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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31085 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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Paul Graham is out today with an essay about the origins of woke. There's nothing in the essay that's particularly new. Did he know about Richard Hanania's book? Did Hanania know that perhaps his book would be better as an essay?

In any case, I think the better topic would be this:

How did wokeness die?

Of course, wokeness isn't dead. Far from it. But the vibe shift is real, and I think it's pretty fair to say that wokeness did peak in 2020/21 and is in serious retreat now. Paul Graham kinda glosses over the reason for its decline, saying:

How does this kind of cycle ever end? Eventually it leads to disaster, and people start to say enough is enough. The excesses of 2020 made a lot of people say that.

But I'm not sure this really explains it. As the social movement known as wokeness gained power, it was able to get more and more people placed into high-ranking positions. Governments, universities, and big corporations all have what are essentially commissars who are given high-paying jobs to enforce orthodoxy. At first, wokeness was just true believers. But pretty soon it gained adherents who did it for practical reasons – they put their pronouns in their bios because their jobs literally depended on it. It seems like a self-reinforcing cycle. Once woke people get more power, they make demands which include hiring even more woke people, giving them more power, etc... Anyone who speaks out is banished from the organization.

There's no limiting principle here. Other social movements, like Christianity, grew and grew until they took over essentially all institutions. Why couldn't wokeness do the same?

Here's my attempt at an explanation.

Wokeness is ultimately like cancer. It grows but it can not thrive because it destroys the institutions it corrupts. Scott talked about how whales should in theory get cancer more readily than smaller animals. A blue whale has 3,000 times as many cells as a human. Each one could theoretically become cancerous. So why aren't blue whales riddled with cancer at a rate 3,000 times that of humans?

Scott's theory: cancer cells are unstable, and the cancer cells themselves get cancer, preventing the malignancy from growing. It's a rare cancer that grows quickly but is stable enough to not implode.

I can't comment on the accuracy of this biological model, but as an analogy for social movements it works well. Early Christianity grew without limit because it was fruitful. Wokeness died because it was toxic. Today, the left is famous for its circular firing squads in which people are excommunicated for the smallest breaches of orthodoxy. Ultimately, this was its fatal flaw. It couldn't coordinate action against its enemies because it was so obsessed with killing its own.

Wokeness only appealed to a segment of the elites and was unappealing to most non-elites. So wokeness gained power quickly but ran out of steam because it lacked any grassroots support. On the other hand, Christianity started out as a religion of the proletariat and by the time it trickled up to the elite of Roman society it had massive grassroots support. I think that's a key difference.

Yeah, maybe communism is a better example.

Like wokeness, Communism only had the support of a few elites. Famously, the Bolshevik's "going to the people" initiative failed because the common people actually liked God and empire. Nevertheless, communists took over Russia and ran it for more than 70 years. Once they seized power, the social climbers came on board.

Four years ago, it looked like woke was going the same way – not because of true belief but because it was personally advantageous to be woke (and incredibly dangerous to speak out against it).

It's worth noting that the October Revolution in Russia was in effect a military coup, but led by an organised faction within the lower ranks rather than an ambitious colonel. The core Bolshevik constituency was the Petrograd garrison.

The reason why there wasn't a communist takeover in Germany is mostly that the USPD and Spartakists were unable to organise the soldiers the way the Bolsheviks were, so the German army remained under the effective control of their officers and the Ebert government.

incredibly dangerous to speak out against it

Hyperbole much? Surely a contributing factor to the rise of wokeness is the utter spinelessness of most people. It was amazing to see again and again, the woke attacking some man of considerable achievements with no apparent woke beliefs, which would conclude with him delivering an abject groveling apology. Or the university presidents and professors who went along with radicals they clearly didn’t agree with. The grad students who traded ‘DEI statements’ for a job. Or you, reader, who put his pronouns in his profile.

Part of the reason is, you aren’t allowed to call men pussies anymore (in polite company). In the past, those who prostrated themselves in this way would have been shamed “Be a man and say no fuck off when you mean no.“ The taboo-ization of manliness has left society wide open for this kind of agreeable-emotional scam ideology, which reinforces the taboo further. Wokeness is both a cause and a symptom of it.

We used to reproduce sexually, which gave us some genetic diversity. After we all turned ourselves into female clones doing parthenogenesis, we became vulnerable to viruses. But thankfully for us middle class folk, through cultural isolation, some intrepid billionaires and rednecks avoided being gelded, and so the woke virus was ultimately stopped.

In the past, those who prostrated themselves in this way would have been shamed “Be a man and say no fuck off when you mean no.

If you opposed woke in that way, you would be fired and/or ostracized. It's not that nobody did it; it's that they were canceled for doing so.

According to you, nybbler, there was never anything to be done, it was an unstoppable steamroller, and all rebels would die for nothing. With an attitude like that, it could never have been stopped.

It has not been stopped. There is merely a pause. Perhaps a legit one, possibly a false one to draw out the remaining opposition so they can be crushed in the next push.

There were people who opposed wokeness that way and are still there. Wokeness always had more bark than bite.

The true answer is, of course, somewhere in the middle.

Joe Rogan stood up to wokeness and got away with it. James Damore didn't.

If you have independent power and wealth then you can express heterodox beliefs and get away with it.

But if your power and wealth depends on an institution (such as a government, university, or corporation) then you have to bend the knee or face consequences. Most people are in this group.

On the balance, I don't have a lot of sympathy for @Tree's argument. People have had their kids taken away because of their position on transgender issues. "Just man up" doesn't cut it.

I mostly agree with you- a CEO could not simply say that he has fewer black engineers because HBD. I do think that the power of woke is overstated but, yes, there’s definitely people who are right to fear it. Just want to address this one:

People have had their kids taken away because of their position on transgender issues.

Which people? Jeff Younger lost custody because Texas courts always favor the woman; his position on trans had nothing to do with it. There are probably similar cases, but parents who agree with each other that the correct response to a trans child is ‘no you’re not’ succeed in getting their child to desist.

Perplexity found one. Kudos because this stuff that normally gets buried. Google is not your friend.

https://www.osvnews.com/2024/02/20/catholic-parents-ask-high-court-to-correct-dangerous-precedent-on-parental-rights-trans-identity/

Not only did they lose custody, but they weren't even permitted to talk to their child about their gender. Insane. And this is Indiana, a deep red state.

The Coxes lost custody of the then-16-year-old in 2021. The Indiana Department of Child Services petitioned a Madison County court, alleging that the teen’s physical and mental condition was in danger and that there was a threat of self-harm as a result of the parents’ physical and emotional abuse.

A case manager’s investigation found that the teen had an untreated eating disorder, that A.C.’s parents had pulled the child from school and discontinued therapy, and that A.C. was contemplating self-harm, according to court records. The case manager’s report also found the teen’s mother used vulgar and demeaning language.

The Coxes denied the allegations, and Indiana officials, following an investigation, conceded that they were unsubstantiated.

But the Indiana Court of Appeals upheld the child’s removal from the home, concluding that the arguments over gender identity had contributed to the eating disorder even though agreeing that the Coxes were fit parents. The appellate court upheld a gag order, which it said was allowed under both the state and federal constitutions, over the Coxes imposing their religious views on gender.

“The appeals court left in place a gag order so the parents could not discuss gender with their child other than at family therapy appointments,” Windham said.

What are you talking about? Female clones? Gelding?

"Ending masculinity" in males leaves you with female clones. Metaphorically, you've cut off their balls. This is unpleasant by itself, but there's a double meaning: eunuch is an insult among men, their high pitched voice is a source of ridicule, and they're assumed to have a weak character, especially among ancient authors.

That’s dumb.

Metaphor or not, don’t you think there’s more to womanhood than lack-of-balls?

Yes, there’s also agreeableness, emotionality, conventionality. I don’t really like femininity, especially not in men. Am I allowed to say that, or is only masculinity subject to censure? Men’s personalities have been one-sidedly filed down by three decades of this.

Right, which is why eunuchs are obviously not female clones. Even metaphorically.

Also, only three decades? I was sure you’d go back at least to the Victorians.

More comments

Uh no bud, I don't care for the spinelessness of most people either, and your second paragraph is entirely on point but the woke mob were absolutely capable of destroying people's livelihoods if they told them to fuck off - that's how my life got ruined. That's why everyone became fucking spineless, because they watched what happened to the people who said no. And what happened to their families, because it was never confined to just the target. So even your family would start distancing themselves from you, because "some of my colleagues don't feel comfortable coming if you are there".

Who did you tell to fuck off?

My boss. Although tbh I didn’t care for the job. I like taking l long holidays after a few years' work.

the woke mob were absolutely capable of destroying people's livelihoods if they told them to fuck off

I'm not saying they weren't, but like hydro says a lot of people were far more afraid than they realistically had reason to. Also, defending one's ideas is not supposed to be costless. I would prefer to lose out on a job than debase myself with a DEI statement. And that's before any moral implications, because all those who went along were complicit in making other people's lives hell. I'm sorry your life got ruined, that's obviously above and beyond what can be expected of people, but I do think they have a duty to offer resistance when they disagree.

I do think they have a duty to offer resistance when they disagree.

I hope the last decade convinces others you are right, but I've long since lost faith in most of humanity.

When you describe it like that it sounds a lot like the Chinese Cultural Revolution: an auto-coup by one faction of the elite weaponizing the militant youth against a rival faction of the elite. It ended pretty quickly when the opposing faction of the elite ended up grabbing power.

Why couldn't wokeness do the same?

It still can. What we have now is likely not backlash but eddy. Or a receding wave in an advancing tide. Nearly all those woke people in high-ranking positions are still there. A few of the commissars got fired but a lot did not, and many just got shuffled around. Once the Trump train runs into a roadblock, they'll be ready to capitalize.

Maybe, maybe not. American society needs white men, who still do most of the useful labor. I think it's going to be tough to get that constituency to play ball again, as they did so readily in 2020.

They'll either play ball (at least in so far as they keep their mouth shut) or get fired, just as they did in 2014-2019.

This ignores that wokeness was only possible because high ranking white men drank the kool-aid. They weren't forced to join the social justice movement. It was a choice.

Even today, the vast majority of people who matter in America are white men. Take a look at Fortune 500 CEOs (84% white men as of 2023).

Yeah, there are still people who cuck out there (see: Mark Cuban), but it's a lot rarer. Eyes have been opened.

This ignores that wokeness was only possible because high ranking white men drank the kool-aid. They weren't forced to join the social justice movement. It was a choice.

I've heard (but cannot confirm) in some cases they drank the kool-aid because it was the only way to avoid being taken down for sexual harassment allegations. But even if not, social justice remains a viable way for high-ranking white men to keep the competition from other white men down.

Mark Cuban

Early life is a meme for a reason.

We live in a society where white men are far more willing to hit defect than they used to be. And per bud light boycott, a lot of that is aimed specifically at woke.

I think it's going to be tough to get that constituency to play ball again, as they did so readily in 2020.

If there is any upside to hustle culture is that it gives men alternatives

What is wokeness, specifically?

  • -14

I've often been asked to define both wokeness and political correctness by people who think they're meaningless labels, so I will. They both have the same definition:
An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

Can you give me some examples of what you consider to be aggressively performative economic, political and social rights & opportunities?

  • -12

This isn’t actually a meaningful response. Firstly because it just kicks the can one step up — how you define “social justice”? Secondly, because “performativity” is neither exclusive to wokeness — God knows I’ve seen plenty of conservatives wearing in-your-face Trump memorabilia, putting American flag and/or Thin Blue Line stickers on their trucks, etc. — nor actually the primary issue with wokeness; there are tons of woke NGOs and anonymous woke bureaucrats doing plenty behind the scenes, unheralded, to advance specific causes and to cause material legal and political change. Focusing only on the “performative” stuff actually misses the point and allows those less “performative” actors to continue their work unnoticed and unimpeded.

'Performative' is the fig leaf that liberals use to distinguish good theory from bad praxis. In practice, however, it is a nuance without a difference, given that liberalism has no defense against bad actors from the left. We know this to be true because of spectacular tactical victories on part of activists and 'the groups' to impose their views on (charitably) good-meaning and agreeable people.

Let me give you my definition: wokeness is the barely-disguised will to power through the soft and feminine language of slave morality. It exults the weak and marginalized to the height of society, to right historical wrongs. That is the 'social justice' part. The 'woke' part comes from the conspiratorial assertions that the dominant racial group in the West (white, male people) have been systematically keeping the marginalized out of power and that it is fundamentally imbedded into every aspect of society.

This concept is called 'white supremacy.'

Therefore, every effort must be made to make society 'woke', to advantage minorities, ethnic and sexual, within the system to counteract the inherent bias of the institutions. Although this definition will be fiercely contested by its own proponents - they are self-aware enough that the programme is wildly unpopular - one defines things by its outcomes, by its real-world impacts. Definitional word games do not change the fundamental power-seeking, inquisitorial drive of the movement. Individually the elements that compose it may not be novel but it is the combination of these elements that make 'woke' what it is.

What is "feminine language"?

  • -17

You seem to be asking a lot of questions here but not contributing your own thoughts.

What do you think feminine language might be? Can you steelwoman it for us?

I don't think I can successfully steelman an argument if I don't know the OP's argument, but I will try. It'll just be a lot of assumptions, which I'm not a fan of.

The position is that there are two binary expressions of gender, which masculine and feminine, and therefore there are two categories of language corresponding. Additionally, the correct expression of this binary is the Western definition of masculinity and femininity.

This is natural; two completely different species attempting to communicate with eachother naturally will have separate languages, complete with their own vocabulary, grammar, connotations and implications. Since virtually all first world countries are Western, it shows that the Western definition of masculinity and femininity is the most successful, and therefore accurate, definition.

If we follow the examples of the Western definition of masculinity and femininity, then, we can assume what OP means by feminine language is language that is "collective, random, accommodating, passive, vulnerable, emotional, fragile, small, dependent, intuitive, submissive" and "tactful", among others.

Now, seeing as I have seen a fair share of men identifying with the Western definition of masculine and use language that is random, passive, emotional, fragile and tactful, then that language can't be exclusively feminine then. And if there is no exclusivity to the language and both elements can be included with one another, then the definitions of "feminine language" have become so vague as to render the whole notion non-existent.

That's a pretty good steelman, but you are implying motive that isn't necessary. Also there's only the one species, humans. Anyway I can't speak for the op of course, but I determine masculine and feminine language based on the western understanding of the gender binary not because the west is the best (although it is) but because I am in the west. In Japan or Taiwan I use different language, or look stupid when I snort at some guy going on about flowers.

Re the species thing, language is a tool for communicating, and in the west until very recently you had a zeitgeist which allowed people to communicate using shared metaphors and idioms built up over thousands of years of history and stories and memes. The idea that aggressive, direct language is masculine and passive gentle language is feminine is a very old one and has never fully restricted the language of men or women except in certain specific, usually formal instances. That has never made it useless - in fact it has made it more useful, as we can have feminine men and masculine women. Parts of Western society have tried to restrict their members' language, because they believe it is in the best interests of the members to adhere to their gender, but it has never applied to the language as a whole.

Soothing, nurturing euphemisms. Environments in which dissent is prohibited and the word of ethnic and sexual minorities must be accepted without question (provided they are orthodox in their opinions) are referred to as "safe spaces". The move to instate an intellectual monoculture in which heretics are shunned and sexual and ethnic minorities are systematically elevated over other groups is referred to as "diversity, equity and inclusion". Maoist struggle sessions are described as "accountability culture". Profoundly unpopular policies such as housing male rapists in women's prisons or performing mastectomies on female teenagers are made more palatable with emotionally manipulative thought-terminating clichés like "protect trans kids". Mastectomies, penectomies, vaginoplasties and hormones are collectively referred to as "gender-affirming care".

I looked up "soothing, nurturing euphemisms" and got "rest your mind," "take a moment," "breathe easy," "unwind," "decompress," "let go," "find your center," "peaceful pause," "quiet time," "soothe your soul," "gentle transition," "calm your nerves," "ease into relaxation," "soft landing," and "tranquil space." If the claim is that men don't use these phrases, I find that dubious.

Additionally, I don't consider definitions of environments, moves and policies to be a part of defining language.

