problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
This article has quite a blatant and succinct description of critical theory and its aim.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02691728.2013.782588
"Critical theory rejects as naïve the premise that natural science is a force only for the good, and strongly opposes the positivist separation of fact and value. This opposition leads to a rejection of the positivist conception of science as a mere mirror image of reality, as broken down into elementary observational facts, captured in “protocol sentences” and finally summarised in inductive generalisations expressing regularities in the phenomena. Instead, critical theory advocates a “dialectical” notion of truth, of reality and of social science, with roots in Hegelian metaphysics as mediated by Marx. According to this conception, some of the ostensible “facts” that would be recorded in a purely positivist (i.e. traditional) social science would not be ultimately real but would be mere reifications, anachronistic and repressive aspects of social reality that would call for elimination through political praxis rather than for scientific recording."
"The aim of critical theory is hence not faithful description and inductive generalisation of data, but to be part of, or guide for, a praxis that will serve to eliminate the repressive aspects of social reality. Hence, the truth test is not observational verification, but evidence of the power to inspire successful practice."
Critical theory is not only indistinguishable from praxis (being a framework meant to inspire activism), it also basically endorses lying as long as it results in things which are conceptualised as good under the worldview. Truth has nothing to do with what can be provably verified, truth is anything which will inspire people to become activists for their hypothetical utopia. Rather than basing their goals on facts, the goals come first and said goals subsequently dictate what's true and what's not.
At this point, I've come to find proclamations about the imminent death of wokeness somewhat naive and premature. These types of predictions have been made almost continuously ever since the Culture War was a thing, and none of them have been borne out yet. I'm unsure if it's even just temporarily receding at the moment, let alone truly going away - the small anti-woke victories used to support the claim that the mainstream is finally beginning to abandon that belief system are usually quite narrow and are often counteracted by increases in wokeness elsewhere, and to interpret that as a general de-wokening of society one needs to ignore the instances where things have either stayed stagnant or have gotten much worse.
I understand the attraction of believing that sanity will prevail, and I would love if wokeness was actually waning. But I can't see how that's happening in any material way, since a huge amount of institutions are still firmly captured by that ideology and staffed by their acolytes (and they are all firmly committed to Doing Better). It's going to take a lot more than NFL helmet decals to make me believe that it's disappearing.
You're not wrong, it's certainly contributed a good bit to the awokening of our institutions. Here's an article called "Did Women In Academia Cause Wokeness?" which is pretty related to what you said, and which I would recommend perusing.
https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/did-women-in-academia-cause-wokeness
The author notes that women are disproportionately represented in grievance studies. Among the humanities, the subject with the highest proportion of women receiving bachelor's degrees and doctoral degrees is "Ethnic, Gender and Cultural Studies" (basically grievance studies).
Then they do a gender comparison of opinions in two fields: anthropology and sociology.
"Compared to men, women were more likely to say that “Sociology should be both a scientific and moral enterprise”, and that “Sociology should analyze and transcend oppression”. They were less likely to say that “More political conservatives would benefit discipline”, and that “Advocacy and research should be separate for objectivity”."
"What about anthropology? The next table shows the proportion of male versus female anthropologists (from a sample of 301) who agreed and disagreed with various items. Compared to men, women were more likely to say that “Science is just one way of knowing”, and that “Postmodern theories have made important contribution”. They were less likely to say that “Field is undermined by antiscientific attitudes”, and that “Advocacy and fieldwork kept separate for objectivity”."
"Finally, there is the evidence supplied by Eric Kaufmann in his mammoth report for the CSPI. Kaufmann compiled data from several different surveys of graduate students and academics. He found that women were more likely to support dismissal campaigns, more likely to discriminate against conservatives, and more likely to support diversity quotas for reading lists. Overall, they had significantly more left-wing views. To quote Kaufmann: “if the share of women rises, we should expect the balance of internal opinion to move in the direction of emotional safety over academic freedom.”"
In other words, female academics are less likely than male academics to place importance on objectivity and dispassionate inquiry, and more likely to place importance on the ability of their work to be used as a vehicle to deliver their political propaganda. They are disproportionately represented in woke disciplines. And women in general are also less pro-free speech and more pro-censorship. As a result, the author considers women's influx into academia to be a factor that led to increasing wokeness.
I ritually repeat words to myself under my breath in order to reassure myself when I'm stressed out/uncertain about stuff. As ridiculous as it is, it feels to my brain as if repeatedly verbally stamping out uncertainties makes it go away.
