Twitter: BBC objects to 'government funded media' label
"The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee," it said.
When BBC News highlighted to the Twitter boss that the corporation was licence fee-funded, Mr Musk responded in an email, asking: "Is the Twitter label accurate?"
The level of the £159 ($197) annual licence fee - which is required by law to watch live TV broadcasts or live streaming in the UK - is set by the government, but paid for by individual UK households.
Collection of the the licence fee and enforcement of non-payment is carried out by private companies contracted by the corporation, not the UK government.
TV licence evasion itself is not an imprisonable offence. However, non-payment of a fine, following a criminal conviction, could lead to a risk of imprisonment - "a last resort" after other methods of enforcement have failed.
I'm sorry, I don't really see the point of the complaints. Or rather: I see a point, but it's not interesting or flattering.
The BBC license it's mandated by the government.
The fact that artists and defenders of the BBC itself argue attempts to remove the 'fee' will harm programming or is a deliberate attempt to cow the BBC also militates towards the conclusion that the worries implied by "state-affiliated" or "state-funded" apply - though I grant that it is a more refined arrangement than direct payment.
Shadow Culture Secretary Lucy Powell said: “The cat is out of the bag. The Prime Minister thinks those reporting on his rule breaking should pay consequences, whilst he gets off free.
"The Prime Minister and the Culture Secretary seem hell-bent on attacking this great British institution because they don’t like its journalism.”
So...the government not imposing a "fee" is an attack on an institution's functioning but we're supposed to act like it isn't a tax or the BBC isn't government funded?
So what reason does anyone (not benefiting from media branding) have to take any of this seriously? It seems to me that the real basis for complaint here is that BBC doesn't want to even theoretically be in the same bucket as Al Jazeera and RT. But it is precisely the media's fault that terms like "state media" are so badly received. Just as it is the media that marks certain dictators as "reformers" and others "strongmen" with "regimes" to aid its attempts to manufacture consent. They constructed this complex of Words That Hint At Things But Can't Be Called Out Cause They're Technically Correct.
So, because the media doesn't want to be marked by its own taboo-words and bad branding everyone is supposed to pretend that an entity funded by a government mandated license, whose supporters claim would fail without aforementioned government mandate everyone is supposed to ignore the correct labeling?
Elevatorgate: Effective Altruism version?Effective Altruism Promises to Do Good Better. These Women Say It Has a Toxic Culture Of Sexual Harassment and Abuse
Does anyone remember Elevatorgate? Long story short: the atheist "movement" had gotten going, many books were published and cons were attended. At one a figure in the community "Skepchick"- Rebecca Watson- was propositioned by a man who'd attended her talk in an elevator and made a video stating - in understated tones given the conflagration it started tbh - that she didn't like it and it made her feel unsafe.
Because this was pre-#MeToo and the Great Awokening and atheists at the time kind of prided themselves on being assholes truth-tellers , figures like Dawkins jumped in, criticizing or mocking her for complaining about such an anodyne event. Dawkins wrote a notorious letter titled "Dear Muslima", mockingly comparing the suffering of a hypothetical circumcised Muslim woman with Watson in the sort of move that wouldn't even begin to fly today.
Well...that led to an absolute shitstorm that split the atheist community with some using it to create "Atheism+": basically atheism that was sufficiently woke, after insisting atheism had a racism/sexism/whatever problem. As foreshadowing for a now pervasive social tendency, it then ate itself with circular firing squads and purity spirals.
At the time, there was enough pushback that Watson and her defenders didn't outright win but she probably won the moral victory. Years down the line most of the leftover "100% atheist" communities were pretty woke, see the banning of RationalityRules for arguing against trans-identified males in women's sports.
Now...
But as Gopalakrishnan got further into the movement, she realized that “the advertised reality of EA is very different from the actual reality of EA,” she says. She noticed that EA members in the Bay Area seemed to work together, live together, and sleep together, often in polyamorous sexual relationships with complex professional dynamics. Three times in one year, she says, men at informal EA gatherings tried to convince her to join these so-called “polycules.” When Gopalakrishnan said she wasn’t interested, she recalls, they would “shame” her or try to pressure her, casting monogamy as a lifestyle governed by jealousy, and polyamory as a more enlightened and rational approach.
After a particularly troubling incident of sexual harassment, Gopalakrishnan wrote a post on an online forum for EAs in Nov. 2022. While she declined to publicly describe details of the incident, she argued that EA’s culture was hostile toward women. “It puts your safety at risk,” she wrote, adding that most of the access to funding and opportunities within the movement was controlled by men. Gopalakrishnan was alarmed at some of the responses. One commenter wrote that her post was “bigoted” against polyamorous people. Another said it would “pollute the epistemic environment,” and argued it was “net-negative for solving the problem.”
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Gopalakrishnan is one of seven women connected to effective altruism who tell TIME they experienced misconduct ranging from harassment and coercion to sexual assault within the community. The women allege EA itself is partly to blame. They say that effective altruism’s overwhelming maleness, its professional incestuousness, its subculture of polyamory and its overlap with tech-bro dominated “rationalist” groups have combined to create an environment in which sexual misconduct can be tolerated, excused, or rationalized away. Several described EA as having a “cult-like” dynamic.
...
One recalled being “groomed” by a powerful man nearly twice her age who argued that “pedophilic relationships” were both perfectly natural and highly educational. Another told TIME a much older EA recruited her to join his polyamorous relationship while she was still in college. A third described an unsettling experience with an influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs. After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.”
I'm torn.
On the one hand, I recognize the same tactics (and, tbh, it doesn't escape my notice that the first victim seems to have social competition with males for funding on her mind) that ripped the Atheist community apart. I also find most of the examples of harassment to be of the all-too-common nebulous and vague variety that allow people to claim victimhood. I honestly don't know if people are this fragile nowadays, or are exaggerating their fragility for points, but it is a bit absurd. If you're an adult, I don't want to hear about you being groomed. A "22f-44m" relationship is one where one party is twice as old but it'd be absurd to act like one party didn't have agency.
