CrispyFriedBarnacles
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User ID: 2417
CrispyFriedBarnacles
14d ago
I'll agree about it apparently being a scissor statement, given the responses so far, but...
Much as every event obviously has an immediate proximate cause, it is obviously true that a system should only be meaningfully assessed on the basis of its actual outputs.
This is not at all obviously true. This is the crux of the entire conversation.
I guess it really is a scissor statement, because to me, the use of the statement, as rhetoric, seems extremely obviously, and Scott entirely whiffs it. And I don't think it's about giving in to cynicism. It's about naming that different groups of people having different amounts of power in systems, as well as different values and worldviews, that this shapes their rhetoric in complicated ways, and participants in some of those groups can be protected from the rhetoric of other, more powerful groups if they can be taught to think about what systems are actually doing, rather than living in other people's rhetoric about what those systems are supposed to be doing.
Say that my wife and I participate in telling our kids about Santa and giving them gifts from Santa, and it's a happy ritual, connecting their experience to our our own experiences from our childhood. We have a lot of power in the relationship compared to our kids, we can get away with bending the truth if we think there's some cultural good to it all, and if they asked about whether Santa was real when they're small, we would probably fudge the truth about it to keep the happy ritual going, and we could get away with it. But there's absolutely no need for cynicism here - it's much more complicated than saying we were lying to them, because we would be inclined to think that "is Santa real" isn't even asking the right questions about that tradition, we would likely recognize that a 5 year old isn't even really in the right position to understand why we participate in the rituals we do, and we would expect that later, when they're older, they'll understand what we were doing and probably keep the tradition going.
A radical child activist (?) who came along and looked at this system might try to shake my kids out of their Santa belief, if that activist thought the entire enterprise was bad for my kids and needed to be radically overthrown, by adopting a "the purpose of a system is what it does" stance. Because that paragraph that I just wrote, which is something like a functional / sociological description of the Santa ritual, is a really strong inoculation against literally believing in Santa; the sociological explanation of why we do the Santa ritual sounds pretty compelling, and it makes belief in literal Santa much more difficult, or least plausibly it does (except we're talking about 5 year olds here, so my just so story is hitting its limits).
Now, this example is a toy one and likely (to most readers) pretty benign. But arguably, this sort of situation comes up constantly in society between different groups of people with different amounts of power and different beliefs about the broader good in the world and how to achieve those goods. I mean, it's no hard to change my Santa story just a bit, swapping parents with intellectuals, kids with normal people, and Santa with socialism, and you've described much of the 20th century. It's the core idea of Plato's noble lie, too. Or of Steve Jobs standing around on a stage, making all sorts of charismatic proclamations that somehow become true enough by people believing them and changing their expectations and how they act when it came to adopting new technology that went on to impact the social world. It's why faith is stressed in certain major religious traditions, too. The cultural scripts that people load up in their heads change how they experience the world and how they behave, and clean mapping to empirical reality is not the main driver here.
"The purpose of a system is what it does" is in the same skeptical tradition as open source programmers saying "I don't need to see your advertising or design doc - please show me the running code instead". Or the tradition of Marx saying he's a materialist and has no use for idealism or ideology. Or sociology tabling the truth claims of religion and instead theorizing about how different religions function in the world (and thus wrecking their foundations in the process). It's economists examining how people actually behave, in aggregate, in the face of incentives, ignoring questions of how they ought to behave. It's the tradition of C.S. Lewis's Bulverism, ignoring someone's argument and psychoanalyzing what forces caused them to make that argument instead. (And I'm not saying any of these are good or bad, for that matter).
To me, that's the obvious rhetorical use of POSIWID, especially on the dissident right. It's primary use is to shake certain people free from inhabiting the rhetorical frames of other powerful, status quo groups of people.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
16d ago
I don’t know if that influence counts as ‘shadowy’ given it was all very public.
I think one of the things that's unusual about the pairing of Trump and Musk, at least for politicians, is the way that they're very intentionally brash and attention seeking.... and provocative, and, for Trump especially, fractious.
It seems to me that, in the normal course of things, activist parts of a coalition's base tend to be very noisy and confrontational, and then the more technocratic part of of a coalition, or the finance-oriented part of a coalition, tends to let that activist part suck up all the negative oxygen and emotion and then respond to in in the most anodyne, bloodless, quiet ways possible, generally making the really big changes. They tend to be more in the Politics and the English Language camp when it comes to attention management. And of course there is often more financial or organizational connections between the two parts of coalitions.
Trump and Musk seem like they're collapsing that distinction, which is... interesting.
Anyway, whether or not this way of behaving, this division of labor between funders/organizers/NGOs and the groups they fund, is shadowy is kind of a tricky issue, or so it seems to me. On the one hand, when I read, say, this Tablet story about the Pritzker family, their wealth, and the way they use it, and all the programs they fund, I could see the argument that none of what they're doing is secret; it's all in public, in some literal sense. That's what makes it possible to write that Tablet article, after all. And yet I also know that my fairly well-educated progressive in-laws, who live in Illinois and follow CNN and MSNBC, absolutely don't know any of this stuff, and it absolutely isn't worth the time trying to get them to know about it, because they have all sorts of ideological white blood cells about even the framing of topic. Same with the topics covered by Jacob Siegel in this article about the rise of the disinfo industry. Same with this famous Time magazine article. Same with all the discussion about the role and influence of USAID. Obama was famously very swayed by Cass Sunstein's theory of nudging groups, which is quite literally about recognizing problems with the attention that normies pay to things and then making policy that leverages those flaws (ostensibly towards pro-social ends). Is Moldbug's Cathedral shadowy? Or is it just normal and inevitable, the reality of complicated modern states dealing with the cognitive realities of their "citizens"?
I feel like this is a major fault line right now. Over and over, one set of people is inclined to say, I think, "Everything is legal and above the board, and this is just what our system literally IS. This kind of technocratic organizing is simple how power works, and how it must inevitably work." And another side says, "Even if it's ostensibly legal, there are so many layers of indirection, and so much rhetorical obfuscation, and so much artful shifting of attention, that surely the goal is not democratic deliberation and self-governance. TPOSIWID." Much like with the USAID stories, whether or not these different organizations or funders or whoever else is shadowy, large blocks of voters sure seem to respond like the organizations have been shadowy when those voters finally realize what the organizations have been up to...
CrispyFriedBarnacles
19d ago
You might also be interested in George Marsden's "The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief", Thomas Leonard's "Illiberal Reformers", and Helena Rosenblatt's "The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century", all of which also cover this same era and dig into some overlapping topics and themes.
