LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
No bio...
User ID: 657
I saw some news articles online about this in Australia earlier today.
What I found really conspicious was that in virtually all the articles there was absolutely no description of the perpetrator of the stabbing other than 'man' or at best 'older man', which was the spark that cause the protest/riot (depending on your political persuasion). There was also no mention that I can recall of the perpetrator being tackled and restrained by a member of the public, and certainly not that he was Brazilian. You'd be forgiven for thinking that the crime was committed by an Irish native.
Except, of course, the second half of all these articles all quote a bunch of Irish politicians and other public figures condemning the riot as the actions of a hateful, far-right mob, or similar words to that effect. Which kind of gives the game away. Do they think by merely mentioning the background of the stabbing perpetrator they will give credance to the 'hateful far-right riot', like invoking a spirit?
It's one of many cases where the news media (at least here in Australia), technically report the story factually accurately, but but omits some details and is framed in such a way to only lead you to one conclusion. They can avoid claims of editorialising by claiming they are merely quoting and reporting on statements made by politicians, which is also true.
Are Pets Replacing Kids?
I have noticed a growing trend of people talking about their pets like children, and pet owners being increasing referred to as parents, mother or fathers of their pets, and the pets as children. Often this goes as far as to referring to multiple pets being referred to as siblings, or even pets referred to siblings of actual children. For examples on social media, you can look at asinine "feel good" animal related YouTube channels like "The Dodo". I'm hardly the first to comment on the phenomenon, a quick internet search for "furbabies" turns up countless articles. However, while most media coverage on this phenomena is playful and positive, my intuition has long been that this isn't just a harmless, fun phenomenon, but rather these 'parents' are really using these pets as a substitute for children. Perhaps attempting to fulfil an unrealised, subconscious need to raise offspring in a social environment hostile to the raising of actual, real human children.
Like any good researcher, I set out to find information to support my prior assumptions. I looked at U.S. data mostly for its abundance, however the overall quality of data is pretty poor, it's particularly hard to find reliable data on the historic rates of pet ownership and data relating to the pet industry going back further than 30 years or so ago.
Based on the APPA's APPA National Pet Owners Survey, the percentage of households with a pet has increased from 56% in 1988 to 70% in 2020. In absolute numbers, the number of pet cats and dogs increased from 108 million in 1996 to 188 million in 2022. But it is not simply the number of pets that are relevant, but the relationship owners have with the pet. Perhaps the most shocking statistic I saw was the growth of the pet industry. The US pet industry has grown from $53 billion in 2012 (~$68 billion adjusted for inflation), to $124 billion in 2021, the industry doubling in size in just a decade! A near doubling also occurred in the prior decade too. The growth has been driven in large part by the increased demand for luxury pet products. The US fertility rate dropped from 1.91 to 1.66 from 2012 to 2020 during this time. By comparison, the US baby products industry was worth $29 billion in 2022. Some (unreliable) survey data says that three-quarters of US pet owners consider their pets 'furbabies'. It should be noted that Millennials slightly overrepresented in many of these pet statistics. US pet owners are also more likely to be female (60%).
Now onto my speculation on the issue. Despite a lot of hand-wringing over the economic costs being the major driver behind young adults not having kids, those same young adults seem to be willing buy a pet and spend significant sums on them, treating them as a pseudo-child. Perhaps a pet is still a cheaper alternative than a child, but in my opinion the economic argument still doesn't hold up. As I like to point out, the fertility rate of the US was higher during the Great Depression, the worst economic period in modern history, than it is today. So the social factors must be playing a greater role, something that has been discussed quite extensively on theMotte in the past so I won't go into detail here. To summarise briefly, but technology, contraception, sexual liberation, feminism, the two-income trap and modernity generally may all have played some role. But humans are still ultimately biological and social creatures, and I think there is likely some innate driver to engage in parental (maternalistic/paternalistic), childrearing behaviours, for both men and women, but particularly women. When social pressure and event stigma prevent people from having children, they have substituted in the closest available, non-stigmatised alternative, pets. What I think is troubling is what will be the long-term consequences of using pets as surrogate children, because pets are not, in fact, children. Using pets as surrogate children is possibly contributing to the fertility crisis, providing a band-aid solution to the unrealised desire of childrearing. Children, as actual thinking humans, can form meaningful relationships with their parents and others, and contribute to community in ways that pets can obviously not provide. Thus furbabies may be accelerating the atomisation of society. When parents enter their elder years, they can rely on the support of their adult children to help. Children will also ultimately provide net economic utility to society, where as pets, as much people might love them, do not.
I personally find the whole phenomenon of pets as surrogate children disgusting or fundamentally morally wrong on a deep, visceral level. It feels so unnatural and perverse to me. I do love animals, including pets I have had in the past, but I would never dream of treating them remotely as people or children. As pessimistic as this is, my instinct that the rise of furbabies is hyper-representative of the cultural, social and moral decline of the West, and is strongly associated with the fertility crisis and the demographic collapse many Western or developed states are or will experience.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
10mo ago
It's almost always framed in how it's bad for women though, typically 'college graduated women can't find husbands (because they will never marry down).'
What I found most frustrating about Amazon's 'girlbossifaction' of Galadriel is the undermining of what I believe to be one of the best mythological portrayals of femininity in modern literature (and cinema), something that is increasingly lacking in modern storytelling. This is actually a problem I have with even those who would criticize modern woke media, constantly pointing back to the 80s and their 'true strong female characters' like Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley. Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley may be female characters, but they aren't really feminine characters. They're just women inhabiting the archetypical male character. In fairness, they are good characters, but there's nothing really feminine about them other than are relatively aesthetic or superficial sense of 'motherliness' slapped on top.
Galadriel is the feminine archetype, or at least one of the feminine archetypes. She is the embodiment of ethereal beauty, not just in the sense of physical attractiveness, but also in the philosophical sense. She represents purity. This is also true of all the Elves, which in some sense are archetypically feminine as a whole, and Galadriel naturally being the most powerful of them all. We even get to see a glimpse of negative aspects, or the shadow of this archetype when she is tempted by the One Ring, where her desire to rule takes on a feminine twist, best represented by the line "All shall love me and despair!", that she (and the feminine archetype) could use her ethereal beauty to ensnare the will of men to worship her. Her role in the Lord of the Rings is similarly archetypically feminine. She does not play an active, overt role in the story, which is archetypically masculine but nevertheless her role is critically important to the narrative. She is the light out of the darkest hour the Fellowship had yet faced, the death of Gandalf. She provides the characters with much needed support, both material and spiritual, the consequences of which play out fully through the entire trilology. I think this is best represented by Gimli, who despite his fierce hatred of Elves, immediately is entranced and falls in (platonic(?)) love with Galadriel upon seeing her. Gimli is 'tamed' by Galadriel and her femininity. Upon leaving Lothlorien, Gimli asks for a single strand of her hair, to which she gives Gimli three. These strands of hair would become Gimli's most prized processions, and really is the beginning of Gimli's lessening of hatred/prejudice towards the Elves. To be a bit crass about it, this represents the purest and moral form of 'simping'.
