Tanista
1yr ago
"Democracy" when used in these contexts essentially means rule by the global professional managerial class.
"Democracy" is important to liberals insofar as they want the legitimacy that comes from allegedly representing the populace.
Once they have that they then go about tying the people up in all sorts of ways that actually prevent them expressing their will.
The social driver is that it is the attractive ideology. It is the attractive ideology because it is reinforced in media, education, and pop culture. Some of this is due to Democrat campaigns, some due to critical theorists, some due to tropes, some just due to capitalism.
I mean...this doesn't actually get us to an answer.
Feminism was once the unattractive ideology. We may have to look back at the sufragettes or alleged bra-burners but it was a thing.
The question is how they won and became the attractive ideology?
If you’re a woman who has the potential to be a doctor, you’re the exact kind of person who should have 3-5 children (you are healthy and intelligent).
Ah, but that's the problem: if this woman actually wants to be a doctor she has an incentive to not only work, but to push other women to work. Otherwise women as a class may be (rightly) seen as less reliable workers since they have to drop out for pregnancy, which would harm her career prospects.
Since feminism, like everything else, is influenced by the interests of more upper class women this may explain why its focus is on stuff that helps working women like provisions for daycare as opposed to...paying a woman per child and letting her just have that child and stay at home to raise it.
Same for the provision and protection aspect, which is all abstracted away so that Big Daddy State does the provisioning and protecting and intead of having an icky toxic man who a woman might have to be thankful to, the resources are instead provided by an army of anonymous men, working in the sewers, patrol cars and steel plants neatly out of sight.
This really strikes me in the #MeToo debates. Especially on the low-end, with cases that don't really rise to violence/coercion and a woman could theoretically have solved by being more circumspect (e.g. the Aziz Ansari case)
If feminism was about aligning men and women's standards we would treat these women the way we treat men: you're responsible for this, learn and don't do it again. But that's apparently misogynist - victim blaming (someone else will have to explain how sexual crimes against women are the one place where mentioning how to use your agency is a sin)
If feminism kept old standards we would have their family get involved to help with the "cad" (which is what men who "took advantage" of good women were; immoral but not rapists. We seem to have lost this distinction since now everything falls under "sexual misconduct" or "problematic").
But that is also misogynist. So now people draw on the entire internet to perform the vigilante acts necessary to defend a woman's sexual honor - hidden in moralistic tones cause no one wants to admit that's happening . Given that these people have no personal stake in either side (not even having to see them around the county) and so they have no costs to moderate their behavior, it's not a surprise their behavior is deranged.
In short, it is a total mess.
Indeed. I wouldn't even mind if we could come to some sort of coherent stance here. Are women the same as men or do they require extra protection where we have sex differences? There's good evolutionary and feminist reasons for the latter (sex is costlier for women) but feminists responded to the problem of evolution by just...rejecting it utterly and deciding it was the province of misogynists so we have to totally ignore that there are differences, while acting like we aren't ignoring that there are differences.
Tanista
1yr ago
The further a woman is 'liberated' from structures of faith, tribe, and family, the more energy can be devoted to political endeavors
Since liberalism/politics serves the economic end/capitalism I would focus more on the economic benefits of convincing a set of women that working for their family was being tyrannized while pouring your life into whatever endeavor some business owner had was, in fact, freedom.
But the end is the same. The atomized woman's energies can be redirected.
elite men gain a patina of virtue. They promulgate values that they do not personally practice: in addition to gaining a harem of strivers from the middle-class of which he can casually discard at a whim.
Given the rise of #MeToo I would argue that feminism functions to actually make it hard to discard these women at your whim. That's a quick way to an unfalsifiable accusation of "misconduct" - that dreadfully vague word that now encompasses everything from being a Victorian-era cad (who had sex with women by promising commitment he had no intention of providing) to an actual serial rapist like Weinstein.
This is why I think the benefit to elite men is oversold. Feminism is primarily a means for middle class and above women to compete with men of their economic class. That involves elite men; those attempts to "diversify the boardroom" have to throw some old white male overboard.
