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This won’t be particularly substantive but hopefully it’s enough to avoid a mod-slap. Apparently a group of women customers accosted staff at a Minneapolis yoga chain and berated them for not having some sort of ICE signage up (presumably a “No ICE allowed” sign, as if ICE agents will be stopping in to do yoga).
Here is an article.
Here is a direct link to the viral TikTok in question
The video’s author is Heather Anderson, 51, essentially the archetype of the wine mom, the core demographic of the latest frenzy. She appears to be an elementary school teacher and host of a podcast Belonging in the Classroom which presents itself with this description:
Of course this dovetails nicely with our discussion of another winemom-cum-podcaster, Jennifer Welch and her open calls for Republican blood. In all seriousness, psychologically speaking, what on Earth is going on with 50 year-old women right now? Have Democrats effectively weaponized Karenism?
The incident reminds me almost exactly of scenes that we saw in 2020, like this similar incident you surely remember of diners being surrounded and screamed at for not raising their fists in solidarity with BLM..
There is much endless discussion of peak woke, but to me it feels almost exactly like we are back in 2020, if not for the historic cold weather of the last few weeks and general time of year, I imagine it would be nearly identical.
There are people screaming about how it's current-era politics, the Trump administration being uniquely terrible, the culture war at fever pitch, so on and soforth...
I prefer the simplest explanation, Karen's Law. Privileged white women, the Karens, the wine moms of the world, are the fucking worst. As reductive as it can be, I believe quite firmly that every miserable authoritarian impulse levied over modern Western society can be laid at the feet of a Karen somewhere who found someone else happy, and upon realizing that someone other than her found some small modicum of joy, decided that something was wrong with the universe, because clearly if she can't be happy nobody else should be.
I have no genuine explanation for why this is, other than vague suppositions about female insecurity trying to wrestle with the fact that certain groups of them belong to a class so privileged that there might be no equal in all of human history. Inventions and conveniences freed them from drudgery, the state and the corporation freed them from a livelihood tied to marriage, the century of the self, widely available birth control and large pools of cheap immigrant labor freed them from responsibility of raising the next generation. Men, and their inventions, free them from war-making. Communities and communal decision making free them from decisions. Maybe if I was a wine mom I could explain it sufficiently to this forum's satisfaction, but I doubt I'd even be here in the first place if I was.
I don't think this is unique to the modern era. However, the internet and memespace egregores and the social media companies have outsized network effects. A Karen today simply has significantly greater social reach than her finger-wagging forebears.
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Interesting. To me the current situation also feels like 2020, but because of coronavirus lockdowns. Again we are being expected to tolerate draconian government interference with our daily lives, because of some supposed threat. Watching people leap to the defense of the ICErs reminds me of how people cheered when Australian police were beating anti-lockdown protestors. Again it feels like the whole world has gone insane, and nobody is willing to do anything about it.
Here is a tweet with 5k upvotes saying that "ICE should start sl**ghtering liberals for no reason at all." I remember seeing opinions like this about anti-maskers, and thinking how weird it was for this "edgy", "transgressive" humor to be deployed in support of government power.
Except that the median American finds out about ICE from social media. The median American found out about the covid lockdowns from leaving their house.
Or, in the case of China, being prevented from leaving their house.
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How disruptive are ICE's activities in Minnesota? I have a hard time imagining that they create 1/10 the interference of the COVID lockdowns (averaged over their respective worst month-ish, counting everyone in the city except those properly targeted for arrest, and not counting the actions of protestors).
How many businesses are shut down? (Probably some, because their employees got arrested) Are they required to get identification and documentation before they serve customers? Are the schools still open? Can you visit your friends?
I'm not on the ground there, so I don't know exactly what's happening (or what their COVID measures were, for that matter). I'd just be very surprised if it was even in the same order of magnitude as the lockdowns.
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While the governmental interference in people's lives doesn't sound half as draconian or invasive as the worst excesses of Covid hysteria (it's not as if, in the interests of combating illegal immigration, Minnesotans are being prevented from hiking on mountain trails or attending their spouses' funerals; nor has their full participation in public life been made conditional on their undergoing a specific medical procedure), I nonetheless agree with you that many of the people cheering on ICE are motivated by a similar kind of spite. As a committed civil libertarian it's always disheartening to find out what a large proportion of my ostensible fellow-travelers really just want the boot on the other foot.
Yeah, one of the most depressing occurrences of my adulthood has been realizing that approximately nobody in America actually values freedom. Most of my countrymen seem to be authoritarian in their hearts, and the only question seems to be who/whom.
I mean principles erode in war time and the culture war is a war - I'm very free speech, live and let live etc but I see what the woke have done and feel it is toxic to society etc.
If principles erode based on what others do, then they were never principles - simply what was convenient to do at the time. A principle is something you always uphold.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
The real world is complicated and messy.
Pacifism is good until you run into an African Warlord or Cartel.
Free exchange of knowledge is good until everyone has a matter printer and can destroy the planet.
Don't lie, cheat, or steal is great until you are an Oskar Schindler trying to save lives.
Sometimes your principles are worth dying for, but making other people die for them isn't really right either.
Shit is complicated.
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May I suggest that it's more about When/Why? For example, I found myself becoming very authoritarian about immigration and drugs and trans, and I thought 'guess I'm not a liberal after all', then genAI happened and it turns out I'm still very libertarian about software and AI, which was kind of pleasing to me. @FtttG is generally quite liberal but was quite clear in the trans thread that (s)he doesn't think it's okay to write anything you want on a government form just because it makes you happy, and generally also doesn't particularly seem to like people traveling across borders as they please. (I criticise neither stance, I'm just noting.)
Who/whom correlates to some degree with this but doesn't actually match it. It's a bit like the saying that everyone is conservative in their area of expertise.
Don't know if you find this reassuring but maybe worth bearing in mind.
Interesting point! I think that is a valid alternate way of looking at the situation. Not that it necessarily makes things right, but it's something to mull over.
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I'm a guy. Although I find it amusing that I apparently have such an – androgynous? – writing style.
I find this characterisation interesting, as while I certainly think of myself as a run-of-the-mill 90s liberal and don't think any of my political opinions would be outside the Overton window for, say, a Democrat or Labour candidate circa 2000 – nonetheless, in my personal life I'm routinely accused of being a crypto-conservative (or even, rather laughably, "far-right"). I certainly don't dispute that I'm more conservative than many of my friends and family, a lot of whom are passively woke, though I still think I'm probably less conservative than the median poster here.