Amazon has gotten rid of this wonderous portrayal of femininity and replaced with yet another essentially masculinized female character. Perhaps this is somewhat reflected in the source material. While I am a large LotR fan, I have never really delved into the 'supplementary' material, only sticking to the 'mainline' books (and films). From what I understand, in the Unfinished Tales, Galadriel is somewhat of a more masculine, sword-swinging warrior in her youth who leads a rebellion, before ultimately maturing to the feminine archetype we know later in her life. However, the Unfinished Tales are, in fact, unfinished and a more a jumbled mess of ideas than a coherent story, so I wonder if this was ever Tolkien's intention. Regardless, maybe Amazon with their girlboss Galadriel will have a character arc for her that results in her embracing this pure feminine archetype for her in the end. But I highly doubt it. Even if I believed that the writers for Rings of Power were capable of such good writing, the idea of actually embracing the feminine archetype as positive thing is anathema. Female characters can only be written as archetypically masculine now, usually with an additional, ironic element of snark towards men. This harkens back to some recent comments I've made both here and on the subreddit just before the move, that the female role is dead or dying and all there is left is for women to act like men and compare themselves to men.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
10mo ago
I would like to bring attention to a small but significant culture war kerfuffle that occurred on Monday, during the Australian Parliament Senate Estimates.
For those of you who are not aware, Senate Estimates is a series of hearings held by the Senate standing committees originally meant to scrutinise the budget and spending of the executive government and its agencies (budget estimates), but in practice is used to scrutinise all activities of the executive government, not just budget and financing.
The exchange I want to discuss occurred on Monday 22 May earlier this week, when the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts (it's a weird combination I know) was being question by the Rural, Regional Affairs and Transport Committee.
In the exchange, Senator McKenzie and Senator Canavan (both Nationals) question Mr Jim Betts, the Secretary of the Department (i.e. the most senior (non-ministerial/partisan) public servant and head of the Department). The Senators question Mr Betts over an alleged event where Mr Betts wore a Black Power t-shirt during an official address to departmental staff. The exchange is too lengthy to quote the whole thing here, so I recommend everyone read the Hansard (transcript) of the exchange.
To summarise the exchange briefly, Mr Betts is questioned on whether he wore a Black Power t-shirt during an official department briefing, Mr Betts is evasive with his answers before it is revealed that the t-shirt in question contained an Aboriginal flag in clenched fist, he claims that the symbol is merely a symbol of "solidarity" with Aboriginal staff and that it has no relevance to Black Power, and continues to be evasive when pressed by the Senators on whether this constitutes a political statement breaching the standards of impartiality of the Australian Public Service. The exchange ends with Mr Betts essentially challenging the Senators to report him to the Australian Public Service Commission for breaching the code of conduct.
It's also difficult to convey the tone of the conversation (unfortunately, I don't believe the video recording of the hearing is yet online), but I have to point out that Mr Betts is dressed in a very casual short sleeve shirt and not a business suit (as would be appropriate for this event, as is sarcastically mentioned by Senator McKenzie), and is wearing a rainbow lanyard (as he will mention). Mr Betts talks in a very condescending but hushed and rushed tone, showing no respect for the Senators, and the Senators, for their part, talked in a generally aggressive, and particularly in Senator McKenzie's case, sarcastic tone.
The reason I wanted to highlight this exchange is because it highlights the woke institutional capture of Australian government institutions, though I suspect this is representative of countries in the Anglosphere. To make it abundantly clear, the clenched fist in Australia is absolutely a symbol of Black Power imported into Australia from America, and used by the "Black/Indigenous sovereignty" movement within Australia. Mr Betts would absolutely know this, and I feel fairly confident in saying he is outright lying here. In fact, the fist was prominently used last year when Senator Lidia Thorpe (radical left Indigenous activist) made the fist and called the Queen a coloniser during her swearing in ceremony, an event I discussed back on the old subreddit.
So the head of a major Australian Government Department (who is allegedly an anarcho-communist, an allegation he doesn't explicitly deny but merely sidesteps) wears t-shirt with a radically left-wing/woke symbol while addressing staff, and he feels reasonably confident that he is going to suffer no consequences for it. If this does not represent a capturing of an institution by woke ideology, I don't know what does. What I also find really interesting is how Mr Betts attempts to argue his way out the questioning by equating his black power t-shirt with his rainbow LGBT lanyard as just symbols of support and solidarity - a false equivalency because the black power symbol remains far more explicitly political in the way LGBT rainbow is not - but this attempted defence does seem to have some strength. But the conservative Nationals Senators were unable or unwilling to make the affirmative case that yes, LGBT lanyards and flags also do constitute a political statement. Even they had to dance around this issue. They have become so normalised and part of the 'new sensibility' that LGBT flags hanging in government offices is perfectly fine, and desirable even, it's simply about promoting a safe and inclusive culture and it is in no way political! (unless you oppose it then you're the one being political).
The vast majority of 'dating advice' young men are given (by the mainstream liberal feminist zeitgeist) is absolutely terrible and only land them in situations like this if they follow through with it.
I can guarantee at some point someone told OP 'just be honest, straightforward and upfront with women and nothing bad will happen, the worst the woman will do is reject you but respect you for being honest.' And he completely understandably took that advice at face value.
This is combined with the fact we have a sexually liberal, if not libertine culture. The young man probably though that offering some girl to be FwB directly - despite being a literal virgin - was perfectly fine cause media and social media told him that's just how things are. And besides, men and women are the same, so women must think about this hypothetical arrangement the same way he does.
OP is also an actual idiot for thinking his proposal would end in anyway but horribly badly for him and being stupid enough to think going from virgin to FwB playa is in anyway feasible or a good idea. But the problem is that young men aren't allowed to fuck up in a healthy way and learn from the experience anymore, if young men fuck up they're 'literally incels' and a danger to young women who must be ostracised and exiled.
This is what happens when you have a social environmental where the social rules are poorly defined if they exist at all, the advice the young men get is terrible and contradictory, and the consequences for men are astronomical and completely at women's mercy.
Re: all the "The Motte is not that smart" comments.
As an Australian, I semi-frequently see people say some variation of "Australia is a horribly racist country" in the MSM, social media, in person or elsewhere. While this is often just a leftwing shibboleth, it's said frequently enough even among moderate voices that it has become part of the cultural conciousness.
