site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6484 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

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.

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.

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, whose welfare the movement was ostensibly so concerned with. It also undermined trust in numerous public institutions for no good reason, of which American police forces are only one. 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.

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.

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...

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. 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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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?

“ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats