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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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The current paradigm is "women's bodies are defective male bodies, men's brains are defective women's brains." That's not an explicit viewpoint or something that anyone intends directly, it's the outcome of the slow process of commoditizing human beings and molding them into good little workers and subjects who are obedient, pliant, and don't rock the boat. Anything that stops them from doing this is a flaw which the powers that be seek to destroy -- signal-boosting any ideology that seems likely to accomplish it. Once again, this isn't a conspiracy; it's a prospiracy, a side effect of powerful institutions doing what powerful institutions do, and of humans in powerful positions doing what humans do: endorsing ideologies that subconsciously go along with their pre-existing goals. This is the origin of "woke capital."

Women are more likely to uphold institutions and, as girls, to sit still for long periods of time (like you say), and are less likely to shout loudly about the emperor having no clothes. Men are less likely to do things that remove them from the workplace for a period of time (especially bear children), and more likely to slave away at work for hours on end while abandoning their families at home.

Institutions, especially corporations, want their employees to be male in the ways that benefit them and female in the ways that benefit them. They don't want people, they want androgynous commoditized worker bees. They want cattle and not pets, human docker containers cloned and scaled at will from the amorphous "cloud" of the "workforce." The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings. You will own nothing and you will be happy, and your storage will be separated from your compute and kept in trust by Amazon.

My girlfriend has gotten explicit advice that she should never get pregnant, it will "hurt her career." She detests these people who have established a system that expects her to sacrifice her biological and spiritual drive to bear and raise beloved children in the name of economic productivity and ruthless inhuman competition. This system sees bearing and raising the next generation of human beings, the most fundamental purpose of society, as a distraction from the more worthy goal of creating wealth for Wall Street. It asks this of men too, but because of the unchangable realities of being a sexually-dimorphic mammalian species, this requirement hurts women more than men. The entrance of women into the workforce on the same terms as men is the true systemic oppression of women. The left used to know this, like when Elizabeth Warren wrote The Two Income Trap. But it has forgotten it as its funding has shifted to corporations "woke" to their own interests, who are more likely to fund the striking of a child in the womb than to pay for the care of that which is born. And the abortionist feminists celebrate them for their avarice like good little girls.

The goal isn't to turn men into women or women into men. That's an ideological side effect, like "Communism" in Stalinist Russia. The goal of Stalin was to empower himself. And so it is with woke capitalism. (Perhaps real woke has never been tried?)

She detests these people who have established a system that expects her to sacrifice her biological and spiritual drive to bear and raise beloved children in the name of economic productivity and ruthless inhuman competition.

Is that actually correct? Unrestrained capitalism, as far as it's political, is associated with the right. Women having equality in the workforce with men is associated with the left, and continues to be.

You could equally well have argued, in the years before women's rights, that companies wanted women to stay at home so as to support the men working long hours in the name of economic productivity and ruthless inhuman competition.

As Ayn Rand points out, collectivism will always seek to override the individual choices of a person to fulfill their own happiness. Whether that be building a skyscraper or turning a child into a civilized adult, a woman’s agency is just as valuable when deliberately chosen, not coerced or bullied. In any collectivist system, right or left, the able bodies and capable minds of those able to work are coerced into working for the collective instead of working for their own happiness.

But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's din,

List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,

—"They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin."

I'm having trouble parsing the last verse.

Who is "who"? Is it "They" or the "children's children"? The logic of the phrase points to "They" but there is no comma.

A more understandable rephrasing is probably "They who make compromise with sin, enslave their children's children".

I love this poem. Any more you'd like to share?

Not at this time; I usually am reminded of them by relevant context.

That particular verse appeared as Arc Words in Scott Alexander's novel UNSONG.