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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26653 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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What does the light at the end of the tunnel look like?

Look, every now and then I stop watching my footfalls and get pensive. And one of the things I've gotten pensive about the past few days is this: the Western culture war is not going to last forever, which means it's going to end. And when it does, how will we look back on this mad time?

Two of the answers are obvious:

  1. If the culture war ends in X-catastrophe, then we won't look back on it at all, because there will be no more historians.
  2. If SJ wins, it'll look back on now much the same way it looks back on the '50s right now, with maybe a few mentions of Nazis added.

But what I can't really put together is the third option, the narrative that will be told if SJ is indeed just a passing phase, either because Red/Grey defeated it or because it wins and then turns out to be unsustainable. Frankly, the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born, so it's hard for me to even picture it. And that troubles me; it's the scenario I think is most likely, and the one I'm to at least some extent trying to bring about, so if I don't have a good idea of what it even looks like that's kind of an HCF. "It is not enough to say that you do not like the way things are. You must say how you will change them, and to what."

So, how will the people in that scenario think of this time? What story will they tell?

(To the SJers here: feel free to answer, if you think you understand your opposition, or feel free to correct me if you think my #2 is uncharitable.)

the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born

Well however young you are I'd suggest if you think that you should look harder. There are plenty of conservatives in prestigious history departments across the Anglosphere.

That is fair. I think I recall some from the 90s that were biased in a not-Blue-Tribe way, now that I think of it.

I mean, ignoring AGI, which is going to be a whole problem -

the Western culture war is not going to last forever, which means it's going to end. And when it does, how will we look back on this mad time?

A reactionary would say what we're getting is a continuation of at least three hundred years of progressive advance, so it might last a while. Or, put differently, when the 'culture war' ends we'll just get gay-accepting partially-pronatalist liberal meritocracy, as opposed to something more racist or theocratic. When the libertarians won against the statists/socialists, in one sense the Right won, and in another sense libertarians were still quite progressive.

The mistakes made by boosters of the soviet union are perhaps not criticized as much as they should be by historians, but they're not praised either.

In other words: the degenerated and corrupted aspects of hyperprogressivism may be minimized, but at least they mostly won't be glorified.

In non-singularity situations.

I find it easy to imagine the current culture war ending with the defeat of the social justice worldview. What that would look like is somewhat like jihadism looks like today - it is an ideology with a small number of adherents, but mainstream culture and political establishments on both sides reject it unequivocally (while one side does so slightly less vocally and a few fringe figures flirt with them enough to keep them on side).

For this to happen, the social justice worldview needs to lose popularity obviously, it is currently too big to be marginalised. But that can easily happen. Ideologies are often abandoned when they cease to be useful - hardly anyone believes in "manifest destiny" today. SJ is currently useful to the left because they have managed to form a coalition of minorities, so promoting minorities means promoting leftists. This falls apart if people start sorting along different lines. E.g. if current trends continue towards education becoming the key political divider, you could easily end up with a working class ideology (we the people!) versus an elitist ideology (the people are retarded).

If that were to happen it doesn't matter whether the elites or the rabble win - neither will have an interest in promoting identity grievance. The new culture war will have its own problems of course - the elites may be dismissive or ignorant of the material concerns of ordinary people and the rabble may actively damage their own society to tear down those they resent - but they will be different problems.

And then two hundred years hence some people will look back and say "How fascinating! The 21st century west thought that maleness was simply a state of mind unconnected to biology! Imagine living in such a time!"

My take is that SJ is just a product of the temporary cultural ascendancy of the clerisy. It will end the day it finally provokes the war it is working toward. Win or lose, social justice is incapable of fighting a real war as opposed to a cultural one. It will either become the fascism it claims to fight, or it will lose to its own creation.

The light at the end of the tunnel is a bloodbath.

I wouldn't call a bloodbath "light" but I don't think you're wrong either..

Personally, I view SJW’s as defectors in a massive prisoner’s dilemma. Conservatives are those who want to punish defectors. But where do you go as a conservative once the defectors have won?

It’s pretty obvious. You defect. And you probably defect worse than the SJW’s, because you are not bound by their strange morality. What will this look like?

Marriage will mostly end as a concept. Women will not have fun in their 20’s and then marry a beta in their 30’s. The betas will be shamed out of existence. Women will either be passed around for their entire lives or settle as part of a harem. Polygamy, the natural mating equilibrium of humanity, will reassert itself.

The economy will shrivel, under nominal socialism or not. It will not be completely obvious, things just won’t get done. Your packages will be delivered to the wrong address. Stores will have random shortages. Software won’t work. Rent will be even more unaffordable. You won’t be able to get healthcare because the doctor-patient ratio is out of whack. Yet they will refuse to train more doctors.

War is certainly on the table. We can already see how militant SJWs are towards Russia and Israel. SJWs are a globalist ideology. All humans are under their sovereignty. And many are willing to prove their loyalty by fighting and dying.

The future is sealed. We have chosen our fate and now must live it. The only way the future may be averted is through a deus ex machina. The impact of AI cannot be predicted, other than to say that those who control access to and direct powerful AI’s will inherit the world for eternity, or until humans are deposed or extinct.

Personally, I view SJW’s as defectors in a massive prisoner’s dilemma. Conservatives are those who want to punish defectors.

No, conservatives are those who want to co-operate because they believe co-operation itself is the right thing in itself (or "for the sake of the institutions"), even as the other side defects every time. That's why playing Defectbot has worked so well for progressives.

"for the sake of the institutions"

Come on. I think if we look, for instance, at political institutions the right has done just as much defecting as progressives. Gerrymandering obviously happens on both sides but Republicans are overall more aggressive and net more seats from it, the absurd hypocrisy over Supreme Court nominations in final Presidential years, Trump/Jan 6/election fraud nonsense and the list goes on.

Polygamy, the natural mating equilibrium of humanity, will reassert itself.

Nah. I sooner see people pacifying themselves with porn, AI companions, and cats. People still having sex will probably stand by marriage. It's too good of a deal for all parties involved.

The economy will shrivel, under nominal socialism or not. It will not be completely obvious, things just won’t get done. Your packages will be delivered to the wrong address. Stores will have random shortages. Software won’t work. Rent will be even more unaffordable. You won’t be able to get healthcare because the doctor-patient ratio is out of whack. Yet they will refuse to train more doctors.

I can see that! I'm half-convinced it's happening before my eyes. Re: doctors, it's not even about them refusing to train them, who the hell will want to be one, for the price they're offering. I feel horrible if I make a mistake in my, relatively inconsequential, line of work, why should I take on responsibility for someone's life, for the salaries they're offering (in countries that are not the US).

And many are willing to prove their loyalty by fighting and dying.

That sounds like a fatal mistake. Antifa black-blocks are legendary for falling apart upon the slightest bit of resistance, and the more resilient underclass shock troops, that progressives sometimes deploy, have no actual loyalty to the regime. If Boston Dynamics comes up with reliable infantry drones, we're fucked, but until they need flesh-and-blood boots on the ground, they'll be limited in what they can do, and in fact, trying to shove critical theory in the military might be the domino causing the whole thing to fall apart. There's still mercenaries, I guess, so maybe they can keep the lights on, as long as they have money.

The impact of AI cannot be predicted, other than to say that those who control access to and direct powerful AI’s will inherit the world for eternity, or until humans are deposed or extinct.

Meh. I'll happily put myself forward as predicting that the impact of AI will be limited to extrapolating current trends. I really don't get this messianic / doomerist aura around it. Which is bad enough! I suppose contra what I wrote earlier, I get the doomerism, and the aura I don't get is better described as metaphysical.

why should I take on responsibility for someone's life, for the salaries they're offering (in countries that are not the US

It seemed like the least bad option at the time, especially accounting for the (not entirely forlorn) hopes of moving to the US and getting a cut of those healthcare fees everyone loves complaining about 🙏.

Polygamy, the natural mating equilibrium of humanity, will reassert itself.

Nah. I sooner see people pacifying themselves with porn, AI companions, and cats. People still having sex will probably stand by marriage. It's too good of a deal for all parties involved.

I feel like this would just result in polygamy reasserting itself. I would expect the people who pacify themselves with porn, AI companions, and cats to be majority - likely overwhelmingly - male, leaving a smaller number of males having sex than women (there's some indication that this is already happening). Marriage is indeed a good deal for all parties involved, but when you have such an imbalance of people still having sex, then polygamy is a pretty natural outcome. I'm sure the modal woman would prefer the currently-typical two-person marriage between one man and one woman, but when that option isn't available, why not choose being the 10th wife of a high status man than turning to AI companions and cats? I suppose part of it will have to do with how good AI companions get in the future; if the AI can actually manipulate the user's mind into genuinely believing that they're having a real relationship with a real flesh-and-blood-born-from-a-real-womb human who is high status, then all bets are off.

but when that option isn't available, why not choose being the 10th wife of a high status man than turning to AI companions and cats?

Presumably they'll program the AI companions in such a way that they won't leave you for a newer model.

That's the beauty of polygamy, he won't leave you for a newer model! The newer model just comes in and raises his status which means it also raises your status (while also lowering your status relatively due to having to share with one more woman; whether this is a net gain or loss depends a lot on the details).

But why would a guy support a harem aging wives when, if we're going for all-bets-are-off hedonism, he can just never marry anyone, or divorce and remarry? If nothing else it sounds dangerous. By the time I'd be adding wife no. 4, I'd be worried the other 3 will plot to give me a gentle push down a flight of stairs, so they can split the inheritance / life insurance.

Hm, good point. I suppose my thinking was that it's higher status to be a husband of a harem than to be a playboy or serial monogamist, but in the brave new world, that's certainly not a safe assumption.

As an SJW: You can't win. It is as impossible for you to win as it is for me to will big communism into existence ex nihlo.

We are currently playing Culture War by a set of rules that gives me infinite tries and only allowed you temporary victories; and it is the same set of rules that means I can vote in as many elections as I like and choose between two dudes representing corporate interests but one has the pride flag.

So, I win the culture war. You loose the culture war. Maybe you make some headway here or there, but in the end all your causes will fail and all of mine will succeed, until they move beyond me and I become the reactionary.

Unless there is some sort of radical reorganization of society; until the socialist or ancap revolution really comes, this is just how it do. Capitalist realism baby!

What has happened in Argentina that an ancap wins election?

The normal churn of society.

Watch as the Ancap fails to implement any policy whatsoever that deviates from the standard economic rails laid down post WW2.

I haven't been paying attention because lol Argentina, but dollars to donuts the dude finishes out his term as a normal ass austerity conservative while the imf nods on approvingly; unless he fails to do anything at all because cancelling grandmas medicare gets him lynched.

Again: capitalist realism baby!

The normal churn of society.

Shall we expect the rise of anarchocapitalist parties in Western Europe then?

Maybe you make some headway here or there, but in the end all your causes will fail and all of mine will succeed, until they move beyond me and I become the reactionary.

I hope you don't mind my asking this, but: if you can foresee that SJ will go places you don't like, why are you "an SJW"?

I don't consider myself an SJW because that's a boomer ass term from 10 years ago, but conservatives do.

I am a gender abolitionist philosophically, and pro everything on that cringe liberal yard sign more practically. Also, I am more equality of outcome than I am equality of opportunity (with limits, ofc).

I can't imagine the future planes of shit I don't like that will eventually get normalized; but when it comes I will know it. Or maybe I will be the cool old guy who remains both "hip" and "with it", who nows.

Capitalist realism, indeed. When the money is flowing, the SJW/wokeness crowd get appeased because why not, there's so much dough sloshing around that playing pretend that this obvious guy in a dress is a real true woman, etc. doesn't lose us (much) money.

When the money gets tight, we see the difference. Suddenly all the DEI departments get thinned out or shut down. Disney is in the toils with flop after flop in a row lately. Luggage-stealing they/thems don't get replaced in the administration.

I think you believe this because of the people around you and the bubble you are in; but it just isn't true. Historically when money is tight, SJW's make even faster, harder, more permanent progress. Prosperity produces empty gestures because everybody can get by well enough, hardship produces actual clicks of the ratchet because people have enough potential energy to be actualized into political will.

But even if that doesn't happen, nothing ever happens for you. Even if nobody believes in DEI (which they don't because it's dumb); the gesture is all that is required. If DEI goes away, it will be replaced with something you hate equally because, again, you can't win permanent victories, just like you can't make water flow up hill.

You can expend cultural capital; you can burn that shit as fuel and pump that shit back up; but eventually water finds it's way to the sea.

Because we live under capitalist realism, because even with two (do I hear three!) wars going on right now, History has Ended. Nothing Ever Happens. If you want to actually see the changes you desire in your heart, you are going to need to take a risk; to smash the system just like I will to see the economic changes I want to see.

How will you smash the system? What economic changes do you want to see?

I won't smash the system, is the thing. It's not gonna happen until shit gets BAD bad.

You might be right, but what does the endgame look like? It seems like the issue of immigration in particular has the potential to undo most of the gains that progressives find important. I'm thinking of France, where it seems inevitable that there will be a de facto Islamic party in the near future. In that case it seems like both progressives and conservatives (except the immigrants) lose.

Then the game board gets flipped and france becomes the seat of the Neo-Caliphate (both lose option); or like every fundamentalist religious group taken out of their milieu, the Muslims get Mellowed over the generations. They go from fire breathing puritans to evangelicals barely holding on to one or two strictures in the style of a cargo cult (capitalist realism option).

Okay, now it sounds like you're saying "we always win, except when we lose and become a Neo-Caliphate." How is the mellowing of Islamic countries going? What's the mood like in Afghanistan or Somalia?

Mellowing*. This is what the market is, this is what the market does. It connects your country to the global super culture; which overwhelms you with it's fitness. They managed to maintain their shitty standards because they were decoupled from the global economy; as they become actual states that need to do shit instead of just saying shit and as they want to participate in the market, they mellow.

It's like how republicans and libertarians talk a big game, but when they get elected what they do is cut taxes and take the most minor possible step in the culture war as red meat for the base, which immediately gets shouted down and rolled back usually while they are in office.

*You can avoid lots of the supercultre effects by being a totalitarian dictatorship, but you also miss out on lots of the benefits. Trading ideological purity strength, as it were

The problem with this is that The Mellowing that comes from constructive interaction with capitalism is dependent on actually being able to interact with capitalism. The average banlieue resident doesnt have much to offer in the French marketplace, and even their unskilled labor is mostly devalued and surplus. I dont see this situation improving, either.

I agree that market activity tends to reduce ideological fervor. But as you note, that doesn't necessarily happen if the government becomes totalitarian, which you also agree is a distinct possibility. So I'm not even sure what your claim is anymore. "Progressivism always wins except when it doesn't"?

Pretty much. My claim is that the American right has to choose between their economic and social goals; they can't have both. They (and other conservatives in free market/free association states) have goals which I believe to be contradictory.

Makes sense, I think I agree. And AI just makes this happen faster and on a larger scale - humans will be outcompeted unless we put a stop to basically all competitive pressures.

SJ-ers will continue to exist so long as there are those from oppressed groups who become intellectuals and want to teach their stories.

Will they lose, long-term? Perhaps if they don't openly side with the State of Israel.

From The Gulag Archipelago:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.

The culture war is permanent, because there will always people who want to be free, and there will always be people who want to censor and control them. That is baked into human nature. In one decade the censorious will use Christianity, in the next, they will fight it, but it is the same impulse and the same people. One generation's scolds will enforce patriotism, the next will condemn it, but the underlying impulse is the same. The church lady is the schoolmarm is the SJW.

We will always fight, and the technology of the day will determine who has the advantage. Movable type empowered the free, a centralized Hollywood and three TV networks gave power to the conformist.

There was a brief moment where the internet was simultaneously difficult enough to require the ability to set up a router, but easy enough that there were lots of people doing it. This enabled the free. Just a few years ago the largest subreddit was The_Donald. A few years before that the most popular politician was Ron Paul, and the Republicans had a lock all three branches and the majority of the governorships.

2014 is Haidt's year that changed everything. Facebook, and then Instagram, as apps on phones removed all the technical and logistical barriers of a computer in a physical location. Now we are as centralized as the days of three TV stations, and once again the joyless scolds and censors have the advantage.

Sooner or later some free people somewhere will develop a way to fight back, and we will bring the 90s back, and soon after that the censorious and conformist will find a way to defeat us again.

The culture war is permanent, because there will always people who want to be free, and there will always be people who want to censor and control them. That is baked into human nature. In one decade the censorious will use Christianity, in the next, they will fight it, but it is the same impulse and the same people. One generation's scolds will enforce patriotism, the next will condemn it, but the underlying impulse is the same. The church lady is the schoolmarm is the SJW.

The Culture War isn't fought between free speakers and censorious arsehats. It is fought between the Red Tribe (the white South and its allies) and the Blue Tribe (New England Yankeedom and its allies), and dates back via Albion's Seed to before the English civil war (with notable lulls during the Era of Good Feelings and the New Deal era). There have been multiple episodes during that period when one side or the other (more often the Reds) had a bout of censorious arsehattery. Right now, the Blues are quite exceptionally censorious in a way which is biting them in the arse when they suddenly can't work out how many intersectional Pokemon points a Jewish cis woman rape victim has. But that doesn't make the Reds pro-free speech, except accidentally. Right now, Elon the Boer is being hailed as the saviour of free speech by the Reds at the same time as he is calling for criminal prosecution of Media Matters for putting a potentially-misleading spin on accurate coverage of how he runs X.

For the Framers, the 1st amendment wasn't a statement of an important free speech principle - it was a part of a negotiated settlement of how the different States could live together in a More Perfect Union. It was quite intentionally not enforceable against the States, several of which had State-level censorship regimes that would never pass muster in the current year. There have always been principled supporters of free speech (notably Jefferson in the Founding era, and the pre-Great Awokening ACLU in my lifetime) but they have always been in the minority.

I fundamentally disagree with you, but I like your writing style and the way you presented your argument. Reported for AAQC

there will always people who want to be free, and there will always be people who want to censor and control them.

