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Last Sunday, I had dinner with my extended family in Germany. They’re what they call ‘Bildungsburgertum’, best class and best-in-class, educated middle class of doctors, teachers, and executives. They accordingly vote either green or social democrat, and gasp if someone dares defend the Afd or Trump.
Cousin‘s girlfriend says she’s in the running for a promotion at the bank she works for because the banking regulatory agency “suggested” they need more ”diversity“ at the top level. She might lose the job to a less competent woman because her rival is also the “director for sustainability” and the title sounds good to the powers that be. I ask her what the hell a bank has to do with sustainability . “Exactly. She just gives a silly PowerPoint presentation once a year and uses that “fulfilled mission” as an excuse to be incompetent on everything else”. Her male boss/colleague/friend did not appreciate being summarily passed over and has tended his resignation.
After the ladies retire to the boudoir, a different cousin’s husband, who works in IT at a large company, picking up on my skepticism, sits next to me and whispers : “It’s pointless if you’re male.” He tells me he just refused a promotion because he doesn’t want to deal with the headache of having women under him, and the constant humiliation of forced diversity. One of his colleague’s career was apparently ruined after a sexism accusation, although he didn’t give details.
He recently had a woman in a junior post who could not do a simple task and would cry sexism(“I feel like you’re always contradicting me and not the others”) if corrected in public or reminded of her duties. He just did her job for her and never corrected her again.
Final words: “I’m not a masculinist or feminist, I hate all those things. I just wanted to do my job. Now I do the bare minimum, I don’t care anymore, I’m a loser” (I had brought up Rao’s archetypes of Psychopaths, Clueless, and Losers earlier).
There was some controversy recently over Helen Andrews’ essay on the feminization of the workplace. I consider all internet discourse a priori overdramatic and disconnected from real people who just touch grass at a barbecue in ignorant bliss. But this couple of anecdotes suggests real life (in Germany, at least) is actually worse than the widely-decried-as-misogynistic Andrews take: open widespread discrimination against men (obviously), ubiquitous fear of one-sided legal and professional penalties, declining competence at all levels.
Well... what a pushover. When men will just bite down on their mouthpieces and do women's work for them, is it surprising that women will act this way?
But yeah, a lot of young women just treat the workplace as another playground for being cute ("aww here's me being cuuttte") and doing cute, fun things ("Gen Z Boss and a Mini! Gen Z Boss and a Mini!"). Plus, a lot of young women have never heard "no" all their lives, so someone disagreeing with them—even gently—feels like a massive insult to their Wonderfulness.
One time at a previous job I got up from my desk to go to the bathroom. I passed by the office of a director (legitimately nice guy that I worked with frequently) whose door was cracked open and I heard him on videocall with a rather displeased sounding woman. I chuckled to myself and thought "damn, hoe mad. But since when did we have such a bitchy female client?" Upon my return passing by his office again, I realized he was talking to a young woman we had recently hired. She was seething because he was giving her an assignment that was interfering with her Princess Treatment Only vibez.
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When I worked in corporate America, I noticed that female employees were treated significantly better than male employees. I think the main motivation was that senior male employees preferred to spend time working with women, especially young women. Probably all these DIE pushes have made things a good deal worse.
For what it may be worth, I never complained about the unfair treatment I received. Rather, for that and other reasons I quit and started my own business.
Couple this with women's greater in-group preference, and suddenly it's not a surprise so many women have moved upward into management in the last 2 decades.
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Yes, it's depressing. We consider building a house soon-ish, since there is a very attractive Erbbaurecht project currently. In short, they treat the value of the plot outrageously low (ca 200/sqm, comparable plots here can easily go to 600 and more!) and then on top you even only have to pay 2% of the cost per year, so you pay an absolute pittance. Connection costs etc. are also very low. After 15 years you also get the right to buy it up properly (still for a low price, though it can increase somewhat), so it has basically all the upsides of either buying OR renting the plot. For this reason, the project is considered "social" and it's also "family-friendly", meaning you can only apply if you're a family AND don't earn too much together.
But then they throw all of this under the bus for the "green" part. You have to use a green flat roof with water retention, which is basically worse in function in all ways that matter to you (notably excludes an attic) and also costs an extra 50k. We have to build significantly more solar than we normally would. You can't build a cellar, either, nor a garage or carport, because ... fuck you, I guess? Most importantly, you're forced to take the local cold district heating for 10 years, which includes renting the heat pump for >100€ per month (in addition to paying 25k connection costs in the first place) and then you still have to pay for the electricity to run the heat pump. The kicker? You can't use the solar energy for the heat pump, "for technical reasons" and since the energy provider owns the pump (not us), we can't do anything about it. And a million other overly-specific, stupid limitations.