I've been trying to understand the shift from the worldview of the progressive era (where a lot of our inherited institutions were built and cemented) to... well, whatever emerged in the 60s and 70s, and all of these books were really useful for me in that regard. Leonard's book was a bit dry, but lots of great information. The other two read pretty easily, IIRC.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
19d ago
I wonder if there's not an alternative way of framing all of this, not as "should we have accountability" but rather, "must accountability be externally legible, and what are the costs and consequences if it must?"
As an example, one of the interesting things about the modern university system is it bolts two incompatible accountability systems on top of each other.
When my wife got her PhD, it was a long, grueling, intensive process. In particular, though, it was expensive in the sense that she had a world class expert in her field who paid quite a lot of attention to her during that multiyear process (she fortunately had a good and ethical advisor). And you can see (if this is working correctly) the outlines of an older system of accountability; in theory, my wife went through an intensive acculturation process by an existing cohort of experts who could, by the end of the process, vouch that my wife had internalized values and norms that meant she could be trusted by the broader cohort of researchers in her field, and thus ought to be able to independently drive a research program. That doesn't mean there's not also lots of peer review and criticism and whatever else, of course, just that she went through a process that, if it worked correctly, meant she should have an internal mechanism of accountability that meant she could be trusted, in general. All of this is much, much clearer in action if you look at universities operating many decades ago, when they had much less money, much less bureaucracy, and generally much more independence.
But clearly the current version of the University is flooded with extra deans, and administrators, and IRB reports, and massive amounts of paperwork, and giant endowments that are lawfare targets, and many layers of bureaucracy, and a bunch of arguably screwed up personal values from cultural evolution the last few decades. And many of those changes are intended to keep everyone in line and make sure everything is legible to the broader system. And so, in those spaces, the older model of producing virtuous professionals who can work cheaply by their own guidance is frequently superseded by this other "trustless society" model. And everything is slow, and expensive, and the values of the bureaucracy is often at odds with getting good work done, for all the reasons discussed in the linked conversation.
Or, to use another example, I've seen this claim made, by certain irritated black activists connected to screwed up urban neighborhoods, that there's just as much crime going on out in the white suburbs, but the cops are racist and just don't enforce laws out there. Which honestly, the first time I read that, was generally just kind of shocking and equal parts hilarious and depressing. Because of course, the entire point of going to a good suburb is that a critical mass of people have internalized an illegible, internal sense of accountability that means they mostly don't actually need cops around all that often. And everyone around them knows that about them, and about themselves. That's literally why certain people find them kind of stifling. (Obviously there are things that happen in suburbs like weed smoking or domestic abuse or whatever. But obviously we're talking about questions of degree here) Meanwhile, in distressed neighborhoods, you simply have to have cops and a legible system because a critical mass of people do not internalize that sense of accountability, and so you need the external accountability of the legible state.
Anyone who has worked in an effective small startup, versus a giant profitable corporation has almost certainly run into these same divides, I suspect.
Getting back to the question of government in this context, a few years ago, I read through Michael Knox Beran's "WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy", which was a great book, as well as C. S. Lewis's "Abolition of Man". And they were a really nice pairing to capture some of these big questions, about whether a society needs to produce leaders who have an internal sense of morality and virtue, who try to do the right thing at any given moment based on an internally cultivated sense of accountability, versus the transition to a world where accountability is an external, entirely legible thing where independent judgement and virtue can't be relied on and instead bureaucracy and technocracy solve all problems (like, say, the way that Uber driver reviews might, as just one simple example). And I think you can find upsides and downsides to each approach.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
21d ago
So why all the hullabaloo about manufacturing? Jobs.
This is the backlash to automation. This is the "wrecker class" implementing destructive policies in response to being automated away.
I feel like all these issues are always multi-causal and overdetermined. To make a comparison, it seems clear to me that since the rise of Obama, there were a bunch of really powerful forces that decided they were interested in using the wedge of "spreading LGBTQ+ rights" as a pretext to push more American power and influence into lots of other countries. Or the cause of black Civil Rights in the aftermath of World War 2 gave much wealthier, more powerful Northern interests a pretext to push for massive development in the American South, fundamentally altering its character (in many cases against the will of many interests that were locally powerful but weak compared to Northern money and social power). In each case, there were obviously lots of true believers, but there were also powerful triangulators who massively amplified these narratives in the public because they could be used to pursue other goals they considered important.
I'm not sure if it makes me a conspiracy theorist, but I have this sense that there are very big, very powerful, very important forces - non-partisans ones - that are less noisy and fractious and attention-seeking than Trump + friends, who have come to see the giant gamble starting in the late 90s of integrating China into the world economic system as a world-historical gamble that has proven to be an existential mistake, at least on the terms that it has evolved. Maybe I'm wrong, but I get that sense. And so there needs to be some public, noisy, easy-to-understand narrative to walk parts of that back, and to rebuild America's military, and to get normie young men to identify with defending a homeland and to start families and to raise kids, and to convince Europeans that they need to defend themselves and to regain something like an internal sense of nationalism (which being pissed off at Americans might ironically inflame and facilitate, as seems to be happening in Canada) and a willingness to actually make material sacrifices to make that all possible. There needs to be something like the 1980s again, basically, in much of the West. If you ignore belief in universal principles and stick with realpolitiks, globalism seemed unambiguously useful to many powerful American interests in 1998, and now we've reached a point where, at least for certain aspects of it, that's not so clear. If you go along with this argument, local automation absolutely isn't a threat to these powers that be - in fact, it's crucial. Chinese manufacturing broadly (specifically where they can piggyback from it to engage in a massive military buildup that leverages it) absolutely has evolved to be a threat to such powers. And if you're onboard with this theory, you would expect the public narratives that get the most oxygen to be the ones that are most aligned with reorganizing America's global system to protect against a rising China, rather than ones that, say, take automation seriously.
I'm not saying that makes true believers in manufacturing=jobs fake or anything, any more than people for whom Civil Rights occupied a sacralized moral status were fake. That stuff is out there and it is real. The existence of decaying parts of the Rust Belt is real. Many families cultural memory of the role that well-payed manufacturing jobs played in buoying their communities and giving them a sense of pride are real. People with those concerns are always out there. But the question of why it's getting so much oxygen now, why the megaphones are amplifying the narratives they are, is a different story, or so it seems to me. That's my speculation, anyway.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
27d ago
How do we get the trust back?
