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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.
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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