All this together means especially that when searching for duplex partners, we had a lot of contact with low-earning people at first, but they all get weeded out by the requirements since they can't afford all this stuff. So the only people left are people like us, well-off Bildungsbürgertum who are not in private industry bc we'd be earning too much then. That's quite convenient to be clear, but also extremely self-serving since guess who are the people making these decisions?
And when I talk with other germans about this, they're just so goddamn defensive no matter how stupid and self-serving it is. Sure the limitations are annoying, but combatting climate change is alternativlos! Yes the cold district heating design is a ripp-off, but gas prices will go up (for mysterious reasons not spelled out) so you come out ahead! Green roofs will be mandatory soon anyways, so why complain! Sure the project is not actually social, but the real fault lies with capitalism not paying enough!
Germany feels so, so dead. The entire mentality revolves around what needs to be done to sate modern progressive moral conceptions, and everything else is an afterthought that can only be used if the former is threatened. German industry going down is good, actually, since CO2 is going down with it, and the only reason why we shouldn't overdo it is that we can't finance the Energiewende otherwise.
And mind you, this is with the allegedly conservative CDU allegedly in charge.
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X algorithm just fed me:
Bias in academic networking: A social media field experiment suggests that gender, race, and university affiliation influence the formation of professional relationships among economists. by Tyler Smith
And
link on x
I enjoyed the "women, minorities hardest hit" spin on that paper, or at least the reaction to it. If blacks get lower follow back rates than whites, it's because blacks are the victims of racism from shitty whites discriminating against them. If women get higher follow back rates than men, it's because women are the victims of sexism from shitty men sexualizing and trying to groom them.
Meanwhile, the error bars are huge relative to the effect size differences between the groups, despite how amusing is the replication of OkCupid online dating results. Also, if all else equal people prefer to network with those higher in competency, it would make sense if they were Bayesian ableists and follow back white men at higher rates than blacks or women. Since, holding university ranking constant, white men will have stronger competency levels than blacks or women given the ubiquity of affirmative action at economics PhD programs.
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Holy shit that's bare-faced:
Let's just leave off the largest difference, why don't we. If the inconvenient results are relegated to the paragraph with numbers instead of the one with quotable sentences, then maybe they can keep their goodthinkwise reputation.
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I was a bit worried about the direction of this stuff a decade ago but it petered out, at least in the fields I'm exposed to (private sector industrial concerns, finance, tech, healthcare and large governmental organisations).
I've seen fairly mild tendencies of this in tech, especially American companies, but nothing major.
There are sectors that seem a bit broken, like academia and media but i have never worked in either sector and dont really know anyone that does so it might just be my negative bias.
Perhaps things are really different in Germany compared to the Nordics. Even though i lived and worked in Hamburg for a while I can't say I have any great insight into the state of things and it's hard to compare.
At least here, people complaining about this stuff today are almost invariably bitter losers, rather than pointing at something real. There is discrimination against men, but it isn't really happening there.
Whilst I've only worked in completely male dominated places, the stories I get from my acquaintances who are in more diversity are always along the lines of 'There is an obvious sex based preference being acted out every single day, which is always to my detriment' but there is never anything concrete. Just an endless stream of second hand examples.
Tracing the chain of causality that drove a bitter loser to complain about how unfair the system is, is practically impossible. But when so many of my smartest acquaintances tell the same story I'm left wondering how it's possible they are all just delusional.
If they are not all delusional, one would ask why nothing gets done about the state of affairs, and the answer is obvious. If you complain you are a loser. The big bosses of society have already decided that things will be like this. You don't have a say. And because it is true that anyone who notices and complains about this comical state of affairs is a loser, they can't do anything. They can't quit. They are completely replaceable and there is no place for them to go. They are not just losers, they are humiliated losers. Every day their hard work means less because there is some frivolous gender crap sucking up energy. It's in their face every single day and they have to suffer it. To that extent your post is pointing at a very important reality.
The only problem I have is with the men who don't notice or complain. Chances are their predicament is no better than that of a complainer. But because they don't notice or complain they delude themselves to feel superior to the losers who outed themselves as being emotionally disturbed by how things are. But it's fake. They are all in the same lot.
There's an interesting Culture War drama example of this on my YouTube feed. Comedian Akaash Singh had a small podcast beef with some manosphere guys. Akaash, along with his married friend, made it clear that they were not the losers, but the other guys. They were happily married, not complaining, the manosphere guys were unmarried losers complaining about women. Well, a few years later it looks like Akaash is, to borrow an old phrase, whipped. Similar to Will Smith and such. So whilst it might be true the manosphere guys were delusional losers complaining about women, it's obvious Akaash was also a delusional loser defending them.
Now, I don't think you can derive a lot of good truth from e-celeb drama on the nature of Akaash's marriage. Maybe it's being portrayed unfairly. But it's a good example to remind us of the fact that the world is filled with losers who won't look reality in the eye no matter what. And that they are delusional in all directions.
