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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29321 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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Is there a youth backlash brewing against LGBT?

I came up out of the subway the other day, and nearly my entire field of view was filled by a massive glowing screen full of flapping pride flags, wall-to-wall and six feet tall. It was a project by some charity or other claiming that "hate crimes" (or victimization, or incidents, or whatever they measure) jump by 60% during pride month. I've been so burned out by the sight of that flag everywhere that the only reaction I can muster is "maybe stop being so obnoxious about it then?" From the POSIWID perspective, one could consider the purpose of pride month to be to spike hostility against LGBT people, so why do it?

A long tweet from sci-fi author Devon Eriksen claims that pride month is downstream of the "toaster fucker" problem, in reference to an ancient greentext. Condensed: the internet brings together people with bizarre niche interests (what he calls "toaster fuckers" — he claims it's meant to be a general term but he's clearly writing about the LGBT theater of the CW). A supportive online community stops these people from leaving the toaster in the kitchen and adjusting to the normal world around them, and instead these online groups metastasize, eventually spilling over into the wider world: intra-group status competitions start with "who can fuck the most toasters", lead to "'toaster-fucker pride' bumper stickers" and then "bragging about how they sneak into other people's kitchens and fuck their toasters, too" and "swapping tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking."

I think I agree with some of that description but not all of it, and may write it up in another thread if I get time, but it's not so important for this post. I need it as context for the bit that I think is more accurate: the normies getting fed up with all the toaster-fucking, the backlash, and the response (lightly edited to concatenate multiple small tweets, but no words changed):

Pretty soon normal people, who ten years before would shrugged and said "that's weird", are now sick of toaster-fucker flags everywhere and their kids being told to fuck toasters by sickos, and now they're going to burn every toaster-fucker flag they see, and Florida just passed a law requiring you to be 21 years old with proof of ID to buy a toaster. And Utah has banned toasters altogether and the Mormons have stopped even eating toast, bagels, waffles, or any other heated bread product.

But it doesn't stop there, either. Because a few toaster-fuckers get beaten with fence posts by people sick of hearing about toaster-fucking, and other people, who didn't see or hear the toaster-fuckers' prior behavior, say "holy shit, toaster fuckers really are oppressed". And they decide to become "toaster-fucker allies", despite the fact that they haven't the slightest real interest in fucking any toasters themselves.

I think this explains the split in normie opinion pretty well: red states have had more than enough and that's led into the various legal battles that Devon alludes to, school choice advocacy, campaigns to replace progressive school boards, etc. I don't think I've seen "beaten with fenceposts"-level backlash (I figure it would pop up here if it was an issue), but even the memory of such events in the semi-recent past could explain normie "I want to be a good person so I'll call myself an ally"-ism. Compare the number of "racist hate crime" hoaxes over the past few years, to the point where "the demand for racism exceeds its supply" has become a dark joke among cynical online commentators. I don't think I've seen LGBT activists fabricate incidents (certainly none as badly as Jussie Smollett did), but it seems useful for a group to have opposition to keep its supporters energized ("our work is not yet done!") and I could definitely see obnoxious pride month displays as accidentally serving this function.

Onto youth. A recent tweet by a newish Twitter account, America_2100, claims a drop in support for LGBT over the past few years (2022–2023: US-wide: -7 points; Republicans: -15 points, to a 10-year low of 41%; Democrats: -6 points; "young people": -8 points). In particular, they claim Gen Z's support for gay marriage dropped by 11 points between 2021 and 2023, which is double the time span of the other stats but could indicate an ongoing decline in support. Unfortunately the tweet doesn't source the surveys it refers to beyond saying that it came from PRRI and I don't have hard data beyond a couple of anecdotes. Lime, a scooter rental company, made a pride-flag crosswalk in Washington a 'walk-the-scooter' zone after several teenagers were arrested for leaving skid marks on it. I saw a recent comment on a gaming subreddit (sorry, I can't find it), in response to yet another pride-month-themed mod, saying something like "don't be discouraged! 50% upvotes for a pride mod is pretty good these days". But when I interact with university students, the discourse is still very pro-LGBT: they talking about being excited for pride events, etc.

So, questions for the floor:

  • Do you see a "vibe shift" around attitudes towards LGBT, and if so, is it generational?
  • Have you seen any discussion on the progressive side around changing strategy?

I recently listened to podcast of Jordan Peterson with Eric Kaufmann and Kaufmann explained the phenomenon of woke as coming in waves. With first being in the 60ies in old Days of Rage where the left radicals first pushed this stuff and actually managed to carve out huge cultural concessions especially for blacks in form of Black Studies departments and such. Then there were eighties where people thought it was all behind them, it was age of Regan and neoliberalism and winning the Cold War - but at the tail end of 80ies and 90ies came the second woke wave in academia with intersectionality and and queer stuff. It also subsided a bit after 9/11 and Bush era of War on Terror only for woke to reemerge in 2010s.