I will freely cop to the former characterisation of my opinions: government forms are for cataloguing demographic data, not for making people feel "validated", and governments should not concern themselves with cataloguing their citizens' unfalsifiable claims about their internal mental states. (Or rather, their citizens' unfalsifiable claims about their internal mental states should not supplant or override objective facts about the compositions of their bodies. "Identify" as whatever you please: that doesn't change what you are.) But when you say I "[don't] particularly seem to like people travelling across borders as they please", I'm a little taken aback. If all you mean as that I'm not an advocate for open borders, that's fair: per an article I read the other day, in order to have laws you must have jurisdictions, to have jurisdictions you must have borders, and if you have borders they must be enforced. But I get the impression you're imputing a stronger claim to me, namely that I'm opposed to immigration into Ireland in general, including legal immigration. If so, that's not how I would describe my own worldview. For example, I live with my girlfriend who's a first-generation migrant who was born and raised Muslim (though no longer practising); of the three long-term romantic relationships I've had as an adult, only one was with a fellow Irish person while the others were with first-generation migrants; it's been nearly a decade since I was physically intimate with a fellow Irish person, with virtually all of the people I was intimate with since being first-generation migrants; I would say a significant proportion if not an outright majority of my close friends are first-generation migrants.
That being said, I'm not going to pretend that all immigrants are created equal; I do think that a significant proportion of immigrants to Ireland (as in the rest of Europe) are a net drain on the public purse, not to mention responsible for a disproportionate share of violent crime; I have a big problem with people emigrating to Ireland solely to claim social welfare indefinitely and never make a positive contribution; and the progressive news media's habitual obfuscation about migrant crime and its wholesale importing of American racial grievance politics are long standing bugbears of mine. Immigrants who come to Ireland with the goal of assimilating and working hard without demanding handouts (either in the form of social welfare payouts or "ethnic spoils" sinecures) are entirely welcome, which is why I get particularly angry when I see immigrants meeting that description (e.g. Ireland's growing population of recent Indian migrants) receiving abuse and harassment from the native population. If you got the impression that I'm opposed to immigration into Ireland on general principle, I'm legitimately curious as to what gave you that impression (and not in a defensive how dare you! sort of way).
What I meant in the context of my last reply is that you clearly not an advocate of totally open borders. That is, when it gets right down to it, you advocate for forcefully (if necessary) preventing people from voluntarily going to certain places, taking up certain jobs, etc. even when they wish to. It makes you less liberal in that area than somebody like Bryan Caplan. Whereas in some places perhaps you hold more liberal opinions around say free-speech on the internet (I don't know). This argument was in service of my overall point that I think the vast majority of people want government force used to bring the outgroup to heel and to enforce their will sometimes in some areas.
On the more general level, I had a vague image of you not being super-keen on immigration partly because I vaguely recall you reporting on the anti-immigration riots in an 'interesting, let's see where this goes' way and partly probably because I am projecting and I have difficulty seeing an intelligent person be super jazzed about the type and level of immigration we're getting in UK + Ireland. I might be wrong about that.
I'm okay with this provided that they and their immediate descendants are capped to approx 2-3% of total population which is, aha, not what we see. I have described elsewhere that I think that there is a slippery slope / addiction mechanic involved with immigration and I am keen to forestall this even when I like and approve of many of the immigrants involved on a personal level. I don't know your feelings on the matter.
It's funny: while writing my previous comment I was thinking of this exact comment, but didn't realise it was you who'd written it!
I agree there's been a great deal of goalpost-moving on the topic of immigration, especially from those in favour. I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of Ireland, and specifically what immigration implies for the Irish national identity, or lack thereof.
What is the Irish national identity, really? Certainly no one would claim that it's based on ethnicity: even the farthest of the far-right would never dare to suggest that e.g. Denise Chaila is anything other than Irish, no hyphen necessary. (As pointed out by Angela Nagle, there's a bit of historical revisionism going on here, with modern Irish progressives loath to acknowledge that the Irish republican movement was always an unabashed, unapologetic ethno-nationalist movement.) It can't be based on a language that almost no one can speak, not even at a conversational level. It can't be based on a shared literary tradition (if the average Irish person has read an Irish novel in their lifetimes, it was probably by Sally Rooney, and I suspect the only dead Irish writer most Irish could name would be Joyce) or a musical one (most Irish people are proudly dismissive of their native musical tradition, and the most popular Irish musicians have always been those who aped sounds coming from the UK or the states). It certainly can't be based on Catholicism, with weekly attendance figures hovering around a quarter of the populace (a figure which is bound to shrink even more dramatically as the older generations die off).
At the height of the clerical abuse scandal (but, I believe, several years prior to the legalisation of gay marriage and abortion), I remember reading an opinion piece in the Irish Times noting that, of the three traditional pillars of Irish society (the Catholic Church, the Fianna Fáil political party and the Gaelic Athletics Association), now only the latter still retains anything like the kind of power and cultural influence it once wielded. After the clerical abuse scandals, the Church's reputation lay in tatters and attendance figures have been in freefall for decades, while it's been nearly five decades since Fianna Fáil secured an outright majority. The tone of this opinion piece was more than a little triumphalist, but in retrospect one wonders why the columnist wasn't a bit more concerned. Yes, these once-powerful institutions are a shadow of their former selves – but what are they going to be replaced with?
I know this is the story of every Western nation in the twentieth century: we gleefully tore down all the old institutions without giving any thought to what we ought to replace them with, and now we're experiencing a crisis of meaning. But I feel like the absence is even more keenly felt in Ireland, given how thoroughly we've deprecated everything else that might have served as a placeholder for a national identity while we got to work building new institutions. Woke progressives often talk about "culture" as if it's just another name for "language, cuisine, music, dance, fashion, sport": when they talk about "multiculturalism" and respecting different cultural practices, what they really mean is "you can speak any language you want, as long as you use it to respect everyone's preferred pronouns". But language, cuisine, music etc. is just superficial window-dressing: when we talk about "cultural differences", what we really mean is that people from different cultures have different moral values, and different assumptions they take for granted. Culture is why Arabs throw gay men off of buildings; culture is why Kenyans cut off their daughters' clitorises; culture is why disgraced Japanese people kill themselves rather than bringing dishonor on their families. With the hollowing out of Irish cultural institutions, whatever moral values and base assumptions an Irish person can be assumed to have are functionally indistinguishable from the European average (and, more to the point, the British* average). But unlike France, Sweden, Germany and so on, we don't really have much in the way of "culture" in the superficial window-dressing sense either. What native cuisine we have (aside from the obvious) is limited to coddle, colcannon, and bacon & cabbage; Irish dancing is that thing you're forced to do in Irish college over the summer before you can get back to kissing girls; language and music were covered above; the less said about Irish fashion the better. The only one in which we can really hold our own in is sport, and even then I'd hazard a guess than an order of magnitude more Irish people follow English club football exclusively than follow GAA exclusively. It's for this reason that Irish people tend to sound so faltering and unsure of themselves when attempting to explain what's unique and peculiar about their own culture, and what makes it meaningfully distinct from that of our nearest neighbour. "Emm... mammy'd have the wooden spoon after you, haha... flat 7Up when you're ill... Bosco on the telly... forgot to turn off the immersion?"
