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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24295 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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We Won

On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.

Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.

The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.

I recently got a permaban from Reddit for voicing no-no opinions, so the needle hasn't moved for me. If somebody was able to revert Reddit to its 2012-13 libertarian bent, then I'd be more optimistic.

There can be no reconciliation without truth. This is a phrase that comes up in indigenous affairs, and advocates for indigenous peoples use it to mean that there cannot be a reconciliation between indigenous populations and the states that oppressed them without there first being a truth-telling and a serious reckoning with what was actually done. I believe that it applies here. "Woke 1 was crazy"; OK, which parts were crazy? Who said them? Who believed them? Will there be a reckoning? Will the people who pushed crazy ideas be kept away from any levers of power, institutional or otherwise? Or, instead, is the Democrat machinery trying to put out a message of "whoopsie daisy, we went a bit far there sowwy" until the next time they can go for the big prize? Based on how little has come back on the architects of the COVID response, I think the answer will be just "whoopsie daisy, sorry, vote for us again please".

Given that there's still an active fight over men playing in the WNBA, the DSA seems to have a lot of influence within the Democrats, and I'd estimate not even 10% of the downstream cultural impacts of "Woke 1" have receded from the high-water mark of ~2022, I don't think anyone has won. To look at some concrete policy examples: Canada and several US states still allow abortions with no gestational limit (i.e. "full-term abortions") and the UK has decriminalized full-term abortions; trans self-id remains the law of the land in e.g. large parts of North and South America, Ireland, Western Europe, Australia, and Scandinavia; land acknowledgements are common enough that Wikipedia documents them as present in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and parts of the US; and the concept that a nation should enforce its borders and deport people who violate them still remains controversial. Software has eaten and now runs the world, and the world of software is still as hard-line progressive as it was in 2022, both in the open-source world and in the halls of the major tech companies. Wikipedia, the world's reference to large parts of reality, remains staunchly progressive; and the cultural bias in the software world will absolutely tilt AI developers' sense of whether a model is "biased", and so when LLMs replace Wikipedia as the default person's answer to questions, it will also put a progressive tilt through the world's understanding of itself.

There's no "won" to assign to any "we", not yet. The vibes are shifting, and most of that shift has been through (and because of) Trump's second term, but IMHO he's got a good chance to flub the midterms after making a mess of Iran, and any shift in electoral performance will be read as a bellweather. Even if he performs well in the midterms and is succeeded by a Republican, I wouldn't say there's any "win" to call until there's evidence of a sustained and durable cultural shift. What became "Woke 1.0" was latent in the culture for some time before it erupted, reactivating people who were sympathetic to the "politically correct" era of culture but mixing their memes with the Tumblr generation, as the latter graduated from being "just kids on college campuses". That generation built on groundwork laid in the 60s, where the left was able to push a lot, make a lot of counter-cultural headway, and when the high water rolled back they somehow landed college professorships and dodged pretty much any serious consequence.

Mild mod rebuke:

Who is "we"?

This is about as literal an example of consensus-building as I've seen. You just assume everyone here on the Motte is on your side here. You're posting, literally, about opposing sides in the Culture War and just taking it as a given that one side is "us."

And you're not wrong that defenders of either Woke 1 or Woke 2 (whatever that is) are pretty scarce here. If I had to pick a side, yes, I'm a disaffected anti-woke like (almost) everyone else.

Still. We may be skewing further and further in one direction, but the Motte itself is not intended to be a partisan platform and we will not be "claimed" and you will not assert that only one side is "us."

The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal.

This is called lying, not winning. The Democratic Party is lying. Rest assured, when they win, all that's really going to happen is more racial humiliation. It's quite literally the only thing they are capable of. Even if they wanted to something else, they can't. I doubt they really want to.

proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy"

The best part about this is now the Republicans can be all "haha yeah MAGA was crazy let's just forget all about that"

I see that Ms. Hong lost, where even Nate over at Silver Bulletin didn't give the winner Crowley a look-in (they had it Hong vs Tiffany), so perhaps woke is slain. Or perhaps not. AOC going "ooh things sure were crazy back then, eh? Ha-ha, those were the days, but we're all grown up now" is very amusing. I've always said she was primarily a political operator and if she thinks the wind is swinging round to a different quarter, it may be worth paying attention.

But mostly I think the craziness is just being skimmed off the top, like fat off a stock, and the main "it's called just being a decent person" bludgeoning remains. Though with Professor Arday also getting critical attention, we'll have to wait and see.

Hong losing has all the calling cards of Atlanta 2020. The only update I can make (and think anyone should) is that Democratic machines are still super powerful and polished and can manipulate any election that is even kinda close. In a general, that means a Republican needs to win by more than 100k to win any statewide with a major Dem metro. In a primary, the upstart probably needs to win real Dem voters by at least 10k.

I think Polymarket and other prediction markets took a hammering on Hong, which makes me laugh also (because I don't think prediction markets are the be-all and end-all), but to be fair, all the polls up till then were showing her leading by a country mile. The margin of loss was so small, I'm sure the conspiracy theories in some quarters will start rumbling if they haven't already.

What I'm really interested to know, if we get any analysis, is why Crowley (the eventual victor) was brought back into the race. Hong was doing extremely well in the polls, but this doesn't seem to have been reflected in the internal party views? Crowley had already dropped out, then as other candidates (who had got party backing) dropped out, Crowley was called back in. Was this because the party wanted an actual Democrat, not a DSA member, as their nominee? He seems to have received the endorsement of the party, but the question remains: how were the polls so wrong, or was this a case of "give us an electable candidate and we'll pick them" for the Democrats? In which case the progressive victories of Mamdani and El-Sayed are not indicators of where the party should turn.

But yeah - "candidate who spent years making herself as unlikeable as possible loses due to mean tweets dug up from the past, well well how the turn tables" will always be funny because of Woke or SJW or PC or the name of the time digging up old tweets and calling for heads on spikes as a result.

The DSA types mostly hate the DNC types. Some, like AOC herself, are opportunistic enough for conversion by management after they get elected (and indeed she’s now basically on the center-left of the party). Others aren’t; after all, Bernie himself still annoys them after all these years. It’s not disastrous for the party if someone like Hong is elected in the long term, necessarily, but it is bad this year and it is possibly bad if the Thanksgiving stuff gets dredged up in the 2028 election even if it’s only part of a woke left montage in GOP attack ads. It’s also a gubernatorial position, which further tilts the logic for party leadership toward the maybe less galvanizing centrist because control of congress isn’t at stake.

Is AOC actually walking back woke 1 ideas she wholeheartedly embraced?

She is saying what she needs to say as the winds shift and the tides recede. A bit like Kamala Harris, only cannier. The Coconut Queen tried tacking hard left for 2019 and left a whole slew of hostages to fortune behind her (the 'they/them' ad just had to show her actual own appearance).

AOC is more brazen in her approach but also more clever in how she positions herself. Probably it's easier for a radical to go moderate than a moderate (or what passes for it) like Harris to try and go radical.

Kamala was never a moderate trying to go radical. She was a nothing pretending to go left then pretending to go center. Her problem always was that she was a nothing.

Well, yeah. That was the problem - there was nothing there (and I think that also is Newsom's problem trying to break out of California to the national stage). But the turn hard left really was terrible, even if her fans lapped it up at the time (OMG, she schooled old white guy Biden on busing! Racism KOd! Never mind everyone with half a brain knew Biden was going to be the candidate because His Turn Now).

As an aside: I never understood the people calling AOC unattractive, and still don't. I find the "Zendaya is ugly" thing easier to understand (not that I consider her unattractive either).

I find the "Zendaya is ugly" thing easier to understand

Well I don't! I have literally never watched a movie or show featuring Zendaya, but pretty much every time I see her in the media in passing, I think something to the effect of "wow, she's remarkably attractive even accounting for her social role that selects rigorously for attractiveness". And she's not all that close to my type, either! She's just clearly a very well-optimized something.

Personality is an important component of attractiveness, especially in the case of someone that wears (or appears to wear) their personality so openly on their face.

I suppose that’s a fair example of personality de-glamming the package.

Look at her mannerisms and overall presentation: tightly pulled-back hair and wears a coat, the overall style broadcasts “girlboss.” A lot of men, especially conservative men, find that combination either deeply unappealing or actively off-putting. And she's basically the mascot of woke polticis, which actively celebrates those traits, treats male preference as something to be overridden or mocked, and works hard to render any criticism of them low-status and socially costly. It’s a mismatch between desirable and celebrated preferences, backed by a status hierarchy that insists the mismatch is your problem.

She's still attractive in a girl next door kind of way, but that is the only vibe that would make her appealing. She's not hot enough that her girlbossing becomes tolerable.

And it cuts both ways, just look at the many dating threads here. You see the same recurring theme vis-a-vis female attraction, the asymmetric tolerance levels for misogyny displayed by incels vs hot Chadonis.

As an aside: I never understood the people calling AOC unattractive, and still don't. I find the "Zendaya is ugly" thing easier to understand (not that I consider her unattractive either).

New to the scene AOC was pretty good looking, particularly for a politician. Easily could have qualified as a Shakira back up dancer.

Putting on some lbs AOC was good looking for what people speculated was a pregnant mid 30s woman. Since she was not pregnant this lost all the potential charm.

Current AOC is nothing interesting. She's above average for 37 or whatever her age is, but not hot, certainly seemingly not a good long term girl to court unless you are a pervy old guy who wants to lab inseminate one trophy son. Shes now officially on team catlady even if she always was without us knowing.

Personal theory: AOC (or her handlers have her) dresses down deliberately to make her look worse than she actually is, because alot of women tend to disfavor women that look better than they do.

Zendaya is still ugly, though.

and/or because men take a woman less seriously if she's hot.

I'm a little skeptical of this, mostly because I've never seen it in action.

I have, however, much to my shock, seen examples where women in a pre-established group reacted in a surprisingly vitriolic manner to someone who's much more attractive suddenly popping up out of nowhere.

I'm a little skeptical of this, mostly because I've never seen it in action.

I've very skeptical of this, but I think what would make sense, given AOC's other stated beliefs, is that she genuinely drank the Kool-Aid in believing the messaging that men take hot women less seriously and thus adjusted her behavior. Though I'd personally guess that, if any of this was intentional, it wasn't consciously so.

Slightly horsefaced, and some angles in photos can be very unflattering. Also she tends to wear her hair tightly pulled back and that is not flattering since it draws your facial skin and muscles taut as well (see the joke about council facelift).

She's objectively above average (for the US, at least), but her face is less attractive that the rest of the package. She has the eyes of a Starfield NPC.

Zendaya is just "girl pretty".

Everyone’s got different tastes and thus everyone has their own “average”. I’m really only into whites and Asians so they’re both starting with a significant handicap.

AOC is like, kinda cute, maybe. She’s not UNattractive.

Zendaya on the other hand is about as sexually attractive to me as a bowl of fruit. I think “girl pretty” might just be a way for women to sabotage and confuse each other.

I'll just come out and say it, then: I believe that Zendaya, in most of her appearances, looks like a man. And I'm assuming you're straight, so naturally that doesn't map as attractive.

I think “girl pretty” might just be a way for women to sabotage and confuse each other.

Most "girl pretty" outside the Asian sphere of influences make female faces more masculine, not less. By the way, did you ever notice that white tomboy women seem to have more feminine-looking faces than average?

I believe the reason for this is to signal the capacity for social aggression just as normal masculine traits stereotypically attractive to women signal the capacity for physical aggression. That's why models are cast that way, that's why the angry librarian glasses and angry-eyebrow jobs exist, and perhaps it's why white women are so obsessed with black women (I don't think that strong-man-Chad-jawed-homoeroticism is limited to men; I think this is just how [normal] women express it).

[It may be the case that, for tomboys in particular, their internal keep-yourself-alive compass points at 'to get stronger, you should get better at the physical aggression side of things'. Kind of sounds like a transgender thing to me, but what do I know. Same with femboys that want to get better at the social aggression side of things, for that matter.]

Furthermore, I think that to be normie-straight, you have to be attracted to the signals of how the opposite sex displays its power or worth. (I also think that men who don't tacitly understand this are doomed to have a hard time in relationships- it's just as much a mismatch as being in a gay marriage would be for most of the same underlying personality reasons (re: @aiislove's push-down-pull-up model of successful relationships being less viable when you're a mirror of each other rather than a compliment).

I'm sure you've noticed this on anime porn sites, by the way- 80% of it seems to be hyperinflation with no attention paid to the face (or the face actively looks male) because of this. The other 20% has faces that are far more palatable, but notice that 'cute' is not a valid search term unless it is combined with 'funny', and that combination yields 80% of the results (in that block of 20%).

Since you tagged me and we're all talking about whether Zendaya is hot or not I'll go too

I'll just come out and say it, then: I believe that Zendaya, in most of her appearances, looks like a man.

I went and saw Dune 2 without having ever seen Dune 1 or reading the books because I thought it would be fun to experience something out of context (much like the fun of traveling places where no one speaks english. Or going to museums and never reading the placards. You can just make up your own stories!) Anyway, the whole time I was just thinking how Zendaya has a very masculine face and how attractive she would be if she were a man. I kept wishing she had a chubby younger brother with a buzz cut, he would be just my type. By media standards she looks pretty good but I can imagine that she's the type of person when you see in real life looks strikingly beautiful.

Most "girl pretty" outside the Asian sphere of influences make female faces more masculine, not less.

I think I understand what you're getting at, although it has varied over the years a bit. Not exactly a shortage of angular-jawed models and actresses, especially a decade back. But I'm not sure if I understand what direction you're trying to describe as "more feminine".

Most "girl pretty" outside the Asian sphere of influences make female faces more masculine, not less.

Pretty much, yeah. Unfortunately.

I'm sure you've noticed this on anime porn sites, by the way- 80% of it seems to be hyperinflation with no attention paid to the face (or the face actively looks male) because of this.

…what?

Are you saying that anime women look like men?

Are you saying that anime women look like men?

A good chunk of them do (it's less bad than any other Western media or RL but it's still at times present) but it's simply most obvious in the hentai repositories.

To be fair, most of my repertoire at this point is CGDCT from the late '00s-early '10s so I might be a little biased; and I think I'm overextending the connection in normal Asian media (because half the reason I'm more focused on that area is because they know how to draw women well).

This is just completely and utterly incorrect. I’ll refrain from linking to any specific hentai examples but you’re free to browse the /h/ and /e/ boards on 4chan for a representative sample.

That's, uh, part of where my observation that they look like men comes from (they're not all like that, but some of them definitely are; 4chan also has better taste than average than some mostly-random aggregator).

I can accept that maybe it's just due to being bad at faces more generally, but the second-order of that then leads me to ask why, implying it's not the primary draw for the image. (It's also just considering the face, not the other characteristics; obviously you can usually see them in the picture.)

Are you saying that anime women look like men?

A good chunk of them do

From what I understand, they're meant to look like cats (not really).

A cat is fine, too.

They do indeed all have snouts to some degree; interestingly, the longer [and pointier] the snout, the more masculine the character (exhibit A: Deltarune; exhibit B: the rest of e621 lmao).

It might just be a neoteny thing (which, again, places where the women appear to have a better cultural relationship with the men tend to express/emphasize more often; the worse it is, the more socially-offensive the look women tend to take on) though.

I’m really only into whites and Asians

Insert obligatory argument over whether Hispanics can be counted as white.

Is there some argument against the "some are, some aren't; depends on ancestry" position other than the "race doesn't exist" SJ-adjacent one?

AOC is obviously not supermajority-white-and-Asian, so it's not surprising that someone only attracted to whites/Asians has reduced attraction to her.

I was just making a half-joking reference to the US federal government's recent race/ethnicity reshuffling.

I personally can't see much difference between indigenous Americans and heavily tanned Europeans, so all Hispanics look basically white to me. But that obviously is my problem, not Primaprimaprima's.

I personally can't see much difference between indigenous Americans and heavily tanned Europeans, so all Hispanics look basically white to me.

Just curious, where did you grow up?