Standpoint theory is a ridiculous concept. It's a circular argument wherein anyone who claims that they're part of an oppressed group can state that everyone should accept their claims because they have knowledge that no one does. The entire house of cards is fundamentally based on the following horror: "I'm oppressed and you're privileged, thus I have a superior knowledge and you have no such standing. How can I be sure that I suffer the oppression which confers upon me this epistemic advantage in the first place? Because I'm oppressed and you're privileged". If I didn't know better, I'd say that the people who use this have no sense of logic. Unfortunately, knowing what I know it reads to me like activism in its most shameless and unprincipled form.
I feel very much the same way with psychological pain points. Claiming offence over something trivial when none was intended, then demanding that everyone you meet must immediately adapt themselves to kowtow to your sensibilities, is a dysfunctional way of approaching social interaction. It's even worse when you're asking people to rework their approaches to fundamental things that are based in reality like gender binaries - an approach that works with all but a tiny percentage of the population, I might add. It smacks of sociopathy. It's a way to assert power over people and get them to assent to things that are prima facie ridiculous for the sake of your comfort. Supposedly, acknowledging any worldview other than the one you want will make you feel unsafe and like you don't have the right to exist, and so anyone who speaks to you must repeatedly spit in the face of their own sense of reality for the sake of prioritising your comfort before their own.
The funny thing is that I check off many boxes in the Intersectional Stack (a model which is based on flawed premises most or all of which I reject), so progressives usually can't use the "You're just privileged and don't have empathy" shit against me since that would contradict the framework which they operate off.
How the fuck did no one think to ask 'could it be that women simply do not aspire to leadership roles?' This strikes me as a real face palm moment for feminists. At the outset, it's a valid criticism that the research just hadn't been done prior.
It is not a valid criticism that the research hasn't been done prior, since there has repeatedly been research into women and leadership roles which has found little to no evidence of bias against women. This is in politics, not management roles, but it's very similar in focus.
The authors of the book "Sex as a Political Variable" compared the success rates of the men and women who were candidates in general elections for state legislatures in 1986, 1988, 1990, 1992, and 1994 and for the U.S. House, U.S. Senate and governor from 1972 to 1994. They find that "Women's success rates were extremely similar to men's over all the years covered in this study".
The book notes on page 85 that "Our research clearly shows that women do as well as men in general elections. It also shows that the reason there aren't more women in public office is that not many women have run. Women have made up a very small percentage of candidates in general elections, particularly at higher levels of office."
And no, it's not a face palm moment for feminists at all, since their refusal to accept female choice as an explanation is entirely wilful and informed by their ideology. My experience is that no matter how much you bring up these types of evidence to them, they repeatedly try to explain away these findings asserting that discrimination exists at other levels.
One of the arguments that I see levelled a lot is that female candidates are often treated worse than male candidates in the press and by the electorate, and the claim is that this differential treatment makes running for office more complex and complicated for women than men, even if it does not ultimately preclude their electoral success. However:
"Our examination of media coverage and voters’ evaluations of candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives reveals no systematic gender differences. The detailed content analysis of newspaper coverage during the 2010 midterms found not only that news outlets devoted a comparable number of stories to men and women running for office, but also that those articles looked the same. Male and female candidates were equally likely to receive mentions of their gender and they were associated with the same traits and issues. Our analysis of Cooperative Congressional Election Study data indicates that voters were just as unlikely as journalists to assess candidates in traditionally gendered terms. Instead, partisanship, ideology, incumbency, and news coverage—long identified as important forces in congressional elections—shaped voters’ evaluations. Candidate sex did not. These conclusions emerged from a study of unusual depth and scope, encompassing media and survey data from nearly 350 House districts involving more than 100 female and 500 male candidates."
The authors of the study claim that these results conflict with much of the existing literature, but in fact there is a fairly large body of research which has been largely ignored that is in line with the findings of this study.
Full text: https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1017/S1537592714003156
Another claim which gets made repeatedly is that women are not encouraged enough into political office and that this is the reason why they run less. Of course, this is an argument that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Is men being more encouraged to run for political office causing men to be more interested in running than women? Or is men demonstrating a greater interest in running causing them to be encouraged to do it more? I think the latter is more likely - people typically don't encourage others to pursue a certain career if they don't seem cut out for the role or express disinterest in running in the first place.
The assumptions regarding the direction of the causation seem to be based on absolutely nothing, and the more you delve into the topic and refute their claims about discrimination against women, the more they appeal to a Patriarchy Of The Gaps: regardless of how much evidence there is of the gap being caused by female choices, there is still something lurking in the social fabric causing oppression.
The fact that feminists have neglected female-choice explanations for the disparity is no accident at all, it is ideologically-driven. They're invested in a narrative of female oppression, and contradictory results that suggest oppression is nowhere to be found don't matter to them.
I have the same problem.
The issue is largely compulsive listening, I think. The more you listen to music, the more it feels weird to go without it for any extended period of time, so you keep recycling the songs you like over and over again until they ultimately lose their lustre. For me, the problem also extends to songs I haven't listened to before. If I've already listened to songs of the same genre extensively I know roughly what to expect from them, and even on first listen the emotional impact is already diminished.
