voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
No bio...
User ID: 3622
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
7d ago
various DEI labor requirements
As far as I'm aware, most of these are (1) self-imposed by HR departments and not actual regulation and (2) falling out of favor. The regulation that I'm most aware of actually pisses everyone off, which is "Woman-owned businesses", where everyone just registers their wife as the proprietor of their business and simply acts as a hurdle for building more housing.
hate speech laws
I've not heard this specifically referred to as "woke" yet, because "hate speech laws" go back at least a century in the West, and "woke" only goes back to ~2012 at the earliest. Speech laws in general are abused by both leftwing and rightwing movements (in my personal opinion, I guess).
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
7d ago
This is actually worse because the woke are not a monolithic entity.
I mean I have to say thank you, because this is my point entirely throughout this entire thread.
Ask 40 contemporary social liberals what their top 10 concerns are and you'll get 400 different things that should be addressed.
I'm not saying this as some defense of the movement. If I'm being honest, I'm frustrated by that as well because I don't feel like there's meaningful progress to the things that I think matter most.
It's greatest "strength" is also it's greatest weakness.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
7d ago
Many movements don't have leaders, or if they do most of their own members probably couldn't identify them. Was GamerGate a movement? Tea Party? 99%ers? BLM? Are all of those words useless and should be dispensed with?
I mean, all of these are deeply different examples of movements that can't really be compared, apples-to-apples:
- GamerGate - grew out of relatively minor scandal, capitalized on a specific set of disillusioned individuals; may or may not have been significantly bankrolled and astroturfed by figures like Steve Bannon
- Tea Party - Anti-establishment movement within the Republican party, lots of younger blood; perhaps a knee-jerk reaction to Obama. Definitely had a lot of centralized planning and coordinated efforts, but paled in comparison to what the democrats were doing at the time and what Trump is doing now.
- 99%ers - response to a specific economic event, fizzled out as soon as the engine started running again
- BLM - initially a grassroots movement as a reaction to some very publicized injustice; later co-opted by a specific organization that seemed quite a bit like a grift, which probably contributed to it fizzling out.
The reason I bring those up is that I do judge those "movements" based on more than just "what they're about". The actual structure of the movement is just as important. That's why we care about grassroots movements more than ones bankrolled by PACs - we at least believe that the former represents the will of the electorate, where as the latter is just astroturfing.
It seems to be the consultants, focus groups, and corporate America that are guiding these decisions - not some National Wokism political action committee.
In other words, college-educated people.
Is the implication here that anyone with a college education is woke? I have a laundry list of counterexamples... My point is that profit-driven individuals and organizations probably overcalibrated to what they thought would sell to their target demographics, rather than some conspiratorial effort to inject woke ideology into our economy. I mean, the opposite probably happened in the 20th century where a certain concept of masculinity was sold to the masses, and we ended up with a John Wayne generation despite all evidence pointing to John Wayne being a pretty poor role model no matter your political tendencies.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
7d ago
Even so, my assessment is that above a certain threshold of "freeness", really existing free markets tend to do better than centralized or relatively unfree markets.
Agreed. Something something Boris Yeltsin visits an American grocery store.
Ideally, I think we should have the minimum number of regulations and laws necessary to prop up a functioning and trustworthy market, along with things like pigouvian taxes and legal nudges to help the market avoid market failures.
Agreed.
But I'll grant that some forms of these are not directly or indirectly propped up by government, and I'm not against light touch, effective regulation that minimizes the damage to society without radically limiting the speed of growth and innovation.
Agreed.
I guess the nuance is what requires the most attention right now. On the regulatory capture side, probably healthcare. On the market capture side, to be "on-topic", maybe Visa / MasterCard - although regulation certainly plays a role there, their competitive moat is network effects. It'd be a bummer to see my "credit card rewards" kickbacks disappear, but I also know that all of my purchases are 1-2% more expensive (at least) because Visa and MasterCard have to have their cut.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
7d ago
Woke people have their own ontology of what is man and a woman, what is justice, with their own prescriptions of how society should work with their own sins such as racism, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia or homophobia.
