This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
What can we learn about optimal cultural leadership in light of the 2013-2021 social justice period?
Religious leaders did not adequately stand up against the mass movement. Although many conservatives see value in religious institutions as a cultural defense, mainstream Catholicism and Protestant denominations did not substantively address the social justice craze. In some cases they placated or even promoted it.
Academics did not adequately argue against the mass movement. It is not the case, for instance, that the experts in western history, literature, or philosophy were more likely to argue against the mass movement in any substantive way. This is problematic: if learning the best of western culture does not lead to protecting said culture in any genuine sense when it matters the most, then how great is the actual utility of such learning?
The main “public critics” of the period have little in common except that they were passionate and somewhat neurotic men. Yarvin, Peterson, Weinstein, Scott Adams(?). My memory of who was most dominant in this period is somewhat hazy, maybe someone with a better memory can correct me. There were more psychologists among critics than philosophers. You had people like Stefan Molyneux passionately criticizing the proto-movement well before its zenith. His Twitter attests to his neuroticism.
Random people online were able to sense a threat that leading experts weren’t able to sense, and made arguments that leading academics did not make. Why?
It’s difficult to come away with clear takeaways. IMO: (1) it is beneficial to increase anonymous discussion, as this laid the groundwork for future criticism, and allowed for arguments to spread which would otherwise be banned. (2) It may be essential to increase the number of passionate and neurotic men, over men with other skills, as the major critics were more often passionate and somewhat crazy. A “passionate” temperament is occasionally inaccurate, and may result in behavior that leads institutions to weed them out — but their utility in sensing and addressing threats compensates for the occasional bout of craziness.
There is a funny review of Jordan Peterson from 2013, possibly the first time anyone commented about his personality online. It was made on the anonymous literature board of 4chan in 2013, long before his rise to fame.
Editing for clarity
The question is geared toward users who believe that wokeness constituted a threat — to institutions, America, truth, etc. I suppose there are some users who do not believe that wokeness was a threat. I can’t recall seeing such a comment in years on this forum, but if you’re such a user, you are of course welcome to comment and critique in any way that you’d like. Feel free to comment on the premise, the points, a tangent.
Why were the individuals leading the fight against wokeness outside of the traditional framework of understanding and designating cultural authority? The study of philosophy, the study of history, the study of great works, the study and authority of religion — these things did not create any of the influential “fighters” publicly arguing against wokeness. If they couldn’t detect, grasp, and eliminate the threat, then how important should we consider these pursuits and domains? Why did they fail when they were needed? Are these pursuits less valuable in moral formation than generally conceived? Many conservatives believe that these mainstays of Western education are important to study; yet the students of these were impotent against the threat. There are conservatives who studied these, and who teach these.
”Institutional capture” doesn’t factor in here because there are non-woke members of these domains, perhaps a few percent or a few tens of percents, but none of them were to be found among the influential critics of wokeness.
It appears to me that temperament played a larger role than anything else in deciding who was instrumental in tackling the threat. Do you agree? Do you disagree? From Peterson to Musk, the great “defenders” against it were passionate and somewhat crazy personalities. They cried publicly. They had strange personal lives. If that’s the case, should temperament be considered a greater deal in the selection of authority?
I think this clarifies. There’s a mismatch between “the study of Western things leads to great moral conduct!” and the reality of how everyone behaved during a mass movement which veered toward moral hysteria. “Traditional education” did not avail anything. This is interesting, provided of course that you agree with the premise.
I believe a lot of the lack of institutional pushback was down to the election of Trump, which made plenty of liberals go insane and abandon their principles. There was both this radicalising force and a desire to close ranks.
Wokism wouldn't have disappeared without Trump but I believe his election supercharged an existing movement that wouldn't have had the same legs without such a convenient and radicalising enemy. For any narrative to really catch on you need the right villain and Trump was just that.