Granted, in my case it could be possible that anhedonia might be partly contributing to it, but I don't think that's fully the issue with me either. Fatigue-by-overexposure is a very annoying thing that I suspect is only really possible to overcome through abstaining.
Yep, the problem is very pronounced in the simpler genres for sure, which incidentally is the type of music that seems to have most widespread marketability. I think initial accessibility often comes with tradeoffs when it comes to how much you can listen to that type of music without getting bored.
I think I've fundamentally ruined most genres for myself, having learned the conventions of all the genres I like, and a lot of the artists and songs that have any staying power for me are fairly odd and veer towards being quite maximalist in style. Stuff that's initially more difficult to get used to. I think about 50% of what I hear would be considered unlistenable by most people I know, who don't seem to acclimatise to (and get bored of) genres as fast as I do.
I think men are violent by only insofar that men are agentic. I don't think it's really possible to separate men's propensity towards violence from their tendency to exert agency in other ways and other parts of societies.
Related to this, I always find it a bit surprising how we've gendered violence of all kinds as male (even types of violence which aren't primarily male-perpetrated, like domestic violence) but almost completely fail to acknowledge that most bystanders who go out of their way to risk their lives for somebody else or expose themselves to danger to protect somebody else are also men.
Even in non-dangerous scenarios, you can see greater male helping behaviours in a public context.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2786599
"One hundred forty-five experimenters "accidentally" dropped a handful of pencils or coins on 1,497 occasions before a total of 4,813 bystanders in elevators in Columbus, Ohio; Seattle, Washington; and Atlanta, Georgia. In picking up the objects, females received more help than did males, males gave more help than did females, and these differences were greatly exaggerated in Atlanta."
In addition, this study does a review of the literature surrounding gender and helping.
"Many previous studies have found that males are more likely to give help than females and/or that females are more likely to receive it than males (e.g., Bryan and Test, 1967; Ehlert et al., 1973; Gaertner and Bickman, 1971; Graf and Riddle, 1972; Latane, 1970; Morgan, 1973; Penner et al., 1973; Piliavin and Piliavin, 1972; Piliavin et al., 1969; Pomazal and Clore, 1973; Simon, 1971; Werner, 1974; Wispe and Freshly, 1971). A few studies have found no main effects due to sex (Gruder and Cook, 1971; Thayer, 1973) and in one case males were more likely to receive help (Emswiller et al., 1971). Two studies have found cross-sex helping to be more frequent than same-sex helping (Bickman, 1974; Thayer, 1973), one has found same-sex helping to be more common (Werner, 1974), and most have found no difference. Although the relation of sex to helping may depend on the specific type of help requested, it is clear that in the preponderance of settings tested to date, males help more than females, and females receive more help than males."
Heroism is likely mostly engaged in by men. As this article notes:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00369/full
"To this end, we investigated reactions to newsworthy, exceptional social roles that are often dealt with in the media: hero and murderer. Both social roles attract much attention and have similarly low percentages of women (ca. 10–20%). In the US, only 9% of the recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal for saving others are women, and in Germany only about 20% of similar medals are awarded to women. This may be because there are fewer women in professions such as firefighters, soldiers, or police officers—jobs involving dangerous situations where jobholders can act heroically."
I would differ from the authors here. Fewer women in dangerous professions is likely not a very big reason for the difference in heroism found between men and women, because the Carnegie Hero Medal excludes from awards of persons such as firefighters whose duties in their regular vocations require heroism, unless the act of heroism is truly outstanding. "The act of rescue must be one in which no full measure of responsibility exists between the rescuer and the rescued, which precludes those whose vocational duties require them to perform such acts, unless the rescues are clearly beyond the line of duty; and members of the immediate family, except in cases of outstanding heroism where the rescuer loses his or her life or is severely injured."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Hero_Fund
This article in Men's Health notes "nine out of every 10 Carnegie heroes have been men".
"Heroic rescuing behaviour is a male-typical trait in humans ... This study looked at news archives of local papers in the UK in order to discover what kind of characteristics rescuers possess. It was found that males were highly more likely to rescue than females were".
When it comes to men there's very much a tendency to focus on the negative manifestations of public sphere agency and ignore all the positive ways it manifests. I think in the past we had a more balanced viewpoint surrounding it, and there's been a very motivated attempt to stamp out positive perceptions of men due to an idea that these perceptions are problematic. It's very hard for me not to see the slow erasure of positive male qualities from the public discourse as being intentional.
Men are expected to commit violence on behalf of women, and to perform on behalf of women.
