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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?

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.