If someone said they couldn’t see any difference between Slavs and Germanics I could forgive them. I especially understand not being able to tell Japanese and Chinese and Koreans apart, since I can’t really do that either, although I’m told that people from those countries have little issue with it. But not being able to tell the difference between South American mestizos and Europeans (even heavily tanned Europeans) is just wild to me. Like, bordering on willfully obtuse.

Korean women seem, on the average, curvier than Japanese women (who are definitely too skinny for me.)

Just curious, where did you grow up?

I am a nigger of Caribbean descent (so technically not in the narrowest definition of "American descendants of slaves") who has lived in New J*rsey all his life (plus college in western Pennsylvania).

Not being able to tell the difference between South American mestizos and Europeans (even heavily tanned Europeans) is just wild to me. Like, bordering on willfully obtuse.

Look at prominent Bolivian Evo Morales as one example. Is he darker than a default European? Yes, obviously. But, other than that moderately darker skin, does he really look that different from, say, Jay Leno? IMO, no. In comparison, East Asians have wildly different eyes, South Asians have skin dark enough that no white could ever tan to match them, and blacks have both super-dark skin and wildly different hair.

Again, this is all my personal opinion. But to me indigenous Americans seem very similar to whites.

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I especially understand not being able to tell Japanese and Chinese and Koreans apart, since I can’t really do that either, although I’m told that people from those countries have little issue with it.

I haven't lived in Korea for too long for my experience to matter, but my experience with Korean relatives who live (and only ever lived) in Korea is that this is a lie we like to spread out to the rest of the world because it makes us feel superior. We have less issue, but it's a stretch to say that the issue is little.

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AOC has African blood as well, or at least she claims to and it seems likely from looking at her. (So do a decent chunk of Hispanics.)

Native Americans are definitely far more closely related to whites and Asians than any of those are to Africans, Austronesians or Australian aboriginals (they're of North Asian descent), and I agree it can be hard to tell apart a white+NA Hispanic from a pure white.

My vascular system doesn’t count them as white, if you catch my drift.

AOC has crazy eyes and big teeth, so she's definitely not supermodel material, but she definitely looks better than Zendaya.

AOC is an attractive woman even on a normal scale, not even the DC scale. But there are definitely pics of her not at her best. Zendaya is also attractive (though not a Hollywood-scale 10), but for some reason has top Hollywood talent uglying her up for movies.

I'm willing to bet Zendaya is easy to work with, she's talented enough, and fills diversity requirements. I would submit she's both good and hot in Challengers.

There's only 6-9 young (ish) actors who can carry movies promotionally. It's the same reason Tom Holland and Pattinson are also in the big films this year (much to The Odyssey's detriment in the former's case). It's arguably even lighter on the female side because they're usually the supporting actor in the big action blockbusters that people usually get a name off. It doesn't always transfer (e.g. Brie Larson's career arguably got worse after making a billion dollars on Captain Marvel, though that was partly her fault)

The Drama proved that people would go to see Zendaya.

But yes, being in the Key and Peele racial goldilocks zone where you can play multiple ethnicities also helps.

In everything I've seen her in (granted I've only seen two or three of her movies), she gave the weakest performance by far. Challengers, despite being the best performance of hers that I've seen, was no exception.

Zendaya to me looks like an actress who was discovered and elevated by some Hollywood pederast, because her body for sure is akin to that of a slender teenage boy who's someone's f*cktoy. As another commenter noted: lacking in femininity. And with a sort of meh face. It's not that she's ugly per se, it's that she doesn't match the beautiful starlets of yesteryear.

AOC seems to be somewhat of a butterface and usually has an expression of a crazy person. It's true though that she has good body shape.

Attractiveness seems to have decoupled from castability around the time Harvey Weinstein got arrested.

I think we've had this discussion here more than once before, but there's a general failure of theory of mind between men with "tits and ass, more is better" preferences towards female physique and those with "thin and elegant, strong but fragile" ones, with each suspecting the other of preference falsification or being somehow fundamentally defective.

Men also aren't the people deciding. The bigger failure of mind-reading is across sexes.

Zendaya has a large female fanbase. She isn't a star that's primarily loved for her appeal to men.

The (straight) female fans she has don't want to fuck her, and at least a significant part of their fandom is about her styling on the red carpet and her fashion choices - having the model-like frame helps her here . This obviously matters less to the guy watching the movie but it is a part of her appeal.

Is there any sort of objective data on this?

I'm so looped out of the modern state of film that I had to google to even find out what she looks like, but she doesn't look less attractive to me than the median highly praised by men film star from back when I actually watched films, like, say, Keira Knightley. On a forum like this, opinions are doubly suspect; people's political opinions influence their aesthetic ones more than they tend to realise, and so I would expect many of the same people saying "slender teenage boy lacking in femininity" towards someone who apparently has a reputation for being a diversity casting prop to be gushing about her cuteness if she were a based and redpilled MAGA princess instead.

Is there any sort of objective data on this?

Which bit? That her fanbase is female? Or that she's not considered a sex symbol by men? I doubt there's much evidence, unless you get a PostTrak subscription:

Broken out, men over and under 25 showed up at 30% apiece while women under 25 were next at 21%, followed by women over 25 at 18%. Diversity demos are 36% Caucasian, 28% Hispanic and Latino, 20% Black, 10% Asian American and 6% Native American and other. The 18-34 set reps 63% of Brand New Day‘s moviegoers versus No Way Home‘s 68%. Over 35 demo grew with Brand New Day at 21% versus No Way Home‘s 15%.

Of those who went, 58% told PostTrak that it was part of a franchise they love, 47% said it looked fun and entertaining, 41% went for the cast as a whole, 39% went for Holland and 29% went for Zendaya.

Can't really drill in to see how much of the male audience came for her. Same with The Drama: much more female-led movie, lots of Gen Z, which I'd attribute to her, but Pattinson is also there and he played a heartthrob (though I think his time is past: Twilight was released in 2008)

On a forum like this, opinions are doubly suspect; people's political opinions influence their aesthetic ones more than they tend to realise,

There's obviously a political (and racial) thing. And a general contrarian thing.

But her choices also play a role. In her own generation Sydney Sweeney is way more of a male sex symbol because she caters to the male gaze much more. Zendaya legitimately looks hotter to me on the red carpet than in her main roles which makes sense given she's meant to be an awkward high schooler in one,a drug addicted high schooler in another and warrior/r/atheist mod in the third.

AOC is hot. She might even not be on the Latina that blimps up with age phenotype. If AOC was in Brickell no one would notice her, but in the general population she’s top 5-10% attractiveness.

One thing I asked myself is Bill Gates attractive? Honestly seems like a stupid question, but I was looking at his daughter Phoebe Gates who’s in the news for doing fraud. And she’s hot. I’d like marry her in a second even without the money. So Bill Gates can’t create that right?

I came up with 2 theories both which are likely partially true. Bill Gates is ugly for a famous person but attractive compared to the average person. Movie Stars etc who are in the news (or even politicians and executives) likely do have strong selection effect for attractiveness. So he’s ugly in that grouping, but within a random population distribution the top 10-20%.

Men are notoriously known for being ugly compared to women. The average female finds like 1-5% of the male population as hot while men find like 20-30% of the female population as hot.

And probably something something about having money so nicer clothes and personal trainers etc.

One thing I asked myself is Bill Gates attractive? Honestly seems like a stupid question, but I was looking at his daughter Phoebe Gates who’s in the news for doing fraud. And she’s hot.

Is she hot or is she young, thin and rich? As I've gotten older, I'm 28, I've realized all a woman has to do to look good at 18-25 is to not be fat and know how to do her makeup. After 25, it slowly starts getting harder, youtful look is gone, aging genetics kick in, years of bad habits start to slowly add up.

Looking at photos of her she's pretty, but not super-super attractive. She must take after her mom since Bill, God love him, is not blessed in the facial department (and so all the stories that got out about him being a playa were even more incredible; it goes to show that fame and wealth can make up for a lot).

Young Melinda was pretty, too, but again not the most stunning. Bill seems to have married within the range of attractiveness available to him, they look like a normal couple (never mind that some time down the line he'd be running after women who worked for him).

Plus she's the daughter of a very wealthy man, so premium health care, nutrition, and possibly (who can say?) subtle cosmetic procedures were all easily available to her.

Bill Gates is ugly for a famous person but attractive compared to the average person.

????

He is not attractive compared to the average person.

Yeah, he's average compared to the average person.

Young Bill wasn't a hideous uggo, but he might as well have had "nerd" tattooed on his forehead, for that is how he looked. He needed every advantage wealth, fame, and intelligence (ahem) could give him.

Not extraordinary, but certainly within the upper half of the distribution, and likely significantly.

https://www.c64-wiki.de/images/b/b4/BillGates1980.jpg https://youtube.com/watch?v=zZrgVG2k8vU&t=158

Good jaw, okay charisma. You have to subtract out the goofy 80s clothing and haircut that makes him look too much like a Bad Luck Brian loser. Look at the face itself. Again, not a model, but not below average for sure, by a good margin.

Not being fat counts for so much.

Honestly, give him a haircut and a change of clothes and he'd look like an indie rock singer the Coachella set would be swooning over.

I agree, he looks like 80s Ed Sheeran.

Phoebe Gates who’s in the news for doing fraud. And she’s hot. I’d like marry her in a second even without the money.

She's not hot. She looks like she was born Phoebus Gates and didn't get on puberty blockers in time.

I'll take the minority view here and say that I don't think AOC is attractive beyond being a young-ish woman who isn't overweight. She has an oddly shaped face and nose.

I don't think AOC is attractive beyond being a young-ish woman who isn't overweight.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Indeed, youngish women who aren’t overweight are attractive by default, assuming no other glaring flaws.

She has an oddly shaped face and nose.

Fortunately she has two other things that are appetizingly shaped to compensate.

She does look horse-faced sometimes when her teeth are seen, but when her mouth is closed her face looks reasonably pretty to me.

Phoebe is pretty hot. Passing resemblance to Ivana Miličević. Looks like she takes after her mum more than her dad.

You're right that famous people tend, to a greater or lesser extent, to be selected for their looks (obviously true of actors and models, less obviously true in the case of successful politicians). Bill Gates is unusual in being a genuine household name who became famous for reasons wholly unrelated to his physical appearance. In that regard he's more akin to a writer or a director, and I wouldn't say he's significantly less attractive than e.g. Stephen King or James Cameron.

Stephen King looks like a weird alien, James Cameron is a decent looking guy though.

Stephen King looks like a weird alien

As a young man, he could pass for Christopher Reeve's less attractive older brother.

The resemblance is uncanny!

Counter-example: https://www.theawl.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/02sxPa7XL-de_rFH_.jpg

Gonna have to hard disagree with you on that one: https://preview.redd.it/a-young-stephen-king-v0-nkrp1vonkb6d1.jpeg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=9de52388e8d8c9162ac39a5256edf5a14914bf98

Counter-example: https://www.theawl.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/02sxPa7XL-de_rFH_.jpg

I never understood the people calling AOC unattractive, and still don't.

It's the same phenomenon as calling Elon Musk "stupid," which is basically dogma in some parts of the country, including where I live. People, even educated, intelligent people who went to academic institutions purportedly meant specifically to disabuse people of that notion, really love the idea that people they disagree with also have other negative characteristics that realistically ought to have minimal - if any - correlation with conformity to one's own personal set of ethics or ideals. So damn physical reality, since I don't like AOC/Musk, then s/he is unattractive/stupid. To be fair, the latter set of people often openly admit to rejecting empiricism as a tool of oppression by White Supremacists, so they're living up to their stated principles there.

As an aside, I'm apparently in a tiny minority in considering Zendaya not only attractive, but one of the most attractive women in Hollywood right now, but also I do find the "Zendaya is ugly" thing not hard to understand. She has bodily and facial features which are not what I'd consider screaming in femininity.

Several months ago, I noted the peculiar irony that many progressives believe that there are multiple different kinds of intelligence which are orthogonal to one another, such that deficiency in mathematical or verbal reasoning doesn't necessarily imply deficiency in artistic expression or physical domains.

This demographic is probably the demographic most likely to say something to the effect that "Elon Musk has stupid political opinions, therefore he can't possibly be a talented engineer and must have earned his wealth illegitimately".

I'm not sure how "notable" these "peculiar ironies" are anymore, sadly. When one of the core, underlying principles that animate everyone in your movement is "logic, reasoning, and empiricism are inventions by cis/white/male/etc. people whose only function and purpose is to oppress minorities," then it follows that holding opinions that are logically contradictory is no vice. In fact, it's pretty easy to argue that it's a virtue, for how it "challenges" the norms of current "hegemony" of "white supremacy/patriarchy" and "queers" reasoning by lionizing "other ways of knowing" over crufty oppressive things like "logic."

Oh, come on. Nine sets of scare quotes to say this movement is unusually prone to contradiction?

Show me a coalition which has national reach and I’ll show you a contradictory mess.

Oh, come on. Nine sets of scare quotes to say this movement is unusually prone to contradiction?

That's not what I said, nor is it even adjacent to what I said. Every movement - down to a movement of one individual - has internal contradictions. Usually enough to call it a "mess." Not every movement - certainly not every individual - believes in the fundamental principle that logic, reasoning, and valuing empirical evidence are arbitrary bullshit that ought to be discarded if they're not useful for attaining what one considers "justice." What makes "wokes" distinct from many (not all - though most similarly national/international-level movements) movements is that it specifically flouts logical thinking and doesn't see logical contradictions as something to resolve or to address at all. This is, somewhat ironically enough (though not really), quite Trumpian, in the belief that what is true right now isn't contingent on being consistent with other things that one has stated as being true, a sort of lack of object permanence.

Mea culpa. Nine sets of scare quotes to say that this movement is inherently averse to consistency, with no comparisons to similar movements.

I think this is still awfully uncharitable. “Alternative ways of knowing” have next to zero impact on the vast majority of progressive politics. People can and do argue any number of progressive policies—police, borders, reparations—on the boring ol’ grounds of facts and logic. That doesn’t change when some jackass decides to mock mathematics for being too white.

“Alternative ways of knowing” have next to zero impact on the vast majority of progressive politics.

I'm not sure how one could even quantify this to enough of an extent to support such a statement. Perhaps you could come up with a way of measuring things such that this is true, but you'd have to be counting the stuff they have in common with virtually every other movement - akin to how humans, chimps, and mice share like 90%+ of the same DNA or something - because whatever sets apart progressive policies pushed by the typical/powerful modern progressive from bog-standard liberal is certainly mostly a consequence of "alternative ways of knowing." I.e. personal revelation, which is never called that but rather often "lived experience," based on the idea that we can judge the veracity of someone's claims about reality based purely on their identity, which is what holds up all of the stuff about "white/male/cis/etc. privilege," which itself holds up almost all of the specific policies that the typical/powerful modern progressive pushes for.

People can and do argue any number of progressive policies—police, borders, reparations—on the boring ol’ grounds of facts and logic. That doesn’t change when some jackass decides to mock mathematics for being too white.

Correct. I'm not sure what this has to do with my comment, though. Some progressives still exist who are still committed to facts and logic. Sadly, they have about a homeopathic level of impact and influence in modern progressive politics. I fantasize that many of us exist, and that we're just cowards who try not to be noticed lest we be cut down, but that's probably just typical mind fallacy + wishful thinking.

Elon Musk is clearly very smart and he's also such a retard. Both can be true at once lol.

My friends frequently describe me as the "stupidest smart person they know" , so I relate to this

I'm not humble bragging or comparing myself to Elon, I doubt I have his level of engineering IQ or grind, I just observe he says stupid shit that makes it harder for him to achieve his goals a lot

My friends frequently describe me as the "stupidest smart person they know" , so I relate to this lol

Ha! Back when I was in middle school or so, I said something to my friend (wish I remembered what) that prompted him to crack up and say “you know, I can never tell if you’re the smartest dumb person or the dumbest smart person I know.”

I suspect this website attracts a type.

What has Musks actually done that is stupid? Twitter posting? A lot of us credit his Twitter posting and fixing Twitter for saving Western Society for atleast a few years.

