Fundamentally, the scary thing about Trump is that he behaves as if American elections are kayfabe on top of an underlying system of raw power politics, and his supporters love him for it.
It's pretty strange to see so much discussion here about why liberals hate Trump - a lot of "sore loser" theory - without Democrats or progressives pushing back on why they think he's particularly norm-breaking.
It actually makes me worry about the skew of this site and if we left a lot of left-wingers back on Reddit.
It's not just that "Trump wasn't supposed to win". He violated a lot of norms - not just red and blue norms like unconditional support for the nominee - starting with not releasing his taxes and escalating to things like playing footsie with not acknowledging the outcome of the election.
THIS was the particular red rag that was theoretically avoidable by a generic GOP candidate (as opposed to being anti-immigration - or rather: anti-some immigration)
There is obviously a thing where liberals (this can be of the left AND right variety - especially if you look at Europe) conflate their particular politics with democracy and freedom as such - which is how things like populism, Brexit, being anti-immigrant all end up being marked as "dangerous" or threats to freedom - but, in this case, Trump tied the connection himself.
We don't even need to look at the lib reaction - look at some of Tucker's leaked texts from the Dominion case if you think this reaction is purely lib derangement at a "blue collar billionaire".
Quran damaged at school recorded as ‘hate incident’ by police
The home secretary has expressed concern after the police recorded a “hate incident” at a school where four pupils allegedly caused “slight damage” to a copy of the Quran.
West Yorkshire police became involved at Kettlethorpe High School, Wakefield, after a Year 10 pupil said to be autistic was told to bring in a copy of the Islamic holy book by friends after losing a video game. It was damaged, allegedly after being dropped in a busy corridor.Four pupils were suspended for a week and the police intervened as false rumours spread that it had been set alight.
Inspector Andy Thornton addressed concerned parents at the local mosque and told them the damage was being treated as a “hate incident”.
Tudor Griffiths, the headmaster, said there had been “no malicious intent” but the pupils’ actions were “unacceptable”. Wakefield council said the Quran had suffered “slight damage”.
You can also watch this hostage apology video from the mother, apologizing, earnestly explaining Islamic dogma while wearing a hijab like she's some Dhimmi. I don't know how to put my contempt for that entire situation into words.
This to me seems like more confirmation of by now an ancient belief of mine: being an alleged victim group that's willing to kill people is worth more than the sum of its parts. If everyone just admitted that the fear here was that Muslims would riot, hurt the family or just generally misbehave there would be no doubt that what happened was deeply ominous and the police - and everyone - would have to pick a side.
However, because there's the patina of victimhood, actions that should be deeply worrisome instead get to be written off as defending against racism. A Swedish man being able to reliably trigger violence by burning a book is somehow not a worrying signal from the minority group, it's about Swedish "far right" types. We wasted a lot of time debating whether Charlie Hebdo was "Islamophobic" , as if it had anything to do with the price of tea in China.
The desire to cast all ethnic groups as oppressors and victims prevents basic analysis here.
The standard argument I've seen against hate speech law is that we can't punish what's in people's minds. But maybe we can add: you can't trust people to treat minorities and their differences sensibly. As in: we're apparently doomed to conflate "racism" against "gooks" for owning all of the grocery stories with being worried about groups that can be reliably triggered into illiberalism and, even worse, outgroup violence by not-even violations of medieval norms (this isn't the first time that straight lies have been used to enflame this issue)
And nobody can do anything with this information. Cause it's racist.
And yes, I think it possible the police acted quickly (and out of proportion) to forestall the sort of drama we've seen elsewhere when Islamic norms are violated. Hell, it might have even been to the boy's benefit for people to hear that the police are on it so they don't seek self-help (until everyone lets it go). But, if that's your local maximum, you're far too close to Pakistan for my liking.
Tanista
1yr ago
Anyone watching the new season of The Boys. Cause it feels...worse?
Like, the show was never really subtle. But it seems over the top now. I don't care about things like the Frenchie subplots already. But the show doesn't even seem to be able to keep a coherent continuity.
- Victoria Ocasio-Cortez is supposed to be deadset against Vought and Homelander. How can she be seen having even vaguely positive conversations with Homelander after what happened last season? Why is she at any Vought event at all?
