I use the term socialism in the meaning that it is supposed to be administrative phase where the ideals are enforced onto the population by vanguard socialist forces. The idea is that once the population internalizes all the socialist values, the final phase will be for the socialist vanguard to abolish themselves and true communist utopia is achieved.
This is the same logic. You will have DEI experts and CSR positions imposing Social Justice values upon the people administratively, but this is supposed to only exist until the true Social Justice is achieved voluntarily and automatically, until everybody internalizes critical consciousness and the system can be maintained from within so to speak. This aim goes in line with the overall acceptance that reality is socially constructed, if you do enough activism to change the people to accept certain values, it will in turn make people build better and more Socially Just society and reality. For instance the old classical Marxists-Leninists believed that [social]reality is constructed by mode of production and abolishing private property by socialist forces will change the material conditions of proletariat which will in turn lead to communism if carefully guided by The Party of course. Different concept in some sense, but one which share certain logic.
Also I used the terms like commissars, censorship and socialism known for more than 100 years as an analogy for Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officers, Inclusion and Equity. As with all analogies it is not the same, but it shares some significant internal logic which I briefly explained. That is my assertion.
EDIT: I can also to use another example of Department of Anti-racism as proposed by Ibram X. Kendi. It should be "comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees" - which means no political control over "experts on racism" or in my parlance anti-racist commissars. This body should have no other authority, they just want to:
The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.
This would literally mean constitutionally enshrining leading position of unelected anti-racist commissars over all public and private policy and personal governmental decisions in USA. For me it is preposterous that anybody even considers Kendi as anything but utmost danger to democracy.
A year ago there was a kerfuffle around A Message From the Gay Community AKA "We are coming for your children" song, which was pretty blatant call that they are the ones who will educate kids into whatever their idea of "tolerance" is - and there is nothing you as a parent can do about that. Of course I think that this is all about clash of ideologies or one can say religions. Of course everybody thinks that they are projecting what is good into the world. There are people who think that books like Gender Queer or surgical transition of 15 years old kids is what tolerance means. So I'd say that "we're coming for your children" can be absolutely terrifying even if taken at face value by the criteria of said group - LGBTQIA+ pride protesters in this case. Radical Muslim imam proclaiming that he is going to teach your children how to interpret the Quran and spread goodness into the world, would probably be taken as a threat, despite his best intention of bringing them to heaven in his own mind.
The same for me. In my mind the LGBTQIA+ movement is now indistinguishable from radical religious cult. For me it is not unlike Scientologists infiltrating government institutions. So for these radicals to chant that they are going for my children is akin to Scientologists saying that they are going for my children (meaning they will "help" them by using scientology auditing method on them etc.).
Anyways, what is interesting is that there seems to be some self-awareness among these people that maybe they have shown their cards too soon and that they maybe overestimated their grip on our culture to some extent, given the current backlash. A year back there was a song by gay chorus about how they are going for our children, now it is a single voice in pride parade that is viewed as cringe by fellow marchers.
georgioz
1yr ago
I don't think you could underpin the concept of 'ideological capture' better that Goldberg does in her opening paragraphs of her opening statement. Not only does she demonstrate what it looks like, and that she is suffering from it. She also demonstrates that if blue journalists were fish, 'ideological capture' is the water they swim in. Lacking self-awareness to the point of absurdity.
I recently had a discussion with a guy who had a take along the lines "We should focus more on economy and not on culture war such as abortion or gay things that conservatives jin up constantly". When I pointed out that this would require the same sentiment from the left: stop going for trans rights, extending term of abortions or stop going for women quotas in professions and so forth. His answer was something along the lines that these are not CW topics, they are matter of unalienable rights that are outside of any discussion. And to me it seemed that he really believed it, he could not probably comprehend that let's say abortion from the position of conservative can be also viewed as question of human rights and preventing genocide. It just did not click.