That is the libertarian dichotomy.

An Effective Altruist would say

there will always be people who want to help others, and there will always people who want to ignore them or merely feel good about themselves

The Christian wold say

there will always be people who believe in Jesus, and there will always be people who reject him for a life of sin and pleasure

The Scientist would say

there will always be people who pursue truth, and there will always be people who cling to dogma

The SJW would say

there will always be people who stand up for the weak, and there will always be people trying to oppress them

etc. etc.

The Culture War is not simply the dichotomy of the free versus the controlling. That is simply the dichotomy people on this forum tend to favor.

I'm usually a fan of this viewpoint, but in this case I'm not entirely sure if it's true. If you have a scientist and a christian, for example, and both subscribe to the sentences you picked for them, but they are also both fine with letting the other one be then you don't have a culture war on your hand; you merely have a disagreement.

A culture war happens if at least one side decides that the other side is so wrong/dangerous that it needs to be converted. In which case @satirizedoor's dichotomy holds. Though you may argue that often enough both sides actually want to control the other side, so it's rarely a conflict between pure freedom and pure control and instead a conflict with different preferences for what to control and what should be free. But the basic fact would remain that culture wars may be about any topics in the first order, but they are always ultimately about controlling people with other viewpoints.

I think the focus on censorship is misplaced. Censorship is one of the many ways a Culture War can play out, and it is neither necessary nor sufficient for showing a Culture War is occurring. Consider, for instance, a racial minority marching for civil rights. It doesn't matter whether there is censorship - that is quintessentially culture war. Conversely, consider censoring how to make nuclear weapons - that's not a meaningful component of any significant Culture War.

A culture war happens if at least one side decides that the other side is so wrong/dangerous that it needs to be converted

I agree with this. A Culture War is created by two groups of people attaching so much value to a dichotomy that converting the other seems important. So, necessary conditions for a Culture War are

  • A dichotomy [ Edit: or two? I remain agnostic on the extent to which each group can have separate conceptualizations of the dichotomy ]
  • Value placed on the dichotomy enough to prompt both ends to attempt convincing others

Hey now, you can't stop there - what is it actually?

I agree KnotGodel is near the right track but not exactly, and GP had a point. In Culture Wars of the way way past, we have stuff like 30 Years' War, or iconoclasts, or Akhenaten's cult. What is the common thread?

My theory: in culture wars, culture is the fuel, war is the process, but the engine is the mass media technology. Each form of technology comes with its particular equilibrium where the locus of control is. (To torture the metaphor, it is a twin-engine aircraft and the other engine is the technology for waging war, but that is no longer the culture war, just the regular war.)

Outcome is likely to be Cuius regio, eius religio once again.

There is certainly precedent for it

Hence the name?

It's not everyday I get to use so appropriately so I couldn't help but comment.

It's led to the most hilarious accusations though.

Turns out that if you say "maybe follow a norm where you don't interfere in the internal affairs of another country and they agree to do to same to you" you'll find yourself accused of being both ultra far left and ultra right wing

The Culture War? I guess something like the social activity related to emotionally-charged dichotomies?

I guess something like the social activity related to emotionally-charged dichotomies?

I've grown more partial to describing it as bike-shedding at a societal level, and I think this make sense: the entire concept is that organizations spend disproportionate time on relatively minor but easy-to-trivially-understand issues because people think their opinion matters more than it probably should. I doubt there are many, if any, people out there without an opinion on gender (although those opinions vary drastically), sex, skin color, and all those times they were treated unfairly. Because everyone thinks they understand the big picture, arguments get exceptionally heated.

We don't spend as much time in popular culture talking about more complex issues, like simplifying the labyrinthine tax code (unless something's in it for me), or which areas merit extra research funding (astronomy? fusion? vaccines?), or how to maintain Western cultural hegemony for the next century. Amusingly, we seem mostly content to trust bureaucrats on those, probably far more than we should: see gain-of-function research funding, or any number of fraught defense procurements.

We don't spend as much time in popular culture talking about more complex issues, like simplifying the labyrinthine tax code (unless something's in it for me), or which areas merit extra research funding (astronomy? fusion? vaccines?), or how to maintain Western cultural hegemony for the next century.

These are matters you can afford to concern yourself with when your immediate existence and position does not seem threatened. The Culture War is caused by and causes such feelings of imminent threat, and so more ambitious concerns are drowned out by what at least appears to be acute crisis.

Not that I disagree with your general sentiment, but

the most popular politician was Ron Paul

I don’t think he ever polled that well. This one has him ahead of the other Republicans, but I have no idea what a “net favorability rating” really means. He certainly didn’t manage to turn it into any primary wins.

net favorability is (depending on pollster) either Strongly Approve - Strongly Disapprove, or (Strongly Approve + Approve) - (Strongly Disapprove + Disapprove)

So it'd make sense for a more niche like Paul to have a high net favorability, because more people would reply "don't know" and thus not make it in to the equation.

Sooner or later some free people somewhere will develop a way to fight back, and we will bring the 90s back, and soon after that the censorious and conformist will find a way to defeat us again.

Or they won't, technology will continue to further enable central control, and we'll have a boot stomping on a human face forever.

I don't know if I'm an "SJer" but I'm probably to the left of like 90% of the userbase here so:

The culture war doesn't have to end, at least not anytime soon. The left-right culture war has consumed western civilization since the French Revolution. To the extent it will end, it will be because new issues come to prominence and the old ones come to seem less relevant, rather than a clear and total victory of either 'side.' And anyway, left and right are moving targets. A victory of today's 'left' or 'right' wouldn't necessarily look like a victory to the 'left' or 'right of fifty years ago, or fifty years in the future.

Frankly, the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born, so it's hard for me to even picture it.

When would you say the left started writing all the history books?

When would you say the left started writing all the history books?

1930s, with the rise of the British Marxist Historians.

Hobsbawm is the name I know because he's pretty much the most famous, but there are some stonking examples such as this gentleman (I have no idea why it's obligatory for historians to have at least three names or sets of initials, and Hobsbawm bucked that trend):

Geoffrey Ernest Maurice de Ste. Croix, FBA (8 February 1910 – 5 February 2000), known informally as Croicks, was a British historian who specialised in examining Ancient Greece from a Marxist perspective.

When would you say the left started writing all the history books?

I don't know; I haven't read enough of them.

Definitely after WW2 and Mid cold-war to late cold-war and beginning of post cold-war.

This question tends to be a good barometer for how far-right somebody is. The most anodyne of normiecons will say things went wrong in the 90s or even the 2000s and on the other end of the spectrum you've got Yarvinite types who will say that the left has been on a winning streak since 1789.

On the specific question of US history books, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is the first woke history to be widely adopted as a high school textbook, and was published in 1980. The first serious pushback against the Dunning School (the academic version of the Birth of a Nation/Gone with the Wind school of history) is by Kenneth Stampp, who published The Era of Reconstruction in 1965.

I have a cousin who will use any opportunity to blurt out that Constantine fucked it all up when making Christianity the state religion

Where would you place Carol Zimmerman and his thesis of western civilization being in a recurring cycle of degeneration, only to rise phoenix-like from the ashes?

I guess it depend on when he reckons the current cycle to have started.

Or 0, if you're Nietzschean or Gibbonian. After all, their statue avatars aren't from the renaissance. Some go as far back as pericles. A true rightist would tell you it was all over by middle kingdom egypt. A real masculinity appreciator knows that when man domesticated animals, he domesticated himself. Conservatives worthy of the name would consider the first instance of gardening as the seminal defeat. While serious traditionalists point to the start of gathering as the crowning triumph of Left, inc.

Conservatives worthy of the name would consider the first instance of gardening as the seminal defeat.

The true sin of Cain the farmer as distinct from his brother Abel the shepherd!

The agricultural revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Did Zog put rocks around fire? That nanny state bullshit!

Zog make fire like soft weak collectivist instead of waiting for lightning god to strike tree and set it on fire? Pah!

It has been said, both disapprovingly and otherwise, that Satan was the first revolutionary.

Sure, according to the internal chronology. Not so sure as to publication order.

Marx certainly seems to have had some sympathies:

Till heart’s bewitched, till senses reel:

With Satan I have struck my deal.

He chalks the signs, beats time for me,

I play the death march fast and free.

And less directly:

Worlds I would destroy forever,

Since I can create no world

and

So a god has snatched from me my all

In the curse and rack of destiny.

All his worlds are gone beyond recall!

Nothing but revenge is left to me!

I shall build my throne high overhead,

Cold, tremendous shall its summit be.

For its bulwark—superstitious dread,

For its Marshall—blackest agony.

which eloquently expresses a certain kind of Satanic sentiment.

Wars end the same way — someone wins decisively enough to discredit the other side. The culture war really only matters to those who are directly involved or those who have politics and culture wars as a source of identity and entertainment. For 80 percent or so of people, they just go along because they don’t care that much. The trans-in-sports issue is small enough to be ignored unless you actually have a dog in that hunt. It will eventually reach a consensus that those 80% will pretend they always agreed with and the opposed will be labeled as crime-thinkers as is tradition. The institutions will be brought to heel as no one wants to be thought of as a crime-thinker.

So the big question is who is actually going to win these wars?

But what I can't really put together is the third option, the narrative that will be told if SJ is indeed just a passing phase, either because Red/Grey defeated it or because it wins and then turns out to be unsustainable.

The narrative will be: "why did anyone ever care about this shit?"

Think about the big protestant/Catholic culture war that waged in Europe in the 1600s, which was extremely bloody and widely agreed by its participants to be a big deal and today people (even devout Catholics and protestants) largely look back with bewilderment on that time period and have a hard time understanding what the big deal was. People were getting burned for saying the consecrated host is just a cracker. Today, Catholics still believe in transubstantiation but most have a hard time understanding why anyone would be punished (let alone killed) for holding a contrary view.

When talking about current culture war issues, it's hard for us to imagine how they could become irrelevant to the point that future generations would be baffled that anyone ever cared. But that's how people would have felt in the 1600s; it was a literal battle for immortal souls, how could this battle ever become irrelevant? Yet it did. I think our current battles will eventually suffer the same fate.

Today, Catholics still believe in transubstantiation but most have a hard time understanding why anyone would be punished (let alone killed) for holding a contrary view.

Speak for yourself, pal 😁

Though Robert Hugh Benson did try writing a novel, "The Dawn of All", about a future where the Catholic Church is dominant and heresy is punished, and even the heretic agrees it is necessary to maintain social harmony, but it doesn't work for modern readers (and I think not even himself). His other SF future novel, "Lord of the World", is much better.

His novel, Lord of the World (1907), is generally regarded as one of the first modern dystopian novels. In the speculative 2007 he predicted there, the Anglican Church and other Protestant denominations have crumbled and disappeared under a rising tide of secularism and atheism, leaving an embattled Catholic Church as the sole champion of Christian truth. Nations are armed with weapons which can destroy a whole city from the air within minutes, and euthanasia is widely practiced and considered as a moral advance. The Antichrist is depicted as a charismatic secular liberal who organizes an international body devoted to world peace and love under his direction.

In his next novel The Dawn of All (1911), Benson imagined an opposite future 1973 in which the Catholic Church has emerged victorious in England and worldwide after Germany and Austria won the "Emperor War" of 1914; this book is also notable in its fairly accurate prediction of a global network of a passenger air travel.

There are 10k splinters of Protestantism and Catholicism is a joke. Nobody has a clue if salvation is through faith, good works, or both. It really really matters if you have any concern for our immortal souls. Maybe consider that everybody lost the 30 years war.

Nobody has a clue if salvation is through faith, good works, or both.

Read the Epistle of St James and never mind Martin Luther unable to make up his mind about it.

and today people (even devout Catholics and protestants) largely look back with bewilderment on that time period and have a hard time understanding what the big deal was.

Isn't it obvious that this is true because both sides ultimately lost? There were no large doctrinal changes, people just stopped caring about their religion that much.

That’s what happens to half the issues. The other half get resolved so thoroughly that everyone in the past looks completely evil - slavery, Nazism, etc

Today, Catholics still believe in transubstantiation

Curiously, a study conducted a decade ago found that only one-third of Irish Catholics believe in that.

I am surprised that as many of one third of Irish people who were baptized Catholic and tick the Catholic box on the census believe in God, let alone transubstantiation.

Think about the big protestant/Catholic culture war that waged in Europe in the 1600s, which was extremely bloody and widely agreed by its participants to be a big deal and today people (even devout Catholics and protestants) largely look back with bewilderment on that time period and have a hard time understanding what the big deal was

I had a history teacher in 8th grade that flat out told our class that if someone even dares to mention to her that WWI was about Archduke assassination she would fail them for the year. [1]

So I am willing to bet that even today Catholics and protestants know that it was mostly political strife. As were the other major Christian schisms and fights. If you look it is very often some inter elite fight.

[1]It was directly post communist time, the educational system had the outdated view that functioning brain in the pupils was not optional, so she expected to actually know what were the political tensions in Europe.

The assassination did kick it off like the first domino falling, though. I agree that political tensions and ambitions amongst the European powers, with their interlocking web of treaties, alliances, secret understandings, and backstabbing had drawn tighter and tighter so that war was on the horizon anyway, and the Balkans were a powderkeg so that once war was declared everyone immediately started trying to make advances into that territory, but the assassination was the spark that lit the conflagration.

The Austro-Hungarian empire was shaky, the dynasty was nowhere near as solid as it looked, and there was plenty of scandal affecting various members of the imperial family. Kill the heir presumptive (who has succeeded to that position after the deaths of other, closer members and who can't have legal heirs of his own due to the morganatic marriage) and you immediately knock away an important support for the entire structure. You can't expect that to have no repercussions, even if the whole of Europe then leaped upon the chance to settle scores, win territory, and advance their own interests.

A while back I read this book about the Catholic/Protestant strife in Sweden in late 1500s which eventually culminated into a Game of Thrones -like civil war between two claimants of the house of Vasa, the Catholic Sigismund and the Protestant Charles, to the crown of Sweden, the latter eventually usurping the former and confirming Sweden's status as a Lutheran nation. The book concentrates on the Finnish side of it (Finland having been a part of Sweden) but covers the entire realm.

One of the things the book shows is that there was both a political and a religious side of it. Obviously when you have a war between two kings like this there's going to be politics beyond religion involved and Lappalainen portrays, for instance, Klaus Fleming (the chief Finnish noble of the time, a chief supporter of Sigismund's claim) as a person who didn't really give a rip about any of this religious stuff and just supported his King out of bullheaded loyalty. At the time, it is also made clear that the two royal claimants, for instance, genuinely believed that their side was correct, even if this didn't stop them from engaging in all manner of scheming and occasionally portraying their intentions otherwise than they believed.

The culture war aspect is also in there; even though the county initially was quite favorable to retaining Catholicism or at least much of it, the Lutherans worked hard to convince the city folk of Stockholm that the Pope was the Antichrist, and this crucially limited Sigismund's field of action at the times when he should have been able to work to stabilize his rule. And the economic side; there was a localized civil war in Finland, the Cudgel War, technically about the kings but really about Fleming (the implicit viceroy of Finland at this time) taxing the peasants in order support King Sigismund so much they eventually rose up against him.

Likewise, the strength of Lutheranism meant that Charles had to acquisce to Lutheranism becoming the specific flavor of Protestantism Sweden would adopt for good, even though his personal sympathies were towards Calvinism. And, of course, trying to be a centrist won one no favors; king John (Sigismund's father, Charles's brother) had tried to create a middle-ground version between Catholicism and Lutheranism, and it just meant that everyone assumed he was secretly supporting the other side.

Of course, the eventual victory of Charles and Protestantism in Sweden would have huge consequences for Europe and the world, since Sweden would go on to fight 200 years of unrelenting Protestant holy war and operate as the sword of Protestantism. If Sweden had fallen into the Catholic camp, it might have meant that at least the Lutheran side of reformation would have been eventually quashed. And there were more immediate consequences; Sigismund also ruled Poland-Lithuania (as king Zygmunt III Waza) and, after losing in Sweden, concentrated on ruling that country, leading to a host of consequences for that country.

Henry IV of France spent years waging war against Catholic lords before giving up and converting. This secured him the crown, which he used to instill religious tolerance and wind down the French wars of religion. It also drew the ire of everyone from betrayed Huguenots to the English monarchy. Catholic radicals weren’t impressed, either, and one of their assassins would eventually succeed. These intrigues spanned decades, and I have no reason to believe they were unusual for the period.

At the same time in France, you’ve got the aptly named Politiques, elite supporters of the french monarchy who didn’t care that much about religion. It appears they were in the minority though, because King Henry III was involved in the ‘War of the three henrys’ with Henry, Duke of guise, chief of the catholic party, and Henry, King of navarre, chief of the protestant party(future french King Henry IV). It did not go well for Henry III, even though he had the easy central position. He lost control of most regions and paris, while the other two would just go at it, while ignoring him.

Fun fact : all of the henrys were assassinated, the second by order of the first, and the two kings by catholic zealots.

Fun connection: Henry III was actually King of Poland-lithuania for 2 years, 13 years before your guy Sigismund III Vasa. When he inherited the french throne he just up and left.

So I am willing to bet that even today Catholics and protestants know that it was mostly political strife. As were the other major Christian schisms and fights. If you look it is very often some inter elite fight.

I think this is partly true, but to the extent it's true you can say the same about the current culture war.

If you asked a devout Catholic in the 1600s whether people should be burned at the stake for questioning the transubstantiation of the consecrated host, most of them are going to say "yes," and their reasoning isn't going to invoke political strife or other secular reasons. They are going to give a religious account of why it's important to burn heretics - e.g. if we suffer a heretic to live, they might lead my children into heresy, causing them to suffer in hell for eternity. It's certainly true that this underlying belief and reasoning was stoked and amplified by political actors who stood to benefit from the conflict, but the reasoning itself stands apart from the political strife going on in the background.