When I hear this, I often think to myself, "what the hell are you talking about? Australia is an incredibly unracist country by any comparison. It would be hard to find any country less racist than Australia - maybe a couple in Europe or something (although even that's changing very fast) or maybe New Zealand, but that's about it. China? Japan? Brazil? Saudi Arabia? Nigeria? Italy? All more horribly racist than Australia by any meaningful standard.
The real issue is that Australia is not horribly racist (by any relative standard) but that Australia, being a Western liberal democracy among other reasons, is hypersensitive to racism. Whenever any racist incident does occur (and they will always occur to some degree), it blasted accross the media as an example of how bad we all and how much we still have to improve, even if such incidents are relatively rare and unrepresentitive (I'm sure American and Canadian readers can relate). Ironically, it is precisely because Australia is so unracist that we percieve ourselves as racist.
I feel the same way about this bashful comments about the Motte being really not all that smart. Are you crazy? By any reasonable, necessarily relative standard, the Motte is full of very smart people writing interesting posts and comments on a wide range of topics from a very varied perspectives. This is matched by few other places on the internet. Even if people are wrong (and people are often wrong), they're still wrong in the right kind of way, the way that's illuminating like when you argue an absurd postition to its fullest extent just for the hell of it.
And yes, as per the original topic of this thread, the Motte could be more intelligent. Yes, there are hyper-geniuses doing their third PhD in astro-quantum-biomechanical-neuroscience engineering, or whatever else who are not on the Motte and probably don't use the internet all the much. But by any reasonable standard, the Motte is pretty smart. We just are hypersensitive to our own intellectual inferiority specifically because this is a community build around casual intellectualism and full of people smart enough to realise there are people smarter than them who are not the Motte.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
10mo ago
I guess moving theMotte off Reddit has proven itself more and more to be a good decision
Australia’s Voice to Parliament (2/2)
And where does the public stand on this issue? Well public polling seems to indicate that the ‘yes’ has a slight majority, though notably this percentage has been steadily falling over the last year (the Liberal Party strategy working?). Importantly, the people supporting yes (between yes, no and not sure) dropped below 50% recently. In my opinion, much of the support for the Voice in the public is mostly driven by white-guilt-ridden Australians who automatically support any proposal in favour of Indigenous Australians, regardless of practicality or principle. As some critical thought goes into it, the support has dropped. Add in social desirability bias/Shy Tory phenomenon (the gay marriage plebiscite won by a much small margin than was predicted), it seems uncertain if the referendum would pass if it were held tomorrow.
I guess now is a good time to segue to a commentary on the state of Indigenous/woke politics more generally. As you can probably tell, I do not support the Voice on principle, as it is incompatible with liberal and democratic ideals (and even if you aren’t liberal or democratic, then you wouldn’t support it for other philosophical/tribal reasons). It’s also not the first time a body or institution like this has even been tried. Mostly recently there was the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission(1990–2005) which more or less basically tried to do what the Voice wants to do, albeit no constitutionally enshrined. The Commission had to be shut down in 2005 after years of corruption (although in fairness, this was partially driven by the final Chairman in particular). The Voice being constitutionally enshrined as well as having the increasing immunity to scrutiny that woke politics will inevitably grant it is just a shitshow waiting to happen even worse that ATSIC.
For Americans, it might be hard to explain just how (pardon my French, but there’s really no other words to adequately express this sentiment) cucked Australia has become on Indigenous representation/recognition/reconciliation or whatever the buzzword is now. Canadian and New Zealand readers will understand (I feels sorry for our Kiwi brothers who have it worse). The analogy I offer you many American readers is like it’s all the black liberationism woke political stuff has become institutionalised in every institution with official statements. The difference between Australian and America here I think is that America has way more variance, the crazy can be crazier, but in Australia this stuff gets institutionalised scarily fast. Literally every meeting, event or document starts now with a ‘Acknowledgement of Country’ which is basically a statement like a mantra or prayer that ‘recognises’ that the area of wherever you are belongs (in some form, the exact words can and do change) to a given Indigenous group. I’m not sure if I’m even being facetious – in Parliament the sitting day starts with an Acknowledgement of Country and then is followed by prayers. Even worse is ‘Welcome to Country’ which is now omni-present at every major event, is performed by an Indigenous person, who basically “invites” (I would say ‘gives permission’) non-Indigenous people onto ‘their land’ and does some shamanistic ritual. Again, I’m not being facetious, one Welcome I had to sit through included the Indigenous representative doing a ritual to invite the ancestors to come and remove the bad spirits from the audience (my God, how is this allowed in government but a Christian blessing would be the scandal of a century). The Acknowledgement and Welcomes are also becoming increasingly radical too, and it’s becoming increasing common to state that ‘Sovereignty was never ceded’. This was amusingly and frustratingly said in one Acknowledgement by a government employee in a very important government building. It’s honestly hard to describe – look up some (recent) examples for yourself. You get increasingly deluded and discriminatory policies too, for example the Minister for Public Service wanting to increase Indigenous representation in the Australian Public Service to 5%, including executive management, despite Indigenous people making up only 3% of the population and most of them live in remote Northern Territory, Queensland or Western Australia. You get government bodies now who must explicitly have an Indigenous representative as part of their board, even if the organisation has nothing particularly to do with Indigenous issues. I could go on.
The tone of Indigenous activism and Australian society's response has also changed over the years, becoming more radical. Increasing 'blood-and-soil' type rhetoric is being adopted by Indigenous activists (and their naïve supporters). Whereas in the past it was common to refer to an Indigenous group being 'custodians' of an area of land (being semi-nomadic peoples who did not have a concept of land ownership prior to the arrival of Westerners), it's now increasingly common to hear language like 'this is [Indigenous group] Country' and the aforementioned 'sovereignty was never ceded', and some more general claims of the unique and unassailable right that that group to the land that the white man could never possess or truly understand. Similarly, Australian society's attitude towards Indigenous practices and knowledge has gone from liberal paternal 'yeah let them do their own thing and maybe humour them' and 'yeah maybe there is some useful tidbits of information we can glean from Indigenous fire management practices once we get past all the superstitious rubbish' to now being 'we must incorporate Indigenous culture and people into literally everything we do and give it privileged attention' and 'Indigenous knowledge and superstitions ways of knowing have some special quality that makes it them literally True and superior to Western™ knowledge, stupid Westerners have been ruining this sacred Country'.
I want to know where the Liberal Party, and conservative politicians more generally, are in all this. This stuff has completely infected government, in addition to all the usual suspects like education and academia. I’m not sure how they allowed to this to happen. Are they just somehow completely ignorant of how un-impartial and politically woke the government bureaucracy has become? Are they grossly incompetent or powerless to do anything? Have they also fallen victim to this in their own ranks, and lack the ability or backbone to purge it from their own party? Or do they also just support it, if less radically so, being naïve small-l liberals buying into the motte-and-bailey? I have no idea, but from my perspective it feels like they have their head in the sand. It’s been discussed here before about how the Republicans seem to be completely unaware about what they’re up against in the US, still acting like it’s 2008. It very much feels the same way here, if not even more so.
