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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38199 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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One signal that wokeness is waning: the words printed at the bottom of the helmets of NFL players.

I don't have metrics on this, this is all just my subjective perception. I scrubbed through my recording of the games while writing this in the interest of accuracy.

At the start of the 2020 season, just a few months after social justice become trendy, the NFL decided to allow players to swap out the name of their team on the back of the helmet for a social justice message. At that time they could choose one of four messages: "Stop Hate," "It Takes All Of Us," "End Racism," or "Black Lives Matter." The league would also sometimes print these messages on the field.

At the season opener this past Thursday, with the L.A. Rams facing the Buffalo Bills, I noticed a new message: "Choose Love." I thought it was just nearly all of the Rams sporting this one, but this article says it was all of them. Few of the Bills were displaying anything except for their team name. That the preferred message was so non-specific was a signal itself that attitudes may be shifting. The article says that the NFL says "Choose Love" is a message against hate crimes and gun violence, but I would never have guessed that had it not been spelled out for me.

This past Sunday I watched three games: Cincinnati Bengals vs. Pittsburgh Steelers, Green Bay Packers vs. Minnesota Vikings, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs. Dallas Cowboys.

For Bengals vs Steelers I saw zero of these messages. Notably neither quarterback on either team had such a message.

In Packers vs Vikings I couldn't see any messages on the Packers, I'd say about a third of the Vikings had them. Neither quarterback had them.

For Cowboys vs. Bucs I saw none on the Cowboys, about half of Bucs players had them, which included the quarterback Tom Brady, sporting "Inspire Change."

In all of the games I noticed just one "Black Lives Matter," on a Vikings player.

Maybe I'm just misremembering the prevalence of these the past two seasons, but I thought they used to be more likely than not, especially for star players.

The next US presidential election could be key to what happens to woke. If DeSantis wins, the federal government might interpret existing civil rights laws as mostly outlawing woke because it discriminates against white people and creates a hostile work environment for them. If Harris is the next president, we might view the Biden administration as the "before times".

If DeSantis wins, the federal government might interpret existing civil rights laws as mostly outlawing woke because it discriminates against white people and creates a hostile work environment for them.

How would that happen? The President can't just fire and replace the entire EEOC.

He can replace the top people at the Department of Justice.

And the EEOC just ignores them and continues to punish based on the widest interpretation of laws when women and minorities are the putative victims, and the narrowest interpretation when it's white men. And anyone the DOJ goes after directly will just delay and endure, knowing the next DOJ will just reverse everything.

Care to elaborate on the proposed mechanisms for either of those outcomes?

We keep the President away from those levers, relatively speaking.

The Department of Justice has enormous power over how to interpret and enforce laws, and the President picks the top people in the Department of Justice. Prosecutors are far more important than judges or juries in the US justice system (outside of cases where one person sues another person) because most cases (over 90%) are settled outside of court. The President picks the top federal prosecutors.

Businesses really don't want to be sued by the federal government for civil rights violations. A DeSantis administration could sue if you have too much woke-stuff, and a Harris administration if you have too little. Antitrust laws are extremely vague. A DeSantis administration could tell Twitter/Facebook/Google that they will be sued for antitrust violations if they ban conservatives, and a Harris administration would tell big tech it gets accused of antitrust violations if it doesn't do a better job of banning hate speech. Financial institutions desperately need to keep in the good graces of the Federal government, and so the feds can coerce credit card companies and banks to financially deplatform selected targets.

Picking the top people isn’t the same as dictating policy for the rest. Case in point: the revolving door of Trump’s justice department. I’d expect just about any other executive to have a more stable department—and to still be unable to unilaterally shift culture.

Prosecution statistics aren’t a good example either. Look at the factors going into those 98% (!) of cases handled by plea bargain. How many of those reference the federal government?

Threatening lawsuits strikes me as more plausible, assuming there was standing. On the other hand, antitrust suits contingent on other behaviors is some banana republic bullshit. I hope to God we have protections against that rather than relying on decorum, but I’m not a lawyer. @ymeshkout, please tell me such a strategy would be nonviable!

When Microsoft first got big it had a policy of ignoring politics so politicians started threatening Microsoft with antitrust actions, which caused Microsoft to become a massive contributor to politicians.

