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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32430 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Harry Potter and the Vibe Shift

I actually was thinking about giving this topic a rest - it makes me feel like I'm being radicalized in slow motion - but...just when I thought I was out...some room for optimism: NY Times: In Defense of J.K. Rowling

To give a brief rundown of the situation:

  1. NYTimes employees in conjunction with GLAAD released a letter putting pressure on the NYTimes for reporting in a "biased" fashion on trans issues recently and how it's being used by states to pass bills against gender medicine.

  2. The NYT...actually shows some spine and refuses to bend, saying: “...But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD’s advocacy mission and The Times’s journalistic mission are different.". Who would have thought that we'd get to the point where a basic recognition of the different role of activists and journalists would be noteworthy?

  3. Apparently the NYT also posted an internal memo warning NYT staffers against public working with an activist organization against their own company stating that they: "will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums."

  4. Then, we see what the bruhaha was likely about and what the open letter was trying to preempt: we get the above op-ed yesterday, basically defending JKR against the criticism she faced - ahead of the release of The Witch Trials of JKR by Megan Phelps-Roper, an escapee from the Westboro Baptist Church.

In essence: the same strategy we've seen from wreckers and ideologues time after time played out, but the Times did the bare minimum and acted like adults. At a certain point - just as with wreckers like Felicia Somnez at WaPo - I suppose it simply became too much for too little gain. The constant fitna was fine when it was in service of popular causes with little cost, but now seems to be in service of a cause that is dragging many people down. So why not put out the op-ed, while also keeping the workers in line?

Said article's content?

This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.

So why would anyone accuse her of transphobia? Surely, Rowling must have played some part, you might think.

...

But nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic. She is not disputing the existence of gender dysphoria. She has never voiced opposition to allowing people to transition under evidence-based therapeutic and medical care. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing. There is no evidence that she is putting trans people “in danger,” as has been claimed, nor is she denying their right to exist.

Nothing here is new to anyone who spent any time checking on the actual words of JKR and her defenders. But it is interesting to see the NYT posting about it and fighting the pushback, especially as it follows the incredible failure of the Hogwarts: Legacy boycott and Sturgeon's fall from power*

The backlash can no longer be written off as the cultural peculiarity of "TERF Island" - a desperate rhetorical ploy used by activists to distract the blind. It's not just a European thing. It's everywhere.

My personal take was that transactivism was just the next, inevitable step in the march to atomization in liberalism. And it probably still is. But there may be bridges too far, even for liberals. I hope.

A good note to leave the trans issue on for at least a while and reset my brain before I become some sort of schizo, hyper-reactionary monarchist or something. Maybe go play a few new games...

* It's been a great month for her, after years of shit, I have to say.

Nothing here is new to anyone who spent any time checking on the actual words of JKR and her defenders.

I too, have Noticed the unnoticeable - that the anti-Rowling crowd will never, ever repeat Rowlings actual words or declared positions, or even describe her actions, instead retreating to overheated and non-specific assertions that Rowling 'hates trans people' or 'rejects their existence' or is conducting 'trans genocide'.

The inevitable winner of a war still loses a third of the battles, and the tide going out doesn't mean it'll stay out. The center has fought back against the farther-left many times over the past centuries - yet both move left.

And what has the NYT won, exactly? A commitment to allowing opinion pieces investigating harm to a small subset (youth) of trans people by overzealous medical approvals. This isn't an end to trans. Trans acceptance, generally, continues to grow, and the reaction to it by the NYT is much less harsh than it would've been in 2000. Gay marriage used to be a bridge too far, too!

NYTimes employees in conjunction with GLAAD released a letter

They did? That link currently starts with

UPDATE: Thursday, February 16, 2023

[...]

[...] GLAAD confirmed to us that they did not deliver a copy of our letter to the New York Times. We look forward to clarification from the Times.

Not sure what's going on there, but it sounds like there were two different letters getting conflated?

they did not deliver a copy of our letter to the New York Times

There are many options. Somebody else delivered the letter. GLAAD delivered it to an intermediary, which delivered it to NYT. The letter wasn't "delivered" at all, but was just published and then NYT was somehow notified of it. They delivered a copy of slightly different letter, same on substance, but modified enough to claim it's a different one.

The money part is here:

Additionally, though we coordinated timing with GLAAD

That's what the NYT was (very surprisingly) pushing back against - professional journalists and activists coordinating a campaign for a political cause, and acting essentially as one body, in action and coverage. It is a huge surprise for me because it's how the press has been operating for decades for now, and I kinda can understand why trans activists are upset - the lefty press has always been promoting the leftists causes in their coverage, why their cause is different from thousands of other causes before? Yet, as far as the substance of the charge goes, it is completely true, and for that purpose it's completely irrelevant who delivered what to where.

The "vibe shift" is a product of the center-left having won political power while feeling that it could have won more power if it weren't for the young left going all in on "defund the police" and other woke excesses. During Trump's presidency, the dem base was totally addicted to a constant stream of outrage over whatever Trump did that day. In those conditions, it's hard to get anyone on the left to care about the excesses of wokeness because Trump did something worse in their minds every day. Now he's out of the picture, people are kind of looking back on what happened during the summer of 2020 and cringing, and the center left has an opportunity to squash some of the grifters and radicals.

This is a backlash led by center left so they're not going to repeal most of the gains of "wokeness", they're still going to be broadly pro-trans and concerned about gender and racial disparities in a way that most of this site finds objectionable. But they're going to try to push back on the stupid stuff that hurts them, like trans activists demanding everyone boycott a nostalgic video game with positive trans representation because JKR said stuff they don't like.

I want to point out the cynical case- trans activists are terrible allies and abandoning them could easily be the woke coalition telling its most difficult members to know their place, not the decline of woke.

Trans activists are demanding, high drama, unsympathetic(at a basic level, they’re mentally ill people who look like either very ugly women or very weak men, which is not a very high status thing to be or something that finds it easy to garner sympathy), have no real message discipline, and tend to overextend themselves picking fights that they then expect to be bailed out of. ‘Teaching these people to be team players’ could very well take the form of letting them lose a few battles and telling them to deal with it.

