.

Thanks to Ccovid for that. And it's going to stay that way because companies, businesses realized that can make equal or more $ with just delivery + takeout and limited hours and fewer employees vs. full hours and more employees.

Often it's faster for customers by not having to wait in line , so the tradeoff is worth it

In my typical experience, self-checkout is about as slow if not slower. 1-3 machines down out of 6-12 across two sections (one notionally reserved for express). 1-2 helper/assistant types who are supposed to resolve errors, handful special case errors like WIC cards/coupons or confirm the shopper can purchase a semi-restricted item (cold medicines/alcohol) get easily overwhelmed by a handful of issues assuming they are there to do that instead of called away to deal with something else/shooting the shit with a coworker. Any sort of error is a hard stop and the wait for the person to notice/finish dealing with the three other problems adds up. The systems have so much lag built-in since you have to wait between scans for the system to confirm you put the thing in the bag zone that even if you were of the same skill level as someone paid to run a check-out register you'll still be slowed down. Of course these days even cashiered check-outs are slower compared to when bagging was a common minimum wage job for high schoolers. It's downright depressing going through stores with 10 check-lanes with only two of them manned.

At my local supermarket I can scan items off the shelf with my phone, put them right into my bag, and when I'm done shopping I pause briefly to scan a checkout code posted near the door. Then I leave.

There was an order kiosk at one of the McDonald’s in Flint in the mid/late 90s. It was pretty clunky by modern standards, but it worked just fine.

On the other hand, it opened up new and exciting possibilities if you were into shoplifting. Scanning premium grapes as regular grapes is its own reward.

Ironic that Eddie Lampert's find blew itself up about a decade before his vision would dominate retail.

Between March and July 2022, an average of 760,000 people quit jobs in accommodation and food service

Does this mean anything without context for: how many people were hired, and how many people on average quit jobs? The food industry has high turnover - 70% generally, so with 10M workers in 'accommodations and food service' generally, that many people quitting over three months is expected. An increase in turnover or quitting existing may happen, but saying '760k' doesn't show much. When you refer to an article, please link it so people can investigate claims made! Also: info comes from a few googles, not expert, could be wrong, etc.

Many people I know take serious pride and work, and in fact for a lot of people their work is the most important thing in their life. I’m talking people who don’t even really need the money, or who claim that even if they had enough money to retire they would continue working just as much as they do now.

Are those people working the same jobs that people are leaving in large numbers? I don't think many would work in fast food if they didn't need the money.

No these are mostly high paying or high status.

Many people I know take serious pride and work, and in fact for a lot of people their work is the most important thing in their life. I’m talking people who don’t even really need the money, or who claim that even if they had enough money to retire they would continue working just as much as they do now.

It depends on the job. Probably the people you know are not representative of most workers. The people who don't need the money probably have good , high-status jobs they enjoy, which does not apply to most workers.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-view-their-jobs/

40% of people making under 30k are "very satisfied" with their job, and 40% of private sector workers claim their job gives them a sense of identity rather than just being a living.

This isn't really consistent with job pride being a phenomenon of the upper crust.

so what about the other 60%?

this shows positive correlation between wages vs. satisfaction https://static01.nyt.com/images/2009/11/17/business/economy/jobsatisfaction.jpg

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/16/perhaps-money-can-buy-you-happiness-at-least-at-work.html

Sixty-eight percent of workers making more than $150,000 per year reported being “very satisfied” with their current job, while only 40% of people making under $50,000 said the same.

Wages correlate with satisfaction (and this is clear from the pew study), but the point is that a very large fraction of people earning very little money are satisfied with their jobs. Job satisfaction and pride are by no means phenomena restricted to the upper class.

People who like their jobs and take pride in their work usually like the status from their jobs. Over time, the association between their occupational role and its status / social effects become so ingrained that they grow to love their work. But this doesn’t indicate that they would not find enjoyment from a different preoccupation of time in the absence of work.

Plus, the “quiet quitters” obtain limited status enhancement from their work. There is literally an underclass for which work is unimportant in procuring baby mamas. Obviously if you’re a Silicon Valley dev who has spent 3000 hours invested in your occupation in a different social environment it is going to be a different story

I had a job I liked and enjoyed, and it wasn't about the status. The work was interesting, I was well able to do it, and the working environment was pleasant.

I have worked retail, and that was a hellscape.

There's a difference, I think, between people who have made their work their life and sunk so much of their identity and self-worth into it, and people who like their job even if that job is a linesman for the county.

Some people will continue to work even as retirees, and even if they don't need the money, because they miss the human interaction and don't know what to do with themselves if they're not working. (I think the French barista mentioned in another comment fits in there, also because she's working in a Manhattan café and not in McDonalds - it's not just for the sake of working, it's the type of work and people). Some people like their jobs, and I can understand why they'd return as a consultant: more money, less hassle, you get to come in and tell the bosses what to do, and it's a nice little addition to your income without the fear of "if I lose this job, I'm toast".

People who like their jobs and take pride in their work usually like the status from their jobs. Over time, the association between their occupational role and its status / social effects become so ingrained that they grow to love their work. But this doesn’t indicate that they would not find enjoyment from a different preoccupation of time in the absence of work.

That seems to contradict a lot of people I know who, upon retirement, immediately return to their previous company as a contractor. It can't be just about the money, and it's certainly not about the status.

I also find status narratives compelling but I feel they prove too much. Are you actually arguing that no higher paid individuals genuinely enjoy their jobs or would enjoy them without the status associated?

FWIW I agree for jobs like sales or similarly grueling positions.

Is the Gender War the oddest "culture war"?

Fair warning: this is going to provide few conclusions. TBH I'm more interested in soliciting opinions on which explanation seems most plausible.

I was on another sub and someone complained about how tiring the interminable gender war was. And it raised something I had been thinking of for a while: it feels like there's something very odd about a society where sexes are encouraged to disdain each other despite being unable to actually do without said sex.

I grew up in Africa and moved to the West near the end of my teenage years so I've lived in very different societies and have struggled to understand their differences. . One highly progressive and aiming for gender egalitarianism and another that has a very traditional understanding of gender still, due to religion and culture. As Muslim nations go we're pretty progressive relative to some of the Arabs (no one I knew growing up wore or was expected to wear hijab - though I saw more of them around when I returned not too long ago), but it's no Sweden.

The interesting thing is though, growing up, gender wars weren't as big a deal as in the West. I'm not saying that women never reacted badly to sexism or no one ever pushed for change. But...it just didn't feel like there was this interminable "battle of the sexes".

Thing is: we had many other forms of culture war. The most obvious being ethnic strife. That was just taken for granted. It makes perfect sense to me that tribes will dislike one another, groups will cynically deploy identity politics as suits them and so on.

It doesn't seem obvious to me that any tribe will be so riven internally that men and women (the two components necessary for it to reproduce the tribe) see themselves as competitors or enemies. With this logic being taken to absurd extremes where women make money publicly mocking their husbands for the applause of the internet

So why is there a gender war? Why didn't it feel as big a deal back home? Potential reasons:

  1. There was, I was just too young to know. The most parsimonious and intuitive. Game stops, do not pass "go".

  2. There's "'gender war" in the same way there's "class conflict" in the medieval era: exploitation is still happening but conditions haven't allowed something like marxism (well...feminism here) to explode cause the proles are still too oppressed. So there's a latent gender war. a. There's some attraction to this one too, especially when it comes to one obvious gender war issue we don't share with the West: polygamy. Here many women are opposed and it does create a clear split between men and women. But it seems like it simply hasn't bubbled up into a politically salient critique of the whole institution or, even broader, some "patriarchy"

  3. The West has much weaker tribal and religious links, which means there's much less of a sense of intratribal loyalty to block gender wars or redirect them. If you're just someone in some random urban region (that you likely moved to) they're not really your men/women, it's not really your tribe. There's no common destiny; it's just random individuals and so it's easier to demonize them as oppressors/bitches. a. As a corollary: the absence of strong, traditional identities allows/drives people to identify in different ways that allow gender conflict.

  4. Traditional societies have a much clearer path to marriage/family which reduces what there is to fight over. It is precisely the shifting of norms (and their endless litigation) that justifies becoming a gender warrior. Even unjust but stable norms may be better here.

  5. Blank slate ideology hasn't taken root. IMO this leads to damage because the natural points of divergence between men and women are no longer natural tendencies we have to work around but actual failings on the part of the other side (obvious examples would be: women being "too" choosy, men valuing youth and variety "too much")

  6. The American culture war is just particularly strange; Austrians and other Westerners do not speak this way but they don't get as much airtime.

  7. Similarly: the Culture war doesn't actually represent lived reality, it is just a loud form of kayfabe, especially on the Left. Women and men pair up and go about their days, regardless of the TikTok rhetoric

  8. Feminism itself is to blame: the ideology, especially when stripped of class, requires a male enemy. When stripped of class it becomes a tool of middle class and above women seeking to remove barriers to their privilege who especially need men as such to be the enemy (if they argued on the basis of class they would risk arguing against the very privileged state they wish to reach). If this allows a middle class woman to talk down to a working class man as an avatar of the problems of all men...all the better.

So...I'm curious which ones the Motte finds intuitive (besides the obvious). Because - if I ignore my desire to be epistemically humble - I do have sympathy for 2,3 & 5 (though arguably 5 is just a proxy for how far feminist ideas have spread in the first place).

To a person living with very traditional gender roles in the west, the question addressed to feminism is not "why do you think men and women are the same", it's "why do you think there can be a democracy with two people". Whether the differences between men and women are well understood or not, the need for gender roles seems like common sense because you cannot have democracy in relations between the sexes because it's inherently an even number of people involved, and the innate differences are viewed as supporting evidence rather than the main case to be made.

I find this interesting because neoreactionaries usually go about making their arguments running in the opposite direction; innate sex differences prove the need for gender roles and the "duh, if two people disagree then one of them has to be in charge or the issue will never get resolved" doesn't seem to come up very often.

I would hazard a guess that more traditional gender roles in african society spares the need to shut down gender wars with 10,000 word essays because "duh, think about it" suffices, and "duh, think about it" is probably a much better argument.

duh, if two people disagree then one of them has to be in charge or the issue will never get resolved" doesn't seem to come up very often.

I don't find this to be true at all, whether in my personal relationships, business, or even politics.

