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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   22840 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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The Coordinating Mechanism for Woke

From the early 2010s until roughly 2023, the prevalence of woke coded speech on the internet was constantly on the rise. There has been endless debate over the origins of it, but everyone here is likely familiar with the terms, tone, and intent of such speech. And then, suddenly, in the last 2 years, it basically vanished. Sure there are small, insular corners of the media landscape that still openly discuss such ideas. But on almost all mainstream sites, media outlets, shows, newsletters, etc, the prevalence of woke coded language has decreased by an order of magnitude.

The political reasons for this should be obvious at this point, but what I find puzzling is the speed at which this marked drop was coordinated across all types of media. I'm not enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe there is any shadowy cabal actually orchestrating this. But in the absence of any other coordination mechanism, I have a hard time understanding what has caused this. You would expect a movement that built momentum and followers steadily over a number of years to take an equal amount of time to slow down. Indeed, most other social trends follow that pattern. But in this case, the halt was sudden and ubiquitous. So, as the title implies, my question is really about how this has happened.

If I were to speculate, I'd say that any mass coordination across disparate elements of society, without any authority dictating it, has all the hallmarks of the invisible hand. And if it were only news institutions and media outlets I would give more credence to this theory. But just looking at social media postings, there has been a huge drop in people using this type of language. Attending free activities and events, this rhetoric is less prevalent. And since I have a very hard time accepting that the beliefs themselves are gone, I can't come up with a convincing explanation.

until roughly 2023

I personally date peak woke to October 7th 2023, and I believe that though there were trends that had started slowing the rise before then, the actual inflection point can be traced to Hamas's attack on Israel. Why something so seemingly specific and unrelated? It opened up a deep schism within woke between (to be as charitable as possible) those who support violent anti-colonial resistance by Palestinians, and those who object to Palestinian antisemitism. This rift is irreparable, as woke demands strident anti-racism as a core tenant which you cannot diverge on. Both sides now have mutually incompatible definitions of racism, and mutually accuse each other of being genocidally racist. Unlike previous splits, which tended to involve salami slicing off the least radical faction, this time they've split down the middle enough for all the energy woke once held to be consumed by infighting. It's unsustainable to be woke and a blood and soil ultranationalist at the same time.

I personally date peak woke to October 7th 2023

I obviously can't speak for everyone but peak woke to me has to be June 2020, and frankly I'm shocked that anyone feels differently.

After the summer of George, things definitely cooled down. Yes, woke still existed, yes, Biden was in charge, but overall the public insanity was definitely trending downwards, especially on the issues most identifiably 'woke' (race, transgenderism, economic redistribution). By 2023, it was somewhat acceptable to start questioning the 'official' narrative of transgender ideology, and BLM was basically gone.

I see the Biden (and then Kamala) 2024 campaign as decidedly not woke in the vein of prior Democratic politics.

I agree. As in most things, the situation for wokeness went bad at first slowly after 2020, then very fast. My purely vibes based reading is that we're only months into the very fast part. We'll see what mutation replaces it.

Many women, even some who literally worked pro-bono for leftist NGOs, thought wokeness was nauseating crap but were too conflict avoidant to complain about it because they didn't want to make a scene. They would complain and bitch in private about the 'piety' of these people but passively uphold its hegemony in public, preface their private statements with 'you should never say this' and even look down on anyone who was actually honest in going against the consensus as a cringeworthy troublemaker. And there's an intense, seething hatred for transgender ideology too.

It's like they were hard-coded many years ago 'the left wing is good and the right sordid and smelly, good deeds include helping refugees, giving money to international charity and helping poor brown people have more political power'. They might recognize from experience that poor brown people are often stupid and can't understand the byzantine political process in a Western liberal democracy, giving them power is often an exercise in futility. Or they see that the power is taken by greedy intermediaries who pocket most of the loot. Or they know that non-Western cultures treat women poorly, importing them harms their own interests. But they then just try not to think about the incoherency between their knowledge of the world and beliefs about what should be done and lean towards various cope arguments that the media likes to put forward about why progressivism isn't working out so well.

It's like Ceausescu support withering the moment people stopped being afraid of the secret police, his support was based not on enthusiastic consent but grudging obedience. Light novel title: 'I can't believe the sex that wasn't selected for martial bravery turns out to be cowardly in their politics too!'

It was women. Always the women. Radlib tumblr progressive-lites whose grand queen was JK Rowling.

Then the trans issue grew into the cause dejure, and suddenly being a moral crusader became sharing female spaces to bearded AGP transexuals.

Most liberal women were not onboard with that, and so quietly left... and were replaced by said BAGPTs.

BAGPTS are histrionic, drama-queen lolcows that rot any organization they join from within. As brown vanguardism destroyed academia and politics from within by replacing Jewish human capital with Islamists, so did the woke censorate lose its feminine inviolability. The individual women who lost out on positions within woke organizations to intersectionality's apex predator no longer contributed their social capital to wokism. Thus, decline into farce and irrelevance.

cause dejure

You mean "cause celebre", or perhaps "cause du jour."

ach! I'm crusader-kings brained.

Maybe a few more elements:

  • the transgender craze made the virtue signaling instrumental to progressivism unpalatable to normal people

  • COVID hysteria also made virtue signaling unpalatable

  • the shift to short form video content made people assess physiognomy more than before, and the silly trends eat up more cognitive space than before (which was open to news)

  • Red Scare and Kill Tony became very popular, and both were anti-progressive; the subreddit of the former constantly goes viral indirectly via screenshots

  • the war in Gaza shifted the moral concern toward Palestinians and anti-Israel rhetoric

  • Tik Tok’s popularity made other platforms compete by decreasing censorship; the things you now see on Instagram reels would have been a front page news story about racism in 2015

  • there may literally be a shadowy cabal influencing algorithms; for instance, Trump influencing Zuckerberg means that his platforms are less censored

Personally I think the CIA made the septum piercing a shibboleth within SJW circles specifically to reduce memetic potential because it’s so fucking ugly and has a 90% chance of coinciding with SJW viewpoints

I found it quite telling the moment trump decapitated USAID all the usual lock step nonsense from mass US media went all over the place, they were like chickens flailing around after decapitation without a unified purpose. Maybe trump also managed to find and pull the plug on some unnamed psyops division? Idk, I don't read reddit anymore but we do know its swarming with glowies literally on the military's payroll, so why not the rest of the internet. How much of the woke hysteria on twitter and tumblr was organic.

David Samuels of Tablet Mag wrote a good article last year on "permission structures" and the development of the concept under Barack Obama.

Its originator, David Axelrod, was born to be a great American advertising man—his father was a psychologist, and his mother was a top executive at the legendary Mad Men-era New York City ad agency of Young & Rubicam. Permission structures, a term taken from advertising, was Axelrod’s secret sauce, the organizing concept by which he strategized campaigns for his clients.

While the academic social science and psychology literature on permission structures is surprisingly thin, given the real-world significance of Axelrod’s success and everything that has followed, it is most commonly defined as a means of providing “scaffolding for someone to embrace change they might otherwise reject.” This “scaffolding” is said to consist of providing “social proof” (“most people in your situation are now deciding to”) “new information,” “changed circumstances,” “compromise.” As one author put it, “with many applications to politics, one could argue that effective Permission Structures will shift the Overton Window, introducing new conversations into the mainstream that might previously have been considered marginal or fringe.”

When Axelrod finally agreed to come onboard, he found that Obama was the perfect candidate to validate his theories of political salesmanship on a national scale. First, he engineered Obama’s successful 2004 Senate campaign—a victory made possible by the old-school maneuver of unsealing Republican candidate Jack Ryan’s divorce papers, on the request of Axelrod’s former colleagues at the Chicago Tribune—and then, very soon afterward, Obama’s campaigns for the presidency, which formally commenced in 2007.