A lot of the complaints also seem to be that alleged rationalists and effective altruists - for some reason - don't just take people at their word.
On the other hand: some of these (e.g. the final one I quoted, the one about a male jumping into a woman's bed at night) are more egregious and the quokka point is well-applied here for those "good" EAs who still encouraged people not to go to the cops. It's exactly the sort of problematic math I can see some people doing. Hell, people did it all the time in churches, schools and so on. It's not a particular foible of EAs.
Also:
Several of the women who spoke to TIME said that the popularity of polyamory within EA fosters an environment in which men—often men who control career opportunities–feel empowered to recruit younger women into uncomfortable sexual relationships. Many EAs embrace nontraditional living arrangements and question established taboos, and plenty of people, including many women, enthusiastically consent to sharing partners with others.
I have to say I find this funny. People discovering that looser social and sexual norms allow bad actors - or merely "people with more status than me who don't want to treat me as I think I deserve" - to accrue sexual and social benefits and blur the lines. Quelle surprise.
So...WaPo just published the opinion piece: James Bennet was right on the firing of editor James Bennett for...posting an op-ed from a sitting US Senator advocating for the use of the Insurrection Act during the post-Floyd riots which permanently, publicly marked out the Times as a partisan org (as if it wasn't already) that was caught up in the moral craze.
“He set me on fire and threw me in the garbage and used my reverence for the institution against me,” Bennet recently told Ben Smith of Semafor. “This is why I was so bewildered for so long after I had what felt like all my colleagues treating me like an incompetent fascist.”
That might sound like the angst of a guy who’s still disgruntled at losing his job. And it is, for a compelling reason: Bennet is right. He’s right about Sulzberger, he’s right about the Cotton op-ed, and he’s right about the lessons that linger from his tumultuous final days at the Times.
His outburst in Semafor furnishes a toehold for reassessing one of the most consequential journalism fights in decades. To date, the lesson from the set-to — that publishing a senator arguing that federal troops could be deployed against rioters is unacceptable — will forever circumscribe what issues opinion sections are allowed to address. It’s also long past time to ask why more people who claim to uphold journalism and free expression — including, um, the Erik Wemple Blog [the author is Erik Wemple] — didn’t speak out then in Bennet’s defense.
It’s because we were afraid to.
TBH: nothing about this op-ed is novel. We already knew what happened: Cotton published an op-ed well within the bounds of discourse at the time, Times' employees lost their shit and started adding pressure and eventually an editor's note was added and Bennett was fired for letting the other side speak. Significant numbers of people were just absolutely cowards about this - including the author of the article who has apparently now come to his senses when the damage has already and Bennett who groveled when that is the worst thing you can do - publicly - been done. As always.
The only interesting bits for me was the implication that the rampant misuse of the term "danger" was apparently deliberately to appeal to workplace safety regs (laughably) so they could have a legal basis for slamming their newsroom and how exactly they manufactured an apologetic editor's note despite being unable to find much wrong with the op-ed itself:
As Sulzberger flip-flopped, an astonishing up-is-down moment unfolded at the paper’s upper reaches. Whereas media outlets typically develop arguments to defend work that comes under attack, the opposite scenario played out over the Cotton op-ed: Top Times officials, according to three sources, scrambled to pulverize the essay in order to vindicate objections rolling in from Twitter. A post-publication fact-check was commissioned to comb through the op-ed for errors, according to the sources, even though it had undergone fact-checking before publication. The paper’s standards desk spearheaded work on an editor’s note.
Deputy editorial page editor James Dao, who pushed for publication of the piece, spent more than an hour on the phone with a Cotton aide that Thursday night to inventory alleged problems. Dao, says the aide, was pointedly unenthusiastic about the pursuit. “It sounded like he had a gun to his head and he had to find something,” the aide — who is no longer with Cotton’s office — told this blog.
Sulzberger seemed disappointed upon being told that the post-publication fact-check hadn’t punctured the op-ed, according to a source involved in the process. The Erik Wemple Blog asked the Times for another example of an editor’s note apologizing for nonfactual issues. The Times didn’t answer that question, among others.
To be honest: I don't know how I can trust these companies after this.
Whenever a seemingly egregious firing or cancelling happens there's always some apologist who comes out to tell us that either we're missing the holy Context and that X, Y and Z awful and "problematic" things happened behind the scenes or it's basically just made up, playing on conservative hysteria
But this is not the first time I've seen evidence of them basically working backwards, like any inquisition: person is accused of one thing and then they go over their entire career with a fine-toothed comb until they can find anything to make it stronger (this happened to the journalist accused by Felicia Somnez - who, ironically, used to work for WaPo. There was one accusation, probably not enough to do anything. Then suddenly Somnez - upon hearing the story - decided that a sexual encounter that would appear consensual to any reasonable outsider - was abuse and now it's not "an accusation" it's "multiple accusations").
For a leftist tactic it actually seems Trumpian: you cannot change the egregious act so simply muddy the waters until you run out the clock. The taboo has now been set, no matter what anyone (including the suddenly brave Wemple) thinks.
Claims that "cancel culture doesn't exist because this particular, highly , highly talented and famous person escaped our wrath" are, imo, just obfuscation.
Akin to saying "homophobia doesn't exist cause this one rich gay Hollywood Jew in the 60s got away with it"; it changes absolutely nothing about the claim being made about society.
This is a common line of argument with JK Rowling and the bad faith is most evident there: trying and failing is not the same as not trying or being globally ineffective. They absolutely would have cancelled her if they could; she's simply a once-in-a-generation celebrity.
Harry Potter and the Vibe Shift
I actually was thinking about giving this topic a rest - it makes me feel like I'm being radicalized in slow motion - but...just when I thought I was out...some room for optimism: NY Times: In Defense of J.K. Rowling
To give a brief rundown of the situation:
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NYTimes employees in conjunction with GLAAD released a letter putting pressure on the NYTimes for reporting in a "biased" fashion on trans issues recently and how it's being used by states to pass bills against gender medicine.
