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Why do Aircraft Carriers vote?
The Case against Democracy.
A common retort on the left is Why does Land Vote? I don’t think they can explain that view when I will assume they believe Aircraft Carriers should vote.
Balaji had an interesting tweet which led me to coin this term.
https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1663429591757885440?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Synopsis the global system is controlled by America with some partners. If it was a Democracy a bunch of other countries would control the system. America consistently interferes with other countries policy thru sanctions etc. Those countries in a Democracy would do that to America when they don’t like what we are doing.
Benjamin Franklin famously said “A Republic if you can keep it”
I think it’s beyond clear that Republic/Democracy isn’t clearly the best form of government but it depends on something else. At the global level I don’t think the world would be a better place if India, China, and a few other populous countries were in charge.
South Africa is struggling a lot now. Electricity is spotty and other public goods. I think that country is probably best if the Elon Musks white people had more power but perhaps in a less racists and nicer way.
Historically I’m not sure I can think of a Republic/Democracy that didn’t limit who could become citizens. Rome made some tribes into citizens but not everyone.
It makes me think the key thing is a shared civic religion and beliefs that are good and makes a successful country. In that situation a Republic probably works better than other forms of government. And yes I’m probably arguing that a Republic needs a certain level of average IQ (Which I believe is Garrett Jones argument he avoided saying directly).
Can anyone make an argument a Republic is best for all people - land and aircraft carriers shouldn’t vote? Or that land and aircraft carriers are not the same thing - the UN should be how it is but countries should all be Democracies?
The only counter I can come up with is at the global level the rest of the world hasn’t developed enough. A blank slatist type argument that America has reasonably good public schools creating a sufficient amount of citizens. But the rest of the world isn’t there yet so the world should be governed by the strong now. But fundamentally I think most people just use the arguments that increase their own power and power of their tribe when they can.
America doesn’t have a democracy in any substantive way. What we have is a colosseum of capitalist interests, where corporations and advocacy groups and institutions fund gladiators to shred each other in the public arena, mediated by social media companies and entertainment. The average American does not participate in or listen to debate or know where they could even do this. Instead, they are presented by political parties with figures and stories and myths, which they then subscribe to according to their limited knowledge and understanding. So what we have is a kind of perverse consumer capitalist meritocracy where wealthy people and corporations controls the trajectory of the nation. I don’t think you can consider this system “mostly democratic”, because democracy presupposes rational actors, informed voters, and an absence of psychological manipulation. If a man tricks a drunk woman into sleeping with him, and then uses brainwashing techniques to keep her around, we don’t consider that a consensual relationship, but abusive.
So, re: “shared civil religion”, the ideas of democracy and freedom are the civic religion. If everyone thinks there’s a democracy, then we have the main benefit of democracy (less rebellion) without its problems (mob rule). Ib the same way, people think they have freedom (despite an inability to decide how their children are raised or what they are taught, ie the continuation of any culture). They think they have a higher standard of living than Europeans, because the system’s thinktanks write studies that inaccurately compare wages without consideration of debt, work conditions, general social stress, commute times, car culture, healthcare, public school quality, etc.
Our civic religion is just… lying to the proles. And in a way, both Christianity and Islam share this feature. Islam has a vivid portrayal of an afterlife with sex and good food. Christianity on the other hand delegitimizes the value of “worldly” goods, like sex and good food, and instead orients the adherer toward focusing on a spiritual life which consists of non-acquisitiveness and non-competition.
The only way anyone comes to this conclusion is by playing games with definitions. Communists like doing this by retorting "real Communism has never been tried" whenever someone points out the faults in their ideology. This post is doing something similar, except instead of defending a system, it sets out an unrealistically high bar for being defined as a "democracy", then using any faults to say "hey the US isn't a real democracy!!!"
The first two would be nice, but are not necessary. See Bryan Caplan's rational irrationality for example. The last one, "psychological manipulation" is just "persuasion" written in inflammatory language.
If by “playing games with definitions” you mean “contrasting the substance of democracy with the appearance”, then sure. That’s the whole purpose of thinking, and words. This is the intended purpose of words. Tell me how far apart you would measure an early American democracy and a democracy in which a ruling party controls all media exposure. Calling the latter non-democratic is a no brainer, because the substance of democracy is being thwarted. No one would call the latter “democratic”. I’m alleging that our current system is similarly thwarted from the fact that the median voter decides votes based on misinformation and propaganda purchased by wealthy parties.
Early American democracy had a vigorous debate and discourse culture a la Lincoln-Douglas debates. These were real debates, published all over America, read by much of the population, with the debates lasting hours. [insert “this is what they took from you” meme.] The distance between 1800s democracy and ours is so stark that we should not call ours a democracy.
It’s persuasion with no scruples or guilt or code of honor*. And yeah, once corporations and wealthy donors are able to “persuade” anyone they want without regard for facts, we don’t have a democracy anymore, we have something else.
Various levels of control over the media and political writers has been going since the nation's founding.
In a modern context, the left does not control the media. Many employees of the mainstream media are left-leaning and that certainly tilts coverage in a lot of ways, but anyone is free to start their own news organization, and there are several ones in existence right now like Fox and Breitbart that cater to right wing views.
The internet has made debating easier than ever, and presidential candidates have several debates while they're running.
I'm not sure what the quote marks around "persuade" are supposed to imply. Rich people can hurl tons of money towards basically whatever political cause they want thanks to the SCOTUS's asinine decision in Citizens United, but thankfully money doesn't have that much of an impact outside the margins. Bloomberg's campaign in 2020 was an example of this.
Wish I could have read what you replied before you deleted it.
But it seems like you blocked me instead =(
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Tell me, what do you think Citizens United actually said?
I'm not sure what you're getting at, but the effects are an extension of money = speech, thus allowing for the formation of superPACs and a greater emphasis on money in political campaigns.
What I'm getting at is that you're talking about it but your description doesn't match what's actually in it.
I'm not a lawyer so my description probably isn't perfectly accurate; The_Nybbler gave a more precise definition. The important bit was that it threw gasoline on the fire in terms of money in politics.
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Citizens United did not assert that "money = speech" -- the FEC asserted that they could regulate "electioneering communications" (that is, speech), and therefore Citizens United could not air their documentary that was critical of Hillary Clinton. The Supreme Court said no, you can't suppress speech under the guise of regulating campaign contributions.
Sure, I trust your explanation is more correct than my simplification.
But the important bit was that it threw gasoline on the fire in terms of money in politics. That said, I still don't think it matters all that much since people overrate the power of money in politics.
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There's a much simpler and coherent way to arrive at that which is to adopt the position that democracy is an impossible state of affairs. Much like indeed, communism is.
Yeah the US isn't a democracy, because the rule of many is not something has ever existed. Every regime is a rule of few. To say organization is to say oligarchy. Etc.
Why use a goofy, excessively stringent definition of democracy like this? It doesn't conform to common usage nor to the dictionary definition.
Then following this up with a very lax definition of oligarchy reeks of noncentral fallacy.
I don't believe it's goofy to worry about where power truly lies when accurate nomenclature of regimes that's the entire point of those words. This is political science, not litterature.
And I'm not convinced it's ever lied with the many. I don't think it's ever lied with the one either by the way. Monarchy is similar fiction.
You can still use the words, but like communism they only refer to the story the ruling class tells about itself. Not actual power relationships.
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Disagree. I think even imperfect voters averaged over millions have largely gotten their interest correct. Pre-2010 Dems for example probably were better for African Americans. More redistribution benefits them even if it shrinks the overall pie. Less policing and Pride may be canceling that out. As higher murder rates and less promotion of trad families probably hurt their part of America disproportionately.
The things you are calling a problem is just the complexity of the system. Even the smartest humans can’t come to be rationalist AI robots on the vast amount of policy.
We aren’t a small Venice Republic with only a few issues to deal with at a time where a human can be rational across a few issues.
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
According to this study, Americans themselves have very little influence on the direction the country actually goes.
I’m not democracolatrous, though. The form of government we have in our country matters much less than people give it credit for. A highly competent king or emperor or oligarchy would do just as well. What I don’t like is the obvious incompetence, lack of thought or forethought into issues. Instead of that we have oligarchs who understand nothing giving us the veneer of democracy wrapped in WWE theatrics.
The conclusions of that study are almost certainly vastly overblown, if not entirely bogus.
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Democracy in a single nation is very different from a single democratic world country that encompasses the entire planet. Pointing at some hypothetical superpower UN and claiming its potential sins proves anything about democracy is an absurd strawman.
Where exactly is a discontinuity of such a magnitude as to make this absurd? It's somewhere between 300 million people and 8 billion people, I gather, but ... I can't even really picture 1 million people in my head, much less calculate how many more would need to be added before we hit Democracy-bad-critical-mass. Can you? Did India cross the line yet, or does it risk doing so? Would China, if the CCP transitioned to democracy? Would a world country have been fine a few centuries ago, but it's too late now?
The US is a single nation ... how? Looking for "a combination of shared features such as language, history, ethnicity, culture and/or society" isn't getting me much. 20% of Americans speak a language other than English at home, and about 40% of native English speakers aren't American. We get a million immigrants a year with their own histories; presumably they still count as American regardless. We're certainly not an ethnostate. This is the Culture War roundup, so that's out; skimming through the old tenets of American civil religion and looking for universal and/or religious levels of acceptance is doomed to fail. The US is a single country, but our hypothetical single democratic world country would check that box too.
Part of what made us (barely) hold together as a single country is the paradoxical idea that we don't have to be a single nation, that "United States" is a plural noun and not just an extra 's' for funsies, that the federal government should just be handling the friction between states, who in turn try to devolve their own power onto even smaller localities ... but that's all pretty antiquated at this point, isn't it? Opposing local control because slavery is too awful was a pretty noble rationalization, but it was less than a century from that point to "growing too much food is too awful", and it's been nearly another century since. Even when Texas state government is grousing about DC they'll happily turn around and overrule Austin city government. Who are we to say that China's citizens' votes shouldn't be overruling US mistakes or (in less common cases) vice-versa too, as the obvious next step once we finally give Californians the rest of the control over Montana they want? Is it just special pleading and status quo bias? It really does feel like "more populated places should outvote less populated ones" is a "principle" that's convenient to hold when I'm part of the majority in the more populated place and suddenly abandon when I'm part of the people expecting to be outvoted.
Any state, democratic or not, becomes pretty untenable when there's a significant, politically empowered portion of people with a different culture. For most countries that line is drawn at ethnicities, e.g. unrest that perennially rises in the Balkans. The US is weird in that its cultural ingroup is a strange amalgamation of mutable racialism and civic nationalism. The intricacies of how that works for the US are certainly interesting, but the pertinent point is that there's certainly still a cultural ingroup. An assimilated, 3rd+ generation Chinese living in Philadelphia is very different from a Chinese living in Beijing.
Sliders' post implies that democracy means we should let Chinese living in Beijing run American politics. But that's obviously wrong. It's pure strawman.
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Aircraft carriers in this context means military strength. Military strength is a derivative of wealth, technology, organization, political will and population. There are some confounding factors like geography, natural resource distribution and luck of course.
Why should the richest, most advanced, best organized, most populous and most dedicated states run the planet? Why should water flow downstream? Some things just are. If God desired that the will of the majority rule, He could make it happen. People might telepathically vote on decrees that operate on the base level of physics - the weapons of an army would disintegrate when faced with the wrath of the people. Armies wouldn't even exist in such a world. But that's not how physics works. The will of the majority is important but it's just one ingredient, overshadowed by many.
One can debate whether values are better or worse. Who can say whether Macedonian culture was better than Persian culture in and of itself? What does it mean for one culture to be better than another - how can anyone objectively weigh these things? Were the Macedonians crass and vulgar sodomites? Were the Persians effeminate and decadent soyboys (or the classical equivalent)? Who can say? We can be sure that the Macedonian army was far superior to what the Persians could muster, there's no dispute there.
I sense someone's going to say 'you're just dressing up might makes right'. I say that might and right are two sides of the same coin. If you have more political stability, confident and well-trained soldiers, plentiful funds, better technology... then ceteris paribus your state is both stronger and superior.
Now there can be interesting situations where states are rich but divided or growing too slowly or incapable of mobilizing that wealth to defeat their enemies. Or if there's mindgames and 4D chess being played by internal factions within states such that they don't act as coherent entities. However, the West still has the physical power to dominate the entire world absolutely (China and Russia excluded) - it is just that there is no political desire to do so. Despite vast political limitations, Western economic-technological power is enormous.
If the global South wants to rule the world (or wants more power), they should develop nuclear triads, resource independence, power projection, industrial capacity, advanced technology and so on. Copy China's notes. It's no coincidence that all of the permanent Security Council members are nuclear powers. It's no coincidence that democracy attained prominence during an unusually egalitarian period - the era of mass mobilization armies.
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Can men respect women as agents?
For all its hypocrisies, there is one aspect of girlboss feminism that continues to seem valid to me, and which makes me frustrated on behalf of women. I am talking about whether men (and women?) can respect or admire or empathize with a woman on the basis of her actions in the world or the way she wields power.
I was recently tickled but these posts on twitter/reddit:
and
In response to a man's story about "the haunting feeling of fumbling a 10/10":
I bring these examples up not to harangue men but to explicitly set aside the discourse about romantic relationships, in which most men and women seem happy to accept a certain asymmetry. A male friend recently gave me the dating advice that what's important in a partner is that they are "naturally happy", which struck me as a hilariously insufficient and condescending criterion, better suited to choosing a puppy. As a spergy gay man, I don't have a dog in this fight, if it is a fight, but I do find explicit commentary on the expectations of gendered social interaction helpful (and entertaining).
But outside the romantic context, is there not still a weird asymmetry in attitudes? For instance, women seem more able to put themselves in the shoes of male protagonists in fiction, while men generally seem uninterested in female protagonists. I am not here to say that you are sexist if you did not enjoy Captain Marvel. I hate being lectured to in my entertainment as much as anyone and find woke fiction repulsive. But it's generally hard to think of good examples of female characters occupying much mindshare among men. (Skyler White?) Who are the female counterparts to Harry Potter or Sherlock Holmes, popular among both boys and girls (and whose roles and stories do not particularly depend on their masculinity)? And of all feminist talking points, the Bechdel test stands out as one that I actually find revealing.
I am happy to grant or even defend all the usual replies, such as that women are in fact less likely to be out in the world doing extreme, daring, exciting, risky things that make for good stories. Maybe when women attempt to fill traditionally masculine roles, they will be less effective, less capable. Never mind that few women want to be mob bosses or whatever in the first place. But none of that entails that when women are competent actors in the world, men should be uninterested or even annoyed.
On the flip side, one could argue that women actually deserve no "empathy credit" for their interest in male protagonists, or at least no more credit than men deserve for their interest in Princess Leia, if women are only interested in stories about men taking action in the world when that is precisely what makes them eligible mates. But I'm not entirely convinced here.
Of course I don't think it's a moral failing if, say, by some effect of psychology, a man is incapable of admiring a woman for her achievements in the same way he might admire a man. Maybe nothing can be done to change such feelings. But if this is generally true of men, more than the reverse is true of women, then when I see rallying cries of the "nevertheless she persisted" variety, after the cringe has subsided, I must still have some lingering sympathy.
I, for some reason, tend to relate to female characters more than male characters. Kusanagi Motoko is legitimately just badass, Youko from Twelve Kingdoms is a relatable character with kingship thrust upon her, the lead women in Dreams of the Red Chamber outshine the ostensible protagonist of the novel. I could go on.
They’re just not recent Anglosphere works.
Oh, definitely in Dream of the Red Chamber, all the men are idiots. There's a competent daughter-in-law trying to hold it all together as the family fortune is declining, but between the family spending money like water because they assume they're rich, and the "keeping up face" that is necessary in order to maintain their position, as well as the court officials and eunuchs 'borrowing' money they're never going to repay, the family is underwater and it's only a matter of time before it all collapses.
The viewpoint character narrating it all is a wealthy young son of the family who has neither the interest nor the capability to manage things or help retrieve their fortunes or cut down spending. It's the inevitable decline of a noble house over several generations, the pattern that we see repeated in all the Gilded Age American fortunes where the head of the dynasty made a huge fortune, then the kids and grandkids divided the inheritance between them, leaving it smaller to each inheritor, and squandered it or were only able to manage to hang on to part of it instead of making huge fortunes in their turn.
I can only say that I wish more people read it.
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Only very rarely. Does Phyllis Schlafly count?
More often I find the choices made by girl bossing feminists to only be coherent in the context of girl bossing feminism, which I find to be a poor fit for our consensus reality.
