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Some time ago, I posted about how it feels like wokeism is getting less popular. I didn't have much to back it up, except some observations about a popular techie watering hole called HackerNews, so the whole exercise left me with more questions than answers.
Well, today I chanced upon "The Great Awokening Is Winding Down" by Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist from Columbia University that focuses on "how we think about, talk about, and produce knowledge about social phenomena including race, inequality, social movements, extremism, policing, national security, foreign policy and domestic U.S. political contests." (With that broad a scope of inquiry, I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't a fellow mottizen). Al-Gharbi puts together a compelling story: there are fewer woke-related cancellation events, fewer research papers are published related to woke ideology, newspapers are writing less often about race/racism/racists, and companies--including media companies--are not only pushing back more strongly against the demands of social justice warriors, but also closing their purses and defunding both internal DEI departments as well as financial pledges they made to the bankrupt ideals of equity just a few years ago.
While this type of news warms my heart, most of the evidence al-Gharbi provides is composed of disparate op-ed columns from American newspapers. Throughout the last ten years, there have always been dissenting voices that managed, somehow, to walk the thin line between criticizing woke ideology and not falling victim to it. So I don't see why al-Gharbi puts any trust in these pieces, even one as monumental as the Times' recent response to GLAAD.
That said, al-Gharbi's analysis provides some value when he describes the recent behavior of companies and when he provides some numbers to back up his claims. The numbers he shares seem to confirm that the public is losing both interest and tolerance for wokeish puritanism. But the numbers themselves are so remote as to heavily dilute their meaning. For example, there is the fall in the frequency of terms like "race", "racists", and "racism" in papers like NYT, LAT, WSJ, and WP. Or the falling number of scholarly articles about identity-based biases. Al-Gharbi chooses to interpret these as evidence for this theory, but doesn't take into account other factors that could be responsible for this behavior. Like, maybe papers are using fewer words like "racists", and instead using some new fangled euphemism (like homeless -> unhoused)? Or perhaps, in the scholarly article case, these topics have moved to other forums, like described in Scott's recent "Links for February" post:
The arguments that convince me the most are when al-Gharbi talks about the changes in company behavior. These are hard, reality-based events that are orchestrated by smooth talking servants of the Invisible Hand (praise thy golden touch!). You can't argue with a company that not only doesn't pander to internal activist pressure, but goes onto punish them by expelling them from its belly. This mirrors my own experience working in the corporate world where more and more people roll their eyes at DEI-sponsored programming, finding convenient excuses to skip out. Even leadership's support, once crisp and vocal, has died down in volume to a DEI-themed zoom background or a quick few words mechanically tacked on somewhere.
Emotionally, the most salient point and the one I hang my hopes on is how Gen-Z seems to be rebelling against the enforced work puritanism. It's probably my nostalgia, but as a child of the 90s, I can't help but see in this behavior the reflection of my childhood. You had gory movies like Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill. You had gory games, probably led by id titles like Doom and Quake--titles which introduced hundreds of thousands of people to online deathmatching. You had dirty grunge, whose raw scream was quickly adapted and made into Billboard Top 100 records. But you also had plenty of metal and industrial sub-genres spin off and avoid total commercialization. Let's not forget the two movies that closed out the decade, both quite clear in their anti-puritanical message: Fight Club and The Matrix.
While later on all of this was sublimated into the cheery smiles and pastel colors of the aughts, if today's teenagers feel a similar sort of anger and distrust of righty and lefty moralists, I can rest easy--the world will not end, at least not for another decade or two.
The Matrix is a result of the Wachowskis taking artistic license of Postmodernistic hot takes by Baudrillard mostly from Simulation and Simulacra. The book makes even an appearance in the movie too. As it turns out Baudrillard didn't like the Matrix because Neo escaped Platos Cave so the latest installment of the Matrix corrected that by making Neo and Trinity the shadow puppeteers to do "symbolic exchange". The Wachowskis are the wokest of the woke and you just take a look at Sense8 to understand that they are part of the problem and some ways the originators of our plight of wokeness.
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I broadly agree with many people here that this is more indicative of wokeness having completely won rather than of it being in decline. To use the same metaphor as someone else here, there's no need to hammer down nails when none are sticking up.
But one area where I think we may be seeing signs of the start of a decline is in certain areas of pop culture. The complete failure of efforts to boycott Hogwarts Legacy based on Rowling's refusal to tow the woke line on trans issues has been discussed plenty here, and that follows a number of other high profile woke failures.
About a month ago, HBO released Velma, a cartoon spinoff/reimagining/prequel of Scooby Doo featuring Velma as the protagonist, along with all the main cast members of the show (except the dog himself, who is completely absent) go through high school (in modern times with smartphones and all that). It was very openly woke with every character being race-swapped except Fred, and the show starting off with Velma narrating that this is her origin story and that "normally origin stories are about tall handsome guys struggling with a burden of being handed even more power," and by all accounts that tone only got more heavy-handed as the show went on. It was also completely panned by critics and fans alike, receiving some of the lowest scores ever from both in places like Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB. This doesn't mean it was a failure, and it seems to have been renewed for a 2nd season - possibly due to "hatewatching," possibly due to a 2nd season already being too far along in the pipeline - but at least it indicates that it's something the general audience doesn't really want to tolerate.
Before that, last year there was Saints Row, a video game reboot of the Saints Row franchise, which was initially a sort of GTA clone back in the day designed to appeal to a more edgy crowd (I never played any of the Saints Row games, so I'm going off 2nd hand information). The woke messaging in this was pretty minor by all accounts, but it featured a lot of changes to the franchise clearly designed to appeal to that crowd, including making the protagonists a diverse set of 20-something recent college graduates trying to make it in an expensive city, who start the eponymous Saints Row gang in part as an effort to pay back their student loans while also fighting for enacting what they see as justice in the world. While in the original, I believe that the protagonist was just a random guy working his way up the gang hierarchy and becoming a ruthless kingpin because he wanted power and money and women. They also changed some running jokes in the franchise presumably for sensitivity reasons, including changing a mechanic shop name from "Rim Jobs" to "Jim Robs," and a fast food chain from "Freckle Bitches" to just "FB's." The game was roundly rejected by both critics and fans, and seems to have bombed financially. Much of the criticisms had to do with the game's buggy state and poorly designed/implemented game mechanics, but, of course, those are not characteristics that exist independently of it being "woke."
