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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27395 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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lighthearted cs drama

The grace hopper conference is supposed to be for women and gender minorities. Since they have recruiters there, the job market is tight, and there's no explicit policy against men showing up, men have been showing up. It looks like a lot of people are unhappy about this. The csmajors sub banned discussion of it, but there are still plenty of juicy threads up; in addition to the gender wars, a lot of the guys being international students adds a 'they're taking our jobs' flair to the fire. Since it's basically impossible to gatekeep nonbinary-ness, the challenge for the organizers, if they choose to accept it, is to weed out the men without being accused of being TERFs.

I've watched intersectionals take Liberalism apart limb from limb using its own reasoning against it. I think turnabout is fair play.

White women who don't want brown enbies at their conferences are just reactionary bigots who are on the wrong side of history. Et caetera.

The most salient contradiction in this movement has always been the unholy union between the essentialism required to believe in transsexualism and feminism and gender abolition in general. It's been successfully papered over by appealing to how expensive the signal to become transgender is combined with careful political maneuvering inside of feminist circles, but now queer theory has thoroughly walked the whole thing into a trap.

They've spent years undermining the borders of trans to wrest control of it from the medicalists, and in doing so have made any proper friend enemy distinction impossible. I didn't know what the exploitation of that weakness would look like. I guess I do now.

This breach will probably be plugged, since the exploiters are not organized. But I'm not sure how they'll do it since the only way they can do it without folding to essentialism (which they can no longer) is to require political tests which can always be faked.

is to require political tests which can always be faked

This isn't as easy as it seems.

  1. People aren't good at passing idelogical turing tests. It requires intense curiosity and acting skills if they're doing these in person.
  2. Even if you could conceivably do a good job with the above, this isn't the court of law. The implicit racial/sexual preferences of the organizers (along with normal biases) have even greater cover than before.

You've argued in other comments this opens up attack vectors. Sure. But with the weight behind intersectionality, as it stands today, the only legitimate attackers are still believers (at least in name). A corrupted institution being overtaken by another that's almost indistinguishable doesn't help anyone that's too low on the victimhood index, it's just boring drama and wasted energy.

There is indeed inertia that makes this particular not a useful actual target and a mere object of study. These weaknesses cannot yet be exploited but they are systematic. And someone eventually will exploit them.

I think that's coming sooner than people think, I can see thermidorian forces slowly coalescing together guided by the path of the repression of the current regime and it's growing reliance on ever harder and more obvious forms of power.

Who knows what's going to happen, but something will. This energy has to go somewhere and all the pressure release valves I can see from here are held shut.

What you're seeing is not the beginnings a Thermidorian counterrevolution but that they believe their ultimate victory is in sight; finally, the boot stomping on a human face forever, and the human face will thank the boot and demand more. That the Grace Hopper Conference is being used to practice employment discrimination and the only objection anyone can come up with is that members of the discriminated-against sex are interfering with this is demonstration that they are right.

is to require political tests which can always be faked.

Everything can be faked. That's not necessarily bad, seen from the side of the movement.

In Havel's Czechoslovakia, by the time he wrote his 'Power of the Powerless', probably few of the Communist Party members were "real communists". That wasn't really the point, the power of the organization called the "Communist Party" over society was the point. In a sense there was a political test, that everyone was faking, from the greengrocers up. It didn't matter that you faked it, all that mattered is that a) you were aware enough that you knew you were supposed to at least fake it, and b) you were willing to fake it - even just for the sake of personal advancement - rather than insist on honesty. In doing so you were both submitting to the system, and contributing to empowering the system.

Every man who shows up and claims to be nonbinary to get a job is doing something similar. They don't say, this is an unfair way to hire people. They say, I'm an enby so I should get a job too. They legitimize it and empower it and in doing so chain themselves to it. They become part of it.

For all that it looks like undermining the stated goals of the movement, the workers of the world never really did unite either. I doubt that bothered the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia (or the other communist countries) one bit.

White women who don't want brown enbies at their conferences

As long as we're all clear that OP just made that up, and the women actually just don't want men at this one conference.

  • -18

You'll have to elaborate on how he made anything up. It sounds like you're confirming what he said.

Of course. And Kyle Rittenhouse never shot any black people.

Framing is everything.

The rare miss. People forget about Maurice Freeland.

he shot at jump kick man, but did not hit him, and jump kick man's identity was not known at the time of the trial.

This breach will probably be plugged, since the exploiters are not organized. But I'm not sure how they'll do it since the only way they can do it without folding to essentialism (which they can no longer) is to require political tests which can always be faked.

