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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35494 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I don't like when people treat empathy as an all-or-nothing, or when they say that not having empathy makes you a bad person. I am capable of empathizing with people, but only when they think the same way I do, which means I hardly have empathy at all. For example, if something makes someone upset, I can understand their thoughts/feelings if the same thing would make me upset. Otherwise, it's like I'm looking at an alien creature. It's why I've never understood why people get offended at jokes when they know that they're jokes, or why people don't find communism as upsetting as racism, and so on. And on the rare occasion I do think I've modeled someone mentally, I usually end up being wrong.

What would you call this phenomenon? Limited empathy?

It's an instance of the overly feminized rhetoric that is taking over the distributed sense-making apparatus of the West (And some other places).

Women do not naturally gravitate to a manly code of honour. The social virtues that are elevated in women’s groups tend to be things like inclusion, supportiveness, EMPATHY (emphasis mine), care, and equality. Through his and his students’ research on the subject of ‘social justice warriors’, Jordan Peterson has identified that it refers to a real phenomenon in the world, but also suggests that it is specifically related to a maternal instinct: ‘the political landscape is being viewed through the lens of a hyper-concerned mother for her infant.’

This instinct causes all sorts of problems when expressed in an academic or political context. It infantilizes perceived victim, minority, or vulnerable groups (women, persons of colour, LGBT persons, disabled persons, etc.), perceiving them as lacking in agency and desperately in need of care and protection. When persons from such groups enter into the realm of political or academic discourse, they must be protected at all costs. Unsurprisingly, this completely undermines the manly code that formerly held, whereby anyone entering onto the field of discourse did so at their own risk, as a combatant and thereby as a legitimate target for challenge and honourable attack. The manly code calls us all to play to strength, whereas the maternal instinct calls us all radically to accommodate to weakness.

Maximizing "Empathy" is just an aspirational value among the set of many values, nothing gives it authority over good judgment, truth for its own sake, practicality, etc.

Imagine you have a set of problems that maps to a set of solutions, which has corresponding elements in a set of values and male/female coding. If all your proposed solutions are from a certain cluster and does not make use of the mapping, you know some serious bullshit is afoot. And looking at the pattern of the LACK of mapping can suggest which direction things went wrong in. In simple words, if your solution to all problems is the maximization of a female-coded value, then you are being ruled by the Tyranical Mother.

Ever wondered why so few female libertarians? Or why was fun made illegal during the 2019-sars-coronavirus-2 pandemic?

And you don't need to look far and wide for the pernicious everpresent penetration of feminized rhetoric.

Ask Reddit what should a programmer know. A majority of the answers are "people skills", "empathy", and other soft skill horseshit. Are those things really more important than design patterns and version control? Or did we just get psyop'ed into thinking that being a people pleaser is the end-all-be-all to making the world go round?

This is a good post. Thank you. We need to meme the phrase "toxic femininity" as an equal counterpart to toxic masculinity. The traits that "toxic masculinity" exists to criticize do exist, though I'd quibble with the implicit claim that they are prevalent in our culture. Toxic femininity, though..

Ask Reddit what should a programmer know. A majority of the answers are "people skills", "empathy", and other soft skill horseshit. Are those things really more important than design patterns and version control? Or did we just get psyop'ed into thinking that being a people pleaser is the end-all-be-all to making the world go round?

This could actually be unintentionally subversive and black-pilled advice in a way. That, for hiring and/or career advancement, it's better to be a people pleaser (and of the right demographics) than be competent.

Product management is much different than programming—but see for example, the TikTok video of that young female Meta product manager whose day-to-day chiefly involved "[trying] to look cute everyday," literally making coffee ☕, and "me being cuuuutte" (cue brief clip of her dancing on the office rooftop) while vocal frying left and right.

She doubled down on LinkedIn with: "I love romanticizing the daily grind that is my life, being a woman in tech, and being a recent new grad trying to figure everything out. Content creators like myself have the utmost power to influence how young people view corporate life, and working in these popular industries" before rage-quitting her social media damage control when it became too apparent the mockery was defeating the simpery.

Yes, yes—as she has shown, such a grind being a #WomanInTech.

There's a bunch of these sorts of videos going around, but I actually don't think they mean as much as the people highlighting them want them to mean. They all intentionally edit out all mention of the actual work they've done in favor of coffee, lunch, workouts, etc. But honestly, we all do most of that stuff, if maybe not quite as glamorously. We have no idea how hard she's actually working or to what extent she's actually accomplishing useful things.

Aren't they literally just advertisements for work? They get hateclicks and boosts from the "look at these millennial bitches doing NOTHING and getting paid!" crowd, which is a plus, but the true constituency is just getting more and more applications for work to choose from - after all, a lot of people would consider light work for good pay and benefits a great deal, subconsciously or consciously. And the idea that there's a workplace full of cute girls doing girl stuff and having plenty of time to chat is going to be attractive to a lot of men, too, obviously.

Her defense of the video showing her doing nothing yet getting paid, isn't consistent with this hypothesis: Were she merely an actress, making a video which in which true nature of being employed by Blizzard is distorted, she would have said so and be free of any condemation (few would call a person lazy, just because they played a lazy person), but in her defense she never posited she made the video at the behest of anyone but herself.

Ask Reddit what should a programmer know. A majority of the answers are "people skills", "empathy", and other soft skill horseshit. Are those things really more important than design patterns and version control? Or did we just get psyop'ed into thinking that being a people pleaser is the end-all-be-all to making the world go round?

People SKILLS are indeed what makes the world go round. Or at least what get people ahead. But not being a "people pleaser". Being good at technical skills makes you a good field slave, being good at people pleasing makes you a good house slave. The people skill that matters is getting people to follow you. That one is not feminine-coded.

This debate is basically half linguistic where 'feminine' subtly alters through a variety of different meanings whilst without making clear which is meant, best shown by the simple 'feminine = bad'. Is success naturally masculine? What about obstinacy? in the face of evident failure?

Feminine =//= Female. This is the core confusion. When Lieutenant Napoleon kowtows to his superiors it is 'feminine' in the sense that he's not being a brash dictator who attempts to trample over everyone and 'masculine' in the sense that this is the optimum social strategy to achieve his ends. IMO a Platonically 'masculine' man would be absolutely self-assured in all his acts, however wrong, and never go back on anything. This is not a recipe for success of any sort, political, military or anything else.

If you are founder. If you are middle manager the ability is to suck up. Richard Marchinco's corporate style leadership is dead.

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