Late last year, there was also Rings of Power, a prequel TV show to Lord of the Rings based on some supplementary material by JRR Tolkien, which Amazon famously spent $1bn+ for production and made a big deal of including diverse racial representation in populations where it wouldn't make sense from an anthropological perspective. It also featured as the protagonist Galadriel, an elf who appeared in the Lord of the Rings and who was clearly better than others in almost every way including her fighting skills and intuitions about Sauron's return while also being highly aggressive and abrasive towards others in displaying that superiority. The show was mostly rejected by critics and fans. I don't think Amazon released viewership numbers, but I recall reading that after the initial 2 episodes which were released together, the show's viewership dropped precipitously.
Also late last year, there was the TV show She-Hulk: Attorney at Law on Disney+, which featured quite a bit of woke messaging, such as a monologue in the 1st episode where She-Hulk goes off on the Hulk: "Here's the thing, Bruce. I'm great at controlling my anger. I do it all the time. When I'm catcalled in the street. When incompetent men explain my own area of expertise to me. I do it pretty much every day because if I don't I will be called emotional or difficult or... might just literally get murdered. So, I'm an expert at controlling my anger because I do infinitely more than you!" Along with the main plot point of the season being about a group of angry men trolling She-Hulk online, culminating in them crashing a ceremony for her winning a "Best Female Lawyer" award and playing embarrassing videos of her for the audience. This one had a bit more critic support, but fans seemed to pan it for various issues, including the woke messaging, poor use of breaking the 4th wall, and bad CGI.
Now, woke works in pop culture failing is nothing new; in the past, we've had films like Terminator: Dark Fate or the Charlie's Angels (Elizabeth Banks version) or TV shows like Batgirl bombing. Even The Last Jedi counts despite the massive amounts of money it made, because of how it poisoned the franchise, preventing it from making as much money as Disney clearly expected to make from buying that franchise from Lucas. But generally those works still got massive support from critics with the bigoted fans being reprimanded for not supporting these great progressive works of art. Some of that happened in these cases, with probably Rings of Power the biggest example. But it seems to me that there's more rejection of works like this by critics than ever before, and they're no longer so willing to circle the wagons to protect some work if it clearly lacks the basic fundamentals of what makes works of fiction like these actually good. And I can't recall ever seeing so much rejection like this happening back-to-back-to-back so quickly.
Maybe it's just a blip, and maybe it's just a tiny bit of overreach being pulled back before "progress" continues unabated, but I think there's an optimists' case to be made that this might be a turning point. The Hogwarts Legacy situation feels like it could be a sort of Emperor Has No Clothes moment as the masses realize just how much power the woke have with them going all-in on trying to "cancel" the game and having essentially negligible - and possibly positive - impact on its sales.
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Another day, another 'wokeness is in decline' post. People have been making this claim for the last decade.
What always gets me about these articles, including this one by al-Gharbi, is that there is no actual critical analysis of what 'wokeness' actually is (which presumably would aid in such an analysis if it were actually in decline). There is no mention of ideology or the underlying philosophical beliefs. The impression you're left with when reading al-Gharbi's article and many like it, is that wokeness is just a cultural fad that's had it's day in the sun (according to the author). That wokeness really is nothing more that a bunch of 'crazy kids on college campuses who will grow out of it', but somehow the entirely of Anglo and even Western society has become those crazy college kids. But still, it'll just pass like any other cultural fad... right? We'll all just go back to being good liberals at the end of history.
The woke winning a bit less doesn't mean they're not continuing to win. And they don't have to win as much anymore, because in a large sense they've already won. They have dominated almost every instituion that matters - academia and education, government institutions (bureaucracy), corporations, media and more. Even ostensibly 'conservative' institutions like religion and churches are falling victim to wokeness (mostly under the auspices of 'liberation theology'). In some sense, they have succeeded in Marcuse's goal of creating a 'New Sensibility', albeit a couple generations of ideology removed from his work. It's virtually impossible to deinstutionalise the woke in our present circumstances. Sure, some DEI workers got made redundant because of what seems to be for purely economic reasons and not ideological disagreement. But can you actually imagine DEI departments actually being complete axed and being openly criticised for not just being useless, but actively harmful ideological commissars? Here in Australia, I can't imagine someone actually trying to remove the profession of faith that is the 'Acknowledgement of Country' that preceeds every meeting and event in every institution, succeeding and not just being dismissed as a bigot. Why does every website now have an input for your 'pronouns' that are totally 'optional'?Where are the people telling workers they have to take down their LGBT flags they've put up around the office and yes, they do count as political/ideological declarations.
When these institutionalised woke presences are being actively hunted and removed and openly mocked, then yes, I will agree wokeness is in decline.
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"Wokeism is winding down, says diversity hire who took a Legacy American's prestige job"
When even the anti-woke argumentation is getting outsourced to extra-civilizational immigrants, it's hardly evidence FOR the proposition, is it? The headline next to the author feels like some kind of ironic joke.
I therefore think rather that if the rate of change is slowing down - big if, Musa is hardly convincing either by his evidence or by ad hominem - it's only because the other demographics' elites have already captured all the spoils they actually want.
Is that actually true? I can’t find anything about his country of origin, but he certainly went to school here.
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I wonder how much of this can be explained by self-policing and self-censorship . The fear of being banned, fired, suspended , shamed, etc. is a powerful deterrent.
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Will try to write something better later, but wanted to point out that almost all these signs are more likely the result of the woke revolution now being fully institutionalized.
For example, there's no longer a need to astroturf noisy campaigns against publishers to hire a cadre of party censors, because those people now effectively run the company and are busy rewriting all our books. This process is generally much quieter than the original takeover, flashpoints like the Dahl incident aside.
Similarly all university hiring is now controlled by DEI departments, right down to filtering janitors with mandatory "diversity statements." Flashy campaigns are no longer necessary; now begins the boots grinding on faces forever stage of the revolution.
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echoing @Lepidus below. just two days ago we read that Rohl Dalh is rewritten by sensitivity hacks and quietly pushed in the night. that story would have sounded like the babylon bee, even as blackface tv episodes were getting disappeared two years ago. like what the slippery-slope critics would have mocked. sure it got pushback on twitter, but not nearly the national coverage that the great tv-show scrubbing got.