Trans activists are

Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion. What I take to be your substantive point (progressives may simply be giving their least-popular allies a strategic time-out) is surely worth consideration, but making a laundry list of negative stereotypes about your outgroup still isn't allowed here.

Trans activists are demanding, high drama

I was thinking about this the other day. "High drama" is a descriptive that fits most of the progressive Left's current "intersectional" favorites. While the left of my youth used to be represented in the US by the likes of Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky, who conformed to The Motte's rules of discourse as naturally as right-wingers like William F. Buckley -- politics was very much like parents having a tense but polite discussion -- the last 10-15 years has seen the left's energy usurped by young gay-adjacent easily triggered women and minorities, which is a coalition of high drama 24/7. The right, starting with Trump, is certainly attempting to match them. That's why the culture war has erupted from the relatively staid discourse of the 1990s-2000s to the Clown World: The Musical show were are getting now, and why Trans activists were able to slip right in without tripping many center-left normy alarms. The volume was already turned up to their level.

As regards the NYT, I think this has less to do with Rowling and trans issues as such, and more that the newsroom staff overplayed their hand a while back. All the weeping and wailing and wringing of hands about being made unsafe because they permitted an opinion column by an outsider to be printed. The editor of the NYT is Dean Baquet, and as "the first black person to be executive editor", I'm sure he had an opinion about "black staffers don't feel safe" under his watch.

So they've been slapping down the new generation of journalists with demands on the woke axis, and this is just more of it. I'm glad to see it, but it doesn't shift the NYT being liberal and Democratic-aligned, just that the older generation are still in charge and don't like their self-image as good liberals challenged by the "you are supporting literal trans genocide!" generation.

As for Rowling herself, she's become toughened because she has had to become toughened. Right now there's a murder case of a young (apparently transgender) teen called Brianna Ghey, and the Usual Twitter Idiots jumped to the conclusion that this was a hate crime - "murdered for being trans in public". It looks more like "usual dumb teen fight that turned deadly" because the alleged assailants are two teens themselves, but that hasn't stopped the Usual Twitter Idiots claiming this was all the fault of J.K. Rowling and bigots being encouraged by TERF attitudes being tolerated 🙄 And of course, the usual vigils all over the place, even where they have nothing to do with this case, because it's allegedly a hate crime.

(Why yes, I am pissed off that people in my country are holding vigils for this. It's nothing but virtue signalling and it's odious because where are they holding vigils for all the ordinary murders that happen every day?)

I'm ready to call it now - preference cascade.

NYT publishing this article mere days after the abject failure of trans activists to organize a high-profile boycott is incredibly telling. And there's been lots of signs that public opinion (especially elite public opinion) has been getting brittle on the issue - no one likes getting bulled by moralists all the time, especially when they're your distant social lessers. Moreover, this isn't a dramatic turnabout & could get accepted fairly quickly by the laypeople - I had a leftist freind tell me umsolicited that they were sick of 'purity politics' on the left (though I checked, they didnt consider JKR cancellation to be an ecample - yet)

Cynical take 1- JKR got fed up & hired a big money PR firm. Possibly quite some time ago, with them waiting for (engineering?) a time and place to strike back. Her upcoming podcast series with the WBC escapee lady fits this theory nicely.

Cynical take 2 - Alternately, the powers that be decided that the TERF wars were sucking up too much oxygen & that it is now time for 'healing & reconciliation' and a renewed focus on squashing down the populist right. Which I've argued for before - right now is the worst possible time for leftist doctrinal infighting, their position is overextended and their enemy is visibly regrouping.

What do you think the results of the preference cascade will be? "hormones and surgery become 10% more difficult for minors to obtain"? Or what?

  • The amount of minors being referred to gender clinics drops to around 2010 levels

  • Trans people will no longer be sent to opposite sex prisons

  • Sports won't allow male athletes in female leagues

  • Slogans like "trans women are women" will go out the window.

  • Misgendering / deadnaming is seen as being rude, rather than beyond the pale.

Pretty sure the anti-trans NYT people would universally hold to 'trans women are women'. I don't see that going 'out the window'.

Not sure precisely what "rude, but not beyond the pale" means. Most trans people don't go into screeching fits of rage when misgendered, that is (I don't like saying this!) mostly an internet thing. Many of them are often misgendered by e.g. family members and go along with it.

I think many sports already don't allow transwoman athletes in female leagues, but could be wrong. Either way, that one seems plausible, although not any moreso than a week ago. I'd guess changes to prisons won't happen, but it's sufficiently noncentral to the trans movement that it might.

"The amount of minors being referred to gender clinics drops to around 2010 levels" - I don't see that happening. Most of the increase is caused not by lowered thresholds by medical professionals, but massively increasing interest in transitioning by minors (they learn about it via the internet or irl friends). So pulling back to 2010 levels would require much more restrictive standards.

Pretty sure the anti-trans NYT people would universally hold to 'trans women are women'. I don't see that going 'out the window'.

"Going out the window" means you're not going to have that argument thrown in your face if you disagree about letting trans people into opposite sex spaces, that you won't be forced to recite the slogan, and that you won't be cancelled for denying it.

Not sure precisely what "rude, but not beyond the pale" means.

It means you won't be able to whip up a mob to go after someone who does it.

Most trans people don't go into screeching fits of rage when misgendered

"Most" trans people are irrelevant. Like I said many times before I don't believe in the "democratic model" of society. It's the leadership of trans activists that's relevant.

I think many sports already don't allow transwoman athletes in female leagues, but could be wrong.

Yeah, because that was the status quo pre-trans activism. I'm saying we're going back to it.

I don't see that happening. Most of the increase is caused not by lowered thresholds by medical professionals, but massively increasing interest in transitioning by minors (they learn about it via the internet or irl friends).