I think one thing that American liberals / institutionalists desperately need to recover is an understanding that most people don't see themselves in some universal, internally sympathetic class with our well-credentialed elites, and thus that the claim of such elites earning and maintaining trust is itself nothing like a default. And "But I did well on the test administered by elites like me" isn't enough. I think that's a really hard pill to swallow for people who have put all their chips on the current meritocracy, though, and it's understandable, because we were all born into a world that once had more default institutional trust.
It's interesting, because I don't think these ideas are hard to get across in the abstract.
I've asked before, as an example, some well-credentialed liberals I knew if they would accept universal health care funded and run by the government, with the constraint that it would be entirely run and maintained by experts from the Communist party of China, with their own internal methods for determining who was an expert. And (it should go without saying), I have not got any takers - and honestly, it's a bit interesting to try to tease out why exactly. And yet, realistically, for many Americans, administration by the current system internally gatekept and administered by American liberals is obviously not that dissimilar to that thought experiment for large swathes of Americans who are entirely alienated from those liberal gatekeepers too. They could well be forgiven for suspecting that the American liberal gatekeepers, as a class, despise them much more, and are much keener to socially engineer away their communities, than a similar program administered by the Chinese might be. At the very least, they can go read what the American version are actually saying in English about them on social media.
I get why it's a tough spot, emotionally, to be in for the winners of the meritocracy I'm gesturing at. It's really nice to get free institutional legitimacy, and it totally sucks to lose that if you were accustomed to having it, especially if you are the tail end of a long process of drawing down that legitimacy that had been built up by your forbearers who understand power and public trust in deep ways that they apparently didn't pass on (which I personally think is an accurate description of the institution builders of the progressive era compared to their "progressive" great-grandchildren). But from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in 3 generations is a thing. And I think American liberals simply no longer have the luxury of being oblivious to the realities of where power and legitimacy come from, and thus how they absolutely HAVE to rigorously publicly police themselves and their institutions to regain that trust. This stuff isn't magic. But I see a whole lot of behavior that looks like magical thinking, with a complete obliviousness to cause-and-effect when it comes to public trust.
Even if "Racism is a public health emergency" made any sense at all, people who want public power have to be smart enough to understand that you can't announce that stuff and then be surprised and huffy when large amounts of white people ignore your authority when you announce you intend to squirt novel fluid in their kids arms via flu vaccine. There's a total misunderstanding about the role of "consent of the governed", and how it means something much bigger in the way Americans organize themselves culturally than just questions about law and the Federal government...
CrispyFriedBarnacles
28d ago
I think it just comes down to costs
I think this is true, but I think it's also very important to be clear exactly why there are the costs there are - I think they're far from inevitable.
From Tanner Greer's piece in Palladium, A School of Strength and Character
"When Alexis de Tocqueville compiled his reports on America for a French readership, he recalled that “In America, there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined powers of individuals.” Yankee agency became an object of fascination for him: “Should an obstacle appear on the public highway and the passage of traffic is halted,” Tocqueville told his readers, then “neighbors at once form a group to consider the matter; from this improvised assembly an executive authority appears to remedy the inconvenience before anyone has thought of the possibility of some other authority already in existence before the one they have just formed.” This marked a deep contrast with the French countryside Tocqueville knew best, where the locals left most affairs to the authorities."
The whole piece is worth reading, but I think the case is strong that, in reality, whatever was good and useful about decentralized democratic power, it has been largely drained by the rise of 20th century managerialism going hand-in-hand with the Civil Rights revolution (which in practice has made lots of basic democratic self-government entirely illegal). Or as Greer also states, "The first instinct of the nineteenth-century American was to ask, “How can we make this happen?” Those raised inside the bureaucratic maze have been trained to ask a different question: “How do I get management to take my side?”" I think this stuff also dovetails nicely with James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State". If you're allowed to solve your problems in tacit, illegible ways, a lot of problems are actually pretty simple to solve, and they respect the Gods of the Copybook Headings too, so you don't get more of it... which I think was the OPs point. But if the entire power of the remote state requires that everything be legible... well. Costs clearly skyrocket, and massive amounts of inertia and veto points kick in. (This also clearly mirrors the experience of working in a motivated, small, mission-focused startup versus working at a giant, wealthy, extremely hierarchical corporation, for similar reasons).
I think after much of the experience of the 20th century, a lot of people in the most "civilized" places have just internalized a massive degree of fatalism about everything. Everyone knows, really, how to solve these problems. It's not like no civilization in the history of the world has figured out how to make safe streets in urban areas, and so we have no models or something. Westerners simply aren't allowed to, that's all.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1mo ago
I have a complicated reaction to this line of argument, I think.
The other day, when talking about the future of the Department of Education, I made a general comparison to how Latvians in what is now Latvia would or should have felt in 1984 if an ethnic Russian were defending the efficiency or professionalism of the central Soviet bureaucracy as it pertained to overseeing education throughout the Soviet Union. And my point then was that the fundamental split was who / whom, and no amount of arguing from the ethnic Russian would bridge that. But the devil is... the "What have the Romans ever done for us" bit in the Life of Brian has a lot of wisdom in it. That was the Soviet bureaucracy. And that is the Cathedral as well. And yet, also, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." And here we are.
To me, it seems like the fundamental problem is that American liberals want there to be "shared" central institutions and "shared" central media voices with "shared" trust and "shared" authority that are somehow perceived as "democratically legitimate", but they also think it's the most natural thing in the world for those "shared" institutions to have their particularist values and their particularist worldviews and be populated by their people and for them to do the gatekeeping. It's totally understandable that they should feel that way, given the actual reality of American since the New Deal, of course. And yet, any argument that's not grappling with that central tension here is, fundamentally, just trying to paper over the actual chasm. For all of these things, they're the Soviet party member in 1984 trying to insist that the ethnic Latvian is being misled by misinformation and propaganda from capitalist roaders by not accepting the authority and value of the central Soviet bureaucracy.