Sometimes you can detect the tension underlying all of this when Irish people talk about Irish history. Opposition to British rule occupies such a central role in the Irish psyche that it's almost impossible to overstate, and when pressed for examples of how oppressive said rule was, one will invariably be the penal laws, which placed heavy restrictions on Catholic practices in Ireland. But when you ask the person citing this example what they personally think of the Catholic Church, they will surely reply that it's a repressive homophobic misogynistic patriarchical institution made up entirely of kiddy-fiddlers whose theological beliefs are incoherent nonsense. In sum: "the Brits were bad because they tried to stop people practising Catholicism; also, the Catholic Church is an evil institution which ought to have no power". This cognitive dissonance is almost never remarked upon.
Ireland spent centuries fighting to protect our native culture against attempts from without to destroy it – then, almost as soon as we had won, we decided our native culture wasn't really worth defending in the first place, and tossed it aside in favour of generic, undistinguished universal culture. More provocatively, one could say that Ireland spent several hundred years ruled by a colonial overlord (Britain), finally achieved full independence in 1949, and in 1973 (barely a generation later) voluntarily submitted to being ruled by a different colonial overlord (the EU). Joining the EU was a sound decision from the perspective of economics, living standards and so on. But it's hard to dispute the idea that it ultimately compromised whatever sense of a distinct Irish identity still remained. The average Irish person's worldview owes far more to a gaggle of unelected administrators in Brussels than it does to Michael Collins, Daniel O'Connell or Charles Stewart Parnell, and that goes double for the hordes of woke West Brits and East Yanks who call themselves Irish but have nothing but scorn for every extant Irish institution or cultural practice. Listening to them speak, they don't even sound Irish. I'd imagine that most of them would know who Washington D.C. is named after, but not O'Connell St or Parnell St.
(Keen to hear @HereAndGone2's thoughts on the above.)
*Regardless of political stripe, Irish people can be relied upon to become very irate when you point out alleged commonalities between our culture and British culture. This defensiveness, in my view, has more to do with the narcissism of small differences than with any real factual dispute. Ireland has its own culture distinct from our nearest neighbour's only in the sense that we have an army and a navy: nine times out of ten, what's true of British people can be assumed to be true of Irish people also.
What I'm finding funny is the re-appropriation of traditional culture but stripping out the religious connotations, see the recent St Brigid's Day stuff. Now it's become a proper bank holiday, but along with traditions such as Little Christmas/Women's Christmas, it's being recast as some sort of proto-feminist, New Agey style feast. There was a completely dreadful 'icon' of St Bridget (very much in the Wiccan style) accompanying one such online article about 'traditions and customs and what we can do today'.
Nobody is going to be making Brid's Crosses out of rushes anymore, but what is left then? Fake Celtic paddywhackery. Deracinated for the natives, and nothing there of any substance to appeal to our new immigrant populations as shared culture.
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I think there is much to what you say. A few minor comments occur to me:
Do you mean that they would never dare in public because they would be crucified, but secretly they believe it? Or that even the far right don't believe in an ethnic conception of Irishness?
I am reminded of the end of the Cold War. No longer having an adversary really made the West lose its mojo surprisingly fast.
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One of my great fears is being caught in a struggle session like this. I'm not really kidding. I used to have nightmares about it as a kid, when I didn't even know what a struggle session was. I would dream that there was a huge crowd around me and they were angry at me, and someone that was my friend would be interrogating me with inane questions that seemed to have no right or wrong answer, but no matter what I answered the friend would announce it to the crowd with disgust and I'd be booed and jeered. Just complete lunacy.
I put myself in the yoga studio manager's position and wonder what I would say. The troll in me would lean into it: "do you stupid motherfuckers think we took the sign down because we're trying to welcome ICE agents to do yoga? do you think they do yoga?" and "so, what I'm hearing is you're mad that we had the anti-ICE sign up but had to take it down? how mad are you at yoga studios that never had the sign up to begin with?"
But I realize the right move would be to say "actually, " lowering voice " one of our dark skinned owners is anti-ICE, but she's afraid her green card will be revoked if ICE finds out she had that sign up. Please be her voice out there, because she cannot speak for herself, here" and then we all
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One of the most scathing critiques of Social Justice is that the same kind of busybody middle class older women who would report young women to their landlords for having a male visitor in their room in 1950 are now ostracizing people for doing a racism or whatever.
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I traveled up to a nearby city a handful of times last year, and every time I had to drive past one of the popular protest spots. The protestors were interesting. I'd estimate 90% of them were old. Gray hair was the most common shade I saw. The average age was clearly 50+, and may have honestly been 65+. The other thing I noticed was that 75-80% of the protestors were women. Of the men, I'd estimate that three quarters of them were there with their wives, and the men were usually sitting on a stone wall that stood next to the sidewalk rather than holding signs and screaming at cars.
I'd also hazard to guess that most of the protestors were affluent. Each individual piece of clothing they wore probably cost more than my whole outfit. The street where they were protesting was lined with parked BMWs and Audis when it would usually be Fords and Hyundais.
I think all those facts might be related. If you're old enough and wealthy enough that you don't have to work anymore, it can be a shock to your sense of identity. What do you do with those extra 2,000 hours a year? Even if you are still working, your risk profile changes a lot when your "I got fired" strategy is to just move on to a life of leisure.
I think it's the same reason that the HOA busybody and Church lady archetypes are usually older. I think all three might be culture-bound expressions of the same thing.
We live the same life in some ways because I've done the same thing and noticed the exact same thing.
The Greeks spoke of this.
What are you referencing re the Greeks?
A joke about the origin of the word "hysteria."
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That’s a good sign. If there were hordes of military aged males out on the street, the chances of civil war would be a lot higher.
If there were hordes of military aged males at all, then we wouldn't be here.
Population aging (both due to declining birthrate and rising life expectancy) is the fundamental fact about Western (and first-world Asian) societies from which everything else follows.
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I can just imagine society finally becoming wealthy enough by 2035 that we could institute a sweet UBI for all, and then by 2037 we have the most brutal civil war because we believe we're the most oppressed people ever.
This would IMO be a great premise for a Star Trek episode. Or maybe a sci-fi novel.