I think that the whole "justice" angle fried the brains of some people. Everything is now matter of justice, fairness and human rights: we have climate justice, racial justice up to mundane things like dental care justice. In a sense this is "genius" position: every topic and policy I am in favor of is domain of fairness, justice and basic human rights. These are nonnegotiable and there is no compromise possible here, these are topics outside of standard political process and all reasonable people already agree. If you disagree it means you are extremist and not worthy of engaging in a discussion.
This is completely inaccurate take. Anheuser-Busch never really apologized, they refused to admit that they did anything wrong. The best non-apology strategy they have is something like that this was one among many influencers and that it was not a campaign and so forth. So in a sense there is no apology to accept.
It is too late to downplay the situation now and pray it disappears - they voluntarily walked into this political mess, so now deal with it. Obviously they do not want to back down and say they did wrong, because then they would anger woke people - plus I'd guess that PMC people in that company genuinely despise their customer base and they would never admit they did anything wrong. So I think it is absolutely okay to continue despising them back, there is no resemblance with your apocryphal proverb. If they come out that they fired all people responsible for that shit, and that they pledge percentage of sales to go for anti-woke causes - like let's say helping detransitioners with their plight - then I would reconsider.
This is also why I vow never to buy Gillette product unless they denounce woke stuff - which will of course never happen.
The rest of the training segment, instead, fumbles towards the idea that cultivating Belonging is the real goal.
The term belonging has a specific meaning in critical studies, there is a good writeup on James Lindsay's encyclopedia. So this concept basically takes inclusion even further, you are not only required not to do bad stuff like microaggressions that can exclude marginalized categories, you also have to participate on all DEI activities proactively and enthusiastically, otherwise you are excluding. I feel sorry for you.
In the broader sense I like how Lindsay described DIE initiatives. Diversity really means experts on diversity. It does not necessarily mean to have people of different colors and genders and sexualities, it means having all those people but above all else they must adhere to Social Justice movement and ideology, otherwise they do not count - they "ain't black". So diversity means employing ideological commissars. Now the main tool of these commissars is inclusion. The agenda is to exclude all thoughts and ideologies opposing Social Justice, marking them as violence that creates unsafe space and so forth supposedly producing exclusion. Inclusion really is censorship. And equity is of course the age old left doctrine: you have to build commissariat that administratively redistributes resources, positions, social status, promotions and so forth from those who were identified by commissars as oppressors to those who are in line with what commissars want and who are thus oppressed or allies. And of course it goes without saying that given that commissars have a very important and tough job ahead of them, they have to get some resources as well. Equity is just expanded concept of socialism.
Even though DEI may sound good and for sure many people genuine believe in it, it is exceedingly prone and one can even say designed to incentivize grift as well as reproduction: it saps company resources aimed at making their products or services in order to spread Social Justice inside and outside of the company.
I will answer the question in kind of roundabout way, the sexual revolution in my eyes is wish fulfilment of certain strains of feminism that basically worship masculinity. I am talking about people who had incorrect analysis of what the social relationships are - that men use male privilege to oppress women and created Patriarchy to reproduce that pattern, that marriage and basically everything is oppression. As with many religions and ideologies - you become what you worship, in this case feminists secretly worship this fantasy of male power and want it for themselves. In their own way they just seized the means of power and put on the other shoe to serve the "just" case of reparations for historical oppression. The thought that they were wrong all along and that they themselves manifested the monster they fantasized about - now in the real world only in pink - and that there is no basis for reparations and revenge, it is too brutal to contemplate now. The new female rolemodel is a caricature of toxic masculine man that feminists supposedly hate: she is powerful and calculating business owner who can also be physically imposing and aggressive as well as sexually promiscuous. She is formidable and feared by all around her, she is highly competitive high status earner and nobody will tell her what to do. She is stoic in her outlook and she is totally impervious to emotions - especially if they take the form of male or other oppressor tears.