I see it leading to poor outcomes and don't entirely understand why otherwise seemingly intelligent women that take this path fail to see the deep tail 'success' they believe has been promised is rare.
It's my perception of her poor choices that precludes my respect for actions.
You just said 'girlboss feminism bad' in five different ways. "poor choices", "success rare", "poor fit for reality". Not that much was communicated.
More effort please. We do not like posts that are nothing more than "I agree," and we do not like posts that are nothing more than "Your post was dumb."
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I think a big part of it is how little agency most stories tend to give women, and how little they are shown to struggle and grow. To be blunt, most of them aren’t even written as people at least in genre fiction. Rey makes very few actual decisions in Star Wars. She doesn’t. Poe stands up to the general (I can’t think of her name), willing to be put in the brig to challenge a poor leader. Rey more or less was carried along by the plot, and was simply gifted the powers she’d need exactly when she’d need them. Even in Hunger Games, Katniss makes no real decisions, they simply don’t come up. She makes no special efforts to win hearts of the audience before the games. Her people did that for her. They tell her what to say and do, and she follows directions. She doesn’t decide not to kill, she just sort of never has it come up where she’s in a position to kill somebody except in self defense. Even Hermione it’s more of a case where she happens to have just read a book and the book tells her what to do so she does it.
Male characters are written with challenges to overcome and often must work very hard to learn to overcome them. They’re allowed to not know, they’re forced to figure it out on their own, and they absolutely are deciding on what to to and how to do it.
You say that like it isn't the result of the girlboss trend? It is girlboss feminist characters who start with all of the tools, based on the idea that the only thing really wrong with women is that men are holding them back (see Captain Marvel for the most prominent recent example).
So they can't just be flawed, it has to be everyone else's fault.
I've only seen the movies, but Katniss' role as a symbol for a rebellion much greater than herself always seemed to be the point. She makes choices (especially in the final movie where she has to act on her own or turn against supposed allies) but the entire point is that her choices are constrained by the tyrannical system she's in.
Even when she is acting as a lightning rod for the resistance she's sort of forced into a particular mold and one of the plot points is how constricting it is (it's actually a pretty funny and interesting look at manufacturing propaganda and the use of symbols and celebrities)
And she does do things, and they do matter. Deciding to (pretend) kill herself and Peta- the fact that this is the closest thing to rebellion she can manage is again just reinforcing the point above - not only wins them the games but makes her into said symbol of resistance despite her wishes cause she knows it puts everyone she loves at risk.
I'm sorry. This just seems like grasping for straws now. Hermione, especially in the films, does a lot that others can't do even though they have access to the same books. You've basically been presented with a genius female character and are writing her off cause...she reads before making her plans?
Another way to put it is: Hermione is the most studious and skilled member of the group and is basically the required support for most of their schemes coming close to succeeding - from independently figuring out the Basilisk's nature, to making polyjuice potion to setting up Dumbledore's Army (including her spiteful little revenge on anyone who tattled about it). She also goes into business for herself on crusades that the rest of the cast don't care for (e.g. freedom for house elves).
At worst, she's Q. At best, she's Tony Stark.
I could come up with a much less flattering description of say...Ron's contributions to the group. But no one denies he has agency.
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Nothing is more important in a partner than temperament. Choosing wisely here is one of the most important decisions most of us will ever make.
In general, I find gender wars very dull. Almost all men and women have always been and will always be without any significant power. In the cloistered world of the elite, women’s power has waxed and waned over the centuries, but it has always been and remains less than men’s power (even in the girlboss era, the vast majority of senior politicians, business leaders and culture creators are men of course).
You say women seem more interested in stories about men than vice versa, but what are they actually interested in?
For example, the bulk of the female Sherlock fandom, which you mention, is essentially yaoi shipping of Holmes and Watson in a gay relationship. It’s not about deduction or criminology or the mysteries themselves. Young women’s fascination with gay men (see Manga and to some extent aesthetically Kpop) is complicated but can be summarized as a safe, distanced, jealousy-free outlet for sexuality and sexual exploration. Dragon Age is a female-dominated fandom, but almost all fanfiction is romance fanfiction (either explicitly or less so) related to a handful of romanceable (male) NPCs and either other NPCs or a female player character.
So men and women do have different tastes, but women sometimes find things in masculine stories/franchises that let them tell stories appealing to women in those settings. Men have no need to find masculine narratives in women’s stories, because men (a) read much less than women and (b) have plenty of their own stories to focus upon that are already core parts of the mainstream/popular fiction canon.
Wellllll.... yes and no. Slash fiction is a huge part of any fandom (I contend, with little to no evidence to back me up). But women are interested in the mysteries, too. But yeah, women are interested in the relationships in that world, between all the characters. Whatever happened to Aggie, Milverton's maid? Was she used and abandoned by Holmes? (I say 'no' but others say 'yes' and write those stories).
I read a lot of Holmes pastiche fiction, professionally published as well as fanfiction. And I do judge it in part on how they handle the characterisation, that's true. There's one pro/semi-pro author who drives me nuts with the way he (and it is a male writer) handles the British class system, attempts to write dialect, and general plotting, but I stick with his novellas because he gets the characters right. Some media (and the Holmes and Watson stories have been adapted for radio and movies and TV multiple times as well as in print) have given us comic Holmes, comic Watson, Watson who is too much of a doormat, Holmes who is too much of a jerk, Watson who is resentful of Holmes (pre- and post-Reichenbach Watson is a study in character development), a sentimental Holmes, and so on. We've even had "Watson was really a woman" as part of the Game, by Rex Stout who seems to have loved messing with the Sherlockians as part of good-natured joshing:
And it's male writers and male directors who do this! I think BBC Sherlock was a wasted opportunity because Gatiss and Moffat didn't understand the characters and rode off on hobbyhorses (including what they probably thought was fanservice). I pretty much stopped watching after the first season (a whopping three episodes) due to "The Blind Banker" because while I'm not remotely progressive, that was so stuffed to the gills with Orientalist clichés it was dreadful. I could never get into Elementary because it was way too Americanised and updated, and oddly enough though it was all over Tumblr and other social media during its run, I haven't seen a single reference to it since. So maybe it strayed too far from the established canon to be remembered after it made its splash.
I'm one of the few (women as well) who don't think Holmes and Irene Adler were a romantic pairing. Holmes was not in love with Irene, Irene was not in love with Holmes, Geoffrey Norton was not an abusive husband. But male writers and male adapters for movies and TV give us the romantic pairing, presumably on the grounds that "you need a love story" and that they can't think what to do with a main female character if she's not in love with the main male character. Rex Stout mischievously hinted that Nero Wolfe was the love-child of Holmes and Irene, but that isn't meant to be taken seriously (we've also had novels about Mycroft Watson, one series co-written by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, yes that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; Mrs Hudson and others all doing their own crime-solving. I'm only going to mention the abominable Mary Russell novels here once, to say that I wish she had gone over Reichenbach Falls in her cradle rather than growing up to be the pest she is).
So yes, while I'll give ground on "women like the stories for the relationships", I contend that is not all we like them for. I haven't clocked up 35 volumes of David Marcum's anthology series just because I'm breathlessly waiting for the moment Holmes and Watson hold hands (Sir Arthur already gave us the hand-holding, anyway) 😁
From "Charles Augustus Milverton":
From "The Empty House":
I hope I wasn’t suggesting that women like Sherlock Holmes for the relationships, women do after all like crime fiction (almost all fiction except hard science fiction and some forms of fantasy, really) more than men. I was trying to say that I don’t think women reading more stories about men than men read about women necessarily tells us anything more than that they do so.
The big gap is that most modern literary fiction is written by women and is by far a women-dominated form of creative expression, but few men read it. Men used to read books, but as visual media became cheaper, more plentiful and more widely available they have gravitated more to television, movies and games, while women enjoy those things but have remained readers, too.
Oh, a recommendation for a Holmes move - Without A Clue. From the late 80s, a comedy take, but it redeems itself in the ending. Funny, clever and even touching in parts.
Novel writing and women - that's a large subject to tackle. While most were and are written by men, and men are the main characters, novel writing became female-identified during the 19th century and women readers as the audience for many novels. Women were able (sometimes had to) earn money by writing. And in general I think it's broadly true that women who read/consume media become familiar with how men write men, as well as women, but men don't read/consume media that is specifically for women in the same way, so they don't become familiar with how women write men and women.
There is some mockery of how (some) men write women characters, and mostly it's around physical/sexual elements. Male writers seem to think women are obsessed with their breasts as much as men are obsessed with women's breasts 😁
I'm sure there are comparable examples of women writing men badly, but I find the failure mode (particularly in young writers, particularly in fanfic writers) is writing men as if they're women (often young women). I have often read dialogue where I go "that is not how two men would speak to one another". I don't think I've read women writing men as worrying over is their penis perky enough, though!
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I’m baffled that this is a rare take. Thinking about it, I also really disliked how the BBC show treated Adler…
Oh, don't get me started on that one! Moffat and Gatiss are clueless, and I was really disappointed with Mark Gatiss because I liked his work on "League of Gentlemen" but clearly he wasn't the main inspiration there if I go by his subsequent solo work. I don't know which of them I should blame more for reducing Irene to literally sex on legs, or mangling the handling of Sherlock's sexuality (or lack of same; I've often felt that there's at least as good an argument that canon Holmes is asexual as any other orientation) and just the whole ugly mess that is insulting to the original characters.
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Taylor from Worm fits best. She's competent, dictates events and leads, though the story is somewhat obscure. Annabeth from Percy Jackson and Hermione I guess fit what you're getting at about them not leading or wielding power (though Hermione is essential and does sort of lead in book 7, while Annabeth has a similar sort of quasi-leadership role). Katniss from the Hunger Games never has autonomy, I admit.
Lyra from His Dark Materials?
I think there is something unwomanly about being a great leader who wields power on a huge scale. In history, we have Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Cyrus the Great, Hernan Cortes... The names of these men echo for millennia - khanates, kaiser, czardom, Alexandria. The great prophets were all male. There just aren't female equivalents on that highest tier. There's Elizabeth I and Catherine who were pretty capable but were only on Bismarck's level, perhaps a little lower. They didn't found gigantic empires from nothing, they didn't lead troops in battle. They were all born into their positions as well - they are A-tier as opposed to S-tier. Joan of Arc is a special case of a female leader rising from the bottom but she didn't actually rule anything or wield great power.
Who else? Maria Theresa did decently for Austria but by diplomacy and influence rather than wielding power directly. She still lost Silesia to Frederick and couldn't retake it even when it was her and half of Europe against him alone. She was about marriages, not conquest and glory. Queen Victoria did very little but sit still and be adored. Theodora has a rather dubious track record.
The heroic archetype is someone like Alexander or Genghis Khan who says 'Nothing can stop me, I will rule the world' and goes on to prove the verity of his claims. Or the gigachad Viking who held up the army on Stanford Bridge, until some sneaky Englishman stabbed him from underneath the bridge. Or the other last stands of history.
Indeed, the Worm fandom is male-dominated.
True. And the story was written by a man. Now I think about it most of the high-profile heroines in fiction are written by men. Buffy, Annabeth, Xena...
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Good point but she was a princess. A princess of a poor principality but a princess nonetheless. Alexander had a higher starting position but achieved much more.
Alexander had everything laid out for him. It was Philip II who reformed Macedonian army, consolidated power in his hands and who provided Alexander with the best tutoring. And Philip also had good sense to get killed while Alexander was young.
The true self-made men were the likes of Genghis Khan, who literally comes from refugee family that almost all died in harsh Mongolian winter. Napoleon definitely counts as well. Possibly Caesar, but less so since he was born into patrician family.
Alexander might not have been self-made but he did so much! Taming wild horses, winning battles as a teenager before he even became king... He went out and crushed everyone, Illyrians, Greeks, Persians, Indians... Phillip did a good job of institution-building but his star didn't shine so brightly.
If Catherine had done what Alexander did, proportionately, she would've expanded Russia all the way to Portugal in the West, or Vietnam in the East. Even if it disintegrated after her, even if she relied upon her predecessor's hard work, she'd have achieved eternal glory.
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She worked hard on restoring the image of the monarchy and creating, with Alfred, the domestic family view of the queen and consort. She was also constrained by the increasing impotence of the monarch to actually do anything, and a male monarch would have faced the same problems. But as a figurehead of Empire, she was immensely important. People were born and grew up and had children and grandchildren of their own during her reign. She was the public face of the entire project. You weren't fighting and building abroad for a faceless government, you were doing it for Victoria.
She did try and get involved in ruling, but her relationships with her Prime Ministers were the important elements there. By helping in the transformation of the monarchy into a symbolic, ceremonial role this helped preserve the monarchy. Remember, there was a lot of upheaval during the entire period from anarchists to republicans. People were questioning the very notion of a monarch. Victoria became the grandmother of the nation and maintained continuity and handed over a functioning machine to her son. One that managed to last even beyond the turmoil of the First World War, where so many other European monarchies came crashing down:
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India has had 3 strong queens in its time.
Jhasi ki rani regained control of her city and held onto it for 5 years in a war against the British East India Company.
Ahilyabai Holkar played a big role in the sustained rise of the Maratha Empire as the pre-eminent Indian power sandwiched between the Mughal and British era.
More recently, Indira Gandhi girl-bossed in a manner that Hilary can only dream of. She was India's leader during the liberation of Bangladesh, managing the Sikh insurgency and seizing the Congress party despite the old-guard being completely against her.
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I would offer Boudica as an interesting example. Her revolt failed, as so many other revolts against the Romans did, but otherwise her story is genuinely extremely compelling and admirable.
Compelling and admirable - according to later reinterpretations of the Roman historians who wrote about her after Suetonius obliterated her. It's like if the hero sallies out, massacres a bunch of civilians, wins a single battle and then gets utterly crushed.
Skanderberg is overwhelmingly superior as a rebel and a hero. He won at least one single-combat duel plus there are many tales of his superhuman strength and endurance. We know he fought and won battles against the odds for 25 years. He even fended off the treacherous Venetians and somehow found time to help his friends in Aragon retake Naples. He personally halted Ottoman expansion into Europe!
Or take Mullah Omar. Veteran guerrilla against the Soviets, tank-hunter, lost an eye in battle. Gets a prophetic vision, leads his students off to fight and kill all the warlord rapists and pedophiles in Afghanistan. He does a pretty good job of that, conquers most of the country and gets his own holy item (the Cloak of Muhammed). He bans opium production fairly effectively. He tells Osama Bin Laden to cool it with the jihad but defies another global superpower and refuses to hand over his guest to America. Based on Islamic law and Afghan customs, he cannot betray guests like that so he offers to hand him over to an Islamic court but is rebuffed. If his life were a work of fiction, he would be almost too cliched a hero. How comically villainous can his enemies be?
Then he hands over the insurgency against NATO to his successor before dying of natural causes, before his followers march on to victory! We made a serious mistake going up against a force led by someone straight out of an Arthurian legend, especially when we side with the pedophile rapists (who infamously filled the ranks of our drug-ridden Afghan National Army). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Army#Ineffectiveness
Oh sure, obviously Boudica isn’t topping anyone’s list of most impressive rebel leaders; her legend is almost certainly inflated by the fact that people want so badly to find any examples, other than Caractacus, of the Celtic Britons mounting a credible defense of their homeland instead of just getting constantly steamrolled. I just think she’s an interesting example of a female war leader who genuinely seems to have demonstrated masculine virtues and achieved some modest measure of real success in doing so.
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The Trung sisters are national heroes of Vietnam, too. Doubtless we can find more of these if we even looked in a cursory manner.
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I think the requirements for being an interesting and beloved protagonist are actually narrower than those for being respected and admired, and more uniquely at odds with the typical (or stereotypical?) disposition of females of the human species than the latter. For example, I know plenty of female scientists in my field who I respect a great deal for their academic contributions (as teachers, discoverers and systematizers), but a fictional account of their life would be soul-crushingly boring, because they did not primarily get where they are by fighting and winning a well-delineated conflict "fair and square" by force of will and effort. In fact there are, and have always been, beloved female protagonists, whose stories do not force us to suspend our understanding of the human condition: think Joan of Arc, Erin Brockovich or Madoka (the magical girl). I think these are all distinguished by their struggle having a prominent moral dimension, of the kind that I wouldn't go so far as to call unpopular nowadays but certainly outnumbered by easier-to-write "protagonist wants resource, antagonist wants the same resource, only one of them can have it" stories.
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I think that a lot of this comes down to the fact that modern men living in many European/Anglosphere countries have lived for a decade+ under a system in which women wield a massive amount of power over citizens’ lives, and men can see very clearly the failure modes inherent in the way that women’s psychology interacts with access to power. (A recent and revealing example of which is this brief clip of an interview with Biden’s new pick for Director of the CDC, a textbook demonstration of the catty and supercilious nature of a woman given far more power than she should ever have tasted.)