If puritanical impulses are getting less attention, that's not a sign of their lessening. It's total saturation normal normalization.
there are two schools. one has a fight about once a month. it disrupts class, causes suspensions, causes a lot of gossip among, and handwringing from the faculty. They have messages to the parents, etc. the other one has daily fights that have become normalized. Administration is helpless to stop it, and has taken to ignoring all but the most severe violence. students at this school, don't really know what a school without lots of fights even looks like.
which school has a bigger violence problem? woke saturation is not the same as peak woke, the latter is a cope.
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To be blunt, wokeism is an efflorescence of booming economic times, when companies can afford to waste money on pastel-haired persons of diverse pronouns and genders as an advertisement of their civic virtue.
Now there's a downturn, and the fat is being trimmed, and that means all the DEI stuff which doesn't make money and where boycotts won't really have an effect since people are pulling in their spending anyway, and now their decisions are not being made on "is the pasta rainbow hues?" but "is this value for money?"
I think there is a definite turn against the excesses which became very excessive, but the major engine of change is turning off the money tap.
No, wokeism expands when times are bad, not good. The worse the economy gets, the woker the people who are holding most of the cash get- if the game is zero-sum, and you can't buy you success over your peers, the first person to press the Defect button wins. The traditional tools for this- sexism, racism, bullshit oppression narratives, and the concern trolling/plausibly deniable lie that turns the moral panics into a globe-spanning hysteria- work just as well in 1980AD as they did in 1980BC.
When the economy's good, purity spirals aren't generally tenable- capital needs labor more than labor needs capital, so capital has to pay more. And that payment comes in what it can and can't dictate through its bureaucracy- if you start kicking out good people when you can't hire them fast enough your company goes under. People usually refer to these time periods as "golden ages"- woke and identarianism (and their perpetrators) are marginalized by economic forces.
When the economy's bad, it's all about fortifying a more tenuous grip on power. Labor needs capital more than capital needs labor, so it can once again dictate the terms. Wages go down, and "the freedom to not be humiliated at work or in society at large" is one of those things that are absolutely part of one's wage (people leave jobs that do this to them all the time, just like they leave the ones that don't pay enough in raw dollars). People refer to these time periods as "dark ages"- there's not enough opportunity to reject woke and the high heel of (capital-serving) identarianism descends once again upon the human face.
We should expect the group that managed to capture the government at the very beginning of the decline to have a bunch of legal carveouts, and continue trying to grow their power by picking tiny fragments of the population to parade around as the excuse for why labor's wages deserve to be in the toilet. Which is the reason we see diversity statements required for janitor positions, and why the oppression has become monotonically worse since wages stopped increasing ca. 1970... except for that blip in the 90s and early 00s when the Soviets collapsed and then everyone was convinced to go to war, but that was just "it stopped getting worse".
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I sort of agree with a mild version of this but I think it way overstates the case; companies are no more amenable to wasting money in good times than in bad, what may in fact be the case is that DEI departments did actually represent, or at least were perceived to represent, a reasonable investment in boom time, for any number of reasons (attracting young talent, maintaining a good public image etc.), and this is no longer to be the case in more lean times. The question was always 'is this value for money', it's just that for many the answer used to be yes, and now it's no.
If your perception of what is reasonable changes depending on how much money you have, and you are more likely to find more things to be reasonable when you have more money, and assuming the perception of what is reasonable is more tolerant towards risk when you have more money, how are you not then more susceptible to waste money when you have more money? Sure, no one couches their investments as 'waste'. But it's hard to call it anything else after the fact has been revealed that you 'invested' in a bunch of snake oil.
I don't think you represented a mild version of what was said. But rather a PR coded version that fronts the notion that companies don't waste money. I don' think the notion of a return on investment was ever on the cards for companies that hired professional racists to do in-house struggle sessions on white supremacy. I think that you could, at best, define it as a wasteful fashion statement.
That such programs are less likely to be considered value for money these days is not proof that they were at one time 'snake oil', only that different economic conditions have now rendered them less useful.
Fashion statements are not necessarily wasteful, especially if you are a very public facing company who markets their goods to the general public.
I am not saying they are less likely to be considered valuable. I am stating that they are and were always not valuable. Not as a matter of perception but as a matter of fact. That's why I likened it to snake oil. The snake oil might have been believed to be good when the prospective buyer didn't know it was snake oil but thought instead that it was a rare elixir that cured all illness. But that belief never made the snake oil a good investment. It was always snake oil and the buyer was always a fool for believing it was an elixir that could cure all illness.
Another way to say this, just because a company believed that something was valuable doesn't mean that it was. Or that the company was reasonable for having believed it was valuable in the first place. It was always a money pit designed by grifters.
But they can be. Like the wardrobe of a bored housewife of a rich husband. Sure, it might be very good for the image of the husband and wife for the wife to be well dressed at social gatherings. That fact does not preclude us from recognizing that you don't need a gigantic wardrobe filled with dresses that will never be worn to present yourself properly 4 times a year at company conventions. On top of that, buying into a bad fashion trend might hurt your company as well. Like the case with the anti-men Gillette razor commercials.
Again, just because a company believed something or did something doesn't mean it was good or smart or reasonable or anything else. Decisions are made by people. You can't shield those decisions behind the fact they were made by a company. You have to look at them as they were taken. Which is why, sometimes, companies go bankrupt and CEO's get fired. Regardless of how good they believed their decisions were at the time.
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I find the the world's most bizzare phenomenon to be the existence of fundamentalists who can't understand the idea of religious-like devotion. All the moral commitments of their enemies must be cynical ploys or trivial aspects of their character; they could never be a driving force stronger than material concerns.
I wonder how long this has been the case. It's fascinating to realize that the descendants of crusaders were brutally crushed in an openly atheistic revolt back in 1790s France, then in 1917 Russia. Then when the threat of depravity (See Weimar's trans-mania) and communism threatened the 1930s German petit-Burgeois, these immediately understood that their only hope was not in the church but in viking Larpers who it turns out were not larping at all. Now the most ostensibly religious country in the West is the exporter of woke culture to ostensibly irreligious Europe, having previously broken records in unrestricted abortion, appalling divorce and child custody policies...
At some point, you've got to wonder what it says about Christians that the the morbidly obese gender-fluid idols of the left inspire in their followers, a greater will to power, than the rock of ages.
I'll have you know that Hitler explicitly hated Viking larpers.
Nothing dies unless it is moribund, I agree with that. Christianity is finished, there are new ideas that inspire greater fervor.
Christianity is alive and thriving with greater fervor than ever before.