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The NYT...actually shows some spine and refuses to bend, saying: “...But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD’s advocacy mission and The Times’s journalistic mission are different.". Who would have thought that we'd get to the point where a basic recognition of the different role of activists and journalists would be noteworthy?
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Apparently the NYT also posted an internal memo warning NYT staffers against public working with an activist organization against their own company stating that they: "will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums."
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Then, we see what the bruhaha was likely about and what the open letter was trying to preempt: we get the above op-ed yesterday, basically defending JKR against the criticism she faced - ahead of the release of The Witch Trials of JKR by Megan Phelps-Roper, an escapee from the Westboro Baptist Church.
In essence: the same strategy we've seen from wreckers and ideologues time after time played out, but the Times did the bare minimum and acted like adults. At a certain point - just as with wreckers like Felicia Somnez at WaPo - I suppose it simply became too much for too little gain. The constant fitna was fine when it was in service of popular causes with little cost, but now seems to be in service of a cause that is dragging many people down. So why not put out the op-ed, while also keeping the workers in line?
Said article's content?
This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.
So why would anyone accuse her of transphobia? Surely, Rowling must have played some part, you might think.
...
But nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic. She is not disputing the existence of gender dysphoria. She has never voiced opposition to allowing people to transition under evidence-based therapeutic and medical care. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing. There is no evidence that she is putting trans people “in danger,” as has been claimed, nor is she denying their right to exist.
Nothing here is new to anyone who spent any time checking on the actual words of JKR and her defenders. But it is interesting to see the NYT posting about it and fighting the pushback, especially as it follows the incredible failure of the Hogwarts: Legacy boycott and Sturgeon's fall from power*
The backlash can no longer be written off as the cultural peculiarity of "TERF Island" - a desperate rhetorical ploy used by activists to distract the blind. It's not just a European thing. It's everywhere.
My personal take was that transactivism was just the next, inevitable step in the march to atomization in liberalism. And it probably still is. But there may be bridges too far, even for liberals. I hope.
A good note to leave the trans issue on for at least a while and reset my brain before I become some sort of schizo, hyper-reactionary monarchist or something. Maybe go play a few new games...
* It's been a great month for her, after years of shit, I have to say.
Basically: Mermaids, a pro-trans advocacy group is suing to remove the charity classification of another charity - the LGB Alliance. Mermaids alleges that LGBA (focused on gays and lesbians and against gender ideology) isn't a legitimate charity and will undermine Mermaids' work...and this apparently provides grounds to strip other charities in the UK?
What's fascinating is how bad Mermaids' showing during questioning is. A few of its members admit to not reading the full Cass Report that was so harsh on current gender affirmation in the UK and led to the Tavistock institute being shut down. Stuff like the following is common (TribunalTweets is covering the trial):
AR [LGBA attorney] - you don't accept that men are stronger and more prone to violence.
PR [Paul Roberts OBE, CEO of LGBT Consortium] - I don't have those statistics. I'm not an expert.
AR - we exclude all male bodies because we have no way to distiniguish between the overwhelming number of men who are not violent and those who are.
PR - I can't answer this without thinking about vulnerable transwomen.
AR - going back to the interpretation of the Eq Act in your witness statement. You are wrong, but we are going to disagree.
...
AR: moving on. You complained about a tweet by Bev Jackson who observed that female lesbians being driven off lesbian dating apps. If you are told by the people running the site
that you cannot specify that you only want to meet female bodied people you are being denied service by the dating site based on your sexual orientation.
PR - I'm not on these sites and not a woman.
AR - you complained about this tweet, so I hope you can answer some questions.
PR - yes
AR - Do you agree that those lesbians are being denied service based on sexuality.
PR - I believe that dating site is interpreting the Eq Act in the same way as I do, to be inclusive of trans women.
AR - let go back to the Stonewall definitions. Is it reasonable that a woman could be kicked off a lesbian dating site for that preference.
PR - The service is inclusive of transwomen.
AR - the definition of trans includes cross dressers. Does a lesbian have the right to exclude male cross dressers from her dating pool.
PR - if the service is inclusive, then a transwoman should be able to use that service.
AR - you are not focusing on the question. A woman is kicked off a dating site for specifying that she is only interested in female bodies. Is that reasonable?
PR - trans women should be able to access that service.
AR - we are not talking about trans women. We are talking about is it reasonable for lesbians to exclude men from their dating pool.
PR - back to trans women.
AR - it is clear that this is an example of a conflict between the rights of LGB people and trans people.
PR - there is no such conflict.
No real answer, just willful ignorance and obfuscation on basic topics and leaning on dogmatic phrases ("well, if transwomen are women").
Mermaids' simultaneously tries to hold the laughable position that they're not medical experts when questioned, despite all of their advocacy on sensitive issues like puberty blockers the rest of the time, including during questioning.
They also have no ability to reconcile their new beliefs with old progressive dogma (e.g. that men pose a significant threat to women due to their size and aggressiveness - hence the push for single-sex spaces for women under stuff like the Equality Act in the UK and Title IX in the US), which I think is why they want to shut down progressive critiques like LGBA.
I'm not surprised. Trans activists themselves have noted that they have more success if they can directly appeal to elites and make them feel as if this is the inevitable next move in progress. When you strip them of any aura of morality and just try to get basic answers things go harder for them cause they demand absurdities.
It's a shame that this isn't being televised because I believe some of these answers would quickly turn off not just normies but even median progressives. Especially last night where, upon being asked if a male with a penis could be a lesbian, the LGBA rep being questioned apparently go so emotional they had to adjourn.
Kate Harris, a co-founder of LGB Alliance, was invited by Michael Gibbon KC, counsel for Mermaids, to reflect on whether some people would have a different understanding of lesbian from the definition given by her organisation.
“That a lesbian can be a man with a penis?” she asked.
Gibbon responded: “Putting it in a more neutral way, that lesbians can include someone who is a woman as a result of gender reassignment.”
Harris, who is a lesbian, was distressed by the exchange, and the judge called for a short adjournment. Gibbon later apologised if he had “raised something inadvertently upsetting”. Harris said: “I’m going to speak for millions of lesbians around the world who are lesbians because we love other women … We will not be erased and we will not have any man with a penis tell us he’s a lesbian because he feels he is.”