It worked. Once in office, though, Axelrod and Obama found that the institutions of public opinion—namely the press, on which Axelrod’s permission structure framework depended—were decaying quickly in the face of the internet.

With Obama’s reelection campaign on the horizon in 2012, the White House’s attention turned to selling Obamacare, which would become the signature initiative of the president’s first term in office. Without a healthy, well-functioning press corps that could command the attention and allegiance of voters, the White House would have to manufacture its own world of validators to sell the president’s plan on social media—which it successfully did.

As a meeting of Axelrod’s theories with the mechanics of social media, though, the selling of Obamacare—which continued seamlessly into Obama’s reelection campaign against Mitt Romney—was a match made in heaven. So much so, that by 2013 it had become the Obama White House’s reigning theory of governance. A Reuters article from 2013 helpfully explained how the system worked: “In Obama’s jargon, getting to yes requires a permission structure.” Asked about the phrase, White House spokesman Jay Carney explained that it was “common usage” around the White House, dating back to Obama’s 2008 campaign.

What the White House understood, and which I came to understand through my reporting on the Iran deal, was that social media—which was now the larger context in which former prestige “legacy” outlets like The New York Times and NBC News now operated—could now be understood and also made to function as a gigantic automated permission structure machine. Which is to say that, with enough money, operatives could create and operationalize mutually reinforcing networks of activists and experts to validate a messaging arc that would short-circuit traditional methods of validation and analysis, and lead unwary actors and audience members alike to believe that things that had never believed or even heard of before were in fact not only plausible, but already widely accepted within their specific peer groups.

The article continue in much more depth. The short version is that Barack Obama was able to enlist an incredibly talented ad man in David Axelrod. Initially applied to campaigns, "permission structures" eventually became the admin's reigning theory of how to get the public to want what the admin wanted, especially on social media and especially as legacy media declined. In effect, the combination of social media and "permission structure" logic enabled the admin to create peer pressure and alter perceptions of consensus and what is considered acceptable as needed. No wonder 88% of students at Northwestern and Michigan pretend to hold more progressive views than they have - they grew up under a system the perceived consensus was systematically manipulated to appear more progressive. However, this mass engineering of consensus directly affects the operators too, who may believe that the consensus they push is the actual consensus. That may explain why some are so surprised when contra narrative messages remain popular in the voting booth.

Now, I can't say for sure whether this permission structure tactic was responsible for the rise and fall of woke. But the timeline seems to match. In particular, Musk's purchase of Twitter seems to play a large role in the downfall of "wokeness" / progressive permission structures. One of the first things Musk did was to change Twitter's ban policies. This made dissent to progressive views easier to see, and consensus harder to create. The layoffs and community notes also probably played a role, as tweets remained with context added instead of being removed by Twitter. Altogether, a key component in creating consensus was no longer available to progressives. Social media and permission structures could create preference cascades in one direction, but they could also be reversed.

That said, I do have a few questions. First, I wonder to what extent Musk was clued in on some of this. Did he try to pull out of the Twitter deal in order to play dumb? Second, is the right doing the same thing now, and will that create the same vulnerabilities going forward?

Woke was never more widespread than ten or fifteen percent of the population. They just control the federal bureaucracy, academia, the billions of NGOs with their trillions of billionaire bribes and taxpayer cash, the legal profession, the intelligence agencies and through those mechanisms, the tech platforms.

This is always a temporary state, this happened in the Seventies and Nineties too. People don't like being lectured by hectoring feminist church ladies any more than christian ones. Once the backlash built sufficiently, the left exposed their complete intellectual and moral inversions during Covid, and Elon broke their biggest silo, the whole thing started to slide. It wasn't fast, it took five years and still isn't complete.

Furthermore, it hasn't gone away. Just like PC followed Days of Rage, and Woke followed PC, set your watches. The next one is coming in ten or fifteen years. You'll start hearing about it in five to seven years. All those people still hold all those same basic hatreds, they aren't going to be fired in any real numbers, and this whole thing will happen again and again and again. Not even Sulla can stop it. Hatred of the (western) nation and its population is the basic building block of lefty ideology.

Hear me now, believe me later. The next one will be even more stupid, and even more hateful.

People don't like being lectured by hectoring feminist church ladies any more than christian ones

I mean it seems like the basic difference here is that a much larger percentage of the population thinks the latter has some sort of moral authority to make lectures, even if those lectures are often unpleasant and they’re not going to change their behavior.

Give them twenty years of the sort of power the lefty cult has had, and they'll sing a different tune. Such are the tides of society.

I'd say there's a variation. Let's take BLM for example. Some guy dies after a cop puts a knee on his neck for several minutes and he's asking for help. This has enough scandalous accusations in it to generate discourse. So somewhere between 15 and 26 million people protest. There are a range of views someone might hold regarding police in America. Here are some:

  • Police in America rarely face consequences when they commit bad behavior.

  • Police in America often commit bad behavior.

  • When one police officer commits bad behavior, others protect him from punishment.

  • This bad behavior disproportionately affects minorities.

  • Police in America are racist, often intentionally so.

  • All structures in America are racist

  • America requires radical transformation to resolve racist structures.

...and so on.

Where I'm going with this is there are clearly escalating claims being made. But what happened to George Floyd and people's general beliefs are such that a lot of the populace believes at least some of these claims. And the amount of outrage was enough that people were willing to tolerate or overlook the stronger claims (especially with a friendly media) because they wanted to see some sort of reform when it comes to police accountability.

I think you can repeat that with a lot of progressive arguments. The general public is probably sympathetic to the weaker, saner versions of progressive arguments. And that's enough for the left to get by, usually. However, some cracks appear. When it comes to trans issues for instance, the Overton window is probably centered around the point of, "I don't really think trans women are women, but if I'm just casually talking with someone and not sleeping with them, I don't want the other person to be unhappy and it's no big deal to say "she" instead of "he." " But the progressive activist is only happy with that status quo to the extent that they think there's enough goodwill to push it further. But what if there isn't enough goodwill there? The activist has to keep pushing, but the public is tired of being pushed. Combine that with a Biden administration that seemed to care more about student loan forgiveness than raising inflation, and you get Trump.

"I don't really think trans women are women, but if I'm just casually talking with someone and not sleeping with them, I don't want the other person to be unhappy and it's no big deal to say "she" instead of "he."

Is it a big deal to do 5 daily prayers to make your Muslim friends happy?

I didn't say it was my opinion. I said it's where I think a large amount of the people around the political center are at. And this analogy doesn't work, because performing a prayer is an additional task, whereas you were probably referring to someone with a pronoun regardless. This is more comparable to the euphemism treadmill.

And this analogy doesn't work, because performing a prayer is an additional task, whereas you were probably referring to someone with a pronoun regardless.

Wouldn't that mean it would be wrong to force someone who doesn't pray, to pray to Allah, but ok to force someone who does pray 5 times a day, but to a different god?

Seems kinda backwards to me.

A better analogy, but still flawed. Everyone agrees that male and female exist (though I suppose there's room there when talking about nonbinary). However the left has has turned the desire to be acknowledged and respected into an obsession, something to be asserted rather than established. And the easiest way to do that is to do something loud yet easily packaged. It's not "I think therefore I am," it's "I act therefore I am." They aren't so much trying to force you to acknowledge a god, they're trying to get you to acknowledge them as a unique person by making you acknowledge how they act.

The standard vocabulary dogma is that between male and female is intersex, and between man and woman (or boy and girl) is nonbinary.

But the progressive activist is only happy with that status quo to the extent that they think there's enough goodwill to push it further.

The activist that has to fundraise needs a live conflict. They can't take yes for answer

Hence Dave Chapelle's admonition to the LGBT coalition that they ought to cash their chips in and go home before the crap out.

And the amount of outrage was enough that people were willing to tolerate or overlook the stronger claims (especially with a friendly media) because they wanted to see some sort of reform when it comes to police accountability.