Funny, out of all the points this one is the one I'm the most confident about, and your arguments is precisely why I think it will go down. Yes, medical professionals have no way of telling whether someone actually has gender dysphoria or not, so the increase most likely had nothing to do with the medical / psychological condition being more prevalent, or more detected than before. The majority of referrals to gender clinics are between ages 12-16, with a massive drop-off around 18 years old. It is far more likely that the whole thing is a social trend, and all social trends are eventually replaced with new ones.

I'm sorry, the referrals to a gender clinic go DOWN at 18? That's very surprising to me. What about all the closested trans people with conservative parents that are finally able to make their own choices when they turn 18? Shouldn't it go up?

They desist. Turns out for most marginalized people, getting away from high school greatly improves the quality of their life.

Time for my regularly scheduled link to Tavistock data. The drop off begins at 17. This is the UK but I've seen similar age profile from a gender clinic in the US.

What you describe may still be happening, it's just their numbers are dwarfed by the number of minors.

Headline: "Referrals to GIDs level off in 2018-19"

Numbers

Should read "Referrals of males to GIDs level off in 2018-19" -- the tomboy genocide continues apace.

I should be rather interested to see crosstabs for age/sex -- not that we will.

I've argued this before, but turning 18 does not magically grant one the actual ability to act on the agency they're legally considered responsible enough to have. Many kids who reach that age may still be stuck at home, especially in this modern era.

And how does this explain there being more referrals for 12-16 year olds?

More comments

right now is the worst possible time for leftist doctrinal infighting, their position is overextended and their enemy is visibly regrouping

With Francoists, fascists and literal 1937 Nazis advancing on them, the Spanish Republican forces split into Soviet-communist vs anarcho-communist groups and fought a civil war within the civil war. Naturally the Republican forces all ultimately lost. Many later died in secret labor and torture camps. The stakes were as high as possible, but Soviet backers demanded prioritizing purging non-Soviet-leftists.

For more information on this matter, read George Orwell's excellent Homage to Catalonia. The Soviet forces were a greater threat to him than the actual fascists. And he fought in trench warfare against Francoists.

I understand that modern American libs aren't 1937 communists, but I think they have a rather leftist tendency towards infighting and circular firing squads.

The same day, there was a call from President Manuel Azaña to Companys, President of the Generalitat. During the conversation, it was cut by the operator, who said that the lines should be used for more important purposes than a mere talk between presidents.[12] For some time, Republican authorities had been suspecting that anarcho-syndicalists controlled all official telephone conversations...

The common reducto complaint about leftist censorship is "you wouldn't censor a phone call between two people just because you didn't like what they were saying!" The answer of course being "yes, just like last time they had the power to do it. Because letting your enemies talk is as dangerous as allowing them guns. The censorship and monitoring division of the phone department must be controlled by loyalists"

The fighting between stalinists and trotskyites continues to this day on the article's talk page, as expected from Wikipedia.

I didn't check the talk page before linking. What a trash fire.

The term Stalinist in slanderous and pejorative. You can say USSR-backed or Sovietphile, but the term Stalinist has been repeatedly rejected by Marxist-Leninists. If you don't change this, I will.

Also the term 'revolution' is a huge POV. Anarchists and poum thought that they were doing a revolution. But i think this is a fringe anarchist friendly theory.

It is fascinating how, once the "if you buy this game, or play this game, or even look in the direction of this game, you are literally funding Rowling's literal campaign of literal genocide!" campaign failed, they immediately pivoted to "She's an anti-Semite, you know" with the goblins and the shofar and the anti-Semitic cheese.

No stick is too bad to beat the dog, as the saying goes.

Based on my limited googling and eyesight, best I can tell there are zero similarities between the goblin horn in the game and a shofar. Am I tripping? Is there any way in which that horn is a shofar that wouldnt also apply to the Horn of Gondor? I am genuinely curious, since to me it looks like "generic fantasy horn", which I understand a shofar very much *isn't *, but I've been seeing it repeated from people who I'd usually trust to know this sort of thing. Or maybe they haven't seen the one in game, and are just repeating the party line.

I've been seeing it repeated from people who I'd usually trust to know this sort of thing. Or maybe they haven't seen the one in game, and are just repeating the party line.

Yes. I'm seeing it repeated online too, just parroting the party line. Because you don't want to be labelled as an anti-Semite, now do you? So agree with what your betters tell you and pass it along. It's very hard to be charitable when discussing this, since it's a bunch of loudmouth and possibly mentally-impaired people donning their tinfoil hats (how obsessed do you have to be to dig down into whether or not a particular type of cheese is kosher? and then tout that online as evidence of the Big Anti-Jewish Dogwhistle Conspiracy?) and spreading misinformation, which the retweeters then swallow as totally true (since questioning only gets a target painted on your back) and spread themselves, and then people go "it has been proven she's a bad person" because they saw something someone had passed on at fourth-hand about it, and if it's on the Internet, it must be correct!

Five seconds' Googling will get you to an article about blowing horns. Is the Basque horn in the photo like a shofar or not? Are the Basques being anti-Semitic by using copies of shofars, since only the Jews ever invented using animal horns (sarcasm off)?

What I think: entirely possible the art department for the game used reference photos of shofars as the basis for the drawing of the goblin horn and indeed they might have picked it not to look like things like the Horn of Gondor because copyright infringement is a pain in the behind and studios have entire fleets of lawyers on stand-by for any perceived "whoa you copied our trademarked visuals, pay up" cases; 1612 is a year of English witch trials which fits in with the lore of the world

What the "if you don't agree that trans genocide is happening you're a bigot" crowd think: Rowling herself personally designed it to look like a shofar and picked a year of a "Fatmilk" which means "cheese" German revolt which included a pogrom and picked non-kosher cheese to insult the shofar and be an anti-Semitic dog whistle because she is a monster and every penny spent on this game goes to fund death camps for trans people

entirely possible the art department for the game used reference photos of shofars as the basis for the drawing of the goblin horn

The thing is, as far as I can tell, it doesn't even resemble a shofar. I have difficulty processing how you could look at that image and think it looks like a shofar, even if youre trying to find the slightest hint of a dogwhistle. It's like if you said that the main character in RDR2 rides a sidesaddle. But thats what i struggle with. I know that a lot of people spread rumours without verifying, but what about the people that have seen both the game horn and a shofar? Is it a gutsy assumption that nobody will call them on something even if it's blatantly apparent that it's false? Is it a deliberate attempt to call a deer a horse, or make people say there are five lights? Or do they honestly, truly, in their heart of hearts believe it? It seems impossible enough that I feel like I have to be missing something, and the two horns really do have more in common than saying that a Cessna is clearly the Red Baron's Fokker Dr.I.