From a purely strategic level, crying women (especially crying minority women) may be exactly what's needed to wake some people up. Men are just too easily written off as aggressive and hateful. People seem to care about female and minority concerns more. Presumably the fear of this is exactly why Mermaids is trying to crush the LGB Alliance in the cradle.
I won't get into exactly why god needed so many attempts to convey his message, but a common point of criticism from Muslims about past attempts (such as Christianity) is that god's message was corrupted and lost through misguided translation attempts. I say this as a Muslim apostate with no stake in the debate but the concern over the Bible's reliability seems uncontroversially true to me given the inherent limitations of translation, and the resulting myriad of competing versions. After centuries of debating whether the in John 1:1 was intended to be a definite or indefinite article from the original Greek, I can see why someone would be too traumatized by the prospect of any translation attempt.
As an exmoose myself, I think this is an ironic thing in Islam because, despite how much Islamic apologists hammer on this, Islam is paradoxically destroyed by this more than Christianity is.
For one: the Qur'an almost never indisputably says that the Torah and Gospel are lost. It often means that the book was covered up or misinterpreted (Gabriel Reynolds has some work on this). It does however say that Jews and Christians should judge by those books (e.g. Q5:47, Q5:68). Which implies they're extant. The doctrine of total corruption was a later necessary apologetic tactic once it was absolutely clear to everyone (there probably wasn't a written Arabic Bible to compare in Mohammed's time) that the Bible and Qur'an couldn't be reconciled (see Q7:157).
So either way, Islam is false. The Quran is the direct speech - not word - of God. And it tells Christians and Jews to either judge by a book that doesn't or never existed (the Qur'an doesn't seem to know what the Gospel is, or much about Jesus) or Christians and Jews should judge by a book that disprove Islam and/or is false.
Beyond that, the Bible is unquestionably unreliable in a dozen ways. The problem is that biblical scholarship ends up harming Islam more. We know the sources for the Qur'an and we know the ages at least of the Biblical stories. One is vastly older and more apocryphal (the story of the snake in the Garden in Islam descends from a later apocryphal story - a lot of Muslims who're ignorant of the specifics of the Bible blissfully cite similarities as proof of their faith, not knowing things like this).
As I said Muslims don't have access to the hermaneutical tactics liberal Christians have used. There's no blaming it on imperfect human messengers distorting God's message or the mores of the day that must naturally show up in any text or in the inherent, deliberate multiplicity in the viewpoints like with the Gospels. The Qur'an is said by doctrine to literally be pre-existent, an atemporal divine attribute, and to sit in heaven. It can't be gainsaid or reformed. This makes its pronouncements strong but it also makes them brittle.
Once you apply critical methods to the Qur'an (an easy trap to fall into once you see Muslims applying it to defeat the Bible) and come to the conclusion that Dhul-Qarnayn is merely the Arabized version of the Alexander Legend common at the time...there's no saving anything.
Pull on any one string...
But why?
Because NPR did it?
I know this comes across as uncharitable. I'll attempt to defend it regardless.
I honestly don't know if you can live here and not see how the phrase from a former Canadian leader that whenever America sneezes Canada gets a cold isn't true culturally as well as economically. Trump starts threatening DREAMers? Canadian outlets start talking about whether to take them. Some black guy dies in America? BLM is in Canada despite the death toll being much smaller miniscule. Kids shot in America? Gun control comes up again. Trump wins? Women's March.
There seems to be a class of Canadians who desperately want a bit of American political melodrama, either as eager auxiliaries or as smug signalers of how much better and how distinct Canada is.
IME the Canadian media class and intelligentsia is especially prone to this sort of signaling. I think it's because the entire industry is detached due to being next to the US and its overwhelming cultural might which lets the CBC be a failure with fewer consequences - everyone is already watching American TV and getting caught up in American political drama anyway.
Canada is basically in thrall culturally to the US (this is recognized by box office tallies that basically fold Canadian ticket buyers into the "Domestic" category). And this leads to them adopting ideas that are already dubious in the case of American politics (NPR's complaint in this case) but also just make no sense outside (e.g. Britons adopting The Knee in their protests against racism)
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:
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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"
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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".
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:
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There was, I was just too young to know. The most parsimonious and intuitive. Game stops, do not pass "go".
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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"
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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.
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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.
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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")
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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.
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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
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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).
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.
My position can probably be accused of being uncharitable but I think it's multiple strands of bad thinking/maneuvers coming together:
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An absolute refusal to ever "validate" the opposing side by granting them anything. You see this in how progressives rage at saying the right thing at the wrong moment (e.g. David Shor being fired for citing research that showed riots were bad for Democrats) and their constant demands to "read the room" So, if your opponents are right, just never answer the question or you will be "validating" their position
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People actually telling themselves this stuff enough to the point of believing it. Or, if not believing it, enough to silence the incredulous parts of themselves in the name of "being kind".
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Most importantly (for us) It's a gambit of false humility; by stating that they're not qualified to define "woman" they're also implicitly saying that their opponents are not qualified to do so either. Who is qualified? Well, professionals whose institutions are at risk of political capture (or have already thoroughly been coopted)..
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I would argue that there's an even more sinister upshot to the last point: the expansion of leftist elitism and managerialism. Sex is one of the most basic, most salient things in any society. We all have opinions on it, rightly so. This position implicitly robs the average person of any right to claim a reasonable opinion except insofar as he parrots the opinion of supposedly-but-manifestly-not-unbiased "experts". Given the absolute salience of sex to so much of life, this would be ceding your intellectual independence and discernment on a bunch of fronts; dating, child-rearing, social interaction, basic speech and so on, to whoever is declared an "expert" (highly influenced by progressive activists and media). We've already seen how this ideology is being used to weaken the rights of parents.
Of course, the most important part is that it's just a lie. They are involved in trying to shape medical opinion. Full document here
So...the interminable Duchess Megan scandal is in the news again. It seems like with Charles becoming King and Harry soon to have a book out everyone is going back to their corners to relitigate this.