Two relevant comments from 2014 on a social conservative blog I used to visit:
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Por que no los dos?
The fact that they're bitter losers doesn't stop them from pointing at something real. Hell, part of the male identity is not whining or complaining and bearing burdens in silence; by default this would make any of them that complain at this state of things (especially at the state of women!) losers. That doesn't mean they're not pointing at a real phenomenon. It just makes people less likely to give a shit, because who gives a shit about losers?
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I've worked in very male dominated industries and had stuff like being expected to hire 50-50 grad intakes each year despite the applications being 95% male.
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This sounds... weird. It's happening. But not here! There are people here who are complaining about it happening here, but we can be confident almost all of them are bitter losers. Is it possible that you're lucky to exist in a bubble of relative reasonableness? Or maybe just bad at noticing things.
To be fair, this guy is Swedish. The sense I get from my Swedish friends is that nobody is allowed to complain about anything in Sweden (except maybe bad fika), and if you do, you are ipso facto some kind of bitter, deformed outcast, a defiler of the Jantelagen. The big old Swedish companies are also culturally fairly old-fashioned in the sense of focusing on their business, I'm sure there are many places you can hide from this stuff, and if you think that it's only a problem when you personally see it that's basically luck of the draw in your coworkers.
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I think the scandis are far worse actually, the anti-rape and anti-harassment laws are “world-beating”. Norway pioneered the 40% female board quotas we are now implementing. They have a law on the books that enlarges the scope of sexual harassment to “statements that have the effect of being offensive, frightening, hostile or degrading “. You don’t even need to go to the office, you can sexually harass a woman by contradicting a random woman on the street if she deems it so.
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Fwiw, my female peers in tech has been promoted faster than the men. I have my opinions on which group was more competent, but even at face value, the absoluteness of it is suspicious. Not so much IC roles, but definitely in being promoted from IC to manager to director.
Seems most prevalent in fields that are male dominated though.
I mean it’s not a mystery, they’re explicitly discriminating against men. There are new EU and german laws mandating between 30 and 40 % of the board of publicly listed companies be women. Note that the employees of large automakers like daimler are 87% male.
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Germans being Germans, are getting a bit late onto this new ideological train but they will soon show the world what peak woke taken to all its full logical conclusions can really look like. An impressive group of people.
A "bit late"? As opposed to whom?
In this case Americans, Anglos generally, and Swedes. Though I agree Germans are actually pretty early on this trend relative to the rest of continental Europe.
The early adoption on woke maps almost perfectly to the English language capabilities of the population in Europe. Germans aren't the worst but also not particularly good at English so it has noticeably lagged a bit.
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Sadly, unlike Facism, Woke only serves to slowly and embarassingly degrade your own capabilities until you're forced to change course again. It's not nearly as dramatic, even with German thoroughness.
What's more, islamization is proceeding faster than wokification, and you can guess which one wins out.
Islamic Germans would be a world historical force to reckon with
This was Hitler's stance. German civ running the Islam religious civic, with it's bonuses to expansionism and wartime morale? Unbeatable. What a pity he got stuck with pussy-ass Christianity, and it's bonuses to culture and Great Artists/Scientists, and couldn't afford all those turns of disorder to switch.
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Imagine what the Germans will do with a cultural narrative dominated by how one nefarious minority group has willfully and surreptitiously organized to keep those righteous, industrious workers at the bottom of the totem pole of economic, cultural, and world power.
Wait, I think I've heard this story before...
Things that are true can sound an awful lot like things that are false; you need to look at the object level to determine how true and how false the accusations are, not just pattern-match it to what Hitler did. I'm reminded of CS Lewis' remarks about witches: if there really were people in league with the devil, then we ought to persecute them. Witch hunts are bad only because witches aren't real.
I'd like to think I am considering the object level: Maybe it's not the most direct accusation, but I do think the "Stormfront or SJW?" comparisons have a concerning kernel of truth to them more broadly. In this instance, the fact that they're German is mostly being played for dark irony, and I don't really think (currently) makes them inherently better or worse than other SJWs.
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IDK man, the joke about the Jew reading Der Sturmer to lift his spirits in 1939 translates pretty much word for word into a dude reading The Atlantic or something in 2023 -- regardless of the truth value, the next steps seem like a valid thing to worry about? I mean, if Hitler had been correct about an overarching Jewish conspiracy, I'd still be pretty concerned if I were a German Jew?
(Another similarity between Nazi Race Theory and Critical Gender Theory is of course the extent to which they are self-refuting -- if the Jews/Patriarchy are actually secretly controlling Germany/the workplace, then how come all these Nazis/girlbosses are running the place?)
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What do you mean, you've seen this? It's brand new!
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Does it count as half a Godwin if we're already talking about Germany?
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