Sure, and that's not wrong either. But the over-reaction at the time had me shaking my head, and that was before I recently saw a video from the time where - gold-plated coffin? what is to all intents and purposes a state funeral? the mayor kneeling and weeping as if at the tomb of a martyred saint? What the hell???

That's way more than "let's have a national conversation about the police and if they do get too much leeway".

Eh. OTOH, the widespread adoption of body-worn cameras has been a nearly unalloyed good (a rare culture-war thing!). It's reduced excessive force, it's vindicated cases w/ justified use of force and it's shed light that neither totalizing view was remotely correct.

I'm not sure we would have gotten them in an alternate timeline without that national conversation.

But the conversation would still have been possible without the deification of Floyd, who - whatever sort of death he suffered - was indeed a petty criminal engaging in fraud at the time of his death. I am not saying he deserved to die or that any one should be treated in that way, but the over-reaction afterwards was indeed like he was some martyr for religion. He wasn't a good guy. Bad guys also have human rights and shouldn't be killed by ignorance or malice, but the immediate emotional reaction was something like the death of Princess Diana where the real person got lost in this persona built up by a lot of hysteria and neediness, and has collapsed in the same way (Floyd's worship much faster than Diana's worship).

And worship is indeed the only word that I can find to fit - the mayor weeping while kneeling before the coffin, touching it like it's a relic? That's the kind of display that would have drawn the attention of Thomas Cromwell and invited a visitation from his commissioners about superstition and idolatry.

I'm not sure that conversation would have been possible at a policy level without the (largely, I agree, bullshit) personal angle. American politics doesn't seem to work at such a wonkish level. Without being too cynical, it seems at least possible that it just never happened otherwise.

The parallels to Trump are also interesting: would it have been possible to get conservative politics and a retreat of the worst of the LGBT (not that I want to roll back some level of acceptance, but surely high school locker rooms were a bridge way too far) without the personal angle of a thrice-married adulterer?

OTOH, the widespread adoption of body-worn cameras has been a nearly unalloyed good

I think it's a bit early to say that. Haven't a lot of places been starting to struggle with poor police recruitment on a similar timeline to rolling out body cameras?

It could be that the loss of privacy from body cameras isn't relevant to the recruitment problems. Body cameras could even be helping recruitment by reducing officer concern over false accusations. But until someone identifies and fixes the cause of the recruitment problems I'd be reluctant to conclude body cameras aren't relevant.

Personally, I think I'd find it quite unpleasant to have a camera and microphone active for most of the time I spend at work. Especially when those recordings could be released to the public.

The cops wanted the body cameras because they thought it would clear up false accusations/spurious complaints. Police recruitment problems have to do with hollowing out of the native working class male population through brain drain and low fertility and the need for police recruits to be super squeaky clean goody-goody two shoes- driving problems, drug tests, gambling debt(it's thought to cause susceptibility to bribery), MIPs exclude a huge portion of the population that finds police work appealing.

At least that's what my police officer friends tell me.

It could be that the loss of privacy from body cameras isn't relevant to the recruitment problems.

Yeah... you don't think the social movement to demonize the police might be more relevant here? Especially since it was the same movement that demanded the body cams, and thus explaining the timing?

Indeed, the prevalence of body cam footage has undermined the demonize-the-police movement considerably.

Possibly! If we fix that problem, keep the body cameras, and the recruitment crisis goes away then the body cameras were probably an unalloyed good.

But as all three happened around the same time it's hard to untangle how much each of the former two contribute to the latter. Police certainly don't seem to have all-positive opinions of body cameras and I can see a number of reasons why even a good cop would hate wearing one.

"I don't really think trans women are women, but if I'm just casually talking with someone and not sleeping with them, I don't want the other person to be unhappy and it's no big deal to say "she" instead of "he." "

The problem is not just that trans activists aren't content with this, it's that it's an inherently unstable position. It is a big deal to say "he" or "she", much of society is built around there being men and women and it being easy to tell which is which.

Thinking back on the vast majority of the interactions I've had in the last week or two, I can't think of that many in which it did matter. The clerk at the store, the other parents at the park, coworkers, friends. If it wasn't easy to tell which were biologically fe/male, I don't think it would have made my life that much harder.

Society is built on reproducing pairs, which is an inexorable function of biology -- but not a ton of day to day life impinges on that.

For people who are members of the demographic most likely to be sexually assaulted, it matters to them a great deal to know if the people in their vicinity are members of the demographic most likely to sexually assault them.

Indeed. Now what percentage of the time is sexual assault a really salient risk: when alone with someone, in a sensitive place like a locker room, at a club or other place where lots of inebriated people congregate.

Those are real, but they don't comprise anything close to a plurality of situations that the modal human being faces.

Human societies are much richer than just "reproducing pairs" and gender is expressed . Tearing down the structures of existing society has been a long term project of the left, for which project the politics of transexuality is but the most recent of many tools.

Well, if the claim is that even a plurality of daily interactions don't depend at all on the sex of those interacting, then that seems evidently true whether or not it's part of a larger project of the left.

[ This is a pet peeve of mine, even wrong movements are very often correct on at least something, even if it's embedded in a vast edifice of incorrect claims. They can't be wrong about everything all the time. ]

If society is richer than reproducing pairs, and the majority of that richness doesn't actually need to care about the biology (or anything else) of sex, then that's a fact we ought to understand & integrate.

Not any more. What percentage of people goes to church compared to college or works in a corporate environment with HR lectures?

As I've heard it told, the culture war battles of the '80s with the Moral Majority didn't confine themselves to the pews. The likes of Tipper Gore and Jack Thompson were at least perceived as coming for your Black Sabbath CD's, Natural Born Killers on VHS, and Grand Theft Auto games because they were influencing corruptible young minds to commit school shootings (several of those examples pre-date Columbine) and other acts of mayhem.

Although from my chair here today, that historical kulturekampf feels almost quaint.

The striking thing about those battles is about how badly they failed. Wokeness got all the confederate flags removed in an instant, Cops and Roseanne canceled, and Dr. Seuss unpublished, and didn't even break a sweat doing it. The peak bipartisan efforts of the PMRC got a label on records saying "Buy this, your parents will hate it".

How much of that improved cancelation capability is due to social media, online visibility (by choice or by callout) and the melding of "US culture" into one big category?

I think the Internet as a global coordination platform here is undersold: it's so much easier to run a nationwide campaign on any issue today. In 1990 you'd do what, post letters and long-distance phone calls? More expensive in money and time than starting a subreddit, Facebook group, or even newsgroup or email list.

On the plus side, it's done wonders for semi-niche hobbies, though.

Aside from the slanted playing field, monthly church attendance is quite a bit higher than weekly.

People don't like being lectured by hectoring feminist church ladies any more than christian ones.

I mean it seems like the basic difference here is that a much larger percentage of the population thinks the latter has some sort of moral authority to make lectures

Not any more. What percentage of people goes to church compared to college or works in a corporate environment with HR lectures?

That's a playing field so slanted it may as well be a mountain cliff. Everyone in church getting lectured by hectoring church ladies is there voluntarily, while college and HR talks are mandatory for anyone who doesn't want to be prole.

The average person in the west still sees pastors and priests as having some residual moral authority, which is why leftist activists still try to infiltrate churches. Respect for woke equivalents is mostly (thought not entirely! The piety of towards George Floyd, etc. is heartfelt) a reflexive and instinctive accommodation to power.

The death of woke has been claimed many times. I'm not convinced.

I'm still afraid to admit to being centrist, maybe slightly right thereof, in social settings and certainly in work ones. A bit left of the modal Mottizen (someone, link the song, I've long lost it!). My close friends know, but I'd never casually admit to even a lack of antipathy for Trump in front of new people. And that's all as someone in many ways immune to censorship - I'm relatively old and well established, take me or leave me.

Concrete questions: when, if ever, will it be acceptable to express even the blander motte views in polite company? Was it ever?

