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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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