Just look what ideal progressive modern woman should look like: she should be given free contraception at early teen or even pre-teen and get fast tracked into sexual experimentation including with her sexual preference and gender identity. Then she should of course spend her most healthy and fertile years of late teens and early twenties studying in college and slaving as HR representative for some nameless corporation while finding meaning not in family and children but by "doing work" on some activist and ideally feminist projects while popping birth control pills and experimenting with sex of course. Then she can go and have a "career" in her late twenties and thirties because every job is a career and groundbreaking work needs to be done on promoting justice of some kind. She may think about relationship, but her "career" and own "wellbeing" should be a priority. You also have right to pursue "career" as Instagram or OF model, it is just a regular work and possibly doable as a sidejob to being preschool teacher.
In her late thirties or early forties there is time to have your eggs frozen so that they can be implanted into surrogate Indian or Ukrainian mother and delivered to you on silver platter as if some pet like Khloé Kardashian baby - you do not even have to have any interesting excuse, just valuing your body is enough. You see, access to motherhood is a right and it is all about YOU as a Mother, the child is there just as a reminder for the rest of the society that you are so wonderful and capable of doing the most difficult work of all on your own. Then you can become happy wine whine mom and bitch about how men ignore women over 45 - which signifies that it is a good time getting some plastic surgery done and hit bars and clubs pretending to be teenager again. It is not as if you are some respected matriarch responsible for helping your gaggle of grandchildren navigating life, it is all about you until you end the misery by euthanasia in Canada. In the meantime go and slay it on the dancefloor in your seventies queen.
So is sexual revolution a failure specifically for women? Maybe not, if you are happy with the story above and you think that is an awesome culture worth reproducing by implanting your eggs into poor 3rd world women so that the state can pay for your single motherhood in case something happens - at least until artificial womb is invented and producing children will be a job of child farms on Epstein Islands of some "eccentric" billionaires somewhere. I guess that would also be a way to "reproduce" this "culture" and a huge win for the whole paradigm. Progress cannot be stopped, it is what it is and it is always good as it presents us with opportunity to move one step further even if we made two steps back.
Other people really view it as obvious failure as it produced inverted lifestyle where everything - from sex to childcare - is done in wrong order and often in opposite ways it was done before, often seemingly just in spite and as part of some endless revolt against religions or other traditions. Now half a century later this is how the new Orthodoxy looks like - and it does not look as hot.
This is deliberate effort to bring scientific sounding language into an already settled situation to confuse and muddle waters. It is also isolated demand for rigorous categorization, something that for instance is not required if the same person argues for let's say race-based affirmative action where OMB recognizes 6 races (Hispanic or Latino, White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander), quite a shallow categorization of immensely diverse situation - don't you think?
As others said, everybody knows what man and woman is even with all the "subcategories" such as post-menopausal or infertile women and so forth. Everything else is unnecessary sophistry. I can use another more innocuous example as an analogy: what is a chair? There are so many subcategories. You have office chairs and kitchen chairs, you have chairs with multiple legs or even those designer chairs without legs. You can have metal chairs and plastic chairs, you have chairs with or without armrest and who even knows what is a difference between chair and stool and even table for that matter - you can sit on a table and you can eat from chair, can you not? It is all so fluid, chair is whatever you think it is. Except no. Everybody knows what a chair is for purpose of virtually all the conversations in human history. We are not interested in this kind of sophistry outside of some funny niche philosophical discussions, we do not have to bring it into the mainstream for sure.
For every year since 1972, that's for half a century now, Gallup has run a poll on institutional trust that asks people to what degree they expect the media, the government, academia, etc... to report facts "fully, accurately, and fairly". The available answers are; a Great deal, a Fair amount, Not very much, and Not at all. Well the results for 2022 have just been released and people who answered "not at all" for trust in mass media is at 38%. This has been characterized by the talking heads, and many rationalists as "a crisis of sense making" but I don't really see it that way. Sounds more like healthy skepticism if you ask me.
