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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Are The Global Elites Coordinating to Push LGBT Acceptance And Gender Theory?

(1/2)

Last week @2rafa posted her comment about WEF conspiracy theories, concluding that the WEF is a mundane organization, pushing mostly boring neoliberal status quo stuff, to the extent they push anything at all. This post isn't necessarily a direct response to that thesis, but might be an interesting contrast to it.

I am a proud Deranged Conspiracy Theorist. It's a relatively new state of affairs for me, but some time ago I've tried the tinfoil hat on, and it seems to fit. This means when the WEF is in session, I browse their livestreams and videos, and if something catches my eye, I watch the whole thing. So when I saw the video titled Beyond the Rainbow: Advancing LGBTQI+ Rights, I knew I had to watch it.

It's a discussion panel featuring a diverse cast of LGBT (well, L and G as far as I can tell) speakers from around the world. We have

Ben Fajzullin, an Australian journalist currently working for the German Deutsche Welle

• Fahd Jamaleddine, a “global shaper” from Lebanon

Sarah Kate Ellis from GLAAD

Tirana Hassan from Human Rights Watch

Sharon Marcil from the Boston Consulting Group

This is in no particular order, to the extent there are themes in this discussion, they're rotated through the conversation, so going over it chronologically doesn't make a lot of sense.

The goal of the panel is to discuss success stories of the LGBT(QI+) community, and best practices on how to implement “this type of thinking”. They start off by bringing up how last year there were still 80 countries with sodomy laws on the books, and now we're down to 70. A reasonable point to start, if there's a steelman case for the global elites coordinating to push LGBT acceptance and gender theory, that would be it.

Would I have no objection if this was where the whole thing ended? I'm not sure, maybe @DaseIndustriesLtd made singletons sound too scary for me, maybe I watched too much Star Trek as a kid, and the idea of the Prime Directive ended up influencing me a bit too much, or maybe I just have an irrational fear of my elites betraying me for membership in a global club? Hard to say. During the Q&A someone in the audience brings up an example and example from the other side:

we can trace directly the sources the resourcing for homophobia in Ghana straight line to the U.S churches

I don't want to be Americanized by Evangelicals any more than I want to be Americanized by Progressives, so I find it just as wrong as Davos-aligned orgs going around the world and spreading their ideas. The only way I could hold my nose, and tolerate it, is if one side was clearly winning, and this was the only way of preserving some viewpoint diversity.

Either way, while the goal ending sodomy laws is something I agree with, Davos panels on how to accomplish that make me uncomfortable.

Singapore is one of the most recent examples that [has] decriminalized [being gay]. It's taking the legislation off the books but at the same time Singapore fortified the rules around same-sex marriage and so you know it's not always a win; and they did that because they were playing to the more conservative base which was agreeing to decriminalization.

This is still on the mundane side, because I also agree with gay marriage, but it raises red flags when you compare it to the western culture war. Many people already had their suspicions, but the pretty explicit “we'll get you next time” that the Singaporeans get to hear if they're paying attention, raises some interesting questions about the seamless transition from gay marriage to trans issues in the west, and about taking any future assurances about social reforms in good faith. Other then that, coming back to the point about singletons, even though I'm personally for gay marriage, different definitions of marriage are one of the central examples of what I think different cultures should be allowed to experiment with.

Later they make a point that this isn't something limited to the non-developed countries:

Marriage equality laws, all of these issues, are actually becoming signs of modernity. They are becoming signs of democracies and countries which respect rights for everyone, but we're seeing also that this has become a new battleground, and in particular this isn't something that happens in certain parts of the world and not others. Even in Europe we see Hungary and Poland who have really been using LGBT rights as a battleground, essentially to try and harness the support of the conservative elements of society, and the government using it to put themselves up as some sort of hero of protector of family values.

Originally they name drop Poland and Hungary, so it might sound like they are focusing on marriage laws, but “using LGBT rights as a battleground to try and harness the support of the conservative elements of society” is a fully generalized argument. Later on they describe the US in similar terms:

May I just say one thing on that, because that is a Battleground that we're facing in the United States right now. It's really tough, I'll be honest with you, they're putting it under parental rights. I'm a parent I'm married to a woman and I have two kids, so they're talking about some parental rights, and they're excluding us, and they're targeting us, and they're banning books at a rate that we've never seen before. They're conflating these conversations about bodily autonomy and trans youth, and it's a really tough moment right now in education in the United States. I'm absolutely sure it's being exported globally this kind of framework that they've come up with, that's been really effective over the past year. They're legislating against it as well.