And you can easily see plenty of instances throughout history of women weaponising that social expectation and openly cajoling men into performing violence against others, as I mentioned in a previous comment of mine. But violence by proxy perpetrated by women is, again, largely a topic that is taboo in the public discourse.
Most of what immediately comes to mind at the moment is strictly speaking more disco than funk-oriented, but the two genres are very related and you did say "everything funky that's not James Brown", so...
Daft Punk - Give Life Back To Music
Bill Withers - Just The Two Of Us
I didn't include it because I wanted to stick a little closer to the prompt and that track's straight up electronic/acid house, but yes, it's absolutely fantastic (and is one of the first things that comes to mind when I think "Daft Punk" too).
Regarding Daft Punk in general I'd say anyone who isn't already familiar with their album Discovery should also check out Aerodynamic and Face to Face. Oh, and if anyone has the time, their Alive 2007 live show is very worth a listen (for those who can't take audience sound, here's a pretty good remake of their live show without it).
I feel incredibly stupid for suggesting this, but Lizzo - Boys actually fits the bill very well.
EDIT: And honestly, so does The Twelve Days of Christmas.
There's also the obvious issue that a generalised program of eugenics might have negative effects on the already poor fertility rate, since if you're using negative eugenics methods you're excluding a large proportion of people of reproductive age from having children.
I'll be controversial and play transhumanist for a second. Maybe all of this is more evidence in favour of research into genetic modification. With genetic modification there is no such issue, and you're given a very fine level of control over the traits you want. You could attempt to optimise for a constellation of pro-social traits, and to the extent that there are tradeoffs a desirable balance between them could be struck (of course there's some risk of catastrophic failure in the near term due to a lack of knowledge of the potential downstream effects of any gene edit, but over the long run it is a net good, and an inevitability).
A common fear I see expressed is that it would lead to a class divide between those who can afford modification and those who can't, thus exacerbating intergenerational poverty, but I see no reason why the cost of such a program wouldn't be subsidised by the state. It's obviously a net benefit to have every member of your society as functional as possible, and due to continuing developments in biotechnology the next generation would be more productive than the last (creating exponential growth and possibly resulting in an intelligence "explosion" of sorts). Arms races between different states might also fuel such an explosion.
There's a question if what would come out of the other end would be particularly human, of course. On one hand, the idea inspires a very instinctual disgust in many people. On the other, I can't imagine an outcome where humans remain the same indefinitely - it's not as if evolution has suddenly stopped applying to humans in the absence of modification. I say shaping ourselves directly is a better outcome than simply being acted upon by the impartial forces of natural selection, genetic drift and gene flow, and using modification just to keep us exactly where we are now is inherently unstable due to the fact that you can't universally enforce a rule that prevents your competition from "elevating" themselves relative to you. Any society that tries to keep themselves baseline would be assimilated into one that embraced transhumanism.
I don't see a net benefit to give your janitors, for example, high-end mental enhancements (other than pruning "boredom" and "ambition" nodes).
I'd say that retoolability counts as a benefit. Operating off a strict genetic caste system based on assigned social roles is unsustainable since it requires you to somehow be able to reliably forecast your future needs (like what ratio of janitors:scientists you would need in X amount of years). If and when skilled roles unexpectedly open up that need to be filled, it'll be very difficult for anyone else to fill them.
The only way this remotely works is if it's possible for forms of mental enhancement (genetic or mechanical/technological) to be applied to service-class mods later in life so they can operate at the same level as those modified as embryos, allowing a society to react to circumstances as they arise. But even if that can happen, radically changing someone at a later stage of development would likely inherently be more difficult and time-consuming than embryo editing and introduces a huge amount of unnecessary lag and unwieldiness into the system. The simpler and more optimal solution would be to make it so that people can pliably adapt to a range of jobs from the outset.
Also, there's automation (which likely would develop in tandem with other technologies like genetic modification), and that would make a lot of "janitor"-type jobs irrelevant in the first place.
EDIT: added more
Yeah, the romanticisation of natives is incredibly blatant. I've seen people genuinely argue that the reason as to why Native Americans were conquered was not because Natives had less technology, it's not because their societies and social structures were less developed and less cohesive on a large scale, it was because they had no conception of kicking other people off their land unlike the evil Europeans!
The idea that the Europeans came in and "stole" land that belonged to any one tribe is ridiculous. Tribes were in constant conflict with other tribes, and the question of who "owned" the land was often in a constant state of flux. The Black Hills region is seen to have been taken unfairly from the Lakota by the US, but that region was actually taken by the Lakota from the Cheyenne, and the Cheyenne took that land from the Kiowa. And during all this conflict, it's likely that a lot of groups would've just disappeared and been outcompeted.