  • -17

When I try to imagine a man regularly using those phrases, what comes to mind is either the kind of modern psychoanalyst that is known to be mostly visited by women, or someone who spends his time nearly exclusively in the company of women.

The first third of the list is somewhat unisex, but the latter two sound like they're straight out of the "female memes" tiktok channel.

If the claim is that men don't use these phrases, I find that dubious.

The only kind of man I can imagine routinely using these phrases is a yoga instructor, therapist or psychiatrist. Unsurprisingly, men represent only 28%, 24% and 21% of those professions, respectively.

https://x.com/BridgetPhetasy/status/1818015936580055118

It can't be demonstrated any better than this. Browbeating people as if they're kindergartners, but doing it passive-aggressively so you can cry and get them in trouble if they talk back to you.
If there are any questions asked, there are obvious right and wrong answers, with the threat of "telling on you" if you give the wrong one.

how do you define "social justice"

Every philosophy department knew how do do it succinctly before the label was banned for being effective: Cultural Marxism. Race/Sex/Gender/etc communism.

The application of moralistic ideas of collective justice and redistribution to the cultural sphere, through the definition of multiple intersecting binaries of oppressors and oppressed classes.

Firstly because it just kicks the can one step up — how you define “social justice”?

A set of interlocking theories emerging from the academic field of Sociology that share in common an understanding of society as dominated by oppressor/oppressed dynamics: Feminism (Men/Women), "anti-racism" (whites/non-whites), Queer/QUILTBAG (Heteros/Queers), Labor (workers vs bosses), etc. These theories coordinate support between their adherents and collectively demand a revolutionary otherthrow of existing social structures to achieve "justice". They also consistently fail to achieve any positive end, and then explain away this failure as due to them not having been granted sufficient power and control over Society.

...I'm skeptical that anyone thoughtful, at this late stage, actually believes that "social justice" is a nebulous or poorly-defined concept. It appears to me that the concept is well-defined, and the large majority of the remaining confusion comes from its adherents who perceive legibility to be contrary to their ideological interests, and so actively fight against any attempt to accurately label or describe their actions or organizations.

there are tons of woke NGOs and anonymous woke bureaucrats doing plenty behind the scenes, unheralded, to advance specific causes and to cause material legal and political change.

Unheralded to who? It seems to me that they herald themselves quite a bit to their fellow NGOs and bureaucrats, just not the public at large. They make Powerpoints, and present them. They hold conferences and publish papers and manifestos. They organize and coordinate around the ideology collectively, they capture policy and process, they manipulate procedural outcomes. All of these are social acts, thus prone to performance.

This action is "performative" because it so evidently degenerates into assessment by consensus, not real-world results. The proper practice of anti-racism means securing the approval of the anti-racist community, not the actual reduction of racism in any objectively defined or measured sense. Victory is nothing less or more than the approval of one's peers, and real-world results are entirely ignored.

I agree. I’d say Trump pardoning people who deliberately and illegally entered government property is performative social justice. What economic/political/social opportunity and right is being denied by jailing people who literally broke the law?

Therefore the claim that “wokeness” is on the letdown seems false.

  • -20

Hoffmeister said performativity isn't exclusive to wokeness and so you think Trump doing something performative proves wokeness isn't in decline? Huh?

Also your gag doesn't work. You can't use your own perspective to set it up, because it only works if your interlocutor agrees that what you are ironically calling performative social justice is performative social justice for the reasons you state. So you'd have to say 'we'd all agree Trump pardoning Jan 6ers is social justice right? And a presidential pardon is by its nature performative' and go from there.

Edit: clarity

Gag? I'm not going to continue conversation with someone who can't restrain themselves from insulting me.

  • -22

Gag is another word for bit, joke, shtick or witticism. I wasn't insulting you, I was trying to help you be a better arguer. You were calling Trump pardoning Jan 6ers wokeness to highlight the irony and some potential double thought, but to do that well you need to get your debate partner to agree on definitions first, otherwise they might not agree with your terms.

Carrying on in that spirit, you had never said anything to me in the first place, so you could never continue conversation with me - this post is you joining in conversation with me.

They did not illegally enter government property. Just as importantly, American citizens are guaranteed a right to a speedy trial; holding them indefinitely "pre-trial" ("pre" being the Latin for "without," apparently; this is not what I was taught that it meant, but who am I to question my betters?)

Do you believe people who enter a building that the police tell them not to enter are not breaking the law?

  • -16

Inspired by in part by Michael Huemer's definition I would rephrase it somewhat more generic along the lines of: all discrepancies of outcome are due to pervasive, systemic biases rooted in unchanging, historically-defined oppressor/oppressed dynamics, and such dynamics outweigh most or all other concerns.

More cynically, "wokeness" is the logical outcome of trying to apply intersectionality to the real world and the result of Christianity-influenced universalist ethics stripped of the supernatural elements, combined with certain common social trends, resulting in acceptably-demonized populations and sanctified, above-reproach populations.

For some examples of your later question of "aggressively performative," land acknowledgements as secular prayers come to mind. Surely the people saying them don't have any faith that they do anything beyond some vague 'raising of awareness' that doesn't actually... you know, repatriate the land or anything.

Anything involving people like Robin Diangelo, Ibram Kendi, Tema Okun, Nicole Hannah-Jones, etc: aggressively performative, actively making the world worse if one attempts anything they say. One would do less damage to the world by simply burning their money in a ritualistic sacrifice. I kind of think that's why audits of BLM vanished from the news cycle so quickly- people did want to treat sending money to scam artists as ritualistic sacrifice, they made a payment on their sin-debt and just wanted to move on.

I fear I am succumbing to a temptation to label anything bad as woke, and related yet good ideas as something else. But that is pretty much my stance on the word: while there are positive contributions to be made to the world in the name of social justice, much of what has happened in the last 10 years has been major, predictable failure modes instead, and that collection of failure modes is "wokeness."

Well, if you are succumbing to labeling anything you consider bad as woke and everything else as something else...I don't know how to argue on that except...don't?

If the question is "wokeness is receding", and you define wokeness as "all discrepancies of outcome are due to pervasive, systemic biases rooted in unchanging, historically-defined oppressor/oppressed dynamics, and such dynamics outweigh most or all other concerns", I struggle to see where claims that a discrepancy is due to biased dyanmics and not merit are, in general, going down. Mark Zuckerburg just claimed that the bias he struggles with in his business is because of the overabundance of "feminine energy"; I hardly see that as symptoms of a decline.

  • -18

LOL at your new flair.

I don't know how to argue on that except...don't?

Well, it's a phenomenon that seemingly a large number of people agree exists and is meaningful, but refuses to name itself, works the euphemism treadmill in an attempt that no name sticks for long, every blowhard commentator comes up with a new name to sell their book, etc.

Since I've been told that nobody calls themselves woke anymore since it got treadmilled by the right, I don't think it's such a bad thing to save it as a negative descriptor and hope that a positive descriptor comes along that sticks for more than five minutes for the parts that aren't terrible. It's not an ideal situation, I agree.

If the question is "wokeness is receding"

I was addressing your question of attempting to define it, not addressing OP's question at all.

I don't think it particularly is receding. Even though it's ebbed from the pandemic-induced mass psychosis a lot of the attitudes are sticking around, and we as a society (and even worse, as The West) are not really wrestling with what it actually means to be multicultural, multiethnic liberal democracy.

Mark Zuckerburg just claimed that the bias he struggles with in his business is because of the overabundance of "feminine energy"; I hardly see that as symptoms of a decline.

Yeah, that's what I didn't like about Huemer's definition. Many people have entrenched ideas about what "racist" and "sexist" means, and even when presented with examples of anti-white (or "politically white" like Asians in school admission cases) racism or anti-male sexism, they'll say that it's justified on historic grounds (regardless of the actual people affected).

I think this is the canonical response to this line of argument.

"Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand, you don't get to insist that no one talks about your political project and it's weak and pathetic that you think you do"? Or is it "the basic stance of the social justice set, for a long time now, has been that they are 100% exempt from ordinary politics." Who is "they"?

  • -22

Who is "they"?

The Social Justice set. The people who think our main problems are caused by Oppressors organizing society to keep the oppressed under their heel. This set believes that they can bypass persuasion ("ordinary politics") and simply compel people to do things their way. Since they are not attempting persuasion, a legible label for their movement or their preferred tactics is completely contrary to their interests, so they actively and vociferously fight any label that starts to gain prominence.

We are talking about a movement that has dominated western politics for the last decade. To the extent that your confusion is in good faith, it is a testament to the effectiveness of this resistance to labels and analysis.

I’m not confused lol, I very much think you are wrong, but in the spirit of debate, I’d like to discuss specifics. Specifically, who is “they” that have dominated “western politics”? Is it the president? The Supreme Court? The circuit courts? The governors? The school boards? The voters? The entire Executive, Judicial and Legislative branches of government?

I’ll illustrate an example; when I say “the people who think our main problems are caused by Oppressors organizing society to keep the oppressed under their heel from a movement that has dominated western politics for a decade”, those people in particular would be Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, Ron Desantis, Majorie Taylor Greene, Mike Johnson and Donald Trump, to name a few.

  • -24

The managerial class. Twitter's board as opposed to Twitter's owners. Agents as opposed to principals.

I appreciate the effort to debate and ask this question, but the problem is that defining "they" down to actual names is quite an arduous task!

I'll take an example that affected my life last year. My wife taught at a suburban (exurban?) Title I elementary school. Majority-minority classes. It has been a trend for several years, and mentioned above in this thread, that disparate impact policy may have been well intentioned but boiled down to "it's basically impossible to suspend students, even if they're violent." She had one student that needed a great deal of help and had violent outbursts. A violent 2nd grader can't do that much, but he could throw a chair or destroy the room. Policy hamstrings teachers against doing anything. So at least once a week, he'd have an outburst and she'd shuffle the rest of the class out to wait it out.

Nobody argues for "public schools should be held hostage by their worst students, and basically non-functional multiple hours a week," but somehow we get there anyways. I can't point to any individual that wants that. It's the result of a long string of decisions and beliefs, some good and some horrifying, a massive messy web of lawsuit-avoidance and ideological pandering and EdD/PhD overproduction.

Should I name the principal? No, she wasn't too bad and I believe when she said she's hamstrung by the school board (and the feds, Title I!). Should I name the board? Well, I certainly vote against them but they're not the source of the idiocy, they just help enact it. Where does the idea come from upstream of them? I'd love to be able to point at one person whose work could be erased and schools could go back to functioning, but unfortunately that's not the way it works.

the people who think our main problems are caused by Oppressors organizing society to keep the oppressed under their heel

Ibram Kendi, Nicole Hannah-Jones, Robin Diangelo, Sara Rao, Liz Warren, Tema Okun, every person that took any of the aforementioned loons seriously, every journalist that doesn't work for an explicitly right-wing media source, every sociologist, every critical theorist, 80+% of university professors that aren't economists.

deBoer provides several examples of the kinds of people who compose "they".

Also, they propose sweeping changes to K-12 curricula, but you can’t call it CRT, even though the curricular documents specifically reference CRT, and if you do you’re an idiot and also you’re a racist cryptofascist. Also nobody (nobody!) ever advocated for defunding the police, and if they did it didn’t actually mean defunding the police. Seems to be a real resistance to simple, comprehensible terms around here. Serwer is a guy who constantly demands that he and his allies be allowed to do politics on easy mode, but he’s just part of a broader communal rejection of basic self-definition and comprehensible terms for this political tendency. Also if you say things they don’t like they might try to beat you up. Emphasis on try.

I am not sure how else "who is 'they'" can be answered (when we're talking about a movement that rejects labels) if we don't describe them by their beliefs. Do you want a list of names or what?

Yes, I'd like a list of names of people you believe are enforcing wokeness.

  • -12

Michael Reinoehl was enforcing wokeness when he murdered a Trump supporter in cold blood on the streets of Portland following a pro-trump demonstration.

His allies were enforcing wokeness when they publicly celebrated their ally's murder later that evening.

Would you agree that these two examples are, in fact, people enforcing wokeness? If not, what would be your disagreement with that framing?

Okay. Off the top of my head, Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are woke. Does that help?

The Cathedral is good reading. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral

Inability to accurately specify "they" is not a gotcha, it is like this by design. Everyone knows that "they" will get you for saying the wrong thing, it doesn't matter who "they" are. You may not be able to name the lawyer who enacts lawfare against you, or the company he's on retainer for, but humans intuitively understand that they are frequently set against a vast, unaccountable memespace egregore that undergoes regular software updates to set itself against others.

The canonical response above is expressing frustration with the inability to accurately name this phenomenon of Cathedral-driven social change, because being able to name it is a weakness. Don't worry too much about social justice- within a few years the Cathedral will start shifting the other way. We're already starting to see signs.

The very beginning of the article define "The Cathedral" as "journalism plus academia". That's pretty specific to me. In fact I scrolled further and found even more specifically "Harvard, Yale, the Times and the Post". In your own example, you listed a line of bureaucracy from lawyers to lawfare to companies.

However I am going to assume you are also implying that even if the article is not being specific, your definition of the Cathedral still holds. Your second claim that "everyone knows that "they" will get you" is consensus building. Who is "everyone"? Does that include me?

Wokeness seems like a rebranding of the SJW--remember that? Woke-capitalism is a rebranding of 90s PC culture--the stuff satirized by Dilbert and others. Leftism was weaponized by smartphones and social media, such as for getting people fired, but this predates the use of woke. It thrives because it confers status without having to actually do anything. In the past, activists had to actually engage in activism; now they just list pronouns.

This is my read. In the 1990s it emerged as political correctness, which worked for a while until the term Political Correctness entered the public consciousness, allowing people the criticize the phenomenon instead of the content. You could say “why shouldn’t we be able to say what we really think” instead of “boo, minorities” which allowed respectable people to disapprove of it without being branded as outgroup. Once that happened, it turned out that a lot of people in the main stream didn’t like the idea.

In 2012 it was Social Justice and SJWs. These guys won until people found ways to mock the movement, again, without having to publicly condemn the content of the movement, thus saving face was possible. You can mock the SJW at home in mom’s basement with purple hair scolding you for saying something wrong, or for not being a good enough ally.

Woke is receding because it’s possible again to hate the movement without necessarily hating those the movement is putting forward. And again this makes it appealing to normies who have to be respectable at least in public. Being able to talk about woke scolds and oppose racial and gender set asides without losing your ability to be seen as good by respectable people is the way to the end of wokeness.

It seems to me that really on whole Jered Taylor is sort of right. The key to beating back various forms of progressive politics is to make sure that you have your countermovement be one that normie whites can support publicly without seeming too out of the mainstream and where they won’t be considered racist/sexist/homophobic for saying that out loud.

Overextension of woke in service of America’s geopolitical goals introduced fatal cognitive dissonance that alienated the most militant core supporters of the ideological movement. The Woke movement has already survived quite a bit cognitive dissonance, but 2022-2023 produced too much.

2022: “The scary paramilitary guy over there? The one wearing the Black Sun T-shirt with the little SS Tottenkopf pin? Oh that’s just Sergeant Kravchenko. He’s woke actually. Yes it is perfectly normal that his friends attend some official funerals in full 1944 Waffen SS uniforms. Ok, his grandfather did shoot an entire village in Poland one time but we’re giving him a medal because those villagers were all communists. Yes we’ve been telling you that fascism is evil and communism is the future since kindergarten, but it just isn’t ok? We need to give them lots and lots of money to help them punch Nazis.”

2023: “Ok yes it’s technically a ethno-state. Ok so there are some theocratic elements too. Yes, some of the people who live there have different sets of legal rights because of their race. Liquidating a ghetto full of brown people is woke, actually. Shut up CHUD, we need to give them more smart bombs and if you say something else I’m calling the campus police! The police beating up student protestors IS woke god damn it!”

Ask the Shapiro right and the woke are actually the student protestors and that guy that immolated himself for Palestine.

This doesn't take away from your point. Woke as a phenomenon was this alliance between progressive minoritarian interests and establishment institutions where the revolutionary fervor was solely directed at the majority group.

Working for Blackrock, Disney and the CIA could be rationalized as a revolutionary act still, ideology doesn't have to make sense.

