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Felagund
1m ago
There are less isolationist, committed, conservative varieties of protestantism out there as well…
The Orthodox Presbyterian Church, or I'm sure some Lutheran denominations (WELS?) aren't going to be abandoning their teaching anytime soon, for example, and they don't have especially high barriers to joining. It won't be as tightly knit as the Amish, but it might be comparable to tradcaths.
ChickenOverlord
3m ago
It is no wonder women are mad and opting out. It is the only rational option.
Yet few if any are pushing for a return to the majority of women being stay at home moms without careers.
Hyperion
7m ago
If Derrida can do it, then anyone can. Post-modernism is the intellectual equivalent of a banana duct-taped to a wall.
I think you are right they are not driven by evidence, but I have never ever in my life made a willing act of choice in my beliefs.
I think you have. Consider the following:
When someone presents you with a belief, you can choose to either accept or reject it uncritically. Either is a conscious act of the will.
If you choose not to do either, you can instead inspect the proposed belief critically. This involves comparing it to the evidence available to you. The consensus model is that you collect the available evidence for and against the belief, weigh the two groups against each other objectively, and allow yourself to be guided by the result. There are serious problems with this model:
- There is a very large, probably infinite amount of pieces of evidence for any possible question.
- For any given piece of evidence, there is a very large, probably infinite number of connections to other pieces of evidence.
- Pruning this infinite sea of data and data-connections to a practical subset involves collecting and assessing each piece and its connections for "relevance" and "weight". Neither "relevance" nor "weight" has any objective measure, and all but a vanishing fraction of the available evidence must be discarded. Consequently, there is no objective scale by which one pile of evidence "outweighs" or is more "relevant" than another. This process is irreducibly subjective.
When we examine a proposed belief critically, what actually happens is that we collect the evidence that is immediately convenient to us, prune it subjectively to the subset that seems weighty and relevant by our subjective, personal standards, sort it into "for" and "against" piles, and then compare the two to get a preliminary result. We then assess this result, and if we decide we like it, we keep it and draw a conclusion. If we don't like it, we go looking for more evidence. Either is a conscious act of the will.
Nor does anything require that this process ever terminates. Even if no "sufficient" evidence can be found to justify the conclusion we desire, we are free to assume infer the existence of such evidence from the conclusions we chose in previous iterations of this reasoning process. The end result is that we choose to search through a small portion of an infinite chain of evidence until we find the support we're looking for, and then we choose to stop.
But what if we wanted to go deeper? What if we wanted to try for something beyond subjective, piecemeal assessment of evidence? The last option is to reason about evidence by way of axioms. A given chain of evidence can fit within or contradict a given axiom, logically speaking. This process seems to be objective, or as close to it as humans can get. But all it tells you is whether a given chain of evidence fits or contradicts a given axiom, not whether the axiom is actually correct. There are still infinite evidence-chains, meaning that there are an infinite number of evidence chains that fit neatly into a given axiom. Choosing an axiom is a conscious act of will, and choosing which evidence-chains to compare it to is likewise a conscious act of will.
All consequential beliefs any of us hold are formed by one of the processes described above. All of these processes involve a conscious act of will. Therefore, all beliefs are arrived at through conscious acts of will.
crushedoranges
21m ago
In one hundred years your shitposts will be taken seriously by the intellectuals of the time.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
23m ago
It may be that the miserable nature of the South Korean lifestyle makes dating logistically difficult, and as a consequence men and women develop mutual hostilities simply because they have fewer opportunities to come into intimate contact with each other. But I'm just speculating.
This is also my suspicion about what's going on in the West. Not to the same degree or because of the same factors, but because social atomization drives people apart. This leads to fewer connections with other people, fewer relationships with opposite-gender people (platonic and romantic), fewer intimate connections with people you share a background with, alongside more internet doomscrolling, more online dating, more echo chambers. The main way men and women are coming into contact with each other is through online dating apps. And even the people who have success there (according to whatever their definition of that is), both men and women, regard it as a necessary evil.
It's no wonder men and women hate each other: they know each other only through the adversarial, hierarchical, soul-destroying apps.