- For that matter, how does she justify her opposition to muzzling supes giving her political positions? Are we just going to pretend they don't exist?
- "Schools that teach Critical Supe Theory"? When was this supposed to happen? The theme of the show has been Vought being in control of the super narrative for decades up until recently. Also: "Critical Supe Theory"? Fuck off.
- What's with this continuity breaking idea that all heroics are fake (raised by A-Train's brother)? Manipulated, yes. Used for Vought's gain? Sure. Not worth the cost in collateral? Probably not. But almost every supe thing we've seen mentioned involves choreography or lying.
However I sometimes feel like the metoo movement and some parts of feminist groups want a completely asexual workplace.
That's where it's inexorably trending, not because most people explicitly want that, but because nobody wants to get sued for unwanted sexual attention but nobody has any principled way to handle the situation because, the minute romance is involved, it'll get messy and complicated and people will be hurt (especially since there seem to be gendered cognitive biases here like men having an optimism bias or some men & women being bad at cross-sex mind-reading). To say nothing of the fact that modern norms are in flux and messy.
And, as we've seen, faced with being hurt, some women* lack any moral vocabulary (or tools for revenge, frankly) for describing it beyond sexual harassment/sexual assault. Which companies must take seriously. But, of course, the "validity" of the case varies but must go through litigation first.
The uncertainty here gives corporations an incentive to be proactive (and thus more restrictive).
So it's simpler to just try to cut it out, even though I doubt that's optimal for even most feminists actually (obviously, people of all stripes want the right kind of attention).
* It's mostly women reporting abuse lbh
I mean, yea, from her perspective it is. I'm curious how you think this compromise works. It seems like your perception of it entails that, since the sodomy law is repealed, nobody is ever allowed to argue for the legalization of gay marriage for all time. This seems like a strange perspective to me, and certainly is not how I understand it. The compromise is about particular legislation happening now. Not about some commitment to never ever changing laws or advocating they be changed in the future.
There's a gulf between "never changing laws after this" (unreasonable) and "this compromise holds only until we break our opponents"
The stronger the latter feeling, the more distrust and the less reason for the status quo power to compromise in the first place. If the opponents are going to be immovably opposed until they achieve maximal gains you might as well try to break them first while the mores are still somewhat on your side.
It undermines the very basis of compromise.
If it were a budget law there'd be less of an issue with the idea that we'll redo it next year. This is about social norms that need to be somewhat stable.
Streaming Bill Regulating Netflix, Amazon And Co In Canada [Finally] Becomes Law
Felt like it's been a slow-motion battle happening for years right past the horizon.
The key impact of Bill C-11 is that streamers such as Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ will now be regulated by similar laws to those overseeing the country’s networks.
In practice, the streaming services are now required to “contribute to the creation and availability of Canadian stories and music” and “pay their fair share in supporting Canadian artists, just like traditional broadcasters,” as per government bill guidelines issued last year. Canadian networks are compelled to hit certain quotas to fulfil terms of their licenses.
Basically: major streamers content sites will be obliged to push more Canadian content like television broadcasters are. For internet companies the goal would be to provide them with an incentive to increase the visibility of "Canadian" (defined by the government) content.
I'm...ambivalent. On the one hand, I constantly attack Canada for having limited independent cultural generation or even political discourse. So I find it hard to be too critical at them for taking proactive steps to push Canadian content. The cultural exception is an old concept at this point.
On the other hand...I just...don't trust the Canadian governments' competence at actually pushing "Canadian" (which they'll define for us) content. It's possible that this'll lead to more "non-descriptly Canadian" shows, but also more Nickelback-style shows (one common explanation for why they're hated is CanCon requirements meant radio stations had to play some Canadian and they benefited disproportionately, with a corresponding backlash).
There's also the question of just how this'll affect Canadian content creators (especially individuals uploading in spaces like Youtube), who probably benefit from basically being seen as indistinguishable from Americans and don't necessarily want the government putting its finger on the scale of what content gets rewarded. It might lead to less good Canadian content, as creators who could probably do a "one for us, one for them" model might find that harder. Or just lead to the people being promoted being part of a government-sustained, low-stakes artistic ghetto that can't be allowed to fail or we might have to give up on this "cultural sovereignty" thing.
Tanista
2yr ago
Russia can just ethnically replace the population.
