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I'll be honest, that show radicalised me far more than "Andrew Tate" could ever hope to.
UK's statistics show a downward trend of violence against women over the years, a pattern that's remained consistent throughout Andrew Tate's influencer period. So even if we generously allow the dubious "correlation = causation" logic, empirical facts point in the opposite direction of the show's premise.
I'm overgeneralising, but progressives are consistently inviting allegations that facts and figures function as their worst kryptonite. The irony is compounded by the real world assault charges against the actor who played the black detective.
And for a production that lampoons boomers for their lack of tech literacy, the show itself mirrors the very species of reflexive (and completely unfounded) moral panic stoked by suburban karens over violent video games in the 2000s.
The actual crime is young white men's perceived departure from progressive politics, but that is not enough to cause alarm. You need to engineer a moral hysteria that your 13yo sons are gonna murder your daughters. But really, you're streisand effecting stuff like this. Progressives seem to have forgotten what teenagers are like. They push boundaries, they don't care what it is but if it's a sacred cow to the adults, they will push those buttons. Perhaps they thought bible thumpers would be the butt of the jokes forever and cannot fathom being seen as the out of touch scrooges themselves.
Yet we're told that men are the ones being radicalised! Women's concerns are a failure of society and men, but men's concerns are a failure of men.
And yet, young able bodied men continue to disproportionately shoulder physically intensive and dangerous vocations that sustain modern infrastructure - the grid, roads, energy, built environment. Men still account for >90% of all occupational fatalities. Male labour remains foundational to the physical backborn of the modern world. Yet, the culture allows anti-male messaging to proliferate without consequence, while framing women's minimal participation in these fields not as a reflection of preferences or average physical differences, but as society's failure to accommodate them. Collective male guilt for crimes committed by men is axiomatic, but collective male credit for dangerous, essential labour carried out by men is never acknowledged.
And despite this, we are not allowed to write stories about male heroism without extensive ideological throat clearing to accomodate girl power mandates. Women are encouraged to retrofit male oriented media (movies that they don't watch and video games that they don't play) with feminist themes, to atone for the arbitrary crime of pandering to male power fantasies and featuring female character designs that appeal to straight men. Frank discussion of men's distinctive struggles is permissible only when prefaced by deference to feminist priors.
Times are a-changing. White guilt petered out with the George Floyd riots, the "Holocaust industry" ran out out of steam with the Gaza war, the "misogyny industry" is next. Acknowledging men's unique qualities and contributions, and extending reciprocal respect, is unlikely to leave women worse off. Quite the contrary, in fact.
This right here has to be my biggest objection to Woke/Social Justice/Leftism/cultural marxism thought when applied to historical 'privilege' arguments.
Collective guilt is assumed. Guilt for your ancestors' bad behavior is mandatory. And of course you can be collectively lumped in with people you've never associated with and share no beliefs with if someone deems you to possess enough characteristics in common with them.
But credit or pride? No, silly, you can't be proud of things members of your group did! You can't take credit for advances that were achieved by your forefathers! Those were individual accomplishments that you had no role in! Why would we let you claim those in the present? But of course the fact that you benefited from them should make you feel MORE guilty over your privilege!
Nevermind that whatever the mechanism they claim allows guilt to propagate forward through time... should by definition also carry credit and accolades forward.
And they do that because a fair accounting would make it clear that in the grand scheme, the amount of suffering that Westerners have caused in history, while it is a staggering amount, is on net outweighed by the sheer magnitude of benefits they have achieved for all humans, everywhere, and continue to achieve. So if you want to hold modern Westerners accountable for sins of their fathers, don't be surprised if they start looking back and taking credit for and pride in the successes and victories of their fathers, too.
Obligatory Thomas Sowell banger.
I really must read one of his books, every time someone shares one of his quotes on Substack or quotes him in an essay he comes off as incredibly sharp and perceptive.
He's the rare intellectual that lives up to the hype, and balances sharp wit with incisive commentary, backed by actual research.
Shame he's so old, we won't have him for much longer.
Not to be a contrarian, and I don't mean to disrespect Thomas Sowell whom I know little about, but I don't think that's a revelationary quote. It's something obvious that any intelligent person would have observed, except that if you say it out loud, you will get accused of white supremacy and fired from your job.
Thomas Sowell has the benefits that he is a black man so the usual white supremacy accusations don't stick (I'm sure they'll call him an Uncle Tom, though) and
he has life tenure as a judge of the supreme court. That enables him to say what everyone is thinking without the usual blowback. I'm glad he's saying it, but I don't think it's a particularly insightful or original thought.He's done a lot of useful research and distills insights down to pithy sayings that even normies can comprehend.
