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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   34287 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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Noah Smith thinks DOGE's purpose is to drive liberals out of the civil service, to make room for conservative hires. Three paragraphs from below the paywall of today's post:

It seems clear that defeating the “woke mind virus” is high on DOGE’s list of priorities — my guess is that it’s actually the #1 priority. Trump’s first action with regards to the civil service was to fire all the DEI staff. But woke attitudes are far more widespread than just the few people who are officially hired to work on DEI, and Trump and Musk are probably united on the need to root out as many as possible.

This is probably why Elon loudly made a big deal out of rehiring a DOGE staffer who was fired for racist tweets, despite having himself gone to war on X against people making similar tweets. Federal civil service workers are a lot harder to fire than workers at Twitter; many are on contract, and there’s a limit to how long they can be placed on administrative leave. Musk tried the gambit of offering a buyout to all federal employees, but very few took it. One relatively easy way of getting the government’s wokest staffers to quit is to make it clear that the culture of their workplace has changed, and an easy way to do that is to have guys who write stuff like “Normalize Indian hate”.

This also explains many of the programs that Elon is going after. Actual examples of fraud are few and far between, but a decent number of federal grants and other programs have either been outsourced to progressive NGOs, repurposed for “justice”-related goals, or had DEI programs attached to them. When the DOGE people talk about “waste” and “fraud”, it’s usually just progressive stuff like this (which, to be fair, they do consider wasteful).

This seems to fit the available evidence, but what would prove or disprove it? I'd be more convinced if there had been a clear effort to recruit conservatives, prior to this - driving out progressives by purposely making civil service jobs generally less appealing doesn't make me want a civil service job.

Do they actually need to hire conservatives? Just kicking our a lot of liberals would achieve the objectives. DOGE's prime objective is to deplatform leftists and they are doing so at an incredible rate. If the left lost its armies of professional activists they would be heavily undermined. Killing USAID doesn't just hit wokeness in America, it hits wokeness globally. The issue with building a right wing bureaucracy is that bureaucracies naturally tend toward the left.

DOGE just needs to turn thousands of full time activists away from their activist career and give them new careers selling real estate, managing paperwork at a hospital or SEO-blogging.

For those on the fringe right, imaging what the right could achieve with tens of thousands of full time activists with billions in funding and top tier connections. Now imagine losing that.

My prediction is that we are going to find that a lot of people aren't actually as woke as we thought. They just played around with it. The people who wanted to defund the police would never walk through the ghetto at night alone with no police. The middle class posers talk about body positivity and trans rights while being skinny and living hetronormatively. They love diversity on twitter but live in an all white neighbourhood.

My prediction is that we are going to find that a lot of people aren't actually as woke as we thought. They just played around with it. The people who wanted to defund the police would never walk through the ghetto at night alone with no police. The middle class posers talk about body positivity and trans rights while being skinny and living hetronormatively. They love diversity on twitter but live in an all white neighbourhood.

Yeah. This is the luxury beliefs hypothesis.

One startling stat I saw recently from Rob Henderson: Among Yale graduates in their forties, 90% of men are employed but only 50% of women are.

The true elite still live the 1950s lifestyle. They've merely denied this luxury to everyone else by imposing a degenerate belief system on those who don't have the resources to overcome it.

The true elite still live the 1950s lifestyle. They've merely denied this luxury to everyone else by imposing a degenerate belief system on those who don't have the resources to overcome it.

What's the degenerate belief system, how was it imposed, and what resources are needed to overcome it?

What's the degenerate belief system?

Promiscuity, atheism, drug use, moral relativism, transsexuality, etc..

How was it imposed

Perhaps imposed is the wrong word. Merely "pushed". Elites promoted the degenerate belief system in, i.e., universities and media, while not actually practicing it themselves. Single motherhood is common in the working class but rare in the upper class.

And it's possible for elites to be atheist drug users and be just fine. But it doesn't work for the lower classes.

What resources are needed to overcome it

Strong social ties. Money.

Here's another example of a luxury belief. Climate change. Do elites really believe in near-term climate change? Not really. After all, they keeping bidding up the prices of luxury real estate in West Palm Beach and Nantucket. But they are happy to suggest that others pay higher taxes to prevent it or, worse, that they must let "climate refugees" into their communities.

None of these thoughts are new or original to me. I'm kind of surprised you've never heard this if you visit this forum regularly.

Perhaps imposed is the wrong word. Merely "pushed". Elites promoted the degenerate belief system in, i.e., universities and media, while not actually practicing it themselves.

Do you draw a distinction between "Elites promoted the degenerate belief system" and "Elites questioned the assumption that the belief system was degenerate?" Is it normal to practice all things one thinks should be less stigmatized than they presently are?

I'm kind of surprised you've never heard this if you visit this forum regularly.

Motters throw around phrases like "degenerate belief system" too much to infer what belief system they're referring to.

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