Yes, the majority of people being so killed are middle-class and upper-middle class men with seniority (that NYT reporter who got canned for saying the wrong thing on a trip with woke elite teenagers is the prototype) but they do get men who are higher up too.
Tanista
1yr ago
Yeah, any form of radical feminism - for example- beyond "it's totally cool for women to go work and also be sexually objectified for money" doesn't seem to be able to hold ground against liberal feminism, which is basically capitalism's handmaiden.
Tanista
1yr ago
Do they think that the desire for representation means that people are going to pointedly not think about the elephant in the room
Yes.
This is what people miss when they try to poke holes in stuff like gender identity; they don't care.
The master value is "equity" or "helping the downpressed"/"owning the oppressors" (defined as white men usually). So they are much less sensitive to claims of contradiction, illogic or irrationality.
In fact; they've already set the groundwork for treating the focus on logic as a mere contingent product of a certain sort of Western civilization or worse: not even just contingent (something can be true and our method for getting to it contingent) but always fraudulent and a cover for power.
Therefore their illogic in the service of helping oppressors is not inferior but of the same level, and actually better cause it's beneficial to an oppressed class.
Whenever I've seen a leftist hunted to ground on some of this stuff the final move is to always shrug their hands and go "well, it's helping the right people and it's all socially constructed anyway so I don't really care".
Pizza and superman are products.
These products contain ideological content. Even a basic Pepsi ad contains ideological implications.
Arguably American cinema was progressive relative to much of the world back when it was conservative. Now? Every story is about how society is keeping a woman/teenager down and it's their job to fight for their inalienable right to be free and do things their own way against a hidebound system.
This is not just portrayed as right but normal. Can't tell you how many times I've heard in American media that teenagers are natural anarchists who need to break the rules (and what of all the teenagers that have historically thrown themselves into the threshing machine of initiation rituals to prove themselves to the tribe?)
Why did American feminism come about when it did? The story as I know it is most credibly that these previously mentioned technologies along with house hold labor saving technology came around and obsoleted the traditional feminine gender roles and feminism was created in search of a new role for women who suddenly found themselves with way less responsibility and it's associate meaning. It seems more likely that this same process happened in there other places rather than the memes created after the fact.
Except a lot of places never industrialized to the degree the US did yet those ideas often still spread (tbf they're especially likely to take root in the elite classes)
Tanista
1yr ago
China's fertility rate is also dropping and they're far less friendly to Western ideas than those other two East Asian states.
Maybe the "Western disease" is just industrialization.
And when has it not been the norm for the vast majority of society? Most people probably couldn't afford to leave one half of the family at home, despite how the stereotypical view of a lonely white woman in middle class suburbia waiting for her husband and family to come homme has come to define the "dark times before feminism"
Tanista
1yr ago
The most fecund in Israel are also the most religious, a relationship that holds elsewhere as far as I know. They just happen to have a comparatively large class of Amish-like hyper-religious types relative to other industrialized nations.
Tanista
1yr ago
and it's easier to search "Reddit typical repairs e46 3 series" and find a nice thread already put together, than it is to find which bmw forum is any good, figure out how to navigate it, etc.
Yeah, this is the problem I run into whenever I try to wean myself off reddit. I can just use Cold Turkey to block Instagram and other social media easily cause I don't also use them for information every once in a while. With reddit it's inevitably a problem. Which is unfortunate because it has too much of the stuff I don't like about Instagram, Twitter and so on.
So I'm keeping an account.
Voter protections are still largely left-coded
When I say "liberal" I mean it in the sense that both sides of the American political spectrum qualify, not in the sense where it's synonymous with "progressive" (or left-liberal)
What are liberals doing to tie up the populace?
They already did it. The structure of the US system allows, for example, judges to invalidate any laws when they've decided they've fabricated a basis for it. Given the current political realities the most obvious way of counteracting this - a Constitutional amendment - is basically impossible so the public has to take the long route to overcoming some of these rulings.
Roe is simply the most notorious example in which even left-liberal legal minds acknowledge issues with the ruling and, more importantly, the populace simply refused to tolerate this novel reading of rights to invalidate the laws of dozens of states and so mobilized for 40 years just to get back to status quo. And, even then, they basically got lucky. A slightly different election and Roe stands.