Russia has its own demographic crisis looming. One potential reason for this war is to secure the grip on or even outright absorb ethnic Russians in Ukraine. Replace them with who? The Chinese are allies but not family and the various Russian minorities may be growing faster than the ethnic Russian population but they're not large enough to replace Ukrainians and have their own issues.
Sure but why does that impact you?
A society accepting what you see as a bad set of memes affects everyone. No man is an island.
The activists know this - that's why they went from "we just want to be left alone!" to "we need X, Y and Z to feel comfortable, fulfilled and validated".
"'You do you and I do mine" is at best an ideal that the temptations of actual power erodes or just an outright tactical lie to wear down opposing norms before instituting your own.
So...I saw the Woman King and...it was a deeply American movie.
As expected: totally historically uncredible. Not just the obvious flipping of the Dahomey into the victorious good guys, but falling victim to the same congenital failing that Western media had since maybe Kirk Douglas's Spartacus framed the man as a proto-abolitionist (though iirc this goes back to Marx) : just a total inability to reconcile criticisms of slavery in practice with criticisms of slavery as such. Or, more generally: an inability to recognize the distinction between bad and evil; things that are bad for us have to be seen as universally evil (the other recent historical epic - The Northman - escapes this problem entirely, interestingly)
In the movie the King - who is portrayed as a progressive - defends himself by stating that Dahomey no longer sells its own people (which some internal slavery critics note is weakening the kingdom in the long run) and is told by his more-progressive general that slavery is an evil in and of itself, and so Dahomey needs to transition totally away from slavery into selling palm oil (something they apparently actually tried and abandoned because it -predictably - was not as profitable)
Characters don't just oppose the oppression of their own, they oppose the oppression of "Africa". They don't just want freedom for themselves, it's about freedom as such. Silly but absolutely predictable for American cinema.
Similarly, the plot is just riven through with standard American tropes. Rebellious girl is too good for an arranged marriage so is sent to the Amazons. There she constantly bumps up against the rules of the regiment since she wants it her way but eventually proves herself (without giving up her independence). There's of course a dashing stranger for her to be attracted to, because sexual taboos (the Amazons are celibate) in Hollywood exist to be strained against.
It's probably because this movie was so distinctly American that I was actually defused and really couldn't care as much how inaccurate it was. In essence it just seemed like a black version of an existing set of tropes that already didn't deserve to be taken seriously. Seen in that light, it was actually pretty fun (my one story complaint is that the lead actress looked far too young and small).
I left the movie wondering if this needed to be a culture war issue at all? Couldn't everyone just written it off as a silly, Braveheart-esque vision of history? It's stupid in very similar ways to other American historical fodder.
I think the movie is an obvious victim of a tit-for-tat strategy: well, you won't let us have our slave-bearing ancestors, you won't let us keep the status but contextualize them as products of their time, they have to be evil. You won't let us white-wash them either, cause that's dishonest. So we'll be damned if we let you create a new set of (mythical) heroic ancestors when we're denied that with people who actually existed and actually were ambivalent about slavery.
Helped along by the insistence of the crew that they were reflecting history - with perhaps the worst possible example (the Dahomey king's quote on slavery is incredible and I can see why everyone quoted it.)
One wonders how differently this movie would have been taken in a world where people didn't try to topple statues of people who didn't live totally in accordance with modern values. I expect the heat would be less if we could all take a sardonic stance towards the past.
It's also not even clear that this sort of precision is worth chasing. Just consider how many more people there are who speak English as a second language than are trans (this has already potentially caused questions about the UK census)
On the one hand the Ukrainian identity is being based on 19th/early 20th century style blood and soil rhetoric.
Look to Ireland for how the transition from ethnonationalism to nationalism-allegedly-but-also-globalism-and-multiculturalist-rhetoric works.
My view of it is that nationalism is still used to make demands against the current or former overlord as suits you (e.g. Scotland as well) while, at the same time, its concrete tenets get hollowed out by the adoption of the inimical ideology of the dominant states nations want to suck up to (e.g. the large settler state to the West whose companies find their way to Ireland)
And somehow this incoherence just...continues.
Tanista
2yr ago
Has anyone here actually experienced the alleged improvement in mood after exercise? How long did it take you?