This is the plot of the Terra Ignota series. It's quite good.
I mean... it's not exactly "because we're the most oppressed people ever" but it's about how war arises in an approximately post-scarcity society.
I have mixed feelings about Terra Ignota, because there's a lot of it that's good and interesting, and a lot that's garbage, and a lot that's somewhere in the middle.
In this case I think one of its flaws is that you can't really describe it without being incredibly misleading. You have to describe the setting, and the setting gives the impression that this is a story about what happens in a world where you can choose your nation, or choose what set of laws to live under, or what a world without borders is like but people socially define themselves by household and elective community, or what war looks like in a world that doesn't have geographic nations, or re-learning war in a world that has had no weapons or violent conflicts for a lifetime, or, etc., etc.
And Terra Ignota is not actually about any of that. Sure, it's in a world where there are no nations and instead people join elective 'hives', which define the laws of their society, but the books clearly do not care about that, and have precisely zero interest in interrogating how that system could possibly work. Sure, the story involves the hives going to war and then flailing about in confusion because none of them know what war is (I particularly loved a bit where people dress up in military uniforms and assemble in groups and march up and down in front of each other, and then just kind of look at each other awkwardly and disperse, unsure of what they're supposed to do next), but none of that is relevant to what Terra Ignota is about.
Terra Ignota is a story told by an extremely unreliable narrator, who is at least partly insane, who has a bizarre fetish for 18th century France. The story is about Mycroft, and once you understand that Mycroft is firstly batshit and secondly a LARPing pseudo-intellectual, you notice that the events of the story don't matter that much, and in fact don't even make sense. This is a psychodrama.
I don't know if I learned anything from Terra Ignota, other than "Ada Palmer be weird, yo". But Ada Palmer is definitely weird, yo.
Oh, and Utopia sucks. As far as I can tell responses to Terra Ignota are bifurcated along several axes, and one of the big ones is whether Utopia is the coolest thing ever and a beautiful dream you want to pledge your life towards (somehow Scott is one of these), or whether Utopia is a bunch of incredibly cringeworthy nerds who need to be given swirlies (this is the camp I'm in). There are people who seem to think Terra Ignota is a beautiful small-u utopia, revealed to us by brilliant and inspiring prose, and I do not understand these people at all.
Is your reading that all of the supernatural stuff is in Mycroft's head?
I kind of love the "Ada Palmer is weird, yo" aspect of the whole thing. It's like she had a list of interests:
And decided to throw it all together in a book. And, idk, my take is that she did it quite well! Some it is a little hard to believe, but I still think it's a world that "fits" and makes sense. What aspects of the hive system do you think are underdeveloped?
Not so much in Mycroft's head as irrelevant? The whole story is in Mycroft's head, and we have no way of sorting what's 'true' in the context of the imaginary world from what isn't. Mycroft tells us a lot of things, most of which are to some extent completely implausible, and often it's the non-magical parts that are the most implausible. Is it plausible that, say, a midget clone of Achilles pilots a giant robot magicked into existence from a kid's reading of some guy's awful Iliad fanfic in order to deflect a couple of nuclear missiles away from Mars? Well, no. But then, is it plausible that the whole world is run by a conspiracy of half a dozen people who all go to the same weirdly-specific brothel where people dress up in 18th century outfits, as part of some lady's attempt to control the world by addicting its leaders to a fetish for gender roles? If anything that part is less plausible! Who's more plausible, Bridger or JEDD? Bridger is the one to whom Mycroft attributes explicit magic powers, whereas JEDD is just an extremely mentally ill person, but nonetheless JEDD is the one I find harder to swallow. I can believe that a magic kid with the ability to rewrite reality exists, but I cannot believe that every world leader, much less the public, are willing to give ultimate power to a person so autistic that he does not understand object permanence.
But it doesn't matter because, well, Terra Ignota's world makes no sense. I think you have to take the whole thing as a glimpse into Mycroft's mind. Nothing here is plausible except insofar as it makes sense to Mycroft. And Mycroft is a lunatic.
(There is that part from 9A's perspective, but 9A's narrative voice is extremely similar to Mycroft's, shares all of Mycroft's values, and eventually 9A is turned into a Mycroft clone via Bridger-magic, so for all I know 9A doesn't exist and Mycroft is just taking the piss. It might just be that Palmer struggles to write more than one narrative voice, but there was one chapter from Martin Guildbreaker's perspective which was nicely differentiated, at least?)
My frustration with the books, really, is that Palmer tends to bring up big questions that she is either unwilling or unable to address. Is it about novel political systems? Well, she sort of sketches out the outline of one, but the system she sketches out makes no sense and she makes no attempt to answer even obvious questions about it. This goes for legal questions (hang on, how does crime work between people of different hives?), cultural questions (somehow Brillist mind-reading remains an exclusive Brillist secret, even though you can change hive at will, there are millions and millions of Brillists, and the skill requires no technology or assistance of any kind? no one has stolen this technique yet?), or economic questions (there's that chapter with the yakuza human traffickers; wait, why is human trafficking a thing in a world without borders? how is crime even possible in a world where everyone wears tracker implants anyway?). The idea of opt-in legal systems and non-geographic nations is interesting, but once you start asking questions about how it actually works, there are too many questions that Palmer just glosses over.
There's a certain type of science fiction author who comes up with an odd idea and then spends all their time trying to break that idea. Isaac Asimov is probably the most famous example of this type. He produces an elegant system and then repeatedly puts that system under stress. He pedantically looks for every place the idea might fail and then sees what happens when it does. Ada Palmer is the very opposite of this type of author. She throws out big ideas, does not bother investigating them at all, and then jumps to the next big idea. The result, at least for me, is a book that has the appearance of depth but not the reality.
One example, for instance, might be her interest in gender. She has a lot in Terra Ignota about the concept of gender and its cultural power. Gender and religion are both, in Terra Ignota, concepts that nobody is willing to talk about in public (gender is just crass; religion is actually banned), and yet the shadows of those concepts hang over the text. Gender and religion both matter even though nobody can admit to them mattering. This is interesting, except that the shoe never drops. By the end of the fourth book, the place the books get to on gender is, "huh, gender is interesting, let's have a committee to keep the conversation going". Really, that's the conclusion? The spectre of religion comes up repeatedly, but it never goes anywhere.
This is most obvious to me when it comes to the books' central conflict. By the end of Perhaps the Stars, the war is about two issues. (Three if you count "should we make JEDD unaccountable dictator of the world", but apparently everybody is in favour of that. It's bonkers.) The first issue is O. S., and the question I've often seen asked along the lines of, "Would you destroy this world to save a better one?" Does the end of preserving Terra Ignota's current political order justify a very small number of political assassinations? JEDD promises to reorganise the world's politics so as to make O. S. unnecessary, but refuses to explain how he's going to do that, or what his new constitution would be. The second issue is the trunk war - should the future of humanity be brain uploading or space travel?
