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I don't even know you? I don't even have hate for any type of person, though I do feel frustration when I think of various stereotypes of people (who I can also consciously acknowledge are just stereotypes and don't exist). If I were to make a shot in the dark about you: I actually empathize for the plight of a lot of Americans (especially rural) who feel left behind / under-served, and think the neoliberal status quo was untenable for them. But I don't think a reactionary "burn it down" federal government is going to be a win for those Americans in the end. Look how Putin sends the peasants of the hinterlands to the meatgrinder in Ukraine for a sneak-peek of how authoritarians treat forgotten classes of people.
What have those decades of rot delivered? The most advanced technological society in history, with the deepest understanding of the physical universe to-date? I almost think the exploitation of those institutions (e.g. Google, Facebook, etc. and other brainrotting social media and advertising companies capturing a generation of our greatest engineering minds) are more sinister than the institutions themselves.
I am genuinely coming from a place of interest: this my best effort of putting my thoughts and coinciding fears down. What have I missed? Is the criticism you provide literally just "Your threat model is wrong, my threat model is better"?
Edit:
Also, I'm not sure why it's always presented as a given that "liberals" are guilty of any decline in the value of our societal institutions, as if it was part of an orchestrated agenda? Why do we never talk about perverse incentives? Is it because people in those institutions, or that those institutions produce, are generally liberal? Why is that so often presumed that this is due to indoctrination? I'm not going to rehash the entire sides of both arguments here, but it's such an entrenched assumption whenever it comes up...
Double-edit: Regret responding to this low-effort response because it's spawned a bunch of subthreads that have nothing to do with my main point in the original post: that the rejection of experts on ideological grounds inhibits our ability to effectively wargame against our adversaries, and we will make mistakes as a country.
I would say The Long March Through Institutions qualifies as a strategy.
This is just a rephrasing of "reality has a liberal bias", the veracity of which is being tested now. Maybe they wouldn't have produced so many adherents of the regressive left if Ayers and his fellow terrorists received tenure in prison, rather than academia?
It was specifically sidestepping the nearly-20-year-old Colbert meme, but I guess you caught me. Maybe I am inclined to believe that those who seek truth for the sake of truth do tend to come out with a "liberal" bias. But more importantly, I feel more strongly that the painting of universities as institutions of liberal indoctrination deny entire cohorts of students their own agency in developing political beliefs, and equal-and-opposite mirror of the claim that FoxNews has indoctrinated an entire generation of cable news subscribers. Like you, I look forward to the results of this "test".
I would say it also qualifies as a conspiracy theory. I am curious, though, is your theory that the Long March Through Institutions was a concerted effort, with agents who collaborated and took specific actions? Or one that happened more "naturally" due to the perverse incentives of a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_education](liberal education)?
This is a tautology, but the reason they come out with a liberal bias is because these people are in fact worthy of the individual rights liberalism suggests exist inherent to every man simply because they naturally do this.
Not all who claim to be liberals are actually liberal, though- hell, that's why progressives call themselves "liberal" in the first place! The problem for true liberals post-1980 or so is that, because socioeconomic opportunity started to dry up around that time (as compared to the '50s-'70s), society started selling those rights with the belief they'd be rewarded with other things that, while they feel good to have, are less aligned with the truth. Short-term moral gains at the expense of long-term advancement: affirmative action, gynosupremacism/feminism, [inorganic at the time] gay marriage, further destruction of negative rights (parental rights, self-defense rights, "freeze peach", free association), etc.
So progressives dressed their corruption in the skinsuit of what liberalism was and carried on with the slogans. And this worked, for a time; the transition kept otherwise low-information liberals believing that they had inherited the movement, and so did the details of being for things like feminism and non-straight sexualities.
Around 2013 there was a Great Awokening... but it wasn't the progressives that woke up, it was the liberals realizing they needed to take back their own label. They found natural allies in the enemies of the progressives (which is why the average liberal is seen as "right-wing"- classical liberalism is a conservative view now) because they know, and knew, that liberals oppress them less than progressives will.