Further, even in this case, who do you think should be in charge? In traditional gender roles it's obviously the man, but why? In a lot of ways this is what the 'battle of the sexes' is all about: One group claiming a right to power and the other challenging it.

if two people disagree then one of them has to be in charge or the issue will never get resolved

This doesn't seem to be at all true to me. Not just in my marriage, but in many situations with just 2 people, nobody is in charge and issues are still resolved. I often do sports in twos with various friends, and I can't figure out any hierarchy at all. In certain situations it's clear that one person has more expertise

People will often say how in male-only groups there is a clear hierarchy, and I have certainly seen that on occasion, but it's not the norm.

Adults can resolve issues in small groups down to pairs, without anybody being in charge.

Similarly: the Culture war doesn't actually represent lived reality, it is just a loud form of kayfabe, especially on the Left. Women and men pair up and go about their days, regardless of the TikTok rhetoric

This is my view right here, although it goes past gender. I think when it comes to Progressive concepts of identity, you're not actually supposed to internalize/actualize them, and they live in more of a theoretical/political space. As someone who has internalized these concepts, I've been told many a time by advocates for these concepts that you're not supposed to do that. Of course, the out-group doesn't get the message on this (and how could they, considering how often they're analyzed and deconstructed using them), and it's that which creates the bulk of the conflict.

you're not actually supposed to internalize/actualize them, and they live in more of a theoretical/political space.

It may start out that way. But I think the wrestling concept of "working yourself into a shoot" can be at work, especially for the younger women and "allies" who absorbed this stuff young without any critical responses and exist in far more cloistered environments.

Even the in-group can get high on its own supply.

This is a big problem. A few weeks ago during the whole Ime Udoka Celtics affair debacle there was a lot of support on places like /r/NBA for the idea that of course employee-employee relationships are bad, haven't you ever had HR compliance training? In real life, I have never met a single person who didn't think corporate-mandated sexual harassments training was the biggest load of shit they ever had to sit through.

In real life, I have never met a single person who didn't think corporate-mandated sexual harassments training was the biggest load of shit they ever had to sit through.

Does that include all office-working women you know?

Oh certainly, and I'm not saying that this message is wildly sent out, but my experiences with being told this make me comfortable with pointing this out without it being intended as boo-outgroup, as I think it's a fairly accurate statement.

My personal belief is that there's just people (including myself) who are more innately wired to internalize these ideas, and this stuff is going to be a potential danger to us. When it comes to teaching this stuff in schools, at the minimum I want "guardrails" put in place to protect vulnerable people in this regard. The other side of this, is that I don't see the actual benefit. I mean...I can understand the meaning of just "Vote Left"...but that feels very hollow. Truth is, even as someone who understands how unhealthy it is, if I thought that there was a hope of internalization being more common, I at least could see the point.

The overarching thing, is that I think the idea of socioeconomic decline, or even stagnation is too horrific to too many people for this to be even a possibility. So any sort of internalizing of the idea of "You don't deserve this, time to give it up", which I think is the message being presented to people on the outside, I think is simply a no-go area.

May I ask, does your native culture have jokes about nagging wives/henpecked husbands? Because this seems to be a staple of humour, even in the heyday of The Patriarchy.

The Battle of the Sexes is an old trope, and for any war, you need an enemy. For feminism, that was The Patriarchy (but in practice that meant 'men in general' and not 'the system of society under which both men and women live').

Things have improved greatly, but life is still not perfect. And it would seem that for many women, all the sexual liberation and workplace equality means "in fact, you can't have it all". So they feel they have been cheated out of what was promised, and there must be Someone To Blame for that, and that means "white cis straight (Christian) men" because that is the traditional enemy.

You are completely correct about class versus race; the newer strains of feminism have gone to Intersectionality and how middle-class white women are as much the enemy, because they modelled the feminist movement on what they wanted and experienced and didn't listen to, or silenced, BIPOC women. There is womanism and mujerism which evolved out of mujerista theology, which evolved out of liberation theology, for black and Latina women respectively.

Ironically, a lot of the black/latina women involved in the theoretical and activist work are just as privileged, having been inducted into the middle-class and academia, as the white women they are competing against, which is why the favoured enemy is still The White Male, because that is the ultimate of privilege against which one can measure oneself: yes, I am more privileged than you are, but I am still less privileged than Him.

The battle of the sexes is natural, but alliances within the sexes seems less straightforward.

Every harmony results from some conflict settling at some equilibrium. Men and women have different imperatives, desires, points of view, etc. and these fundental conflicts have to bump up against one another and get settled at some compromise but with some leverage and threat remaining, to keep both parties to hold to their end of the bargain.

Such conflicts even arise between generations and even the most intimate connections like mother and child. Both on a social and a biological level. The embryo already tries to exploit the mother in utero, trying to grab on to as much resources and nutrition as possible, which the mother must defend itself from.

Even one's own cells and body parts are in conflict and this is most apparent in cancer.

Men and women are in a biological arms race too, a lot of deception, signaling, trying to see through all that and more layers of this (with reality providing a grounding through life and death in natural selection, and so an anchor to truth).

But it doesn't follow that members of the same sex are allies in all this. Rather, they just have a different type of competition going on. Especially among males, who are more competitive (that's why they need to be so big). I think the MRA idea of male solidarity is therefore doomed to be low status. A man who needs other men to protect his interests against women is seen as weak. Now women are competitive among themselves too, but typically less openly and overtly and more subtly than men. So the expectation would be that they also shouldn't have too much purely sex-based solidarity to each other in reality, but perhaps more pretension of it at least, than in the case of men.

May I ask, does your native culture have jokes about nagging wives/henpecked husbands? Because this seems to be a staple of humour, even in the heyday of The Patriarchy.

I've seen those jokes but you'd be surprised how hard it is to tell what's been influenced or not in a place where the language - and thus history - is oral and the British have ruled since before living memory. I suppose, at a certain point, it doesn't matter.

I sometimes saw - amongst the more educated cadre - a more benign version about the supposedly all-powerful "lady of the house" and I'm really not convinced it's an independent belief.

I agree with you, gender wars make least sense when it comes to conflict. Mostly because men and women do (or at least used to) literally live together. Everybody has some mother and father or some brothers and sisters or cousins and nephews. Also it is very hard to be hardcore misandrist feminist if you happen to raise a boy.

I think that the modern gender wars are fueled by mostly technological but also social changes in the west in 20th century. There are several important milestones there: the first one being invention of home appliances which made it easier to take care of household production/chores freeing mostly women to pursue other things in life. Second was overall servitization of economy where unlike agricultural or industrial economy the physical strength is no longer advantage. And the last and huge one is of course the pill which gave women control over their reproduction.

What happened as a result of all three of these technological changes is basically emasculation of women who could go out and take over traditionally masculine roles of a provider and also ability to adopt more male style of sexual behavior. One can easily see this in all cultural product where a woman can get away with some pretty nasty and outright insulting stuff that men would not be able to get away with. But this is still incomplete transition, there is still a lot of friction there. We still see lingering women are wonderful effect which basically gives them license to behave this way. It also has to be said that while emasculated women and effeminate men are a thing, they are not necessarily viewed as a model for ideal partner.

I like how Louise Perry described it - if you are a modern woman in office setting you can go about your life without ever encountering any situation where sex really matters, that is if you do not go to a gym or similar setting trying to lift weights or something like that. You would be correct to assume that there is no distinction between men and women and possibly perceive any challenge to that experience as somehow weird or even insulting. Having a widely accepted conspiracy theory about how patriarchy is beyond all this, that any differences are unnatural and a result of these nefarious forces distorting the natural equality of sexes for millennia can look very appealing - especially if believing or at least espousing ideas of such a conspiracy can get you advantages. However this is less tenable view if one becomes a mother of a boy or if one wants to have long-term partnership or if a woman is faced with some really nasty things like financial stress, crime in the neighborhood or myriads of other situation when actually having masculine man would really come in handy.

emasculation of women

emasculated women

Did you perhaps mean "masculation of women" and "masculated women"? What you wrote means the opposite of that.

Similarly: the Culture war doesn't actually represent lived reality, it is just a loud form of kayfabe, especially on the Left. Women and men pair up and go about their days, regardless of the TikTok rhetoric

This one hits with my personal experience. Much as my TikTok feed is full of TedPosting, but only the marginal "weirdoes" actually go shoot up an ATF office, and I suspect even most people posting these memes would agree that such a person wasn't "in on the joke" or didn't "get it;" the internet is full of feminisms and RedPills, but only the weirdoes actually do things like refuse to have sex for fear of rape/false-rape-accusations, or can't get a date because of ideology, or view men/women as the enemy in a way that interferes with their day to day life. Hell, irl I know a fair number of like serious racists who have fully normal cordial relations with Black people in their day to day lives. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and expecting people to live by their rhetoric would leave very little of the motte standing.

Speaking personally, the only romantic life I can truly speak to, I've hooked up with lots of women who love to make "God, men are the worst" jokes, and for whom Cis-Hetero-White-man is practically a slur! I'm whiter than mayonnaise and straighter than a yardstick; alone in bed the members of our school's "Women of Color Collective" would mostly just flat out say they loved white guys, while the white girls wouldn't admit it but their dating patterns proved them wrong. For all the criticism from the online left and all the corresponding whining from the online right, being a white man is awesome, I've never experienced it as anything but an advantage.

But this probably also plays into the "class struggle" aspect to the soft-polygyny that lots of other comments are pointing out: the top whatever% of white men have it great because the benefits of being tall/strong/pretty/blonde/rich/intelligent outweigh the rhetoric of criticism, while white men who are short/weak/ugly/defective get all the rhetorical criticism and none of the spoils.

I agree with your general point - that most people don't say extreme things and most people who say extreme things don't act on it.

But the problem is the everything is indicating there is a breakdown of the relationship between the sexes, extreme rhetoric or not. Increasing rates (and somewhat assymetric) of sexlessness, lower and delayed marriage, increasing rates of divorce (which are overwhelmingly initiated by women). If we are willing to looking media and culture we are increasingly getting stuff like 'where are all the good men gone' published in mainstream media.

Really, it seems obvious to me that the sexes are coming apart and it's making everyone unhappy. I don't think it's unreasable to that 'TikTok rhetoric' is just a symptom of that.

the internet is full of feminisms and RedPills, but only the weirdoes actually do things like refuse to have sex for fear of rape/false-rape-accusations, or can't get a date because of ideology, or view men/women as the enemy in a way that interferes with their day to day life.