I think you can say the same about culture war issues today. Much of the culture war is being driven by inter-elite conflicts or by conflicts between elites and the common man. But the underlying reasoning stands apart from this conflict - e.g. if you ask someone their opinions on trans issues they are going to appeal to object-level arguments to support their views and they won't perceive their views as being the product of cynical elites stoking the conflict.

So I am willing to bet that even today Catholics and protestants know that it was mostly political strife. As were the other major Christian schisms and fights. If you look it is very often some inter elite fight.

I can maybe believe that the elites were primarily motivated by real politik, but masses and mobs really did murder each other on the streets throughout the era. I find it hard to believe that their true motives were stuff like decreasing regional tax-kickups to the Holy Roman Emperor.

I agree characterizing it as an inter-elite struggle I think is incorrect. But I think even for the hoi polloi, I think the violence while on the surface religious, was mainly executed politically. The differences in dogma providing a patina to cover what really can be seen as later as grasping for political control even for the common rabble. I don't have a good quote but I found this source interesting on the period: https://archive.org/details/voraciousidolsvi0000wand

Which might be a salient message for the conflicts in our own age.

I find it hard to believe that their true motives were stuff like decreasing regional tax-kickups to the Holy Roman Emperor.

I don't know much about the continental side but in Ireland a lot of sectarian mob violence in the 17th and 18th centuries can be explained by fear of another Jacobite rebellion or unwanted economic competition from Catholics:

The winter of 1795–6, immediately following the formation of the Orange Order, saw Protestants drive around 7,000 Catholics out of County Armagh. In a sign that tension over the linen trade was still a burning issue, 'Wreckers' continued the Peep o' Day Boys strategy of smashing looms and tearing webs in Catholic homes to eliminate competition. This resulted in a reduction in the hotly competitive linen trade which had been in a brief slump. A consequence of this scattering of highly-political Catholics, however, was a spread of Defenderism throughout Ireland.

So, how will the people in that scenario think of this time? What story will they tell?

I remember in textbooks when I was in school, the sixties new left was taught as a passing phase which never had much support.

I imagine this is what a future historian treating a defunct SJ movement will write.

A fairly likely outcome is that the crazier edges of SJ will be filed off as media/political elites find they've become a liability, and the average member of Blue Tribe will simply follow along as when The Science switched from "masks don't work" to "you're a monster if you don't wear a mask on the beach." There won't be any great reckoning followed by explicit adoption of a new ideology. Any SJ gains that can fit within the "tolerance" model of '90s-style liberalism will be retained. Some true believers will carry on with the craziness, but institutions will mostly stop listening to them.

We may have just seen the start of this pivot. That's Fareed Zakaria on CNN yesterday succinctly laying out the situation on American college campuses, explicitly calling out DEI, racial quotas, the response to Floyd, the degrees in fake subjects, the implications of eliminating the SAT. The average member of Blue Tribe has never previously been presented with this narrative from a source they felt obligated to pay attention to; if Blue Tribe media now widely takes it up (which remains to be seen), it will be very easy for them to respond with "Huh, didn't know that was going on, obviously we should fix it."

This easily seems like the most likely possibility. Social Justice will be assimilated to some extent by left-leaning institutions like the media, bureaucracy, academia, etc. but the craziest parts will be screaming into the void. The most interesting part will be to see what kinds of issues make the jump, e.g. do trans issues end up on the assimilated side, or are the inherent contradictions with traditional feminism too much?

I'll add that the Culture War could end because No One Came: it exists for now because people show up to argue, and care (or pretend to care). It fills headlines because nothing more notable is going on. I suppose it's similar to (1), but I don't think it needs catastrophe to the level of "no more historians", but something more on the scale of 9/11, which I remember basically dropped the floor out from under partisan bickering in the US (which wasn't unheard of in early 2001) for a few years. I've previously described Kulturkampf as akin to bike-shedding, where we argue most about comparatively trivial details that we think we understand instead of the actual hard questions -- I don't know that I completely endorse the position, but it's worth consideration.

And sometimes time moves on and leaves political positions behind. Historically, the original progressive era met its end in the World Wars of the last century. Not all of its policies went away (the forty hour work week seems generally-accepted), but things like Prohibition and eugenics were largely pushed out. Notably, eugenics became strongly associated with Nazi Germany, and some progressive leaders (most notably Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh) were seen as sympathizing with them. Far left political parties generally were sidelined during the Cold War as communist-adjacent, leading the "progressive" label to fade until probably around 2000 or so.

It really depends on what you think the culture war is about: if you think it is two inconsequential groups like 4chan going to war with Tumblr then yes it fades, but I don't think that the people dead in the summer of love make it so inconsequential.

On one hand, yes it does seem important in the heat of the moment, even to me! Lives really are at stake, but at a societal level a few lives lost here or there are, while absolutely tragic, the sort of thing that, while we'll say we don't like bargaining with and deem priceless, in practice we'll gamble as if they don't really matter much to us. Witness, for example, fights over making streets safer for pedestrians, which many are happy to argue against (myself included sometimes) because it'll add a minute or two to a given car trip.

The Culture War also has no shortage of examples of catastrophizing on all it's extremes: witness that time that our current president told Black voters that milquetoast Republican Mitt Romney would "put [them] in chains," or how using undesired pronouns is akin to genocide, or how an admittedly-neglected immigration policy is a deliberate choice by certain figures to drive "demographic replacement." I'm not going to claim there isn't a kernel of truth to those claims, but finding common ground probably requires ceding that the bigger picture being painted is pretty biased. Of course, that position does embrace mistake theory, but I personally think we're still at a point where it's viable and nobody needs to be actively coordinating meanness.

On one hand, yes it does seem important in the heat of the moment, even to me! Lives really are at stake, but at a societal level a few lives lost here or there are, while absolutely tragic, the sort of thing that, while we'll say we don't like bargaining with and deem priceless, in practice we'll gamble as if they don't really matter much to us. Witness, for example, fights over making streets safer for pedestrians, which many are happy to argue against (myself included sometimes) because it'll add a minute or two to a given car trip.

Certainly, but to get down to brass tacks how many dead people will it take before it is a catastrophe? One of the more fun bits of the community is that we can break this down into QALY and similar stats without people thinking we are moral monsters.

The Culture War also has no shortage of examples of catastrophizing on all it's extremes: witness that time that our current president told Black voters that milquetoast Republican Mitt Romney would "put [them] in chains," or how using undesired pronouns is akin to genocide, or how an admittedly-neglected immigration policy is a deliberate choice by certain figures to drive "demographic replacement." I'm not going to claim there isn't a kernel of truth to those claims, but finding common ground probably requires ceding that the bigger picture being painted is pretty biased.

And so does the Israeli-palestine conflict, exaggerated claims in the bailey do not mean that the motte is indefensible.

Of course, that position does embrace mistake theory, but I personally think we're still at a point where it's viable and nobody needs to be actively coordinating meanness.

Generalized firebombing is beyond the pale at the moment, but I'd not be against something more surgical against people actively engaging in ratfucking and other anti-social behavior.

If left-wing opinions are the only opinions that get accepted, that's going to greatly inform public policy. More so if conservatives can't even get elected in significant positions. There's no way that's just people showing up to argue; who becomes president and what policies get made have real world consequences.

Why will the culture war ‘eventually end’? This culture war has been happening, in some form or another, since the enlightenment. Certainly it’s been happening since America’s founding. It may wax and wane (the latter if there’s some larger unrelated international or domestic crisis for a prolonged period), but it would be ahistorical to expect it to end. I suppose AI may change things, but since it is likely only to increase the reliance of the people on the state (due to mass unemployment etc), probably not in any direction I’d consider positive.

... I'd be interested to see what sort of 'wane' would fit your expectations, even if the culture war would still remain in a form, that's anywhere short of modern conservativism (and anything drawn as close to it) being smothered out completely.

One of my big frustrations is that for all people might say that this stuff isn't as bad or is 'only' as bad as McCarthyism, McCarthyism lasted less than a decade, and it very much had the seeds of its own destruction within it. We're coming up on fifteen for the most obvious start date of this particular cycle.

But McCarthyism won!

'Communist' is still an insult in like 90% of American contexts and none are tolerated anywhere near positions of real power, capitalist realism is so pervasive that it's treated as a fundamental facet of reality rather than an ideology, and the US is still explicitly hostile towards communist and formerly-communist regimes around the world to this day!

It's hard to imagine McCarthyism succeeding much more strongly than it actually has. The fact that he's remembered as a jerk in some textbooks is pretty immaterial.

You are conflating McCarthyism with anti-communism. Anti-communism won, but not because of McCarthyism, and the distinctively McCarthyite features (trying to root out communist subversives in government, anti-communist loyalty tests, blacklisting communists) are completely outside the mainstream of US politics. For example, the House Un-American Activities Committee is gone and would be regarded as an intolerable infringement on American values if it was restored, at least as an anti-communist institution.

You also say "some textbooks." Don't you think that "almost all" would be more accurate?

I mean, sure, but isn't that sort of like me saying 'you're confusing cancel culture with progressivism, all bad things proceed from the former and all good things proceed from the latter'?

I'm ok with movements disavowing their idiot extremists, or being held accountable for them, as long as that standard is applied consistently.

You also say "some textbooks." Don't you think that "almost all" would be more accurate?

I meant 'some' as in 'a small overall amount' rather than 'a small percent of the total'. My point is that we don't talk about him much in day to day life, compared to how much we praise capitalism and vilify communism.

That said, I literally haven't read a history textbook since highschool, so... sure, I would guess it's at least most, but I honestly have no idea. I occasionally read claims about red-state textbooks being different but I have no idea how true that is, haven't investigated it.

I mean, sure, but isn't that sort of like me saying 'you're confusing cancel culture with progressivism, all bad things proceed from the former and all good things proceed from the latter'?

That could be a perfectly legitimate claim, if you can independently distinguish the two, as people can distinguish anti-communism and McCarthyism. If you conflate the two, you end up jarring with usage, e.g. George Orwell, Sidney Hook, and other anti-communist socialists become "McCarthyites."

McCarthyism took ground, but that's the other reason I'm using it as an example. I'm neither expecting nor asking 2rafa to come up with hypotheticals where 'racist' or 'sexist' stops being an insult in 90% of contexts and clear examples are tolerated anywhere near positions of real power, where the assumptions of social justice aren't treated as a fundamental facet of reality, or where the US stops being explicitly hostile towards racist and formerly-racist regimes.

((Hell, I don't even want a lot of that by its strict definition. And, of course, 'racist' is only useful as a description for what the SJW movement targets as a caconym, in the triple sense that the net is wider to catch entire other 'sins', that it's narrower in excluding a lot of SJW racism, and that it's fine-enough mesh to catch a lot of things that aren't actually in any of those categories by any reasonable definition.))

I'm just wondering when people stop getting fired for minor acts, or being to slow to report those suspected; where we don't see criminal investigation or massive civil liability coincidentally pointed at the politically unacceptable; where the FBI does not take con membership as cause for investigation. Where one-in-two people don't undergo loyalty review 'sensitivity training', where we don't see weaponization of the IRS, of the Veteran's Affairs office, of Social Security benefits, where no rando is highlighted by national politicians by name and by photograph for public humiliation.

((And, again, a lot of what's targeted today has less in common with actual-racism or sexism or homophobia or whatever as McCarthy's Army hearings did with communism.))

These aren't goals, they're just weapons, and they're weapons that were placed fully out of McCarthyist hands by people who told us they were too dangerous for anyone to access.

Win/lose might be meaningful for discussing movements in terms of their longer-term impact, and far more important than who's remembered as a jerk, but it doesn't really say as much for the conditions of the war itself. Yet those conditions matter in their own rights: a recurring claim is that since we've seen those weapons set down in the past, they'll be set down here.

Those weapons will not disappear. They just aren't used in times of peace when dominion over the culture is unquestioned.

The 90s were not peaceful because people had grown weary of the quarrels of yore, they were peaceful because only one side was powerful and they didn't feel threatened.

I don't think that's a terribly good model -- McCarthyism's weapons were put down in the late-1950s/early-1960s, which is not exactly where I'd say conservatives felt unthreatened by communists -- but even supposing it's true, what does the equivalent look like today? When, if ever, does the modern social justice movement not feel threatened? When will they feel as their dominion over the culture is unquestioned?

The later 90's were peaceful because one side had just made a run at power ("Political Correctness") and been repulsed. As it turns out, they were regrouping, and now they have achieved victory and are in the "mop-up and occupation" phase.

I think you're right that top-level people (senators/congress people, equivalents in the UK) don't feel comfortable being called communists in public, and it's detrimental to them. See the reaction to Corbyn or 'Red Ed' in the UK. I think it is also true that quite a lot of people on that level, and a LOT of people lower down in the PMC are communists. I knew a lot of communists at university, half the politics PhDs were doing their thesis on Marx or Marxist thinkers.

I would say that people's hostility to communism comes from the increasing awareness of what went on in the USSR, and in particular from its very public collapse. (Other communist countries like NK or Cuba don't exactly offer appealing prospects either). It has very little to do with McCarthyism - when I was younger it was common wisdom that communism had failed AND that McCarthyism was a blot on the history of the US, and there was no tension between those two things.

If McCarthyism had won, communist philosophy would not be taught, it would be difficult to buy or publish related books, and any trace of communism in someone's past would get them fired. I don't think we're anywhere close to that. As it is, people just prefer not to have open communists in charge of government, and even that caution is fading IMO.

EDIT: @Harlequin5942 put it better and more briefly.

I think it is also true that quite a lot of people on that level, and a LOT of people lower down in the PMC are communists. I knew a lot of communists at university, half the politics PhDs were doing their thesis on Marx or Marxist thinkers.

Well, I guess we are probably going to disagree about what 'being communist' is here.

A lot of people study heterodox things in college and maybe even post about them on social media later in life, but if they produce like a capitalist, consume like a capitalist, vote for neoliberal politicians and invest their retirement fund in capitalist organizations, what do we actually call them?

And yeah, certain liberal arts colleges have a lot more of those people than the general population, and then they go on to teach at other liberal arts schools, and that's a thing. Not many of them write their dissertations praising Marx and then go on to hole serious political or economic power, though, and the vast majority of the populace still disagrees with them strongly (or rather, has blind contempt for them without understanding their ideas in teh first place).

I would say that people's hostility to communism comes from the increasing awareness of what went on in the USSR, and in particular from its very public collapse. (Other communist countries like NK or Cuba don't exactly offer appealing prospects either). It has very little to do with McCarthyism

Sure, but I would say that growing trans acceptance comes from increasing awareness and understanding of trans people and the trans experience, and has very little to do with social contagion and SJWs getting people banned fro social media.

I think it's pretty normal when a movement succeeds for the parts of it that look inconvenient in hindsight to get disavowed or forgotten. That doesn't mean that they're not all part of the same movement at the time.

(If they were, I could just 'no true scotsman' any SJW that does something annoying and insist that the movement itself is never wrong)

If McCarthyism had won, communist philosophy would not be taught, it would be difficult to buy or publish related books, and any trace of communism in someone's past would get them fired.

That's a pretty stiff standard for victory. I'm not sure we've beaten anyone except literal Nazis and slaveowners that badly in US history.

I'd say this particular 'cycle' started with gamergate, so it's been about ten years. The 'wane' depends, but I'd say it would look a lot like the early-1990s Jim Goad punk era backlash to '80s and late '70s political correctness that lasted through the early 2000s when 9/11 and Patriot Act conspiracy discourse kind of took over the public imagination until towards the end of Obama's first term.

You can already see the seeds of that kind of discourse being sowed in popular media, I think. But of course, that doesn't mean a 'reversal', it just means the most extreme average-LibsOfTikTok-post type stuff will be mocked for a while and mainstream politicians will call it ridiculous without anything actually changing much.

I profoundly disagree on the dating. Gamergate isn't a cause of the culture war, it is a reaction to the fact that video game journalism had already been taken over by SJWs, or at least by unethical weasels who successfully resorted to acting like SJWs when called out.

I was still hanging out in left-wing spaces at the time, and I see the key point is around the failure of Occupy in late 2011 - that is when the activist energy on the left switches from economic issues to social issues. Steve Sailer puts it slightly later with the death of Trayvon Martin in summer 2012 and Obama's decision to take advantage of it to run a more racialised re-election campaign. Exiting the Vampire Castle is published in 2013, and takes for granted that left-wing activist spaces are already dominated by wokestupid.

I'd say this particular 'cycle' started with gamergate,

Nah I'd say it started with Atheism+ and possibly even before that with LiveJournal sjws vs fiction fail

August 2014 is a weird starting point, even from the progressive view. That post-dates Atheism +, Racefail, Zimmerman, It Gets Better, the first and second Scott Walker John Doe investigations, so on. In particular, discussing the modern social justice movement without the Affordable Care Act -- both its effects, and also the discussions it depended on to get public legitimacy -- is missing a lot.

2014 contained two of the biggest flashpoints for what we call "wokeness". If wokeness is principally designed by a political fixation on racial and gender identity politics, Gamergate was the "gender" catalyst and the Ferguson riots were the "race" catalyst. I was working in a hotel for the last four months of 2014 and first four of 2015, and remember discussing with a colleague the edit wars on the Gamergate Wikipedia page and also watching a report on the Ferguson riots on a TV in the hotel restaurant. August 2014 was a busy month.

While you're correct to point out that Atheism+ and Elevatorgate was a big precursor to this kind of thing, I think 2014 was the moment when "wokeness" went mainstream: unlike Gamergate, I don't think Elevatorgate made the front page of the New York Times.

I don’t think so. The modern online culture war can be traced directly back to Gamergate, which is what got millions of previously apolitical young men interested in politics.

