EfficientSyllabus
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User ID: 827
it can't be positive to grow up watching superhero movies and none of them look like you
"Look like you" as in has two arms, one head, and so on? Equating same shade of skin with "looks like you" needs more examination. By the way I had no problem identifying with animals like Simba in the Lion King, even though I never got to see his skin color under all the fur.
Acting is pretend play. Generally there's no problem with acting out the role of someone different from you. Obligatory reference to the ancient Greek men playing female roles all the way back at the inception of theater.
The demand for movies to be visually realistic is quite new too. Obviously theaters couldn't turn the stage into several realistic places within one show, nor could they use hyperrealostic props, so things were anyway much more symbolic and required suspension of disbelief. In such a context, race swapping is perhaps less of a sore thumb. Now that everything is supposed to look hyperrealistic, it's harder to argue for suspending disbelief specifically only regarding DEI attributes.
The problem isn't diverse people popping up in media but the ugly mindset behind it all, specifically that is seen as some revolutionary act, the dehumanizing bucketing of people based on a handful of attributes and patting each other on the back and huffing one's own farts over it.
If only we had a way to make sure that a (sexual/romantic) relationship is socially acceptable (according to whatever the local moral rules are) within your community. Maybe we'd gather a bunch of friends and family together and give everyone the opportunity to chat with both parties, see that they are willingly there etc. Maybe even let the government know that you're fucking. And if someone opposes the sex-having (based on laws or morality) they have to bring their arguments up there and then. But from that day on, the sex between those people will be normal, accepted and expected.
But wait, no, that would be marriage and that's conservative and patriarchal (except when it's same-sex marriage - then it's liberating). We're supposed to enjoy the fruits of the sexual revolution, have flexibility etc. Just enjoy sex without marriage, no worries at all, pleasure is king. Oh, except a bunch of people can still scrutinize your sex life and decide at any point that the kind of sex you are having does not get the stamp of approval, retroactively.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Which other language than the English of the last few decades has separate words for the two? It's not that "oh in Finnish both translate to the same word" but that the distinction was made up recently in English (where they used to be synonyms, gender being a euphemism). When other languages need the distinction they have to loan the English word.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Well, it's good to bash attention-seeking but this sort of competition is constant. So what, should teens just be good boys/good girls and not compete for status and attention? But it's oneupmanship all the way. A quiet nestling won't get fed.
Teens are right to join fads, going through them creates shared experiences, the acting out of various social roles, etc. It's a form of play, even if it feels serious from the inside at the time.
The bigger question is why our broader culture is drifting in a way that the fads are becoming self serving, narcissistic, self referential, navel gazing and misanthropic.
There are many ancient myth story types, killing one's father, the father devouring the sons etc. Is there an archetypal story of the daughter refusing to give birth to the new generation just to spite the tyrannical father? Because I think that's the story our current culture is playing.
Hungary officials warn education is becoming ‘too feminine’
(from a month ago, but not discussed yet, I think)
Hungary's State Audit Office wrote a 19-page (+appendices and references) report on gender and education in Hungary, that is, the gender ratio among teachers, university students, parents' and teachers' expectations of what traits (related to school performance) are feminine and masculine... that sort of things. But the main thing that ruffled people's feathers was something that's probably not so surprising to people of the Motte but is a no-go for the zeitgeist: that so many women having high education leads to issues in partner-finding and therefore it impacts fertility and having children. Concretely, that women try to partner up with men of equal or higher educational and professional level as themselves.
The report: "Pink education" phenomenon in Hungary?! Factors and socio-economic impacts of the overrepresentation of women with tertiary education (Unfortunately, it's only available in Hungarian) (Out of the five authors four are women, if it matters.)
Here is the "Conclusions" section from the beginning:
Hungary's Constitution states that women and men have equal rights. Under Article XI of the Fundamental Law, our country ensures the right to education by providing higher education for all, accessible to all on the basis of ability, and by providing financial support for those who pursue education, as defined by law. According to the National Curriculum, the main aim of learning is to develop the competences of pupils that enable them to apply knowledge creatively in different situations and to develop creative and logical thinking. The strategy for a change of gear in higher education states that 'even among the functions of higher education, which are so important, the promotion of social mobility should be emphasised'.