Ante hoc ergo non propter hoc. That is, all this stuff, without institutional pushback (and often with full-throated institutional support) pre-dates Trump's election. Yes, Trump's election made them go insane, but they weren't pushing back before either.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think wokism is the logical conclusion of blank slate, everyone-is-equal democracy. Blank slate meaning that everyone is born the same, there are no genetic or inborn advantages in intelligence or drive between demographics, and that everyone is equal. This is a sort of immaculate conception myth that all modern liberal democracies believe, not just woke people.
Progressives or “wokists” take this to the logical conclusion: since demographics are clearly not equal in terms of educational achievement, wealth accumulation, property ownership, etc, but since they were exactly equal at birth, it logically HAS to be some systematic form of oppression to cause these sort of disparities.
The logic is sound, but the premise is flawed. Human Bio-diversity is a thing. Ever watch the NBA or NFL? It’s predominantly black, but there aren’t many who have an issue with this. At the upper echelons of business, it’s predominantly white and Asian. Many have problems with this, and a lot of flawed programs are devised as a result like DEI and Affirmative Action.
Unfortunately, you aren’t really allowed to talk about these things in polite company, but most people fundamentally understand this.
Thanks to social sorting by occupation/income/class/education I'm not sure that HBD is that obvious to your average layman. The kind of black person that hangs out in lefty college educated millennial circles is not the sort that drives an Altima with a fake paper tag. If anything, your average college educated white millennial might be more likely to know/be related to some embarrassingly white trash types than they would the average ghetto-dweller. Pro football players are supermajority black, but high school football players and more broadly football fans more closely reflect the demographics of the sort of places that are into it.
To give a Trump-coded example I work for a trucking company in the deep south whose employees are almost entirely black and white, and of the pre Ellis Island variety at that. Your HBD guy would argue that our black employees are in fact an above-average sample of the black population of AL/MS/GA while the whites we have mostly aren't (More accurately, there's an age gap. Our white employees are mostly older/from a time where college education wasn't that common and trucking was more widely considered a good job. Our average office guy was a trucker for a decade or few before they switched to the office.) but IRL it looks like a place where "90s colorblindness" (aka. the normie Trump voter position) is accurate. The black and white men (and it's all men) I work with are largely the same: high school educated/some college at most, very Southern/rural-coded, married or divorced with children (Educated incels would rage at the fact that fatass truckers can get laid and they can't.), of average intelligence, and somewhere between fat and fat as hell for the most part. The drivers (and frankly a lot of the office guys; I was hired into the office with no trucking experience based in part on the expectation that as a college educated white guy I'd have superior computer skills) might not be the brightest guys, but we pay well above-average for trucking so we get the kind who are experienced and by and large have their shit together (especially the owner/operators).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Hmm, what can “we” learn by summing your entire outgroup up as one monolithic movement, then gaming out an elaborate social strategy?
Probably not much. Definitely nothing “optimal.” I think you’re overfitting a model, and in a way that just happens to bait agreement from a certain sort of ambiguously-autistic Internet commenter.
I suppose I also think you’re assuming the conclusion. Perhaps, for bait, that goes without saying?
Point is, your model kind of sucks.
More options
Context Copy link
I think this depends on whether you are judging from the perspective of Christian conservatives or secular ones. If you are a secular conservative hoping to see the churches hold back the woke tide, you are going to be disappointed; we no longer have that kind of influence. Secular old-school liberals may see it as more of a mixed bag, but many of them seem to suffer from the same misunderstanding.
I can't speak to the experience of the last few years within Catholicism, as I am not a Roman Catholic. But I think that any proper understanding will have to start from the realization that the Roman Catholic church is in practice a very big tent and it is necessary to distinguish movements within it.
As an evangelical, though, I can say that evangelical churches did often address this internally. My pastor, whom I would describe as a moderate social conservative, talked about the dangers of the woke movement quite a lot. Evangelical groups produced a lot of woke defectors (or ideological refugees, to be more generous) during this period, demonstrating that wokeness was being vigorously rejected in the bodies they left. But external advocacy was indeed more selective, reflecting a need to pick our battles.