I strongly suspect that framing celibacy as a reaction to being afraid of accusations is often just a mental crutch to explain away an unwillingness to suffer the fear, doubt, and embarrassment of approach and rejection. Rather than having to deal with that real, difficult reality that men get rejected a lot and it stings, but eventually you'll get through (in all likelihood), adopting a defensive crouch that explains away why you're not doing it allows reconciling some cognitive dissonance. Regarding ideology, quite a few people have noted that the commonly experienced reality is that most people aren't actually all that dedicated to their politics and that pairing off with a fairly normie woman tends to result in her adopting some approximation of her man's politics, or at least tolerating his idiosyncrasies. Sure, being a literal Nazi might be a dating problem, but you can probably get away with saying "Pinochet did nothing wrong" without alienating very many women.

I strongly suspect that framing celibacy as a reaction to being afraid of accusations is often just a mental crutch to explain away an unwillingness to suffer the fear, doubt, and embarrassment of approach and rejection.

They admit as much. The people who take this stance are usually the more jaded MGTOW types who had some sort of bad experience (divorce is a common one) and have decided romance isn't worth it.

Incels just tend to state that they have no chance cause women are totally shallow or whatever other story they come up with, not that they could have women but it wasn't worth it

In my opinion, as with most wars, the reason why it started becomes less important as the war continues and we should examine the reasons why it doesn't end. And of course I can provide that reason: Because the west can afford it. We are so damn wealthy and powerful that we can afford to let our birth rates plummet, to sacrifice our economies for vanity projects and to fight the stupidest culture wars among ourselves. Why is a war between the sexes? Because it was started, and there is no pressure to end it.

I'd wager most of it is simply from the decline of monogamy. In the West, both men and women are regressing to their biological sexual imperatives where men want to have sex with lots of women and women want to clinch commitment from a high-value man. This creates an adversarial relationship with many people left out in the cold: low-value men are rejected by most women outright, high-value men have a huge abundance and can treat women like sentient fleshlights, and women in general target the top quintile of men who treat them as disposable goods, or else they have to brave the lower quintiles full of "creeps". The best soothing balm for the battle of the sexes is simply being in a healthy long-term relationship, as it's hard to have a war when all the soldiers are fraternizing with the enemy. But the decline of monogamy has had a catastrophic impact on the rate of healthy relationships.

There are other more minor factors, e.g. the Internet has let people delve into their niche interests harder than ever, which has led to men and women dividing from each other more. I, for example, spend much of my free time playing grand strategy games and discussing culture war + philosophy with strangers in a rationalist framework. Women probably make up <5% in any of these areas, and as such I barely have any meaningful interactions with women since I graduated college. I didn't make a conscious effort to weed women out of my life or anything, I just focused on the things I was most interested in. I do interact with women a bit at work, but modern white collar environments are completely sterile so that hardly counts for much. In any case, two groups dividing from each other doesn't do wonders for understanding between them.

There's also the impact of third wave feminism implicitly branding most men as latent rape machines and red-pill/incel communities treating women like drones, which also doesn't help.

But yeah, it's mostly declining monogamy.

In any case, two groups dividing from each other doesn't do wonders for understanding between them.

What you describe, however, is more the traditional way things worked: men had their own sphere (generally the exterior world of work) and women theirs (the domestic), and both sexes went their own ways with regards to interests and hobbies (men-only clubs, women's sewing circles or coffee mornings). Interaction between the sexes was mostly within the realm of the family; you found someone, or your parents found someone for you, you got married, and setting up as man and wife in your own home was where you interacted. Men in general didn't expect to interact with women at work or in their spaces, and the same for women with regards to men.

And then the feminist movement pushed for women in work alongside men (ignoring for the moment that working-class women and men were working together in factories and the mines, which is a whole other question) - in white-collar jobs, let us say, and no more men-only clubs. This introduced more social interaction between men and women, but unless interests overlapped, there still remained and remains the gap where, as you say, "I, for example, spend much of my free time playing grand strategy games and discussing culture war + philosophy with strangers in a rationalist framework. Women probably make up <5% in any of these areas, and as such I barely have any meaningful interactions with women since I graduated college."

I think this was less of a problem when society as a whole accepted that "John is going to visit his club and talk about politics" (even if mostly John went to his club to drink and smoke and gossip with the lads), and "Mary is going to her sewing circle or ladies' benevolent club" and there wasn't the expectation that the sexes were supposed to mingle like that. Yes, it was hard on women who did want to talk about politics and philosophy and not about cake recipes or knitting scarves for the poor, hence the label of bluestocking, but it also gave both sexes a breathing space where they could cluster around their own interests.

But the decline of the acceptance of separate spaces, because that is discrimination (and again, yeah, if the boys are all going to strip clubs for entertaining clients and making deals, this cuts out Joan who works in the same industry from climbing the career ladder the same way Phil can) combined with the decline of monogamy and marriage, means that the gears have slipped. Now Sally is supposed to be able to join the He-Man Girl Haters' Club and talk about politics and economics and the like, which is great if Sally is interested in that and can hold an intelligent opinion. But if Sally is only joining because "I should be able to join this club!" (the absurd limit of this being avowed atheists protesting that they can't join college Christian groups and be officers in them, so the university either forces the group to let them include atheists or close down) then in the long run there will be a dilution of the purpose of the club, and we'll end up with the familiar complaint by women that "I wanted to join this hobby club, and I met a guy there who I thought was interested in being my friend, but it turns out he only wanted to sleep with me and when I turned him down he never spoke to me again" versus the complaint by men that "she friendzoned me, why are women such mercenary bitches?"

You don't meet a girl, get married and settle down now as per the expectations of society; both men and women are supposed to play the field, sow their wild oats, and cohabit before marriage. Romantic partners are now also supposed to be all-in-all to each other - not just lovers or spouses, but best friends, total emotional support network, interested in everything the other is interested in, the first and only port of call for all needs. That John goes out for a night out with the boys separately, leaving Susie at home, and Susie goes off on a day shopping with the girls, leaving John home, is now a bad thing. You're supposed to be joined at the hip at all times.

A little space, where John and Susie are allowed separate interests, as long as Susie (or John!) can join the same Baking Club or Economics Forum, isn't a bad thing. I think we threw the baby out with the bathwater when we pushed for closing those down. And the decline of monogamy/the family does mean that the primary way men and women relate to each other is as sexual partners first, before ever stable relationships come into the picture, and that drives for a lot of sleeping around when you have the opportunity, then the whole "men want a lot of women, women want a high-value man" disjoint becomes even worse.

EDIT: To quote C.S. Lewis writing about Friendship in "The Four Loves":

I have said that Friendship is the least biological of our loves. Both the individual and the community can survive without it. But there is something else, often confused with Friendship, which the community does need; something which, though not Friendship, is the matrix of Friendship.

In early communities the co-operation of the males as hunters or fighters was no less necessary than the begetting and rearing of children. A tribe where there was no taste for the one would die no less surely than a tribe where there was no taste for the other. Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had to. And to like doing what must be done is a characteristic that has survival value. We not only had to do the things, we had to talk about them. We had to plan the hunt and the battle. When they were over we had to hold a post mortem and draw conclusions for future use. We liked this even better. We ridiculed or punished the cowards and bunglers, we praised the star-performers. We revelled in technicalities. (“He might have known he’d never get near the brute, not with the wind that way” . . . “You see, I had a lighter arrowhead; that’s what did it” . . . “What I always say is “ . . . “stuck him just like that, see? Just the way I’m holding this stick” . . .) In fact, we talked shop. We enjoyed one another’s society greatly: we Braves, we hunters, all bound together by shared skill, shared dangers and hardships, esoteric jokes—away from the women and children. As some wag has said, palaeolithic man may or may not have had a club on his shoulder but he certainly had a club of the other sort. It was probably part of his religion; like that sacred smoking-club where the savages in Melville’s Typee were “famously snug” every evening of their lives.

What were the women doing meanwhile? How should I know? I am a man and never spied on the mysteries of the Bona Dea. They certainly often had rituals from which men were excluded. When, as sometimes happened, agriculture was in their hands, they must, like the men, have had common skills, toils and triumphs. Yet perhaps their world was never as emphatically feminine as that of their men-folk was masculine. The children were with them; perhaps the old men were there too. But I am only guessing. I can trace the pre-history of Friendship only in the male line.

This pleasure in co-operation, in talking shop, in the mutual respect and understanding of men who daily see one another tested, is biologically valuable. You may, if you like, regard it as a product of the “gregarious instinct.” To me that seems a round-about way of getting at something which we all understand far better already than anyone has ever understood the word instinct—something which is going on at this moment in dozens of ward-rooms, bar-rooms, common-rooms, messes and golf-clubs. I prefer to call it Companionship—or Clubbableness.

This Companionship is, however, only the matrix of Friendship. It is often called Friendship, and many people when they speak of their “friends” mean only their companions. But it is not Friendship in the sense I give to the word. By saying this I do not at all intend to disparage the merely Clubbable relation. We do not disparage silver by distinguishing it from gold.

We have down-valued friendship and companionship, and mixed them up with erotic love, and so there is now the feeling that not alone should men and women intermingle in all spheres, (and I have no objections when it comes to them both being genuinely interested in something for its own sake, be that talking about philosophy or the latest Marvel movie), but that not to do so is discriminatory, and on top of that, you should always be on the look-out for sexual opportunity: whether that is "join this club to meet people" (again, not a bad aim in itself, but if you're only wanting to find someone to bang, then you are misusing the club) or "why do guys always try to get in your pants/why do women always friendzone you" complaints.

Yes, it was hard on women who did want to talk about politics and philosophy and not about cake recipes or knitting scarves for the poor, hence the label of bluestocking, but it also gave both sexes a breathing space where they could cluster around their own interests.

If they wanted to do that they could just join one of the numerous female political groups - temperance and abolitionism vome to mind e.g. Women's Christian Temperance Union. Of course, despite obviously engaging in political activity, they are rarely if ever described as 'political' clubs or organisations even today, often described in terms of the social or moral. Politics has acquired a broader meaning in contemporary society ('personal is political') but historically mostly just meant explicit partisans politics reflecting parliament. The idea that women weren't engaged politically in the broad meaning is a myth that won't die. They just did it via different means and largely seperate from men, which is keeping in with the theme of this thread.