There is a comment in the linked Reddit thread by someone with relevant experience who says that it is indeed not a Shofar, and also that the "anti-Semitic cheese" thing is also a massive reach (since Kosher cheese basically didn't exist for a long-ass time at all).

My personal take was that transactivism was just the next, inevitable step in the march to atomization in liberalism. And it probably still is. But there may be bridges too far, even for liberals. I hope.

Mine is they figured out that trans ideology, and the science around it, is a house of cards, and they need to protect their status as the paper of record. Any hopes about the trajectory of liberalism of wokeness are probably going to get crushed as they pick a more defensible cause.

Cosigned. In particular:

  • The rate at which teenage girls are being transitioned is unsustainable and a reckoning is coming.

  • DeSantis is their next adversary, and he's able and prepared to go to war with the left over this issue. The NYT sees this coming and wants to eliminate their most vulnerable attack surfaces, which was never necessary against Trump's undisciplined ranting or other GOP candidates' ineffectiveness on cultural topics.

DeSantis is their next adversary,

I prefer not to put my hopes into politicians. In fact I'm a bit worried about conservatives grifting the whole cause into oblivion.

I actually was thinking about giving this topic a rest - it makes me feel like I'm being radicalized in slow motion - but...just when I thought I was out...some room for optimism: NY Times: In Defense of J.K. Rowling

I don't think it's harbinger of much. Left-wing publications occasionally publish counter-narrative stuff, because controversy and debate generates clicks and viralness. An article castigating J.K. Rowling is less likely to go viral, given it's old news, than one praising her. Look at all the articles from The Atlantic, Washington Post, and elsewhere from 2015 or later about the 'coddling of the American mind', overprotective parents, 'how the left has gone too far' etc., yet Covid and post-Jan 6th has seen the most restrictions on discourse to date. There has always been a niche of 'center-left critique of the left'. Reddit and other sites have more censorship than ever. Unless you are already rich, and or famous, or have a big brand, your options are much more limited if you are outside the window. Discussing and debating race vs IQ and crime stats will still get you banned from almost everywhere online.

Left-wing publications occasionally publish counter-narrative stuff, because controversy and debate generates clicks and viralness. An article castigating J.K. Rowling is less likely to go viral, given it's old news, than one praising her.

Agreed. The 'literally violence' rhetoric is bumping up against the reality that publications exist to sell clicks or subscriptions. Which I'm sure feels like a knife in the back of the 'literally violence' faction.

As ancient as "please read literally any other book" seems now, some senior NYT people simply never got off the 2015 "Gryffindors for Hillary!" train. They overslept and missed the stop all the cool junior staffers got off at.

Lagging cultural updates seems a more likely explanation than this being some watershed cultural moment caused by a retvrn to fundamental principles of journalism.

(I'm sure someone's already written about this, but there's an essay in how much of fandom is now about tearing down the last popular thing and denouncing it as problematic to show how cutting edge you are. Weaponizing "eww, that was so six months ago" fashion-bullying was huge for the cultural revolution.)

I understand the allure of seeing a watershed moment in this decision. We may well be at the point where the trans acceptance movement, at least its more rabid factions, begins to crumble. It won't even be very surprising: I've always felt that it's a tangent in the general scheme of the culture war, and there's too much autism and honest-to-God male aggression in those conquests perpetrated by trans warriors to truly align with the all-dissolving feminine logos of Cybele. But: whatever happens next, the NYT is probably not acting because of those object level disagreements.

This is not so much evidence in favor of wokeism having peaked as it's evidence against the theory of Cathedral.

The latter predicts that the media is essentially directed by its middle management, not its owners; an intelligentsia network that emergently develops and changes consensus. The standard theory of power (our banned friend would say, Powerology) predicts that the NYT is a family business of Sulzbergers and a vessel for their long-term agenda; and, like any serious dynasty or a crime family, they will not suffer to have their turf usurped by their own minions. It is well known that they do not appreciate grassroots initiatives on their ship:

For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”

It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.

Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”

The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”

(I'm becoming like Sailer with those repetitive references, aren't I? But they are worth reiterating).

Rowling is barely a factor of consideration. What those journalists demanded, in essence, was for the NYT leadership to acquiesce to a character assassination of a high-profile figure they personally dislike but who is not on the kill list. Letting them run with it would be fomenting the impression of them being in control, which has a way of eventually becoming reality. If the impression that a bunch of radicals can get the NYT to publish whatever they want spreads in the relatively narrow world of journalism, they may overwhelm it, to the point the newspaper would have trouble finding high-skilled employees who'll tolerate following orders. Better nip it in the bud. I believe this has happened a few times already, when the NYT upper brass noticed some journalist getting ahead of him/herself.

A good theory, but then, wasn't that whole "Send In The Troops" drama more of a bottom-up revolt against an editor? Sure, not the same thing as being against the head staff or owners, but why let that one bout of revolutionary energy through?

Eh, I would disagree with that "three logoi" formulation; Cybele is not about logos at all. She's either ethos (the appeal to the authority, as Great Nature, the Mother) or pathos (the suffering of such as Attis). More pathos, I would say, as it is mystical and ecstatic ritual in the vein of Dionysius.

Can you summarize that whole link? It's a lot to digest and I already don't think I have the needed context for it. I'm vaguely aware of the "Apollo/Dionysus" dichotomy (or, at least, I saw a Ratsphere Tumblr post once saying that, actually, Edge is Dionysian and Whimsy is Apollonian--or was it the other way around?), but that's about it.

