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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38236 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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I'm dipping in and out of watching the live coverage of the death of the Queen of England, currently the coverage of the procession of the queen's body to the cathedral in Edinburgh, and addressing Charles as King. Peace to the woman, she's dead now, and they are no longer claiming rights to my fealty, so let them rule their own lands and good luck to them.

Now, royal coverage brings out the professional royal watchers/specialists in royal affairs for such coverage, and you have to expect an amount of bootlicking and sycophancy. But what strikes me - and maybe this is because I'm born and reared in the Republic of Ireland - is how tilted all this is towards the English audience. Right now they may have a few Scots on, but the coverage by British media is London-based, and for instance - I've heard an English live commenter burbling on as Charles' plane arrives, in an unmistakably RP accent with a posh tinge, about the Royal Standard of Scotland that is flying on the car awaiting to transport him that is "an emphasis on the descent of the king, ultimately back to King Robert the Bruce and the ancient lines of the Picts and Scots".

To which the only possible answer is: my arse it is. The name of the present royal House is Mountbatten-Windsor, because they had to change it from Battenburg due to anti-German sentiment from the First and Second World Wars. But again, this is all slanted towards an English viewership, eliding over the history between Scotland and England, and trying to pretend that no, of course all the other constituent parts of the United Kingdom are every bit as important as England.

Tell me again where he will be conducting his reign from? It's not Edinburgh, that's for sure.

As with this announcement of William now taking on the titles Charles bore: Duke of Cornwall. Prince of Wales. Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland. The titles of conquered nations, assumed and folded into the English rulership. A reminder as to who is the top dog in this "United" Kingdom.

England has about ten times the population of Scotland, so I'm not seeing anything very surprising there.

Oh it's not surprising, but the unctuous attempts to cover over that this is, in effect, an English king with no ties to Scotland beyond "my great-great-great-grandfather purchased and lived in a house here which we visit at times because we like the shooting and the scenery" by evoking Robert the Bruce and the Picts fool nobody. It's the level of royal arse-licking by toadies that you have to expect at times like this one.

Literally everything on TV is unbelievably London-biased. You've not caught onto anything new. Every other region of England feels this just as keenly as the Scots and Welsh. We are not represented by London either, and programming/advertising that uses its demographics feels just as alien to us. So don't try and divide this along those lines.

The act of the union invited a penniless and embarrassed Scotland, fresh off the back of their failed attempt at colonialism, to put a Scottish King on the throne of England. To the extent that you are moaning about the provenance of the royals, that you skate over this in such a cavalier way is very revealing of the intent of this post, and the particular basket of chips on your shoulder.

As an aside, I often notice this continual reference to the German origin of the royal family comes up a lot from people who would otherwise insist that second-generation immigrants are just as British as those who can trace their lines back hundreds of years. The exception, as ever, only seems to be made for targets of personal dislike.

If Scotland is a conquered nation, a notion that it completely and totally laughable, then we should all be so lucky as to be conquered, and become the beneficiaries of millions and millions of pounds of transfer from our supposed oppressors.

The act of the union invited a penniless and embarrassed Scotland, fresh off the back of their failed attempt at colonialism, to put a Scottish King on the throne of England.

Not as I understand it - there was already a (partially-)Scottish king on the throne of England, and had been for over a century. What happened in 1707 was that the Scottish elites were bailed out financially for the Darien disaster in exchange for agreeing to merge the Scottish and English parliaments, creating a single London-based government for both countries.

failed attempt at colonialism

Ouch, right on the Darién Gap, a region tough enough to have no roads running through it to this very day? Thank you for filling in this (Darién) gap in my knowledge.

If Scotland is a conquered nation, a notion that it completely and totally laughable, then we should all be so lucky as to be conquered, and become the beneficiaries of millions and millions of pounds of transfer from our supposed oppressors.

Sure, it beats the hell out of the alternative, but receiving an influx of subsidies doesn't really do that much to dull the resentment for rule-by-outsider. Speaking as someone that originally hails from a non-city part of the American state of New York, no amount of "well ackshually New York City sends you tax dollars" reduced our dislike for having laws created for metropolis applied to our irrelevant backwater. There would have been a pretty strong consensus for rejecting the bribe if it also came with the removal of onerous legislation.

I don't know the Scotland-England political dynamics to have any idea if that maps on at all, I'm just saying that the residents of a region that receives government subsidies will not necessarily reflect on this as being a fortunate arrangement.

It does map, and it also maps onto the rest of England that isn't London, but there are a few wrinkles with the Scots that make it all the funnier.

Firstly, that the loudest online ScotNats tend to also be fierce EUrophiles, and are so mad that the UK as a whole chose to leave the EU (to which it was a net contributor) that they want to leave the UK (from which they are a net beneficiary). That the relative damage they would do to their economy would be multiples of what the UK faced when leaving the EU is never addressed.

In addition to that, ScotNats like to think of themselves as uniquely tolerant and progressive, especially in comparison to England, despite being 96% white and until recently, only having a single city accept refugees (until they were called out on it)... not that refugees want to go there anyway. Much is made of how progressive an indy Scotland would become, but the question of how this would be funded remains conspicuously unanswered by nationalists -- as over 60% of their economy depends on trade with the rest of the UK, in addition to their received welfare via the Barnett Formula.

I fully accept that it might not calm the underlying feelings, but at some point one would hope pragmatism must prevail. I don't really want a failed state next door either, to be honest.

Back her up there, sunshine. It wasn't the Act of Union that put a Scottish king on the throne, that was the Tudors failure to have a male heir that lived long enough to have kids of his own. Due to Elizabeth finally dying without issue, the nearest heir was her first cousin twice removed, James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England, and ruled as James VI and I, uniting the crowns of Scotland and England.

England had often warred with Scotland and constantly tried encroaching on its territory. This was a peaceful annexation, since it was England that was now the seat of monarchy for both nations. A United Kingdom did not formally come into existence, however, until 1707 despite the union of the crowns: those Acts created the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

Ireland was not roped in until the Act of Union of 1801 which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Your current state of "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" came about as a result of the partition of Ireland

As for the rest of it, I don't care if they're British, German, or Martians, just so long as they acknowledge they have no right (and never had any right, save that of conquest) of claiming sovereignty over my nation. My grandmother was born a subject of Queen Victoria. I was born a citizen of the Republic of Ireland. Let Charles be king of England, and indeed Scotland and Wales (that is up to the Scots and Welsh, if ever they do gain independence, if they want the monarch to be head of state as with the Commonwealth). But he's not king of Ireland, and he damn well is not a descendant of Pictish kings. He'd have better right to claim German territories via his great-great-great-grandfather Albert; after all, the English long maintained romantic claims to territories not theirs (such as France) because a distant ancestor had been a noble there.

Is he claiming to be king of all Ireland? Did the commentator specifically make a false claim regarding the ethnicity of his ancestors?

Given that Charles isn't claiming to be king of Ireland, what are you even asking for? A public ceremony where he shouts "I'm not king of Ireland! I'm not king of Ireland!"?

He'd have better right to claim German territories via his great-great-great-grandfather Albert; after all, the English long maintained romantic claims to territories not theirs (such as France) because a distant ancestor had been a noble there.

King Charles III is actually one of the many descendants of Brian Boru. If we're going by descent, he may actually (I don't know much about royal lineages) have more of a claim to Ireland than he does the Pictish lands.

The Hanovers are also descendants of Elizabeth Stuart -- the line from there to the ancient Scottish Kings is (ironically) at least as direct as to the Anglo-Saxons -- it's the (French) Normans that were mostly cut out by the failure of the Tudors to reproduce.

You missed a juicy detail: the house was called Saxe-Coburg und Gotha which became extra awkward when the German Empire was running a bomber called a Gotha that was bombing london. So they made up Windsor.

Yeah, all the jokes about them being German do have a point. They are much more of a mixed bag than "can trace his descent back to the Picts". His father was a member of the deposed Greek royal family and considered himself Danish. Because royalty has to marry royalty, most of the royal houses of Europe have intermarried over the centuries. There isn't a 'pure' British or Dutch or Spanish lineage, there is just the legal justification for why X is heir to the throne.

Horrible Histories has the right of it.

Advocacy for marginalized European identities can be in a bit of an awkward position, as the most-aligned general philosophical current available to tap into to advocate for the rights of marginalized identities tends to be really universalist. I think a majority of people (at least outside Scotland - and absolutely not counting you, if you are Deiseach as I think you are) who would express concern about Scottish underrepresentation might also have a hard time defining "Scot" as anything other than "person who happens to live in Scotland," at which point the whole thing would seem pretty arbitrary.

In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money: New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years but are unaccountable to outside oversight.

The New York Times has an expose on how ultra-orthodox Jews in NYC are funneling billions in public money for use in their yeshivas. Students are barely taught how to read and write in English (as an example, one couldn't spell "America") and the state requirements are effectively optional or used as a study hall.

The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.

Only nine schools in the state had less than 1 percent of students testing at grade level in 2019, the last year for which full data was available. All of them were Hasidic boys’ schools.

The boys’ schools cram in secular studies only after a full day of religious lessons. Most offer reading and math just four days a week, often for 90 minutes a day, and only for children between the ages of 8 and 12. Some discourage further secular study at home. “No English books whatsoever,” one school’s rule book warns.

Their leaders, the grand rabbis, wield significant power, and breaking the rules they set can carry serious consequences. That point was underscored by the more than 50 current Hasidic community members who spoke to The Times only on condition of anonymity, for fear of being exiled and barred from seeing family and friends.

Another former teacher provided hundreds of pages of work sheets from the past five years that showed that 12-year-olds — in their last year of English instruction — could not spell words like “cold” and “America.”