Between 2010 and 2021, more women than men entered higher education in Hungary each year, so that in the autumn semester of the 2022 academic year, the proportion of women among higher education students was 54.55%. The proportion of women among graduates was even higher, at around 60%, due to a higher drop-out rate among male students. In the 2020/2021 academic year, almost half of the students were enrolled in upper secondary schools, where female students were also statistically over-represented, at 55.4%. 58.1% of those admitted to higher education and almost 70% of those admitted to full-time education came from upper secondary schools. The shift in gender ratios may have been driven by the feminisation of the teaching profession. In 2021, 82% of the 96 000 teachers in Hungarian public education were women.
Research data show that the average intellectual ability of men and women does not differ, but that there are differences in the distribution of intelligence and in some sub-skills.
In our own research, we asked parents and teachers (a representative sample of 700) about their perceptions of the gender gap presented in the literature and the importance of different attributes/competences in education. The perceptions of the respondents, similar to the literature, showed a significant gender difference for all attributes. According to respondents, the most feminine qualities were emotional and social maturity; diligence; verbal fluency; manual dexterity; good oral and written expression; tolerance of monotony and precision and accuracy. In contrast, the most masculine qualities are technical and mechanical aptitude; risk-taking; liveliness, agility; spatial awareness; entrepreneurship and logic. The results show that respondents consider the qualities they perceive as more feminine to be more important in public education. One of the skills rated as least important in public education is technical and mechanical aptitude, along with innovativeness and entrepreneurship. It is also surprising that girlish qualities such as diligence, verbal skills and adaptability are considered by respondents to be more important than logic, without which it is difficult to imagine meaningful learning, lasting, useful knowledge and problem-solving. The qualities considered to be boyish, which are necessary for the sciences are considered less important by both parents and teachers.
Of the compulsory subjects, three are humanities (Hungarian language and literature, history, foreign language) and one is science (mathematics). In terms of social mobility and gender equality, this fact raises the risk that boys may suffer disadvantages in terms of secondary school leaving examinations and further higher education. It may be appropriate to consider equalising the humanities and science baccalaureate subjects, both in order to prepare them for everyday life and for the labour market. Boys are also significantly behind girls in terms of emotional and social maturity, which may be taken into account when determining the age at which children should be admitted to school.
The so-called "pink education" phenomenon has a number of economic and social consequences. To the extent that education favours feminine characteristics, it undermines social mobility and equal opportunities. A lower valuation of masculine qualities can cause mental and behavioural problems for male pupils, who are unable to display and develop their special talents optimally. The over-representation of women in higher education can also cause demographic problems, making it difficult to match young people of nearly equal qualifications. Creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship and technical and engineering skills are necessary for the optimal development of the economy, to alleviate labour market problems and to improve competitiveness and sustainability.
More emphasis should be placed in public education on the transfer and development of competences and skills to meet the changing needs of the labour market in the long term. An education strategy is needed that prepares young people, regardless of gender, for successful independent adult leadership and effective labour market participation. An important objective of national education policy could be to explore in more depth the causes and consequences of the phenomenon described above and to define measures in the light of the results.
After this they describe the percentages of female students and teachers in secondary and tertiary education and the surveys on what qualities are seen by parents and teachers as more feminine and also what qualities they think are important for school success, and they found that they overlap highly (ie feminine qualities are needed for school success).
The next interesting section is on the socio-economic consequences of the phenomenon (bold from the original).
Equality of opportunity between men and women is in the common interest of society. Women have an equal stake in ensuring that men do well, achieve and succeed. If the development and valuation of masculine, boyish qualities/competences is disadvantaged, there are many economic and social consequences.