Cause I'm going to the gym again (nothing serious; half an hour of cardio a day) for a couple of weeks and I'm wondering if this is a false bag of goods or if there's some threshold.
Tanista
2yr ago
Mark Zuckerberg is ready to fight Elon Musk in a cage match
I'm really not sure how I feel about this new trend of nerdy billionaires getting into wellness and steroids (Bezos went from Lex Luthor to Kingpin) but this'd be an interesting contest. If we're gonna have bread and circuses...
I'd put my money on Zuckerberg btw
Obviously the sentence is false if taken literally, as critics have pointed out. But does anyone know what he might have actually meant? They don't have pronoun badges? They don't put pronouns in their email signatures? They don't use trans people's preferred pronouns? I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious as to what leads people to say nonsensical things like this, what they understand the word "pronoun" to mean.
I mean, it seems quite clear what they mean - especially if you look at the full paragraph: they're not paying respect to the new woke pronoun regime and all that entails.
Why can't they see the issue with phrasing it that way? If we have to unfurl it:
The old conception of pronouns was unchosen titles that were assigned to people based on which of two sexes they were. This was done automatically and many older people may not have even considered themselves as having "personal" pronouns as a result. They just consider those pronouns the appropriate ones for their sex. Before the woke wave the way to correct someone was not "those are not my pronouns/use my pronouns" but "I'm actually a man/woman" - and then the other party would be expected to switch.
It's thus not a shock that random people slip up and say "we don't use pronouns" instead of "we don't use preferred pronouns" or "we don't use neo pronouns" for two reasons:
-
the Leftists are the ones who keep talking about "use my pronouns" so you can assume that any ask to "use [someone's pronouns] will involve "woke" deviations from the old conception. So "pronouns" as a culture war issue means "woke/preferred/neo pronouns"
-
normies aren't always watching every single word to thwart some Twitter nitpicker from having a dunking session. A more cautious or introspective person might have avoided it, but it's hardly a big impediment in debates.
My bet is that almost everyone knows what they mean. Including the people "owning the cons".
Lewis and his society were simply closer to the reality of war.
Even to this day, this attitude is held when the rubber meets the road. Ukraine didn't put both men and women on the frontline and Ukraine did not stop women from leaving on the grounds that they had to fight and there was very little outrage about it.
People just don't want to be told they can't do X, even if they had no intention of actually doing that thing.
Of course I think the same problem exists with Hannania’s new position on race. Treat everyone the same. Be tough on crime. Do I think being colorblind will be accepted by the left when it ends up with whites always on top and blacks on the bottom with a lot of black men in prison? No.
Thank you for the chance to vent on this: I just listened to him talk with Rufo on this and they sounded - frankly - delusional.
The things that they and others cite - AA is unpopular with the general public - just don't seem to matter that much. Because...the public hasn't had to live with the outcomes Hanania predicts in living memory (when they did, they could easily blame it on racism).
When I see normies and progressives agree with SCOTUS' AA decision the idea is always "good, do it by class". But that's cause normies aren't HBDers like Hanania. What does he think is going to happen when we get #OscarSoWhite every couple of years at some major college or you see huge jail sentences for black people?
Most likely outcome: exactly what we're seeing now. People like Kendi are looking a step ahead, like Hanania and unlike normies they know "lol, class" isn't a solution right now, which is why they've forced the dilemma of "either it's society or you're saying our kids are broken". As you say: most people, even Republicans, don't want to bite the bullet here. If they do, they do similar moves to "I'm not against gays but.." like "well, it's the culture...", which not only gets called racist but still suggests AA.
I don't even know what I'd do if it came to my vote, and I think just being here and being so open to his takes marks me out as pretty atypical.
The only charitable explanation I have is that Hanania doesn't actually think you can reason people into separating race from everything (at least not those with a lot to lose). The plan would be to simply not sound super-racist (Hoste-like, one might say) so you can build enough of a mixed coalition with minorities with success in America like Vivek that you can tell blacks and their most devoted prog allies to suck it up without causing another Racial Reckoning. But even that sounds dubious.
While I think these positions are unstable I’m not sure the right could move the country to the stable positions.