I think this shows your bias much more than evidence of Musks stupid actions.

  1. Picking a fight with the guys who saved those kids in the Thai cave. He looked vicious and petty for punching down and had nothing to gain had he won.
  2. That whole Path of Exile thing. Video games are low status, and faking talent at them in the most cartoonish obvious way is even lower.
  3. Not testing his metal ball vs cyber truck window demonstration.
  4. Funding Secured.
  5. Dogecoin.
  6. His insistence that he is a founder of Tesla a company he wasn't even involved with for it's first year.

the guys who saved those kids in the Thai cave

Calling the guy he picked a fight with (Vernon Unsworth) one of "the guys who saved those kids" is a bit of a stretch; he was the first diver at the cave when the kids were reported missing, and he was smart enough to advise calling the British Cave Rescue Council (4/18 of the divers who brought the kids out, 2/2 of the divers who found the kids) rather than making a stupid immediate attempt at solo heroism himself, but after that his reported contributions to the rescue were sticking around as one of 80-odd available-but-unused divers on site and belittling Musk's team's submarine work.

He looked vicious and petty for punching down and had nothing to gain had he won.

If someone punches you first, you can punch back, and Unsworth punched first. If someone punches you along with your employees who are working overtime to try to help save children, you definitely should punch back. Musk's submarine idea might not have helped, but trying to make more options available was a good thing; that's why Unsworth and the other 80-ish divers who didn't end up going on rescue missions were still there too.

This incident still counts as one of Musk's stupid actions, of course. Calling someone a pedophile just for being a frequent tourist in Thailand is viciously stupid in general, is immorally stupid when you're in the middle of trying to cooperate with other Thai visitors and citizens toward an important goal, and is inexcusably stupid when your primary interaction with your insult's target is entirely based around the real reason why they're a frequent tourist in Thailand. But Unsworth definitely had some insults coming; Musk just sucked badly at picking one.

3 and 6 are defensible.

The story with 3 is that they tested it too much just to be sure. They’d done it something like 10 times in the back and damaged it.

As for 6, I’ve seen this situation before and I don’t know about Tesla, but a company at founding can be just a nominal address, or at least a few guys making pamphlets and phone calls. If someone joins at a very early stage when they really have nothing and takes the company to success, it seems fair to call them a founder even if they didn’t own stock on the first day the company existed.

3 is defensible but stupid in a different way, test obsessively, but on a spare item not the demonstration one.

  1. In my book corporate founders sign the charter. Somone else may domineer the thing and be the person associated with the company but no one who isnt there at day one, is a founder. They can be the person who made it what it is today, or the largest contributor, or the dominant figure, but not founder. Words should mean something.

I wouldnt consider Patrick Henry to be a founder of the US either. Important contributor sure or leader of the revolutuon and very worthy of respect, but not a founder.

Similarly, I wouldn't call Andy Grove a founder of Intel. Even though he joined on day one seved as COO from its inauguration, and probably contributed as much as anyone to its most successful state.

I’ll give you (1) is dumb. Some of these are just having fun. (6) I believe it’s fair for him to call himself the founder of Tesla. He came in before they built anything and were just an idea.

The PoE stuff linked below.

Everything about Doge?

Constantly lying about Tesla stuff.

Idk man, if you genuinely think that every single thing Elon has done is actually a 4d chess move then we're just gonna yell at each other.

Like I can go google/AI "dumb stuff Elon has done or said that didn't help his stayed goals and preferences" and cobble together a list and then you can pick them all apart. But that seems silly.

I don't even dislike Elon, I think making electric cars cool and making rockets cheap are fantastic achievements that earned him his place in history. But my god he's retarded sometimes.

Why did he do the sperg salute?

Ok so like I said you are just showing your bias.

Doge was a policy win. We gutted US AID, likely reduced low IQ population growth, and defunded a lot of the funding for the left. It achieved less than he hoped but it was 100% a policy win.

“Lying about Tesla stuff”

  • that form of motivation for employees works. Setting big goals recruits talent and pushes your team harder. That’s another win.

I really regret not putting

inb4 you start picking apart things in my comment

In my original post, have a nice day sir, we don't need to bicker over Mr Musk

Smart people can and do do very stupid things, sometimes quite often, to such an extent that they have a reputation for it. One could accurately say, e.g. Musk behaves very stupidly when it comes to certain things such as politics or ideology, and that he has a pattern of doing so. But to claim that he's stupid means something else, and it's to ignore all the other pieces of evidence around him. And, ironically, accurately noting his intelligence is a greater moral condemnation from anyone who confidently disagrees with his politics or ideals, because, unlike a stupid person, a smart person has no excuse for not reaching the correct conclusions.

Thank you for clarifying my frustration with Musk: it's annoyance at someone who I have colloquially called a "moron," but unlike a true idiot has plentiful cognitive capacity to know better - unless, of course, he likes the internet drama his braggart-persona creates and his apparent emotional investment in e.g. probably faked video game achievements is just another amusement for him; doesn't seem plausible to me, but I could be typical-minding as a wallflower.

Musk is not stupid, but he often acts foolishly. Even a very skilled driver may drive recklessly.

I agree with your optimism and I think people are taking this a little too critically. I know that AOC is saying this cynically, that there is a lot of work to do, that "Woke 1.0" is dormant but not dead, etc. But this is also what winning looks like. And I don't think the fact that we have to keep fighting is evidence that we aren't winning.

The talk about "peak woke" as if it was in the past or "woke 1" as if there was some sort of stopping of "woke" where it would make sense to say that some new "woke" thing is "woke 2" instead of "woke continued" reminds me of the 2024 POTUS election when people were breathlessly trying to establish consensus that there had been a "vibe shift" among Democrats who were finally getting excited again and lining up behind the young(er), energetic Harris compared to the decrepit Biden or calling Walz's insult of Vance as "weird" as some brilliant bit of marketing. I can understand both why people who dislike Woke would have wishful thinking that it has receded and why people who like Woke would want to act as if they're powerless, but I think the fact of the latter should make people in the former highly suspicious that they're falling into wishful thinking. From where I sit, there's more overt pushback to Woke than ever before, but that's akin to there being more pushback to Nazis in 1942 compared to in 1932. it's not an indication of the Nazis' lack of power, influence, harm; rather, it's the exact opposite.

Exactly, woke 1, woke 2, woke 100, doesn't matter. I don't want ANY shit sprinkle in my ribeye, zero. And I consider woke as objectively shit.

Yes, some pushback against woke has become socially permissible now than before, but zero material gains are made until you significantly dismantle female and minority associated privileges in political, social and cultural contexts. An all white, all straight gender conforming cast in Odyssey for example. Zero girlbosses in male oriented media. Media napologetically catering to the straight male gaze. Regardless of who it offends. No more diversity hiring and affirmative action (at least, not based on anything beyond income levels). No more woke pandering in academia. These are real gains, "well, more people hate it now" is just a consolation prize.

You have won a few battles, but all you have done is halt the advance. The woke have simply retreated to more easily defended positions. As long as they control academia and the arts (science AND culture) they will keep coming back and continue to be relevant.

"Woke 1 was crazy" does not mean that wokeness is dead. It simply means that mistakes were made and Woke 2, when it happens, will account for the learnings of the past.

The woke have simply retreated to more easily defended positions. As long as they control academia and the arts (science AND culture) they will keep coming back and continue to be relevant.

I don't think academia is a great position to be in long term. Sure, it's easily defended, but like any walled fortress, it can be starved out. And it's already showing signs of hunger. COVID and the replication crisis are ravaging its moral authority, while it is being put under increasing financial strain by both right-wing government funding rugpulls, the decreasing perceived value of the degree, and the demographic decline of the customer base. Plus, being an academic has become increasingly unglamorous over the past two decades as would-be academics have realized that there are more would-be academics than there are slots, so you spend 5 years taking classes and working as a barely-paid TA for the privilege of fighting with six or seven other people just as qualified as you over the privilege of an underpaid non-tenure-track adjunct position. Right-wing colleges and universities probably won't suffer much from the demographic decline, and neither will the Ivy Leagues, but there's a good chance it wipes out small left-by-default liberal arts colleges. There was clearly an effort to compensate for this by importing students, but Trump's actions may have put a damper on that, at least for a bit.

Culture is also going to take a hit from this effect, since the colleges are the pipeline to it. It might be less vulnerable in some ways, particularly to direct government action, but there are signs that culture is going to increasingly fragment in the future and that will substantially weaken predominately left-wing institutions like Hollywood.

I don't think these developments are set in stone but if I saw lefties telling each other "at least we still have academia" I would finger it as cope.

I don't think academia is a great position to be in long term.

It seems like I've been hearing something like this for 10+ years, yet academia stills seems to be around and the main gatekeeper of white collar/tech jobs. The system can stay irrational longer than you can stay alive, or whatever variant of that saying you prefer. What percentage of applicants are getting a white-collar/tech job with mid-corp, big corp, NGO, fed/state/local government, etc. without the piece of paper that says they can be a good boy/girl/them and follow the dictates of HR? As long as those areas demand the paper, academia will be strong enough to cause all kinds of problems.

The system can stay irrational longer than you can stay alive, or whatever variant of that saying you prefer.

If you're not preparing to fight over a longer time-span than your own life, you're not preparing to win the culture war.

Are we going to ignore the elephant in the room that is AI? It is bound to do something to the university system, even if it is just further decoupling the college experience from hard skills. If humans do not intellectually contribute to the object-level problems in the workplace anymore, then there can not be any pretense that any job requirements for them are about anything other than manners, that is, how they relate to other people; and so college will have to go all in on its role as finishing school.

I definitely think that AI might have an impact, but the Internet didn't have quite as big an impact as one might have predicted. If AI does make a big difference, I wonder how much of it will be because of the tech and how much because of the state of the university.

I am largely all right with colleges understanding that they are something like a finishing school.

Part of the problem at the top end of the US prestige pyramid is that the Ivy+ schools always knew they were finishing schools, but at some point (I think the 1990s) they decided that "finishing" the next generation of elites meant indoctrinating them in a particularly stupid form of left-wing "anti-oppression" politics, and not only (or even mostly) in the classroom.

What that got us was an elite that lie about their privilege and claim to be oppressed victims, and take it seriously when other elites do the same thing. Increasingly including conservative/Republican/red tribe elites.

Yes, I think this is exactly right. I find the claims of victimhood to be extremely revolting coming from elites, not because I think elites definitionally have it cushy, but because I think elites definitionally have obligations. What the Ivy league schools (and any school that is trying to give their students a liberal arts education so that they can be cultural leaders) should do is inculcate a sense of responsibility.

And I agree with you that righties can do the same thing. Righties usually couch it in terms of group oppression - not "I personally am oppressed" but rather "my group is being discriminated against by the great and powerful." Which does happen, and does need to be called out. But there is a fine line there and I think it's dangerous to emphasize it too much. In particular, I think right wing media spends too much time pushing "look at how we are being mistreated" stories instead of simply doing good gumshoe work.

Right wing small liberal arts colleges are not in great financial shape right now either.

Hmm, I haven't gotten the impression that things have gotten worse for them recently. I broadly expect right-wing demographics to somewhat offset the general demographic decline that will hit schools, but I could be mistaken.

Let them die. We don't need right-wing colleges, we need to destroy college as an institution. The idea that everyone should spend one fourth of their life in school is fucking mental.

From "Against Tulip Subsidies" by Scott Alexaner:

If I were Sanders, I’d propose a different strategy. Make “college degree” a protected characteristic, like race and religion and sexuality. If you’re not allowed to ask a job candidate whether they’re gay, you’re not allowed to ask them whether they’re a college graduate or not. You can give them all sorts of examinations, you can ask them their high school grades and SAT scores, you can ask their work history, but if you ask them if they have a degree then that’s illegal class-based discrimination and you’re going to jail. I realize this is a blatant violation of my usual semi-libertarian principles, but at this point I don’t care.

From "You wake up on the morning on the 20th of January to find that you are now Donald Trump, on the day of your inauguration as president." by the same:

Declare War On College. Forgive all existing student loans, then refuse to give out any new ones. Prohibit the government from asking about college degree when hiring new employees, and put pressure on private industry to follow suit for any position less absolutely-requiring-of-specialized-knowledge than doctor or engineer. Increase government loans to boot camps, online courses, et cetera.

And from "A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class"", idem:

War On College: As it currently exists, college is a scheme for laundering and perpetuating class advantage. You need to make the case that bogus degree requirements (eg someone without a college degree can't be a sales manager at X big company, but somebody with any degree, even Art History or Literature, can) are blatantly classist. Your stretch goal should be to ban discrimination based on college degree status. Professions may continue to accept professional school degrees (eg hospitals can continue to require doctors have a medical school degree), and any company may test their employees' knowledge (eg mining companies can make their geologists pass a geology test) but the thing where you have to get into a good college, give them $100,000, flatter your professors a bit, and end up with a History degree before you can be a firefighter or whatever is illegal. If you can't actually make degree discrimination illegal, just make all government offices and companies that do business with the government ban degree discrimination.

This tweet is a bit mean, but I interpret it as trying to point out a sense of class entitlement. College degrees are no longer thought of as factually giving you skills which let you earn enough money to be comfortable. They’re thought of as inducting you into the class of people who deserve comfortable lives. Treating an upper-class employee the same way you would treat a working-class employee is considered morally wrong.

Stop the thing where high schools refuse to let people graduate until they promise to go to college. End draft deferment for people who go to college - hopefully there won't be a draft, but do it anyway, as a sign that studying at college isn't any more important than the many other jobs people do that don't confer draft exemptions. Make universities no longer tax-exempt - why should institutions serving primarily rich people, providing them with regattas and musical theater, and raking in billions of dollars a year, not have to pay taxes? Make the bill that does this very clearly earmark the extra tax money for things that help working-class people, like infrastructure or vocational schools or whatever."

College exists for a reason. We need higher educated people in order to run the society we choose to live in.

College nowadays is just a mechanism to take advantage of tribal nepotism and entry into higher strata of social circles and connections.

Sadly, I learned that one far too late.

No, you need this system of education because it's a jobs program (and because Boomers are obsessed with graduation rate as a proxy for how well society is doing). The purpose of college is not to teach; professors are not evaluated on knowledge retention rates and are notorious for being poor at teaching.

Ironically the problem with this system is that, because its primary objective is not education (both lower and higher), it's proof that high-IQ people will be fine no matter how garbage and wasteful the education system becomes. Which means that if you reduced a degree to the IQ test(s) for which it serves as a hyper-inefficient proxy, you could save billions upon billions of dollars and refund nearly 8 years of prime lifetime to nearly every young citizen, something worth several hundred thousand dollars at current rates.

This isn't to say that we must abolish job training, of course- that would still be required- but it's also required right now on top of education anyway. Cutting out the middleman would probably be OK, though of course, employment in academia is one of the primary contributors to the existence of the middle class as a concept.

if you reduced a degree to the IQ test(s) for which it serves as a hyper-inefficient proxy

It's not just IQ. Conscientiousness is a huge part of the story in terms of both inputs and outputs - a smart but lazy person won't necessarily be a better worker than a hard worker with lower IQ, and university outcomes will more-or-less mimic that dynamic.

College may be mostly signaling, but there's a real signal there beyond what can be measured in a quick IQ test.

Nearly eight years? College only lasts four to five. Most people don't go to grad school.

I am pretty strongly in agreement that the expansion of higher education was mostly bad, that things like sending nursing students back to community college would be very good. But every first world society has near-universal high school education. I'm not sure about that chesterton's fence being avoidable.

What proportion of the "highly educated" population is "highly educated" in the ways actually needed to run our society? Why is this system specifically necessary to educate them?

Realistically we only need college for engineering, medicine, and a small amount of trained scholars to write books.

Other countries do not do credentialism and you end up randomly meeting people who end up having an international surgeon as an uncle (so likely some inherited IQ) and talk perfectly fine upper middle class socialization but never went to college.

From what I know most forms of testing for jobs that is basically an IQ test are illegal because of civil rights and disparate impact. We could get rid of college if every job application had a 10 min IQ test. Instead we do an expensive proxy system for IQ.