Australia’s Voice to Parliament (1/2)
The Voice to Parliament is one of Australia’s largest active culture and political wars, and I think encapsulates the whole macro global culture war on a (relatively) micro scale.
What is the Voice to Parliament? Well, half the problem is that no one seems to know what it is, as we will soon find out. The Voice to Parliament (the Voice) is a proposed government body of some kind intended to consist of and represent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous Australians) enshrined into the Constitution of Australia via referendum. The Voice would have some kind of involvement with the Australian Parliament and the legislative process. The referendum to enshrine the Voice is expected to take place at some point this later this year, and would also enshrine ‘recognition’ of Indigenous Australians in the Australian Constitution. This marks the end of the consensus on what the Voice even is (or would be). Details about what powers the Voice have or how it would function have been incredibly vague and hotly debated.
The Voice is the latest in a long line of attempts to get constitutional recognition (of the special status of) of Indigenous Australians. This is by far the boldest attempt too, attempting include a permanent constitutional body with some legislative power as part of it. The Voice most directly originates from the 2017 ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’, which keeping in with the theme was/is an attempt to get some kind of unspecified constitutional recognition (and power) for Indigenous people. The Statement directly called for “the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution” and “a Makarrata [Treaty] Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.”
After a bunch of government activity looking into the Voice that is honestly not worth getting into, the National Indigenous Australian Agency published the Indigenous Voice Co-Design Process final report in 2021. While this does contain a lot of detail how a potential Voice might work, this is merely a suggestion and is in no sense binding. Mostly charitably (but still concerning), my understanding is that this suggested version of the Voice’s powers would be not dissimilar to the current Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights (something I am also sceptical of), which has the authority to review every piece of legislation and legislative instrument and make reports on whether they are ‘compatible with human rights’. The Voice would seeming operate in the same way, except it would be constitutionally enshrined (and therefore virtually impossible to remove in the future), and its member will be made of completely unelected and unrepresentative Indigenous representatives. And I must reiterate, this report is in no way necessarily what the Voice will end up being, and even the report is uncertain what the internal structure of the Voice would look like, offering a number of hypothetical examples.
So what do the major political parties have to say about the Voice? The current Labor (left to centre-left) government, the ones who will be ultimately responsible for putting forward the question and implementing the outcome, obviously support the Voice (or at least their version of it), having previously supported the Uluru Statement and making a referendum on the Voice part of their election promises. But they have been alarmingly sparse on details of what it is exactly they are supporting. The only message they have been clear on is that the Voice won’t have veto powers over Parliament (something that is of genuine concern). Pretty much the only detail is now-Prime Minister Albanese’s draft referendum question he proposed back in 2022 in the lead up to the election “Do you support an alteration to the Constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice?” along with some draft words to add to the constitution which are similarly vague.
The Liberal Party (right to centre-right), the major opposition party, has yet to openly state their position on the Voice referendum, instead repeatedly asking for more detail about how the Voice would function before they state their position. While it’s hard to say with certainty, my feeling is that the Liberal Party generally doesn’t want to support the Voice but can’t state that position openly for whatever reason (internal party politics, don’t want to give left-dominated media ammo) and is instead engaging on this (effective?) strategy of ‘asking questions’ to undermine public support for the Voice.
The National Party (right rural based), the minor party in the Liberal-National Coalition, is the only major party to actually outright oppose the Voice, although it should be noted that their stated justification is not anything along the lines opposing it as an undemocratic, illiberal body or the privileged status it would grant Indigenous Australians over other Australians, but rather for being “another layer of bureaucratic tape” and that the Voice “will not advance the primary aim of Closing the Gap [term used to describe the difference in life outcomes between Indigenous Australians and white non-Indigenous Australians] and dealing with the real issues faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people”.
Then of course, there’s the Greens, Australia’s progressive party. They whole-heartedly support the Voice to the fullest possible extent, and while they are similarly vague as Labor on details, my impression is that they would support the Voice having veto power or similar powers to Parliament. The Greens also support ‘Truth and Treaty’ which is a whole other can of worms I would rather not get into right now (it’s all the highly woke stuff about ‘Truth-Telling’ and ‘Justice’ and give more privileges to Indigenous Australians). The Green’s position is actually really important, because Labor does not currently have a majority in the Senate, and they need Green crossbench support to pass any legislation relevant to the Voice if it reaches the point.
As a slight aside, Senator Lidia Thorpe, an extremely woke Indigenous woman and Indigenous activist whose actions I previously discussed in an old Motte comment recently broke ties with the Greens over the Green’s support for the Voice referendum (and now is fully committed to representing ‘Blak Soverignity’). This is essentially because she believes the Greens are not radical enough, and she refuses to support the Voice while a Treaty doesn’t exist yet. It says a lot about someone when they think the Greens aren’t radical enough.
As part of the referendum process in Australia, the Government is required to provide a brochure/flyer/information explaining the arguments both for and against the given referendum proposal (including related funding and research, essentially the Government is required to provide support/funding to both sides of the referendum). The Labor Government took steps towards removing this requirement through legislation, claiming such a requirement “out of step with today’s electoral laws and does not reflect modern delivery and communications methods.” Many opposing politicians and commentators quite rightly pointed out that this as a pretty blatant and undemocratic attempt to suppress the ‘no’ campaign, counting on left dominated media to overwhelmingly support the ‘yes’ vote. The Labor government ultimately backtracked in the face of criticism. One more thing of note is that in Senate Estimates the Shadow Minister for Education (Liberal) recently raised the issue of schools only promoting the ‘yes’ case and likening it to ‘indoctrination’. Which absolutely is what is happening, I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty there are approximately zero teachers in public schools opening advocating for the ‘no’ vote and plenty openly advocating for the ‘yes’ vote. As far as I can tell, nothing has come of this event as of yet.
A neologism (or a new meaning for the word?) that I have begun to see everywhere and has really started to annoy me is 'anti-racism'.
The annoyance began when I noticed the term being used in places where it was anachronistic. Two instances that I remember were the Wikipedia pages of "Pepsi" and "J.R.R Tolkien". Pepsi's article describes Pepsi's early attempts to advertise to black people as an untapped market as an "anti-racism stance". Tolkien's article states that "scholars have noted... he was anti-racist." After some digging around in the edit history of Pepsi's article, I found that the term 'anti-racist' was only added to the Pepsi article in mid-2018, and to Tolkien's article in early 2021.
"Anti-racism" is a term popular within Critical Race Theory. It was particularly popularised and entered the public consciousness in large part due to Ibram X. Kendi's 2019 book How to be an Anti-Racist. Kendi defines "anti-racism" in that book as follows:
The opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “anti-racist.” What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism.