What brought it down is that the internal components of the coalition wanted different things. And those things became incompatible.

The US Army didn't get a better war footing from being more inclusive, Disney didn't materialize more interest and sales out of pandering to the margins, and ESG investor funds have long ran out along with ZIRP. All the nice promises that DEI would actually make things perform better could be entertained as luxuries then.

Now that the rubber meets the road, that companies have to perform to get funding, that war is no longer a thing of the past and that sabotage and division aren't affordable luxuries, suddenly the elites no longer like wokeness.

Ask the Shapiro right and the woke are actually the student protestors and that guy that immolated himself for Palestine.

Well yes that’s the problem. Both the true believers and the mercenary government and party apparatchiks considered themselves to be woke. For the last ten years that’s never been a problem, and the two camps have moved in lockstep with regard to domestic policy. But two years ago the international situation exploded in various ways and suddenly there is revealed a number of pretty big gulfs between what the different sub-denominations of woke actually want. And most of the revolutionary zeal is in the true believers, who are got disgusted and are walking away, leaving the befuddled apparatchiks holding the bag.

Ok yes it’s technically a ethno-state. Ok so there are some theocratic elements too. Yes, some of the people who live there have different sets of legal rights because of their race. Liquidating a ghetto full of brown people is woke, actually.

I like the fact that this could be Ukraine too.

Not quite sure who the “brown people” would be in a Ukrainian context though: ethnic minorities/foreigners in the Russian military (or mercenary groups fighting alongside them)? That would make some sense, but they wouldn’t really constitute a “ghetto”

Alternatively, if the intended meaning is “ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine”, I’m not seeing where the “brown” part comes from.

Gypsies. I was referring to pogroms against gypsies. And the restrictions on Russians in parts of the country, albeit not with the brown part.

Just generally, I delight in pointing out that the state Twitter DR says it wants is… Ukraine. A white supremacist ethnonationalist society with a tradcath religious establishment(and that is what the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is) and conservative views about women and gays. And the second best match is probably Israel.

Please don’t paraphrase unflatteringly. Specific groups would be better, too. If you’ve got receipts for people saying these things—not just statements you feel are equivalent—bring them! It’ll be appreciated!

Wokeness isn't productive. Unless you are counting the favor it gets you with certain powerful people

And aside from that, Mrs Lincoln? Pretty much everything people do, unless it is somehow directly nailed to physical reality (or sometimes bits will do) is all about monkey dominance games. When reality intrudes there's a carveout for it, but only as large as necessary (or a bit smaller).

Eric Kaufmann defines wokeness as the sacralization of historically disadvantaged identity groups. Sacred in this case means it’s profane to consider tradeoffs in pursuit of these groups’ interests.

On this definition, woke is in retreat. I think people are noticing that tradeoffs do exist thanks largely to the liberation of X. These narratives have still not pierced the MSM veil, but people are aware of Boeing and now LAs DEI failures (regardless of whether they are actually linked to outcomes). People are noticing it is hard to get hired as a white man in a status profession. People are noticing their kids schools teach gender ideology and kids bookstores are full of anti racist baby. Meta took away the men’s tampons. Trump won the vote.

If you look deeper though, the belief that enables the woke policy agenda — the blank slate sameness of mankind and its groups — remains undefeated. Indeed beyond criticism. So long as that bastion remains unconquered, the armies of the left will continue to sally forth to attack western institutions by claiming “disparate impact means injustice”. I was talking to a friend and complaining about diversity quotas. He dismissed it as “probably worth it — after all how many black men work in the city’s CBD?” Such an argument can still not be rebutted in public because the answer remains beyond the pale.

I mean that in its original sense: these ideas are in the wilderness and are so low status you cannot utter them in polite company anywhere. Until the right wins that battle, centrists will take the sides of the woke in all but the most aggressive moves and won’t resist their consolidation of power in institutions. And generational and ethnic replacement will not make this easier over time.

I think wokeness is approaching a local minima sure, but it’s far from dead.

regardless of the underlying issues and whether blank state is true or not as soon as you bring in quotas it changes peoples incentives and may change the equilibrium. if you required quotas for left handed people then if left handed people could coordinate to reduce their personal investment then left handed people would start performing worse in the equilibrium. take a toy example where left-handed people all are able to agree to spend half the time they otherwise would have spent in university studying. if quotas are rigid then they are still going to get same personal output but at a lower personal cost.

the reason for the coordination requirement is because I would expect intra-handness competition between lefties would incentivise people to maintain the same personal investment in the quota system.

Given how large some of the gaps are or were, it's inconceivable that quotas are never going to be better than doing nothing.

Especially if the blank slate is true. Then one can argue for maybe a limited quota system (for a fixed time period) to remedy discrimination, under the assumption that whatever gains are made will continue when the original barrier is smashed and a self-sustaining population of female /minority X is formed and the stereotype threat/unfriendly environment is gone.

So long as that bastion remains unconquered, the armies of the left will continue to sally forth to attack western institutions by claiming “disparate impact means injustice”. I was talking to a friend and complaining about diversity quotas. He dismissed it as “probably worth it — after all how many black men work in the city’s CBD?” Such an argument can still not be rebutted in public because the answer remains beyond the pale.

Yeah. Sunny Hostin is broadly considered to be a partisan hack and not a particularly smart one, but I felt I was talking crazy pills when I saw people acting like Coleman Hughes schooled her on colorblindness.

I didn't think Hughes was convincing in answering her question: what if a colorblind system ended up with racial inequities?

Hughes doesn't really have a good response because, in practice, it'll play out as it has: when "something special for the Negro" doesn't work something more special will have to be done. Under the inertial theory of racism you clearly didn't act enough on the object to change its path.

It usually doesn't go much better. I remember Yarvin being stymied by Ben Burgis just straight up refusing to grant that there was any reason Scandinavian politics wouldn't work in Haiti. Very little in what I've heard from Burgis impressed me, but he beat Yarvin cause he could state his position and Yarvin was clearly scared to.

This attempt to row back to a colorblindness that doesn't have to answer these questions simply cannot work when it can't deal with this basic challenge besides sputtering platitudes. In fact, precisely because everyone has gotten so good at cataloguing racial progress in the hopes that the various gaps will close and they can get the good news out first. You'll always be subject to the charge that there are clearly places were race has more explanatory power than class

So you have to pick a side: woke or the racists.

(This, I suspect, is why Ayaan Hirsi Ali accepted the Lord Jesus Christ into her heart. Some people seem the problem coming as the right gets more anti-woke and many of the right wingers outside the center just bite the bullet.)

Before I start, I think we need to make it clear that by "woke" we mean a certain kind of racial and sexual politics rooted in the idea of recognizing oppression. It's a broad definition, but it's important that we distinguish woke politics from typical left-wing politics than have been around for decades, as a lot of right-wing detractors have lumped these policies together in an attempt at discrediting them. So, by my definition, simply arguing for stricter environmental regulations for the normal reasons isn't woke. Arguing for stricter environmental regulations because of the disproportionate impact of air pollution on communities of color is.

That being said, wokeness got a lot of press but it was never able to coalesce into a serious political movement, and while it certainly influenced the "national conversation", it didn't really lead to any concrete changes beyond hand-wavey gestures that in hindsight look more to have been done for purposes of public perception than to make any real changes. One only has to look at the history of the movement to get a feel for how unpopular it really was among Democrats. It started around 2012 in the wake of the Trayvon Martin scandal, but it didn't really have any appreciable influence on Obama's reelection campaign. The late Obama administration made a few changes regarding sexual assault on campus, trans people in the military, and the like, and while woke ideas were gaining greater prominence, the work "woke" wasn't even in the public consciousness yet.

That wouldn't happen until the 2016 primary season got into full swing in the summer of 2015, by which point a number of blacks killed at the hands of police led to riots and other expressions of outrage. But while these things were gaining media prominence, they hadn't coalesced into any real policy proposals. The 2016 Democratic primary was supposed to be a coronation of Hillary Clinton, whose style was straight out of the 1990s, but was met with a challenge by Bernie Sanders, whose ideas were more out of the 1960s. The woke set tried to glom onto Sanders as, being far to the left of Hillary, he seemed to have the most promise, but his ideas centered more around class and economic inequality than identity politics. He would occasionally give a nod to his new compatriots, but it was never a central part of his platform. In any event, he lost the nomination.

After Trump won the presidency, woke politics gained increasing prominence in the media, and would seem to be the future of the Democratic party. Yet the 2020 primary field, despite being the largest in recent memory, failed to produce a single credible woke candidate. The wokest was probably Kirsten Gillebrand, who identified herself as a “white woman of privilege” and promised to reach out to “white women in the suburbs who voted for Trump and explain to them what white privilege actually is.” Yet her campaign never got any traction and she was done by the end of summer, 2019. Beto O'Rourke's woke credentials didn't run as deep as Gillebrand's as he tried to unseat Ted Cruz in 2018 as a pragmatic centrist, but his presidential run saw him embrace wokeness in an attempt to distinguish himself. He too floundered, and dropped out in November. Kamala Harris actually had the best run of the woke candidates, but this is subject to some qualifications. First, her wokeness wasn't explicit; you had to squint to see it. Second, though she did get some momentum—in contrast to the other two, who got none—she couldn't sustain it and had to drop out in December.

What about the candidates who actually made it to the primaries? There was Sanders, who had more concessions to the progressive left but didn't really change who he was. There was Liz Warren, the darling of the woke media types. She was basically running a Sanders-lite campaign that had a few nods to racial and gender politics but was nonetheless centered around inequality and corruption. There was Mike Bloomberg, a former Republican and Independent who was nobody's idea of woke and who nobody voted for anyway. There were Amy Klobuchar and Mayor Pete, clearly vying for the centrist lane. And there was Joe Biden, ultimate winner of the nomination and the election, who was also running as a centrist. He was woke in the sense that he was the only candidate who could get a significant amount of black votes, but in this sense he seemed more like a throwback to Bill Clinton than the vanguard of racial politics. And as woke rhetoric heated up during the summer of 2020, he would take positions explicitly contrary to the worst woke excesses.

So there we were. In 2019, as wokeness was nearing its peak, the Democratic field could not support a single woke candidate. Liz Warren, the wokest candidate in the eventual primary field, did miserably. The eventual nominee didn't embrace it during primary season and didn't turn to it in the general, even as its public prominence was peaking. The most prominent advocates of wokeism in the political arena were The Squad, a group of lefty representatives from safe districts. While they got a lot of media attention, they were essentially freshmen who didn't hold any leadership positions and didn't have any real influence. The most prominent piece of legislation they produced was the Green New Deal draft, a document so widely ridiculed that most Democrats disowned it as an overenthusiastic preliminary draft b some plucky kids that was never meant to see the light of day, let alone become a serious proposal.

The biggest political successes of wokeness were in local governments in heavily left-leaning areas, particularly on the West Coast. But these are local governments, and for all the press their policies got, they never impacted more than a very small percentage of the total population. It's telling that when people are discussing the effects of woke culture it almost always comes down to a few things that don't really mean anything. For instance, I have yet to read a critique of wokeness that doesn't mention pronouns in email signatures. But what does this really mean? As much as conservatives would like to view it as a symbol of capitulation to radical ideology, it's really just the cheapest, lowest-effort thing a company can do to make it look like they're changing the status quo.

Which leads us to the biggest changes corporations made: DEI initiatives. Were these merely symbolic? Yes, in the sense that they aren't anything other than a spinoff of the HR department into something that sounds more impressive.But what did they actually do? Mostly investigate discrimination claims that HR would have to investigate anyway. Wed to this was the implementation of various training programs meant to counter this, which is why companies were spending large sums having people like Robin D'Angelo speak at all-hands meetings on Zoom. But the rise, and subsequent downfall, of these initiatives wasn't merely symbolic, or necessarily borne out of a sincere desire to combat racism, or sexism, or whatever.

No, they were borne out of the belief that there was a growing zeitgeist that would make them subject to additional liability for employment discrimination. So, in order to show juries that you're Taking Discrimination Seriously, you have additional trainings and a dedicated DEI staff and prompt investigation of complaints. But aside from the investigation of complaints, this additional stuff doesn't do much. Employment discrimination suits ended up being based on the same boring grounds they were before wokeness became prominent. Very few attorneys were willing to file suits based on microaggressions or implicit bias or whatever, and those who did couldn't find willing juries. And even if there was a jury willing to entertain these notions, few of them would reconsider because of some bullshit training the supervisor attended a year earlier. Now that it's clear that shit like that isn't going to play they can move the discrimination investigations back to HR where they belong and get rid of all the trainings that don't accomplish anything useful.

Arguing for stricter environmental regulations because of the disproportionate impact of air pollution on communities of color is.

IMO there is some reasonable ground for considering "systems of oppression" that I would be willing to not consider "woke". Claiming that slavery or segregation happened, or that women (often) weren't allowed to have certain roles isn't so by itself. I think it also requires a component of looking at those axes in exclusion of others.

That being said, wokeness got a lot of press but it was never able to coalesce into a serious political movement, and while it certainly influenced the "national conversation", it didn't really lead to any concrete changes beyond hand-wavey gestures that in hindsight look more to have been done for purposes of public perception than to make any real changes.

Nationwide riots seem like a pretty concrete result. Turning off law enforcement for a variety of crimes in major metro areas seems like a pretty concrete result. The title 9 fight in university campuses seemed like a fairly concrete result. Logan act prosecutions and the FBI spying on presidential candidates seems like concrete results.

As much as conservatives would like to view it as a symbol of capitulation to radical ideology, it's really just the cheapest, lowest-effort thing a company can do to make it look like they're changing the status quo.

...And if Social Justice encroachment into the business world had ended at pronouns in emails, this would be a valid argument. But it didn't. It expanded into bedrock corporate policies about hiring and firing, and into a metastasizing consultancy empire that existed to divert money from corporate profits to progressive activists. Progressives were injecting an ad hoc private taxation system into the corporate economy, with the threat of significant economic harm to any individual or organization who objected.

It expanded into bedrock corporate policies about hiring and firing, and into a metastasizing consultancy empire that existed to divert money from corporate profits to progressive activists.

Yeah, credit where it's due. The identitarian left fundamentally understands something that the color-blind right does not.

It's not about ideas. It's about who/whom.

Wheres a conservative might seek to enshrine free speech into university bylaws or something, a progressive seeks to get his people into positions of power. Who interprets the laws matters a lot more than what those laws say. This is something that the left intuitively grasps while the right wonders why it keeps losing again, and again.

When the woke make demands, chief among them is high-paying jobs inside institutions. At the extreme, this leads to the belief that certain seats on the Supreme Court "belong" to women or black people.

The Right seems to have figured it out wrt SCOTUS

The right is happy to put women or black people on the court.

But Biden explicitly said he only would appoint a black woman.

The left is explicitly racist in a way the mainstream right is not.

Didn’t Trump say Ginsburg’s seat would go to a woman?

Indeed. To the detriment of the court for many years. Barret is mid.

Preliminary:

  • Right now I prefer the term "gender & race communism" to "wokeness." And as such "wokeness" did not start in the 2010s or in the 19080s as Paul Graham posits, but was a growing trend the entire last two hundred years.
  • In the Anglo-American sphere, it has tended to grow, not in a straight line, but in a saw-tooth pattern -- three steps to the left, one to the right. During the 1960s and early 70s we went three steps to the left on race communism, then there was a bit of a movement rightward during the 1990s. We went another three steps to the left from 2012 to 2021, and now there is a bit of a movement back to the right. However, we are still a long way to returning to the status quo of 2010.

it didn't really lead to any concrete changes beyond hand-wavey gestures that in hindsight look more to have been done for purposes of public perception than to make any real changes.

Nuts.

  • The curriculum of the school system in the major US city where I live is a near total wreck. Up through eighth grade, they basically don't teach a single classic American text, they don't teach anything that would inspire a white American boy (and frankly the curriculum probably isn't that inspiring to the people of color it is supposed to represent). Even the unit on space exploration -- uses Hidden Figures as the main text -- the school is flat-out teaching "misinformation." The magnet schools that were previously a great option for the better students have been greatly harmed by the post-2020 equity craze that lead to a change in admission rules. The administrators talking about these changes explicitly said that these changes were a result of making equity and anti-racism a central focus of their mission.
  • The police were told to stand-down, a huge crime wave ensued, and urban public safety in the major cities has not come close to returning to 2000s levels, far less 1950s levels (Don't talk to me about crime rates -- due to police capacity and risk homeostasis, crime rates don't actually measure changes in public safety in the medium-term -- you have to look at how people's behaviors have changed).

