problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
The win condition in Catan is just about getting 10 victory points, yes, but the benefit of winning is something more inherent - it's about getting the status of "winner", which is what drives everyone in the first place. A perspective that views winning in Catan as "nothing inherently that great" kind of also allows one to argue that kingmaking in Catan really isn't a big deal in the first place. Since winning in and of itself isn't valuable, the one on the receiving end of kingmaking shouldn't care too much.
Anyway, let's consider this hypothetical scenario. I have a three-player Catan game. Sat clockwise around the board are Player A, Player B, and Player C. Player A has 9 points and possesses Longest Road, Player B has 8 points, and Player C has 5 points. C is pretty much out of the game, and A is clearly about to take the win with a massive deck of resource cards. However, A blocked a road of C's earlier in the game which meant C couldn't build a settlement in an important place, and/or they repeatedly moved the robber onto hexes of C's at an early stage, meaning they couldn't progress. Now, it's currently B's turn and C has enough brick and lumber to grant B Longest Road, granting them 10 victory points.
I can't make a coherent argument as to why C shouldn't kingmake, in this scenario, outside of "You might make A feel bad". Making people feel bad is also what you do when you block people earlier in the game (even when it's done for your own benefit), and games like Catan are all about stepping on people's toes. I see no reason why policing or punishing early aggressive behaviour with sabotage in the late-game should be prohibited.
problem_redditor
1yr ago
Most people who are in support of circumcision absolutely aren't doing it for logical reasons, they're doing it entirely because of emotion.
I have a friend who's very pro-abortion and very much in favour of the idea that you should let people have their Bodily Autonomy, but then he also believes that circumcision is "no big deal". These two positions ("Abortion should be allowed because bodily autonomy is such an important right to preserve that it trumps any moral status the foetus might have", and "Cutting off parts of non-consenting infant boys' genitals is perfectly fine") are clearly incongruent positions, but he holds them anyway. I've seen him mercilessly make fun of a guy who was a bit touchy about the topic of circumcision, having had it done to him.
A good amount of the most entrenched supporters of circumcision are culturally attached to the practice, and they're more likely to have had it done themselves (or had it done to their own kids). So they're more likely to already think it's normal, and additionally if they accepted that circumcision was a bad thing they'd also have to entertain the idea that they have been "mutilated" and that their parents actually did something to them that wasn't good (or, worse, they'd have to accept that they mutilated their own kid). There's also the paediatricians who carry out the procedure, who have a financial stake in it and also who I would expect would probably not be able to live with themselves if they realised that it was a moral wrong.
That's an uncomfortable thing to have to face, so they end up rationalising it to themselves in a variety of ways. "Well, I had it done to me and I'm perfectly fine". That's like me being locked inside a room since birth and then me saying that I'm fine with not seeing the outside world. Now, I don't have the full information here, do I. It's mainly because I have no point of comparison that I can say I'm okay with it - just because I don't know I've been deprived of something important doesn't mean I haven't been. Then there's "Well, it's yknow, not a big deal and lots of people have it done" as if the commonality of a practice has any bearing at all on its moral rightness or wrongness.
Anyway, I sympathise, and I'd recommend you take a look at a very long thread I wrote about the topic of male genital mutilation with circumcision as a main focus. I think you might like it.
problem_redditor
1yr ago
Just do it the same way you would on Reddit. [Text goes here](Link goes here).
I began to appreciate it once I learned how feminist theory defined patriarchy. The wording (doubtless there are many) I recall is, "a system of gender roles which is harmful to men and women" or some such. Some might say that this definition smuggles in a claim: that gender roles are harmful. That's not quite correct.
In addition, this is also not how feminist theory truly defines patriarchy. Feminists will use "patriarchy" in their writings and also often in discussions to refer to a system built by men to privilege men and oppress women (and they will very gratuitously throw around that term to describe societies past and present). However, when people call them out on these statements as being inaccurate many feminists will run to the motte and firmly assert that "patriarchy" only means that men predominate in positions of political power, or that there are gender roles that harm both sexes, or some other relatively innocuous claim that they’ll portray as being devoid of any extra implications. When their interlocutor can't rebut them due to the motte definition of "patriarchy" which they have claimed is the feminist definition they can claim victory, and when the inconvenient interlocutor leaves they can return to the bailey and continue using the word to strongly imply that the system is inherently based on male oppression of women.
Given that I see this behaviour all the time, I can't help but regard this definition of "patriarchy" as being a cute little Planck length-sized motte perched in front of a monstrous bailey the size of North America.
Because whites are the majority, it largely doesn't make sense in my day to day life to treat whites as a unitary group with united interests, to see another white person and say "Oh, we'll have much more in common."
Interesting. But it seems clear that any such reasoning based on group differences could be applied both ways regardless of numerical majority/minority status. Even if whites are a numerical majority and see their own race as being the norm, when they see a non-white person their reaction could be "We'll have much less in common" due to a lack of shared background. The same cultural differences that could be the driver of a strong in-group bias among non-whites also has the potential to create a strong in-group bias among whites, however, in practice it doesn't seem to occur to the same extent considering whites' lower in-group biases.