According to Kendi, any racial inequity, or anything that results in a racial inequity is by definition racist, and in order to be an "anti-racist" you must support racial equity (i.e. forcing equal outcomes) for everything. A similar quote is from Angela Davis: "In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.”
"Anti-racism" is a classic example of linguistic laundering/doubling, or linguistic motte-and-bailey, that is rife within woke/Critical Social Justice circles. The pattern is to take a word that has a plain meaning to the layman (anti-racist simply means against racism), and create a second specific, academic and ideological meaning for it. This second meaning is then smuggled into conversations and policy when the public naturally just assume the first, plain meaning. Ultimately, this is done for political and ideological ends. Manipulate people to get on board through the plain meaning (you're not a racist are you? You want to be an anti-racist!), then implement the ideological agenda, while maintain it is nothing usual because the word is the same. Other common words doubled in this way are the trio of diversity, equity, inclusion.
Critical Social Justice is the amalgamation of Neo-Marxism/Critical Theory, and Post-modernism/Post-Structuralism. Michel Foucault is the most cited scholar in history, and many other post-modernists, and Neo-Marxists top the list of most cited humanities scholars. It's hard to overstate how influential these ideas are currently in the humanities. Both Neo-Marxism but particularly post-modernism have an extreme focus on language. Language is the medium of power, and therefore, of oppression. It should not be surprising then that Critical Social Justice deliberately engages in such language manipulation as part of their political project, including engaging in historical revisionism to legitimise themselves.
I'm going to try and synthesize a lot of points that others have brought up and also add my own analysis.
By 'colonialism' I assume you're referring to style of so-called 'exploitative colonialism' of Africa and Asia during the 19th century, I think a poor name that betrays the ideological perspective the dominates the analysis of colonialism today. I think the style of 'settler colonialism' of the Americas etc. are not possible today for more fairly obvious reasons.
I do think many of the below comments are correct that nationalism has played a significant role in making colonialism extremely difficult to enforce in the present day. In the past, there was not a huge amount of difference whether you paid taxes to or have allegiance to a 'local' lord or king, or a foreign lord or king. For example in India, for the Rajas who existed British rule, pragmatically there was not much difference between allegiance to a 'local' Islamic Persianised ruler (Mughals) or to the British. Indeed, many Rajas willingly switched allegiance to the British, which they saw as preferable. By and large, colonial rule was legitimate - the colonial powers couldn't have governed such large amounts of land with such little Western manpower otherwise. This changed with the development of a national identity in the colonial states, which ironically is a Western import. Anti-colonialism is ironically a Western invention. What you see consistently during the decolonisation period was Western educated local elites picking up Western political philosophy (liberalism and socialism too) often during their travels and education in the West, and using that as a basis for decolonisation and nationalism. It's the case for figures like Kwame Nkrumah, Obafemi Awolowo, even Gandhi. Once nationalism took hold in colonial regions, it became socially and politically untenable for a militant minority of the local population to be administered by a group deemed not part of the new national identity (anti-colonial movements usually did not have majority support), regardless of any material benefits. Indeed, many of these countries collapsed immediately after decolonisation. A matter of national pride as it were. This is really no different to the Springtime of Nations, where Italians, Czechs, Hungarians opposed Austrian rule (no matter how nominal), Poles under German rule etc.
Another major factor is that there is just no political will to do colonialism in modern societies. A major motivating factor behind the 19th Century colonialism was the Civilising Mission. While this is often the subject of contemporary revisionism like the term 'exploitative colonialism', there was a strong altruistic motivation to European colonialism. The 19th Century was a period of great intellectual and economic progress, and many Europeans strongly believed they had a moral, often religious imperative to bring this progress and civilisation to the unfortunate primitive peoples of Africa and Asia. Again, their motivations were primarily altruistic, whether you think those motivations have merit or where legitimate is up to the reader. The reality is that with a handful of exceptions, colonialism was actually incredibly expensive for European powers and largely was a net deficit for the coloniser, not a benefit, mostly motivated by colonial prestige and the moral imperative of civilising. Building infrastructure, schools, hospitals and a functioning bureaucracy all from scratch isn't exactly cheap. Otto von Bismark was famously anti-colonial, not out of any compassion for would-be colonised people, but rather he saw it as a significant waste of resources that could be spent on strengthening Germany. Germany would eventually reluctantly join the colonial race anyway due to international peer pressure and prestige. This ties into my own personal theory for why I think decolonisation took hold in not just the colonial states themselves, but also in the Western academia and elite in the mid-20th Century - postwar Europe had been devastated by WW2 and could not afford to maintain its colonies, but needed a moral justification to abandon the colonies, if at least to save face. The decolonial movement was that justification - Western elites had a genuine motivation to promote or at least passively accept decolonisation to absolve themselves of any responsibility they may have had to colonial states and people they governed. Though, this may have come back to bite them decades later, giving fuel to what would one day become the contemporary critical social justice movement and anti-Western sentiment in academia more generally. Kind of like the CIA funding the Mujahideen.
As other comments have also mentioned, contemporary Western states just don't do colonialism correctly, in large part caused by ideological and political concerns. To use the common America and Afghanistan (or Iraq) example, the 'correct' or functional way to do colonialism is to copy what the British did, ally with local elites, prop them up, arm them, and help them destroy their enemies, but otherwise keep local governance structures intact (the British were more than happy for local allied chiefs, shieks or rajas to govern their own territory as long as they kept to certain conditions. This is not what the Americans did or tried to do - instead, they tried to completely supplant local government structures by installing a completely foreign, Western style liberal democracy in those states that has no legitimacy and collapses under its own weight. Part of the reason for this is that America is so narcissistic that it thinks that remaking the world into America-style liberal democracies ("spreading democracy/freedom") is just the Greatest Thing Ever, but also because functional British style colonialism would never fly in the ideological waters the West is currently in - human rights, self determination, colonialism creating 'evil' hierarchies and so on. So the Americans have to try and do 'non-colonial colonialism' which obviously doesn't work.
Another thing to consider is that 21st century societies simply don't operate in the same way a 19th century society does, and we shouldn't expect contemporary colonialism to resemble previous colonialism. Obviously, this brings in the neo-colonialism debate. To simplify greatly, modern service economies and financial systems and multinational corporations may have made old boots-on-the-ground colonialism redundant. Why do you need to literally, physically control the governance of states in Africa when you can achieve the same effect from a distance with IMF loans? And it's not just the West - what China is doing could also be called neo-colonialism as well, least of all with the Belt and Road Initiative, where China will indebt half of Africa to China and basically have control of all their finances.