The mainline went woke, yes. They've been progressive for a very long time. But what may not be visible from the media coverage is that they are also dying.
Anyway, I think it's too early to hold a postmortem of the woke movement. It's still very much alive and kicking.
The RCC, excepting perhaps the most liberal fringes, was generally very anti-trans consistently throughout the period; beyond that the Francis pontificate was basically a cold civil war(which came very very close to going hot, more than once) that kept the guns pointed at each other and sucked the oxygen out of the room.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the reason that most institutions didn’t actually stand up against it is that most of them had been infected with nihilistic thinking decades ago, maybe centuries. The idea that nothing really mattered and nothing is really true left the traditional institutions with no footing with which to push back. The churches had long been ecumenical institutions that often hold to nothing as essential to Christianity. They’ve fallen to the point that many of them no longer hold things like the Trinity, Solus Christus, or the need for genuine repentance as essential. Fewer hold that the Bible defines sin or the proper way to live. So from the position that nothing is true or matters, how do you assert that something is wrong?
Academics has been nihilistic and post-rational for about the same amount of time. It’s no longer a search for truth, it’s an opinion laundering operation with a bunch of job training programs attached. How does a professor defend against demands from the woke? He can’t point to facts, he’s long since abandoned them. An institution that cannot defend a definition of woman is not going to stand for much of anything.
More options
Context Copy link
Probably shouldn't have let so many activists and grievance scholars critical of Western civ into the henhouse.
Maybe this is where being Western gets you into trouble. Others would accept that, while their beliefs are true, education is a matter of indoctrinating people into viewing those alleged facts through the right lens. Westerners think argument will lead to the correct conclusion so why does it matter? Some people allowed themselves to be anesthetized by claims of institutional neutrality.
People did sense it, the ones in spaces with the activists just had to be terrified. The "why not transracialism?" argument everyone uses online, for example, led to a huge shitstorm for Rebecca Tuvel. I think someone like Weinstein didn't know what he was getting into, and Peterson just has a personality type where he's prone to grandiosity about his positions and importance, and his ideology makes him very contemptuous of public shaming and struggle sessions (if you're charitable, his background in psychology makes him very suspicious of moral tyrants).
The other problem is that a lot of the more established people in institutions who could say something hate the enemies of the modern social justice movement more than they do the socjus types (agreeing with them on what they think are the important points and being baffled when it's not enough), and would rather be in denial than grant them an inch . Trace more or less summed up the dynamics when one set of consistent deniers ran into problems getting hired elsewhere (I suppose when you already have a job and seniority it doesn't seem worth it to rock the boat, instead of admitting you're a coward you cope by claiming it's no big deal)
What lesson can be taken from this? Don't fall asleep at the wheel while the pipeline for educating your kids and new elites is taken over by your enemies. That's about it.
More options
Context Copy link
As someone who thinks that no organized religion that I am aware of is accurate to reality, I am actually glad that religious leaders did not do more against wokism. I think that this helped anti-wokism to plausibly portray itself as being rooted in reason rather than in superstitions or religious emotions. And for me, that is what I want anti-wokism to be rooted in. One of my main problems with wokism, besides what I consider to be its deleterious effects on public attitudes towards things important things like policing, is that I consider it to simply be inaccurate. This is something that would annoy me about wokism even if it had no deleterious impacts on my life in any way. So I do not want to use other things things that I consider to be untrue, like organized religion, to battle it.
More options
Context Copy link
Religious leaders pushed back against LGBT in the Catholic and evangelical cases; mainline Protestants no.
More options
Context Copy link
They ARE the movement bruh.
People have been asking this for at least a century. "The Nazis listened to Wagner and read Goethe and they still plunged the entire planet into total war, how is that possible?"