(For those of you who were complaining about frivolous Anglosphere topics : you're welcome :))
Last time I actually dug into this the conclusion I came to was that there was essentially a cultural clash between Hollywood and royal values. I similarly felt that the geographic divide in the reactions (Americans seeing her treatment as obviously racist, there being a more mixed British reaction) was a product of clashing ideas about work and just how awful life could be for a royal of any race (my take being that the Americans vastly underestimated the relevance of classism and foreign culture - since they tend to see this stuff through a mainly racial lens, other factors either merely being aggravating ones or just dogwhistles)
Recently, a new book based on the Courtier's perspective had excerpts published in the Times that go into more detail.. It had some interesting tidbits that were reported years ago.
The take of Palace courtiers is - unsurprisingly - that they tried to be accommodating but a combination of culture clashes made this impossible: Megan not respecting that the Palace staff had no interest in being called on late, Megan being directly hostile and rude, Megan simply not understanding how the Royal family worked (as that Palace Papers' excerpt puts it "she thought she had more seniority [than she did]").
However, relations between Meghan and the team at Kensington Palace were fraying fast ... a senior aide discreetly raised with the couple the difficulties caused by their treatment of staff. People needed to be treated well and with some understanding, even when they were not performing to Harry and Meghan’s standards, they suggested. Meghan was said to have replied, “It’s not my job to coddle people.”
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At around the same time, Meghan spoke particularly harshly at a meeting to a young female member of the team in front of her colleagues. After Meghan had pulled to shreds a plan she had drawn up, the woman told Meghan how hard it would be to implement a new one. “Don’t worry,” Meghan told her. “If there was literally anyone else I could ask to do this, I would be asking them instead of you.”
Later, Prince William, who had heard of some of the treatment that she had been subjected to, came to find the woman. “I hope you’re OK,” he told her. “You’re doing a really good job.” She promptly burst into tears.
On another occasion, when Meghan felt she had been let down over an issue that was worrying her, she rang repeatedly when the staffer was out for dinner on a Friday night. “Every ten minutes, I had to go outside to be screamed at by her and Harry. It was, ‘I can’t believe you’ve done this. You’ve let me down. What were you thinking?’ It went on for a couple of hours.” The calls started again the next morning and continued “for days”, the staffer said. “You could not escape them. There were no lines or boundaries – it was last thing at night, first thing in the morning.”
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On another occasion, there was confusion over the arrangements for a London engagement by the duchess. Meghan thought that no media would be there, but it was on a press rota. It was the sort of mishap that did not go down well. The member of staff involved knew they would have to talk to Meghan about it and was dreading the prospect. After they missed a call from her, they rang back, but she did not pick up. They said: “She hasn’t called back. I feel terrified.” A short time later, they added: “This is so ridiculous. I can’t stop shaking.”
The excerpts paint a picture of what is, essentially, a "girlboss". In multiple senses of the word . How you feel about Meghan shapes which girlboss you see. From what I've heard from pro-Meghan Americans keen on Royal gossip the Palace staff essentially come across as lazy and incapable of handling a driven woman who has strong expectations for the work ethic of her staff. To the people on the other side she comes across as a crass American determined to drive "her" workers into the ground in the name of her empowerment, incapable of adapting to a more traditional organization (one that has more...refined means of showing aggression*) - aka a "girlboss" in the pejorative sense.
Does this really come down to just a different work culture in the US vs UK? Cause, to be honest, my stereotype was that UK was basically European Canada on this: there are a few differences (and they never stop bragging about them where they feel they're ahead) but work culture and its expectations are much closer than with other states. The Palace staff sound positively French at some points of this! Is the Palace just some oasis sheltered from the rat race that envelopes other parts of Britain?
* I'm not convinced that the Palace considered her behavior immoral. At worst, it was probably considered...uncouth.
But I disagree that the capitalist’s goal is to destroy identities. It is only necessary for them to be made interchangeable.
If the recent trans thing has shown anything, it's that turning identities into mere markers for self-expression that can be donned and doffed at will can functionally destroy them and the goods they provided.
There too, they first came to us with honeyed words about how this posed no threat and simply increased "freedom" for everyone. Turns out: you can't just endlessly extend "freedom" without costs. That is just a liberal fallacy.
My identity is not fully chosen, and that's partly what makes it powerful. That's what roots me. Why would I trust anyone who was a countryman today and not tomorrow, a family member today and a member of someone else's family tomorrow?
I mean, sincere religious conversion is one thing. But the market logic you're using basically presumes mercenary attitudes.
I know what you’re going to say — that it’s not real, it’s superficial, it’s commoditized and the real national identity is something else entirely. Well, it is. The real national idea, the one you’re left with when the music stops, is always to force you to surrender everything you have to the state and to go die in the trenches for no good reason, ostensibly as a sacrifice to your country. Perhaps it’s for the best if we abandon that.
And global capital's form of "identity" uproots everything stable and important to the human psyche in favor of endless consumption that is simultaneously diverse and homogenized (food court diversity I believe it's called - you can eat whatever you want but it's still shitty fast food).
All of the things that root people - to a history, to a culture, to a set of people you owe things to are dissolved in the name of turning you into an atomized (and thus unprotected) "individual. After which you are left to expect not your local community to protect you (since you left) nor even your state (which at least theoretically answers to you) but some collection of foreign nation states and, even more laughably, major corporations and the agents of global capital. They'll have your interests at heart!
It's not hard to come up with a harsh story about an ideology/position. I'm sure you feel that the above is an unjust framing of the costs and benefits of globalization.
Putting that aside: I think this entire conception of the nation is just based on a conflation between "nation", "country" and "nation-state" and presents a very narrow view of history. The concept of the nation is broader than a tool of fascists or whoever to feed you into a meat grinder.
For many places national identity is useful precisely as a form of resistance to overweening state power . This is obvious in colonial regions. Even "nations" without states use this; Quebec has won concessions due to the unity that they've managed to cobble together in the name of their "nation". Meanwhile French-Canadians elsewhere? Shit out of luck. Move to Quebec or assimilate.