There's always been an authoritarian streak to leftism going back to Marx
And, you know, that other guy.
I think listening to a bunch of Marxists about Kant is an exercise in futility. Everything is ego defense of Granddaddy Hegel, all the way down.
EDIT:
But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely
This is Marxism in a nutshell. The ideological superstructure is determined by the material substrate, not the other way around. If you find this disturbing....well, now you know why they find it so important to try to blame Kant for Naziism (you know, that famously individualist creed).
Ponder
1hr ago
I agree with this answer. Religion allows small groups of people to slowly reshape the culture as it attracts new members. The religion grows stronger as the mainstream culture grows weaker, which can eventually lead to the religion re-shaping/replacing parts of mainstream culture. A historical example is the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire.
States with Religious Freedom Restoration Acts have stronger religious protections than those that don't.
Traditional religions in some people's eyes have lost their credibility/safety so there seems to be an opportunity to create a new religion that is better aligned with modern scientific beliefs.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
Okay, but how bad is it really?
Looking at the Unherd article, for example. Their thesis: #MeToo caused radical misogyny and conservative backlash. Their evidence: one survey showing young men were unusually hostile to the current president. A second survey, published in 2019, saying they really disliked feminism. And then a smattering of demographic and dating stats which don’t really measure opinion so much as try to justify it.
If that’s the quality of evidence, I’m not sure it can be distinguished from garden-variety fearmongering. Hey, our students don’t really like Biden. Does that mean the Democrats are at a crossroads of anti[femin/egalitarian/Semit]ism?
On the other hand, SK apparently elected their antifeminist. That speaks a little louder. Has he actually acted on his alleged platform? Because this sort of narrative is what I’d expect to see from a smear campaign.
What is gpt2-chatbot?
(a mysterious entry appeared a couple days ago in the LMSYS Chatbot Arena and is blowing people away)
SSCReader
1hr ago
This is not to say that reality is as we wish it to be, only that our beliefs about reality are under our direct, willful control, and always will be.
Interestingly I think it is the exact opposite. We don't choose out beliefs about reality by act of will, they emerge from our sub-conscious (our "true" self) and then rationalized thereafter. I think you are right they are not driven by evidence, but I have never ever in my life made a willing act of choice in my beliefs. I simply realized that I believed X, or didn't believe Y (sometimes after someone made a point and I argued against only to realize weeks later, that my belief had changed). I don't know how I would even go about choosing through an act of will to just believe something to be true.
I might also go so far as to say that almost by very definition beliefs cannot be under our conscious control. I cannot choose to believe in God, and I should know because I spent a lot of time trying so that I would fit in. I just could not do it, no matter how I tried.
Hyperion
1hr ago
I think the biggest issue is that he assumes all these 'great' thinkers of the past actually had a point. From my perspective it's all a tower of nonsense with more dung being flung on top and each successive generation just adding more nonsense to the pile.
Saying that Adorno or Horkheimer said something isn't a valid argument if Adorno and Horkheimer were making bad arguments in the first place. You can't just cite each others claims as authoritative if those claims are bullshit in the first place.
Not that Zizek cares, his whole philosophy runs on vibes and free association. He is a clown and he likes it when you laugh at him. Trying to argue with a clown is like wrestling with a pig.
non_radical_centrist
2hr ago
I don't have anything to say directly on the content, but writers like Zizek who seem to try to make their writing as difficult to parse as possible in order to show off their vocabulary have always annoyed me. There are times when a big, unusual word captures something that a shorter word doesn't, or is more convenient than using a string of shorter common words to represent the same concept. But when you're having to take a second to understand a phrase, time after time, it's irritating.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
2hr ago
Yeah if you're smart, at all, you figure out it is all make believe bullshit when you learn that Santa or the Tooth Fairy aren't real. For everyone else...I mean if they can't get out of the simple indoctrination, maybe they were going to be ideologically captured by something worse down the line? That is my steel man.