Previously there was /pol/ (which had only been remade from /new/ a few years previously, and hadn’t yet fully taken over the site) and the generic stormfront type neonazi sphere. And on the more ‘intellectual’ dissident right there was the Taylor & MacDonald sphere, which was much smaller, and a handful of publications like TakiMag and to some extent Moldbug and his sphere, which initially had a lot of overlap with the more political side of TRP, derived from more generic PUA stuff. But it’s almost hard to overstate how niche and esoteric these things were, and how many of them (eg. AmRen conference attendees) had a primarily older audience. On the ‘mainstream right’ it was all old men, the ‘classic’ Christian right, and a few nerdy libertarians. It was Gamergate and now almost forgotten figures like Sargon who were responsible for the political investment of millions of young men in conservative politics. The ‘new right’ that emerged post-2014 was completely different to the right of McCain etc that opposed the ACA. Young millennial (white) men in 2008 didn’t give a shit about conservative politics. It’s unclear whether Trump wouldn’t have won without Gamergate because the Facebook boomer MAGAverse was largely unrelated to it, but the success of the entire millennial online movement around ‘The Donald’ on the subreddit, on /pol/ and so on was a product of it.

On the left you’re correct that the chain of causation extends a little further back because it can be drawn more directly from SomethingAwful in the late 00s and the emergence of tumblr, which saw ideas that had largely been confined to the philosophy departments of European universities reach a mainstream audience of young women. But still, the explosion of support around eg trans issues does date to around 2014. That was when Amazon’s Transparent debuted to extreme critical and media praise and extensive commentary on its sympathetic portrayal of a transwoman, Dragon Age had the first positively-portrayed trans character in a major game, Caitlyn Jenner came out towards the end of the year and, as the US came out of a long period of economic pain, progressive attention focused more wholly on social issues again as Occupy receded into memory.

So yes, I think 2014 is critical.

I would say the events of 2012 are a crucial inflection point leading to your basic normiecons being willing to support harder edged, less sensitive right wing movements. The DR is twitter weirdos but it does crosspollinate with the republican grassroots leading to some(overstated) actual influence; I don't think that would happen if it wasn't for things like the Trayvon Martin case or a lot of the 2012 election behavior.

I agree that it's crucial and maybe a turning point (though I'm not sure that, in a world where Gjoni got distracted before posting, some other thing wouldn't have taken the same role). I just don't think it makes sense as a starting point.

My post to FCfromSSC goes over the left side, but while I think the impact was bigger on the right, I think you're overlooking the extent a lot of pre-Gamergate groups were less 'apolitical' or not 'interested in politics', and more just hadn't yet been shoved out of mainstream groups.

In 2009, I could write at length on rpgnet on political topics, if at the risk of (even boring) threads getting locked. A couple years before gamergate, conservative-leaning positions had stopped being zebras and started being understood as unacceptable on their own premises; by the Trump era support of a Republican President was verborten; today, "support or apologism for the use of AI generation in commercial projects" is outside of the bounds of acceptable discussion. My politics didn't change, but the extent I would be visible from the outside and especially the extent I could be seen-as-a-state-sees did, and while my pathway was unusual, I don't think the direction was.

A lot of those groups that these people motions around collapsed, either when the broader Tea Party movement did or with the collapse of web culture into social media and doxxing, and they were never as large, but they existed and in many ways were the very things that the early SJW movement were reacting to.

the emergence of tumblr, which saw ideas that had largely been confined to the philosophy departments of European universities reach a mainstream audience of young women

The thing that made me a conservative as a young man wasn’t gamergate, it was this. I distinctly remember the day a friend said, “hey come look at this,” and he was showing me tumblrinaction. The intense “KILL ALL MEN ALL MEN ARE RAPISTS EVERY ADVANCEMENT TOWARDS ARTIFICIAL CONCEPTION GETS US CLOSER TO ELIMINATING MEN” stuff that was du jour on tumblr back during this time shocked the shit out of me. And the racial and trans (and it’s almost forgotten now, but otherkin) stuff too.

Then I started to see women I knew in real life saying those things explicitly. And then I saw people in institutions saying it. And then it seemed to take over. At each stage, of course, the rough edges were sanded off. The radfems who truly hated men were very quickly marginalized. But the animating spirit remained the same.

So I remember when it wasn’t “crazy kids on college campuses.” I remember when it was crazy girls on tumblr. And I saw the crazy tumblr girls’ ideas take over the world.

That certainly does for making one a conservative.

I discovered Scott's blog in the comments of a post on TumblrInAction in 2014.

I believe I did the same. Crazy to think he was the most insightful anti-SJ voice at the time. But he was.

When people wonder why there are so many non-rationalist types here, the origin story is Scott writing about feminism in 2014.

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Interesting.

Gamergate is roughly where I put the starting point as well, and it's the date I feel like I see people citing the most often. Notably, Gamergate (and the several other concurrent Feminist pushes, Jackie's story, #TeamHarpies, Listen and Believe, etc) was the point at which the Rip hit me personally, a heretofore more-or-less doctrinaire progressive and a true believer in what I then understood Social Justice ideology to be. I think it's possible that it's the same for a lot of other people; previous to that point, people saw this stuff playing out in their individual subcultural niches, but 2014 was the point at which Social Justice cohered into an acute movement and began seriously pushing for society-wide solutions. Gamergate figures were invited to speak at the UN. Listen and Believe's efforts had what seemed to be a continual media presence from that point on, and there were no more lulls, only compounding acceleration as we transitioned into the 2016 election.

I generally think of it in terms of policy starvation. Progressives had a theory of how things should be fixed; the Bush wars and the recessions convinced them that the time of action was at hand. Obama's presidency was supposed to be the turning point, but nothing significant actually changed. 2014, halfway through Obama's second term, is the point where those who'd run out of patience hit critical mass, and the whole culture started tipping toward radical ideology.

I could see it as a point of heightened visibility or 'crucial', but it feels too much like calling the start of McCarthyism at the Communist Control Act in '54. Dickwolves was 2010, and it wasn't like that was a battle specific to the people pissed off at Penny Arcade. RailFail '09 wasn't just about writing native voices, but heavily balanced around the extent the wrong people got to talk at all, or that tone mattered.

Even other contemporaneous-feeling things end up coming first, like Brendan Eich (April 2014) and arguably TeamHarpy (first posts in May 2014, lawsuit filed in July 2014). NotAllMen and YesAllWomen were promoted and popularized through the first half of 2014, too.

That's not to call it any less of a turning point, but it's hard to call a starting point.

In my perspective, the major difference between gamergate and dickwolves or racefail or elevatorgate or Eich's ouster is that it was with gamergate that the online journalists stopped even trying to understand the other side. Previously articles would include a sentence or two explaining roughly the other side's position (this is stupid and hysterical usually) but with gamergate it was just mouth breathing chodes impotently raging at Quinn the whole way down. And when the publications started doing that, so did the rank and file - you could sit an agg down and walk them through your perspective and at the end of it they'd bsod, shake their head and call you a mouth breathing chode impotently raging at Quinn*. Everyone acted like Arthur Chu was a lone spark of extra insanity after he talked about mind killing himself, but that's because he was actually giving the game away.

*Note I am not saying they would bsod because they knew I was right about gamergate, I am saying they would bsod because they could feel themselves empathising with me.

What is this about Arthur Chu?

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First time?

I get what you're motioning around, but that's what it felt like for a lot of other people a lot earlier. Any opposition to the Affordable Care Act deriving solely from the President's race was a mainstay from 2009-2012. The only possible motivation for a specific anti-gay policy being thoughtless homophobia is gold-standard SCOTUS law, recognized at three different major cases, and with far broader academic and institutional support. Gun owners as wanting more Trayvon Martin shootings was absolutely a thing.

Journolist was revealed in 2010: it wasn't just that it happened, but even the why and how was common knowledge for a set.

It matters that a bunch of people suddenly got to see it first-hand! But it's why I'm skeptical of it as a starting point.

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Agreed, seeing multiple major online publishers run near-identical stories with near-identical headlines at the same time was a gigantic redpill.

This culture war has been happening, in some form or another, since the enlightenment.

Which means it's not eternal. We'll move on to something else yet.

Or that it requires at least a printing press and efficient enough farming that you can support an idle intellectual class.

I mean what do you actually think your side 'winning' looks like?

People stop thinking 'trans' is a thing and it's illegal to call someone by different pronouns than they were born with?

We go back to having white men be 70% of characters in all entertainment media, and another 25% are white women with zero character traits beyond 'sexy and horny for the main character'?

We all agree that actually women and minorities are genetically more stupid and incapable than white men, and stop giving them jobs that earn more than a subsistence wage?

Or just 'everyone thinks the leftists of that period in history were being kind of histrionic and weird and that the right from that period in history were less bad than everyone thought, and that's what history books say, but everything else about society is mostly the same'?

Because the latter is certainly possible, sure, but I wouldn't call it SJ's 'losing'. If everything they wanted to change about society stays changed but the future thinks that 'feminist fail compilation' videos are funny, then ok, that's an acceptable cost.

Sen. McCarthy is depicted as a villain today, but he won. 'Communist' is still an insult in 90% of American contexts, and capitalist realism is treated as a fundamental facet of reality rather than being a philosophy or ideology at all. Something like that could easily happen to the SJ/woke movement, and that's about what it would look like.

But if you think we're going to roll back the actual changes to society, most of that means taking away rights or privileges or respect or acknowledgement or etc. from people who have spent a long hard time and earning it, and trying to do that ussually involves a lot of kicking and screaming and destruction. Frankly I don't find it likely that we'll move in that direction while we're still a liberal democracy, and if we're not then there's more important changes going on to worry about.

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We go back to having white men be 70% of characters in all entertainment media, and another 25% are white women with zero character traits beyond 'sexy and horny for the main character'?

We all agree that actually women and minorities are genetically more stupid and incapable than white men, and stop giving them jobs that earn more than a subsistence wage?

Could you put even a little effort into not straw manning the opposing viewpoint?

See discussion here.

But also, this is actually an interesting opportunity for a discussion of aesthetics vs. empirical meaning.

We all agree that actually women and minorities are genetically more stupid and incapable than white men, and stop giving them jobs that earn more than a subsistence wage?

The aesthetics of this statement are pretty crude and confrontational. But also, AFAIK HBD relating to black people being on average less intelligent and women being on average less suited for/interested in high-paying jobs is a median position around here. People have defended the Damore memo to me without pushback from the rest of the community, which definitely talks about capabilities in addition to preferences. So lets make some purely aesthetic changes to that sentence and see how it matches up to people's actual beliefs-as-they'd-frame-them here:

We all agree that actually black people have lower average IQ and women are less suited for and less interested in high-stress, thing-oriented positions , and not be surprised or try to change anything when we find that they have* jobs that are less prestigious or have lower average pay?

Is that a fair summary of at least a common worldview around here?

Because my contention is that the two worlds that these two sentences describe are empirically identical to each other.

'Lower average IQ' is aesthetically nicer than 'more stupid', 'less suited for or interested in' is aesthetically nicer than 'more incapable than', and the passive voice of 'not be surprised to find' gives an aesthetic sense of impartiality that the active voice 'stop giving them' does not.

But they describe the same beliefs about people's mental attributes, and predict/endorse the same empirical state of the world with regards to employment and wages.

Basically, I don't see the value in letting people hide behind aesthetics. Your empirical beliefs/preferences about the state of the world are your empirical beliefs/preferences about the state of the world, no matter what words you use to describe them.

If you agree with one description of World State A presented with nice aesthetics and are offended by another description of World State A presented with mean aesthetics, that's probably a sign that your beliefs are motivated by aesthetics more than they should be.

(which certainly happens to me and people on my side, I assume! People describe my side's beliefs like this all the time, and I try to respond to them fairly, see here re 'submitting' to individual trans persons vs being a member of a society with certain beliefs and preferences)

'Lower average IQ' is aesthetically nicer than 'more stupid'

No. These are not the same statement. They say vey different things. If I were to say that black people are more stupid than white people I would be denying the important fact that there are indeed black people smarter than myself and white people dumber than nearly all black people. It's very important, and I am careful always to be very specific about this fact.

We are talking about population level averages that we could, as a society, just decide not to look at or be interested in at all. I have no idea what the relative average iq or job achievement of blonde haired people is when compared to brunettes and I don't care to know.

This is not hair splitting, it is foundational to the prescription. That you pattern match them is perhaps why this has had to be described to you so many times. Do no not pattern match this. Put away your bingo card.

'less suited for or interested in' is aesthetically nicer than 'more incapable than'

uninterested vs incapable just very trivially mean different things. This matters a whole lot in particular discussions like the Damore memo you invoke. It really does matter if women are not going into some high paying fields because they are understandably unpleasant to most people VS if they're being discriminated against in hiring. It is very possible there just isn't a way to make things like computer programmer much more interesting to women but we could definitely reduce discrimination. This difference is critically important to any serious look at the topic. That you think they mean the same thing despite being told exhaustively multiple times that they don't leaves me in a kind of good faith trap. Is it worse faith to assume you're just incapable of understanding this difference or to assume that you understand it but are playing dumb?

Less suited for is closer to a incapable but then again I'm unsure why I'm defending words you conjured.

Those two rephrasing of my beliefs are egregious enough themselves but then you, and I understand why you didn't even bother trying to defend this part, broke out:

and stop giving them jobs that earn more than a subsistence wage?

What a thing to say! What an absurd thing to assume would happen if we used race blind hiring. I believe we'd see disproportion in many jobs but you seem to think that there are no black people that can compete on merit. Not to mention that you apparently equate less than average pay to be equivalent to bare subsistence.

It would be one this if I had any faith that you'd take any of this onboard and avoid applying this uncharitable filter to the things people like me say in the future. But I think we've had this talk before. I think I will wake some time in the future to a post by you that has made the same error, not even on a different topic but this same topic. You are in love with your hatred of a position that as far as I can tell is not held by anyone here.

No. These are not the same statement. They say vey different things. If I were to say that black people are more stupid than white people I would be denying the important fact that there are indeed black people smarter than myself and white people dumber than nearly all black people. It's very important, and I am careful always to be very specific about this fact.

See, this is what I'm talking about. You're letting affective valence drive your interpretation, and being maximally uncharitable towards anyone not treating your views with careful aesthetic kid gloves, in order to justify to yourself that actually they don't understand you or else they'd be forced to agree with you, or at least be respectful towards you.

You're acting like I don't understand you, when I'm the one that just wrote the summary of your position that you're currently agreeing with!

Because the thing is, no, that is not what 'x is dumber than y' means. No one would interpret it to mean that if they weren't doing a motivated reading to shore up their own position. If that's what 'x is dumber than y' meant, then it would literally never be a sensible thing to say; you couldn't say 'People with Down Syndrome are dumber than Phd graduates,' because one Phd grad somewhere in the world overdosed and fried their brain and is near-catatonic and thus now dumber than one Down syndrome person somewhere.

What you need to understand is that no one is impressed by you carefully parsing your language in this way. They're not failing to understand your nuanced and balanced and fair-minded take on racial superiority; they know that 'there is a population difference in IQ levels with lots of overlap' and 'black people are dumber than white people ' mean the same thing, and that the people who say them are both pointing us to similar worlds that they don't believe in and don't want to move towards.

People aren't failing to understand you, they disagree with you, and the insistence on politely-intellectual aesthetics isn't persuading them.

uninterested vs incapable just very trivially mean different things... Less suited for is closer to a incapable but then again I'm unsure why I'm defending words you conjured.

And again, proves my point. Yes, the 'uninterested' part is the meaningless window dressing your side uses to make it sound like no one is being hurt by this (as if poor people living under capitalism are uninterested in making more money!), and the 'less suited' (incapable) part is what is doing the real work. 'If women were just as good at the jobs they're underrepresented in, why wouldn't CEOs hire them,' right?

Because women are saying they'd actually like to work those jobs and make that money and have that power, and those are intuitive desires to everyone in the audience, so it's real hard to convince everyone of the 'uninterested' thing. And if they were good at the jobs but just didn't like the corporate office culture, well, rational CEOs would just change that culture to get more talented workers and increase profits! So the only alternative to institutional misogyny that holds water is the 'less suited' (incapable) part, that's what is actually doing the work in explaining what the world is like.

And note that you happily spend a long paragraph arguing about the aesthetic 'preferences' part, but once you get to the actual meaningful part, you just throw up your hands and imply it's beneath your dignity to answer. Which, again, is a tactic we recognize.

What a thing to say! What an absurd thing to assume would happen if we used race blind hiring.

What is race-blind hiring, and when were you advocating it?

Do you mean like the cello players who get interviewed behind a screen so that no one knows their gender before they get hired, and then way more women end up getting hired? It was people here who told me that was a myth.

Do you mean that you want more regulations so that job applicants cannot be interviewed in person or by phone and cannot give any information on their applications that would reveal their race or gender, including things like their address and which college they went to? And no one is allowed to ever hire someone they already know? So that all hiring is truly blind to race and gender?

Or do you just mean that you want hiring to work pretty much like it is now, except we get rid of any types of incentives or pressures or rhetoric around diversity, and go back to the way things were in the past?

Because there were times in the past where, yes, women and black people had extreme difficulty getting any work above subsistence wages. Not in our lifetime, earlier, but: people from the times when that was true wouldn't tell you they were racist, they would also tell you that it was just because of innate differences that make those people unsuited or uninterested in higher paying jobs.

The point is, if you don't acknowledge systemic bias, then you don't have any reason to look at any specific outcome gap and say 'that's too big to be natural'; without systemic explanations, whatever the gap is must be natural.

And if you know that systemic bias does exist while also spending all your time attacking and rolling your eyes at anyone who tries to address it, then people are going to infer your motives based on that, and it doesn't matter what aesthetics you try to use to fancy it up.

What you need to understand is that reality is nuanced, but directional public policy is not. Either we're to one side of the 'natural' wage gap and should be pushing for more diversity and opportunity initiatives to shrink the gap until it reaches the natural level, or we're to the other side of the 'natural' wage gap and should be pushing to stop those programs and eschew action on the matter until the wage gap grows to reach it's natural level.

You can spend a million pages writing about how it's a complex topic with many factors and no one thing explains the entire phenomenon and so forth, and there's a role for actual scientists and policy-matter experts to do that in a systematic way so that we can learn more. But for average people the thing that matters to them is policy direction because that's what they use to cast their vote.