To be fair, people who are violently anti-woke also have their own ontology of all of those things. Man is John Wayne, woman is kitchen appliance / baby incubator (/s).
I agree though, generally, that the parallels are there (re: the content of your 1st paragraph) - but they'll be there for literally any ideology that posits that classes in society are arbitrary and not meritocratic. What makes this distinct from Marxism, to me, is that none of these things are centrally defined. It's a consensus-driven ideology, not a top-down prescriptive ideology. And there's quite a bit of infighting as well, which elsewhere I point out, kind of prevents it from leaving the fringes of the leftwing. Does Nancy Pelosi give a shit about transgenderism beyond the token "statement from the office of"? She certainly doesn't fight against it, true, but I don't think she's ever been claimed as an "ally".
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
8d ago
Who said it had to be a single theory?
Freddie's title:
Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand
I guess maybe I'm being uncharitable by interpreting this as "Please associate with each other as a cohesive, organized political movement so I can attack the principles of your group rather than deal with the 17-headed hydra that is contemporary social liberalism". Maybe I shouldn't have use the term "single theory".
You and Freddie both are painting contemporary social liberalism as a monolith, with the implication that it's a coordinated effort with offices and political committees. Maybe there's a reason that it's so hard to wrangle these disparate movements together (and why they seem to cannibalize through debates on intersectionality):
"What idea? I'm not suggesting anything other than being a decent person and teaching history!"
This, but unironically.
Cherry on top:
There are several people out there who say there are not enough [insert non-white-male group here] in [industry, fictional story or type of art, etc.] and flat-out state that they are selecting for or wanting to select for said group. What is this group or idea called?
I've actually seen the pendulum swing way harder in the past couple of years, with many more complaints of too many non-white male characters. It seems to be the consultants, focus groups, and corporate America that are guiding these decisions - not some National Wokism political action committee.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
8d ago
The criticism from leftists is that:
I actually think that United States has already hitched itself to an economic system (capitalism) and a political system (classical liberalism) that by their nature tear down power just by existing.
does not square with:
I think that the hard part is getting all strata of society to embrace the creative destruction of capitalism. Most people are economically illiterate, and easy targets for bad economic thinking.
Either humans are capable of toppling non-meritocratic structures (e.g. ladder-pullers, by your example) in "free" market societies by design, or there is a "tragedy of the commons" and it's a first mover's race to the top that devolves to oligarchy or feudalism. My take is that there is no such thing as a "free" market, just like there is no such thing as objective absolute individual liberty. "Free" tends to be defined by whoever happens to be winning the market at that point in time. To that point:
eliminate fair competition through regulations and laws that make it harder for a new competitor to enter the fray and take them down.
are we going to ignore things like cartels and monopolies that exist in absence of regulations and laws? I'm willing to cede that there are bad actors who rent seek through regulatory capture, but are you willing to cede that there are bad actors that rent seek through market capture?
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
8d ago
When you say "almost everyone", who would you exclude? I agree directionally, but where we probably disagree is on who is included or excluded in "almost everyone".
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
8d ago
FWIW, the opposite extreme ideology is easily dismantled as well: that the West in perfectly meritocratic and there is no need to study or even acknowledge power structures that affect and influence socioeconomic conditions. I suppose I could call this "right-wokism" and attack it as a strawman.
Woke, when I was first introduced to the concept from a leftwing perspective, would be the middle ground: an acknowledgement that arbitrary[1] power structures exist that continue to exacerbate adverse socioeconomic conditions. To be "awake", or "aware" of those power structures. It wasn't a call-to-arms, but more of a sly-wink of "Hey, be kind to one-another, because things don't have to be this way."
But now, woke as it's used from a rightwing perspective, is an extremism as you've described: that all socioeconomic conditions are due to perverse power structures that benefit only white men (self-victimization), and they are therefore thieves and exploiters.
