domain:papyrusrampant.substack.com
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
That's a fair response to @hydroacetylene's argument, but the "this goes against what our elders say about gender roles" argument against transgenderism is itself a rather weak one.
I think a stronger one is the following: transgenderism, in its common form as I understand it, is totalitarian and intrusive, because it demands that I rewrite my mental categories in a particular way. It is fairly clear that, from the point of view of the transgender activists, someone who perfectly abides by all etiquette demands (pronouns, social grouping/shunning, social expectations in line with the person's chosen identity) but internally continues to believe that the person is, for all purposes other than adherence to the preceding rules of etiquette, a member of their biological sex, is morally evil, and this pattern of thought is one that ought to be rectified even if there is no evidence that it will lead to any etiquette violations. This is intrusive and totalitarian, in a way that otherwise only religions are allowed to get away with (you can't just go to church on Sundays and say the prayers, you have to really believe, and there will be busybodies trying to figure out if you secretly don't and do their utmost to fix you); and as a price for being allowed to keep that power, liberal societies have severely circumscribed the power of religions in other ways (they are not allowed to threaten you into conversion, use your belief or lack thereof as a criterion in hiring, etc.).
None of these restrictions are being applied to transgenderism, and in fact acting outside of those restrictions is central to its existence as a movement! "Test if your professor secretly thinks that transwomen are men, and get him fired if it turns out to be the case" is praxis. This is not some tangential feature of religions, either - if one were to create a quick summary of what was bad about religion before our present framework of regulating them, "they perform intrusive tests to distinguish true believers from fakers and exclude the latter from society" will probably feature prominently in some form.
It sometimes seems to me that progressives have performed a horse-cart inversion regarding the relationship between biological sex and "gender roles", and typical-mind themselves to assume that everyone else must have constructed their categories likewise. The traditional gender role believer will think, "you are a man; therefore you must wear pants, wield violence and hide your emotions", but the progressive instead sees something like "you must wear pants, wield violence and hide your emotions; therefore you are a man". The former is a statement of fact, followed by a statement of "socially constructed" expectations contingent on that fact; the latter looks like a statement of arbitrary socially constructed expectations, followed by a socially constructed label for that set of expectations. I don't care if you think that way, but realise that it is not standard!
As it happens, I am not particularly attached to gender roles myself; if a man wants to wear dresses and makeup and act like a caricature of a Victorian damsel, I am happy to let him. There are plenty of people who do things that are more aesthetically displeasing or outright harmful to those around them. However, I will continue to think of him as a man, and I will consider a demand not to, for whatever reason, to be as presumptuous and intrusive as a demand that I make myself believe that Brahma created the universe. Hindus are free to believe this; they are free to be sad that I don't believe it; and they are even within reason to demand that I will not walk up to them and yell in their face that Lord Brahma does not exist/is an aspect of Satan/is a minor god that my god would make mincemeat of. However, if they presumed to demand that I publicly affirm Brahma as the Lord Creator of the Universe, made employment contingent on the belief, or subjected me to tests to see if my polite silence during their rituals wasn't because I secretly thought it is all bollocks, I would feel in my right to gently remind them that last time someone did that to my people, in the end we sent them to build railways in Siberia or gave them a one-way limousine ride to a nondescript downtown basement.
(...and to be clear, the asymmetry that I view "transwomen are men" as a statement of fact while you view "transwomen are women" and "transwomen are men" both as statements of belief/social construction does not matter, insofar as the demands of transgenderism would be hardly less presumptuous if we both accepted your premise that gender is socially constructed. Long before Europe went secular, it successfully figured out rules that prevented believers from forcing beliefs on each other!)
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
1d ago
Very broadly speaking, and using these terms in the American context, liberals and conservatives are fine-grained and coarse-grained thinkers respectively. Liberals tend to believe that the machine of society can be tinkered with and engineered at every level to produce desirable outcomes (it's not a surprise that more educated people, tend towards this political orientation). An extreme example of this for instance is the energy that a non-trivial number of people in academia and the media devote to the intricate rules of what counts as racism sexism. Conservatives, OTOH are more inclined to view society as a collection of fudges that more or less function to keep the anarchy of nature at bay. They're consequently typically concerned with much more coarse-grained issues: things like crime or illegal immigration.