Philosophy in the Socratic tradition (and if we can speak of a "western tradition" at all, as distinct from other traditions, then we must start with Socrates) never promised wisdom. It promised a love of wisdom; it promised a critique of those who pretend to wisdom. But wisdom itself is for the gods alone. So it is unsurprising when mortals do things that are unwise.
You have to be something of a weirdo to violate social consensus as publicly and flagrantly as Peterson did.
Because the experts wanted it to happen, they couldn't perceive it as a threat if it wasn't threatening to them in the first place.
More options
Context Copy link
Flagged as consensus building.
What you call "optimal cultural leadership" is really just "how to make my outgroup not get in power". And your use of neutral language to cover this switch up is bad rhetoric.
A very large percentage of Americans still find the "social justice craze" to be a good thing, including many of the academics/religious leaders/politicians you are critiquing for not being anti-social justice craze from early on. It's fine for you to be anti-social justice craze. But you shouldn't be assuming that everyone else is or that it is the norm around here.
FWIW, I would be very interested in reading an ideologically neutral account of the failures of conservative leadership to account for the rise of wokism, and what lessons can be learned in order to better spread/suppress future ideologies.
I would be interested in you actually substantiating that a very large percentage of Americans find the "social justice craze" to be a good thing. From what I remember of studies such as Hidden Tribes is that progressives make up like 5% of Americans which is an incredibly small amount. It is hard to get a very large percentage of Americans to agree on just about anything. Only 82% of Americans say that illegal aliens face discrimination! I don't see how you can think they don't when by definition they face de jure discrimination and there is so much obvious de facto discrimination as well.
I think to get very large percentages of Americans to agree on social justice you have to either water down "very large" from 70%+ down to like 30% or define "social justice craze" in such a broad manner as "yeah some things kinda suck for some people and thats a bad thing".
Though I do think that the grandparent is also at fault for not being more specific in what exactly he thinks the leaders he is thinking of should have opposed and how they should've gone about accomplishing that.
Yes, I meant on the order of 30%. That's not a majority, but it's large enough that you can't just assume that everyone in the world agrees with it. For the type of framing that OP used, I think you need the percentage of people to disagree with it to be on the order of the lizardman constant.
I mean, the percentage of modern day Geocentrists is above the lizardman’s constant(upper teens percent in most western democracies IIRC- weirdly this is the one time thé US isn’t an outlier). It seems fair to round off anything under ~20-25% as a fringe in most contexts and that’s not a massive underestimate of SJ popularity, at least.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not a mod and I don't speak for them, I only speak for myself and my own opinions.
There obviously is an anti-woke consensus here, I don't see what point there is in denying that. That doesn't mean that wokes aren't welcome, it simply means they're not in the majority. The rules about neutrality and consensus building made more sense in the early days when this was all new and the ideological split was closer to even, but now we've gotten to the point where the regulars have been here for 10 years, and they all know each other's positions fairly well. Nitpicking someone about consensus building this late in the game seems a bit silly. As though every post in a 10+ year dialogue has to assume that we're starting from a totally clean blank slate.
I think it's good to still have the rule about consensus building on the books to deal with particularly obnoxious violations (like, saying "obviously we all know that [woke position] is wrong..."), but I don't think it should be enforced that stringently.
I find OPs framing to be even more obnoxious than your quote because it buries the assumption of agreement until mid-post and never makes it explicit. So I was expecting to read a very different type of post, and was unhappy when I realized what was going on. At least when someone starts off "obviously we all know..." you know where they're coming from and can read/skip accordingly.
More options
Context Copy link
I would like to register profound disagreement here. We should absolutely not relax any rules because "everybody knows we all agree." Allowing consensus building will degrade the quality of commentary significantly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Hold up.
For years, on this very forum (well, fine, you have to come buck to the /r/SSC days), whenever someone pointed out the advances of the SJ movement, the response was something to the effect of "it's just a couple of crazy kids on college campuses / Tumblr", or alternatively there'd be an attempt to "steelman" the movement to make it look more reasonable than it actually is ("defund the police doesn't really mean defund the police"), something later dubbed "sanewashing" by other elements of the left.