Orthodox Jews also often have normal upper middle class people without a college education. There network perhaps helps them navigate American society without an expensive credential.

From what I know most forms of testing for jobs that is basically an IQ test are illegal because of civil rights and disparate impact. We could get rid of college if every job application had a 10 min IQ test. Instead we do an expensive proxy system for IQ.

Oh please. I've been IQ tested for jobs before in a field that everyone wants to get more blacks into and in which hiring managers will straight up tell people 'yeah, we'll give a black guy a chance, but they're lazy and don't learn, so we wind up having to fire them'.

Well, man, don't hold out; what field was this? I'm sure there are plenty of us here that would love to hear about a career where an IQ test is the major barrier to entry!

i'm sure there's some lawyers around that might see a big juicy steak if they could get slightly more solid evidence than that too

More comments

Undergraduate is a proxy for IQ and conscientiousness, so replacing it with pure IQ loses something.

most forms of testing for jobs that is basically an IQ test are illegal because of civil rights and disparate impact.

In theory hiring based on IQ tests is not necessarily illegal, since if you can prove the IQ test is a "reasonable measure of job performance" then you're in the clear, and a priori the expected correlation is something like "between 0.2 and 0.5 but it's complicated" so that might be doable. But in practice, are you going to run the study to make sure that that correlation really applies to the job you're hiring for, in a way that's not too complicated to explain to a judge? No.

We could get rid of college if every job application had a 10 min IQ test. Instead we do an expensive proxy system for IQ.

It's worse than a proxy for IQ, because it's a proxy for IQ and SES. Employers don't care if you were the sort of person who could take 4 years out of the workforce while your family and/or your creditors paid tuition and room and board for you, but if you want a good college degree that's who you need to be, and the disparate impact of that might be more significant than a test of IQ alone.

Realistically we only need college for engineering, medicine

Ironically the disciplines that are important enough that we really need college for them are also the ones that are important enough that we don't trust college for them; even if you're a straight-A student in one of those fields, you're still going to be taking your PE or USMLE tests.

It would be nice if someday grade inflation just gets so ridiculous that we realize this is a general principle: proper mechanism design concludes that the institutions getting paid to teach you should not be the same institutions in charge of evaluating how well you've been taught. Creating effective and robust general tests is a big problem, but perhaps not as much of a problem as not creating them has been.

We don’t need college as it exists today, but it fills certain niches that need replacement:

  • Undergrad: specialized education beyond what school teaches. Although we could probably have online learning with online/LLM lessons, small in-person groups, and tutors for milestones and edge cases; a more decentralized college-like system without the bureaucratic overhead and tuition costs of today’s colleges. Honestly, I think this is the future: it has only been possible recently (last 20 years without the assistance of reliable LLMs, last 4 months with them), so although traditional college has existed for so long, maybe now it’s obsolete and only persists by inertia.

  • Postgrad, lowercase-a academia: projects too experimental and unprofitable for industry, too expensive long and collaborative for hobbyists. We have a system to fund those projects (grants), understand (papers) and verify (peer review) their results, have experienced people (PIs / advisors) plan them and manage inexperienced ones (labs) and pass tacit knowledge to their successors (PhD students); feel free to propose a better alternative, or figure out how to create a parallel academic system.

Postgrad, lowercase-a academia

Kill it with fire. This system is entirely broken. The grants are politically or ideologically written, peer review is largely logrolling, papers are nonsense (Replication Crisis). The PIs are there to take in money and build fiefdoms, the PhD students are highly-educated grunts to actually write the papers.

The grants are politically or ideologically written, peer review is largely logrolling, papers are nonsense (Replication Crisis).

How many engineering/math grant proposals or papers have you read? Peer review is broken, though.

How many engineering/math grant proposals or papers have you read?

Enough to see the ideology. When supposedly pure math grant proposals contain various DEI goals, it's pretty clear the system is broken.

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You’re not wrong about uppercase-A Academia, but it will be sought and kept alive unless there’s another institution to replace the type of projects it handles. It’s the worst system except for industry, independent research, and everything else.

It's occupying the niche while not satisfying it. It has to be burned down for another institution to arise.

I am directionally pro-removing college from its entitled position as a signifier of talent, but I think (specifically for the right wing) that it still retains a lot of merit for elite formation purposes. Part of elite formation is enculturation, and part of it is networking.

What I think isn't needed is for college to be the bottleneck through which job privileges are awarded. Most professions would likely be better off with something like a guild system that does on the job training. Colleges in some professions can slot easily into this, of course.

If you don't like unions, credentialism, and regulatory capture now I have some bad news for you about guilds...

Perhaps that's a bad word given the historical use. What I really mean is "job preparatory training," which can look like certification, a college degree, or just on-the-job training.

We have right wing government rugpulls because of Trump. Trump is unique, and even if he wasn't, administrations tend to change parties and it's likely a Democrat will be elected as the next US President. Actually having wokeness receding would mean something that doesn't just depend on one individual (maybe two individuals if you count Musk).

And I have no idea how COVID has caused any problem for woke academia. Any wokeness-related COVID problems have been forgotten by now, at least to the point where you can't criticize the woke for them and get taken seriously.

Actually having wokeness receding would mean something that doesn't just depend on one individual

I agree with this very strongly (and have pointed this out several times) but state-level right-wing governments (notably Florida and Texas, if memory serves) have decided to get in on the action and they aren't going to go anywhere when Trump goes away.

And I have no idea how COVID has caused any problem for woke academia.

I can't use X The Everything App without it telling me that Fauci knew ahead of time that COVID vaccines could cause miscarriages. That sort of hit to institutional trust hits the upstream academic institutions by association.

Florida

They tried but the bigger effort was enjoined as violating free speech. I guess New College is still trying but... ehh?

DeSantis is term limited out in Florida in January; that'll end his attacks on Florida college woke. Abbott's haven't been nearly as effective.

Abbott's have much more staying power, because he's doing this mostly by stacking admins at flagship universities with Abbott-aligned technocrats. Yes it works slower but it probably works better.

I think "attacking woke colleges" is the sort of thing red states are more likely to do under a blue federal administration.

I'm inclined to agree with you about the lack of impact on such efforts so far, I just don't think it's right to assume that after Trump, nobody will pay attention to colleges ever again.

Trump is unique, and even if he wasn't, administrations tend to change parties and it's likely a Democrat will be elected as the next US President.

He's not unique in this particular aspect, but unfortunately his match is DeSantis who right now seems very unlikely as a Presidential contender.

And I have no idea how COVID has caused any problem for woke academia.

It was a reputational hit to the expert class, which is the main product sold by academia.

I don't think it's rare to have noticed that the reaction to COVID from the expert class was, charitably, akin to flailing around. Now some people will still cut them some slack that they were acting with best intentions, or did the best with that they had, but it doesn't address that they did not seem to know what they were doing ultimately, which people will remember. Prior to that, the prevailing thought regarding the expert class was that any visible failure was a result of not following enough the suggestions of the expert class.

You need an actual alternative to academia though. Even if a lot of stuff coming out of academia is no longer scientific, it is also still the main source of actual good public knowledge. Corporations also do research, but they keep their results to themselves and don't want to spend money on educating the next generation.

Right wing colleges are surely quite rare, and Ivy league universities still lean left to my knowledge. Left-by-default is the norm as far as I can tell.

You need an actual alternative to academia though

Do we? What critical function do you believe that academia is filling?

Higher education and public research. Private companies are generally too concerned with their immediate bottom line to do either. Even if they do produce papers it is only within their own fields.

The get rid of college crowd isn’t saying get rid of Cal-Tech or remove college for most of the top 10% intellects. It’s about returning to 1950’s college attendance levels and finding a sorting method (Basically an IQ test) for the 10-50% instead of making them get a Spanish degree at a mid-tier university.

You need an actual alternative to academia though.

"The right" as a political movement needs right-wing or "neutral" colleges and universities to engage in elite formation. It probably already has enough institutions to fulfill this function.

Otherwise it wants research labs to help with things like growing crops and building better bombs. These functions of academia are likely to survive (even if the rest of academia is hit pretty hard) because they have a steady demand that exists outside of the student body size.

it is also still the main source of actual good public knowledge.

I don't think this is the case, if by "main source" we mean the source that is getting used. The press and advocacy/special interest groups have the ear of the public much more so than academia, which communicates with the broader public via the press. And the press covers issues that doesn't really get processed via academia, whereas a lot of even the best academic stuff nobody in the public really cares about (except maybe to look at pictures from Hubble or w/e). It's true that there may be university-affiliated think-tanks that do good work, but if I want to know something like "how many munitions did the US fire off in Iran" academia is not going to help me out (CSIS hasn't been affiliated with Georgetown for 30+ years, apparently because Georgetown booted them out precisely because they were so focused on the press and not "scholarship.").

The press and special interest groups do not produce the data themself though. They rely on others to do so, and are very much biased. You need primary sources for that ecosystem to work.

The press and special interest groups do not produce the data themself though.

The people who fund them do. They produce studies which just happen to support what they are advocating through the press and the special interest groups.

Do you see accademia becoming more or less relevant as boomers die and future entire institutions and cohorts rounte around them or actually attack them

Calling something crazy doesn’t even necessarily imply that there were mistakes. It simply means trivializing something as harmless and just a fun memory of sorts. Like saying ‘that punk concert the other day sure was crazy’.

What she's calling Woke 1.0 was actually already Woke 2.0. Woke 1.0 existed on tumblr, it was Atheism+ and the invention of a billion insane genders.

Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge

These are non-achievements. Wokeism is still the law of the land. Policy is still based on it. Until you can get fired from university positions for being accused of being a communist, it isn't done. Until 13/52 is openly stated and policy is based on it being true and self evident, it isn't done. Until BLM is viewed the same as Kony2012, it isn't done. Until stating your pronouns gets you laughed out of a room, it isn't done. As long as people are willing to openly call themselves socialists, antifa, anti-racists and the like, it isn't done. Until Ibram Kendi, Kehinde Andrews, Priya Gopal and all such people are destitute, derided, and working in McDonalds cleaning toddler vomit from the ballpit, it isn't done.

If reporting from Axios and CNN is any indication, the "Woke 1.0" period AOC is referring to seems to be late 2019 to around 2022 or 2023. Or, in other words... the Biden administration?

It's actually kind of incredible how, in a four-word phrase, AOC managed to convey:

  1. The last time Democrats were in power, it was really bad.

  2. You'll probably get a repeat of that if you vote for them again. (Calling something "1.0" implies that a "2.0" version is in the works.)

  3. They think their main problem was that they got a little too uninhibited, in the way that a house party where everyone drinks too much can get "crazy". They haven't reconsidered their actual beliefs or positions at all, and are just hoping to hide them better this time around.

Seriously, if I was the team responsible for writing ads like "Trump is for you, Kamala is for they/them", I don't think I could have come up with a better line.

Until BLM is viewed the same as Kony2012, it isn't done.

Why so kind to BLM? Kony 2012 was a well-meaning but silly exercise in virtue-signalling which accomplished nothing and wasted a lot of money in the process. BLM directly precipitated the single worst murder spike in American history resulting in tens of thousands of additional dead young black men, the precise demographic whose welfare the movement was ostensibly so concerned with. It also undermined trust in numerous public institutions (of which American police forces are only one) for no good reason. In the process, the movement funnelled hundreds of millions of well-intended dollars into lining the pockets of cynical opportunists and carpet-baggers.

Kony2012 should be judged a silly time-wasting trifle. BLM should be judged a ginned-up moral panic and an atrocity.

I’d call it Woke 4.0 or 5.0. ‘Racism’ is a Trotskyite concept from the ‘20s. The concept of ‘Whiteness’ was developed and popularized in the late ‘60s. Feminist theories that became law in the 2010s such as the Duluth Model and affirmative/enthusiastic consent (the concept of ‘yes means yes’ as opposed to ‘no means no’) were developed in the ‘90s. ‘Critical race theory’ is from the ‘80s or so. And the list goes on. Otherwise I agree. I’d nitpick about Kony2012 as I guess it was mostly and correctly seen as harmless and organized by a lunatic.

‘Racism’ is a Trotskyite concept from the ‘20s. The concept of ‘Whiteness’ was developed and popularized in the late ‘60s.

This rhymes with "rape is really the fault of whomever named the concept, without it there would only be sex".

Are you arguing that there were never any racists, that the Nazis and the KKK were simply "race realists" who had discovered HBD a century before it became cool? That the fascists murdered the Ashkenazim due to an unfortunate sign error when applying their otherwise correct HBD theory?

If you want to argue that racism is one of those problems where the cure turns out to be worse than the disease, that is a point which can be argued, but to argue that the evil commies have invented the concept of racism from whole cloth seems far-fetched. Might as well blame Marx for inventing capitalism.

Likewise, the antebellum Southern States clearly had a concept of 'Whiteness', where certain ethnicities could be full citizens and other ethnicities could be property. Even in the 1960s, a sociologist would likely find that some men who have consensual sex with unmarried white women in the South get shotgun weddings and some get lynched. And he would likely discover that a great predictor for the outcome is skin color.

I'm not him but I'd say a yes chadding is in order. Racism is only bad in so far as whites have been mind broken to consider any other option, while the rest of the world continues to operate on a national/ethnic mode of operation and will continue to do so. Maybe we should choose to take the high road and enjoy the suicide while no one else plays by the same rules.

Since you mentioned rape I’d incidentally argue that leftist culture warriors have successfully manipulated society’s concept or rape largely in the same way they have done so with the concept or racial prejudice/bigotry, the difference being that the word itself already existed in one case whereas in the other a new one was invented. That is, their culture war messaging is aimed at normies who share an everyday definition of ‘rape’ in order to push for new legislation and norms which adhere to their own definition.

But anyway, I’ll try answering in detail. I’d say the interconnected concepts of ‘racism’ and ‘whiteness’ were invented as ideologically motivated tools for culturally transforming and manipulating a Christian high-trust society that was and largely is clueless about the true aims of the revolutionary leftist inventors. The goal was never to actually help black people or women, and none of it has anything to do with how the KKK or the Nazis 'interpreted' the concept of race.

Feminist theories that became law in the 2010s such as the Duluth Model and affirmative/enthusiastic consent (the concept of ‘yes means yes’ as opposed to ‘no means no’) were developed in the ‘90s.

Honestly, I hate the way that "consent" language has crept into so many other domains.

Like the artists complaining about the lack of "consent" to having their images be used to train image models and LLMs. Like, if there's some sort of law that has actually been violated, I'm all ears, but I care about artist's "consent" to AI training about as much as I care about an artist's "consent" to me learning their art style and stealing all their business by undercutting their pricing.

Unfortunately for them, destroying someone's livelihood doesn't require consent under capitalism. Look what happened to the AM radio monopoly after FM radio was invented! Or what is happening to Google as LLMs start to become the most common way to search the web.

What she's calling Woke 1.0 was actually already Woke 2.0. Woke 1.0 existed on tumblr, it was Atheism+ and the invention of a billion insane genders.

Some would go even further and describe Woke 1.0 as the "political correctness" movement in the 1990s. @JeSuisCharlie recently touted the virtues of a film called PCU, which I haven't seen, although my understanding is that it satirises the political correctness trend on university campuses. See, for example, this clip, depicting a feminist caricature using the phrase "rape culture". This film came out in 1994. Given the lead time to write, produce, edit and release a film, this implies that "political correctness" was ascendant as late as 1992.

Which rather illustrates the point that wokeness is cylical, with periods of ascendancy followed by periods of dormancy.

If feel like "touted the virtues" is overstating things but it is a fun movie that I had recently rewatched and had been considering posting about as an interesting culture war time capsule.

The plot revolves around rich-preppies colluding with university president Jessica Walter, playing an ersatz Hillary Clinton, to drive "the normies" off campus. Part of their plan is to explicitly de-normalize normie behavior like guys asking girls out, so that the university can claim that they are responding to legitimate complaints rather than engaging in illegal discrimination.

The whole "rape culture" thing was satire back in the 90 but now it has fallen victim to Muggeridge's Law.