I'm not convinced by the (military) technology arguments put forward by many of the other commenters here. There are several reasons for this. First, the vast majority of European colonialism in the 19th century was not done through military conquest, but primarily through diplomatic means and gaining the allegiance of local elites. This is not to say there was no war, but there was very little compared to the scale we're talking about. You can perhaps make an argument that there was still a lot of indirect military conquest as Western powers would arm and fund elites favorable to them who would then conquer their rivals, but this is both indirect, and negates a lot of the apparent technological advantage by using an intermediary. Secondly, many of the colonised states weren't actually that far behind the Europeans in military technology. India in particular was home to the 'Gunpowder Empire' of the Mughals who were very familiar with advanced firearms long before Crown rule in India. The British defeat in the First Anglo-Afghan war is another good example of this. Third, even when the Europeans had a clear military technology advantage, it still wasn't a clearly decisive factor. The clearest example of this was the Anglo-Zulu War, where the Zulus nearly beat the British despite only having mostly iron-age technology. Fourth, it's not clear to me that the technological disparity between, for example, the British Empire and Iraq in 19th century is larger than it is between the USA and Iraq today. The Americans have a level of military sophistication that is miles ahead of anyone in the Global South. The Americans steamrolled Saddam's forces in 2003. But in my opinion, colonialism was never really a question of military might or technology, but of governance and legitimacy. This is not to say military technology provided no edge for the Europeans, but I think it is generally overstated. Which leads me to my next point:
I might be convinced that technological superiority might be a reason for 19th century colonial success if the technological superiority being described was social, political and economic technology, rather than military technology. Simply put, the Europeans were generally far better administrators, in many cases building a functioning, large-scale administrative system where previously there had only been anarchic tribal and ethnic conflict. The Europeans brought with them engineering, medicine, rule of law and so on, which did wonders for their legitimacy. This gap in social/economic technology between the Europeans and colonial states in the 19th century is still probably larger than the Europeans and even the most dysfunctional post-colonial state (e.g. Somalia) today, though I might be convinced otherwise.
To conclude, I want to link to the article the Case for Colonialism by Bruce Gilley, which I have previously posted on /r/theMotte, rebuts much of the anti-colonialist literature. While not explicitly about the topic at hand, its arguments are highly relevant.
I agree with this advice.
From my own experience, you can mostly disregard the calls for woke signaling as long as you do not do it overtly at all. Do not explicitly disagree with anyone on woke-related issues (it can end REALLY badly if you do, keep your mouth shut and know when to pick your battles), just simply ignore their requests. If it comes to it, feign ignorance but never follow through with their requests. You can just ignore the email telling you to use pronouns and just don't put them in your email. Specifically in my case in Australia, I also avoid putting any 'Acknowledgement of Country' in any of my work as much as I can get away with.
You do have to be careful around true believers, who will notice your lack of participation and will try to ostracize you, and you might not even realize it. It probably heavily depends on your specific context, but just avoid them at all costs.
The plus side of this strategy is that fellow covert conscientious dissenters will likely notice your lack of participation and will hopefully network with you.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
While we're discussing DeBoer, I want to briefly talk about his post immediately prior to this one, Of Course You Know What Woke Means.
In typical DeBoer fashion, he makes a lot of poignant points about the nature of the woke, but ultimately misses the forest for the trees. Woke isn't a 'school of social and cultural liberalism', nor is the 'woke approach to solutions to politics is relentlessly individualistic'. DeBoer does what virtually every old school anti-woke materialist socialist/Marxist does when talking about the woke - completely ignore the reality the woke/critical social justice is a leftist movement that shares some roots (even if it has developed distinctly) with the Marxism that DeBoer and people like him support. DeBoer obviously would rather incorrectly lay the blame squarely at the feet of 'liberalism' (the arch-nemesis of Marxism), then in anyway implicate Marxist concepts through association with the woke. While DeBoer does vaguely allude to the woke being 'leftist', it's pretty clear DeBoer believes that wokism is liberalism that has evolved into a quasi-leftist movement, rather than wokism genuinely descending from leftism and overtaking liberal sentiment.
Marcuse was not liberal. Angela Davis is not liberal. Bell Hooks was not liberal. Ibram Kendi is not liberal. The underlying ideology and philosophy of woke is not liberal. The fact that 'liberals' have been adopting this ideology while still (mis)labelling themselves liberal does not make woke liberal.
does Feminism actually have any realistic solution to how men should react to female promiscuity?
Feminism's answer or 'solution' to any problem is always the same. Men have to be more and more accommodating, to the point of remaking men if necessary. If women are unhappy, that's because men (i.e. the patriarchy) are making them unhappy! Women feeling like sluts and devalued after years of sleeping around! That's only because the negative spooks the patriarchy is slut shaming you and trying to control your sexuality! Men have to learn to accept women's sexuality (sexuality, of course, means sleeping around)! Women feeling unfulfilled after 20 years climbing the corporate ladder and having no family? That's only because the patriarchy is trying to push you back into oppressive gender roles (at a abstract, psychic level if necessary if not discrimination can be found)! Men need to accept women can be girlbosses! Feminism is just a long list of demanding men accommodated more destructive behaviours from women and give them more.
Really, this is nothing new, this is how women have excerted influence for millennia. Women complains, men accommodates or makes changes. Moral panics. The difference is that feminism is leading women down a endless self-perpetuating death spiral, a train with no brakes. Other moral panics would reach a critical point and dissipate. Here, the dissipation that feminism is pointing at is women, men and society itself.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Stuff like this really demonstrate the philosophical kinship feminism has with Marxism with this blatant utopianism. The argument being put forward is "if the entire world was in a permanent communist revolution feminist, there there would be no war and no problems in the first place, everything would be great! Problems only exist because patriarchy creates problems to then solve (for some reason)." Nirvana fallacy par excellence.
Other commentors have made some good rebuttals but there's an obvious one missing:
The vast, vast majority of people do cannot or could not be bothered putting this much effort into nutrition. You are obviously an outlier, being an amateur athlete who seems to get some enjoyment out of monitoring your nutrition needs like a hawk. Most people cannot or do not want to do this. If you're a 'casual vegan' (in that you just eat vegan and you are not monitoring your food for nutrient content) it is incredibly easy to end up with a vitamin or some other deficiency. I've seen it happen to multiple friends and family who have gone vegan.
It is far, far easier (in fact, it's the norm) to eat a nutritionally complete diet incidentally as a non-vegan. And this is not even considering the mental energy expended on working out whether certain food is vegan in the first place, let alone the nutritional content of said food.
It's not a secret I have a strong dislike of radical feminism and its theory, to put it mildly. The feminist theory of 'patriarchy' (I know other people like to use patriarchy to mean other things) is wrong, and this includes the idea that men are 'default degenerates'. I guess I also am disagreeing with many other commenters here too, but in a milder form.