"Trump? A little grating, but the country's doing fine, I don't mind him." "Trans? I mean...you do you, but you ain't a chick, and stop pushing books into the elementary school curriculum."

The trans stuff is definitely becoming more visible in Ireland (now that the gay rights stuff has been won, I guess). I'm seeing more articles in mainstream media recently about "coming out as trans", "when you're older and trans", "mother of trans kid" (that last one really literally the 'protect trans kids' meme).

So yeah, keeping my mouth shut in public about any doubts I have about the wonderfulness of total trans transformation.

Fun fact: you guys lost the war before you even knew there was one. Trans activists slipped in gender self-ID into the referendum that you thought was about gay marriage.

On the flip side, arguably the most prominent leader, in the whole worldwide pushback against trans, is an Irish woman.

Fun fact: you guys lost the war before you even knew there was one.

Oh, I've been unassailably on the Wrong Side of History from the debates about contraception on down. Voted "no" in the Gay Marriage referendum, mostly because the "yes" side had managed to pull off driving me from what should have been tepid agreement about "meh, civil marriage is a morass anyways, why not?" into frothing "hell NO" opposition. (I am very Schadenfreudig about Graham Linehan's troubles right now, because back when he was being anti-Catholic Church* and pro-social liberalisation, he was feted for his wonderful views in line with right-thinking modernity, but the Overton Window kept on moving while he didn't so now he's one of the bad ones, just like us social conservatives were the bad ones back when he was in the right).

I expect to be on the Wrong Side about the trans stuff, too, until in fifteen or so years time we get the inevitable "but how were we to know?" backlash.

*The whole thing about the church in Ireland is very complicated.

On the flip side, arguably the most prominent leader, in the whole worldwide pushback against trans, is an Irish woman.

JK Rowling? She's English, born in Gloucestershire. Parents also English, though with Scottish ancestry and on naval posting in Scotland for some time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._K._Rowling

Stella O'Malley. Rowling only finances and shitposts, as far as I can tell, doesn't do any actual leadership.

Rowling only finances and shitposts, as far as I can tell, doesn't do any actual leadership.

I’d call that leadership. Paying for things and talking shit; I hadn’t thought of her before as the Tony Stark of trans-opposition.

She shitposts; you share low-effort provocative content; I provide thought leadership in a jocular and efficient manner.

Ok fine, but in that case I would say it pales in comparison to organizing workshops and therapy for parents of trans kids, trans kids themselves, detransitioners, all at a time of peak social-media censorship, and kicking off a remarkably well-run series of conferences. I don't know what is your experience of actually getting shit done, but whenever I tried taking on a leadership role, it was like squeezing water out of a stone. After a few experiences like that, I have mad respect for leaders who actually pull it off at a consistently high quality.

That's not to say I don't appreciate JK Rowling. Her high profile and sharp wit probably exposed a huge amount of normies to the subject, and made it all quite entertaining to boot. But it's not the same thing, I think.

Is she that prominent? I've never heard of her, though I'll look her up.

Everybody plugged into the transphere, either pro- or anti-, probably knows who she is. Normies might not, but they don't matter. Left-wing European politicians attend her conferences to keep an eye on what's going on. Her activity is what keyed me in on the tide turning on trans. I really doubt it would have happened (or at the very least - would have happened at the time it did) without her.

I've had some posts about my criticisms of the "organic" / "market-driven" / "democratic" view of society, and one of these days I might flesh out a compare-and-contrast to and "elite-driven" one, which I think is far more accurate.

There are dozens of us. Dozens.

Concrete questions: when, if ever, will it be acceptable to express even the blander motte views in polite company? Was it ever?

So far, in polite society, it isn't. The progressives are less aggressive than they used to be, but outing yourself as even slightly right-of-center is still a good way to end conversations.

I am... Eclectic in my politics. I fear I'm a gigachud among most of my friends, and left-leaning for the Motte.

Over the past one or two years, I've been a bit more willing to express my opinions. When I do, the responses are far more balanced than my fears. Some of the things I've heard would make the median Mottezan blanche.

I'd encourage being open; you might be surprised. Particularly if you have a diverse friend group.

Unfortunately in most of my IRL friend group, casual wishing of death on Trump and veneration (literally, in the form of faux-votive candles) of Luigi Mangione is the norm. I've known and cared for a good number of these people for over 20 years, but SoCal shitlibbery won out.

I agree with you because I am just like everything you described. But I have to ask the question: are we being too cautious? Once bitten twice shy. We have been in the trenches in the most awkward of warfare, and I know I've lost friends and opportunities from being too vocally centrist. I hate getting yelled at and lectured to.... So I'd rather just not start it anymore. So I keep my damn mouth shut.

But truthfully I don't think it's the case that we are being too cautious, not yet. But I must raise this question because there may come a day when society does, or could, accept centrists again, but it won't happen if centrists don't feel free to let our middle-of-the-road freak fly. If people don't start speaking up, others who agree will stay suppressed themselves, due to lack of common knowledge of centrist acceptance.

So basically, I think we can say that the woke conditioning of the past 15 years was massively successful. Even when things are starting to get better, we can't go back to feeling better and acting like we used to. We've been trained to act like the woke, even though we are not, and this makes it all the harder to change society to non woke.

"Centrist" has now become one of the damned terms, like Nazi and fascist and racist and transphobe. Being a centrist apparently means not that you have a moderate view, or can see good points in the arguments by both sides, but rather you are - at best - mushy, spineless, and indulging in the 'both sides are as bad as each other' fallacy (which is a fallacy because as any fule kno there is one and only one Good Right True side and one and only one Bad Evil Monster side), or at worst you are a Nazi fascist white supremacist transphobe etc. who is lying about your Bad Evil Monster views and are only pretending to be someone reasonable.

"Filthy centrist" isn't a joke anymore, it's an opinion a lot of the online left hold.

It's meant that for a long time, at least in the US. The sentiment behind "there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos" goes back to at least 1890.

There's several different types of people who call themselves moderates or centrists, and a lot of it isn't good.

Most common is the "centrist" who considers themselves the center of the universe; they may hold any position including very radical ones but they'll still insist they are moderates.

Closely related is the "centrist" who goes along with their local consensus and thinks anyone who doesn't is bad. This local consensus, again, could be anything.

Then you've got the ones who swear they are centrists who carefully consider each of their positions, but somehow come out exactly where whatever political commentators they listen to are, and parrot those arguments without understanding. In the US this is nearly always NPR.

And you've got the ones you refer to, who take the fallacy of grey as gospel. Yes, sometimes the truth lies between the two most commonly articulated positions. But sometimes, in fact, the truth lies AT or very much more near one of those positions. Sometimes it lies BEYOND one of those positions on the same axis. Sometimes it lies off the axis. These people deserve the contempt they are given; in addition to being unthinking, they can be manipulated through one side making it's position more radical to move the middle, at least if that side can prevent the other side from responding. These are the people who just went along with woke, because the center between Ibrahim Kendi and the weaksauce opposition that was all that was allowed to be voiced was STILL woke.

The sentiment behind "there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos" goes back to at least 1890.

...there were yellow stripes in the middle of the roads in the 1890s?

The 1890 version was 'Now if there are any who don’t want to join the procession, they had better keep out from the middle of the road or they will get run over by the band wagon.'

Honest question — does the fear you fear make you question whether your near group are the baddies?

Not really, maybe sometimes with regard to individual incidents, and sometimes those do result in me changing my mind on small things. But I've mostly come to terms with stuff by now.

Ingroup you mean? Why would it?

Or the people who are around him, and putting all that fear and pressure on people? They sort of are, but it's human nature, getting too resentful of it leads towards nothing but misanthropy.

I would be really annoyed if the people I spend time with were always monitoring my speech etc

Ingroup you mean? Why would it?

"[X] is persecuted because it's bad" should be the default assumption, despite what a lifetime of cultural conditioning tells me. Are they correct when they claim that those views have no place in a well-ordered society?