And if you are on the 'increase the wage gap' side of the policy dispute, it doesn't matter to those people what your reasoning for it is (including when you say it's uncharitable to call your side the 'increase teh wage gap side', yes you are against policies aimed at shrinking the wage gap and that means your policies being implemented would probably see it increase but that's not your terminal value or anything so it's a strawman to call you that), you're still the person trying to fuck their life and drive the country what they see as backwards.

You and the person who says 'I do have a terminal value of increasing teh wage gap, I love inequity!' have the same effect on their life when you go to the ballot box. In fact you're probably worse because your focus on aesthetics and polite rhetoric actually is persuasive to enough people to be dangerous.

You're letting affective valence drive your interpretation, and being maximally uncharitable towards anyone not treating your views with careful aesthetic kid gloves

That's about as much as I needed to read. Good luck. What could possibly be the point of arguing when you get to just pretend I said something different and attack that person.

Welcome to my world. At least I have the courtesy to respond in good faith when it happens to me.

And so the whole world must be made blind. I want no part in it.

People stop thinking 'trans' is a thing and it's illegal to call someone by different pronouns than they were born with?

I just want to comment on this one thing, which is that this matches a pattern I've noticed by many people where they just project their own way of thinking to the other side, just reversed. The notion that any meaningfully mainstream pushback against SJ would involve illegalizing calling someone certain pronouns is pretty absurd. It's the SJ side that wants to illegalize such things, and the pushback is by people who want the chips to fall where they may without legal coercion.

Similarly, the pushback against SJ in transness isn't that "trans" isn't a thing - it's that it's a very different thing than what SJ claim it is. Of course, many in SJ would claim that that's the same as saying it's not a thing, but that's just word games; the fact is, the JK Rowlings of the world acknowledge that there is a category of people who identify themselves as "trans" - this clearly is all that is required to think that "trans" is a thing. They just don't believe that "trans" is the kind of thing that places obligations on other people to submit to the person who believes themselves as "trans" in terms of things like pronoun usage, prison assignments, shelters, sports, etc.

All 3 were ad absurdum examples demonstrating the crazy steps you would have to take to make the future look like the past, in the 'roll back the clock' or 'return to glory days' way that I think people imagine.

My point is, if you don't take those absurd steps, then I think the future continues to look mostly like a continuation of the present in all the major particular, because the changes to society and culture and the zeitgeist and the Overton Window have already happened. They're not being sustained by an ongoing SJW effort that can be 'defeated' and return everything to 'normal', they are 'normal' now (aside from the most toxoplasmic excesses).

Going back to the old 'normal' would take as much effort and revolution as it took to get to the current 'normal', and I think that's unlikely to happen, is my point.

But, to discuss your points:

They just don't believe that "trans" is the kind of thing that places obligations on other people to submit to the person who believes themselves as "trans" in terms of things like pronoun usage, prison assignments, shelters, sports, etc.

Well maybe we should explore what it means to 'submit' in a cultural context.

Assuming I don't want to, is it 'submitting' to the church if I'm quiet and respectful during sermons, instead of heckling the priest and playing loud music on my phone?

Assuming I don't want to, is it 'submitting' to a restaurant if I wear a shirt and shoes when I eat there, in accordance with their posted rules?

Assuming I don't want to, is it 'submitting' to a parent with a loud child on a plane when I don't scream at them to shut their stupid brat up?

Shelters and sports teams can have whatever rules they like about who they admit, and you can associate with them or not. You can call people you meet any names or titles you want, and if other people think you're being rude they're allowed to yell at you or stop associating with you.

The obligation you talk about is not placed on you by the person who considers themselves trans. The obligation is placed on you by the society that believes and wants to respect that fact. The obligation is placed on you by your own desire to be a part of that society and interact with it nicely despite disagreeing with it on this point.

I don't think JK and the people she retweets would actually be happy if we just repealed whatever law Peterson was talking about that approximately zero people have ever been prosecuted under, and any other legal requirements on private citizens (which is different from government policies about government functions), and everything else remained exactly how it is today. She would have faced exactly the same backlash and been outraged by 99.8% of the same events in that world.

In order to have a world where sports and shelters don't spontaneously choose to include trans people, you would have to change their opinions about trans people to something different than they are today. In order to live in a world where there's no social consequence to misgendering trans people, you'd have to change everyone's opinion about how rude that is or isn't.

I don't see how you imagine a social structure in which you are not required to 'submit' to this agenda, without requiring that everyone else submit to your agenda by changing their opinions and preferences to match yours.

When you preferences and beliefs are far enough away from the rest of society's, then society does a lot of things you disprefer, and society is likely to yell at you if you follow your preferences in ways that impact other people. 'Submission' doesn't really enter into it, it's just a straight-up conflict, a zero-sum relationship in which one side getting more of what it wants means the other side getting less.

All 3 were ad absurdum examples demonstrating the crazy steps you would have to take to make the future look like the past, in the 'roll back the clock' or 'return to glory days' way that I think people imagine.

But they aren't such examples. They're just absurd ideas that you pulled out of your ass without even explaining that this was the point being made; except you didn't even make a point; you just made naked assertions that such absurd things would be required to roll back to the past, without making a supporting argument. At best, you were playing an obvious bad-faith shell game of equating "SJW" with anything relating to rights or things like genetic intellectual superiority, which fools no one, since those are simply milquetoast liberal things, and liberals are almost definitionally anti-"SJW."

The obligation you talk about is not placed on you by the person who considers themselves trans. The obligation is placed on you by the society that believes and wants to respect that fact. The obligation is placed on you by your own desire to be a part of that society and interact with it nicely despite disagreeing with it on this point.

Sure, and we live in a world where society hasn't decided that we want to submit to trans people. Some people in society have, others haven't, and it's under discussion now.

In order to have a world where sports and shelters don't spontaneously choose to include trans people, you would have to change their opinions about trans people to something different than they are today. In order to live in a world where there's no social consequence to misgendering trans people, you'd have to change everyone's opinion about how rude that is or isn't.

This, and honestly the entire last part of your comment, is just consensus-building. I'd prefer if you didn't do that, since it's dishonest, and it's also not fooling anyone. It's also you just playing another transparently bad faith shell game of claiming that sports and shelters "spontaneously chose to include trans people." Whether or not they chose to include trans people is not in contention; if you combined the people who believed transwomen should compete/shelter with females and those who believed transwomen should compete/shelter with males, that would cover basically everyone. It's not a question of "including" them, it's a question of how you include them.

I don't see how you imagine a social structure in which you are not required to 'submit' to this agenda, without requiring that everyone else submit to your agenda by changing their opinions and preferences to match yours.

This is another shell game. No, it doesn't require that everyone else submit to my agenda. It requires me convincing enough people that freedom speech is worth protecting (admittedly a losing battle these days). This is especially rich when the very agenda that you are claiming these people have is submission. It's not about submitting to an agenda; it's that the submission is (part of) the agenda. This sort of transparently bad faith shell game where you elide between submitting to some sort of claimed-to-be-popular agenda and submission in itself being the agenda itself doesn't fool anyone.

I'd also like to ask directly, have you ever gone by a username "darwin2500" or something similar on Reddit or the SlateStarCodex website? That's honestly the first thing I'd like to know, so that I have a better idea of if this kind of bad faith is the norm to expect from your comments.

But they aren't such examples.

In what way are they not?

70 years ago, the wage gap for women and minorities was much larger than it is today and they were widely considered to be mentally inferior (or 'different' in ways that excluded them from full economic participation), women and minorities were much less represented in media than they are today, and the modern category of 'trans people' didn't exist as a social construct.

Are you saying there's some non-strawman path back to that reality that I should have hypothesized instead of the way I described things? I'd like to hear it.

Or are you just saying that I should have interpreted 'defeat the SJWs' to mean something other than moving society backwards on those 3 things, even though the modern trends surrounding those 3 things are pretty much the main topics that people here complain about in relation to the SJ movement?

Because if that's what you mean, that's why I phrased it as a question, and then offered the alternative of just defeating cancel culture and loud annoying woke scolds and etc. (the 4th thing that gets complained about) while keeping most of the actual material advances. I offered that as an interpretation of what OP meant, and asked if that was what they meant, and continued to address that point along the assumption that they probably meant that. That was the actual point of the comment, which you (like many) are not bothering to engage with.

Again, this is the whole 'take a sentence and respond to it in-line instead of responding to the entire comment' thing.

The overall comment was 'When you say "defeat the movement," do you mean materially or rhetorically? Defeating them materially would actually be pretty nuts and hard to do and you probably don't actually endorse it, so probably you mean defeat them rhetorically? In which case, sure, that could happen, it just wouldn't mean very much if the material advances of the movement mostly remained in place. People have muddled thinking in general about what it means to 'defeat' a movement, and movements that are remembered as absurd or evil often accomplished many of their goals in reality; that's probably important for you to think about as you consider your question'.

But you don't read the whole comment, see the shape of it, and respond to the intent. You grab a few sentences, apply an uncharitable new context to them that doesn't match how they were being used rhetorically, and want to debate those instead.

It's tiring.

Sure, and we live in a world where society hasn't decided that we want to submit to trans people. Some people in society have, others haven't, and it's under discussion now.

Yeah, and my point is, saying that treating trans people with respect is 'submitting' to them, like you're a dog rolling over to show your belly and whining so they won't hurt you, is just as uncharitable a phrasing of the progressive position as any of my phrasings in this comment.

Which is to say: it's a phrasing I'm totally fine with! I understand why it might feel like that to someone who's not on-board with the project, and while I think that phrasing misses really important nuance and misrepresents people's intentions, it still more-or-less points at the same empirical reality as the charitable phrasing I'd use, so whatever. I can be a good sport about it, and continue the discussion in good faith despite having my position uncharitably framed that way.

And if you think that these are different, that my phrasing of your side is a straw man but your phrasing of my side is totally fair, then you're the one who is too far into your own side's rhetoric to recognize where you're failing to understand your opponents.

It's also you just playing another transparently bad faith shell game of claiming that sports and shelters "spontaneously chose to include trans people." Whether or not they chose to include trans people is not in contention; if you combined the people who believed transwomen should compete/shelter with females and those who believed transwomen should compete/shelter with males, that would cover basically everyone. It's not a question of "including" them, it's a question of how you include them.

Sorry, I can't even parse this. Are you implying that I was offering a hypothetical 'excluded' world where trans people aren't allowed on teams/in shelters for either gender and are thus 'excluded' at a societal level, assigning a preference for that world to my opponents, and saying that's bad?

Because, no, that's nuts, if that's how you're reading my argument then I really really wish you would take like 30 seconds to try to think of a more charitable interpretation whenever you get mad at something I write.

My point is that individual teams/shelters can choose to include or exclude trans people in their individual organization. And if any individual organization ever chooses to include them, that leads to the state of affairs that people like Rowling et al. are objecting to, with battered women sleeping next to what they would call men, with girls competing against what they would call boys.

You can't actually allow those organizations to freely choose their own policies on this topic without creating the situation that those people are mad about and want to abolish (or you'd have to change everyone's opinions so that those organizations never used that freedom to make a choice they'd disagree with). To get what they actually want, they would need everyone else to 'submit' to their preferences.

That was my point.

No, it doesn't require that everyone else submit to my agenda. It requires me convincing enough people that freedom speech is worth protecting

What are you talking about.

Like, literally, what are you talking about?

I already stipulated in the hypothetical I was advancing that we repeal any laws that would restrict your ability to speak however you'd like on these topics. That's already something I granted here.

So when you say 'It requires me convincing enough people that freedom speech is worth protecting', are you talking about repealing laws restricting speech in this area, and you just missed where I already granted that?

Or are you saying that people getting mad at you for saying things that they consider to be incredibly rude and dehumanizing is a violation of free speech?

Are you saying that if more people just agreed with your passion for free speech they'd be perfectly happy with hiring you so you can misgender and deadname their trans coworkers 20 times a day, and tell them how you're sorry that they fell for a social contagion and mutilated their genitals around the water cooler?

Again: outside of whatever laws in this area might exist, which I already granted you, it comes down to the fact that people have values and norms and preferences and social mores and rules of etiquette that you're violating, and they react the way people always react when someone does that. There's not a way around that without people either changes those preferences and etiquettes to match what you want, or changing to care about 'free speech' so much that they stops reacting to those violations in the normal way humans throughout history have always done.

Which I already said in my last comment, and you didn't address in your response, preferring to just insult me instead of addressing the argument. Again, tiring.

I'd also like to ask directly, have you ever gone by a username "darwin2500" or something similar on Reddit or the SlateStarCodex website?

Yes, obviously.

You were more interested in attacking my character than responding to my points there, too.

  • -11

Okay, thanks for confirming, Darwin. I have no interest in attacking your character, only in pointing out the pattern of bad faith you have displayed over the years. Please consider this conversation to have been completely and utterly "won" by you - or perhaps just "lost" by me for spending any sort of effort reading and writing arguments as if there was any chance of good faith discussion.

We go back to having white men be 70% of characters in all entertainment media, and another 25% are white women with zero character traits beyond 'sexy and horny for the main character'?

I think it's at least worth noting that the racial demographics of the United States were substantively different in the '50s-'80s (about 85% of the country was considered "white" by the 1960 census, and most of the rest was black) such that, while white characters may still have been overrepresented in those eras (not doing a formal study here), the background expectation should be much different today, where closer to 60% of the country fits that description. Complaining that the culture of yesteryear looks like the people of yesteryear seems a bit misplaced, in my opinion, although I don't have quite as strong of thoughts on current television demographics.

This, of course, doesn't apply to the gender breakdown of leading roles, so your mileage may vary.

Well, as you'd say I'd still push back on gender representation in those time, but yeah I'm generally fine with all of that. I wasn't actually trying to attack the past for their practices here.

My point was, people complain about ubiquitous diversity in everything as one of the annoying consequences of SJWs getting their hands on the rudder of popular culture. So if the question is 'what would it look like to defeat the SJW movement', and the current levels of diversity in media are a hated consequence of the SJW movement, then what's the alternative? What would 'defeating' that look like?

As you say, having media be 'representative' today would involve a ton more diversity than we had with 'representative media of the past. I cited to someone else a study showing that even today, minorities are still underrepresented in most media sectors compared to the actual population average.

So if 'defeating SJW's absurd push for diversity' means just moving to representative proportions instead, and representative proportions would actually be more diverse than what we have now, then what are we actually asking for?

A few people narrowed the complaint down to, paraphrasing, 'race-swapping, implausible world-building, and bad writing' which, sure, that's a lot more reasonable and is a definition we could discuss.

I kind of think that winning on those types of corner-cases would still leave you with a media landscape that looks a lot less changed from the current one than I feel like some people are asking for, giving the volume of complaints, is the thing.

We go back to having white men be 70% of characters in all entertainment media

Well, let's have a little look at that, shall we? I've never followed "Doctor Who" but I have been vaguely familiar with it. A superfan, who's also gay, got the gig as writer/showrunner (Russell T. Davies) from 2005-2010. He also created the spinoff "Torchwood" which was the "grown-up series Who couldn't be" (mainly everyone was gay or bi, was the big change there) which never rose to the same heights of popularity, and has now come back to try and make the show popular again after the era of the Female Doctor tanked it (turns out there is not a massive audience for making such huge revisions to an established character).

"Who" is a show that suffers from the problem of being perceived as a 'kid's show' so there's not too much they can do there to change it, and any changes that have been made since 2005 to now treat "adult" as meaning "we talk about sex and everyone is gay".

Davies started this, but wasn't responsible for the worst of it because at least he is a fan, and stuck with popular characters for the second spin-off "The Sarah Jane Adventures". But even then we got the Doctor having an ex-wife, lectures about black people in Britain, and the rest of the progressive push leading up to the Female Doctor in 2017/18 (well after Davies had left).

Now, if I believe what I'm reading online, even with Davies back, they had to bring back one of the new popular Doctors of his era - David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor, now the Fourteenth (even though all this makes nonsense of former canon that there could only be thirteen incarnations). And this is how we get the new Fifteenth Doctor who is black - a completely new process invented whereby the next regeneration splits into two separate beings.

The new actor is also gay (I'm presuming, from the description "the first openly queer actor to lead the series"). Since they've given previous Doctors romantic partners in the new revision, are we going to see the first gay Doctor Who?

Possibly, but who cares? Davies managed to revitalise the series, but also set it on the path to "we must have the first sexually active, first female, first whatever" revision of the character, as well as the lectures about black representation, colonialism, and the rest of it. The success of all that is that the show slumped again, until they had to bring back a popular, white, straight, conventional Doctor to lead into the new black queer Doctor. The hopes there are that instead of going straight from the female Doctor to the black one, and continuing to shed viewership, they can hook viewers coming back to see the return of Ten and keep them when Fifteen is on the scene.

My point out of all this rambling? That when your audiences are mainly white, and straight, and cis, then promoting lead characters on the basis of minority status is marking the show out as "oh it's for the LGBT+ crowd, not me" and you lose viewers and then you lose money.

There's a difference between "the return of a popular show and this time the lead happens to be X" and blaring "the return of a popular show where the whole point is that the lead is X!" I'll be interested to see how the new Doctor turns out, but if the show is going to be all "Did you know he's black this time? Yes, the first black Gallifreyan (if he is, I have no idea on that) and certainly the first black Doctor, he's black you know, we're going to have all sorts of lectures about black people and colonisation" then they're going to shed viewers like leaves in autumn, and then of course it will be blamed on racism and homophobia.

To put some numbers on these claims, UK ratings for the 2022 specials were the worst in the show's history, not even taking population growth into account: https://guide.doctorwhonews.net/info.php

I was forced to watch the three recent special episodes with David Tennant back (absolutely the best doctor of the reincarnated version of the show) because of friends and was surprised just how much the quality had dropped since his original series with Rose Tyler. No 15. did seem cool though from the last few minutes of the last special episode (the plot of the last third of this episode was really stupid though), not cool enough to make me watch the show again, but definitely better than Whittaker.