The development of masculine qualities and competences at an inadequate level and to an inadequate extent is economically damaging and detrimental to the country's competitiveness. Creativity, innovation, entrepreneurial spirit, engineering acumen and a competitive, performance-oriented attitude are necessary for the optimal development of the Hungarian economy, the success of domestic enterprises, and the improvement of competitiveness and sustainability. These qualities are also needed in everyday life, as the young person growing up will be confronted with a frozen computer, a leaky tap or furniture that has been delivered flat packed and there is no one to solve these problems.
Labour demand data show that there is a serious shortage of labour, especially in technical and engineering fields. A report by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (EUROFOUND, 2021) highlights that the lack of highly skilled labour is a major constraint on innovation in the Hungarian economy. Thanks to digital technology, jobs are becoming more flexible and complex. As a result, more and more employers are looking for workers who can manage complex information, think independently and creatively, and use resources efficiently. It is important that the qualities and skills needed to do this - such as logic, creativity, entrepreneurship and technical and technical aptitude - are also given an important role in public education.
If domestic education favours feminine qualities, and this causes women to be over-represented in higher education, this will significantly undermine social equality of opportunity and fairness. Failure to achieve equality of opportunity for boys and girls in education will affect social mobility and jeopardise the achievement of the education strategy.
(continues below)
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
I've heard this all my life from teachers and professors. I went to university many years before covid and profs were always ranting about how unprepared our cohort was and how it was so different back in the day, and high school standards are falling off a cliff and they must offer all sorts of prep courses about stuff that used to be core high school material. And a few years before that, my high school teachers were ranting about how primary schools don't prepare students for high school any more and they must repeat primary school material during the first year. And this is in Hungary where there is no "customer mentality" in education like in the US.
The reality is, the fraction of capable people per cohort is fixed (or grows very slowly) over time, but more and more people are going to higher and higher educational levels. At that point it's basically inevitable that every new cohort looks less and less prepared and cannot learn the same material as the cohorts a decade prior.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
First, I agree there is some value in putting in effort into something. It demonstrates a virtue in the person, the ability to delay gratification, to work towards a purpose. The reason we like this is probably evolutionarily determined, as such people are useful allies in bad times. Admiring people for the effort they put into climbing a mountain etc. is alright, it pushes us to become better and apply effort in smaller scale things. It's a symbolic distillation of our everyday struggles and shortcomings. That's all fine.
What I don't see as virtuous though is the other half of the attitude you show, namely that you want to feel that the stuff around you was done with a lot of human effort. Essentially this is the opposite of striving for efficiency, which we have been doing as humans since time immemorial. It would take more effort to swim to the other shore, but instead we build ships. It would take more effort to walk, but at some point people decided to ride horses instead and then invented cars.
Things that are made in an inefficient way for the purpose of demonstrating extra human effort are luxuries. Probably it would feel nice to be carried around town in a litter but why do that if there are cars? Understandably, it is a way to signal status if you can get many people to do inefficient work for you. Essentially it's a way for you to show that you can boss people around, having amassed (perhaps over generations) enough effort-tokens (presumably through some efficient method, using leverage, not by the sweat of your brow) to do this. It makes one feel important. I, however, think that the enjoyment of other people's senseless labor for showing off one's own status is a vice.
We should continue to use our brainpower to achieve more with less effort. This is not an argument to be lazy, but to work smart and get more done. Putting up artificial constraints makes no sense in general. Now if the constraints allow for the exploration of something interesting, that's another things. For example it could be a way to hone one's wits, eg the limitation of size in demo scene demos etc., to see novel ideas and creative solutions. That's all fine. It's also all fine if the actual hand made product is better. Furniture made of solid wood, designed to fit your rooms is better than the cheap stuff you buy at IKEA. But the reason to want it is that it's better. Also if you want lots of stuff done for you manually, how do you justify that? What makes you think that you deserve the fruits of all that effort? And independent of the answer, can you understand that many people can't afford having so many people jump around to their whim, and for them increases in efficiency can bring more improvement in quality of life?
I agree. Parents think they have to be best friends to their kids. Kids crave the boundary, they search for it and want to find it. As a mature adult you play along and provide it. So they can get the adrenaline of transgression but still without ruining their life.