I think that for any student in a liberal arts degree (including those who are only capable of that, and assuming this education is an accurate assessor of intelligence- the people for who that is not true tend not to emerge as progressives) progressivism is a natural adaptation because these people are in massive oversupply, and their policies are a natural reflection of this fact. That's why they need the absurd amounts of illegal immigration- after all, the easiest way to correct a problem of "too many chiefs, not enough indians" is simply to import a shit-ton of indians (literally, in many cases). As we might expect, academia was simply ahead of the curve here, because they were championing this stuff 20-30 years before this would become apparent to the average citizen.
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Are you aware that at least a majority of the people arguing right-wing views here used to be doctrinaire liberals?
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It's no secret that students are allowed "agency" to develop a very specific set of beliefs. Believe Women, No Human Is Illegal, ACAB, Black Lives Matter, Trans Women Are Women - funny how this liberalism-afforded agency only extends to things left of center. Additionally, these beliefs are constantly proselytized in an "everything not forbidden is mandatory" fashion.
I'm not sure how it can be both, so I'll ask for clarification of what you mean. As for the "natural occurrences" of left-liberalism based on incentives - what is the source of those incentives? Did they just change on their own in the 20th century, or, perhaps, it occurred because the composition of the incentive makers was changed by putting a thumb on the scale? Ayers and Kaczynski received wildly different treatments for some reason.
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Stick around, new kid. Time in this community will thoroughly disabuse you of that notion, presuming you can avoid the traditional leftwinger meltdown and flounce-out when you realize that other people are going to continue to be allowed to argue back.
Prospiracy with significant conspiracy elements. Something like a third of professors openly admit they would refuse to approve of the hiring of a conservative, no matter how qualified. Iterate that attitude for the better part of a century and here we are.
No, I think people with that view do indeed tend toward liberalism.
The mistake is in assigning the word "liberal" incorrectly; social justice isn't liberal, it just (in the USA) has been wearing the word (and Officially Designated Intellectualism) like a skin-suit.
I very much agree, as a personal idiosyncrasy. In most cases, I just mentally replace all liberal->progressive whenever it's used by someone who isn't e.g. Glenn Greenwald.
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The existence of a niche forum whose membership selects for right-wing views and truth-seeking does not disprove the idea that all else being equal people who strongly value truth for its own sake will be more likely to be liberals.
I dunno, I am pretty left wing (by the standards of the Motte) and while there are certain brands of bullshit popular here, it's more that this forum selects for truth-seeking regardless of who it offends, and that, as a side effect, selects for contrary rightist or dissident leftist opinions. I literally don't know of any other left-leaning or so-called "neutral" forum, for example, that would let someone argue that trans women are men or that IQ is both hereditary and has a racial component, or that deporting illegal immigrants is good, or that Trump is not a fascist. I don't mean that any of those propositions are necessarily true: I'm saying almost anywhere else, you can't even debate it. You might get away with suggesting it, but after the subsequent dogpile, if you persist, you will be banned as a Nazi. No exaggeration, I've seen that happen... almost everywhere else.
As a liberal it's disheartening and annoying. I don't think rightists actually have a closer relationship with the truth, per se. But they do put a higher value on truth as a terminal value, whereas leftists today regard truth as secondary to social approval and psychological comfort.
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Thanks, bro. Genuinely, I'd like to. It would be far too easy to comment somewhere that I receive no push-back, but then I wouldn't be sharpening my mind at all, would I? Unless you're not interested in also sharpening your mind, I would imagine you wouldn't want this to devolve into a reactionary circlejerk?
I'd buy it. But I'd also push-back that it was a one-way street and that conservatives had no agency in the matter. It's almost as if it would be convenient that academic institutions were one day able to be simply "deleted" for wrong-think.
The situation seems to model as a cooperate/defect situation. Leftists were able to gain a foothold precisely because enough of the old guard were swayed by arguments about academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. And enough of those leftists do not return that consideration that they were able to slowly grind out their outgroup.
We've seen the same dynamic play out in a thousand venues, from forums to corporations.
And we were warned! The usual formulation nowadays is from 1976's Children of Dune
but the sentiment goes back to at least 1843,
-- Thomas Babington MacCauley.