I think he is right, saying that the woke is subsiding to me feels like previous times of pause. Kaufmann is especially skeptical as the millennials and zoomers are strongly in favor of woke ideas in various researches - especially women. If there will be some pushback next few years we may expect 4th wave maybe in the 2030s where the phenomenon may be rekindled with some new additions.

It does seem incredible but either the search is broken, totally broken, but no one has posted a review of Christopher Rufo's book "America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything" which pretty much explains woke as a result of a carefully planned campaign by a few prominent neo-marxist thinkers to shape the nation's memes by altering language so favorable politics result and the glorious revolution and liberation from oppression can be achieved. Namely Herbert Marcuse and Paolo Freire. If you've never heard about either, that's pretty curious. Freire's book 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed' is a classic in the field of American educational studies, that is, teacher training.. And has been, for the last 50 years. 100k hits on Google Scholar, e.g.. For comparison, Foucault's famous scribblings have 100k too..

You might think the title is a bit hyperbolic. It's really not. But aren't you at least a little curious why a book written by a Brazilian Marxist, later neo-marxist, concerned with how to use education to promote conditions for the Revolution is a mainstay of US teacher training? It's pretty odd, you know, US having been an ostensibly anti-communist country.

Anyway, here's Kaufman's review of it (1st part is .

Key paragraphs:

Rufo’s account begins with Marcuse, who, despairing of the Western working class, turned to the energy of Third World Socialism, Black Panther radicalism, and the 1968 student revolts for inspiration. Instead of the orthodox “dictatorship of the proletariat,” Marcuse dreamt of a “dictatorship of the intellectuals” who could join hands with “outcasts and outsiders” to make a revolution. In effect, he invited Marx’s lumpenproletariat into history. His One-Dimensional Man (1964) became a bible of the counterculture, and while his Frankfurt School colleague Theodor Adorno reacted against the anti-intellectualism of young protestors, Marcuse embraced them as a harbinger of the new utopia.

Dubbed the “ideological leader of the New Left” by Weather Underground terrorist Bernadine Dohrn, Marcuse rubbed shoulders with their leadership and that of Black Panther radicals like H. Rap Brown. The rioting and vandalism in America’s inner cities in the late 1960s blighted neighborhoods and sent crime soaring, hindering black progress. Together, the Weathermen and black militants conducted some 4,330 bombings, resulting in 43 deaths. The Weather leadership gushed that it would have to kill 25 million people to achieve its aims. The organization styled itself the “white revolutionaries inside the oppressor nation” and their manifesto, Prairie Fire, spoke of the United States as founded on white supremacy and “white-skin privilege.”

Marcuse envisioned the university as the “first revolutionary institution,” the nerve centre from which the revolution would spread. As if on cue, many comrades settled into cozy academic sinecures. Dohrn landed at Northwestern, Bill Ayers, who bombed the Pentagon and the Capitol, wound up at Columbia, and Angela Davis, who participated in a courtroom siege that left the judge and three others dead, was handed a position at UCLA. Davis, a Black Panther, successfully recast herself as a latter-day runaway slave resisting a system of white supremacy.

Rufo convincingly draws a line between violent Panther radicalism and the Black Lives Matter movement. For instance, Panther leader Stokely Carmichael coined the concept of “institutional racism.” The Panthers’ Ten-Point program called for affirmative action, the release of “all Black and oppressed people” from jail, and the teaching of its revisionist racial ideology in schools. The Black Lives Matter movement of the 2010s merely reiterated these slogans, seeking to abolish the police and prisons while demanding “culturally relevant education.” BLM leader Patricia Cullors, meanwhile, studied with the Weather Underground’s Eric Mann and lauded the influence of Davis and the Panthers.

Still reading the book, I've been very online so aware of the woke and even the abortive laughable revolutionary attempts in early 1970s - but I had no idea there was a direct line, same phrases used, same concepts, even personal continuity.

Sure, I love my boy James Lindsay including his extensive deep dive into Paulo Freire - with Pedagogy of Oppressed being the 3rd most cited work in humanities. Kaufmann himself gives a lot of praise to Lindsay and he by no means denies these influences.

But that is not the whole story, Kaufmann argues that it is moderates and "bleeding-heart liberals" who enable free reign of these ideas. The way he put it is that after defeat of economic socialism at least in its most radical form of planned economy, liberals still do not understand where the borders on social issues are. This is what enables woke to rampage through our society. It is a little bit depressing but also encouraging - most people do not actively believe these revolutionary thoughts such as Critical Race Theory or Queer Theory - they just want to be and sound as if they are kind and moral. On one hand they can be easily duped into various extremes, but on the other hand it means that potential pushback may not be as tough as many people think.

I fully agree. It's the consequence of our being not anxious enough. Prosperity has insulated us from the consequences of bad decisions,we can afford to be sloppy and sentimental.

they just want to be and sound kind and moral. Which is precisely what the critical theory deconstructors are using. If you redefine $your radical demand as compassion, just being nice etc..

As the mad prophet said: "Never get so racist that your forget that white leftists are the worst people in the world."

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