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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).
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.
I consider "cancel culture", broadly defined, to be a politically neutral set of tactics. It was invented or popularised by progressives, but conservatives quickly cottoned on, and there have been successful right-wing cancellation campaigns.
When the OP said "wokeness is defeated", I took that not to mean "cancel culture is defeated" but "the most recent strain of radical progressive identity politics is in retreat". My example of the city festooned with progress pride flags was intended to illustrate that it's premature to claim that said movement is defeated.
Whenever someone says "woke", do you interpret that to mean "cancel culture"? Most conversations around here would be practically incoherent under that definition. I understand that cancel culture is a political tactic closely associated with wokeness, but it's not the ideology itself, any more than the ideology of the Provisional IRA is "Armalites and gelignite".
Again: I never disputed that American Eagle was being provocative and intentionally stepping on the toes of wokescolds. That's quite far removed from the claim that American Eagle were explicitly touting the virtues of governments proactively improving the genetic fitness of the populations they govern. Wokes were not rending their hair and claiming "Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle are promoting a belief which is a prerequisite to endorsing eugenics!": they were saying "Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle are promoting eugenics!" The belief that some people are hotter (smarter, taller, faster etc.) than others for reasons of genetics does not in any way imply the belief that governments should e.g. sterilise those deficient in said traits against their will. This really does strike me as transparent sanewashing.
As far as I can see, both meanings are in use, and indeed, are often subject to a motte-and-bailey that the current convo seems to illustrate. It's used both to mean "the abnormally illiberal political-correctness movement that began somewhere in the 90s", and "the grab-bag of left-wing opinions that the people in the illiberal movement subscribe to", which is to say, "any and all meaningfully left-wing opinions".
It seems to me that a discussion about whether or not wokeness has been "defeated" only really makes sense in the context of the latter - of the recent and unprecedented threat which fundamentally cannot coexist with American democracy as it had been practiced for the preceding 250 years. If we try to parse the statement using "wokeness" to mean "leftism", it honestly sounds deranged. Leftism-is-general is, again, not going to be "defeated" overnight - hundreds of millions of Blues are not going to suddenly change their minds about their most fundamentally-held social and moral beliefs. The Culture War is just not the kind of conflict where one Tribe can "defeat" the other on the scale of a few decades, unless it were to turn into some sort of actual boots-on-the-ground armed conflict, which has, at the very least, clearly not happened yet.
But compare HBD. I'm always banging the drum that "blacks are, on average, biologically lower-IQ and more aggressive than whites", if taken as a true scientific fact, still doesn't inherently justify moral claims like "blacks should be second-class citizens" or "it's okay for whites to make fun of blacks with minstrel shows" - in short, still doesn't justify white supremacy as an ideology. But in practice, if you see someone trying to signal-boost HBD, it's unlikely that they're just spreading awareness of interesting scientific trivia which they regard as having no political ramifications whatsoever. A progressive who accuses a HBD-promoter of trying to put white supremacy back into the Overton window is, on average, not being irrationally paranoid, even if there may be a few false positives.
The leftist position on the American Eagle ad is that this is very similar. Making value-judgements on genes has been declared taboo to keep the evils of eugenicism at bay, and although it's conceivable for someone to try to put them back into the Overton window for benign reasons, there is going to be a heavy suspicion that they don't think the full package is that bad either. (Heck, the HBD hypothetical would be a stronger case, because "racial IQ differences exist" really is, at a base level, a neutral factual claim about the world. In the "good genes" case, the problematic element isn't a factual claim, but a taboo value judgement.)
This just seems like yet another tiresome instance of "dog-whistle politics". "You can't talk about this true fact because some people could use it to justify bad behaviour" is a fully general counter-argument which applies to literally any factual statement.