Men and women used to have common interests, but seperate spheres.

Everyone went to the same movies, dances, etc... but men had clubhouses (litterally this is what service clubs were) women had their own seperate spaces, and this was how you had cross gender and homosocial relationships...

Now to get the value of single sex spaces you prettymuch need to dive into some niche interest that's actively repellant to the opposite sex. men can't just have men only drinking and social clubs, that's sexist, you have to cultivate something so nichely male coded that it will actively prevent women from trying to voluntarily occupy the space... thus you get something like warhammer 40k which could be summarized as "history, but actively trying to alienate women"

A little space, where John and Susie are allowed separate interests, as long as Susie (or John!) can join the same Baking Club or Economics Forum, isn't a bad thing. I think we threw the baby out with the bathwater when we pushed for closing those down.

I don't know that America made a conscious choice to downgrade friendship - Bowling Alone was calling the decline of social interaction and traced it to much earlier in time (which implies it isn't just ever more hegemonic feminism at play)

And, tbh, a lot of hobbies (And even sites) are still functionally gender segregated, outside of spaces where you can get sued for it.

The declining friend group issue may be its own that then exacerbates others (e.g. like turning one partner into the end-all,be-all - which may also be helped along by monogamy)

I do think the glamorisation of romantic love has a lot to do with it, and this is probably more so for women than men, but I'll let the men answer that for themselves.

Our culture has made romantic love the supposed peak of existence, there is a Mr. Right, the soulmate, out there for you and until you find him (or her) then your life is not worth living. When you do find them, they will be the all-in-all to you, this will be the most important relationship in your entire life, they will meet your every need. And when the romantic glow fades and you find that the soulmate is just another struggling human, then you dump them and go out to find the real soulmate to live happily ever after.

Which is stupid, because no one person can be everything, and they shouldn't have to be. When it was accepted that men had their own interests, and women had theirs, and once married you would have kids and women's main priority would be their family and home, then there was more room for people to get on. John could go off with the boys, and it wasn't a hanging offence. Susie could have her night out with the girls, and that was fine. They didn't have to be in each other's business all the time, and they had a wider circle of people to meet their emotional and other needs, rather than putting all the eggs in one basket.

I think also women took on the role of managing friendships once married; it seems often to be that the friends of a couple are different to the friends each individually had before. But now we're supposed to put our romantic partners above our natal families or our friends, and they are supposed to come first in everything (except your career). And then we had the breakdown of the bargain, and maybe it was good that it broke down, but it hasn't made all the problems obsolete. Now women are supposed to 'have it all' - a career and a relationship, and men are supposed to be whatever ideal modern feminism holds up. So there is more strain on people, and more dissatisfaction: you are not having the perfect work life and perfect relationship and being fulfilled and all the rest of it, and it's easier to blame the other party for it - it's all the fault of men who still have all this privilege, or it's all the fault of women who take advantage and then fall back on "you are supposed to treat me as special".

I don't have any solutions, but maybe putting down the guns in a ceasefire is a good start. Yes, men did have a social advantage, but men today aren't the oppressors (unless they are, you know, burning their wives in dowry murders). Yes, women do have a social advantage today, but we should be aware of that and not expect six impossible things ("I didn't really want to kiss him but we were both drunk and I felt pressured into it so it was rape because I didn't consent the way I'm supposed to consent").

I do think it is the oddest culture war in that such an antagonistic relationship between the sexes is historically speaking quite new and seems to have originated in the West (though it is increasingly spreading to other countries now due to the fact that a huge amount of countries are culturally influenced by and want to emulate the West, and additionally feminist ideology has been intentionally promulgated by the West in countries they deem as being insufficiently progressive).

As to your list of possibilities, I think I am most sympathetic to 3, 4 and 8. I am not sympathetic to 2 at all.

The most key thing that I think it's necessary to note is that the gender "war" is mostly only fought in one direction - it's primarily feminist-leaning women and their male sympathisers accusing men of all manner of wrongdoing towards women, and most people out there who aren't all that invested in the gender war seem quite willing to go along with and accept that same narrative. The only major pushback is from people who think that feminism goes too far in their demonisation of men (a defence of men rather than a condemnation of women). Outside of a few isolated and much-maligned circles which people really love to draw attention to due to their deviance from mainstream thought, there's no real reverse equivalent where men express animosity towards women on any large scale and identify them as the source of society's major social ills.

I do think there's an element here of Western society being extremely fractured. When people's lives are atomised and disconnected, it's very easy to forget about people as being, well, people. Especially by the people most disconnected from the trials and tribulations that "normies" face. It's easy to forget about the countless men who work the dirty dangerous jobs to hold our society together when you spend your whole life far removed from that, and to see men as a group as being privileged oppressors. It's notable that feminism is predominantly a movement of upper-middle class women, and has always been such from its very inception. They are so distanced from these conditions that they have the ability to ignore the sacrifices of the men who keep society afloat, and can regard male behaviour and masculinity as a virtual pathology in need of reform. These are the women with the most social clout and influence, and who have the most ability to propagate narratives into the mainstream.

Even in the West, the further away you get from the urban sprawl and the less atomised people are, the less of a gender "war"-type dynamic there is. In the smaller and more rural towns, everyone knows each other, the conditions are far tougher, and it's probably more difficult to start arguing that the men going out and doing all kinds of dirty, thankless labour each day to bring back money for their families are nefarious oppressors of women whose behaviours exemplify toxic masculinity. It's harder to conceptualise of an imaginary spectre of "patriarchy" looming over everything when the society is cohesive and you have personally formed bonds with everyone in your small village.

Then there's the inherent unnatural-ness of the current environment we exist in which has shaped our gender roles in a very weird manner. Our advancement rendered the female role obsolete - a domain which women's psychology is suited to - and pushed them into the male sphere. While technology didn't render human labour in the public sphere obsolete (it would probably take the development of AGI to do that), it unintentionally ended up destroying the private/domestic sphere. The development of all sorts of domestic conveniences to make women's lives easier - created in the men's public sphere, might I add - ended up leading to women's discontentment, as all sorts of chores they would often do communally and share with other women essentially became a set and forget activity. The female role lost the status that it once had (which it should be noted was considerable), and so they flooded the male sphere. Who wouldn't?

The issue here is that the public sphere is characterised mostly by hierarchical, stratified relationships where people are valued for their productivity and are generally held at arms length. This contrasts with the kind of more communal relationships that women prefer, and additionally women are less likely to value climbing the rungs of the corporate ladder than men are. In line with these preferences, since women have entered the workplace and public life more broadly you can see social changes to the nature of the workplace which have made it fall better in line with women's preferences. There's increased emphasis on niceties, stepping on other people's toes is discouraged, making people feel uncomfortable is the worst thing you can do, strict hierarchies are increasingly seen as a negative and the environment has slowly started to look more and more like the personal network-type relationships women tend to be predisposed to.

But no matter how friendly to women's psychology the workplace has become, there's only so much that can be done. These cooperative super-organisms which make up the public sphere can't exist without hierarchy, and can't exist while prioritising the comfort and preferences and sensibilities of every individual at all levels. In other words, it will always suit male psychology far more than it does female, and women will always feel somewhat alienated in such an environment. So you get all these knee-jerk narratives which I think resonate with a lot of women on some level about how the public sphere and its institutions are unfriendly to women. However, they get the cause wrong.

All these things that accompanied industrialisation and modernity massively contributed to the rise of feminism. The feminist preoccupation with women's representation itself could be an ill-conceived attempt at replacing the social status and elevated moral standing that used to accrue to women for performing their roles in the private sphere with formal authority in the public sphere, and it might be ultimately why they attempt to engineer equal outcomes for women in the public sphere in the face of all evidence pointing to the fact that it is simply unworkable. Though of course they won't frame it that way, they'll point to "workplace gender bias against women" (the widespread existence of which, for the most part, I think is questionable and contested at best) in order to justify their attempts at social engineering in order to force parity in public life.

Once feminism and feminist ideas about the "patriarchy" and man-as-enemy became entrenched, the whole thing ended up feeding itself. While it claimed to be a radical, revolutionary ideology, its success was precisely because it capitalised on and reinforced very old perceptions of men as agents with a responsibility to channel their agency towards protecting and providing for women, and women as non-agentic victims who are the appropriate recipients of this protection and provision. Fundamentally, feminism is nothing new, and the main difference I see that exists is its extremely antagonistic attitude towards men and its portrayal of gender relations as being a conflict (well, and its insistence that women occupy the same sphere as men). Many generations have at this point grown up being invested in feminism, and there are plenty of feminist academics and activists who have made the entire thing their livelihoods.

As to the reason why I am not sympathetic to 2, it's because I think any claims about any historical female lack of power (and by extension, female lack of power in other similarly traditional third world societies) are incorrect and simply appeal to perceptions of potentially dangerous, agentic men and non-agentic women. Analogising it to class is a false equivalence because women have never been viewed by men like the underclass was viewed by the nobility. For an upper-class person, their entire social milieu and family are likely upper-class as well, whereas men have wives, sisters and daughters and have incentives to want them to do well. There's also all sorts of evidence pointing towards the idea that people generally (yes, including men) have a preference for protecting women and view them more positively than men which is simply not the case when it comes to other social distinctions like class or race, and there's lots and lots of evidence of traditional social norms and practices that clearly contradict the "male oppression of women" hypothesis. And that perspective is incoherent too - how is it that feminism is such a dominant ideology now if under traditionalism men were so tyrannical and women were so powerless? Men just thought "you know, we should stop doing this 'oppression of women' thing we've done for centuries on end now in virtually every society and never once questioned before?"

I don't hold the opinion that even polygyny reflects male privilege and female oppression. I don't think polygyny has to reflect control and coercion of women and there's evidence against that prevailing view, but even if we assume that that is what it is for the sake of argument the fact is that anything that controls female reproduction necessarily also controls male reproduction. Every polygynous marriage results in a man (or multiple men) being forced into reproductive oblivion and no hope of partnership (especially in these societies with strict premarital and extramarital sex taboos), and the only way you won't end up with a society full of incels is a society where a good portion of the men are dead. This is actually a big deficit of polygamous societies stability-wise - it's not good to have a huge amount of men disconnected from society and family.

There's so much more to say (I can explain and source my arguments more rigorously than I have here) but I don't want this comment to branch into a two-parter.

Every polygynous marriage results in a man (or multiple men) being forced into reproductive oblivion and no hope of partnership (especially in these societies with strict premarital and extramarital sex taboos)

You would think that the ban on widow remarriage in such societies also disadvantages men - after all, being able to marry a widow gives a second chance to men who can't get a partner under the system of one man/multiple wives - and yet it is always the widows who seem to do worse. The traditional hope and blessing was for the wife never to be a widow (so she should die before her husband), and the widower is free to remarry if he wishes.

I do think we don't realise how heavily Western values were influenced by Christianity, especially by the honour paid to the Virgin Mary. This slowly changed attitudes to women, to marriage, to sexuality, to a lot of things.

You would think that the ban on widow remarriage in such societies also disadvantages men

As far as I know there is currently no legal ban on widow remarriage in India at the moment. This is not a particularly new development either - the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act 1856 is the early piece of legislation that granted widows the legal ability to remarry, and more current laws such as the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 do not prevent widows from remarrying (rather, it simply provides that a marriage may be solemnised between any two Hindus as long as neither party has a spouse living at the time of the marriage). The article you linked is talking more about the social stigma that gets attached to widows in very staunchly conservative parts of the country than anything else.

If we were to talk about the current Indian laws, I think there's actually an argument that the laws are very favourable to women in quite a few ways, especially considering the fact that preferential treatment of women is explicitly allowed in the equality provisions of the Indian constitution. In a section dictating that the State shall not discriminate based on demography, it's followed up with a bunch of caveats, including "(3) Nothing in this article shall prevent the State from making any special provision for women and children."

and yet it is always the widows who seem to do worse.

Unless you do a proper comparison as to who's "doing worse", I don't quite see how this has been proven. The article does speak about the plight of shunned Hindu widows, but it does not provide any such comparison, nor does it attempt to.

I do think we don't realise how heavily Western values were influenced by Christianity, especially by the honour paid to the Virgin Mary. This slowly changed attitudes to women, to marriage, to sexuality, to a lot of things.

This is a common view I see expressed - that the Western world is unique in its treatment of women, even historically - and I am a bit doubtful about it. I've noticed that women are simply assumed to be worse off in the third world with no real substantiation - this is not to say that everything is great for women in these societies, but there's little acknowledgement of the corresponding male issues that exist in them.

In countries such as Afghanistan, there is a practice such as bacha bazi, which translates as 'boy play'. It is on the surface a harmless form of entertainment - young boys dancing for the entertainment of their elders. The boys are trained as dancers, dressed as girls and made to perform to groups of men. Then the boys are taken to hotel rooms where they can be sexually abused. And despite the US military knowing that many of their Afghan allies were involved in the practice of bacha bazi, they continued providing aid to these units.

Then there's things like Boko Haram in Nigeria. People know them for kidnapping the Chibok girls. What people don't know is that Boko Haram went from village to village kidnapping thousands of boys. They not only kidnapped boys, but they killed them too (in many of their attacks, they seem to have specifically targeted men and boys and exempted the women and girls). Here are some links about that. Source 1, source 2, source 3, source 4.

A report by Oxfam in August 2016 noted that thousands of men and boys were killed by the terrorist group Boko Haram in north-eastern Nigeria. In an Oxfam protection survey with communities affected by violence, people reported 41% more killings of men and boys by Boko Haram than of women and girls; and the number is even higher among adults, with 77% more men killed than women.

What the mainstream goes nuts over, though, is the kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls. This despite the fact that Boko Haram were not initially intending to kidnap the girls - the girls were not even the actual target of the raid, and yet these girls being kidnapped was the event that galvanised the international community to start paying attention, as well as offering equipment, intelligence, resources and manpower to "bring back the girls" and deal with Boko Haram.

So let's just say I always regard it as a bit dubious whenever the spectre of misogyny and unique female hardship in third-world countries is raised due to the selectivity of the attention applied to the third world. This is a very good counter-narrative article on women in the third world and media bias (actually, it's a chapter in a book by Tim Goldich, published as an article), which sums up my views on this pretty well:

"You can go to a brutal place, catalogue only the brutality toward women, and on that basis conclude that women are the victims, but if you don’t research conditions for men, if you don’t compare the female victimization against male victimization, your conclusion is logically bankrupt."

Don't get me wrong: I am not trying to argue who has it worse or better. I'm trying to explain why as a result of all of this, I've come to see most takes on gender relations in the third world as the presentation of half-truths at best.

Social stigma is a very potent force, no matter what legislation may say. Talking about how polygyny affects and affected men neglects how it affects and affected women, too. We can't disentangle it by saying "X has it worse, Y has it worse"; for every man who can't marry the woman he wants, there is a woman being married off as a second or third wife who doesn't want it either (first or primary or higher-ranking wives have traditionally not been very kind to subsequent wives or concubines).

The Bachi Bazi boys and the likes are disgraces. It's not much consolation to say that women have been forced into similar roles, and I think you do have to look at "why do some cultures tolerate this, and others don't"? You are correct to say that unique female hardship in third-world countries is not unique and is more complicated than "Western culture is more advanced", but there are differences.

However, the main point is that feminism took the real disadvantages and pointed them out, but is now stuck in the mode of "it is all the fault of men". Men are disadvantaged too, but it may be that male disadvantage and female disadvantage do not resemble each other. So we're trying to compare apples and oranges, and measure it in how many bananas that means.

Social stigma is a very potent force, no matter what legislation may say.

Sure (though I suspect the stigma heavily depends on where in India you are). I'm just clarifying some things and also stating that there's no actual proper analysis which is made that allows us to appropriately come to a conclusion that women are faring worse. Usually, people look at things that affect women (or that they think affect women), create narratives of female oppression in their mind and assume there is no "other side" of things, when often, there is.

Legally, women in India actually have a huge amount of protections and privileges most people elsewhere never hear about. There's way too many to easily list here, but as previously noted, article 15(3) of the Indian constitution explicitly allows for preferential treatment of women. The constitution (article 243D and 243T) surprisingly also provides for very generous female quotas in village councils (panchayats) and municipalities, but there are other, more egregious things in the law I'll detail below.

The Indian penal code (IPC) contains specific offences that uniquely protect women.

IPC section 354 contains the offence "Assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty" which is female specific and carries a more severe sentencing of up to 5 years. Section 354A on sexual harassment is also gendered. Section 354B "Assault or use of criminal force to woman with intent to disrobe" and 354C "Voyeurism" are both strictly male-on-female crimes and carry sentencing of up to 7 years. Section 354D "Stalking" is also male-on-female, and carries a maximum of 3 to 5 years depending on whether it is a first or second conviction. In comparison, the penalties for the other gender neutral offences under the section "Of Criminal Force and Assault" carry sentences of up to only 2 years at most.

IPC section 375 clearly defines rape as only male-on-female, and any attempts to make the definition of rape gender neutral were fiercely protested against by Indian feminists. The IPC does have a law against unnatural offences (Section 377) which may cover male-on-male offences, but it doesn't seem like it would cover the case of a woman forcing "natural" PIV sex on a man.

IPC section 493 has an offence titled "Cohabitation caused by a man deceitfully inducing a belief of lawful marriage" which is also gender-specific - it can by definition only be male-on-female.

IPC section 498A has an offence titled "Husband or relative of husband of a woman subjecting her to cruelty" which carries a sentence of up to three years and a fine. 498A is pretty infamous in India for being misused by women, where many of them used it to file false accusations so that they could settle scores. In line with this, there is also an additional law called "Protection Of Women From Domestic Violence Act 2005" which is again gender specific.

IPC section 509 has an offence titled "Word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman" which sets out punishments for anyone who, intending to insult a woman's modesty, "utters any words, makes any sound or gesture, or exhibits any object, intending that such word or sound shall be heard, or that such gesture or object shall be seen, by such woman, or intrudes upon the privacy of such woman". There are other corresponding gender-specific acts relating to this topic such as the "Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act".

Then there's the Code of Criminal Procedure, or Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), which has more. CrPC section 46 states that "Provided that where a woman is to be arrested, unless the circumstances indicate to the contrary, her submission to custody on an oral intimation of arrest shall be presumed and, unless the circumstances otherwise require or unless the police officer is a female, the police officer shall not touch the person of the woman for making her arrest". Even more bizarrely, officers are instructed not to arrest women after sunset and before sunrise (except in exceptional circumstances with prior permission from a Judicial Magistrate).

As to male social issues, I'd note that India itself has its own version of bacha bazi, known as "launda dancers". Again, these are young boys who dress as women and dance, and "A range of physical and sexual abuse towards launda dancers has been documented during wedding processions. These include: being bitten, burned with cigarettes, assaulted and gang raped at knifepoint, with even reports of deaths for protesting against such abuses."

There are studies that seem to indicate that boys in India are subjected to more childhood sexual abuse than girls, but boys are hardly ever thought of as victims in the mainstream.

Then there's also the boys and young men who are abducted, castrated and forced into being "hijras". Point of this entire thing is, if you don't go looking into things yourself, you're going to come out with a bit of a skewed view as to what third world countries as well as traditional, historical societies are actually like.

Talking about how polygyny affects and affected men neglects how it affects and affected women, too.

I'm unsure how I specifically neglected this and how else I was supposed to approach it, especially considering that my comment partially functioned as a rebuttal of the conceptualisation of polygyny as being oppressive towards women - I argued that it was a fundamentally incomplete view because it ignores how polygyny affects men. In my opinion, the majority of people have a fundamentally broken view of polygyny as representing male privilege when I think it does not. My statement that "People are ignoring half the picture" isn't me ignoring half the picture.

I'll also restate that it's probably a hasty assumption that polygyny must represent women being coerced since there is ample evidence that polygyny can be driven by female choice. As I stated elsewhere:

"It's commonly posited that polygyny can definitely be chosen by women when a given female’s position is enhanced by becoming the second mate of a resource-rich and already paired male, rather than the sole mate of a resource-poor unpaired male."

"In their paper "Why Monogamy?" Kanazawa and Still propose a female power theory of marriage practices, hypothesising that polygyny arises when women have more power in a society with high inequalities of wealth among men. Using data obtained from political science and sociology indexes, they demonstrated that societies with more resource inequality among men were more polygynous. Additionally, they found that, controlling for economic development and sex ratio, when there is greater resource equality among men, societies with more female power and choice have more monogamy; but when there are greater resource inequalities, higher levels of female power are accompanied by higher levels of polygyny. Accordingly, the incidence of polygyny may indicate female choice rather than male choice. "These findings are consistent with our prediction that women choose to marry polygynously or monogamously according to which choice benefits them or their offspring"."

