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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:
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.)
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.
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.
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:
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)
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.
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:
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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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:
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, obviously.
You were more interested in attacking my character than responding to my points there, too.
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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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?
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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.
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 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.
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"
themselvespeople 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.More options
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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.
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Gender dysphoria is a mental illness, the fight is over what's the best cure.
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.
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!).
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
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.
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.
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
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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?
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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.
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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
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.
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.
It sounds like you're agreeing with me?
As opposed to the group "Asians and Pacific Islanders", or the group of all black people worldwide, including Pygmies and Kanye West?
A grouping made up by census-takers, which the people inside of it strenuously object to.
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.
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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?
This is literally the opposite of what happened, and of what always happens. Orthodoxy has greatly increased.
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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.
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.
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.
And yet, the poor white people who joined the "right" side get the same ill treatment.
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