Tax dollars are not supposed to go toward religious education. But public agencies pay private schools to comply with government mandates and manage social services. Hasidic boys’ yeshivas, like other private schools, access dozens of such programs, collecting money that subsidizes their theological curriculum. The Times identified dozens of federal, state and local programs and analyzed how much they have given to yeshivas, looking most closely at the last year before the pandemic. The analysis showed that New York’s Hasidic boys’ schools received more than $375 million from the government in that period [...] they appear to get more government funding on average than other private schools in the state, including other religious schools, the analysis found. The city voucher program that helps low-income families pay for child care now sends nearly a third of its total assistance to Hasidic neighborhoods

This might come as a shock to those who have no experience with Williamsburg, Monroe, Kiryas Joel, or Monsey in the NY tristate area. There is what can be described as a Hasidic Jewish mafia, that violates norms and laws to obtain hegemony, while siphoning resources from the surrounding communities. Towns are genuinely afraid of encroachment by the Hasids, because they move in en masse and quickly obtain town leadership positions and school board positions. They usually vote to reduce all extra funding, like extra-curricular funding for public schools, because their children only attend yeshivas. They label their homes as temples and don't legally marry their wives to reduce their taxes. Towns in subjected areas will purposely reduce sidewalks or veto funding for sidewalks in order to deter Hasids from moving in. Usually they will have a non-Hasidic lawyers go door to door asking to buy property with cash. They are involved in coordinated welfare schemes yet somehow get sweetheart plea deals of no jail time. Kiryas Joel was once the poorest place in all of America, and yet they have their own private security force that follows non-Hasids in SUVs if you drive through their estates, they have an enormous temple and their own state-funded maternity clinic on site and are able to obtain a unique 30 million dollar water aqueduct project.

I'm happy that the NYT is doing solid journalism on this. I kind of gripe with portraying the young as victims and bringing up the Holocaust, but it is what it is. In my mind, the Hasidic power structure is a legitimate problem that needs to be made sense of, because if there is all this corruption at just 200k members, well, in 60 years it will be 1,600,000. They will comprise a majority of America's Jewish community in a few decades.

In my mind, the Hasidic power structure is a legitimate problem that needs to be made sense of, because if there is all this corruption at just 200k members, well, in 60 years it will be 1,600,000. They will comprise a majority of America's Jewish community in a few decades.

Corruption? My mother once told me she could never make sense of antisemitism. Every time she asked someone, who expressed an anti-Jewish sentiment, what their beef was, they'd come back with a variation on "they're too in-groupy". To which she'd say "instead of dissing them, why don't you learn from them?"

You're telling me, that not only is there a community successfully resisting the influence of the modern techno-dystopia, but that they're well-disciplined, vibrant, and growing... and you're telling me I'm supposed to be upset???

Why don't you tell me if they have a Paypal, I want to send them money.

Yes, it's corruption. The Hassidic communities (or at least their relation to welfare and government) are basically the answer to the question "What happens if you take a welfare system designed for the utterly dysfunctional, helped along with slightly-above-average social workers, and set upon it a highly intelligent and organized group whose claim to fame is rules-lawyering God?"

I'd watch that sitcom!

To call it corruption, I'd have to see the current regime as legitimate, and at this point, I can't. Maybe there's a more honorable way to escape Leviathan, I guess I do feel more sympathy for the Amish than the Hasids, but I don't feel like I'm in a position to lecture them.

If the laws are poorly written enough that they can be so easily gamed, I don't see how you can blame the minority of a minority of a minority that learned to exploit the system. It's not as if the ultra-orthodox wrote this stuff.

the laws are written with a general assumption of people not being hyper ingroup focused. they figured out that if you outbreed everyone else, do your best to get everyone else to move out, and vote as a block in a democracy, you can live off their tax dollars. that's perfectly blameworthy.

Indeed. There's a reason we call some moves "unsportsmanlike", even if they are entirely allowed within the rules of a proverbial game.

And people tell me that Maurice Samuel is not 100% correct...

the laws are written with a general assumption of people not being hyper ingroup focused.

1: Are they?

2: If they are, isn't that really stupid?

3: How is it a minority's fault that majority politicians are so naive to the world they would assume for the purposes of a law that people don't have ingroups?

The laws are written with extremely unintelligent people in mind as the clients. Writing them in a way to exclude some of these communities would be the same as eliminating them.

I think if non-Hasids tried to copy their playbook, the government would crush them, using every trick in the book, including mass media propaganda campaigns. The Hasids are special because they are run like a fascist micro-nation, yet they have the appearance of the caricature victim of fascism, and play off of religious protections. It's a confluence of factors that allow the Hasids to occupy their uniquely powerful position. I cannot imagine Christians getting away with anything like this, for instance, and it's remarkable that for all the discussion on fascism and religious extremist, no one is overly concerned with a religiously extremist fascist micro-nation in the Big Apple. The Amish, which is the closest Christian equivalent I can think of, do not utilize as much social resources as the Hasids, and are also in the middle of nowhere.

I cannot imagine Christians getting away with anything like this

Yeah, neither can I, but I don't see how that's the fault of Hasids, nor do I see what good is supposed to come out crushing their community. Their culture isn't my cup of tea, and I also have more sympathy for the Amish, but the Hasids are at least Human which is more than I can say for what the regime has in store for us.

it's not 'crushing their community' to stop letting them live off a system that was never meant for their situation.

I don't believe that. This is clearly aimed at disrupting their community, and plenty of people are "living off the system" and they're not using it "how it was meant", can't say I often see the NYT complaining about that.

the Hasids are at least Human which is more than I can say for what the regime has in store for us.

Fearing genocide or dehumanization from "the regime"? You mean Biden and Congressional Dems?

Partisan politics? You insult me.

Okay. Which regime does not consider which people human?

Well, first of all, you misunderstood me. I didn't say the regime does not consider us human, I meant that the plans they have in store for us are inhumane. This is contrasted with the Hasids, who I think are extremely weird, but I consider their lifestyle humane.

As to who has inhumane plans for us... I mean, the whole western world seems pretty set on sticking us into the metaverse, putting us under total surveillance, feeding us bugs, etc.

This is a low quality comment. Please do less of these.

Specifically it is very "boo outgroup" without supporting evidence. And you are not speaking very plainly.

Oh dear... Look, speaking plainly would result in going on a several paragraph long rant about the relationship of the common people to the people in power, it would be off-topic and didn't feel appropriate. And "boo outgroup" will be hard to avoid, when I essentially believe we are under hostile occupation.

Long effort comments are ok, and in fact encouraged. Next time go on the rant. Otherwise don't comment at all. We have rules of engagement here. Earnestly believing that you can break the rules of engagement is not an acceptable reason for breaking them.

it's remarkable that for all the discussion on fascism and religious extremist, no one is overly concerned with a religiously extremist fascist micro-nation in the Big Apple.

...what, apart from the New York Times, in this very article upon discussion?

A single article for an issue that has been blazing for much more than a decade, does not qualify as "overly concerned", when the article focuses on the victimhood of the defecting group. The actual instantiation of a religiously extremist fascist micro-nation does not command one one-thousandth of the attention in mass media as would be expected. The article is largely free from language implication religious extremism and fascism. This is a far cry from the dramatizations of "Christian nationalism" that Biden et al want you to be concerned about.

Well, yes, but this "single article" is a hitpiece in the New York Times. This is Zeus throwing his thunderbolt. This is the new popular consensus written right in front of us. As single articles (that aren't breaking news) go, this is about as consequential as they get.

True, and I do hope the NYT continues this investigative path. All props to the NYT for this great piece.

Simple Googling found more than a few mainstream media articles about problems in Hasidic schools from years past. Here's Newsweek writing about child abuse. NYT has also written about child abuse, as well. Here's CNN about a specific case. Another New York mag, generally about the yeshivas. The Guardian about the issue in UK. I found some other articles that were paywalled well enough that I'm not linking them, including loads by Jewish magazines.

Of course, if your specific concern is whether it's specifically labelled as fascism and religious extremism, I don't believe the word fascism is used, at least - but it's hardly like New York Times has been the first to discuss the issue of Hasidic schools.

There are fundamentalist LDS groups that seem to be pretty similar to the Hasidim, including not officially marrying to avoid taxes and collect additional benefits and using lots of welfare. They are generally located in the middle of nowhere, and there have been efforts to stop them, but as far as I can tell these are mostly limited to prosecution on the basis of serious crimes (like child rape) which I think the Hasidim avoid. Mainline mormons and the mainline LDS church seem to be at best ambivalent about these efforts, and sometimes oppose them. There are some other legal issues that might also apply to the Hasidic communities (like misuse of public funds and effectively having a privatized religious police force) but they might also be better at staying on the "maybe legal" side.

See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints#Short_Creek_raid and the sections immediately below.

The FLDS practices statutory rape as a religious doctrine. They largely get away with this(although Texas has prosecuted a few of their leaders for not marrying their underaged baby mamas), and from a blue tribe perspective they’re fascist Christian microstate. From a red tribe perspective they’re an untrustworthy, heretical, and occasionally murderous cult.

The other major Mormon fundamentalist group, the apostolic United brethren, colours significantly more inside the lines and avoids underaged marriage.

Well, a race to be as ingroupy as possible would be seeking a destination of tribal-warfare all-against-all that I, at least, would prefer to avoid. There's an optimum to be sought somewhere between the two extremes of "pure, featureless, universalism" and "raw, violent, tribalism." Would be nice to have some obvious description of what exactly that point would be, but I don't have one at this moment.

I didn't quote the conversation verbatim, there was an implication there that it's "positive tribalism" we're talking about. Things like "looking out for your own" rather than screwing over the outgroup.

Under conditions of serious scarcity those overlap enough to be functionally indistinguishable.

Well, we're not quite there yet.

Experience in recent years leads me to believe we've got less cushion than I'd like.

But yes, cooperation between otherwise self-interested groups is still the dominant survival strategy.

I have never heard of this. Honestly this deserves its own post or an email to the NYT. Very alarming.

You're telling me, that not only is there a community successfully resisting the influence of the modern techno-dystopia, but that they're well-disciplined, vibrant, and growing... and you're telling me I'm supposed to be upset???

If ISIS were doing the same thing, would you or would you not be upset about it?

I hardly think it's a stretch of the imagination to say that most people do not believe you need to jump to the complete opposite end of the spectrum in terms of "adopting the modern secular techno lifestyle/culture" to avoid a bad outcome.

ISIS in particular are a bit extreme with their beheadings, suicide attacks, and all. I did, however, warm up to generic radical Muslims recently.