Then there's also the fact that there's plenty of countries where the racial and ethnic majority seems (at least on a surface level) to be quite a good bit more tribal than those in the West (e.g. Japan), so clearly being a numerical majority doesn't preclude a group from having a strong sense of unity.
The explanation I'm leaning towards at the moment is that there's some external factor tempering the in-group biases of whites and/or exacerbating the in-group biases of non-whites, and people being raised with woke ideology does seem to be a plausible candidate. I think it's beyond the realm of possibility that being repeatedly exposed to these types of ideas doesn't end up affecting real-world perception and behaviour.
Similarly, patriarchy is not this wishy washy idea that masculinity is valued more of that men hold most of the power. No, what you find in the scholarship is a system of social structures and practices, in which men govern, oppress and exploit women. And exploit and oppress are the operating words here.
There's already been talk further up in the thread about all the things that feminists are misguided about regarding the traditional societies they would call patriarchal. On that topic I would say that I too happen to disagree with the idea that masculinity was "valued more" in the past, rather masculinity and femininity were both respected in their own distinct way, and men and women had their own corresponding and complementary forms of power and influence.
However, another very big part of the reason why feminists can come to the conclusion that societies were "oppressive" towards women is because of some very extreme selectivity on their part. They hyper-focus on any perceived male privileges and ignore the very real female privileges and male responsibilities that existed, obscuring the tradeoffs inherent in traditional gender roles. In the societies that feminists claim fit their ideas of "patriarchy", there's plenty of commonly found social norms and structures that contradict the "gendered oppression of women" hypothesis, but are conveniently left out from the definition of patriarchy.
These elements of traditional societies that feminists ignore (e.g. their protectiveness towards women and tendency to assign men responsibility for ensuring female wellbeing) are massively important parts of their social organisation, and I strongly suspect that the exclusion of these inconvenient elements from their definition of "patriarchy" is deliberately done so that the definition fits the preordained framework that feminists already have in mind. When confronted about it, they might occasionally acknowledge the existence of these female privileges and male responsibilities, but then will subsequently attempt to rationalise it away with baroque, unintuitive and unfalsifiable "benevolent sexism"-type word games which paint attitudes and norms that favour women as merely being side effects of patriarchy so as to maintain the idea that the foundational elements of patriarchy are that of male power and privilege. Again, their ideology and beliefs inform their definitions.
As you have already noted, the feminist definition of patriarchy isn't separable from their moral judgements surrounding it - all these moral judgements are baked straight into the DNA of feminist theory. Oppression of women is fundamental to the feminist conceptualisation of gender relations, and all of their definitions and theory bend to accommodate this idea as much as possible through misconceptions, half-truths and some very skewed and selective framing.
I'd say that I entirely sympathise with these concerns, even as a non-white immigrant to a Western country myself. It's not even about "a country that's not yours", at this point. There are more pressing considerations at hand.
Let's go best case scenario. Even if these immigrants do end up integrating into Western society and adopting their values - I'd say that's definitely still something one should be worried about. Western culture itself seems absolutely intent on stirring up racial animosity between the groups, as well as creating and maintaining a threat narrative that paints whites as being deserving of contempt regardless of whether they actually did anything or not.
The current culture in the west is one of blame, shame and hatred towards whites (just as it is towards every other group that wokes target). They are described as creating a system that oppresses all other groups to their benefit, and they are maligned as being complicit in this oppression by simply existing as a white person and thus unjustly benefiting from the system. They are falsely thought of as being uniquely monstrous in historical terms, uniquely capable of inflicting harm, and uniquely deserving of retribution enacted against them.
The news cycle and the entertainment that gets produced regularly stirs up animosity towards whites, and celebrates open demonstrations of dehumanisation and hatred towards them as merely being righteous anti-racism. Even incitements to violence against whites as a group are tolerated in a way it isn't against non-whites. Meanwhile, anything an individual white person does to an individual non-white is always assumed first and foremost to be motivated by racism, is always assumed not to be the bad act of an individual but the product of a society that is built by whites for whites (so the blame can be extrapolated to all whites), and is bandied around in the news cycle for days and days in order to stir up maximal outrage.
This is the type of rhetoric that often precedes racially-based violence against the target group. You can see the type of havoc that resulted after the massive George Floyd story, and that's with whites as a majority. What happens if they are no longer one?
There might be a way that different races can live together in harmony, but looking at the social environment right now, I don't think that outcome will come to pass. I know I'm not going to take advantage of these racial narratives, and I think doing so is morally reprehensible, but looking at the attitudes of many non-white people in Western countries (yes, even those Westernised ones), I can't say I have very much faith that most of them won't be super tribal.
At this point, if any significant subgroup of whites developed a strong "racial consciousness" for themselves and started pushing back against this crap with their own rhetoric on any large scale, I don't know if I would be able to blame them.