But setting up expectations, rules and boundaries is apparently too authoritarian. And parents themselves don't want to grow up or feel old, so they don't dare to draw a line and take on the role of "the mean parent" (from the kid's POV). Why people don't want to grow up probably has many reasons. One is the media's obsession with keeping people perpetual adolescents, because those are better consumers. Also for some reason teen culture is somehow elevated to be seen as the "real" culture of the times and if you don't follow it, you're a dinosaur who is out of touch and it's cringe and whatever. An adult should have no time to care about getting called cringe, but here we are.
We pretend that all this is about keeping up with the times, but in fact we collectively froze around the 60s in the role of the rebellious Beatles fan teenager.
change their name, and let everybody know that their pronouns are "she/they" now - while changing nothing else about their appearance or presentation. [...] I often feel baffled by why they find it so important?
How do people in your circles react to them coming out? Is there an outpour of love, applause and validation?
Being nonbinary in gender or bi-curious in sexuality are cheap ways to become LGBTQIA2S+. No need to transition. You suddenly become an interesting person. It's basically the next level of "ally". There was some leaflet I saw on the Motte how the gender spectrum goes from Barbie to GI Joe. If conceptualized like this, it's not even a lie for them to say they don't feel fully female, as they are not some plastic barbie doll or stereotypical extremely girly girl. They see the female role as too weak, too patriarchy-defined, to male-gaze-defined.
Call it fashion, peer-pressure or whatever. People want to belong. And today, especially online, you can belong, be interesting and validated by showing that you are "diverse". Identify as mixed-race, discover your 1/32 indigenous roots, be nonbinary with 'they' pronouns, have "mental health struggles" etc.
There's also this gender hobbyist/enthusiast community who like to catalogue all the genders, like stamp collectors. They are the same sort of people who made Tokio Hotel fan club websites in 2003 on Geocities. The sort of people who make the Aesthetics Wiki. I think this hobby community (who debate the fine differences between demigirls and whatever else) is also really just a small subset of the whole progressive pro-gender crowd, a kind of autistic/aspie subset probably. They also probably don't quite understand it so they obsess about systematizing it, and probably a lot of them are wannabes. The rest probably just go about their lives, or go to weird quirky bars and have nontraditional sex and so on, instead of arguing online.
This is not to say that it's all based on nothing. There certainly are some rather androgynous people, tomboyish girls. But now it's hard to distinguish because it's become a fashion too.
It's certainly more healthy to do this, than to go full HRT+surgery. It seems to me to be an alternative path towards becoming LGBT instead of just a step on a slippery slope. It might be a memetic evolution to allow teen (which nowadays extends to the 20s) girls to do their teen girl stuff without also destroying their bodies and their ability to have kids once they grow out of this.
I wonder if any such controversy or split exists outside the English-speaking countries. In languages where the spelling doesn't lag behind pronunciation by several centuries as it does with English, something like phonics seems just obvious. In my Hungarian school we first learned the vowels (as they are easy to pronounce in isolation), the teacher would show big cards with these letters, and we pronounced it out loud, she would show another letter and we'd pronounce that etc. (We'd also do exercises of circling pictures in a workbook whose name contains the new letter/sound that we just learned.) Then after learning the vowels, we learned each consonant and immediately combined them into syllables. E.g. lesson about the letter "b": teacher writes syllables on the chalkboard like "ba, bá, be, bé, bi, bí, bo, bó, bö, bő, bu, bú, bü, bű" and we'd go over them, entire class pronouncing them. Then she may ask if any of these are meaningful words by themselves. Or if we know any word that starts with any of these syllables. This seems closer to phonics than to whole word. Then gradually we'd move to longer words, then very short sentences, then longer sentences in large font, short stories etc.
I'm a bit confused on the whole-word method though. Does it mean that they simply don't have a dedicated class/timeslot for each letter, they don't say that "hey this is the letter b, the capital letter looks like B and the cursive handwritten looks like this and this". That they don't do syllables? That it's all just "here's the word 'hello' and we pronounce it as hello", before the kid was ever told that the letters h, e, l, and o are things? Seems very silly. English spelling is far from pronunciation but isn't so far...