I'm very skeptical of the idea that South Korea's birth rate is a product of gender war. It just seems like a miserable place to live, where children are drafted into the rat race as soon as possible, forced into 4 A.M. tuition classes for exams they're going to write a decade later, coming home at 10 PM, then doing it all over again, until you eventually graduate, get a job and can inflict the same rat race on a new kid who has the misfortune to emerge from a South Korean womb. An endless labyrinth of status games that makes the experience of parenthood and childhood uniquely awful, even by the infamously taxing standards of East Asia.
It may be that the miserable nature of the South Korean lifestyle makes dating logistically difficult, and as a consequence men and women develop mutual hostilities simply because they have fewer opportunities to come into intimate contact with each other. But I'm just speculating.
One point of commonality between Korea and the West is that these stories of "gender polarization" are really just about sharp radicalization of women, and the author's need to coach that observation in both-sidesism for political correctness. There's a graph that circulates on Twitter frequently about how Western youth are supposedly polarizing sharply away from each other, with women becoming more left-wing and men becoming more right-wing, and if you actually look at the graph it just shows men becoming mildly more conservative, a change that is barely perceptible, while women are stampeding to the left.
oats_son
2hr ago
I don't at all disagree with the benefits of genuine belief. I feel I have been robbed of these for myself because I just thought about the issues too much. Are your children doomed to the same bitter realization decades down the line? You're just supposed to hope they're less good at critical thinking than yourself?
2rafa
2hr ago
But for all this ridiculousness, these seem to be the only way of maintaining key social technologies including fundamental prosocial memes, at least in the West.
Secular reactionaries can come up with countless legitimate reasons for many aspects of traditional morality, but it seems to mean nothing in the West without “you will go to the fire pit for eternity if you break the rules”.
“Why not have free love?”“Well, actually, you know various studies have shown that things like promiscuity can have deleterious effects on partner bonding with later partners, increasing the risk of blah blah blah…”
Secular justifications for traditional social technology just don’t work with normal people of average and below ability, and even with most above them. Yes it’s stupid, but it’s better for our children to believe it than not.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
2hr ago
This whole thing is getting crazy enough that it is even leaking into NPR on my commute and I've heard several stories about it from major news outlets. They of course are spinning it as the eventual chickens coming home to roost from having men that do zero child rearing and housework and also having the women work outside the home too (which is what they wanted!). But regardless of how they got there, they have a solid point. No one is going to willingly sign up for a life of wage slavery + all domestic tasks, that is fucking crazy town. You or I wouldn't do that!!! It is no wonder women are mad and opting out. It is the only rational option.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
3hr ago
Zizek's new piece in Compact: Happy Birthday Kant, You Lousy Sadist (paywalled, but you can read the whole thing on reddit here):
Is there a line from Kantian ethics to the Auschwitz killing machine? Are the Nazis’ concentration camps and their mode of killing—as a neutral business—the inherent terminus of the enlightened insistence on the autonomy of reason? Is there some affinity between Kant avec Sade and Fascist torture as portrayed by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film version of 120 Days in Sodom, which transposes the story into the dark days of Mussolini’s Salò republic?
The link between Sade and Kant was first developed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the famous Excursion II (“Juliette, or Enlightenment and Morality”) of the Dialectics of Enlightenment. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s fundamental thesis is that “the work of Marquis de Sade displays the ‘Reason which is not led by another agency,’ that is to say, the bourgeois subject, liberated from a state of not yet being mature.” Some 15 years later, Lacan (unaware of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s version of the argument) also developed the notion that Sade is the truth of Kant, first in his Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1958-59), and then in an écrit of 1963.
In typical Zizek fashion, he bounces between multiple different ideas in a rapid fire stream of consciousness style, so there are a lot of different threads here that you could grab and run with. Some of our resident anti-enlightenment posters and Christian posters may find something productive in Adorno and Horkheimer's diagnosis of the ethical situation of modernity:
Sade announced the moment when, with the emergence of bourgeois Enlightenment, pleasure itself lost its sacred-transgressive character and was reduced to a rationalized instrumental activity. That is to say, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, the greatness of Sade was that, on behalf of the full assertion of earthly pleasures, he not only rejected any metaphysical moralism, but also fully acknowledged the price one has to pay for this rejection: the radical intellectualization-instrumentalization-regimentation of sexual activity intended to bring pleasure. Here we encounter the content later baptized by Herbert Marcuse’s “repressive desublimation”: After all the barriers of sublimation, of cultural transformation of sexual activity, are abolished, what we get isn’t raw, brutal, passionate, satisfying animal sex, but on the contrary, a fully regimented, intellectualized activity comparable to a well-planned sporting match.