I actually think this is incredibly dangerous trend but for other reasons. While people lose trust in various institutions it seems that somewhat parallel process also emerged when institutions feel less inclination to explain their policies to general public up to openly demonizing them. It was felt before, but I think it was fully shown during COVID management. What I see as a result is sort of depoliticization of general public, often because they do not see much point in being active. They will be marginalized, punished, made fun of and so forth. I see a lot of people adopting "passive aggressive" stance, where they increasingly care only for their private interests and private life and are willing to outsource political decisionmaking as long as establishment reasonably leaves them alone.
If you want to have some analogy look no further than Russia. You see huge depoliticized population who completely abdicated on any political activity and who actively refuse to either support or criticize the regime. They just want to be left alone, the political process is just some sort of kayfabe and there are people who even if let's say agree with Navalny's critique nevertheless think of him as some stupid idealist as opposed to some rolemodel. Instead of working toward overall political change it is seen as wiser to develop internal network of contacts and "fuck the system" using nepotism, corruption and other means only if they feel personally threatened - maybe even rationalizing this behaviour by claiming that they are all brave Kolmogorovs fighting against the system by stealing for themselves. There was even socialist proverb for this behavior: he who does not steal, steals from his family. This was the Soviet way.
As an example if let's say there is high crime and terrible schools in some city and somebody is robbed and/or child is ruined by the school system, the response is not to improve things, but just sneer on stupid leftoids who did not know how to operate a gun and/or that they should have homeschooled their kids. They should have known that the media is lying, that social networks are censored cesspits full of bots, that the government statistics are fudged and that it is all just one huge kabuki performance from elites to entertain the plebs in simulacrum of politics, everybody knows that one should not act upon it. The belief that the system is irredeemable and irreparable corrupt swamp is taken as a fact of nature and one just needs to navigate it to best of ones ability not falling into some muddy pit along the way. Especially while helping somebody clueless out there and getting dragged down, he deserves what he got. This I think is the feeling many people have and why even if some insane ideas "seem" to be losing, they can in actuality be entrenched. This race to the bottom does not exactly feel like winning.
There is a whole TV-series produced to skew the narrative that torture is effective way to combat terror, despite that there being ample evidence that people being tortured will eventually make shit up to avoid being tortured.
To be honest I am extremely skeptical of this conclusion for two reasons. First, torture including torture as part of military intelligence gathering as well as counterinsurgency was used for thousands of years probably in every war humans fought. For me it is hard to believe that people were so stupid for such a long time and wasted time and resources doing it just for fun. Second, the conclusion that torture does not work is suspiciously close to support moral intuition of modern western researchers, I would hardly expect some research in the vein of "torture is moderately effective, but historical evidence such as study of notes by Gestapo and Khmer Rouge investigators shows that torturing prisoner's children in front them increases investigative efficiency by 346%. Further study in Guantanamo is needed". I do not think this would gather much praise for any Psychology journal.
As others said, this misses the overall debate and more importantly also function of language. Overall you have two types of language: you have colloquial, normal language that tends to be broad enough so that it is simple to learn and capable of communicating vast majority of day-to-day concepts between people with different backgrounds. It tends to break on the edge cases. Then you have scientific language (that rationalists prefer), which requires a lot more effort to learn, it is mostly meant for smaller communities of let's say academics but which has advantage of being able to deal with edge cases that these communities find interesting.
A simple example of a word: chair. Go and google image the word chair, you will find all types of those: office chairs, lounge chairs, plastic chairs, wooden chairs, chairs with armrests and those without them, chairs with multiple legs but also chairs with square or circular base. Now there may be some edge cases, where we may have confusion if something is a chair, or a table and many other edge cases. But people generally know a difference between table and chair. The solution should not be to force people to say: "Please, sit on that plastic object over there, that weighs 4.85 pounds and that has four cylindric legs touching the ground."