Personally I think it's a terrible decision; if they're going to muck about with regeneration so that we get "bigeneration" and splitting into a black and a white Doctor (oh man, just typing that out makes me wince), then why not have the post-female doctor regeneration be a reset to a former version, i.e. Ten? They're already making this a Special Special regeneration, why not set it up as "uh, this has only happened very rarely and when it does then it's unstable" and that sets up for the Special Special Special bigeneration.

When a show does a return of fan favourite character, it's because they need eyeballs desperately. I appreciate Davies does love the show, but I think him being gay means he did and does want "representation" for personal reasons (and not just ticking off the DEI boxes), and when you are in a position to get your own fanfic done as canon, that leads down very winding paths.

You're thinking too small. Davies has hinted that this split regeneration has retroactively applied to every previous Doctor as well. So that they all now exist, simultaneously within their own time line, creating the Doctorverse, such that they can now have multiple Doctor's having multiple adventures at the same time. In other words this is the multiverse for Doctor Who.

Primarily this appears to be away to be able to monetize Dr Who more heavily, outside of just the rare crossovers due to the time line shenanigans they used to use as an excuse for why it didn't happen more frequently. That this happens just as Disney pump a whole bunch of money into the franchise is probably not a coincidence I would suggest.

Yeah, that's the kind of fanon retconning I meant. He's Officially In Charge now, which means he can set what the new canon is, even if it contradicts what has previously been established. The awful movie, where they decided that the Doctor was half-human, is quietly ignored. Can't do that when it's the television show.

They've done it to Trek, they've done it to Star Wars, and now they're doing it to the Doctor.

Interestingly he is also trying to reverse a retcon that was brought in while he wasn't in charge (The Timeless Child) by showing it was essentially an in universe retcon, the Master and Toymaker have rewritten the Doctors past. So trying to remystify his real origin.

To be fair original Doctor Who was always very blase with continuity and rules, so I can't really say even as a 7th Doctor fan, that it has got much worse in that regard. Famously they didn't have canon, just deciding on what was needed for each story to work (including regeneration itself) .

I believe "just deciding on what was needed for each story to work" is a central pillar of most western versions of Buddhism.

I hereby petition to repeal the 8th, so we can render just punishment to the next screenwriter that tries to do anything involving a multiverse.

turns out there is not a massive audience for making such huge revisions to an established character

Frankly, trying to appeal to the female fans of Doctor Who by making the Doctor a woman strikes me as about as wrongheaded as would trying to appeal to the male fans of, say, Tomb Raider by making the next game star "Lars Croft". A basic point seems to have been missed somewhere.

I mean if there were 20 different individual 'Tomb Raiders' across a series spanning 60 years of production, I don't think it would be crazy to have one of those 20 be 'Lars Croft' for one game. Could be fun.

We've had Time Ladies before, there's no reason they couldn't have introduced a new one to be a co-lead with the Doctor. But things like River Song just turned me off, and I'm not anything near a hardcore Whovian. Oh, the Doctor was married? Well, presumably, since the very first Doctor had a grand daughter, but we really don't need to have the Doctor and his love life on show. That's not what the show is about, even if it did start off with the excuse of being "oh it's educational for the children, it will teach them about history because of the Doctor time-travelling". All the lectures about woke issues and 'we must have a female Doctor' (why?) just made it boring.

'we must have a female Doctor' (why?)

Well...

>"More girls than boys (under-16s) watched Jodie Whittaker's Doctor Who debut - 378,000 v 339,000," Parker wrote. "Last year's series opener: 143,000 girls / 390,000 boys.".

Looks like a 13% increase in overall viewership plus major capture of a new demographic, opening the door to new advertisers and new types of merchandising.

'Never attribute to ideology that which is adequately explained by capitalism.'

Girls and SF is one of those perennial questions. For a long time, it was considered a boys' and men's playground, and women were scarce on the ground indeed. Then we got a lot of good female writers. Then SJW came along and well, you know the fall out of that, plus the Hugos débacle, culminating now in the perceived necessity that you have to be female, LGBT+ or ethnic minority to have any chance of winning one of the awards.

How many of those girls will stick with SF? Hard to say. I think there have always been girls interested in the field, but how many will keep watching Who after the female Doctor is gone?

People stop thinking 'trans' is a thing and it's illegal to call someone by different pronouns than they were born with?

People stop thinking 'trans' is an identity and instead an unfortunate mental illness. Relatedly, mental illnesses generally are viewed as undesirable, both practically and socially.

We go back to having white men be 70% of characters in all entertainment media, and another 25% are white women with zero character traits beyond 'sexy and horny for the main character'?

I would settle with characters roughly in proportion to population, as opposed to the gross over-representation of minorities we see today. In particular, race-swapping characters and even historical figures would require justification beyond "representation matters". Media that appeals to characteristically male fantasies should be permitted to exist on its own terms without its creators being subject to harassing accusations of sexism.

We all agree that actually women and minorities are genetically more stupid and incapable than white men, and stop giving them jobs that earn more than a subsistence wage?

We agree that differences exist and that unequal outcome is not itself proof of discrimination. We explicitly reject equal outcomes as a reasonable policy goal.

As long as most media is concentrated in urban areas, and also aimed at the youth, it's also going to seem like it's overrepresenting non-white people to many people outside of those areas. Like, the reality is, to use a recent example, it makes more sense for a young kid in Queens who gets bitten by a radioactive spider to be a mixed black and Puerto Rican kid, not a nerdy white one.

Also, as noted below, there's a distinction between "media gets attention" and "all media." There are plenty of procedural shows on CBS that are still mostly white, especially when you account for guest characters and the like.

As long as most media is concentrated in urban areas, and also aimed at the youth, it's also going to seem like it's overrepresenting non-white people to many people outside of those areas.

This isn't true, though. "Aimed at the youth [in urban areas]" doesn't imply that the demographic properties of the characters reflect or have any significant similarity to the youth [in urban areas]. Of course, the argument that a character who fits Miles Morales's situation is more likely to be black than white is perfectly cromulent. But also of course, the idea that the distribution of demographics of characters in a fictional work ought to somewhat realistically reflect the real setting in which the story takes place is an artificial one that producers can freely choose to follow or not. And notably, a near-universal refrain from SJ when it comes to media has been that demographics in media somewhat realistically reflecting the real setting is neither good nor necessary; the demographics in media ought to reflect what they believe will help accomplish societal goals such as, e.g. girls and minorities being able to "see" themselves people with demographic similarities to themselves in respected positions of power so that they are more motivated to pursue such things. And given that "somewhat realistically reflecting the demographics of the real setting" as a priority has been basically abandoned and destroyed, I think it's clear the overrepresentation of minorities is a completely free choice that could be changed trivially to representation-reflecting-proportion-of-population.

Media that appeals to characteristically male fantasies should be permitted to exist on its own terms without its creators being subject to harassing accusations of sexism.

And media that appeals to female fantasies of submission. Was just listening to a podcast about Three Days of the Condor, about half of which was moaning about the hostage-to-lover plot thread. Some women find that kind of thing of exciting; can we stop shaming lurid fictional fantasies of all stripes?

If you want the latter to happen, you need women fighting for it, not men advocating for it, and claiming that women want it. Even if it's true.

You need women writing it, is the thing.

Like, there's plenty of great media about female submission that women love, it's mostly written by women and explores the internality of the women characters and represents their emotional journey in dignified and relatable way.

When men write it, the woman is ussually just a sexy lamp that falls in love with the male lead as a reward for him completing his character arc or w/e. That's not the same thing.

People stop thinking 'trans' is an identity and instead an unfortunate mental illness.

Gender dysphoria is a mental illness, the fight is over what's the best cure.

I would settle with characters roughly in proportion to population, as opposed to the gross over-representation of minorities we see today.

Unless you have a different data set or a different operational definition you want to offer, I think you're just empirically wrong about this. You may be in a filter bubble that brings you every egregious example of this it can find and nothing else, but on the numbers minorities are still underrepresented relative to gen pop in almost every entertainment arena.

unequal outcome is not itself proof of discrimination.

Equivocating between 'proof' and 'evidence' here.

Since there's no such thing as 100% probability, the meaning of 'proof' is always vague and needs to be operationally defined to be meaningful.

And it certainly is Bayesian evidence in favor of discrimination, in that it's more likely to happen in worlds with discrimination than in worlds without it (independent of all other factors!).

And it certainly is Bayesian evidence in favor of discrimination, in that it's more likely to happen in worlds with discrimination than in worlds without it (independent of all other factors!).

This is true. But it's also true that it's bayesian evidence of genetic aptitude differences. I would prefer a world where when we encountered uneqial outcome we carefully considered both possibilities. Instead we live in a world where anyone who even suggests the second is a possibility is shamed and all of our policies treat it like an impossibility

This is true. But it's also true that it's bayesian evidence of genetic aptitude differences.

Absolutely!

The problem is people who confidently proclaim it's only one or the other. Not only is that a priori unlikely, we definitely definitely don't have clean enough data to make such a claim (in either direction) at teh moment.

Instead we live in a world where anyone who even suggests the second is a possibility is shamed and all of our policies treat it like an impossibility

Well, that's the thing - what 'policies' are recommended by the HBD hypothesis?

Like (ad absurdum here), we could stop bothering to educate women and black people at all, or funnel them into home ec/trade schools, but that seems clearly discriminatory and not really how you should react to small differences in population averages where the distributions have tons of overlap.

Would the policy just be 'stop trying to push diversity at all, because any differences are probably genetic and ok'? But that's assuming all differences are genetic, which is the opposite of carefully considering both possibilities, and makes no sense in the most-likely world where both factors contribute to outcomes.

The thing is, if discrimination exists the correct policy is probably to take steps to fight it, and if genetic differences exist the correct policy is probably to just do nothing and let the market sort itself out.

So if you think that some discrimination and some genetic difference both exist, then the correct policy is probably to take steps to fight discrimination, and that's it!

(or, fight discrimination but less strongly than we would in the world with zero genetic differences. But we don't have a measure of 'how strongly to fight discrimination in a hypothetical world', we just have directional policies that fight discrimination or don't, so we can't really distinguish policy agendas between those two worlds)

Anyone pushing for something other than that seems like they are making assumptions about discrimination not existing, or the genetic differences being way stronger and more universal than we have any evidence for.

Which is where the shaming comes in.

The problem is people who confidently proclaim it's only one or the other

I hope you realize that almost all of these people are on the anti-hbd side. Even big names like Rushton and Jensen said they thought IQ gaps were only 50-80% genetic.

As far as policy goes I support doing everything based off test scores and keeping all judgements as colorblind as possible. The only place where hbd comes in at all is just not being shocked and acting like the system is failing when the low preforming group is disproportionately black.

See the rest of my previous comment after that sentence for my reply. That's what the whole thing was about.

My point was, if you are against any attempts to account for and correct for institutional discrimination, then you are in effect behaving as though you believe it doesn't exist and all outcome gaps are only caused by innate differences.

That may not be your explicitly endorsed belief about the world, but it's implicit in your policy preferences; they don't make sense in a world where that's not true.

And I do think it's mostly the hbd side which falls into that category.

I'm not opposed policies which attempt to stop institutional didcrimination. What I'm opposed to is policies that pretend to be stopping institutional duscrimination but are actually just opening the door to discrimination in the other direction.

I support removing names/ethnicities and other identifying information from applications, relying heavily on standardized test scores for college and aptitude tests for jobs etc. All of these policies reduce the opportunity for a bigoted boss or admissions officer to discriminate against a qualified applicant because of their race.

Liberals just don't like these policies because they know from experience what results they'll produce but they're still policies directed at reducing discrimination

More comments

And it certainly is Bayesian evidence in favor of discrimination, in that it's more likely to happen in worlds with discrimination than in worlds without it (independent of all other factors!).

You're just assuming the conclusion, here.

???

Can you explain what you mean?

If X causes Y, and you observe Y, that's Bayesian evidence for X. What's your objection specifically?

I think you're just empirically wrong about this.

There are some obvious holes with that. For instance, it ignores the practice of making the villains white men while diversifying the good guys.

So different operational definition, then.

taking away rights or privileges or respect or acknowledgement or etc. from people who have spent a long hard time and earning it, and trying to do that ussually involves a lot of kicking and screaming and destruction

You would think so, but didn't we just watch this happen to straight white men, and Europeans more generally, with basically no effective pushback? Some days it seems as simple as

  1. Comedians joke about it
  2. Thinkpieces recontextualize it
  3. Comedians mock the stupidest examples of pushback
  4. A few people get cancelled for pushing back

And soon after, countless formal and informal corporate, academic, personal, and government policies change to enforce the new policy. In a way it's impressive how liberal democracies can coordinate to change which groups they marginalize without much violence or state-directed propaganda.

You would think so, but didn't we just watch this happen to straight white men, and Europeans more generally, with basically no effective pushback?

No, we didn't.

First of all, the clause of my sentence that read 'people who have spent a long hard time and earning it' wasn't just for show, I do think that inherited privilege which has existed for centuries without justification is treated differently by society than hard-won rights where the people who fought for them are still alive and speaking to us today.

Second, what you're describing was neither fast nor without pushback. I'm not a historian, but the curtailing of the privileges of straight white men plausibly started with the abolitionist movement and the idea that maybe they shouldn't be allowed to own people as property. The pushback to that involved a civil war, and it's been hundreds of years of violence, cultural and political strife, and making the conflict over this question basically the central pillar of our entire political divide for generations in order to reach the point we're at today.

I agree that slave-owning and the civil war is a good example of a right that took a lot of destruction and kicking and screaming to take away.

I guess I'm thinking of basically everything that happened post-civil rights. Straight white men, and white people more generally, now aren't allowed to form their own clubs, be praised as a group, or advocate for their own cultural traditions or interests in almost any way in the west, and I think that change happened without much serious pushback.

EDIT: Sorry, I guess I didn't address your qualifier 'people who have spent a long hard time and earning it'. Are these individual people, the same individuals who did the fighting? If not, does building a civilization count as earning it?

Because "straight white guys" aren't a group. Now, even in my deep blue super-SJW city, there are Irish festivals, there are Polish festivals, there are Norwegian festivals, where all the things those people did as immigrant groups or whatever can be hailed.

Also, you fall into the problem that a lot of straight white males don't have any interest in the "cultural traditions" a lot of other straight white males do, unlike say, African-American's, where even very conservative religious African-American men like Tim Scott are a tick to the left of all of his fellow Republican's on how great the police are.

The reason why white straight men aren't allowed to organize as a group is the same reason why brunettes don't - because they're not an actual cultural group.

As far as building a civilization goes, it turns out, a lot of people have differing views on what that actually means, and in a world with less gatekeeping, people with more varied views can gain a voice, as oppose to those who want to give all the credit to a small group.

The reason why white straight men aren't allowed to organize as a group

It sounds like you're agreeing with me?

they're not an actual cultural group

As opposed to the group "Asians and Pacific Islanders", or the group of all black people worldwide, including Pygmies and Kanye West?

As opposed to the group "Asians and Pacific Islanders",

A grouping made up by census-takers, which the people inside of it strenuously object to.

or the group of all black people worldwide, including Pygmies and Kanye West?

Also not an actual political movement of any size.

Yes, that's my point. These are equally arbitrary groups, but are legally protected and officially encouraged to advocate for their own interests at all levels of legal and corporate governance.

The reason why white straight men aren't allowed to organize as a group is the same reason why brunettes don't - because they're not an actual cultural group.

Try starting a club exclusive for anglo-saxons, see what happens. Or, you know, just one for men.

You don't get to deny the reality of repressive tolerance by hand waving away that the people being repressed actually don't exist as a culture. Why are they being repressed then?

As far as building a civilization goes, it turns out, a lot of people have differing views on what that actually means, and in a world with less gatekeeping, people with more varied views can gain a voice, as oppose to those who want to give all the credit to a small group.

This is literally the opposite of what happened, and of what always happens. Orthodoxy has greatly increased.

I'm not a historian, but the curtailing of the privileges of straight white men plausibly started with the abolitionist movement and the idea that maybe they shouldn't be allowed to own people as property.

This is a very unusual way to describe abolitionism. Abolitionism was never explicity about stopping White men from owning Black people, it was more universal then that based in Christianity and/or the enlightenment. The vast majority of abolitionists were White and to my knowledge there was no attempt by any other group of people to eradicate slavery.

The pushback to that involved a civil war

A war largely fought by poor white people.

A war largely fought by poor white people.

Hey, they could've joined the Union side, and ended the war in two weeks, basically, or failing that, and not immediately joined up with the rich white people who started the war to take rights away from black people.

World War II was mainly fought on the Axis side by poor Japanese, German, and Italian people. Doesn't make it less right.

Hey, they could've joined the Union side, and ended the war in two weeks, basically, or failing that, and not immediately joined up with the rich white people who started the war to take rights away from black people.

I was reffering to the people who fought on hte union side.

I'm sure you will also agree that the Africans who died fighting European attempts to eradicate slavery should have joined the European side.

World War II was mainly fought on the Axis side by poor Japanese, German, and Italian people. Doesn't make it less right.

And yet, the poor white people who joined the "right" side get the same ill treatment.

We see it now that folks on the left have a fond nostalgia for the dawn of the social movements of the 60s, and never mention where those ideas ended up: Jonestown, NAMBLA, Black Panther Party and its spin-offs torturing and assassinating one another, bombings, kidnappings, Foucault fucking little boys bent over headstones in Algerian cemeteries.

The country rejected the leftist social revolution when it elected Reagan, and that seemed to give permission to much of the left to forget the excesses, focus their hate on Reagan, and wish for another Woodstock.

This is more of just some thoughts your post made me think of than officially a response.

The New Left were hardly punished for their crimes, then got to work in elite companies and universities and literally raise the next generation of these kinds of radicals who are destroying our cities today. Reagan was just a temporary ceasefire for these kinds of people, which allowed them to reorganize more effectively and create the situation we are in now. These are the kinds of people who celebrated a Black Panther Party member who bragged about raping white women as a political act. There was never hope of reasoning with these people.

