The Sailer line is "progressives don't believe in IQ but know they're smarter than conservatives". And progressives do in fact cite studies that say right wingers have lower IQ (and lower openness), the only time I've seen this permitted without comment.
A cynical person might say that how people inveigh against sexism/racism/otherism is meant to demonstrate higher learning and intelligence. Think about the increasingly arcane examples of racism, backed by scholarship inaccessible to the public.. Think about the claim that most people are basically blind because they haven't figured out the underlying structures that shape society. Think about the defense of trans activism: sex is way more complicated than you think prole - you're not qualified to have a take. And oh god, the fucking jargon, that old shortcut to appearing smart.
Intellectuals are arguably the highest status people in progressive spaces, even if we think that the fields they love are not particularly rigorous or g-loaded.
Obviously he's achieved atypical things and is talented. The point is that they're not the same sort of achievement as Musk's.
b) the (usually correct) fear that any men's movement or space will rapidly become anti-woman.
There was a story not too long ago about Men's Sheds, an organization for men to get together to combat social isolation. These were not young incels. These were not redpillers. Many were married older men.
If any institution wouldn't need to be feminized in order to avoid sexism, you'd think it'd be this. And yet...
I think it's just zero sum thinking on the part of ideologues + an obvious realization among others that society makes it easier for people to force entry into someone else's organization rather than being forced to do their own thing. The Men in Sheds women were not really nefarious or trying to maintain their gender's power, they just wanted to spend time with their husbands. Once upon a time, it'd just be accepted that men can have a little corner to themselves. Now it's more dubious (since we know men and women aren't really that different), so some people push in.
I don't think that trans-identifying males barging into woman's spaces is because of a real sense that women would be otherwise sexist (though that sort of neuroticism can be encouraged as a pretext). Society has simply corrected for past sins by moving towards a suspicion of allowing groups to determine their own affairs if it cuts against certain protected characteristics. If Ibram Kendi is right about anything, it's that these legal norms then spread out to the rest of society.
Men & Women are judged and valued by society differently. Men are valued based on their ability to climb up social hierarchy to obtain status.
This cuts no ice with gender abolitionists because they're social constructionists and their response to something like this is simply to demand society change this judgment.
You're actually falling into the same dynamic that causes the the quoted post. I doubt that no one has given them an explanation of why they think male roles are valuable. They likely reject those explanations because a)most are seen as sexist/essentialist and b) they find what remains to essentially be content-free because no one can make a substantive defense of actual gender roles (precisely because it is sexist/essentialist). Which makes sense: we have changed a lot of gender roles. Appealing to how society treats people without explaining why those things are anchored in biology or dynamics we can't or shouldn't change is useless.
There's no way out of this new folk religion without recreating the old, it's just hard between technological and social change. But that's where you're gonna have to go.
Women don't grow up thinking about how to be woman, because much of what defines femininity is there by default. You are simply born a sexy girl - you simply gestate a fetus - and then give birth to it. There is little to no skill barrier required in comparison.
And yet societies put a lot of effort into controlling the transition into womanhood. Conservative Muslims start training their women on how to be at puberty, Westerners had finishing schools, etc.
He's a success because of the failure of the system. It's not a novelty, it was always the criticism of democracy that it would allow charismatic demagogues to claim political power. The miracle was supposed to be figuring out a way to either keep them at bay or check them
Trump is clearly skilled at moving the public. He's not skilled in some sort of objective domain like someone like Musk who we can say is more impressive at that than the bulk of the elites.
(And I think that Musk also failed at government).
The UK is careening toward authoritarianism, but it's hard to predict what flavor it will take
Is it? Looks like authoritarian multiculturalism with none of the redeeming qualities Singapore has.
Looking at the political, demographic, economic, and fiscal cliffs the UK is teetering upon, it's hard to imagine that this wasn't by design.
Really? I suppose you can say this about Blair's changes but they legitimately seem to have sleepwalked into fiscal issues like the triple lock. Which sounds insane but if it was just expected that you could do nothing about the elderly's benefits Labour wouldn't have been forced into humiliating retreats on something much less essential like the winter fuel allowance. They would have just let the train run.
Like many people they just promised more than they could deliver.
Both the US and Apartheid South Africa demonstrate that the economic conditions of a country are largely detached from immigration/demographics. In right-wing UK circles, I see a lot of "cope" around the plans of Reform/Restore, in which the major factor for productivity collapse is entirely low skilled immigration, and once they are kicked out companies will be forced to pay much higher wages. It's an oddly left-wing viewpoint, one in which greedy companies are keeping all the money for themselves, and you just have to force them in order to get that money to the wider public.
The argument, as expressed by Mark Carney below*, is that cheap labour functions as a good enough solution that doesn't force companies to become more productive and thus able to raise wages for those they do hire (and doesn't force the government to figure out how to create incentives towards this end). Why bother?
I don't know that this is particularly "leftist". It's about as stereotypically leftist as claiming that companies faced with higher goods prices they can't pass on will either shrink the item or stop selling it. The left wing answer (that we saw post-COVID/stimulus) would be to deny that the business' options are limited this way in the first place in the first place, and that the companies are using it as an excuse to be greedy.
It can totally be the rational decision for UK employers until something changes without it being pure greed.
*
Yes, that's absolutely right. There can be short-term, and you're familiar with it.... Mr. Macklem was just in Fort McMurray, and I'm from the area as well, so we're familiar with the kinds of gaps you get there. One doesn't want an over-reliance, certainly, on temporary foreign workers for lower-skilled jobs, which prevent the wage adjustment mechanism from making sure that Canadians are paid higher wages, but also so that firms improve their productivity as necessary. We don't want to mask it, and the intent of the government's review is to ensure that this is used for transition, for those higher-skilled gaps that exist and can hold our economy back.
I think the spirit of the program and the spirit of the government's review is to ensure that this program is concentrated on higher skills, number one, to fill gaps, and to recognize that those are temporary gaps, so that we are ensuring that Canadian businesses are providing Canadian solutions—the training—and that we're working together to ensure that Canadians can meet those gaps. For the lower-wage jobs, it is important over a reasonable time period to ensure that the market adjusts and that those market wages adjust; then there will be productivity and other adjustments that ensure that Canadians are paid more, but also that we're a more productive economy as a whole. Getting that balance right is what is necessary.
Tanista
3d ago
It's funny because, arguably, the winning left-wing critique is that Israelis act like Middle-Easterners, which is unacceptable for a Western nation.
Tanista
5d ago
the PLO are not as willing to die as Hamas.
That's a problem too. It allows the more radical element to drive things.
Almost certainly just a conflation of the revisionist fascist states of WW2 with ethnostates in general to better discredit the latter. At least, that's always been the purpose this criticism has served when I run into it.
Which is why the murderous and expansionist nature of the Soviets doesn't discredit propositional nations, nor is the theory debunked by the also-common criticism of the empires in WW1.
How far back are we going here?
If we're going very broad, I'd say the advantage intellectuals have is that their achievements are still legible today, preserved as they are by other intellectuals. The conquering noble (who may legitimately be illiterate) may have been higher status in the past but we only see him through the eyes of historians.
Modern era? Sure.
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