There is much that could be said about Kant's continuing influence on thought and politics. Putin has expressed admiration for him, for example. But probably the biggest point of interest to a general audience here will be Zizek's remarks on Trump near the end of the essay:
Things are similar with the new rightist populism. The contrast between Trump’s official ideological message (conservative values) and the style of his public performance (saying more or less whatever pops up in his head, insulting others, and violating all rules of good manners) tells a lot about our predicament: What sort of world do we inhibit, in which bombarding the public with indecent vulgarities presents itself as the last barrier to protect us from the triumph of the society in which everything is permitted and old values go down the drain? Trump is not a relic of the old moral-majority conservatism—he is to a much greater degree the caricatural inverted image of postmodern “permissive society” itself, a product of this society’s own antagonisms and inner limitations. [...] Trump’s obscene performances thus express the falsity of his populism: to put it with brutal simplicity, while acting as if he cares for the ordinary people, he promotes big capital.
I view this as one of a series of similar critiques coming out of the left in recent times, all of which center around the curious theme of rightists not acting rightist enough. There's been a growing concern on the left in the last few years that "the positions have switched", to a certain extent. Traits that used to be associated with the left - a general rebelliousness, experimentation with new ideas, a critique of established values and established authority (Covid is a big one here), and, yes, a certain willingness to engage in crass vulgarity from time to time, either as a political act or as simple good-spirited humor - have now become associated with the right. Meanwhile the left has become much more strongly associated with order, morality, and authority than they were in the post-war 20th century.
Reactions from leftists to this alleged reversal have been all over the spectrum: everything from panic ("they're stealing our bit! we have to get a handle on this!"), to Zizek's strategy here of denying the authenticity and veridicality of ostensibly rightist forms of rebellion and protest, to simple avowal ("yes, we are in charge, we are Justice, and that's a good thing actually").
Among commentators who believe this to be an authentic political phenomenon, the standard explanation is usually something like: well of course rightists were all for law and order when they were in charge. But now they're not so in charge anymore, so now they're learning the value of critique and skepticism, of free speech and civil liberties, and so forth. Similarly, leftists were in favor of free speech and questioning authority when it was beneficial to them, but now that their institutional capture is more entrenched, they don't need those things anymore.
But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely; you will hold the views that you must based on your relational position to other political actors while taking into account your rational self interest, and that's that. But it becomes rather boring if you're always just looking for the self interest behind everything. The much more interesting and radical project is to find the abstract ethical commitments hiding behind apparent self interest.
There's always been an authoritarian streak to leftism going back to Marx - it's not something that they just happened to discover after attaining political ascendancy. It's reflected in how they govern their own private institutions, even when they don't have societal power. There was frequently internal strife at the Frankfurt school over this or that theorist not sufficiently holding to the party line. Leftist organizations at least as far back as the 80s were already using the progressive stack at group meetings to make sure that white men spoke last. Marxism itself claims that the end goal of the communist revolution is the dissolution of all antagonisms between individual and collective good - but the individual is right to be nervous about what processes the collective might institute to achieve this utopian vision.
Similarly, I believe in the possibility of a principled libertarianism that wouldn't immediately abandon all of its commitments as soon as it got hold of actual power. It's true that ideology always has to make affordances for reality at some point, but clearly, ideology has some impact on the reality of governance as well: I don't think you could, for example, explain the different political situations in the US and Russia entirely in terms of their different material and sociological conditions, with no reference whatsoever to the beliefs and motivations of the individual people who actually govern those countries.
You don’t need to believe it. You just need your kids to believe it, and religious schooling and so on can accomplish that with at least some degree of efficacy.
Secular society has no competent alternative to religious social engineering. All alternatives so far have failed.
Well if you walk out your door and a little box on your wrist literally tells you what you'll do next, even if you change your mind, or more importantly, what others will do. If it is always right you'll trust it. Then that might be good enough to get people to 99.9% yah? It is possible, yet not likely.