But neither of those issues are actually addressed in any depth. JEDD does take over the world, but his new constitution is to just make some minor tweaks on the existing system, none of which seem like they obviate the need for O. S. How does making the Cousins into a strat, merging Mitsubishi and the EU into a super-hive, capping the number of Mason senators, and adding representatives from the Reservations to the senate address that issue? That seems just as unstable as the prior system. It seems strange that after a thousand pages and a global war over the issue of O. S., nobody actually answers the O. S. question. How does this world remove the need for O. S. again?
And the trunk war is simply bizarre. There doesn't seem to be any reason why the Brillist and Utopian paths are incompatible - heck, Faust himself says that there is plenty of time for space travel after digital immortality is achieved. This 'conflict' is two different research projects with different priorities; the only actual clash is that both parties think the other is being somewhat wasteful in the face of their grand dream. The Brillists believe there is a pressing global imperative to abolish death, and the Utopians believe... er... they never get to this part. But they think that going to space is very important. Maybe there's a contrived conflict because both groups want to study Bridger's relics, but... what, we're going to have a world war because NASA and MIRI couldn't figure out how to share? It makes the conflict seem bizarrely petty.
At any rate, the fundamental problem there is that no one ever makes the case for Utopia. Here I'm just recapping Balioc, but I think it bears mentioning again. All the narrators are passionately on the Utopian side, and portray the Utopian dream as beautiful and heroic, and the Brillist dream as contemptible and narrow-minded, but no one ever reflects on why Utopia's dream is so important. It just axiomatically is.
I guess the problem I have is that Terra Ignota is, fundamentally, a bunch of things that Ada Palmer thinks is cool, all free-associated together. It never really coheres into a world or even really into a story.
There are a lot of things in the series that are difficult to swallow, but make sense once you realise that it's not trying to be a realistic work of political fiction. Something that struck me was that Terra Ignota is a world of utter sincerity. There are no liars or cynics; no world leaders who just opportunistically cheat. The closest you can find to that is Perry-Kraye, and even he's deeply embroiled in romantic melodrama. The Mason hive is an absolute dictatorship constrained only by the leader's determination to hold true to an oath that nobody but himself has ever read, and apparently this works! But every single character is like that. No one is corrupt. Everybody deeply believes in this or that philosophy. Mitsubishi are a bunch of calculating corporate imperialists, and yet when JEDD questions them, every member of the board is able to wax rhapsodic about the spiritual value of land. The blacklaws come together and make this lovely idealistic city called Hobbestown, rather than being the sorts of poorly-educated low-impulse-control people you might expect to live outside the law. Moral suasion is an incredibly powerful force in Terra Ignota - this ties into all the incredibly ropey gender stuff about the power of women and seduction and Marie Antoinette. It's just a world without cynics; a world without pragmatists.
I suppose I'm just ranting incoherently at this point.
My point is that I think Terra Ignota is an interesting look into Ada Palmer's brain, conveyed by way of Mycroft's brain.
I don't find it particularly sensible as a story or as a world, though.
Yeah, this bothered me.
Thanks for all your other thoughts, no particular comment on them.
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Older, affluent women are, and have always been, ideological enforcers. That's true regardless of where you go. In blue tribe suburbs they're screaming at people about ICE; in the Arab world they're lecturing their (grand)daughters about the hijab.
Indeed. "Men build civilizations, women build societies." (I read this on a Manosphere blog ages ago.)
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I don't have much to add other than I've also noticed that there are lots of old people at the big protests that get a lot of coverage. My impression of the previous century's protests is that they were attended by young people. Are they...the same protestors? Has the same cohort been bullying our politics for decades? Or does the timeline not match?
I have a sensitive distaste for old people who can't help but weigh in on the current outrage. Conservatives and liberals. All the old ones have very nasty ways of expressing their opinions. If it's not super cringe it's very ugly. I think people gradually lose the skill of persuasion as they ossify, or something. There's something there.
It reminds me of how the Hollywood studio system had grown stagnant in the 70's and 80's, which allowed up and comers like Spielberg, Lucas, and Cameron to innovate and eventually take over the studio system themselves. Only now, 40 years later, it's still a lot of those same up and comers from the 70's clinging to power and not letting up and comers displace them. I think there are similar trends in politics and activism.
From the more rightwingish side of things, a lot of people from the Nixon era (including Henry Kissinger) were still power players in the Republican party and various GOP administrations all the way up until the 2010s, and even if they hadn't aged out they were effectively forced out by Trump and the MAGA movement.
I have little doubt that there are similar dynamics on the progressive protest everything activist side of things.
I think that the issue is more that a lot of the up and comers who do replace them, come from within the same structure, having worked with the big directors, rather than having made their own way. Kathleen Kennedy never made something by herself. She was always the one who enabled others to do great things, but she didn't have a good creative vision of her own, nor was she able to spot new talent. Perhaps Dave Filoni will be better. At least he actual creative work on new IPs.
Perhaps that is because most of the elite is in the thrall of illiberal activism, so they are innately opposed to the idea that 'the people' get to have a say. So instead of giving a chance to directors/writers that punched above their weight on smaller projects, they select people that only appeal to them and their agenda. And even if these people turn out to be good by chance, they sabotage them with bad instructions, with bad advisors, etc.
Something similar seems to be true in politics.
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Your timing is off a bit there. The studio system declined in the late 1960s. "New Hollywood," incl. the Spielberg/Lucas class, got started circa 1967 and rose to prominence in the 1970s (Jaws / Star Wars), and then dominated the 1980s. Cameron rode their blockbuster wave a bit later, making his first big splash in the mid-80s.
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I don't think it's exactly the same cohort; somebody who was active in the Days of Rage would be in their 70s or 80s now.
Right. It's later boomers and first Xers larping as civil rights and anti-Vietnam war activists (who were mostly silents and older boomers).
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Yeah, the people of Minneapolis seem to have been spiraling for years now, and despite having lived nearby, I don't really have a feeling for it. I have a middle aged female relative, in a different part of the upper midwest, who's been broadcasting some of this energy over the past half decade. She's since blocked me on social media, but appears to be influencing my mother in law, who is cowed into just not saying anything about her at all. Back when we were talking, my impression was that she is, in general, kind of boring, and living a fairly boring, constrained life, lacking traditional middle aged woman outlets like running a church ministry, generating cultural output, and mentoring/getting help from younger women. She had a baby in her mid-thirties, and has been trying to "gentle parent" it, which sounded like it was going rather badly. I think she had the father of one of her children leave her for a man. I think there's a lot of sublimated anger going on, but the culturally approved expressions are only political. Rene Girard would probably have something useful to say about it.