That sounds like tying up the popular will to me.
If you want an example of this left-coded anti-populism see the Left-Liberals acting like judges returning one of the most consistently controversial issues to state legislators was illegitimate. The federal governments increasing power also gives it levers here; iirc Biden threatened the funding of schools that enacted policies counter to his view of LGBT children's rights . So your school board and governor are onboard? Tough.
But it's not specific to left-liberals. It's a general principle of liberalism itself, with America in particular having a lot of bulwarks against popular enthusiasm.
Tanista
1yr ago
I always do a double take at the idea of a population that is (largely) voluntarily sterile could be subject to "genocide," since that term literally invokes the idea of a genetic lineage
That's kind of the point: for a synthetic group that depends on everyone else allowing and/or funding their transitions it's in their interests to frame simple non-endorsement as genocide
It's essentially a form of moral arm-twisting to ensure they get what they want.
Tanista
1yr ago
Yes, that was the original line and it convinced me at the time. There's just two or three issues for it:
No feminist I've ever followed has ever said "so-and-so didn't take those precautions so it's okay what happened". In fact: the argument is "'even if she didn't take precautions this should never have happened and even stating that she should have taken those precautions is now verboten".
There's no evidence that the woman in the Ansari story (or the stories it's proxy for) took extreme precautions - if she had it may have never gotten to the very sex she found so distressing. The story was also not one of being raped in an alley but a sexual experience that was unpleasant but probably legal by most standards. This matters, because there's the question of just what the heck we are supposed to do about it that doesn't exist for straight up rape. For crimes we go to the criminal system. For affronts to your sexual honor you typically go to your parents. How much of a role should the rest of society have here? There's no clear answer since half the time you're told society has no business in someone's bedroom...until something unfun happens.
Finally even if the original intent was good and was aimed at a world where women did take every reasonable precaution I'm not convinced that it can't still have the effect of promoting a certain mentality towards bad sex - i.e. it's not your responsibility, it's the fault of patriarchy or the avatar of patriarchy you had sex with- that is markedly different from the attitude inculcated in men, all at the same time we're insisting on female sexual agency being equal (or even identical) to that of males.
(As I said: I'm not even opposed to having "double" standards. But you have to bite the bullet)
When breasts serve either to provide milk to children, or female genitalia exists for reproduction, faking that entirely misses the purpose
Except conservatives like Matt Walsh do say this.
That isn't conservative though, conservatives say stuff like 'marriage is for real men and real women'
Presumably there's implicit conditions on what makes a "real" man or woman that...preclude anyone adopting it via cosmetic surgery.
But if you don't address that, you ... don't have any basis for your argument, and they end up being incoherent. "woman: adult human female" is a 'terf' slogan, but it's totally meaningless - any claims a trans has about 'woman' apply to 'female', and 'woman' and 'female' mean the same thing!
No, it doesn't. To the conservative it does - which is why he's reaffirming it. But the trans activist often specifically makes the claim that sex and gender are so distinct that one can be a woman without being female. This was, in fact, the thin end of the wedge until recently where, buoyed by success and annoyed by the existence of "biological women" as a distinguisher, people have insisted that "sex is also not binary".
But them now needing to say "sex is also not binary" makes it clear that that wasn't the original sell
I'm sorry, I don't really see how you show the conservative position to be hollow. I notice there's a lot of discomfort about conservatives somehow being allowed to park themselves on "Common Sense Hill" but that doesn't mean they're not sitting on said hill.
Socially/mentally bucketing Lia Thomas and Joe Biden together is an example of one such contentious policy.
And socially bucketing Lia Thomas with biological females has clearly been contentious. TBH just looking at pictures of him on the podium with smaller women gives off a sense of wrongness to me.
It's contention all the way down. The question is whose position should win.
I would not be opposed to some compromise position *where we accepted that our use of terms like "transwomen" was clearly just acknowledging a polite fiction and not to be used to imply something deeper and to seize more and more absurd concessions (like Thomas on a podium with women). But it's clear now that the trans activist side is utterly opposed to this and feel they shouldn't have to compromise and should enforce their ideology on everyone.