Regarding if I know this feeling: I feel a huge amount of dread, particularly surrounding relations between the sexes (feminists might be even more tremendously dishonest than critical race theorists, and that's saying something), but this also extends to racial relations and every other issue that wokes touch. Little of what they do seems to be conducive to a healthy, functioning society, instead it seems designed to absolutely stamp any semblance of social cohesion and unity into the ground in the name of some abstract, poorly-defined, constantly-shifting liberationist goal. I have no doubt that they think they're doing good things. They're just wrong about that.
I'm going to hazard a guess that it's the former. Of the leftists I know and have engaged in political discussion with, all of the ones I actually find know their shit in any way belong to the "original" economic left (most of whom have a distaste for woke). There are even some tankies I'm fond of, despite vehemently disagreeing with them on almost every point about economics.
The DEI/woke-type leftists, on the other hand, are by and large painfully confused on every topic including their very own ideology.
And in those areas with the highest concentration of repression, selection pressures will be very significant; you would expect only to find those outliers, in terms of personality, who would be both motivated enough and perseverant enough to dive into those depths, and those traits are likely to correlate with plenty of other things that can be weaknesses. There are fine lines -- and relative ones -- between perspicacity and paranoia, between holistic judgment and black-and-white thinking, between personal virtues and social vices, etc.
This is the conclusion I've come to as well. The people who are most likely to break from any social hegemony and are most willing to criticise its most sacred tenets (which I believe can be a valuable and necessary thing to do) are almost certainly going to have many outlier personality traits which mean they likely won't behave in a manner which people would usually term as "pro-social", even in other parts of life unrelated to politics.
Most of the time, the people who will break from the majority or mainstream view are likely to lean towards being bitter, disagreeable provocateurs who don't care much for "the wisdom of the masses" or the niceties of social life. Additionally, the very effective ones are likely going to be driven and almost obsessive in nature, but they're also going to be motivated by very different considerations than your average person is.
I suspect that, often, you would find more than a small heaping of self-destruction in their behaviours too - it kind of comes with the territory when you're not only willing to firmly stick to your unorthodox beliefs but also risk social death in order to promote these beliefs (keeping in mind that a willingness to self-deceive e.g. genuinely believing in the orthodox view and promoting it is the most personally beneficial behaviour in terms of social gain). "I will die on the hill of my convictions"-type behaviours are principled but almost certainly do not correlate with positive personal outcomes.
I can very much testify that in my experience, those attributes that make one personable and affable and those that make one an independent thinker who is willing to openly criticise mainstream thought in any significant way do not seem to overlap.
Perhaps my first thought about many identity-left people when I've spoken to them has been "Why are the things they like and find entertaining so weird". It was like peering into a mindset and a type of culture that was entirely alien to me and that I still don't feel like I understand well on a base level, and this might be the first comment which I've seen acknowledge that the tastes of many people in the left are extremely distinctive and reek of an attempt at social signalling (to others, as well as to themselves).
A huge portion of their entertainment shares these ironic, deconstructive, absurdist characteristics you mentioned, sometimes with a very heavy dose of blink-and-you'll-miss-them references most of which exist primarily to confer insider/outsider status. The same goes for many of the memes they enjoy, which are these weird maximalist parodies of memes that kill my brain and seem almost exclusively like an assessment of whether one exists on a sufficiently high level of irony to understand the joke or not. Quite honestly, my level of disdain for a good amount of this kind of entertainment is off the charts, and I can't imagine anyone enjoying it or engaging with it on any real level. My disdain for it is not inherently because it's "nerdy" or exists outside of the mainstream - there are many strange cult pieces of entertainment I very much enjoy, probably more than the vast majority of mainstream entertainment - but rather because the types of entertainment I'm referring to don't seem to serve much of a purpose outside of denoting those who consume them as being an outsider. There doesn't seem to be much genuine love or vision behind the piece of work itself.
As you note this attitude also jives with the general viewpoints of the woke left, too. Their entire political worldview exists in opposition to any stable or traditional cultural structures, and continues to do so even after these cultural structures bend to them. They see themselves as being politically ascended in some sense, having "realised" that the overarching culture is intractably patriarchal and white supremacist, and thus they have to take it upon themselves to educate the unwashed masses about how everything they do perpetuates prejudice because of their superior understanding of social dynamics. Red-tribers especially are portrayed as being reactionaries, which is a very meaningless term in my opinion (since opposing change isn't inherently negative) but in the Blue Tribe the implication is that any pushback against the supposedly unequivocally positive changes they want to implement exists simply out of ignorance or fear.
The particularly notable thing to me is that much of these leftists' sense of being an outcast who looks down upon the normies can persist long after their viewpoint and sense of aesthetics become culturally entrenched. That type of self-aware, absurdist, deconstructed entertainment has become fairly widespread, but these creators and their audience do still try to portray themselves as being on the cultural fringe, the very same way wokesters think of themselves as being counter-culture revolutionaries despite their beliefs basically being the dominant view within the mainstream at this point. They would think of me as being part of the cultural hegemony and them as being outside of it despite the fact that the very opposite is true. They're perpetually able to look down upon the mainstream, even when they are the mainstream.