Men are not inherently degenerate. Men are inherently risk-takers, driven and ambitious compared to women. Men need a proactive 'purpose' in a way women do not. Part of this is the male social role - masculinity is determined by a man's ability to protect and provide, but of course there is a innate biological element to it. This drive that men have can go in any number of directions, good or bad, productive or degenerate. But given that humans are, on average, pro-social creatures that generally prefer to cooperate, this drive tends towards good and productive. If the natural state of men is degenerate, then how does civilisation exist? Given that men literally built civilisation, at the very least in the literal physical sense.
The problem arises when society fails to provide young men at large with a pro-social way to harness their drive, which has to indicate a systematic failure with society, given that I believe the natural tendency is to be pro-social. If men can't be or aren't allowed to proactive within the society, they will 'degenerate'. Men need a sense of identity, a sense of community, a family, to channel their efforts into something productive. Without those things, they're going to just lash out and/or become 'degenerate'. That energy has to go somewhere. The crisis of masculinity is exactly when society fails to provides those things. There is an oft used proverb of dubious "African" origin which describes men pretty well here - the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. It should really not be surprising that the men who are the most 'degenerate' historically have been men who have existed on the fringes of society.
I think men are violent by only insofar that men are agentic. I don't think it's really possible to separate men's propensity towards violence from their tendency to exert agency in other ways and in other parts of societies. Men are expected to commit violence on behalf of women, and to perform on behalf of women. It is the same drive that causes men to commit violence that also causes them to compete with other man for status, climb the corporate ladder, engage in physical labour. So it is not so much that men are violent per se, but rather that men are and expected to be agentic beings which necessarily includes the domain of violence.
I think hoax is a perfectly adequate term. There are billions of people in the world, there's a near certainity that there will be someone, somewhere who will vaguely fit the profile of what scenario you wish to conjure up. But the scenario itself is still fictitious, a deliberate choice to misrepresent (and necessarily fabricate) information.
Even if you want to make the 'well, technically there was at least one dude somewhere saying something along those lines, so it's not a hoax' the obvious and immediate counter-argument is that the hoax is not the fact there is that one guy somewhere, but rather the hoax is the deliberate misreprentation of a non-credible threat as a credible threat, in a situation where it's obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence it's a non-credible threat, least of all supposed 'hate crime experts' like the ADL.
On principle, this is not dissimilar to a situation where someone sees a bunch of mischievous teenagers messing about with some paintball guns, this someone knows they're nothing but mischievous teenagers with paintball guns (who might even talk a big game but everyone including the someone knows are harmless), calling the police on them as an active shooter situtation,where people are being shot and 'potentally' killed then literally everyone believes and parrots the caller, up to the top level of government and media, no one does any due diligence investigating because it plays into their political incentives (an active shooter situation is great fodder for gun control politics). Oh, and it turns out the caller is a owner of a private security firm who tends to gets a lot of contracts after something like this occurs. What would you call that situation, if not a hoax?
R.G. Collingwood and the Idea of Historical Progress
Every so often a discussion about the nature of progress, why society seems to trend ‘leftwards’ or similar teleologically related questions. In the past I have given my own answer to such a question. However, I recently came across the book the Idea of History by historian and philosopher of history R.G. Collingwood, one of the more interesting philosophies and theories of history and what it means or if it is even possible for society to ‘progress’. But first, some context.
R.G. Collingwood was a British historian and philosopher of history during the early 20th century (I will admittedly simplifying his ideas here for brevity). Collingwood was a major and influential figure in neo-idealist or British idealist movement. The neo-idealists, as idealists, believe that human actions and events, and therefore history, is driven by human thought, ideas, or reason. This is contrasted with materialist or naturalists who aim to explain human action and history through laws or law-like processes, the classic example being Marxist historiography. Collingwood believes the analogy between human history and natural processes is wrong. For this reason, Collingwood history proper is the study of human thought, ideas or reason over time. Natural history (e.g. geological history) is not true history, because it is driven by natural processes and laws. It is no more history than a mathematical equation or scientific theory is history.
The neo-idealists could broadly be described Hegelian but deviate or disagree with Hegel’s philosophy of history in several ways. Collingwood, like Hegel, was a historicist – that all human culture or nature is contingent on its historical period, and therefore all historical events are unique. This lends itself towards a kind of historical moral subjectivism, though I would argue in Collingwood’s case it is a weak form of subjectivism. According to Collingwood, as part of truly understanding history, one must attempt to inhabit or relive the experience of historical figures to understand them. To understand Caesar and crossing of the Rubicon, we must put ourselves in Caesar’s shoes. But we can still understand empathise and reason as those figures did (at least to some degree) and make judgements about their behaviour relative to their context, hence ‘weak’ subjectivism.
Collingwood’s best-known work is The Idea of History in which the majority is dedicated to how the idea of history has developed across time, from Thucydides to Collingwood’s fellow neo-idealist contemporaries like Croce and Oakeshott. Essentially, a history of history. However, I admit I have not read much of this part of the book. It is the final third of the book (the “Epilegomena”) which I found most interesting, in which Collingwood explains his philosophy and theory of history, including in which he addresses “Progress as created by Historical Thinking”.
Collingwood denies the existence of historical progress, primarily by his argument that historical progress is not a natural process. He argues that the belief in historical progress arose out of this false analogy to natural progress (particularly natural evolution). It is here where Collingwood deviates from and contradicts Hegel and earlier idealists the strongest. Collingwood does not believe in a teleology of human history - that human history is leading or progressing towards something. However, human thought still changes and develops (and thus history occurs) over time. Collingwood believes it improper to conceptualize history as a whole as progressing because it is impossible to evaluate a historical period as a whole. This is for both practical and philosophical reasons – the historian can never have complete data to truly recreate (relive) the entire historical period, and even if the historian did have enough data, he will be unable to truly grasp the historical period as a whole. Collingwood provides the example of Christianity being ‘progress’ on Roman paganism – such an evaluation would require us to understand the entire internal religious experience of the Romans, which is inaccessible to us, even if we have a robust understanding of their rites and myths.
Collingwood does believe that progress can occur, however. For Collingwood, progress can only ever occur within a limited field or scope. Progress occurs when a change occurs to solve a problem with no loss of the essence of the original. As Collingwood puts it:
If thought in its first phase, after solving the initial problems of that phase, is then, through solving these, brought up against others which defeat it; and if the second solves these further problems without losing its hold on the solution of the first, so that there is gain without any corresponding loss, then there is progress.