And if you say, "this is mainly a problem of the blue cities" -- well, I don't accept "just move to the reservation the suburb bro" as a cost-less mitigation. "Just give up on your ability to hold on to the central nodes and your ability to coordinate easily." The cities becoming less habitable for white, family-oriented, traditional families is a huge defeat.

  • The demographics of our elite colleges were greatly changed as a result of equity focused changes in admissions. This matters a lot for the future leadership of our country.
  • The nature of campus social life and dating has fundamentally changed, partly because of Title IX investigations and metoo, but of course, also for many other reasons.
  • The demographics of the entire country changed because it became racist and xenophobic to do any border control which produced bad optics or "violated human rights"
  • The replacement of merit-based hiring with DEI hiring has not been rolled back, our institutions are continuing to crumble as a result. We do have people claiming they saw explicit anti-white-male discrimination in hiring at companies like Google and Intel and I think it has something to do with the stagnation and decline of those companies.
  • Cross-dressers went from being a joke, to something that will get you fired and ostracized if you don't play along with their false beliefs. School systems now teach multiple genders and you are a bad person if you don't acknowledge someone's chosen gender. Code-of-conducts across an enormous number of projects, conferences, and other institutions, now ban "misgendering" someone. Mandatory denial of reality across many institutions of society is an enormous concrete change.

Right now I prefer the term "gender & race communism" to "wokeness." And as such "wokeness" did not start in the 2010s or in the 19080s as Paul Graham posits, but was a growing trend the entire last two hundred years.

I'm not playing this game. Sure, you can trace the roots of any political or intellectual movement back hundreds of years or even further. But that's not what anyone is talking about when they mean "woke". I've been in enough online discussions to recognize that this is just an entree to claiming that Marbury v. Madison / The 14th Amendment / Women's Suffrage / The Progressive Era / The New Deal / The Civil Rights Act / any number of other things is the moment the true spirit of the founding was lost and America started to go to hell in a handbasket, but I'm not buying it, not least of which because most of the people complaining about wokeness aren't buying it either. Not least of which because a colorblind society a la Dr. King was anathama to a large enough segment of the population as to be a progressive idea for the time but is the essence of anti-woke ideology today.

The curriculum of the school system in the major US city where I live is a near total wreck. Up through eighth grade, they basically don't teach a single classic American text, they don't teach anything that would inspire a white American boy (and frankly the curriculum probably isn't that inspiring to the people of color it is supposed to represent). Even the unit on space exploration -- uses Hidden Figures as the main text -- the school is flat-out teaching "misinformation." The magnet schools that were previously a great option for the better students have been greatly harmed by the post-2020 equity craze that lead to a change in admission rules. The administrators talking about these changes explicitly said that these changes were a result of making equity and anti-racism a central focus of their mission.

I've been hearing complaints about the alleged intrusion of wokeness into the elementary school curriculum for years, but there's been a paucity of concrete evidence. It's never anything that anyone's kids are bringing home, but what they heard is going on at a school district that's close enough to seem familiar but not so close that there's a good chance of actually knowing anyone whose kids go there. I'd expect that in this era of cell phone cameras and social media that the people who are outraged over this would have no problem coming up with examples of worksheets, reading materials, etc. that is supposedly indoctrinating our children, but somehow the only things I've ever seen produced are copypasta obtained from Google Images.

As to why kids aren't reading the classics of American literature anymore, my cousin, an elementary school teacher, gave me the answer, and it's more boring than some communist plot to make every story about black people. Basically, the so-called "curriculum experts" who decide these things came to the conclusion that the reading material needed to be specially tailored so that conformed to the precise reading level that was expected of the children and contained all the necessary vocabulary words but not any that were too hard. The result was that none of the existing children's literature filled all of the specific requirements, so they essentially had to commission a lot of stuff that did.

Anyway, this isn't a new thing. I was in elementary school in the early 1990s, and while we read some of these books, it was always apart from the standard curriculum. In any event, most of the stuff (like Charlotte's Web, for instance) involved all animal characters, so I'm not sure what was supposed to have especially inspired me as a young white boy. the stuff we actually read from the provided textbooks had no shortage of multicultural influence, so I'm not going to chalk up the mere existence of stories that center around black characters and traditions to some woke mind-virus.

The police were told to stand-down, a huge crime wave ensued, and urban public safety in the major cities has not come close to returning to 2000s levels, far less 1950s levels (Don't talk to me about crime rates -- due to police capacity and risk homeostasis, crime rates don't actually measure changes in public safety in the medium-term -- you have to look at how people's behaviors have changed).

If you're going to jettison statistics in favor of vibes, you also have to consider how much the narrative contributes to those vibes. When I was writing the entry on the South Side for my Pittsburgh series, I discussed the increased perception that the South Side was unsafe, a perception that wasn't really supported by the statistics. At first, I thought that maybe the perception was being influenced by high-profile shootings that made the news. But I was surprised to find a similar number of high-profile shootings in 2014 as in 2022. The difference was that in 2014, there was no narrative about how the South Side was becoming increasingly unsafe in the wake of a post-pandemic crime wave. With the overall crime rate having gone down the previous few years, there was no reason to believe that anything was out of the ordinary, so the shootings were reported on, chalked up to bad dudes hanging around nuisance bars after-hours, and quickly forgotten about.

In 2021 and 2022, after a summer of protests, rising crime rates, and being told that police were at the end of their rope, a similar number of instances caused the widespread perception that the South Side was unsafe, at least late at night on weekends, and it accordingly prompted various police strike forces and visits from the mayor. Never mind that the crime rate in the neighborhood was roughly similar to 2014, including the number of shootings that made the news. Now it was dangerous when it wasn't before. Are people really responding to increased risk of crime victimization, or to a conservative narrative that says woke policies are sending our cities to hell in a handbasket?

The demographics of our elite colleges were greatly changed as a result of equity focused changes in admissions. This matters a lot for the future leadership of our country.

Just out of curiosity, I checked the demographics of Harvard. The class of 2010 is roughly similar to the class of 2023. The biggest gains for blacks in university admissions overall seemed to happen in the 1980s. But this is also concurrent with the biggest gains made by Asians. Not only did this change happen in the pre-woke era, it happened at a time when blacks made huge gains in closing the high school graduation rate gap. It's no surprise that the percentage of blacks in a certain college will increase at a time when the college-eligible black population is also increasing.

The nature of campus social life and dating has fundamentally changed, partly because of Title IX investigations and metoo, but of course, also for many other reasons.

Fundamentally? I can't speak to any changes that have happened since I was there in the early 2000s, but I'd bet they're nothing compared to the changes made in the 1960s, prior to which men couldn't even get into women's dorms and people had to sign in and out, or since the 1940s, when you add to that the fact that the overall college population was 75% male, and all-girl's schools were much more prominent than they are today, meaning that if you went to a big college like Ohio State or Notre Dame, you probably weren't dating any fellow students.

The demographics of the entire country changed because it became racist and xenophobic to do any border control which produced bad optics or "violated human rights"

Hispanics were 5% of the US population in 1970, 6% in 1980, 8% in 1990, 12.5% in 2000, 16% in 2010, and 19% in 2020. The demographics seem to be changing at about the same clip as they have for decades. As an aside, this is why people who are anti-immigration are often accused of being racist. the official explanations range between worrying about them taking American jobs (if you assume they work), and leeching off of the welfare state (assuming they don't work), which at least are credible economic concerns. But here you make it sound like the real concern is demographic, which is as much as most Trump critics suspect.

The replacement of merit-based hiring with DEI hiring has not been rolled back, our institutions are continuing to crumble as a result. We do have people claiming they saw explicit anti-white-male discrimination in hiring at companies like Google and Intel and I think it has something to do with the stagnation and decline of those companies.

If this really happened then Mr. Magire was a fool to not take the statement to an attorney. If Google was actually using minority hiring quotas then they would have settled for a pretty penny to avoid discovery and the attendant publicity. Even the all-in DEI grifter employment law firms around here are quick to warn that DEI is not affirmative action and that private companies need to focus their efforts on recruiting and "fostering an inclusive atmosphere" and steer clear of anything that could be construed as a Title VII violation. I'd be surprised if a company that can afford the kind of attorneys Google can would be this stupid about the whole thing. And who are these unqualified black senior executives I keep hearing so much about?

Cross-dressers went from being a joke, to something that will get you fired and ostracized if you don't play along with their false beliefs. School systems now teach multiple genders and you are a bad person if you don't acknowledge someone's chosen gender. Code-of-conducts across an enormous number of projects, conferences, and other institutions, now ban "misgendering" someone. Mandatory denial of reality across many institutions of society is an enormous concrete change.

School systems encouraging this kind of trans-affirmation or whatever you want to call it isn't so much a symptom of woke ideology as it is of administrators who are spineless when it comes to discipline. I hear it from high school teachers and parents in several districts that administrators are loathe to discipline all but the most troublesome students, because the parents all think their own kids are angels and can't be inconvenienced by after-school detentions or suspension. The teachers are basically told to stand down; they can send the kid to the principal, but he just comes back without punishment. The result is that bullying is rampant, and the bullied kids end up going trans because it at least gives them leverage over the teacher that they didn't have before. And this isn't happening in highly-rated PMC school districts in the suburbs; it may be happening in urban areas, but the stories I'm hearing come from rural parts of the rust belt where the parents in question aren't voting for Kamala Harris.

I know you put a lot more effort into the rest of your post, but..

worksheets, reading materials, etc. that is supposedly indoctrinating our children

Reading this paragraph knowing that you have been here for awhile is something else! I have questions. What do you think of Critical Theory and do you believe it has impacted K-12 curriculum in a significant way?

Second question, what do you think of this toolkit for teachers and would you accept it as evidence for the kind of "woke" people are talking about? There is an FAQ page so you don't have to download the materials. The first 'stride' has 30 mentions of 'praxis' and 41 mentions of 'critical'.

If you are interested in seeing what kind of crack pot lunatics contributed to this, you can find them in this PDF. In case you don't want to check that, then it is meant to demonstrate that this was developed, propagated, and adopted by real educators-- in addition to goof balls.

Equitable Math is not applied in every school across the country. It is (or was) applied in deep blue urban cities such as Seattle. Critical Theory has impacted K-12 curriculums across the country in a major way. As you've identified, it enters other areas of K-12 like tracking or student discipline.

I hear it from high school teachers and parents in several districts that administrators are loathe to discipline all but the most troublesome students, because the parents all think their own kids are angels and can't be inconvenienced by after-school detentions or suspension.

Parents hate it, teachers hate it, yet the trend toward more relaxed discipline just kept growing. I guess a policy like minimize suspensions at great cost could theoretically be implemented at the behest the 5% of parents with troublesome kids. They may have gained outsized influence on discipline policy at schools in the last 20 years. I'm not sure how. They didn't seem to have that large of an influence 20 years ago. Maybe such policies are justified with commonly accepted ideas like equity which are related to other ideas in education. I'm open to other theories.

Education has to be one of the most difficult positions to argue against the pervasiveness of woke. Educators are some of the bluest of the blue. Their counterparts in academia are sometimes so blue they're red. Your average teacher in South Carolina is a normal person who wants to learn kids and probably doesn't want to turn them gay. Still, much of school is indoctrination. The indoctrination many kids get today is more woke than it was in 1990. Usually not to excess, depending on tolerance, due to the normalness of average teachers. Directionally, without a doubt.

What do you think of Critical Theory and do you believe it has impacted K-12 curriculum in a significant way?

I'm not a fan of it personally, but I haven't seen evidence that it has affected the curriculum of the average school in any significant way. I've heard a lot of accusations that it has, but there's a difference between news reports and actual substance to the allegations. I don't doubt that critical theory is part of school curriculum somewhere, but I also don't doubt that there's some district or classroom that's teaching a far-right version of American History. The question is whether this is something the average student in the average suburban district is being taught, and while I've heard plenty of rumors, none of those have been substantiated with any evidence. Pulling something off the internet may be evidence that it exists, but it isn't evidence that it exists where people say it does, let alone that it's the dominant method of instruction.

Second question, what do you think of this toolkit for teachers and would you accept it as evidence for the kind of "woke" people are talking about?

Having downloaded some of the modules and looked at the FAQ, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. It uses a lot of cringeworthy language to explain how math instruction is secretly racist, but when you drill down to the core of what it's saying and, more importantly, what it's actually recommending, there isn't really anything objectionable in it. The idea that different students may benefit from different instruction styles isn't exactly a new idea, and the changes they're proposing aren't even that substantive. It reminds me of the whole Ebonics debate from 30 years ago. The media made it sound like students were going to be instructed in jive talk and given English tests based on different grammar, when the reality was that they wanted to do additional instruction relating formal English concepts to the vernacular the kids were already speaking. If what the documents are recommending was quietly slipped into the curriculum without all the woke verbiage few people would even notice, let alone care.

For example, you don't consider this image to be A) objectionable to teach to children B) reasonably deduced to have derived from the Critical Theory framework? If those are the definitions of bad stuffs, because you made your teaching unit have to define 'white supremacy', welp, you probably shouldn't be sanctioned by the state.

The Oregon Department of Education distributed this to math teachers as an opt-in program to use. To my recollection.

The media made it sound like students were going to be instructed in jive talk and given English tests based on different grammar, when the reality was that they wanted to do additional instruction relating formal English concepts to the vernacular the kids were already speaking.

Couched in language and vernaculur, and actual concepts, of a Critical Theory framework. You're really stuck on how the media reports on things. The media is dishonest all the time. I believe it would be possible to make teaching doctrines without teaching kids bad ideas, or ideas derived from bad ideas, such as those in the image.

I bet in 1990 the "give everyone extra attention" doctrine wouldn't be couched in such language or concepts. Thus, this is one piece of evidence, for one state, that teaching became more 'woke' in some (at least) marginal respect, no? Saying it's not as bad as it looks is not the same as saying it's not a real thing. We should limit the number of indoctrinations into, what I consider, goop.

To do so, I ask* the state not sanction such ideas be taught or be near the indoctrination pathways. At least not those funded by tax dollars. This is a reasonable position. It is not media hysterics. If you don't consider this inserting a certain political valence into education, then what does that look like to you? "Children must don their Ushankas and praise Stalin" on pg. 3?

*Again, apologies for derailing.

I would consider that both objectionable to teach to children and derived from a critical race theory framework. That's irrelevant, though, because what you linked to wasn't intended to be taught to children. Your screenshot was part of an explanatory note at the very beginning of the first module explaining that certain terms in the materials would be italicized in reference to concepts put forth in another publication. It wasn't even explained in detail, and it certainly wasn't intended as a handout or something to be taught to middle school kids as part of the curriculum.

You're really stuck on how the media reports on things. The media is dishonest all the time.

Because this is how most people hear about this stuff. Very little of what is reported to me on this comes from an actual student, parent, or teacher. It comes from people with no connection to the education system responding to media reports and to a lesser extent, rumors based on media reports. Hence the inability to produce any classroom materials as evidence supporting their assertions. If there weren't any media coverage about CRT in schools it's unlikely that very many complaints would arise from people who discovered it organically, given how unobjectionable most of these proposals are once you strip away all the woke bullshit.

I bet in 1990 the "give everyone extra attention" doctrine wouldn't be couched in such language or concepts. Thus, this is one piece of evidence, for one state, that teaching became more 'woke' in some (at least) marginal respect, no? Saying it's not as bad as it looks is not the same as saying it's not a real thing. We should limit the number of indoctrinations into, what I consider, goop.

The entire point of my post is that, for all the discussion of various woke concepts, precious little of it has made it into actual policy. The fact that people are citing to documents that are long on bullshit and short on actual substance is only further evidence of that. If I really had to I could probably justify the entire Trump policy platform using woke CRT language, but it wouldn't really say anything about the underlying policies. All the use of this excess verbiage does is provide evidence of the thought-process of the people writing the documents, but I'm not arguing that there aren't important people who think this way; I'm arguing that this kind of thought hasn't been pervasive enough to result in objectionable policies.