The MacCauley quote is, I think, a better representation of the woke position.
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That's like praising the Mafia for running a lot of great Italian restaurants when nobody else is. The reason that nobody else is running Italian restaurants is that the Mafia won't let them, not that the Mafia is particularly good at running restaurants.
You don't get credit for doing X when your rivals didn't, if the reason your rivals didn't is that you didn't let them do much of anythng at all.
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The crux of my argument without getting too far into the weeds about politicization of the sciences and "expert consensus" is that "the most advanced technological society in history, with the deepest understanding of the physical universe to-date" has delivered us a significant population of elites and voters who cannot define what a woman is.
Epistemic collapse is my threat model.
Genuinely, I am here to get into the weeds so I would love to hear the line drawn between "cannot define what a woman is" and "epistemic collapse", and the threat that "epistemic collapse" poses, especially since throughout scientific history we've updated words to better match the scientific consensus of the model of our universe and our existence within it. I do assume you have more evidence for epistemic collapse beyond the "definition of a woman"?
I, too, have deep antipathy towards the perverse incentives within current academic institutions, and the actors who exploit those perverse incentives. Maybe you and I actually have some common ground there?
The epistemic collapse is that if a woman can be anyone who says they're a woman then we can't know what a woman is without asking everyone what they are, and taking their answer at face value. It's not an ultimate erasure of any meaning whatsover, but it's not really much better. It doesn't produce a model of our universe, it destroys the consensus and replaces it with an idiosyncratic label. What I call X he calls Z, and what he calls Z she calls Y. At that point you effectively are unable to talk about "women" in a meaningful manner.
Beyond women, what does violence mean? What does Nazi mean? If I tell you that violent Nazis are active on a local university campus do I mean that German centenarians who were members of the NSDAP are there physically wounding people, or do I mean that somebody mocked my objections to their putting up a Trump poster? Or what if I say that Europe was rocked by Nazi violence during the 1940s? Do I mean Belgians were upset about some Hitler posters they saw, or that stormtroopers kicked their doors in and killed them while tanks rolled through en route to Paris? You'll have to ask me what I meant to be sure because a consistent meaning has collapsed and now we can't talk about violent Nazis until you do so.
This is bad for the people who pushed it too because now there's no need to become a woman when they can simply say they're a woman without any other changes, and when people hear warnings about violent Nazis we can justifiably assume they're neither violent or Nazis.
It's worse than that. Under that definition I have no idea whether I myself am a woman, or not.
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Isn't the line, in this case, a dot? The entire point being that epistemology has collapsed to the point that the world's top experts in the field of gender can no longer define a commonly used word?
We're not talking about the definition changing, let alone changing to be more in line with any kind of science (or even scientific consensus), we are talking about the definition becoming incoherent, and experts outright refusing to give an answer about what they mean by the term.
The definition has done no such thing. People who refuse to give a straight answer to the question are trying to avoid political backlash for endorsing the radical ideas which are the necessary bedrock of a coherent and non-evil definition of "woman" (perhaps because they don't believe it themselves and are trying to have it both ways); not because no such answer exists.
Some might be avoiding political backlash, but some (the majority of academics vocal on the subject, in my estimation) are true believer queer theorists. Their basic belief is that anyone can (or should be able to) identify however they want, and express themselves however they want, that's why they see any constraint beyond a person wanting to be a woman as unacceptable. This is why they have to avoid even a "social" definition of "woman", and always put forward the circular self-ID based one.
Well, yes. I am a queer theorist. (Not in the sense that I do it for a living, but this is what I was referring to as the coherent, morally-correct, but unacceptably-radical-if-you're-a-mainstream-politician position.)
Then I have no idea on what basis you're saying that the definition isn't doing what I described.
Also, we're not talking about politicians refusing to state your position, we're talking about academics and clinicians.
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I was hoping a response would be more about the threat of epistemic collapse, rather than the certain evidence of it. But I'll bite.
