ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
26d ago
If Tea stayed around, it would eventually monetize by allowing men to pay to take down negative reviews, just like Yelp.
ThenElection
26d ago
If the EU passes a law regulating all their leading models, but there isn't a leading model there to hear it, did they pass a law?
ThenElection
26d ago
They do have a better option, though: dating through people known to friends, family members, and organizations they're a part of. Still far more options than at the shtetl.
The issue with that is that dating apps give access to "higher quality" men, and women prefer all the other negatives than not having that access.
ThenElection
26d ago
I would push against your point here, though I agree French is off base (for different reasons). Men and women have different roles in society (by nature or nurture, doesn't matter), and inflicting violence has been and is squarely men's domain. Women simply do not inflict violence of the sort that actually physically harms someone, compared to men. They will and do participate in violent structures but always at arms length.
Where French is wrong is that it's silly to blame the bad cop when two cops are playing a good cop/bad cop routine.
A core question I don't know the answer to, that seems at the heart of the issue. Are young men of 2025 better or worse off than young men of 1985?
In a world where things are generally and genuinely trending up, French seems more compelling. In that frame, whatever annoying cultural things have developed, good or bad, it's pretty petty to worry about the feminization of society or whatever. If the pie is growing, why fight over the who gets more of the growth of the pie, when that fighting could put everything in jeopardy?
In a world where the pie is stagnant or even shrinking, raging against the system that shrinks the pie is much more appealing. French is then someone who rode a lucky wave of growth under Reagan/Bush/Clinton and now is preoccupied with defending a system (and his own place in it) that, even if it once worked, is now failing.
And what's the truth of it? We're far richer now, and comparing me (who got screwed graduating college in the late 2000s) and my father (who got screwed graduating in the early 80s), I did a lot better and really don't envy his experience. But that seems a bit myopic: most young men I meet (mostly through work, white collar) seem miserable, and all that economic growth doesn't seem to have improved their lives any (with the possible exception of access to video games and porn).
In the end, I end up against French. Whatever his concerns about the propriety of questioning the order of society, they wouldn't be an issue if the society he (probably among the top 1000 most influential people in the USA for the past couple decades) created actually made people want to sustain that order.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I guess she would say, well, women are outcompeting men, so they should get the jobs. If it turns out that women would naturally comprise 90% of oil riggers, so be it. I don't know that she has secret beliefs that would override her publicly professed beliefs.
Very well then, but what is the "right" or "correct" proportion of men to women in the workplace? What ratio of men to women in a profession or field? Forget meritocracy, because now we're talking about quotas, and those are every bit the fruit of wokeness that she decries. 50/50? Two-thirds male to one-third female? Three-quarters to one-quarter?
I do not understand where you get this. The author does not call for quotas, but the removal of rules and policies that drive artificially higher representation of women in certain roles.
One reasonable response to that is that it's reasonable to question whether those policies and laws do drive higher representation of women, though it does seems a bit chud-coded to me to claim that progressive policies have been entirely ineffectual.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I think nobody suggested that the they should be investigated for conspiracy to commit murder wrt the gas chamber chat. Everyone understands that they were not seriously suggesting that.
Calling for gas chambers. Expressing love for Hitler. Endorsing rape. Using racist slurs. This is not a ‘joke.’
Totally fair politics, for what it's worth, but Newsom is at least pretending to think they were being earnest.
ThenElection
1mo ago
The world is simple: we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. The existence of bad guys isn't fundamentally bad; indeed, it's what justifies the program of the good guys.
But to joke about the dichotomy undermines it, and that's very dangerous indeed.
I mostly don't care; it's layers and layers of irony, and there's not enough information to determine what they believe in their hearts of hearts. Most likely, their error is not in being Nazis, but simply in treating a professional(?) forum like a personal 4chan. Organizations don't have to go total longhouse to have some standards of conduct, and heads should roll (NOTE: I am not calling for a Robespierre-style solution to this problem; it's a turn of phrase indicating someone should be fired).