It wasn't even explained in detail, and it certainly wasn't intended as a handout or something to be taught to middle school kids as part of the curriculum.....

No, it's not considered as a handout to children. It's a teacher's module created for teachers to learn to instruct on maths.

It wasn't even explained in detail

What am I missing here? White supremacy is a central focus of this introductory module. That's why it is defined and given ample space. Pages 4-7, 8-12, etc. It's mentioned 54 times. This is explicit in its aims.

Some of it is mild injection of ideas couched in the gobblygook. Which I may have accepted with an eye roll if it existed by itself. Other parts I find insidious. I will vehemently disagree that children (or educators) should be taught to model the world in such a manner. I don't think it's necessary or good. It's ideological.

I will be school shopping soon! But have not personally been in one in awhile. Kids, I know. Parents, I know. Teachers, I know. I have been friends with a liberal teacher in a city school for well over a decade until she left the profession in 2023. She is a kind and thoughtful person. She is a true blue believer. I could never envision her with intent to maliciously implant an ideology in children. I also can't imagine she was very careful around sharing ideas she feels are justified by: "reality has a liberal bias", "just being a good person", or that white people X. I can easily imagine her teaching Equitable Math's program in 2018.

My impression, rather than a denial, is that much of this is the flavor of public education propaganda. Celebrate Maya Angelou instead of George Washington. To escape that one needs to spend a lot of money on private school. In my city, at least. There are still good public schools. I know kids attending them. To the extent these schools have a Woke Mind Virus it's fairly mild. What's easier and less expensive is to choose to raise smart children that can identify bullshit. Not everyone is blessed enough to raise such children.

You make a judgment call that all the not-math noise and concepts in my chosen example is unimportant, but I think it's very important. If we replaced the "white supremacy" concepts and definitions with a white supremacy one-- the '14 words', 88, etc -- would you so readily wave off "excess verbiage"? I wouldn't!

A training module for teachers created and endorsed by a number of educators, partnered with numerous California systems, and distributed in Oregon. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive review that I can to the measure the impact of CRT and woke-adjacent concepts in public education. I briefly looked, but mostly found research looking at state-governments legislating away CRT stuff. Education is local, and your experience in NYC will be different than mine in Topeka.

I was hoping that picking, what I consider, an egregious example of teaching materials (err, instructor materials), in use in more than one place would help work out the details, but I think we fundamentally have different tolerance for this type of propaganda. The creators of this programming have very clear ideas of what a child's indoctrination should be.

The "excess verbiage" in our example could have been any number of concepts-- relevant to education or otherwise-- but it's not. It is what it is. Is it everywhere? No, thankfully. However, related ideas contained within it became fairly common in other aspects of life and industry. What am I to surmise?

The entire point of my post is that, for all the discussion of various woke concepts, precious little of it has made it into actual policy. The fact that people are citing to documents that are long on bullshit and short on actual substance is only further evidence of that. If I really had to I could probably justify the entire Trump policy platform using woke CRT language, but it wouldn't really say anything about the underlying policies. All the use of this excess verbiage does is provide evidence of the thought-process of the people writing the documents, but I'm not arguing that there aren't important people who think this way; I'm arguing that this kind of thought hasn't been pervasive enough to result in objectionable policies.

I believe if you look with regards to education you'll find a number of objectionable curriculum and policy changes in major school districts. They may or may not have an effect on your state and local systems and curriculums. I'm of the mind that the years of 2010-2022 we saw major cultural changes in American society. It's why I'm here. Many cases of policy changes in industry, academia, and K-12 education have been brought to this very forums. I do not believe education was immune to the changes.

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That being said, wokeness got a lot of press but it was never able to coalesce into a serious political movement, and while it certainly influenced the "national conversation", it didn't really lead to any concrete changes beyond hand-wavey gestures that in hindsight look more to have been done for purposes of public perception than to make any real changes.

Well, it did get the FAA to blatantly enable people to cheat in order to fix the racial admission ratio of traffic controllers.

And they managed to make a small minority of Blacks to get away with killing more Blacks because policing them is racist if it leads to disparate outcomes.

Citing something that was implemented between 2009 and 2014 is hardly evidence of the woke explosion having influenced anything.

And they managed to make a small minority of Blacks to get away with killing more Blacks because policing them is racist if it leads to disparate outcomes.

This is based on the assumption that "defund the police" and other movements led to a conscious effort to decrease policing that resulted in a higher murder rate. But the increase in murder rate happened everywhere, and to much the same degree. I haven't seen any study that's attempted to grade cities based on how enthusiastic they were about implementing police reform and looking at how the murder rates responded. Hell, Dallas and Miami had Republican mayors and still couldn't avoid the crime increase, so I doubt that this phenomenon was solely driven by policy decisions. Until someone actually takes a look at this, it's nothing more than conjecture.

Dallas has a Republican mayor, but that’s because he switched parties after being elected as a democrat(this is reasonably common in Texas politics, but a Dallas mayor is unusually high profile for it). The Republican didn’t win the election and every other elected official is a democrat.

This is a large underplaying of DEI/Woke, particularly within corporate HR, and within the Biden administration proper. He may have run as a centrist, he governed as a wokist. Media kept calling him centrist of course. Perhaps even attacking him from the left as he invited naked gays to the White House.

So how if woke stuff never polls over 60% in California are there pride flags in classrooms in Galveston, TX, entire wings of hospitals dedicated to choppping off 12 year olds penises and breasts in Nashville, TN, and admissions departments giving scholarships to Black Lesbian 'B' students with a 24 ACT and stumbling over themselves to keep out a 4.0 White Dude with a 35, in Gainsville, FL?

The phenomenon is that so many people in the mainstream refuse to have enemies to their left. This meant moderates never critiqued the extreme leftists until they had already been expunged (as we have seen at basically all mainstream media organizations, most are to the left of Elizabeth Warren). So only institutions subject to market pressures (and most big business and all education has been shielded from these recently) and anonymous voting were able to resist wokism for the longest time.

Now perhaps we have gotten to an inflection point where the insanity of it is exposed. But again, perhaps not, perhaps it is merely a speedbump, the wokists certainly will not stop trying, and few will be reformed.

So how if woke stuff never polls over 60% in California are there pride flags in classrooms in Galveston, TX, entire wings of hospitals dedicated to choppping off 12 year olds penises and breasts in Nashville, TN, and admissions departments giving scholarships to Black Lesbian 'B' students with a 24 ACT and stumbling over themselves to keep out a 4.0 White Dude with a 35, in Gainsville, FL?

The fact that you have to resort to obvious hyperbole proves my point.

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No, it doesn't. Even if there aren't entire hospital wings devoted to transgender surgeries, or if it's just one wing of one hospital, or whatever it is that makes it hyperbole, the amount by which the trans issue has been pushed over the past decade is insane. I'll remind you it was trans activists themselves who swore up and down that no one is doing irreversible procedures on minors, as they were penetrating ze cabinets of the Biden administration to hatch a conspiracy to abolish age limits on irreversible gender procedures.

Which part of it is obvious hyperbole? I see maybe some exaggeration in details (like, maybe child trans surgery dept does not take entire wing but shares it with other surgical needs) but which part is supposed to be obvious here?

It's hyperbolic in the implication. Yes, I'm sure you can find some classroom in Galveston with a Pride flag in it, but the existence of one isn't necessarily an indication that this is a widespread phenomenon, any more than a British flag in a classroom in Des Moines is evidence of widespread Anglophilia. the fact that Vanderbilt has a trans surgery center that may have, at one time, performed an operation on a minor is a far cry from them having an entire wing at the hospital dedicated to pediatric trans surgeries. And just because one particular person was admitted to the University of Florida doesn't mean that they've gone full DEI. If they're really stumbling over themselves to keep out highly-qualified white dudes then it doesn't explain how they continue to make up a large percentage of the student body. And it really doesn't explain why the proportion of black students has been trending downward for over a decade, to the point that it's only half of what it was in 2010.

but the existence of one isn't necessarily an indication that this is a widespread phenomenon

But it is. I mean, I don't know specifically about Galveston, but I am aware about dozens of cases without even trying to look for any, just because of how saturated the scene is with this phenomenon. Maybe out of all classrooms the ones with Pride flags are still a minority, but I remember a time where it wasn't a thing at all. Now it's not only a thing, it's a common thing that is not surprising anymore. Some like it, some hate it, but nobody is surprised "how could it happen?!" - everybody knows how it happens.

that Vanderbilt has a trans surgery center that may have, at one time, performed an operation on a minor

You know perfectly well that minor transition surgery is not "one time" thing, there are people that specialize in it, publicize in it and it happened thousands of times. This is not adequately described as "may have, at one time", and I think you know it as well as I do, so what exactly are you doing here trying to present something that is true not only as fiction, but as "obvious" fiction as if everybody should have subscribed on the notion of pretending it does not exist? I mean I can get a person that thinks it's a good thing, it helps children, it cures them from terrible mental illness - I think they are horribly mistaken, but at least they have a consistent position to stand on. But saying something that is known to be true to be obviously false? What's that?

just because one particular person was admitted to the University of Florida doesn't mean that they've gone full DEI.

Again, we know that DEI is well beyond one particular person, with whole departments being allocated to this and rules explicitly known to be modified to satisfy it, and people are being forced to submit their positions in support of DEI as a condition of employment and promotion. Again, these are widely known facts, how it is "obvious" that it doesn't happen?

If they're really stumbling over themselves to keep out highly-qualified white dudes then it doesn't explain how they continue to make up a large percentage of the student body.

Very simple - there are a lot of highly-qualified white dudes (especially when you count Asian dudes as white, which colleges already do) and not a lot of even barely qualified idpol approved candidates. If the group supplies to many qualified candidates (like Asians) they get automatically demoted from the preferred list. So if they want those sweet parent money and student loans to roll in, they need to accept some white dudes. That said, Harvard has been fighting for over a hundred years to get the Jewish student percentage under 12% or so, and I've read recently that they emerged victorious. So if there's a will, there's a way. What again remains unexplained is how these well known facts are "obvious" exaggeration?

It is noteworthy that many hn comments are not amused:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682305

There's a whole lot of voldemorting there. Claiming you can't say woke since it "doesn't mean anything" or is "just a boogeyman at this point".

HackerNews is mostly captured now unfortunately.

So perhaps someone can answer: are they TRULY captured, true believers in the cause, or are they engaged in a social signalling game, everyone hiding their power level in public for fear of social sanction.

My till-recent theory of mind is particularly uncharitable: young men pretend to be progressive to impress young women. Yet I have met single young graduate men who, unprompted, stated their commitment to inclusive work practices at business meetings. Like they say it before the beginning of their presentation decks which will feature some black woman in a hard hat all the time, even though their solutions are pure leetcode deskbound shit. Its like true believers reciting the shahada. What gives?

So perhaps someone can answer: are they TRULY captured, true believers in the cause, or are they engaged in a social signalling game, everyone hiding their power level in public for fear of social sanction.

There are plenty of true believers in the tech world, and they sound like that.

Well, the tech industry runs on autists and a good fraction of them are MtF now.

There are certainly true believers, but there are also fair weather friends and ideologies of convenience.

Of course, wokeness isn't dead. Far from it. But the vibe shift is real, and I think it's pretty fair to say that wokeness did peak in 2020/21 and is in serious retreat now.

I would not hold my breath, yet. Wokeness thrived under the first Trump presidency, and I would not discount his ability to energize his enemies again.

Wokeness flourished when it was viewed as the inevitable stymied by a fraud, the will of the changing demographic majority-minority populace frustrated by the last gasp of white rage. That framing allowed white progressives to lead black progressive (women) by the nose, trotting out blacks as shields to block criticism of wokeness. The minority support of trump upends this entire argument, making it clear that wokeness was not supporting the preferences of the inevitable majority.

There are plenty of other reasons, in particular ZIRP ending and the fact that DEI policies neither improved bottom line nor stopped activist screeching. Nevertheless the vanguardist progressives have lost their colors. They have no leg to stand on, and barring a cogent minority voice emerging from a massive race scandal, wokeism has lost its merit.

The minority support of trump upends this entire argument, making it clear that wokeness was not supporting the preferences of the inevitable majority.

Unfortunately, my view from the ground here in blue country is that people are extremely resistant to absorbing this particular truth, no matter how many numbers are thrown at them.

Harris lost 15m biden voters because she was too cosy with Cheneys? Is this the 'democrats weren't woke enough, so their supporters stayed home' argument? Democrats needed to be more woke, promise more DEI positions, legally enshrine black representation, force a ceasefire on Israel (but not Hamas). If the dems did that, then the army of disappointed minority socialists would feel welcome in the now sufficiently progressive democrats?

Sounds just like the DSA meetings I attended in college. Rooms full of white (literal) autists and their racial adjacents (asian autists, latino autists, tranny autists, black autists, white progressives) theorycrafting about the hidden socialists eager for the revolution. In your neck of deep blue county are there people of working class values there, or is it primarily class aspirants?

Democrats needed to be more woke, promise more DEI positions, legally enshrine black representation, force a ceasefire on Israel (but not Hamas).

Be different from Biden in some tangible way, at least.

Harris lost 15m biden voters because she was too cosy with Cheneys? Is this the 'democrats weren't woke enough, so their supporters stayed home' argument?

I live in a deep blue enclave of a blood red region, and what I saw is that yes, she did alienate left wing voters by not running hard to the left. Her prosecutorial history in California and her stance on Gaza were both highly unpopular among the University set.

She simultaneously alienated centrists and and squishy Republicans by running too hard to the left, but on different topics. Trans stuff, DEI, and gun laws all came up when talking to people outside the boundary.

It seems like she was uniquely bad at activating her base, but also rallied her opposition.

Did they stay home instead of voting? And were they in significant enough numbers to move the needle were they to turn out? I have very lefty friends telling me that supporting Gaza would have won Harris Michigan and North Carolina (I don't understand this one) for (((reasons -ok jew hate))), and that defund the police backlash will blow over once the social programs start driving down crime, winning over Pennsylvania and Geoegia. In their view this would have given her the popular vote by increasing turnout across the blue strongholds, and flipped the key battleground states. This seems too deep in the woods for me as an external observer, but at the very least it seems that my lefty pals have retreated deeper into their shaky mottes, even as more normies are ok talking openly about how theres too many ugly dudes in dresses talking shit about kids.

I haven't really pressed, but I get the impression that a significant number of them didn't actually go out and vote. They all talked like they didn't want to participate in a Harris win, but assumed it was fait accompli.

Harris lost 15m biden voters because she was too cosy with Cheneys? Is this the 'democrats weren't woke enough, so their supporters stayed home' argument?

Nothing succeeds like success. Nuking the legislative filibuster to make Puerto Rico and DC states, or otherwise passing big reforms that actually do things (not just the IRA with its patronage handouts that aren't even getting spent because of restrictive rules) make you look successful. Whinging and begging for table scraps from a dissident faction of the enemy party (let alone a dissident faction which contains your own party's biggest boogeymen circa 10 years ago) makes you look weak and desperate.

Yup. I heard someone railing against moderate candidates in CA because "look we sent a SF moderate to run for President and it didn't work".

An adversary that doesn't learn from their mistakes is a godsend.

I'd argue that wokeness flourishes when it boils the proverbial frog, which is markedly the thing they haven't been doing in the past ten years or so.

I think if wokeness will get a second wind it will look quite different, see Tea Party and MAGA. If I had to take a swipe at how it might be different I could see there being a luddite/anti-tech angle. I think you can already see some seeds with phrases like 'tech bro'. Plus it's fertile ground for anyone with grievances or misgivings about the negative cultural impacts of social media, as well as the economic impacts of increasing automation.

If I had to take a swipe at how it might be different I could see there being a luddite/anti-tech angle.

I find this highly dubious. As others have noted, wokeness is in many ways a product of tech, and social media specifically, and a number of their issues — most notably around transgender — require the magnifying effect of the internet and media to maintain relevance.