Note that it is Christianity explicitly devoid of intellectual content and rational thought.
True, I saw a graph of church attendance in the UK and all the traditional churches were shrinking year on year, all but one of the evangelicals were growing. But this was in the context of the Anglican church of Uganda splitting from the English church over some compromise they were doing with gay rights: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/church-of-england-crack-up/
The key thing is getting tangible results. Christianity is not pulling in its own direction, it's getting pulled in other directions. The strongest, richest and most important parts of the world aren't getting more Christian, they're getting less Christian.
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None of what you quoted claims that. "There are X adherents" where X is a large sounding number doesn't imply growth at all. And "Pentecostalism is believed to be the fastest-growing religious movement in the world" neither says that Christianity is growing, nor does it even say that Pentecostalism is growing fast. ("Fastest growth rate" doesn't imply "fast growth rate".)
Be very careful not to interpret Wikipedia articles as saying more than what they literally claim, because writers phrase them to imply things that they don't have evidence for while being literally truthful. (Wikipedia is similar to the media in this way.)
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Do you have to wonder? Nietschze spent quite some time arguing that Christianity, as slave morality, was inconsistent in terms of will to power.
This is a strong argument but it's not exactly consistent with the behaviour of Christians before the enlightenment. I think the defining shift happened when God died in the souls of the tiny proportion of people who are capable of embracing an idea fully, and going to war for it. These, then went for other ideas that could still capture them, and everyone else was at most a trivial inconvenience in their way.
Okay, then what caused them to turn their backs on God?
Actually, who were these few people? I think it’s a mistake to read the greatest and most venerated of historical figures as categorically different from the masses. The existence of a warrior nobility was no guarantee of success, and it was specifically the transition to professional militaries which put Catholic Spain in charge of the western hemisphere for a few decades. But the Protestant nations of the 17th and 18th centuries clearly met success after the Enlightenment. It’s the incentives and the technology afforded to common men which drive history.
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A traditional cycle: The older generation promote strict social mores but fails to follow them, the younger generation observes the hypocrisy of the older and is disgusted and so loosens up, the next generation observes their libertine elders and is disgusted and so tightens up, on into infinity.
I bet that gen Z (or the gen after it) will be more conservative in some ways than the millennials (although not on lgbtq stuff, that is locked in forever once the boomers stop taking up all the cultural space);
The TQ stuff is likely to blow up in a spectacular way once all the sterilised kids grow up and huge chunks of them decide they were failed by the system (and the rest of the probability space mostly looks like "AI killed us" or "we get fertility-restoration tech"). It's exactly the sort of thing that makes a society decide Never Again once everyone's had time to stand back and process.
There's also the issue that nuclear war is pretty likely in the near future and I think that most SJers literally dying in a fire would lead to the few who survived getting removed from power; SJ's hold on the countryside is tenuous.
And, y'know, the stats of millennials/zoomers who reproduce are immensely different from the rest along this axis.
Not obvious how fast Thermidor will come or how far it will go, but I wouldn't count it out just yet.
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It may, in fact, be true that we are in a temporary lull as it pertains to concrete and public exercises of woke power. However, I think the great lesson of post-2014 wokeness is that its most enduring victories - the ones that create lasting changes to the legal and cultural infrastructure - are achieved directly after, or in the months following, specific events which get maximally weaponized into a coordinated outrage machine.
Before Michael Brown, the “cops are killing innocent black men for no reason” narrative was just not on the radar of most people; afterward, suddenly this narrative was everywhere, and activists were working every day to locate examples to turn viral, in order to maximize the salience of the narrative and to solidify as many concrete gains - and put as much money into the pockets of activists - as possible. Thousands of new jobs and tentacles of the NGO-industrial complex were generated in that roughly two-year-period - even while support for BLM began steadily declining among white Americans not too long after the initial 2014 spike.
Then, just as that level of support had finally dropped below a certain threshold, and most people had stopped thinking or caring about that narrative, George Floyd happened, and suddenly the outrage machine went right back into full gear and ratcheted everything one step further. The activist class had spent the intervening years quietly laying the scaffolding behind the scenes, waiting for the right viral event to light the fuse that would allow them to spring into coordinated action. Even as most Americans now start to lose interest in the narrative and things start to get pared back slightly from the new 2020 peak, the overall baseline level of power accrued to the activist class still vastly exceeds the old pre-2020 baseline, which was itself vastly larger than the previous pre-2014 baseline.
So, my question to the public who are belatedly starting to rethink things and to push back on the extremes which they themselves were willing to tolerate in the immediate aftermath of that viral event is as follows: Will you have the moral courage and willpower and hard-heartedness the next time a George Floyd level event happens, to say, “I don’t give a fuck”? When the news shows you some incident with horrible optics and constructs an expansive and emotionally-manipulative narrative around it, will you stand firm and reject fundamental elements of that narrative? Will you say, “it’s completely fine that this happened, and we should change nothing about our society to prevent it from happening again”? Or, like the previous times, will you say, “I understand why you’re angry and I agree things need to change, but do you have to be quite so extreme about your response?” If all you can muster is the latter, then you’re allowing another ratchet of the dial one more step to the left and they’re going to claim as much more power as they can before you start to lose interest again.
There is talk on the Dissident Right - I was actually exposed to it initially by James Lindsay, who is himself only a lukewarm member of the DR - that the activist class is quietly laying the groundwork for a “Drag Floyd” or “Trans Floyd”; in other words, the increasingly aggressive pushing of things like Drag Queen Story Hour into as many Red enclaves as possible is a tactic designed to eventually provoke one or more violent responses which can be virally weaponized. Eventually somebody will get radicalized enough to take violent action against one of these drag queens, or one of these doctors who performs sex changes on minors, and that will be just what the outrage machine needed to light the spark. Will the parts of the public who matter be able to hold firm and say, “Well yeah, what did you think was going to happen? Sorry, we’re not interested in another ratchet”? I predict that they will not. That would require much more conviction and unity/clarity of purpose than the Anglosphere public is willing and able to muster. No, we’ll get another massive coordinated action, another permanent power grab, and it’ll take a few years for people to start forgetting about that narrative, during which a new baseline will have been established, from which we will never retreat.