It may at some point have been possible to believe that women given power under the right circumstances, if thrust into power and forced to perform, might do as well as men. Certainly history contains salient examples of exceptional women - Elizabeth I of England, Boudica, etc. - ably wielding power even under extraordinary pressure. (For a fictional example, many would point to Ellen Ripley from the Alien film series.) However, now that so many men are living under the direct consequences of a feminized power structure - in which even most male officials have to cater to and navigate around female preferences and sensibilities - it’s extremely natural for men to bristle against a regime that is always going to feel on some level like an unnatural imposition.
I will say that young boys, for whom sexual ideation has not yet come to totally dominate their interactions with females, might have an easier time connecting with fictional female characters. I might be shredding some of my already-scarce Dissident Right credibility by admitting that I was a massive Harry Potter fan up into adulthood, and I always found Hermione Granger extremely relatable. She’s exactly the sort of spergy, fastidious, precocious pedant that so many of the commenters on this forum almost certainly were as kids. Of course, now we are confronted with the consequences of living under a political regime controlled by Hermione Grangers - the great majority of whom don’t even have the courtesy to look like Emma Watson while crushing us under the might of the longhouse - and reading the series over again with that life experience makes it far more difficult in hindsight to feel any warmth or empathy toward the character.
A world in which a precocious and hyper-intelligent girl could have her energies directed in a positive direction is certainly desirable; I don’t want Hermione forced to be a housewife, her prodigious mental faculties dulled by menial drudgery. Female scholars and researchers have done wonderful work in the past - see Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin - as have great female artists and writers. What I don’t want is a world where those same women’s political sensibilities come to dominate the cultural production, and consequently the political priorities, of our society. (This is leaving aside discussions of hypergamy, and whether or not by opening up more avenues for women to accrue significant power, resources, and status, we throw reproductive/romantic relations between the sexes into chaos.)
Are societies still ruled predominantly by men much more competent than those ruled (in part) by women? Most of the more disastrous decisions in 20th century western politics (eg. mass immigration) were made by parliaments that were 90%+ men.
So, obviously societies rules by men have their own catastrophic failure modes. History is littered not only with incompetent male rulers, but also men who very competently and effectively executed their vision for society, to the immense detriment of everyone involved because their philosophical premises were rotten. The masculine virtues of course have their corrupted forms, and I would dread living under a regime run by men who embodied those corrupted virtues. (Being sent off to get butchered in some pointless war waged merely to satisfy some red-blooded moron’s bloodlust and pig-headed sense of honor would be a nightmare scenario for me personally.)
Now, when we’re talking about the 20th century, it’s a complicated discussion because in most of the nations you’re talking about, women could vote, and even in the ones where they couldn’t, they were certainly far more emancipated, and their preferences taken far more seriously, than in any previous time in history. That arguably had a massive effect on the political trajectory of the 20th century, even if the people actually tasked with implementing those political preferences were still overwhelmingly male. But, of course, you’re right to point out that it wasn’t female leaders who drove most of the disastrous decisions we’re living under today.
Those are in the past, though, and most men living today didn’t experience life under those regimes firsthand. They have experienced life under the gynocracy, though, so its failure modes and frustrations loom heavily in their minds. And even if male-dominated societies suck in their own ways, female-dominated societies are always going to feel more unnatural, more like an imposition, more difficult to live under, for men, which is whose perspective I was talking about.
Right wing movements came to power without any women voting at all in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Croatia, etc. The notable country that went from being a democracy with full women’s suffrage is Germany (and even there women mostly voted along with the male head of the household), and the NSDAP was the only party to not run female candidates because of their open stance that politics was the domain of men; women’s representation dropped from 37 MPs to 0 under them.
In which country did a fascist party come to power with majority support from women, or really any major attempt to cater to women’s preferences? Most mid-twentieth century right wing parties were pretty explicit about wanting to roll back women’s rights and restore traditional gender roles.
Why are you assuming that fascism was one of the things I had in mind when discussing the disastrous political decisions of the 20th century?
Is that not what you’re referring to with this passage?
A discussion of “the more disastrous decisions in the 20th century” and “pointless wars caused by masculine leaders” that didn’t include fascism would be an odd one indeed. We could certainly add other countries, but ie the Soviet Union of course was no more reliant on women’s support than any other dictatorship from that era.
It seems there are two separate arguments happening at the same time.
I acknowledged that masculine governments have well-documented failure modes, probably the most obvious of which is a cavalier attitude toward war. I even think that it’s fair to point to the one-two punch of the World Wars - one of which it’s reasonable (although more contentious than you might think) to blame primarily on fascism, the other of which has causes so multifarious that it’s impossible to persuasively pin the blame on any one factor or ideology - as the thing which finally totally discredited the old masculine virtues in the minds of many subsequent generations. I don’t know how long it will take, if ever, for the classic God-and-country martial virtues to re-assert themselves in European/Anglosphere countries; certainly the “specter of fascism” cannot continue to look over our national psyches in perpetuity, but it might take a very long time before people’s mental barriers against unadulterated traditional masculine governance erode.
Still, you haven’t yet offered an affirmative defense of feminine governance models. My contention is that most men would be more psychologically comfortable under a macho fascist-adjacent government - even one that led them to fruitless slaughter - than under the soft gynocratic model of governance under which they live now. If your argument is that those same men are stupid to feel that way, and that they ought to be far more willing to give women an honest go at governance for a while, since men fucked it up so badly a century ago, then it’s an argument we can have.
Yeah, I likely blended the two together through reading rushedly both of your comments.
Imo it's more than enough to argue that modernity (if you consider it to be run by women, which I don't actually) is a lot better than many of the previous societies we can pick from among. All the women-dominant world needs to be is not demonstrably worse than the alternatives for us to take pause before we assume that rolling back women's political representation would improve things. I'm skeptical of the argument that men would be psychologically healthier under a more masculine, authoritarian government, largely because I've lived in a country like that and can't say particularly that men were thriving more than anyone else. I think that kind of thing sounds a lot cooler in theory than in practice. Even assuming it were true, there are lots of things I don't like about society that I consider a fair trade off for overall modern peace and prosperity. I don't much like the psychological experience of going to work and taking orders from my boss either, but I still conclude the modern economy is probably a net win - others are free to disagree.
To loop back though and address broader left wing changes, I'm also skeptical these can be laid at the feet of women either. To take OP's example of mass immigration, America's most restrictive modern anti-immigration bill was passed shortly after all women in America gained the right to vote, and was only reversed in the 60s by Emmanuel Celler, who was many things but not a feminist, and rather than cater to women's preferences ultimately lost re-election because he explicitly did not do so (ie by loudly and publicly opposing the Equal Rights Amendment).
In fact, it's an oft repeated talking point that one of the longest lasting arguments against women's suffrage was that women were on net considered more conservative than men. This held true in the West till pretty recently, with American women more likely to identify Republican than men until the 60s, only noticeably voting significantly more for Democrats by the 80s and the present day gap being a historical anomaly. And keep in mind that crude party preference also obscures things like high women's support for Bill Clinton in the 90s, a candidate who slashed welfare and regulations, passed the strongest anti-crime legislation in a generation and banned federal recognition of same sex couples. Likewise, European women voted for conservative parties more than men until the 70s and in some places later. To take one salient example from our cousin country across the pond, Thatcher would have lost her election if only men were voting, and English women supported conservatives over labor until 2005.
Women are more left wing than men in the past few decades, but a glance at the recent historical record indicates this is in no way fixed. Today's rightist are skeptical of woman's suffrage making everything woke; a century ago liberals were skeptical of women's suffrage because they thought women would restore the Bourbons to the throne.
I don't blame all of the world's problems on men either, nor am I really interested in balancing out past wrongs or whatever; I just need an active argument to draw a line from anyone's liberties to societies' problems. My position is that gender just isn't that important till proven otherwise. There are societies both bad and good, liberal and conservative, across all varying degrees of women's enfranchisement, and their ills or successes usually come from elsewhere.
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Given the obvious genetic advantages and resulting scientific performance of Pierre and Marie Curie's descendents (only one Nobel prize, but several eminent careers in the third generation despite having only two daughters, one of whom spent her child-bearing years nursing her sick mother and then writing the "authorised" biography after her death), my most heretical opinion about women in STEM is that Marie would have contributed even more to physics if Pierre had managed to keep her barefoot, pregnant and above all not irradiated. WW2 makes it hard to work out the counterfactuals in detail, but I don't see how three of four Curie sons wouldn't change the history of science.
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There seems to be a distinction here between individual women and feminine structures. Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin, etc were all women, but they operated in structures organized along masculine norms. As such, I don’t think it’s necessary to exclude the Hermione’s from the levers of power, but to require masculine norms in their operation.
I may be naive in thinking the maintenance of such a precarious balance is possible. The referenced women existed in environments where they were a fraction of a percent of the total population. Effective Altruism, despite selecting for women with the most masculine of norms, is succumbing to feminization with only a quarter of survey-takers being women. LessWrong and ACX survey-takers are about 12% female.
Of course, very little of this is actionable, but it’d be interesting to identify the threshold at which it snowballs. As a side note, I agree with Helen Andrews that feminization will be disastrous for the rule of law, so we have that to look forward to. While the influence is already clear, it will do nothing but strengthen.
To save you all the read, there is exactly one example of support this claim: Open Philanthropy publicly expressing concern about sexual harassment after a bad PR incident.
This is both false and uncharitable. The linked article references:
The widespread admonishment of Nick Bostrom among EAs after his comment on factual group differences was leaked
TIME article from disillusioned women in EA making questionable claims of sexual assault (to which the CEO of Open Phil replied, not the organization itself, as you suggest)
Open Phil making donations towards criminal justice causes without any evidential basis for their effectiveness
A highly upvoted post on the EA forum titled “I’m a 22-year-old woman involved in Effective Altruism. I’m sad, disappointed, and scared.” This post then goes on to critique EA for placing too much emphasis on rationality and not enough on emotion.
Highlights two cause areas (global dysgenic trends and the power laws of crime) that are ignored by EA as taboo.
There are more instances outside the article’s scope that I could list, but figured that captured the main body of issues, and further examples would just be further evidence of these specific trends.
I didn't really see much of a difference, but I guess I can see how some people could.
A social taboo against talking about HBD is not feminization. It was the de facto state of society well before the rise of modern feminism and woke culture. Take a random sample of men at the gym or in an MMO and start talking about how Black people are genetically inferior and let me know how it goes. HBD is not something all men secretly believe and want to talk about (if not for those pesky women!).
Though while we're on the topic, imo the general state of HBD has been the same since at least 2013 (when I started reading about it) -- basically: "Some of EAs believe in HBD and some EAs are uncomfortable with talking about it, and some EAs support strong social norms against talking about it", which should already seem strikingly different from how its talked about in the normal population.
Open Philanthropy's funding for criminal justice reform has been significant since at least 2016, went down in 2020 (when George Floyd died), and then separated from OpenPhil in 2021 because they weren't as effective as global health.
Those don't seem like the actions of an ideologically compromised organization.
I'll admit I missed this (my mistake for posting while at the gym). While I don't think "highly upvoted post on a forum" is great evidence (or I'd prove that EA is okay with Bostrom), it should certainly qualify to be included in a "summary of evidence".
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To be fair, not all of that is specifically feminism.
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Didn't they come out and say men weren't their audience? If you write bad male characters (or hire writers that hate men) is it really surprising that (most) men are not interested?
Isn't this looking at a couple outliers (some of the most popular media of all time) and making very broad assumptions? Besides, Harry Potter has some very strong female characters... Are you saying that there are no boys who related to Hermione?
I mean, could it be that men and women tend to have some biological differences? I'm currently mostly dating women in their early 30s... It's kind of amazing to watch them melt at a baby anything (it could be a small chair and it's soooooooooo cute). Don't get me wrong, I can appreciate the cuteness of kitten but it's not the same. Is that a moral failing? It seems like you're glossing over the most obvious answer...
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I find this to be quite the opposite, personally. I'm always reading books with female protagonists with my wife (most recently mistborn and the Alanna books) that she read when she was younger, and getting into deep conversations with her about them. I grow to really like those books. My wife will consume media with me with male protagonists, but she rarely grows to really internalize it and love it. The only time she ever likes something enough to rewatch it is if it has a female protagonist. I personally blame the feminist movement for putting this mind worm in her to believe that there's something inherently better about female led media.
Misborn is weird. SAnderson does seem to write characters in a manner that is almost entirely devoid of their sexuality. Nothing wrong with that, but Vin could be guy, a girl or an amorphous 4 limbed entity.......and my mistborn experience would have been exactly the same.
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Male protagonists are often in a sense sex symbols for women. You can't easily write a leading role of a female sex symbol. Competent male leads work for both men and women. James Bond is an obvious example of a character tailored in some ways to female tastes.
As to your question, I have never thought of Major Kusanagi as anything other than incredible.
Ahhh - no. He's definitely a male fantasy figure, the idea that he's irresistible to women is all part of the idealised man of action character. If you're a women reading the novels, he's not that great to the women he encounters. A lot of them are the stock femme fatale types anyway.
Modern Bond probably has been revamped to be more appealing to feminine sensibilities, but when I was a kid Bond was Connery and Connery was Bond, and he does have that raw masculine appeal (even if the 60s sexism is alive and kicking in the films).
Are you sure the raw masculine appeal isn’t there because of the 60s sexism instead of despite?
Hard to tell, but there's a difference between "gosh this guy is just oozing testosterone" and the Inspector Monkfish treatment.
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As @Harlequin5942 said, it's a desirable train in any partner. It might be a bit different between the sexes, as women often look for men who are higher achievers than them, and this requires a certain level of natural unhappiness with the order of things, but I've heard about enough couples where a high-achieving woman was happily married to a Monsieur Alphonse, whose ambitions ended at looking good as arm candy.
Does it? Big Five neuroticism is negatively correlated with success in just about every domain of life. It's likely to make people unhappy and it's innate, but it's not useful for being a high achiever.
Big Five disagreeableness, to some degree, is correlated with success in some domains (and it's useful for getting a pay rise etc.) but disagreeableness, to this limited extent, is not correlated with (reported) unhappiness, AFAIK.
Big Five conscientious people might seem less happy, because they tend to spend less time chilling out, but IIRC conscientiousness is correlated with higher variance of happiness (conscientious people feel guilty less often but experience more intense guilt) rather than the level of happiness.
One problem with correlating big five with happiness is that reported happiness flows directly into the neuroticism and extraversion values. The example phrase “I seldom feel blue” counts as low neuroticism. Neuroticism includes withdrawal (tending toward depression and anxiety) . That is not “correlated” with unhappiness, it is unhappiness. Extraversion includes enthusiasm , so if you say you’re happy all the time, that counts as extraversion. If you are low in negative emotion, you’re ¬ neurotic , and if you are high in positive emotion, you're extraverted.
However, it does appear that conscentiousness and agreeableness are correlated with reported happiness, though less than with ¬ neuroticism and extraversion. That is surprising to me, I guess I’ll have to work on that.
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I think the real question you need to be asking is can anyone who buys into the theory of external loci control respect anyone as an agent. Not just men or women.
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I think reducing it to sex/gender really hides what's going on, at least in my mind. I can absolutely respect women as agents. What I can't respect is narcissistic attitudes. And of course, not all women. I know plenty of women who are wonderfully good and what they do and maintain a very healthy center. But I will say that I do think that cultural pressures have been creating more "Girlboss" attitudes. And stories that feature those attitudes....no thank you.
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Harry is totally average, aside that he has -accidentally- a piece of Voldemorts soul. But he is not the best wizard in the world or is the coolest guy ever. It is Longbottom in the end who wielded the sword of Gryffindor, it is Hermione who is most clever, the Weasley family who harbors the resistance.
This is a large exaggeration. Harry is more gifted than Hermione at defense against the dark arts, even after Voldy's soul is gone, as he goes on to become Wizard FBI.
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Everyone involved in that series, with the exception of Rupert Grint, got extremely hot. I’m entirely willing to chalk it up to a combination of 1. anyone can become hot with enough money and resources, and 2. the kinds of kids who had the acting background to be selected for these roles in the first place, and the basic functionality to be able to sustain that career without flaming out horribly (like the kid who played Vincent Crabbe in the early films) are heavily weighted toward coming from affluent and intact families with good genetics.
Lead actors are almost always cast (even subconsciously) for things like facial symmetry that predict attractiveness.
