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.
I'd guess I'd give current odds as 60-40 for Harris, but this is solely because the online American right spending the final days before the election losing its shit over some squirrel seems like losing type behavior.
I think this is disingenuous way to describe the kerfuffle. It is not about a squirrel, it is so much more. The owner was treated as some kind of criminal, waiting for hours while government agencies raided his home as if he was some member of cartel or something. Also the squirrel we are talking about was a mascot of his nonprofit serving 300 other animals, it was quite famous minor social celebrity with many cute videos. There is so much packed into it besides a cute little squirrel getting killed, it is what its killing represents. There is so much you can read into this: the insane level of licensing, the fact that government probably spent thousands of dollars in mandays of agents investigating and killing some "random" squirrel. It is about facelessness of bureaucracy, where even blunders like these cannot be pinpointed and they just go away as if nothing happened
And it is also about media coverage, including comments like yours here. Which is now standard "why do you care so much about X" response. It is easy to throw back - if some stupid squirrel is so unimportant, why did government went so hard after it? You cannot have it both ways, where on one hand it is just some stupid problem, while at the same time it is a problem that requires probably dozens of people investigating it. So which one is it? If I grant you that it was just some stupid squirrel, then the person in charge of the raid should be automatically fired for mishandling public resources on such a stupid thing, right?
I have a little bit different take. It is not that western world is against moralizing, it is just that it changed values that people are judged by. The don't be judgmental schtick was there only as a temporary stopgap in order to protect these alternative moralities while they were weak. Now when they reign, instead of traditional moral values and virtues that people were judged by, you can now easily be judged as committing one of the big 4 "new" istophobic sins: racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. You can add various other moral issues such as being a bigot (you are against these values as interpreted by new religious authorities) or some sort of other enemy: anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist and so forth.
What I find interesting is how a lot of the new morality is direct subversion of traditional virtues and promoting related sins instead. Instead of chastity, we promote lust. Instead of humility we literally celebrate pride month. Instead of patience we celebrate righteous wrath of punching Nazis and persecuting bigots. Instead of temperance we literally promote gluttony, celebrate obesity and drug culture. Instead of charity we promote greed by eating the rich and demanding rights without any related responsibilities. Instead of diligence, we excuse sloth ideally enabled by some sort of UBI or by medicalizing it and removing any responsibility for it. Instead of kindness we prefer envy of those who have some kind of privilege and who are in in some mysterious systematic ways responsible for our situation.
I am not the first one to notice, that the new moral regime shapes up to be almost literal subversion of the old system.
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
2yr 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.
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.
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.
So today there was an assassination attempt on prime minister of my country of Slovakia - Robert Fico. It happened during his tradition of government meetings across the country, in small coal town of Handlová. He went to greet his supporters when a 71 years old man shot him several times, he was then carried away and sent to hospital in critical condition, he undertook complicated surgery and his fate is still not known.
All the leaders sent their condolences from Putin to Macron, Biden and Ursula von der Leyen, all condemning the violence. The same for Slovak political leaders. Of course, Slovak reddit as a bastion of more progressive people could not hold their glee, most upvoted comments for one of the threads were of the like of "JFK from Wish" or "this is what you get from hate". I mention it just as a litmus test of how more progressive people think in Slovakia and to be frank I find it disgusting. As you can gather, Fico is viewed as a populist and Slovak Orban and pro Putin and all that, despite major differences that may take too long to explain. But he definitely is described as archenemy by the strongest opposition party literally called "Progressive Slovakia" here. You probably get the picture.
As for the assassin, to me he seems like an unhinged man that was supporting a lot of fringe movements from right-wing movements to talking against the current government as leaked by one policeman who released a video of the perpetration in custody, where the assassin ranted something about recent law regarding the state broadcasting and overall disagreement with the government.
At this point all I have to say is that I am in shock. Something like that never happened in 40 years history of my country. I see already a lot of spin including Guardian and other foreign press as well as very strong proclamations from parties in government about "political warfare". One thing is apparent, the politics in my country changed and not for the better. I think there will be some ripples also elsewhere, ranging from "stochastic terrorism" by having somebody radicalized by media to just politicians being more alerted to this kind of thing happening. There is also EU parliament elections in couple of weeks and this is something that may have more impact there.
That is all for now, I am not sure if this will be deleted as it is not probably quite a topic for some extra thread, but also not your cookie cutter idea thrown here for discussion. But it is widely relevant on so many levels even outside of Slovak politics so I think there may be some good discussion bellow. I may add some edit and I am willing to anybody else to update bellow if let's say Fico's condition changes in the upcoming hours when I am asleep.
As non-US person I consider US presidential election system as mindbogglingly stupid, prone to fraud and unsafe. Ballot harvesting, voting machines, no requirement of any ID in many states, inability to actually count votes for days or weeks, etc. When I raised these questions before, a lot of people mentioned how this is complicated system where states have their own rules and so forth. It does not matter. Your elections are laughable and a mockery of security, it is far beyond anything I have seen in my country of Slovakia or other countries where I follow elections. Also your politicians are unwilling to do anything about it to make elections more safe and trustworthy, while constantly talking about "threat to democracy".
So the steelman of Trump's argument - or argument by any other candidate who loses and raises questions about legitimacy of election - no matter the results, your elections in their current state will always have huge issues with legitimacy and trust no matter who wins.
the Democrat elite may hate him, may despise him, may say that he is a threat to democracy, but I don't think I can remember any time that any of them acted as if he was a threat to one's very psychological foundation. Maybe their power and their close understanding of American politics generally inoculates them against such a reaction.