In a sense I think that your proposition is just another attack on normal language and parlance and common sense. It is exactly in line with the original attempt that similarly confuses words such as sex and gender and personality and interests and so on, which just reinforces the idea that everything is just socially constructed and everybody is entitled to their own version of social reality, and that there is no common ground for communication - of course except of social power relations in this never-ending cultural war of what group can force their version of social reality upon the rest of us. The only criterion for preferring certain language has to be moral/ethical/ideological one, there is no such thing as usefulness of language, or its history - it is only about power and if it leads to "good" or "bad" moral outcomes. I refuse the whole thing as a premise.
georgioz
3mo ago
Slave plantations are less efficient than small farmers.
This was not so for usual cash crops such as tobacco or sugar cane or other similar crops especially if these were grown in on large plantations in hot climates ridden with tropical diseases. After revolution in Haiti the newly freed slaves were not that keen on continuing growing cash crops and the revenue plummeted.
This is the opposite of grain or other type of crops that are more suitable for small family sized groups of yeomen farmers. Heck, even growing rice gives rise to different types of societies given that it is a very labor intensive type of farming that requires irrigation and other communal infrastructure projects. So yes, I'd say that slavery is also largely (but not solely) due to economic reasons.
I'd argue that demanding other people to use neopronouns or different pronouns or in general pushing for hate speech laws or pushing DEI trainings and initiatives is exactly opposite to your claim that left wants to "leave people alone". I do not think we need to rehash the whole CW discussion of left vs right that is discussed here every day.
Rather the point is that whatever the case - be it "leave trans people alone" or "go back to Roe v. Wade" - is automatically taken as natural and proper value to hold, everybody who argues against it is evil. Which would BTW mean that the SCOTUS members who struck down the law are somehow evil and they should not even be allowed to discuss ever weakening these "human rights".
Even if we assume that the left is "just defending", I do not see why this should be redeeming in any way. This means that any left wins are to be enshrined in sacred text as unassailable rights? Why should the left have power to create this new holy book of human rights, which is then used to forcefully prescribe social values and that can never be questioned? Who defines what is a "right", what is the source of the legitimacy for it and who adjudicates in case when different rights are in conflict? Apparently it is not SCOTUS as the left went bonkers after the judgement, immediately questioning legitimacy of the ruling and rehashing all the possibilities like packing the court and so forth. Also what you say would basically guarantee that the Cthulhu can ever only move left or at worst stay in place. Why can we not say that conservatives are just "defending" a position that existed prior to Roe v. Wade? What made the year 1973 so special that we can never move before that in any shape or form?
I think that most people on the left do not even think about these issues - as the OP said, they just swim in the water of their own values and do not even consider them as such. They see them as something natural, as "a right" and enforcing those values as "doing good" and unlike religious people they are often unable to articulate source of those values. I think that it is a feature and not a bug. Every other value system is "ideology", our own value system is the default and correct one, and thus above even being included in ideology category.
georgioz
1yr ago
Talking to some poor people from Romani community, this is not always the case. Poor families often organize themselves around clans. If one of them "makes it" there is implicit expectation of support for wider family/clan supposedly in exchange for higher status but also higher pressure and responsibility. Shit is complicated.
My understanding is that most of the tsunami of African or Middle-Eastern immigrants of the 2000s would rather go to Western Europe or Scandinavia for better welfare or economic prospects.
You underestimate how recent the whole woke/proimmigration bent is. In late 90ies when EU negotiated expansion with new members, the negotiations were tough. As part of the acceptance criteria there were temporary periods where free movement of labor from eastern members were suspended for years exactly for fear of mass economic immigration from east to west.