His use of neutral language is not covering up any switch, it's taking what progressives who participated in Culture War commentary at face value, i.e. assuming their good faith. We can dispense with that assumption, but I'm not sure you'd be happy with that either.
It was more than that, but not much more. There was a lot of media rhetoric from the left and teeth gnashing on the right about certain things, but in the end it doesn't seem to have amounted to much. But beyond some limited effects at the local level, most of the media coverage from the left amounted to little more than trend pieces (where a fringe phenomenon is puffed up into something bigger than it is), and the right's reaction had all the hallmarks of a moral panic. I can't tell you how many arguments in bars I got into where someone would insist that this school district just down the road was teaching kids that white people are bad blah blah blah and can you believe what these kids are hearing about gay people only to find out that they got this information from their neighbor's cousin's kid, or something, which is the equivalent of them just admitting that they got it from some dubious social media post. I have yet to talk to anyone with actual firsthand knowledge of any of this who could reproduce lesson plans or anything.
And at the national level, this rhetoric was soundly rejected within the Democratic party. Regardless of how the Republicans would like to portray them, there are few woke Democratic elected officials. The Squad is the most notorious, but those are a few House reps in safe seats, and even some of those got primaried the last go-round. AOC may be nationally known, but it remains to be seen whether she's that popular outside the Bronx. And when woke politicians do get the opportunity to go national, they fall flat on their faces. If there was ever an election where wokeness could triumph over the Democratic establishment, it was 2020. The woke lane was there for any Democrat who wanted to take it. Who did? Kirsten Gillebrand and Beto O'Rourke. Arguably Kamala Harris, though she wasn't very convincing about it. The Democrats ended up nominating Joe Biden, about as an establishment candidate as you can get. Hell, Mayor Pete made a convincing run as a moderate and even led early on despite being the mayor of a town most people couldn't point to on a map.
There's been a recent scandal where the Minnesota Department of Human Services released a policy requiring:
And that's just an example I pick because it's recent, newsworthy, and about as well-proven as possible. The Moderate Centrist Establishment Candidate Joe Biden sued dozens of cities over 'discriminatory' neutral tests of ability for firefighters and police officers, along with a wide variety of other woke policies; the moderate centrist people confronted with this class of problem answered that they still got successful moderation, and when questioned on that, answered shut up that's why.
People run on different things. But they do this.
There's a plaintiff's counsel I deal with frequently who will occasionally send out exhibits ahead of a deposition, and all the points she wants to emphasize will be highlighted, and I very quickly learned two things: 1. It's really easy for your eyes to go straight to the highlighted portions, and 2. It's just as important that you read what isn't highlighted. If you're trying to create right-wing ragebait for a targeted audience, it helps if you can not only direct readers to the most inflammatory sounding parts of a document but also omit 3 of the 5 pages included in that document, lest some smartass actually reads the whole thing and comes to the incorrect conclusion. It also helps that the document wasn't intended for the public but for a specific audience and thus omits crucial context that the target audience would be familiar with, though I can forgive Ms. Collin for that because I doubt that she took the time to familiarize herself with that context either.