So why should I care if there's a backlash that attempts to destroy even the compromise position and roll us back to "contentious" outcomes like "males shower with males"? As far as I can tell it's a solution that solves problems for vast segments of society, as opposed to creating problems for all of us in the name of a tiny minority.
Tanista
1yr ago
Gender dysphoric individuals exist, but it's fairly arbitrary how the rest of society chooses to class them.
AKA unlike all other body dysphoric people.
Really not sure why this particular group deserves such specific, overbearing exceptions
Tanista
1yr ago
Arguments over whether transgender, fat, autism, etc. are diseases seem like rhetorical techniques in order to enforce a preferred aesthetic on society.
Yes, that is the activists' argument.
The problem they run into is the diminishing returns of the social constructionist theory. This all works well and good to explain why, for example, dreadlocks aren't unprofessional.
But it's simply a much better founded belief that being fat is unhealthy. Unfortunately, activists can't pivot from their sophomoric "it's just a lens for the dominant power structure" one-size-fits-all explanation. So they spend time pettifogging you with debates about whether Kate Moss was a healthy figure, as if that changes whether Lizzo is.
I imagine the disgust reaction to transgender and fatness happens first, and the designation of disease happens second
Again: this would be true if there was no fact of the matter - no link between weight and health. But there is so this is a toothless point.
Our fear reaction to snakes predates our scientific understanding of venom. But our fear is still tracking something truth-apt and evolutionarily valuable.
Similarly, I think there's an obvious common sense intuition towards "if you wish to mutilate your body because you find it fundamentally unpalatable you're probably mentally ill". It actually takes a lot of "education" - aka decades of sexual revolution/LGBT social engineering - that suppresses our natural incredulity here.
A fat-activist does not have any disgust to fat people, and aesthetically values diversity of size, In her world where the problem is solved, there are fat people, but they don't suffer health risks due to improved medical technology, nor beautyism or logistical issues because of social engineering.... I do not think they want everyone to be thin. I think they are willing to implement more difficult solutions (medicine, social engineering) to achieve their preferred aesthetics.
If this was the belief of fat activism then its activism should either be limited until our medical technology reaches this level OR be focused on lobbying for health research and dissemination of the resulting tech.
But this is manifestly not what fat activists do. Instead they idolize fat people like Lizzo today despite the manifestly bad impact on life being fat has. They criticize anti-fat standards as imperialist, racist white strictures and muddy the waters on whether one can be healthy at any size. Fat acceptance involves a significant ambiguity (at best) on whether being fat is bad as such, whereas your hypothetical activist recognizes this and seeks to mitigate it with medical advances that change the biological (not just social) landscape.
You are defending an idea that might be viable and worth looking at in spherical cow land but the dynamics of real world movements differ significantly.
And that difference is important. Because remove that element - focus on medical advances to mitigate the known downsides of being fat- and you have a movement founded on what is fundamentally a delusion : that you can simply think your way out of a medical problem if you call the standard tied to that problem unfair.
Tanista
1yr ago
Yeah the liberal democratic political formula really unravels once you start to seriously ask yourself how all the rubes turn into informed thoughtful statemen through the mystical power of the ballot box.
Liberal democracy has a solution for this: checks by experts and judges. The senate wasn't supposed to be elected.
The problem is that, if you drive this too far, you can actually encourage the very enervation of the democratic energies of the average voter.
Why care if judges and bureaucrats will decide everything? Why care if there's no fundamental belief that a citizen must maintain a good understanding of their polis but instead is free to do whatever they like and pursue happiness however?
Seems like the whole ideology is trapped on the horns of a dilemma.
Tanista
1yr ago
We have four amazing scientists directly credited to Emma Darwin ... and yet I struggle to justify using the word "credited" to describe a paragraph where she still doesn't merit being directly named! With the status of homemakers that low, is it any wonder that people in search of status (to some extent, pretty much everybody even a little neurotypical) look for it elsewhere? The anesthesiologist might end up less contributory to and even more forgotten by history, but at least in the meantime she gets a title (edit: and an excuse to keep her surname with it) and a white coat and a big paycheck and deference from patients and underlings.
