Rosencrantz2
11d ago
What would your argument be for why meritocratic hiring would be likely to prevent feminisation? Is it that the high-merit candidates are low on feminine traits, regardless of their gender?
(It seems meritocratic university entrance is leading to more women than men in many subjects, but perhaps those women are more masculine?)
Rosencrantz2
11d ago
I am confused whether she thinks merit is a separate quality from masculinity. E.g. could you have lots of extremely talented women who get a job on merit but then, by their fundamentally feminine traits and preferences, ruin the workplace nonetheless? Or are merit and maleness the same thing to her, in which case you could safely allow a whole bunch of very 'male'-leaning women like her into a workplace, as long as you vetted them carefully?
I think in the latter scenario she can probably unhypocritically keep her job, it's just she'll also have to adopt a notion of merit that is divorced from ability to directly perform a job function, and is instead all about degree of fit to a male workplace culture.
Rosencrantz2
11d ago
I don't see how she can say that. Her whole argument is that once the field is >50% female it changes to become worse. If that is not the case and a female majority profession works out just fine, then I don't even know what she is trying to say.
I think I agree with Hereandgone -- if meritocratic employment results in women dominating a field, quotas would have to be implemented to prevent this from wrecking the field. OR she is admitting that some female dominated communities can be truth seeking, competitive etc. and in that case it seems she just has a problem with certain specific corporate cultures rather than with their gender composition.
Rosencrantz2
11d ago
I think the author is saying that she is smart and got her position through merit, and is willing to prove it, but she thinks most women in high positions did not. Does this make her kind of an asshole? Hell yes but she did say she's a disagreeable sort of person.
Rosencrantz2
11d ago
A progressive is hardly going to agree that the truth-seeking traits are the same ones as the female-excluding traits.
Rosencrantz2
12d ago
The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it?
This paragraph is amazing. As if the primary characteristic of people who are oriented towards the sole goal of 'open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth' is their gender! A small proportion of academic communities in history have managed to take this kind of pure truth seeking as their goal. To see gender as the main faultline of truthseeking vs other interests is identity politics at its worst.
Rosencrantz2
15d ago
Claim (1), that these are all just jokes, seems doubtful. Many 'ironic' posters pretty clearly are using their irony for plausible deniability, and do basically believe the things they think they're being ironic about, so I guess to the assertion that these are all just jokes, I'd say 'I don't really believe you. Some of them are, some of them aren't.'
Rosencrantz2
20d ago
Large pizzas are usually a good deal for the same reason as 16" vs 12" sounds like only a third more pizza.
Rosencrantz2
21d ago
Yes, I think this is a fair criticism of the left. I don't think it's terribly surprising the left would recoil from a position that seems to excuse companies profiting by employing illegal immigrants, but punishes being an illegal migrant. It seems a bit downpunchy, and to constitute an acknowledgement that government policy is to deliberately cause people to want to come to the US, and then deliberately punish them when they do. However I think the left should be working to find a policy package that resolves these tensions in a way that it is more thoughtful than the right-wing version.
Rosencrantz2
21d ago
I think in general ICE defenders want the perception of unpredictability, even if they don't admit it. The fact that it's sometimes ICE itself posting the videos of sloppy and menacing looking raids that serve as both content for those on the right and outrage bait to ICE opponents speaks volumes. Some here will be more open about the usefulness of this perception, arguing that it's only by creating a climate of fear among immigrant communities that you can defeat the pull factor causing people to come to the country. They believe 'I am here but at the pleasure of capricious forces' is what we want going through the heads of all immigrants, legal and illegal, as well as anyone who might be somewhat 'bad guy' presenting (e.g. tattoos, ethnicity, employed in a precarious and peripatetic part of the economy). They want a sense of order that comes through establishing, with shows of force, who is in charge. I understand the motivation behind that attitude, though I disagree with it. What I find insulting is people trying to claim that what we are seeing is genuinely intended just as efficient implementation of rules, and it's the media doing all the scaremongering.
Rosencrantz2
22d ago
Yeah, this seems more than a little important to recall when accusing the Democrats of starting the civil war talk.
Rosencrantz2
23d ago
I suppose they were just hail marying their last and only hope of stopping Trump 2 though. You can easily see she wasn't regarded as a great candidate before she was anointed.
Rosencrantz2
24d ago
nothing but
Rosencrantz2
28d ago
Indeed. And if both are multi-dimensional I'm starting to question the value of the distinction!
