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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   36004 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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it's just a grim reminder we should have banned tiktok ages ago.

As opposed to brainrotted Boomers who think women and minorities are oppressed.

They didn't need Facebook to come to that conclusion yet arrived at it anyway, so the problem rests with the people, not the technology.

As opposed to brainrotted Boomers who think women and minorities are oppressed.

I mean, they were back the last century. At best, they're just slow to update and relying on cached thoughts from when they could last think independently. In that sense, it's less like rot and more like calcification/ossification.

back the last century

If by 'last' you mean 'the 19th', sure, I'll grant that. At no point past 1920ish was this true for women (so no woman born/raised in the West knows what it's like to be uniquely oppressed- that it happened once upon a time is their origin myth, just like it is for the Indians); for minorities, at no point in Boomer living memory (post-childhood, so 13+: someone born in '45 would be post-Brown v. Board at that age) were they really oppressed.

It's something their parents and grandparents had reason to take seriously; what we're seeing now is the echoes and turbulence of a once-truth so widely held industry sprung up around it reaching its sell-by date. (This is also why, if LGB organizations did not embrace and pump up T, they'd have faded away like MADD did: their original grievances don't exist any more, hence the lie that they do must be defended ever harder.)

Goesaert v. Cleary: “Only when the owner of the bar was a sufficiently close relative to the woman bartender, it was argued, could it be guaranteed that such immorality would not be present.” 1948. Overturned in 1976.

Schulz v. Wheaton Glass: it turns out making identical job listings but paying the women’s jobs less actually counts as discrimination. 1970.

US v. Virginia et al.: no, spinning up a second school to allow male/female segregation is not, in fact, separate but equal. 1996.

I find it obvious that second-wave feminism was legitimately fighting oppression. The same is doubly true for racial minorities. There are plenty of reasons why the Civil Rights Act was significant, rather than a formality.

US v. Virginia et al.: no, spinning up a second school to allow male/female segregation is not, in fact, separate but equal. 1996.

And yet women-only colleges survive.

In private schooling, yes. Same as for men. Women’s are a bit more popular.

Discrimination in education and employment was de-jure legal through at least the 60s and de-facto for even longer.

But anyway, this is a continuum, there was no single date in the 20th century when those grievances went away. It suffices to highlight that we agree that in 1960 it was generally so and that by 2010 it largely wasn't without having to bicker about the precise point. The echoes of that truth are indeed relevant, and the boomers formed much of their thinking that way.

Disagree. Historical evidence is strong that being a housewife in deracinated, suburban 1950s America was pretty damn miserable. Consider that it was their daughters in particular who became second-wave feminists - in open repudiation of their mothers’ lives. Why would they do that if it were something to look forward to?

Disagree. Historical evidence is strong that being a housewife in deracinated, suburban 1950s America was pretty damn miserable.

What's the evidence? Progressives used to like bringing up Valium and the like, but drug consumption among women has, if anything, only gone up since.

Consider that it was their daughters in particular who became second-wave feminists - in open repudiation of their mothers’ lives. Why would they do that if it were something to look forward to?

Because society requires active maintenance and not just mere inertia, and propaganda based around sowing resentment towards specific subgroups is quite effective.

“The damn commies mind controlled our women!” is a pretty lame excuse, given that women are well-known to be more little-c conservative than men (which is why so many of them are big-L Lefty these days).

The actual problem was exactly what I said: the suburbs were deeply deracinated and undermined two of women’s deepest sources of stability and happiness: connection to their (non-atomic) families and to a strong network of peer women, especially including older ones. Those connections provide material support for the primary duty of childcare and serve as a stabilizing factor for emotional distress, as well as being simple entertainment and fulfillment. Being locked down more to her husband made a woman more fragile and increased the aspects of her life which she required from him in particular, proportionally lowering her own self-reliance and alienating him (as the demands put upon him grew ever more conflicting and severe). In the edge cases the relationship fractured in some dimension or another, and this fracture in turn alienated daughters from their mothers’ way of life. The most determined and hot-tempered became feminists and started changing the tradition from the top down.

Properly big-c Conservative cultures give women the strong same-sex support groups they need, typically through something as simple as a village gathering or an extended family.

“The damn commies mind controlled our women!” is a pretty lame excuse, given that women are well-known to be more little-c conservative than men (which is why so many of them are big-L Lefty these days).

I don't have an issue with everything else you said (other than it being a theory, rather than evidence), but I don't know how to process the last decade or so of my life, without "mind control works" being somewhere in the top conclusions. It's not just women, though. Men have proven themselves to be at least as susceptible.

Seconding the others’ interest. I want to say I agree with you but I suspect we have pretty different ideas of which movements are the central examples.

Believe it or not I'm fairly neutral on the valance of ideas spreading through mind control, and am perfectly capable of admitting my tribe is doing it's fair share of that, but you're probably guessing right about what kind of experiences about what kind of people shaped my views on the matter. So I don't know if I'll be writing any effortposts on this, pretty sure it will come off as whinging about past culture war drama, I think I'd prefer to finish the Psycho Pass review.

Ideas spreading is not like mind control. I don't know how you would arrive to that conclusion. A lot of factors have facilitated the spread of ideas that did not exist before the last few decades. I would like to read a more elaborate post from you on this topic too.