I think they're wrong to look down on those views, but I had to examine the object level to reach that conclusion. A different group of people imposing fear about a different set of opinions might be right.

"[X] is persecuted because it's bad" should be the default assumption, despite what a lifetime of cultural conditioning tells me.

Huh, so what you're saying is that the Jews really did have it coming?

I agree you should examine the object level views on a case by case basis, this is, in fact my default. I disagree with "if they're persecuted, they're bad", though persecution probably indicates a fundamental incompatibility of values.

Huh, so what you're saying is that the Jews really did have it coming?

Lol, nope. But I did check.

Cults are marginalized, criminals are jailed, and pedophiles are excluded from some jobs. Unproductive workers are fired (or at least not promoted), unpleasant people don't get invited to parties, and flaky people don't get trusted with responsibilities. I'm guessing I would agree with the consensus 90% of the time, but that last 10% is very important.

"[X] is persecuted because it's bad" should be the default assumption, despite what a lifetime of cultural conditioning tells me.

Cults are marginalized, criminals are jailed, and pedophiles are excluded from some jobs. Unproductive workers are fired (or at least not promoted), unpleasant people don't get invited to parties, and flaky people don't get trusted with responsibilities. I'm guessing I would agree with the consensus 90% of the time, but that last 10% is very important.

Yeah. I gotta say, mainstream conservatives seem drawn like salmon to their native pool of the worst argument to support directionally correct positions. Throughout the 2016-2024 window, "cancel culture" was the rallying cry of conservatives against the left. But that was always the worst tack to take.

  1. Bad things should get you cancelled. Even if not, it's a universal feature of human societies. Every society has the sacred and taboos, whether right or not, and violating them has always resulted in punishment or shunning. The left is more likely to eliminate inequality of outcomes than you are to eliminate cancellation.
  2. When you whine about cancellation, you're pre-emptively sabotaging yourself for when you take the cultural catbird seat back. If you've spent eight years complaining about viewpoint discrimination, you can't easily conduct a purge of the people who did the last purge, the people who kicked you out to begin with. They can then shiv in your back and seize back power at the first opportune moment.

See also: The "snowflake" insult conservatives used around 2012 for woke people complaining about representation of blacks or gays in movies. Well guess what. Now Hollywood is woke, and conservatives are holding the bag of being "snowflakes" for complaining about the representation of blacks or gays in movies. Funny how that works.

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The flip side is that positions of power than can persecuted often draw a disproportionate share of the power-hungry and the sociopaths, and those are not the sort of archetypes I would believe only persecute the deserving (though they will happily do that).

Concrete questions: when, if ever, will it be acceptable to express even the blander motte views in polite company? Was it ever?

I sometimes question my own sanity, and start asking if my recollection of the Before Times was all a fever dream, but to the best of my ability to answer your question: yes. It was completely normal to have a friend group with all sorts of people. We've had a dude that was an open (actual) fascist in mine, and the group was majority left-wing. Sometimes things would get heated, and people would fight, but at the end of the day people just wanted to have a good time. The blander views wouldn't even raise an eyebrow. Insert "this is what they took from you" meme.

Now, while I also think the news of Wokeness' death have been greatly exaggerated, I do feel like I can breathe a little. Still not comfortable attaching my Tinker Tuesday github to my resume, but way better than "undercover agent" mode of the COVID era.

I think being older than thirty helps, because you can indeed remember for yourself the Before Times and how things were, both bad and good. The young'uns online don't have those memories so are inclined to "this is the first time ever this happened" and "we are the only ones ever doing anything about it" and of course forgetting the previous waves of "Maoism is so dreamy!" or whatever, for both sides, and the mountains of skulls that resulted.

But that also makes it harder to argue with them, because they don't seem to have the habit of "well what are the primary sources here?" They see it on TikTok or social media or their own little bubble and spread it around as Gospel (e.g. Trump really is a paedophile who rapes thirteen year old girls, this isn't exaggeration or rhetorical sarcasm, they are convinced this is all true).

In my view is that coordinating effect of Twitter trends can't be underestimated in my view. The activists lost the thumb on the algorithmic scale when Elon kicked out the activists. And the ensuing exodus of the most extreme voices the decline was cemented. They are trying to recreate the feel with bluesky and mastodon, but they can't artificially create culture war with trends with the same way anymore.

But there is another aspect to it. So if we go back to the credit crunch of 2008 and after a couple of years(2011) after was the Occupy Wall Street movement. Now not many people remember or care to know that mainstream media was making fun of the woke groups that was part of the protests. Clips are near impossible to find with google(or maybe I suck at googling). Those segments that I saw on Comedy Central was the first contact I got with woke terms. I've gotten the distinct impression that the most extreme activists derailed the whole occupy movement. And for some reason Blackrock and Vanguard started pushing ESG and most of the talking points that where made fun of became holy for the mainstream media. Strange that.

The last thing that I also think is contributing to the decline: Rob Henderson's Luxury Beliefs is really well named and that a bunch of people can't afford to hold luxury because they simply can't afford it anymore, since people can't be bullied anymore because of lack of coordination and less usage of ESG scores. Regular people speak up with less fear because of the political climate and layoffs that affect non-producing departments like HR and DEI initiatives.

And for some reason Blackrock and Vanguard started pushing ESG and most of the talking points that where made fun of became holy for the mainstream media. Strange that.

I think something that is still underestimated, though it's been clearly documented by research, is how strongly people's feelings and opinions and actions are formed by whom their bread is buttered, i.e. by (mainly economic but also emotional and expressive) incentives. I noticed this to some degree in my own mind when Trump won and one of my investments did great because of it. I still think he's a loathsome moron, but I softened on him a bit because I made money.

Broken forbes link.

Who thought Twitter was this influential? I still kind of don't believe it. But I'm open to believing it. It still seems kind of crazy for Elon to have bought it.

Ok, I'll post an archive link and edit my post to point to it. https://archive.ph/CXqXE thank you!

You don't have to believe it, you can try to search for proof to the contrary or you can try to find other aspects that might prove my claim. Absence of other things that might disprove the thesis that the coordination happened on Twitter.

You don't remember the Blue Check stuff? How after Musk bought Twitter, all the scrambling was to deny it ever happened, no, having a blue check just mean you were a verified account, nobody thought it was a big deal.

Conveniently forgetting, or desperately whitewashing, that Blue Checks were treated as the last word in authoritative sources, regularly cited in arguments, and used as "shut up" debate stoppers when A quoted "well Blue Check Z said..." and that was it. A bit like Wikipedia with what it treats as reliable sources, which can then be weaponised by the interested so that statement X is a reliable source but statement Y is not.

Conveniently forgetting, or desperately whitewashing, that Blue Checks were treated as the last word in authoritative sources, regularly cited in arguments, and used as "shut up" debate stoppers when A quoted "well Blue Check Z said..." and that was it.

I honestly was not in any communities where a blue check was considered anything other than an indicator of Twitter prestige. I truly can't remember people citing Blue Check said so-and-so with the same authority as a Wikipedia article on the topic.

To me blue checks had the same valence as CNN covering a bridge collapse and cutting away to, say, a gangster rapper and asking him to react. Entertaining but also worthless. But maybe I wasn't paying enough attention.

Tell me more!

I wasn't on Twitter at the time, but a lot of people on social media where I was involved did have a habit of going "Well so-and-so said this/contradicted what you are saying, and they're Blue Check, so they must be right and you must be wrong". The idea, so far as I could see, was not so much "this is a factual authority" as "this person has a badge of right thinking and being on the right side of history".

I see. If this was particularly common the project for regime change at Twitter makes a lot more sense.

I recall that the Blue Check system was utterly corrupt. Money exchanged hands for that little icon. It was status that needed to be guarded if you wanted to keep it. Making it a virtual panopticon where anyone not demonstration the right opinion they where severely punished with a loss of status and possibly economically at the workplace by informal ESG-auditors.