Brilliant! This delineates the concept of "microagression" beautifully -- basically a foreign concept to a conservative, who can be very focused on macro-aggressions like crime, terrorism, breakdown of rule of law and order, riots, etc.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Probably one of the worst short-term political play decisions in modern American politics on the part of the Democrats and their allies in the media.
Romney was, and probably will be remembered as, the last major Respectability candidates of the early 21st century Republican party. He was a compromise candidate who was about the best possible synthesis of red tribe considerations and blue tribe value, a Republican who was willing to accept the legitimacy in part of blue tribe framings, and cared about their opinions. He wasn't a perfect candidate for the Republican base, but a man that- outside of a specific election cycle- had a generally consistent reputation as virtuous, even if you disagreed. It was about as close to a synthesis of red tribe and blue tribe as you could hope for, even down to sincerely practicing affirmative action and having an adopted african-american grandson.
The character assassination of Mitt Romney- among which Democratic Senate Majority Harry Reid later defended with "We won, didn't we?"- was probably what I'd point to as the breaking moment where the Republican base revolt that became the Trump-MAGA movement began.
MAGA was in part a revolt against the Republican elite, including significant disatisfaction against Romney for not fighting back. The Republican party's commissioned autopsy that argued the party needed to move decisively to the left made that revolt worse. But almost as importantly the Obama '12 campaign discredited the argument by Republican centrists/moderates, and media commentators more generally, that what the red tribe needed to be treated with respect was to present a respectable candidate.
Romney was the candidate, and was still slandered and jeered. Virtue- and especially virtue as recognized by the media establishment that joined in the jeering- wouldn't be recognized when during an election cycle. And if virtue would not be recognized, nor would it be sufficient to win even if not recognizeed, then appeals to virtue were going to lose support compared to appeals to fight back.
Which, of course, Trump was happy to do... but Trump wouldn't have won without a disillusioned Republican base that no longer responded to appeals to respectability like Romney was willing to.
Celestial-body-NOS
Supra tumulum tuum, astra nobis.
1d ago
People are concerned about Trump doing the fake version of fascism ... because they think it's the real version of fascism ....
Or they're concerned that the former is a Camel's Nose for the latter.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
In this house, Pinochet was a hero.
To be clear, there is a lot that Trump is doing which it is reasonable for lefty institutionalists to be concerned about. I'm not disputing that. But thinly veiled political lectures being canceled is not it. And Letitia James needed to be prosecuted under something after her own political targeting scandal.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
if you're not familiar with the Professor Brothers, I do recommend them. They're a goldmine of old-school internet humor.
Totalitarianit
1d ago
It's certainly possible that some, or even most of those people were prosecuted fairly in the court of Law. However, they weren't found guilty in the court of Mainstream Media and Democrats. Summer of 2020 rioters were heralded as social justice warriors fighting against a racist dictator, and almost any act of force against them was liable to be treated as an act of tyranny.
Cops and DAs could have arrested and prosecuted way more, but I don't think there were many large departments or DA offices chomping at the bit to be sued into oblivion. Most large city DAs are blue anyway and are all about whatever "perception" wins them their seat come next election cycle. The perception at the time was that any person who fell between Hitler himself all the way to some average Joe saying "I'm not sure people should be burning that." was racist, and the mainstream media and Democrats leaned into it.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
There were plenty of actually-literally peaceful protests, too. It's not hard to find examples to muddy the waters any way you want.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
If that song lives in my head from now on whenever I hear JFK, I'm blaming you.
Not in the way it did, but easily in a recognizably similar way.
The Arab Spring revealed systemic issues that were underway well before 9-11, and which would have remained primed for violent escalation even without the American invasion of Iraq. People like to focus on how ISIS had an Iraq power base, but are less inclined to note the series of uprisings against the Assad dynasty or Saddam regime, or how the fruitseller in Tunisia who figuratively and literally lit the match was responding to bog-standard petty tyrants common across the region. Names and places would have changed, but the Middle East would still be a tinder box primed to start major- or even larger- humanitarian crisis. Iraq-Iran alone could light Syria in a different way, if an fruit-seller riot spreading to Iraq led to crackdown on the Shia majority when the Iranian paramilitary capability is already present across the region.