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I remember doing a double-take when I realized that Dudley's actor, of all people, was playing one of the love interests in The Queen's Gambit. Amazing that Harry Melling could successfully grow out of a role like that. (Incidentally, The Queen's Gambit is another contemporary example of a female-led story that everyone loved.)
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Harry has the most usual quality you'll find in a hero, and the most valued quality in the real world: leadership.
He’s not really a leader though, he’s naturally popular for the same reason, say, the child of an A-list celebrity might be very popular at their school. He’s rich and famous and everyone knows it from the minute he arrives at school. His leadership ability is minimal and until almost the end of the story it’s the adults who are in charge and who order the main characters around.
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The first part doesn't seem true to me, or else why the continual complaining about representation? If they actually are capable of empathising with people unlike them, why should it matter so furiously?
The answer to that is that most modern female characters are written absolutely terribly. But go back a bit and there's Lara Croft, Jill Valentine, Samus Aran, Ellen Ripley, Lightning Farron... We used to have good female characters, until they were either ruined or replaced with girlbosses whose only flaw is that they can't see how awesome they are.
Because id-pol (be it of the woke left or dissedent right variety) is about socially atomized urbanites latching onto superficialities precisely because the lack both a proper ethnic religious or cultural identity, and the empathy to feel like part of a community.
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If we're going to speak about failing at cross-sex mind-reading the fact that girlbosses - who are basically an inversion of the male role - come across as more defensive and mean-spirited than the average male hero says something about how these writers think men see their heroes.
I don't think I've ever gone to a Tom Cruise movie to see him upstage some woman (or women as a class) by rescuing her or being the competent hero.
It isn't just one side failing to read the other.
The Taming of the Shrew. Where Katharina is unpleasant, but Petruchio is no prize himself; he turns up in town looking to marry a wealthy woman - any woman - because he is knee-deep in debt. His 'taming' involves force and ends up with Katharina more brainwashed or Stockholm Syndromed into being the obedient placid wife than coming to genuine understanding of each other.
I would not be surprised if five years later, she ended up poisoning him and becoming a rich, independent widow - if he hadn't squandered her fortune before that.
and yet, the Richard Burton film is my wife's favorite movie.
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Let's take 4 example films with female protagonists. I really enjoy the protagonists in Alita, Rogue Squadron, Mirrormask, and Spirited Away.
Alita is great because the titular character appears as an underdog in most of her fights (who levels up in badassness multiple times through the film). There are plausible reasons why a 100lb girl can beat giants (they're all cyborgs and she's from a higher tech civilization). She grows in her power through the films and is faced with consequences for her actions both positive and negative.
Jyn is a normal person with PTSD who is only attached to the mission because of her connection to a warlord who isn't a close friend of the republic. She's got a lot of mental fortitude, and she fights and kills but mostly she's doing brave things because they're the right thing to do. The film makes it clear that actions have costs by the end.
Helena in Mirrormask is a clear fish out of water, but who quickly picks up the rules of the surreal place she finds herself relying on her wits to solve the many mysteries required to escape. She's making as little sense of the place she finds herself as the viewer, but persists in making allies, and using the strengths she has eventually overcome and defeat the villain.
Chihiro perseveres through working hard, having pity, and following her people's traditions (not eating the gods' food like her parents, not accepting No Face's gifts, respecting even the humble spirits at the inn). She shows her wisdom early and continues to develop or refine it and it remains her ally in the story.
I can't put myself in their shoes in many ways, but they appeal to my sense of finding a purpose larger than myself, familial loyalty, accepting challenges, hard work, and protecting those weaker than myself. I enjoy all of their stories because each of them struggles and many of them fail especially early in their story.
Rey is a bad enough protagonist that I think the best thing that could have happened in the Last Jedi would have been Kylo questioning his attachment to the dark side and Rey joining Snoke by attacking him during the confrontation in Snoke's throne room. Rey makes an excellent dragon, she's hyper competent, emotionally distant, and ruthless in her commitment to accomplishing her goals, but those qualities make her an awful protagonist. I believe her lack of appeal as a character is a direct result of girlboss instincts not to ever show her as weak or lacking.
I legit thought this was going to be the route they went, that Rey beat Kylo in Ep7 by tapping into the dark side, and would keep relying on that and eventually do something that made even Kylo go "what the fuck" and switch sides to stop her, but no... bland and uninteresting to the end.
I felt like Anton Ego there, thinking "surprise me" and hoping there was an interesting film about Kylo to make. It was easily the best 5 minutes of the film, before resuming my utter disappointment.
I feel the same way, there were hints of an interesting story there, but they turned out to be only hints.
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Cordelia Naismith? Almost any woman in the Vorkosigan Saga is well written.
But since right now I am pretty annoyed by the Ironwood part of the GoW Ragnarok - Angrboda is just terrible. She beats Loki in no less than 3 scripted occasions. A scripted race, a scripted stone tossing contest, a scripted moment where she refuses Lokis help to climb a wall and does some parkour, and her main rant is how she disappears from the prophecy ... and 10 minutes later when some of the evilest things in the universe is about to happen - she is trying to stop it not with righteousness but with "I am not sure but I have ignored it for too long and we can't hide forever" and suddenly she is likeable and relatable. It feels as if those two parts are written by different teams with different ideas about the character.
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Ha, this is such a female way to write. If a guy wrote “when I read women’s opinions on men and interactions with men it gives me this disgusting skin crawling feeling all over that makes me want to puke. I wish I was born gay” he’d come across as a histrionic fruit-cake and would get mocked into the shadow realm for being an incel instead of receiving 200 upvotes.
I imagine part of that woman’s dramatic reaction was motivated by OP writing about women like they’re objects that can be fumbled, and not acknowledging women as Wonderful, agentic girl-bosses. However, women are incredibly passive in dating and courtship, especially in the early game, so it’s understandable for men to metaphorise them as inanimate objects that can be fumbled away like a crappy gather or sloppy behind-the-back-pass. Sometimes a man has been James, sometimes he’s been Curry, sometimes he’s been Thompson looking exasperated while a wingman botches a group approach or double date.
Men need to do the approaching, lead the interactions, drive the conversations, perform the monkey-dancing and court-jestering, hold court if necessary, navigate any shit tests, figure out when/how to make the first move, make the first move, and figure out how to seal the deal from there. Women just exist and follow or not. For men, picking-up and/or dating women is like going on job interviews and conducting escort missions; whereas for women getting picked-up and/or dating men is like shopping and going on guided tours.
Online women like to prattle on about emotional labor and so forth, but the efforts of men when it comes to dating and courtship are completely invisible to them. Romance and courtship are things that Just Happen to women like Acts of God. Yet many of them enjoy shaming and mocking men for perceived dating ineptitudes as if they were petty Monday Morning Quarterbacks, just like they’ll pin white feathers on alleged draft-dodgers and laugh at men running to escape the draft. As Norah Vincent remarked in Self Made Man:
Women certainly have ones that got away (cue the Katy Perry song), but they generally don’t have ones that they think of having fumbled away. In contrast, just reading the words "the haunting feeling of fumbling a 10/10" was a cognito-hazard; I got a pit in my stomach while the memories of past fumbles flash-flooded across my mind.
In the romance novels most popular among women, the female protagonists are passive, hypoagentic damsels in distress to be swept off their feet by an active, hyperagentic suitor. Sometimes there are even two such suitors for a Let’s You and Him fight scenario.
I don’t think men are fundamentally disinterested in female protagonists. Ripley in the Alien and Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider franchises come to mind, as female protagonists that are more popular among men than among women. Even brutish, cynical wrong-thinkers like me have contentedly watched the entirety of Love and Death. However, men don’t like getting lectured about #GirlPower in what should be entertainment, from Marvel girl-bosses assembling for a pose-down to an X-Men Mystique walk-off of “by the way, the women are always saving the men around here. You might want to think about changing the name to X-Women.” All while the actress has photos floating around of her on her knees getting facialed.
Both men and women are more concerned for the safety and well-being of girls and women in a movie or television series, just as they are for girls and women in real life. It’s no coincidence that popular works like 28 Days Later, World War Z, The Last of Us, Station 11 have the protection of daughters/daughter-figures as plot points to keep the emotional stakes high for the viewer. A girl/young woman dying gruesomely is/would be much more of an ”oh shit” moment than a boy/young man doing so.
Nor do I think men are inherently incapable of admiring women for their achievements. It’s not like Cathie Wood's lacking in simps and fan-boys. Neither is Elizabeth Holmes, for that matter—strong, independent #GirlBoss when winning; damsel in distress when getting charged with fraud. If anything, women garner greater male (and female) admiration for a given level of achievement than men do.
There’s some apex fallacy here. Men don’t generally admire women for their achievements, because they don’t generally admire other men for their achievements either. The Don Draper I-don’t-think-about-you-at-all is the default.
When men admire the achievements of other men, it’s often in the realm of right-tailed achievements in science, mathematics, business, or sports, where women are usually absent. Given greater male variability in interests and ability, there are far fewer female Terence Taos, Elon Musks, or Jeff Bezos’s; the Forbes list of top 10 female billionaires is a who’s who of widows, heiresses, and divorcees (including MacKenzie). It’s even more sensible that men generally don't admire female athletes, as they generally don't admire random high school boys athletes, who are often better than professional women. It’d be weird as hell if grown men admired random high school boys athletes, Foxcatcher vibes but worse (it’s already pretty weird how many grown men admire and have parasocial relationships with their favorite professional athletes/teams, wearing other men’s names on their backs and cheering their performances).
Yet, despite the relative lack of right-tailed female achievement in sciences, mathematics, business—even aided by the tailwind of affirmative action—and female professional athletes being worse than high school boys, men are constantly bombarded by girl-power propaganda in media and entertainment, schools and workplaces. So it’s natural if some annoyance results, especially when men's experiences in romantic contexts suggest that women are not, in fact, strong independent hyperagentic girl-bosses (more like the opposite).
When I read women's opinions on men and interactions with men it makes me see red that makes me want to follow in Ted Bundy's footsteps. I wish I was born gay.
Somehow I read your nickname as "adjective born noun"
There are two things I miss from Reddit here: comment counts on collapsed threads, and autogenerated throwaway names.
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A rare point of agreement. When women do right-tail well (say Margaret Thatcher), they have plenty of men and women admirers. I don’t think this is really a strongly gendered thing, most people just aren’t very impressive.
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Insofar as that guy is suggesting that low neuroticism is a desirable trait, he's very understandable. Less neurotic people tend to have happier, more stable, and more lasting relationships. That it's important doesn't imply that it's sufficient and it seems like a strawman of his position to suggest that interpretation.
Alice from Alice in Wonderland. Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.
Sherlock Holmes isn't particularly popular among boys and girls, as far as I know, but the female counterpart is Miss Marple.
The closest parallel to Harry Potter is Hermione Granger, who is also a character in the Harry Potter series.
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Sailor Moon.
rose stabs the ground
It is me, Tuxedo Kamen, coming to remind you that I save Sailor Moon in 99% of the episodes.
Is that how it works? That’s a bit sad.
I guess maybe Precure is different?
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This isn't true.
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Do women admire one another for their martial achievements?
As others have already mentioned, there are a decent number of examples of female agents from the 90s and early 00s, even up to Rogue One. These tend to be fairly masculine movies, appealing more to men. Women like them about as much as if the protagonist were male. In a certain sense, they might as well be male.
Meanwhile, the prototypical female story by a woman, appealing to women, is Pride and Predjudice. The heroine most uncover the true characters and motivations of the men in the story. It doesn’t matter all that much which men have served in the military and defeated their nations foes. In Persuasion it matters for status, but not who he has killed or under what circumstances. It matters a great deal whether the man will treat his wife well, be faithful, provide a good living, be respectable according to social norms, and so on. She must figure this out, and choose wisely. They are, to some extent, morality plays. Men do read, for instance, Persuasion, and admire it for its subtlety and deep observation.
Female archetypes are different from male, and perhaps should be different, and the current trend of populating action movies with what amount to trans men is silly. The motherly feminine archetypal character is speaking wisdom and weaving cloth, and that is alright. I especially love the great grandmother in The Princess and the Goblins, and would like to see more of that, rather than yet another woman fighter. Civilizations need wisdom and cloth and social norms as much as they need to repel the invaders or solve the mystery or Do Science.
And yet, she’s still the standard, still frequently adapted, still culturally important in a way that Marvel Girl Boss is not.
That isn’t necessarily to say there aren’t any important contemporary female protagonists, just that there’s no reason they are or should be catering to heroic male action expectations.
Bingo.
I'm prepared to bet that in 50 - 100 years the works of Jane Austen and JRR Tolkien will still be culturally relevant whereas Captain Marvel staring Brie Larson will be a forgotten footnote.
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How do you put a female protagonist in a story for men, who occupies a traditional male role? You need a woman who embodies honor/courage/valor/stoicism/risk taking in the face of immediate personal danger and you also need a damn good reason why it’s a woman doing the job.
We don’t see this in modern fiction (targeting men) because the characters are pretty universally terribly written. I imagine it’s at least partially due to the authors being outright inimical to the role and it’s requirements (except as a vehicle for empowerment) and their would be audience alike.
It’s not impressive or engaging when woman does classic man thing better than all of the doubting men, overcoming the inevitably evil male antagonist, but that seems to be the only plot now. I’ll point out it’s the opposite of empowering, too.
Give me more Ripley! She isn’t a paragon of female empowerment who breaks the glass ceiling through a newly learned sense of self worth and boss bitch power. (Disregarding the allegory of the horror of childbirth…) she deliberately faces down a terrifyingly gruesome death to protect a girl from the same because everyone else is already dead.
I’d gladly watch more (T1/2) Sarah Connors, Buffy, Scully, or even Margot Hanson for a contemporary reference.
How much agency did Buffy have? She didn't choose to be the slayer, nor was she the 'brains' of the operation.
Give her visions from God, Jeanne d’Arc style.
I don’t disagree too much. On the side of agency and moral worth, Buffy embraces her destiny and personal responsibility to her own detriment. She takes on raising her sister, and later fighting a war. I think we should also cut her slack for being a teenager.
Buffy is compelling in the Vonnegut sense of character writing, where the universe continually throws awful stuff at her and she is just going along for the ride.
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By this standard any superhero with innate powers may be said to not have agency?
How much agency can someone called by destiny to save the world from evil with their supernatural powers have?
The universe inhabited by many superheroes with innate powers often don't allow for much agency. That these characters as portrayed also often lack dimension doesn't help.
Non-powered superheroes frequently have more agency, Batman, Ironman. They use their wealth and intellect.
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Accurately. Or at least sort of. Superheroes are considered children's entertainment because they fly so close to the Mary Sue, they are simplified down to base archetypes and motivations to tell stories without the additional complications of logic and reality and the like. Buffy was built off the superhero mold, and as a result she lacks the complexity of a more human character. But that is by design, and traits she lacks are made up for by her ensemble, or are used to further the story.
That's just me waffling though, I agree AvocadoPanic is mistaken here. They are making the same mistake a lot of critics have been making over the past two decades, which is sort of like the use mention distinction - yeah Buffy doesn't have any agency, she's a fictional character. Her characteristics were given to her by a man, namely Joss Whedon. But inside the show she has plenty of agency. That's where it matters.
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The answer here is simple.
The type of man that's described in traditional media, does not describe that average man. Hell, it doesn't describe 99% of men. It describes a human of initiative. Sacrifice : A human who chooses to set aside their own interests for the greater good. Growth: A human who starts from the bottom, and chooses to put in the work to improve. Moonshots: Someone who chooses to act even when the odds are stacked against them.
The hero is not male or female, the hero is superhuman. Gender doesn't matter. The hero has been portrayed by a man for a long time, but that's arbitrary. It can be a woman. But, girl-boss feminism is incompetent at portraying the hero. Because, the key subversion of a hero is that he seems super-human, but is in fact, a weak person.
Writing an effective 'weak' character needs 2 things.
First: Recognizing the freebies that comes with being an individual of a certain demographic.
Second: Actively depriving them of those freebies; so that the journey appears difficult and relatable to all.
Hollywood writers can't write a relatable girl-boss, because it starts with needing to cast a sexually undesirable woman. It starts with recognizing, that they need to thoroughly deprive their character of the 'women are wonderful' effect. Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 is a properly relatable girl-boss, in part because she is NOT 'Hollywood sexy'. It also helps that all 3 male characters in the movie: John, Arnold & T2 are incapable of sexualizing her. She spent the entire first movie being weak, and she is relatable not because she wins, but rather because she tries against all odds. Linda Hamilton grows, she sacrifices, she shoots for the moon and she is relatable.