I do think this lack of ability (real or affected) to detect irony is part of the puzzle of why Democrats are losing young men. Conversations like this happen all the time, among both Democrats and Republicans, and treating obvious jokes as literally as possible gives a strong out-of-the-loop school principal or humorless HR lady vibe.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Freud was a much bigger influence. But, a quote from him, to highlight the issues with the genealogical approach:
The Communists believe they have found a way of delivering us from this evil. Man is wholeheartedly good and friendly to his neighbour, they say, but the system of private property has corrupted his nature... psychologically [communism] is rounded on an untenable illusion. By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, a strong one undoubtedly, but assuredly not the strongest. It in no way alters the individual differences in power and influence which are turned by aggressiveness to its own use, nor does it change the nature of the instinct in any way. This instinct did not arise as the result of property; it reigned almost supreme in primitive times when possessions were still extremely scanty; it shows itself already in the nursery when possessions have hardly grown out of their original anal shape; it is at the bottom of all the relations of affection and love between human beings.
Freud was a classical liberal in his politics. But we can draw a very clear line from his thought to the Frankfurt School. Can we then conclude that the Frankfurt School was anti-socialist? No; the existence of a genealogical relationship is interesting and often a useful lens to view things through, but to stop there without looking into the content of the theories can lead to very wrong conclusions.
Fascism is the political movement that Mussolini built to win control of Italy. If I'm being generous, you can lump in the Nazis and maybe Franco (though the Spanish Falange is really a cadet branch at best).
Even your definition is too broad. Was the 19th century US fascist? Australia? Imperial Britain or France? There needs to be some kind of mass mobilization of society to apply. And, probably, intentional mass murder of political opponents and demographics labeled the Enemy, since that's what people most strongly object to and mean to apply when labelling a contemporary a fascist.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I'll take a stab at it, because I like the spectacular boldness of the claim:
The human brain can host an extraordinary variety of mental structures. Only a minority of them give rise to consciousness. Those that do, however, are better at navigating complex environments than others (maybe some concept of the self and self narratives are the simplest way to get agency, conferring advantage, and those happen to be the ones that host qualia). But environmental drift toward increasing bureaucratized environments make agency less useful: navigating them is difficult for most people, and so the concept and resultant consciousness are abandoned. It's not so much that consciousness gives an advantage in itself, but that the simplest structures that enable taking advantage are conscious. You could have brains that are equivalently capable without being conscious, but they take too much compute to be realized.
I don't have a clue where consciousness and qualia come from, though, so I don't have a sense of whether Homo erectus or Homo bureaucratus would lack them.
I think they're basically all free squares; the list is just a toolkit for anytime you want to coordinate the masses into some kind of political action.
If you tried to form a political project that was the exact inverse of what the list describes, you get a kind of bloodless, nebbish classical liberalism. Which is nice, but it's not something a movement has ever been made from.
ThenElection
1mo ago
The Smithsonian has an evergreen cheat sheet for understanding white supremacy:
- Action Orientation
ThenElection
1mo ago
I think most of the time political domestic terrorists don't think that the majority is actually opposed to their ideology. Instead, the logic seems to be that society is stuck in some kind of controlled equilibrium, the majority is aligned but stuck in some kind of Schelling point or false consciousness, and all that's needed is some shock to the the system that will bring about a series of rapid changes to bring the ideology to fruition.
Otherwise, if you believe society is genuinely against you and everything you stand for, it seems like a very visible act of terrorism can only go badly for your cause.
ThenElection
1mo ago
The issue with a genealogical approach is that theory is more like a lattice than a tree, with extensive lateral gene flow and different branches being reabsorbed into the main.
For instance, we have a Marx -> Marcuse -> New Left -> Social Justice lineage. But what do we make of Carl Schmitt's significant influence on Marcuse (who found his critique of liberalism very strong)? Does that mean woke activism is just a far right extension of Nazi legal theory adapted to modern times?
ThenElection
1mo ago
It's fair to say that the CRA is central in the history of social justice activism, right? And, I agree, the Frankfurt School didn't condemn it. But that's because they by and large ignored it--a quick search through Google books isn't digging up anything by Adorno, Fromm, Habermas, Horkheimer where they even mention it. They would probably have thought it was a fine thing, in the sense that people generally think "oh, that sounds good!" But race, in general, isn't something they concerned themselves with much: anti-Semitism gets at least 100x the attention (which is a point of critique against them by the social justice crew).