A friend of mine got a Blue Check just for being cool, AFAICT. He wasn't a celebrity or an authority, just some kind of jetsetter guy who knew everyone.

Also conveniently forgetting that people got deverified for badthink. That kind of put the nail in the coffin for the claims of "objective notability" for verified status.

Zvi Mowshowitz had been spruiking it as a potential EA cause area.

I was rather surprised at the effectiveness, too, though.

Crazy like a fox. 🦊

Isn't it just a case of a preference cascade? The vast majority's opinion on woke ranged from mildly annoyed to actively hating woke stuff but falsified their opinions publicly due various well known factors. Wokeness then suffered a number of setbacks, plenty of them self inflicted, that caused annoyance to both boil over and being able to be expressed, leading to a preference cascade.

The opinions "disappeared" quickly because >90% of people never held them in the first place.

This of course doesn't mean people are rightwing, if anything redistributive policies seem more popular than ever. It's just that woke specifically was never popular on a grassroots level (perhaps outside a brief period of post Floyd hysteria).

Along with the other things people have mentioned, I would bring up COVID and the lockdowns as critical. In many ways, it was directing the tools of wokeness--social media, news media, government bureaucrats, the Science--to solve a novel social problem. This led to people experiencing its downsides in a very visceral way, and that led to a loss of authority and respect. (Those same institutions didn't help their cause much when they switched on a dime from "COVID is a critical public health issue that responding to is worth devastating the economy" to "well BLM protests are about an even more critical public health issue, but COVID is still the second most critical issue.")

There are other material issues the response introduced as well--the spike in crime, the surge in inflation--which might have shifted people from identitarian concerns to bread and butter issues.

This created a diffuse, durable shift in opinion, and over the course of a few years new structures emerged to represent them.

I stick with my previous hypothesis that the woke movement its own period of dealing with failed prophecies and that's why it's currently declining. The impulse behind woke was that everyone wanted it except for a few backward people on the internet. But look at what happened in 2022 ~ 2023:

  • March 2022: The interim report of the Cass Review is published lending scientific credibility to argument against "trans kids"
  • August 2022: the woke Saints Row reboot bombs
  • 2022 in general: a lot of democratic cities have to quietly walk back the "defund the police" messaging they had pushed
  • November 2022: Twitter is sold to Musk, an outcome the wokes had cheered on for months, they suddenly realize it is actually a bad outcome for them and immeditely predict Twitter will collapse within weeks, which didn't happen
  • February 2023: Forspoken is realesed and bombs, nobody defends it, Antman and the Wasp bombs, the "pandemic" cope can not be used
  • April 2023: Bud Light makes a co-promotional campaign with Dylan Mulvaney which kickstarts a boycott which depresses its stock price for months
  • November 2023: The Marvels bombs, nobody defends it.
  • November 2023: SF cleans up the streets for Xi Jin Ping simultaneously showing both how poorly the city had been kept and how easily this could be reversed

Never saw “Antman and the Wasp”. Is it a woke movie?

Not really.

Antman wasn't a particularly woke movie per see, but it was a more comedy-action movie that aligned with woke tropes for its own reasons.

Antman is first and foremost a comedy-action series in the broader MCU. This is/ was suitable / appropriate in part because the character's power set allows for distinct / unique setups, like this memorable high-stakes fight on a train(set). The core power set of size changing but keeping the pre-size 'strength' means that the choreography involves a lot of exagerated scale differences and motions, which makes better for comedy than goofy action.

The thing is, because Antman (Scott Lang) is a comedic movie protagonist, he's, well, a comedic male lead. Which, yes, is a bit awkward, goofy, makes mistakes, and so on. And this does pattern-match with the woke-tropes of belittling the male leads. Scott is often the butt of the joke, in a series where most of the cast is the butt of various jokes even in serious contexts.

For example- the opening context of the origin movie is Scott Lang, is getting out of jail as a convicted criminal. Part of his call to adventure / instigating context is that he needs money to pay child support to his beloved daughter, who lives with his divorced wife and her new husband (who happens to be a cop). Scott wants to be on the straight and narrow, but his criminal past makes that hard. So one of the early gags is him- a highly qualified engineer- failing to be able to keep an icecream job. This is tragic, but is played for laughs, even as it sets him up for the dabbling into a functional heist plot. The plot of the movie is functionally that Scott is hired by the inventor of the shrink tech precisely because he is an ex-con in order to do one more crime, which is to steal shrink tech from a dangerous corporate former partner of the inventor.

The main counterpart to Scott on the protagonist cast is the Pym family, a duo. There is Professor Hank Pym, who invented the shrink tech and has hired Scott to keep it from being used by the evil mastermind, who was his former protege. Then there is Hope Pym, Hank's daughter who is estranged with her father but reluctantly working with him because she discovered the evil villain's evil plan after she helped the evil mastermind oust Hank from his own company..

Hope can / does pattern match to the woke female protagonist tropes. She is an exceptionally competent woman, both in terms of positional authority- she outmaneuvered her own father and is doing so against the villain- and in technology- she knows her father's tech and can use elements of it far better than Scott at first- and even in martial arts- where she's the more skilled, especially for the tech.

Hope is set up as the clear 'natural' user of the tech, but this is a Antman movie titled Antman, and so comedic lead clutz is the one who has to be trained to be a hero by the reluctant, more capable woman.

But while Hope Pym does have a bit of the 'women aren't allowed to be weak' woke-ishness, and a resting bitch face, and seems to hate men, there's actually more to it on a character level. Rather, Hope's could-be-mistaken-for-woke relationship issues with men come down to the fact that she has a justified grievance / issue with the three main men of the plot for valid character reasons. The evil man is evil. Her relationship with her father is estranged because her father had a critical role in getting her mother killed, which changed their relationship, and now her father is bypassing her for the key role in the heist by trusting Scott with the suit-tech that her father's whole character is about not trusting others with. And finally, the relationship with Scott is because he's a thief (who's first encounter is stealing the shrink tech suit from their family), who is less comptent than her (not having her familiarity with the tech), who her father seems to trust more than her.

Moreover, as Hope learns new things, her relationships with the men in her life changes, or is subject to change, with her being the one to learn and change more than then. Hope shows an emotional response and sympathy when she realizes that the evil vaillain's evilness may in part be a side effect of her father's shrink tech particle, making him a victim of her family. Her relationship with her father begins to heal when her father finally shares the context of her mother's death, which is that the shrink tech failed and made her lost forever. And her relationship with Scott starts to change not only when she realizes Scott's motive of doing this for his daughter, but when Scott is the one to point out that the reason Scott is being trusted with the suit is that Scott is the expendible one if there's another incident like with her mother.

Hope, in other words, has a bit of character development when she learns new things, rather than being the one to change others by informing them.

But also- and more importantly back at the meta-structural level- Hope is the straight woman of the comedy cast. She and her father both, mostly, but Hank Pym is more dry/acerbic humor in his own right, and the rest of the cast feeds into the over-the-top comedic archetypes. So while Hope is a feminist-worthy hyper-competent character frustrated with the nonsense around her, that is not least because she is the foil for the comedic nonsense going around her in the plot.

So, even if it's woke-compatible, it works on its own merits. Still cheesy / Marvel quippy / not everyone's jam, but not forced solely for the sake of itself either.

If anything- and this is only a post if someone actually wants fanfic-worthy idea crafting- I maintain the Antman series of movies could have been improved if it leaned into LGBT themes more, and had Antman- Scott Lang- be a gay man.

I actually meant "Antman and the Wasp: Quantumania" (Antman and the Wasp would be the second of the trilogy and came out in 2018). It's one of those movies where the putative male lead in an action movie is in actuality sidelined by the strong female costar, think Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (which also came out in 2023 and also flopped and it's probably a better entry from this list than Antman).