Honestly, America in particular seems to be inept at writing relatable women. Vidya Balan has played many a relatable woman. (Kahani, Bhool Bhulayya) in Bollywood. There's a never ending list of manga where you can respect, admire, empathize with the agenthood of the woman. Some examples are Kakukaku Shikajika & Silent Voice (The manga). I have yet to complete The Mother (2009), but it also gives me a similar vibe. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of many post 2000 American films that qualify here. Even British TV has more relatable women. Olivia Coleman played only relatable women before her big break in TheCrown. There is something about the brilliance of Victoria Coren Mitchell or the sharp wit of Jo Brand that makes them girl-bosses of a type that I am kinda jealous of, even as a man.
complete tangent :It is a shame Jo Brand was no on the episode of QI that led to this wonderful moment. Sandi Toksvig is brilliant, but this still takes the cake for the best 1 liner.
This. My favorite movie is Pig (2021). I have shown it to 3 highly empathetic (1 is a licensed therapist) women. The movie is about 3 weak men, grief and the weaknesses of men. All 3 of them reacted with either platonic appreciation or confusion as they watched the movie. They understood the universal themes : grief takes time and death is sad. But they didn't understand where the weaknesses of either men came from. The feeling of abandonment without the warmth of a mother. The level of intense pair-bonding that men undergo and isolation in their grief, the desperate incompetence of a father who has only ever played the role of bad cop. I never cry, but I was bawling my eyes out at the end of this movie. my 'daily weeper' female friends felt nothing more than a general sadness in the air.
Women and men only relate across genders when it is the proverbial 1% superhero, and that's because the superhero has no gender. Women don't relate to the 99% weak men, and men do not relate to the 99% weak women.
Something similar occurred to me and I’d considered touching on it in my earlier comment, but didn’t want to get bogged down in a potentially crass “is so-and-so fuckable” argument with anybody. The example I was going to give was Sigourney Weaver - who I personally find somewhat mannish and haggard-looking, even when she was in her prime as Ripley - and I would say that some more recent examples would be Michelle Rodriguez and, to some extent, Jennifer Lawrence. (Lawrence has an attractive body, but it’s easy for a director to de-emphasize it, and her face is somewhat plain.) The key tightrope act is that these women aren’t unattractive - there’s nothing obviously off-putting about them that would make men want not to look at them (it’s not like we’re talking about casting Melissa McCarthy or Ruth Buzzi or whatever) - but not so attractive that a man would be unable to turn off his “sexy lady want to bone awooooogah [wolf whistle]” instinct long enough to relate to her on a peer level.
Perhaps one of my edgiest opinions is that McCarthy and Jason Statham are really funny in ‘Spy’.
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There's also a question of realism. I believe that Sigourney Weaver is fairly strong - maybe not as strong as an average American man, but not far off. She's a tall, athletic woman. It's much easier to suspend disbelief with her as Ripley than Emilia Clarke as Sarah Connor, or young Linda Hamilton vs. Old Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor firing a machine gun.
If you compare the actress in the first versus the second movie, the change is huge. She worked out, she completely lost the softness from the first movie. It's at least as impressive as actors hitting the gym to pile on the muscles when playing superheroes.
Then you get "Rings of Power" and small Morfydd Clark supposedly able to one-shot an ice troll (that was smacking around her entire squad of male Elves up till then) and teaching the Númenorean youth volunteers which end of a sword is the pointy bit, and even without the ludicrous 'acrobatic' stunts it just does not work. It doesn't matter that she's an Elf, she is simply not convincing as tall enough and strong enough to be able to pull off all this Warrior Girlboss routine.
Yes, there's a reason why Superman is muscular, even though his strength is obviously disconnected from just his muscles: it aids the suspension of disbelief. Chalamet as Superman would not work, unless he put on 40+ pounds of muscle, and also wore platform shoes that were at least 2 inches...
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That is excellent advice and well-worth blasting from the rooftops with megaphones. Could've saved me decades of trouble if I were amenable to advice.
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In anime and manga there are entire genres, most obviously slice-of-life comedies, where it is typical to have nearly 100% female casts (and a 50% or higher male audience). Female characters are a publishing requirement at plenty of manga magazines, and not for ideological reasons. Here is a relevant extra from the comedy manga/anime D-Frag, which ended up with a main cast that looks like this. The same is true for anime-style videogames, in particular gacha games which have an emphasis on character design. Even aside from the subsets of Japanese/Japanese-inspired media doing their best to tile the universe with cute girls, plenty of stories from times and places unconcerned with feminism have gone out of their way to incorporate female characters into roles like "warrior" which would realistically be all male, from ancient myths to modern fantasy.
If a subset of modern western characters like the female Captain Marvel aren't appealing to men, perhaps it is because none of the people involved with creating them designed them to be. That doesn't mean they can't be "strong" or whatever, female anime/manga characters are varied and include those with nearly every kind of "strength" imaginable, both the kinds of strength primarily associated with men and the kinds that aren't. But it does mean they shouldn't be designed by people who view "making a strong female character" or "making sure not to incorporate misogynistic tropes" as primary goals in character writing, which often takes precedence over concerns like making the character likable or interesting. Indeed, most of those strong female anime/manga characters were written by people who have probably never encountered a phrase like "strong female character" in their lives, let alone having them as important categories shaping how they think about writing fiction.
I don't find the new Captain Marvel appealing and I'm a woman, but then again I may be an outlier. The fact that the second Captain Marvel movie had to be turned into The Marvels, with the lead split among three actresses, may indicate that making Ms. Marvel* into Captain Marvel and then making her as unpleasant as humanly possible isn't attracting anyone.
(*Yes, I'm old enough that I remember when Ms. Marvel wasn't a Muslim teen named Kamala Khan).
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Many of these are even written by women, with Bocchi the Rock being a recent prime example. Given that, I lean towards ideological distortion in media companies being the big culprit here.
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Biden-Harris Administration Releases First-Ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism
Last week the Biden administration published the anticipated national strategy to counter antisemitism.
The Full Report starts with a legal disclaimer that it does not supersede any existing regulation or law- it should be viewed as a blueprint and aspirational. However, the 100+ "calls to action" touch every corner of government, even the USDA and and Department of Forest Services. One of the main architects of the initiative is Kamala Harris's Jewish husband, Dough Emhoff.
The first question you may have is "what's antisemitism?" I have discussed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism in the past, and it is acknowledged in the report as the most prominent definition which has been adopted by the US:
The IHRA working definition of antisemitism includes:
The Biden administration's strategy to counter antisemitism includes censoring criticism of "the power of Jews as a collective", even while there exists a whole-of-society effort to engage in mendacious criticism of the power of white men as a collective.
There are indeed well over 100 calls to action, which includes things like:
The most tangible impacts of this strategy in the short term are the mandated propaganda initiatives described here and in many more "calls to action" in the document. By my view, the most alarming dimension of the strategy is in combatting online antisemitism (emphasis in original):
In today's day in age, where something like Twitter is unambiguously the public square, this call to action is clearly intended to abridge the freedom of speech even though it wouldn't run afoul of constitutional checks in the court system. In particular, the call for permanent bans from the public square in the face of a "zero-tolerance" policy is chilling. If you rob a Walmart, or assault someone, even if you are a repeat offender, you will go to jail but then eventually be released. A permanent ban from the public square is tantamount to a worse punishment than faced by many criminal offenders.
The Call to Congress is even more alarming:
The Right Wing has naively supported changes to Section 230 that would prohibit politically-motivated content censorship, on the logic that if they aren't publishers they shouldn't be censoring political speech. The more likely changes to Section 230 would be that social media companies will be required to have strict content policies and moderation against antisemitism and other forms of hate speech in order for social media companies to have legal protection.
This call to action doesn't seem unrealistic, I noted last month that Ron DeSantis travelled to Jerusalem to sign a hate-speech law which was described as "the strongest antisemitism bill in the United States". Likewise, this all-encompassing initiative by the Biden Administration has sparked absolutely no opposition of any note, indicating it's one of the rare areas of bipartisan consensus among "our" representatives.
Generative AI is only mentioned in one part of the fact sheet:
No doubt AI will be more prominent in the Second-Ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.
One of the most tired memes is "replace 'Jew' with 'white' in this article and look how 1488 it looks loool", but I have to say if this document were a whole-of-society effort to combat anti-white hatred online, among our society, and institutions, it would be unambiguously identified as fascist, white supremacy.
Great write up.
Is there any major group in America that is more of a collective than religious Zionist Jews? It’s a combination of nationality, bloodline religion, singing odes to their ancestors in the Temple, praying for their bloodline, remembering historical slights… So, any criticism against white people as a collective applies some 60 fold to “collectivist” Jews, IMO (namely those who are deeply self-identifying, religious, and Zionist).
There exists a kind of Victimhood-Oppressor dynamic which is the lifeblood of Judaism since antiquity. You can read it in the stories of the Israelites against the Canaanites, and you can hear it in psalm 137: “for there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth […] Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!”. This psalm is 3000 years old, and yet you can see in it how the Jews depict themselves as a collective. In a way, it reads like a scene from Schindler’s List. The threat of, let’s say, Jewish extremism is not something to be laughed at. Consider what happened in the 2nd century, when the Jews waged an insurrection and massacres hundreds of thousands of innocents:
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Any relationship between this initiative and existing Noahide laws on the books?
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Looks good to me.
The most invasive part is potentially deplatforming some people on Twitter. Anything which discourages treating that cesspit as a “public square” is a net good in my book.
All the rest looks like boring cultural initiatives. Business as usual for the NEA and friends! Hardly worth being a Concerned Citizen over, no?
Why would these actions discourage the treatment of those platforms as a "public square"? They will continue to fulfill that function while they deplatform content that criticizes Jewish power or anything else deemed antisemitic by the IHR definition. Their purpose is to set the boundaries of acceptable speech within the public square, and the boundaries of acceptable speech will entail incessant criticism of white people with a zero-tolerance ban on criticizing Jews.
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Does everyone in America really need to be right about something that happened on another continent 80 years ago?
I'm not saying the Holocaust didn't happen, I'm saying we shouldn't care whether it did or not; certainly not to the extent of making laws about it.
The Holocaust ended up a quite reliable proxy for whether one has something against Da Joos or not.
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Doesn't this cut both ways? "Who cares if the Holocaust even happened - there's a known history of anti-Semitic hate and violence across Europe and America in their pasts, so we're better off just banning it legally to avoid further violence."
How about, "Who cares if the Holocaust even happened" leading into "all of those ethnonationalist things left-inc doesn't like are fine and dandy".
Yes, that is also an option. The point I'm getting at is that if you decide the truth is irrelevant, then you can justify things that people don't want. I assume that Butlerian is probably not in favor of European laws that ban Holocaust Denial.
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Sometimes, if a thing is "needed" and violates the constitution, that means you still shouldn't get to have it. What's the point of principles if you only hold to them on matters that are agreeable anyways?
I would say that there is no point, that you should abandon paying lip service to principles you clearly don't believe in and live a life more authentic to the principles that actually govern your actions.
This is nice in theory, but giving yourself licence to break your own oaths on the altar of honest practicality is not a coherent ethic.
Oathbreaking needs to be punished with dire consequences, otherwise nobody can believe anybody's word and all conflict is total war.
In this case it means the only reasonable form of dissidence is armed terrorism since the State will always be able to justify any means to any ends and is bound by no chains of law.
Defection is the only rational behavior against defect-bot.
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I'd worry less about antisemites and more about the government cracking down on wrongthink.
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I don't think they are "unambiguously the public square" at all. For the obvious difference the historical public square was, well, public in that it was operated by a government and open to all. Twitter, Facebook, and similar online platforms are very much private. They have a big long list of things you have to agree to in order to use them and are definitely not operated by the government. Maybe they are the best way to disseminate a message to a mass audience, but that was true of television and radio in their time without them becoming the "public square."
Not so, the public airwaves doctrine put requirements and restrictions on broadcasters to require them to be used in the public interest, and the First Amendment applied to those.
The first amendment applied to the restrictions the government put on broadcasters, yes. Not to the restrictions broadcasters put on what they aired. Symmetrically the first amendment would apply to any government regulation of social media, but not a social media companies policies that users must follow.
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If you want to know why Dems will never get the working white class vote this is it
A lot of antisemitism as defined is very close to just telling facts. Jews really do have a disproportionate amount of power in key institutions. Things like criticizing George Soros gets lumped in with a world wide Jewish conspiracy. And his play on DA’s was outside of prior political norms. Of course Koch plays too. I back Israel as part of the religious right but many of their actions are against enemies are more Old Testament vengeance than what grew out of the neoliberalchristianglobalhomo norm of exerting power.
There is explicit mention of athletes in the documents. I guess in the identity politics games we see it confirmed blacks aren’t at the top of the totem pole. Sorry Kyrie.
I wish a prominent Jew would trash the ADL or atleast this document. Like a formerly libertarian type who donates a ton like Zuck. I think this document only inflames racial tension.
Agree this is an end-run around the constitution. They can’t themselves censor people. But they can strongly encourage those who are allowed to censor because they are technically “private”. It’s as I’ve pointed out in a prior comment in another convo I’ve radicalized on the use of power. I never would have supported Desantis versus Disney 5 years ago. It violates my understanding of US civic norms. Power should be used by the right when they can.
What? Yeah, I'm sure non-binding anti-Semitism plans are absolutely top salience issues for Bud from Scranton.
This misses the point. No-one denies that Jews are over-represented in important areas, what is anti-semitic is suggesting that this is either the product of some nefarious process or that it will have deleterious consequences because of some imagined Jewish agenda. One can criticise Soros individually, even if I think the criticisms are mostly dumb, but bringing up his Jewishness in a negative light certainly implies anti-Semitism.
The above point that if you replace Jew with white and you basically have crt and all the anti-white woke ideology of the left. Buds not that dumb be realizes he’s being point at the bottom of identity politics.
On the second point perhaps if the document is read that tightly. I’ve seen plenty of people make antisemitism accusations for even mentioning Soros/DA. Same thing for Jewish over representation. But like I said in what you quoted “this comes pretty close to just telling facts” - let’s say this was law and I go to jail if I violate it. If I’m talking about Soros/DA manipulation then one wrong word or one judge who thinks I’m dog whistling/implying something puts me in jail. It’s very very close to the line of banning facts.
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Ah, Critical race theory!
I'm glad to find another adherent on this sub, most people are super against it here.
Less snarkily, your points are all valid only through the racialized, critical framing that produced the document you are arguing against.
If you are a white nationalist or black hebrew isrialite or some other flavor of such you are acting 100% consistent, otherwise I think you should do some intellectual hygiene regarding prevailing theories accepted without critical analysis.
I believe in hbd. I don’t think Jews win more because of societal advantages. I think genetically they have a much higher average IQ than other groups. Which I don’t believe is critical theory.
In that case, carry on and thank you very much.
If it's not too personal, may I ask which you are? White nationalist or Black Israelite or some other flavour of such?
No, I'm jewish.
I'm just taking the compliment.
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Jewish criticism of the ADL is hardly uncommon. In any case, I highly doubt that a lack of antisemitism is why the Democrats aren’t doing well with the white working class.
In this case, "not being pro-Israel enough" means "only being pro-Israel when it can be used to attack the right, but ignoring it when the left would be the target". That's a substantial objection, not just a twenty Stalins criticism.
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what better way to deflect criticism of a group than to give said group protected status against criticism
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I do agree that there are a couple of ringers thrown in here that may be concerning (particularly the hate speech one, which is a clear end run around the Constitution), but I don't believe for a moment that it's just those parts that SecureSignals is objecting to.
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Only if you're a white-collar PMC. The underclass is not governed in the same way as the overclass. Do you think that being banned from Twitter would do anything to the people stealing random shit from Sephora? Most people are not on Twitter, or, if they are, use it to communicate shit-takes with their friends or as a mechanism to view various types of entertainments. Those latter functions are not part of "being in the public square" and can be done in any number of other ways, including passively consuming TikToks, Instagram Reels, YouTube shorts, etc.
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Obligatory reminder that one of the first actions Biden took upon taking office was rescinding Trump's executive order banning executive-branch training that makes these sorts of claims about white people.
Edit: It wasn't limited to white people, but it was widely understood that nobody with any real power in the executive branch wanted to run trainings that made similar claims about people of any other race.
Do you have further information for that?
My first thought is that it was performative deTrumpification—he did something, so it’s got to go. If it was clearing the path for anti-white training, I haven’t really seen the follow through.
What do you mean? There's been reports of CRT training in the military since then.
I don’t honestly have a great handle on what constitutes CRT. I guess I’d believe that the military has picked it up; if they did, it was probably down to the executive.