My personal take, before anyone tries to paint me as a believer of a specific ideology, is not necessarily that government needs to play the role of dismantler of those power structures, but that it definitely should not continue to enable them to fester as open wounds in the social fabric of our society. E.g. don't test nuclear bombs near the indigenous peoples, but maybe also don't shoehorn social justice concepts into every bit of middle school curricula (just read a link from the Freddie de Boer post linked downthread).
[1] arbitrary, in the sense of an opposite of meritocratic
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
8d ago
There have been various attempts at defining "wokism", but for me the distinguishing characteristic is the set of tactics it employs and not just its goals.
Pulling at this thread more - wokism isn't (strictly?) an ideology, but a set of tactics to bring about social change. I agree that many of these same tactics are being used - or have been historically used - by the right. And, might I add, for every tactic to bring about social change "the left" has that "the right" doesn't, there also seems to be one "the right" has that "the left" doesn't, e.g. evangelism.
That does make its comparison to Marxism interesting, though, if one views Marxism as an ideology to bring about revolutionary social change to end the class struggle under capitalism. But apart from self-described leftwing revolutionaries, I don't personally know anyone "woke" who desires revolutionary change rather than incremental change, because incremental change seems to have been working pretty well over the past ~60 years or so. Someone recently posted "capitalism, but nice" in this thread and that's pretty much the extent of "woke" that I experience. Otherwise we would just call them communists. But if we're saying that woke = communist then we're back to the original strawman position.
Freddie's post sounds like ravings of exhaustion from having to fight a broad and deep set of ideological concepts that all have shared roots in 20th century social liberalism (feminism, civil rights, etc.), and his solution is to pigeonhole all those ideological concepts into a single overarching theory that can be attacked directly without having to get into the weeds and nuances of any individual ideology. But also, he says that it's not his responsibility to perform this abstraction, but that all of these separate ideologies must bring themselves under a single banner? For his convenience?
I don't see the appeal of his writing, either. This is the only snippet I've read, but I've stumbled across his name.
Edit: I've read more of his writing. This post seems to be written in an intentionally exasperated voice.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
8d ago
Should've framed it more as "chronic, debilitating and high maintenance medical condition" than a single "medical event". Complaints about medical bankruptcy in America aren't because of MRIs for broken arms.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
8d ago
This is not limited to environmentalist parties. Many leftists are acutely aware that nearly every leftist political action becomes strangled by purity testing. Intersectionalism should've remained in academia, because it's a utilitarian race to the bottomless pit when implemented in public policy. That's probably why we've never had actual leftists in positions of meaningful power, just neoliberal centrist democrats.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
8d ago
Do you have a concise definition for "wokism" that you can share?
To be clear why I'm asking, I know I can read through Marx to understand Marxism, and even more, through criticisms of his works and even political actions based on his ideas. But there is no equivalent for "woke". Without a solid set of works to reference, the invocation of "woke" becomes a catch-all strawman for de jour leftwing politics, similar to "chud", "bootlicking", etc. for de jour rightwing politics. Useful for flaming; completely useless for having dialogues grounded in reason.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
8d ago
Guilt by association is one of the first tenets of political mudslinging.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
15d ago
young ghetto boy ... virulent invasive species that will leave the land barren.
Whelp that's enough of TheMotte for me today.
Anyway, my bigger concern in the US is actually having a healthcare crisis with my child and becoming destitute, especially since I've worked diligently to create a life of relative comfort compared to my very blue collar ancestors.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
15d ago
Some thoughts that immediately jump to my mind on this subject:
- The euphemistic treadmill, which is more of a linguistic phenomenon than a "woke liberal" phenomenon. There is a progression that occurs where words are first used academically and scientifically, then colloquially, and then in a vulgar way. Examples being retarded or hysteria. The role of pseudoscience here is also richly ironic from a culture war perspective as well. IMO this aspect of linguistics is inherent to human nature, and opposition to it is not well-founded in reason. Just accept that words change meanings in a highly predictable way, please.