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
As far as I can tell, the entire idea of rewarding winners in a competition has to do with spiritual merit, like determination, or how hard someone practiced
No, spectators want to see someone being excellent, beat world records, and show the peak of human performance. Because we like to watch greatness. Yes, effort factors into it, determination etc, but nobody gives a damn if all that hard effort didn't result in actually being excellent. All that sort of stuff would just be niceties, participation trophy, consolation prize.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Gender = a set of roles, behaviors, etc, generally expected by society of the members of each sex.
This definition presupposes that these roles are all learned and are mere societal expectations (presumably arbitrary ones at that).
But actually the same thing that makes your body grow a penis or a vagina also affects the brain, the hormones etc. The gender-sex distinction is made up, it's not even possible to express it in any other language than English (other than outright loaning the word "gender" as is). Gender started out as a euphemism for sex, to avoid referring to the act of sex (before that, it only referred to grammatical categories). They should be nothing more than synonyms.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Maybe examine the source of your anxiety and the assumptions behind them. Tribal feelings are probably natural/ingrained but what the tribe is is cultural. For some reason you learned to associate tribe with skin color/race. If a bunch of Bulgarians moved into your neighborhood and stayed in their circles, cooked and ate Bulgarian food, spoke Bulgarian on the street, etc. would you feel less anxious because they are white? How about Arabs who are white-passing? I guess it isn't exactly about skin color, but level of cultural integration and connectedness to other parts of society as opposed to people living in culturally segregated parallel societies. Or perhaps about the level of education among the different groups. (But if it really is about race, I would say you've become - perhaps unconsciously - racist.)
There's nothing wrong with wishing for a united, high-trust community in your town or city as opposed to splintered ethnic or racial tribes being in conflict with each other. But how would you feel about the future if it consisted of people of various racial and ethnic background living together, regularly interacting and sharing a base culture, attaining similar levels of education etc.?
You could also examine your beliefs about some sharp separation between white and non-white people, which is quite nonsense on a global view (but may be a good simplification in certain times and places, like the US some decades ago when most people were either descended from European immigrants or African slaves). White people are not "the same", the culture and people of the Nordics are quite different from the Mediterraneans, Slavic nations are different from the French or the English. The Greeks are pretty similar to Cypriots and Turks, who are not that dissimilar from people of the Levant and so on all the way. My point with this is two-fold, all whites are not that close to you as you may seem to think (eg I as a Hungarian don't feel more connected to a Spaniard than to a secular Iranian simply based on skin tone) and that non-whites aren't some homogeneous bunch either.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Of course, the weight of "denier" comes from "Holocaust denier". Then recently people started using "climate change denier" and also "election denier", "vaccine denier" etc. The association with Holocaust denial also makes it easier to argue that these other types of denials should similarly become illegal.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
It depends on how deeply you both are certain and convinced and how well-founded your beliefs are. Most people only very shallowly know politics, if you prod a little you very quickly find that they don't have solid reasons for believing things, there are many contradictions and inconsistencies and questions they have not though through ever. I definitely feel so myself when reading certain people here, and then some people I know are even more so.
So explicit politics is often pretty arbitrary. It depends on one's social circles and is a bit like religion: a protestant and a catholic can be in a good marriage if their confession is not a deep and central part of their life.
Whats more important are implicit political beliefs that may actually (consciously or not) be opposite to the explicitly proclaimed beliefs. Implicit beliefs and culture, like the practical rubber-meets-road understanding of gender roles, parenthood, what a relationship is and what it's supposed to be about, whether to have kids and if yes how to raise them.
These worldview aspects are important of you are looking for the mother of your future kids. But if you're just looking for a sex partner for a few months, then who cares? Then what matters is probably mostly sexual attraction, compatibility and whether any beliefs stop either party from having sex (very conservative, religious etc).
So I think explicit political beliefs can actually falsely make it seem like two people are so different, but if they broadly actually do and want similar things in life (eg value college education, see similar things as desirable for the future like where and how to live), then it can work. In such cases the politics is just a thin aesthetic preference.