If ISIS were doing the same thing, would you or would you not be upset about it?

Not the OP, but that description could also apply to the Amish, and FWIW I don't think that many "English" have a big beef with them...

That is because the Amish are in Lancaster County (and a lot of other places, mostly rural), not New York City. The haredi in Lakewood, NJ and Kiryas Joel, NY do annoy the other locals (as do the Amish where they live, for that matter, though it's usually about buggy accidents rather than schooling). But while those may get (and have gotten) a mention in the New York Times, being in New York City helps with the in-depth hit pieces.

That's irrelevant. The point I'm making, as stated in my previous post, is that just because a group rejects what the OP thinks is a dystopia doesn't mean they are somehow a good group. There are different and important reasons for rejecting both the "techno-dystopia" and the Islamic State.

how ultra-orthodox Jews in NYC are funneling billions in public money for use in their yeshivas. Students are barely taught how to read and write in English

There may be something here, but let's frame this in comparative terms. How is this different from regular public schools? And do the educational outcomes at the end of this produce bad societal results? For instance, is there a lot of welfare usage, violent crime etc. in ultra-orthodox circles?

It's much worse than regular public schools according to the article. However, the zero pass rate seems suspicious, and perhaps they are deliberately blowing the test to avoid demonstrating whatever the real extent of the issue is.

For instance, is there a lot of welfare usage, violent crime etc. in ultra-orthodox circles?

Yes, but it's organized welfare usage and violent crime.

That's the interesting thing. Once you've assumed an extremely high level of coordination in the group you're examining, then you CANNOT assume that the outcomes you're seeing are 'natural' and accurate, because it would be relatively trivial for a highly coordinated group to game a test to produce a particular outcome for outsiders.

I could absolutely see it being simply known wisdom among Yeshiva students that you bomb all the state tests. Perhaps this is to camouflage the students who genuinely aren't learning the material or is itself a coordination mechanism (students who don't bomb the test are looked on with suspicion?) but there's no reason to assume they aren't aware that this test is producing signals that outsiders can see, and thus manipulating it (like everything else in the process) to their own ends.

The NYTimes piece suggests that Hasidic schools do have worse outcomes on the 12-year-old reading and math tests than most low-income public schools. Hasidic schools counter that their students do better in (voluntary) high-school-aged tests, though it's not clear that those are much more representative. A lot of the rest of the numbers and arguments seem to be pulled or supplied from this YAFFED report, although they're a single-issue non-profit focused on this issue.

That said, the breadth of the difference looks wonky enough that I'd like to see the actual measurements, especially since I can't find any mandatory testing for private schools in New York or NYC specifically, and that the numbers don't make sense -- YAFFED repeatedly highlights the breadth and importance of this topic, with tens of thousands of students effected, and... I can't see how that matches with a total of 12 boy's schools, especially given the Hasidic preference for tiny classrooms. A different YAFFED report looks like it found low scores in a NYC-specific subset, but the numbers there don't look to match either. That report points to NYSED, which seems to love 40+MB Access or Excel files (why?!), and doesn't seem to cover non-charter private schools anyway.

EDIT: actually, the extent that this doesn't seem to match the internals of the NYSED researcher files worries me a lot about its general accuracy.

In terms of broader results: Hasadic communities have high poverty and welfare usage, but low reported rates of violent crime (although there's some controversy about how much domestic violence is not reported).

I suppose that could depend on what you consider a "bad societal result" but I would say yes, definitely.

There is a lot welfare usage and active abuse, like the comment you replied to mentions in the bottom. There probably isn't a lot of "public" violent crime like gang murders (although I did find a report of a dynastic struggle in Jerusalem that lead to street brawls). However, I expect there's quite a lot of abuse that goes unreported and/or unresolved because, like with most cults, any such problems are swept under the rug or "handled" internally and victims (especially young or female victims, or victims of anyone with social power) are expected to not make waves for the sake of community cohesion. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haredi_Judaism#Controversies or search Google for something like "Hasidim and domestic violence."

In addition, members are typically made completely dependent on the community, and made to believe that any contact with people outside the community will make them unclean (like with the Roma or FLDS) so any violations of norms can be punished with shunning which is obviously legal but devastating. As with these others groups, even members who would like to leave may struggle to do so because they have no relevant skills, poor English, no outside family or friends, etc.

There presumably is a lot of indoctrination into a very regressive religious world view (what else are they going to do in a religious school that doesn't teach basic English) which leads to conflicts with the outside world, such as Hasidic men refusing to sit next to women on airplanes.

One could argue that, given how academically inclined Jews typically are, a failure to teach basic English and Math is much more damning of the Yeshivas than of urban public schools.

Yes, how dare they be free to practice their dumb religion? This is America.

Did you mean to reply to someone else? I can't imagine how that's a reasonable reply to what I wrote.

There has to be a difference between "trying and failing to teach reading in English" and "refusing to teach English at all".

I don't see a functional difference that society should care about. Either we're ok with public money going to private enterprises because we don't want poor kids going hungry, or we are so enraged by a pack of religious nutters who figured out how to game the system that we are not.

Personally I don't really care which, but I find the sudden surge of interest when the religious scammers are jewish to be depressingly predictable. This article could have been written about any charter school in the country. The NYT is publishing it, and we're arguing about it because the position of jewish people in the progressive stack is in question.

To be clear, I don’t mind state resources going to catholic or Mormon or evangelical or Islamic schools separate from the local public school in large part because almost all catholic, evangelical, Mormon, and Islamic households have at least one working adult.

Generational welfare scammers shouldn’t get catered to by the state, even if it doesn’t cost any more than sending them to public schools. If I had my way, the kids of these communities would get bussed to inner city public schools with high percentages of households on welfare until the community boosted its male employment rate to match the surrounding community.

I'm fine with fixing the welfare laws to prohibit lifelong moochers in the vast majority of cases. I'm fine with banning public funds from going to religious schools.

I don't think it's logical to construct a just-so scenario that lands exclusively on one out of thousands of religious groups. Seems really specific.

That's true, though in turn it raises a few awkward questions. One of the possible explanations for a bunch of 'schools' that have very long classroom hours and culturally-encouraged out-of-classroom study, yet get these test results is that they're learning to read, write, and do math in another language.

((You can find the ELA and math questions online.))

Hasidim are underrepresented among violent criminals, true, but their welfare use is the literal highest in the nation- in part because they refuse to undertake any secular education whatsoever and do not do any secular work.

I’m not saying ‘send cps into them, force their kids to attend public schools, break their culture wide open’, but we can easily stop paying the bills for their lifestyle and expect them to support themselves. I’m sure they have the wherewithal to support themselves at least to the extent of, say, rural Mississippi.

I understand that this happens as lot in Israel too, and fuels a lot of Israeli unhappiness towards the Hasidics (who also refuse to perform the military service that is mandatory for Israelis because it "violates their religious tenets."

No successful society tolerates parasites and freeloaders in their midst. The reason the West is failing is because our leaders are gutless people-pleasers who lack the moral culture to persecute any minorities who behave this way, for fear that they'll be accused of bigotry.

The hasidim are protected and accommodated largely for political purposes; ‘avoiding the appearance of bigotry’ has nothing to do with it. They live in high concentrations and vote as a block, that’s why.

That kind of highly-polarised tribalism is a very dangerous game to play. In the short-term, it gets your group what they want, but in the long-term it fuels lots of resentment towards them. This kind of heavily-polarized tribal mindset is the reason that the Jews have been driven out of almost every country they took up residence in. It was only until WW2 - when Jews learned the costs of these cultural traits and adapted their society to be more multicultural and less insular - that their worldwide persecution stopped. And I think that if the Jews ever went back to their insular pre-WW2 attitudes (with the "us against them" mentality that many non-Jews find so distasteful), it would very quickly become socially acceptable to persecute them again.

Like I said, nobody likes freeloaders. You can't be part of a nation while prioritizing tribal loyalties over national identity. This kind of mindset is rightfully viewed as disloyalty at best, and treason at worst. In other words, if you are an American Jew, then you're American first and Jewish second. If you can't handle that - if you view your Jewish identity as more important than your American identity - then you don't deserve American citizenship. Likewise, if the Hasidic Israelis view themselves as Hasidics first and Israelis second, then they don't deserve Israeli citizenship.

Given the way polarization is shaking out in American society, Hasidic people are distinctly small potatoes in the tribalism issue.

I'm going to take something completely unintended from this article and ask:

Hasn't the official narrative for the past couple decades been that the reason schools in the U.S. underperform is due to lack of funding?

And thus, shouldn't the suggested solution to Yeshivas underperforming state requirements be to give them more money?

I could swear that the argument regarding, e.g. Baltimore, St. Louis, and yes, New York was that there was simply a large gap between how much money the schools needed and how much they actually received.

Perhaps it is fair to peek into how that money is being spent and closely examining the type and quality of instruction being provided to judge the value of such spending?

I'm not trying to make any larger point with this besides noting how interesting it is that the NYT takes up a story which tacitly admits that funding is, itself, not the end-all be-all for improving education outcomes, as the state tends to measure such outcomes.

If the fear is that organized groups with goals orthogonal to those expected of the school system may be seizing too much control and funneling that money towards priorities other than education on the topics society generally considers important, then we can certainly open this debate up to other groups with similar power.

Hasn't the official narrative for the past couple decades been that the reason schools in the U.S. underperform is due to lack of funding?

Yeah, but it's always been a ridiculous lie. The United States outspends almost every country in the world. The failures of American schools (such that they exist, I would argue that the failures are more with the local demographic stock than with the schools themselves) cannot plausibly be explained by funding at schools that are spending more than Germany, Japan, or our neighbor to the north.

I'm not trying to make any larger point with this besides noting how interesting it is that the NYT takes up a story which tacitly admits that funding is, itself, not the end-all be-all for improving education outcomes, as the state tends to measure such outcomes.

The good news for the NYT and the larger narrative regarding education spending is that no one really bothers to maintain much continuity of analysis between these points. Even better for narrative maintenance is that anyone who notices that Americans actually do very well on PISA testing relative to similar demographic groups (suggesting that there isn't much of a problem with the schools) can be countered with rhetoric around how this demonstrates that schools are racist.