The Biden administration did end the investigation of the self-proclaimed institutional racism at Yale that was initiated by Bob Barr.

Richard Hannania had an interest point on gay marriage yesterday. He like me has trouble making a direct attack on gay marriage. But the gay marriage bundle (he used woke bundle) as a whole seems like it’s been a big negative. I’d use Pride bundle. He cited rising depression on the left; I usually cite falling fertility as a bad thing.

Maybe I just want to get to dislike gays like 2 decades ago. But the bundle argument which gay marriage seemed to be the spears tip seems like it’s been a giant negative for society. And then you get an argument of can you pick and choose policy and get ride of Pride but keep gay marriage or you just have to suppress the whole thing.

Richard Hannania had an interest point on gay marriage yesterday. He like me has trouble making a direct attack on gay marriage.

I think there is no need for attack on "gay marriage", mostly because either gays were duped or "gay marriage" was just another in the long line of attacks on the very concept of marriage, I'd say even a paltry one compared to no-fault divorce proliferating in the society.

In fact I think that gay marriage only showed what was happening in the broader society for some time already, we do not have marriage - a sacred bond between man and a woman before god supported by the rest of the society morally and culturally. We only have "registered partnership", something like a special version of LLC that can be created and dissolved on a whim, with specific bankruptcy laws aimed at distributing wealth as well as children between the partners. In many cases the traditional marriage vow of - I take you to be my lawfully wedded (husband/wife), to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part - does not have value of breath spent to utter it, the vow can be broken in a few hours to laughter of wedding witnesses, especially if one party was "duped" somehow into believing such a nonsense.

I'd hope that by now people would be more knowledgeable of all the language games played out there, the words seem to hold some residual power despite having completely different and sometimes opposite meaning. There are other examples out there, often distorted by (mostly left) to suck up the power of the original concept. In the CW space there are myriads of such words like racism or violence up to basic words like man and woman. At a time to me it looks like some strange magical ritual, where people really believe in social construction of reality, as if words can expand their meaning beyond the practical limit inside the communication, that they will retain their original explanatory and cultural power, only with some toxic appendix feeding off of them invisible to the society at large somehow. Just repeat the mantra like "2022 marriage is real marriage" and the very fabric of reality changes to accommodate your wish. It does not work like that.

Maybe I just want to get to dislike gays like 2 decades ago. But the bundle argument which gay marriage seemed to be the spears tip seems like it’s been a giant negative for society

why not just say ... ok, gay marriage is kinda meaningless, doesn't change much, but being gay is bad because it misses the point of sex (reproduction, children)? What does the natural desire for children even mean without actually having children, if it's targeted at M/M? What's the point?

The fertility crisis could be solved tomorrow by outlawing birth control and legalizing child labor. Gay marriage is a symptom of sexuality becoming decoupled from reproduction, not a cause.

I agree with your point that gay marriage is a result of sexuality being decoupled from reproduction. And hence with the decoupling banning gay marriage just becomes bigotry.

But I don’t know how to attack the root cause which I think on net has been a negative.

My observation is that wokeness proceeds in waves. Imagine you are standing on a beach watching the tide come in. The water level appears to rise each time a wave hits the shore and then fall again as the wave recedes. If you have never seen the ocean before then it is easy to think that the crest of each wave marks the highest level that the water will ever achieve. But in truth, each wave crests a little higher than the one before and gradually the water level rises until much of the beach is under water.

Wokeness has not advanced in a straightforward manner, increasing a little each day. Instead, wokeness advances and recedes in waves but each wave leaves a somewhat higher baseline level of wokeness than came before.

I remember thinking in late 2019 that wokeness seemed to have abated. The worst excesses of #metoo had already come and gone. BLM, Ferguson, etc seemed to be a long time in the past. It felt like there was a little more space to speak openly. And as bad as covid was, I remember feeling like it had led to even less focus on woke issues, at least for the first few months of 2020. Then George Floyd was killed and within a few days, wokeness had become more popular and more intense than I had thought possible.