And of course, many atrocities were committed. The Iroquois tortured prisoners of war and famously practiced cannibalism. Not only is this documented multiple times in the historical record, there's also archaeological evidence showing evidence in favour of this. Mayans were thought to be peaceful up until it was found that they were routinely enslaving and subjugating their neighbours. In the central Mesa Verde of Southwest Colorado, "90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms."
You have archeological sites like the Crow Creek site, wherein they found the remains of at least 486 people killed during a massacre during the mid-14th century AD between Native American groups. "Most of these remains showed signs of ritual mutilation, particularly scalping. Other examples were tongues being removed, teeth broken, beheading, hands and feet being cut off, and other forms of dismemberment."
In my opinion the very idea of "native" itself is very arbitrary and inaccurate, used primarily as a political bludgeon to try and imply that those groups designated as native have a moral right to the land that the "settlers" don't. It ignores that no group is really "native" to any patch of soil at this point and that pretty much every piece of land has likely been taken from someone else.
So I was talking with a leftist friend recently about race-swapping in movies, as well as the general topic of racism, and we clashed on a bunch of things. I'm not sure how well I did, and I'm worried I capitulated too much - I usually take more moderate stances when speaking with leftists IRL than I do online, since I'm usually trying to persuade and shift them towards a point of view which is more critical to wokeness and the usual mainstream narrative.
If you go "Your entire worldview and perception is wrong, here's the evidence" from the outset all you're going to have is an opponent that won't listen to you. It's a fine line you have to tread and I'm still finding my feet as to how to navigate real-time debate. He did capitulate to quite a good portion of my points too (or at least seemed to, from my perspective), but again it's hard to know how hard to push your ideas. There's also the fact that they've got a lot of "common wisdom" on their side which is a big boon in conversations because they can simply make statements and disproving big claims in real-time communication can't be effectively done, as opposed to online where you can take the time to organise things and fully make your case against certain common preconceptions.
What are your methods of debating with people in the real world, and how do you know how hard to press your point?
Yeah, it's maybe not exactly what the OP was looking for (hardly any Boards of Canada tracks can be said to have anything resembling coherent "lyrics", apart from maybe In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country and 1969). That being said, Aquarius is a fucking fantastic track anyway so I heavily endorse its inclusion.
And along those lines, Gyroscope is another Boards of Canada track featuring a list of numbers.
I've been doing some research into in-group bias and race and have been finding some fairly interesting results.
Let's start with a well known piece of evidence which is often used in the culture war. This article uses ANES 2018 Pilot Survey data regarding racial in-group and out-group biases, and shows the average differences in feelings of warmth (measured along a 0-100 scale) toward whites vs. nonwhites (i.e., Asians, Hispanics, and blacks) across different subgroups.
Here is the first relevant graph from the article. According to the article, the only subgroup that has an outgroup bias is white liberals (having an outgroup bias of 13 points). Even among white non-liberals, their in-group bias (11.62) is less than that of your average black person (15.58), Hispanic (12.83), or Asian person (13.84). Granted, the differences there can be argued to be pretty marginal in size, but if you take into account the outgroup bias of white liberals it would almost certainly make it so that whites' in-group biases are quite a bit lower than that of other races, and it flies in the face of the idea that whites are any more tribal than other races.
Here is the second relevant graph showing the biases of all the subgroups of whites. Those who are "very liberal" have an outgroup bias of a whopping 19.45 points, while liberals have an outgroup bias of 8.56 points. Moderates have an in-group bias of 9.42 points, conservatives have an in-group bias of 11.51 points, and very conservative whites have an in-group bias of 15.62 points. Very conservative whites have an in-group bias that's only as strong as that of your average black person.
This finding of an average lower in-group bias among whites isn't just an isolated anomaly. On L.J Zigerell's blog, he presents data reporting the mean ratings of races from Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians of Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, using data from the preliminary release of the 2020 ANES Time Series Study.
You can easily see from the graph in the blog post that whites' mean ratings of whites are not much different from their ratings of blacks, Hispanics and Asians. For all the other racial groups, their mean ratings of their own races are far higher than any other race. Every racial group other than whites also all rank whites the lowest out of the four racial groups.
Additionally, in another blog post he presents data from the 2020 ANES Social Media Study detailing racial feeling thermometer responses. Respondents ranked each race based on how warm, cold or neutral they were towards them, and the findings are in line with the previous results.
In the blog post, this graph compares the race evaluations of white respondents with black respondents. Among whites, the percentage of those giving warm ratings towards whites is only very slightly higher than the percentage of those giving warm ratings towards blacks and Asians. Among blacks, the percentage of those who give warm ratings towards whites (and Asians) is markedly lower than the percentage of those giving warm ratings towards blacks. This graph compares the race evaluations of white born again Trump voters with black respondents, and surprisingly, the pattern of whites being less biased in favour of their own race than blacks still holds (albeit less strongly).
