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This forum seems to be missing the biggest actual culture war battleground of the week: The US Hockey Gold Medal team.
For those who haven't heard, the US Men's Hockey Team won the gold medal over Canada, on an overtime goal by Jack Hughes. The team celebrated, the country celebrated, and everything was great, until it wasn't.
Kash Patel was part of the celebration, for some reason. Apparently he's a hockey fan, as I've read he was attending games when Ovechkin was nearing Gretzky's goal record. And then there was a call from Donald Trump to congratulate the team, where he made a joke ("I'll have to invite the women's team, too, or they'll impeach me.")
Of course, the usual suspects have come out of the woodwork to scold then men for being bros.
Jodi Walker called them losers.
The New York Times decided to praise the defector while shaming the victorious Americans.
Mary Clarke says that they failed to meet the cultural moment, and boy is she waging the culture war. Some highlights include reminding us that a black woman won a gold medal in hockey, bemoaning that the NHL is 44% Republican, decrying the hiring of someone accused of and found not guilty of sexual assault, implying his guilt.
Then, finally, she has the gall to say this:
Well, Mary, you are responsible for writing the message of this team, and you are participating in making sure the message you dislike is the one that's getting spread.
For a reasonable take, I always go back to the characteristic machine:
And a quoted response
This really does cut to the core of it. There is a civic ritual, which we can all participate in. Civic in a way that crosses race and sex and religion, or should, at least. But not anymore. We are not allowed to have civic rituals unless they pay obeisance to the cult of multiculturalism, unless they celebrate black women and foreigners and anyone but straight white men.
ETA: Two more posts, more from the fans with substacks and less from the professional pundits:
Don't Let Them Fucking Take It From You
The Sports Exile
This second one really pissed me off, and this quote in particular. Patriotism was abandoned by the left, not weaponized by the right. You left (pun intended). As evidenced by a later paragraph:
"I'm proud to be an American" "Wow, why do you only care about yourself, why don't you care about me?"
They reveal themselves as unamerican at every opportunity.
Wait, that was the misogynistic joke? That’s it? I’m not sure how that’s supposed to be offensive or sexist to anyone.
To quote the video (in the video Trump says this in a joking way, breaking into a chuckle as he mentions the women's team):
To steelman:
I get that you see nothing wrong with it (and I think it is fine too), but that is why some people (like Clarke) find it offensive - and there is an actual conflict between worldviews here, the feminists aren't just mistaken.
is a ridiculous idea. It's like pretending that children's sports is equal to young adults', or that local leagues are equal to world championships. Obviously false, and everyone knows it. Is it really necessary to pretend otherwise?
Yes, actually; if they get taken seriously maybe more [women] will show up to compete, which has downstream positive social effects in the long term. More value for people who Do The Thing means the population at large is more interested in Doing The Thing and sends a message we value Those Who Show Up. To the extent you want women to Show Up, this is important.
That said, if [women as class = feminists] take it for granted and start attacking men because of it- that they're not being honored above and beyond because they didn't realize- or that their mothers (including public surrogates like teachers) failed to impress upon them- that the entire reason they have this league is already the 'above and beyond'?
Then it's OK for men not want to continue that pretense, to not be interested in making the space for them, and more accepting of reminding them more frequently that the deal/concession didn't need to exist.
Which is a shame, because again, to even be a female athlete in these competitions means you have certain qualities that it would honestly be a waste not to hold up as an example, so as always it's the worthy who suffer here.
That's a load-bearing "maybe" you have there. The same/similar arguments have been made about all sorts of things with poor female representation like STEM and video games. Tons of money and effort have been poured into these outreach efforts (and a lot of outright discrimination against men too) with nothing much to show for it.
Wake me up when an outreach program for more female coal miners gets some serious attention from the mainstream media.
Maybe.
Then maybe just, like, don't do that? We can talk about whether the structures allowing/encouraging female participation enable corruption inherently- and indeed, some of them clearly have (academia in particular); but if your answer is "they all do and this is an intractable problem so huge it should never be done", then the natural next question is "then why should men be exempt from this in the organizations that solely permit them/to what degree should they be exempt/what happens when they exceed that exemption"[0]?
That isn't to say that it isn't time to move on from the current system- indeed, it can no longer serve its primary function, and its time has come.
Do you even know what the ultimate objective of these representation programs even were? It wasn't "give privileges to the unworthy and reintroduce 19th-century sexism from the other direction", it's specifically "make sure the worthy do not give up". The tenor of society at the time this issue started to be raised was that this was a somewhat-undue burden on worthy women, so that's how the chips fell.
The liberal experiment has... I hesitate to say "failed", but more that it has run its course and now needs reform, because it in large part stopped being about this and started about being a sociofinancial hand-out to the corrupt and worthless. You can see this in the way progressives argue for men in women's sports- the entire point was to encourage worthy women, not to let [the Establishment] make it all about their political power instead.[1]
The problem with the "experiment" is both that it didn't count on corruption (and you can expect liberals to ignore that angle), and related to that, that it is ultimately incapable of yielding tangible/measurable results. We know that we can't turn a woman into a man[2], but both understand dignity in more or less the same ways, and that's what we're buying for the extra cash. In the end, it doesn't actually matter what the record is (re: Goodhart); but we can encourage the process.
Again, the objective wasn't really even to increase female representation: the problem was to ensure that women who should be participating are not discouraged by the lack of prior participation (or the logic believing in [0] demands). And it did succeed in this, perhaps a bit too well.
[0] Of course, in traditionalism the answer to that question is an axiomatic "because men are better", but this comes with certain other problems that traditionalists have had the last 100 years to answer for. It appears they may have dropped the ball somewhat.
[1] Though I will note that this was all about the liberal Establishment's political power when they set this up; encouraging worthy women was a demonstration and advancement of their political power. This is why progressives call themselves liberals.
[2] And the fact that people are actually trying to do this is perhaps the biggest indicator that the devotion to the measure ate the expected outcome. (That's not all it indicates, but it has something to do with it.)
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