I doubt it. Because the consensus has been broken and leftists , deliberately or not, act in ways that break up groups that might stand against the new status quo (e.g. more and more people identifying as some sort of alphabet person). Even if the Right could muster up the courage to maintain a substantive exclusionary position I don't know that it matters.
It's like racial homogeneity: easy to keep. Once it's gone it's much harder to argue for.
Nicola Sturgeon says time is right to resign as Scotland's first minister
Nicola Sturgeon has confirmed that she is resigning as Scotland's first minister after more than eight years in the role.
Ms Sturgeon said her decision was not a reaction to short-term pressures, but came from "a deeper and longer-term assessment".
According to her, this was a decision long in the making and not a response to current events.
Personally, I think they had something to do with it (even if just in a "straw that broke the camel's back). She suffered twin defeats of having the UK government strike down her self-ID bill on the grounds that it'd violate equal rights protections and somehow ending up looking reasonable (usually "nationalists" will oppose such a thing on principle, at least that is my experience with Quebec*), in part due to the possibility of the other disaster: a male rapist suddenly identifying as a woman and trying to get into a female prison.
AKA that thing we were told would never happen.
For many, this was a bridge too far and the backlash was intense. While she and her team did try to mitigate the damage by pointing out that he was still being assessed, it didn't seem to comfort (for me: even the need for a risk assessment is silly) Sturgeon herself was grilled and tied herself in knots trying to tread some middle ground between her ideological commitments and mollifying people who thought the whole thing was a bridge too far (attempts by SNP boosters to dodge the question by saying "this person is a rapist" apparently didn't work)
To me this highlights two things: the hollowness of a nationalism based on "we're more progressive than you" as opposed to the good old blood and soil stuff that is apparently verboten now that everyone wants to plug themselves into some larger cosmopolitan, neoliberal bloc or to ingratiate themselves to American companies and culture (e.g. Ireland).
Everyone can understand "we're a distinct nation with a particular history that converged with but is not identical to the greater state's". Basing nationalism on progressive policy is silly because it's both incoherent (said policy is inimical to nationalism) and is liable to overreach because being progressive is an ever shifting target.
Second point: the fact that trans activists were right. Their greatest successes come when they can roll the elites into believing their cause is just an inevitable extension of existing rights and they can bypass the public. As Joyce put it:
All this explains the speed. When you want new laws, you can focus on lobbying, rather than the painstaking business of building broad-based coalitions. And when those laws will take away other people’s rights, it is not only unnecessary to build public awareness – it is imperative to keep the public in the dark. This stealthy approach has been central to transactivism for quite some time.
In a speech in 2013, Masen Davis, then the executive director of the American Transgender Law Center, told supporters that ‘we have largely achieved our successes by flying under the radar . . . We do a lot really quietly. We have made some of our biggest gains that nobody has noticed. We are very quiet and thoughtful about what we do, because we want to make sure we have the win more than we want to have the publicity.’
The result is predictable. Even as one country after another introduces gender self-ID, very few voters know this is happening, let alone support it.
A poll in Scotland in 2020 suggests that even young women, the demographic keenest on gender self-ID, become cooler when reminded of the practical implications.
Joyce, Helen. Trans: Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women's Rights (p. 227).
Well, the public is like an elephant. They'll mostly follow the rider's instructions. Until you alarm them. Took a while but it eventually happened. Sturgeon had the easiest job in politics: just keep running and blame the UK. That's all she had to do. And she somehow bungled that. This topic is toxic for everyone.
* There is an argument that Sturgeon's real sin here was not triggering overt action from the UK - in fact, that might have been seen as helpful for raising nationalist sentiment- but picking a case so absurd that it made it palatable. That is the real failure of a nationalist politician here, and perhaps why she's gone.
So...last week I expressed skepticism at the idea of exercise boosting one's mood. I got some good responses about what to do (lift, more intense exercise, etc.) but I wanted to hold off on some of them because it's basically a law of the gym that, if I do any strength training, I overreach and injure myself.
So...I overreached and injured myself! I can't even be mad this time because it's so absurd: I deliberately didn't touch weights and injured myself doing...Kegels - which was supposed to be light work. I was literally doing 5 a day and I still managed it. Low WIS + CON is a helluva combo.
But! It did give me an opportunity to test out if I feel worse without exercise and...eh?
I was annoyed on Monday, but I honestly can't tell if that was just my usual cyclical moroseness and depression and stress at work.