Eventually I realized that this pattern has played out many times in much the same way. Wokeness seems to be declining until some new event ignites the public's passion, re-energizes the woke and facilitates new achievements for wokeness. Gradually the fervor dies down and some people start to question the worst excesses of the moment. For a time it seems that wokeness is in decline until the cycle repeats again. There are the major ones: Ferguson, #metoo, George Floyd. But there are also many minor incidents that follow the same pattern: JK Rowling, the Atlanta spa shootings, each new Dave Chappelle show, and so on.

But even though each of these waves eventually subsided, most of them left wokeness at a higher level than it was before. Presumably wokeness will not increase forever. Eventually the waves will cease or diminish so much that they don't matter. I am genuinely unsure if that will take closer to 2 years or 200. But it is a mistake to think that just because wokeness seems to be receding now it has truly peaked.

If we think of wokeness as a tool, and not as a social phenomenon (with its "natural" cyclicity), then its occurrence could be explained almost purely by underlying events, when this tool is applicable. But I am not sure its level is net raising. As a tool, it stimulates development of counter-tools and techniques.

Depp v Herd is a good illustration of countering Metoo. So when Metoo and abuse narrative didn't work out, they employed "harassment by the internet mob anyway". Here's the grandiose title of the report:

"Targeted Trolling and Trend Manipulation: How Organized Attacks on Amber Heard and Other Women Thrive on Twitter"

A quote from Variety:

In the report, the company disclosed that Heard’s lawyers had contacted Bot Sentinel in 2020 and hired it “to determine whether the social media activity against Ms. Heard was organic or if there was some other explanation” (and the company concluded that “a significant portion of the activity wasn’t organic”). For the report released Monday, the firm claimed, “Neither Amber Heard nor anyone from her team hired Bot Sentinel to review the activity. No one hired Bot Sentinel to compile and publish this report.”

Apparently no one hired Bot Sentinel! The troll farm as a rhetorical device is known since at least Rian Johnson's defense of his StarWars movie against popular criticism, but here the coordination seems to raise at a new level. Arms race goes on.

In sum, I think there is a nonlinear arms race dynamics, fueled by underlying social events, not a steady rise.

At this point, I've come to find proclamations about the imminent death of wokeness somewhat naive and premature. These types of predictions have been made almost continuously ever since the Culture War was a thing, and none of them have been borne out yet. I'm unsure if it's even just temporarily receding at the moment, let alone truly going away - the small anti-woke victories used to support the claim that the mainstream is finally beginning to abandon that belief system are usually quite narrow and are often counteracted by increases in wokeness elsewhere, and to interpret that as a general de-wokening of society one needs to ignore the instances where things have either stayed stagnant or have gotten much worse.

I understand the attraction of believing that sanity will prevail, and I would love if wokeness was actually waning. But I can't see how that's happening in any material way, since a huge amount of institutions are still firmly captured by that ideology and staffed by their acolytes (and they are all firmly committed to Doing Better). It's going to take a lot more than NFL helmet decals to make me believe that it's disappearing.

I think only when we start to see women participating less in positions of power will wokeness recede. Wokeness imo is almost entirely explained by women taking over more and more media spaces and capturing institutional power. Unfortunately this trend hasn’t really slowed down much.

You're not wrong, it's certainly contributed a good bit to the awokening of our institutions. Here's an article called "Did Women In Academia Cause Wokeness?" which is pretty related to what you said, and which I would recommend perusing.

https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/did-women-in-academia-cause-wokeness

The author notes that women are disproportionately represented in grievance studies. Among the humanities, the subject with the highest proportion of women receiving bachelor's degrees and doctoral degrees is "Ethnic, Gender and Cultural Studies" (basically grievance studies).

Then they do a gender comparison of opinions in two fields: anthropology and sociology.

"Compared to men, women were more likely to say that “Sociology should be both a scientific and moral enterprise”, and that “Sociology should analyze and transcend oppression”. They were less likely to say that “More political conservatives would benefit discipline”, and that “Advocacy and research should be separate for objectivity”."

"What about anthropology? The next table shows the proportion of male versus female anthropologists (from a sample of 301) who agreed and disagreed with various items. Compared to men, women were more likely to say that “Science is just one way of knowing”, and that “Postmodern theories have made important contribution”. They were less likely to say that “Field is undermined by antiscientific attitudes”, and that “Advocacy and fieldwork kept separate for objectivity”."