- The leaking of academic or "non-profit" language into colloquial discourse, especially in cases where it disambiguates nuanced concepts within that domain. One example is "unhoused" vs. "homeless", which actually do have utility in terms of what they're precisely trying to describe, but do not have much utility on the 24-hour news cable network.
- When words become "purity" memes in academic subcultures: the word Latinx polls very poorly outside of very specific niches. But, if all of your colleagues are using the word Latinx, and you are not, despite the fact that you don't necessarily agree with it, your paper will not get published. But every subculture has its own "purity" memes, and a lot of them are incredibly cringe-inducing. That's what keeps me coming back!
All of these are great cannon fodder to get the red tribe of the culture war fired up, but I personally think they're pretty weak in terms of showing actual flaws in blue tribe principles. There are plenty real flaws in blue tribe principles that these don't really make me lose any sleep.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
15d ago
There is no true free market. Give me a market, and I will provide a counterexample to how free it is.
But there is truth behind "All is fair in love and war": I would agree with primax3 that dating is one of the free-est of markets, which may also be why there's so much complaining about it.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
15d ago
Briefly on procreation, the population crisis, homelessness, and foster care:
I'd like to have children for pro-social reasons. I believe that failing to give back to the world when it has given so much to you is somewhat of a metaphysical thievery. My position isn't that everyone needs to have children, but I have contempt for old men who fail to plant trees whose shade they won't enjoy, especially when they have plenty of land and seeds. It's a narcissistic and hedonistic rot.
I'll focus on the word have, though, because my partner and I are not particularly well-positioned to have biological children. I feel that the base urges we have to literally procreate are just that - base urges. I am not Genghis Khan. There are 7 billion people on Earth, and cosmically my specific genetics are not even a footnote within a footnote in the story of humans. My siblings and cousins have me covered anyway when it comes to the genetic progeny of our bloodline, anyway. While the concept of creating something so awesome from almost nothing is romantic, it strikes me a bit as a novelty when put into a modern global context.
The factoid that I always try to bring up concerning homelessness in the US is that, depending on the source you cite, between ~30% and 50% of every homeless adult spent time in the foster care system. Like many social programs, the issues lie with the "cliff": when foster children turn 18 they age out of the system overnight. In 2025, it's a near impossibility to support oneself at age 18 entirely independently, especially if you're struggling to graduate high school or obtain a GED. To be a bit cliche, 22 is the new 18 (and 26 is the new 22, according to health insurers). It seems like, if you were to try to provide better than the "median" fostering experience, you would go a long way by simply supporting the foster child to age 22 instead of age 18.
To connect the dots, adoption and / or fostering seems to be a great way for this old man to plant trees, especially if biological children are completely ruled out. There is undeniably a population crisis and replacement rate is an issue, but from a (gross?) utilitarian perspective the population crisis is about productive members of society. Adopting and / or fostering well kills two birds with one stone: it reduces the population that is at-risk for homelessness, and creates more productive members of society.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
16d ago
Thanks, I'll adjust my priors. Hard to get a good sense of what may be happening "behind the scenes" when what's happening "on the surface" (mainly TikTok, indirectly) is so much more visible.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
16d ago
However, the evangelical right has been losing quite a bit of power and cultural cachet, and we're seeing the rise of more traditional versions of Christianity such as Catholicism and to a lesser extent, Orthodoxy. Buddhism has also made inroads in a more serious way, as well as Islam mostly via immigration of Muslim peoples.
That's not been what I've personally observed? I do recognize that Catholic churches have seen a very slight uptick in attendance over the past decade, though, after bottoming out during the Obama admin and the height of the scandals. If you're referencing the "TradCath" social media movement in some way, I've not been convinced that it's anything more than an aesthetic circlejerk of 1950s-1980s view on femininity and masculinity than an actual revival of Catholic belief systems.
