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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   Edited 3yr ago   36272 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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My personal prediction is that Caplan does not suffer at all for publishing this book. The book is most likely ignored.

Probably right, but IMO it's because he isn't goring any sacred cows. Women aren't on top of the progressive stack anymore. They can't even keep the natal males out of their bathrooms and sports leagues. MeToo had its moment, but the moment passed, probably because it took out so many woke-adjacent men and failed to stop Trump.

Let's come back to this when he publishes "Be a Transphope" or "Be a Racist" with excruciating data to justify all of the Trans/Blacks Less Likely hypotheses. Then we'll see if his cultural immunity persists.

They can't even keep the natal males out of their bathrooms and sports leagues.

That's because of a lot of progressive women supporting this stuff.

Yup... and they support that stuff because they've internalized the idea that trans are higher on the progressive stack than women.

MeToo had its moment, but the moment passed, probably because it took out so many woke-adjacent men and failed to stop Trump.

Biden's alleged improprieties didn't help either. In 2020, many MeToo activists had to say things like "We never meant believe all women, we meant don't automatically disbelieve women, but let them speak their story."

There is some cosmic irony about a woman claiming that Biden literally grabbed her by the pussy (forced a finger in anyways), and it was met with a nationwide collective shrug. Turns out people don't much care.

MeToo had run out of steam a bit at that point, for various reasons that people have mentioned (didn't stop Kavanaugh's nomination, boomeranged against a lot of Democrat politicians) but the Biden accusations really killed it off.

Yeah... they killed a bunch of Democratic donors, they killed Al Franken, then they pulled out all the stops and still failed to stop Kavanaugh, they didn't put a dent in Trump, and then they had to walk back their Kavanaugh positions to defend Biden.

Maybe women aren't a sacred cow. But they are not not a sacred cow. Also Caplan has smart friends, many of them are academics that deal in ideas, and some of them like Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson have achieved their own degree of fame. If his friends say this might harm him, and I think it won't harm him I have to wonder why I disagree with some very smart people that I normally agree with.

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