Edit: Another woman I knew in Minnesota, who seemed generally like a nice person, had her husband and the father of her very young children decide he was a woman. She took her baby and toddler to pride demonstrations with her spouse, and posted about it online. That seems very stressful, but she probably can't really complain about it, he has the right to become a woman if he wants to, and seems to be still helping to care for the children. It's probably the Right's fault that the situation is uncomfortable.
Well yes, it is. Transgenderism and homosexuality are traditions in our culture dating back to Roman and Greek times. If we weren't being subjected to Judeo-Christian values, her ex-wife wouldn't have felt the need to repress being transgender in the first place. And it wouldn't be such a big deal for a relationship to end because one partner evolves. All of the supposed problems with that situation are caused by artificial right wing judeo-christian morality.
...? You're arguing that in the ancient world a woman with young children being abandoned by her husband wouldn't be a big deal?
nobody is being "abandoned", the trans parent can just continue parenting without pretending to be a perfect judeo-christian Family Man. What's the big deal? Most marriages end in divorce anyway. I would have preferred if my parents got divorced right away rather than screaming at each other for 15 years, and they were both transgender heterosexuals, they just didn't get along. Imagine growing up with a dad who was so cucked he wouldn't even let himself be the gender he wanted.
Edit: snowflake mods banned me, so don't bother responding. Imagine being so sensitive you call a slight difference of opinion "trolling"
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You should ask Elagabalus how accepting the pagan Roman world was of gender non-conformity.
The difference is that the romans would just call Elagabalus a fag and laugh about it, then go back to having anal sex with their femboy harems. I wouldn't have to listen to endless christwoke virtue signalling about family values from coping closeted homos like JD Vance. People could just do what they want without the insufferable handwringing.
Between this post and this one, I think it's obvious you are trolling and you've been given enough charity.
One week ban. Future bans will escalate sharply.
ETA Permabanned after threatening to troll harder if he was banned.
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Since the Roman pagans accepted E's gender nonconforming hijinks for four years, we can call ancient world pretty accepting.
It would be unthinkable for medieval Christian ruler get away with such lifestyle even for four days.
That argument is not as strong as you might think. Roman emperors had a degree of liberty that regular Romans couldn't dream of.
The sole surviving roman novel is a comedy about roman men competing for the affections of a sixteen year old boy. I'm not sure about transgenderism, but pagan Rome does seem to have accepted homosexuality among the plebs.
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Just remember, folks, trans rights will not affect your ordinary lives at all! Ignore the sixteen dozen examples of where exactly that is happening, you're just imagining it, or making a big deal out of "the biological father claims to be the mother and wants that to be legally recognised", which is nothing at all exceptional, right?
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Memesis? Please elaborate on your thought here.
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What the hey is happening in the Midwest? Is there something in the water (turning the frogs gay)? I'm not laughing at your relative or friend, this is a hell of a shock when your spouse/partner suddenly turns everything upside-down but if you don't treat them like the hero(ine) of the story then you are a bad wicked phobic bigot who needs to be cut out of everyone's life with your toxicity.
I think it's conceivable in the 2nd case that the man has long checked out of the marriage mentally and emotionally, knew that there is a heavy social and legal penalty for a man who abandons his family, but years of trans propaganda and the social normalization of transgenderism made him notice that him claiming to be a woman is the one option he has to shield himself from those penalties. In the first case I think there is also some chance that the man in question decided to just fake gayness.
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Most simply, Germans/Scandinavians are hysterical conformists with a tendency to go Way Too Far on whatever the current dominant ideology is. Luckily this one doesn't seem to involve any panzers yet. The Midwest more generally is always about 5-10 years behind the coasts culturally (5 in big cities, closer to 10 elsewhere), so the Great Awokening is really hitting them now.
I'm sorry, but this is a profoundly historically uninformed take, and one almost hilariously so within the context of Minnesota. The Germans who settled Minnesota are, perhaps, the most decidedly non-conformist of the whole bunch, given that they're largely descendants of the failed revolutionaries, both liberal and socialist, who tried to make a constitutional German Empire back in 1848. You know, the Frankfurt Parliament, the "crown from the gutter" that Frederick Wilhelm IV rejected? That's why the Farmer-Labor Party has always had such a strong presence in Minnesotan politics, and you didn't see it go the way of the Dakotas, or Iowa or Missouri. These are the descendants of radicals and dissidents, not conformists.
>mfw Germans will literally have entire revolutions just so they can find an ideology that lets them be even more conformist
>mfw they did this like eight times
Though, to be fair, there was a properly independent-minded strand of German society that did emigrate here. You can see it in Texas, the Mountain West, rural Wisconsin, etc. In Minnesota it's drowned out by Sw*des and other Scandis, who are now the world's poster boy for "very nice but mildly stifling high-trust society that falls apart catastrophically the moment someone comes along and starts defecting."
Texas Germans are incredibly bureaucratic and conformist, they just vote republican. The Texas hill country is a Norman Rockwall painting with the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The Hill Country, Fredericksburg, etc. are like that because they're affluent second home/tourist traps. Stay out late in a small town and you'll see the frontiersman admixture - or, as Mann's Satan quoted Bismarck, that "the German is never himself until he has half a bottle of champagne in him".
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I think this is bubble effects for an affluent, socially liberal stratum. Trailer trash is also dysfunctional(as you presumably know well, you post about the Irish equivalent often enough), we just expect it because they're dysfunctional poor people. I have female relatives who would claim to have similar socially liberal beliefs but they won't walk the walk- when you've lost the internalized socially conservative views you'll fall for totally stupid stuff that usually affects the dysfunctional underclass.
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Fifty year old upper middle class women being karens is the sort of thing that requires more of an explanation if they don't do it, you notice it from the left because of 1) lies about ICE and 2) media focus on the protestors, not what they're protesting against.
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Case in point of the below discussion of algorithmically delivered biases, my recollection of 2020 was a constant stream of videos of 50 year conservative women acting crazy, which is the origin of the word Karen ime. It’s interesting if you at the same time were seeing a bunch of videos of 50 year old progressive women behaving badly. Maybe the conclusion is not that the conservatives or the liberals are ‘weaponizing’ 50 year old women but rather “the algorithms are driving everybody insane”.
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Contra a few posters below, this isn’t nutpicking, and I consider that term to be more often an asymmetrical dodge than helpful clear thinking.