This is not so much evidence in favor of wokeism having peaked as it's evidence against the theory of Cathedral.

It's evidence that for-profit media occasionally acts in its financial interests, which should not be that surprising.

wreckers

constant fitna

a desperate ploy to distract the blind

too far, even for liberals

Come on, make your point without all the boo lights. I promise I won’t mistake you for one of us blind liberals.

ideologues

Now that one is fair. I think this situation is well modeled by a visible, loud minority getting mistaken for a much larger force. It is absurd to put a failed AA game boycott on the same level as the many reasons for Sturgeon’s withdrawal. American Twitter is controlling the narrative, and commentators are just…taking it!

Nothing in that defense of JKR is new because none of its quoted criticisms matter. Her sentiment—that trans women don’t belong in all the same categories as natal women—is anathema, enough to damn her in the eyes of the loudest twits. The rest is commentary. It is a mistake to try and divine, in those entrails, the opinions of a nation.

If there’s any sea change, it will be among the people who are reporting on the reporters. They’re the ones keeping this narrative afloat, trying to convince substack readers and forum posters that they have the latest instrumentation. But, as the song goes…you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

I have a somewhat more pessimistic take on this.

The NYT have often been the defenders of the rich and powerful. They were still publishing pretty nice pieces about SBF right up until he got arrested.

I also don't remember the name of the article, or where I saw it, but it was about how most newspaper articles get written. That there is a marketing agency or PR firm behind so much of the news that we see. And this defense of JK Rowling doesn't come at a random time, it comes during the huge video game release of Hogwarts: Legacy.

I see it less as a shifting in the battle of ideas, and more of a temporary setback to trans activists because they have so clearly gone against large commercial interests.

I am hopeful that this defense of JK Rowling will stick. If I see other active celebrities or actors willing to stick their neck out for JK Rowling I'll believe it has been effective.

I see it less as a shifting in the battle of ideas, and more of a temporary setback to trans activists because they have so clearly gone against large commercial interests.

Yeah, but the boycott failed before this piece came out. The game pre-orders were very healthy, and now it's on general release it's selling like hotcakes. This argument would be more likely if the boycott had been seen to be working. I'm sure Avalanche games are pretty pissed-off with being smeared as anti-Semites and all the rest of it, and nobody is mentioning their name in this context. If the piece is good for Rowling, it'll probably be good for them, too.

I still don't really understand why it's so popular. The ads look absolutely surreal and uncanny, like that moustached guy who looks like he just found out he can identify as a 12 year old witch for dorm assignment.

Are people just really nostalgic for having never gotten a real Harry Potter game?

/images/16766826537842422.webp

I mean, all the other previous HP games I am given to understand were pretty much just licensed games, and even the most ambitious licensed game, no matter how good or unique, still has to conform to its source material, and probably gets overlooked by those who aren't big fans. Hogwarts Legacy has the advantage of not being an adaptation of the films or books, so it can do more of its own thing.

Do you think everyone is wrong about it? It's popular because it's a legitimately good game in a very approachable genre, and happens to be the best game version of one of the most popular IPs ever.

I don't care about Harry Potter at all (I've read half the books to my kids...) but I'm enjoying the game.

Guess I just don't get it.

The NYT have often been the defenders of the rich and powerful. They were still publishing pretty nice pieces about SBF right up until he got arrested.

Pretty much. Defending the Iraq War, boosting for Hillary fits in with this too. The NYTs wants to signal that is has not gone too far . Alliances and teams mean everything when it comes to the media. Carving out niches and such. I see this on twitter a lot. There are certain views that confer higher status, even the possible cost of annoying your readers, than lower status ones.

And this defense of JK Rowling doesn't come at a random time, it comes during the huge video game release of Hogwarts: Legacy.

It certainly isn't a coincidence, but it's probably meant to lead into the podcast which is more about JKR than the game (of course: that could have been and probably was set to coincide with the game's success). But the fact that the NYT are publishing it at all is telling.

I don't think that the game has enough cachet to explain it on its own tbh. There's a specific gaming press that is totally captured but the NYT doesn't have to release puff pieces for Hogwarts: Legacy and the game was always going to be successful unless it was a dumpster fire.

I think it's of a piece with less (relatively) slanted coverage recently.

It's scary that I remember exactly the same thing but with no company names. There was a brief flurry of articles and then nothing

There's an extremely dumb review in Wired, which is nothing but a trans person regaling everyone with how they have suffered, suffered (after an initial 'this game stinks, Rowling stinks, you stink if you like it' bit) and the general impression I've gotten is that most people think this is bad, that Wired have really done themselves no favours here because it's not a game review, it's an ideological opinion piece. (It starts off, quite literally, with "Yikes, y'all" which screams 'could you be any more edgy 14 year old?') and many have made merry at the expense of this person because up to this, they had reviewed sex toys, not video games.

Most gaming press reviews, after the obligatory disclaimer about "we are not transphobes", were generally favourable to the game.

I also don't remember the name of the article, or where I saw it, but it was about how most newspaper articles get written. That there is a marketing agency or PR firm behind so much of the news that we see.

I don't know where you heard it, but Paul Graham's essay on submarine advertising is considered a classic.

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Paul Graham's essay ... is considered a classic

Always true. Can't recommend enough. Also I somehow didn't read that one. Thanks for the link.

I like Paul Graham's writing and I hadn't seen this one before. Thanks a lot.

This was it!

PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.

I can’t help but compare this to Scott’s “media rarely lies” series. If the PR rarely lies, and most (non-emergency) reporting is PR…

I thought NYT would for sure say that woman: adult, human, female is transphobic, but I guess not. I would think that insisting that trans women are not women would have been the sticking point for them. Maybe the editors are in charge of the asylum again.

But there may be bridges too far, even for liberals. I hope.

I doubt it, I think we're just pumping the brakes. We're not turning around, we're not even stopping, we're just going in the same direction at a slightly slower rate. Given the backlash I've seen from people streaming Hogwarts Legacy on Twitch, including building a blacklist of everyone who has streamed it, I don't think we've hit the high water mark.