Indeed.

The other narrative killer is when you disaggregate the U.S. so that outcomes across the nation are not squished together and smeared across the entire country as if it represents the performance of every state and city and town.

I have gotten extremely tired of the tactic of lumping in every single state's statistics to create a single metric and then pretending this somehow accurately depicts the state of the union as a whole.

Yeah, but it's always been a ridiculous lie. The United States outspends almost every country in the world. The failures of American schools (such that they exist, I would argue that the failures are more with the local demographic stock than with the schools themselves) cannot plausibly be explained by funding at schools that are spending more than Germany, Japan, or our neighbor to the north.

There's some serious slight of hand going on here where your link (by default) only shows US spending on tertiary education but the rest of your comment uses 'school' to mean primary+secondary education. If you instead look at primary and secondary education costs and use % of GDP, the US is just above the middle of the group.

I don't see a toggle for displaying the desired data in the direct link, I assumed people would be able to look at those pretty easily.

I am strongly against using percent of GDP rather than PPP or nominal dollars. The education sector isn't entitled to a fixed percentage of the overall economy.

The education sector isn't entitled to a fixed percentage of the overall economy.

No, but to the extent it provides services via humans rather than automation, it is subject to Baumol's cost disease. Ironically, the education you can afford in a country where most talented would-be-educators don't have any better options may be greater, at the same adjusted dollars-per-student price, than the education you can afford in a country where that education really pays off in other sectors of the economy. GDP isn't a good unit against which to compare this, but neither are dollars adjusted by a PPP basket which weighs mass-produced consumer goods along with skilled man-hours.

On the other hand, that's about as much of a steelman as I can come up with before noticing that the education sector may be to blame for this themselves. "Students work on computers at their own pace, teachers are on hand to work with students who are having problems the automated lessons can't handle" was how a few of my best classes were handled, experimentally, decades ago, and it's a tragedy that the closest most kids can get today is "Make a Khan Academy account, then hope you have time for it on top of whatever superannuated one-size-fits-all busywork your teachers assign instead". I'm not sure what happened over those decades, but I don't think that whole "software" thing turned out to be just a fad in the rest of the economy, so I have a suspicion that the possibility of teaching more students better even with fewer teachers was treated as a threat to unionized teachers rather than an opportunity for the kids.

Somewhat unrelated, but I was watching Vinesauce last night, and he was playing a few of those JumpStart games by Knowledge Adventure. The Kindergarten game (yes, seriously, I'm going somewhere with this) got me thinking: could people ever really trust software to educate their kids? Edutainment games are one thing; but serious educational programs, software, and websites have developed to the point that they can serve as legit building blocks for getting through at least public school. I understand that at the undergrad level and beyond, anyone who might hire you for a cushy job expects a prestigious credential that digital services can't offer, but if we pretend that doesn't exist, what happens then? Could software (have) eat(en) the education world so thoroughly that the way we teach children would be radically different?

For some anecdata, in undergrad, I had to take two algebra classes, and both of those relied heavily on a mixture of hardware (a "clicker" device) and Pearson's testing website. The second one was practically an online course (something my college offered) that I still had to physically show up for (though few of my classmates did).

Using percentage of GDP makes sense in certain circumstances, such as when your trying to analyze the burden the spending puts on the economy but I agree it makes less sense when your comparing national education spending to see who spends more, or when you considering whether spending is increasing over time and how rapid the increase is.

Hasn't the official narrative for the past couple decades been that the reason schools in the U.S. underperform is due to lack of funding?

I don't think the argument has ever been "all schools everywhere that are underperforming need funds", it's "all public schools...".

Fair.

I mean to say, the general, reflexive response to pointing out that a given school (usually public) is underperforming compared to expectations is "they need more money!"

Schools that aren't underperforming are usually just not considered in the question at all.

Yes, I understand the general form of the argument you are making. But I don't think it's nearly as contradictory as you make it out to be if you admit what I'm saying is fair. The underlying assumption is that the school is not a private religious school run by a community that refuses to work and instead leeches from welfare.

And if we admit that how a school is run is actually very impactful on student outcomes, we can frame the debate in terms other than whether funding is sufficient. Which normally the NYT seems reluctant to do. Yet here they try to imply that the schools in question gets too much money despite failing to produce results. Stripped of context, this sounds like a conservative talking point!

That's the leap I'm willing to make. I think poorly runs schools are poorly run schools, regardless of being private, public, religious or secular. I don't necessarily agree with all the metrics the state uses to determine education outcomes, but basic literacy seems like a fair one. I don't think religious schools are somehow worse at producing literate students, nor that disparate outcomes are attributable to them being religious schools.

However, I think it is completely and utterly fair to say that if a school is performing poorly, then the first step towards a solution should be examining why it is poorly run, and holding those who are in charge of it accountable. Then one should examine if the school is adequately funded and whether increasing funds would be likely to help.

Because throwing more money at a poorly-run school seems like an obvious way to set said money on fire for no real improvement. Dis-functional systems don't magically improve merely by adding more funds.

In short, if we assume that the Yeshivas are failing to educate their students in important subjects, I DO NOT see why we should assume the reasons for this are somehow inherently different than if a public school likewise fails at the task. Which many of them do.

Why should Yeshivas be singled out as if they present a unique problem? Note, I'm not claiming that the NYT shouldn't publish stories about this issue, I'm questioning the framing.

However, I think it is completely and utterly fair to say that if a school is performing poorly, then the first step towards a solution should be examining why it is poorly run, and holding those who are in charge of it accountable. Then one should examine if the school is adequately funded and whether increasing funds would be likely to help.

No disagreement here.

In short, if we assume that the Yeshivas are failing to educate their students in important subjects, I DO NOT see why we should assume the reasons for this are somehow inherently different than if a public school likewise fails at the task.

As other commenters have mentioned, Hasidic Jews are an insular community who are politically organized to give little and take lots. They appear to actively disdain and prevent their community members from seeking employment and instead just study religion all day. They very much violate the unspoken assumption that a school is trying to make a better American citizen (loosely defined as that is) who will not take from the public more than necessary. I'd say that's deserving of higher scrutiny.

As other commenters have mentioned, Hasidic Jews are an insular community who are politically organized to give little and take lots.

They very much violate the unspoken assumption that a school is trying to make a better American citizen (loosely defined as that is) who will not take from the public more than necessary. I'd say that's deserving of higher scrutiny.

I'm amenable to this argument.

But explain to me why this same line of thinking wouldn't apply to Teachers' Unions. Especially if we swap in 'woke' ideological teachings for religion in this instance.

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/how-teachers-unions-are-influencing-decisions-on-school-reopenings/2020/12

https://nypost.com/2021/07/04/teachers-union-vows-to-fight-back-against-critical-race-theory-critics/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/teachers-union-wants-democrats-fight-back-republican-crt-attacks-rcna38001

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teachers-ohios-largest-school-district-go-strike-2-days-start-new-scho-rcna44239

...Because there's no religious defense being offered? For all that you want to claim hypocrisy about this, there's a big difference between "a public school that is run to spread controversial messaging to kids as truth" and "a privately run religious school which actively tells you to not do more than study religion all day".

Moreover, you seem to think that I would support the teachers unions but not the Hasidic Jews. You shouldn't assume that about me when I haven't said anything about it.

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They very much violate the unspoken assumption that a school is trying to make a better American citizen

Then public schools are worse. The Hasids are just scamming America, not trying to train its executioners.

Alright, but that's just grounds to fix all of them, not declare that what the Hasids do doesn't matter.

Edit: Also, that's an incendiary and divisive way of speaking about them. They have a different view on what makes someone a better citizen, and would describe you as trying to bring back a reactionary and bigoted government. Neither your accusation nor theirs is conducive to the discussion.

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This comment and your other one:

Yes, how dare they be free to practice their dumb religion? This is America.

Are low quality.

I see you participating heavily in this discussion and some of your other comments are better contributions.

But there are some rule violations. Please try to support controversial arguments with evidence. Speak plainly and without sarcasm. Do not be antagonistic or inflammatory.

I’ve been under the impression that the “moar funding!” angle has been less popular since Bush 2. Partly due to the stellar reception of No Child Left Behind and partly due to the recession. But then I’ve also been out of public school for long enough that it may have passed me by. Aannnnnd I’m down here in a part of Texas where the property taxes completely define school mappings. So take anything I say with a grain of salt.

Hasn't the official narrative for the past couple decades been that the reason schools in the U.S. underperform is due to lack of funding?

Yes. And that despite the fact that a massive increase in school spending in staffing per pupil, failed to do anything noticeably in terms of increasing educational achievement. - https://www.cato.org/blog/obama-vs-romney-public-school-jobs (old data now but it shows a decades long trend).

Later that spending increase slowed, and in some places even had short term reversals, but still generally kept an upward trend (and again I'm talking about real per pupil spending so ts not inflation or more students causing the increase).

It keeps on saying "public money" but what does this actually mean?

Finally I find it

Tax dollars are not supposed to go toward religious education. But public agencies pay private schools to comply with government mandates and manage social services. Hasidic boys’ yeshivas, like other private schools, access dozens of such programs, collecting money that subsidizes their theological curriculum.

The details are vague, I expect on purpose. The NYT can surely clear this up but are not so they deserve no bonus points for confusion.

It feels like the government wants to make sure kids have enough to eat, so they pay schools money to do stuff like free school breakfast. And we call this "public funding."

The schools serving the very poorest children will simultaneously have the most "public funding" as well as the worst scores.

At that point the article should never have been written.

Tax dollars are not supposed to go toward religious education.

That's a line that caught my attention, because I recall there being a very recent Supreme Court decision saying that that principle mustn't be taken too far. Indeed: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-1088_dbfi.pdf

I remember reading a story about how in a certain area, the kids were declared to be special needs and that they would be sent to a school for children with such disabilities, and it was set up that way, but it was a yeshiva. They got public funding for special needs education and funnelled it to religious education in order to bypass laws about that. And the objections are not "they are getting public funding for special projects like other schools", but that "they get onto school boards and get voted in to be the majority members, then they start diverting all the funding to their yeshivas and stripping out funding for the secular schools". You're right that the NYT has to prove this happens, but you're not representing the story correctly with "this article should never have been written, this is just the same as funding for free meals for underprivileged kids".