One thing I did notice was that fasting was harder without the cardio. Not much harder (a 16:8 schedule is pretty easy) but I just feel hungrier (which might explain why I'm more irritable). Still not sure exactly why moderate-to-vigorous cardio would make me less hungry. Maybe it's that I'm just wasting an hour and a half working out and walking home that I would otherwise been thinking about food?
Anyways, besides that I do feel somewhat uncomfortable not being able to go to the gym because working out early was becoming a keystone habit and I feel like I'm losing that progress. But I don't feel significantly worse.
In retrospect I should have kept a log right after the injury. But low WIS strikes again...
Tanista
1yr ago
If Christianity is not true then I don't care about what kind of record it has at encouraging adaptive behavior and institutions.
That is a value judgment (arguably a very Christian one) you're entitled to make. It's not just a fact.
I don't want to build society on a bedrock of delusions.
I'd prefer a non-deluded, rational secular humanism where we dispense with all superstitions and life is improved in every way by it, as was promised to me by Dawkins and Harris (PBUT) at a formative point in my teens.
But I'm no longer certain that truth and value are the same (especially when it comes to an individual life). And I'm not sure that option is available. What I see in that clip are dueling "delusions", except one has a longer track record of encouraging kids and pro-social behavior.
I'm pretty doubtful here. I don't think Obama is ideologically motivated enough to shape ongoing policy
The article has an answer: it started as a response to Trump and continues cause Obama wants to push his non-achievements like rapprochement with Iran.
It doesn't seem contradictory but it's yet another thing that is blamed on his narcissism.
Tanista
1yr ago
Did Hamas debunk the "Bronze Age Mindset"?
There has been a lot of discourse among the American Right about the recent Hamas attack on Israel. This specific attack has caught this attention of the "vitalist Nietzschean" sphere of the Right, often followers of Bronze Age Pervert.
This sphere is known to be against moralizing and all "slave morality" coming from either the liberal establishement, the left or religion. An example of this would be the meme culture of the BAP sphere, which openly celebrates murder, rape and death. However, with an ironic twist of reality, Hamas is precisely getting accused of what these BAP rightists vitalists uphold. But when they are faced with Hamas's "barbarian vitalist attack" on Israel, utilizing non-modern warfare techniques, they suddenly all cowered out.
All of the BAP sphere has stopped celebrating "vitalism" when it came to Israel. This is because it is now "low IQ Muslims" that do it. It is very clear that Islam challenges the ontological foundations of the Nietzschean worldview. They can not explain Hamas on their terms.
Since you are forced by the rise of the world market to take a position (the American people's money is going into this), the Nietzschean BAP sphere can not say anything. They are practically rendered politically irrelevant. Thus, their position is reduced to fence-setting or straight zionism, a position completely and utterly in line with the political establishement in America. All of this to claim to be "right-wing dissidents". All of the rejection of moralizing now became an endorsement of moralizing. BAP openly retweeted a post denouncing "the rape & genocide" of Hamas (unproven by the way) while he himself, a couple days earlier, celebrated the killing of a leftist journalist saying it turned him on.
This reveals a huge hole in BAP's worldview. A gap between his "complete surrendering to natural instinct" and "transcendetal Platonist moralizing". He has now suddenly decided to start moralizing! He has found the exception to his Nietzscheanism! This single event has proven the complete bankruptcy of the Nietzschean outlook. It can never explain REVOLUTIONS, it can only react to it in its own moralizing sense through its metaphysical lense of "will to Power". It is fundamentally a whining ideology.
The Nietzschean outlook does not understand that high culture is only secondary to material harmony of society. Only when inherent tensions are solved in modernity can "high culture" be produced once again. Harmony is directly derivative of political & economic realities. Thus, taking the metaphysical lense of "will to Power" becomes non-sensical when faced with a pre-modern (non-aristocratic) revolutionary force. It is what creates (or destroys) aristocracy itself. Faced with the deep ancient Islamic spirit, the Nietzscheans have no answer. In the same way that the revolutionnaries of the 20th century rendered Nietzschean fascism politically useless (this was done by Mao and the creation of Neo-China), the same is happening with the new Hamas partisan. This is material Being asserting itself against ideology.