I hope we insist on sex segregated bathrooms and locker rooms. I hope we insist on sex segregated sports, with normal anti-doping rules serving to exclude female transsexuals. I hope we can use the word woman, not egg-producer or chestfeeder, and that anyone who tries to change this will be roundly mocked. I hope we're seeing the pendulum swing back, but I doubt it.

actually was thinking about giving this topic a rest - it makes me feel like I'm being radicalized in slow motion

Indeed. I know I have gone on about Rowling before, but this is the thing that threatens to radicalize me, because I feel like I'm surrounded by crazy people, who keep mindlessly repeating assertions like "JK Rowling is transphobic," "JK Rowling wants trans people to die," "JK Rowling is a literal fascist," "JK Rowling wrote an entire book about a trans serial killer" - things that are just flatly untrue. And if you clear your throat and say "Well, actually" - you will probably have to write off those relationships.

Sometimes I feel optimistic that Twitter is not reflective of real life and I am hoping in 20 years we'll look back on the era of letting children be sterilized and mutilated with horror, but that will still be a pretty grim vindication.

My personal take was that transactivism was just the next, inevitable step in the march to atomization in liberalism. And it probably still is. But there may be bridges too far, even for liberals. I hope.

Similar here, I figured that the high water mark before the tide receded would be somewhere in the vicinity of HAAS Fat Activism and the push for acceptance of "Otherkin." I hoped dearly that it would be be WELL before we hit the "MAP is a valid and acceptable sexuality" movement.

My suspicion is that the very visible entrance of Trans women into female sports leagues combined with the push for gender reassignment of prepubescent children is what snapped normies into a posture of resistance.

Note that I don't think the resistance is particularly well organized or even coherent, but with NYT taking the position that "it is in fact acceptable to consider the implications of these policies and one is not required to accept activist claims at face value" at least there's some room to breathe for those who actually WANT there to be a discussion on the matter.

But the left has no option to just retreat on this point, and as we've seen even the most milquetoast of defiance is treated as a nigh-existential threat, so generally I just find myself wondering which angle of attack they will implement next.

It feels very weird, though, to be on TheMotte talking about a culture war issue where the right is seemingly the one with momentum and the left is now on defense. Only took the combined might of the most popular author on the planet, the largest newspaper on the planet, and some of the more popular GOP governors and pundits.

The Cathedral as a whole appears to be proceeding with it's general plans quite unhindered, mind.

My suspicion is that the very visible entrance of Trans women into female sports leagues combined with the push for gender reassignment of prepubescent children is what snapped normies into a posture of resistance.

That, and the high-profile sex crimes cases. It's very hard to argue that "trans women are real women and just want to be left alone" and even more "Rowling is a monster" when, for Scotland, they have had three recent cases of "men who are sexual abusers/rapists deciding that they're really women" (Isla Bryson, Tiffany Scott, Amy George).

You're an average person, you see those stories in the media, you see that the crime Rowling is accused of is saying "maybe don't put people with dicks into spaces with women", which side are you going to come down on? The people defending "when the accused committed the rape, she did it as a woman with her feminine penis" or the people saying "don't put rapists in women's jails"?

You're an average person, you see those stories in the media, you see that the crime Rowling is accused of is saying "maybe don't put people with dicks into spaces with women", which side are you going to come down on? The people defending "when the accused committed the rape, she did it as a woman with her feminine penis" or the people saying "don't put rapists in women's jails"?

Yeah, I don't know if that's the actual thought process used, but basically when the "TERFs" are warning vociferously that allowing penis-havers into female exclusive spaces puts females at risk, and these stories come out, and the trans-activists continue to bash the TERFs for being, it seems, correct, I expect the average person is swayed to the TERF side.

And of course the vestiges of feminism are still hanging around telling people that women are an oppressed class, so what the hell are you supposed to think when you see women being harmed and ousted from the sports leagues set up for specifically for them, by biological males? Seems likely it's just too much whiplash for people.

I figured that the high water mark before the tide receded would be somewhere in the vicinity of HAAS Fat Activism

The fat activists have been pretty successful. The fact that "fat shaming" is regarded as something that shouldn't be done is really quite remarkable.

I've been listening to the Maintenance Phase podcast recently, if only for the entertainment of hyper-woke individuals spewing typical Fat Logic, and I've noticed a sort of Holocaust Denial vibe. They'll do very good episodes about how some diet or some other piece of health apocrypha is bullshit, complete with what at least seems like a fairly rigorous review of the scientific literature, which is fine and what makes it entertaining. But the conclusion you're supposed to draw from the series as a whole isn't that certain things in the diet ecosystem is bad, but that you shouldn't worry about your weight or anyone else's and that doctors are unnecessarily turning obesity into a health problem it's not. It reminds me of how people like David Irving will focus on minutia like whether a particular facility was used as a gas chamber and, regardless of the quality of the scholarship, expects you to draw the conclusion that the Holocaust never happened. Being obese is really unhealthy; any doctor will tell you that.

Two groups tend to be left out of the whole "fat acceptance" culture, though. The first is fat men. Fat women never had much of a problem getting fat men to date them. I suspect that a lot of this fat acceptance bullshit is really just trying to guilt thin men into dating them; you don't ever hear of any obese young women standing up for some fat Trekkie who's being made fun of. The second group is old people. I see a lot of stuff on the internet about being "healthy at any size" but it's always women under the age of 45 who seem to be the poster children for this stuff. You never hear about older fat people in this context, despite the fact that magazines love to profile active seniors who talk about how their lifestyle has prevented health problems. Of course, none of these people are ever fat, because there aren't many fat older people who do things like walk 9 holes every day or take ballroom dance lessons. Most of them are at home in front of the television, dealing with diabetes, or heart problems, or arthritis, or any number of other disorders that obesity increases the risk of.

I see a lot of stuff on the internet about being "healthy at any size" but it's always women under the age of 45 who seem to be the poster children for this stuff.

