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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   25063 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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Kind of a side bar, but it's really interesting watching Democrats openly promise vengeance on all companies who did business with the Trump administration. That seems like a risky tactic.

FYI, the wikipedia page doesn't contain the quote you're referencing.

We have all read Scott; we all know the quote. That's the point of a shared literary canon; you can allude to it without having to quote the whole thing. And, in any case, the Wikipedia page does include the story:

Chen Sheng and Wu Guang were both army officers who were ordered to lead their bands of commoner soldiers north to participate in the defense of Yuyang... However, they were stopped halfway in present-day Anhui province by flooding from a severe rainstorm. The harsh Qin laws mandated execution for those who showed up late for government jobs, regardless of the nature of the delay. Figuring that they would rather fight than accept execution, Chen and Wu organized a band of 900 villagers to rebel against the government.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/

So am I claiming that the feminist war on “nice guys” is totally uncorrelated with the existence of the manosphere?

No. I’m saying the causal arrow goes the opposite direction from the one B’s suggesting. As usual with gender issues, this can be best explained through a story from ancient Chinese military history.

Chen Sheng was an officer serving the Qin Dynasty, famous for their draconian punishments. He was supposed to lead his army to a rendezvous point, but he got delayed by heavy rains and it became clear he was going to arrive late. The way I always hear the story told is this:

Chen turns to his friend Wu Guang and asks “What’s the penalty for being late?”

“Death,” says Wu.

“And what’s the penalty for rebellion?”

“Death,” says Wu.

“Well then…” says Chen Sheng.

And thus began the famous Dazexiang Uprising, which caused thousands of deaths and helped usher in a period of instability and chaos that resulted in the fall of the Qin Dynasty three years later.

The moral of the story is that if you are maximally mean to innocent people, then eventually bad things will happen to you. First, because you have no room to punish people any more for actually hurting you. Second, because people will figure if they’re doomed anyway, they can at least get the consolation of feeling like they’re doing you some damage on their way down.

I don't think it's really that risky, given that tech has been against them no matter how hard the D's bounce on it; and people are really starting to HATE hate tech companies.

Despite the feelings about it people have, business in general and tech specifically is pro republican as a rule.

They have DEI programs and pride socks and what have you because +-70% of anyone who is worth anything as an employee has libertarian views on social issues; as someone in such a field one autistic trans hypergeniuse who can't make a phone call but can recite every instruction ever processed by a RISC chip is worth any amount of chud bonafides, and most of the human capital pilled conservatives either grit their teeth or don't actually give enough of a shit to not work at eg lockheed. The people that have explicitly anti-libertarian views and mean it are disproportionately dysgenic low IQ types who are worth pissing off to secure talent.

So, you have your pride socks and DEI program and stump for Republicans because despite all the bloviating and selffelation, RFK is never actually going to cut into Nestle's bottom line and they (R's) will crush unions, allow you to employ illegal labor, de-regulate, lower taxes, and also increase government spending on contractors and lower interest rates and fuck a debt ceiling if the numbers don't look good.

They know which side the bread is buttered by, if you will.

tech specifically is pro republican as a rule.

I have no idea what fantasy you have right now but tech is woke as af. I was there.

Employees who get uppity and threaten profits are obviously beaten down or fired, but for everything else, maximum woke it is.

Tech LABOR is woke, tech OWNERSHIP is chud.

The people who use their big brains to do stuff are disproportionately woke across the population; the people that use their big bank accounts to run shit are disproportionately chud across the population.

You are observing the interpersonal relations of the prole class, not the economic motivations of the owning class.

I have no idea what fantasy you have right now but tech is woke as af. I was there.

I think it's a specific kind of woke. Flattening it is a huge mistake.

Of course you can't have tech without the autistic MtFs and the ACE chicks, and so there's a very predictable LGBT contingent. And the companies are all extremely woke on BLM/DEI side and all that. But they are not "capitalism is systemic plunder of the poor" wokes or "we stand with Iran" wokes.

There's plenty of capitalism-is-systemic-plunder-of-the-poor people making mid-6-figures and building up some really nice equity at the FAANGs. You can be a Marxist as long as you don't oppose the wokes.

"Capitalism is systemic plunder of the poor" is not wokeness, it's good old fashioned communism. One of the main criticism the old left has of wokeness is that it leaves corporations intact as long as an appropriate fraction of CEOs are queer women of color. See rainbow capitalism, /r/stupidpol, Freddie deBoer's nightmare scenario, etc.

Not so much, when you look at intersectional wokeness and the “all the evils are connected”.

Look for example at the pro-Palestinian folks talking about how anti-LGBT activism is connected to climate is connected to colonialism.

I deeply appreciate you fighting this fight. I've tried, but the vernacular of our society (and thus, this website) is wildly unable to separate the woke from the old left.

By this standard the Democrats are pro-Republican.

That is correct!

The democrats are left social corporatists slowly unrolling state capacity to manage, the republicans used to be right social corporatists slowly unrolling state capacity to manage, and are now right social corporatists quickly unrolling state capacity to manage.

It's why even though democratic policy goals are massively popular, the democratic party is completely despised: they say some FDR shit and then follow the regan program.

Both parties contain factions …

Not being a literal communist is not the same thing as being "pro Republican".

Being anti regulation, pro corporate power over labor, pro lower taxes, anti lowering spending does though, is the thing.

Eg, DEMs have Lina Khan, REPs have one of those bobbing bird toys with a rubber stamp that says "Go Nuts" on it.

It doesn't matter how woke you are if on one side the government says "You can't fucking do that, also say these woke shiboleths" and on the other the government says "Say these chud shiboleths and in exchange do whatever the fuck you want"

No. Might make you an anti-woke Democrat though.

But the original claim was that tech was pro-republican.

And anyway, not really. Being pro-DEI, but anti-"capitalism is systemic plunder of the poor" doesn't make you anti-woke.

Ah yeah, sorry, context was lost there.

I agree tech isn’t pro-republican.

I even agree it’s not anti-woke, but it does represent within woke a fairly distinct faction,

Certainly not. The libertarians got purged, converted, or driven to silence during earlier phases of the Culture War; the woke DEI-and-pride supporter are as anti=libertarian as any given member of the Moral Majority in its heyday.

They have DEI programs and pride socks and what have you because +-70% of anyone who is worth anything as an employee has libertarian views on social issues; as someone in such a field one autistic trans hypergenius who can't make a phone call but can recite every instruction ever processed by a RISC chip is worth any amount of chud bonafides, and most of the human capital pilled conservatives either grit their teeth or don't actually give enough of a shit to not work at eg lockheed. The people that have explicitly anti-libertarian views and mean it are disproportionately dysgenic low IQ types who are worth pissing off to secure talent.

Or "God bless America" for short.

I don't think they can. Pretty much all major tech companies have been cozy with Trump. Giving him millions of dollars, awards, eating dinner with him. Democrats can't go against all tech simultaneously. They can seek vengeance on Musk. But not also Google and Meta and Amazon, etc.

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