The fact that this was allowed to happen for 60 years and people are only now freaking out because they are threatening Jews tell you all you need to know about what's been going on here. The country's plebs may have rejected The Movement of the 1960's, but many of the elites didn't and even participated in it with fond memories. If you get any regret out of them at all, it is just for the violence. They still stand by their political views for the most part, and all their views have more or less become main stream today in academia and the chattering class. The universities have finally just come up against something they will actually get push back and serious consequences for.

But make no mistake, nothing is stopping this train short of a coup. Nixon, Reagan, and Trump couldn't, so I don't know why anyone is thinking anything different will really happen in the future other than a continuation of what's happened since the late 1950's.

Nixon, Reagan, and Trump couldn't, so I don't know why anyone is thinking anything different will really happen in the future other than a continuation of what's happened since the late 1950's.

When I said I think it's most likely, I'm pricing in nuclear war very heavily. Sudden loss of half the city population means country-based conservative parties will have a lot of power and still be on a culture war footing.

I'll go ahead and guess: it will look explicitly and seriously religious.

To me the social history of the last few decades, and indeed the last few centuries, is that of a hollowing out and lack of seriousness in religious practices and traditions. While there have been revivals here and there, the overall trend has been to become more and more secular as modern 'philosophy' and science becomes more powerful. When Descartes completely threw out Aristotelean formal causes, and claimed the Mind was totally separate from the body and physical reality, he unwittingly destroyed the way humans made sense of the world and each other from time immemorial.

At this point I'm convinced that modern philosophy, specifically post-Cartesian philosophy that sees materialism as the ultimate truth and the universe as nothing more than meaningless particles bouncing into each other, cannot coexist with human society. Either we will destroy our societies through increasing social fragmentation, or the transhumanists will get their wish and change the fundamental way human beings interact with each other to paper over the problems of a materialist philosophy. Perhaps both will happen.

Either way, Social Justice has become such a force because it attempts to fill the gap left by the absence of sincere religions, and just like previous 'isms' and secular ideologies, it is doomed to fail because these sorts of religious systems just can't work in a materialist universe. For better or worse, humans need to believe in purpose and meaning beyond dead matter in order to cohere together in large social groups. If we can't have that, well, we will burn it all down.

Personally I think Christianity will rise again to rule the day, at least on a religious level. It has died many times before and come back from the grave - that motif being the mythological bedrock upon which the entire enterprise is founded is no coincidence. The primary, hidden strength of Christ's gospel is the fact that it gives hope in the darkest of times, and promises a renewal and escape from death.

It has died many times before and come back from the grave

When? The reconquista?

The reformation and counter-reformation probably did lead to increases in popular piety in certain areas. The Islamic world is much more religious than it was 50 years ago. America had a massive revival in the early 19th century leading to more-or-less permanently higher religiosity than Europe.

Contra Dag, I think Christianity is in rapid and terminal decline, especially in America.

America is incredibly un-Christian. Its foreign policy prioritizes promoting LGBT, defending Christians is ignored. Nearly a million abortions per year. Gay marriage, Pride parades. A world-class pornography and casual sex industry with all the top brands - Pornhub, Tinder, Grindr. Breakdown in the family: more born to unmarried parents than to married. Intense materialism that largely overtakes the religious essence of the holidays.

I can't think of any Christian value or doctrine that the US particularly exemplifies, as a state. There are certainly Christian lobby groups and pockets of devout Christians but they're largely insignificant to the state, if not actively despised. Can anyone call the US a Christian country? Are Christians in control? Are Christians capable of anything more than legal tomfoolery like making people drive to another state to get an abortion?

See the 'Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence' being invited to the Dodgers game - what kind of Christian country has explicitly and intensely anti-Christian groups being invited and legitimized at popular events? They'd be lucky to escape with their lives if they tried that in an Islamic country. Look how angry the Islamic world got over quran-burnings in Sweden, that's what real religiosity looks like.

Compare the fervour of Christians in the US to LGBT, BLM, trans, climate change. Even white supremacists can find more men willing to kill and die for their beliefs than Christians can. The latter ideologies possess much more power, they are acknowledged or feared by the state, they drive debate.

Sure, there are those statistics that say 70% of the US is Christian but what is the point if their beliefs don't seem to have any effect on the state or national culture? If they can't wield state power, if they can't cancel, if they can't get the obsequious submission of the big corporations what good are they?

US still has double the church attendance of Western Europe.

Global South is the new dominant Christian sphere. There's a shift in emphasis from the West, and if the forthcoming years are going to be non-white, the new missionaries will be African and Asian clergy coming to reconvert Europe.

Its foreign policy prioritizes promoting LGBT, defending Christians is ignored.

I got curious about this claim, so I headed down to the US State Department webpage. Current topics of main concern seem to be, in addition to the predictable Middle East and Ukraine focuses, to be climate, health and terrorism (and, notably, regarding the climate themes, the administration is talking a lot about increasing nuclear power capacities).

It was surprisingly hard to find anything talking about LGBT issues; I guess those would fall under the purview of the "Human Rights and Democracy" policy category, but browsing five pages of statements, the only one that, by title, was related to his was a short boilerplate statement on Transgender Day of Remembrance. After using search, I found out that Dept of State has a special LGBTQI+ envoy but what she does, apart from travelling to various events for representation, remains a bit of a mystery.

State Dept also has an Office of International Religious Freedom, which doesn't seem to be one of the more important offices around, but still has issued a number of statements defending the religious freedom of Christians (as a group and individually), like this one, this one and this one.

On the basis of this exercise, neither seems to be a particular priority for US foreign policy, as expressed by its State Department.

I was thinking more of the Biden memo, or Blinken talking about how he hectors the Saudis on LGBT.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/16/blinken-i-press-saudis-on-lgbtqi-issues-every-time-00040325

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/02/04/memorandum-advancing-the-human-rights-of-lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer-and-intersex-persons-around-the-world/

There's no equivalent 'defending Christianity' memo, nor do dozens of US embassies make use of Christian symbolism like they do LGBT symbolism.

I’d take that bet.

Postmodernism exists because you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Any competing philosophy is judged not on its own, but as commentary on any antecedents. And in the Information Age, such influences are very easy to identify, at which point they can be dusted off and used as weapons.

It’s not a symmetric battleground, either. Discontent is much easier to catalogue—to commodify—than experiences of the sublime. No one talks about how Jonestown cultists felt in the weeks leading up to their suicides. Instead, the cultural touchstone is a sarcastic reminder not to drink the Flavor-Aid.

On a materialist battleground, how does religion get an advantage? The current frontrunner is probably that sentiment expressed by “yeschad.jpg”. It’s a call to disregard the back-and-forth commentary and just…do obviously correct things. When combined with a self-justifying source of correctness, I.e. a holy text, this has a competitive advantage against postmodern arguments. But it’s not scalable. You don’t build institutions by ignoring all forms of dispute resolution.

So I don’t believe that religion can make a comeback. Not so long as we remain connected to the firehose of information. It’s much better at delivering materialism than ephemera.

I think this is a bad model of what modern religion is or will aim to be. Which isn't to say it's better or even good, nor that Christians will be coming back to the forefront, but it's a recognizable pattern.

Thanks.

You’re right—the success of religion won’t hinge on lists of debunks or on refined apologetics. That’s not what people are really seeking, and it’s not going to dissuade the believer or convince the atheist. Such was the takeaway of the 00s.

What I failed to convey was that our dominant culture is categorically different from the ones which developed successful religions. Our default mode is a sort of detached, conversational skepticism where we compare and contrast against the corpus of existing ideas. It seeks novelty and abhors sincerity—except when it doesn’t, because fashion is fickle and sometimes what’s old is new again. I called this postmodernism, though that’s probably insufficient.

I think this mode of engagement favors entrenched systems over growing ones. The atheists get satisfied with a debunk and end up back in their comfortable ennui. The traditionalists get pulled off to whichever existing movement. The ironic radicals drift onwards to new heights of post-post irony, while the serious radicals fall into one of the existing big-ticket ideologies, because real *ism has never been tried. These attractor states suck the life out of new movements, and they do it faster than ever before. Any which survive are out there on the fringes, distrusted by a mainstream that takes pride in cynicism.

Perhaps I’ve gotten carried away. I have a high confidence in this theory as applied to media, where the market forces and the lust for novelty are a bit more dominant. My certainty is much lower when it comes to the appeal of religion, especially in light of your blogpost. It is a strange world out there.

I was just pondering yesterday that we’re entering a time when a number of childless Millennials are passing 40 and probably going to feel a rather acute feeling of uselesness and search for meaning - no, not all of them but a number - and whether a number of those will be attracted by monastic life or some other type of a new religious calling - no, not all of them but a number.

Islam seems like it's in a much better position than Christianity, at least to me. They have the highest birth rates, advocate for their own interests unapologetically, and have a long history of punishing and assassinating critics and opponents. This causes lots of internecine strife, but I predict these traits will allow rapid expansion within the West.

Not gonna happen.

Nobody seriously defends the superstitions of Christianity, and while social movements can survive a large amount of inconsistency, all attempts at "cultural Christianity" have basically been failures due to the inherent contradictions. It's just a bridge too far to try to harness the culture of Christianity while ignoring the superstitions that underpin them, while also having people who do believe the superstitions loudly proclaim they're undeniable truths.

Nobody seriously defends the superstitions of Christianity

I'm your huckleberry

Nobody seriously defends the superstitions of Christianity

The different bubbles that we are in fascinate me. If someone asked me, I would say that Christianity has never been more or better defended before now. In fact, I have heard a Catholic Bishop thank New Atheism for revitalizing Christian Apologetics.

The content coming out from Capturing Christianity, Jimmy Akin, and Bishop Barron is both sophisticated and unafraid to defend the foundational positions of Christianity, dive into thorny philosophical weeds, take atheistic arguments seriously, and approach topics from a scientific, rational perspective.

I can feel your disbelief across time and space, so let me give an example: In his video on "Time Travel Prayer," Jimmy Akin explains the methodology of a study where patient records from prior years were randomly assigned to a prayer group or control group. After praying for the patients in prayer group to have gotten better in the past, the researchers looked at the outcomes for the patients and found a statistically significant correlation between the prayer group and recovery.

Despite this result supporting his argument, he took the time in his show to talk about how studies can be done hundreds of times, with only the results that the researchers like getting published. And that this practice can make even random chance look statistically significant on paper. And that, though he has no evidence this happened in this case, it is important to keep in mind when papers shows weak significance around surprising things.

Sounds a lot like how a rationalist would approach a topic, no? I highly recommend checking out Jimmy Akin's Mysterious world - most of the topics are not religious in nature but they are a lot of fun. He has pretty soundly debunked the Loch Ness Monster, Loretto Staircase, and a number of odd things.

Sounds a lot like how a rationalist would approach a topic, no?

Yes, it indeed sounds so much like a rationalist that it also sounds like he's not defending the superstitions of Christianity at all!

I should have said "nobody relevant defends the superstitions of Christianity", i.e. there might be some, but no major public intellectual does it and gains any sort of traction. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was the most prominent defense in recent times which got a fair degree of traction, and not a single sentence in her defense was about the actual superstitions.

Jimmy Akin has defended the efficacy of prayer. He does defend the supernatural and paranatural.

I had never heard of Ayaan Hirsi Ali before her conversion, meanwhile Bishop Robert Barron's Word on Fire Institute has a global audience, streaming service, publishing company, etc. What qualifies someone to be a major public intellectual?

What qualifies someone to be a major public intellectual?

People from outside their religion regularly taking their arguments seriously would be a good start. Modern Christian apologetics don't seem to be having much headway with people who aren't already looking to be sold on Christianity.

Bishop Barron has been on the Ben Shapiro Show, delivered lectures for the Heritage Foundation, been interviewed by Lex Freidman, and many more. If you look in the comments on his Youtube channel it does seem like many atheists, protestants, and members of other faith traditions watch him regularly.

On a whim I decided to watch a bit of the Ben Shapiro interview, and I'm thoroughly unimpressed. When Ben asked him what his favorite argument is for the proof of God, he says what essentially boils down to the First Cause argument, something that's been trounced in the internet atheist debates for decades. When pressed with a follow up of what caused God then, he responded with special pleading. He dressed it up with fancy words like "that which is properly unconditioned on this reality", and his presentation is polished, but he's just regurgitating arguments from a debate that was largely settled over a decade ago. After watching a bit more and hearing nothing but a few "God of the Gaps" arguments I closed the tab.

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specifically post-Cartesian philosophy that sees materialism as the ultimate truth and the universe as nothing more than meaningless particles bouncing into each other, cannot coexist with human society.

There is a major paradox in this philosophy, as it often takes a maximalist tabula rasa view. The world is supposed to be nothing more than mechanistic particles, yet the human psyche is untouched by it. Biological essentialist is used as a slur in the social sciences. Subjects such as human biodiversity, heritability of criminal behaviour or Iq or differences in evolutionary strategy between males and females are the ultimate taboo. A person can be born in the wrong body which means that the person isn't their body.

The view is that we are some free floating spirit that happened to be attached to a body. The phrase my friend who happens to be black is a perfect example of this reasoning. He was created black, he can't be anything else than black. There is no he without his black body. Yet we talk about it as if there is a he independent of his body that got inserted into the black body at birth.

Descartes philosophy is deeply flawed in that he both believed in mind body dualism and a mechanistic world. Either we are meat bots, aka mind = body or the world isn't mechanistic. Mind body dualism doesn't work in a mechanistic world. If there is no ghost or spirit there is no dualism.

How this giant contradiction in the middle of the modern world view doesn't explode goes beyond me.

I’m not seeing the paradox. Even for a radical blank-slatist, there exist things outside the human mind. Things like social and economic pressures. I have yet to see someone argue against the concept of malnutrition!

There is a major paradox in this philosophy, as it often takes a maximalist tabula rasa view. The world is supposed to be nothing more than mechanistic particles, yet the human psyche is untouched by it.

There are millions of people who don't think human cognition is somehow beyond the realm of materialism or at least cause and effect.

There are. However, this view is difficult to combine with people being born into the wrong body or that the mind is separated from the body. If we are a meat-computer there is no dualism between the body and the mind.

The brain has an internal representation of the body — some tangle of neurons, presumably — that can be out of sync with the body's actual physical state. We see this pretty clearly with e.g. phantom limb syndrome.

There's no philosophical challenge for materialism here; both the brain's representation of the body and the body itself are entirely physical, as both a paper map and the territory it represents are entirely physical.

If we are a meat-computer there is no dualism between the body and the mind.

Well, yes? The brain is an organ like any other.

Signed -A meat computer

people being born into the wrong body

Well I'm born into the "wrong" body since I'm not a 6'8" 269 IQ biologically immortal ubermensch, but to the extent that I'm vaguely sympathetic to trans people, it's because I recognize them as other people who are unhappy with the limitations of their current physical form and consider it laudable to adapt it to one's tastes, if possible.

As far as I'm concerned, unhappy with your body? Feel free to change it. Can't change it, (yet) like trans people and their biological sex? Nobody claimed that the universe is obliged to make it easy.

And yet none of them can give a material explanation of it, which is, well, the whole problem.

You can't just look at drugs having an effect on experience and handwave away that the whole thing can be explained in material terms without actually providing a material explanation. And any explanation you need to provide has to answer a whole lot of thorny questions about what is conscious, how it becomes so, how it stops becoming so in a way that is tantamount to solving the largest part of metaphysics.

As far as I know the only coherent materialist answer is the one given by modernist totalitarianism, which is to say that individual consciousness is a delusion only experienced by the mentally ill. And that one is falsified not just by ones own experience of oneself but also by practice.

Fascinating. I would make the opposite inference. If the mind was separate from the body, like if we were little ghosts remote controlling the body, I would expect drugs and brain damage to have a much smaller effect or no effect at all. You can get some effect in the brain-as-antenna model, but stuff like prefrontal cortex lesions causing personality changes and primary visual cortex lesions causing loss of color vision in memories is hard to swallow.

None of this is conclusive but it makes me lean more towards materialism.

The antenna model is indeed a good way to approach the problem with the materialist understanding.

Did you know that radio transmitters can be damaged by operating them without an antenna?

At RF frequency voltages and currents are not well behaved and will do weird things that break Kirchhoff's laws. Power devices operating at those frequencies are often fragile and without the load of the antenna there's a risk that the output device creates much higher voltage magnification than the setup is rated for...and there goes your amp.

Now walking away from the metaphor, it is very much possible that even in a dualist understanding mind and matter are entangled enough that messing with their link creates big and specific problems. After all the radio transmitter and the antenna are properly different objects despite sharing this kind of link.

But my intuitions (in the total lack of evidence we are in of course) point towards a monist understanding as well. Just not a materialist one, but a realist one, as in an Aristotelician one. I think we probably are some combination of body and mind, but I have no reason to believe that this whole combination resides solely in materially observable reality given the fact that consciousness has never directly been observed or can be completely explained by materialism.

I trust we will get more answers (and more questions) once our understanding of neurology improves.

Did you know that radio transmitters can be damaged by operating them without an antenna?

But in this case the brain would be the receiver antenna. I mean, this is all an hypothetical so you can always make up an excuse how a damage on one end (physical) would propagate to the other end (ghost world?), none of this could disprove it but also none of what we've discovered in neurology so far reinforces the existence of an immaterial mind.

none of this could disprove it but also none of what we've discovered in neurology so far reinforces the existence of an immaterial mind

Of course. That said if you take the Ghost-in-the-Machine view you can feel just as secure as pure materialists in that nothing that's been discovered so far reinforces the idea that mind is made of matter.

We really have no fucking idea how any of this shit works. We're barely further than antic medicine on this particular issue and it's almost purely down to the invention of MRI. Given most of the stuff people care about in this debate probably happens in the deeper regions of the brain we're even unlikely to get anywhere close to asking the right questions when Neuralink is tested on many humans.

But we are making some progress, so maybe someday we'll be able to have a meaningful debate about what consciousness is instead of hypothesizing about Motoko Kusanagi.