Why is that the only way they can do it? Isn't the classic obscenity test - "I know it when I see it" - good enough? Arguably, the current regime is just that with more steps designed to obfuscate it. This ties into my thoughts on your first statement:

I've watched intersectionals take Liberalism apart limb from limb using its own reasoning against it. I think turnabout is fair play.

which is cromulent enough on its face, but which doesn't account for the defenses that the "intersectionals" (first time I've encountered this term used as a noun to refer to the people - I like it) have built against this very sort of thing. After all, if you master how to exploit a vulnerability, you also often learn how to fix them. In this case, it's just rejecting the concept of "using reasoning or logic to draw conclusions" as an oppressive made-up structure, in favor of "listening to marginalized voices." Which, given the degrees of freedom in determining what a "marginalized voice" is, in the context of some conference discriminating its attendants, is just another version of "I know it when I see it."

To address the core of your argument, I disagree that intersectional greatness on the attack translates into a learned defense. That may be how strategy works sometimes but not all the time.

Indeed most of the gambits that are and were deployed to sustain breaches, up and including the use of arbitrary power to break principles where contradiction is effective, are not translatable to the defense.

Progressives are not good at building or sustaining solid institutions. They are great at taking over existing ones and getting their effort's worth out of the ruins they end up holding, but builders and stewards they are not.

To take this specific example, the use of arbitrary power to maintain a "i know it when i see it" standard requires the constant deployment of political capital to defend a blatant injustice that can easily be attacked. This is not a problem if this is used to exploit a breach, such as in the case of preferential admissions into an institution as one's power can grow faster than is spent, but it's not something that can be maintained in the long term without a legitimizing principle.

Eventually someone you don't like gets the arbitrary power and can wipe you out since all restraints are gone. If it is "i'll know it when I see it", then you may very well say that only neo-post-chisto-integralist women are real women for these purposes, insofar as you have a coalition backing you.

I've long predicted that intersectionalism is going to have to mutate into a proper imperial religion if it seeks to maintain its gains as Christianity had to do. Either that or it'll end up being the same sort of flash in the pan as the Terreur or the Cultural Revolution. But I'm not sure which is more likely even now.

To take this specific example, the use of arbitrary power to maintain a "i know it when i see it" standard requires the constant deployment of political capital to defend a blatant injustice that can easily be attacked. This is not a problem if this is used to exploit a breach, such as in the case of preferential admissions into an institution as one's power can grow faster than is spent, but it's not something that can be maintained in the long term without a legitimizing principle.

Eventually someone you don't like gets the arbitrary power and can wipe you out since all restraints are gone. If it is "i'll know it when I see it", then you may very well say that only neo-post-chisto-integralist women are real women for these purposes, insofar as you have a coalition backing you.

These are fair points, and I particularly find the note about having to expend political capital to be a very good one. But what if these people believe that they have effectively infinite political capital, and what if they're right? We can talk about how naked power moves make the populace less likely to politically support you, but I think the protection they developed against the vulnerabilities they exploited can keep that at bay such that the long term is the long term. At some point as that long term gets lengthened, it becomes effectively infinite for someone living in 2023.

I've long predicted that intersectionalism is going to have to mutate into a proper imperial religion if it seeks to maintain its gains as Christianity had to do. Either that or it'll end up being the same sort of flash in the pan as the Terreur or the Cultural Revolution. But I'm not sure which is more likely even now.

I'm not sure either. After all, even tracing all the way back to the intellectual roots in the 20th century, it's barely a blip so far in historical terms. I don't know what a "proper imperial religion" is, but by my lights, I think it has already mutated - or perhaps "evolved" or "ascended" - to a proper religion at this point. I see it as one possible next evolution of religion, one that's developed in response to the greater materialistic and scientific thinking by the populace of the past couple centuries in comparison to most times before, which has greatly weakened the status of traditional religions which often directly contradict materialism or science. The religion that succeeds in this environment is the religion that convinces its believers that it's not a religion or even that it's antithetical to religion, and I think intersectionality (or CRT or wokeness or idpol or whatever name its adherents refuse to let others label it by) is proving to be extremely successful at this.

It’s easy enough for organizers to implement “I know it when I see it.” It also opens up new attack surfaces. “Live by the sword…”

...Isn't this just reimplementing monarchy with extra steps? The liberal thing is supposed to be figuring out how to run things on rules, but the rules don't work so we get "I know it when I see it", but that just hands power to an "I"; what's the difference between "I know it when I see it" and "‘L’etat c’est moi’"?

I knew there was a reason I didn't trust NrX...

I have been to night clubs where they obviously wanted to limit the number of straight regular white men, but this is in a country where face checks are just not a thing and would really enrage people. So they put an alt black female security at the door who would have a short chat with you at the door asking questions like "what does tolerance mean to you". Unless you really believe all the bromides (or you have an autistic level of cynical knowledge of social justice thinking like me and my friends), it is very difficult to give a fake correct answer.

Figuring out how to run things on rules works when you have a unified culture where people interpret the rules in the same way, but fails when that ceases to be true.

Maybe I’ve misunderstood but haven’t you said the same many times?

In the absence of a shared understanding, the reification of a local or federal “I” is the only alternative to full anarchy.

Quite.

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