So, I do want to make it abundantly clear that I am a genuinely passionate decades-long fan of Weird Al’s work, and if you’re accusing him specifically of lacking a sense of love and vision, I think that accusation is baseless.
I did pick up on that and am not accusing Weird Al specifically of anything (I wouldn't be able to, anyway, since I am not familiar with him or his content whatsoever). For my part, I'd also like to clarify that there's content I enjoy myself that shares some of the deconstructive/absurdist characteristics which appeal to the cultural left, but the ones that appeal to me are those that seem to have more substance and where the creator has something to say outside of dead-eyed detachment. It's the stuff that seems entirely hollow and alienated that I have a serious disdain for and exemplifies all the worst things about that kind of aesthetic.
I do think there are certain things which are pretty appealing in a widespread manner. However, when you see the types of entertainment that does have a huge skew where the fanbase appears to primarily be of one political tribe, it's very notable how distinct they are.
I wasn't going to bring up specific examples because I think any specific discussion will invite some very vehement disagreement by people who happen to enjoy anything I lambast, but here we go.
So I used to be pretty involved in music communities, and a genre with one of the most overtly woke fanbases I can think of is PC Music/hyperpop (the most notable of these artists being SOPHIE). Example here. For those who are unaware of what this is, it's basically an ironic/post-ironic caricature of pop music which exaggerates every single one of the criticised elements of pop. The aesthetic of their music and music videos and entire public image exemplifies sterility, artifice, almost sickly cuteness and has a very strong undertone of cynical parody to it - basically nothing about it sounds genuine, and I think that's the point. Another factor that also probably helps to attract leftists is that a huge proportion of the artists making PC Music are part of the rainbow community.
Other artists that have a bit of a strange outsider aesthetic, even those I like, also tend to have a primarily leftist fanbase. I can testify to being kicked out of an Autechre discord server after expressing wrongthink once during a political conversation (which I did not start). While I enjoy their music quite a lot myself I can also testify that a huge amount of their fans are extremely woke and also tend to be quite the pretentious type.
Then there's games. I'm currently watching a friend play through Disco Elysium (a game with a fairly strong leftist bent to it that kind of plays out like a postmodern novel) with a group of other left-leaning friends. It's got style in spades, and I don't doubt that care was put into this, but at the moment my perception of it is that it's a pretty slow and artsy game which I can't help but regard as being quite difficult to like. It comes off as a bit of an unfocused mix of political satire, philosophical musings and absurdist nonsense all of which don't really blend into the murder-mystery narrative well. My opinions might change later, but I'm not too optimistic about that.
For film, I’ll just refer to a huge portion of A24’s output. Their films resonate with that same audience, the type who like artistic slow burns.
There are more I could include, but these are the first few examples that come to mind. And it's not even that they're always bad, either. It's just that in most of these cases, the people who consume them are often the type who tend to like distinguishing themselves from the normie crowd, and who see themselves as being part of a distinct, unique, subversive subculture that is new and revolutionary, one which is simultaneously aesthetically superior to and yet ignored by the normies. There's a certain amount of elitism that comes with the territory which doesn't seem to have been nearly as prominent in OG nerd culture.
This seems like a fairly distorted rationalisation for circumcision. I experienced quite a huge amount of pain myself, both in infancy and in adolescence (neither of the instances I'm referring to were circumcision-based either, since I haven't ever had it done to me), yet I would not in any way condone a situation where suffering is purposefully inflicted on an infant. Especially by the very people tasked with caring for it. That is effectively what circumcision is, regardless of the true intent of the individuals involved.
The idea here isn't "It is feasible to eliminate every source of suffering from a person's life". Even if you hold the belief that some amount of suffering is inevitable in any human life, that's not incompatible whatsoever with "You should not be intentionally adding to that by inflicting suffering on someone against their will". Any line of reasoning that states that suffering is inevitable, thus it is trivial and of no consequence whenever it is inflicted, can literally be used to justify not only circumcision but also torture and all manner of atrocities.
"So what, I pulled off your fingernails? That's trivial compared to the pain experienced by other people!" Technically true, but it makes it no less morally reprehensible. And disregarding the physical and mental toll it can take simply because of the existence of other potentially unpreventable sources of suffering is incoherent. If someone had to endure one painful, traumatic event as opposed to two, I think anybody would prefer the former.
I'm aware this is on the border of CW and Wellness, so if anyone has any problems with it being here, I'll move it to the normal CW thread.
The long and the short of it is that engaging with the academic discourse on a controversial CW-related topic is really starting to exhaust me and burn me out. I'm not going to introduce what the topic here is, since this is strictly Wellness-related, but I seem to have mentally taken it upon myself to refute the opponents of mine that are involved in the field. As a layman, I've basically endeavoured to take the strongest versions of their arguments possible, and then challenge them in a rigorous, data-driven fashion. And needless to say, acquainting yourself with an entire field is not easy (note also that I'm also researching a huge amount of other related topics which the aforementioned field is just a part of).