I don't know how you would arrive to that conclusion

It's simple - the "entry points" through which these ideas are spreading through society are centralized in the hands of a relative few. Sure, they can't control the entirety of society at will, 100% of the time, but engineering does not require 100% accuracy, just predictability.

More comments

That would be a good top-level post, in my opinion, if you ever feel like fleshing it out. I suspect I personally disagree, with some caveats, but it sounds like you have something interesting you could argue for, and which would be well worth seeing the light of day.

Ping me if you do. I’d very much like to read what you have to say.

Well, like I told Netstack, I think the end result would end up coming off much more whiny than interesting, but I'll keep it in mind.

At no point past 1920ish was this true for women (so no woman born/raised in the West knows what it's like to be uniquely oppressed- that it happened once upon a time is their origin myth, just like it is for the Indians)

While I'm broadly sympathetic to the idea that women are less oppressed than is commonly claimed, I do take issue with your claim here. In the United States, The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was passed in 1974, and was the bill that allowed women to get credit in their own name without the signature of a husband or male relative. I would argue that lack of access to credit in one's own name is a form of oppression, even if it could be counterbalanced by paternalistic or progressive benefits.

It is also worth pointing out that families and social expectations can function as "tiny tyrannies", even if people are theoretically free according to the law. My mom grew up in a fairly patriarchal household, and when my aunt got into the Air Force Academy her dad (my grandpa) said "no, you're staying right here with the family" and my aunt meekly accepted his word as final. On the other hand, my mom got into MIT and when my grandpa told her she couldn't go, she basically said, "I wasn't asking for permission, I'm going to MIT." My mom was also the most stubborn of her sibllings, and I don't think it's a coincidence that she was the one that left the state they all grew up in and became an upper middle class engineer, while the rest stayed nearby like grandpa wanted and mostly didn't do as well (except for the one aunt who got into real estate and banking.)

Women are higher in the Big 5 trait of Agreeableness, and I think that means that even in legal regimes that are relatively favorable to women, they can still get "stuck" in a tiny tyranny through mere social pressure alone. The women who escape are either unusually low in Agreeableness for a woman (like my mom), or autistic/weird enough that they naturally drift away when given the chance (like Aella.)

Bitches in the Jo freeman sense. Makes sense that career women got a reputation for being difficult and shrill. Also competent.

In the United States, The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was passed in 1974, and was the bill that allowed women to get credit in their own name without the signature of a husband or male relative.

No, this was the bill that made it a Federal legal requirement that women could get credit in their own name without the signature of a husband or male relative. The idea that the opposite was universally the case before 1974 is a recent fabrication.

Your understanding of the bill and mine are the same, though I certainly see that I didn't word it correctly in the post you responded to.

But even reduced, uneven access to credit is a form of oppression.

Like, are we going to pretend that the moment Esso started serving gas to black motorists nationwide in the 1930's, that suddenly black motorists were completely unoppressed as a group? Having to navigate an environment in which you can get an essential good from some firms, and can't get an essential good from others limits your options and often mean you're left with a worse set of choices.

Edit: Typo

But even reduced, uneven acces to credit is a form of oppression.

Motte-and-bailey. Motte: Women weren't guaranteed equal access to credit, and sometimes didn't get it, prior to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Bailey: Women couldn't get credit at all without the signature of a male relative (Often coverture is mentioned, though that was largely eliminated by state legislation in the mid-to-late 19th century). The bailey makes a MUCH stronger case for "oppression", but it just ain't so.

I'll concede that "I have to shop around for banks that will give me credit in my own name, and I might not get it in the end" is less oppression than, say, "Society is structured so that the entirety of my future is decided by another person", but I think it still qualifies as oppression.

The nature of this discussion is that there is going to be some point where the oppression falls below a threshold where it makes sense to draw attention to it, or where the benefits of paternalism and freedom outweigh the downsides of oppression.

I don't think it would be unreasonable to say that women were oppressed as late as 1974, and that things may have tipped over towards very slightly favoring women on net starting in 1979 (when women became a slight majority of people enrolled in college), but I wouldn't think a person was wrong for choosing slightly different dates for those things either, or for saying that there is rough equality of the sexes in the United States, because both sexes have problems and they mostly fall under the threshold of attention worthiness.

There's a vast gulf between "I'm financially considered a ward of my nearest male relative" and "I sometime get discriminated against in credit decisions". The latter is small enough it has to be compared against all the OTHER shit people experience (including men qua men), rather than basically being a modern atrocity.

It's a true statement that the majority of women could get credit in their own name before 74.

But it's not enough to say "the majority of weren't discriminated against". For example, only a small number of Christians today are being hounded over anti-LGBT views. It's still wrong.

Another way to put it is that the requirement of fairness is one that each individual is due. It's not something that accrues to groups or classes. This is also a bit about the way the recent affirmative action cases have played out: Harvard (standing in for the entire ideological clade) argued that they treat all groups fairly, the conservative answer is that groups don't get treatment, only individuals do.

As opposed to brainrotted Boomers who think women and minorities are oppressed.

Those people are also morons, yeah. When the boomers have died off, we'll be living in a crazy world.

They didn't need Facebook to come to that conclusion yet arrived at it anyway, so the problem rests with the people, not the technology.

It's both. A better people would perhaps not be susceptible to TikTok propaganda, but we don't have a better people.

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