In turn, nothing about the Arab Spring divergences would have really changed the African inflows, or the Russian incentive to use humanitarian border rushes via Belarus, or so on. Deviations might change election cycles, but not fundamental drivers.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Hello, and welcome to the Motte. We appreciate the writeup, but we can’t approve a separate thread.
Please consider posting this as a top-level comment in the Culture War thread.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
You seem to have spent a lot of words on justifying the fact that Untermensch as originally employed by the Nazis did not have a racial connotation - which I already agreed with - and then simply swerved into reasserting the claim I originally questioned, ie that the misleading translation subhuman was "deliberately manipulative" (or "deliberatively" manipulative, as you had erroneously written) as if you had refuted my counter in any way.
I will admit it is interesting to learn that the term was originally coined in English as "Under-Man" before it was translated into Untermensch and backtranslated into "subhuman"; but this is, as you say, esoteric. I find it pretty likely that whoever coined "subhuman" as a translation was simply unaware of Stoddard's writings. My assumption is that they coined "subhuman" based on "superman", with no deliberate intent of introducing a racial connotation at the time, and that this neutrally-intended English translation went on to be misunderstood.
Besides, I suspect we now associate "subhuman" with racial bigotry at all because of the widespread belief that the Nazis used Untermensch as a term of racial abuse. I'm not entirely convinced that "subhuman" is innately more scientific-racism-coded than "under-man". Had "under-man" remained the accepted English translation from the start, we might simply find ourselves in a place where most people mistakenly assume the Under-man is an inherently racism-based concept. That is, after all, what happened with "the Superman", spandex-clad Kryptonians aside.
One man once died
but did you know before that he could read all our minds
he was the US Adam with Jack the wife
he was a hyper-charismatic telepathical knight
Jaaaaay-ehehey Ef Kaaaay....
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Ah, but he was sexy and had lots of sex. Women wanted him, and men wanted to be him.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
1d ago
It's certainly a bit of esoteric history, but the term "under man" was actually introduced by American author Lothrop Stoddard in his 1922 pamphlet The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man. The term was adopted by the Nazis from that book's German version Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925). The leading racial propagandist Rosenberg (earlier I posted his testimony disputing the "Master Race" translation of his work and the translation/denotation of "Ausrottung"), wrote in 1930 that "this is the kind of human being that Lothrop Stoddard has called the ‘under man.'” "…den Lothrop Stoddard als ‘Untermenschen’ bezeichnete." Quoting Stoddard: “The Under-Man – the man who measures under the standards of capacity and adaptability imposed by the social order in which he lives."
The term was applied also to figures like Churchill and Roosevelt and even Germans who were Communist sympathizers.
I would say the translation is deliberately manipulative foremost because it has advanced the fiction that the Germans considered Slavs "sub-human", with the propaganda pamphlet Der Untermensch being the chief piece of German propaganda used to establish that claim. But Der Untermensch doesn't mention "slavs" a single time, "Untermensch" is used to describe, culturally and ideologically, Bolshevism and the threat it imposed on "Aryan Europe." The Russians are portrayed as victims, and the cultural connotation of the term used that way is very clear, here for example the art on the left is labeled Zwei Untermenschen and on the right Zwei Menschen. The term was used by the Nazis to characterize cultural and political struggle against what they viewed as counter-civilizational cultural and political movements.
Stoddard's interpretation of the "Under-man" and it's use in Nazi propaganda is very similar to the Rationalist musings of what they call "bio-leninism." But it was not a racial categorization and the slavs were not called "subhuman".
The translation and interpretation of the term in popular understanding as a racial classification is deliberatively manipulative meant to discredit Nazi thinking. "Slavs are subhuman? How could anybody possibly believe that?" is a lot easier for mass audiences to grapple with than engaging the propaganda as it was actually written and what it was actually saying.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1d ago
No less than HRC herself claimed that W Bush was "selected, not elected".
I've written about it a few times before. Short version is that I was raised a Conservative Christian with Rush Limbaugh characteristics, fell off the bandwagon due to the post-9/11 neocon flip, went hard-Libertarian to Deep-blue atheist for a decade (with considerable flirtation with Ron Paul in the middle years), and then got blown off that bandwagon by the Social Justice blastwave in 2014/2015. In the runup to the 2016 election, I was still seriously considering voting for Hillary up until Trump cinched the Republican nomination.