I'm not going to begrudge anyone the schadenfreude of watching the other tribe beclowning themselves, and this is absolutely fucking hilarious for anyone with a functioning sense of humour even if they are basically pro-Ukraine and pro-Trudeau, but I don't think this means very much.
Like with the blackface it matters only because we all know the Liberals would be calling for nuking the CPC from space if they even approached anything like this.
And it wouldn't be seen as an honest mistake but a reflection of real issues within the party (it clearly is a reflection of credulity on the part of Liberals since, as you say, this shouldn't have even passed the sniff test but good luck getting that standard applied equally)
But it's the Liberals so they'll get a pass , like the time they did both a misinformation and a stoking stochastic terrorism while pushing for ever greater censorship and control to fight such things.
Contrapoints is a sophist. The purpose of "her" videos is not to convince , it's to basically provide a good narrative to her own base as well as something they can point to as a retort to the criticisms they'll face defending their ideology. Example: how so many Breadtubers who were challenged on what exactly Rowling said that was bigoted would bring out her original video - you wonder how many people actually read the substance of her words vs the mediated version Contra gave? (IIRC the question-begging on "what is a woman?" was there too btw.) The fact that no detached observer would dedicate time to this must have simply given them the chance to write their opponent off.
I watched the video. There are so many flaws. Not only the question begging but also the desire to psychoanalyze Rowling as projecting her hatred of her rapist unto transpeople or being horrified at the idea of sterilizing children due to internalized misogyny since that's all society values women for.
First off - this once again deliberately ignores the distinction between being worried that allowing any men in female washrooms will allow predators and the predators being trans. Contra is smart enough to know better. She chooses not.
Second- the simple answer is that Rowling is aggressive towards TRAs because they're the ones trying to do things like invade single sex sexual assault shelters. They started it. If someone else did it she'd have furiously tweeted too.
Third - the idea that JK Rowling thinks the only role for a woman is motherhood is insane. But Contrapoints apparently can almost never admit that there are serious downsides to trans activism (this was quite clear in the Phelps-Roper podcast) so she can't admit that there is a risk of children being rendered sterile - which is awful since they can't consent - that JKR is right to be concerned about outside of some pathology around being a self-hating self-made billionaire who wrote one of the most famous feminist characters in YA fiction.
The one thing Contrapoints is clear about is that not acknowledging that "trans women are women" is at the least "transphobic" (if not a violation of "trans rights" in some hard to define way), which is interesting. What does it mean to be "transphobic"? Could one not be "transphobic" and still refuse to acknowledge that "trans women are women"?
This is exactly the problem Nicola Sturgeon ran into: they call anyone who argues that TWANW(sometimes) a bigot but are forced to admit that even they believe in exceptions that imply TWANW.
Good thing they never address this incoherency.
Nonetheless, I do take her point: Arguing against "cancellation" or "illiberal" tactics in the abstract is kind of pointless, because almost no one is a true free speech absolutist here
This is exactly why I say Contra is bad faith; this doesn't capture the landscape.
People aren't just arguing about it in the abstract. Contrapoints is ensuring that only the most abstract case gets discussed by insisting on begging the question on whether trans activism is in some ways distinct from other forms of activism (which would mean the cancellations could be more unjust than past ones without requiring an abstract "no cancellation" principle).
As you say, this question-begging is silly when her own concession on trans sports violates it but she otherwise sticks to it. As a result, it makes it sound like her opponents are just saying "cancellation is bad" cause that's what she criticizes.
And that sort of mushy view might be a fair characterization of Phelps-Roper and some but a lot of these critics like Rowling are progressives themselves. She, iirc, inveighed against Corbyn for anti-semitism. Sam Harris said there was reasonable discussion on the issue activists were suppressing but he was fine pushing people like Alex Jones off platforms. They are not necessarily opposed to cancellation as such, they think it's awful here (uncharitably, since the leopard ate their face).
This entire "debate" is a virtual debate Contra has constructed based on her undefended premises. As I said, it's not an argument for anyone who doesn't already agree with her on everything. It's really about talking to her audience and telling them "hold strong on cancelling these guys. Resist the siren's call of 'reasonable discussion'. The past bigots did that too. It's okay cause we've done it before and it works". It's about inoculating her base using the weakest version of the argument, the one Nazis could use instead of the ones their fellow progressives (who are out of step with the tribe on this one issue) would use.
Finally, I was surprised to see how much more aggressive Rowling has gotten in her anti-trans rhetoric. Not that I necessarily disagree with her, but it looks like I can no longer say that she's being unfairly smeared as an enemy of the trans movement.
It's a case of mutual polarization. Because Rowling actually believes in the misogyny of this situation she reacts badly to the reaction she faced (and they have also become more hysterical in turn). With some justice. Seeing men like Contrapoints brush off her concerns about sexual assault is jarring because not too long ago it would seem clear misogyny.
As for whether she's an enemy of the trans movement: it depends on what the trans movement is. If all it wants is reasonable accommodation for ordinary transpeople then no. If what it wants is total victory at the potential cost of women's spaces then yes.
Once again Contrapoints' question-begging comes back to haunt us. If trans activism is somewhat distinct from other movements, what might seem very aggressive in the case of gay rights might be justifiably less so here.
So, in the wake of Elon Musk's bid for Twitter being back on and him apparently suggesting layoffs of up to 75%, Twitter employees have released an open letter begging demanding:
We demand of current and future leadership:
- Respect: We demand leadership to respect the platform and the workers who maintain it by committing to preserving the current headcount.
- Safety: We demand that leadership does not discriminate against workers on the basis of their race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or political beliefs. We also demand safety for workers on visas, who will be forced to leave the country they work in if they are laid off.
- Protection: We demand Elon Musk explicitly commit to preserve our benefits, those both listed in the merger agreement and not (e.g. remote work). We demand leadership to establish and ensure fair severance policies for all workers before and after any change in ownership.
- Dignity: We demand transparent, prompt and thoughtful communication around our working conditions. We demand to be treated with dignity, and to not be treated as mere pawns in a game played by billionaires.