I can't remember if it was Moldbug where I first saw this observation, but I once came across the observation that almost every major power in the world covers, in their authoritative institutions, a lot of the same material in the hard sciences and engineering and basic medicine, and they get a lot of legitimacy by mastering and employing that materially-based knowledge and improving the lot of their citizens - and then they smuggle in a bunch of not-science in the same institutions but call it science to piggyback off that authority, and they spread the legitimating ideology of the hierarchy in this state or empire... anyway, once I saw that observation, I can't not see it everywhere. And that move seems fundamental to this specific discussion, especially given the role that trans (and LGBTQ2IA+ more broadly) has played in exactly this kind of context.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1mo ago
British writer Louise Perry, in one of her podcast discussions after her book "The Case Against the Sexual Revolution", made an observation about this. And she noted, basically, that her conservative critiques about the sexual revolution weren't interpreted as being tied to regressive evangelical Christianity in Britain, because that wasn't a movement with any particular force there. So it meant she was free to make something like a secular argument for a return to older Christian ethnics, and for it to be received that way in Britain. Whereas in America, because of the contours of the culture wars (and honestly because of the physical contours of the country, with evangelical Christianity often being coded as a Southern thing, meaning racist low-educated poor losers of the Civil War etc etc etc), that kind of argument is automatically slotted into a pre-existing fight. And I think she had the sense that it was much easier to advance that sort of argument and have it be engaged with in Britain as a result. In a way, it reminds me of the Charles Murray argument that a lot of well-credentialed American progressives of a certain sort seem entirely unwilling to preach what they practice; in their personal lives, they are thrifty and monogamous and live up mostly to a 1950s-ish life script (once they admittedly exhaust a non-martial serial monogamy phase in their 20s), but they're largely unwilling to advocate those positions more broadly.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1mo ago
Oh, I am well aware of why libraries are hotbeds of woke - it's for precisely the same reason that certain fields in universities are (and with substantial cultural and demographic overlap). Although I understand the general comparison to religious soup kitchens here, though, I believe there are actually also severe constraints on how and in what ways religious charities can be overtly religious or proselytize when dealing with public money, aren't there? I have that general sense, and Claude suggests there are indeed extremely strict behavior limits imposed on such charities. And I know the question of, say, if Catholic adoption services could reject gay potential parents has been a culture war flash point previously, for example.
Recognizing the social dynamics of why libraries have been taken over by a very specific, very radicalized niche subculture seems like the start of the conversation when it comes to public funding and public goods, not the end of it, at least to me anyway. It feels very similar to the issue with universities, where the people who dominate them use some extremely narrow, extremely particular definitions of "inclusive" and "global" that, in practice, exclude way, way too many people in a destabilizing and social mission undermining way.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1mo ago
My mom was an elementary school teacher, and her general experience was that you can teach bright kids all sorts of ways, and it will mostly work out eventually.
On the other hand, there are a lot of slower kids who will struggle to learn but who can, eventually, pick things up via rote learning like phonics. It's slow and perhaps not fun, but they can do it eventually. But a lot of other methods of instruction (which are often supposed to avoid beating the joy of learning out of students the way rote learning theoretically does) often end up just failing complete with slower students, because the cognitive machinery simply isn't there. And while learning phonics might not be fun, being illiterate for the rest of your life is way, way less fun.
All of this is vexing if you happen to be a bright kid who struggled through boring methods of instruction, because you probably were ill-served by that kind of instruction. And you probably would have done better (and maybe we all would have benefited, for that matter!) with personal instruction that could lean into your natural capacities. School actually really does suck for lots of bright kids.
But there really is a serious problem with Ed schools producing all sorts of novel instructional methods based on blank slate ideology and theoretically serving the moral goal of equity and anti-racism that, in practice, just hurt the students they're supposed to help because their (highly ideological) diagnosis of the problem starts wrong and then stays wrong. And all the rest of us are externalities to that process.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1mo ago
I don't mean China as the people of China, here, or their material conditions. I mean China as the political entity run by the CCP. And by "rotted out from within", I meant the CCP having their sovereignty dissolved and capacity to act undermined... which is very clearly what liberalization is supposed to do to political regimes. I've seen this discussed at great length by western political intellectuals in the past; this isn't some kind of giant secret. Globalization and integrating China into the global economic order was supposed to weaken their government and dissolve the insularity of Chinese culture.
My wife takes our kids to our local public library. The YA section is overflowing with [unasked for aggressive child targeting LGBTQ evangelism] graphic novels (I get that that's a unkind way to describe this shit, but they are overtly targeting my early middle school aged daughter - I didn't start this). There are giant, proudly displayed pride flags up all the time. Jack Turban "hooray for trans!" book endcaps. Lots of community "witchy knitting circle!" outreach. I am not exaggerating here. We live in a purple area, politically, although our particular corner of it is more like 66% blue. I legitimately find it all very frustrating - if I took my kids to a "pray the gay away" church, it would horrify my wife, but our local library is quite literally that, and then some, for a different ideology (or secular religion, really), and one that appalls me. But, you know, it's a public library. Reading is good. Libraries are good. This is currently a really vexed issue for me, actually.
Anyway, I'm not saying burn it down, exactly, but if Hercules came along to reroute a river through it to clean it out, I wouldn't shed any tears. And I grew up loving my time in libraries, too. Very depressing.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1mo ago
Imagine it was 1984, and you were an ethnic Latvian, living in what would later be Latvia, and you were well aware of the impact Moscow had on the cultural formation of your children and surrounding community. And then an ethnic Russia, mid conversation one day, brought out some spread sheets to show off how efficiently the Soviet Ministry of Education was being run, and thus anyone who had any problems with the system was misinformed by fake news. You would probably recognize that there was a crucial gap between the actual, deep issues and the argument being presented.
My entire life, since my childhood in the 80s, all the conservatives I know had had dismantling the federal department of education right up there with ending Roe vs. Wade. There was never a time when the adults in my life didn't despise that Department as an organ of cultural domination and social engineering. It was on the same level for the kinds of conservatives I knew as Universal Health Care or Real Gun Control or First Female President is for liberals.
This is absolutely straight up who/whom stuff.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1mo ago
I don't know if he is on the path to leaving, but I want to pull on what seems like the subtext here: is it the case that a large subset of Americans overtly identifying their national identity with historical European Christianity bad for the Jews, like Ben Shapiro? Right? Like, I assume that you are suggesting that Walsh taking this stance puts him at odds with the owners of Daily Wire.