I foresee a bunch of questions about why I'm this invested, so I'll briefly explain. Why I'm doing this is because when I look at the field, I see a very dedicated group of ideologues who are committed to promoting a certain specific view, and whose acolytes have in the past actually engaged in very unethical behaviour (e.g. targeting people's careers, harassment, bomb threats, etc) in order to shut down an opposing view. Even those who do not do this have a clear ideological commitment and have endeavoured to find reasons to explain why measures other than the ones which find results that are congenial to their worldview are invalid or that they do not "explain the full story". This has been a decades-long effort on their part at this point, and most of the talking points offered up by them have subsequently either been proven to be untrue or did not have much validity in the first place, but they continue coming up with new, novel rationalisations as to why measures which conflict with their ideology should be thrown out. Some of the things I've read have been painfully slimy - examples of the type of duplicity I've come across from the aforementioned ideologues range from preselection of the sample to outright trying to misinterpret the findings of their own research in order to publish things which are congenial to the ideology, and these "findings" have then been repeated in subsequent publications. I also suspect there's a lot of publication bias going on, though I obviously can't prove that.
These ideologues' opponents in the field, comparatively, don't seem all that invested to me. They exhibit the air and attitude of people who simply discovered results that were contrary to their initial expectations, and decided to take them at face value and defended what they considered to be good social science. However, due to how influential these ideologues are and due to the almost constant stream of papers that group churns out, it's very difficult for anyone to properly address all their claims especially considering the fear of consequences that comes with opposing them. Worse yet, they're extremely prolific in responding to any challenges of their hypotheses, and basically flood the academic discourse with self-justifying screed after self-justifying screed. Someone has to contest them, but there's just not enough people who will do that, and most people seem indifferent or outright opposed to the idea of contradicting an accepted narrative.
My involvement in this is so intensely deep at this point that I have a reputation in certain circles on Reddit (or at least I like to think I have one, hah) for being fairly well-researched in one specific area. What happens now is that I semi-regularly get private messages from multiple different users about my general areas of political interest, and usually they're either asking me to help in an argument or showing me an academic's or activist's writings and asking me to refute them. I do not blame them and this wouldn't be that bad at all in isolation, but at this point I am getting my opponents' rhetoric shoved in my face almost constantly not only by my culture war opponents, but also those who are on my side (not to mention the media and every other vehicle of political propagandising that exists).
So the exhaustion has been piling up for a while. And recently, I got a message from a user who showed me a writeup from one of said ideologues in the aforementioned field and asked if I could refute it. I took a look, and trying to follow the citation trail led really deep, and it sent me into a spiral for some reason. It isn't the worst thing I've had to address, rather this just kind of feels like the straw that broke the camel's back. It's a symbol of "No matter how much effort you put in, nothing and no one is going to change. What are you even doing this for?" And it's true. I can't think of very many people who've changed their mind because I decided to throw a bunch of data at them. Additionally, what I'm doing is basically akin to pissing in the ocean since the more ideologically-motivated crap I refute, the more seems to crop up elsewhere and the cycle starts all over again. It's an endless memetic arms race and I'm simply outnumbered on all sides. I've realised this for a long time, but it was sheer stubborn principle which prevented me from ever backing down.
That can only last so long. At this point, I find myself really wanting to put in the time to refute it yet not being able to get myself to muster up the energy. Increasingly, I'm finding myself alienated from politics because of just how demanding it can be and how mutually exclusive it seems to be with any sort of even slightly fulfilling or productive existence. You need to breathe, eat and drink politics if you're going to actually do it properly, and even then the dent you're going to make is likely going to be minimal if not completely immaterial.
I've wanted to start something for a while outside of mere participation on social media (A youtube channel? A Substack? A book?), but I resolved to do it once I had refined my perspective enough to handle any challenges thrown my way with ease. But this simply isn't the case, and will probably never be the case. Especially not for someone who holds opinions that are as fringe as I do.
TL;DR: frustration, despair, long rant about how politics becomes an awfully soul-crushing thing if you get too deeply involved and especially if your view is a contrarian one. Yes, I'm painfully aware that I need to touch grass.
problem_redditor
1yr ago
Well, thanks. I might give it a go then.
Three or four instruments in one entire piece or three or four instruments going at the same time? These are two very different things.
Personally, I would say it depends on the piece of music and how complex each of the individual parts are. A track can sound very, very dense and disorienting with quite little if the sequencing and/or sound design is sufficiently detailed. Here's an example.
I had a post back in the old country about spending a few months living rurally and one observation I missed was how much more ideosyncratic, but not neurotic, country folk are.
I agree. Cities seem to foster these weird little hyper-networked monocultures where everyone thinks similarly, acts similarly and just generally behave as if they stepped straight off a conveyor belt, because everyone is absolutely obsessed with what everyone else thinks of them (though it's likely not out of any sense of community, they adopt these beliefs and behaviours because there are incentives to do so). There's also a tendency to self-elevate and to thumb their nose at the poor, uneducated country-dwellers who aren't as liberal and cosmopolitan as they are, though I won't get into that.