In the defense industry, diversity training has remained fairly anodyne. The closest we got to Internet-activist talking points was “race-blind isn’t good enough.” I wanted to see Trump’s EO so I could tell whether that would have made it past.
You keep saying this as if you don't want to admit what's happening. https://reason.com/2020/08/13/sandia-laboratory-nuclear-white-male-privilege-training/
And then when you're given evidence you forget all about it by next week. Is this deliberate?
My reply is simply, "which do you expect me to trust? Some guy on the internet, or my lying eyes?"
ETA: it is amusingly on brand to though see LockMart chase [latest thing] off a fucking cliff but I also suppose that I am in no position to cast stones.
Wait, why did I get notified here? Was there a ping?
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By "off a fucking cliff" do you mean "they will continue receiving lucrative government contracts until the collapse of the American Empire"?
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I keep saying this because it matches my experience. No one was giving me this evidence last time I raised the subject. Or the other time which got a little sidetracked by some guy ranting about socialism. So no, it's not deliberate. I'm just clueless.
arjin's example was better, anyway. Coincidentally, it's the same workshop, same year, and the same smug journalist blowing the whistle.
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It never ceases to amaze me how precise people's confusion on critical theory is. But if anyone's curious, a one sentence summary would be: dividing society into oppressor races and oppressed races, and analyzing social problems through that lens.
Or if you want something more in-depth and from the horses mouth, you can read something like Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement.
Is this going to be like that time you asked someone for an example of segregation, I gave you a link to segregated housing, you went "holy shit, how is this legal", and promptly refused to change your mind about anything? I wouldn't call this anodyne but YMMV.
You've convinced me. I won't try to pretend that's anodyne. So yeah, I'm seriously unsettled, and I'm reevaluating whether I've been misreading the messaging at my company.
I really didn't believe we were getting stuff like that. Given the level of cross-pollination in defense, it's unlikely that we are much less woke than LockMart. I could believe that the messaging is very stratified, and that expensive, controversial workshops are only spent on the upper management. Or it's possible that I've just had my head in the sand.
For what it's worth, you convinced me that people are successfully bringing back segregated housing, too. I stood by my belief that Pynewacket was being hyperbolic, but I was naïve to assume that sort of project would be banned.
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It was this executive order, repealed on Biden's first day in office.
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Here's Biden's 2023 follow-on 'whole of government' "Equity" EO: https://www.whitehouse.gov/equity/
It's chock-a-block with the government's plans to:
stuff every agency full of DEI commissars ("requir[ing] agencies to designate senior leaders accountable for implementing the equity mandate")
giving those commissars increased control and oversight over the agency's policymaking and enforcement decisions ("instruct[ing] agencies to consider bolstering the capacity of their civil rights offices");
directing the agencies to slant everything they do through DEI analysis ("direct[ing] agencies to produce Equity Action Plans annually and report to the public on their progress");
ensuring that resources will be allocated to the DEI commissars to carry out this new institutionalized and systemic racism/sexism/heterophobia ("direct[ing] the White House Office of Management and Budget to support agencies’ Equity Action Plans");
increasing the amount of racial, sexual, and gendered discrimination and graft in federal contracting ("formaliz[ing] the President’s goal of increasing the share of federal contracting dollars awarded to small disadvantaged business by 50 percent by 2025"); and
carefully pruning the collection and dissemination of federally-collected data and statistics so that these progressive DEI shibboleths can't be challenged ("focusing [agency OCR] efforts on emerging threats like algorithmic discrimination in automated technology" and "further promot[ing] data equity and transparency").
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I wonder if this push will have any effect at all on the increasing hostility towards Jews in Blue-team institutions, particularly towards those who wholeheartedly support Israel?
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-vanishing
https://www.thecollegefix.com/conservative-israeli-scholar-at-princeton-target-of-cancel-culture-campaign/
https://www.thecollegefix.com/harvard-hosts-fiery-palestinian-activist-well-known-for-antisemitic-rhetoric/
Or will they address the anti-semitism coming from Democrat darlings like Linda Sarsour, or from black activists? Or is this just another attempt to attack any conservatives they can paint as anti-semitic while ignoring any signs of it from their own side?
Yes, in fact a cynic might suspect that this is the intent. The grievance mongers are going to pedal racial grievances as is their wont, and guys like SS, @coffee_enjoyer, and others here are going to boost that signal like the good little Id-Pol stooges that they are because anything that increases the likelihood of ethnic strife is seen as a win in their book.
Do you see a difference between defensive and offensive id pol? Or active versus passive? In your book, id pol is bad even if others have been waging it for a decade?
Not really. It's all a load of psuedo-marxist bullshit, all of it.
Bruh. Ethnic, religious and racial identities have been a thing for far longer than marxism even existed. Get a grip. Not playing the game doesn't absolve you of the consequences for the enemy team owning you.
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I’m not sure this changes anything except for costing money.
Does anyone believe the Biden admin wasn’t already ‘encouraging online platforms to combat antisemitic misinformation’ or whatever?
The propaganda stuff literally just looks like excuses to spread money around to left wing NGO’s.
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I find this pearl-clutching a little hollow when most Westerners eat animals for breakfast lunch and dinner. Close the factory farms first, then you can get all high and mighty about Mexican dogs.
The point is that there is no coherent moral framework under which this is a bad thing while simultaneously meat-eating is fine.
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Do you really not understand the difference in how people perceive pet species and food species, or are you ignoring it to make a point?
Yeah but the point is that I don't think there's any genuine moral difference there, so it doesn't really make sense as a stick with which to beat Mexican society.
I take it you don't hold with Newtonian Ethics?
While I suppose it's a plausible moral system, where our obligation to pets fits in in that scheme doesn't seem obvious. Which is to say that lets say most Mexicans subscribe to something resembling Newtonian Ethics, they could simply and quite plausibly regard dogs as further from them (or maybe in Newtonian terms they exert less of a pull than humans) such that their obligation is sufficiently small as to not worry too much about mistreatment.
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An interesting hypothesis. If only there were some way to test it, such as looking at any of the currently existing majority Hispanic neighborhoods in major US cities.
Try Google street view. But why are you asking if there are "any" "poorer" neighborhoods like that? The claim was that it would be the norm. And it is not as if there aren't "any" "poorer" white areas like that, both in the US and abroad.
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While this guy apparently just dislikes Mexicans, I've seen American rightists go like "Mexicans hate Americans immigrating to Mexico when THEY are the ones immigrating to America?" and I've never quite understood the point - the Mexicans staying in Mexico are obviously not the ones immigrating, are they? (Well, they might have done it at one point, or might do it at some point, but at that moment they're obviously not invading the USA or whatever).
Not to mention a huge contingent of Americans hate the Mexicans who are immigrating to America.
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The Mexicans staying in Mexico still get very self-righteous about American attitudes regarding immigration - see AMLO's criticisms of DeSantis's immigration policies. Everyone loves talking about migrant rights when it's their in-group that benefits or their out-group that suffers. It's a different story when there are migrants who are driving up your own rent bill.
In reality the only people competing for rental apartments with American expats in Mexico City are the Mexican upper-middle class, who for the most part are indistinguishable in politics (and complexion) from the PMC of the rest of North America.
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The ire is probably misdirected when it's from Americans at the Mexicans that stayed and are irritated at American immigrants to Mexico, but I think the actual sentiment is more like, "goddamnit, can you libs at least notice that the Mexicans aren't being lunatics when they're sick of Americans and Americans aren't just being racist when they want people here to speak the damned language?".
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No, but their brothers, sons, cousins, fathers, or uncles are, and they are benefitting from the nearly $60 billion in remittances sent home annually by those expats - roughly 4% of Mexico's entire GDP.
Quite. The Mexicans in Mexico are the ones puppeteering the Mexicans in the USA: "Go to El Norte and send us some money" style. So yeah, they are invading the USA, in the same way that George Bush was invading Iraq - he isn't personally the boots on the ground, but the boots on the ground wouldn't have been there if he didn't direct them.
Is there no real difference between these two invasions? Something that might make it nonsensical to use the word "invasion" to describe both? Like the fact that Bush invaded using tanks and missiles and the Mexicans are "invading" by getting jobs?
Some (me) would say the Iraqi one is much more benign because that invasion didn't leave millions of American-Iraqui colonists / anchor-babies there to cause further demographic and political disruption in perpetuity.
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Uh, the recent migrants have mostly not been from Mexico.
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I dunno, are they? I'm not sure about Mexican immigration to USA, but traditional immigration pattern when it has come to Euro immigration in USA (or, say, Indian immigration to UK etc.) has been that it's been on a village basis - some villages are accustomed to sending immigrants to foreign countries (and generally each village has a typical region or city where the young people go when of age and unable to find local jobs), others are accustomed to sending them domestically to some big city. If someone's living in Mexico City, their brothers, sons, cousins, fathers and uncles might very well also live there, as that is the custom where they come from.
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I think HBD is glaringly obvious and true, that's probably the biggest redpill I've swallowed since growing up.
I personally wish for us to do something about it. While I'm not outright against drastic measures like sterilization of the retarded, I think there are simply kinder and more broadly palatable options sitting there on the table and that Western society simply ignores by sticking it's head up its own arse.
HBD is a fact, what policy ramifications it entails is a statement about your priorities rather than about HBD. Some find it to be in violation of their heartfelt belief in fundamental equality, and being idiots, choose to ignore reality instead of reassessing their beliefs. Others leap up at the opportunity to be xenophobic, to expel the unsightly other given that they have a mildly defensible pretext for it.
Personally, I think the only lasting solution to the issue of HBD is going full steam ahead on genetic engineering or other forms of cognitive enhancement. It's a silly artifact of evolution that the color of one's skin should have anything to do with one's intelligence, and we should be uplifting everyone to be the very best they possibly can be, and where it's too late for somatic improvements, at least offer them the option of making sure their kids get dealt a better hand.
Leaving aside that there are a bazillion other excellent reasons to do the above other than HBD, it's a no brainer, and it fundamentally disappoints me that civilization as a whole fell prey to absurd taboos. We're leaving trillion dollar notes on the floor and then covering them up with our dung.
I'm not even calling for the establishment of a race of Ubermensch, I want everyone raised up to as close to equality as possible, but I don't want to rely on frankly stupid and unproductive endeavors like trying to spend billions more on educating the uneducatable.
Or at the very least, the US should realize that if they're in a hole, they ought to stop digging, or throwing trillions more into the money burning pit to absolutely no avail.
No it's not. Those who went away from ancestral environment are more likely to change. As color of skin is a proxy of going away from ancestral environment, it is no surprise is correlated with something else.
I don't mean it literally, of course I'm aware of the evolutionary pressures that changes in the ancestral environment might have produced.
Imagine if, like Orks from Warhammer 40k, painting an F1 car a different color made it faster. That would be an awkward state of events, and to the extent that the human body is a machine too, I want as much phenotypic diversity as possible with trading off something important like intelligence.
But it isn't what happens. In shop there are, say, professional photo cameras in black color and toy children cameras in pink but their color has no bearing on features that make them different.
Where would you stop?
What about, say, blue, green or purple skin? They are missing. And I want tentacles too.
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Honestly sterilisation is not even needed, given how modernity is reducing the natural birth rates of the lower classes below replacement. Give it a few generations and they'll wipe themselves out of their own accord. All that we need to do is let it run its course among the lumpenproles while subsidizing better human beings to have more children (e.g. tax breaks as a percentage of your income for each child you have work to do this well, a woman who's earning $20k get $2k from a 10% cut, while a woman who's earning $200k gets $20k from the same level of cut) and work towards developing artificial wombs so that we can grow superior humans directly.
Lower classes are actually above replacement in USA. In middle class, income is correlated negatively with TFR and doesn't go up until top 3% in income. I guess if we take TFR vs IQ instead of TFR vs income then it doesn't have inflection point at the right.
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Why?
Seriously, why do you think it should be some sort of teleological objective of mankind to have everyone calibrated to be of equal ability?
Even if these abilities are high, this is still some kind of Harrison Bergeron dystopian shit.
It might be a bad idea to try to adjust every individual to be of equal ability, but I am not sure that it would be a bad idea to raise up every population to be of equal average ability if it could be accomplished through the sum of voluntary decisions made by each set of parents. Of course you would need to fix the definition of "population" (say, US census categories as of 2020) to prevent later complications.
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My opinion is that there's a physical ceiling on how far it's possible to enhance one's capabilities, and everyone deserves an opportunity to get there.
I don't think a society of everyone with Olympian physiques and Nobel level IQs is in anyway dystopian, and that's lowballing it in terms of what's possible. If there are minor variations, so be it, but I don't want people to suffer needlessly from drawing the short straw in genetics, there's nothing else you have less control over after all.
To sum it up:
Offer everyone cognitive and physical enhancements.
Let them choose which ones to avail.
If it's even a remotely sensible society, you'll end up with everyone at Pareto optimal points, and the world will be a far better place. Anyone not taking up the offer is an idiot, and no tears should be shed for them.
The end result approximates almost perfect equality, but that does not mean that I want equality for its own sake. Let everyone be the best they can be, and it'll work out.
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"Raising people up" is, in fact, the exact opposite of Harrison Bergeron dystopia.
The problem is that if equality is your primary goal and "raising up" is only a preferred method, you quickly realize there's not a lot of raising you can do, but lowering is a lot more practical.
Nothing in the grandfather post indicated the poster was in favor of lowering people down. Let's try taking people at their word.
The post said:
It's ambiguous as to whether equality is the goal and raising up the desired method, or not. But if it is, then the unsuitability of the method quickly leads to other methods of fulfilling the goal.
I'm sincerely baffled you find that statement ambiguous. I'm finding it really hard to take your reply in good faith.
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It isn't. And frankly even with gene modding the genetics of body features are so intermeshed whatever you do to enchance some one's intelect WILL have an effect on how they appear on the outside, indeed their whole body will change in subtle ways, some times only AI will be able to tell they were genemoded, some times you'll be able to tell yourself just by looking at them, wheather it will be entirely new skin colors, or facial features or hair distribution or whatever.
You can't just change one organ, it doesn't work that way with our genetics. Everything is masively horizontally integrated. You change one thing, you will change a dozen other systems and organs at the same time.
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I haven't given much thought to the idea, but I would probably be against mass involuntary sterilization of people with undesirable characteristics. A method of implementing eugenics which I find far more defensible, and I think many people would agree with me, would be to sterilize criminals. There is a lot of overlap between criminals and people who a eugenicist would want to prevent from reproducing. Objections that it's involuntary are inapplicable, because we already do horrible things to criminals like imprisoning them, or even, depending on time and place, executing them. You could frame it as just another punishment, or to prevent children being raised in abusive households, etc., without publicizing the eugenic effects.
In America, Black people would of course be disproportionately affected by this, which would upset some on the left, but it would also mean that the difference between Blacks and Whites would narrow over time. (And Whites would be affected more than Asians, and so on. All the racial differences would narrow.)
If this had been implemented, say, two generations ago, in the 1970s, we would already be seeing huge results. As is, however, it seems kind of pointless because by the time we start seeing results, genetic engineering will likely already be widespread.
You'd need to get them early. Offer vasectomies as the diversion program for first-time violent offenders, or accept nominations into the program from their high schools or truant officers.
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The objection to that plan is that most criminals have already reproduced by the time they’re convicted, isn’t it?
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I may be misremembering. I seem to recall a minor skirmish in the 90's culture wars around billboards in California that were advertising cash payments for volunteering to be sterilized.
It seems we pay the underclass to reproduce now, would we see better outcomes if we paid them not to?
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I mostly agree with you, but I think if we do go the genetic engineering route it will be even more critical that we take care of the cognitively impaired than it is now. Because there is no way we figure out optimal genetics without fucking up a shitload of people in the process. And a world where you can get executed or neutered because you didn't want to be dumb, but were already dumb enough to trust a shady pharmaceutical company to make you an ubermensch, is definitely a dystopia.
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I constantly wonder what it is about the dumb people looking alike that makes it politically salient. Just our inbuilt tribalism I suppose.
I just keep thinking back to my time in school. I don't recall encountering a single minority until highschool. We still had dumb kids. Nobody gave a fuck. There will always be dumb kids and smart kids. They turn into dumb adults and smart adults. Sometimes even the smart kids turn into dumb adults. When everybody looked the same, it simply was not a political matter. It was a fact of life.
I simply do not understand what The Plan is these days. The average IQ of African Americans, near as I can tell, is incontrovertibly lower than the rest of America. You can argue over causes all day. Whether it's cultural, environmental or genetic. Even if we had that answer to all our mutual satisfaction, it changes nothing about the population we have, and need to live with, today.