Previous mentions: 1 2 or this thread from the old country.
When I fetched up in SSC's comments section, my previous-favorite blog had been Shakesville, and the political issue I had been most concerned with was a tossup between the burgeoning threat of Rape Culture and the idea that another fucking Bush was being nominated for the presidency.
The short version is that I've spent considerable portions of my life on both sides of the tribal divide. I think a bunch of people here have switched sides once; it seems like fewer of us have done it twice.
Having read a few books about Hitler, one thing that struck me was a key part of his drive for control was street thuggery. Brownshirts brawling with Communists but later suppressing more general protest.
Has Trump tried to encourage anything like this? Maybe I'm not plugged-in enough but I can't think of any semi-organised street thuggery that could be called right-wing or meaningfully tied to Trump. The only things that come to mind are explicitly left-wing groups like Antifa and parts of the Free Palestine crowd.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
to three-star generals, all of whom must now personally meet with Trump before their fourth star is formalized.
Is this unusual? Per 10 U.S. Code § 601, generals, lieutenant generals, admirals, and vice admirals (three- and four-star positions) require nomination by the president, and confirmation from the Senate. I'd be more surprised if the president, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, didn't feel it necessary to meet with his top checks notes 37 military officers (plus a few currently-vacant positions).
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
1d ago
I'm having trouble reconciling two different AAQCs from FC:
https://www.themotte.org/comment/359139?context=3#context
Let's take a concrete example. I used to be very concerned about government spending and the national debt. I thought that it was very important that we get this spending under control, and bring the debt down. This was part of the basis for my voting for George W Bush in 2000. But Bush then blew the budget out funding the war on terror, and then Obama (who I also voted for) blew the budget out even worse (to my recollection, corrections welcome) with his various domestic and foreign policies. Voting for fiscal responsibility did not actually secure fiscal responsibility.
https://www.themotte.org/comment/357773?context=3#context
When I was much younger, I was a deep-blue progressive atheist deeply embedded in the Blue Tribe narrative machine. I believed that Bush did 9/11, that he was a fascist, and that he intended to overthrow American democracy, probably by conducting another false-flag terror attack and then using it as a pretext to suspend elections. This was a quite popular belief among Blues back then, and I bought it all hook, line and sinker. I believed it so firmly that I moved to Canada and seriously considered renouncing my American citizenship. Only, none of the things I believed would happen, the things the people I was listening to predicted would happen, actually happened. There never was another major terror attack anywhere close to the scale of 9/11, false-flag or otherwise. Bush was re-elected in an election I and most of my social circle was certain was rigged, but then four years later Obama trounced Romney, and power transferred as normal.
I can certainly reconcile this on my own, but I am also getting a little bit of a "chameleon" vibe that I hadn't noticed before. This not meant to be any sort of callout, as a longtime fan of FC posting, just a note.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Most of them don’t get into government buildings while the process is ongoing, do they?
Imagine if Gore had spent Dec. 11 holding speeches on the Mall and telling them to go peacefully protest outside the Supreme Court. If a few hundred of them broke in, demanding a particular verdict, I’d call that categorically different from “doubt in the integrity.”
(I actually don’t know what Gore was personally doing in the weeks after the election. Presumably there were some public appearances.)
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
which is not a good translation in comparison to "underman"- the inverse of the Nietzschean Overman
I do actually take the point that "subhuman" is an imperfect translation, but I think a part of the story you're missing is that the received translation for Übermensch itself in the first half of the 20th century was "Superman", not "Overman". That only changed when the guy with the red cape became so famous as to make the term hard to take seriously in a grown-up context - thank heaven no serious philosopher had invested pivotal significance in the Spinnemensch or the Fledermausmensch. The upshot of which is that at the time the "subhuman" translation emerged, it would not have been intuitive to coin "Undermen" to translate it, because there was no "Overman" to base it on. Instead, you would look at "Superman", which used the Latin prefix "super", and find its antonym, which happens to be "sub". But "Subman" sounds absurd, like a comic book character who can turn into a submarine, and anyway "human" is in fact a more precise translation of the gender-neutral Mensch than "man" is.
End result, "subhuman", a questionable translation but not I think a deliberately manipulative one when it was coined.
Eh? You don’t believe he’s a fascist, but also he might as well do the crime?
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