"Finally, there is the evidence supplied by Eric Kaufmann in his mammoth report for the CSPI. Kaufmann compiled data from several different surveys of graduate students and academics. He found that women were more likely to support dismissal campaigns, more likely to discriminate against conservatives, and more likely to support diversity quotas for reading lists. Overall, they had significantly more left-wing views. To quote Kaufmann: “if the share of women rises, we should expect the balance of internal opinion to move in the direction of emotional safety over academic freedom.”"

In other words, female academics are less likely than male academics to place importance on objectivity and dispassionate inquiry, and more likely to place importance on the ability of their work to be used as a vehicle to deliver their political propaganda. They are disproportionately represented in woke disciplines. And women in general are also less pro-free speech and more pro-censorship. As a result, the author considers women's influx into academia to be a factor that led to increasing wokeness.

The people with their wallets on the line finally got the message that social justice on the field leads to low viewership. Ratings were terrible from 2016-2018 when kneeling was a big issue, rebounded a bit in 2019 when kneeling wasn’t as prominent, dipped back down again in 2020 when kneeling came back (although Covid makes this data point less compelling), then by 2021, when kneeling and social justice had once again faded into the background, ratings were back to their pre-2016 highs. At the time, mainstream outlets attributed the 2016-2018 dip to cordcutters, but cordcutting has continued since 2018 and yet NFL ratings have rebounded.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/289979/nfl-number-of-tv-viewers-usa/

Attributing it to cordcutting doesn't make sense anyway. All of the Sunday games are shown on broadcast television, and at that time, about half of the Thursday Night games were. The only games that consistently weren't available over the air were Monday Night games, though MNF's ratings woes since 2016 have mainly been attributed to the network's inability to find an announcing crew anyone likes after Mike Tirico left. MNF and Thursday Night games are also carried locally in the primary markets of the participating teams. That being said, Thursday Night games will be carried exclusively by Amazon (with the local market exception) starting this Thursday, though I doubt this is due as much to cordcutting as it is that the NFL wants to get Amazon to pay them a ton of money while streaming is the hot new thing.

They lost me, I went from watching about 100 games a year through 2016 to one since (I watched a single game in 2018 hoping they'd turned over a new leaf).

Overt cultural pressure is less important now that banks, universities, bureaucracies, and schools are, in large part, captured by wokist moral reasoning.

Yup, my thesis on cancel culture is the following:

It was less aboyu converting people to the new cause, and more about having the justification to purge people from academia and cultural production factories, and putting new barrier at the entrance.

Wow, I must have missed the memo.

"It's cool, we won, you can take the sticker off now."

Who is coordinating this action? Who is telling league execs and players' publicists that their great work is over? You're hypothesizing a conspiracy tailoring its response to the level of institutional capture. This also suggests that the last couple years were the only ones where those darned woke moralists felt threatened enough to exert overt pressure!

There is an easier and more realistic explanation. Those slogans were never important. For a brief period, the invisible hand identified them as a cheap appeal to the current Cultural Moment^TM. In the absence of that signal, most everyone went back to the default.

Wow, I must have missed the memo.

"It's cool, we won, you can take the sticker off now."

This is unnecessarily antagonistic and reads into Supah's comment something that isn't there. There doesn't need to be coordination/conspiracy for fashion/fads to change over time. It's not at all uncommon for peope who see themselves as trendsetters to tire easily of what was trendy last month, especially when a trend has since been codified by less-cool bodies, like commercial institutions.

I agree with your conclusion, but didn’t read Supah’s comment like that at all.

“Overt social pressure” is distinct from status. Trendsetters aren’t changing tactics because the ideology became “less important”; they’re pursuing a separate goal. He was definitely asserting that pressure and not status was the goal.

Edit: per his clarification, pressure was obviously not the end goal. It was a means to policy ends. This is still a reading that does not rely on trends or fads, but activist strategy.