This is a very touchy subject, because it's very easy to make a mis-step and fall right into stereotypes about 'the Jews'. But I think it's evident that the Hasidim are, in effect, what would be called a cult elsewhere and that even within Judaism they're on an extreme edge. They do think of the outside world, the Gentiles, as foreigners and strangers among whom they live, and so despoiling them is permissible because it's the spoils of Egypt.

the Hasidim are, in effect, what would be called a cult elsewhere

I give you the Rogan Formulation:

1: In a cult, it's run by one guy who knows the whole thing is bullshit.

2: In a religion, that guy died.

It feels like the government wants to make sure kids have enough to eat

Of course not. Americans are free to elect pro wrestlers or turn their libraries into sleeping quarters for the homeless, but the stated purpose of the library is still providing access to books. And feeding children isn't the point of education. Education is, i.e. ensuring at the minimum that children learn basic skills needed to navigate the broader society (like, literally read signs, understand arithmetic, handle elementary instructions, speak the common tongue – do things only a foreign premodern peasant thrown into the middle of Manhattan won't be able to). This is a very low bar and, if the NYT is to be trusted (which I guess they can be, here – authors seem to be sincerely distressed with the kneecapped condition of their kin), it is not reached, leaving kids helpless and forced to depend on the unaccountable and overbearing religious community.

So the outrage is legitimate: this is defrauding the state.

the point of education

This is a more complicated issue than it might appear.

American schools serve a complicated role as an educator, babysitter, and social service.

Some of that falls under “necessary skills” in terms of socialization and, in theory, physical fitness. Other parts are more vaguely prosocial, keeping children at desks instead of selling hypothetical drugs. And there is a surprisingly broad category of benefits to parents, especially if they are not part of a traditional household. The single mother or the dual-income couple is better able to participate in the economy.

Feeding children is mainly in the middle category, It is a reasonably means tested and selective way to keep the poorest from starving. But it also helps compensate for poor or overcrowded households, reducing their food costs. And, even more tenuously, the program is supposed to maintain nutrition with obvious benefits to society.

So, even though it is barely coupled to the creation of educated citizens, school food programs serve a number of widely accepted social roles.

Towns in subjected areas will purposely reduce sidewalks or veto funding for sidewalks in order to deter Hasids from moving in.

I'm not sure if I'm being thick here but what's the relationship between sidewalks and Hasidis?

They prefer walkable neighborhoods and on the Sabbath they can’t drive. They can be driven on the Sabbath but they need someone out of the community to do the driving, so it’s a hassle to move into a town with no sidewalks.

In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money

Among the array of Holocaust literature that was required reading throughout public school, one of the worst was surely The Chosen. Although it took place in New York and the Holocaust was only part of the backdrop.

The novel explores the dialectic between Jewish Chosenness and Jewish secular achievement in the form of the Hasidic versus Modern Orthodoxy. Danny is a Hasidic boy being groomed to succeed his father as Rabbi. But he has photographic memory and secretly wants to pursue a career in Freudian psychiatry. Danny pursues secular studies at the library under his father's nose. Reuven is a Modern Orthodox Jewish boy whose father wants him to have a career in academia, but Reuven wants to be a rabbi. For Potok, the resolution is of course a synthesis where Danny achieves his academic goals while maintaining his orthodoxy and Reuven achieves Talmudic enlightenment or something.

But even at the time, what stood out was how poor behavior from the Hasidic was portrayed sympathetically although it was in violation of all the other principles we were supposed to be learning as children. Dogmatic, authoritarian, insular, abusive... Danny's rabbi father raises him in silence, only talking to him when they study Talmud together- because of Auschwitz, or something.

Hasidic power structure is a legitimate problem that needs to be made sense of

Americans are deeply incapable of grasping Jewish power structures. This is due in large part to the lessons they have been taught as children, like in The Chosen, where are are made to sympathize and valorize the worst elements of a cultural tradition as implicit penance for the Holocaust.

/images/16630473337475488.webp

We strongly discourage low-effort one-liners, emojis, and links to memes. Don't do this. Make your point with words and complete sentences.

If you seriously believe this, isn’t this extremely counterproductive? What are you going to get out of making those potential Von Neumanns into 1.6 child average secular adults? Isn’t it much better to let them continue with their extreme multiplication rates so in a couple generations we have 20 Von Neumanns instead of 1.

Just the firstborn son. A side tap to siphon off some of that beneficial HBD.

Students are barely taught how to read and write in English (as an example, one couldn't spell "America") and the state requirements are effectively optional or used as a study hall.

So they're performing about as well as the rest of New York then?

Lame jokes aside, New York has the second lowest literacy rate of any state in the US, behind California. Rough a quarter of all New York adults are (functionally illiterate), though this depends on how one defines illiteracy. Focusing on the Hasidic Jews at this point seems remarkably short sighted, when much of the rest of the education system in New York is performing just as poorly, and state education funding to public schools is similarly siphoned away to administrators and DEI enforcers and all other sorts non-educational processes.

Maybe if the public school system in New York was more functional there would be a leg to stand on. Obviously, there is a cultural ethno-religious element to the Hasidic Jewish education that is not present in the public school system needs that should be addressed (although... woke influence on the education system does have some eerie similarities). But it's hard to single them out for change while so much of the rest of the public education system is just as, if not more, dysfunctional. At least self-isolation of the Hasidic Jews means their poor educational outcomes don't have wider negative social consequences as public schools do.

Anyone who finds this interesting and wants to hear one of the best radio segments ever recorded, may I recommend this wild ride:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/534/a-not-so-simple-majority

This was very interesting, thank you.

A yet another New York story about the ultra-Orthodox goes into my collection (previous entries: The New York Post: I was a Hasidic Jew – but I broke free, New Yorker: When One Parent Leaves a Hasidic Community, What Happens to the Kids? and bonus entry Vice: The Child-Rape Assembly Line).

What's always fascinating about traditionalist Jews is that they're not doing anything special or clever, all the secret sauce apparently lies in the execution and commitment to the cause. What is novel here? Strict patriarchy and gerontocracy, meritocracy where it matters (rabbis are smart and also fiercely loyal to the tribe), rewarding cooperation and association with cooperators, punishing defectors and non-punishers (with an eye to long-term pruning of bad branches: denying marriage prospects to non-compliant individuals), guarding against infohazards, sieged fortress doctrine to bring out maximum ingroup sentiment, willingness to sacrifice opportunity for your principles and forgo temptations for long-term (reproductive) gain, cozying up to local authorities and making use of acquired resources until your group grows enough that you can boss those authorities around, exploitation of politically expedient memes, playing the victim; and or course perfect coordination like voting in bloc, with blind trust in the judgement of your tribal hereditary elite. If it takes that much today to stop young Ashkenazim from using TikTok, the Rabbis will do that much. They take their mission as stewards of the group seriously.

(By the way: «Grand Rabbi» sounds like Archbishop or something, but that's basically a clan leader, a dynastic head priest; I wonder if Americans comprehend just how alien those people's livestyles are. They are not represented at all by your favorite blogger, or some funny nerdy STEM professor from a sitcom, running in the morning to the BART station, half-eaten bagel in hand. It's not a matter of degree, not an issue of extremist outliers, nothing like some beautiful exotic superstitions your gf's granny from Hawaii knows: they really are living like old Qahals, by strict Mafia-type laws enforced with more consistency than your state laws, omerta and all. But I digress).

They don't do anything their ancestors didn't do in Russian Empire shtetls and European ghettos. This is how they have been surviving – and attracting hate – for centuries, sans minor details like voting, and their dress code looking more quixotic now, a frozen snapshot from 18th century. If we are to trust Romans and Greeks, this is how ancient Jews have been living even in the pre-Christian era. In some ways the Hasidim have become more archaic, almost desperately LARPing as old school Orthodox; but in most ways they're being true to the general mold of the tradition.

If the society has «evolved» in any sense except purely technological, why are their tricks so effective? Why is it so easy to exploit? This reminds me of Wyclif's great series on Universal Cultural Takeover:

Bryan Caplan:

Given a choice, young people choose Western consumerism, gender norms, and entertainment. Anti-Western governments from Beijing to Tehran know this this to be true: Without draconian censorship and social regulation, “Westoxification” will win.

How’s that story working out in Tel Aviv?

Ultra-Orthodox Judaism is not a one-off. As Eric Kaufmann points out in _Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? r_eligious cultures which haven’t been “eaten by the demon” are doing fine.

In all parts of the world, fundamentalist fertility exceeds moderate religious fertility, which in turn outpaces secular fertility.

Sometimes explicitly, self-consciously so. Some of the most extreme fundamentalist groups eschew conversion in favour of reproduction. They have quit persuading people on to their ark, and are getting ready to float.

Anyway. Ethics of nakedly particularist rules-lawyering aside, are they unhappy? The NYT authors are certainly very opposed to the continuation of their lifestyle, because it's, well, not explicitly geared towards what we recognize as self-actualization (I don't believe they worry all that much about subverting local politics or the funding issue). And sure enough, there's plenty of abuse in that community. But are they neurotic? Wracked by climate fears and anti-racist remorse? Invested into the Culture War, frothing at the mouth about Beijing Biden or Trump, Pizzagate and COVID? What do they think about their brothers secular/Reform Jews, or about Gentiles for that matter? I recall they think the latter are soulless murderers (to the extent that staying with one in an isolated space is inherently dangerous), and Reformers are lost souls who are almost as bad. They probably feel immensely greater disgust towards modern innovations like trans rights than the staunchest reactionary here (those of them who are allowed and willing to expose themselves to the Chaos of external society, the courageous vanguard). So, do they want to be rescued?

One additional issue is the existence of AI. We have many pundits and thinkers discussing the dangers of automation, the loss of meaning that for now comes with hard work. That's a very Christian, even Protestant idea. This group, if no other, will make the transition just fine. They do not like to work, they try to work as little as possible, their religion promises them liberation from work at the end of history as reward for millenia of piousness and fulfilling mitzvot, they find meaning in their family, tribe and praising their God, and that'll be only easier to do with universal basic income. If the AI deity offers it to them, they'll gladly welcome the opportunity to multiply and prosper.