Country folk, on the other hand, generally seem much less... Borg-like, in the way they act. It was refreshing, the few times I've been out there. I'm sure there are things that are lacking in rural areas, such as economic development and job opportunities, but there's a vibrancy and genuineness to the people there which you simply do not find in the city. I suppose it's a consequence of not being involved in perpetual status games.
the former can be considered bloat (as opposed to overkill) if they're real physical instruments with human players who are just sitting around doing nothing when the score doesn't call for them, rather than a single computer player swapping between instruments instantly.
I suppose by that standard you would consider most classical orchestral music bloated beyond belief, then?
Nobody is smiling, they all have that quirked-lip smug look, like they are constantly thinking "look how great and unconventional I am, scaring the normies, congratulate me and validate me for being stunning and brave!", which is very unattractive.
To be fair, I would say that's an extremely accurate depiction of the pink-haired types in the poster.
The funny thing about many of these people who really badly try to distinguish themselves as unique is that they still adopt much of the same underlying beliefs and values as the mainstream does, they just tend to proclaim it louder, take marginally more radical positions, and pretend that makes them "subversive". It's difference in the most trivial and safe manner possible, the type that's more likely to get you applauded instead of burned for heresy.
I do think it is the oddest culture war in that such an antagonistic relationship between the sexes is historically speaking quite new and seems to have originated in the West (though it is increasingly spreading to other countries now due to the fact that a huge amount of countries are culturally influenced by and want to emulate the West, and additionally feminist ideology has been intentionally promulgated by the West in countries they deem as being insufficiently progressive).
As to your list of possibilities, I think I am most sympathetic to 3, 4 and 8. I am not sympathetic to 2 at all.
The most key thing that I think it's necessary to note is that the gender "war" is mostly only fought in one direction - it's primarily feminist-leaning women and their male sympathisers accusing men of all manner of wrongdoing towards women, and most people out there who aren't all that invested in the gender war seem quite willing to go along with and accept that same narrative. The only major pushback is from people who think that feminism goes too far in their demonisation of men (a defence of men rather than a condemnation of women). Outside of a few isolated and much-maligned circles which people really love to draw attention to due to their deviance from mainstream thought, there's no real reverse equivalent where men express animosity towards women on any large scale and identify them as the source of society's major social ills.
I do think there's an element here of Western society being extremely fractured. When people's lives are atomised and disconnected, it's very easy to forget about people as being, well, people. Especially by the people most disconnected from the trials and tribulations that "normies" face. It's easy to forget about the countless men who work the dirty dangerous jobs to hold our society together when you spend your whole life far removed from that, and to see men as a group as being privileged oppressors. It's notable that feminism is predominantly a movement of upper-middle class women, and has always been such from its very inception. They are so distanced from these conditions that they have the ability to ignore the sacrifices of the men who keep society afloat, and can regard male behaviour and masculinity as a virtual pathology in need of reform. These are the women with the most social clout and influence, and who have the most ability to propagate narratives into the mainstream.
Even in the West, the further away you get from the urban sprawl and the less atomised people are, the less of a gender "war"-type dynamic there is. In the smaller and more rural towns, everyone knows each other, the conditions are far tougher, and it's probably more difficult to start arguing that the men going out and doing all kinds of dirty, thankless labour each day to bring back money for their families are nefarious oppressors of women whose behaviours exemplify toxic masculinity. It's harder to conceptualise of an imaginary spectre of "patriarchy" looming over everything when the society is cohesive and you have personally formed bonds with everyone in your small village.
Then there's the inherent unnatural-ness of the current environment we exist in which has shaped our gender roles in a very weird manner. Our advancement rendered the female role obsolete - a domain which women's psychology is suited to - and pushed them into the male sphere. While technology didn't render human labour in the public sphere obsolete (it would probably take the development of AGI to do that), it unintentionally ended up destroying the private/domestic sphere. The development of all sorts of domestic conveniences to make women's lives easier - created in the men's public sphere, might I add - ended up leading to women's discontentment, as all sorts of chores they would often do communally and share with other women essentially became a set and forget activity. The female role lost the status that it once had (which it should be noted was considerable), and so they flooded the male sphere. Who wouldn't?
The issue here is that the public sphere is characterised mostly by hierarchical, stratified relationships where people are valued for their productivity and are generally held at arms length. This contrasts with the kind of more communal relationships that women prefer, and additionally women are less likely to value climbing the rungs of the corporate ladder than men are. In line with these preferences, since women have entered the workplace and public life more broadly you can see social changes to the nature of the workplace which have made it fall better in line with women's preferences. There's increased emphasis on niceties, stepping on other people's toes is discouraged, making people feel uncomfortable is the worst thing you can do, strict hierarchies are increasingly seen as a negative and the environment has slowly started to look more and more like the personal network-type relationships women tend to be predisposed to.