2rafa
3hr ago
Monkeys are trained to pick coconuts in Thailand commercially, that’s the central example of monkey labor as far as I know. There have been a few historic examples like the baboon in South Africa trained to be a railroad signalman (albeit one under supervision, apparently). I don’t think we really want large numbers of semi-wild monkeys living near populated places in Western countries; in the countries that do have them labor is usually cheap enough that it might not be worth it for many things.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
3hr ago
WTF is going on in Korea?
Meta: I haven't posted in the CWT in a minute, Life gets in the way. This post is going to be mostly copy pasted content from elsewhere. I will attempt to consolidate some of it here. It's probably going to be a very sparse list compared to all the relevant pieces of context, but I attempt to shed some light and discuss nevertheless.
TLDR: The "Gender War" is a significant aspect of the Korean culture wars. And it seems to be more pronounced in Korea than any other society. I really want to know why. I think this bears studying given gender relations are deteriorating globally, and if Japan is 10 years ahead in neetdom, South Korea is definitely 10 years ahead in whateverthefuck dom this is. Their infamously low birthrate is also an elephant in the room, whilst we have this discussion.
Exhibit A
Page 12, We can see that Koreans most of all nationalities think there is significant tension between men and women. Koreans tend to top the charts for other questions as well, so it might just be the case that the Korean social fabric is especially frayed, or Koreans are just especially neurotic or self-critical.
However, it does seem that the social fabric is fraying like no other on multiple fronts in Korea:
Exhibit B
Just simple web searching. If something is in the air, people are probably talking about it. Or inversely, if people are taking about it, it stinks.
It does seem that the Gender War is becoming more "interesting". Not especially so in Korea however. But try the search term "reddit war $COUNTRY", and lo and behold, you actually get posts about it when you try with COUNTY='Korea'.
Some examples from the first page: https://old.reddit.com/r/Hangukin/comments/1708gpj/can_people_explain_to_me_wtf_is_going_on_with_the/, https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/18cnto9/whats_going_on_with_the_gender_conflict_and_it/, https://old.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/18qlyqe/why_does_the_battle_of_sexes_seem_more_pronounced/, https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/19bvpjq/whats_the_deal_with_feminism_and_antifeminism_in/, https://old.reddit.com/r/SingaporeRaw/comments/192yymo/do_you_think_singapore_will_face_a_south_korean/
Exhibit C
"The incel election" Enough said? I don't think there is much other evidence required that this is a significant CW front in Korea.
Youtube video - Gacha Drama and the Korean Gender War (You can disagree with thesis, I'm just linking to show its a thing people are picking up on)
Study - The Gender War and the Rise of Anti-family Sentiments in South Korea (You can disagree with thesis...)
Exhibited D
This is totally comprised of anecdotes, but I buy it.
Some comments from the reddit posts above: Common theme, Korean feminism dials the man-hate up to 11.
Answer: radical feminists are really, really, radical in Korea.
Interesting that you hear about how "young men are turning to right" all the time, but at least based on these, outside of SK the men are fairly stable, yes moving to the right but the graph is not very steep. On the other hand the women seem to be moving to the left at a much steeper incline, but nobody ever talks about this
Women's social media is a different breed of animal. Lab created.
Korea take feminism to ANOTHER level bro...
Being a westerner in Tokyo I've dated three Korean raised women and all three were absolutely, balls to the wall, rabid, men hating psychos who regularly voiced violent fantasies of what they'd like to do to Korean men.
All three were utterly confused when I'd tell them the kind of stuff they were saying wasn't acceptable in any way and would respond with "but you're a westerner, I thought you supported feminism".
Like no, woman, your idea of 'feminism' shouldn't be angrily ranting about cutting off dicks and sodomizing men. You can say three people isn't a large enough sample size to judge something by but I also think it's enough to be suspicious of whatever the hell they're branding feminism as over there.
So what gives? Why did the gender war hit Korea like a truck?
Korea is already on its way to extinction, so at least this won't be a problem for that long, but still, I am really left scratching my head. Are there any historical examples of this ?