But it's not always so. You may find someone who is a progressive climate doomer who refuses to have a car, despises you if you have one, is obsessed with zero waste, is vegan and doesn't tolerate you eating meat in your shared home. Then it will be hard to live together. It all depends on how much it impacts real life everyday decisions and how much he/she believes that it's not only about her/his choices but those choices must also be enthusiastically mirrored by you,or if they are more tolerant and chill and understand that their understanding of what's moral isn't complete and 100% right in every aspect.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
High status respected people have to lead and these people will follow. Once the avocado toast people can be sure that being unworried about covid doesn't mean you're a Nazi or Qanon or anti-science guy, they will go along. At this point some are still very afraid of being seen as part of that "misinfo" cluster if they aren't worried about covid enough, the cluster that includes things like climate change denial, Russia stuff, etc. But once it's announced that The Science now actually says XYZ, they will accept it too. They are just taking a bit longer, like that Japanese soldier on that island who "fought" WWII even decades after it ended.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Programming is hard to fake. In most school subjects it's enough to know the "teacher's password", so memorization (of facts or algorithmic processes to solve one of a few types of problems that are likely to be in the test) is a decent strategy for getting good grades.
In programming, you have to problem-solve, face uncertainties, without an option to bullshit your way out of it (the code either compiles or not, it either crashes or not, and the computer doesn't care about your emotional state or your deadline or whatever).
I think the necessary relentlessness and intrinsic motivation required is comparable to playing musical instruments or sports. And incidentally, it's mostly boys who spend insane amounts of time on practicing the guitar or football or yoyo or skateboarding or even video games etc. without any external pressure from parents and teachers.
If you don't give a shit about playing the guitar, and have no aptitude for it, a private tutor will similarly have a very hard job to try and teach you to play.
It's impossible to teach things like this, it's only possible to learn them. By that I mean that the action has to come from the learner. The teacher can't actively put anything in the learner's brain. You can lead a horse to water and so on.
Intelligence surely is a factor here but it's not the only one. I know intelligent people who are not obsessive tinkerers and less intelligent ones who constantly muck around with some stuff, building various kludge and messing with their car, building stuff around the house, repairing this or that in a custom way etc. This itch to make things is a big component in who will actually learn to program and who won't.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
We attach social roles to many attributes of people. For example, there are social roles for old people and young people that can differ between cultures. So do we need a new word for "age" that describes the social role attached to one's age?
In turn women are also tools in the game, to show to other men how much better you are for getting hotter/classier women than they can.
I used to believe what you say, but I don't think it makes sense. Simply physically getting into the panties of a hot woman isn't worth grinding yourself to the bone. It must be seen and known. By other people. Simply being powerful, being respected, feared, obeyed, exerting control over the course of things feels good as an end to itself not just as a means to get your dick wet physically in private, behind closed doors.
Success with women is an ego confirmation/validation that you are important, high status etc. That's not to say that powerful men don't enjoy the sex part, but it's not the only goal.
Human motivation is multi-faceted. We enjoy eating food, enjoy relaxing, enjoy accumulating resources and status, enjoy sex, enjoy being accepted as part of communities and friend groups, enjoy having good shelter and warm clothes etc. There's no need to pick one and claim that they others are just proxies for that one.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
It was the same in Hungary. All the grandmas watched the Mexican and Brazilian soap operas throughout the 90s. The first classic was Escrava Isaura back in the 80s. Then in the 90s it was Esmeralda, La usurpadora, and so on. Today many watch Turkish soaps. In the 90s the series Dallas was also hugely popular. Surely my Eastern European peasant grandparents watched Dallas because they shared the culture of Texan oil magnates. And also Latin American culture, sure. Oh wait, no, it was because of skin tone (grandpa got quite tanned on the sun, working outdoors, so he surely identified with the Brazilians).