ThenElection
1mo ago
When in the history of the ideology has it been otherwise?
The Khmer Rouge. (And, yes, Lenin/Stalin/Trotsky/Mao.)
The distinguishing characteristic of communism is not that it critiques society. It's that it seizes state power and uses it to commit mass murder in order to radically reorder society, with the murderers being at the top of the new order.
Neither the Frankfurt School nor Social Justice activists, despite their faults, desire that. Their relationship to power in the existing order is very different, in that they, in different ways, already had/have substantial access to it. That's not capable of creating the apocalyptic communist revolution, because that kind of upending would undermine their power. Instead, they want to expand their existing power and use it to push their different visions (a legally and socially recognized racial and gender hierarchy for the wokes, and some odd psychological liberation for Adorno etc).
ThenElection
1mo ago
I'm saying that it's a mistake to identify the critical theory of wokism with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. The major figures of the Frankfurt School would reject wokism--ideologically and aesthetically, and in particular its focus on consumerist identity.
The only major thing they do share (at least, if we don't want to group together a lot of wildly disparate approaches) is a rhetorical commitment to communism, and in both cases that commitment is fake.
ThenElection
1mo ago
How bastardized does a theoretical development have to be before it can be considered an entirely different thing?
The Frankfurt School had lots of critiques of Western Civilization. But "people having critiques of Western Civilization" isn't a useful class--it'd group together everyone from the Frankfurt School to Evola to wokes to Mottezans to etc.
And, when you look at the actual content of Frankfurt critiques, they don't overlap much, if at all, with woke ones. They seem rather quaint actually, given the points of conflict and focus of today. And when you look at their actual actions during e.g. 68, they were considered enemies by student activists, shiftless intellectuals creating masturbatory theories while ignoring praxis. Habermas condemned "left wing fascism," Adorno famously called the cops on students protestors who occupied a lecture hall. (Marcuse, to be fair, was friendlier.)
The current theory of the American Left doesn't draw much from the Frankfurt School or any thinkers really; to the extent it exists at all, it's just a ramshackle gloss on patronage politics with a couple academic shibboleths to give it an air of legitimacy.
ThenElection
1mo ago
You can require the military to purchase only e.g. equipment made of rare earths that are mined and processed in the USA or its allies, with a rigorous supply chain verification. Expect to pay out of the nose for it. (And if you don't get any takers with your initial offer, you're not paying enough.)
ThenElection
1mo ago
To a first approximation, everyone is bad at math, and it's a rare person who applies it thoroughly to all parts of their lives. As a more immediate demonstration than abstractions around compensation, just pay a Starbucks worker cash for your latte and see them figure out the change.
For this particular case, union officials are absolutely aware of this, and I don't think it's common for a bargaining committee to push a fix to this as a demand during contract negotiations. Or, honestly, that it happens at all. Union staff have plenty of people who can do math. But it is an effective rhetorical move: it's evergreen and will always be true, so once the disparity becomes a true-ism among workers, it can be called on in any situation. The alternative would be to focus on e.g. profits. In which case, the rhetoric would entirely lose its potency: if high profits mean workers should get higher pay, then low or nonexistent profits would undercut any argument for improved pay.
ThenElection
1mo ago
One possibility is that the Right implicitly accepts that there will always be disbelievers/bad people/whatever, and so the role of the inquisitor is to put them lower on the hierarchy. But the Left believes in the perfectability of society, and there's no room for bad people in a utopia.
I'd bet a lot of the time it's just a matter of individuals following their incentives. Get into some scandal or high profile beef with someone, create a large sink of free attention, and then that sink of attention gets divvied out to the participants, using whatever eldritch rules determine such things.
How consciously faked it is is almost besides the point--it's 100% fake parasocial engagement through and through, and probably the best adapted parasites are the ones that're able to convince even themselves that it's real.
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