I guess I should add that I do have sympathy for both sides as well. In the same sense that I have sympathy for a stranger dying of an inoperable brain tumor
Sometimes I do but often, in my darker moments, I think "fuck 'em". Because this stranger had access to the best oncologists in the world and decided to pull a Steve Jobs and try some nonsense. Do you know how many peoples with grievances wish they could have had a tenth of the effort and attention poured into this cause for themselves?
How many people have been murdered and ethnically cleansed with not even the prospect of justice? These people are inordinately centered and it seems to have only fed their own narcissism.
I'd argue that Western liberalism has also been on the defensive since 2016 or so, for a decade, or at least that is surely how its believers see themselves, and I don't think the defense they're putting up appears that impressive or convincing either.
It really isn't. But liberals/progressives have an additional asymmetry in their advantage: even though people may not like their own proposed solutions they don't actually have to deal with a return to some older regime because it's been practically foreclosed. Multiculturalism may not win, but you're not getting back to the old white majority, secularism may have failed but adherence to faith and the power of the church has collapsed regardless, liberalization to divorce law was only supposed to impact a few cases but now you can't roll it back, etc.
So, once conservatives have failed, the solution will be some form of "progress". Even the reactionaries often can't fathom a real RETVRN.
The past decade? Many hypothetical, pre-civilization states of nature thinkers like Rousseau came up with don't really seem congruent with our evolved history.
Tanista
9hr ago
I think part of the problem is that when these norms were challenged, the people defending them didn't have anything legible to use.
Their arguments were legible and worked for thousands of years. They don't work within the particular frame of secular liberal individualism, which refuses to accept certain arguments.
I'm not sure we've established that secular liberal individualism is so right that failing to meet its standards means you don't have an actual point. There are places where it seems obviously wrong, imo.
For example, homosexuality. They might say that it's a sin, and I don't think they're lying or coming up with an excuse, I think that's what they legitimately believed and they just didn't know the real reason was that gay promiscuity would lead to an extremely deadly STD being spread.
A more charitable view is that they don't like homosexuality because it's seen as degenerate and one of the reasons they think it's degenerate is STD spread. God enjoins the good and forbids the wrong, after all.
It's just not the ultimate reason. The problem you face without that normative anchor of "God said so" is that moderns rightly believe the world is more malleable to our powers. For a vast number of people now any problems with the gay lifestyle are technical ones: either we need better medical technology to render the downsides irrelevant, or we need more social engineering to solve the attendant psychological problems that come with that lifestyle.
Without some sacral peg, even clear downsides do not necessarily justify banning the behavior.
Tanista
10hr ago
Is there any sort of objective data on this?
Which bit? That her fanbase is female? Or that she's not considered a sex symbol by men? I doubt there's much evidence, unless you get a PostTrak subscription:
Broken out, men over and under 25 showed up at 30% apiece while women under 25 were next at 21%, followed by women over 25 at 18%. Diversity demos are 36% Caucasian, 28% Hispanic and Latino, 20% Black, 10% Asian American and 6% Native American and other. The 18-34 set reps 63% of Brand New Day‘s moviegoers versus No Way Home‘s 68%. Over 35 demo grew with Brand New Day at 21% versus No Way Home‘s 15%.
Of those who went, 58% told PostTrak that it was part of a franchise they love, 47% said it looked fun and entertaining, 41% went for the cast as a whole, 39% went for Holland and 29% went for Zendaya.
Can't really drill in to see how much of the male audience came for her. Same with The Drama: much more female-led movie, lots of Gen Z, which I'd attribute to her, but Pattinson is also there and he played a heartthrob (though I think his time is past: Twilight was released in 2008)
On a forum like this, opinions are doubly suspect; people's political opinions influence their aesthetic ones more than they tend to realise,
There's obviously a political (and racial) thing. And a general contrarian thing.
But her choices also play a role. In her own generation Sydney Sweeney is way more of a male sex symbol because she caters to the male gaze much more. Zendaya legitimately looks hotter to me on the red carpet than in her main roles which makes sense given she's meant to be an awkward high schooler in one,a drug addicted high schooler in another and warrior/r/atheist mod in the third.
Men also aren't the people deciding. The bigger failure of mind-reading is across sexes.
Zendaya has a large female fanbase. She isn't a star that's primarily loved for her appeal to men.
The (straight) female fans she has don't want to fuck her, and at least a significant part of their fandom is about her styling on the red carpet and her fashion choices - having the model-like frame helps her here . This obviously matters less to the guy watching the movie but it is a part of her appeal.