The whole "what is a woman" thing is just a "gotcha" that abuses the fact that words have different meanings in different contexts. Very few words evoke a singular meaning in our minds. It's like asking "what is water"? Well, are you asking about the thing I can drink? The thing I can swim in? The chemical composition? My take is that if you asked people before the concept was politicized, very few people would spit out the answer "someone with a vagina". They would probably describe quite a few gender-coded concepts, thinking that you were asking something that had more philosophical depth than the most obvious answer. Just like when you ask me "what is water" I don't immediately go "H20, dumbass." Matt Walsh is a hack and this paragraph sums up his entire strategy.
More importantly, within our legal documents the word "water" takes many different meanings as well! Why not "woman"?
I disagree, there's no gotcha. This is literally a case where the group that refuses to give a non-circular definition does so, because they don't want to constrain the category. They will not give a biological definition, because they want to allow for transition, but they will not give a social definition either, because that means being a woman requires imposing a certain set of social expectations and that would contradict their ideology as well.
Their only option is to not give a definition at all, which is what they're doing. I think your explanation is incapable of explaining this behavior, so I don't think it's correct.
I don't think so, but even if you're right, that's a strictly superior situation to the one we're in right now.
Well, I'd say it's pretty obvious. If you can't tell the difference between your dog and your chair, you might sit on your dog, and take your chair out for a walk, which is exactly what we're seeing with things like male rapists being sent to women's prisons.
See that's the line I'm interested in. How do we go from "gender and sex are different concepts, and woman is attached to gender, not sex" to "Whoops I sat on my dog because I can't tell the difference between a chair and a dog?" That's the bailey and:
this is the motte. It's a real problem that I can't argue against. Why can't we update our institutions to be sensitive to the rights of inmates in general? Why does it take a "male rapist" being sent to a "women's prison" for us to give a shit?
They were more sensitive to the rights of prisoners 'in general' when we weren't forcing female inmates to bunk alongside male rapists. And plenty of people gave a shit about it and begged the government not to do it, and were told they were killing vulnerable trans women.
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No, it's not. We're not going from "gender and sex are different concepts, and woman is attached to gender, not sex", we're going from "I refuse to give you any definition of 'woman' that will constrain the category in any meaningful way (beyond, perhaps, it applying to humans, but even that is not certain)". How we arrive from there to treating men as though they were women because you're not able to define either, analogously to the dog & chair example I gave, should be clear and obvious.
It's not the motte. It's a supporting example for why my interpretation on what's happening with the definition of the word "woman" is correct, and your's is incorrect.
I'll note this is a complete change of subject, but I'll answer anyway.
We do give a shit, and not sending male rapists to women's prison is an example of that. The disproportion of strength between men and women is so massive, that basically every society came up with sex-segregation in contexts where it wanted to maximize the safety of women. If you're asking why we can't provide safety for all inmates, it's because we don't live in a perfect world, and we will never live in one. Unless you put the prisoners under total surveillance under all times (a violation of their rights) or into solitary confinement (a violation of their rights) you will never keep them completely safe. We opted for an arrangement where prisoners are sorted by how much danger they pose to each other, and I doubt you'd be able to come up with something better.
Regarding the trans-women-in-prison thing, I came up with a counterargument the last time this came up. Curious how you'd answer it. Some trans woman prisoners may try to rape biologically female inmates if put in women's prisons; but won't male inmates be even likelier to try to rape the trans woman if she's sent to the men's prison? If we assume that not all trans women are rapists, but all male prisons contain at least one rapist willing to rape a trans woman, it seems like sending trans women to female prisons will prevent more rapes than it will enable.
(By the way, this is unrelated, but AI could allow us to cut the Gordian knot on constant surveillance pretty soon. A 'dumb' AI can be constantly monitoring prisoners on video feeds human wardens can't access, and if it observes what appears to be rape, it rings an alarm. Slightly ahead of current technology, but IMO clearly achievable using the kind of tech that goes into self-driving cars. It wouldn't need to be foolproof, either, few positives have minimal cost.)
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No, it's a "gotcha" that uses the fact that the people "got" are using the word in a very non-standard way. Human beings are divided (not quite perfectly, but more perfectly than most things in biology) into two sexes and the term "woman" refers to a large subset of the individuals of one of those sexes. Those being "got" do not agree to that and so are stuck.
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