The relative lack of white in-group bias found might seem surprising, but it is not only found in ANES - it is also in line with some other work. This study "reports results from a new analysis of 17 survey experiment studies that permitted assessment of racial discrimination, drawn from the archives of the Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences. For White participants (n=10 435), pooled results did not detect a net discrimination for or against White targets, but, for Black participants (n=2781), pooled results indicated the presence of a small-to-moderate net discrimination in favor of Black targets; inferences were the same for the subset of studies that had a political candidate target and the subset of studies that had a worker or job applicant target."
Anecdotally, I can say that these results do jive very well with my own experience - whites are as a group less likely to place primacy on race and are also less likely to classify themselves as a group with united interests.
Okay, I want to focus on this part, since it undergirds the rest of your comment.
It's difficult for me to think of a lower status take than consternation about, say, the casting decisions in the Little Mermaid remake. There's a few layers to that -- the content is for children, and these live action remakes are kind of shameful to have any investment in even before getting to the politics that is easily read as a kind of adolescent, race-fragile myopia.
One of the primary concerns of the left regarding representation etc is about programming tailored to children as well as the messages it purportedly ends up conveying (which is part of why race-swapping is happening in kid-tailored IPs as well), so if such a leftist were to go on to subsequently believe that being concerned with children's content reads as shameful it would come off as at least somewhat hypocritical to me. It is entirely possible to be invested in a piece of entertainment solely on a "meta-level", so to speak.
With regards to "adolescent, race-fragile myopia", it might be easy for people to read it as being that. In most cases, I think it would be entirely a strawman of the position based on wilful misunderstanding, but anyone certainly can form whatever ideas of their opponent they want independent of the things said opponent actually expressed (sadly a common occurrence in the current climate). That doesn't mean discussion about woke ideology being forced into every production under the sun is inherently unwarranted.
Unless I've misunderstood, this doesn't seem to be a criticism of the take itself so much as it is "if a position can be argued not to look good on X level, you shouldn't even try to argue it at all" which is an idea that doesn't resonate with me whatsoever and is very disconnected from my method of approaching things. It's a focus on aesthetics over all else, which is a consideration that in my view shouldn't inform anyone's decisions as to whether to argue something or not. If there's a valid argument there, it should be promoted regardless of how dignified the take looks on an instinctual, knee-jerk level, and the challenge is getting people to see your point of view.
A bit like how a strong large man needs to learn to control himself because he can inflict real damage, while a small woman lashing out is seen as harmless and maybe even endearing and cute/funny.
I wouldn't attribute the entirety of the gender effect found to this factor quite so quickly. Respondents condemn violence by men against women more harshly than violence by women against men, and this disparity persists even after controlling for perceptions of greater injury of women. "Our findings suggest that real or perceived differences in injury or potential for injury provide some explanation behind differences in attitudes regarding domestic violence across perpetrator or victim gender, but it does not fully explain this difference. Rather, across all three measures, respondents evaluated violence by men against women more seriously than they did violence by women against men. We find that third parties (a) rated men’s violence as more injurious, (b) were more likely to label men’s violence as a crime even after controlling for injury rating, and (c) deemed men’s violence as more worthy of police contact, controlling for injury rating and criminal labeling."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15564886.2017.1340383
When it comes to male/female relations, a good amount of the prioritisation of female safety (and the cultural norms regulating male behaviour around them) are likely influenced by factors unrelated to a simple evaluation of women as being physically at risk. I believe we view harm done to women as inherently objectionable on a more fundamental level and reflects an underlying "empathy gap" of sorts.
For example, this paper notes that "Gender differences were investigated in the experience of empathic sadness towards same- versus other-sex targets. ... In both studies, female adolescents reported more empathic sadness than did male adolescents. Female targets also received more affective empathy than did male targets, and, more importantly, gender differences were observed in same-sex versus other-sex affective empathy." They also note that the finding of female targets receiving more empathy, especially from male adolescents, is consistent with previous research.
Meaning, when non-whites do some in-group biased thing, whites may think it cannot have any consequence, it's just like a lion cub doing some cute roaring. But when whites get into that style of thinking it leads to very professionally and industrially-scientifically orchestrated and engineered genocide, like the Holocaust.
I actually do believe that this could be true to some extent regarding race (which is evident whenever white liberals talk repeatedly about prejudice + power as a reason why only whites can be racist). That really doesn't change the fact that the tolerance for prejudice when non-whites do it is a benefit offered to non-whites.
By acting as a powerless victim that is only ever downtrodden by society, it is possible to gain help and provision on an individual level, as well as to game society to get financial, professional and social benefits, which is why you see so many non-whites and women and [insert other protected class here] capitalising on the very social justice narratives that paint them as having little power. It's notable that all of those complaining about being "looked down upon" continue reinforcing that narrative themselves through repeated claims of victimhood instead of asserting one's agency.