This has forced the online political sphere, specifically the Right, for a re-alignement. You either oppose the current political establishement (left-wing) or you support it (right-wing). BAP has chosen to support it.
The choice is clear.
Tanista
1yr ago
Except Iger was responsible for some horrible content like Star Wars, which he rushed into production - which caused a cascade of production issues and failures. Which then basically killed the movie side
Is the Gender War the oddest "culture war"?
Fair warning: this is going to provide few conclusions. TBH I'm more interested in soliciting opinions on which explanation seems most plausible.
I was on another sub and someone complained about how tiring the interminable gender war was. And it raised something I had been thinking of for a while: it feels like there's something very odd about a society where sexes are encouraged to disdain each other despite being unable to actually do without said sex.
I grew up in Africa and moved to the West near the end of my teenage years so I've lived in very different societies and have struggled to understand their differences. . One highly progressive and aiming for gender egalitarianism and another that has a very traditional understanding of gender still, due to religion and culture. As Muslim nations go we're pretty progressive relative to some of the Arabs (no one I knew growing up wore or was expected to wear hijab - though I saw more of them around when I returned not too long ago), but it's no Sweden.
The interesting thing is though, growing up, gender wars weren't as big a deal as in the West. I'm not saying that women never reacted badly to sexism or no one ever pushed for change. But...it just didn't feel like there was this interminable "battle of the sexes".
Thing is: we had many other forms of culture war. The most obvious being ethnic strife. That was just taken for granted. It makes perfect sense to me that tribes will dislike one another, groups will cynically deploy identity politics as suits them and so on.
It doesn't seem obvious to me that any tribe will be so riven internally that men and women (the two components necessary for it to reproduce the tribe) see themselves as competitors or enemies. With this logic being taken to absurd extremes where women make money publicly mocking their husbands for the applause of the internet
So why is there a gender war? Why didn't it feel as big a deal back home? Potential reasons:
There was, I was just too young to know. The most parsimonious and intuitive. Game stops, do not pass "go".
There's "'gender war" in the same way there's "class conflict" in the medieval era: exploitation is still happening but conditions haven't allowed something like marxism (well...feminism here) to explode cause the proles are still too oppressed. So there's a latent gender war. a. There's some attraction to this one too, especially when it comes to one obvious gender war issue we don't share with the West: polygamy. Here many women are opposed and it does create a clear split between men and women. But it seems like it simply hasn't bubbled up into a politically salient critique of the whole institution or, even broader, some "patriarchy"
The West has much weaker tribal and religious links, which means there's much less of a sense of intratribal loyalty to block gender wars or redirect them. If you're just someone in some random urban region (that you likely moved to) they're not really your men/women, it's not really your tribe. There's no common destiny; it's just random individuals and so it's easier to demonize them as oppressors/bitches. a. As a corollary: the absence of strong, traditional identities allows/drives people to identify in different ways that allow gender conflict.
Traditional societies have a much clearer path to marriage/family which reduces what there is to fight over. It is precisely the shifting of norms (and their endless litigation) that justifies becoming a gender warrior. Even unjust but stable norms may be better here.
Blank slate ideology hasn't taken root. IMO this leads to damage because the natural points of divergence between men and women are no longer natural tendencies we have to work around but actual failings on the part of the other side (obvious examples would be: women being "too" choosy, men valuing youth and variety "too much")
The American culture war is just particularly strange; Austrians and other Westerners do not speak this way but they don't get as much airtime.
Similarly: the Culture war doesn't actually represent lived reality, it is just a loud form of kayfabe, especially on the Left. Women and men pair up and go about their days, regardless of the TikTok rhetoric
Feminism itself is to blame: the ideology, especially when stripped of class, requires a male enemy. When stripped of class it becomes a tool of middle class and above women seeking to remove barriers to their privilege who especially need men as such to be the enemy (if they argued on the basis of class they would risk arguing against the very privileged state they wish to reach). If this allows a middle class woman to talk down to a working class man as an avatar of the problems of all men...all the better.
So...I'm curious which ones the Motte finds intuitive (besides the obvious). Because - if I ignore my desire to be epistemically humble - I do have sympathy for 2,3 & 5 (though arguably 5 is just a proxy for how far feminist ideas have spread in the first place).
More options
Context Copy link