It does seem contradictory and self-defeating, but so does much of the progressive orthodoxy. Regardless what I am positing is anti-tech rhetoric and maybe something performative like restricting phone use to strictly utilitarian ends, not full blown ludditism.

Wokeness was a particular expression of the politics of the Coalition of the Ascendant logic.

I first remember encountering this logic from Michael Moore in his abysmal Dude Where's my Country? circa 2004:

Just for once, wouldn’t it be nice to win, especially considering how liberal most Americans are? It’s time to start thinking outside the tiny box that exists in our minds. For starters, let’s stop believing the president has to be a white guy. White guys are a shrinking minority in this country—making up just 38 percent of voters. Plus, as I’ve pointed out before, all the Democrats who’ve won the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt (with the exception of Lyndon Johnson’s landslide in 1964) have won by losing the white male vote. They won by getting an overwhelming number of white women and black and Hispanic men and women to vote for them.

If the Democrats would stop watering down their beliefs to appeal to all the dumb white guys out there, they’d win. Women of all colors are 53 percent of the electorate. Black and Hispanic men make up nearly 8 percent of the vote. That means that women and these minority men represent about 60 percent of the entire nation, an overwhelming majority and a powerful winning combination.

This was the core Democratic logic from the Obama era to today. The POC coalition concept, that everyone other than White Men naturally had similar interests. That White Men held such a large proportion of the pie that splitting up those spoils, once captured, among blacks/women/gays/jews?/hispanics would be so profitable as to mask any conflicts between those groups.

This logic mostly held through the second Obama term, and the wars of the first Trump term were about trying to preserve and expand it.

The Biden era saw the coalition fracture.

Israel did a lot of work. Biden's vast incompetence did a lot. The pursuit of ever more baroque goals did a lot.

But largely, the logic of the coalition just ran out, in that their ability to expand the power of all coalition members by seizing power from white men ran out. Choices started to need to be made, between blacks and asians, between gays and women, between immigrants and the native born underclass. This always existed at some level, the famous anecdote about Shulamith Firestone:

“They laughed at us,” Freeman recalled. “The chair said, ‘Move on, little girl. We have more important issues to talk about here than women’s problems.’ And then he reached out and literally patted Shulie on the head.” Soon afterward, Firestone and Freeman convened Westside, the first radical-feminist group in Chicago. Yet many of the women in Westside, and its successor, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, thought that the concerns of the male-dominated New Left should take priority. Naomi Weisstein, then a young neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, recalled, “The first thing the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union did was vote to give half our money to the Black Panthers.” Firestone, who had no interest in what she called “Ladies’ Auxiliaries of the Left,” united a faction that called itself, simply, the feminists.

But they've come to a head in recent years. Consider racial conflicts on campuses. When 90% of students at elite colleges were white, and the leaders all male, it made more sense for ascendant Asians and Blacks to try to expand their numbers and power from that reservoir of whites than it did to fight each other. Now that whites are down to 34% of Harvard students, and many of those are some form of Jewish or gay or other semi-protected status anyway, minorities have to fight each other for influence and power.

This is a great insight.

I'd just like to comment about incredibly WEIRD white people are.

Moore, a fat stupid white guy, thinks that the problem with the world is that there are too many fat, stupid white guys in charge.

Pretty much no other cultural group other than northern Europeans think like this. The pro-outgroup bias is insane.

Christopher Hitchens on Michael Moore:

The laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious, and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all those qualities.

Pretty much no other cultural group other than northern Europeans think like this. The pro-outgroup bias is insane.

This is such an odd meme online. The world is full of people who have a pro-outgroup bias, and probably always has been. In-group, out-group, far-group dynamics are not exclusive to Europeans. Asians who prefer whites, Africans and Arabs who prefer European institutions, so on and so forth. I recall seeing a nice little chart passed around from a study "Proving" that liberal whites are unique compared to other ethnic groups in America...without even trying to break down those ethnic groups by politics.

Moore is just another Charlie Manson type racist, who assumes that he is different from everyone else and special and will be spared in Helter Skelter. He can't defeat the Republicans he hates himself, but he can enlist the blacks and the women to do it for him, and at the end of the process the grateful blacks and women will turn to Moore for leadership.

The world is full of people who have a pro-outgroup bias, and probably always has been. In-group, out-group, far-group dynamics are not exclusive to Europeans. Asians who prefer whites, Africans and Arabs who prefer European institutions, so on and so forth.

I think most of these either aren't about the same subgroups of each category (some Africans prefer European institutions, others want to kill the Boer) or they're about the fargroup part, not about the ingroup part.

But pretty soon it gained adherents who did it for practical reasons – they put their pronouns in their bios because their jobs literally depended on it. It seems like a self-reinforcing cycle. Once woke people get more power, they make demands which include hiring even more woke people, giving them more power, etc... Anyone who speaks out is banished from the organization.

There's no limiting principle here. Other social movements, like Christianity, grew and grew until they took over essentially all institutions. Why couldn't wokeness do the same?

There is another limiting principle -- once everyone puts pronouns in their bios then it's no longer a signal. Despite the true believers trying to up the ante with ever-more-Stalins, they eventually get outnumbered by folks that are just backing the winning team. The slogans remain at the surface level only, it's hollowed from within.

Then the wind blows the other way and they're just as willing to follow something else. That's why these things don't change at all until they change all of a sudden -- it's a common knowledge problem.

Elaborate theories about institutions and cancers have far less explanatory power than the fact that once it gets known that you can be hired by appearing woke, those that appear woke aren't necessarily so. And once hired (and once they hire someone that hires someone) there is no longer much leverage against them.

Paul Graham is out today with an essay about the origins of woke.

Not even one mention of either OWS or the Tea Party?

What you mention is a weakness of the movement, but the biggest reason I can see for why it's in retreat is the boring "Elon Musk spent $100,000,000,000 to damage it, and actually managed to hit something important".

One factor going unnoticed: the 4chan generation of conservatives entering adult fruition. This involves 100k+ (1 million even?) American teens who went from liberal-libertarians to hardcore infographic-clad conservatives somewhere between ‘12 and ‘15. This generation is now 25-31 and influencing things. Their influence extended to the Red Scare Podcast subculture which extends even to some celebrities (Timothy Chalamet and Aubrey Plaza having familiarity). This cohort was kept in an online meritocratic containment zone where persuasion (memes) were of exclusive clout, and then they were released into the wild with their memetic infections and immunities.

So there’s Musk, but then there’s also an element of progressive memes losing persuasion due to a longterm culture cohort shift. Then it’s also news media losing influence.

A podcast I listen to described anons archiving court transcripts from the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK as 'monks preserving scriptures during the dark ages'.

Just like how the woke college kids grew up and into positions of power, now the edgy memelords of yesteryear are growing up and entering the workforce too.

For the connoisseurs of online drama, there is newly created single-article substack making anonymous allegations against some user being a sock puppet of another user on both Wikipedia and something called RationalWiki and using his accounts to discredit people doing intelligence research.

The article was voiced by askwhocastsai, therefore the source must be credible. This is likely published by someone who is not a neutral party with a pathological interest into pathological wiki people, but rather someone who has been feuding with the subject of the article, personally, so one should probably take it with a grain of salt, for all I know this Smith guy is a fabrication and the sock puppet owner wrote the article to deflect attention away from him.

Anyways, the alleged subject of the article is said to be a former neo-Nazi who has reformed and is now using sock puppets to write hit piece articles about academics who research the genetics of intelligence on RationalWiki, which per WP 'is an online wiki which is written from a scientific skeptic, secular, and progressive perspective.' (It likely shares some ancient history with the ratsphere in that both movements precursors include the atheism wars, but they did not update on the cowpox of doubt.) His other alleged hobby is to sue people (representing himself) who write about him doing that. The article claims that most people who he sues actually tend to settle and remove their articles even though he would be unlikely to win in court. Per the article, substack managed to get a case kicked out of court when he sued them.

The articles claims that his tactics include getting articles on him deleted by personally editing them, adding info which is clearly slander, and then proceed with his legal actions, which seems like a neat if evil trick if you get away with it.

Generally, the claim that a select few who have the time to maintain one or more online personas have an exaggerated influence on how members of the public who are somewhat noteworthy (but not very noteworthy) are perceived through a google search seems worrisome. (Nor do I expect the LLMs bound to replace google to be better here, mostly.)

Personally, I am also fascinated by how much dedication and time some people on the internet have. Despite not being overworked, I write perhaps four comments on LW, ACX or the motte per week in total. Seeing someone who manages to run dozens of sock puppets, or painstakingly unearths sock puppetry going years back, or (as the alternative) invents whole complex allegations of sock puppetry has me amazed.

I'm amazed at the effort some people still put into sockpuppets and trolling just here on the Motte.

I think some people get infested by brainworms once they've been balked, just once, and cannot let go of the idea that they have to "win" and "show them."

RationalWiki has to be one of the most cringeworthy sites around.

Everything is written with the kind of contemptuous, snarky tone that you see on the incels.wiki page for 'femoids'. At least the incels are succinct.

For instance, on the Vladimir Putin page for instance they have "Reality-defying good stuff?" and "And the reality-returning bad stuff" as sections. 'Elderly imperialist Elmer Fudd and Daniel Craig’s evil twin.' is not an appropriate subtitle for an image.

It's so bad. I don't know why Google points to it so willingly.

Trump's Mideast Envoy Forced Netanyahu to Accept a Gaza Plan He Repeatedly Rejected

Last Friday evening, Steven Witkoff, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's Middle East envoy, called from Qatar to tell Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's aides that he would be coming to Israel the following afternoon. The aides politely explained that was in the middle of the Sabbath but that the prime minister would gladly meet him Saturday night.

Witkoff's blunt reaction took them by surprise. He explained to them in salty English that Shabbat was of no interest to him. His message was loud and clear. Thus in an unusual departure from official practice, the prime minister showed up at his office for an official meeting with Witkoff, who then returned to Qatar to seal the deal.

In fact, Witkoff has forced Israel to accept a plan that Netanyahu had repeatedly rejected over the past half year. Hamas has not budged from its position that the hostages' freedom must be conditioned on the release of Palestinian prisoners (the easy part) and a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza (the hard one). Netanyahu rejected this condition and thus was born the partial deal proposed by Egypt.

It's hard to know how Netanyahu feels about this aggressive behavior. While it provides an excuse he can give to his base, he may resent being dragged into an unwanted deal that will end the war and possibly lead to political upheaval at home. His propaganda machine is pushing the no-choice narrative that it's Trump. On Monday, laments began to be heard on Channel 14 that Trump isn't what we thought. "I'm surprised all the senior officials in the U.S. administration are saying the same thing," Yotam Zimri said on the Patriots program. "If this doesn't happen by the time Trump comes in, Hamas will understand what hell is. I don't understand the Israeli interest in at least not waiting for Trump." Yinon Magal answered," It's because Trump is pressing to do it! That's what's happening."

Trump declared repeatedly that if the remaining Israeli hostages weren't out by his inauguration there would be 'hell to pay'. Most people assumed this meant that MIGA Don would fully back more aggressive Israeli military action, but instead he's willing to pressure Israel into a deal they don't want. Israeli finance minister Smotrich called it a 'catastrophe' and if he quits the government it would collapse Netanyahu's coalition.

Details of the proposed plan can be found here:

Both sides agreed that Hamas would release three hostages on the first day of the agreement, after which Israel would begin withdrawing the troops from populated areas. Seven days later, Hamas would release four additional hostages, and Israel would allow displaced people in the southern to return to the north, but only on foot via the coastal road. Cars, animal-drawn carts, and trucks would be permitted to cross through a passage adjacent to Salah al-Din Road, monitored by an X-ray machine operated by a Qatari-Egyptian technical security team.

The agreement includes provisions for Israeli forces to remain in the Philadelphi corridor and maintain an 800-meter buffer zone along the eastern and northern borders during the first phase, which will last 42 days. Israel has also agreed to release 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including approximately 190 who have been serving sentences of 15 years or more. In exchange, Hamas will release 34 hostages. Negotiations for the second and third phases of the agreement would begin on the 16th day of the ceasefire.

This smells like giving Israel and out. Big bad Trump comes in and makes them take a ceasefire deal saving face internally.

If so, brilliant work by Trump.

This is a no-win conflict and the sooner it ends the better. The longer it festers the higher the chance it escalates into something much more serious.

I don't expect the Middle East conflict to end entirely, but if this causes a significant reduction in tensions, then Trump deserves the Noble Peace Prize (but of course they'll give it to Biden or Blinken instead).

Let's be honest, though—it only works because Trump is untouchable among his base. If Biden had insisted on a similar deal Trump would be screaming about how he can't sell out Israel and we must support Israel at all costs. Any US president could force Israel into a ceasefire by threatening to cut off military aid, it's just that the political consequences would be dire. Whether the pro-Israel wing of the party (i.e. the wing that's more pro-Israel than usual) will take him to task for this remains to be seen. I doubt the Orthodox Jewish community will let this slide, though. They're essentially single-issue voters.

I doubt the Orthodox Jewish community will let this slide, though. They're essentially single-issue voters.

It's not like they can do anything to him. He's already been elected for his second term as president, and he couldn't have another even if they did vote for him. It's not like we have recall elections for presidents either. So why would he care?

They can't do anything to him personally. But they have their own elected representatives who are going to be looking for concessions lest they find themselves on the hot seat. It's not so much about what they can do to Trump as it is about Trump's own lack of loyalty. He's acting like he can do anything he wants to and Republicans in congress will just fall in line. If he oversteps, though, people who need to keep their seats will make it very difficult for him to get anything done.

If he oversteps, though, people who need to keep their seats will make it very difficult for him to get anything done.

I don't think it would be a very good look for the jewish community to openly and nakedly hold the entire political establishment hostage because their foreign homeland is no longer being treated better than American citizens in the wake of natural disasters. If this actually happens, how do you prevent it from becoming visible and tanking Israel's reputation among the American people?

I would hope that if American citizens are fighting back against people who are shooting rockets at them, we wouldn't punish those American citizens.

Who's talking about punishing Israeli citizens fighting against Hamas?

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If a Texan rancher lost one of his family members to a cartel robbery then went on to line a bunch of random mexicans up on the ground and crush them to death with a bulldozer he would absolutely deserve serious, rigorous punishment and prosecution. "A member of their ethnicity attacked me" is justification for retaliatory violence (EDIT: just to clarify, I mean retaliatory violence against the actual culprits, not random members of said ethnicity) - but it isn't justification for ethnic cleansing.

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I suspect that for domestic reasons Trump wants this over on whatever terms so that it isn’t festering during his term. Israel splits the left, yes, but it also splits Maga.

No it doesn’t. Even IRL antisemitic right wingers- of whom there are far fewer than on the internet- see Palestinians as a bunch of savages in the desert that need dealt with by someone.

The American right has, probably, a literal single digit number of people with any sympathy for Palestine whatsoever. If there was a way to poll trump voters who also deny the Holocaust, I suspect that poll would show strong support for Israel in its wars against Palestinians. There are more Trump voters who use Palestinian as a slur than who think Israeli forces have done literally anything wrong.

Right, but a loud single digit (let’s say 5%) can cause trouble on an issue, especially when they’re overrepresented in your propaganda wing.

EDIT: Sorry, misread you. I think your numbers are off: I’ve had multiple in-person MAGA Americans bring this up with me spontaneously. They’re not like the left, they don’t have any love for Hamas, but ‘we’re spending gold and reputation so Israel can defend its stolen land by bombing helpless savages to paste’ is absolutely a POV that exists on the MAGA right. I think a percentage in the high single-digits is probably about right.

Trump has enough on his plate, I doubt he cares much about Israel, and so I can imagine him wanting to just get this off the table so he can focus on more important stuff.

IME the most common formulation is ‘I don’t trust Jews but they have the right to do whatever they want to sand niggers but they should pay for it themselves because they have all the money in the world anyways’. This is not a pro-Israel position but it’s also not a position which has sympathy for Palestine.

Our experiences differ, I guess. There are plenty of right-wingers who are pro-Jewish, or at worst mildly irritated by them, who nevertheless feel that killing lots of Palestinians is wrong.