I am not of the opinion that it is inherently beneficial to be seen as powerful, or that it is a perception that you necessarily want (which is an assumption inherent in the comment you wrote). In all honesty, I think the less power you can convince people that you have, the more benefits you can actually milk from society at large. There are a huge amount of incentives to seek out a perception of yourself as weak, and in fact that is indeed what you see people willingly doing for themselves now - trying to attach the weak, abused victim role to themselves to exploit double standards and place greater responsibility on their out-group while dressing it all up in the guise of empowerment.
If it was truly so undesirable to be viewed in that way, you probably wouldn't be seeing the proliferation of these kinds of woke movements en masse.
Could this be linked to the Women are Wonderful effect?
There could definitely be some relation, the Women are Wonderful effect itself is a pretty substantiated finding after all (source 1, source 2 for proof) and it's plausible that it has an effect.
And I would agree that the mindset you've outlined ("well, he must have done something to deserve it") is very common.
Like all stereotypes, there is some truth in this and some falsity. It's true that almost all women are unconfrontational and need a lot of provocation to be violence. However, it's also true that almost all men are that way too! Only a small minority of men tend to be violent with little justification. But, as usual in relations between the sexes, minority groups seem to have a disproportionate impact on people's cognition.
Yeah I wouldn't say there's much merit to the stereotype at all. It's actually very possible to flip the argument in the other direction and state that since people are generally averse to hurting women in the first place, if they do so, there probably must be some reason why (note that I do not endorse the adoption of this attitude whatsoever, this is just an argument to show how easily this logic can be flipped on its head).
Regardless of whether behaviours that are protective of women are instinctual or sociocultural (as previously stated I lean heavily towards the former having at least some impact), the unwillingness to hurt women can't just be chalked up to being an artefact of socially desirable responding, since it is also verifiable in experimental, real-world contexts.
The article "Moral Chivalry: Gender and Harm Sensitivity Predict Costly Altruism" details a few small studies concerning the topic. Study 2 is probably the most interesting of the studies to me, because it moves out of the realm of the hypothetical and into an actual experimental situation where participants actually believed people were being hurt. They gave participants 20 dollars, and told them that at the end of the experiment the money they still had would be multiplied by ten-fold. However, they'd have to go through 20 trials where a person would be shocked, and during each trial they could opt to give up an amount of money in order to reduce the shock the target received. They were broadcasted videos of either a male target (Condition 1) or female target (Condition 2) responding to the shock, and the results were:
"During the PvG task, deciders interacting with a female target kept significantly less money and thus gave significantly lower shocks (n = 34; £8.76/£20, SD ± 5.0) than deciders interacting with a male target, n = 23; £12.54/£20, SD ± 3.9; independent samples t-test: t(55) = −3.16, p = .003, Cohen’s d = .82; Figure 2B. This replicates the findings from Studies 1A and 1B in the real domain and under a different class of moral challenge, illustrating that harm endorsement is attenuated for female targets." Note also that the videos broadcasted were prerated by an independent group to be matched across condition, such that both male and female targets elicited similar body and facial pain expressions.
Male robbers downright express a reluctance to target women. "Overall, the men in our sample tended not to target women, or, if they did, they did not admit it. Overwhelmingly, the cases discussed here involved men robbing men or men robbing male/female couples; in the latter case, the robbers focused their discussions on gaining the males 'compliance, not the females'. ... Mark described robbing two females under the influence of an alcohol/valium cocktail. In the interview, he expressed considerable shame for his actions: 'I robbed a girl as well so it makes it so much worse … I was heartbroken … I gutted her … I don’t do shit like that.’ The other male, Thomas, who robbed a lone female, also said that he was ashamed of having robbed a woman. In fact, he went out of his way to suggest that such activities were not typical of his modus operandi: ‘I never done anything like that before, that’s not really me …. I feel terrible that I robbed that woman so I don’t want to talk about it really … I am so ashamed of myself.’"
"A number of other men in our sample offered up explanations for why one should never rob women. In outlining how he chose targets, Mark2 interjected: 'You must be thinking I have no morals. I wouldn’t go out and rob an old person. I would look for a bloke …. It wouldn’t be right to be robbing women and little kids or anything like that.’ When asked if he had ever robbed a woman, John2 replied: 'Yeah, but not violently … generally I don’t want contact with women because I don’t like to be violent with them … I never hit a woman in my life. ’Then he expressed empathy with the potential female victim: ‘It’s just that if it was my mother or sister … it is all right to nick their bag, but not alright to hit them [women].’ Similar philosophies have been described by male street offenders in United States-based studies (e.g. Mullins 2006 ; Wright and Decker 1997)."