There's only 6-9 young (ish) actors who can carry movies promotionally. It's the same reason Tom Holland and Pattinson are also in the big films this year (much to The Odyssey's detriment in the former's case). It's arguably even lighter on the female side because they're usually the supporting actor in the big action blockbusters that people usually get a name off. It doesn't always transfer (e.g. Brie Larson's career arguably got worse after making a billion dollars on Captain Marvel, though that was partly her fault)
The Drama proved that people would go to see Zendaya.
But yes, being in the Key and Peele racial goldilocks zone where you can play multiple ethnicities also helps.
I wrote about it at length before, but it's interesting that Rowling wrote a fictional universe that made sense to her, a liberated late-boomer/early gen X feminist, and it ended up enshrining values that are diametrically opposed to her stated world view.
Or her stated worldview just isn't as radical as younger wokes, which is one of the reasons she got herself into a lot of trouble.
She just didn't write in the hyper-doctrinaire way people do today. This is a woke more correct situation since they pointed out that JKR is the moderate white: for things like equality but not for revolution. Hermione is shown to be silly, but the end result of that entire SPEW episode is that house-elves being paid instead of indentured servants becomes a policy supported and instituted by Dumbledore, who is also pro-magical creature rights, just not an obnoxious child about it.
Tanista
3d ago
a cast of secondary villains that includes a catty and deceitful female journalist (Rita Skeeter)
This is just the British hatred of the tabloids (who've given people across the spectrum reason to loathe them). It's not really a partisan or based opinion.
Tanista
3d ago
I don't want to hear about capitalism in a system that actively hunts you for not having enough preferred minorities
It's been an incredible win convincing people that left-wing social engineering, both successful and deeply unsuccessful, is just "capitalism"*
* When it unequivocally fails I believe it's called "late stage capitalism", to distinguish.
Q: If Americans are stupid and lazy, then where did all the technology come from? A: The Americans a hundred years ago were different; they were like the ones I imagined in my head before. They came from poverty and built everything with their own hands, but their descendants are a bunch of spoiled brats who are letting it fall into ruin. This is an inevitable process with nations and families. My descendants will probably be like that too.
Foreigners from poor countries are quite well aware that, even today, Americans are vastly more productive and advanced. Though, I grant, there's a contempt for your decadence - especially the homo shit.
Coping that America isn't that far ahead seems like a thing for Europeans, maybe. The Third World cope is more likely to be "the American Empire does it by robbing us"
I come from an immigrant family that runs the gamut on this.
My parents don't care. Or rather: they're totally pragmatic. They came to America because it's the best place to be. When Trump does something annoying on an immigration level they take it with fatalism because what are you gonna do? They know they don't deserve to be in America in the AOC/Billie Eilish "no one is illegal on stolen land" sense, but it's good so they want to stay.
They don't hate the culture. Except maybe for its licentiousness but their response to this is to just stay the hell away from that shit, not try to change it. They don't get into the drama and they don't really care that you think the culture is being destroyed. That's your culture war, if you don't want immigrants don't take any?
My brother and sister on the other hand, are basically American leftists since they came so late that Africa is an abstraction to them. Constant talk about how racist America is. Why do they talk this way? Besides the fact that everything in pop culture was telling them this sort of thing was cool? Besides the fact that the natural retort that cuts down on this - "go back to your country" - was considered a macroaggression? Besides the fact that it's the common take from high status industries and people? Besides the fact that those people tell them the other side wants them dead or deported or oppressed?
They absorbed the same attitude as the people around them (except without any irony or balance from knowing a broad cross-section of Americans or having a deep link to the country), and the same embarrassment about inequity (we were once subject to a speech about how good street vendors in Freetown were compared to supermarkets because I guess supermarkets are Western and inauthentic?) except even worse for lacking a strong American history and actually coming from those countries. So they double down on the rhetoric they've been told is an answer.
Thing is: it doesn't have to be this way. Poor Africans are by this logic even bigger victims of the West than immigrants yet this wasn't common growing up. If anything, people were pretty embarrassingly obsequious towards the British (some of the stereotypes of wypipo had the younger generation rolling our eyes).
What is to be done? Short of remigration, can it be fixed? I think it will be challenging since there’s often a political wedge in western democracies where half the country is using immigrants to expand their power base. Half measures will be stopped and fail.
Right, so you understand the problem exactly. What's to discuss? The problem is other Americans.
It doesn't matter what immigrants think. Immigrants can be assimilated or made to say various prosocial things if they are forced to by the populace. Instead you've failed to form a unified front, so kids will misbehave. That's it.
Tanista
7d ago
to being widely available, means that a lot of educational Visas are just not really doing what they originally were intended to do.
They're being used to prop up schools via higher fees (at least going by Canada's example). They seem to be working quite well in that regard.