Rosencrantz2
28d ago
Haha. Sorry you've had that experience. It's all relative though. Find people who care about soft status more and within that group there'll be nothing second best about your soft status unless you yourself don't value it.
Rosencrantz2
28d ago
I think soft status is so much more multi-dimensional than this model allows, and your model is a bit stuck in feudal times. You say Prince William is high in soft status for example, but really he is high in social standing because he's a prince, but quite low in talent and having much to say for himself. So he doesn't necessarily net out that high. Likewise, you put Michael Jackson as being low in soft status. He is the inverse of Prince William though – low in social standing due to his crimes, but also still high in influence because he's an all-time great musician.
The multi-dimensionality of soft status is in fact the saving grace of modern society because it gives us multiple paths through which to attain dignity.
Rosencrantz2
28d ago
I kind of agree with you – yes, lawyers and politicians who decide on bills of rights are playing a role akin to religious councils. I would just say that there are those who do not interpret such a role as necessarily involving any metaphysical commitment. 'Ruling Passions' by Simon Blackburn is interesting on this, as an example of someone who is advocating for a quasi-realist position wrt morality (including rights), where we continue talking as if moral proclamations are 'out there' in the world, while also acknowledging that what is going on under the surface is fundamentally to do with our attitudes and sentiments rather than something we've discovered independent of us.
Rosencrantz2
28d ago
I kind of agree that the language of rights is obfuscatory as to what is really going on, sometimes implying that a right is something metaphysical, though I suppose this is true of a pretty wide range of concepts. However, I think that rights talk does accomplish something real. I see rights as a legit expression of commitment to/hope that there are some core rules of human morality that transcend any particular legal system and that deserve to be incorporated into every legal system by one means or another. It is of course true that people then change their mind about torture being wrong, for example, and go ahead and do it. But at least rights provide a clear stake in the ground that countries, having signed up to a bill of rights, must renege on, proving that the values they once claimed are no longer/never were their true values. This should be at least embarrassing though perhaps we have entered an age where double standards and reversals of this kind no longer incur any shame.
Rosencrantz2
29d ago
How does that distinguish rights from the concept of morality itself? Right and wrong as ideas are already not transcendental and grounded (at least in many worldviews). They are just language frames used to express commitments and to systematically boo/yay different types of behaviour. And we can't do without that.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Nah, but trans IS bundled into LGBTQ, so if Trump is running with 'She's with them, I'm with you', it'd hit extra hard with Buttigieg as VP.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
I pretty much agree with all your criticisms and also enjoyed the book as I read it. It really struck me as it did you how repetitive and baggy it is, something it has in common with successful books in most genres today (other recent culprits I've read – 'There are Rivers in the Sky' by Elif Shafak and 'Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow' by Gabrielle Zevin).
You might think that in an age of frenetic short-form content it would be the tautly written books, in terms of both plot and prose, that would break through as they make less demands on our time and pack in more beats per page, but that has not been the case. At all. My theory is that people are so used to scrolling at speed and not having to think that they read in sort of the same way, so that repetition and cosy re-confirmation is the only way they can actually take in and understand what's going on in the story. Conclusion: the faster we read and the more distracted we become, the longer and flabbier novels are going to become.
This is f'd up. We should be taking the same time as it takes to plough through epics to read miniaturists and elegant stylists with care. (Kazuo Ishiguro, Patrick DeWitt, Yoko Ogawa, Percival Everett could all be worth a try in this regard.)
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Hmm. The Cambridge dictionary definition:
"someone who says they have particular moral beliefs but behaves in way that shows these are not sincere"
Your example does not seem to show the heroin addict is insincere in their belief, but rather that they suffer weakness of the will.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Railing against heroin while taking it isn't a very good example of hypocrisy. A more clearcut example would be criticising others for being morally weak enough to take it, while you claim the moral high ground and secretly take it yourself.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Kimmel disparaged the MAGA base and made a factual error (and there's a possibility he believed it at the time). In no way did he dance on anyone's grave.
This taps into a key point which is that for a huge range of activities, it's hard to know if they ever actually contribute and how much, regardless of whether they add to GDP or don't at all, and that even activities that fail completely can still 'contribute' in a loose sense of being in the direction of something others approve of. Even claiming benefits but being a good friend could plausibly bring far greater economic and moral good to the world than not existing as you might (just for example) unknowingly save someone from suicide.
For this reason one should think very carefully before deciding others are unproductive or parasitic based only on headline facts.
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