All that said, I simply don't understand how you convince a population that believes "We wuz kangs", and successfully convince them that they are probably ending up at about the correct station in life given their individual IQs. That there will never be as many blacks in the most intellectually rigorous fields as other races. There will be some, because every population has a distribution. But don't be shocked when all your asian classmates (if they haven't fled the community) are getting accepted to colleges while you are joining the army. If they'll even have you.
Frankly the only workable solution I see any longer is Scott Adam's sage advice.
This is one of the arguments against HBD, though, that black people won't accept underrepresentation (and you're a bad person for wanting them to). But lots of white parents have to break it to their kids that, no, you probably won't get to be an astronaut, so why should black people be any different?
There are a lot of things relatively dumb people can do and make decent livings.
But being a plumber in Tulsa is low status, and while dads can get away with telling their sons that ‘aren’t good at tests’ to consider it, school systems categorically refuse to even try whether the kids in question are black, white, oriental, native or Malay.
Now you’re asking them to open themselves up to a disparate impact lawsuit to do something they don’t want to do anyways?
Look, I’ll buy that blacks should be as functional as 85 IQ whites. But it’s kinda hard to get them there, because the social institutions that make 85 IQ whites more functional than 85 IQ blacks are not things that can be imposed from the top down(you’ll notice that a big chunk of modern bro country is dedicated to glorifying being a plumber in the suburbs of a third rate metro in flyover while functionally no rap music is, for example), and even discussing the cultural differences that feed into it is taboo.
Regardless of social status, plumbing is not a low IQ gig (for the well paying positions at least).
This site shows plumbers with IQ’s starting in the lower-mid eighties, which is what I would call ‘low’. And there’s almost always a legal definition of ‘plumber’ which excludes people who, say, come along to paint the pipe plumbers have put in place, and which keeps wages high.
https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/occupations.aspx
Neat! Thanks for the info.
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That’s surprising
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This raises my respect for country music, since a lot of the happiest men I know fit that approximate description.
The distinguishing feature between country and pop these days is the former reflecting things the blue collar laboring class thinks are important.
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I mean, sure, but also, I knew plenty of dumb kids that were so dumb they didn't even understand how dumb they were. They just thought life was "unfair". When their poor impulse control caused them to punch other kids in the head when they got bored, it was "unfair" that they got in trouble. And frankly, the apple rarely fell far from the tree, and their parents were also so dumb they didn't understand how dumb they were. Everyone was just "unfair" to them.
But they were all white, so nobody gave a shit. There weren't enough of them to band together and demand schools stop punishing their children for randomly punching other kids in the skull. They had no cards to play against other white parents who didn't want their children punched in the skull, even if they had somehow organized.
That this is not how things play out currently when dumb parents of politically salient skin color complain about their dumb kids getting punished for randomly punching kids in the skull is a large part of why my kids will never enter a public school. The entire system is held hostage by the most violent, lowest performers because race card. All you can do is flee.
Worse, the system is redesigned to not punish anyone. Not the dumb black kids, dumb Hispanic kids or dumb white kids.
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It's not about intelligence, it's about violating one of the basic tenets of our civil religion - that making a comparison between "black" and "white" which imputes negative characteristics to "black" is bad and wrong, because easily pattern-matched to bad, unenlightened white southerners and colonialists from the 19th Century.
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Is there anything in this section (other than time-period specific technology) that would have been out of place in the US 100 or 200 years ago? For example, the behavior of early Mormons makes it seem like skepticism and common sense literally hadn't been invented yet:
One of the key witnesses is described as:
Among other fantastic claims. There's a lot of crazy stuff in that link. And this wasn't the Borderers in Appalachia--Joseph Smith's ancestors were definitely Puritan and Mormonism began in upstate New York.
Safety is expensive. Car seats, climbing harnesses, etc. If something has to be done, and you're poor, then you'll just have to do it in the unsafe way. How many Darwin Awards went to hillbillies using guns for things they shouldn't have?
Overall I don't see a good reason to believe that these are problems inherent to a particular ethnicity of people rather than contingent on education, wealth, and possibly culture.
I think it’s also a part of the de masculinization of modern American and European culture in which all risk of any sort are horrific and to be avoided even at the cost of actually living.
I'm all for facing certain risks head-on and accepting that some amount of risk is unavoidable in a life worth living. I don't know what's to be gained from neglecting even basic safety regardless of context. At least Pasha's post from today is about taking risks to have fun, explore, and learn things. Risking disability or death when it's easily avoidable for misplaced machismo is the opposite of masculine, in my opinion. "Duty is heavier than a mountain. Death is lighter than a feather." Your duty as a traditional man is to take care of your family. Can't do that if you're crippled or dead. Put aside your ego and do the boring but important things; that's actually the hard part.
Most of the complaints about risk come from people who don't really understand the risks though -- I will do things at heights which make onlookers shit their pants, mostly just so that they will shit their pants. Also for the lulz; it's fun, and work is supposed to be fun! But these things are less dangerous than the drive to work, for me.
I've also seen people do stuff that makes me shit my pants at work, but they don't have a deathwish -- they figured out a trick that makes people shit their pants, and can do it safely. Like trapeze artists.
(Nybbler's welder was probably using a torch -- it's actually not that hard on the eyes, the googles are quite bright compared to arc helmets, and are mostly there in case of spatter)
No, an arc. I know the difference.
Huh -- I've caught the odd flash, and it's pretty blinding even in the short term.
Was he like, doing short tacks while looking the other way? I've seen that before, but unless he was already blind actually looking at the weld sounds rough. (I don't think you'd be able to see anything anyways?)
Yeah, pretty much. Looking up, more like. He was doing repairs on some metal stairs parallel to the ones I was using (in the US of course both sets would be closed off, or they'd have built some sort of temporary barrier between the repair area and the open stairs), and I noticed because the flash was pretty bright even from where I was. There was a visor right next to him, but I guess he thought it was too hot or maybe it was easier to see where to start without it.
This one actually makes kind of sense from an efficiency perspective if you don't have an auto-darkening helmet -- the classical approach is to line up your stinger with the helmet up, then kind of shake your head side to side until it drops. This is a PITA if you are doing a lot of small discontinuous welds, and once you've done a few you don't really need to see what's going on with the weld pool to do an OK job. Auto-body workers do a lot of this when welding panels (to keep the head spread out and not warp them); I think I've seen a torch-head designed s.t. it's just the right distance from the panel if you press the nose of it up against the work that it makes a nice tack weld but hides the arc.
tl;dr -- that's pretty safe by Mexico standards; lots of people in the US will do it to if OH&S is looking the other way. (although maybe not so much anymore with auto-helmets being pretty cheap)
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A lot of this safety stuff is genuinely good and useful and not using it is idiotic, like the example nybbler gave above you.
It doesn’t make you a ‘real man’ to unnecessarily risk life and limb when there’s a trivial mitigation. It makes you reckless and stupid.
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It's that, but it's not just that, it's also attitude. I've seen Mexicans (in Mexico) arc welding without eye protection when the eye protection was right there. Personally I think we could use a little more of that attitude in the US, but maybe not that much; vision is important.
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the thing is, the actual Nazis did not use IQ tests. they never used them, unlike the US.
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An awful lot of people believe that low intelligence logically implies moral inferiority. That if you are unintelligent, you are a bad person. It is a moral failing to not be smarter.
Progressives seem to believe this more strongly than conservatives, and use it as one of their primary attacks against the right. If you take "stupid = bad" as an axiom, then HBD forces you to conclude that less intelligent races are bad, and progressives who don't even question the "stupid = bad" axiom automatically equate HBD with "some races are inferior". But because the "stupid = bad" axiom is unstated, and probably not consciously endorsed, they can't quite articulate this chain of reasoning. The embarrassment that would come if it were incontrovertibly proven that some races were inferior on a genetic level is that it would be revealed that they are bigots. They have always been bigots against unintelligent people, but by restricting their bigotry to unintelligent white people, manage to convince themselves that that doesn't count. But if colored people are even less intelligent, and it wasn't society's fault it was inherent to the individuals themselves and their genes, then the progressives would either have to admit to being racist, or change their worldview to account for good but unintelligent people. Who, in my opinion, exist in multitudes. I've met quite a few. But a lot of people aren't ready to admit that.
If anything it is, of course, the exact opposite. "They deserve to be at the bottom of the ladder because they are stupid" is the essential line of race conservatives. Therefore, welfare, affirmative action, criminal justice reform, etc, are a waste of time at best, and counter-productive at worst. The progressive line is "they are not stupid, so if they are at the bottom it can only be because society has placed them there." Therefore, welfare, affirmative action, criminal justice reform, etc, are necessary.
The original quote:
That description is straightforwardly true, supportable by innumerable examples from across our popular media, entertainment, academia, etc. Progressives and Blues generally do in fact treat stupidity as a moral failing when talking about white people and particularly about Reds. It is not unreasonable to assess their insistence that Blacks cannot possibly be less intelligent on average with the way they treat Reds, whom they loudly and frequently have insisted are significantly less intelligent on average, and have spent decades mocking for this failing. There is no way to reconcile their treatment of the perceived lack of intelligence of their collective outgroup, with their treatment of the factual lack of intelligence of a collective ingroup.
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But if you actually prove that they are stupid, then what?
This is MathWizard's point: progressives don't actually disbelieve that the stupid deserve to be at the bottom of the pile, they simply disagree about who are the stupid ones.
Yes,if they really are stupid, that undermines the argument of progressives. But I was responding only to MathWizard's claim that progressives think stupid = morally inferior, which is quite silly.
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I don't think that's opposite. The progressives aren't questioning that stupid people belong at the bottom, they're tacitly agreeing that stupid people belong at the bottom and arguing that minorities are secretly intelligent if all the cultural biases didn't keep underestimating them. The argument is "they aren't stupid so they don't belong at the bottom with the stupid people", not "it doesn't matter how smart they are, they still deserve good outcomes anyway"
It does seem relevant that progressives are in favor of downward redistribution though. "The market needs to set wages based on scarce traits like intelligence, but the unintelligent should still get healthcare, free college, public housing, and childcare subsidized by redistribution from the intelligent" might imply a different moral judgement of the unintelligent than 'the unintelligent should be at the bottom and get nothing but their market wages".
I don't think I would categorize that as a "progressive" position though, that just seems like classic liberalism. Maybe with a wider reach, and an ignorance of economic incentives. But I'm not opposed to the general idea of redistribution. But the progressive position is usually that the market does not need to set wages based on scarce traits, a "wage gap" between groups is evidence of discrimination and needs to be fixed at the source. Rich people should give their money to poor people not because they are more capable and competent and thus should subsidize the less able, but because their wealth was stolen in the first place by discriminatory institutions and exploitation of the disadvantaged. The advocated policies are similar, but the justifications, and the extent of them, are very different.
Maybe I'm setting up too weak of a straw man to knock down. Obviously there are more and less extreme people along the way. But if you find someone claiming "minorities need social support because they're less capable than whites" they are going to be tarred and feathered in progressive circles as an evil Nazi, not held up as an orthodox progressive who says what they're all thinking.
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yeah, somehow lead poisoning is still holding back blacks even though whites and Asians in same environment or worse environments do better, and lead levels have been low for half a century now.
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There is no one strain of denial.
You have the people arguing IQ isn't even real. As in it can't be measured and different "types" of intelligence are totally uncorrelated with each other.
You have people arguing that IQ is real, but their is no racial IQ gap because the tests are racist.
You have people arguing that IQ is real, and seemingly admitting there is an "achievement gap" between blacks and well... everyone. But they will never utter the word intelligence, have no plan to deal with the substantial population permanently lacking in "achievement" and beyond all help. They just believe that somehow, this time, and with enough white guilt, lots and lots of tax payer money, and totally neglecting the needs of every other demographic, you can nurture all those young black geniuses into their full potential.
IMHO, given the way our institutions are continually abolishing all means of measuring competence, I think some combination of the first and second strains of denial are winning the day. Probably a majority of the first strain that disbelieves in IQ at a fundamental level. Or is so far down the "everything is a social construct" rabbit hole that they disbelieve being good at things has any relevance to whether you should be rewarded handsomely for them. Even Doctors. Because "racism".
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"progressives believe stupid = bad more than conservatives but conveniently don't think about it" always looked like a sneer to me rather than an accurate assessment. Progressives do think uneducated = bad.
Can it not be both?
Let us be blunt IQ does not measure "intelligence" it measures "academic aptitude". To the degree that there is any correlation at all between IQ and positive social outcomes it is because our society has chosen to use academics as a means to sort winners from losers. This coupled with general laziness (actually calibrating your test cases is hard yo) is why that progressive professors are always grading on a curve rather than knowledge and understanding of the material.
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It's not enough to just be educated, though. Trump has a B.S. from Wharton, and yet many of the progressive attacks on him focus on his perceived lack of intelligence.
It's not enough to be credentialed. Does it show that Trump went to college? There certainly isn't much emphasis on it from his own side: as someone removed from American politics I had not heard of his education before.
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George W. Bush went to Yale and he was famously seen as an idiot by the left in the 2000's merely because he had a few malapropisms and committed the largest foreign policy blunder in my lifetime. If your family is loaded and you're not an eloquent speaker people will assume that your degree wasn't really earned. The right is similarly dismissive of Jill Biden's PhD because she got it after Joe became a senator.
Jill Biden has a Ed.D which is a doctorate in education, and enables you to make more money if you are a teacher. It is not a Ph.D. A Ed.D is a practical degree, for people who plan to teach. Most schools pay you more the more education you have, so it makes sense to get the qualification. At Delaware, where she got her degree, you need a portfolio rather than a dissertation, and and Ed.D is part-time for 3-4 years as opposed to a Ph.D. which is full-time for 5 to 6 years.
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It's more than reasonable to be dismissive of something that doesn't exist, such as Jill Biden's PhD, since Jill holds a Doctor of Education (EdD) and not a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).
Equating EdD degrees with PhD degrees is a common misconception—one that EdD holders are in no hurry to correct—as they get to gas themselves up with the prestige of a PhD using a degree obtained at a much lower difficult setting. Academic stolen valor: plus it's not like one would expect even Education PhDs to be all that tough either, in the first place.
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There's an underappreciated element here IMO: the instinctive refusal to utter fighting words while not being a fighter. The brain is capable of marvelous feats of self-deception & motivated reasoning not only in order to protect its self-image, but also to physically protect itself from harm, ie. by preventing the adoption of beliefs that will get its owner's ass kicked.
How often do we straightforwardly tell another person "I'm smarter than you"? I've never done it; I imagine most people haven't. With good reason: it's a challenge, 'fighting words', as it fairly directly implies 'so we should do things my way if we come to a disagreement' AKA 'I'm in charge now.' This isn't something any social structure can let stand, but modern white America even less than most, with its reliance upon poorly-defined social hierarchy for avoiding conflict. (See: VKR's Gametalk) If you're middle class, went to university or worked for a corporation, chances are very good that you've been extensively trained to subconciously avoid conflicts of precisely this type, and it may well be that this taboo is load-bearing. Scaled up, saying 'my group is smarter than your group' has even more serious social ramifications, again independent of the statement's truth value. Pretending it isn't so may be the best alternative.
The standard response to inconvenient truths, at least as far as I can tell, is to change the subject and not talk about them, not to actively deny them. The only time I've ever told someone to their face that I'm smarter than them was when having petty arguments as a child, usually at some point where it escalates to them calling me an idiot and me going "well actually..." and bragging about my grades and advanced math.
But I have never never never pretended to be the same or lesser intelligence than someone I'm not. Nowadays when I get complimented for being smart, I get embarassed and shrug it off as unimportant rather than bragging, but I never never never lie and pretend that it isn't true when we both know it is. There's a difference between choosing not to actively announce certain truths to avoid conflict, and lying about them to protect yourself when confronted by a hostile crowd. And there's a vast gulf between that and actively opposing and arguing against people saying the truth that you yourself secretly agree with. I'm not saying it never happens, but it's way more rare than strategic silence.
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I think the best world for how it is would be an ignorance is bliss world. HBD isn’t taught but the elites have read Charles Murray. MSNBC doesn’t say the word white supremacists constantly. They accept differences in outcomes isn’t proof of racism. It’s probably not good if every kid is taught in high school that blacks are you on average much less intelligent. It would be very discouraging. I still had an inkling as a 5 year old that most of the sports players didn’t look like me especially at run fast positions.
But that’s also a conservative view. Some systems just work better probably because they get to a workable rational equilibrium that agrees with human nature and not a pure robotic rationalist.
I was always fond of the 90s vision of diversity, AKA the RPG party: everyone is different and has different strengths and weaknesses, and by specializing, and working together, and dividing tasks appropriately, we can achieve greater things than we could alone or if everyone were the same.