This is essentially a form of the Hegelian dialectic. A thought is formed – thesis. It has problems – antithesis. The problems are solved while preserving the essence of the original thought – synthesis. An example of where Collingwood believes progress can occur is progress in science. We can say Einstein is progress on Newton because Einstein is able to solve the problems of Newtonian mechanics while retaining its essence. It is appropriate to say that Aristotle provides progress on Plato so far as Aristotle resolves problems within Platonic philosophy, but it would be inappropriate to say that it is progress when Aristotle rejects Platonic philosophy. We can apply this idea of progress to other fields, e.g. economics, law, morality etc. - A new precedent in common law for a previously unresolved issue is progress, but we cannot say whether the idea of common law itself represents progress from other systems of law.
What does this mean for us online who constantly argue about the nature of progress? I’m not really sure but I think it might be wise to keep this dual notion of progress in mind. That progress can and will occur within a certain part of history and society but it cannot progress (or be said to progress) as a whole. That Cthulhu does indeed swim leftwards, but only within a given scope. A Liberal society will continue to solve problems within its society and progressively become ‘more liberal’ until the liberal period ends, after which we cannot tell which way he swims from our perspective.
If you want to hear some more about Collingwood’s philosophy of history and clarify my butchered attempt to summarize it, I recommend this video lecture which got me to read Collingwood in the first place. The Idea of History is also available on the Internet Archive to read.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
But then again, the reason this does feel slightly discomforting is because we are primed to be especially sensitive towards discussions that might be insulting to women.
We had top level comment a few months ago discussing (arguing) that men are degenerate by default. While there was some disagreement and pushback (including from myself), no one really batted an eye at the topic, and is seen as a completely legitimate topic to discuss with no handholding. In stark contrast, any discussion that involves criticism of women and their behaviour, including this week's, is viewed with suspicion by default and is frequently demanded to have higher standard both in quality and decorum (isolated demand for rigor). Even in the Motte we can't escape it. And for what it's worth, I think the quality of discussion on this week's women/gender politics topic was noticeably higher than the one about men being degenerate, though I'm happy to admit I might be biased in this regard.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
And Karl Marx was an bourgeois wannabe who lived on handouts from his parents and Engels and never worked a day of real labour in his life. And neither was he able to fully articulate what the ideal communist state would look like.
Just because their personal lives don't perfectly reflect their stated ideological preferences doesn't mean their preferences aren't real or don't resonate with a lot of people.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
10mo ago
These kinds of leaks just reinforce my postion that woke corporations aren't just acting woke to 'respond to the market' or to cover their own asses from regulation (i.e. that corporations are only acting woke for sound, economically rational reasons), but that corporations have been subjected to entryism much the same as any other insitution and that market forces and competition aren't some impenetrable bulwark against woke entryism.
Another day, another 'wokeness is in decline' post. People have been making this claim for the last decade.
What always gets me about these articles, including this one by al-Gharbi, is that there is no actual critical analysis of what 'wokeness' actually is (which presumably would aid in such an analysis if it were actually in decline). There is no mention of ideology or the underlying philosophical beliefs. The impression you're left with when reading al-Gharbi's article and many like it, is that wokeness is just a cultural fad that's had it's day in the sun (according to the author). That wokeness really is nothing more that a bunch of 'crazy kids on college campuses who will grow out of it', but somehow the entirely of Anglo and even Western society has become those crazy college kids. But still, it'll just pass like any other cultural fad... right? We'll all just go back to being good liberals at the end of history.
The woke winning a bit less doesn't mean they're not continuing to win. And they don't have to win as much anymore, because in a large sense they've already won. They have dominated almost every instituion that matters - academia and education, government institutions (bureaucracy), corporations, media and more. Even ostensibly 'conservative' institutions like religion and churches are falling victim to wokeness (mostly under the auspices of 'liberation theology'). In some sense, they have succeeded in Marcuse's goal of creating a 'New Sensibility', albeit a couple generations of ideology removed from his work. It's virtually impossible to deinstutionalise the woke in our present circumstances. Sure, some DEI workers got made redundant because of what seems to be for purely economic reasons and not ideological disagreement. But can you actually imagine DEI departments actually being complete axed and being openly criticised for not just being useless, but actively harmful ideological commissars? Here in Australia, I can't imagine someone actually trying to remove the profession of faith that is the 'Acknowledgement of Country' that preceeds every meeting and event in every institution, succeeding and not just being dismissed as a bigot. Why does every website now have an input for your 'pronouns' that are totally 'optional'?Where are the people telling workers they have to take down their LGBT flags they've put up around the office and yes, they do count as political/ideological declarations.
When these institutionalised woke presences are being actively hunted and removed and openly mocked, then yes, I will agree wokeness is in decline.
Articles like this infuriate me. I am a pretty mellow individual and it usually takes a lot to get me riled up, but feminist articles, particular those about "masculinity" (God I hate that word and how it's used to pathologise men) I just find so rage-inducing.
Like all feminist piece about masculinity, it's doomed to fail because they cannot contradict the core beliefs and assumptions of feminist theory, which is a major, if not core contributor to the problem the article is trying to address in the first place.
When the author talks about the protector and provider role, and fatherhood being the base for developing a new positive "masculinity", my immediate response is "just what the fuck do they think they think masculinity has been about for millennia?" The feminist answer of course, is that masculinity has historically and currently been about oppressing women. "Hegemonic" masculinity and related terms. Before feminists turned "patriarch" into a dirty word, it actually reflected the reality that historically family life has always formed a key part of male identity, and it wasn't oppressive!
Of course, the author can in no way put any responsibility on to women for the social breakdown - and if they do it admit it, it's a good thing! In fact the article tacitly admits to this by singing the praises of the working woman, but the solution is never an adjustment on the part of women, oh no no no, the solution is always that men have to do more, "be better", and remake themselves into the New
SovietFeminist Man if necessary. How can you expect to build or maintain a masculinity around fatherhood and family when feminism has spend the last 60 years demolishing the family and cheering on its demise? How can you expect men to put family and fatherhood first when women clearly aren't putting family and motherhood first. Someone reneged on the social arrangements around family, and it wasn't men. But apparently men are expected to build a new "masculinity" to try and plug the gaps that weren't created by them.The end of the article had me rolling my eyes incredibly hard.
Yeah, because men totally haven't been held to high standards in the past and have been "free" to do whatever they want throughout history. I'm not sure how we the readers are meant to square the circle with the claim that men are protectors and providers but are also "free".
"Hey men, you know how masculinity has traditionally been built on men being protectors and providers? Well we feminists decided that actually didn't happen and you were all oppressive bastards who have to pay for the sins of your ancestors. But we now going to give you the opportunity to build a new "positive" masculinity that built upon being protectors and providers in a feminist friendly way! What does feminist friendly way mean? Well, it's kind of the same as before but this time women are under no obligation to reciprocate in any way! Hope you join us with building something better!"
There's something so insidiously evil about selling the cause of the problem as the solution. If only we had more feminism and men embraced it the problem will be solved. True feminism has never been tried! Gotta keep digging ourselves in that hole I guess.
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