Him being black is surely a factor, but his observational abilities are extremely keen by any reasonable measure.
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That's Clarence Thomas, not Thomas Sowell.
Oops, you're right. How embarrassing. Wikipedia tells me Thomas Sowell was a professor at UCLA between 1974 and 1980 and is now 95 years old, so clearly in a position to say whatever he wants. But the quote isn't necessarily recent; when did he say that?
If he was a tenured professor at ACLU that's still consistent with my point that he was in a unique position to say what was obvious to anyone with a brain. Kind of similar to Jordan Peterson who could say the things he said because he was a tenured professor who didn't have to worry about losing his job, not because he was the first person to ever think of them.
JK Rowling is another example. And many such cases.
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This isn't true, though. A common, but not major, "woke" talking point is that black people ought to be proud of all the things their ancestors did, often including rather historically questionable claims of inventions or identities, such as the claim that Shakespeare plagiarized from a black woman or that Cleopatra was black. Of course, this is often justified on the basis that this sort of pride is only to make up for the way oppressive society forces them to be shamed merely for existing or whatever, but also of course, the actual explanation doesn't matter. It's just who/whom, based on identities that educated people can convince themselves belong to whatever part of the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.
In short, your ingroup oppression points and achievements are positively correlated. One woman's achievements are treated as collective credit for all women. And women get to hijack men's inventions by claiming female erasure, an ironic which systematically hinges on male erasure.
IMO woke history revisionism is one of the most damaging trends in modern academia, simply because of how much it is allowed to proliferate uncritically or even treated with any seriousness. It usually manifests in the systematic downplaying (or outright denial) of slavery, human sacrifice and other endemic practices among non white civilisations, and claiming that white men somehow introduced these vices to their otherwise harmonious civilisations.
There's also a recurring theme in progressive history circles to claim the Americas would've still evolved to become the modern superpower that it is today had European settlers never arrived on these shores, as if leaving the indigenous peoples entirely undisturbed would have produced equivalent institutional, scientific, and industrial outcomes. Even though historical and even current parameters do not support this claim.
I doubt even they believe this though, but saying it out loud would get them exiled by their ingroup as it would be implying that atrocities (real or perceived) against indigenous Americans was justified as it had led to more productive outcomes.
Yes, but also, this is just a generic problem with anything "woke" in academia, because one of the core tenets of "woke" is the rejection of logic, rationality, and empirical evidence in favor of "other ways of knowing" based on claims by people who belong to favored identity groups, since the former are oppressive inventions of White Supremacy and Patriarchy. As such, there's no limiting factor for claims made by people who are at or close to the top of the oppression totem pole. Academics resolve the cognitive dissonance between this and the fact that academia is fundamentally about applying reason, evidence, and skepticism, by just looking the other way when such claims are made. This applies outside academia, too, of course.
I'm sure some are performing like this - perhaps more now than ever - but let me assure you, I know for a fact that this is a genuine, sincere belief that has been held by at least one person in this group, and I have near-fact-level confidence that an extremely high proportion of people claiming this also do genuinely, sincerely believe it (to whatever extent anyone can be said to genuinely believe anything, anyway).
You're right, they probably do genuinely believe it. But I think that's marginally better than being dishonest with your own intellect and staying in the bandwagon out of fear of getting kicked out. You can make a far stronger case for States' rights being the leading cause of the Civil War, but no reputable journal will ever publish it. You'll only see them arguing against it, while allowing far more methodologically flawed papers arguing for woman the hunter. I just think, absent any social/career cost of offending progressives, academics will more readily reject these narratives offhand. Instead, it's pick the wokest answer and write backwards, basically.
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Perhaps, although I think they allow you to feel pride only in proportion to the amount of oppression that was heaped upon your people.
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If I was of a group that had barely any ancestors [particularly, of my gender] that did anything interesting, it's only natural I'd be tearing down the notion anyone should be proud of that too, least of all the people closest to me (i.e. men) whose ancestors actually did do anything interesting.
I would also be incredibly concerned about the fact that the technological developments that even allow me to feel this way in the first place were also nearly exclusively developed by those ancestors. I would claim that the reason why my ancestors have no achievements is out of malice, and make sure the dominant pretense in society is that my gender (in aggregate) is just as capable- because if those guys organized (in the way my gender does instinctively), they would shut me out again.
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It doesn't work as kryptonite. If facts and figures are necessary, they just make them up, and the media (which they control) will back their play. Control of the mainstream media is a superweapon.
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