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You can't just look at drugs having an effect on experience and handwave away that the whole thing can be explained in material terms without actually providing a material explanation.

Well, yes, you can.

If someone hands me a keyboard, I have no idea how the mechanics and electronics of the keyboard works, but I can demonstrate that the sounds produced correlate to the keys being pressed, and predict that there is some physical internal mechanism that produces this effect.

I don't get to say 'must be magic' just because I don't yet have a fully detailed physical model of the internal workings, that's not how Occam's Razor works.

You don't get to say must be magic indeed. The thing is I regard materialism as just as magical since it's not explaining anything.

Faced with something too complex to be understood, the correct answer is not to make up unfalsifiable theories based of one's moral tastes rather than evidence. And I denounce materialists because they pretend not to be doing than much harder than any mystic.

That is indeed not how Occam's razor works. And Occam's razor is a fallacious argument in any formal sense anyways.

Alright, this is the point in the conversation where you have to explain what you mean by 'explaining' for us to make any progress.

Because yeah, the ultimate riddle is always 'why is there something instead of nothing', and no observer within the universe can ever possibly give any explanation for that. All 'explanations' are just descriptions of how lower-level observable properties of the world lead to higher-level observable properties of the world, and there will always be a bottom level which defies further reduction into observable causes and can only be described as 'magic'.

But the magic layer for materialism is pushed orders of magnitude further down the causal chain than the magic layer for any other explanation, and materialism correctly explains far more things above its magic layer than any other framework.

That's pretty much what we mean when we say we 'have a good explanation' or 'a good model' of something, that the magic layer is pretty far down and we can use it to predict a lot of things above it.

I have deliberately avoided in this conversation referring to ultimate explanation of causes precisely because this is inaccessible.

A satisfactory theory of something has to be able to make falsifiable predictions about the phenomenon and provide precise causal insight into its mechanisms.

String theory is not yet a satisfactory theory of quantum gravity because it does not pass this bar. And yet it is internally a lot more precise than any of the speculations going around in neurology, let alone anything that relates to consciousness.

I am satisfied saying atoms (or rather what they represent as a model) are material because they can be manipulated predictably through experiment. Produce the same level of predictable manipulation and then we can talk about how much explanation you need. Because as it is you have nothing.

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Why makes you so sure that "we don't know" isn't an acceptable answer? Certainly beats making shit up, which is how I would frame the non-materialist position.

drugs having an effect on experience

Drugs?

Brain damage?

Electrical stimulation?

If it can physically induce even minor changes to the brain, and that produces robustly consistent corollaries to conscious experience, it beats me what people are so intent on looking for.

Why makes you so sure that "we don't know" isn't an acceptable answer? Certainly beats making shit up, which is how I would frame the non-materialist position.

Because Galileo was right, but his rivals could tell you where Saturn was tomorrow and he couldn't.

Well, good thing we sorted that small matter out eh? And that's withholding my disbelief that this claim is true.*

Materialism has explained ever greater fractions of reality, and everything else has been losing out. I know where my priors lie. It's the mark of a deeply broken mind to update when the evidence "forces" you to, as opposed to when you should.

*oh and it's not.

Your statement is completely wrong and a willfully revisionist reframing of history. Galileo was wrong about his claim that there were two moons on the opposite side of Saturn, but at no point did he manage to lose the entire planet, which would be an impressive feat, given that it's visible with the naked eye.

His geocentric rivals certainly didn't do a better job at predicting its motions, and where he outright won was to apply heliocentrism to the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter, where geocentrism failed miserably.

Evidently this historical example, which you were wrong about, was loadbearing on your beliefs about the applicability of materialism. Given that I went to the effort of correcting you, am I to assume you're a bona-fide materialist now? Didn't think so.

Edit: Oh, the irony of using empirical investigation into material causes to judiciate this.

Truly, materialism is the worst metaphysical model, except for the rest of them.

When a system explains the world outside of my brain to a greater extent than I'd ever need to predict it and act upon it, and all the others can only shrug and say "well what about the mind?", I see no reason to assume that the truth is within one of the latter systems.

Is this how Elon Musk's defenders feel when he, despite being a successful unprecedented entrepreneur and engineer and all that, is mocked and belittled by redditors for posting cringe takes on Twitter?

I maintain skepticism is the only reasonable metaphysical position. We don't know how any of this works. Be humble.

the Western culture war is not going to last forever, which means it's going to end. And when it does, how will we look back on this mad time?

Like the end of the 70s, going into the 80s, which were a complete change in social emphasis. Now greed was good, loadsamoney, etc.

The 70s, if you weren't around for them, were wild. All the 60s idealism had curdled and the hippies had been displaced by the Me Generation. Selfishness was now rebranded as self-determination, you were trying to find yourself, you needed to be that authentic person you were, and society had no right to bind you or hold you down with rules and expectations. Hence the boom in feminism, divorce (often initiated by women), therapies of all sorts, self-help books, things like EST and Transcendental Meditation, New Age and pseudo-science of all sorts - lost Atlantis, ancient astronauts, advanced civilisations of the past which had been lost shoulder-to-shoulder with past life regression and the Age of Aquarius: all to do with the infinitely fascinating topic of Me, Me, Me and my own rich inner life and concerns and I was a queen of Egypt in a past life, I deserve more in this one. The hippy kids of the 60s were now older and middle-class and well-off enough to indulge in these concerns.

American cities looked to be in flames, or heading that way. Riots, bombings, groups like the Weathermen and Symbionese Liberation Army and other radical socialist/Marxist/Maoist/who the fuck knows, we're copying Europe groups springing up to rob banks and kidnap heiresses and bring about The Revolution.

Mainland Europe had its own share of those, from Baader-Meinhof to the Red Brigade.

For a moment there, it looked like the American Civil Rights Movement might go the same way as the Northern Irish Civil Rights Movement, with paramilitary groups of its own (e.g. the Black Panthers). The main difference there seems to have been that we had the IRA lingering on in some form to take up the armed struggle, and the US government wasn't quite as sang-froid as the Brits about killing its own citizens, even black citizens. You guys really dodged a bullet on that one.

And yet all that ferment and fervour and Revolutionary Energy petered out, and along comes Gordon Gekko in due time as the inheritor of the age.

So yeah, I think we'll look back on the period 2020-202? and go "wow, that was a crazy time, wasn't it?" and the kids who were too young to understand what was going on, or who didn't live through it, won't even know what it was like.

The good thing is that in my experience blue tribers greatly prefer denial & misdirection over blatant lying/fabrication when the facts don't go their way (yes I know the story of the harvard honesty prof, no I don't think this is a major problem currently). This means that it's often trivially easy to read the truth between the lines if you care to look. There's plenty of papers that put some left-friendly conclusion into the title, intro and discussion but if you look even just at the tables in the paper itself with a critical eye, you'll come to a very different conclusion than them. If they're very dedicated, it may only become obvious after looking at the raw data bc they tailored the tables well, but you can usually still find it.

That said, I consider myself in no way red tribe, and I also consider the "grey tribe", which is the closest to my own position, merely a subgroup of the blues and not a proper third faction.

So I think there is some room for non-woke centrists and even red tribers to generate a history from the evidence left behind. Probably something along the lines of a well-meaning movement that caused a lot of damage by being unwilling to deal with tough choices and instead engaging in increasing levels of make-believe and blaming others every time their plans fail.

So, how will the people in that scenario think of this time? What story will they tell?

They won't. Soon enough all of it will be forgotten, and all that remains will be a giant gaping hole where mobs whipping themselves into frenzies on Twitter used to be, terse Wikipedia pages that may mention the more memorable incidents, but will be very cryptic about the who, how, and why, and a bunch of mainstream media articles that should, in theory be indicting, but mysteriously people will care about it as much as they do about the NYT Holodomor denial article that won the Pulitzer. If you still manage to make enough stink about it, someone will dig out some statistics showing that you're blowing everything out of proportion, the problem was tiny, and no one was really taking it seriously.

There's a lot of historical precedent for that. How much are common people aware of eugenics' popularity with progressives? How many know Sweden had an active eugenics program until the 70's? You may have heard about lobotomies, but have you heard about their sequel? Did you know the Cultural Marxism was/is an actual intellectual movement, and not a crazy Nazi conspiracy theory?

The rule is pretty simple - excesses of traditionalism must never be forgotten, excesses of progressivism must never be remembered.

P.S.: This ended up sounding a lot more pessimistic than I actually feel about it. The point is that historical memory requires active maintenance. If Reds / Greys / whoever manage to set up parallel institutions that will maintain their version of the story, it will survive, and the Blues will be forced to take it into account.

If Reds / Greys / whoever manage to set up parallel institutions that will maintain their version of the story, it will survive, and the Blues will be forced to take it into account.

The reds are increasingly getting better at doing this.

If Red / Greys / whoever manages to set up parallel institutions that will maintain their version of the story, it will survive, and the Blues will be forced to take it into account.

There is a true need for an alternate Wikipedia at this point. Future generations will see Wikipedia like we see Herodotus's "Histories" - flawed but ultimately the core upon which historical knowledge is built.

Most of what we know about the Persians comes from what the Greeks wrote about them. Most of what future generations will know about Ronald Reagan will be the words of his enemies.

There is a true need for an alternate Wikipedia at this point. Future generations will see Wikipedia like we see Herodotus's "Histories" - flawed but ultimately the core upon which historical knowledge is built.

This slams into Neutral vs. Conservative problem. Much ink has been spilt trying to model the core value that splits progressives from conservatives, but I'll piggyback on Richard Hanania and say the central difference is pretty banal — the left has causes they really care about advancing, while the right would mildly prefer to not be pushed off their spot, please. Any time a new faction has fervent ideas for changing the social fabric, they get automatically slotted into the left coalition, and the political theory bloggers have to do midnight brainstorming on how this group's ideas are a logical extension of progressivism.

The conservative right definitionally cannot summon the passion to create a rival Wikipedia. Arguably, the conservative right cannot even summon the passion to have its own political party. Here in the US, the GOP has repeatedly been parasitized by some passionate heretic progressive faction, like libertarians or then neocons or most recently the NRx inspired alt-right. These groups do not reflect the values of the baptist truck driver or stodgy civil engineer dad who wants lower taxes, but they have passion, so they out-ground-game mere conservatives.

Any time a new faction has fervent ideas for changing the social fabric, they get automatically slotted into the left coalition, and the political theory bloggers have to do midnight brainstorming on how this group's ideas are a logical extension of progressivism.

the GOP has repeatedly been parasitized by some passionate heretic progressive faction, like libertarians or then neocons or most recently the NRx inspired alt-right

You have an unintentional bait-and-switch in your comment, I think. Very clearly the latter "has fervent ideas for changing the social fabric" but they are not treated as "a logical extension of progressivism". In other words, if you a going to define conservatism purely as a "do nothing" philosophy then obviously it's going to do nothing, but I think you lose a lot of understanding about how political movements relate to each other by doing so.

The Neutral vs. Conservative problem, as I understand it, has an entirely different genesis. It arises from the fact that creating a specifically right-leaning version of something that already exists is a project that is only going to attract rightists, and the result will be much more obviously skewed than the original. It will therefore put off leftists or even moderate rightists and so grow ever more unbalanced and untrusted by the majority. The same problem exists if you want to make a left version of something that already exists - for a slightly cheeky example, look at TheSchism. This is why entryism is usually preferred by both sides when they can pull it off.

You have an unintentional bait-and-switch in your comment, I think. Very clearly the latter "has fervent ideas for changing the social fabric" but they are not treated as "a logical extension of progressivism".

I'm aware of the seeming contradiction, and considered including a "What about the Nazis, why don't they get considered progressive?" paragraph, but I thought it would be going too much into the weeds of political taxonomy.

To summarize, I view people like Mencius Moldbug as progressive heretics rather than conservatives. Their ideas for changing society are such that they cannot be integrated into the progressive gestalt, so they try to pitch their platform under the only other tent instead. Progressives are more than happy to generalize everyone under that tent as the same. And the progressive heretics (like libertarians, neoreactionaries, or neocon New American Century types) will structure their radical message to play to the base of conservative voters. Said voters will of course be aghast when a libertarian pretending to be a conservative tries to implement open borders, or when a neoreactionary pretending to be a conservative lets slip he thinks the constitution is stupid and the US should be reconfigured into a no-voice only-exit-rights monarchy. Or posts something like this, revealing he has absolutely no reverence for tradition and an Openness factor that is off-the-charts for a "conservative".

Certainly you can disagree. But I think the average Democrat voter is much closer to the platform of their party than the average Republican voter. Because, again, conservatives don't care enough to take command of their own party.

The Neutral vs. Conservative problem, as I understand it, has an entirely different genesis. It arises from the fact that creating a specifically right-leaning version of something that already exists is a project that is only going to attract rightists, and the result will be much more obviously skewed than the original.

I think it's because, when the left takes over an institution, conservatives don't care enough to stop them. Then, when an alternate new institution is created, normal conservatives don't care enough to join, leaving only the extreme fringe of people who say, think the Holocaust is fake, which is not a typical US conservative position.

Thank you for writing this detailed reply. I get where you're coming from, I think. This worldview stands on its own merits perfectly well but my criticism of it is that it defines mainstream conservatism to be almost exclusively the group of people who want nothing to change, or at most want some stuff they dislike from the last few years rolled back. But in practice this means that conservatives are just progressives from five years ago. You can't write your own history if you have no ideology or motivating principle beyond 'old new thing good, new new thing bad, also stop putting up taxes'. That sounds condescending, it's not, I've been that guy. It's just that ten years later you look back and you realise that the status quo you wanted to defend was actually a rock rolling downhill, and at some point you have to decide where you want that rock to be and start pushing it there.

To put it another way, I think that any conservative with a brain sooner or later has to start asking themselves what they want to conserve; what kind of country they want to live in and what they need to do to get it back there. If you want to conserve Britain's ethnic makeup from the 90s, you are going to have to rip up huge chunks of the economy and undo a bunch of international treaties. Not very conservative! OTOH, if you want to conserve the welfare state, you may end up making decisions on the economy that produce huge societal changes, like taking on even more debt or lots of immigration.

I think that libertarians, neoreactionaries and neocons are conservative to the extent that they say, 'You know, the country used to be good because of XYZ, let's try to move back in that direction'. Whereas progressives say, 'Things have always been bad, but they will be good once we XYZ.' This isn't just a taxonomy, it has big consequences for how each group behaves, what it values and what it appeals to.

I think it's because, when the left takes over an institution, conservatives don't care enough to stop them. Then, when an alternate new institution is created, normal conservatives don't care enough to join, leaving only the extreme fringe of people who say, think the Holocaust is fake, which is not a typical US conservative position.

In my limited political experience, the left has a lot of institutional knowledge about how to play dirty that the right lacks, as well as the whip hand in polite society. Conservatives who care quickly find out that your life can be made absolutely miserable in various ways. A lot of the 'not caring' is pre-emptive self defence and an unwillingness to expose oneself to humiliation. A lot of it is also the lack of ideology - normie conservatives like some of my family have a political philosophy that's a mismash of mostly leftist memes from 10 years ago and aren't able to defend them against the more developed version, so they avoid politics to prevent their worldview from damage. I don't think not caring is the problem, the problem is pre-emptive cringe and an inability to translate caring into useful action.

I think it's because, when the left takes over an institution, conservatives don't care enough to stop them. Then, when an alternate new institution is created, normal conservatives don't care enough to join, leaving only the extreme fringe of people who say, think the Holocaust is fake, which is not a typical US conservative position.

Consider a case of entryism from the right: Musk's takeover of twitter. It's top-down entryism rather than bottom-up entryism, but a heavily left-leaning institution was taken over by a more right-leaning person and remodelled. The result is still fairly moderate: now much more supportive of conservatives but still with a lot of centrists and leftists. The left wasn't keen on this and tried to move to a more friendly alternative (Threads, Mastodon) but couldn't manage the switch because the moderates didn't move and the new alternatives were consequently niche and offputting.

"But I think the average Democrat voter is much closer to the platform of their party than the average Republican voter. Because, again, conservatives don't care enough to take command of their own party."

So, speaking from the left, I agree with you on the first part, even if my fellow lefties don't.

On the latter part, the difference in the GOP makes sense, even if that is currently changing, thanks to Citizen's United (ironic that's largely been a negative for the GOP & a positive for the DNC), because there isn't much split between what college and non-college educated Democrat's want. Sure, the non-college educated may not be as woke, but they're not opposed. They just don't really care, but both college & non-college educated Dem's want higher taxes on rich people, a larger welfare state, left-leaning social policies, and so on.

OTOH, the college and non-college educated parts of the GOP want distinctly different things. The issue is, and I'm trying to be nice to the conservatives here, is that an actual fervent conservative loses 36 to 40 states, against even a fairly liberal Democrat, because most people like most of the things Democrat's have done, even if they don't like the Democratic party. The ACA currently has it's highest approval ever, because it's now part of society, and those that disliked it have forgotten the Muslim Kenyan passed it, they just know their sister can get Medicaid now, when she used to not be able too, or their kids can stay on their insurance through college.

Note, I'm not saying a Republican can never win. I think Trump has a 1 in 3 shot next year. But, Trump either talks a lot about the stuff where he disagrees with the unpopular stuff Republican's want to pass, or he says such insane stuff nobody believes he'll do it. Plus, most famous person since Eisenhower to run for POTUS. There's a reason why Trump can win in places, that Trump-adjacent candidates underperform, while 'normie' GOP politicians actually overperform - see Arizona.

The ACA currently has it's highest approval ever

I'm relatively plugged in to American politics, but probably not as much as an American, so I'll happily concede if you're sure about this, but aren't you getting this precisely backwards? Wasn't the entire point of Trumpism to ditch the free trade / free market parts of the platform pushed by establishment Republicans, in favor of economic interventionism?

Typically when progressives wanted to make the "Trumpists are disconnected from common voters" argument, they use all the anti-woke stuff as an example. Debatable of the sentiment is correct, but at least the example is in line with what is animating Trump supporters.

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