I mean, obviously there's a lot of schadenfreude to be had by conservatives and anti-wokes over demands that political beliefs be respected.
Personally, as someone who has watched the Left begin to sound like libertarians on corporate power ("Facebook is a private company) when it comes to social media sites (which I view as a purely self-serving move) I find it hard to be sympathetic. Since nobody has any principled solution to billionaires owning the public square and they should deal with the consequences if things don't always swim left.
Even on the matters that aren't that "culture warrey" and align with my beliefs (e.g. good worker protections) I see no reason to care since their argument seems to be that they're important enough to have a right to an outsized say and protection (since Twitter is apparently being used in important places like the Ukraine war). You see similar things during the Chappelle Netflix or Peterson-publisher kerfuffle where relatively well-off employees think they have right to dictate the direction of the company, a right they don't seem to fight for for any other set of employees.
This is the game. I think these people are confused: you're the imperial functionaries, not the Emperor. Sometimes the tune changes and you have to dance.
My perspective is probably economically naive, but I think, if Elon actually wants to change the direction of Twitter, a purge is a good idea - perhaps in the vein of Basecamp: the culture is getting less partisan, we're not going to cater to your activism, accept it or take severance. A lot of the more "woke" employees are never going to reconcile themselves and will in fact attempt to be internal saboteurs who are waiting for their chance to cause a mess and potentially get a payday (like Netflix getting sued by the anti-Chappelle protestors).
Uproot it and start again, setting good expectations for the company culture.
So...more people have dropped Kanye West in the wake of his "anti-semitic comments" (it took more digging than it should have to actually see what he said - a few articles just leave it incredibly vague which is...problematic). In this case Anna Wintour/Vogue and CAA, both of which are hugely influential, even though CAA only repped him for touring.
To tie it into another recent trend: the Floyd family is allegedly thinking of suing him for suggesting Floyd died of fentanyl though I don't know on what grounds? I guess people have been emboldened by the Alex Jones verdict?
A while ago a rapper called DaBaby went through a similar thing where he refused to apologize until the consequences got too serious - I personally was interested in how far someone could take it. But the outcome proved that "cancel culture" isn't really a paper tiger that only works when people play along because they're too spineless. Nope, it'll work regardless.
This is an interesting test case because Kanye is basically as close to "uncancellable" as a person in a hugely PR-focused industry like music (and fashion) gets. He has a bunch of rabid fans who will buy his music or gear and he's already so vastly rich and famous that he'll likely always make waves. And , according to him, he has an ironclad contract with Adidas
Presumably he knew all this when he - once again - decided to say something he almost certainly knew would bring controversy. But, unlike the "slavery was a choice" or all of the other shit he did, this one is actually leading to the most serious consequences we've seen yet. Ironically for saying Jews cancel people who don't play by the agenda.
Recall also that Nick Cannon eventually was forced to apologize not for racist, Scientology-esque pseudoscience about white people, but specifically for annoying Jews.
It's a shame we don't have a way to see what the median person thinks about this (it's all just elite shunning and op-eds right now) because my first impression when I saw that happen to Cannon is "this is bad for everyone. White people are seeing this - they're basically seeing that anti-white racism is fine and the only whites you don't get to be racist towards are Jews". I wonder how black people will feel if this is what kills Kanye and not...y'know, going against the strongest racial partisan preference in the country.
Wait, does that mean that they would accept the untranslated versions?
No. This is a polemic tracing its way directly to Mohammed. He claimed he was prophesied in the Torah and Gospel (a common sort of claim for an upstart) and he just...wasn't. The Qur'an cannot be wrong, so the solution for him was to claim it was corrupted. The Qur'anic phrasing usually implies mistranslation or lying - it says people cover up the truth or lie with their mouths, not that the books were lost. It's a more extreme version of the polemics of some early Christians about Jews hiding prophecies of Jesus. God has a sense of humor.
But Muslims eventually* realized that what Christians especially believed about the Gospel was utterly incompatible with their own (the Qur'an seems to believe it was a Qur'an-like book given to Jesus that commanded his followers to fight and die) and so they insisted that it was utterly, totally lost. Meanwhile the Torah was conveniently corrupted enough to eliminate the references to Mohammed.
This also led to a polemic that Islam was so much better because it was perfectly preserved. Not actually true but Islam does have earlier witnesses of the Qur'an compared to say...the Bible and they're remarkably similar to what we have, even though there's still variants due to the consonantal text. Muslims reacted really badly to even one Islamic scholar pointing out "holes in the narrative". It's a deeply emotional issue, a pillar they take for granted.
Muslims instrumentally use critical scholarship to point to things like the Documentary Hypothesis that they think backs their view of corruption. But they will never take the conclusions to their natural end. Conclusions like:
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Yes, things like the Exodus and Patriarchs are inherently historically dubious and part of works that show clear artifice. Given the Qur'an copies them...
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Yes, even though that is the case we actually have a very reasonable view of what the Bible says over centuries, even if it isn't historically credible and there's no "Muslim Gospel of Jesus" or missing links in the Torah - it's an apologetic construction. We have a general idea of when books were compiled and we certainly have a lot of witnesses and variants that help us try to figure out what was meant (unlike the Qur'an where the "bad" manuscripts were all burned by Caliphal fiat).
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There's no "'goldilocks zone" where we accept all we've learned about corruption but also the Bible is corrupted in these exact ways that're helpful for Islam but also substantially true in the telling of its legends that we know from critical scholarship are dubious.
tl;dr: Textual criticism for Muslims is a train: they reach their station (Bible is corrupted and they took out the references to Mohammed) and get off. No amount of showing them ancient copies of Deuteronomy that match what we have now will change their minds. They're right for the wrong reasons.
* The Bible probably wasn't translated into Arabic in Mohammed's time. In fact: a lot of the stories people think the Qur'an got from the Bible actually came from Syriac Christian apocryphal versions that likely would have been spread orally in the region. Most obviously Jesus' miracle of breathing life into the clay birds - not Biblical, but from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
Tanista
1yr ago
Black Cleopatra Goes Mainstream or Netflix exploits the Toxoplasma of Rage?