Does this really require hard-heartendess though? The hippie era ended not because people became tough, but because everyone got sick of them--the people, the ideology, the empty promises, the same blah tunes, etc. The same thing happened with the early 90's environmentalism craze: it was everywhere, absolutely everywhere. We had recycling lessons in school. There were cute cartoon characters of mother Earth on TV. There was probably some take of the President segregating his trash or some such thing. And you had PETA or the Sea Shepard and people chaining themselves to bulldozers. What about the trash barge that couldn't find a port that was scaring the whole country into thinking we'd all drown under an ocean of garbage?
It all faded away. Well, not all of it. Recycling is somewhat enforced, even though it doesn't appear to work much. And people mostly rejected EVs until mostly recently when they became--almost--as good as ICEV. But, in general, people got tired of being told they're immoral idiots who are destroying everything every minute of every day.
That's my hope at least. It's too early to tell, but the recent news about Rowling makes me think that the crowds are getting tired of listening to same tired old stuff all the time. Perhaps we here are even more tired since many of us have been audience to this show for a decade or more.
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The left and the right aren’t symmetrical, tho. Feel-good press bulletins get amplified, while the walk-back is a small blurb in the business section of the WSJ. Stuff getting worse or better doesn’t correlate with the # of words spent.
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If it is similar to the George Floyd situation, then why would I say that? In the death of George Floyd, the cops acted - and this is the most charitable interpretation - incompetently. I do not want cops to advertently or inadvertently kill people who are doing nothing more dangerous than trying to use counterfeit money, weakly resisting arrest, and being on drugs.
The fact that afterward, a bunch of activists misrepresented the facts about overall police performance around black people and tried to turn this issue into a race war against white supremacy or whatever is a separate matter. I was clear about it then and I am clear about it now - yes there absolutely are huge problems in America's criminal justice system. I support police reform. But I do not support hysterical activists who twist reality in support of their ideological narratives and go crusading against some sort of hated white enemy.
Why do you care? How does it affect your life or the lives of anyone you care about? Do you have any relatives or loved ones who are even remotely likely to end up dying in a similar matter? Is the extremely rare death of the occasional junkie ex-con seriously worth devoting any significant political capital toward preventing? Wouldn’t you rather live in a country where an event like this is at best a local news story that gets handled in a routine manner within the local court system?
I believe that you are willingly complicit in the exact problem I’m highlighting. In my opinion, by far the most important problems with America’s “criminal justice system” is that criminals are not punished nearly severely enough, and that in almost any genuinely functional criminal justice system George Floyd would not have had the opportunity to die under Derek Chauvin’s knee, because he would have either 1. been executed or imprisoned for life after the first time he broke into a woman’s home and held her at gunpoint, or 2. forcibly institutionalized for being a chronic abuser of fentanyl and amphetamines, subject to conditional release only after a demonstrated long-term ability to desist from the use of those substances.
That is the kind of hard-heartedness I’m talking about. Not “yes, I agree that this country needs a major overhaul of its criminal justice system to protect the George Floyds of the world, I just don’t think those overhauls should extend to as many aspects of society as Antifa thinks they should.” No, we’re going to need much stronger stuff than anything you’ve offered.
What about caring for the maintenance and running of a complicated machine like the court system or the police system? Am I not to care that parts of this system seem to be defective in certain area of my country, a country I care a lot about? Should I just ignore that these core institutions are producing false positives at a rate higher than acceptable?
I imagine the answer is no.
But I also imagine that you could argue that the existence of people like Floyd outside of prison is the sign of the system being broken. With that, I agree wholeheartedly, but I must push back against the idea of not caring about the health of fundamental institutions. And arguably, a court and police that's in better shape would have more appropriately handled the such a case as Floyd's by, most likely, isolating him from society. But the same system killing even a man like Floyd by mistake is even more cause for alarm than letting one like him walk about freely.
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You could just as well ask this about most of the things that people typically discuss here. Most of the topics that you bring up here, I suspect, also do not really affect your life or the lives of those you care about that much.
I do not want to go into too many personal details but in short - no it is not likely. However, I have certainly known or at least known-through-friends people who were treated by the criminal justice system in a way that I disagree with. One was jailed briefly for criticizing incompetent cops to their face. Another was imprisoned for years for drug transportation, and in my view almost all laws against recreational drugs should not exist.
In any case, I can sympathize with people who are hurt by the criminal justice system even if I personally do not know them.
Your attitudes towards recreational drug use are totally alien to me. I have no idea why anyone would have your attitudes and I have never seen a good argument in favor of them that did not boil down to being pro-authoritarianism/pro-social engineering. And I am not pro-authoritarianism, although I am also not some kind of unrealistic libertarian. I think that obviously some authority is necessary for society to function, but I prefer to limit it and the idea of using state power for social engineering - which the war on drugs basically is - is distasteful to me just as it would be if, say, a communist state did it. Again, obviously some degree of state-imposed social engineering is necessary for a society to function but I prefer to limit it and certainly the idea of using force to prevent people from consuming mind-altering substances seems absurd to me, as absurd as say would be the idea of using force to prevent people from wearing certain styles of clothing or the idea of using force to prevent people from consensually having sex with certain other people.
It is hard for me to understand the mindset of pro-authoritarians. It is almost like trying to understand some different species.
Hard-heartedness cannot be imposed without authoritarianism.
Does this mean that we should let violent people run wild without trying to stop them? No, not at all. I am not anti-police. I am for competent police who do a better job of using the minimum of force than the current police do. If that means we need to fund the criminal justice system more so that they can hire a higher quality of person, I am for it.
Should George Floyd have been executed for breaking into a woman's home and holding her at gunpoint? In my view, no. I am absolutely against capital punishment if for no other reason than that it occasionally kills innocent people. Should he have been imprisoned for life? That is a different matter, and I think that "yes" is certainly a reasonable position to have on that question. There are decent arguments pro and against. People do change sometimes and lifetime incarceration is a very harsh sentence to impose. On the other hand, it is clear to me that letting people who have a track record of gun violence back on the streets is not fair to their possible future victims. So I am not sure about this issue.
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I think the "Trans Floyd" event is the recent murder of Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old transgender woman, in the UK, allegedly by two 15-year-olds who were placed in custody thereafter. It appears to not be a hate crime - just a dispute gone wrong - but the trans activists are pushing the narrative that this is the result of transphobia like crazy, and especially the "protect trans kids" narrative too. I think it's too early to tell what the lasting public reaction to this will be.
A lot of this hysteria also appears to have latched itself onto JK Rowling. I haven't seen anything in isolation, it always is attempted to be tied to her.
