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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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I don't know. I'm frustrated. I'd have no problem with a "don't talk about politics in work" rule, provided it was applied consistently.

I think this ties into the argument from that Helen Andrews essay about how American society is becoming more feminized. And the office/workplace culture is maybe the biggest shift. All of the political views that are allowed to be expressed are the feminist positions, all the ones banned are the anti-feminist ones.

To be fair, you'd have a very different experience in other places. If you put up those posters in, like, an army barracks, or a gaming discord, or uh... here... most people would make fun of them and maybe attack you personally. You'd have a lot more slack to put up the opposite views.

Bottom line: people are political animals, we're not neutral, everyone just favors their own side.

Working remotely has made the politicization of work much less salient, at least for me.

I forget exactly where I read it, but I believe it was in Ed Dutton’s book on the conservative demographic revolution where he pointed out in Islamic medieval society (this was back when the Mongols were rampaging throughout the continent), women had an increasingly considerable influence in political society. You had female imam’s, elites and you even had them influencing military affairs; but his point was that on some level, all of these ended up getting turned in pet projects of sorts and ceased to serve the original function for which they were intended. That was one of the reasons they became so internally weak and were later pushed over by Genghis Khan so easily. There definitely are consequences to an overly feminized or masculinized society.

The stakes for female status games is who seizes the pie and distributes it thusly, the stakes for male status games is getting more pies or defending pies from raiders, or failing which destroying the pies so no one gets to eat. The reign of Ottoman Sultanas consolidated and preserved Suleimans expansions for nearly a century, an unheard of territorial expansion when succession crises were the literal order of the day. Women have a role in societies, and can perform them better than men precisely because they are not men. Unsurprisingly societies that had long term continual civic stability without women in charge had un-men running the show: eunuchs and celibate clergy. The value in having the authoritatively incapable administer the machine prevents claimants from fearing what is effectively management buyouts and what keeps the machine going in lull or transition periods.

The tradeoff is when the administration thinks it is the authority and parasites itself into power. The trappings of authority are not the muscle inside the fist, and when push comes to shove the kinetic authority must assert itself. Ironically the women who know the game therefore are incentivized to accumulate and wield authority rather than administrative alliances because their authority is more likely to be directly challenged. Theres a point here somewhere about Merkels weakness being indulged by the German public lead to the wif schiffen das death knell, but I can't be bothered to spell it out.

All of the political views that are allowed to be expressed are the feminist positions, all the ones banned are the anti-feminist ones.

But this is my point: I don't think there's anything feminist about housing male rapists in women's prisons. I think gender ideology is a profoundly misogynistic worldview, in practice if not necessarily in theory. I likewise don't think there's anything feminist about the Palestinian resistance, and at best they have nothing to do with each other.

And in any case, our company's HR department is made up of two men and one woman, the latter of whom has been on sick leave for well over a month. I don't think this trend can be attributed to feminisation (or if it can, not in a fashion which is synonymous with "feminism").

I attempted to have a gentler and simpler version of the "trans ideology is actually misogynistic" conversation with a woman I know recently. (Results inconclusive - at least she hasn't dropped me as a friend.) As best as I can tell, this is one of those issues where my pro-trans feminist mom friends are genuinely unaware there's a conflict of interest because the problems are simply not reported on by mainstream outlets, and most people aren't inclined to sit down and think through the full implications of, e.g. what happens when you abolish psychiatric gatekeeping and let anyone who says the magic words, "I identify as a woman" have full access to all women's facilities.

If your HR department only has two active employees, unless your company has well under 50 total I doubt that either of them are scouring internet calendars looking for interesting fake holidays. They're probably pulling these from a third party service and distributing them without looking too hard.

But this is my point: I don't think there's anything feminist about housing male rapists in women's prisons. I think gender ideology is a profoundly misogynistic worldview, in practice if not necessarily in theory. I likewise don't think there's anything feminist about the Palestinian resistance, and at best they have nothing to do with each other.

Ah, you might think so, and I think so too. But in practice those are both positions split along gender linees, with women being far more likely to support Palestinian resistance, light prison sentences, and putting trans women into women's prisons even if they committed rape. The feminist position isn't "what's good for women," it's simply "what do feminists support," which cn sometimes be very different. One could even argue that it's good for feminist leaders when bad things happen to women, because that strengthens the political support for feminism. But it's not up to you and I to figure it out, all we can do is signal which team we're on, and you're trying to signal the anti-feminist team which they're obviously not going to like.

And in any case, our company's HR department is made up of two men and one woman, the latter of whom has been on sick leave for well over a month

Yeah and what are the political opininons of those two men in HR? Are either of them even slightly conservative? Probably not.

Besides it's not just about the HR department. It's all of corporate culture, generally, becoming a feminist safe space. Eveny manager with any sort of political savvy will instinctively know this.

For feminists women in prisons aren't a relevant entity because women are wonderful so their being in prison is simultaneously a removal of the halo effect and expulsion from the category of women and thus are irrelevant to Womxn. Trannies on the other hand are a relevant entity outside of the prison for Womxn, so catering maximally to them is automatically a high payoff if you have rejected criminal women from the Womxn coalition. Pity about the second order effect of other women self selecting out of the Womxn but thats just false consciousness and internalized misogyny.

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