More than just failed prophecies- the emperor had no clothes, period. When it became clear that everyone, not just rednecks, could see it- well it doesn’t take a coordination mechanism.

its own period of dealing with failed prophecies

I have seen a common thread on this: there are a few topics where what I consider to be "woke" types express epistemic certainty based on a tiny number of very small studies with results that sound really nice and politically convenient for partisans explaining the world, and occasional shouting down of alternate takes. For lots of these we've collectively thrown lots of effort and money at applying more broadly, but strangely have never gotten a good larger scale followup on those implementations. I personally have found it frustrating how slow we are to walk back claims that I suspect a good chunk of conservative-leaning people [1] thought were "too good to be true" all along.

Other examples [2] that come to mind (hopefully not too uncharitably phrased):

  • Housing-first approaches to homelessness
  • "Harm reduction" against drug addiction
  • Failing inner-city schools are that way exclusively because they are under-funded
  • "Poverty causes crime, and crime doesn't cause poverty"
  • Fat-acceptance and body positivity
  • Gender medicine, especially in children: taxpayers funded a study on the efficacy of puberty blockers that strangely hasn't been published, presumably because its conclusions aren't positive. "Trust the science", though.
  • The lab leak hypothesis for COVID
  • Almost all conflict globally can be mostly blamed on colonialism
  1. It feels to me like there is an element of ivory-tower elitism in many of these conclusions in that they feel very out-of-touch with people who have to go outside and interact with the public on a regular basis. I think this is at least an element in the ongoing political realignment.
  2. Just because these claims likely seem overplayed doesn't mean that the inverse claims are completely right. I think there is a bit of a short-term alliance between reactionaries that'd claim the inverse and nuance-enjoyers that I think will gradually fall apart while they're trying to govern as a coalition.

See here:

First, the argument from exhaustion: because we've been trying to fix these problems for the better part of a century. Many hundreds of thousands of smart, capable, hardworking people have dedicated their entire lives to solving these problems for multiple generations, across fifty different states, and have uniformly failed every single time, on every single approach to every single issue...

Second, the argument from blindness: we have no way of effectively measuring the problem we're trying to fix, other than by raw outcomes. The dominant narrative holds that bad outcomes are caused by racism, but there is no detectable racism gradient. That is, there do not appear to be places in America that are noticeably more or less racist in any coherent or useful sense, as measured by outcomes, despite a wide range of policies, populations, and cultural norms...

Third, the argument from dementia: we don't approach the problem in a systematic way, we don't learn from our failures, and we don't even keep track of what's been tried or what the outcomes were. The realities of politics, policy, media narratives and public attention span and engagement mean that there is no consistent train of thought, no effective accumulation of experience. People can and do spend their whole lives pushing solutions that were proved to be a dead-end a generation ago. For obvious reasons, this makes the previous problems much worse. It's not just that we're stuck in a maze, and it's not just that the maze is extremely vast, it's that we aren't capable of remembering what turns we took. For an example, look at the ubiquitous claims that bad educational outcomes are caused by differences in school funding between majority-white and majority-black schools. Note, halfway down that article, the following sentence:

The analysis does not include federal dollars, much of which is targeted to the poorest communities.

You will find a similar sentence in most articles on this subject, because those federal dollars completely close the gap. Less educational funding for black students looked like an obvious example of low-hanging fruit, so we fixed it by using federal money to compensate for differences in local funding from disparate tax bases. Only, the disparate outcomes didn't go away, and so people willfully ignore that the solution they're advocating has already failed...

Fourth, the argument from sociopathy: powerful institutions are incentivized to aggravate all of the above problems, because doing so provides significant short-term benefits at no appreciable short-term cost. Blacks get the soothing reassurance that all their problems are the fault of the out-group, not the inevitable result of their own bad individual choices. Progressives get a profoundly loyal block of supporters, and a massive rhetorical cudgel to beat the out-group with. And of course, the alternative is admitting "things suck, and we have no idea how to fix them", which is never going to be a winning answer, despite it being the truth. At this point, any solution is pretty clearly going to require a minimum of decades of constant effort, and the reality is that on the timescale of our existing political system, decades-long solutions are effectively impossible. Lying provides immediate and significant benefit at no cost, and not lying imposes significant costs with no compensating benefits. The result is that lying is adaptive, so our political and knowledge-production systems are absolutely overrun with liars...

Fifth, the argument from senescence: we do not get unlimited attempts at a solution to the racial justice problem. Attempted solutions burn social cohesion, and we are running out of social cohesion. Despite popular narratives, this is not primarily a problem between Conservatives and Blacks; Conservatives and Blacks mostly don't live near or exercise power over each other, so there's not all that much cause for direct, serious object-level conflict. No, the problem is between conservatives and Progressives, who are locked in a direct and extremely damaging culture war due to incompatible values...

The impulse behind woke was that everyone wanted it except for a few backward people on the internet.

Uh, no... The correct way to phrase it is that everyone in power wanted it, but wokeness was never popular among the wider population. This was confirmed in the early days by the woke themselves, endlessly whining about being spammed with criticism, or having their audience being flooded with critical videos in recommendations, every time they upload something. I think surveys that actually asked about specific ideas showed that woke beliefs are supported by something like ~10% of the population (I wish I had links, but this is something that came up in the subreddit ages ago).

You're misinterpreting him. @aaa was saying that "everyone wants it except a few backward people on the Internet" was a load-bearing untruth that was used to justify SJ's various actions.

  1. Non-wokes successfully built and/or bought their own websites. Wide-spread censorship thus became impossible because the US still has strong free speech norms, so extremely strong tools like direct government censorship / DOS provider bans / payment processor bans are only used in the most exceptional cases.

  2. Trump won again, which damaged wokes' belief that the masses / the demography are already with them and they're only fighting a war against some retrograde holdouts. Mainstream Democrats began to realize that they simply would not win national elections running on an extremely woke platform. The fallout of how the Democratic Party handled Biden's health issues also showed that the Party has some profound incompetence issues at the very top, which led to calls for changes in strategy.

  3. I think it became obvious to many people who did not realize it before that the more extreme woke law enforcement policies such as "defund the police" led to direct decreases in quality of life for the average person in affected cities. At the same time, the part of the Democratic coalition which likes sending their kids to top schools began to feel threatened by DEI policies in education.

  4. October 7 splintered the woke-friendly coalition. However, I think that wokism was already past its peak of influence at that point.

  5. The constant insertion of woke political messages into popular media wore people out and made wokism seem very stale, corporate, and establishment-y.

think it became obvious to many people who did not realize it before that the more extreme woke law enforcement policies such as "defund the police" led to direct decreases in quality of life for the average person in affected cities. At the same time, the part of the Democratic coalition which likes sending their kids to top schools began to feel threatened by DEI policies in education.

There's a direct line in my mind from the college woke shit "transing" one of Elon's kids to him going turbo-4chan on their asses and taking down one of their strongholds.

Non-wokes successfully built and/or bought their own websites. Wide-spread censorship thus became impossible because the US still has strong free speech norms, so extremely strong tools like direct government censorship / DOS provider bans / payment processor bans are only used in the most exceptional cases.

And as we're seeing in the latter case with the crackdowns in Steam and itch.io, these tools are available to non-wokes too. Hopefully this is making some people - if not wokes themselves, then relatively-neutral bystanders - realize they can be used against them as well as in support of causes they like (or at least don't mind), and people are waking up, no pun intended, to how dangerous some of the authoritarian precedents that have been set in the last few years actually are.

First they came for Kiwifarms, and I did not speak out, because fuck Kiwifarms...

And as we're seeing in the latter case with the crackdowns in Steam and itch.io, these tools are available to non-wokes too.

That seems to have been a response to an open-letter and phone campaign by Australian feminist nonprofit Collective Shout to payment processors a week before it happened.