Wikipedia claims the term was first used in 1974, although I can't remember hearing it before the early 2010s.

Weirdly enough I actually think the term is a perfectly legitimate one: it's uncontroversially true that certain cultures promote rape, downplay the severity of it, or protect those guilty of it rather than protect their victims. It's just that every example of a culture meeting this description is a culture that modern feminists would object to being so characterised. "Gangs of adult men sexually exploit adolescent girls in their thousands, and the police turn a blind eye to it for decades for fear of 'inflaming community tensions' (the perpetrators are disproportionately Pakistani men) and because of the girls' socioeconomic background" is such an on-the-nose description of a rape culture it hurts – but intersectional feminists would likely get mad if I said that the UK was a rape culture provided that the rapists are Pakistani. Likewise, pretty much any Muslim-majority country in MENA could reasonably be characterised as a rape culture.

I don't disagree with feminists that rape cultures exist – I disagree with which cultures ought to be characterised as such.

Some would go even further and describe Woke 1.0 as the "political correctness" movement in the 1990s.

...or the "New Left" of the 60's, or various far-left movements in early 20th century Europe from Spain to Russia, and and so on and so on, probably until the French Revolution, if not before...

I see the tendency to group the Woke with such things like the 60s left or the French Revolution, but I don't think that quite captures it. Woke is actually just the latest iteration of identity-based tribalism. 10,000 years ago, it might have simply been "Grog looks like he's one of those guys from the tribe across the river; let's kill him and steal his stuff," and 300 years ago, it might have been "X people intrinsically belong in chains due to their nature, while Y people like me intrinsically belong to the ruling class above them due to our nature," and today, it's "X people have been oppressed by Y people throughout history; therefore, individuals who belong to groups X and Y deserve privileges/disadvantages to counteract this historical effect, which we know as a FACT had some unfair and unjust effect in the lives of these specific individuals." People have been coming up with rationales for why unfairly discriminating against people they dislike is actually virtuous and even obligatory forever, only changing up the rationales based on what the current population would be receptive to. Wokeness is the version that's been most perfectly evolved for modernity.

A major difference between woke and the other identity-based tribalisms is that it is adopted and promulgated by members of the hated tribe. Big difference between "Whitey is the enemy" coming from Stokely Carmichaeel and "Whitey is the enemy" coming from e.g. Stephen King.

Big difference between "Whitey is the enemy" coming from Stokely Carmichaeel and "Whitey is the enemy" coming from e.g. Stephen King.

I'm not convinced. As I was arguing with @6tjk last week. If we take the intesectionalist's definition of "Whiteness" seriously, Stephen King is not white.

Yes, I think enabling this via the use of pseudoscientific language around things like "systemic racism" and "privilege" and all those other terms is the great innovation of Wokeness in updating bog-standard tribalism to a Modern Audience who would reject something that was overtly purely based around selfishness. The gloss of the false claim that The Science - which is objective and universal and True - supports Wokeness is what allowed such naked, self-serving tribalism to appear just not-tribal enough to fit into the egos of people who consider themselves beyond good and evil above all the old tribal nonsense due to their modern, enlightened sensibilities.

Hmmm.

The thing that made Woke different, in my opinion, was social media. To criticise oneself is noble and self-effacing, and a desire to appear such, as well as morally superior, is what I think drives much of wokeness. Essentially white leftists are pick-mes for minorities, they sell out their own race or nationality to be considered "one of the good ones". Some cynically think they are helping minorities upend the entrenched order (to install socialism, or whatever) and that they will be rewarded with a higher position than they currently have in the new hierarchy, or indeed something other than a shallow grave, once their fantasy revolution is complete.

While one can easily situate wokeness in a lineage with historic leftist/progressive movements, I think nineties political correctness (with its fixation on identity politics organised around race, sex and sexuality) has so much overlap with the wokeness of 2010s that it's fair to consider it a recurrence of the exact same ideology, rather than an offshoot, or a distinct ideology that shares a common ancestor. Consider the use of the term "rape culture" in that clip: it's the exact same vocabulary, the exact same preoccupations. It isn't hard to find earlier examples of uncontroversially leftist movements which were explicitly not feminist (e.g. just pull up a quote about women by literally any Black Panther of note). My guess is that when we get woke 2.0 3.0 4.0, it'll be pronouns-in-bio, "we acknowledge this meeting is held on unceded Pawnee land" all over again. If the next ascendant thing in progressivism is something radically different (e.g. centred on class consciousness and wealth expropriation), then while it'll still be left, it won't be woke.

While one can easily situate wokeness in a lineage with historic leftist/progressive movements, I think nineties political correctness (with its fixation on identity politics organised around race, sex and sexuality) has so much overlap with the wokeness of 2010s that it's fair to consider it a recurrence of the exact same ideology rather than an offshoot.

Yeah, but I'm saying the 90's were themselves a recurrence. For example, this:

Instead, the task for socialist feminists is to develop a cultural marxism that can adequately explain the intricate interactions of the oppressions of race, class, and sex; a cultural marxism that helps give a clearer articulation of our various voices: feminist, black, chicano, Native American, Asian, male, female, gay, lesbian, heterosexual; a cultural marxism which understands human needs-family, ritual, religion, sex, fun, insanity, pain, fear and so on.

Was written in the 80's, and the obsession with identity seems to already have been in place, and the author was not the one who came up with the idea either.

In the other comment you put forward a hypothetical of Nazism being defeated, but not condemned in the same way we do it now. I think one of the effects of that would be what we're seeing here - the ideas periodically resurfacing under a new coat of paint, and the old iterations being forgotten.

That's a fair point. Which leads me to wonder – what's the absolute earliest ideological movement which could be characterised as "woke" in a way people in the 2010s would recognise as such?

The easy mode answer is for wokes to list off Martin Luther King, the abolition of slavery, Mary Wollstonecraft etc. I'm looking for the hard mode answer.

Given the mix of Constitutionalism and Christian Dominionism that motivated both MLK and John Brown I feel like both of their movements read more as "far-right" than "proto-woke".

To invoke God while claiming that people ought to be judged by the content of their character rather than racial or class traits is to explicitly reject intersectionalism and pretty much everything the modern secular left stands for.

Years ago I read an article arguing that the "content of their character" thing, while a memorable turn of phrase, was not really representative of MLK's true beliefs and he did believe that, in the absence of racial discrimination, the ethnic composition of an organisation would be reflective of its host country. Therefore, we ultimately have MLK to thank for affirmative action and DEI. In that sense he was certainly proto-woke, far more so than Lincoln.

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An early example of an insufferable SJW twat wielding real power was Danish physician, philosopher and regent Johann Friedrich Struensee (1737–1772).

The defining feature of woke is the Omnicause, so third wave feminism is the obvious thing to point to.

Right, there’s black supremacists who believe in woke narratives about race, not woke because of their views of women/palestine/the concept of gender. Theres TERFs, actual feminists, not woke because of their beliefs about sex/gender and because they don’t care about Palestine or race. Etc, etc.

07mk upthread mentionned the French Revolution as something people sometimes mistakenly compare to woke, but I think there's definitely significant parallels; a liberation movement (so a "noble" cause, har har har) that devolved into purity spirals and witch hunts. You have the same obsession with redefining the language to erase the traces of the past. I, of course, don't need to be told, I'm just a decent human being who celebrates "holidays" in early Nivôse.

(I use this analogy not to invoke Godwin's law, but because it's the first example I could think of a once-ascendant ideology which is now widely condemned. Wokeness is not Nazism, not "like" Nazism, not "as bad as" Nazism.)

From Germany in 1933-45, Nazism was the thing. The Nazi party was in power, swastika flags flew everywhere, "Heil Hitler" was the official greeting. Since the end of the war, Nazism is perhaps the most widely reviled and condemned ideology in the world. Labelling someone a Nazi is such a reliable rhetorical kill-button that it's become a cliché, and yet still sees unironic use every day. In the Anglosphere and Western Europe, no public figure openly identifies as a Nazi. Even things with incidental connections to the Nazi regime (like the phrase "final solution", or the term "concentration camp", which the Nazis did not coin and which had an entirely legitimate meaning prior to the war) have become untouchable by association. In some cases this stigmatisation is enforced by law (e.g. for understandable reasons it's illegal to display a swastika in Germany), but not always: publicly wearing a swastika t-shirt in Boston is a legally protected act under the First Amendment, and yet one's likelihood of getting beaten up by a complete stranger for doing so is similar to the likelihood of same in Berlin.

Now imagine a counterfactual world wherein Nazism went into retreat, without being so aggressively stigmatised. After the war, the Nazi party was no longer in power, but politicians elected as party members during its peak make no especial effort to distance themselves from their electoral pasts: indeed, many politicians proudly self-identify as Nazis, and openly announce their intent to seek election under a Nazi platform. Academics with cushy university jobs hang swastika flags in their offices, and no one so much as raps them on the knuckles. While most Germans have gotten back into the habit of greeting each other with "Guten tag", a handful still use "Heil Hitler", and this is treated essentially as an amusing anachronistic idiosyncrasy, like someone who persists in referring to the internet as the "world wide web". Whenever Nazi atrocities are brought up in public, the reaction among those responsible is not solemn contrition but flippant dismissal: "ha ha, we sure did get a bit carried away, didn't we?" And whenever Jews complain that open expressions of support for this ideology make them uncomfortable, people roll their eyes and tell them to stop moaning. We had the Nuremberg trials, the party is no longer in power – what more do you want? Let the baby have its bottle.

In the above scenario, I doubt many would say that Nazism as an ideology had decisively lost. I think most would describe it as dormant, not extinct.

After the Sydney Sweeney "great jeans" thing, I observed that there has been a vibe shift, in that, while woke people are still free to publicly express pretty out-there opinions without it having much impact on their public standing, there's no longer any expectation for normies to play along, to mouth along with the catechism. On the surface, this might look like we've "beaten" woke. But as many other commenters below have pointed out, I think it's premature to be doing victory laps. Sure, I don't have to pretend to agree that American Eagle is covertly promoting white supremacy, and I won't get into trouble for denying that it is – but woke people can still explicitly state that and face no career repercussions of any kind. I don't have to pretend to support putting convicted male rapists in women's prisons, or the sterilisation of autistic teenagers by their thousands – but every June, without fail, my entire office (my entire city) gets festooned with flags celebrating both. (Lest you think I'm exaggerating, last weekend I walked past a mural depicting a trans-identified female with prominent mastectomy scars that was paid for with EU money).

Wokeness is not extinct: wokeness is dormant, and AOC knows this better than anyone. If she really wanted to distance herself from a permanently radioactive ideology, she couldn't afford to be half this flippant.

Sure, I don't have to pretend to agree that American Eagle is covertly promoting white supremacy, and I won't get into trouble for denying that it is – but woke people can still explicitly state that and face no career repercussions of any kind (…)

Heaven forbid anyone be allowed to hold and express political or ethical opinions that clash with yours! Where would American democracy be then?

The salient characteristic of "wokeness" that right-wingers had a legitimate case against - the thing that needed, needs, to be wiped out - is cancel culture. It was the unprecedented defection from American norms around freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and peaceful coexistence with people from the other side of the aisle. If there are still wokes out there cancelling people, that's one thing. But the fact that people still hold beliefs of the kind that wokeness sought to enforce by illegitimate means, that is not relevant. It's normal. It's the equivalent of non-murderous German nationalists, who do not deserve to automatically be tarred with the Nazi brush just because they pursue similar aims to those that the Nazis committed horrific crimes in pursuit of.

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The salient characteristic of "wokeness" that right-wingers had a legitimate case against - the thing that needed, needs, to be wiped out - is cancel culture.

Then someone should probably have figured out a way to wipe it out. But they haven't, and the best defense available depends entirely on mirroring its tactics. There simply is not support for any other form of response, and people are never, ever going to accept "heads we cancel you, tails you tolerate us" as a stable equilibrium. And yet, in values-incoherent environments, that is precisely the deal on offer from all sides.

1990s-style maximal-free-speech norms were an unsustainable confluence of one-off factors, and they are gone now and are not going to come back. They have no constituency, and Free Speech ideology itself is variously either wildly unpopular or wildly hypocritical (CP? Revenge Porn? Malicious code? Copyright? Deepfake porn? The N-word, or slurs generally?). People, speaking generally, do not actually want Free Speech. They want "Free Speech" for speech within a standard deviation of what they consider good and normal, and speech outside that island of tolerance they do not want to see or to know about or for it to exist at all. This is all they have ever wanted or ever will want, and impressions to the contrary are artifacts of large-scale, coordinated, and evidently unsustainable lies. One of the most popular lies you're cutting across in your comment: "you shouldn't censor, because if you violate the taboo on censorship then others will turn around and censor you." But this only makes sense if they actually will turn around and censor you; if "free speech" goes dormant when you censor, it can either stay dormant forever, prove the maxim correct and render free speech to the past-tense, or it can wake up, at which point the argument is falsified and your initial censorship was the correct choice after all. Neither horn of the dilemma results in durable free-speech norms; the argument was never anything more than a feel-good deepity.

It's the equivalent of non-murderous German nationalists, who do not deserve to automatically be tarred with the Nazi brush just because they pursue similar aims to those that the Nazis committed horrific crimes in pursuit of.

But they are tarred with the Nazi brush, observably, in the real world we actually live in. At some point, "deserve" is just a word you've made up to describe things that aren't going to happen. People notice this, and they stop playing along or pretending otherwise.

People want more good things and less bad things. Speech is a thing. The math is pretty simple.

CP?

One can be a free speech absolutist and still think CSAM should be illegal. The thing that makes it evil is the manner of its production, not its distribution.

Banning mere possession (with no before-the-fact knowledge of production) is already on shaky ground, free-speech-absolutist-wise. As soon as you cross into "This should be illegal because it resembles actual CSAM" you have to turn in your absolutist card.

Actually, you've probably already lost your card when you ban production, because CSAM includes material produced by sexting teens.

CSAM includes material produced by sexting teens.

I think this is an extremely noncentral example of what people talk about when they talk about CSAM.

I'd consider the point of being an absolutist to be that one considers the principle to apply absolutely, such that it is just as appropriate to apply to noncentral cases as to central cases.

My point was that this is the first I've heard of teens sexting being categorised as CSAM, and would genuinely love to know in which jurisdictions it's categorised as such.

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Central enough to produce real felony charges, apparently.

Could you provide a citation?

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And my point, which you seem determined not to grasp, is that even with woke supposedly in retreat, there's still an asymmetry. Woke people in positions of power and influence can express obviously insane opinions (like "American Eagle is covertly promoting eugenics and white supremacy") without repercussions, while conservatives cannot do the same. Even normie centrists cannot publicly express many opinions which are well-attested by the sciences without being smeared as "far-right".

That may be, but the problem is that conservatives are not allowed to state their beliefs; not that progressives are allowed to do so. And your post sounded a lot more like you thought it was a problem that progressives were allowed to voice their beliefs at all.

(I also wouldn't describe the American Eagle thing as "obviously insane". The pun is pretty obvious, and "good genes" is, you know, literally the etymological meaning of the word "eugenics", so it's hard to argue that the ad wasn't playing with garden-variety eugenics-adjacent ideas, the question is just how deliberate, how consciously politically-motivated the reference was. I don't believe it was intended as some sort of pointed dogwhistle or propaganda, rather than a slightly naughty reference to low-grade wrongthink which they correctly reckoned to be widely held by their target audience; and I don't particularly think that whiteness was on the makers' minds, just ordinary non-race-specific, non-systematized folk eugenics. But it's a question of degree rather than of kind.)

And your post sounded a lot more like you thought it was a problem that progressives were allowed to voice their beliefs at all.

Well, that wasn't the point I was making at all. Perhaps I didn't express myself clearly enough. My point was that woke people can get away with publicly expressing rather out-there opinions without taking any kind of reputational hit, while conservatives or moderates cannot even get away with expressing comparably (or even much less) crazy opinions. This doesn't look like wokeness has been defeated.