But no matter how friendly to women's psychology the workplace has become, there's only so much that can be done. These cooperative super-organisms which make up the public sphere can't exist without hierarchy, and can't exist while prioritising the comfort and preferences and sensibilities of every individual at all levels. In other words, it will always suit male psychology far more than it does female, and women will always feel somewhat alienated in such an environment. So you get all these knee-jerk narratives which I think resonate with a lot of women on some level about how the public sphere and its institutions are unfriendly to women. However, they get the cause wrong.
All these things that accompanied industrialisation and modernity massively contributed to the rise of feminism. The feminist preoccupation with women's representation itself could be an ill-conceived attempt at replacing the social status and elevated moral standing that used to accrue to women for performing their roles in the private sphere with formal authority in the public sphere, and it might be ultimately why they attempt to engineer equal outcomes for women in the public sphere in the face of all evidence pointing to the fact that it is simply unworkable. Though of course they won't frame it that way, they'll point to "workplace gender bias against women" (the widespread existence of which, for the most part, I think is questionable and contested at best) in order to justify their attempts at social engineering in order to force parity in public life.
Once feminism and feminist ideas about the "patriarchy" and man-as-enemy became entrenched, the whole thing ended up feeding itself. While it claimed to be a radical, revolutionary ideology, its success was precisely because it capitalised on and reinforced very old perceptions of men as agents with a responsibility to channel their agency towards protecting and providing for women, and women as non-agentic victims who are the appropriate recipients of this protection and provision. Fundamentally, feminism is nothing new, and the main difference I see that exists is its extremely antagonistic attitude towards men and its portrayal of gender relations as being a conflict (well, and its insistence that women occupy the same sphere as men). Many generations have at this point grown up being invested in feminism, and there are plenty of feminist academics and activists who have made the entire thing their livelihoods.
As to the reason why I am not sympathetic to 2, it's because I think any claims about any historical female lack of power (and by extension, female lack of power in other similarly traditional third world societies) are incorrect and simply appeal to perceptions of potentially dangerous, agentic men and non-agentic women. Analogising it to class is a false equivalence because women have never been viewed by men like the underclass was viewed by the nobility. For an upper-class person, their entire social milieu and family are likely upper-class as well, whereas men have wives, sisters and daughters and have incentives to want them to do well. There's also all sorts of evidence pointing towards the idea that people generally (yes, including men) have a preference for protecting women and view them more positively than men which is simply not the case when it comes to other social distinctions like class or race, and there's lots and lots of evidence of traditional social norms and practices that clearly contradict the "male oppression of women" hypothesis. And that perspective is incoherent too - how is it that feminism is such a dominant ideology now if under traditionalism men were so tyrannical and women were so powerless? Men just thought "you know, we should stop doing this 'oppression of women' thing we've done for centuries on end now in virtually every society and never once questioned before?"
I don't hold the opinion that even polygyny reflects male privilege and female oppression. I don't think polygyny has to reflect control and coercion of women and there's evidence against that prevailing view, but even if we assume that that is what it is for the sake of argument the fact is that anything that controls female reproduction necessarily also controls male reproduction. Every polygynous marriage results in a man (or multiple men) being forced into reproductive oblivion and no hope of partnership (especially in these societies with strict premarital and extramarital sex taboos), and the only way you won't end up with a society full of incels is a society where a good portion of the men are dead. This is actually a big deficit of polygamous societies stability-wise - it's not good to have a huge amount of men disconnected from society and family.
There's so much more to say (I can explain and source my arguments more rigorously than I have here) but I don't want this comment to branch into a two-parter.
The distinction is fairly simple to me. In the case of science and technology being run into the ground, these minorities and women who do not obtain these positions are no worse off than your average white man.
In the case of polygyny, I would actually argue that this results in lower-class men's position being worse than women's - being the second or third wife of a powerful man does confer certain benefits that make the position preferable to having no partner at all. Polygyny simply results in a very severe reproductive skew among men that doesn't exist among women: if there is a subgroup of men enjoying the reproductive benefits that polygyny allows them to have, the remainder of men will reproduce less than even the women under polygyny.
This is not the case when a certain sex or race can monopolise positions. However, I will grant that in the case of sex the inherent inseparability of men and women makes things more complicated, namely, the sharing of resources between men and women when they pair up is a pretty big equaliser. That being said, fast-tracking women into high-status positions men are barred from will likely wreak havoc on male-female pairings in the first place due to a female tendency to look to partners of higher status than themselves (so what these DEI programs are doing is essentially making it so that almost all men will be far below her standards, which is going to have wide-ranging effects). And there's also the fact that a lot of these positions are inherently more suited to male preferences than female which makes such extreme DEI programs for women quite a maladaptive way of doing things. So I do think these hypothetical sex-based DEI programs are basically How To Make Everyone Unhappy: A Guide.
I'll also take this opportunity to elaborate on my other statement by providing some challenges of the common idea that polygyny is enforced merely by successful men and that it is against the interests of the women (thus its existence reflects female control by successful men). It's commonly posited that polygyny can definitely be chosen by women when a given female’s position is enhanced by becoming the second mate of a resource-rich and already paired male, rather than the sole mate of a resource-poor unpaired male.