I wonder how much JK Rowling is hated just because she's hated. Like the Kardashians are famous for being famous, it seems to me that Rowling is hated because other people hate her, and not because she's actually done anything particularly objectionable. You ask people to provide specific details for why they hate her and they either can't, or they make a tenuous reach to connect her with something transphobic, or they just plain make up completely false facts.
Narcissism of small differences? Trans rights are negligible in the grand scheme of things and Rowling's already fully on board with identarianism except for that; it makes sense that the person who resists slightly would be hated the most.
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Rowling is hated because she is a transphobe. She could have bent the knee but she didn't. She chose a different team. No one was hating Rowling before the trans stuff. Before that, at best she was being mocked a bit for being a hamfisted fuddy duddy about retconning all of the characters in her books as being either gay or black. At worst she got involved in UK politics criticizing Corbyn and co for not being anti-Brexit enough.
This changed when she was obviously tangled with TERF stuff. First by liking a tweet that referred to trans women in a derogatory manner, which a PR person of hers lied about and said it was 'liked' through an accidental slip of the finger. And then later when she got involved with the Maya Forstater thing. Maya being a person who made very explicit transphobic comments including the statement that men can not change into women. Rowling stood up for this person explicitly.
Imagine a different scenario, where Rowling accidentally likes a tweet about race and IQ research that says blacks score lower than whites. Oops. What an accident. Why would she even be reading that? Anyways, a year later she, out of the blue, stands up for Noah Carl and talks about how ridiculous it was that he was fired. That doesn't mean she is a racist. Right? She just likes academic freedom stuff. Later she writes a lengthy blog post about the reality of evolution in humans. She doesn't say anything explicitly, she just says that we are all different and that this is great. But that the differences are real and immutable. OK. She then starts tweeting about the excesses of the black rights movement and how the movement is promoting conditions that make white people unsafe. She then writes a novel about a black serial killer... lol
Now, at which point do you think the real Rowling would call the 'different scenario Rowling' a racist? I'm pretty sure it would happen as soon as the support for Noah Carl came out. And she would never look back or bother reading a blog post about some racist 'explaining their views'.
So much of what pisses me off about these conversations is that I'm betting your description of her behavior is fairly accurate to a degree. The sticking point for me is the completely-bought framing that any of this qualifies as 'transphobia'; at least in a way that I could give weight to the term, as opppsed to simply granting and swallowing the activist line.
It seems obvious to me that if you dig deep enough, immutable differences between the sexes will reveal themselves. This does not automatically entail that trans people don't deserve respect or the same same basic protections and amenities as any other citizen. To my understanding, this is Rowling's position. And if there's a moat around her stance, its on what would have previously been largely agreed-upon, practical notions like "putting penises in womens' prisons and shelters is a bad idea". Compassion and universalism does occasionally need to reconcile itself with the hard limits of bad actors and material reality.
If the word 'transphobic' encapuslates even this, then it's a dead word to me. I register it as a hostile entity everywhere it comes up.
Now, I'll admit that I actually don't know much about who Rowling allegedly platformed or buddied up with. Perhaps they were truly terrible and a shade too red even for me. But if their statements and conversations are less "Delete trans people" and more "Your neovagina - bluntly - is incapable of fooling anybody", then I'm so over it.
Given that I recently copped a permanent sub ban and a weeklong site-wide admin ban for daring to make a three-sentence tepid defense of JK against activists (not trans people with any specificity) - charged with transphobia and 'promoting hate' - I think my disdain for this word has been freshly renewed, and replanted a few feet deeper towards core of my being.
Rowling is a feminist. I.e. someone who wants to preserve and extend female privileges. This puts her at odds with people who want to extend those privileges to a subset of biological men. "Transphobe" is just the label the latter group uses for anyone opposed to that project. It's that simple.
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This single paragraph makes a point that I, as someone who was as left-wing as they come in the older days, wish I could thrust in the face of every single social justice commissar I argued and spoke with before changing societal pressures meant that even this mild objection was forced into the same category as thoughtless anti-semitism and racial chauvinism.
Being banned for your (self-reported, so who knows) anodyne defence of a position held by a broad swathe of society has not made you more likely to support trans people. You have not seen the "error" of your ways and decided to go give a trans person money - your attitudes were strengthened and your beliefs hardened. This is exactly what a lot of thoughtful people said would happen and other people are saying is happening right now - but societal discourse has been so polluted that even bringing this point up is seen as a wholehearted defence of Hitler, the kind of thoughtcrime that will get you removed from polite society.
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I think "transphobe" is a hugely overloaded term that communicates almost nothing of value. The only thing you know for certain when someone invokes it is that they are referring to something negative, and something to do with trans people. That's all the information it conveys. It's frequently used to describe everything from the tiniest, object-level objections to certain trans positions (don't put biological males convicted of rape in biological women's prisons) to extreme, hateful rhetoric that genuinely wants to see trans people genocided (and not the "soft" form of genocide that entails detransition; actual murder).
It reminds one of calling Martin Luther King Jr. a criminal.
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I don't disagree. What I disagree with is the selective rejection of otherizing language. Where we want to have our cake and eat it to.
'Transphobe' was always an otherizing dehumanizing term. And as soon as it's applied to oneself it becomes obvious. What is less obvious is that the deconstruction of 'transphobe' applies to all the other terms as well. Racism, homophobia, misogyny or any other group defining otherizing language. The point of these words is not to accurately describe, the point is to otherize and dehumanize anyone who is not sufficiently demonstrating themselves to be a member of the ingroup.
I can't join a pity party for people like Rowling who have excessively enjoyed the luxury of being able to dehumanize their opponents instead of actually making an effort in understanding and discussing things with them. This is her world. She does not bother with reading blogs detailing the finer points of the position of some racist or misogynist in their own words. She allows herself the convenience of dehumanizing them as members of the outgroup. She doesn't weigh herself down with the effort of understanding them as human beings. No, she just otherizes them. That's the game being played and she sees no issue with it so long as she is the playmaker.
Well, now Rowling dun goofed and found herself enemies that are doing the same thing to her. They are not bothering with her blog, or mealy mouthed excuses. They are just recognizing her as the enemy. And they are not wrong. Rowling is against trans women having the same rights as women. Why should a trans person accept that? Why should the boundaries of acceptability for trans emancipation be tied to the sensibilities of some author?
This is a battle in the culture war. Rowling picked a side. She is a transphobe.