"good genes" is, you know, literally the etymological meaning of the word "eugenics"

This seems like a rather extreme motte-and-bailey/sanewashing to me. Eugenics is the belief that governments should take proactive interventionist measures to improve the genetic fitness of the populations they govern. It is not the belief that some people are congenitally more attractive than others. If it meant the latter, there would be literally no one on the planet who didn't qualify as a eugenicist, and if everyone's a eugenicist, no one is.

The "is" belief "some people are congenitally hotter than others" in no way implies the "ought" belief "the government should intervene to improve the genetic fitness of the population it governs".

Well, that wasn't the point I was making at all.

Then why just list "debatably-crazy things lefties are still allowed to say" rather than "debatably-crazy things righties still aren't allowed to say" as the watermark? That's really what gave me that impression. It's difficult to take your aside about Pride Month as anything else than "Pride Month celebrations should end", as distinct from "Conservatives should be allowed to have equally-extravagant celebrations".

If it meant the latter, there would be literally no one on the planet who didn't qualify as a eugenicist

Not so. Radical progressives would be very uncomfortable with the sheer phrase "good genes" - the belief that some genes are in any objective sense better than others is viewed as a dangerous slippery slope to proactive eugenicism. Certainly no one would deny that there are, biologically, genes for particular eye colors or cranial structures, but the far-left view is that attractiveness is subjective, and Sydney Sweeney genes are in no objective sense "better" than Danny DeVito genes, it just happens to be the case that more people are into Sweeney-like body-types/it's more socially acceptable to express attraction to Sweeney-like body-types.

Talking about "good" and "bad" genes, with the possible exception of medical conditions, is, precisely as I said, a "slightly naughty" reference to a widely-held opinion that's benignly, but significantly at odds with the maximally progressive view. It doesn't mean you're secretly advertising to Hitler, but I think it's fair to take it as a signal that you are less than maximally concerned with the opinions of the radical left; as a signal that you are addressing normal people, not Tumblr keyboard warriors. It's not especially sinister, but the keyboard warriors weren't entirely wrong to think that the ad was winkingly espousing a worldview antithetical to their own.

It's difficult to take your aside about Pride Month as anything else than "Pride Month celebrations should end"

This is not very relevant, but I will note that one can hold the position "Pride Month celebrations should end" without actually supporting crushing them by force.

Like, I think Pride Month celebrations should end, in the sense that it would be good if people were less attached to the idea and didn't run/join Pride Month celebrations. I would petition the webforums I go to that run Pride Month celebrations to stop doing so, attempting to convince them of this, but all the forums I'm a member of which run such celebrations have also threatened to ban me for blasphemy against SJ.

Then why just list "debatably-crazy things lefties are still allowed to say" rather than "debatably-crazy things righties still aren't allowed to say" as the watermark?

Because the OP was claiming that woke is defeated, and wokes being able to say absurd extreme things without repercussion is not what a defeated movement looks like. I presumed it went without saying that conservatives and moderates still cannot express comparably crazy (and in some cases, ordinary commonsense) opinions without repercussion. I mean, it obviously does go without saying: even you aren't disputing it.

It's difficult to take your aside about Pride Month as anything else than "Pride Month celebrations should end" - "

Difficult for you to take, perhaps. I thought the point was abundantly clear: an entire city being festooned with the flags of a particular ideology at the city council's behest is not what a defeated ideology looks like.

Radical progressives would be very uncomfortable with the sheer phrase "good genes"

They might claim to be uncomfortable with the concept, but their revealed preferences (in terms of their choice of romantic partner, their aspirations for their children, the people they sexually fantasise about, which sports teams and athletes they bet on, their attitudes towards inbreeding etc.) would tell a very different story.

wokes being able to say absurd extreme things without repercussion is not what a defeated movement looks like (…) an entire city being festooned with the flags of a particular ideology at the city council's behest is not what a defeated ideology looks like

But then we're back to equating between "woke" as in "the anti-free-speech cancellation machine" (which needed to be defeated) and "woke" as in "people holding left-wing opinions at all, however respectfully" (which there is no particular justification to expect to be 'defeated' overnight, any more than any mainstream belief system held by hundreds of millions of people).

They might claim to be uncomfortable with the concept, but their revealed preferences would tell a very different story.

Even if we grant this point for the sake of argument, that still leaves "phrases like good genes are taboo" as a bona fide leftist shibboleth that the American Eagle ad campaign would have been stepping on the toes of. The question then is whether they did so out of ignorance, or if they considered that left-wingers would be offended and decided that being seen to mildly upset SJWs suited their PR purposes just fine. I have no fixed belief, but the latter is plausible, and it would mean the woke brouhaha about the ad was by no means "crazy" in ascribing hostile intent to the ad, even if it was still something of an overreaction.

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Suppose there are a hundred people from a variety of backgrounds. Which is better:

  • fifty people randomly selected don't get to speak
  • the largest common-background group gets to pick twenty people who don't get to speak
  • twenty people get to each pick a person who doesn't get to speak, and those silenced in this way each get to pick one other person who doesn't get to speak?

I don't understand the need for this hypothetical when Communism after the Cold war fits the bill.

Since the end of the war, Nazism is perhaps the most widely reviled and condemned ideology in the world.

I slightly disagree with this; I'd say Nazism became the most reviled and condemned label in the world. The policies that supposedly make Nazism so terrible, namely killing millions of people based on ethnic characteristics, are enthusiastically supported in their modern form today by billions (and millions of westerners).

Now imagine a counterfactual world wherein Nazism went into retreat, without being so aggressively stigmatised. After the war, the Nazi party was no longer in power, but politicians elected as party members during its peak make no especial effort to distance themselves from their electoral pasts: indeed, many politicians proudly self-identify as Nazis, and openly announce their intent to seek election under a Nazi platform. Academics with cushy university jobs hang swastika flags in their offices, and no one so much as raps them on the knuckles. While most Germans have gotten back into the habit of greeting each other with "Guten tag", a handful still use "Heil Hitler", and this is treated essentially as an amusing anachronistic idiosyncrasy, like someone who persists in referring to the internet as the "world wide web". Whenever Nazi atrocities are brought up in public, the reaction among those responsible is not solemn contrition but flippant dismissal: "ha ha, we sure did get a bit carried away, didn't we?" And whenever Jews complain that open expressions of support for this ideology make them uncomfortable, people roll their eyes and tell them to stop moaning. We had the Nuremberg trials, the party is no longer in power – what more do you want? Let the baby have its bottle.

Isn't this basically just a description of Japan? Like, seriously, read the WP article on Nippon Kaigi; most of the things you've stated have an exact parallel mentioned in that one article.

It wouldn't surprise me, but I'm not sufficiently acquainted with Japanese culture to pass comment.

Wokeness is not extinct: wokeness is dormant, and AOC knows this better than anyone. If she really wanted to distance herself from a permanently radioactive ideology, she couldn't afford to be half this flippant.

Even calling it "dormant" seems to me to be far overselling the state of things. At best, I'd say it's baiting, by creating the appearance of weakness which allows it to gain an advantageous position such that it can impose even greater strength than before. Perhaps one can argue that a key component of what defined "woke" was the appearance of strength and so conceding that appearance is, in itself, a retreat, but I'd say that's pretty weaksauce compared to the very real policies that have been locked in and still influence people's everyday lives just as much in 2026 as in 2021.

Now imagine a counterfactual world wherein Nazism went into retreat, without being so aggressively stigmatised. After the war, the Nazi party was no longer in power, but politicians elected as party members during its peak make no especial effort to distance themselves from their electoral pasts: indeed, many politicians proudly self-identify as Nazis, and openly announce their intent to seek election under a Nazi platform. Academics with cushy university jobs hang swastika flags in their offices and no one raps them on the knuckles. While most Germans have gotten back into the habit of greeting each other with "Guten tag", a handful still use "Heil Hitler", and this is treated essentially as an amusing anachronistic idiosyncrasy, like someone who persists in referring to the internet as the "world wide web". Whenever Nazi atrocities are brought up in public, the reaction among those responsible is not solemn contrition but flippant dismissal: "ha ha, we sure did get a bit carried away, didn't we?" And whenever Jews complain that open expressions of support for this ideology make them uncomfortable, people roll their eyes and tell them to stop moaning. We had the Nuremberg trials, the party is no longer in power – what more do you want? Let the baby have its bottle.

That would largely describe Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union vis-a-vis communism, yes? And I would still say that the global communist movement took a big one on the chin after the events of 1991.

I’d argue it also more or less describes old local communists in the entire former Soviet Bloc, Falangists and other Franco supporters in Spain after 1975 (for a few decades, at least), Italian fascists and Japanese nationalists after 1945 (or at least after US occupation ended).

Russia is still communist in spirit: the state is a full-on dictatorship that controls everything and spreads dogmatic propaganda full of doublespeak, currently fighting a pointless cruel war and struggling despite having a massive advantage, effectively massacring its own citizens. Even communist times had people with extra income and private property ("more equal than others"). Russia is also widely considered miserable and it's economy is declining.

Meanwhile, my understanding is that in non-Russian-aligned Slavic nations communism is widely stigmatized, and many have banned communist symbols and ideology.

Russia does not have a planned economy. The state does like to extort, terrorize and rob business owners who get big enough, but you can have that in capitalism. In communism, there is categorically no such thing as a business owner.

People need to learn other words for "incompetent centralized state" than "communism", or you just look like the mirror of one braincell leftists who call everything they don't like "nazi fascists", except you're not winning.

I think it’s more accurate to describe all this as autocratic and despotic in spirit, with a legacy that goes back centuries.

in non-Russian-aligned Slavic nations communism is widely stigmatized

I’d opt to nitpick here. This in large part is taking place in the Baltics, and they aren’t Slavic. Also, the reason these symbols got banned is not that these represent Communist ideology but because they were the symbols of the Soviet state, which is in turn interpreted as another vessel of Russian imperialism, which is seen as seeking to dissolve the national character of proud smaller nations under its rule. In other words, the ban is not of ideological intent but driven by nationalism and cultural considerations.

Is support for communism not stigmatized in Poland, Ukraine, Croatia, etc?

Nostalgia for the bygone days of socialism – I imagine not (again, the Baltics and Poland are probably an exception more or less, in the latter case the reason being that there is scarce nostalgia to begin with)

Sympathy for Russia or merely Russian ‘imperialist’ sentiments for whatever reason – yes

Support for Marxism-Leninism – also yes, bit I imagine to a much lesser degree

Yup. I've often said that wearing a hammer-and-sickle T-shirt on a college campus should be exactly as unacceptable as wearing a swastika T-shirt would be, and yet it isn't. It's interesting to note that all the examples of once-ascendant but now aggressively stigmatised ideologies I can think of are on the right. Even moderate conservatives have to preemptively condemn the extremists on their side, but it's not symmetrical: liberals don't have to preemptively condemn communists before they can air their views.

liberals don't have to preemptively condemn communists before they can air their views.

Cretins like Hasan Piker get glowing NYT profiles, even. They don't just not have to condemn them, it's apparently a benefit to be associated with evil leftists.

The point isn't whether Nazism or communism is more stigmatized, it is that one can still see many instances of the sort of a thing going on you presented in your hypothetical on Nazism going around and still believe that communism has gone through a major defeat that has changed the situation worldwide fundamentally.

Agreed.

You'll have to wait for the communists to start a total extermination race war and then proceed to lose horribly for them to be equally condemned.

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communists to start a total extermination race war

Can I ask the Finns, or the eastern half of Poland? Or Tibet.

Both Finland and Poland invaded the Soviet Union, and then lost the war. They did not face an extermination race war. Did the Soviets kill 30 mil. Finns? Or a comparable fraction? No, they just won a war against them and took some land, then proceeded afterwards to have relatively warm relations up until literally a few years ago.

Communist propaganda detected. Report for termination, traitor.

All citizens listening to communist propaganda are demoted to Infra-Red clearance and reassigned to the food vats until further notice.

Damn, I knew the Internet is full bots, but I wasn't suspecting you of being one, let alone that you're Liberty Prime.

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Both Finland and Poland invaded the Soviet Union

What are you referring to, specifically?

Does it count if the Khmer Rouge started a total extermination race war, largely directed at their own population, and then lost horribly to Vietnam?

Oh, so a total extermination class war is perfectly fine, but a total extermination race war is suddenly "Whoa, not so fast, bucko!".

You'd be amazed at the number of self-identified leftists whose response to your rhetorical question would be yeschad.jpeg. One of Dublin's most recent mayors, for one.

then proceed to lose horribly

That's part of it, I'm sure: the Cold War was won peacefully, not via destruction and unconditional surrender and occupation and rebuilding.

Exactly, people jump in with half-baked reason to condemn one side, even though another side was easily as murderous. "Oh no, our murders weren't as bad, because they're not race-based!". It makes absolutely no sense.

It makes complete sense if you are either non-white or otherwise care about the continued existence of non-whites in the centuries to come.

Communist murders of Kulaks were an attempt to purify their society from within, while Nazi murders of Untermench were an attempt to eradicate a people to make way for another. Although their means were unacceptable to contemporary observers, their ends were not; before the post-war consensus began to form, it was taken for granted that the world was the white man's heritage (see footnote 2, also see this excerpt). It is the principal objective of Woke to prevent a reversion to that state; do we not post on (stolen/conquered) land?

Don't you kind of have to be racist for this to make sense? I can see the tragedy in an entire group of people going extinct, but only if there are inherent differences between groups, and losing one one of the groups means forever losing their particular expression of traits.

Otherwise "kill anyone who disagrees" doesn't feel all that different from "kill anyone who looks different than me", particularly when the demand to not disagree includes conversations about agricultural reform that have caused mass starvation.

Communist murders of Kulaks were an attempt to purify their society from within

They believed in a global revolution. To the point that I had commies tell me you can't say real communism has been tried until there's still capitalism in any part of the world.

I can see the tragedy in an entire group of people going extinct, but only if there are inherent differences between groups, and losing one one of the groups means forever losing their particular expression of traits.

Tragedy? I have it on good authority that the disappearance of certain "particular expressions of traits" would be quite desirable indeed.

Don't you kind of have to be racist for this to make sense?

C'mon, acceptance of HBD is basically consensus here. What isn't, and what I aim to inculcate, is acceptance of its full implications.

If you object to the contents of any of my above links, can you explain why? If you do not, do you then object to @Chi_Wara's sentiment here? If so, what is he to do instead?

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Until the people that were woke paid their price we have not won.

HAHAHA! What a wacky time! Glad we stopped doing that, right? Stares at you maniacally

"Woke 1 was crazy".

It was only "Woke 1" if we're in Year Zero. These are core progressive ideas that have popped up throughout the century, that they sometimes get temporarily embarrassed about, and when that happens they try to throw the whole episode down the memory hole.

I would say this is "woke 2" with the 1990's PC wave being "woke 1".

I agree that the various ideas that make up wokeness are older, but 1990's PC was the first time they were combined in something resembling the modern format - in particular the idea that Newspeak is a useful tool for addressing group-based social inequality.

The overall narrative is ‘woke is dead and incidentally it never actually existed’.

Another such victory and we are undone.

Further elaboration really deserves its own post, focused on a specific topic in depth rather than my usual scattershot bluster. Soon, hopefully.

Alas, still filing under "the people involved can't be trusted near anything important." There'll be others.

Call it woke, call it the woke right, call it whatever. The real war is freedom vs censorship, and due to the Paradox of Tolerance, it never ends.

"Woke 1" implies the existence of a "Woke 2".

I wouldn't let my guard down until it's seen as necessary to publicly express contrition for participating in the madness.

This is anecdata, but the other night, I asked a woman at a bar about what book she was reading. [She was black, and a sociologist]. This escalated into making out and some light groping and her dragging me to her doorstep. I left her at her doorstep, because:

  1. At one point, she repeatedly said White Supremacy, like three times over the course of five sentences. Like she was baiting me to engage with it (I didn't).
  2. She accused me of "sounding/dressing conservative", apparently my wisconsin accent and open denim shirt were some sort of red flag. Still kept cuddling up to me, though.
  3. A long rant about how 17-year-olds get catcalled, and that proves all men are pedos. Attempts to redirect the conversation failed repeatedly.
  4. "Why haven't you kissed me yet?" [I kiss her] "Hey, you didn't ask if you could kiss me before kissing me! [she keeps kissing me]

Which is why I left her at her doorstep, the last one in particular, for obvious reasons, I don't find that game very cute. 3rd party observers said she really just wanted to bang a white guy. She went about it in very much the wrong way.