I find dog-whistle politics particularly frustrating because they always, ultimately, seem to boil down to "you didn't actually say anything bad, but I don't like you, so I'm going to interpret everything you said in the most uncharitable possible light and infer things you didn't mean from perfectly innocuous statements, then treat you as if you explicitly said the most uncharitable misreading of your statement possible". I've read multiple people who independently argued that wokeness/social justice politics/whatever seems to attract a lot of people with cluster B personality disorders, and the shoe certainly fits here: "dog-whistle politics" is practically identical to how women with borderline personality disorder win arguments. (That is, without threatening to kill themselves.)
I will reiterate: the factual claim "many desirable human traits are heavily, if not solely, determined by one's genetic makeup" does not in any way imply the normative claim "therefore, governments should proactively intervene in the lives of their citizenry to improve their average genetic fitness". The belief that American Eagle were trying to promote the latter belief (via a fucking jeans and) is silly and absurd, one step removed from the surprisingly widespread belief that the CEO of Procter and Gamble is an avowed Satanist who openly admitted his faith on national television. The people advancing this belief deserve to be ridiculed. The belief that American Eagle are advancing the "many desirable human traits are heavily, if not solely, determined by one's genetic makeup" idea as a "dog-whistle" for literal eugenics is only marginally less silly, and deserve to be ridiculed. If you believe this about American Eagle, then you deserve to be ridiculed.
As an aside, "HBD is true, but the only people who want to talk about are white supremacists, so you should be automatically suspicious of anyone who brings it up", in addition to being one step removed from Bulverism, is just factually wrong. Most HBD enjoyers are acutely aware that Ashkenazim and people from the Far East are above average in intelligence. LKY built Singapore on HBD principles: he was aware from the outset that Malay professional outcomes would never equal Chinese, and took intentional, practical steps to mitigate the resentment that would inevitably ensue. In your opinion, is LKY a white supremacist?
And even if people want to talk about HBD for reasons of political policy, there are plenty of HBD-influenced policies which no reasonable person would characterise as white supremacist in nature. If indeed there is a significant IQ gap between blacks and whites, it follows that we can never expect black representation in STEM to equalise with white in our lifetimes, and so all public monies advancing that goal might as well be flushed down the toilet for all the good they'll do. It is hardly a coincidence that many HBD enjoyers are advocates for universal basic income.
And I will reiterate: your 'factual' claim is no such thing because you are smuggling in a subjective value judgement as if it were a fact. There are no such thing as objectively "desirable" traits, or objectively "good" genes. It is a factual claim that the color of one's eyes is determined by one's genetic makeup; it is not a factual claim that blue eyes are nicer than brown eyes. It's just a fairly common aesthetic preference some people have. Once you have taken for granted that some human phenotypes are "good" and others "bad", and that this means there are "good" genes and "bad" genes, you are already some considerable ways down the slippery slope that makes Brave New World-type eugenics look like a remotely acceptable idea.
I do not claim that anybody at American Eagle was using "good genes" as a dogwhistle in the hiding-one's-power-level sense where they would actually support eugenicist policies, and are trying to work people up to the idea. But the "good genes" meme hints at a broader worldview which is antithetical to pro-diversity progressivism, and whose most extreme form leads to eugenicist policies. Pro-diversity progressivism opposes that worldview altogether, not just its direst consequence, and trying to give that worldview extra cultural capital can thus, IMO, fairly be regarded as an attack on the rival progressive memeplex. (Of course, I will add that in my view this is all a tempest in a teapot, because it is a fact that many normies still uncritically accept the implied value system in the "good genes" phrase, it is what it is, hopefully they'll come around once we get the Singularity, I'm not convinced they will any time before, and one goofy ad certainly isn't going to move the needle either way.)
No, I'm not. "I think Sydney Sweeney is hot" is a subjective value judgement. "Sydney Sweeney is considered exceptionally attractive by millions of people" is a statement of fact, as is "millions of men would give away all their worldly possessions for one night with Sydney Sweeney". If "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", it logically follows that a person considered beautiful by 1 million independent beholders is 100x more beautiful than a person who is only considered beautiful by 10,000 independent beholders. Given that, to the best of our knowledge, Sydney Sweeney's appearance is ultimately the product of her genes, it follows that Sydney Sweeney was born with genes which produce traits which are considered highly desirable by a huge proportion of the population – traits that a huge proportion of the population would either like to have for themselves, or would like their romantic partner to have. A reasonable compression of the previous sentence is "Sydney Sweeney has good genes".