However, the main point is that feminism took the real disadvantages and pointed them out, but is now stuck in the mode of "it is all the fault of men".

Feminists created a false perception of how gender relations operate with their myopic focus on women. If someone is essentially going around treating massively important social issues and parts of the social system as if they're not even there, it can hardly be argued that their view is in any way balanced.

Men are disadvantaged too, but it may be that male disadvantage and female disadvantage do not resemble each other. So we're trying to compare apples and oranges, and measure it in how many bananas that means.

Well, if anything that's a reason why one should find statements about women's oppression dubious at best! Any statement that women have been uniquely oppressed and represent a sort of gender "underclass" requires one to have made such a comparison, which is probably quite difficult if not impossible to do without making a litany of very questionable value judgements. More than that, as you also note it's presented as oppression by men without much evidence being offered up to support the idea that the offending custom actually originated from men in the first place.

And the other big reason is that most of the people making these statements often fundamentally just don't consider male issues to be a salient consideration at all, which is another huge error in their thinking.

EDIT: trimmed some parts, made an amendment

The most key thing that I think it's necessary to note is that the gender "war" is mostly only fought in one direction - it's primarily feminist-leaning women and their male sympathisers accusing men of all manner of wrongdoing towards women, and most people out there who aren't all that invested in the gender war seem quite willing to go along with and accept that same narrative.

I think there is starting to be a new front opened up, where men are now accusing women of having the upper hand - the whole "Women Are Wonderful" narrative, that men lose everything in a divorce, that men can and do/did have their lives ruined by accusations of sexual harassment where the female accuser never had to prove anything and got away with it (see Mattress Girl ) that women gatekeep sexual access and create incels, that women over-value their own sexual market value and chase a small number of high-value men who only use them, and so forth.

And, like the women's accusations about male privilege, there is certainly something in the men's accusations of female privilege. But I think we should remember that we are in a war, and a lot of accusations made during wartime are propaganda, not fact. Men did have the upper hand in society in the past, women do have the upper hand in society at present. Either or both of these states can change, and are not permanent.

I was about to say: just cause feminism started the gender wars doesn't mean no one else can participate.

I would argue that, where progressivism wins, it often makes even its critics absorb parts of its ideology or tactics to fight back.

For example: conservatives attacking affirmative action for disadvantaging a minority (Asians).

I don't hold the opinion that even polygyny reflects male privilege and female oppression. I don't think polygyny has to reflect control and coercion of women and there's evidence against that prevailing view, but even if we assume that that is what it is for the sake of argument the fact is that anything that controls female reproduction necessarily also controls male reproduction. Every polygynous marriage results in a man (or multiple men) being forced into reproductive oblivion and no hope of partnership (especially in these societies with strict premarital and extramarital sex taboos), and the only way you won't end up with a society full of incels is a society where a good portion of the men are dead. This is actually a big deficit of polygamous societies stability-wise - it's not good to have a huge amount of men disconnected from society and family.

I don't think "only a subset of a group X can obtain benefit A, and those of group X that don't obtain it are actually worse off than in the alternative" is at odds with a reading of "benefit A is only available to members of group X" as advantaging group X. Compare monarchy where the monarch has to be a specific gender - or, even better, an extreme form of DEI world (only minorities and women can get scientific or corporate positions). It seems that in the latter, your argument would then say that because there are only so many spots in science/corporations and the other members of the groups in question will suffer from science and technology being run into the ground just the same, this world does not in fact amount to minorities/women being privileged over majority men. Do you agree with this? If not, why not and why does that argument not also apply to the polygyny setting?

The distinction is fairly simple to me. In the case of science and technology being run into the ground, these minorities and women who do not obtain these positions are no worse off than your average white man.

In the case of polygyny, I would actually argue that this results in lower-class men's position being worse than women's - being the second or third wife of a powerful man does confer certain benefits that make the position preferable to having no partner at all. Polygyny simply results in a very severe reproductive skew among men that doesn't exist among women: if there is a subgroup of men enjoying the reproductive benefits that polygyny allows them to have, the remainder of men will reproduce less than even the women under polygyny.

This is not the case when a certain sex or race can monopolise positions. However, I will grant that in the case of sex the inherent inseparability of men and women makes things more complicated, namely, the sharing of resources between men and women when they pair up is a pretty big equaliser. That being said, fast-tracking women into high-status positions men are barred from will likely wreak havoc on male-female pairings in the first place due to a female tendency to look to partners of higher status than themselves (so what these DEI programs are doing is essentially making it so that almost all men will be far below her standards, which is going to have wide-ranging effects). And there's also the fact that a lot of these positions are inherently more suited to male preferences than female which makes such extreme DEI programs for women quite a maladaptive way of doing things. So I do think these hypothetical sex-based DEI programs are basically How To Make Everyone Unhappy: A Guide.

I'll also take this opportunity to elaborate on my other statement by providing some challenges of the common idea that polygyny is enforced merely by successful men and that it is against the interests of the women (thus its existence reflects female control by successful men). It's commonly posited that polygyny can definitely be chosen by women when a given female’s position is enhanced by becoming the second mate of a resource-rich and already paired male, rather than the sole mate of a resource-poor unpaired male.

In their paper "Why Monogamy?" Kanazawa and Still propose a female power theory of marriage practices, hypothesising that polygyny arises when women have more power in a society with high inequalities of wealth among men. Using data obtained from political science and sociology indexes, they demonstrated that societies with more resource inequality among men were more polygynous. Additionally, they found that, controlling for economic development and sex ratio, when there is greater resource equality among men, societies with more female power and choice have more monogamy; but when there are greater resource inequalities, higher levels of female power are accompanied by higher levels of polygyny. Accordingly, the incidence of polygyny may indicate female choice rather than male choice. "These findings are consistent with our prediction that women choose to marry polygynously or monogamously according to which choice benefits them or their offspring".

https://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/SF1999.pdf

Again, none of this is to say that polygyny is a sustainable model for a society to operate by in the long run - sexual egalitarianism among males carries the benefit of increased male-male tolerance. But I fundamentally disagree with the automatic framing of polygynous societies as necessarily reflecting male coercion and control, or that it actually serves the interests of men in general.

EDIT: added more thoughts, cut out some long-winded bits

The distinction is fairly simple to me. In the case of science and technology being run into the ground, these minorities and women who do not obtain these positions are no worse off than your average white man.

This is a fair distinction to make, if it is indeed correct that the two scenarios can be distinguished in that fashion. Thing is, though, I'm not sure it's so clear-cut.

In the case of polygyny, I would actually argue that this results in lower-class men's position being worse than women's - being the second or third wife of a powerful man does confer certain benefits that make the position preferable to having no partner at all. Polygyny simply results in a very severe reproductive skew among men that doesn't exist among women: if there is a subgroup of men enjoying the reproductive benefits that polygyny allows them to have, the remainder of men will reproduce less than even the women under polygyny.

However, being the first wife of a powerful man is probably worse than being the only wife of an equally powerful man in a monogamous society. Is the loss to the first wife (assuming for simplicity's sake they can in fact be totally ordered by "quality"; otherwise just take it as a stand-in for "the woman the powerful man would have otherwise monogamously married", assuming for simplicity's sake that her counterpart will be in the harem in the polygynous world) worth less than the gain to the second, third etc. wives over being stuck with someone of their rank? Perhaps it is, in which case your argument holds; but perhaps it isn't, in which case women as a group do in fact lose total utility - and then we could further debate whether their total loss of utility is actually less or greater than that of the men who would counterfactually have been paired up.

If we're moving the discussion into the increasingly wishy-washy realm of "utility" instead of using more definite measures, any such questions are probably going to be very difficult to answer.

But I will add that even if I assume for the sake of argument that the entire population of women does end up losing total utility under polygyny as opposed to monogamy, a pretty convincing argument can be made that men as a whole lose total utility as well (even after you factor in the polygynous men) because of the diminishing returns inherent in adding on wives - after all, a single man getting a wife will have a much higher gain in utility than a polygynous man getting his 5th woman, or his 10th, or his 30th. That woman, if paired with a single man instead, is going to result in a greater gain in utility for the single man than the loss for the polygynous man. Correspondingly, if a successful man can monopolise multiple women, his gain from doing so will be less than the total loss experienced by the (now single) men who would've been able to procure a wife under monogamy.

It also seems clear to me, at this point, that then trying to compare "which sex's total loss of utility is more" is something that would be very difficult if not outright impossible to measure.

EDIT: clarity

It would be helpful for this discussion to provide a strict definition of "gender war" first (or at least try to).

In my personal worldview, "gender war" is not really its own thing. The observations you make seem to be more a consequence downstream of the general atomisation of society caused by modernity. The bond between man and woman seems like one of the final units to split up in this process of increasing entropy, largely enabled by technology (contraceptives, service economy).

To speak of a "gender war" means moving largely into the frame of neo-marxism (see your point #2), where one always needs groups/classes to pit against each other to provide a worldview. E.g. in my country, leftists speak of "femicide", when a woman gets killed by her male partner. This wording implies that its somehow "all the men's fault".

The topic is interesting, because IMHO personal relationships (or lack thereof) are a strong entry point to persuade individuals more on the left of the need for some kind of narrative bonding modern people together and somehow working to reverse the ever increasing entropy of society.

Berkley Law School's Jewish free zones is causing some stir. The student group also wants to ban Zionist speakers. I wonder how this will sit with progressive Jews, who themselves are quite often found heading pro-Palestine activism in the US. Now these bans are trotted out by progressives, not alt-righters. Accusations of anti-semitism likely won't find any purchase in the vogue that's disillusioned with Israel. And I'm not seeing any sign of American Jews tilting rightward anytime soon.

It's forbidden viewpoint discrimination whether they're banning white nationalists or Zionists. Even if they aren't using "Zionist" to mean "Jewish".

Sneer Club is gonna love this one!

[Edit: In hindsight it looks like I hit a sore spot of the moderators- Sneerclub. I don't know exactly what the full story is with Sneerclub but clearly there is more going on here.]

  • -27

I don't know why exactly this has happened, but ever since Amadan asked you to avoid culture war in the Fun thread you seem to have gone on a shitposting spree. There's this, of course, but there's also this and this and this.

