Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
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Notes -
Looking for anti-woke books on parenting, preferably secular. How does raise children to not be woke? How does one teach them the gospel of success through hard work and mastery through practice? How does one handle the hypergamy question? How to balance tolerance with an appropriate level of caution around "inner-city youth"?
media which increases the positive valence of western culture at a young age (Little House on the Prarie), decreases positive valence of other cultures (old YouTube documentaries on foreign savagery), or makes fun of wokes (no idea where you’d find this, maybe there are some old cartoons out there )
This is not real and this is also not a gospel. Why would you want them to internalize the unhappiness-generating myth that their personal effort leads to success, by which you mean income? There is no study that shows this. It’s a mix of genetic factors (personality, IQ, beauty, height), social factors outside one’s immediate control (where one is raised, early peer group), social factors in one’s immediate influence but unrelated to effort per se (networking), and luck. The notion that “hard work” is a toggleable feature in humans which has a role in their success may be a useful glue to keep poor people quiet and make the wealthy feel even prouder, but it is the least proven of all the possible factors of socioeconomic success. Terence Tao is a funny example of this mythmaking. He obviously loves math, he was raised to love it, he has the genetic features for it (including a likely +1 Racial Trait), and has a social life which revolves around math that administers all the right social reinforcements. He will tell you to work hard, but when you actually look at what that means, it involves only working when he wants to, and not working when he is tired or unmotivated. It’s, like, an hour of hard work followed by a nap and a pleasant stroll. And you look at his interviews and he has no stress while working and clearly loves it. But of course, when a person loves his work and its accompanying frustrations he often calls it “hard work”, even when the whole thing was pleasant and a preferable experience (even gamers and climbers do this). And it is the socially-ascribed way of taking about one’s productivity. Similarly you can look at Magnus Carlsen: little toggleable effort that he pressed to succeed, it’s in his DNA, and when truly stressful “hard work” actually became required to win competitions he gave up competing.
That was the mainstream position prior to circa 1960; Western white people Could Do No Wrong, and everyone else was seen as half-beast. Then people realised that that view wasn't entirely accurate, assumed¹ that the opposite of a false claim must be the truth², and adopted the position that people of colour Could Do No Wrong, and white people were half-demon.
The truth of the matter is that cultures both in and out of the 'western' cluster have done both good and bad things.
"There are very few black or white hats in history; most are in the charcoal or slate range." --A. J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All
¹...and do you know what happens when you ass u me?
²"A car with a broken engine cannot drive backward at 200 mph, even if the engine is really really broken." --E. Yudkowsky
That’s not what happened in the 60s. There was a movement that actively sought to make Western culture seem worse than it was through propaganda. The entire civil rights movement was based on the idea that White people were acting irrationally for not wanting to be around a group that was more violent and disordered, for instance. And when reality gets in the way of someone’s preconditioned beliefs, they are more apt to doubt reality rather than their social conditioning, which we see in all manner of political topics. Somebody raised to believe that everyone is absolutely equal will look at racial crime data across three continents and adjusted for income and conclude that reality is wrong, and their media-driven conditioning is correct. That’s just how conditioning works.
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