Schizophrenia is estimated to be between 70-80% heritable. If presented with the option, would anyone choose to be schizophrenic?
There is no "differently abled": some traits are just intrinsically less desirable than others, and nobody actually believes that we're all created equal, much as they might pretend to (or cope by so doing). You can play this "no one is 'disabled', society has simply chosen to accommodate certain traits and not others" game as long as you please, but it's nonsense and everyone knows it.
The belief that "some people are more attractive than others" does not lead inevitably to Auschwitz.
I don't think this works with other forms of subjective taste. Most people like M&Ms better than they like aged Shropshire Blue - would pick the M&Ms over the cheese if given a choice of a free snack - but I don't think "M&Ms are better than Shropshire Blue" is a reasonable compression of that statistical fact, let alone "M&Ms are good snacks (and Shropshire Blue isn't)". This is what I mean when I say that I value diversity.
I feel very keenly that the world would be a worse, duller place if everybody conformed to bog-standard majority tastes - if nobody liked blue cheese. There's nothing wrong with sophisticated gastronomy being a niche taste, there's nothing wrong with most people finding Sydney Sweeney to be the pinnacle of attractiveness, but the moment you try to turn a subjective trend into a normative statement, you necessarily imply that in some sense, people who aren't attracted to Sydney Sweenney are in some objective sense "wrong", that it would make more sense if everybody was into Sydney Sweeney and M&Ms. That way does not necessarily lie Auschwitz, but accepting such a precept does lead in a very direct sense to envisioning a utopia as a conformist, monotonous Brave New World-type society that massively curtails the wonderful variety of possible human experience.
You seem positively hell-bent on misunderstanding what I'm saying.
Let's compare with financial capital. Alice has $1,000 in her bank account, and Bob has $100,000 in his. No one would dispute that, all things being equal, Bob has more financial capital than Alice. There are certain disadvantages associated with having more rather than less financial capital (as they say, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose), but all things being equal, most people would rather be in Bob's shoes than Alice's. There might well be people who would refuse to do business with Bob on principle, but no one really disputes that Bob's financial capital affords him a greater range of opportunities than are available to Alice. This is not a normative statement: I'm not saying "it is an inexorable law of the universe that having $100k is morally superior to having $1k". It is simply a factual statement that, ceteris paribus, people with $100k in their bank account can do more things than people with only $1k, and hence that most people would rather have $100k than $1k if they could help it. This statement remains true even if you, personally, would rather not have $100k in your bank account, for one reason or another.
Now consider Sydney Sweeney. Her appearance affords her a great deal of social capital. Men will buy her expensive things in hopes of going to bed with her. People likely assume she possesses positive traits unrelated to her beauty which she may not actually possess. She has the privilege of working in, frankly, physically and mentally unchallenging jobs, in which she's paid extravagant sums of money largely just to show up and look pretty. (For the "jeans/genes" ad, she probably got paid more for eight hours' work than both of us will collectively see in our lifetimes.) If she wanted to, she could surely marry a wealthy man who would provide for her and fulfil her every whim, all for the low, low price of keeping herself trim and fetching (which she was doing anyway) and missionary sex with the lights off every other week. Of course not everyone is attracted to her, but that doesn't matter: enough people are that it's a fact about the world she can take advantage of. These facts don't in any way imply that her beauty is the only "correct" kind of beauty, or that the only beautiful women are women who look like her: there are doubtless women who look nothing like her, but whose appearances afford them a comparable level of social capital (e.g. female K-pop singers, Bollywood starlets etc.). Doubtless there are certain disadvantages associated with being unusually attractive (even before she was famous, she probably faced a disproportionate amount of street harassment, and probably struggles to be taken seriously) – but all things being equal, most women rather be in Sydney Sweeney's shoes than the shoes of a less attractive woman.