These days, that's worth something. I would like other groups to take notes.

There is plenty of things "impressive" with what Hasidim manage to uphold in both Israel and the West. The main problem is that they are simply one group out of many, and if everyone (or even some significant number of groups) behaved like this we would very soon have societal collapse and descend into tribal warfare. They are a truly insignificant minority in America and rest of the West, but Israel is already waking up to this problem.

But are they neurotic? Wracked by climate fears and anti-racist remorse? Invested into the Culture War, frothing at the mouth about Beijing Biden or Trump, Pizzagate and COVID?

The Orthodox life might look idyllic from the outside, but it is not spared angst and trauma, angst that might look silly to the outsiders, but is deadly serious for the insiders.

for example: "Is the water I was drinking all my life really, really kosher? What if I accidentally swallowed some tiny bug?"

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/nyregion/the-waters-fine-but-is-it-kosher.html

https://gothamist.com/food/nycs-tap-water-clean-but-filled-with-crustaceans

https://oukosher.org/blog/consumer-news/nyc-water/

I realise I'm a little late to the party, but I want to talk about Tolkien and RoP.

One of the themes of Lord of the Rings is the idea that the smallest, the humblest person can change the destiny of the world, and become a hero. The Hobbits represent small, humble, ordinary people. They don’t lust for power or fame, or aspire to do great deeds. Thus the Ring can’t corrupt them in the way that it would corrupt Boromir or Galadriel, although it can make them covet it as a possession. We see this when Sam willingly gives it back to Frodo, even though we have seen others kill for it having been exposed to it for far shorter periods. Bilbo manages to give it up, after having owned it and been subjected to its influence for 60 years, and Frodo manages to bear it right into the heart of Mt Doom, with the Ring fighting him all the way.

The Ring works by tempting its owners, offering them ways to get what they desire most. The Wizards want to make the world a better place. The Elves want to stop the decay of the world. Men desire power and the ability to defeat their enemies. Dwarves desire treasure. All of them want something they don’t already have, therefore the Ring has something to work with, something to offer them. While Hobbits are content creatures: “But where our hearts truly lie is in peace and quiet and good tilled earth. For all Hobbits share a love of all things that grow. And yes, no doubt to others, our ways seem quaint. But today of all days, it is brought home to me it is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.”

Galadriel was never some paladin of light. She is the ultimate redemption arc. Someone who had many of the same flaws as Sauron, but who came back. Sauron had a chance for redemption, but couldn't follow through due to his pride. Like Galadriel he was told to come back to Valinor. He didn't want to leave his powerbase or his pride behind however. The character who some consider to be the ultimate hero of the tale, who gets the last scene is not Aragorn the King or an immortal elf. It's the family man with scars, who lost his friend, and who comes home to his family and does the best he can.

It seems Amazon Studios never bothered to understand when they decided they'll make Galadriel a sort of "girlboss" claiming to save the world but with the writers' focus being on her path to glory like most woke cape blockbusters these days. Given how literarily significant Tolkien is world over, its so bizarre that they'd try to pick apart his legacy and crap all over him. Within my reading circle in India, LOTR is a favourite. The supposed racism doesn't even register. The last RoP trailer in regional languages here also got ratio'd on YouTube. I don't know what Amazon was thinking. They said this is the most expensive show ever and that the future of the studio itself relies on its success, and yet they decide to check the woke quotas instead of giving Tolkien fans what they want. Did they really just not expect this level of blowback? Its so unfathomable to me that the answer is that simple, could it be something else?

They said this is the most expensive show ever and that the future of the studio itself relies on its success, and yet they decide to check the woke quotas instead of giving Tolkien fans what they want. Did they really just not expect this level of blowback? Its so unfathomable to me that the answer is that simple, could it be something else?

I saw this video on reddit today that explains the phenomenon as "parasitic storytelling" and I've only watched it once, but I'm inclined to agree:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=gFxu3Q71NvE

Basically, the problem would be that people responsible for these shows care first and foremost about using a brand to subvert and attack what they see as some kind of oppressive status quo, and they tend to see the world through surface-level stereotypes.

It is just the left's version of Christian Movies. Quality, plot, hero's journey, none of that is as important as The Message.

Nice video. Thanks for linking it as I never would have watched it otherwise.

They said this is the most expensive show ever and that the future of the studio itself relies on its success, and yet they decide to check the woke quotas instead of giving Tolkien fans what they want. Did they really just not expect this level of blowback? Its so unfathomable to me that the answer is that simple, could it be something else?

I also find it a bit funny because two of their most popular series recently, Reacher and The Terminal List, were extremely successful acting as straightforward adaptations of their source material with all the problematic themes and messaging included.

Compared to the Jack Ryan TV series which seems to have plopped out two seasons and been largely forgotten, and as I recall it was because hardcore Tom Clancy fans picked apart the show's accuracy to real life and the plausibility of the plots (i.e. the things Tom Clancy was famous for) whilst the casual viewers found it too hard to follow and with too dour a tone.

Turns out, many popular things are popular because of certain elements that can be directly adapted to the screen, and trying to wedge in themes, ideas, characters, etc. that weren't present in the original poses a real risk of crowding out those elements and alienating the audience that actually likes the property.

A note on the "Jack Ryan" thing, I thought the first season was very solid and went into the second hoping for more, but it was a dumpster fire. I don't know or care what they changed, but it ruined the show for me. Season 2 was just shit.

Tend to agree. The few bits I liked about Season 1 were gone in Season 2.

I don't mind John Krasinski in the role, and you get the sense that they could have made something realistic, tense, and interesting, but I forgot literally everything that happened in Season 2 less than a week after watching it, and have no desire to follow up on it.

Oh wait, I didn't forget the part where they literally turned the government of the Venezuela-analogue country into a RIGHT-WING dictatorship with a heroic left-leaning female candidate as the country's hope for revival.

Jesus.

Oh wait, I didn't forget the part where they literally turned the government of the Venezuela-analogue country into a RIGHT-WING dictatorship with a heroic left-leaning female candidate as the country's hope for revival.

...Yup, that was it for me. Doing it while executing a piss-poor retread of Clear and Present Danger, probably my favorite Clancy story when I was a kid, was just salt in the wound.

Oh god, you're giving me flashbacks. YES. They made not-Maduro a conservative. They couldn't even set it in Chile or something. Wild, wild stuff.

I also find it a bit funny because two of their most popular series recently, Reacher and The Terminal List, were extremely successful acting as straightforward adaptations of their source material with all the problematic themes and messaging included.

I watched Reacher and I don't recall much "problematic" about it except in the sense that a huge white man in a mostly white small town was running around solving crimes.

Even then the show threw some "woke" stuff in by talking about how that town treated black inhabitants.

I mean, Reacher goes around on a vigilante rampage beating up on criminals of various stripes, including some PoC. Guns are treated as a generally useful affordance for protection rather than a dangerous item to be feared and regulated. Small town rural life is given an overall positive depiction (corruption by the local elites notwithstanding) and race relations are actually shown to be overall peaceful and genial.

I think by current standards Reacher himself represents many aspects of so-called 'toxic masculinity.' Doesn't talk about his feelings much, solves problems through application of brute force (precisely targeted, though), and demonstrates active contempt for authority figures or, indeed, anyone who tries to reign in his behavior. Oh, he also gets to rescue some damsels in distress at the end there.

Its not like it actively seeks to trangress current year norms, just doesn't pay them any respect, either.

But Reacher does end up being more about dumb entertaining violence than any real message whatsoever, which is actually quite refreshing in it's own right.

I mean, Reacher goes around on a vigilante rampage beating up on criminals of various stripes

Meh, vigilantism is kind of a weird grey area where you can reason from first principles that "wokes" would be set against it but they aren't, necessarily. Super hero movies are hugely popular, including ones like Batman who are more grounded vigilantes with all of the problems that entails.

Vengeance and violence are also allegedly not progressive values but they sell well and with little controversy.

I think by current standards Reacher himself represents many aspects of so-called 'toxic masculinity.' Doesn't talk about his feelings much, solves problems through application of brute force (precisely targeted, though), and demonstrates active contempt for authority figures or, indeed, anyone who tries to reign in his behavior. Oh, he also gets to rescue some damsels in distress at the end there.

He doesn't talk about his feelings but there're flashbacks that humanize him.

As for brute force: Reacher in the show (and the Tom Cruise movie) uses brute force the way Batman does; after he uses his other advantages of wealth and atypical intelligence to find the Acceptable Target.

In terms of sexual dynamics...not really much there either. Reacher doesn't stick around to raise a family with one woman he does have a sexual relationship with but there's functionally no acrimony and romance doesn't even seem to be that important to the plot of the show.

I'm not saying that no individual "woke" person could take offense - I've seen criticisms of A Quiet Place for allegedly lionizing rural, red state values, whatever that means - but I'm also not surprised that this hasn't boiled up into something more.

Its not like it actively seeks to trangress current year norms, just doesn't pay them any respect, either.

Sure, it's not really "woke" I guess but it's also not anti-woke or "problematic" such that it would be one of the juicier targets.

I wouldn't necessarily enjoy it if it were 'anti-woke' either, is the thing. I don't crave entertainment that validates the opposite of everything SJWs believe, I just want entertainment that doesn't either cram SJW values in where they clearly don't fit OR cowtow to SJW sensibilities to the detriment of its own audience, who may or may not care about such things.

That is, I appreciate works that are 'politically neutral' insofar as the story is able to stand on its own and the messaging isn't overtly designed to push a given ideological lens.

I got a similar sense from Top Gun: Maverick. Somehow that film even managed to downplay the RAH-RAH AMERICAN PATRIOTISM angle! It just wanted people to be able to get some positive emotions and thrills in exchange for their money! And audiences have rewarded the hell out of it, in return.

If there's a reason Reacher isn't a juicy target, I suspect it is because it doesn't have the same cultural cachet of, say, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and of course LOTR so it isn't as valuable a vessel to control. If it does breach into wider popularity, not sure if that'll hold.