Back in the day there was also strong debate about what EU is: is it Europe of nations and just pact of economic convenience, or is it European superstate with its own army and foreign policy and so forth? The overall makeup of EU institutions was skewed to the former with deeply rooted principles of subsidiarity and voting system with multiple veto possibilities. It was before Treaty of Lisbon of 2007 that amends 1992 Maastricht Treaty and which brings more power to EU structures compared to member nations.
So one can say that EU left some member countries as opposed to member countries somehow not realizing where they entered.
Many academics posit that the concept of mammalian sexual dimorphism is a conspiracy of straight white men to oppress everyone else. The true believers are 100% convinced they are making the world a better place with their feminism/leftism. The only reason one would disagree with their theories is deep rooted misogyny/white supremacy.
What I think is happening is something that happened in Soviet Russia before. It also required all scientists and everybody really to say the politically correct things, you know the original 1917 Soviet style "political correctness". You guys in the west are just slowly and step-by-step finding out how really feels to live in such inherently dishonest society full of Havel's greengrocers. Of course it won't work and it will cause destruction and damage morally, mentally and for sure physically as well. And then the history will be rewritten as if "no true progressive" ever really believed it, possibly blaming it on reactionary corporate neoliberal fascist forces that distorted the original pure message, and it took some progressive heroine in 2030ies to push back against it proclaiming that true social justice was never tried. Rinse and repeat after two or so generations.
One "theory" I heard was that recent history in the West - and to some extent also elsewhere - basically revolved around baby boomers, partly due to the fact that it is such a populous generation but also due to the fact that so many ideas got discredited as a result of first and second world wars.
-
The forties and fifties were the times when boomers were born, it was a time of rebuilding, family stability and security.
-
Sixties and seventies were the times when boomers were young adults full of rebellious energies, experimentation with sexuality and drugs and all that. It was the time of peace movements and mass refusal of military service in the name of communal love and peace and almost teenage ideals.
-
The eighties and nineties were the times where boomers really came of age, it were the times of risk taking yuppies that proudly destroyed the old stuff in order to unleash creative destruction of this new tide of success hungry urban professionals. It is interesting to see that exactly at the time when boomers were in their most energetic years was also the time the society suddenly discovered that individualism and self-reliance is to be promoted. It was also the time where the society really leaned into gym culture worshiping this youthful vigor, it was the time of Gordon Gekko and Mitch Buchannon.
-
The Aughts and Tens are the decades of solidification of the previous achievements. At the same time it is the time of bailouts and growth of assets but also the time of glorification of all the ethos and views of how boomers see themselves, as paragons of Civil Rights virtue who carried the torch of progress forward. But maybe right now we should cut back on some of the stuff and strengthen our social security, healthcare and we should also do everything possible in order to save octogenarians from deadly virus. If the price is incarcerating pre-teen kids in their homes, that is the price boomers are willing to pay.
Now take the aforementioned with grain of salt, but once you see this it is kind of hard to unsee. Boomers collectively seem to have quite a grip on our societies to the extent that they literally shape the cultural lense of how society views itself for over half a century at least. One can even better see it if one for instance looks into statistics of average age of let's say US government officials. The first Baby Boomer president was Bill Clinton born in 1946 who became president in 1993 and we are going to have a president either born in 1946 or 1942 in 2024.
For me, this is another example of the woke are more correct than the mainstream. Don’t whine about black music! Respond to this criticism by saying that it’s much easier to appeal to PMC fears of chud expression, that liberals said they favored free speech, and that this is a serious art form that deals with all aspects of human life, including the negatives. Have they ever listened closely to country singers and thought about what it might mean for an artist to give voice to the people that they grew up alongside in the trailer park? It’s doubtful.
This misses the point, Walsh was not as much whining about rap music, he was pointing out the double standard of Aldean's critics. And even that one is not self-serving, it is just a reminder that the PMC class does not not care about the rules - they run anarchotyranny of culture. The clerics on Twitter are the ones interpreting the reality, and they are the only ones with arbitrary authority to call for excommunication for any transgression - even the one that is on the face value thousand times milder than what they regularly not only tolerate, but also praise.