Why isn’t this nutpicking? Because it is pretty within the general zeitgeist of what is currently happening. It’s not some outlier story that doesn’t fit or alters the narrative.
Nutpicking would be focusing on the schizophrenic protesting ICE because Zorblog, king of the lizard people is behind it.
We have a coordinated group of activists doing stuff like this, at enough of a scale that it is controlling a large portion of the media and political reaction. This example might have some outlier characteristics, but it doesn’t distort, change, or amplify what’s in the water. And to dismiss it as an anecdote is to attempt to tell people that the clear pattern in front of the can’t be extrapolated from or examined.
We just had a comment about some apparently prominent guys blogpost about how him and his wife are basically spending their winter vacationing through these protests.
In isolation, Pretti is a ‘nut’. Statistically what can we infer from a divorced murse with a gun getting in confrontations with ICE. Good is a ‘nut’, a newly lesbian widow, with children form multiple fathers, who gets involved with blocking ice with her vehicle.
Yes every anecdote has nutty contours, and no nobody here has “statistics” on just how many Karen a Karenchuck can Karen.
But the leap is to then, “you can’t notice what’s happening, who’s doing it, and the effects it’s having” is less than useless. It’s active attempts to disperse conversation from reaching “conclusions”. Some of it is malicious, a lot is “um ackshully autistic im-so-smart contrarianism”, a lot is quokkas gonna quokka.
But this anecdote here is not baseless, not nutpicking, and we’re well past the hour of avoiding noticing social trends and associated demographics by calling it “just a few kids on college campuses” metaphorically or not.
I really don't comprehend how you and @The_Nybbler think the argument is "It's a few kids on college campuses" (well, I do, I think the attack is disingenuous, but that doesn't get us anywhere). No, it's a not a dodge. It's, as for example @Jesweez pointed out above, largely a matter of what you notice more (and what you choose to or want to notice). If you think bitches be crazy, you will see a lot of crazy bitches, and social media will feed you more and more of them. If you think specifically 50-year-old liberal women are losing their minds, you will see lots of 50-year-old liberal women losing their minds. If you think right-wing e-thots are on the rise, you will see lots of right-wing e-thots. I don't think I have to repeat myself about how easy it is to convince yourself that conspiratorial Jews or murderous black cannibals are everywhere.
Show me some "clear thinking" that shows specifically that 50-something women are increasing in both mental instability and liberalness because Minneapolis videos are trending.
I mean, the stats about progressive women's mental health tanking are out there. Its just whether you personally want to connect that, and other statistical facts with the viral videos and think the world makes sense. Or, if you think the videos are basically algo-slop and totally disconnected from progressive women's mental health, the fact that the governor of the state had been in Little Rock 1950s mode for 3 months, etc.
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Because that's what they're getting told, and I'm getting told, and everyone who posts an example of 'real world effects' is getting told: this is nothing, this is just a few kids on college campuses, this is only an exceptional edge case, nobody is saying that, nobody is doing that, it won't and doesn't affect you at all, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseam.
EDIT: Whoops, I forgot the ever-popular "Well nobody I know said/does/thinks that!"
Post example where this does have an effect on 'ordinary life' - get told 'you are engaging in boo outgroup'.
Post second example - get told 'why are you obsessing over this fringe trivial thing?'
Remaining options: continue trying to demonstrate with examples from real life why you think this is a big thing and get routinely slapped down for that, or shut up and go along with the new normal (the preferred outcome for those slapping you down, so they can then say in future 'well nobody is objecting to this so it's fine and okay and widely accepted').
Be stubborn, contrarian, slightly autistic, no social skills whatsoever, probably also slightly mentally deranged, and keep doggedly on with option number one in the full knowledge you'll get called all sorts of names and have all sorts of motives attributed to you. Not claiming superior virtue or higher principles, just being the stubborn, obstinate donkey that won't be drove as ever.
Do you think it can also be the case that people show videos of the kind of people they hate to argue that the kind of people they hate are all like this?
Of course they can, and they do it on both sides.
But I also think there comes a point where the denial of "there is nothing wrong" carries on even when the iceberg has smashed against the bow. "Well we're not underwater yet, it's just a few rooms in the front!"
Okay, so you think that indeed, GenX liberal women are going crazy en mass and I am doing "It's a few kids on college campuses" when I question whether a few viral videos is evidence of this?
See, I'm early Gen X/late Boomer, depending where you draw the generational line, and I feel more Gen X. So I see my cohort around me, and they're not making viral videos, but they sure are way more liberal, more woke if you want to call it that, with very little resistance to what is being imported from America.
I honestly cannot emphasise strongly enough the huge sea change in values and social mores over the past forty years, more particularly in the past twenty years. We've gone from the Magdalene Laundries to advice columns in the mainstream media with agony aunts dealing with questions such as "my friend goes after married men for affairs, I feel I can't handle this anymore" and "my husband is no longer interested in sex, should I divorce him or just have an affair?"
That's the 80s kids (Gen X) growing up, becoming adults, and adopting liberal cosmopolitan values from the outside world as mediated to us via movies, TV, the more socially liberal society of the UK next door, and aspirations to be just like the US where a lot of people emigrated to, then maybe returned during the Celtic Tiger era (which again, in the few dizzying years of 'we're rich! properly rich!' meant people got notions, as we say round here).
So, yeah. I'm here to say "it's only a few viral videos" does not cover the whole ground of what is going on.
I'm about the same age as you. I'm going to say that growing up in a country that had the Magdalene Laundries, you probably have seen a much more massive change than I have. That said, how many GenX women in Ireland are going viral like this?
I certainly see many of my generation going woke (especially women) but I see much greater numbers of Millenials, who are the ones I mostly see going diehard woke (along with Gen-Zers, but I'm still not really sure what to make of them yet). Clinton's and Harris's margins over Trump were very slim with GenX women compared to younger generations.
I am not arguing that wokeism "isn't a thing" or that we aren't seeing more radical polarization. Why do you think I have been so gloomy lately about that very thing? I was being very specific about the sort of nutpicking in the OP, who seems to be trying to make a very broad generalization about, specifically, older women. Do I think people protesting Trump or ICE are "a few kids on college campuses"? No. Do I think a few viral Karens, including Renee Goode et al, are? Statistically, yes.
I think we should be skeptical of "pattern-matching" a handful of tragi-comic figures who happen to look like your most mockable archetypal nemeses to some general demographic trend.