If there's a reason Reacher isn't a juicy target, I suspect it is because it doesn't have the same cultural cachet of, say, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and of course LOTR so it isn't as valuable a vessel to control. If it does breach into wider popularity, not sure if that'll hold.

I'd argue that Rainbow Six is probably the more recognizable Tom Clancy IP, though maybe that's not fair to bring in a franchise that Ubisoft continues to milk to this day.

I don't think it is any more complex than Amazon simply throwing money at a franchise which is universally known so that it is very likely to draw a large viewership and then producing some generic uninspired series which postures as part of the universally known franchise while pandering to whatever Amazon thinks is the current zeitgeist. On the level of the people who actually produce and write the series there may be some conscious ideological commitment, but on the corporate level where the decision to make this series was actually made, I doubt it is more than just pure indifference to franchise itself and a simple desire to make money.

Also, it is pretty ironic that a multinational tech giant is working with Tolkien material, when Tolkien himself was a bit of a Luddite and a localist.

More than a bit. He once resolved to speak in nothing but old Mercian as a protest for the conversion of the midlands from woods and villages to industry, and the intrusion of radio, television, and other mass-media

I don't think it as any more complex than Amazon simply throwing money at a franchise which is universally known so that it is very likely to draw a large viewership and then producing some generic uninspired series which postures as part of the universally known franchise while pandering to whatever Amazon thinks is the current zeitgeist.

Yeah, there's functionally no difference with the Wheel of Time scenario. Or what happened to Percy Jackson. Or what happened to Dark Tower. Or Dragonball: Evolution...

It's simply a matter of magnitude: Tolkien is the most well-known fantasy author (except maybe JKR) and so doing it to his works correspondingly draws more attention

This is my thought as well.

The LotR appendices were, shockingly, not TV ready. A team applied them to what is by all accounts a fairly standard plot. Much budget was spent on CG and costuming. Casting was more diverse than Peter Jackson’s oeuvre, presumably in an attempt to hit a slightly broader audience.

All pretty vanilla decisions, but because of the brush with diversity, critics have a nice scapegoat.

If they'd spent less money on terrible wargs and more on finding somebody who knew how to write scripts for TV that involved credible dialogue, there would be less to complain about. Their inexperience is not helping them; if they had enough successes under their belt then they could pull off selling the woke stuff. But since their major idea of filling in the gaps in the Second Age seems to be "We have 1 black dwarf and 1 black elf, yay diverse representation!!!!" - no, it's not working.

On the level of the people who actually produce and write the series there may be some conscious ideological commitment, but on the corporate level where the decision to make this series was actually made, I doubt it is more than just pure indifference to franchise itself and a simple desire to make money

But shouldn't they, in theory, make more money if they make something that's remotely high quality? Wouldn't someone be more likely to subscribe or keep their subscription 20 years from when this woke shit expires?

I'll push it further - the people who produced and wrote the serious do have a conscious ideological commitment, and the check writers were too cowardly to make the maximum amount of money possible. They said "OK... we'll make $100m instead of $300m but at least we won't have to have a tough conversation about respecting the source material".

I'd bet against the latter.

My assumption is that writing is hard. Cohesive or compelling writing is harder. "99% of everything is crap." Given a random TV team*, I'm expecting a starting point of mediocrity.

Now add the source material. Compelling worldbuilding, yes. Nail-biting plots and snappy dialogue, no. So they're required from the start to take some sort of liberties. Maybe in the hands of a bold visionary, that means subversion of tropes, detailed intrigue, a stylistic homage. We get a standard hero's journey.

Throw in some romance to hit one crowd, a couple "relatable" characters for others. Marketing is throwing in a demand for one or another actor. Are they running an agenda? Doesn't matter--it's not like the direction is going to conflict. Appeal to the diehard fans with a couple name-drops. Don't worry too much, they'll come back to Middle-Earth for anything. Fill in the stock characterizations and frayed plot threads with luscious set pieces and big-budget CGI, since money is flowing freely.

That's how you get something like this.

* As a side note, the two main writers are both practicing Mormons. Not exactly the first demographic I'd pick for woke ideological capture.

  • As a side note, the two main writers are both practicing Mormons. Not exactly the first demographic I'd pick for woke ideological capture.

It's been my experience that Christians are the worst about wokeness in the racial division.

The racial angle is looking like the weakest criticism of this particular show. See this comment for examples of dumb characterization, Mary Sueing, and blue-tribe audience pandering.

Bezos is only concerned with making money. This show is meant to be the flagship that hooks everyone into paying for a Prime subscription.

I think it's painfully obvious that Payne and McKay have no experience or track record in writing or creating a successful show or movie. They have, what, writing credits on the third reboot Star Trek movie? That's about it, and I have no idea how two guys with nothing to back up "yeah, we did this hit show, that hit movie, etc." could get hired just on the recommendation of J.J. Abrams. How Abrams can manage to get his mucky paws either directly or by proxy all over three beloved fandoms like Star Trek, Star Wars and now Lord of the Rings, in order to mess them up, is another puzzle for the ages.

So they're falling back on standard tropes and slapping an epic fantasy coat of paint on them, as well as borrowing the names of Tolkien characters. Strong Independent Woman who is (spins wheel) motivated by Revenge Quest to avenge (throws dart) her dead brother. Stomps and scowls her way everywhere, because she don't need no stinkin' allies to achieve her aims, she is so omnicompetent she can take down Sauron and his entire army all by her ownsome.

Unless they manage to pull off a heck of a lot of improvement all round in the remaining episodes, there won't be a season two. It's already veering on omnishambles, not omnicompetent.

It's not ironic, they had to wait for the man himself and his son to die to pull this bullshit off.

What I found most frustrating about Amazon's 'girlbossifaction' of Galadriel is the undermining of what I believe to be one of the best mythological portrayals of femininity in modern literature (and cinema), something that is increasingly lacking in modern storytelling. This is actually a problem I have with even those who would criticize modern woke media, constantly pointing back to the 80s and their 'true strong female characters' like Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley. Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley may be female characters, but they aren't really feminine characters. They're just women inhabiting the archetypical male character. In fairness, they are good characters, but there's nothing really feminine about them other than are relatively aesthetic or superficial sense of 'motherliness' slapped on top.

Galadriel is the feminine archetype, or at least one of the feminine archetypes. She is the embodiment of ethereal beauty, not just in the sense of physical attractiveness, but also in the philosophical sense. She represents purity. This is also true of all the Elves, which in some sense are archetypically feminine as a whole, and Galadriel naturally being the most powerful of them all. We even get to see a glimpse of negative aspects, or the shadow of this archetype when she is tempted by the One Ring, where her desire to rule takes on a feminine twist, best represented by the line "All shall love me and despair!", that she (and the feminine archetype) could use her ethereal beauty to ensnare the will of men to worship her. Her role in the Lord of the Rings is similarly archetypically feminine. She does not play an active, overt role in the story, which is archetypically masculine but nevertheless her role is critically important to the narrative. She is the light out of the darkest hour the Fellowship had yet faced, the death of Gandalf. She provides the characters with much needed support, both material and spiritual, the consequences of which play out fully through the entire trilology. I think this is best represented by Gimli, who despite his fierce hatred of Elves, immediately is entranced and falls in (platonic(?)) love with Galadriel upon seeing her. Gimli is 'tamed' by Galadriel and her femininity. Upon leaving Lothlorien, Gimli asks for a single strand of her hair, to which she gives Gimli three. These strands of hair would become Gimli's most prized processions, and really is the beginning of Gimli's lessening of hatred/prejudice towards the Elves. To be a bit crass about it, this represents the purest and moral form of 'simping'.

Amazon has gotten rid of this wonderous portrayal of femininity and replaced with yet another essentially masculinized female character. Perhaps this is somewhat reflected in the source material. While I am a large LotR fan, I have never really delved into the 'supplementary' material, only sticking to the 'mainline' books (and films). From what I understand, in the Unfinished Tales, Galadriel is somewhat of a more masculine, sword-swinging warrior in her youth who leads a rebellion, before ultimately maturing to the feminine archetype we know later in her life. However, the Unfinished Tales are, in fact, unfinished and a more a jumbled mess of ideas than a coherent story, so I wonder if this was ever Tolkien's intention. Regardless, maybe Amazon with their girlboss Galadriel will have a character arc for her that results in her embracing this pure feminine archetype for her in the end. But I highly doubt it. Even if I believed that the writers for Rings of Power were capable of such good writing, the idea of actually embracing the feminine archetype as positive thing is anathema. Female characters can only be written as archetypically masculine now, usually with an additional, ironic element of snark towards men. This harkens back to some recent comments I've made both here and on the subreddit just before the move, that the female role is dead or dying and all there is left is for women to act like men and compare themselves to men.

Galadriel is the feminine archetype, or at least one of the feminine archetypes. She is the embodiment of ethereal beauty, not just in the sense of physical attractiveness, but also in the philosophical sense. She represents purity.

Not really. Galadriel, in Tolkein's telling, is a failure as an elf, full of mortal fires and furies and ambitions. Instead of retreating to the west and eternal communion with Eru and the Maiar, she clung on to dominion in Middle Earth, willingly accepting the corrupting power of her ring (which, remember, draws its power from Sauron and The Ring just the same as the Nazgul's rings did) in order to keep Loth Lorien in a state of protected stasis. Her journey in the LotR is the story of finally learning to let go of earthly loves and trust in the underlying goodness of powerlessness and subsumption into communion with God.

Much of that isn't particularly relevant to the narrative being told in LotR. And the feminine archetype doesn't mean she's perfectly good or moral either, that's not what I was talking about. Her desire to to preserve Lothlorien is completely keeping in with her theme of purity, and definitely has aspects of the shadow.

Absolutely, in the context of the narrative of Lord of the Rings, she absolutely does represent femininity. That is not mutually exclusive with other, religious themes.