Phase one is beauty and fashion and dating instas.

Phase two is complaining about unfair beauty standards.

Phase three is assertions that chronic health problems have nothing to do with weight.

Phase four is turning into a shut-in due to immobility.

  • The first is fat men.

Fat men that are tall or built do well. Those that look like Jason Alexander do bad though on the market.

The second group is old people. I see a lot of stuff on the internet about being "healthy at any size" but it's always women under the age of 45 who seem to be the poster children for this stuff.

People the size of some of the hard to miss (300 lbs+ for women) fat activists die between ages of 45-55, which is probably why.

Being obese is really unhealthy; any doctor will tell you that.

More critically, your own two eyes will tell you that.

The fat activists have been pretty successful. The fact that "fat shaming" is regarded as something that shouldn't be done is really quite remarkable.

Good for them! We shouldn't be fat shaming people. The problem with fat activists is that they are celebrating unhealthy behavior or even denying that its unhealthy at all.

And I suppose from an aesthetic perspective it's awful as well, much like the deliberately ugly statues, public art, and brutalist buildings we are now forced to endure.

The problem with shaming is it ignores the role biology plays too. Long-term results for most dieters are abysmal. Trying to lose weight long-term means having to make restrictions that are possibly infeasible. Some people who have bad genes are quite literally unable to stop eating, or have really slow metabolisms, or bad balance of ghrelin vs. leptin, etc. These people are screwed

I am increasingly adopting this belief. Willpower didn't just collapse, nor did activity levels. There is something in our food or environment that is making people having a higher set point. In the 1970s or in modern-day Taiwan most people don't struggle to maintain a healthy weight. But in the modern day U.S. most people will be overweight because it is very difficult to maintain a weight lower than one's set point. Not impossible, of course. Just not worth it for many people.

On the other hand, semaglutide and other weight loss drugs will fix this for wealthy people within in the next decade, so I expect being to fat to become even more of a low class signifier than it is already.

weight loss drugs are the future. i see no other way out unless we get better fat substitutes. most of the calories come from fat

Physical activity did collapse, though. Combine high caloric intake with very low physical activity and voila, everyone is fat.

Can't find the citation, but I believe that's not actually true, at least for U.S. adults since the 1970s?

Iterestingly, the average BMI of Japanese people doesn't show (Top left graph is men, top right is women) any sort of change in direction or strength of a trend during the 1970's, but does paint a steady increase in BMI of men of all age groups, and quite a complicated picture for women.

If I'm reading these graphs correctly, Japanese men have been getting fatter since the early 1960s while Japanese women have generally not. Interesting dichotomy. Potentially there is more social pressure for Japanese women to be skinny? Certainly, in Japan, the standards for feminine beauty are far above what they are in North America.

Nevertheless, Japan does not have an obesity problem. With only 4.3% obesity in 2016, it is in fact the LEAST obese of any developed country in the world, and less obese than almost all the poor starving countries as well.

So even though Japanese BMI has apparently been increasing since about 1960, it's not having nearly the effect it is on other countries. I wonder what their corn product consumption looks like?

And yet the obesity rate was much lower in living memory, and people who follow the procedure of ‘just shoving fewer groceries down their maw’ lose weight. Yes, that entails being hungry sometimes and passing on dessert most of the time and probably learning to drink water. But pushing people to actually do those things is a plausible justification for fat shaming.

Yes, that entails being hungry sometimes and passing on dessert most of the time and probably learning to drink water.

Isn't this what a diet is. yet the stats are pretty miserable. ppl lose weight and then regain it

Don't you know people with healthy diets? I have relatives who eat muesli and yoghurt in the morning, a salad with some prosciutto berries for lunch, some potato chips (that is to say fairly traditional ones with just potato and salt) and cheese in front of the television, then beef, rice and vegetables for dinner. Or maybe salmon or lamb instead of beef.

They're not fat and never have been. It's not dieting so much as having a healthy diet. If we started people on that sort of diet rather than American style plastic food, there'd be no problem. These people have no attraction to McDonalds or whatever, they look upon it with disgust.

I know lots of people who maintain a healthy weight. I know many fewer people who were once obese but then slimmed down and maintained a healthy weight by dieting. It's far from clear from the data that "trying to diet" or "telling people to diet" is an effective intervention once they are already obese. It seems like something intrinsic to metabolism and appetite regulation is irreversibly broken at that point, and the only permanent solutions are gastric surgery and (now, hopefully) semaglutide and its analogues.

not so much healthy but rather eat little. I know someone who would often go something like 9 hours without eating anything. Dinner + small amount of food in morning...that's it. Stayed thin forever. No snacking, But steak for dinner and pastry in morning, so not particularly healthy anyway. Plus daily exercise.

People have been trying to figure this out for a century. Think of all the federal and state dollars spent on raising awareness about health, school lunches, etc. As an HBD and libertarian leaning person, I am inclined to believe this is infective. A bunch of factors come into play: Something as basic or fundamental as food is still largely a mystery. I think the solution will have to come from the private sector to provide better drugs to combat obesity and better substitutes for food, like low calorie food that better mimics high calorie food.

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n=1, but I pretty much only eat pizza and other take-out food, and have for the majority of my life (I'm in my 30s now). I'm not fat and haven't been since I was a kid. It's not my metabolism or genetics, either - I quickly gain pounds if I let myself indulge snacks too much for a few weeks. In that eventuality, I just eat slightly less for a few weeks and go back down. I know the CICO observation is trite at this point, but it's true. It's trivially true. You simply won't get fat if you just don't eat excessively.

I suspect the sort of disdainful attitude you're describing/exhibiting (e.g., "plastic food") is just class signaling and virtue signaling, frankly. Pizza and burgers, for example, are just wheat, tomatoes, cheese, and meat. But combine them into the form of pizza or burgers and all the sudden it evokes an image of a lower class person who's perhaps not that bright, not that health-conscious, doesn't really understand nutrition, doesn't really want to put in the effort to be "healthy" (unlike you, dear observer, of course), and probably also has Coors Light instead of craft beer in his fridge.