For me, this is another example of the woke are more correct than the mainstream.
Yes, this is nothing new. As an example, back in the dinosaur days of 2019 Bill Maher had Denis Prager on his show who talked to him about how there is a push to say "men can menstruate". I think Maher was absoletely clueless about it, he thought that Prager was some nut inventing conspiracy theories or some such. I think Maher now admitted that he underestimated the whole thing back in the day on Rogan's podcast, and he now does interviews with Peterson, which is interesting to see. I would not describe it as woke being more correct as mainstream as opposed to mainstream being absolutely clueless. It is almost a defining feature of mainstream, as soon as you stop being clueless you will pick a side - Maher will be right-wing coded by "platforming" people like Peterson.
The word tansphobic itself is already part of the whole stupid CW game. It is obvious that homophobic or transphobic means something else compared to let's say arachnophobic or claustrophobic.
In general you have to identify this whole ad-hominem weapon used in culture war. Your opponents are either evil (racists, white supremacists etc.) or crazy (you say it because you are hurt) or stupid (you do not have PHD). Or ideally combination of all of these. Saying that you are transphobic achieves at the same time medicalization of your view and it also makes makes it evil. You can often see it applied in various lefty spaces like sneerclub, Contrapoints himself uses it a lot.
I also think that there is something more here. For instance after ideological 60ties and crushing/burning 70s came 80ies with their yuppie culture. These were free market hedonistic know-it-all youth, often in love with Ayn Rand and similar radical thought. Even then this was not the culture that would be predominant in the general population, but this was something in the air.
Similarly I think that wokism today has its function inside corporate governance structures. It provides executives with convenient moral cover for various things they want to do and it offers huge toolset to narcissists and psychopaths inside the organization. Remember, today's wokeness is often viewed as a successful turn where former radicals marched through institutions such as law, education, media but also government administration. There is rich tradition such as that from Dwight Waldo preaching that there is no "value-free" governance and thus we should adopt governance that promotes equity.
Again, I think that the mistake here is to evaluate wokeness in its own idealistic terms, or maybe in terms of alternative structures. I think wokeness should be evaluated in its own practical terms of its inevitable end state, which would look more like Chinese state today. Everything is political, everything is argued for as implementation of one noble government goal or another. But bellow the surface you have vicious struggle of elites for power inside beurocracy where identifying where the wind blows from is crucial for commercial success. For politically well connected CEO, it is easier to squash competitors by making sure they have low ESG score by taping ones social network as opposed to market competition. It does not matter if population wants or does not want ESG, what matters is what elites want and how they compete for power. Similarly in China it does not matter if you provide service that people want, as soon as you are not protected politically, you end up like Jack Ma.
The applause lights come on, people clap, and they clap because they enjoyed the applause light.
I do not remember it exactly, but I think comedian Bill Burr described similar phenomenon as "clap commedy". "Comedian" tells a joke and instead of people laughing, they just clap. Comedy is special in that even if the joke is maximally politically incorrect, the laugh is involuntary and it clearly shows if the joke was actually funny.
Whatever Amazon is doing, they're doing something right. I cannot escape hearing about this fucking show from every possible outlet, social media site, and of course this culture war chessboard.
I agree, this fanbaiting was adopted by big studios at least since Ghostbusters 2016 with all female cast. The overall phenomenon of critics and showruners vs fanbase dates back to Gamergate if not even farther in the past. And while it may not be the best long-term strategy for the corporations, I think it is the best strategy for people inside those organizations: C-level executives, directors, writers and actors. Even critics are now part of the game - with the Zeitgeist being what it is, they cannot afford standing out too much if they like their career. As an example there is an upcoming The Woman King movie about African Amazonians from historical kingdom of Dahomey fighting white colonialists and slave traders. Predictably it sits at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes with 36 reviews so far, which should make it one of the best movies of all times on par if not better than movies like Citizen Kane (99% out of 127 reviews) or The Godfather (97% out of 149 reviews) and of course Black Panther which has 96% out of whooping 529 reviews.