I'm curious, what do you think of the term homophobe? I know the comparison between trans and gay people have all sorts of problems but as far as pathologizing critics as inherently irrational it does seem to be the same tactic. I've always kind of found the tactic pretty frustrating despite mostly disagreeing with those called homophobes and mostly agreeing with those called transphobes.
so many word games are played just in the monikers groups go by these days and I always find the tactic infantile. Naming your group what amounts to the "good guys" and the opposing group what amounts to "insane bad guys" really should get you looked at like someone who is deeply unserious about the topic and has no interest in good faith.
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Fair enough argument, and I suspected this was the lean of your post. And Rowling is in many ways a victim of the kind of culture she herself enabled.
I wish there was a way for her to get her comeuppance without making life more irritating for everybody else. Le sigh.
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I've noticed something similar to you as well. As hanikrummihundursvin said, the reason JK Rowling is hated is because, by the definition of the term as used by the people who most use the term, she is a transphobe. It just happens to be that the definition of the term encapsulates entirely reasonable and non-hateful, kind, non-bigoted opinions and behaviors regarding trans people. It's the same sort of phenomenon as the redefining of "racism" and "sexism" to encapsulate similarly reasonable, non-hateful, non-bigoted opinions and behaviors. These terms seem to have continued to hold onto the negative connotations through the redefining, which was the apparent goal of the people doing the redefining, and it remains to be seen how well that will go for the defining of "transphobia."
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I was going to say exactly that. The Usual Suspects are trying to portray this as a hate crime, when it seems to have been the usual tragic dumb teenage spat going wrong because idiot kids are walking around with knives trying to be hard.
I think that two things will make this not as successful as it might be: (1) it's in the UK, not the US and (2) the recent "trans sex criminals" cases in Scotland. "Female-identifying person involved in disappearance of 11 year old girl" is still something that can't be handwaved away.
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This is like saying communism must be winding down, because I'm not hearing about as many shootings of kulaks and imperialist agents. No Shit. Who the fuck is left to cancel? This is what complete victory looks like. You don't need to hit people over the head because everyone agrees with you they just want you to shut up about it already. Yes, communism might be entirely antithetical to human nature and party officials, together with everyone else might cynically use the black market on the side, but no one will openly question government ownership of everything and everyone will claim to hate the capitalist parasites.
And this time around there is no Western World for dissidents to point to and say, this is a better way to live, or BBC radio to tell them about it.
The tech layoffs, outside of twitter, didn't disproportionately target DEI departments. There is some pushback against the complete destruction of liberals who joke about or reservedly oppose trans people getting exactly the privileges of women. Nearly all criticism of wokeness on both sides of the political spectrum must punch near exclusively at white woke liberals/white woke liberal women, white being the understood ecumenical slur that makes someone a legitimate target.
Every bloody media company in the country spent the 90s aggressively telling the free spirited teenagers you are talking about; "Hey aren't your parents and elders boring, repressive shits..." Who, is telling them that now? Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro?
Yes, worlds rarely end, things can go on and get eternally worse forever - Do "rest easy"!
Well, didn't it though?
Communism--revolution of the proletariat, utopia around the corner, full employment, 3-hour work week--were all the rage in the beginning of the 20th century. Even after WW2, there were still many people, many fellow travelers, championing the cause despite more and more reports about the purges and gulags coming out of Soviet Russia or Communist China. And yet, but the end of that century, communism had few open supporters. Sure, you had the Noami Kleins and other angry activists, but they were mostly selling tired tropes to angry teenagers. Also, true, today there seems to be a revival of anti-capitalist sentiment, but it seems to be mainly a side dish to the main course that is identity politics. No one is starting communes, no one is talking about seizing the means of production--except a bunch of hipsters trying to organize a "May Day" that attracts a total of, what, 100 people out a metropolis like New York that numbers over 8 million residents?
I don't know. I don't hang with teenagers. But I can make out movements of large masses of popculture and it looks like woke-filled pieces like Velma or Rings of Power aren't really getting much of a following. What appears to be gaining popularity is the dirty grungy style of the 90's. Of course, this could be a fad. Maybe it's all just about the aesthetics and not about the substance. But if it's not, we should see more stuff like Tarantino's movies, more heavy music--and an increasingly strong resistance to the morally pure elders that make up such a large chunk of millennials.
I'd rather rest easy than get carried away by the rapacious currents of dooming.
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This has been a recurring trend since the Baby Boomers, who's to say it won't happen again with Zoomers or Alphas? Sure, it probably won't be Walsh or Shapiro, but there probably will be an effective figure for any counter-woke/counter-safetyist/counter-softness wave that may come.
It could easily happen in the 50 Stalins way: the problem with your hyper-woke parents is that they aren't woke enough.
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No! This is actually exactly what I'm talking about--if woke has become The Establishment, then youngsters' attacking the establishment is good, no?
Though, to add nuance, anti-work seems like a spinoff from woke, a tumor of it trying to eat itself, and not some healthy type of rebellion, but I'll take what I can get.
Doing the opposite things they see their parents doing. Wearing dark clothing instead of happy pastel colors like in the 00's and '10s. Smoking or rather vaping, rather than sticking to ubercool health regimes. Watching gory movies. Understanding the the DEI stuff they hear at school is just the system trying to control them.
Of course, this may only describe a minority of gen z. Like the 90's crowd, most will go on to happily comply with any beliefs they're given. But this minority are the future mottizens.
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The 2020-2021 time line lost its mind everywhere regardless of ideology. Something was broken then.
You had GME/AMC, legitimate people did the GME/AMC trade too (Tiger Global, Huang, and many more), Doge Coin, Putin I believe lost touch with reality maybe not on desire for war but a belief he could just drive his tanks to Kyiv like it was 1965, the right Larping in congress, the semi normies relatively that just decided to 4x overdoses. Nothing on that entire timeline makes any sense to me. I don’t think it’s culture war only that went crazy as people went crazy all over the place. The stock market literally turned into investors investing in fraud in a business model.
I don't know if covid was part of it, but I would not be surprised if there is a complex and almost inscrutible relationship. Repressed emotion seems to be a frequent cause of anxiety disorders; perhaps the George Floyd mass hysteria was the product of mass repressed emotions about covid: a radically new and unsettling experience for all Americans.