Additionally, this study surveyed a sample of 208 Israeli couples examining their tendencies to escalate aggression in eight hypothetical situations where they were provoked. What they found was: Men’s intended escalation to female partner aggression was lower than women’s escalation to male partner aggression. Men’s escalation to male stranger provocation was higher than women’s escalation to female stranger provocation. Men’s escalation to female stranger provocation was lower than women’s escalation to male stranger provocation.
In other words, men, if anything, are actually less willing to escalate aggression with women than women are with men. The results here are congruent with much domestic violence research where results of gender symmetry and often greater female perpetration are the norm in properly-conducted research.
It would help if I knew from your post what you mean by leftists and what your respective capitulations were. Sorry but since the move it seems a lot more common to see huddle-up posts against a "leftist" outgroup without clear definition of what that even means.
It means he falls on the political left, which is associated with a constellation of broadly predictable beliefs (for example: he's invested in race politics in the direction you'd expect, believing that racism is widespread and omnipresent and that there was a historical injustice perpetrated by whites that needs to be corrected for and which still needs to dictate our behaviour in the present). And I don't even mean this to be derogatory, it's just a shorthand so people here can generally understand his positions (and by extension mine) without needing much explaining.
Though they are definitely my out-group, "leftist" here isn't exactly meant to be an epithet, it's a label I've seen him repeatedly apply to himself. I'm not using it to mean "Bad People Who Believe Bad Things".
I'm quite aware that the studies I linked about explicit measures of racial bias are not the end of the story, it wasn't meant to be a comprehensive assessment of the literature. I simply wanted to post some interesting results most of which haven't attracted much mainstream attention (probably because "whites at the moment have less in-group bias than other races" contradicts the popular view). And I will say that a good portion of the experiments covered in my final link - which on the whole found no in-group biases among whites, but did find in-group biases among blacks - did not seem to directly ask people about their racial perceptions, instead many of them attempted to more covertly assess biases by manipulating characteristics of the target (e.g. showing a photograph of a black person instead of a white person, or using the name "Jamal" instead of "Greg").
In any case I think it's very possible to reconcile racial grouping-up behaviours with the findings I posted, since whites on aggregate still do have a slight in-group bias according to a good bunch of the data (albeit one that's quite a good bit smaller than that of other races, as Zach Goldberg demonstrates in his twitter thread here), and even assuming a complete lack of any white in-group bias the strong in-group biases found in non-whites could create the same outcome of racial self-segregation. Additionally, it should also be entertained that other attributes that happen to correlate with race such as cultural similarity could be what is driving the grouping-up behaviours.
I'd also add that many of the innate/unconscious bias studies on race certainly have their own problems. As an example, the innate bias measure which has garnered the most attention in the mainstream is the Implicit Association Test, or the IAT, and it has been used to demonstrate the existence of omnipresent implicit racism. It is based on differential response times to pairing a certain race with positively or negatively coded words and it is a very questionable measure at best. To start, here and here are articles with dozens of citations overviewing the plethora of problems with the IAT. There's a lot of evidence debunking it as a scientifically and psychometrically acceptable test, and the creators of the test themselves have been very inconsistent in their statements on the topic of whether the IAT can actually predict behaviour or not.
EDIT: added more
If anyone here plays board games regularly, what's your opinion on kingmaking? I'm aware there are a range of opinions on this, and this is a point of contention for many players out there.
Kingmaking, for the uninitiated, is basically a behaviour players can engage in during board games where after you fall behind the other players to the extent that you're effectively out of the game, you can throw the game in favour of the player you want to win. This is usually based on in-game grudges (someone absolutely screwed you over, so you'd rather they not win) and it regularly rears its head in social board games, one of the most common games I see it in being Settlers of Catan.
Personally, I am not against kingmaking. I think kingmaking, teaming, and all other related behaviours are inherent in social board games with more than two players and can't really be avoided (nor should it). A big part of any social game is about judging your adversaries' personalities and playing the players accordingly, and if you engage in aggressive behaviour early on and make enemies, there's clearly a risk that comes with it. You can't make it difficult for a player to win then expect them not to take their revenge. Additionally, strategically employing kingmaking and threats thereof can set a meta-rule for future games - if you screw me, I'll screw you back - which might make a player think twice about taking their chances to screw you in the future. The humans you're playing with are part of the game, and the relational dynamics are what make a lot of social games interesting in the first place.
It goes without saying that if the player still has a good chance of winning kingmaking would probably be a poor strategy, but I don't inherently have a problem with pursuing revenge in and of itself.
I'm reading Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom. From what I've read so far it argues that existential catastrophe is the default outcome of an intelligence explosion, and there's a huge focus on AI failures as well as potential methods of mitigating the danger by either containing or better aligning the AI with our values.
Less excitingly, I'm reading APRA's (the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority's) liquidity reporting standards.
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