Whatever the reason for this, knock it off; this is low-effort and antagonistic and largely valueless.

What do you have against Sneer Club? I don't consider Sneer club to be culture war, or rather, I believed reaching out to critics of the Motte and trying to understand their perspective was something to be aspired to.

"Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion"

I assumed this also applied to Sneerclub. Maybe not...?

To be honest, I'd prefer if you didnt track each and every comment that I make. If I have been posting more than usual it's only because my power is still out from hurricane IAN so i am guilty of doomscrolling more than usual.

If it bothers you so much, I'll leave and go join Sneerclub.

All the best.

  • -14

My first comment in your collection added to the total list of types of denialism.

The second one was asking how many people had been reported.

Can't find the third one.

Value is in the eye of the beholder. If you dislike my opinions, jokes, and questions I am open to hearing why but they weren't intended as shit posts, neither were they intended to be effort posts. Just obscure comments to a comment of a comment to a roundup of random threads.

It seems to me like you have for some reason developed a grudge.

For the most part my exchanges have been civil and mutually beneficial with the exception of the mods.

I have tried to be more careful about comments that fit into the definition of culture war in threads that forbid it, even foregoing a comment altogether if I am uncertain...

As for you first allegation of "shitposting," that was made in a thread that allowed culture war posts and it was merely an addition to a list in the previous comment.

Is it overly snarky? Probably.

But it's general ungrounded snark.not directed at anyone specifically in the conversation.

TLDR: What actual rule did I break? I'll wait.

What do you have against Sneer Club? I don't consider Sneer club to be culture war, or rather, I believed reaching out to critics of the Motte and trying to understand their perspective was something to be aspired to.

They have a tendency to attempt to brigade communities they disagree with. "Gonna love this one" suggests that you're going to go show it to them for the purpose of getting them angry at us.

My first comment in your collection added to the total list of types of denialism.

It's low-effort and antagonistic. The "muh" thing is commonly used to insult someone for having an opinion.

The second one was asking how many people had been reported.

Yes, it was. Also, antagonistic, given your history of complaining about moderation.

Can't find the third one.

We really do need to improve the permalink system. Try this link. But before you ask: you're complaining that people are downvoting you and throwing around accusations as to why. Low-effort and obnoxious.

To be honest, I'd prefer if you didnt track each and every comment that I make.

All your comments are tracked here as part of posting on this site. But I'm not specifically following you; you're just getting reported a lot. (To the point

Value is in the eye of the beholder.

This is true. But the moderators are tasked with preserving the tone of a community and removing people from the community when deserved. It doesn't matter if someone else somewhere would find value in it; the question is whether it fits what we're aiming for here, and the moderators are the judge of that.

TLDR: What actual rule did I break? I'll wait.

Low-effort participation, unnecessary antagonism, and this kind of defense starts leaning heavily into egregiously obnoxious.

We're not convinced by stuff like "oh I was just asking how many people had been reported". Yeah, you were, that's technically a true statement; but we're also capable of reading words and understanding tone, and either it was meant to come across like an attack, or you're terrible at understanding how your words come across. Either way, I'm requesting firmly that you stop coming across that way.

If it bothers you so much, I'll leave and go join Sneerclub.

If you can't figure out the intended tone of this community, yes, that would be preferable.

If you can, you're welcome to stay.

While I find "Jew free zones" to be exceedingly disingenuous, I do think people who rush to point out that they didn't ban Jews, just "Jews who support Israel" to be parsing finely in a way that doesn't apply in other circumstances.

Israel/Jews have always been a fault line among progressives. "Opposing Israel is antisemitic" is a motte-bailey used by both sides. I've seen lots of Zionists claim it's a bailey: "of course you can" in theory, oppose (some of) Israel's policies without being antisemitic. And yet there is no actual opposition to any actual Israeli action that they will not claim is motivated by antisemitism. On the flip side, a lot of leftists will claim "Oh, you're just labeling any disagreement with Israel as antisemitism" when a lot of opposition to Israel (especially on the left) is in fact motivated by antisemitism.

And yet there is no actual opposition to any actual Israeli action that they will not claim is motivated by antisemitism.

Look at it as shorthand. The full argument should involve the hyper-focus on Israel specifically, the framing in media, the barrage of propaganda and not-even-wrong takes that are levied against any Zionist in a left-aligned space etc. all originating from actual anti-Semites. It's not so much that the person objecting to whatever hates Jews, it's that his entire view is influenced by people who do.

As I said, motte/bailey. There are legitimate criticisms of Israeli policy, and there are people who are hyperfocused on Israeli wrongdoing, to the exclusion of wrongdoing by any of their neighbors. Yes, a lot of it comes from people who just plain don't like Jews. But some of it comes from sincere political opposition. If someone calls Israel an "apartheid state," is that coming from a place of informed criticism of Israeli policy, is it coming from the kneejerk leftist impulse to defend oppressed POC against a country receiving billions in foreign aid from the US, or is it coming from the influence of genuine antisemites?

I don't trust people who harp on Israel's sins, but I also don't trust people who try to shut down anyone who harps on Israel's sins.

This is only one poll, but it finds that 25 pct of American Jews agree that Israel is an "apartheid state."

That's not a motte and bailey, it's one argument. It's just longer than a sentence. The very reason we're having this discussion in the first place is anti-Semitism - but I'm not accusing you of being an anti-Semite, I'm accusing whoever is pumping out the anti-Israeli propaganda at the source - e.g. Al-Jazeera, BDS. The disinformation is so rife that it makes its way into the cultural "common knowledge" and extends the inferential distance between Zionists and anti-Zionists, until casual discussion is almost impossible. When every other sentence is either so incorrect that it can't be dismissed (not-even-wrong), or alternatively has enough truth in it that it's not literally wrong (motte and bailey), the discussion becomes like wading through quicksand.

Take the example you provided: "a country receiving billions in foreign aid from the US". Is that true? Well, there's an item in the Israeli budget for "bonds and grants from the US", and it's on the order of a few to some tens of millions of NIS. Here's the full budget, in Hebrew of course, and it's on pages 20, 60, 276. Those are Israel Bonds, so that's not from the US government. So where is all that American foreign aid? It's almost 4 billion in Military Aid. See here, from the US Congressional Research Service, table 2. This money goes back to the US, either in direct purchasing or in technology, such as Iron Dome tech which was recently moved to Raytheon's site for manufacturing.

Is this what is commonly referred to as "Foreign Aid"? Well, the US Congressional Research Service uses the term, so it's not wrong! But I also don't think that's what is implied by "a country receiving billions in foreign aid from the US". Just like "Rittenhouse killed people in Kenosha", "trans activists are influencing kids in schools", "reality is socially constructed" (a classic!), they're not wrong, but they're wrong. It takes immensely more effort to refute the claim than to make it, and even still anyone can keep claiming that Israel receives billions in foreign aid.

So it goes for every drive-by comment, backed by countless headlines, memes, tweets, all implying the same thing and creating a shared understanding that something is not right in Israel - wherever the hell that is, since most people can't point to it on a map, or realize how small the scale is. They're... something something oppression, something genocide, something US aid. Those poor Palestinians. Whatever, on to the next issue - I heard Lizzo twerked with some old guy's flute.

Track it back to the source and yes, you'll usually find actual, honest-to-god, Jews-hide-behind-the-bush-on-judgement-day, protocols-of-the-elders-of-Zion-believing anti-Semites. I don't call the people propagating the same info anti-Semites, but I do label the info itself an anti-Semitic attack. The people who believe they're informed, they're just the attack vector.

I wasn't taking a position on the "billions in foreign aid" line, any more than I am taking a position on the "apartheid state" line. (I'll talk about my own personal thoughts about Israel if you think they matter, but I don't think they do.) I've been more or less neutral because my entire point is that both sides tend to use a motte-and-bailey. Amusingly, you went right for the motte of your side while accusing the other side of standing in the bailey.

(To clarify, when I said "is it coming from the kneejerk leftist impulse to defend oppressed POC against a country receiving billions in foreign aid from the US," although I did not use quote marks, I was referring to said impulse and the line that typically accompanies it, not asserting myself that this is an accurate description.)

I wasn't taking a position on the "billions in foreign aid" line

Yes, and I didn't mean to imply that you are taking the position. It's a very illustrative example that you provided, and I was working off it. (perhaps too passionately, though)

Was it "The very reason we're having this discussion in the first place is anti-Semitism"? Because I'm talking about the exceptional focus on Israel coming directly from anti-Semites, leading to this very discussion.

Amusingly, you went right for the motte of your side while accusing the other side of standing in the bailey.

I don't see it. I'd love for you to expand on that, because it seems to me like my argument is pretty clear and bailey-less, as it were.

I don't see it. I'd love for you to expand on that, because it seems to me like my argument is pretty clear and bailey-less, as it were.

Your motte is pretty much as I stated initially, that there are "reasonable" criticisms of Israel allowed (just none that will actually be accepted as reasonable when expressed), while the bailey is where you fell back to arguing that the ultimate source of all such arguments is Protocols-spouting ZOG believers.

I’m not arguing the supposed motte at all. I’m only arguing what you labeled the bailey. I also don’t understand how one can fall back to the bailey, that’s the opposite direction from retreat.

when a lot of opposition to Israel (especially on the left) is in fact motivated by antisemitism.

Wait, really?

I could see that opposition to Israel is motivated by anti semitism among Arabs or something like this. But since when is the left anti-Semitic, I’ve never seen that?

I didn't say "the left" is antisemitic. I said a lot of opposition to Israel (especially on the left) is motivated by antisemitism.

I don't think most leftists are antisemitic, but a lot of the folks who spew vitriol about Israel being an "apartheid state" seem to have a lot of problems with Jews in general. Not for the reasons rightists normally dislike Jews, but because the association in their minds is Jews = Israel = colonialist white oppressors. But it amounts to the same thing, whether you distrust Jews because they are Zionist oppressors of brown people or you distrust Jews because they are rootless cosmopolitan bankers undermining Western civilization.

This seems very familiar to the left now. It’s not that GOP is extremists it’s maga (though all gop are basically maga). It’s not that Catholics are bad just those who actually are against abortion. As long as your identity isn’t real and it’s just superficial then your not actually a witch we can burn.

deleted

Allan Bloom said that true open-mindedness is when one both (a) is willing to view different cultures as possible alternatives and (b) recognises that cultures are not, deep down, all the same.