So Netflix and Jada Pinkett-Smith worked on...a new version of the tale of Cleopatra that is deliberately designed to piss people off.
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Action Girl Cleopatra.
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Implying, of Caesar, that he was looking to rise to Cleopatra's level which is just...so wrong as to have either been deliberately malicious phrasing or born of only watching the 1963 Cleopatra film.
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And, of course, Cleopatra and her courtiers being black - not SSA-black but at least ambiguously so, with the called out curly hair. They make sure to insist, for a good chunk of the trailer, on discussing this fringe Hotep bullshit.
I've always thought that the black American focus on Egypt showed a deep insecurity at best (since Egypt is the one "African" state that's broadly respected and known in the West) or outright spite at worst - an attempt to seize and twist a European icon in Morgoth-like fashion so you can have an "aha!" gotcha.
That's why it made sense for it to be a fringe hotep thing.
Now...apparently it's going mainstream. I kind of missed out on history documentaries after I lost History Channel so I can't remember if they were always this bad. I'm pretty sure not though. This also doesn't just seem stupid in the way Ancient Aliens is stupid - the point seems to be division. On a naive level you'd expect people to fight over more than one Egyptian queen being black, if they wanted "'representation". Yet it all seems to center on like the one person you'd think would be unambiguously "white" by our standards.
I suppose that's a comfort - I don't have to worry about Aurelian suddenly becoming Desi. Clearly some figures are preferred.
And yes, I checked Netflix and it is under "Docuseries" and "Historical Documentary".
Tanista
1yr ago
Older people are more likely to be married, have kids and property they wish to protect. So they become more conservative.
As I understand it, these general trends (getting married, having kids and homes) are on the downtrend in the UK (and other parts of the industrialized world).
As such...millennials have less reason to be conservative and more to go for more robust attempts to fix this by robust redistribution policies (which are more left-coded)
tl;dr: They have nothing to conserve.
I think that the distrust of experts on this site goes way too far. 99% of the topics experts agree on or are on places like Wikipedia are true. If you look up something like the Central Limit Theorem on Wikipedia the answer will be more or less correct. But most things are boring. The ideas we focus on that are controversial and we don't trust them on are ones that cause the experts to lose their minds over and lose the ability to be impartial. Some examples are HBD and Covid. But if you open up a biology textbook, you can take most of that knowledge to the bank.
Using your own examples: in 2020 it would have just been HBD. Now it's "HBD...and a global pandemic". Am I supposed to be relieved that they can still be rational about stellar mechanics and calculus but not an actual global health emergency? If I had told you ahead of time that we can't trust the experts on an upcoming pandemic, would you see me as going too far?
And I bet, a decade ago, there would be no controversy over the sex binary. Now I'm seeing publications like SciAm flirt with nonsense on this topic.
Who said this is a fixed situation? Polarization is driving this behavior and polarization begets polarization. If you see that as the underlying issue there's little to be sanguine about.
Also, what about the second-order consequences of irrationality? Let's grant HBD is true for the sake of argument. If you cannot be rational about this it'll cascade into everything: your views on schooling, diversity, the causes of poverty, how to handle the Third World, how to handle crime, interpreting history, immigration...All of these are then suspect.
I don't think this is hypothetical, I think a lot of the derangement and ludicrous (like, actually dangerous to lives and entire localities) policy and absurd expert advice we're seeing across a huge number of fronts is due to exactly this sort of cascade of irrationality.
I'm not smart enough to tell when something is just a harmless little carveout from rationality. I'm not smart enough to know some of the consequences of these beliefs in the moment (many of the current irrationalities du jour like gender ideology were uncritically supported by my past self). I imagine many people aren't. Which is probably what alarms them when they can tell someone with authority is being irrational (especially in a partisan way). What about when they can't tell?
People have really summed up the issue with the guy; he really does sound like he's playing Paradox grand strategy games with actual grand strategy.
With Nixon and Monroe firmly in hand, we can now move into application. Let us start with our great power rival, China, and the jewel of their near-abroad, Taiwan. We have operated in strategic ambiguity with regard to Taiwan for far too long. I will move to strategic clarity, by which I mean that China must understand that I will defend American interests in Taiwan. If Taiwan wants any partnership in their defense, then they will need to raise their defense spending and military readiness to acceptable levels. Meanwhile, I will commit to making sure Taiwan has the weapons they need for that defense, both from a sea-borne invasion, and in future, for a long-term insurgency against any occupying foreign force, if needed.
Vivek has publicly said that he's going to tell China "we'll defend Taiwan until we get semiconductor independence". Which...I guess everyone is supposed to take well?
Can we consider one potential consequence of telling Taiwan that the US will defend them right now (against an enemy that continually states it'll declare war if Taiwan ever tries for independence) while also promising to throw them under the bus as soon as the US is sufficiently diversified?
In Paradox-land, only the player has agency so it isn't that big a deal. People are less cooperative.
And that IMO is the biggest problem with the manosphere - it doesn't offer you solutions to your problems, but makes you feel good for having problems.
This is one of those statements that sounds accurate, but it's probably just due to outgroup homogeneity bias.
While what you're saying is true of say...incels. I would argue that TRP is vastly more helpful than say...Men's Lib or any feminist coded version. And it's really cause it captures a few banal insights:
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No one cares about any ideological justification you can come up with for failing*. That's for feminists. Just try not to fail
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Lift weights
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Approach - a lot of the "marginal" men really just need to be more outgoing. All of the TRP evopsych just gives them the confidence to do it.
That's all it takes to be better than a lot of the more "progressive" versions. Simply because it emphasizes an internal locus of control rather than commiseration.
* A very common thing on /r/MensLib and other such progressive spaces is to note problems, tut tut piously about how this or that problem all caused by patriarchy (even if women are the ones driving it) and will be solved...eventually when we dismantle it. In the meantime...they have nothing for you.
Quran damaged at school recorded as ‘hate incident’ by police
You can also watch this
hostageapology 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.
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