The bigger problem isn't even the loss of the opportunity to gain status imo.
It's the risk of losing status if the man tosses you overboard. Now you don't have that youth and fertility (since you "wasted" it on a bad match) and you don't have the wealth and security to compensate.
There is a solution to this, but it's a more feminist alimony/spousal support systems so that just leads us back to where we ended up.
Tanista
1yr ago
Well, an activist's argument might merely be "you call fatness a disease to enforce your preferred aesthetic on society". My argument is that in addition, an activist calls fatness not-disease to enforce their preferred aesthetic on society
And my point is that they're wrong and this isn't a symmetrical situation.
If this was just about preferring or not preferring curry or fish and chips this symmetrical framing work. But that's not the discussion.
Which is why they would argue for medical or social interventions to remove the bad things about being fat,
But not the bad things I care about. The ambiguity in "bad things" is doing a lot of work here. They fight to remove social stigma. They have no answer to the unavoidable bedrock issue (health).
If they actually had a pill that made fat people as spry and healthy as thin people I would bet that our dislike would inevitably dissolve, just as it has for other situation where the downsides are purely social or we have otherwise mitigated the non-social ones (e.g. dreadlocks, unattached sex). But we aren't there.
So, in the absence of that precondition, you might as well say that I am trying to impose my aesthetic preference against smog and the corporation is trying to impose its aesthetic preference for smog.
In some sense, this can be said to be correct. But would you choose this framing? It misleads more than it enlightens.
In all of these cases, there has got to be a second value difference:
Not in this case. Because they haven't actually cleared the first hurdle (being fat is actually tied to real problems that don't boil down to people being mean)
When they invent the fat pill and people are still against fatness then this argument would work.
I searched trans on his twitter and didn't find much like that.
I've watched some of his videos and he explicitly says you can't change sex. If you want an example: I believe in his Dr Phil episode he basically states that sex is so essential that we recognize it in skeletons (which obviously implies you can't change it).
Here he denies that self-perception can accurately represent someone's gender (so, essentially, trans people are deluded).
Here he makes the skeleton point.
TBH he doesn't even need to say it explicitly. What else is implied by treating transitioned people as the sex they were born as and literally calling them deluded?
... yeah, an implicit condition. What is the implicit condition? Why isn't it explicit? If it's unsaid, no argument is being made.
Implicit conditions can be so obvious as to not need to be outright stated (for example: "a baby has the same right to life as the rest of us" - has a pretty obvious implicit condition).
But I have given one example above. I think the issue here is less that Matt Walsh doesn't imply or say it with every single move he makes in his anti-trans ideology crusade (it is the basis for all he says) - it's more that you haven't seen it. which is fair but not a grand mystery.
The term 'trans activist' is like nails on a chalkboard. It does not matter what, precisely, the randomly-generated, changing-every-year post-hoc justifications for trans stuff is. Yeah, it's incoherent and tangential! But the conservative arguments are also incoherent and tangential
I don't feel you've shown this yet. All you've shown is that you aren't aware of Matt Walsh's implicit and explicit arguments. Which, again, is totally fine (he's not Plato, his opinions aren't particularly novel either) but it hardly rises to the level of "the conservative arguments" as such being able to be easily written off as incoherent.
Also: it seems inconsistent to be so opposed to generalizing the trans activist position when you show no compunction throwing over the conservative position - with Matt Walsh being the avatar- as well.
The motte (what trans people actually do) / the bailey (here is a particularly ridiculous thing someone said in the gender studies department).
Well, the gender ideology stuff is what's being used to push trans acceptance , so we're trapped with it.
It doesn't make them right, either. Saying the word 'common sense' and appeal to circular definitions doesn't mean anything, convey anything, etc.
I mean, to be fair: we haven't actually started to debunk/un-debunk anything yet, let alone the conservative position as such. All we've talked about is what Walsh may not have said, not even debunking his own position (standing in for the conservative position as such apparently).
I have an ambivalent stance of loving a "good" (as in: intuitive) grand theory but also having been trained by endless tearing apart of those theories by historians combined with just a general distrust in my own knowledge and ability to judge between them.
But they're so much more...fun than the narrower works that historians actually respect!
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