Its also worth noting that Galadriel was married to Celeborn in the First Age and their daughter Celebrian was born early in the Second Age, but looks like both of them have been retconned from the show. It may be one thing that the Elvish society has evolved beyond human borders of intimacy, and become far more comfortable expressing closeness in a platonic way, but the show doesn't sufficiently establish exactly what kind of relationship Elrond and Galadriel share, its just coming off like he's making googly eyes at her. They might as well be completely different characters then, given that Elrond is married to Celebrian in canon. So what then, Arwen and the Twins are "written out" too?

If I were writing a LOTR prequel show and had "don't upset the fans" sticky-noted to my monitor, delving into what Tolkien actually had planned for is probably going to be my bible (over fealty to "are we correctly preserving the divine feminine" etc).

Funnily, the Sarah Connors and Ellen Ripleys [1] are more of an 80s-90s picture of "strong female characters", though that view gets regurgitated by the (mostly male) reddit/IMDb film culture -- usually to put down a female lead lauded as strong that may come off as too vulnerable or indirect or reliant on others. There is certainly a painful way to write these characters, most commonly seen in Disney's attempts to discharge its guilt in its live-action remakes [2], but most prestige screenwriting has much better developed and complex view of what strong female characters can be now, particularly in TV and four-quad, family media.

Yeoh's leading role in Everything Everywhere All at Once is probably one of the best characters and is interesting as a direct subversion of the strong female action star. She is given the capability for extreme violence, to shed the family she resents for true independence, and to live a thousand lives where she is successful in all the ways she wished for -- but it doesn't bring any success. She succeeds when she fully embraces the typically feminine virtue of kindness that she finally recognises as expressed, purely, vulnerably, bravely in her husband.

[1] For Alien, at least. In Aliens Ripley's character is more genuinely feminine-coded with both her and the big bad xeno cast as conflicting mother roles.

[2] An issue more of competing interests between fidelity and addressing problematic elements than anything -- either shrug and replicate it or go full on with the inversion. If Cinderella is criticised for being a bit flat and without agency, it'd be a more fun movie to make her and the prince a bit dim but destined for happiness if the godmother can only pull it all off against the odds.

Okay, but what’s actually wrong with Galadriel?

It’s one thing if her “path to glory” is too much like capeshit. I have no idea how one could make a Marvel movie in Middle-Earth, so if they really tried to do that, I wouldn’t be surprised that it’s trash.

Of course, that would be true regardless of the political slant.

“Path to glory” power fantasy isn’t new to the setting. It’s the default for video games, of course. Shadow of Mordor trampled all over Tolkien’s themes and worldbuilding, but after a few months of grumbling, the intended audience decided it was kind of badass. This suggests that the problem with RoP runs deeper.

On the political side, there’s a difference between woke casting and woke writing. Gender-flipping or race-swapping a character doesn’t necessarily change their arc (even if it pisses off fans). Writing the plot into a corner to score ideological points is a bigger problem. I have yet to see examples of RoP screwing the latter up.

So how much of the backlash is political, and how much of it is about general writing quality? Did wokeness somehow prevent a decent show, or was it incidental? What did Galadriel do?

This may be hard to explain to somebody seeped in certain type of culture, but for other people the themes are grating and obvious to see. What did Galadriel do? As with all feminism Galadriel is perfect example of what if gender swapped would be seen as "toxic masculinity" only written badly. She is bitchy, disrespectful and overall pain in the ass. She constantly mansplains to everybody her point, like the "you have not seen what I have seen" to Elrond, a character who was literally out there fighting Morgoth. She is always angry and her solution to problems is either violence, or angry demands to speak to management to do her bidding. Her scene with Regent Murielle was one long cringe pissing contest. She is for some reason instantly liked by important characters like Elrond, Gil-Galad or Elendil for no reason despite her acting like a bitch - in case of Elendil even threatening him with dagger for which he conveniently shows her Numenorian secrets in their library or whatnot.

But there are other stupid and self-serving cameos in the show so far. One of the "original characters" showrunners invented was Elendil's sister (I won't bother looking her name), in their own words to "introduce some feminine energy into the family" or some such. And her main cameo in the show was bragging that they accepted her to the university or something like that. It is so on the nose and stupid beyond belief, but I guess for some people it is absolutely normal writing.

Thanks for elaborating.

That sounds absolutely abysmal, and definitely crosses the bar for blue-tribe pandering.

To be fair, I think a lot of fandom was primed by what is nowadays standard "fanbaiting" to look for "woke" stuff in the show. And it is there for sure, but it is overshadowed by bad writing, bad pacing and overall bad direction even. For instance there is a scene where a human woman meets black elf (they have supposed "forbidden romance" but with no chemistry) talking about attack by orcs on her village (where she decapitated an orc, slamming it on table in tavern proving the veracity of the threat). And when they get there to asses the situation the woman shows no emotion - she does not call out for potential survivors of her family or friends, she does not cry or anything like that. She just kind of goes around as if she was hardened mercenary surveilling yet another site of a massacre she got accustomed to.

What happens next is that all the elven garrison jump into a hole from which orcs came only to be promptly captured - and BTW by this point everybody knows that orcs are there. And then they make a plan - let one of them escape to alert nearby garrisons of potential threat. Because it did not occur to anybody to send a messenger back before jumping to fight orcs in a pit in the first place.

The reason why I am talking about all of this is that I think this is not a coincidence. It is not the fact that the show itself breaks suspension of disbelief by inserting some modern blue tribe/woke aesthetics into the programming. I think that the whole cast, directors, producers and above all else the writers are just sheltered blue tribe brats with no relevant life experience, seeped in their respective bubbles thinking that creating fanfictions where they insert their fantasies as well as their aesthetics is the pinnacle of fine art. It is kind of narcissist, it breaks the 4th wall where you can clearly see what characters the writers love or hate in their own life, there is no separation or thinking outside of the box. I think they seriously believe this and the result is what we see.

I think that this whole culture elevates incompetent writers and other professionals. And I am not even that opposed, for instance I quite liked the professionalism in Everything Everywhere All At Once - which had diverse cast and also some woke messaging, but it at least made sense (although ending was kind of cringe).

Even if we take out what I am being forced to conclude is indeed "Woman always right, Man always wrong" writing, the rest of it just dumps all over the character.

Take the scene in the audience hall of Númenor when she is speaking with Tar-Míriel. She recites a list of her titles, which should mean that she knows how to behave - both politically and as a matter of courtesy - when speaking to someone in that context. She should be diplomatic, she should be polite, she should behave like a civilised person. But instead she demands passage back to Middle-earth and manages to get everyone's back up with the way she does it. When it falls to the ragged guy pulled off a raft in the middle of the ocean to be emollient and diplomatic, then that's bad writing. It may be supposed to hint that Halbrand is not what he claims to be, that he too has had the training of a noble line, but it only works because Galadriel is so arrogant, rude, and flat-out stupid.

The writing is just poor all round. Fake profound statements that are idiotic (nobody is going to stop mocking the "do you know what the difference between a stone and a ship is?" speech) and too much jumping forward without explaining. If you know the lore, you know why Galadriel says "my family started this", but if you're a casual viewer who just tuned in to watch some fantasy TV and you maybe watched the movies years back, you have no idea what that is about, because the only mention of family you have seen so far is her brother, who was killed by Sauron. So how did they 'start this'? Did Finrod (and we don't even get his name mentioned) start this? What happened?

No time to explain who the Faithful are and why would they be considered traitors, but we got plenty of time for a slo-mo horsey ride!

Right now Galadriel (or the character with the name Galadriel) is an awful brat. We're three episodes in, out of what I think are going to be eight episodes for the first season, and so far she has scowled, snarled, and whined her way from Middle-earth to Númenor. She is such a pain in the backside that Gil-galad put her on a ship to Valinor, in the guise of a 'reward', to get rid of her. And at the last moment, as the ship was about to be brought into the Undying Lands, she jumped overboard to, apparently, swim her way back to Middle-earth rather than dock in Valinor. Just let that piece of show-writing sink in for a moment.

Even if this is meant to be Young Piss And Vinegar Galadriel, she is both immensely stupid (see: jumping overboard to 'certain death' as she puts it in a later episode) and immensely, well, stupid. She is arrogant, entitled, and driven by a personal quest for vengeance. Allegedly she is Commander of the Northern Armies, but she shows the leadership skills of a pot of yoghurt: she leaves her men (and yeah, men is the defining term here) far behind as she zooms her way up the ice waterfall, she shows no concern about morale or the issues they raise with her, she's perfectly happy to leave one behind if he falls in the snow, and while the ice troll is smashing them into the walls of the cavern, she then steps forth to dispatch it with a twirly-twirl of her sword in a fight that is over so fast, it is anti-climactic. Why does she have even a squad with her, she plainly doesn't need any of them and they only hold her back?

She is curt and rude to Elrond, she is rude to Gil-galad, she is rude to Tar-Míriel, she is rude to Elendil - you get the gist. We're supposed to sympathise with her being driven by her vengeance quest for the death of her beloved brother, and that she is indeed and in fact right about the danger of Sauron, but she's just too damn unpleasant and borderline unhinged for it to work. And I don't know how fair I am being to the actress, but she has about two expressions: Resting Bitch Face and Weird Eye-Twitch.

I just saw a funny (and very tongue-in-cheek with how it phrases the political elements) video about the real villain in The Rings Of Power.

Why September 9 in the headline?

Sigh. Because I looked down at my clock and saw "9" and typed 9 in.

That was the month, Zorba, not the day.

(Fixed, though - I like being able to edit titles here.)

At some point we'll get this automated and these problems will go away.

I'm curious, are there any plans to expand this website to mobile apps in the future, once this site settles in?

I think it is very unlikely that we'll reach a point where a standalone mobile app is the best use of our development time. It would also make us far more vulnerable to Apple/Google censorship; even if we could get it for free, I'm not sure it would be worth it.

The only downside I've found of using a mobile browser is the lack of push notifications, but that isn't really a big deal for me since I hate those. At least themotte.org isn't overtly HOSTILE to mobile browsers like reddit is.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that on Android Chrome, choosing "add to home screen" in the top right menu on themotte.org essentially produces a decent mobile app.

Fennec works the same for me. I guess rdrama mobile version is good enough.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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/

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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".

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

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

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

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.

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.


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