This is Sarah Kate Ellis describing the state of the controversy in the US. Everything you've heard about trans women in sports, placement in prison based on self-ID, concerns about the standards for diagnosing dysphoria in kids, the reversibility of puberty blockers, and their side effects, minimal ages for surgeries, eunuch fetishists promoting their fetish via WPATH, schools hiding children transitioning from their parents, Drag Queen Story Hour, and putting Queer Theory in school material have been reduced to the above paragraph, and it's made clear these stances are being deliberately pushed back on.

Someone seeing the WEF as boring and benign should also meditate on how despite gathering people from all over the world, they somehow seem confident no one in the audience is going to give them any push-back. They're not worried an American might say “you've misrepresented everything that's been happening in our country”, let alone that someone from a more conservative part of the world might proudly assert their values.

And of course, the part where she says ***they*** are exporting their framework globally, as she's sitting at Davos, talking to an international audience of some of the most powerful people in the world, is just... *Chef's Kiss* (there will be more of those).

[tag:rant]

The interesting part is the apparent absence of calls to slow down. The window dressing is diverse, but the Overton Window for issues pertaining to the Culture War is all left of zero point. The subject of discussion is how many Stalins we need – maybe 50, maybe just 1.5, and how exactly to implement their will; from repelling Christian counterattacks to «why can't we just do it, you know?».

Yet we cannot say that the entire set of speakers has the same end state in mind. Some are as utopian as radicals a century ago; some seem to believe the status quo is 95% perfect. Clinton'2001 and probably Obama'2008 would have been canceled today, because their desirable end states were to the right of the rightmost edge of the window. But they aren't invited, or perhaps aren't interested. It so happens that the kind of people who come either know in advance how the window will have crept, or come to learn from its movement and update. The «consensus of elites» is thus not a static thing, nor chaotic, but a comprehensive message continually updated in the same direction. People are very sensibly interested in reasons and forces that canalize those updates.

@2rafa brings up a hypothetical convent of racist, colonialist 19th century elites. Would it count as a conspiracy? Probably not. At the same time, isn't it interesting how such a convent is unthinkable today, and the same social classes have dedicated their energies to combating homophobia in Singapore? Did some new evidence convince them to rally under the LGBTQ+ banner? Or was it moral progress, late Enlightenment unfolding in accord with its inner logic? But that logic is made of people's choices. So what guides those choices?

Whenever I see her push back on plebeian notions of conspiracy, I'm reminded of David Foster Wallace's parable. What we call conspiracy is not a secret organization but the liquid form of power: the process of like-minded people using significant information, coordination, prestige and status advantage to steer the society towards preferred outcomes, using a toolset which focuses on furthering those advantages. Plebeians live in the desert like moloch (lizard); they know power by clouds in the sky, morning dew, those occasional stray drops that evaporate on the rocks, by rain that rapidly flows down the layers of sand; or at most by tales of their forefathers about that one time they've seen a puddle. So their armchair theories about behavior of its large bodies, no matter how clever, are fantastical and laughable to more knowledgeable beings. 2rafa is a thoroughbred aquatic being: she navigates torrents and feels at peace looking down into the abyss. But for her, power is just... the way the world is. Huh? What do you mean «tsunami»? For that matter, what is a «puddle»? We'd benefit from having some littoral animals who have a more balanced frame of reference.

Of course, the desert is only metaphorical. We can watch WEF streams these days – no secrecy. No smoke-filled rooms or dreadful caves, cackling, twirling of facial hair, classified documents, decrees of infallible elders, certainly no conscious malice. What there is, is an intellectual and ethical monoculture, a set of null hypotheses, a shared sensibility as to which topics are not interesting and low-status, which call for proactive enthusiasm, and on how to fit new talking points into the old program, iterating it for another Agenda-{year}.

It's richer and more complex, but not that different from any other echo chamber. Except it's not a debate club, these people do have the authority to just order the little people to do things. And they will be obeyed, not only for obvious reasons but because it is human nature to habitually obey, and because there's Respectable Consensus backing them up. Maybe the little people will even volunteer – after all, Moldbug says consensus flows through the elites in a bottom-up manner, or rather medium-up. Maybe. It sure is interesting where its real inflection points lie. We know that, at least, some elite social movements – and clubs, and Societies, like the Fabian one – have claimed being those.