I want to put it this way, because I think that topic is itself interesting and non-obvious. If you look at the original neocons, a LOT of them were Jewish (and many former trotskyites), and, in the 80s, a lot of them seemed to think that some version of very pro-Israel evangelical Christianity in America as the default public religion, as long as certain kinds of separation of church and state were followed and anti-semitism was still heavily stigmatized, was, in fact, Good For The Jews (tm). I read the interesting book "The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy" by Murray Friedman not too long ago, and it takes up exactly this topic. And in particular, some of those thinkers might well have come to see an ideology of secular, leftist third worldism (especially after the 7 days war) as Bad for the Jews, and a default European evangelical Christianity as a bulwark against that, given the deep chasms between that form of Christianity and secular, leftist third worldism, as well as that strain of Christianity instilling certain kind of salutary personal moral discipline in citizens anyway. And certainly we are seeing a repeat of history with the current leftwing Israel-is-Genociding-Palestinians stuff, the deeper internal Black-vs-Jew power fight within the Democratic party, and the response of some American Jews to all that.
If you go down this road, I think it raises a bunch of other, bigger, interesting questions. Recoiling against antisemitism is, itself, rooted in certain Christian-derived values (Tom Holland's Dominion is a really strong book on a lot of these ideas). Is the rise of China and its ability to avoid being rotted out from within by Western liberalism and capitalism, China with its internal culture that is unabashed racialist in a way that late 19th century would find recognizable... is that rise Good for the Jews? Would a world run by the current culture of China be hospitable to Jewish people and Jewish power?
I'm reminded of an observation that Glenn Loury has made. He made the point that it wasn't at all obvious that it was in the best interest for African American descendants of slaves for America to be flooded by immigrants. And his point was that, while there was this naive belief that everyone would team up against White-y, over in reality, because of the Civil Rights movement, American blacks could make a certain kind of moral claim on other white Americans whose ancestors have been here for a while. "I'm not so doing well, but your ancestor enslaved me." But it seems deeply unlikely that newer immigrants from East Asia or South Asia, as they gain power, are likely to be moved by such claims. Far more like is for them to see the deep pathologies of black communities not through a lens of guilt, but rather through a lens of disgust.
Obvious Jewish people aren't a monolith, and there are more Jewish opinions than there are Jewish people. But, in America, for a bunch of reasons, the concerns of powerful Jewish people do matter a huge amount. And I think it is the case that there are probably versions of "America was founded as a white Christian nation" that some such people could find useful and tolerable, and there are some such versions that aren't. I'm not sure where Walsh's current views fit on that front (and, of course, Catholicism is it's own deeply interesting, deeply complicated topic here too, for that matter).
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1mo ago
Here's a theory I've been toying with - let me start with an analogy, though.
Is it good for me, as a random American citizen, for the Chinese government to become more efficient, effective, capable, and trusted by its residents, to the point where such residents are willing to sacrifice personal things for some greater common good? Should I applaud any such efforts, or even figure out how to participate in various international organizations that could somehow encourage such things?
I think it's obviously that the answer isn't trivially "yes", because I have no reason to assume that an effective Chinese government actually has my values and concerns and best interest in mind. In fact, it's fairly likely that their values and goals might have some very zero sum consequences for me and my loved ones. The more effective the Chinese government is, the worse for me... at least possibly. This is not a crazy thing to think. And indeed, every empire that has leaned on divide et impera seems to have a similar view, because they very frequently find ways to keep their competitors divided and low trust to prevent exactly that kind of efficiency.
One of the consequences of the Reagan revolution is that it cemented a certain kind of public rhetoric about the American Federal government in relation to citizens. We've been habituated to that rhetoric being what it means to be conservative. "Of course we need good government, of course we have a shared common good... but the problem is waste. The problem is corruption. The problem is big government is too distant from local communities. The problem is that do-gooder liberals have real difficulty understanding second order consequences, and they often don't understand economics at all. Let's shrink government and make it better, let's get of waste, let's give taxes back to responsible taxpayers who work and raise families and follow the law and participate in the military."
But that rhetoric, successful as it was, still pushed the idea that there was a shared, consensus common good, and that an effective central government simply needed to be pointed correctly in the direction of the revised common good. It needed to be pruned, it needed to be tended. But that rhetoric intentionally papered over a lot serious fissures. This is especially true if you pay more attention to the kinds of people who might be labeled paleocons in their inclination. If you read about the history of forced busing in the seventies, for example, you might personally read it as a story of good intentions not being enough to achieve a desirable outcome - the right thing was done the wrong way. That's a very public Reagan conservative way to talk about it. But for a LOT of people who lived through it, they actually experienced it as the government and its utopian bureaucrats, as external tyrannical forces, actively ethnic cleansing them. For people who experienced it that way, having the government be more effective or efficient, and having it cut waste, is arguably a worse outcome, not a better one. Destroying the capacity of the government to function, if that's your view of things, is a feature, not a bug.
I'm not exactly saying Musk believes something like this in relation to either the Federal government or international institutions. But I am saying that this issue - whether or not the Federal government is intrinsically a foe, or if it can be a friend - seems much more live on the Right in positions of actual power these days than it ever has been in my lifetime. All my years growing up, seeing the government as an outside, malign force of extreme power was a really widely held position by the adults around me, but they were accustomed to getting lip service from their politicians about the issue but never any actual movement. And the issue is that all the adults around me were like the ones who were on the receiving end of forced busing and other similar liberal projects. They did not experience the Federal Government as a solution to a problem, but more like a God like Zeus at his worse - it had to be placated and otherwise avoided as much as possible.
Anyway, this is a long winded way of saying, if there is interest in wrecking government, then it's absolutely possible for public rhetoric that involves conspicuously lazy fact checking, repeated at very high volume and frequency, to be a feature, not a bug. Because anything that bolsters public trust in shared public discussion helps build trust in shared public institutions. And anything that pollutes the media environment and invites skepticism reduces that kind of shared public resource. This is part of why the high profile failures of Federal institutions during 2020 and Covid were much more damaging for pro-centralizing, pro-institution progressives; they need public trust for public authority to gain the power they want and to achieve their goals in a way that some other political strands simply don't. It's likewise why the public radicalization of so many professors and prestige journalists, spewing all their misinformed, polarized, clickbait political opinions on twitter for the last 15 years, was probably a mistake of historical proportions for the legitimacy of the American academy and legacy press - I'm supposed to implicitly trust well-credentialed voices in a way that I don't trust Alex Jones, but it turns out a lot of "smart" people sound about as epistemically rigorous as Alex Jones when you get them away from the very narrow slices of knowledge where they actually maintain rigor, and it turns out that a lot of them have very different values from me, and are deep in a Schmittian friend-foe distinction that they used to be able to hide much better, maybe even from themselves. Elon Musk being exactly as epistemically lazy as those other voices doesn't redeem them; instead, arguably it just reinforces my skepticism. There are serious asymmetries at play here about the consequences of public distrust. I'm thinking very specifically here, too, of the 2016 Adam Curtis documentary HyperNormalisation, by the way, which makes a very specific argument that established political forces under Putin in Russia had mastered a form of flooding the media environment with conflicting sensational garbage to get people to become very skeptical and disengage from political engagement more broadly.