People are familiar with the closed-mindedness that happens when people fail at (a) - the classic dogmatist who refuses to read about other religions or who dismisses other civilizations as savages. Yet there is also a closed-mindedness that comes from (b) - I have even known well-read professors who have been very reluctant to accept that Islamic or Confucian ethics meaningfully differs from contemporary left-wing liberal woke ethics in any respects. As Bloom pointed out, (b) is often driven by the combination of relativism and multiculturalism: a way of "resolving" moral conflicts in a multicultural society by denying their existence.

When I have taught philosophy and world religions, I have often found that the best students have strong beliefs/disbeliefs (including fundamentalist Christians or Catholics, and also New Atheist types) combined with a courage to think seriously about alternatives. So, while they are not Muslims or Ancient Greeks, they are willing to face a radically different culture, take seriously the possibility of adopting ideas from it, and thus they are motivated to apply reason to the intellectual problems that result, e.g. "How to live? What do I know? What can I know?" The students who start with a bland relativism and multiculturalism rarely developed a taste for such serious thinking.

fundamentalist Christians or Catholics

Is this meant to be "fundamentalist (Christians or Catholics)" or "(fundamentalist Christians) or (Catholics)"?

The first. Though, given how intellectualist fundamentalist Catholics tend to be, it's perhaps less surprising when they show an aptitude for thinking seriously about philosophical or religious issues.

This was my biggest problem with Scott's 'archipelago,' really. At first, it sounds pretty wonderful to me - a free and pluralistic place where all kinds of people and cultures can pursue their own ways in peace, which is differentiated from "the whole world we now live in" through this central authority which keeps them from trying to conquer or exterminate each other-

-But it doesn't just do that: it also exists to save the people from themselves. To make sure that is properly exposed to the Objective Perspective and hasn't just been Indoctrinated into living in their own culture, so that every child can choose for themselves how and where they want to live, rather than being kept in a place that's not really best for them.

And that just destroys the whole thing. That's not an archipelago of many cultures and many values: that is one culture doing a lot of pretending and play-acting. You can profess anything you want, so long as you don't actually believe it. You can say anything you want, so long as you don't actually mean it. The whole benefit of such an archipelago - that even if some great evil is choking out all the world, you can make for yourself some little island of refuge from it - is gone, provided you aren't limitlessly confident in the incorruptibility of the central authority. And if you're limitlessly confident in the incorruptibility of any institution, what reason (beyond matters of taste and cosmetics) do you have for bothering with this 'archipelago' thing at all?

Add it here. Maybe someone will have the link.

It’s a careful parsing similar to pointing out that Trump didn’t call Mexicans criminals or support anti-Mexican racism, he called Mexican criminals criminals and supported a wall to keep foreign nationals from crossing the Mexican/American border.

In the interests of charity, I’ll concede the “I’m not anti-semitic, I just hate the state” point if that person concedes I indeed wish to protect Americans from the narco-state to our south without hating any of the races of Mexico: the descendants of the Mesoamerican indigenous peoples and the Spanish, German, or Jewish colonials.

I'm pretty sure that the percentage of people of Mexican descent in the US who are illegal immigrants is nowhere near as large as the percentage of Jews who support Israel. I'm also pretty sure that people of Mexican descent, in general, don't consider their immigration status to be part of their cultural identity.

If Trump just said that all people who celebrate Cinco de Mayo are criminals (and assuming for the sake of argument that its importance was not invented by Americans), it would be closer.

Probably. My comparison was solely on the conflation of state nationality and ethnic nationality, with the accusation of hidden racism being unfalsifiable.

On the flip side, a lot of leftists will claim "Oh, you're just labeling any disagreement with Israel as antisemitism" when a lot of opposition to Israel (especially on the left) is in fact motivated by antisemitism.

I haven't noticed this, though. Maybe its a rather thin line while discussing certain aspects of Israeli lobbying efforts that sometimes do overlap with conventional antisemitic tropes trotted out by the alt right. But motivations are difficult to 'prove' when someone doesn't publicly espouse them. Are there any examples of this in leftist pundits though?

I haven't noticed this, though. Maybe its a rather thin line while discussing certain aspects of Israeli lobbying efforts that sometimes do overlap with conventional antisemitic tropes trotted out by the alt right. But motivations are difficult to 'prove' when someone doesn't publicly espouse them. Are there any examples of this in leftist pundits though?

I don't think any notable leftist pundits come out and say "I don't like Jews." Hardly anyone does. You're right that motivations are difficult to prove when not explicitly stated, so there's always plausible deniability. But I've seen these interactions pretty frequently, where you've got on the one side, leftists who really don't like Jews much (often not so much because of "traditional" antisemitism but because they don't like Israel and assume Jews are all pro-Israel or at least anti-Israel-being-wiped-off-the-map), and Jews who really do throw the "antisemitism" card as soon as someone criticizes Israel, and like I said, it's a fault line that pops up in leftist spaces over and over again. E.g. the ongoing jockeying over whether or not Jews count as "white" (answer: yes or no depending on who's making the argument and which strategy it serves).

Except that they didn't ban Jews who support Israel. They banned everyone (actually, just all speakers ) who supports Israel: The organization "will not invite speakers that have expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine." See here. So, "Jew-free zones" is even more disengenuous than you thought.

Sure, but there is no good left of center reason to not support Zionism. "the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine." Is just a pair of easily debunked mottos.

Thus, it is reasonable to suspect different, real, motives.

"I didn't ban Catholics, I just banned people who go to Mass." Would it be fair to call that a Catholic-free zone? I'm pretty sure that many Catholics don't go to Mass, after all. What if you just banned people for agreing with the Pope? I'm pretty sure many Catholics don't do that either.

Banning pro-life speakers regardless of topic would be closer and, well, that is a thing that has happened, is happening, and will likely continue to happen. The usual suspects cry about it, sure, but unless you're specifically reading a pro-life magazine, it's not actually newsworthy and even most of those don't consider it discrimination against Catholics.

I occasionally gripe at left wingers here that try to make silly hypotheticals about right wing policies with actual real world examples of what the costs and benefits would be; in the interests of consistency I'm now doing the same thing to right wingers making silly hypotheticals about left wing ideas(which, to be clear, I see as much stupider than the right wing policies I have defended in the past by reference to real life).

"I didn't ban Catholics, I just banned people who agree with the Pope on [topic]" would be closer. There are a lot of Zionist non-Jews; similarly, on any given topic, you can find a lot of non-Catholics who agree with the Pope on any given topic (exactly who varies by topic).

Now, you could claim that "the central example of a Zionist is a Jewish Zionist," or that "the central example of someone who agrees with the Pope on [topic] is a Catholic person," but in both cases, I'm not sure that's actually the case. I'm pretty confident that the set of "Zionists in the US" has a large majority of non-Jews (mostly Evangelical Christians in the Republican Party).

???? supporting Israel is the position of the Republican Party, very few members of which are Jewish, as well as the position of many evangelical Christian groups. And note the quote in the latter argument:

These trends in American politics may explain the recent statement by former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer that Israel should spend more of its energy reaching out to “passionate” American evangelicals than to Jews, who are “disproportionately among our critics.” Criticizing Dermer, Israel’s former consul general in New York, Dani Dayan, added that “our embassy in the United States capital has invested most of its energy in the relationship with conservatives, Republicans, evangelicals, and a certain type of Jews only.”

"Opposing Israel is antisemitic": episode 47239875.

Zionism is an integral aspect of the identity of many Jews.

Segregationism and secessionism is an integral aspect of the identity of many in the Southern US. That doesn't make it acceptable.

I oppose banning specific viewpoints on principle, but it is entirely possible to ban a viewpoint without this being secretly a way to ban some group whose members disproportionately hold that viewpoint. The Zionists here are trying to apply the "disparate impact" principle, which I think practically everyone on TheMotte rejects. They're not standing up for free speech, they're just standing up for their own specific belief. I'm sure they wouldn't mind banning Holocaust deniers.

(Edit: When I say that "I think practically everyone on TheMotte rejects" the principle, I'm not trying to build consensus, I'm just stating my impression that a consensus already exists.)

I oppose banning specific viewpoints on principle

Many student groups at law schools are mission driven, such as the Federalist Society. Surely the Federalist Society shouldn't be expected to invite Democratic activists to speak at their events, but isn't that viewpoint discrimination?

I think viewpoint discrimination is inappropriate for entire law schools, and even unconstitutional for a public law school like Berkeley, but it seems appropriate for at least some student groups.

Actually, for the record, the Federalist Society is well known for inviting speakers with opposing views to debate. But your overall point is sound, even if the FS is not a great example.

Do you know of any examples of FedSoc inviting Democratic activists to speak at their events?

I don't know examples of them inviting "activists" of any stripe, since they every event I have heard of has featured law professors and the like. But I am not a member so I don’t regularly see lists of events. And of course there are local chapters all over the country, each of which holds events. That being said, a quick Google search brings up this article, in which a liberal complains about other liberals participating in Federalist Society events, including Larry Krasner.

Great response, thank you!

The progressive Jews who are pro-Palestine are not subject to the ban. Why would progressive Jews oppose these measures any more than they would oppose similar measures against other speakers they deem as racist and supportive of ethno-nationalism? If they view Israel as an apartheid state, which they do as written in their bylaws, why would they take issue with this?

Calling these bylaws from some student organizations "Jewish Free zones" is a classic misrepresentation (nah, it's just a lie) by Jewish Journal, and it's revealing to see such kvetching for simply having a small fraction of the anti-racist critique against white identity applied to Jewish nationalism. Would these organizations allow speakers that support white nationalism? If not, are those "white free zones?"

A tiny percentage of whites support white nationalism. Most Jews support Israel.

I suppose this begs the question: how many American Jews actually support Israel?

Given the demographics of Hasidic and non-Hasidic American Jews, a percentage that will increase in the future.

Aren't the hasidim in the USA more likely to be anti-zionist than non-fundamentalist jews? IIRC there's jewish scriptural prophecies that the state of Israel is seen as acting against and a lot of US hasidim have other objections to israeli state policy that seem equally silly to a non-jewish person but are a big deal to the ultra-orthodox(stuff like the hebrew language being removed from common use such that the state of Israel conducting official business is viewed as sacrilegious).

Not that many. Maybe a half or a third, iirc.


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