And to some extent this is a fictional exaggeration, some people are just better at nearly everything than some other people. But even then, comparative advantage is a thing that can provide mutual benefits (I bet Elon Musk would be an excellent fry cook, but the fact that someone else does it means he has more time to do his thing, even if they're not as good at frying as him). But to some extent it's straight up true. If you tried to make me be a lumberjack I would be absolutely awful at it. There are literally millions of Americans better suited to the job than me, many of whom are less intelligent than me. The fact that they can do their thing and I can do mine is great, and I'm glad they exist, even if a hypothetical version of them with all of their existing talents plus my intelligence on top would be better.
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Oddly, the only ways you can keep the smarter kids from figuring out black kids are on average less intelligent basically amount to segregation. If black kids are in other schools, the kids get no basis for comparison. If the student bodies are carefully curated so some schools have only the smart black kids, they get a false one -- but you can't apply that one too widely for lack of appropriate population.
I don’t care if the smart kids realize it. I literally said as a 6 year old I realized all the football players were black.
My point is sometimes their knowledge you don’t need to yell out. People know it but they don’t talk about it constantly.
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I remember a study or book years ago showing that nerdy black kids in all black schools got hassled less because they couldn't be so easily compared to Asians or whites.
(Of course who were they getting hassled by?...)
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I think most people, correctly, view the unintelligence as a disaster waiting to happen, that they don't want to be around when it happens. I think many people, especially here, fail to truly appreciate the qualitative difference being stupid brings. It's not like an RPG where you rolls are harder, but you can still occasionally have a streak of good RNG.
For example, lets look at what you can expect of African Americans in their measured average IQ range.
While I agree that smart people often overestimate the intellectual capabilities of people with average or below-average IQ's, the claim that violence is associated with a particular IQ range seems extremely tenuous. Intelligence is important but it isn't the sole determinant of personality, and while there is a correlation between lower IQ and violence in the US owing to the particular populations present here, the opposite trend can be observed in Mexico, where murder rates are lower in plurality indigenous regions than in plurality white ones (Conquistadors were a mean bunch).
I think American blacks are culturally (strongly) and genetically (not as strongly) predisposed to violence, and that those genetic predispositions are to some extent shared with southern whites i.e. not from slave ancestry, but from slaveowner ancestry. Black people elsewhere would have to be analyzed independently, as they don't share all of these characteristics. In some multiethnic countries like Mali, the black agricultural population is less violent than the lighter-skinned desert pastoralist population.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I have a mixture of Asian-style social conservatism and more classically American liberal beliefs i.e. on a personal level I follow the typical "immigrant parent" line, on an intermediate scale I think of Tocquevillian-style local democracy as an ideal, and on a larger scale I align more or less with Hobbes or Xunzi. When I'm feeling witty I call this Confucianism with American Characteristics.
I mean, I don't want to believe this. I take no pleasure in it, but it is simply what I have concluded given the available data and a lifetime of observation. It is as unlikely that every group of humans would be equal in their propensity towards violence as that they would have the same skin tone, the same average height or IQ, or be equally capable of running marathons. Moreover, the difference between any two ethnic groups in terms of aggression will be nothing compared to the difference between men and women, and we have (mostly) managed to accept and internalize the latter.
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This is not really sufficient effort for engagement on the matter. "That seems messed up" signals your disapproval ("that view seems low status") without explaining why you disapprove, or how the observed evidence might be explained in other ways.
(It may help to sub a different ingroup/outgroup to grasp the dynamic here. For example, if the other user had suggested that men are naturally more violent than women, would you say "that seems messed up?" Or imagine they had suggested that young people are naturally more violent than old people, or that people with cognitive impairments are naturally more violent than cognitive normies. Whether any of these claims is actually true or false, you can hopefully see why someone might make such claims, and think of the kinds of evidence that would strengthen or weaken your tendency to endorse or reject such claims.)
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If you thought the Conquistadors were mean, you should read about the Mexica.
My impression is that Mesoamericans are like the Japanese or Germans: capable of committing horrendous acts when sanctioned by the state or their religion, but less likely than most to commit spontaneous acts of interpersonal violence. People who have lived in Guatemala, for instance, have told me that the stereotypes there are that Mayans are shy and docile whereas Ladinos (the local name for Mestizos) are loud and aggressive.
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The Mexica were exterminated, though. There’s a million or so nahua(who are their closest relatives) left, but the biggest mexican indigenous population is probably the much tamer maya.
Honestly I’d wager that if you count by genetics rather than language there’s more pure blooded purepecha left than mexica.
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Why would this be the case?
And what is this website, anyway? Is it trustworthy? A quick look around gives me the impression that the guy is a nutcase.
I think the mechanism would be that it makes you smart enough to realize that you can solve your immediate problem with violence, but not smart enough to realize that it will make you worse-off in the long term (assuming your environment is such that violence really is bad for you in the long run).
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This website seems scarcely believable. Only at 130 does one apparently 'just capable of writing a legible piece of text', yet he a moment before described the 120-9 range as masters students, lawyers etc. who are surely capable of writing 'an article'? Where are his sources? Just looks like complete dross he plucked out of the air.
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You don't have to see unintelligence as a specific moral failing or believe it impossible to be both unintelligent and righteous in order to recognize the fact that, broadly speaking being intelligent is better than being unintelligent
Better in the sense of being more competent and thus better able to enact ones will on the world and accomplish desired outcomes. Not better as in "this person tries to make the world a better place instead of being selfish". Intelligence is comparable to being physically strong, or talented at piano, or a skilled actor. It can be impressive, and can accomplish more good things if used for good, but it doesn't actually make you a good person and if you use it for evil then it just makes you a more impressive villain who accomplishes more evil.
I agree that the intelligence axis is for the most part orthogonal to the evil/good axis but i still think you're downplaying just how important intelligence is. Intelligence is the primary quality that seperates men from beasts. It was a necessary part of nearly every societal advancement ever made. Almost everyone would be better off if they, their neighbors and their countrymen were more intelligent. If one group is on average less intelligent that reflects very poorly on that group and that's true even without adding any mythos about intelligent being equivalent to moral virtue. Now that doesn't mean we should stick our heads in the sand to avoid truths that are offensive but i don't think pretending they're not offensive is helpful either. Personally I think the best way to make the truth of HBD more palatable instead of downplaying the importance of intelligence is downplaying the importance of race. A white man with an IQ of 80 is less intelligent than a black man with an IQ of 120. Population means mean nothing when evaluating individuals.
"Better off" is not "morally superior". Neither is "healthier", "safer", or "more productive". Not even "less prone to addiction". Generally, crime rates are used as a proxy for morality, but this is a foolish thing to do: there are a lot of ways to be an absolute shit to your fellow humans without breaking the law. And sure, crime is a more immediate problem, and lower-IQ people commit more of it, and that's a problem that has to be managed... but it wasn't low-IQ people who built the current race-war narrative into the memetic hazard it's become, or who make effective law enforcement impossible.
You completely missed my point. My point was that intelligence is important enough for reasons outside of "moral superiority" that even if we all make it very clear that intelligence is not the same as morality that acknowledging one group is more intelligent than another will still not be easy in the same way that acknowledging one group is more athletic is.
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I have tried debating liberals on this, and it's not just leftists who are hostile to HBD. It usually ends up going in circles. they start by denying that IQ is real or that it measure anything. i ask why are some people better at {math,engineering,physics, etc.} than others, and it's a sort of cognitive dissonance of conceding that there is some innate ability or 'thing' that is unequally distributed but at the same time not the same as intelligence.
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This matches my pet theory exactly. Something I've noticed is that people who strongly hold the "stupid = bad" axiom (though I might characterize it more as the equivalent "intelligent = virtuous" axiom) often tend to be quite intelligent themselves and also enjoying the fruits of their intelligence. E.g. they make a lot of money in white collar work that they got through excelling at school, and they also have little trouble with the law or finances due to being pretty good about planning their behavior. It's led me to believe that much of this belief in this axiom is tied up with one's ego, that believing in the virtuousness of intelligence rather than the dumb luck of it allows one to more easily justify the cosmic rightness of one's good lot in life. And that deep belief that the reason one lives a better life than others is because one earned it by being more virtuous is a hard thing to let go of, especially if your worldview also posits that the luck of birth having any impact on one's lot in life relative to others is wrong and ought to be destroyed wherever possible.
I've said similar things myself on this topic previously. Everyone is biased to think that their own attributes are better and more valuable than other peoples'. I've struggled this myself, and do still retain some subconscious sense of superiority for my own intelligence. But philosophically I reject the premise on a conscious level, and I think that has helped keep my ego in check somewhat, though definitely not entirely.
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This article is not the worst thing I've ever read on the subject, but it's frustrating how readily people go to the strawmen/weakmen/worst-case-scenario in these discussions.
If you don't personally think of native intelligence as high-status, then you aren't going to much care if (say) Asians are more likely to have it than Native Americans. In fact many people throughout history have treated native intelligence as either neutral or low-status; in some circumstances it might be bad to be smart (recall the manioc example from The Secret of Our Success). Because the "Information Age" has imbued nerds with social cachet they haven't always enjoyed, this is less often the case today than it has been in the past.
Progressives are (like most Westerners) far too quick to run to the Nazi analogy, but their underlying concerns are more, I think, a combination of their own eugenic instincts and their concern that social programs not be dismantled. Because progressives tend to think of intelligence as high-status, they also think of it as the sort of thing that should be distributed "fairly" (i.e., as equally as possible, whatever that means). But because progressives also tend to think we should "follow the science," specifically through government intervention in the human condition, they tend to jump immediately from facts to action plans. Tell a progressive that you've developed a low-cost, low-energy, non-polluting technology that turns dirty water into clean water, and they're immediately wondering how that technology can be deployed to benefit of humanity. Tell a progressive that you've found the genetic cause of a particular disease, and they're immediately wondering how we can turn that discovery into a treatment. The progressive mindset is fundamentally one of engineering the human condition.
To a deeply conservative mind, the proposition that "some people are stupid, it runs in families just like eye, hair, and skin color" is not only so blindingly obvious that researching it seems like a huge waste of time money, but also just a fact of life from which no particular conclusions need be drawn. Oh, sure, maybe you have second thoughts about marrying the handsome boy when you realize he's kind of dull; you think "do I really want to have this guy's dull children?" But this is not substantially more eugenic than secretly hoping that your children get your wife's red hair.
But the deeply conservative mind is living in the human world, not attempting to renovate it. So when a progressive is presented with mountains of meticulously-assembled peer-reviewed evidence that (1) IQ is substantially predictable along the lines of racial heritage and (2) IQ substantially influences the quality of a community's culture and economy, they don't just shrug their shoulders like a conservative. They start to wonder--how can we use this information to engineer the human condition? And the human mind, in its wonderfully inventive way, starts making suggestions: sterilize the idiots! Increase high-intelligence immigration from other nations! Uh... date white men and Asian women, perhaps?
In this way, progressive opposition to the very expression of the data on these matters is a kind of "telling on themselves," so to speak. It's not that they think the only logical thing to do would be to murder anyone with a low-IQ; it's that even a cursory grasp of HBD painfully illustrates the incredible shortcomings of progressivism as an ideology. If it turns out that your life is good, not because of anything the government has done for you, but because you live among the right sort of people, then huge swathes of social policy are just pointless and wasteful expenditures, fruitless attempts to engineer the human condition that can never, ever succeed until we literally engineer the humans themselves. This is incompatible with Western liberalism, and further exposes the daylight between "liberal" and "progressive." It threatens to unravel such entrenched political interests that the only possible response from the ingroup is to taboo the subject entirely.
It's hard to square this idea that progressives are relentlessly devoted to engineering the human condition with Scott's piece "Galton, Ehrlich, Buck" which describes progressives as considering Eugenics so taboo that they oppose even oppose sperm banks of very talented people or attempts to inform people with rare genetic conditions so that the don't marry people with similar genes The 'eugenic instinct' is dead, replaced by deep concerns about ableism.
Your examples of how the liberal engineering drive would function in response to HBD don't make much sense to me. Recruiting international scientists isn't about eugenics it's about meritocracy. You don't need HBD or hereditary IQ to justify it. You'd still want whoever the smartest people in the world are currently working in your labs regardless of how their children turn out.
I think it's less profound and more historically contingent. As with Eugenics where a regime of forced sterilization made the whole field taboo obviously segregation made the entire study of racial difference taboo. Even where that difference is not facially threatening to liberalism, like explaining black athletic achievement, genetic explanations are taboo (with maybe an exception for Ethiopians because they're a subset of black people and there's the environmental explanation of altitude). There's no IQ gap that would be small enough to not be taboo, because we're all the way down the slur cascade.
They don't, though. Or rather, they do in cases where society has attached the word "eugenics" to a particular activity, but primarily a matter of social signaling. I cannot think of a more obviously eugenic practice than elective abortion; "the time is not right to have a child" or "this child is genetically defective and so I will terminate the pregnancy" is an extremely eugenic decision, and of course abortion is a keystone of American leftist politics. Virtually every human I know is at least weakly, and often strongly, eugenic in every way that makes any practical difference. Progressives have always loved eugenics, and still do; they just hate the word and its historical associations.
In particular, a progressive is far more likely to abort a Down syndrome baby than a conservative. In some especially progressive parts of the world, Down syndrome has essentially been eliminated via elective abortion. I admit that I regard most cries of "ableism" as fundamentally unserious for this and other reasons (like the progressive advocacy of assisted suicide for non-terminal and/or psychiatric maladies). You have to separate the signaling from the substance, though.
Even if, say, their children turn out to cause a crime wave? Surely that can't be right. Anyway you're not entirely mistaken, but the case is essentially overdetermined here.
Sure, but it's important to notice the difference between tabooing a word and certain specific historical examples, and actually disavowing a concept. Eugenics remains a fundamentally progressive idea; progressives just stopped calling it that. This is a very common approach to progressivism, shedding unpopular names for things while keeping their practical substance intact (see e.g. "cultural Marxism").
I think you’re totally misunderstanding the motivations and thought process of the average woman who gets an elective abortion.
Eugenics requires perceiving oneself and one’s progeny as part of a larger biological project - as merely one tiny branch of the human genetic/ancestral tree, the long-term health of which requires careful and intentional cultivation. Eugenics is a fundamentally communitarian endeavor. It’s about wanting humanity as a whole to be improved, using individual instantiations of eugenic breeding/sorting to direct the overall genetic health of the population in the direction of iterated improvement.
A middle-class American progressive woman who aborts a fetus with Down Syndrome is not thinking like this at all. Her decision could be framed in two ways: one is as a purely selfish decision - “If I have to raise a massively burdensome and defective child for the rest of my life, it will be financially catastrophic, require massive amounts of resources and effort, and will substantially decrease my quality of life.”; the other is to see it as an act of mercy for that child - “It would be better not to be born at all, than to be born as an incurably defective and mentally/physically retarded person, incapable of independence and entirely dependent on the indulgence of others for my entire life.”
Neither of these require, or in fact in any way involve, any orientation toward how your decision to abort a child ties into the larger genetic health of other future humans. Many of these women are some of the smartest and most capable individuals in our society; if they were primarily motivated by eugenic thinking, why on earth would they be deciding against perpetuating their superior genetic stock just because “it’s not the right time for me personally”? Abortion is clearly the dysgenic course of action in that case, barring fetal abnormalities.
This still qualifies as eugenics. Eugenics doesn't have to be about "humanity as a whole". You can think about eugenics on the level of a single person.
But how is this eugenics specifically? Yes, Down Syndrome in particular is a genetic condition, but what about aborting a fetus with any other sort of detectable congenital condition, i.e. hydrocephaly, missing limbs, etc.? I think that these are all motivated fundamentally on a recognition that some people’s lives are doomed from the very start to be unpleasant, short, or burdensome, and that if one had the ability to spare such people a life of suffering and extreme adversity, it is morally correct, or at least permissible, to do so. I think it’s coming from a totally different perspective than progressive eugenics proper.
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The motivations and thought process of the average woman who gets an elective abortion was not the point, there. The point was that progressives do not oppose eugenics per se; practices of a eugenic character are in no need of special particular motivational states in order to be eugenic practices.
So, yes, if we're talking on a personal level about individual motivations, the science of "improving stock" (as Galton put it) is something individuals are not necessarily thinking about when they make decisions of a eugenic nature. But this was a discussion about policy, and I was responding to someone else who suggested that progressives oppose eugenics, which is simply not true. Progressives are fine with a wide array of eugenic practices, so long as people don't talk about the eugenic character of those practices (especially, while using the word "eugenics").
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