So when I say "Sydney Sweeney has great genes", all that means is "Sydney Sweeney was born with genes which produce physical traits considered highly desirable by a huge proportion of the population, a fact which affords her a great deal of social capital". This is not a value judgement, nor a normative statement: it is simply a statement of fact. It doesn't imply that there's anything wrong with you if you don't want to fuck her or would rather not look like her. You might personally find another woman (whom the average man might consider a 6 on a good day) more attractive than Sweeney. That's a perfectly legitimate preference to have – but it doesn't change the fact that Sweeney has more social capital than the 6 in question. And you might say that a big chunk of the social capital Sweeney enjoys is not because she's hot but because she's famous – but that's bullshit. Even in the counterfactual world where Sydney Sweeney wasn't famous, if she found herself in the same nightclub as Rebel Wilson, I know who'd be paying for her own drinks.
Compare with your M&Ms example. The statement "M&Ms are delicious" doesn't in any way imply that Shropshire Blue isn't delicious. But more people consider M&Ms delicious than consider Shropshire Blue delicious, a fact which is reflected in the respective net worths of Mars Inc. and the Colston Bassett Dairy. If I asked a hundred people "would you rather control the assets of Mars Inc. or the Colston Bassett Dairy?" almost everyone would say the former, including people who personally prefer Shropshire Blue to M&Ms. Likewise here: if given a choice between becoming Sydney Sweeney or becoming a random unattractive woman, the overwhelming majority of women would pick the former, including women who don't personally find Sydney Sweeney physically attractive. And that includes women who claim to believe that men only find Sydney Sweeney hot because they've been "brainwashed by Eurocentric beauty standards" or whatever. I don't think the responses would be especially different if you clarified that, post-transformation, you don't get to keep any of Sweeney's monetary or tangible assets (I mean, obviously the... err, other assets are part of the deal): women understand that Sweeney's appearance alone affords her an enviable amount of social capital.
Oh sure, sure: some woke women would answer my hypothetical with "I'd rather live in a world in which a woman's social capital was not primarily determined by her appearance" or "I'd rather live in a world in which everyone enjoyed exactly the same amount of social capital". But gun to their head, even these women would pick being Sydney Sweeney over being a random unattractive woman.
Last point: Freddie deBoer has long argued that the most common pathology among people who describe themselves as on the left is a fundamental failure to understand the "is-ought" distinction. As I say, when I said that "Sydney Sweeney has great genes", all I mean is that her genetic makeup means lots of people find her very attractive, which affords her a great deal of social capital. I'm not endorsing this state of affairs: I'm not saying she deserves to possess the social capital she currently enjoys. No one is arguing that she isn't a winner of the genetic lottery. But it's indisputable that she does enjoy a great deal of social capital, and that this is primarily due to her genes. Denying that she has "great genes" is tantamount to denying that she has social capital, which is obviously ridiculous.
Ah. I understand what you meant, now - you're analogizing the "good" in "good genes" with the "good" in "good investment". I don't think people who use of "good genes" colloquially would define "good" in this context as "contingently socioeconomically valuable genes", which is a jarringly cynical way of seeing the world. I don't think that a woman faux-modestly boasting "Guess I just have good genes" when complimented on her beauty is saying "My genes make me a valuable market object in the society I live in". I think what she has in mind is some vague underlying belief in objective beauty standards. I think she would say that her genes would still be "good genes", and her looks "good looks", on a desert island. That's the assumption I've been arguing under. Perhaps you think the average American in 2026 is both more clued-in to the fundamental subjectivity of all aesthetic judgements and more ruthlessly mercantile in how they relate to the world around them, but if so, that's the crux of our disagreement/misunderstanding. I think that when people who joke about "good genes" they are flirting with an unexamined belief in an objective value system, and that belief in such a value system is potentially morally hazardous. If you think that they aren't doing that in the first place, fine.
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