I think Americans don't quite get how absolutely normal it is in rest of the world that TV doesn't depict your own culture, cities, stories etc. People who travel to the US are often surprised that "wait, this is really like that, and it's not only the movies?", like yellow school buses, college football, high school lockers, doorknobs, whatever. It's all foreign but we are used to TV being a different world. When my grandma saw the skyscrapers in the Dallas opening sequence it was as foreign as watching some sci-fi. But she still liked the series because the human stories aren't all that different. Sure, you miss many cultural references but it's rarely crucial for the entertainment.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
It won't neatly map to a left/right divide, not the least because there's no single such divide. So while I can empathize with feelings of "hey, you are a leftist/rightist, this isn't what you should think about this issue!", ultimately this is not very interesting, other than showing that a binary categorization is insufficient.
The split here is between pro-tech optimists, believers in quantification, that problems of society are mainly technical etc. vs people who miss the "soul" of things.
Some leftist utopias are fully automated large scale standardized productions, but others are about local communities in opposition to capitalist exploitation (of environment and communities). The left is supposed to like disruption and new ways of solving things, except if it comes from capitalist exploitation. There's also a distinction between classical left and woke capital which is nowadays often confused with the left.
Some of the right is pro business and pro capitalist, pro-large scale production, but other parts are more religious and miss the soul of things, the traditions, like the fruit of skilled dignified hard human labour, prefer local things as opposed to multinational business output, out of patriotism and nationalism.
There are some otherwise unnatural pseudo-alliances around woke topics that may connect trads with libertarian transhumanists but things like the AI issue may be a point of collision.
My own attitude is similar to eg furniture. Sure, a skilled carpenter can make a fabulous bed frame with soul and all, and it's beautiful hard work that puts bread on the table from the sweat of the brow etc. But it's expensive and so IKEA has its place too.
Most of the pictures, illustrations and clip arts, stock images, filler crap don't need novel artistic expression. It's like lamenting the emergence of word processor software and how it displaces the fine artists that typographers and editors are, now that people can typeset their own docs. And I'm sure people said as much back in the 80s. It's the same but for drawing.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
LARP has a more specific meaning, even in the insult version. A certain Don Quixote-like quality of delusional ly pretending to be something anachronistic, from a different time. Also not fully standing behind the thing with proper skin in the game. Playing a tough guy without backing it up. Now whether this applies to the Azov people, I don't know but accusing them of being unreal, weak, all talk, etc. is a classic insult. It doesn't make those words meaningless.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Feminists who still understand gender as the roles you mention are fringe today and labeled TERFs. Yes, originally gender studies was about these roles and women's place in society etc, but today's woke gender concept is something else. The whole point was that these gender roles are something you are pushed into by your social setting, not something you choose based on your unique snowflake personality quirks. The original goal wasn't to tell people "hey, you don't like the roles/social expectations put on you? Then you aren't actually a woman/man!" but to allow women and men more flexibility in shaping their roles to their personality and temperament without anyone denying that they can live like that as women/men.
Interestingly enough, a significant chunk of the Hungarian left (including a massively popular leftist YouTube show) are also with that earlier definition and are woke-critical/gender-critical. It would be worth a post sometime I think.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
The same sentence stood out for me. What a masterful twist of rhetoric: in the name of protecting agency, I forbid you to speak about this thing! I can only imagine that it's somehow embarrassing (or can be framed so) for the bluecheck left.
Now, again I don't think this is all too new in this space, but it's interesting what a flurry this obscure report caused even in the international media. It seems to have stepped right on a sensitive toe. The rebuttals aren't on a detailed level though:
And they immediately contextualize it with this sinister atmosphere:
(I have criticized some of those LGBT-related political campaigns of the government myself, but these things can be kept separate.)
A right-wing journalist called attention to many distortions in these articles: Foreign Media Distorts State Audit Office’s Report.
I think it's a good example of how even just touching these types of issues immediately triggers this mental blockage, like "crimestop" in Orwell's 1984. To even care about demography is adjacent to white supremacy, and to consider women's tendency to marry higher in status (hypergamy) is also just a non-starter and is seen equivalent to forcing them to stay in the kitchen.
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