As I say, I have no idea how Musk actually fits in in all of this. But it's a theory.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2mo ago
I get the impression that the election results have been deflating for the Democrats, not just because they lost, but because of who they lost.
Democrats REALLY liked the idea that, regardless of the vote totals, the voters who would make up the future (minorities and young people) were overwhelmingly on their side. And so losing young men, and having a severe dent put in Hispanic votes, has been really demoralizing and disorienting.
And it's specifically demoralizing in the context of taking radical action. "We have to take direct action because, even though old white Fox News voters have a slight voting edge, our base of marginalized voters, full of righteous fury, demand it - they can't wait any longer!" is a great motivator to direct action for a certain kind of progressive. "White middle aged upper middle class Karens are super pissed and are going to take to the streets after being repudiated by their sons", on the other hand, is... I don't know. Whatever it is, it's not at all the same kind of moral justification story.
All of which is to say, I think its finally sinking in that certain aspects of left-of-center radicalism are REALLY unpopular to a much bigger part of the voting base than had been previously accepted, and its unpopular with groups that left-of-center types don't feel as comfortable writing off. And yet those same people are still, also, uncomfortable with crossing the radicals in their coalition, too. So they are left in a bind about how to respond to the current moment.
Also, I think there is also a sense in those circles that their media / communication situation is much more damaged than they had realized. To make protesting valuable, you need favorable coverage that reaches the kinds of audiences you care about, and that requires a favorable media apparatus with serious reach. I get the sense that Democratic thought leaders, right now, have a sense that they've lost that, with legacy media having less and less reach and less and less trust, and with new social media like Tik-Tok and X and huge bro podcasts being less than sympathetic at this point. And worse still, the corners of social media that are more sympathetic to them, the corners that actually have audiences, are also often steeped in the Pro-Palestine / Anti-Israel stuff that massively fractures the Democratic coalition by driving Jews crazy.
Those are some thoughts, anyway.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2mo ago
This might be a little meta, bit here's a theory about what's happening with Trump et al, and why I'm dubious about reasoned debate even being particularly clarifying.
I remember, back when Tumblr grew popular, being struck by the rise of a specific rhetorical tone. It was a kind of outraged, indignant, wounded "How DARE you defend yourself while I was attacking you!" It was the cry bully tone. I found it deeply infuriating, and it leaked out into all sorts of social media spaces and even into more mainstream media. And in the background, all the various intersectional theories were key to justifying it, because those theories were the basis for the attackers feeling, really and truly, that they were just fighting back and calling out injustice - hence the wounded tone on encountering resistance. There was a strong, assumed element of moral grievance backing it all up. But if you weren't actually onboard with all the foundational intersectional theories, it was enormously off-putting.
And then, despite all that, it was incredibly effective for about 12 years, and cancel culture rose, and 2020 happened, and DEI happened, and Woke Hollywood and Wokeness in games happened, and insanity at universities happened (and is still deeply entrenched), and after a while it became clear that, at least in the short term, people doing the cry bullying stuff actually knew what they were doing, at least in some tacit sense... or at least the people who developed their foundational theories did. Because it turns out that most normal people want to engage with reason and discussion when faced with conflict, and most normal people are very conflict averse and very cowed by public claims of public morality and public offense. And so, it turns out that being extremely unreasonable, confrontational, and obnoxious can be surprisingly effective. It's an accurate read about a weakness in how normal people react to drama. Actually, even more so, in this particular case, it's also an especially accurate read of the dynamics between radical "marginalized" activists and normal well-credentialed liberals who want, more than anything in the world, to publicly show that they're not low status conservatives, at any cost.
The dynamics here remind me of why people buy guard dogs. At least as far as I understand, and this is obviously not from experience, it is (relatively) easy to threaten people with weapons like guns. You point the weapon at someone, you use loud and menacing tones with specific instructions to push people around and force them to do things so they can avoid being hurt. Threatening dogs, on the other hand, especially if there are a few of them, especially if they're bred to be guard dogs, is an entirely different matter. The dogs are, in some deep sense, unreasonable. They literally can't be reasoned with. So they function as facts about the world that have to be navigated around, rather than as potential debate partners. And I think that's the logic that unreasonable activists have latched on to. They understand the power of being willing to gun the engine, tear the steering wheel out of the car, and lean in hard to being totally unreasonable. And in the short term, that works great - until the circle firing squads start forming once you've run off everyone who wants to be reasonable, and until enough opponents recognize the trick and then coordinate to massively punish this illiberal defection.
Power in the business world works like this all the time, too, of course - higher management slashes jobs or unceremoniously kills even promising projects for all sorts of reasons, little people get randomly punished through no fault of their own, and being willing to be seen as dicks is actually a major part of the job, because, well, that's just sort of what business is, right? Such people might need to project a certain amount of public reasonableness, but internally, in the hierarchy, saying "no" doesn't need justification, mostly. That's what power is. You get to be the immovable fact of the world, and someone else has to compromise and reason their way around that fact and make the best of things.
Republicans and conservatives have had it hammered in to their heads, the last decade and a half, that preemptively being reasonable, when your opponents have been supine to deeply unreasonable, monstrous people who hate you and are taking active steps to harm you, is a losing game theoretic move. Being willing to be unreasonable and confrontational, to be seen as a dick, to be the immovable fact of the world that other people have to compromise and reason their way around, is a super power and the only sensible move, at least in certain contexts. And in large measure, this is because being that unreasonable forces other people, through their actions, to reveal the actual distance between their rhetoric, on the one hand, and their actual capabilities, values, and priorities, on the other. It makes other people make hard choices. And lurking in the background is something even deeper; it's the willingness to say, "When you were doing something ill-advised, and then I stepped in and said no, I'm taking responsibility for saying no, but I'm not taking responsibility for you getting things to this situation in the first place. The damage that is about to happen is on you." That dynamic has played out especially in relation to the immigration crisis.