I think Sensibility is a good way to put it.

There have been several iterations of the «Globalist»/World Government Sensibility, with WEF becoming, in stereotypes and to some large extent in reality, the public face of the contemporary one. It seems that at some point around the Russian Revolution they have gotten integrated with the Social-Democratic Sensibility and the Liberation Sensibility, which began with successes of the Feminist movement. Let's focus here. Skipping minor details: after Women were processed into an Identity and a political block and propped up to their victory (a sequence of victories, beyond expectations of the first generation of feminists), it was the turn of American Blacks, Gays, and now the LGBTQ abbreviation is being vindicated with Trans Wars and the principle is generalized and franchised. In all cases there are early goals justifiable by commoner morality; then, slippery slope and divergence, with the group-identity becoming attuned to the whole Sensibility package.

There are various critiques of those projects. Conservatives gesture at the fraying of social tissue, discrediting of family unit, pitching sex against sex, race against race, loss of common decency, you know it. Reactionaries agree, and explain those negative outcomes with appeals to fundamental inequality of human groups and the natural order.

I don't care much about this stuff. The underappreciated problem I have with this Sensibility is that it's the sensibility of the managerial class. Of those snake oil salesmen who think reality is downstream of their Powerpoint slides. Progressive ideology aside, they have some catastrophic habits of mind for rulers, chiefly: belief in faking it till you make it, and habit for sidelining those who point out their fakery and overpromising. This is bad for reasons Scott has outlined in his Parable of Lightning. Crucially, because fighting against being exposed necessitates building a de facto power-maximizing conspiracy. We've seen a toy model of how it works – a puddle – with COVID, both the lab story and countermeasures. But it's pervasive.

At the moment of each successive Identity Liberation, its advocates had to work against the belief that the group in question is somehow flawed and thus undeserving of new rights. Women cannot into rational political decisions, black people are unfit for the polite society, gays are promiscuous immoral perverts whose perversion is contagious, queers/transsexuals are mentally ill fetishists (and sex pests). Invariably, the argument was that it might look this way now, but after some adjustment period – maybe with compensation for past iniquities – demerits would go away. Anything a man can do a woman will learn to do just as well, affirmative action will be unnecessary in a generation, gay men will go marry each other, transsexuals will get mentally well without all the abuse. Invariably, this doesn't come quite true for the group as a whole, and there remains at least a fraction of stereotypic bad actors who personify all concerns of retrogrades and exploit new rules. Nth wave feminism misandrists, antisocial blacks, sex-obsessed AIDS evangelists in bathhouses, psychotic and predatory AGP "troons" from 4chan memes. Shortcomings of the group as a whole are problem enough, but these guys get weaponized by the outgroup – as evidence that those promises were bullshit.

A reaction of a PMC when you poke holes in his presentation at is to double down. I can see three particularly harmful kinds of doubling down.

The first is to reflect the charge, accuse the outgroup of getting in the way of closing the gaps, maybe even provoking those unfortunate extremes with their bigotry.

The second is to flip the table, saying that your standard of goodness itself is obsolete – those gays are just ahead of the curve, poly/open relationships are all the rage, nobody needs family and monogamy and of course religion (conservatives understandably suspect this was the plan all along, and can point to early socialism as evidence).

The third is to deny the charge. This sounds toothless, but it's the worst kind. There are no brakes on the denial train. You start with FBI statistics, then you have to deboonk SAT, then people must be deceived about the physiology of body odor, oops databases critical for medical research are closed off; soon enough you warn of the dangers of critical thinking, and absolute trash science on an unrelated topic is accepted because the whole institution is now running on Stone Age taboos and mass hysterias and you need to chase down heretics overseas! And by the way Damore asked for it! And of course there's NOTHING to Blanchardism– nor any costs to shoehorning teenagers and the very concept of gender into its negation...

Every one of those liberation projects has inflicted compounding damage on our ability to reason and find working solutions in general, because of the unwillingness of its proponents to admit they have been faking it on specific points. And places like WEF is where they coordinate the message on which to double down – like that Media leader asking for specifics.

It's a public key conspiracy, with the private key being their Powerpoint-class identity and the shared sensibility of people who would rather change the world than admit failure before the plebs. Without this key, and in the context of external reality, their actions look incomprehensible or

or?

Or evil.

The site truncated my post and I just missed it. Thanks

First they got Dugin ('s daughter), and now this...