It is far more sinister. It is public secret, that Hillary Clinton wanted Trump as her opponent, she expected to defeat him easily in 2016. While this strategy backfired, Dems had no problem funneling over $50 million to promote MAGA candidates during 2022 midterms, expecting easier opponents while from the other side of the mouth shouting how they are threat to democracy. There is great deal of cynicism and theater in current politics.
The influence of US media narratives on crime has been especially distorting outside the US.
I find this fascinating, the same is happening in my country of Slovakia. My working theory is that we live in de facto what accounts to US Empire. It is not dissimilar to let's say Roman empire or British empire - you have various naturalized people who feel allegiance to the empire, they adopt the imperial customs and ethos and even ape people in imperial centers of power. It also fosters certain strange allegiances, I am sure upper class of Roman Britain or Egypt felt more in common with Roman elites than local people - not unlike what is happening now.
When it comes to culture, there are obvious things such as racism or sexism etc. However what I find interesting is that people here internalize even completely invalid themes - for instance the boomer vs millenial dichotomy from US. In Slovakia, boomers spent their best productive years during communism or very shady early years after the fall of Eastern Bloc in 1989, with 20%+ unemployment and average salary of $100 a month/$1,200 a year - if you were lucky enough to actually have an average job and the employer was actually paying you on time. Boomers at large do not have any financial property such as stocks or bonds to help in their retirement, because these were not accessible. Whatever they had, they probably lost it to double digit inflation, failing state banks and bankrupted post-communist industry. At best they may own some old commie apartment in some small town where they lived their whole lives. They are wholly dependent on state pension, which averages around 60% of average net wage, many of them have to work various odd jobs to survive. And yet young people are parroting the US talking point of how boomers had it so much better than them, how they hoard wealth, how much harder it is now in current economy etc. It is amazing to see.
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.
All these articles about "cranks" to me are just wordgames. Radical/progressive/woke left believes in their own conspiracy theories, the main one is what I call as universal leftist conspiracy - courtesy of James Lindsay. It is really simple:
There are two groups of people: purple and beige. Purple people have access to some special attribute or property - let's call it purpleness. Purple people use this property to oppress beige group. Purpleness also helps purple group to create and reproduce system of purpleness, which reproduces oppression over to the next generation. Liberation from oppression and true equity will only happen if we dismantle the system of purpleness.
This is the most simple and primitive form of conspiracy theory which you can apply to mainstream ideas that for some reason are not considered as low status conspiracies. Some examples:
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There are men and women. Men have access to male privilege which they use to oppress women. This system is called patriarchy and women will never be free unless we dismantle it.
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There are heterosexual people and the rest such as queer people. The former group has ability to define what is normal, they have access to heteronormativity which they use to oppress nonheterosexual people. We will not have true liberation until we will not dismantle it.
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There are white people and the rest, especially Black people. White people have access to whiteness to oppress other races. There can never be true equality until we will not dismantle white supremacy.
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There are capitalists and workers. Capitalists have access to capital and they exclude workers from access to it, reproducing the system of capitalism. There can never be true equality unless oppressed workers have access to means of production which is the first step to dismantle capitalism.
These are all the simplest and crudest forms of conspiracy theory which if applied to anything else would be identified as some uncouth theory only stupid people believe in. Except these conspiracies are high status so they are fine to utter even in a good society. This universal conspiracy can also be applied to many other popular leftist systematic conspiracies, just define new groups and systems of oppression be it handicapped people or fat people or tans people or many more. This type of "analysis" is in my opinion absolute farce, people who believe in these things can identify racism and sexism everywhere - from knitting to hiking. Which is the point - once you are woke to this systemic conspiracy thinking, then you will see sexism, racism and white supremacy even if you see somebody throwing a bugger from his car as he waits on a red light.
I like Lindsay's take on the whole DEI. Paraphrasing:
Diversity means whatever is opposing the cultural hegemony. That is why room full of white women feminists can be diverse and why Larry Elder can be a Black Face of White Supremacy. So in practice, diversity means that you have to welcome subversive elements into the company/movement/club or whatever, diversity needs to be ensured by cadre of political commissars who themselves are experts on diversity.
Inclusion means that you are welcoming to "diversity", it is making sure that the subversive elements can have free reign. The basic form of inclusion is basically censorship - you will be subject to certain "ethical standards", that you will not do hate speech or microagressions. The advanced level of inclusion is called belonging, this means that you now have to be active and supportive of these elements: you have to put pronouns into your bio, you have to get rainbow keychain for your company card and so forth. The aim is to create atmosphere of fake consensus via social pressure to supress any resistence.
Equity means adjusting shares in order to make citizens A and B equal on basis of diversity. This is your cookie cutter socialist redistribution so that subversive elements get necessary resources to thrive and multiply, but now expanded to other domains such as positions of power inside companies or in casting of movies or moderating teams of some random forum. As with other socialist movements that were also very keen on redistribution, it has to be enforced by diversity and inclusion experts - those are the vanguard forces that will at first enforce equitable society until this becomes automatic as when socialism is supposed to voluntarily turn into communism now called Social Justice.
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
1yr 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
2yr 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.
Naraburns probably said it the best, including how this question of "define woke" is often used as a trolling technique to derail discussion. In fact these rhetorical techniques are often very useful to certain strains of woke, as naraburns said woke stems from so called Critical Theory, which functions best when it is well - criticizing - as opposed to explaining. So using some form of rhetorical judo in discussions is used quite often to have opponents on back foot and in defense, where they are the ones asking questions and criticizing all answers. While at the same time they do not subject their own terms to the same scrutiny.
Two can play the same game of gish gallop: define racism, define systemic racism, define whiteness, define white supremacy, define heteronormativity, define gender etc. We can also play the same game with much older terms such as: define capitalism, define socialism, define communism, define neoliberalism. All of these can and were used as "boogeymen", however they continue to be used and they capture something.
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.
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