You might have read me as asserting that pressure was the goal in and of itself, but that is not what I wrote. Clearly, influence in policy is more important to most activists than just getting culturally-popular institutions to signal fealty to their cause. This is apparent from listening to woke/leftist media products, which in my experience spend a lot more time thinking about how to actually pass Medicare-for-all, or gun bans, or abortion guarantees, or fossil fuel restrictions than they do about getting instagram influencers or sports stars to parrot the latest slogans. Further, it's a sort of obvious assumption to make if one assumes that the activists are operating in good faith and believe their own statements; to assume otherwise would be to assume cynical grifting. While there's a lot of grift in politics, assuming it's universal - particularly on the left - strikes me as a mistake.

Furthermore, there's no reason to think that policy success requires uniform cultural pressure. There is limited activist money and time, which isn't always focusing on the same institutions and causes. Moreover, as an idea becomes successful, former activists "graduate" into institutional positions, and now have the opportunity to influence policy directly rather than being forced to form rabble-rousing pressure groups spearheaded by popular cultural influencers. Illinois just put second-degree murder on a "no-cash-bail" list. Congratulations, I guess?

Still, the slogans were extremely important in that they shifted the overton window of permissible behavior. How many corporations were divesting from oil and gas exploration due to ESG in 2018? How many new """diversity""" racial set-asides and sinecures have been created since 2020? How much money was funneled to activist NGO groups? How many people will get fired today for saying things about differential crime rates? How many melanated workers and students can demand that their pale comrades get punished for verbal lese majeste of being insufficiently deferential to the aggrieved? Would opposition to affirmative action get you called fascist in 2018? I could go on but I don't want to belabor the point too much.

Moreover, the slogans continue to be important because they spread a large number of actively false and pernicious ideas through the population, and tied those ideas to one's moral standing in the community (after all, only Nazis don't support BLM, right?). Without BLM and these slogans permeating every aspect of life in 2020, there's no way that the general public comes to believe that 1,000 unarmed black people are shot by cops every year (it's actually more like ten) (cite: https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf), or white liberals come to believe that white people are more violent than black people (13/52, etc.) (https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1101118880154611713). So their effect is going to be long-lived (or at least continue until something else actively drums them out of the public's heads).

My mistake.

I maintain that the life cycle of slogans and stickers is better understood by capitalism than by activism. They were promoted--at a corporate level--to serve a market, and they faded away when that market lost cohesion. I think the distinction is important when gauging influence and popularity of the underlying movement.

Honestly it's probably both. Capitalism is adaptable to a wide range of aesthetics and policies; the activists provide the substance of the aesthetic and, ironically, serve as market-leaders and promoters for those corporations which are on board with the slogans.

Isn't this still limited to one industry though? I don't think we'll see such waning anytime soon in entertainment media until at least we see the tentpole IPs recede in popularity. I was hoping that pressures arising from competition to Russia and China would've helped accelerate the reversal, but I'm far less optimistic now.

On the gripping hand, we've had some pretty big fan revolts recently. Marvel fans hated She Hulk and no one can defend Dr. Strange. The Ring of Power seems to be badly written Tolkien fanfic hiding behind a woke facade. No one the Star Wars sequels anymore.

We're seeing some tentpole IPs recede, for sure.

On the gripping hand, we've had some pretty big fan revolts recently

"Fan revolts" don't change anything. It's just the same cycle - fans complain -> fans are called racist or sexist -> creators of woke content play the victim-> both sides retreat to their silos.

If anything "fan revolts" have been folded into the PR machine of these shows. Notice how these divisive or outright bad shows always have articles coming out talking about "racist backlash" even before the show is released? It happened with the Sequel Trilogy, it happened with Kenobi, and now it's happening with Rings of Power. Before you even have a chance to enjoy the show for yourself some actor is whining about how awful it was that strangers were mean online, don't you feel bad?

At this point I legitimately think that companies that made mediocre products pray for some "racist backlash" (usually large fan backlash that they nutpick racists from) because it causes a certain sort of middle class left viewer to instinctively side with the product.

I keep seeing complaints that RoP is particularly woke, but they don't seem well substantiated. Most articles talking about it spend more time 1) calling detractors racists and 2) pointing out how the original works could be problematic. Example.

Maybe this is because they focus on race and not the show's relationship with gender? I haven't seen as much on that side.

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