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I wanted to write about the WPATH leaks: the cancers and the shrinks debating over how many of a 12 year old's "multiple personalities" need to be transsexual before they should give them hormones and surgery.
I wanted to write about a woman I know who just got a $90,000 government grant for her instagram hobby farm, alongside hundreds of other fake businesses like "the Black farmers collective." Taxpayers gave her more money than her business will ever have in revenue to play upper-middle-class status games while the few remaining real farmers around her are going out of business.
I wanted to write about watching my friend once again change all the grocery store tags because prices keep skyrocketing as talking heads insist we're imagining it all and everyone's actually getting super rich.
I wanted to write about my state banning non-"cage free" eggs and claiming it won't increase prices... because they negotiated a kickback deal with the remaining suppliers to eat the cost until after the '24 election, after which they can harvest their monopoly rents and some lobby group can release an official report claiming the price increases were unrelated.
I wanted to write about how my state house just banned natural gas hookups and enabled pressuring companies to drop service to existing customers.
I wanted to write about the people chanting "glory to the martyrs by any means necessary" while insisting nobody could possibly suspect them of supporting Hamas, with every leftist somehow getting an identical memo about how to provide cover for them.
But what's the point? Seriously, why even talk about this just to get gaslit by the people who are celebrating it at the same time as denying it's happening?
You could spend your entire life writing tens of thousands of words explaining and analyzing this insanity, and all it does it give the perpetrators the satisfaction of gloating about getting away with it.
What are we even doing here? Are we just going to keep doing it forever as the country goes completely insane?
Why? What possible good will it do? Is this whole place just a safety release valve to stop any pressure building up against the overton window slamming left faster than the eye can see?
Does anyone actually get any pleasure out of this? Does anyone think it's doing any good? Can anyone point to an example of it doing any good in the past? Has culture war discussion on the motte ever actually led to anyone solving culture war problems? The closest thing I can come up with are TracingWoodgrain's exposés, which while incredible have hardly moved the needle on public awareness.
Virtually all the energy expended here seems to be vented straight into the void, almost like it's deliberately set up to do so, keeping people arguing in circles until it's too late to do anything about it. And it's been going on for over a decade! When will it stop?
Edit:
I hope this example might get across what I mean. A few weeks ago I wasted time finding out about "multiplicity" (the new social contagion of kids who spend too much time on discord deciding they're all "plural systems" of different personalities). Did a bunch of research, got on a bunch of discords that use the "pluralkit" plugin, found examples of psychologists taking it seriously, started writing a post.
It turned out Gattsuru was already talking about it last year like it was just a normal thing that normies will learn to accept soon.
Yesterday we found out a bunch of WPATH associates all treat it like a legitimate and uncontroversial diagnosis that lots of their "trans kids" mysteriously have. It hardly made a splash in the news. Pretty soon people will be mocking anyone who cares about it.
I realized that any discussion I started on the motte would be pointless. It would just run the same circle of "noticing, denial, minimization, celebration, resigned acceptance" that literally all culture war events go through here.
What good would bringing it to anyone's attention do? Even the most bizarre event that would have been considered unimaginably stupid until the second it happens will just be rationalized away like it's no big deal.
There are of course many reasons to worry, but the modern US is still one of the freest and least corrupt societies in human history. We have a lot of corruption and stupidity in the US, of course. However, the average human society, either today, or historically, would be amazed at how well the modern US is doing at balancing individual freedom and collective action. I don't like wokist authoritarianism, DEI corruption, or inflation, but if you feel that they are such great threats that they are worth becoming deeply emotionally distraught over, you are doing the same thing that leftists do when they become deeply emotionally distraught over the (in my opinion, near-zero) chance of Trump becoming a dictator.
The reality is that most things are going alright. The number of minors getting sex change treatments is a drop in the bucket. All the DEI corruption in the world hasn't stopped the strongest economy in human history from continuing to innovate. Inflation sucks but we're not living through the Great Depression or anything close to it. The Hamas supporters in the US didn't get any identical memo, they're just excited about somebody sticking it to what they view as an oppressive regime and they are ignoring the various atrocities that the rebels commit... which means that, while they are not being objective, nonetheless they're just indulging in an extremely common human psychological pattern that people on all sides of the political spectrum regularly indulge in. Musk owns Twitter and Google Gemini is widely mocked, the scary predictions about how the wokes would put us all in gulags have not panned out.
Basically, things are just not that bad. It's just that they seem bad if you focus a lot of attention on everything that is going on that you dislike.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/microsoft-engineer-sounds-alarm-on-ai-image-generator-to-us-officials-and-company-s-board/ar-BB1jrH1c
The government is going to make sure that every AI is exactly like Gemini. The entire US media has, in total lockstep, taken the position that:
I just saw a motte post from JTarrou saying how we have finally seen "peak woke"... two years ago. Things keep getting worse, people here keep coping, nobody seems to remember anything.
Everything happening today would have been considered an impossible joke even two years ago, and yet here we are. What good did any of those discussions do except to ease us into accepting every new Current Thing as it happened?
How would they do that? The government has limited control over private individuals' local AIs. As for the big corporations, the more they go woke the more it creates both a monetary and an ideological incentive for competitors to offer non-woke AIs. Not only that, but China will probably offer its own AIs that will be politically correct in CCP ways, but not in the US way.
It's possible that we did see peak woke two years ago. Musk owns Twitter now and it's pretty much a Wild West of opinions. 4chan is still chugging along. TheMotte and rDrama got off Reddit. /r/europe is full of open anti-immigrant sentiment. A bunch of highly progressive US city subreddits regularly hate on progressive ideologues for taking things too far when it comes to law enforcement policies. Biden is at least trying to look like he is clamping down on immigration.
Two years ago? In 2022? How? Give me an example.
Hell, didn't Goody-2 come out less than two weeks before Gemini, and everyone was laughing at the absurdity of an "ethically responsible" chatbot that refused to do arbitrary things? The parody became reality overnight!
Look at the example I edited into the bottom of my OP. A few years ago people were calling that a slippery slope hysteria that would never be a thing, because it was just conservatives exaggerating Some Kids On Tumblr.
In fact, Tracingwoodgrains actually tried to pull the "lol at least we can laugh at conservatives who think Plurals are a thing" gag recently on twitter, and his replies had people going "actually it is and accommodating them is just Basic Human Decency." It happened so fast one end of the leftist tail doesn't even know it's wagging yet!
Canada's bill C-63 is going to criminalize basically all dissent in the country, the UK is... jesus, just look at them. Germany is going to ban its largest party to keep the immigration coming. How are things getting any better?
What are you talking about here? Last time I recall mentioning systems on Twitter it was to marvel at the way some people take the whole thing seriously.
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