Anyway, that's my meta read on the current Trumpian moves, and that kind of flipping over the tea table always generates collateral damage.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2mo ago
Here, let me try an alternate frame, the Male Feminist as Something Like a Victim:
Many male feminists are fish swimming in water and unable to see it; they've been raised to accept certain social frames as authoritative, and so they grant authority to those social frames. They want to be Good Boys in a simple kind of way. However, the frames are full of huge amounts of problems.
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No one is in charge. Sex positive feminists say very different things from sex negative feminists. Extremists get lots of air time, way out of proportion to reason. The abstractions used by any particular ideologue turn into a broken mess on contact with any particular woman. A lot of men want simple rules, vigorously followed, for their moral systems, and that is not an accurate description of the messy, decentralized tangle of messages they get if they grow up under what currently passes as feminist discourses. But it takes a certain amount of critical distance to be able to recognize all this.
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Women are people, and so on the ground, many of them don't know what they want, some don't like to take responsibility for their own actions, many are also confused and conflicted by the various messy social messages they think they're getting, and so on. One of the most useful observations I picked up from early online proto PUA stuff 20 years ago was that feminist activists don't really know what women want, they often think women are wrong for wanting what they want in a false consciousness kind of way, they don't actually speak for women even when they claim they do, and you get a lot farther paying to women as particular individuals and thinking about the turbulent mess in their own heads rather than whatever cultural marxist abstractions feminists are inclined to reach towards. BUT if you're a certain unreflective male feminist, all of this giant mess is opaque to you. It's easier to try to find an authoritative voice and latch on to it. But that doesn't actually survive contact with real people.
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Lots of strands of feminism are just flatly, nakedly wrong (and sometimes hateful, and often viciously incurious) about male sexuality, male emotions, male concerns, male compulsions and weaknesses, and so on. Many are wrong about basic things on fundamental biological levels, and they have deeply wrong-headed norms and advice that stem from that ignorance. This isn't a giant problem if you have some critical distance from those schools of thought and can ignore ideas that are fatally undermined by their anti-biology ignorance and biases. But if you're an unreflective Male Feminist, you're loading up programs about the world and yourself in your head that are actively harmful and at odds with reality to you and those around you.
A sex pest male feminist might well be a hypocrite or liar, I'm not trying to argue that isn't possible. I think there are lots of different varieties out there. But I have the strong suspicion that there are a lot of guys who have loaded up a bunch of simplistic feminist claims in their head as authoritative about morality and gender in the world, and then when the actual messy reality of their own physical biology shows up, and the intensity of their desires, and the shame of their compulsions and their weaknesses, they are entirely unequipped to navigate it successfully because the social tools they have been given are non-functional and not even addressing the correct basic facts.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
5mo ago
Here's a theory for you - blame cultural marxism....
... Okay, I'm intentionally being a bit obnoxious, obviously, but let me try to make a case here.
Here's one view: women have a lot of power, and women have always had a lot of power. In many cases, that power has looked somewhat different than the power that men have wielded. That's fine and normal. And in a healthy, functional society, gender roles and ideals and responsibilities evolve that take the natural human tendencies of both men and women into account and help temper reliably occurring problems in both men and women to keep their worst impulses in check and help them wield their various kinds of power responsibly, stably and pro-socially. All of this is the ideal, anyway.
But then, enter enlightenment ideals about legibility, equality, and combine them with post-enlightenment ideals about oppressor-oppressed dynamics. Now, the fact that lots of ways women wield power is illegible means it is invisible in political discussions. And an insistence on a sort of a priori equality between men and women means that even accepting that men and women might wield power in different ways is seen a suspect, like it's just a justification for women not having more legible power. And finally, an insistence on seeing things through an oppressor-oppressed binary means that even the basic idea that women might routinely and predictably behave in ways that hurt people, and those ways of being might need to be tempered, is no longer basic wisdom, but rather just one more way to keep women down.
That combination of world views arguably has a tendency of infantilizing women and stripping them of any real agency and responsibility, which over in reality ends up being a giant problem if they actually DO have a bunch of agency and power that actually needs to be kept in check sometimes for the good of broader society.
Anyway, that's one theory, anyway... something like that.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
6mo ago
There's something at the core of this all, from progressives, that I fundamentally have a hard time wrapping my head around.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s in the South in a conservative religious family in a conservative community. The view of the Supreme Court was overwhelmingly that it had behaved as an unelected, anti-democratic, civilization wrecking dictatorship for half a century. If you valued freedom of religion and freedom of association in a more traditional, de Tocqueville-ian sense (with a strong emphasis on the ability of people to form and police their own communities with their own values and their own norms and their own boundaries), the Supreme Court had behaved as a wrecking ball. And particularly if you were sensitive, as most smarter conservatives I knew were, to the ubiquity of second order effects in society, the Supreme Court came across constantly as a body that was totally indifferent to, and totally insulated from, the disastrous second order effects of its dictates and airy social engineering.
BUT... well, Reagan won in a landslide, and the country had turned back to the right, and with that level of political domination, at some point the Supreme Court was going to have to reflect that political reality... or so we thought. And besides, conservatives value authority and institutions and fear chaos. There's a very deep awareness of Chesterton's Fence on a gut level. So despite those wide spread, deeply held beliefs about the Supreme Court, we just marched ahead, accepted their rulings, and tried to steer our lives around the damage they inflicted. (Also, the federal government had made it clear earlier that they would send in Federal troops from time to time to enforce Supreme Court rulings at gun point, and most people were ready just to move on with their lives)
But of course, over time, all the pipeline issues about the judiciary did become more apparent - the political domination of Reagan conservatives really SHOULD have resulted in a much more conservative judiciary than actually resulted, with much, MUCH more radically conservative rulings on all sorts of things like abortion and affirmative action and disparate impact back in the 80s and early 90s, if you were going by the feelings of voters at the time. But it took too long for conservatives to recognize the problems about where you get those judges from, and by that point, the country had moved on... or so it seemed until Mitch McConnell played the hardest of hard ball, fate intervened, and former Democrat Donald Trump got 3 supreme court picks after not winning the popular vote.
Anyway, that's my baseline for how people I grew up around viewed the Supreme Court.
And so when I see enraged public progressives and fellow travelers like David French railing against the current Supreme Court and its legitimacy, the thing I keep thinking is, the progressives I'm thinking of have built their ENTIRE moral universe around other citizens respecting all sorts of previous (as their opponents see it) destructive Supreme Court rulings from roughly the 1940s to the 2010s. Much of their moral progress stories require other citizens to simply bow down and accept and actively prop up those other rulings. They gain from the legitimacy of the Supreme Court in a way that the traditionalists I grew up around absolutely don't. Given that, it's very difficult for me to imagine a future where people upset by the current Supreme Court manage to publicly delegitimize it and mess with it AND also their opponents still accept the legitimacy of previous generations rulings. And if I'm right about that, it seems like progressives have vastly more to lose by having a much more weakened Supreme Court.