Tanista
7d ago
CIS is slow to approve applications for visa renewals, and the timetables are sufficiently unpredictable that "it's your problem and you should have applied for a renewal in good time" is Kafkaesque advice.
Once upon a time - pre-COVID - Canada basically had a 90 day expected timeline for renewal of status. And even then they still had implied status while your application was processed.
From what I hear about my family's struggles in the US, the system is much more opaque and slow. Insane to be deported because the federal bureaucracy is a mess.
Tanista
7d ago
So she came on a non-immigrant visa, was attempting to turn that into permanent residency, and the government at that point was okay with that.
US doesn't have the concept of implied status? Canada does; so long as an application is in the works you can stay. Imagine being a student working to extend a study permit in the middle of your semester and being deported.
This doesn't seem like a big problem, if the rest of your system is ruthless about clearing the backlog and removing them once they fail (or letting them in in the first place).
Tanista
9d ago
A certain chunk of society has realized that claims of disability/anxiety give them an instant win button against all forms of mild lifestyle agitation.
Back in the day you had to descend from someone rich enough to be able to support a totally useless daughter prone to fainting spells or whatever the mental illness of the day was.
You may not like it, but this is what successful democratization looks like.
Tanista
9d ago
That's possible but even that is, imo, unjustifiable.
What if someone did do a pro forma search, just to say they did it, and found something icky on his social media? Would they still do nothing?
And why couldn't they just tell him there was nothing to be done?
Tanista
9d ago
Grove was also reported to the police, accused of harassing Arday, although the police dropped their investigation after four months
Everytime I feel like I can't get shocked at how the British police behave anymore and then something new comes up.
How does one waste four months of investigation on this? And why is no one terrified that the cops are now involved in a plagiarism scandal? How does it even occur to this guy to call the cops on this issue and be right to do so?
Tanista
9d ago
Anyways, fabulists and serial liars are not new in the human experience so it's not even all that specific to Academia or the UK or leftwing circles. Academia especially is supposed to be a rarefied gentlemen's club where the select few who make it are granted a lot of deference. It will probably always be vulnerable to fabulists.
One would assume that a small club where social status accrues to very few members would have a strong set of gatekeepers, which is the only way that leeway is sustainable.
Some amount of Ariely-style shenanigans are to be expected but these lies would be stopped at the door by a twelve year old.
I wonder too tbh.
Stories like this intrigue me me because I truly ask myself if I should have traded my education as a mediocre programmer to be a really bad academic. Apparently there are no checks.
I'm a bad writer, but I like to think I would at least avoid carrying over typos from the works I'm plagiarizing.
But, being immigrant-brained, I thought I had to study programming so my children could study philosophy.
Tanista
11d ago
I haven't been to Australia since the 80s (very nice, very safe, very distinct un-American culture), but I can assure you that the major urban centres of Canada are pretty full of addicts in tents and other screaming maniacs. StatsCan will probably say that these are disproportionally Indians, but my feeling would be that it's a lot less disproportionate than it used to be -- many many skinny white crackheads, and significant numbers of chubby white schizos.
The people hanging around the streets of Toronto or near Union station seem to be much less Indian than I'd have assumed. See a bunch of black and white schizos and druggies though.
TERFs in the UK seem to have succeeded because of the legal system - the court victory of Maya Forstater, the recent Supreme Court ruling on sex-segregated spaces being mandated by the law as it stands - at which point the powers that be basically folded and pretended they could do nothing because of how unpopular the issue is. But they offered little help beforehand.
In the US SCOTUS also just finally set the abuse of Title IX to rights but before that this issue was strongly driven by conservatives. Trump rolled back the use of gender identity in Title IX when he came back in. Most of the court cases that have either made it to SCOTUS or are getting there are from conservative states pushing laws banning it (Tennessee for Skrmetti and West Virginia for the recent sport ruling).
Culturally there was internal criticism in the Left but it didn't budge and those people were essentially cancelled and they left an open road for the Matt Walshes of the world to dominate the issue.
I don't think there's been any equivalent to Mumsnet feminists organizing in the US, with or without conservatives, and the Democrats who tried to preemptively drop this issue post-2024 like Seth Moulton found themselves with little support materializing from the left side of the spectrum for whatever reason.
This issue is both overwhelmingly unpopular and the institutional structures of the Democrats and progressives just refuse to fold or help check it
There are arguments that don't require god that nonetheless get rejected or closed down because they violate the prevailing ideology of the day. For thousands of years people have argued for human sex differences and thus gender roles in a variety of ways. We tend to be much less sympathetic to this to the point of not just rejecting the normative conclusion but denial of the empirical claim itself because it sits uncomfortably with this ideology.
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