I agree with you, there is a utility in all these controversies: it is free marketing and a very good shield against constructive criticism of the content.
The President laments not only not being able to get anything done to the hysterical claims of harm but it being used to basically marginalize and remove her and other party figures
Oh, she does not understand what is going on. The idea is as follows: there are people at or near the center of a circle who hold power and then there are people "on the margins" of the circle who are oppressed by those in the center. Once all the people on the margin band together, they can collapse the circle - this is often called as centering [oppressed category] in wokespeech. It is literally described in the book Mapping The Margins by Kim Crenshaw.
So sorry Mr/Ms/Miss Kuttner. You were not marginalized for finding yourself out of the new collapsed circle - you were just de-centered. And by your inept defense you just opened the door for future criticism to bury your career 10 feet under. I am sorry for the person, but to be frank I have some level of schadenfreude here. This is exactly the shit that was happening in the past in many countries gripped by the revolution. You cannot be just an ideologue, you have to also be savvy political operator and you have to constantly have your finger on the pulse of where things are going or you are out.
Revolution eats its own and if this new challenger actually invented the whole trap for cynical purposes to gain power, I want to congratulate them on their game. They are the harbinger of the things to come.
You probably did not notice, but there is potential schism brewing inside the Catholic Church. The theological debates are interesting, they revolve around ecumenism post Second Vatican council and it seems that current Pope takes them very far with messages like
Some theologians say it is part of God's "permissive will," allowing "this reality of many religions. Some emerge from the culture, but they always look toward heaven and God," the pope said.
As a former Catholic myself just briefly investigating this over last few months I am convinced that the pope is probably either an apostate or a heretic. The church also has to deal with day-to-day subversion from the left as with the rebellious bishops from German Catholic church that decided to bless LGBT unions. And on top of that there is some strange relationship between Pope and Davos types around wide variety of topics such as climate change or strange messages like this openly mentioning return of catholic integralism, which may be the way how some of the critics of Vatican II were placated.
It really is strange and pope Francis himself seems to have interesting enough background to generate controversies ranging with his embrace of socialist version of catholic teachings endemic to Latin America called liberation theology with openly communist figures like Hélder Câmara whom Pope calls as that holy bishop. Add in a very strange way of how Francis got elected - while previous much more conservative pope still lived and you have anther leg of the controversy.
So yes, Catholic Church is not safe from culture wars, if anything they are waged even on larger scale given that Catholic Church is a vulnerable institution. Now it is not as if there was not a problem with Catholic Church before, there were antipopes and murderous popes like Stephen VI and so forth, this time may not be different.
georgioz
9mo ago
There used to be a meme that if UK was US state it would be third poorest state. I looked at 2021 numbers and with UK's GDP of $46,500 Per Capita (Purchasing Power Parity) it would actually rank as literally the poorest before Mississippi with $47,190 and West Virginia with $53,852. The US GDP is $70,250
Many people talk about welfare state in Europe, but even this ranks hollow mostly because people do not understand that US is 51% richer than UK. So even if USA had half the spending on welfare as percentage of GDP compared to UK, it would still be on par in absolute amount.
The EU has population of 447 million and in 2021 the were 4.06 million births here. Having third of the population growth from immigration is definitely not a small "trickle". Even USA that had peak immigration year of 1907 with 1.3 million legal immigrants, there were around 2.7 million people born during that year. So the immigration was also around one third of the population growth.
It also does not look like small trickle in certain attractive countries, regions and cities. And we are talking about comparison with peak immigration in US, which then had efforts of bringing immigration down during the following decades. Which is not how it seems now in EU - especially with speeches like these which paint it it all as nonissue.
More options
Context Copy link