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I agree with @OliveTapenade. This is nutpicking enabled by modern social media. When there's a probably smartphone within range of just about anything happening in public nowadays, you can be sure that any time someone gets loud, aggressive, crazy, or weird, someone will start recording it and uploading it. This enables anyone who wants to post a regular stream of Karens Going Crazy, Black People Doing Crime, White People Doing Racism, Gen Z Zombies, etc. etc. will have no trouble finding content.
We're not going to "mod-slap" you for this, though it does border on "Can you believe what Those People did this week?" I would prefer we not have endless threads about "Look at the latest crazy thing some people did that validates my biases" but to a certain extent I understand the urge to post the latest crazy thing Those People did.
You say that as if it was a bad thing. Frankly the world would be a getter place if loud, agressive crazy and weird people got immediately slapped (literally or figuratively) but since that doesn't look to be happening, the best we can hope is at least some face negative consequences via such videos.
Not per se. But if my goal is "Prove that a certain subset of people is loud, aggressive and crazy" and I can find lots of videos of people being loud, aggressive and crazy and I am always looking for the subset of people I hate doing that, it suggests that when I post those videos and say "These people are loud, aggressive, and crazy" you should be skeptical.
Okay, so how about if someone posts videos of "look at group X doing all this loud, aggressive, crazy stuff!"
You retort "This is nutpicking, this is boo outgroup, why didn't you post videos of group Y and group Z as well if you're not trying to pick out that subset group X?"
But what if they can't find videos of group Y and group Z doing the same things, because groups Y and Z don't do that thing? If the only people playing basketball are all seven feet tall, then it's not discriminatory special pleading to only have videos of basketball matches where all the players are seven feet tall, and requiring "show me the five foot tall players before I believe you are not bearing a grudge against the seven footers" is an unachievable request.
Though I guess it is refreshing, for once, to have late middle-age white women be the outgroup being booed! I feel so seen and vindicated!
No, I retort "Is this a representative sample or did you go looking for videos of group X because you wanted to make a point about group X?"
Why are Karens screaming at ICE more representative than all the Karens getting screamed at by younger women for voting for Trump?
That might be evidence that group Y and group Z are also not doing those things much. In the case of the crazy woke agitators, though, I'd be astonished if you couldn't find more than enough Millenials and Gen-Zers to fill your feed.
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Some people will never figure out that no, it's not just a few kids on college campuses. Even when they make a podcast about how they're teaching it all in elementary schools.
It is not your personal obsessive counter-argument. It's a broader phenomenon, and in terms you might care about, it's "Why is the culture war manifesting like this?" Framed as the OP did, it's "Why are 50-year-old women like this?" Using a few videos as evidence that this is a phenomenon with 50-year-old women is shoddy thinking. You are capable of reasoning this out when your fingers aren't twitching reflexively to post insults.
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That's smack in the right era for Generation X, who grew up with tales of the counter-cultural heroism of their parents, lived through recession, and became more conservative and more nihilistic: the Grunge generation.
These women are now old enough that the kids are probably out of the nest, so they can take part in the kinds of protests their parents (may) have. Time to be socially important yourself now! Think of The Breakfast Club and how these women may see themselves as heroines of that movie.
Princess and Basket Case were heroines?
Basket Case became an elementary school teacher with a podcast.
That movie was "the kids are all right, teacher leave them kids alone". They all had backstories explaining why they were the way they were, and the over-rigid teacher trying to dragoon them all into conformity was the bad guy. Even the 'bad boy' was secretly sensitive under it all, remember?
So if you're the right age to have been watching the Brat Pack movies during your teens/early twenties, you'll be influenced by the role models there.
I was 10 in 85, I didn't see it in the cinema.
I prefer to think of them as negative examples with backstories they fail to rise above.
We should excuse the acting out?🤮
That was the crux of the movie! Misunderstood kids, domineering adults who didn't understand them and used them as props in their own lives or ignored them.
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To be fair, this is, what, three examples? I want to at least venture another hypothesis, which is that America is a very large country and there's always going to be, in most demographics, some small percentage of people who are crazy. As populations have increased, the absolute number of crazies has also increased, but the amount of space in the media spotlight has stayed the same. (In fact it may have shrunk, due to media consolidation, and the increasing nationalisation of politics.) This makes competition for attention more intense. In times of elevated public interest in this or that issue, the number of crazies trying to get attention by exploiting that issue will be high, and the existence of YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, etc., allows for rapid dissemination of memes, as well as a kind of survival of the fittest optimising for the most shareable.
So it may be that nothing in particular is wrong with women in their 50s, but that nonetheless the spectacle of entitled older women yelling at poor service workers is very memetically successful. There could be plenty of reasons for that - I suggest that the power differential is a big one, with older middle-class people with money holding power over younger and poorer frontline workers - but I suspect you can colour in those blanks yourself.
It may be worth, after all, the reminder that both white women and over-50s are demographics Trump won all three times. The specific intersection of women over 50 just barely favoured Harris, 50-49 in 2024, and if you restricted that to white women over 50, you'd get a win for Trump. So white women in their 50s are not, by national standards, a particularly Democratic demographic. What's going on with 50 year old women right now? Plausibly the answer is - nothing special.
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It would be interesting to see what they would think if a large group of illegal mexicans with criminal records showed up to their Yoga class. The issue with this class of people is that their worldview doesn't add up. They want to live among white middle class people who want to invite the world. This will result in them living in world different from what they want.
The problem is that while this is very true, and while they may eventually realize their mistakes (emphasis on may; there are plenty of upper middle class white libs in places like Brazil and South Africa), by that point it will be far too late to fix anything - see Lebanon. So “I told you so” is at most a brief, meaningless future catharsis in a worse world. These people need to be removed from any power now.
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FWIW, the idea that "If you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem" is an idea that has been around for a while, at least since the 1960s. And while it holds a certain moral appeal, it's easy to see how it can be abused. In fact, it's very common for totalitarian governments to require average people to show support for the regime.
That's an interesting question; in my own life I've definitely noticed that there is pattern of middle-aged women who get caught up in Leftist politics to the point where they are pretty crazy. Actually, my impression is that a lot of young women as well are going this route but it seems to be the middle aged women who are more active and aggressive.
Pure speculation, but I would guess that there are two main reasons. First, women as a group are much more prone to mass hysteria. Social media and smartphones act as a sort of consensus-building machine, with the average person having a lot of opportunity to be steeped in constant propaganda. Second, generally speaking it's really a lot of fun to be a young woman. When you are constantly being catered to by society, invited to do fun things, etc. there's less time to agitate and less feeling of dissatisfaction to blame on the outgroup. That being said, my sense is that young women these days harbor many of the same feelings about the Current Thing.
There's that Orwell quote from 1984 about the young women being the most fanatical supporters of Ingsoc and worshippers of Big Brother.
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