Miss sociologist got left at her door by a guy because she still seems to think peak woke is in this season. If woke is over, no one around me has gotten the memo.

On the one hand, they say "don't put your dick in crazy", advice I've never really taken to heart: I'll smile and nod at a lot of nonsense if it means getting to smash, even if I know it'll never progress beyond that. (My favourite was one time a girl shared a meme on her Instagram story which read "at some point a man has to choose between making fun of astrology and getting laid". On my first date with this girl, I made fun of astrology to her face; she still had sex with me later that day.)

On the other hand, this sounds like the exact type of woman to falsely accuse you of raping her, so you likely dodged a bullet.

You made the right decision. That was someone just itching to write her next Instagram or whatever post about the toxic white supremacist masculinity of the guy who pumped and dumped her, and never mind she was the one with her hand down your pants in the first place.

Think you meant to reply to the person I was replying to.

It's turtles all the way down!

On the other hand, this sounds like the exact type of woman to falsely accuse you of raping her, so you likely dodged a bullet.

This piece of advice exists precisely for this and other similar reasons (domestic violence etc). The issue isn't whether you get to smash or not, but what happens to you afterwards.

Of course, but I think the advice is a little underspecified. Some crazy girls will go out of their way to try and ruin your life after you dump them, and some won't. Lumping all crazy girls into one box unnecessarily limits your pool of prospective one-night stands/fuckbuddies.

I wouldn't really call this one crazy, I'd call her a self-centered jerk. Aside from the wokeness, a lot of what annoyed me was, well, the sorts of behaviors that Redpill content is always talking about and usually falls flat for me because I never normally encounter it.

"Waaaait a minute...am I being shit-tested? That's a real thing? I thought it was invented by internet misogynists."

She probably thought she was playing a cutesy game, or Negging me.

Better safe than sorry, I guess.

True. When in doubt, maintain the drought.

Which is why I left her at her doorstep

Poor gal, she got all excited about what she learned in her anti-racism class, and now she keeps getting disappointed

I wasn't there and might be reading this very wrong, but it sounds like she wanted you to politely be the caricature of all of the things she was accusing you of. If it was me and I felt there was a window, I would have very carefully and politely asked her if she was into raceplay.

When in doubt go over the top, that's how Dad did it, that's how America does it, and it has been working out pretty well so far.

Crazy left wing stuff isn’t over yet. And likely comes back if they get a sniff of power.

Trans still exists. For 8k years of human civilization a man wearing women clothing got stoned to death. That’s normal. We didn’t just create a new sex 8k years into civilization. The WNBA is actually considering letting men into the league….or at a bare minimum can’t come out and say this is dumb and unworkable. It was only 25 years ago when the most popular tv show of all time executed a person for being gay.

Hasan Piker is only being “talked about” being excommunicated from the Democratic Party despite advocating destruction of white people (whose funnily is 100% white; probably Roman or Greek blood that was by the sword converted to Islam).

It’s not about overreach on a political mandate. Some ideas don’t work. People on the right wanting a lot of deportations are likely correct. We have opinion polls. Only white people favor capitalism, liberalism, and democracy. Which is a big reason why I’ve become facism adjacent because it seems clear to me as currently structured western culture is dead without radical action. Maybe we just haven’t tried to assimilate them hard enough. I’d rather vote for fascists Caesar and get to keep liberalism and capitalism than wait 50 years and lose all 3.

So yes the left still has a lot of wacky ideas. The broader left coalition can’t keep those people in check.

AOC was kind of funny freezing her eggs recently. Shes 36. She’s been with her bf for 8 years. You either get pregnant or you dump your bf and freeze your eggs. But maybe she would lose the 20 something female vote if she had a kid or something.

Edit: AOC broke up with her fiance 5 years ago. So the freezing eggs things makes sense.

For 8k years of human civilization a man wearing women clothing got stoned to death.

Not always. People like that, along with the mentally challenged/mentally ill and standing out by other characteristics (e.g. albinos or twins) could be considered unlucky/unnatural and be sacrificed or killed.

Or they might be considered taboo, which was always on the fine edge between being auspicious and inauspicious. Strange edge cases like that were the province of the spirits or the gods, and could be intermediaries between our world and the world of the ancestors/spirits. You might have a crossdressing shaman, but this was not something for ordinary people (the berdache system is something woefully misunderstood and I think modern progressivism has made interpretation of what exactly was going on even murkier and hard to disinter, see the Wikipedia edit on it which can't sufficiently spit in disgust on the horrid European repugnance of it all).

Certainly it was not something to be considered "and this is just like Real Women/Real Men" but now we insist on "and this is exactly precisely the same, see how trans women get their monthly periods on HRT".

we insist on...

What you mean "we", kemosabe? The people who think that transwomen get real periods are laughed at in public by normies and in private by other transactivists.

But laughing is considered rude, don't you know? It's called just being a decent person, bigot! To be polite and kind! To go along with the fantasies!

and in private by other transactivists.

How does that help when in public they enable them at every step?

It was only 25 years ago when the most popular tv show of all time executed a person for being gay.

What show are you thinking of? What I think of as the most popular show didn't have this, at least that I recall.

"Jerry and I are just friends! Not that there is anything wrong with that."

Sopranos. Vito was killed when it came out he was homosexual. But it was by the NY Family and his own family thought about it but felt hurt when the NYC guys did it for them.

I wasn’t sure if I should state it directly or just give a reference for the reader to be like I know the reference.

Also an element that Tony wanted it to be clean and quick, if it had to happen, but the NY guys tortured Vito before killing him. The way you phrased it was pretty funny though, makes it sound like The Sopranos crew were actually executing the guys who died in the show. "Sorry, Joe, Vito got whacked. You know what happens now..."

ChatGPT thinks he's referring to a character in The Sopranos, an episode that came out in 2006. I haven't seen The Sopranos though, so I can't comment.

My other guess was The Wire, but neither are depicting morality of the society at large, and I think you still see depictions of homophobia its just very strongly the outgroup doing it.

Google thinks it's the murder of Scott Amedure on The Jenny Jones Show.

Crazy left wing stuff isn’t over yet.

Trans still exists.

Non sequitur, unless by 'crazy left-wing stuff' you mean 'anything Jack Chick didn't like'. Trans people existing does not, in my view, belong in the same bucket as 'refusing to acknowledge biological sex even in medical contexts where it is relevant', 'condemning anyone who refers to the previous name of a trans celebrity even if they were famous under that name', and 'cancelling anyone who doesn't participate in the cancellation of anyone not on board with the cancellation of anyone who disagrees with the trans community'.

For 8k years of human civilization a man wearing women clothing got stoned to death. That’s normal.

One, that was not universal across all civilisations (and they also varied widely in which garments were considered to belong to which gender); two, there have been many things which were considered 'normal' for thousands of years, until we realised that they were inflicting enormous unnecessary suffering, and moved beyond them.

We should focus less on being normal and more on being kind.

We should focus less on being normal and more on being kind.

Bit of an is-ought affair.

IMO we, not even getting into who we might be, should focus more on being disciplined, productive, realistic and very very suspicious of others trying to trick us, kindness and normalness both be damned. That is what I think current-year demands.

I will note that "trans still exists" could be read not only as "transsexuals still exist", but also as "trans ideology still exists", and even "substantial official deference to trans ideology still exists".

We should focus less on being normal and more on being kind.

No, we should be normal. We tried being kind, and then the definition of what kind is shifted from "refraining from outright laughing in their faces" to "wholeheartedly playing along with their delusion at all times". Now, "being kind" just means outright lying because a person prefers lies to truth.

Trans people existing does not

From my point of view the majority of new trans since the great awokening are - FtM - mental illness and social contagion in young women. MtF - sexual fetish.

We should focus less on being normal and more on being kind.

Misdirected empathy is what got us in this mess in the first place. I have no problem with 'being kind', but only when it is appropriate to do so. Unrestrained 'kindness' is effectively cultural AIDS and will lead to further eradication of the West as things stand.

Here's a brilliant article on why "just be kind" produces bad policy.

(I like the author of this article, it would be so cool if he also posted on The Motte.)

I do!

Non sequitur, unless by 'crazy left-wing stuff' you mean 'anything Jack Chick didn't like'.

How? Demanding that new definitions for "man" and "woman", and a belief if in "gender" be adopted is far beyond anything I recall seeing in a Chick Tract. The practice of Gender Affirming Care can also be rejected on the basis that it's pseudoscientific garbage, rather than "Jack Chick didn't like it".

One, that was not universal across all civilisations

Still a lot more universal than pro-trans people like to believe. A lot of the cultures they like to portray as having a concept of "trans" or "third gender" didn't, and they're just reinterpreting them through their values.

We should focus less on being normal and more on being kind.

There is nothing kind about accepting transgenderism, though.

The parent poster fantasises about stoning, a punishment that is only known/relevant in our cultural context due to its preservation in the memetic time capsule of the Levant ca. 500BC that is Old Testament Christianity. The reference to Jack Chick, as one of the most internet-famous proponents of Old Testament morality, is apt enough.

(All the more so because I don't even think the Old Testament, or other historical texts, tend to opine particularly strongly on transsexualism or crossdressing per se. Once you get into "apply Old Testament punishments to modern American bugbears, while entertaining the belief that this is a human universal" territory, Jack Chick becomes a very iconic choice indeed.)

No, the old testament very explicitly condemns cross dressing- although from the perspective of believers who hold the prohibition still in force, the more common example is women in pants.

The point of the OT prohibition on cross-dressing is that the two sexes should be visually distinctive so you can tell from a distance whether you are dealing with a man or a woman. The practical application of this rule is easy in almost all cases.

For example, male and female Highland dress are completely different, despite both involving a skirted bottom.

Similarly, although some women wearing trousers are doing so to be deliberately androgynous, nobody could think a Hilary Clinton pantsuit was anything other than ladieswear and a man wearing one would be cross-dressing.

In the context of western culture, "men only wear a skirted garment as part of full traditional Highland dress, and women only wear a garment with divided legs when doing work or sports for which a skirt is unsuitable" is a good fence around the rule against cross-dressing which I find broadly reasonable if you accept the rule.

This kind of creates a circular reference, though, since the OT has nothing carved in stone about what 'women's clothing' and 'men's clothing' is, and who/what the deciding factor as to what article becomes for what gender is.

(If 'intent of the person creating the clothing', then pants are women's clothes and skirts are men's clothes [re: kilts], so it can't be that. If interpreting that as 'the clothes that provide sexual designation', that seems like a better dividing line, but it still suffers from the fact that to everyone else, pants aren't sexual designators any more- dresses and undergarments, sure, but that's not usually what they're restricting themselves to.)

I think that "women must never wear pants" is just an excuse to be traditionalist for the sake of traditionalism (or "fostering group cohesion by believing odd things"/"set apartness", if you prefer), or at least that appears to be the intent behind doing that.

The parent poster fantasises about stoning

If that was his objection, maybe he should have quoted that part?

A lot of the cultures they like to portray as having a concept of "trans" or "third gender" didn't, and they're just reinterpreting them through their values.

As far as I've been able to tell, the vast majority of them are simply "failed male, useless for the normal purpose of men". Spartans would have yeeted these off a cliff. These other cultures allowed them to live, and found something marginally useful for them to do.

A lot of the cultures they like to portray as having a concept of "trans" or "third gender" didn't, and they're just reinterpreting them through their values.

The progs are reinterpreting those foreign/ancient culture through their own values, yes, but so are you. Those ancient foreign cultures were sexually degenerate; they were not exemplars of traditionalist Abrahamic sexual ethics, they were the thing that traditionalist Abrahamic sexual ethics defined itself against. I think the progs' "they had a third gender!" read of the situation is, though entirely incorrect about right and wrong, still closer to the truth than your "the entire world stoned these people to death until just now". There's nothing new under the sun. Modernity did not invent rampant culturally promoted sexual degeneracy.

but so are you. Those ancient foreign cultures were sexually degenerate; they were not exemplars of traditionalist

Uh... Where have I said that they were?

Perhaps I overinterpreted:

For 8k years of human civilization a man wearing women clothing got stoned to death. That’s normal.

and

Still a lot more universal than pro-trans people like to believe. A lot of the cultures they like to portray as having a concept of "trans" or "third gender" didn't, and they're just reinterpreting them through their values.

?

One of these was not written by me.

“ We should focus less on being normal and more on being kind.”

  • Kindness to depravity isn’t a virtue. Locking an alcoholic in a Jameson distillery doesn’t lead to good things but is seems to be your definition of kind to him. Kindness to an alcoholic would be the rest of society accepting prohibition for his benefit.

Here I am primarily talking about you using “kindness” as a moral code. We should do good things for people but what is the good can be subjective.

For 8k years of human civilization a man wearing women clothing got stoned to death. That’s normal.

I don't think you're correct here, no matter how narrowly or broadly you define human civilization.

In the UK, you have things like Shakespearean actors playing female parts, or the pantomime tradition of cross-dressing.

In the Weimar republic, you have things like transvestite passes.

And even in places where it was disapproved of or illegal to crossdress, I bet you would find a variety of actual practices for most of written history.

We didn’t just create a new sex 8k years into civilization.

No, arguably we did that early on, when eunuchs were more widespread in many different human societies.

Certainly, calling a eunuch "male" probably isn't obviously correct until the discovery of sex chromosomes, (and even with that discovery, I think you could have a perfectly viable definition of "male" that excludes eunuchs.)

If you are going to use a prime example The Weimar Republic - Please tell me what came next? And what happened to the people blamed for instigating practices like transexuals in the following years?

The Weimar Republic would not be a good example to refute a claim that for 8k years we stoned transexuals. I was being a little hyperbolic but that time period would seem to support my hyperbolic claim.

Creating eunuchs wasn’t a good thing to do. And its entire purpose was to prevent someone from having kids so they could guard your hoes and not fuck them. Or could run your empire without trying to kill you and create a new royal lineage. But still essentially male.

I was just trying to give a basic existence proof. I don't think there was anything inevitable about the Weimar Republic becoming Nazi Germany, and so I think the fact that there were years of official tolerance of transvestites is a decent proof that your statement was wrong.

If you want more, look at Plato's Republic, suggesting that upper class men and women in the ideal republic wear the same clothes. Look at the legends of Achilles being raised as a girl and wearing girl's clothes, because his parents hoped to avoid his prophesied death if he ever took up arms. Look at the eunuchs in the cult of Cybele.

And you breezed right over my examples of cross-dressing in theatre and pantomime in the British tradition, which lasted for hundreds of years and doesn't fall to the flaw in my Weimar example.

Even as hyperbole, I think your comment falls short. Practices differed across time and space, and to pretend otherwise is to replace nuanced historical analysis with a make believe mono-culture extending back further than one is actually attested to in the historical record.

And you breezed right over my examples of cross-dressing in theatre and pantomime in the British tradition, which lasted for hundreds of years and doesn't fall to the flaw in my Weimar example.

Tbh one of the biggest recent crossdressers I can think of, Dame Edna, got cancelled pretty hard for anti-trans comments and the actor seemed pretty heteronormative outside of the Old Lady character. I'm sure there's been a lot of gay crossdressing actors in theatrical history, but the phenomenon has also arised in sufficient cultures and places amongst straight men who've produced generations of children that I don't think it's a 1-1.

Trying to tangle ancient cultural expressions like cross-dressing into sexual identity is a sad thing that's only happened as a consequence of the normalization of Homosexuality in recent years and the requirement to 'No Homo' all sorts of Male activities. I know people from gay-stoning cultures who engage in behavior that'd seem overwhelmingly homoerotic by current Western norms, like the old Khabib Nurmagomedov bath photo that surfaces every so often. Western Men are essentially deprived of expressing platonic love for eachother due to the desire to not appear gay, which is a direct extension of the average woman finding any sort of homosexuality on a partner's part to be a massive instantaneous ick.