Getting down to the nitty gritty, as Ms. Collin so helpfully highlighted, the policy provides that:
She did not, however, highlight the following definition:
In other words, this isn't a wide-ranging justification requirement for hiring white men; it only applies to job categories in which there is underrepresentation. And underrepresentation isn't based on the minority population as a whole, but on the estimated number of qualified minority applicants in a particular geographic region. To see what this actually means, though, you would have to look to the DHS Affirmative Action Plan, which the document's intended audience would almost certainly be familiar with. There, you'll find that there are seven job categories, that protected groups are divided into three broad categories: Women, disabled people, and minorities. This gives us 21 data points for determining whether there is underrepresentation, of which four actually show it as such; Minorities are underrepresented in three categories (supervisors/administrators, skilled crafts, and service maintenance) and women in one (paraprofessionals). There are no categories that underrepresent disabled people. There is no underrepresentation in the technician, professional, or administrative support categories. When you look at the statistical breakdowns, it is clear that these targets are dispassionate and completely unidealistic. There are approximately zero women currently employed in the skilled craft category (plumbers, electricians, etc.), but since the estimated number of qualified women in this category is zero, there is no target, and you thus don't need to justify hiring a man. For the service maintenance, on the other hand, there is a minority hiring target, even though these are the kind of low-level service jobs that minorities were historically relegated to in the past. The upshot is that you need justification for hiring a white janitor over a black one but not for hiring a white attorney over a black one.
And this says nothing of the fact that the justification involved doesn't even have to be that persuasive. If you look at page three of the document (which Ms. Collin didn't provide), it provides a laudry list of acceptable justifications, with the caveat that the list isn't exhaustive. The point of the process isn't to force the issue of hiring more minorities in jobs where they can't cut it, it's to to make hiring managers take a second thought about why they're hiring one candidate over another. The canonical conservative argument against AA is that it substitutes racial preferences for merit, but such arguments are always made without any understanding of how AA works in practice. All this policy does is say that if you think the white guy is the best man for the job, in the limited cases where AA even applies, you should be able to explain why he's the best man for the job. If you're incapable of doing that, then one wonders why you picked the guy in the first place.
You can feel free to disagree with the merits of the policy; I was merely pointing out that it's much different than the Tweet you posted implies. But that's all collateral to the real point, which is whether such a policy is evidence of a wokeness epidemic. The key here is page five, which Ms. Collins did not provide for us, though even if she did it's unlikely that anyone would recognize its significance. It well within the references and statutory authority and all the other housekeeping stuff that appears at the end of these kinds of directives, and contains but one item before the signature line:
If one actually examines the referenced document, they will discover an Affirmative Action Implementation Policy implemented in 2014 that contains the following provision:
In other words, this NEW policy that goes into effect next month is actually just an elaboration of a policy that's actually been around for over a decade. It gets even better, though; the 2014 Affirmative Action Implementation Policy is the third revision of a policy that initially went into effect in 2002. I couldn't find a copy of the 2002 policy so I don't know if it contained the above language in it, but I suspect it contained something substantially similar, as I was able to find an Affirmative Action Plan from 2004 from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic development that contains a documentation packet with a form asking substantially the same questions as are required in this "new" plan, i.e. asking the hiring manager to justify hiring a non-affirmative candidate. And those requirements appear to have been stricter, as they indicate that the non-affirmative hire must be substantially (emphasis in original) more qualified than the minority candidate, while the new guidance contains no such provision.
To this effect, it's hard to see how you've given any evidence that "wokeness" has increased in any meaningful way in recent years. And yeah, I know the Biden's EEOC filed a bunch of diparate impact suits. But that doesn't say much; the EEOC has been doing that for decades. And before that they were filing pattern discrimination suits whose effects were much more severe than making a police department use a different test. In 1974 nine steel companies entered a consent decree by which they would grant minority candidates practically automatic seniority when it came to bidding into skilled positions as compensation for past discriminatory hiring practices. What this meant in effect was that if you were a white guy working in the labor pool for years with the hope that you'd eventually be able to bid into an apprenticeship to be a pipefitter or something, you'd get stepped over by a black guy who had been there for a year and got first priority. I don't hear many people talking about the wokeness of the Nixon Administration, though.
More options
Context Copy link
That isn't even a NEW policy. I mean, that particular form of it is new, but here on their web page is a policy with the same objectionable criteria, which was issued on May 6, 2014.
But no matter how much proof you bring, it's always "nothing to see here".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, LoTT might not be the most reliable source, but it has enough documented instances to say this is at least a thing that is happening and relatively widespread.