One running theory other than the normie, "It's because they work really long hours hurr durr" (which does have a massive nugget of truth to it), is that Korea is especially unfathomably status obsessed. All that exam cramming, all that plastic surgery, it's all indicative.
I point out the above because most countries the gender war is more along the lines of "incel men" vs "feminists". Men are usually the active camp complaining about not getting anything from women, women complain about not getting anything from society, men take the aggressive stance. However, in Korea women are on the offensive as well, this seems unique to me.
True, I was thinking from a more general genealogy family tree prospective but yeah I guess his mother's DNA isn't going to help us at all here!!! I was totally wrong to even mention it and I'm not sure why I did. We really need his or his kids plus a Castro relative.
Columbia protests and the "right side of history"
A tremendously dumb argument, especially when made by woke people
[A tweet reading “Is [sic] is amazing how the protesters are always right 50 years ago and always wrong today.” @Will_Bunch]
In reaction to the ongoing pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University, a lot of people I respect have shared the above tweet. I don’t have especially strong opinions about the protests themselves, but I uncritically support the right of political activists to protest for any cause they choose to, and think that the Republicans (such as Greg Abbott) trying to prevent them from doing so are pathetic, cowardly and shamelessly hypocritical.
First things first: the tweet is just wrong on its face, unless you would have me believe that the people who protested against racially integrated schools in 1960s America were really in the right all along (hot take if so).
No: I’m sure that what Mr. Bunch meant is that all of the protestors from fifty years ago who are currently considered to have been on the right side of whichever political issue they protested were deeply unpopular at the time. This is probably true, but essentially useless when gauging the relative virtue of current political movements, because of survivorship bias. If there were only two sides to every political issue and the less popular one always came out on top in the judgement of the future, one could accurately predict which side of a current political issue would “win” purely based on which one had the lowest approval ratings. But, of course, there aren’t two sides to every political issue, many political activists protested for causes which were deeply unpopular at the time and remain so to this day, and so the category of “protesters who protest in favour of highly unpopular causes” is bound to include political causes which go on to be viewed in a generally positive light and political causes whose popularity never improves from a low baseline. (For a historical example, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists never fielded any successful election candidates and their peak membership was only 40,000 people. More recently, to the extent that the riot in the Capitol on January 6th was a “protest”, most Americans think it was a bad idea, and I hope it stays that way.) A more accurate rephrasing of Bunch’s tweet might read: “Of the people who protested for various political causes 50 years ago, it is amazing how most of them were generally considered wrong at the time and a small subset of them are now looked upon favourably in the popular imagination.” (Not as catchy, but it does fit into the 280-character limit!)
But the tweet isn’t really about historical protests: it was tweeted about the Columbia protests, the implication being that, fifty years from now, historians (and society more generally) will look upon the protests in a favourable light. The tweet is hence just the latest example of that tiresome argumentative trope that woke people trot out for essentially every political issue, the assertion that their support for this or that political movement places them on the “right side of history”.1
All the “right side of history” framing boils down to is a prediction that future popular consensus will judge Political Group X favourably. I think this argument would be profoundly weak and fallacious coming from any political faction: how arrogant of anyone to think they can accurately predict what the people two generations from now will believe, when they can’t even reliably predict where they’re going to go for lunch tomorrow. But I’ve always found it especially strange when woke people in particular make the “right side of history” argument. I’ve never been able to put my finger on quite why, until the tweet above got me thinking about it.
The reason being, historical revisionism is woke people’s favourite pastime. There’s nothing woke people enjoy more than taking a historical figure who enjoys a high level of approval in the popular imagination and demanding that we reappraise their moral character, even to the point of completely reversing it: not merely that such-and-such was a more complex and flawed person than is widely believed, but that he was actually a monster. The woke exist to take the wind out of people’s sails, never forgoing an opportunity to remind people around them that Their Fave is Problematic, actually. It’s such a quintessential part of the woke playbook that even The Onion poked fun at it; or think of that wonderful scene in Tár where the “BIPOC pangender person” says they can’t enjoy Bach’s music because of Bach’s unrepentant misogyny. Take just about any historical figure who is widely admired in one or more Anglophone countries, and I guarantee you I can find a woke article in a mainstream publication arguing that he or she actually sucks (usually for reasons relating to the woke faction’s monomaniacal fixation on race and/or sex), e.g.:
Abraham Lincoln (consistently ranked one of the top three Presidents in American history)? Check, check, check.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (likewise)? Check.