The American right has, probably, a literal single digit number of people with any sympathy for Palestine whatsoever.

I think we have more than single digits of people on this site who fit that description.

The slogan is "make America great again". Not waste trillions on forever wars in the middle east with no prospect of success. Maga is the opposite of the fiascos of nation building from the mainstream republicans. Genociding the local christian population isn't that popular with young people. Younger voters, including younger republicans skew a lot more pro Palestine. Israel actively supporting jihadists in Syria hurts their supposed "anti-islam" stance.

Not waste trillions on forever wars in the middle east with no prospect of success. Maga is the opposite of the fiascos of nation building from the mainstream republicans.

Well, there's some on the right — though, per your later point about "younger republicans," these skew older — who belong to what Parvini calls the "counter-jihadis." For them, the answer is that it's not about "nation building" or bringing democracy, feminism, and LGBT tolerance to the Middle East, it's about killing Muslims — because either you're killing Muslims, or Muslims are killing you.

I remember one, shortly after Oct. 7, demanding that US troops be sent over to start killing Gazans, because if we didn't do so right now, we'd have similar attacks in countless American towns, and that the whole reason the attack happened in the first place is because we weren't keeping the Muslims suppressed enough, which is why we need to make sure that we are bombing or shooting Muslims in multiple countries 24/7/365.

I've encountered arguments about how there are no civilian casualties in Gaza because there's no such thing as a Muslim civilian, that every single one of them — even a newborn — is a valid military target. About how there are no moderate Muslims, only those biding their time and practicing taqiyya, and how even the most well-integrated and moderate-seeming Muslim could suddenly commit a terrorist attack at any given moment. How the First Amendment doesn't apply to "Mohammedanism," because it's not really a religion at all, but a political ideology of murderous global conquest — much like Nazism — trying to pass itself off as a religion. How Islam is and has always been the number one enemy of Christendom — with invocations of Charles Martell, the Reconquista, the Gates of Vienna, the Crusades, etc. — and thus fighting them must remain the West's highest priority. (I find this one skews a bit younger and more online than the rest, tending to come with a fondness for "Deus Vult" and "Make Istanbul Constantinople Again" memes.) Lots of "founded by a pedophile warlord" comments.

Israel actively supporting jihadists in Syria hurts their supposed "anti-islam" stance.

Yeah, and that has quieted some of these folks a bit, though there's a certain amount of "enemy of my enemy" and "it's a complex situation" rationalization that happens IME.

If there was a way to poll trump voters who also deny the Holocaust, I suspect that poll would show strong support for Israel in its wars against Palestinians.

This doesn't match my personal experience… but then again, the "Holocaust-denying" sorts I know IRL weren't exactly big on Trump — either from a 'not voting until the left is actually correct about the GOP candidate being Hitler' position, or a 'they're both ZOG puppets, but Harris winning would at least keep more attention on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has been the best thing in decades for waking people up to the vile, murderous inborn character of the Eternal Jew' position.

It's not correct to assume there are only antisemitic right wingers and zionist right wingers. There are a great deal of Republicans who are noninterventionist either out of libertarianism or as a result of Iraq/Afghanistan and there are many who, like me, have a great affinity for Jews while seeing Israel as morally no different than the terrorist states they fight. This isn't a coalition, but it's certainly a larger group than the "Holocaust didn't happen but it's a good thing" types. If it's enough to contribute to Democrat election losses, then that means it's enough to contribute to Republican election losses.

And that's not delving into the conservative voting Muslim or global South origin issue.

Yeah, there’s non-interventionist right wingers- and they don’t particularly want the war to stop. They don’t care about gazans. It’s somebody else’s troops fighting. At most they want Israel to pay for it.

Yeah, there’s non-interventionist right wingers- and they don’t particularly want the war to stop. They don’t care about gazans. It’s somebody else’s troops fighting. At most they want Israel to pay for it.

At most? Did you mean at least? You don't get to call yourself a non-interventionist if you support intervening in a foreign conflict by sending vast sums of money, military equipment and military support. That's the bare minimum required to be a non-interventionist.

Holy shit.

I'm a lukewarm (non-American) supporter of Trump, but this is genuinely impressive to me. Even if he can't resolve the situation completely, the fact he can progress some kind of resolution at all at this time is amazing.

Honestly if this is true and succeeds, this might be the single thing that has raised my opinion of Trump the most. He's not even in office yet!

Trump had some major Israel related diplomatic victories in his first term, too.

They were only "diplomatic victories" in an Israeli sense, not an American one. Israel got a ton of stuff it wanted while the US increased its presence and exposure in the region for negligible gain.

He's thrown Canada into a bit of chaos, particularly since the NDP (left wing party) stopped supporting the minority Liberals and the government will therefore fall at the first opportunity. Of course, Prime Minister Trudeau prorogued parliament until his replacement gets selected by his party in late March, so the "first opportunity" isn't any time soon.

We now have provincial leaders dealing with Federal responsibilities (see Alberta Premier Danielle Smith visiting Trump), which is an odd change of pace.

Interestingly, this also appears to be occurring in Ontario itself, since the rest of the province has stood in opposition of the federal government for the past 7 years [and the same thing was true of the City of Toronto itself, at least for a time, considering who they elected as mayor]; this is partially why Ontario didn't set up internal border checkpoints (the police told them no), and is part of how [and why] the truckers were effectively permitted to occupy the city where a significant fraction of Liberal voters live and work for a solid month.

Really, Ontario is Canada in microcosm- it's as harshly divided [against the policies the rich and the federal government (and its employees) would prefer] as the rest of Canada is in comparison to Ottawa. No wonder the Feds (and by extension, the supporters of the current government) feel so threatened and fed up that they can't get anything done.

We now have provincial leaders dealing with Federal responsibilities (see Alberta Premier Danielle Smith visiting Trump), which is an odd change of pace.

That's actually a big fucking deal, for the same reason it's a big deal when Texas starts signing security agreements with Mexico. Granted, there isn't exactly much migration across the prairie border (not that the US could really stop you, of course), but the fact that the US is the primary trading partner for each province isn't lost on anyone here.

Canada calls its federation "confederation" for some reason, but if the Federal government continues its abdication and some absurdity happens (either the Western Canada party doesn't get a majority, or Trump actually does manage to destroy the Canadian economy especially if no election occurs until October, or Quebec continues on closing itself off from the rest of Canada) it might actually become what it's called.

until his replacement gets selected by his party in late March

I kind of feel sorry for Kim Campbell 2.0. Maybe they won't do it because the PC already claimed 'first female PM' back in the '80s but I have no expectation that they'll be able to refrain from doing this- perhaps an East Indian woman, both to out-IdPol Singh and remind that intentionally-imported demographic who brought them here in the first place?

That's actually a big fucking deal, for the same reason it's a big deal when Texas starts signing security agreements with Mexico.

Yup. The biggest power voids I've seen the provinces fill before this is some trade delegations to foreign countries. Even that could've been framed as just helping the local businesses and industries.

This is straight-up international diplomacy.

if no election occurs until October

God I hope not. Singh has been half-assing opposition to Trudeau for months (and hinting at it before then), but he finally committed to bringing down the government...in late December, with at least six weeks until it would be possible...which has now been extended to more than three months. I'm hopeful that it'll all be over when parliament reconvenes in March (Early April election call + 37 day minimum campaign = new government in May??), but I'll believe it when I see it.

perhaps an East Indian woman, both to out-IdPol Singh and remind that intentionally-imported demographic who brought them here in the first place?

Remember that (under the current Liberal rules) temporary foreign workers and students are eligible to vote for the next Liberal leader (who will be the next Prime Minister, of course). In contrast, voting for the Conservative leader required a $15 membership fee and being a Permanent Resident or Citizen.

Unless they change the rules, that candidate could get in by appealing directly to foreigners for votes, instead of appealing to sentiment towards them by citizens and permanent residents.

This is straight-up international diplomacy.

And I find it more interesting that the Liberals don't give a shit. Then again, it's not like that had far-reaching consequences in Texas even though it really should have, but then again the US hasn't had an acting President for the past 2 or 3 years.

Maybe they think it'll end with a Con majority so Smith is just wasting her time playing Queen of Alberta (or hedging her bets if the Liberals somehow retain their minority status- and that's a risk I think is understated given the below), but I think the more notice the Cons (and their newer Ontario backers) are put on the better it'll ultimately be for the West if for no other reason than to provide a check against policy starvation.

but I'll believe it when I see it.

The reason I think it's still going to be October is just because that's the optimal game theoretic strategy for every interested party. If an election was called today everyone already knows the result; what else do they have to lose by stalling for time? Black swan events are a thing, and if you don't wait for them, you can't get lucky.

Unless they change the rules, that candidate could get in by appealing directly to foreigners for votes

I can't think of a more on-the-nose emblem of Liberal immigration policy than this. Fortunately, non-citizens can't vote in elections, so I don't expect much to be put on the scale by these groups, but still.

Then again, it's not like that had far-reaching consequences in Texas even though it really should have, but then again the US hasn't had an acting President for the past 2 or 3 years.

Yes it did. Greg Abbott is for better or worse aligned with the hard right faction; he now has a free hand to defy the federal government. Internal politics are radically different and a big part of that is the conception that Texan interests and US national interests may not be one and the same anymore. Nullification is now a mainstream part of political platforms.

The reason I think it's still going to be October is just because that's the optimal game theoretic strategy for every interested party.

Eh, the NDP's run down the clock about as much as they can -- at a certain point propping up the Liberals will cost them more votes than it's worth. (and it's already costing them some)

The Bloc I suppose is always a wildcard, but it doesn't seem that they had much success with issuing ultimatums and they are poised to make out very very well in QC for the forseeable future -- so I can't see Trudeau's successor turning them.

Throne speech is a confidence vote; I predict an election declaration soon afterwards. (although at the maximum period, not the minimum -- for just the reasons you mention)

so the "first opportunity" isn't any time soon.

Exactly. The NDP has refused to go along with the Conservatives bringing down the government for a while now. Instead, Singh just constantly said Trudeau had to go but won't vote to kick out the Liberals.

Then, all of a sudden, after Trudeau resigns (Freeland has to play a role here) and prorogues Parliament, Singh is suddenly on-board when...he can do nothing cause Parliament is suspended for months until the Liberals pick a new leader.

The cynical explanation is that this has little to do with Trump: the NDP knows they're utterly done due to backing the Liberals for so long and Singh deliberately ran out the clock so he could get his pension.

Then, all of a sudden, after Trudeau resigns (Freeland has to play a role here) and prorogues Parliament, Singh is suddenly on-board when...he can do nothing cause Parliament is suspended for months until the Liberals pick a new leader.

I think you actually have the causation backwards: Trudeau lost Singh's support, then he resigned. Singh took a more-firm-than-typical stance against the Liberals after the winter break started, which is what prompted the most recent rounds of Poilievre pushing non-confidence motions. If all had gone according to plan, the government would have fallen about a month later. Instead, Trudeau resigned and prorogued parliament as they search for his successor.

The cynical explanation is that this has little to do with Trump: the NDP knows they're utterly done due to backing the Liberals for so long and Singh deliberately ran out the clock so he could get his pension.

Yes. The Saskatchewan party ran on the connection of the Federal Liberals -> Federal NDP -> Provincial NDP. Blaming Carla Beck for Justin Trudeau's actions seems to have worked, so it absolutely would work for Singh as well.

I think that Singh's pension is a meme. It's a nice jab, but I'd bet that he'll get reelected in his seat. The only examples I could find of a party leader losing their seat are:

  • Maxime Bernier, who created a tiny splinter party which disappeared at the first chance.
  • Kim Campbell, when her party collapsed from 169 to 2 seats
  • John Bracken (1945)
  • Arthur Meighen (1926)

I think it happened to the Green Party too, but they don't count. High-profile politicians generally don't lose their own seats.

Biden had already been pestering the Israelis to GTFO, with Bibi hoping Trump would come to the rescue and give him a free hand. Trump signaling "no" ends those hopes.

Netanyahu isn’t particularly religious either. Witkoff likely knew that and realized he was being blown off with an excuse as a power play, hence his reaction.

I think that, if true, this is a good thing. Like the US going into Iraq, Israel had no real endgame, and, like people have said below, US pressure may give Netanyahu an out. BUT... I'm not a Trump supporter. Six months ago the idea that Biden was even suggesting the necessity of a ceasefire was anathema to my IRL Republican friends. I personally tend to be pro-Israel so I'm kind of agnostic about the whole thing given my above comments about there being no endgame. Trump hasn't even been inaugurated yet and he's already expressed willingness to sell out his base. First in siding with Musk on H-1B visas and now by forcing Israel into terms that they find unacceptable. One further possibility is that Netanyahu, realizing that acceding to the deal ends his political career, tells Trump to pound sand. What's Trump going to do, withhold aid? Again, six months ago this would be unthinkable. Will the US become completely aloof from the Middle East? Will the Jews who support the Republican party exclusively because they're the most unwavering about Israel turn coat? Seems more likely than the pro-Palestinian protestors backing Trump. But what about the Muslims? Are they another group Trump is trying to pull into his orbit? How many more sacred cows is Trump willing to slaughter?

Back in 2016, I couldn't rule out the possibility that Trump was some kind of Trojan Horse meant to gin up the loyalty of a populist base only to betray them. What I had in mind at the time was that his "replacent" of Obamacare with "something better" was just code for instituting some kind of socialized healthcare system, since a popular Republican would have an easier time getting such a proposal through, even if heretofore no Republican would consider doing such a thing, and would be lambasted if they even tried. But Trump was so completely unlike any other politician that he might have been able to pull it off. His first term shattered any such illusions of moderation, as he leaned further into MAGA expectations, but this veneer is beginning to crack. Maybe he figured he needed to win a second term and solidify his base of support before delivering the coupe de grace. I wouldn't bet on it, but between siding with his billionaire friends over his own base on an issue central to his popularity and selling out Israel to Hamas, it wouldn't exactly surprise me. And the worst part is that the Trump true believers will tell me that he's being entirely consistent and that H-1B immigration is good, actually, and he's not selling out Israel because this war had no endgame anyway, and while all that may be true it doesn't change the fact that you have to do quite a lot of mental gymnastics to make this conform to anything Trump has said previously.

expressed willingness to sell out his base.

No, he is focusing on "Make America great again", not wasting endless sums of money fighting wars in the middle east that end up destroying the local christian population. His base has won absolutely nothing from the last few decades of neo con wars. His base got nothing but debt and mentally ill veterans from the fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq. Providing Israel with endless welfare is the opposite of America first.

Will the Jews who support the Republican party exclusively because they're the most unwavering about Israel turn coat

Trumps loyalty should be to the US, not people whose loyalty is to other countries.

His base has won absolutely nothing from the last few decades of neo con wars. His base got nothing but debt and mentally ill veterans from the fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Who exactly do you think Trump's "base" is. More specifically, who matters more, the average (R) voter, or the "donor class"? I can't find it again, but I remember a bit circulating right-wing circles online some years ago, quoting an interview with a Republican "campaign advisor" who got a little too honest with the interviewer and said that his job was basically to help GOP candidates more convincingly lie to red state rubes about how they're going to do the various stupid things these voters want, all the while knowing, as all Republican candidates do, that once in office their job will be to do none of that, and deliver what the deep-pocket donors want instead.

Trumps loyalty should be to the US, not people whose loyalty is to other countries.

"Should be" ≠ "is."

I've been heavily persuaded by thinkers like Yarvin and Parvini (who have many disagreements) about how elite backers matter so much more than the peasant masses who have nothing but their (meaningless) votes, and "democracy" is a sham. For example, the H1B fight: Musk is going to get his way, because he matters, and millions of "Trump voters" simply don't.

For an alternative narrative (which I don't exactly share) I know some right-wing anti-Trump people — a very much different group from the "Never Trumper" crowd — who have their own narrative about 'who is Trump's real base.' These acquaintances held that the "Russian collusion" narrative was pretty much correct in all the broad strokes… except for having the wrong country. They argued that when people say that Trump didn't (or wasn't able to) deliver for his base in his first term, they're wrong: Trump very much did deliver what his actual backers, the people who installed him in the White House, put him there to do: "moving the embassy to Jerusalem and tax cuts for (((billionaires)))." (Cue more comments about Kushner, "the Tribe," "ZOG," and how it would have been better if Harris won, because at least then we'd have more attention paid to the "ongoing genocide" in Gaza, etc.)