More options
Context Copy link
Perhaps my experience was atypical, but in my neck of the woods, the neighbor’s cousin’s kid brought receipts. After high school students found that their complaints about their teachers were being ignored, one or two started secretly filming the offending remarks and sharing them on social media. A scandal ensued, the administration was livid (at the students, not the teachers), a few teachers lost their jobs, the community was in uproar, and so on. I thought the most unfortunate aspect of the debacle was that so many people took your position—“the kids can’t be trusted,” “they’re all just exaggerating,” “if this was true, the administration would be on it”—until some kid risked expulsion to provide proof. Notably, in neighboring school districts, kids complained about precisely the same issues and had many of the same stories, but no one was brave enough to secretly film the lectures and share them online, so a lot of people assumed the problems were restricted to the one bad school district. Given the circumstances, I find that unlikely.
More options
Context Copy link
Several European countries passed gender self-ID laws, last year the town hall where I live was draped in "TRANS DAY OF REMEMBRANCE" banners, the whole "Gender Affirming Care" thing is a fiasco based on no evidence, and a failure of scientific institutions to do proper filtering, there's people being harassed by the police or outright arrested for not buying the gender ideology, or for mild jokes... Yes please go on and tell me how these things are indicative of a moral panic. I guess it's completely normal for sweeping reforms in accordance with a specific ideology to take place, when the influence of said ideology is nothing but a moral panic.
No it hasn't. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, probably not even you, has ever rejected it. What happened is that Democrats noticed that it's losing them the election, so they're trying to turn the volume down, but they did absolutely nothing to reject it.
On this part, the Democratic party is in a bind because it contains both centrists and progressives. Both want to push the party in one direction but the party heads can't overtly reject the other side because they need all the votes they can get. Biden in 2020 was one of the least progressive candidates and became the nominee, though admittedly it's hard to draw conclusions because he was also Vice President and the other candidates weren't all that well known. I somewhat subjectively believe progressives are a minority, but the party knows they don't have the luxury of rejecting them whether they truly want to or not.
Right, I can appreciate the tough position they are in, but I'm having a tough time sympathizing with the "we have already rejected the woke, what more do you want?" attitude. I can also understand the the official Democratic Party leadership isn't going to air their dirty laundry and say anything to the effect of "look, listen... we're kinda in a tug of war intra-party conflict here, and there's only so much we can do right now", but I would expect more from anonymous posters here.
The problem with this as a metric is that candidates have to be aware of their chances of victory in the general election, so there will almost certainly be some amount of hiding their power level (or even exaggerating it, when they know they're not going to implement a policy, because it's not popular with elites / lobbies, but popular with the nation as a whole). For example, Biden might not have ran on pressuring medical associations to remove age limits on medical transitions for children, but that is, in fact, what his administration deliberately did, once in power.
I consider myself anti-woke/centrist Dem and feel I have commented along those lines here (notably when trans topics come up). And I should mention that Carville does air his dirty laundry with progressives.
I don't disagree on your general observation, but I was more using Biden an example of voter habits rather than politician. The politicians that win Democratic primaries tend to be centrists (or at least posing/perceived as centrists), making me believe that progressive policies are less popular even within the Democratic party.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My belief, based on my recollections of the time, is that "leading experts" and "leading academics" were the originators of the social justice memeplex, and therefore wouldn't make arguments against it even if they could conceive of them. In support of this, the common dismissal at the time of "it's just college students spending too much time on tumblr" highlights that this memeplex's breeding ground was immediately downstream of leading academics. Or perhaps more accurately, academia was the superfund site and Tumblr was the groundwater.
Sorry if the metaphor is too dramatic, I'm feeling bitter.
More options
Context Copy link
This is the result of the much-discussed "march through the institutions". By the time social justice began to come out in the open, the institutions -- even religious ones -- had largely already been taken over by progressives.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link