My extended family is traditionally Catholic, in a way where we attend churches in America that still give services in our ancestors' language as well as English. There are portions of our family that have broken tradition and started attending "Evangelical" megachurches, and it's caused quite a rift that was only exacerbated by issues that aging elders bring to the table (think: kidnapping grandma while she's suffering from Alzheimer's). Notably, the Catholic portion of our extended family is relatively socially liberal (for Catholics), but the Evangelical portion has taken a hard right turn: lots of Facebook drama for the world to see. The family undoubtedly split votes for Harris / Trump according to religious views, based on my personal interactions and what they post on Facebook.
I see more of the same happening. The prosperity gospel is too enticing for many people, and I see megachurches as validation for the modern American vices that more traditional Christian religions would preach against. The guiding voice of the religious right in the US has never really been the Pope, but now it's undoubtedly the chorus of grifters and cheats who call themselves holy men while flying on private jets to their private islands. I will throw them a bone, in that they are succeeding in creating communities where communities have been hollowed out: some of the healthiest white, rural communities (in terms of networks) are organized around these Evangelical churches. But my praise stops abruptly there.
My (naive?) theory is that Trump owes his victory as much to the Evangelical community more than any other - they very much represent his spirit. The GOP would do well to embrace that community, and I think they are doing so especially in the House led by Mike Johnson.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
16d ago
I rarely come back to look back at comments, but the comment I replied to originally is also bait, when viewed from a different lens.
We're simply arguing about which problem is bigger, not whether either problem exists. Leaving my comment in response to phailyoor cuts back on the circlejerk that regulation is inherently bad. I mostly make comments like this when the circlejerk becomes unbearable.
Yeah this and other "mathematically unbiased" district-drawing algorithms often get plenty of upvotes on Hacker News, so I've seen them. My first issue with them is that they often have to choose some arbitrary optimization criteria to close the space of the problem (e.g. for this one why is that the "shortest" splitline should be chosen among all splitlines?).
My second issue, more practically, is that you'll never get state congress critters to give up even a little bit of power, let alone the power of the district-drawing pen. But red-blooded Americans love a good competition so I'd like to almost think that it would become some sort of televised spectacle where each party announces its next line like it's the NFL Draft. Maybe even some will gamble on it (or would have, if the BBB didn't hamstring gamblers). The congress critters would even get additional time in the limelight, which we all know is what they truly crave aside from receiving a greasing of the palms from industry buddies and pals.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
16d ago
If it's so inconsequential, why not follow the mundane processes of publishing why and how the change was made? That's my main issue with it. It's a canary in the coal mine for poor data integrity, which, taken in conjunction with the rest of the actions of the administration, is a huge red flag. It did not happen in an isolated context. If this was a corporate setting with financial or industrial data, heads would roll - even if the changes affect "very little".
Like many arguments about the liberal bias of college graduates, this is doing immense work of denying those college graduates agency in their own process of academic discovery. But, I guess this is like the "nature" vs. "nurture" debate, except "reality has a liberal bias" vs. "higher education is liberal brainwashing". Maybe somewhere, someone is begging that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Every political dialogue I had in college, often frequently with people who I had very little to agree with, was emphatically more informed and nuanced than any YouTube gotcha shitpost (Charlie Kirk) that tries to paint college students as some misinformed monolith. It was a period of rapid opinion changing for me, and I only took one or two "woke" courses. I guess maybe my foreign language classes could be considered woke, as the literature we focused on was mostly from the times of massive political upheaval in those nations thanks to radical reactionary politics (I didn't study Russian or Chinese)...
Most of my opinion changes came from the fact that I went from a town where we could see the stars because there wasn't enough light pollution to drown them out, where people still used the word "Jew" as a derogatory verb, to a college campus where I met (and even dated) a Jewish person for the first time, and realized that I actually wasn't 10% as smart as I thought I was even though I was at the top of my class. Humility and worldliness liberalized me, personally. If I had stayed home I would've continued to be one of the smartest assholes in my hometown, and probably would've made a good chunk of money doing some regional white collar work. I didn't, though.
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