In their paper "Why Monogamy?" Kanazawa and Still propose a female power theory of marriage practices, hypothesising that polygyny arises when women have more power in a society with high inequalities of wealth among men. Using data obtained from political science and sociology indexes, they demonstrated that societies with more resource inequality among men were more polygynous. Additionally, they found that, controlling for economic development and sex ratio, when there is greater resource equality among men, societies with more female power and choice have more monogamy; but when there are greater resource inequalities, higher levels of female power are accompanied by higher levels of polygyny. Accordingly, the incidence of polygyny may indicate female choice rather than male choice. "These findings are consistent with our prediction that women choose to marry polygynously or monogamously according to which choice benefits them or their offspring".
https://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/SF1999.pdf
Again, none of this is to say that polygyny is a sustainable model for a society to operate by in the long run - sexual egalitarianism among males carries the benefit of increased male-male tolerance. But I fundamentally disagree with the automatic framing of polygynous societies as necessarily reflecting male coercion and control, or that it actually serves the interests of men in general.
EDIT: added more thoughts, cut out some long-winded bits
You would think that the ban on widow remarriage in such societies also disadvantages men
As far as I know there is currently no legal ban on widow remarriage in India at the moment. This is not a particularly new development either - the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act 1856 is the early piece of legislation that granted widows the legal ability to remarry, and more current laws such as the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 do not prevent widows from remarrying (rather, it simply provides that a marriage may be solemnised between any two Hindus as long as neither party has a spouse living at the time of the marriage). The article you linked is talking more about the social stigma that gets attached to widows in very staunchly conservative parts of the country than anything else.
If we were to talk about the current Indian laws, I think there's actually an argument that the laws are very favourable to women in quite a few ways, especially considering the fact that preferential treatment of women is explicitly allowed in the equality provisions of the Indian constitution. In a section dictating that the State shall not discriminate based on demography, it's followed up with a bunch of caveats, including "(3) Nothing in this article shall prevent the State from making any special provision for women and children."
and yet it is always the widows who seem to do worse.
Unless you do a proper comparison as to who's "doing worse", I don't quite see how this has been proven. The article does speak about the plight of shunned Hindu widows, but it does not provide any such comparison, nor does it attempt to.
I do think we don't realise how heavily Western values were influenced by Christianity, especially by the honour paid to the Virgin Mary. This slowly changed attitudes to women, to marriage, to sexuality, to a lot of things.
This is a common view I see expressed - that the Western world is unique in its treatment of women, even historically - and I am a bit doubtful about it. I've noticed that women are simply assumed to be worse off in the third world with no real substantiation - this is not to say that everything is great for women in these societies, but there's little acknowledgement of the corresponding male issues that exist in them.
In countries such as Afghanistan, there is a practice such as bacha bazi, which translates as 'boy play'. It is on the surface a harmless form of entertainment - young boys dancing for the entertainment of their elders. The boys are trained as dancers, dressed as girls and made to perform to groups of men. Then the boys are taken to hotel rooms where they can be sexually abused. And despite the US military knowing that many of their Afghan allies were involved in the practice of bacha bazi, they continued providing aid to these units.
Then there's things like Boko Haram in Nigeria. People know them for kidnapping the Chibok girls. What people don't know is that Boko Haram went from village to village kidnapping thousands of boys. They not only kidnapped boys, but they killed them too (in many of their attacks, they seem to have specifically targeted men and boys and exempted the women and girls). Here are some links about that. Source 1, source 2, source 3, source 4.
A report by Oxfam in August 2016 noted that thousands of men and boys were killed by the terrorist group Boko Haram in north-eastern Nigeria. In an Oxfam protection survey with communities affected by violence, people reported 41% more killings of men and boys by Boko Haram than of women and girls; and the number is even higher among adults, with 77% more men killed than women.
What the mainstream goes nuts over, though, is the kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls. This despite the fact that Boko Haram were not initially intending to kidnap the girls - the girls were not even the actual target of the raid, and yet these girls being kidnapped was the event that galvanised the international community to start paying attention, as well as offering equipment, intelligence, resources and manpower to "bring back the girls" and deal with Boko Haram.
So let's just say I always regard it as a bit dubious whenever the spectre of misogyny and unique female hardship in third-world countries is raised due to the selectivity of the attention applied to the third world. This is a very good counter-narrative article on women in the third world and media bias (actually, it's a chapter in a book by Tim Goldich, published as an article), which sums up my views on this pretty well:
"You can go to a brutal place, catalogue only the brutality toward women, and on that basis conclude that women are the victims, but if you don’t research conditions for men, if you don’t compare the female victimization against male victimization, your conclusion is logically bankrupt."
Don't get me wrong: I am not trying to argue who has it worse or better. I'm trying to explain why as a result of all of this, I've come to see most takes on gender relations in the third world as the presentation of half-truths at best.
This is my position too - kingmaking based on factors that are external to the game itself is definitely crossing a line, but there seems to be a substantial amount of people I see who are clearly just very opposed to any form of kingmaking. I happen to think this set of restrictions is not implementable in practice.
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