And further, I'd conclude by asking why we should be trying to "make America great again" when "American greatness" is what got Western Civilization into the mess it's in in the first place.

You're engaging in the same fallacy that Democrats often engage in when it comes to Trump voters and other Republicans: Assuming what their interests are. Trump spent the entire campaign season portraying himself as the protector of Israel, and Republican politicians routinely criticized Biden for the mere suggestion that Israel should make concessions in cease fire talks. Remember when he threatened to withdraw supply of offensive weapons and the backlash surrounding that. I don't think Trump coming in and saying that Israel would have to completely withdraw from Gaza and release 1,000 Palestinian prisoners would have played well during the election. Especially considering he made no bones about the fact that Ukraine would have to surrender territory. You may agree with Trump's actions here, but it runs contrary to what anyone could have reasonably expected based on his prior statements. Whether or not this constitutes selling out his base depends on whether those who wholeheartedly supported Israel up until now are willing to cast these loyalties aside in favor of Trump.

Trump spent the entire campaign season portraying himself as the protector of Israel,

I don't actually think that he's going backwards on that. Have you paid any attention to the international reaction to Israel's efforts at ethnically cleansing Gaza? Huge swathes of the world are currently off limits for Israeli government visits due to their arrest warrants, and there are criminal prosecutions against vast numbers of individual soldiers as well. They're hurting themselves too - the example I used in discussions like this previously was the IDF soldier who killed himself because he wasn't able to live with the guilt and trauma he picked up crushing the meat out of innocent people with a bulldozer. This conflict is not good for Israel in any real sense (though it may be good for Netanyahu's personal position) and continuing to enable it isn't doing Israel any real favours. It actually makes an incredible amount of sense that he'd pursue a strategy like this after portraying himself as the Protector of Israel - if a drug addict asks for a lot of money to buy drugs and a free space to do them in, you're not really protecting them in any sense of the word by continuing to enable their addiction.

First in siding with Musk on H-1B visas

Does Trump's base compete for jobs with people who get into the US on H-1B visas? Not H-2A or H-2B?

Yes. Many roles performed by Americans now in companies not permitted to employ foreign nationals would likely be filled by H1b holders as we see this presently in organizations unfettered by prohibitions against employing foreign nationals.

I think they're still Trump's base, just not as visible or loud. Many will still have to move in very PMC circles.

I think it’s a shot in the dark. I don’t see Bibi deciding to go with the deal because he already rejected it, and frankly doesn’t trust tge Palestinian side to really keep the deal. Given 75 years of “Israel signs peace deal, leaves area” and “to the surprise of absolutely nobody, Palestinians have rearmed and are trying to destroy Israel — again” he really can’t make a deal. It’s either an unconditional capitulation followed by military occupation to prevent rearming, or the situation as it existed on 10/6. He knows it, everybody who’s looked at the history knows it. And so I think Trump is offering the deal because he wants to say he tried.

It’s either an unconditional capitulation followed by military occupation to prevent rearming

I don't even think that offer is on the table.

I think it’s a shot in the dark. I don’t see Bibi deciding to go with the deal because he already rejected it,

Ok, then Israel gets cut off from the US' teat and no longer receives financial, military or social support from the US, and Trump initiates prosecutions against anybody who broke the law to assist them. It is easy to get confused and believe that Israel is the one holding the leash, given how many members of congress have an AIPAC handler, but the US is actually the dominant power here and what they want to happen matters. This deal is getting forced down Bibi's throat and he doesn't have any leverage here.

Could it be that this is Trump getting revenge for Bibi not backing up his election fraud claims in 2020 and instead calling Biden to congratulate him? I vaguely recall Trump saying “Fuck him” (in reference to Bibi) at the time. For someone as vindictive as Trump is said to be, this seems like a reasonable hypothesis.

Israel has also agreed to release 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including approximately 190 who have been serving sentences of 15 years or more. In exchange, Hamas will release 34 hostages.

Presumably, the Palestinian prisoners were not getting 15 years for nonviolent protests.

Take Sinwar:

In 1989, Sinwar was sentenced to four life sentences in Israel for orchestrating the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians he considered to be collaborators. He spent 22 years in prison until his release among 1,026 others in a 2011 prisoner exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. [...] He is widely regarded as the mastermind behind the 7 October Hamas-led attack on Israel in 2023 [...]

The correct utilitarian response would have been not to exchange 1026 prisoners for an Israeli soldier, and it would certainly not be to exchange 34 hostages for 1000 prisoners now.

How is this anything but an almost total Hamas victory?

The correct utilitarian response would have been not to exchange 1026 prisoners for an Israeli soldier, and it would certainly not be to exchange 34 hostages for 1000 prisoners now.

How is this anything but an almost total Hamas victory?

To me it reads like a very dehumanizing admission from Hamas, and a natural corrolary from the idea that Israel will retaliate more than ten-fold against attacks on its population. It enshrines the idea that Israel has such a social, technological, military, political advantage on Palestine that its people's lives, even just civilians and common soldiers, are worth orders of magnitude more than Palestinian lives. And Hamas agrees with that.

If it was plausible for Hamas to claim it was because they are kicking Israeli ass so much on the battlefield they forced them into negociating an unfavorable exchange, then maybe it would be a Hamas victory. But the only way Hamas is winning is that they getting killed so hard that Israel has to pull its punches for it not to look like they're outright massacring the helpless.

But the only way Hamas is winning is that they getting killed so hard that Israel has to pull its punches for it not to look like they're outright massacring the helpless.

I feel like pointing out that Israel is very much not pulling their punches, to the point that "Israel is outright massacring the helpless" is the default position among the youth, and among most people outside the US' sphere of influence. This is a gigantic contributor to the massive rise in antisemitism (well, in combination with the conflating of anti-Israeli sentiment with antisemitism). IDF soldiers and members of the Israeli government are currently unable to travel to huge portions of the world without being arrested due to the belief(and evidence) that they are outright massacring the helpless.

It seems like that's largely owed to the fact that any amount of striking buildings that house Hamas and also (by Hamas' design) house the helpless is going to look like massacring the helpless. The only way to not massacre any helpless in this case is to stop doing anything, or invent magical weapons like that one scene from Iron Man where he takes out terrorists with micromissiles while sparing every hostage they had.

Granted, but at some point if you have any humanity you have to say, 'the number of helpless people we're massacring is not worth the number of terrorists we're killing".

The point of killing terrorists is usually not to kill terrorists for the sake of it, but to protect the helpless people that are close to you.

Perhaps at some point it would be "humane" to give up and let the terrorists do what they want because they have too many human shields. I do not believe that point has been reached, or that Hamas can ever hold that many people hostage.

The point of killing terrorists is usually not to kill terrorists for the sake of it, but to protect the helpless people that are close to you.

Yes, of course, that was implicit.

You seem to be saying that the number of people killed in Gaza is well below the number you feel would be worth ensuring that no Israeli is ever again killed by Hamas, and that this number is not de facto reachable given the scale of the current conflict. That, to me, seems to indicate that you believe the appropriate number is greater than the number of helpless civilians remaining in Gaza. And yes, I do find that abhorrent. If I said three decades ago that killing all the Irish would be easily worth it to stop the depredations of the IRA you would think I was a maniac, and rightly so.

The wall basically works. The Iron Dome basically works. What happened on Oct 7th was awful, and I feel sympathy for the Israelis who worry about rocket attacks, but neither of those things justify slaughtering far greater numbers of Gazans.

I do not believe that Israel can indefinitely protect itself from Hamas and its other hostile neighbours with purely defensive tactics, and moreover, I do not believe they are obligated to restrict themselves so.

If you said killing all the Irish was worth it to stop IRA, I would call you a maniac because by all accounts I know of, IRA's goals were not like Hamas', and IRA's tactics were not like Hamas', and IRA's reliance on putting their own citizens under enemy fire for the sake of martyrdom was, if at all existent, not like Hamas'. IRA was not, as far as I'm aware, making the English pick between their own destruction and killing innocent Irish along with IRA soldiers.

If Gazans have any agency, the onus is on them to drive the militants who are martyring them for "free Palestine" out. If they do not have that agency, I find that I cannot feel more sympathy for them than for those who can and will defend themselves [or are defended by their government].

To condone Gaza indefinitely bombing Israel because Israel can (mostly, for now) take it because stopping them would take more Gazan lives than Gaza currently takes Israeli lives is far too close to the concept of utility monsters for me.

"There's a third option: just leave." - yeah, because that worked so well 109 times before. At least, that's the number Israel's opponents cite sometimes.

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And what is the equivalent point for non-helpless people, and non-terrorist combatants?

Even people under terrible regimes have agency, which is why 'just following orders' or 'just running train schedules' were dismissed as defenses in notable past examples. Helplessness in turn also implies an inability to defend one's self- but this cannot co-exist with the ability to attack, since the means are the same, and which has certainly been displayed.

Similarly, terrorists are- by almost universal international definitions- actors who conduct unlawful violence. This is not only categorical, but generally morally, distinct from the systemic use of lawful force by a governing entity- particularly when the stated and demonstrated intent is to continue violence as a matter of policy. The categorization is certainly complicated by legalistic disputes, but as far as the moral premise goes the acts which started the war were conducted by the same entity that would be responsible for punishing said acts if they were unlawful.

The Palestinians have many issues, not all of which are their own fault, but treating them as helpless and without agency is neither accurate or humanizing them. There certainly isn't a lack of willingness and ability to fight and die against a hated administrating entity- only a dispute as to who it is. A consequence of that, however, is that arguments of helplessness against the other don't carry the same weight.

I'm not defending the terrorists, as in the people actually firing rockets, I'm defending everyone else. Including, yes, people who hate the Israelis and hope that Hamas wins, which I imagine is just about everybody at this point, as well as the people who pack their lunch boxes.

Even people under terrible regimes have agency, which is why 'just following orders' or 'just running train schedules' were dismissed as defenses in notable past examples.

Incidentally I disagree with this, and discussed it further here. Until WW2, it was almost always understood that those giving orders would be held responsible for the results of those orders being carried out, providing that the actions taken corresponded roughly to the orders given. Like so many load-bearing aspects of our society, we jettisoned this so that we could jump up and down on the Nazis a bit more.

Perhaps if every country or faction that wanted to defend Palestinian citizens sent troops so that there would be enough manpower to force the end of hostilities without bombing the places where the rockets are being fired from, we wouldn't be having that talk. And yes, it is my understanding that Israel can't afford to have that many boots on Palestinian ground, certainly not when they're bound by the need to wear uniforms and Hamas isn't.

I'm not defending the terrorists, as in the people actually firing rockets, I'm defending everyone else.

I would dispute that you are actually defending the non-terrorists. (Which- if it seemed otherwise- you weren't being accused of. Apologies if that seemed so.) Rather, I would present that your attempted framing is a form of moral malpractice- not because it defends terrorists, but precisely because it does not defend non-terrorists, and instead leads to greater risk to them.

The question was posed to you with the expectation you'd avoid it, but also to demonstrate its limits: the humanity argument's tolerance for casualties goes up significantly when the populace has agency that they use to support actors, and even higher when the actor in question is the government. Simple humanity is willing to both kill and watch a lot more people get killed when it's a result of an inept aggressor than a helpless bystander. You can see demonstrations of this in everything from fiction, to group social dynamics, to- of course- security politics both domestic and inter-state.

As such, appeals to humanity that imply the former (humanity has a low tolerance limit for violence) is in play rather than the later (humanity has a high tolerance limit for violence against aggressors), appeals which are used by bystanders in rationalizing acceptance of the 'actual terrorists' who use such appeals as the basis of their strategy, are placing more people at risk, rather than a less.

Including, yes, people who hate the Israelis and hope that Hamas wins, which I imagine is just about everybody at this point, as well as the people who pack their lunch boxes.

This would be a great deal of wishful projection.

Sadly, most people in the world don't particularly care about the Israeli-Hamas conflict, any more than they could be forced to care about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It wasn't a dominant factor in recent Western democratic elections. It has notably not set the Arabic street ablaze as middle eastern states have not merely maintained neutrality, but even increased cooperation with Israel. It certainly hasn't been a particularly captivating issue in Asia or sub-saharan Africa, where sympathy for far away non-co-religionists is in short supply and where you can often find non-trivial examples of even sympathy for Israel on anti-islamic grounds.

The dominant trend of anti-Israeli international politics over this war is how few of them outside of the normal muslim world religious sympathies are about Israel, and how many of them have American or domestic political motives. Whether it's a low-cost/high-visibility way to raise a middle flick off the US (always popular in Latin America), a way to counter-balance/win some favor with American strategic rivals by signaling partial alignment with them / against the US (often overlapping), a way to discredit international law advocates/bodies that might challenge them (Nicaragua), or a way for electorally unstable ruling parties to try and rally support by appealing to narrative origins (South Africa, Ireland), it quite often has little to do with Israel or Hamas themselves.

People who believe the world is on their side on any issue, let alone this one, are going to be disappointed, much as the Europeans were disappointed when 'the world' and 'the international community' were not particularly on their side in the Ukraine War.

Incidentally I disagree with this, and discussed it further here. Until WW2, it was almost always understood that those giving orders would be held responsible for the results of those orders being carried out, providing that the actions taken corresponded roughly to the orders given. Like so many load-bearing aspects of our society, we jettisoned this so that we could jump up and down on the Nazis a bit more.

And WW2 was also where the pre-WW2 era of geopolitical dominance by European monarchies and empires was broken, and with it the artificial imposition of European monarchist political norms which tied sovereign immunity to the legal identity of the Sovereign and their enabling actors which helped lead to said world wars.

Whether your post-WW2 political tradition holds more in the individualist western political traditions (in which the individual agency permits guilt, even as it can protect from collective judgements), a familial/clan-centric model (in which membership of the oppressive ethnic-clan group allows guilt), religious-identitarian models (in which case participation in the religious-administrative group permits disposition), class-ideological models (in which case membership to the relevant oppressor classes enables class-based action), or other more collective-responsibility models in general, the pre-WW2 models of European monarchial-sovereign supremacy of responsibility have globally been replaced by traditions that- for various reasons- recognize the agency and culpability of various non-central actors.

Given that one of the enabling factors of WW2 (and even WW1) was precisely how load-bearing 'it's not my responsibility' was on enablers to the wars that (repeatedly) self-destructed the European political system, there was a fair deal more reason to jettisoning that presumption than just Nazi-jumping.

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But that's not the entire calculation. The more terrorists you kill, the fewer of your people die in the future (and the likelier you are to save some hostages). A state should absolutely accept the collateral deaths of foreigners as the price for the security of its own.

Even leaving this aside, what you said seems to imply that the ratio of Palestinian civilians to Hamas militants is particularly inhumane. From what I've seen, it seems to hover between 1:1 and 2:1. Is that particularly extreme by the standards of urban warfare?

But that's not the entire calculation. The more terrorists you kill, the fewer of your people die in the future (and the likelier you are to save some hostages). A state should absolutely accept the collateral deaths of foreigners as the price for the security of its own.

I feel honor-bound to point out that this is the actual logic and justification used by the nazis during the holocaust - every single jew could grow up to be an enemy of the state, so better to kill them all now. You're totally free to adopt this position on the motte, that ethnic cleansing is ok because the ethnicity you're cleansing doesn't like you, but outside of spaces where people like SecureSignals can post you're not going to have much luck - and in fact most people around the globe will think you're an utterly repellent person as a result.

It seems like that's largely owed to the fact that any amount of striking buildings that house Hamas and also (by Hamas' design) house the helpless is going to look like massacring the helpless.

No, it is due to Israel going out and massacring the helpless. Last I checked, all that horseshit about the Hamas terror hospital was debunked - and Israel then went on to blow up all the other hospitals in Gaza to boot. They specifically blew up multiple people whose only goal was to distribute food or first aid, they killed journalists, they killed aid workers - there's far too much evidence of deliberate genocidal intent (including direct statements by Israeli government leaders!) for these arguments to hold water.


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