Ronald Reagan (likewise)? I feel like I don’t need to demonstrate this one (even normie Democrats hate Reagan), but for the sake of consistency here you go.
Winston Churchill (voted the greatest Briton in history in a 2002 poll)? Check.
Charles Darwin (voted the fourth-greatest Briton in history)? Check.
Christopher Columbus? I mean, they created Indigenous People’s Day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Peoples%27_Day_(United_States)) for a reason.
(If you really want a laugh, turn this technique back on them. Next time you see some twentysomething university student reeking of weed wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt, point out to him that the man in question once asserted “The negro is indolent and lazy, and spends his money on frivolities”.)
I’m not even arguing that the woke revisionist accounts of the figures listed above are factually wrong or uncharitable (I certainly have no interest in defending Churchill from accusations of genocidal white supremacism, or Reagan from accusations of unabashed hatred of gay men). My point is that, once you recognise that morally atrocious people can go on to become near-unanimously revered both by scholars and in the popular imagination, it completely neuters the case for “the right side of history” being a useful guide to the moral virtues of present-day political figures or movements (or lack thereof), even assuming that one could accurately predict how these entities will be viewed in the popular imagination of the future.
To put it more plainly, woke people would have us believe both that:
and
The first premise is unassailably true, the second remains to be seen. But even if both premises are true, this doesn’t even come close to demonstrating that the woke movement actually is morally heroic. So in the future, historians and society more generally will look upon the Columbia protesters in a favourable light. So what? By the moral and epistemological standards espoused by woke people themselves, a popular consensus that Alice was a good person does not remotely imply that Alice actually was a good person. If Winston Churchill was an irredeemable monster who went on to be considered the greatest Briton who ever lived, why couldn’t this also be true of (to pick the first two woke Britons who popped into my head) Humza Yousaf or Diane Abbott? Not to say that either of these people are irredeemably awful, but there’s literally nothing in the woke framework which contradicts the notion that they could be and subsequently go on to be generally considered paragons of virtue.
This is the problem with employing postmodernism as a rhetorical device. Once you’ve done your best to redpill your listener by telling them that a widely admired figure was actually a crypto-fascist pederast Nazi sympathiser and the establishment don’t want you to know about it - following that up with “the establishment will look upon our movement in a favourable light” doesn’t seem like much of an accolade, even if it’s an accurate prediction. “So let me get this straight: you’re saying that history books have always been written by biased historians beholden to special interests, who systematically lionize awful, wretched people and ignore or gloss over their most atrocious moral failings, provided the person in question helped to advance the historians’ own political agenda. But the historians of the future (who by inclination and temperament will be no different from the historians of the present or the past) will look upon your political faction in a favourable light? Wow, what a ringing endorsement of your political faction! Sign me up!”
And this brings me to my final point. Although “the right side of history” sounds like it’s appealing to the listener’s moral sensibility, it’s really little more than a veiled promise and threat. History is written by the winners, so an assertion that supporting this or that movement puts you on the “right side of history” is really just a prediction that your team will win. That’s all it is: “my team is going to win”. Try rephrasing it in your head: “I support gender-affirming care for minors because I predict that my team will win” doesn’t sound half as noble as “I support gender-affirming care for minors because I want to be on the right side of history”, now does it? What the “right side of history” promises is that, if you join our team, historians will write hagiographies about us and forgive all of our worst sins. And if you don’t join our team? We’ll have no choice but to smear your team as depraved monsters with no redeeming features to speak of. Nice reputation among future generations you’ve got there - it’d be a shame if something happened to it.
1I had a feeling that the specific wording of “right side of history” had fallen out of popularity in recent years, and Google Trends seems to bear that out. That massive spike in 2019 appears to be the release of Ben Shapiro’s book of the same name (lol).
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