I've noted before that I often get a "born on third, thought they hit a triple" vibe from progressives when it comes to the institutions they've inherited, and their overwhelming sense that it's just natural for different institutions to lean their way - and the Supreme Court is absolutely a place where I think that is true.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
7mo ago
As a data point, there's a giant astrology / witchy section of books very close to the register at my local Barnes and Noble (I live in a 65% Biden voting area in a purple metro in a purple state, for what that's worth... very Karen territory). So at the very least, there are marketers who believe that there is an audience there, and it's the trendy kind of audience that you try to extract money from to keep your ailing business afloat.
That entire store at this point gives off serious anti-straight-male vibes, because of the books they stock and foreground, really. Which I suspect is more a reflection on the current publishing industry and the audience that still goes into book stores like that to buy books than anything particular about B&N. But as someone who reads a huge amount and loves books and bookstores (but, well, libgen, so hey, I concede my role as part of the problem), it is seriously depressing to be there.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
7mo ago
What we see isn’t what is, and how we’re seen isn’t who we are.
"we" "we" "we"....
We?
I think there's a very, very strong case to be made that the birth of the entire New Deal state and its subsequent massive growth (along with all its cousin forms of government in the mid 20th century, be it social democracy or communism or fascism or what have you) relied intensely on real time, overwhelming broadcast media. No radio+national periodicals+Hollywood movies+(later)broadcast tv -> no New Deal state. And more particularly, no polity that could even make sense to the New Deal state in the first place. And then throw in ever more centralized public schooling and the role of ever more dominant national university systems in finishing off the process of population... "massaging", let's say. Add in the draft and military service, too.
There's your "we". It has always been a technologically created Frankenstein monster... which, to be honest, is kind of the Western Enlightenment thing anyway. Can't have the Protestant reformation and the 30 years war without the printing press.
One deep problem "we" face right now, I think, is that current year American liberals in positions of social authority often very much have, I think, a "born on third, thought they hit a triple" sense of recent history, the 20th century, and the actual contours of sense making institutions in America in the 20th century. The stories of, say, the Red Scare in the 50s are still a memory they keep alive, but the similar role of the New Deal state in snuffing out conservative / traditionalist / reactionary broadcast media in the United States from the 30s until the 80's is largely unknown to them, and thus it seems like just a natural state of affairs, of them "being on the right side of history". So things like J Edgar Hoover's and FDRs actions against American "isolationists" - like here - or JFK's relationship to right wing radio - like here - are stories that are unfamiliar. Thus you end up with oblivious claims like, "Fox News and Rush Limbaugh were the aberration after normalcy, brought into being by the dastardly end of the Fairness Doctrine".
I think there's a similar undercurrent to the frustration with social media from people who desperately want to go back to the broadcast news environment I remember from the early 1980s as a kid. I recognize where it's coming from. And I know exactly why my conservative family abandoned its catechizing, scolding, and noxious (to them) values the moment they had the opportunity to have any other options for news, too.
I don't even disagree, at some object level, with all sorts of critiques about social media, their business models, and pervasive phones more broadly.
But we are living through a broad collapse of shared authority. Because they have been the unquestioned and unquestioning inheritors of a lot of that shared authority, this experience is apparently especially shocking to a lot of American liberals. Social media and new communication technologies certainly play a role in that process. But, at least to me, it seems like that collapse is a much bigger story, with a lot more moving parts, than just social media, and it's not so clear which direction casual arrows point.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
7mo ago
Everybody gets what they want here: liberals get the fact-based learning about sex and contraception and conservatives get the abstinence-only perspective.
Let me try to make the case that this isn't really getting to the heart of the matter and why these issues are difficult.
One, imagine that schools had a strictly materialist class about the proper ways to season and cook your dead pets and dead relatives to eat them, in times of war or famine or plane crashes in the Andes or even just economic depression. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the proper ways to use sex workers or to even perform as one yourself in a healthy way, if you happen to come from a moral culture that sees that as being reasonable. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the proper care and upkeep of your slaves to ensure they had good diet and exercise to perform their slaving duties effectively. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the most efficient way to operate a factory farm. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the healthiest ways to engage in sexual gratification with minors. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the current state of human biodiversity in different populations, and the appropriate ways to take advantage of those biological facts in constructing a functional society.
In each case, these classes would be controversial, regardless of whether the material was actually accurate and useful, because the move to a strictly materialist frame is already putting the activity in question into a category that some people would intensely disagree about in a metaphysical way. And just so with sex ed. Traditionalists disagreeing with progressives about abortion is downstream from traditionalists disagreeing with progressives about what sex IS, in some profound existential / spiritual sense, and, for that matter, what humans and families and mortality all are... just as in my hypothetical, the other classes would be offensive because they make assumptions about what a dead relative is, what so called "sex work" is (which is the entire point of the rebranding), what slavery is, and so on.
And two, the actual history of the 20th century and progressives championing of Sex Ed and abortion and planned parenthood and contraception and all the rest has had a significant undercurrent of them trying (from what they see as a civically responsible perspective) to get a bunch of other demographics to get their fertility rates under control... which has, of course, totally worked. It absolutely hasn't been just been some disinterested attempt to share some really interesting facts that they learned. You really don't have to read around much in history to see that this is true. I'm not even going to argue the morality or wisdom of this here; I'm just saying there is a history here. I'm also not saying that many people haven't also become convinced of the moral neutrality of a great deal of sexual stuff, or a bunch of the individual rights aspects of sexual liberation or whatever, either. But wealthy, civically-minded people from specific backgrounds and specific worldviews have absolutely used giant amounts of money to push this stuff to try to shape demographics. And because of that history, there's no way to talk about "Hey, so, what about Sex Ed?" without it raising a bunch of controversy, especially with groups that have been on the receiving end of this all. It already absolutely hasn't been used in a neutral way.
... Never, ever, ever underestimate the skeeviness and boldness of a certain subset of men, if they think they can get away with their exhibitionism or voyeurism fetishes while avoiding consequences. I've read elsewhere that many women are absolutely shocked by the brazenness of a subset of men sharing unsolicited dick pics quite freely online, too.
I think there might be a significant experiential gap here.
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