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Even if this is true, I think there's two further questions to be answered:
Even if wokeism as a mode of explicit political behavior (with its cancelations, DEI rituals, and such) declines, will many/most of the social norms (decoupling gender roles from sex, conceiving of certain types of expression as violence, increases in matriarchal and gynocentric behavior, etc.) it promulgated equally decline, or will they be subsumed into the neutral social default and persist in a fashion not explicitly woke-coded? (You saw this with the "sexual revolution" of the 60s/70s. People eventually got sick of the hippies who were often seen as overly self-righteous (comparable to modern woke types), but they for the most part kept their drugs and promiscuity. If anything those only grew in reach after the hippies' decline.)
When will it happen again (or, if you are inclined to think of it as bad as I am, how can it be stopped from happening again)? There have been plenty of proto-wokeisms (that in some cases arguably had as much reach) in the past, from the 60s/70s hippiedom to the "political correctness" of the early 90s. Defeating those (or letting them burn themselves out) sure didn't seem to ever stop variations of them from continuing to crop up again at some later point. If desirable (as I believe it is), how can society be inoculated fully against the continuous recurrence of this phenomenon? In a secular age, is it perhaps just the replacement for the occasional outbreak of religious fervor, man's natural instinct to bring about an occasional reckoning of repentance?
I like how these questions make you think.
I'll put on my sci-fi hat and do some guessing:
The social norms will stay but will lose power. It's like having that one vegan friend that's into freecycling. Fun to invite sometimes, maybe even cook a meat- and dairy-free dish for, but they know that if they act up too much, they'll get axed from the social circle. It's like with all the boomers who thought they could keep the summer of love going forever, but instead grew up, got jobs, kids, mortgages and now just want stable living. Youngsters will roll their eyes when their parents will recount for the 12th time how they were fighting for racial justice--because youngsters will be well aware that, well, nothing really changed, so all this SJW stuff is just the same old crap you see in old movies.
I would guess that we should see another woke cycle in 20 years. I'm basing this on my own fairly short timeframe of observation that only goes back to the early 90's, and a bunch of history I've learned, second hand, about the 70's and 80's. I don't think it can be stopped, though I hold onto some hope on that a great refragmentation is happening that will make purity-based movements like woke much less likely to spread. As for full inoculation against religious fervor, I suspect we're biologically programmed to engage in tribal behaviors whose symptoms include religious and political fervor, so we'd need a massive change to take place, something like artificial wombs or gay space communism, that would completely change the fabric of society to the point where tribal games would be severely punished. Short of that, I suspect it'll be some thousands of years before these genes are weakened enough to make this type of social behavior stop popping up like cockroaches in a bad NYC neighborhood.
But what are your thoughts on these questions?
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Musa al-Gharbi again? These events have always been sorta uncommon despite all the hype/attention they get on twitter when they happen. Right now, without deferring to Google, name at least four major campus protests or cancellations. Evergreen, but that a long tom ago. Middlebury, again, a long time ago. Berkeley protests over Milo? Three. Top Universities like Brown, Stanford, Harvard seem to go a long time washout any major problems despite the largely left-wing student body . For most of the year campus life is mostly uneventful, such as students going to classes , writing papers, taking exams, etc. , not protesting.
They are uncommon because cancelling an important person or even low-ranking academic always incurs a risk of backlash and defection, because of the media attention it gets (like regarding the rewriting of Roald Dahl books, which hardly anyone on the left supports even) . Cancelling someone or something important is like a nuclear weapon. Firing one is ok, fire too many and you destroy yourself in the process, too.
Rather, it's much worse in the private sector, stuff like DEI , social media censorship, being banned from platforms, etc., which is far bigger than academia and affects more people for most of their lives more so than academia or school, which is just 20-30% of one's life, and also is unseen and in the background, except occasionally when it does blow up (like the James Damore memo). The risk of being banned on Facebook, Reddit, etc. for committing 'bad speak', or even on twitter still, is still pretty bad and has not peaked. Gatekeepers on social media still command considerable power.
If you're claiming that they've stopped hammering down nails that stick up, and as evidence show that there's not much hammering happening, you also need to show that there's still nails sticking up.
they cannot hammer all of them down. it's an optimalization problem. Hammering down too many would mean losing legitimacy and support, like the backlash to re-writing/censoring Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl books.
they are still hammering nails but in the private sector , like social media or work, stuff which gets less media attention than highly visible targets. Going after highly visible targets incurs risk, so they cannot do it that often.
But this is a backlash that occurred primarily on Twitter, lasted about 48 hours, and resulted in no changes. No firings, no policy changes, not even an apology. Pretty weak tea I think.
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...We're talking about academia specifically, right? Which academic nails are sticking up, currently?
My assumption is that within academia, within the corporate world, most places run on procedure and the manipulation of procedural outcomes, they absolutely can hammer down every nail there is. I've seen pretty much nothing that leads me to think otherwise in the last seven or so years. And sure, they get pushback sometimes, on specific issues. Usually this pushback doesn't even stop them on the specific issue in question, much less roll back previous wins; most commonly, there's simply a week or two of grumbling and then people give up. Seuss and Dahl are still censored. The "pushback" lacked any meaningful substance.
"that often" is a flexible term. it seems to me that they can do it often enough to consolidate their gains in preparation for the next push. Again, the policy/procedure/rules changes aren't rolling back. What they got, they keep, what they failed to get, they'll be back for soon enough.
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Harvard canceled a Law School dean for representing Weinstein. There was also the Christakises at Yale. Then there's MITs cancellation of Sabatini for a MeTooing, and NYUs refusal to hire him. MIT also cancelled Stallman.
I suggest that if there are fewer events, it's because so many witches have already been burnt, and the remaining witches are keeping their heads down. We're not seeing a blossoming of intellectual freedom.
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The Federal Reserve has cut out woke ideology. But I guess when you have a real issue like 10% inflation you cut out the bs. Similarly big tech got the memo that their bloated from wall st. I think these areas were real factors showing up.
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Semantic nitpick: "Bookended" means "at both/either ends," but those movies both came out in 1999. So they may have closed out the decade, but they didn't "bookend" it.
Thank you! I always thought this phrase describes a single "bookend."
I suppose if you only mention a single item, it could act as one bookend -- I've never heard that usage -- but when two items are mentioned as "Bookending" you would have one on each end, like a set of bookends.
The thing about bookends is that it only takes one to solve the problem on a bookshelf. At least one with sides. That does make the expression rather odd. No idea if it’s leftover from a specific fashion or something.
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