I am not talking about identity at all. I am responding to a specific and narrow claim about how men who dressed like women were treated for 8000 years.

It was a claim about behavior, not identity.

Did those men claim to actually be women, though?

I mean you have given zero evidence of transsexuals ever existing without being killed. London Theatre is acting not being transsexuals. Eunuchs were not trannies. Germans ended up killing them. Achilles was basically an Arya Stark situation of hiding your identity.

My quote that transsexuals were basically killed historically seems to be truish.

I wasn't talking about transsexuals. You said:

For 8k years of human civilization a man wearing women clothing got stoned to death.

Which is a claim that I disputed. I gave several examples where men wore women's clothes, and were not stoned to death.

If you had wanted to claim something different, you should have claimed something different.

I mean you cited the Weimar Republic and transvestite passes. I didn’t know we swapped to wearing women’s clothing for professional reasons.

Transvestite passes were just an example of men wearing women's clothes and not being stoned to death. I brought it up as an example of behavior, not identity.

Look back through my posts in this subthread. Where did I ever get off of the specific topic of responding to your specific claims about 8000 years of stoning men for dressing as women?

More comments

It's really just another way of saying that people misread the mandate they actually had and overreached into nonsensical and unpopular areas. For example anti discrimination rules against racial minorities are pretty well supported (even if I think they're unnecessary and illiberal), where as discriminating against white applicants to boost minority groups is not. Some of the people riding the waves of the first push into the second and trigger a rebound.

The same thing I've been talking about what the GOP is doing now. Securing the border and kicking out bad criminal immigrants is popular, shoving a gun in the face of the friendly abeula who lives across the street or kicking out a hard working farm assistant is not.. Greg Bovino might literally believe there needs to be 100 million deportations, but the general public does not. That's why putting Bovino in charge of deportations was stupid and why he inevitably created major backlash. There's a natural ebb and flow to the stupidity back and forth. A very recent example, vaccine mandates violated people's rights to body autonomy, so now we have a retarded antivaxxer in charge of public health recommendations instead.

Things are looking to flow back to the Dem side pretty soon so let's hope woke 2 won't be as stupid as before. It will be, they're still playing the same incentive and signaling games everyone else is, and they'll cause a right wing backlash which will cause a left wing one and so on and so forth as people refuse to learn the lesson that bathing in the excesses of your idealogy is not actually a good way to maintain support, but who knows. Maybe someone will finally learn to moderate their actions for once and tell their sides extremists to fuck off.

It's really just another way of saying that people misread the mandate they actually had and overreached into nonsensical and unpopular areas.

I remember one alt-right argument that was skeptical of Trump from the beginning, namely that he is likely to antagonize, further radicalize and energize the Woke but at the same time is rather unlikely to render any direct or indirect assistance to the struggle against them, or to their victims. Of all the criticism directed at Trump from anywhere, I was sure that this has the strongest legs to stand on and will also have severe consequences down the line. From a rightist perspective, one’d think that radicalizing the leftists only makes any sense if you’re planning to use that as a pretext to crack down on them. If you’re unwilling to do that, there’s no point in it at all.

Of all the criticism directed at Trump from anywhere, I was sure that this has the strongest legs to stand on and will also have severe consequences down the line.

I always thought this argument deserved a longer take-down because it was so common and so-often taken for granted. (I remember having this argument on The Motte, in fact.)

I think though, after ten years of Trump, we've seen how the fight goes and time makes more converts than reason. Personally I think we gained a lot more than we lost by fighting even if this radicalized many in opposition.

True. But I don't think the choice is merely between fighting and not fighting at all.

I want them to cite concrete things that they now see as having been crazy. "X said Y in 2021 and it was all over the NYT, and on Twitter and everyone was nodding along, but actually now I realize it was crazy." And don't take some edge case lunatic, but the central cases of what people understand under woke that was everywhere. They never do that. They just say "oh yeah actually things went a bit too far, great intentions, but it was a bit over the top here and there, teehee I guess it was a wild time, quite crazy..." That's weak. If they think something was crazy they should say what precisely. And then let's see them say that into the face of social media. Because I'm pretty sure that nothing of substance has been rethought. It's just that "I guess we were too fast and it turns out we have to be more strategic about this because not as many were onboard as it seemed online, especially during the covid lockdown when all we had was online, so social media seemed representative." Was it crazy to rename master to main, blacklist to blocklist? Which cancellations and witchhunts were actually crazy? Was it crazy to insist on capitalizing Black, but not white? We'll never know. "Some mistakes were made". Which ones? (What I listed are obviously the surface presentations of much deeper assumptions, which certainly haven't been rethought, so even just removing the frivolous annoying useless stuff like the Orwellian language redesign won't address the core issues. The true reversal would be around a re-evaluation of the oppressor-oppressed axes and the woke interpretation of history, gender relations, race relations, the eternal crimes of cishet white men etc.)

How did we go from "there is no such thing as 'woke', it's just a conservative invention, there is only basic human decency" to "Woke 1" (who even invented this term? First time I'm hearing it) having been bad. Presumably implying there is "Woke 2" in the making which will be non-crazy.

Also as just one example: has Wikipedia been un-woked? If woke has been defeated?

I claim in casual interactions all the time that we clearly left schools, etc, closed for way too long in 2020-21 and, depending where you live, 2022. Generally, everyone agrees that stuff was way too strict, especially for kids - certainly, I am not ostracized for this. Although lockdowns were not necessarily a clear "woke" position, they were very much the prevailing dogma.

It is also now very possible to criticize Black Lives Matter with the benefit of hindsight; it accomplished nothing, and the leaders of the movement seem to have predictably used it to enrich themselves. You could probably even critique the movement on its merits (e.g., it is probably true that American police resort to lethal force too quickly, but it is much less clear that they are particularly racist about it).

it is probably true that American police resort to lethal force too quickly

Even though I never thought the shooting of Michael Brown was racially motivated, around the time of that shooting I probably would have agreed with you on this point. I'm no longer so sure. Comparisons between police shootings in the US and peer nations (with the intent of demonstrating how trigger-happy American cops are) are hopelessly confounded by the fact that the US is an objectively more violent country, with an unusually large black underclass. If I recall correctly, even the difference in per capita police killings between the US and Canada is not half as large as progressives would have us believe.

Bodycams did a lot to dissuade this incorrect notion. We have literal video proof that the overwhelming majority of the time the police shoot a suspect, it's because the suspect pulled a gun or knife. There was never any such epidemic of police being quick to shoot people.

Just spitballing, but:

  1. Do the bodycams perhaps affect the behavior of policemen?

  2. Was there perhaps an epidemic of bodycams suffering unfortunate damage and the footage becoming unrecoverable in cases of violence?

  1. Most likely not. The rate of justified-vs-unjustified shootings is about the same before and after bodycams. Moreover, there are still plenty of policemen who commit unjustified shootings knowing full well they are being recorded.

  2. No? To my knowledge there have been vanishingly few cases of this, if it has ever happened.

Also as just one example: has Wikipedia been un-woked? If woke has been defeated?

Nope. The article for Kiwi Farms is still full of blatant lies.

It was a rhetorical question. Nothing has been willingly reversed or retreated from where the cultural power of the left is still intact. The only things where some reversal may have happened (but mostly just a reversal of the first derivative) is stuff under government control under Trump. I don't see anything else. Where Trump isn't president, e.g. in Western Europe, woke is still on the upswing.

The other big reversal is X/Twitter, because Elon.

And they reacted by making a new site (Bluesky) in an attempt to usurp X as the dominant conversation site. Thankfully it seems rather irrelevant and subject to a form of evaporative cooling that results in it being an echo chamber for crazy beliefs.

The other, bigger deal is that you can bet they won't let something like Twitter be taken over by someone like Musk ever again. I'm suspect that The Onion wanting to take over Infowars was a sort of ironic retribution for Twitter. "You take over my site, then I take over yours, and fair's fair."

Woke is still pretty close to generic liberal Democrat stuff- they’ve certainly backed down a bit on race, but not on sex and gender, and Palestine is a woke issue thats eaten thé others.

That is because woke and generic liberal Democrat merged into being the same term.

I almost consider myself a liberal. And I definitely was a liberal 10 years ago before science convinced me a lot of conservative beliefs were better. The people who call themselves liberal democrats today are not what a liberal Democrat was in 1990.

I'd have agreed prior to October 7th. The main difference between woke 1 and woke 2 is that for woke 2 Israel is the most important question for the far left and establishment liberals refuse to budge.

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard was a step in the right direction. Before, colleges were openly discriminating and celebrating it, and now they are doing it with a wink and a nod. Flagrant patterns of illegal discrimination are trivial to identify by looking at the standardized test gap between the median black student admitted and the median white student admitted. The DoJ needs to put some metaphorical heads on spikes. College administrators should be as terrified of a DoJ civil rights investigation as they were of a Title IX case during the Obama administration. Until that happens, claims of "winning" ring hollow, when white and Asian students still don't get a fair shot at one of the most critical junctures in their lives.

Calling the current state "winning" is pretty weak. What was won? One professor at Cambridge resigned, not the whole department that gave him the position. BLM "leaders" still have their million dollar mansions financed by donations from Coca Cola, while almost no one got prison time for lighting whole cities on fire. Many qualified white and asian men are still sitting on careers that never launched. Black women are still sitting in their unearned positions in corporations that hired 90%+ minority candidates only for half a decade.

Winning means fixing all these things and making sure woke 2.0's inevitable coming can be easily stopped before it results in rioting, sterilizing kids, etc. The people who did "woke 1.0" are still in position to do the same thing over again if the whims of the day indicate they want to.

What was won?

We got the marketplace of ideas back.

If you want something less abstract, there is now a general consensus among serious people that demographic performance differentials (whether or not they are genetic or environmental in origin) are real. The idea that all measured gaps are artifacts of testing bias or an unjust economic system did not withstand public scrutiny.

We got the marketplace of ideas back.

I was not aware that we had lost it.

If you want something less abstract, there is now a general consensus among serious people that demographic performance differentials (whether or not they are genetic or environmental in origin) are real. The idea that all measured gaps are artifacts of testing bias or an unjust economic system did not withstand public scrutiny.

This is just the intersectionalists being forced to retreat from "the bailey" to "the motte". Yes "the blues" have suffered some setbacks and are currently backpedaling, but there is still a ways to go before we can reasonably claim victory.

I was not aware that we had lost it.

Are you kidding me? There was a whole decade where anything to the right of Obama got deleted from Reddit and WordPress and YouTube and Twitter. Thought criminals were forced to flee to 4chan and invent alternatives planforms like Bitchute and Gab and The Motte just so we could keep talking to each other.

Twitter I will grant you, but my impression is that Reddit and WordPress were always explicitly Left-Wing/Blue-Tribe spaces (the right were all on Blogspot and substack) meanwhile YouTube had remained neutral/vaguely-libertarian until 2020 when they started cracking down on "misinformation" and footage of a "mostly peaceful" nature.

Reddit was very much grey tribe libertarian in its early days. As late as 2012, people were voting for Ron Paul, /r/atheism was huge, etc. Back then, Reddit was a bastion of free speech, with subreddits like /r/FatPeopleHate that would not last five minutes today being allowed to operate in peace. One hundred AR-15s were engraved with the Reddit logo as part of a licensing deal, but then the New York Times did a hit piece and /r/Gunsforsale got banned.

As for WordPress, the original Heartiste blog was hosted there until 2019. Heartiste was one of the big three of the manosphere. The banning spooked Spandrell into moving elsewhere.

I think you citing /r/atheism kind of proves my point. /r/atheism was always an explicitly progressive subreddit. It's whole reason for being was to be a place for members of the liberal striver class vent their spleens and organize against the religious right.

As I recall it /r/atheism was one of, if not the, primary attack vectors through which the woke gained access to the wider nerd/gamer sphere.

I was not aware that we had lost it.

My understanding of the "marketplace of ideas" is that anyone can put forward an idea, and let it stand on it's own. Not that as they do it, they also have to strategize about not getting fired, what to do if they do get fired, how to get around institutions throttling their reach or banning their idea outright, how to organize and fund security for IRL events, etc.

"Humans are also subject to evolution" was the general consensus on Wikipedia back in 2010. What trendy giveth, trendy taketh away. Normal people are not formal logicians.

Can we stop using weasel words here?

I won't lie to make you feel better about yourself, no.

Watching "some human subpopulations process oxygen more efficiently" transition into "probably racist" was kind of funny. But as long as you keep that attitude, you and I are enemies.

At least this mess has been educational. Saul becoming Paul really is rare.

We got the marketplace of ideas back.

Parts of it. Yes. A non insignificant amount of that is just Elon Musk. The next Dem president can easily ruin him. Cancel all the spaceX contracts, run some bogus IRS operation, use the latent DOJ lackeys just waiting to file 100 discrimination suits against him, gin up some actual criminal charges if they are really dedicated. We dont have HBD on NFL broadcasts, BLM certainly WAS.

If you want something less abstract, there is now a general consensus among serious people that demographic performance differentials (whether or not they are genetic or environmental in origin) are real. The idea that all measured gaps are artifacts of testing bias or an unjust economic system did not withstand public scrutiny.

I doubt this assertion very much. Stating what you stated here will get you denied tenure at most universities. Chris Rufo is just one man running one place. And universities are just the peak of the iceberg. The public k-12 is still infested with woke and woke adjacent instructors giving woke instructions.

Edit.

IMO we have won a few battles, but the fundamentals look weak to actually win against woke. It is yet to be seen if we are more akin to the Confederacy after Bull Run or the 13 colonies after the surprise attack in Trenton. But either way the other side has far more deploy-able resources right now, and is just temporarily embarrassed from a recent set of high profile losses. But those relatively minor losses need to be followed by dismantling the ability to launch attacks and building of redoubts against the obviously coming future sallies.

The next Dem president can easily ruin him.

I will note that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. already did declare Fair Game on Elon Musk and Musk was the one who wound up getting Biden fired.

I'm not saying that there aren't ways that USG could dispose of Elon Musk, but it wouldn't be trivial or cost-free.

IMO we have won a few battles, but the fundamentals look weak to actually win against woke.

The fundamental of "does not live in a nuclear target" is a fairly-important one with the Doomsday Clock where it is. Do note that SJ would likely not be able to concede ground quickly enough in the aftermath of that to prevent the Serious Business tools from being handed over to its enemies - in the USA, Constitutional amendment and impeachment.

...is your argument that in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange, SJ would be in trouble because non-SJ would have access to Constitutional Amendments and impeachment?

No, it'd be in trouble because half its adherents would become, to borrow your phrase, charcoal briquettes.

If law and order disintegrated, lots of the survivors would then get shot.

The relevance of impeachment (in scenarios in which the USA doesn't fail, which are quite likely) is that if unlocked (which it likely would be due to the aforementioned charcoal briquettes being unable to vote) it allows a total purge of the judiciary and major purge of the civil service, because of how hilariously open-ended it is (Congress doesn't have to spend weeks on each case; 900 cases in a day is totally legal!). That turns a major defeat into a total rout.

I guess my read is that the incineration/large-scale shooting parts totally eclipse the parliamentary maneuvers parts. At that point, if some SJ partisan found a genie and wished for total control of congress and the judiciary, I don't think it would make a difference. The system's inertia would be gone, people are not going to listen to laws or judges they don't like any more, there's not even relative peace and plenty to keep people complacent. I'm quite sure there would be very radical things happening in whatever ad-hoc legislature the continuity of government machinery spat out, but I'm skeptical the outputs would matter much.

I'm skeptical that laws and courts, as such, actually mean that much. They are valuable because they are coordination mechanisms, but the point is the coordination, not the mechanism, and people observably can coordinate in a lot of other ways. In a serious disruption of the existing social order, I think all this stuff just goes away, as it's too misaligned with the interests of people acting in crisis mode, regardless of tribal affiliation.

Reasonable points.

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