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Do you know where to buy actual muesli or toasted oat-based cereal any more? All my local stores stopped carrying the last one they had, and now the only marginally edible cereals are that horrible raisin bran stuff packed with as much sweetener as kids' Sugar Puffs.

I guess it fell victim to the successive wave of fads against carbs and grains

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Because they don’t stick with it.

That's because sustained willpower is hard. For a diet to work long term, it requires a more fundamental behavioral change than just toughing it out.

Do you think that the root cause of increased obesity today vs in 1970 is primarily due to people in 1970 being more persistent in sticking to a diet where they are hungry sometimes? If so, do you think that's due to a general decline in willingness to stick with unpleasant things in general between the 1970s and now, or something specific to dietary habits (e.g. "feeling slightly hungry" was a feeling with ~neutral valence in 1970, but is a feeling with negative valence now)?

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Tend to agree, but they've had far less success in getting people to actually change their preferences.

And, unlike Trans activists, they haven't coalesced the weight (heh) of the medical establishment behind them, either. It's still not taboo to say "obesity contributes directly to various health issues and reduced life expectancy."

Fat activism has been spectacularly unsuccessful. Obese people are as hated as ever, women and girls with normal-range bodies are still hating themselves and riddled with insecurity. More people are overweight, but that's basically unrelated.

However, if a large enough segment of people are overweight, it results in obesity/fatness becoming normalized. This has already happened among the underclass and lower class, especially among Blacks and Latinos, I think.

Normalized sure, idealized no. Something can be common while also being despised. In fact, it's very common for common things to be despised. Suburban life and whiteness and factory work and office work all became something derided in popular culture as they became more common among the populace. Idealization was the goal of the FAs, get people to accept the obese as equals. Not gonna happen.

Obese people are as hated as ever

Not seeing this. Maybe if you're 12 years old in gym class during the 90s, but ppl tend to overlook or stop caring about that stuff as adults

... Which they did before fat activism started.

They've managed to get "plus size models" onto Magazine Covers, so that's at least a norm or two cracked open.

Likewise, look at the very existence of Lizzo and Rebel Wilson as celebrities.

It's fair to say they've had superficial successes, even if it isn't going to "take" with the rest of the population.

Wait and see how they react to the recent development of seemingly effective weight loss drugs, though.

Likewise, look at the very existence of Lizzo and Rebel Wilson as celebrities.

I will not stand for this erasure of Ella Aretha Ma Rainey and this absolute fuckin' banger. I don't really know who Rebel Wilson is so I won't comment, but Lizzo makes fun music, fat acceptance for her isn't any stranger than Aretha or Ella.

Are there any obese male singers that have any real prominence now, other than Rick Ross?

I'll grant that Meat Loaf was a sex symbol in his day.

Speaking of Meat Loaf, if you broaden your scope to film actors as well as singers, you also have Jack Black, for instance.

I'd say DJ Khaled isn't exactly svelte. Luke Combs is a fatass, when he's in music videos with his wife it is disgusting to imagine them together. Historically we have Biggie, biz markie, Cedric the entertainer, big pun, a dozen great Tenors, fats domino, fats waller. Toby Keith's waistline varied throughout his career, as did the mustachiod half of Brooks and Dunn, I don't remember which is which.

Rebel Wilson has had recent weightloss and is no longer an example of what you're writing about. She might even be too thin for comedy now. Plus-sized people in comedy has existed for a while (Fatty Arbuckle, 1/2 of the duo Laurel and Hardy) and in woman more recently but I would say predates the fat acceptance movement (Roseanne Barr, Melissa McCarthy).

Wait and see how they react to the recent development of seemingly effective weight loss drugs, though.

It does show the power of revealed vs. stated preferences.

Fat celebrities are nothing new, and it's very possible that the occasional plus size model can be explained at least as much as a cynical attempt to garner hate clicks and get any-publicity-good-publicity as a genuine sop to fat activism.

Fat celebreties in the past were usually men, but never a woman whom one isn't supposed to laugh at.

Appeals to publicity don't make sense since they are always to left, were they not motivated by political considerations, right-coded deviations from the norm would be as common, if not more, than left-coded ones. Probably more, since a media espousing nazism is more controversial, than that which promotes stalism.

Not in opera?

Or, for that matter, Oprah?

I also don’t believe that appeals to publicity are “always” left-leaning. Jokes about reality’s bias aside, there are marketing niches which clearly code right. You don’t have to talk about the extremes to count.

Well, sure, at some level they're going to bump into the same problem as trans activists - people are still attracted to what they're attracted to and people will still feel self-loathing when they're physically repulsive. They've had about as much cultural success as I think it's plausible to have though. You probably can't get away with saying, "I won't hire fat people because they're lazy, undisciplined, and I just plain don't want to look at them". Likewise, I've had people personally scold me for saying, "I would never be attracted to an overweight woman".

But there may be bridges too far, even for liberals. I hope.

I doubt it, if for no other reason than that the defense of her still includes this framing:

She has never voiced opposition to allowing people to transition under evidence-based therapeutic and medical care. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing.

This is the equivalent of, "you accuse her of being a witch, yet she has barely cast any spells at all!", and it's about the most vigorous defense you're going to find in mainstream outlets. The shift of the window of acceptable positions on whether men can become women and whether this must be subsidized by tax dollars is still very much that you're only a non-witch if you agree that this is a completely reasonable and normal thing to do, that it must be publicly funded, that no one should be allowed to discriminate against someone that has transitioned on pain of losing their business, and so on. If the Rowling position qualifies as pretty edgy for modern liberals, then no, I do not think we're even close to arriving at bridges that are too far.

I will be more optimistic if it becomes publicly acceptable to say, "I think this is mostly a gross fetish, I shouldn't be required to pay for it, and I am not interested in hiring people that look like that". Instead, I expect the next decade to include the evolution of the right-most boundary being Gorsuch-style conversative case for compulsory employment of trans people.

Oh well, at least I can still play Hogwarts...

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