Open letter to payment processors profiting from rape, incest + child abuse games on Steam

These games endorsing men’s sexualised abuse and torture of women and girls fly in the face of efforts to address violence against women. We do not see how facilitating payment transactions and deriving financial benefit from these violent and unethical games, is consistent with your corporate values and mission statements.

We request that you demonstrate corporate social responsibility and immediately cease processing payments on Steam and Itch.io and any other platforms hosting similar games.

Now, what makes this case unusual is that instead of their fellow SJWs rallying to support them the cascade went the other direction, with many of them insisting that Collective Shout are fake feminists or whatever. (Though the Online Hate Prevention Institute, having worked with them in the past, still sided with them and said their critics were the new Gamergate.) You can go to places like /r/GirlGamers, which previously was campaigning to get No Mercy banned by urging people to sign Collective Shout's petition and copy Collective Shout's email template, and now people think it's a "heavily conservative group...under the pretense of feminism". Factors that presumably contributed to this include that a co-founder of Collective Shout is pro-life, the censorship happened to get some bad press in left-wing spaces early on, and due to this there was rumors going around that "LGBT content" was being targeted. Also the fact that it was a big enough news story for a lot of more moderate SJW-positive people to hear about it, not just the hardcore.

Now that doesn't mean it can't lead to some changed opinions about censorship. Despite how frustrating the dishonest and self-serving narratives about it are, people's opinions on the subject are presumably generally sincere. But it does seem important that this is payment processors continuing to listen to the same sort of arguments they've been listening to for years as they censored various (mostly Japanese) storefronts, not suddenly listening to "non-wokes". Also it's hard to guess what percentage of people objecting are just going the way the winds are currently blowing in their ideological environment, and will flip back without acknowledging any contradiction if circumstances are a bit different. Hopefully it'll stick at least somewhat, among the less-ideological gamers if nothing else.

Two mutually-reinforcing effects.

  1. SJ had control of all the major platforms, and an aura of inevitability, which meant the apparent level of SJ was considerably higher than the real one (due to anti-SJ being bannable, due to algorithmic fuckery, and due to people pretending to be more SJ-aligned than they actually were out of fear of cancellation).

  2. Peer pressure is a thing (particularly for people who aren't habitual contrarians like, y'know, much of this site's membership), and it works off apparent peer group.

The Twitter sale (and SJ's failure to neutralise that sale via Bluesky) directly destroyed #1. That, in turn, rapidly cancelled out large chunks of #2. So some of it's real (see e.g. the Voice referendum in Australia, or Trump's re-election), but not all (or rather, some of it was never real to begin with).

Do note that sites like SpaceBattles and Wikipedia with stronger moderation and weaker network effects have not, TTBOMK, rebounded nearly as much.

If I were to speculate, I'd say that any mass coordination across disparate elements of society, without any authority dictating it, has all the hallmarks of the invisible hand.

I mean, or a visible hand, if you just look.

Third Way circulates ‘blacklist’ of terms Democrats shouldn’t use

Third Way, a prominent center-left think tank, is aiming to shape the way Democrats speak to voters as they try to counter President Trump’s agenda, including avoiding words such as “birthing person,” “cisgender,” “the unhoused” and “Latinx.”

“In reality, most Democrats do not run or govern on wildly out-of-touch social positions,” the group alleged in a new memo identifying dozens of phrases that Democrats should avoid. “But voters would be excused to believe we do because of the words that come out of our mouths — words which sound like we are hiding behind unfamiliar phrases to mask extreme intent.”

Yes, there are literally memos publicly available about this.

The pivot happened after October 7th, when the woke movement and campus protestors in particular transitioned from anti-white demonstration to protesting Israel. That was the moment the elite apparatus, with Bill Ackman being an iconic example of someone who supported wokeness before that moment, but then had a "realization" that wokeness had run amok and had to be extirpated from elite colleges, began his highly public "war on woke." Ackman, he says, had no idea how dangerous Wokeness truly was until they started protesting Israel:

I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the “canary in the coal mine” – despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.

I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.

I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.

This dovetails with the rise of "anti-woke" figures like Bari Weiss poised to be installed at the top of CBS with her shitty news startup about to be acquired for $200 million, also demonstrating this realignment at the highest levels of media.

an oppressor/oppressed framework

I mean, how did people not see that "racism is power + prejudice" basically pattern-matched to bog-standard anti-semitism? Was it that they didn't want to think it might turn against Jews? That this time, it would be used righteously despite being almost word for word how anti-semites justified hating a small minority that they thought were privileged and had control? (See also: Men Kampf)

Lots of people saw this ahead of time, but only the chuds said it out loud.

I mean, how did people not see that "racism is power + prejudice" basically pattern-matched to bog-standard anti-semitism?

The woke crowd, for a long time, basically ignored Jews and the Japanese as groups within the US. These two groups being counter examples that oppression was the cause of groups having bad/low SES outcomes. The Jews having a multi-thousand year history of it and the Japanese being put into camps and having most of their assets stripped from them during WWII. Both groups doing reasonably well post-war.

There were some attempts at addressing this with talk about the "model-minority myth", but the default was to just not bring it up for a very long time.

Speaking of, anyone have a steelman of model minority being a myth? I'm reading the wikipedia article and this clearly isn't it. It's honestly the most insane cope I've read in years. Nothing but nitpicking obfuscation and moral condemnation for noticing.

I've never heard any reference to "model-minority myth" that wasn't clearly just starting from the axiom that America is racist and minorities can't possibly succeed by any excellence inherent to their genetics or culture. If those are your unquestioned premises, then you can derive that:

  • Asians aren't really more successful, the racist society just props them up in a false position to further oppress blacks and Latinos.
  • Because "successful Asian" is a role society is asking Asians to play for racist purposes, it is harmful to Asian people who have to either play into it and thus reject their authentic selves, or reject it and fight other people's expectations their whole lives.

The wikipedia takes a different route to any of those and basically just argues this can't possibly be true because if it were then people would support policies we don't like.

Despite widespread scholarly criticism of the model minority myth as a racialized and harmful stereotype, its influence continues to persist in media, education, and policy discourse. Academically, the myth has been widely discredited for obscuring structural inequalities and reinforcing anti-Blackness, but in practice, it is still frequently invoked—both implicitly and explicitly—when portraying Asian American communities as exceptionally successful or culturally predisposed to achievement.

The only point in the article where it even makes an attempt as disputing the facts of the matter is by saying that the 1965 immigration act lead to selection effects of rich asians moving to america, which I don't buy for a second for many reasons.

I'm pretty sure I brought up that woke was naturally antisemitic before october 7th either here or on the subreddit and was told "nah it'll never happen". The thing is, there have been a lot of firmly antisemtic people on the extreme right for a long time, which made woke people take the opposite side reflexively, that made it seem like the safer bet.

I would say that Jews have bought a little too much into their own national mythology, and seeing themselves as the perpetual underdog has not prepared them to wield power. It manifests in the obviously authoritarian crackdowns in the west against anti-semeticism that even the most blind liberal has noticed. No one can honestly claim the Jews have no power in the west, and they have obvious tribal enmity with the Arabs. Is this not the prejudice and power that progressive constantly scold against?

Something something, golem...

No one can honestly claim the Jews have no power in the west, and they have obvious tribal enmity with the Arabs. Is this not the prejudice and power that progressive constantly scold against?

Took a while to realize that "we have a culture of learning" isn't flying anymore.

Anyways I think the problem here is just numbers. I can see how a certain status quo would convince progressive Jews they'd never be turned on. But when you have as many or more Muslims in the mix, who can claim victimhood without the massive issues raised by Israel, they'll always be more appealing for the woke. Especially since 9/11 made them even more suspect in the eyes of their red tribe enemy.

Something about leopards and faces....

Oodles and oodles of SMS groups, chats, Discords, Slacks, FB groups etc with partly overlapping membership bases. Information on changing preferences can move very fast with reinforcement from multiple sources at the same time.

Are you speaking from your general leftist activist experience?

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