site banner
PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   2735 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 19, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

A passage from Cryptonomicon which had me laughing out loud on the train this morning (no spoilers):

Nevertheless, there are three messages from Kia, Epiphyte's only actual employee, the administrative assistant for the whole company. Kia works in a totally alienated, abstracted office in the Springboard Capital corporate incubator complex in San Mateo. It is some sort of a federal regulation that nascent high-tech companies must not hire pudgy fifty-year-old support staff, the way big established companies do. They must hire topologically enhanced twenty-year-olds with names that sound like new models of cars. Since most hackers are white males, their companies are disaster areas when it comes to diversity, and it follows that all of the diversity must be concentrated in the one or two employees who are not hackers. In the part of a federal equal-opportunity form where Randy would simply check a box labeled ᴄᴀᴜᴄᴀsɪᴀɴ, Kia would have to attach multiple sheets on which her family tree would be ramified backwards through time ten or twelve generations until reaching ancestors who could actually be pegged to one specific ethnic group without glossing anything over, and those ethnic groups would be intimidatingly hip ones — not Swedes, let's say, but Lapps, and not Chinese but Hakka, and not Spanish but Basque. Instead of doing this, on her job app for Epiphyte she simply checked "other" and then wrote in ᴛʀᴀɴs-ᴇᴛʜɴɪᴄ. In fact, Kia is trans- just about every system of human categorization, and what she isn't trans- she is post-.

This book came out in 1999. Intellectually, I was aware that what we call wokeness was previously ascendant in the nineties, at which time it was called "political correctness". Still though — if you didn't know better, you would assume that the passage above had been published in the last ten years.

The debates we're having about diversity in the workforce and affirmative action date back in more or less their current form to the 1970s at least.

I'm reading Eig's biography of Mohammed Ali right now, and it's fascinating how there are a lot positions that got mainstream news media coverage in the 60s and 70s that we would consider utterly absurd today. Black Nationalism, earnest black people who really did publicly believe in black separatism, were given TV coverage and newspaper op-eds. Two Yankees pitchers traded families in the 70s. There were huge socialist and communist organizations with broad support from the 1900s to the 1980s in America.

Even just watching sitcoms from the 90s, you see a lot of less traditional values that are constantly thrown in your face. Frasier, which I love, stars a divorced dad who is totally absent in his son's life. And this is not presented as a crisis, it is at most a minor personal problem every ten episodes. We would never accept that today.

Wokeness might be a local peak of leftism in 2020, and over time we can argue that Cthulhu always swims left, but there have been in certain ways higher peaks, and post Reagan we are more conservative than we were before.

I think it's probably true that the Overton window from the 90s thru say 2016 was actually remarkably narrow. A good chunk of the western world had converged on...let's call it post-socialist bourgeois liberalism as The Way of Things. By contrast, in some ways the 60s and 70s were super left wing but you can find other public figures espousing equally right wing views, and being taken seriously. This was also the era of George Wallace and "segregation forever" after all. The Students for Democratic Society and The John Birch Society were formed within two years of each other. I think the 2016 election was less a harbinger of a rightward lurch in American politics as such and more an announcement that the consensus around narrowly defined norms of political/economic/social life had begun to dissolve - at least amongst the masses. It's taken the elites a minute to notice that however.

let's call it post-socialist bourgeois liberalism as The Way of Things.

I think the term you're looking for is Reaganism, Thatcherism, the Reagan-Thatcher consensus, or the Washington Consensus.

Some of it is a narrowing of the Overton window, but I think in other ways it's useful to see as a rising and receding of the tide, as a genuine improvement. For the divorced dad example: it was very common in the early years of no-fault divorce for dads to simply abandon their children after the divorce, and this was seen as fairly normal. Frasier is one example, another in James Clavell's Noble House (published 1981 and set in 1963) a character left his wife and kids and reflects with self satisfaction that they got "enough" money in the divorce that he doesn't need to be involved in their lives, the well researched portrayals in Mad Men are a contemporary example portraying the historical norm. This was normal, and not considered particularly noteworthy or blameworthy, divorce was considered bad but once it happened it was natural that the father would move on from the children. Today, we see that as bad, we see it as important that a divorced dad stay close with his kids, do his best to remain in their lives, or at the very least feel bad about it if he can't do those things.

I consider that to be actually good moral progress on the topic.

On a related but admittedly anecdotal note, it seems to me that a lot of men my age (mid thirties) prioritize family relative to career in way that earlier generations didnt, at least going by cultural depictions. Ive known more than one man in a "prestige" career - finance, consulting, military officer etc - say something to the effect of "if the wife could support us I'd be happy to drop out and stay home with the kids". I wonder how much of this is a change in default life scripts. At one point it was assumed you'd have kids; now this is no longer assumed, people who do choose to have kids are presumably more committed to the whole project. The decline in employment stability probably also plays a role. It makes a lot less sense to give your life to a company when you're not expecting a pension after 40 years

divorce was considered bad but once it happened it was natural that the father would move on from the children.

This is still commonplace in Japan. Even some married fathers, as long as they send money home, live in a different city from their family (Tokyo, etc.) due to employment, in a set-up called tanshin fun'in/単身赴任. The emotional aspect of a father bonding with his children (in particular dads with daughters) is not considered culturally salient (at least this is my own perspective.) Exceptions abound, no doubt.

A father divorced from his wife, though, yes, it is not uncommon to ask the young person where his or her divorced father is and to receive a shrug in response. Edit: Alimony as we understand it in the US is not a thing here.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats