domain:philippelemoine.com
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
20hr ago
If it's so inconsequential, why not follow the mundane processes of publishing why and how the change was made? That's my main issue with it. It's a canary in the coal mine for poor data integrity, which, taken in conjunction with the rest of the actions of the administration, is a huge red flag. It did not happen in an isolated context. If this was a corporate setting with financial or industrial data, heads would roll - even if the changes affect "very little".
Terracotta
22hr ago
What are you "transcending", and how? How do you not already have the "dignity of self-authorship"? What are you talking about? Well, let's start with the objective facts of the matter. Women can already "self-author" themselves into essentially anything. Vice President (admittedly not President of the United States yet, but there's no reason we couldn't get there in short order), professor or artist, blue collar laborer, criminal, and anything else above, below, or in between.
I don't know, she seemed pretty clear to me. Here's the key passage that answers your specific question:
Today, women are invited to succeed, but only as women; to claim rights, but only through the vocabulary of identity.
Regardless of norms in the family or on dates, earlier-wave feminists wanted to not be judged by their gender in the marketplace, in professional and political life. The idea was, as you correctly identify, for a female engineer to be perceived by her colleagues as an engineer first and not "hey, tits!... oh yeah, and I guess it's an engineer too or sth."
The author seems to be arguing that the modern left has replaced that interaction with "hey, diversity points!... oh yeah, and I guess it's an engineer too or sth." Either way, the individual woman is reduced to a passive carrier of purely instrumental value for somebody else, and (critically) not in ways she herself chosen. She doesn't get to say "my competent engineering, which I've worked hard to develop, is the value I offer the world," because the people around her have already decided that her key value is either (a) tits or (b) decorative diversity points, neither of which redound to her personal credit or are in her control. That's what I take to be her point about self-authorship still being out of reach.
Because the male body has little to no intrinsic value, it's easier for men to become a "blank slate".
Yes, this matches how I read her argument. Although re: the intrinsic value of the male body... this is something I never quite understood about the whole female-privilege "men have to be human doings, women get to be human beings" meme. If a man longs to be passively valued for the fuckable parts of his body, by people he doesn't especially want to fuck, it seems like that should be trivially achievable by hanging out in more gay men's spaces. I'd imagine a comparable range of male body types would be admired there, and pretty young men could get nearly the same mileage a pretty young woman could get. Maybe the target audience is not quite as large, but there are easily identified locales where you'd have solid odds of finding someone appreciative. In complete seriousness, when guys complain that it would be so nice to have a body with intrinsic value in others' eyes, why do they not explore the many places where this is already true?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
47m ago
What dating crisis? This is just the almighty hand of the free market at work. Standards are high, as they inevitably will be when all parties are equally free to enter into voluntary associations.
We need to take "collective action as a society" to remove impediments to men's access to women (including, presumably, the "ugly, mean, and poor bottom 50%" of men) -- yeah, ok, have you asked the women how they feel about that? "I have this plan that will make it more likely for you to date someone who's ugly, mean, and poor". Wtf that's a terrible sales pitch.
Guaranteed monogamy for all is nothing more than the socialized ownership of the means of reproduction.
- Amish: >6.0 (Mennonites also appear high but I couldn't find recent data)
- TradCaths: 3.5/3.6 (3.6 anecdotal, "Kloster 2018" cited for 3.5)
- Mormons: 3.4 -- According to this link from @Crowstep below, 57% of Gen X Mormons have 0/1/2 children
- Muslims:3.0/3.1
- Evangelicals: 2.3 (All following numbers use this citation)
- Catholics: 2.2
- Jews: 2.0
- Mainline Protestants: 1.9
- Atheists: 1.5
- Agnostics: 1.4
Religion will interact with the US culture war effectually, as the nonreligious population largely selects itself out of existence. This will swiftly accelerate with the wifebot and the half-right to reproduction, where it's mostly religious families buying the half-rights of mostly nonreligious sellers. Especially Mormons, when it becomes socially viable for them to pick polygamy back up (Smith and Young, laughing). Catholicism and Mormonism, there's your Western future.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
18hr ago
How do you think religion in the West will interact with the Culture War in the next few elections, and in the future? Up until recently, the religious right seemed to be a mainstay of at least American politics. In Europe of course, Christianity is mostly an irrelevant force (though theoretically Catholics should have some weight?).
However, the evangelical right has been losing quite a bit of power and cultural cachet, and we're seeing the rise of more traditional versions of Christianity such as Catholicism and to a lesser extent, Orthodoxy. Buddhism has also made inroads in a more serious way, as well as Islam mostly via immigration of Muslim peoples.
In the future, how will these religions impact politics? Personally I see a fusion of Buddhism x Christianity already happening, and expect a sort of Christian orthodoxy mixing in Buddhism mental techniques as the most successful religion of the 21st century. That being said, I feel it could shake out in many different areas on the political spectrum - ironically, many of the Orthodox priests I know personally are surprisingly liberal.
One area we could see a resurgence is in monasteries, and the potential downstream impact in local communities. Within the Catholic community (and Orthodoxy in the U.S.) there has been a groundswell lately of pushes for more monasteries, and revitalizing the monastic order in general. We'll see how it shakes out.
Tell me, what do you think religion will do to the modern political landscape?
jake
2hr ago
I think if you have two largely identical groups, where Group A reproduces below replacement and Group B reproduces in excess of replacement, Group A, from a purely materialist and natural reading, is a biological phenomenon whose function is as a genetic terminus, i.e.; here, the humans of western civ are in the process of selecting for genetic predisposition to specific rather than generalized religiosity. ("What kinds of things you believe but can't prove.")
Listening
4hr ago
This isn't really something I'm commenting on, but it is culture-war related and I do genuinely want to know, so...
Can anyone who considers themselves left of center comment on the accuracy or lack thereof of this post? Is this a thing, or more something particular to this specific guy.
Quantumfreakonomics
15hr ago
On the Protestant end, the number of things that are “demonic” are growing really fast.
This is in contrast to the Catholic view, in which everything is presumed demonic until exorcised (why do you think they bless things so much?)
Terracotta
15hr ago
I mean, I chose engineering because it's an area where genuine technical ability/ technically excellent work exists, and because it draws personality types (both male and female) who tend to get excited about the material work itself and who want to use their technical ability to do a good job. Also because I have first- and second-hand personal experience of adjacent things happening.
Sales and similar bro-professions seem much more like jobs where persuasion through performing a social role is the whole point, so it's hard to imagine someone complaining about their externally-imposed social role getting in the way of their good work. I know a realtor who works her augmented breasts very effectively as part of her job, and she doesn't seem upset about it at all, any more than the local car salesman who leans into stereotypes with his down-home aw-shucks accent. But maybe I'm being unfair to sales, and actually there is a lot of technical subtlety there as well, who knows?
Terracotta
16hr ago
As far as I can say she does, in fact, get to say this. Literally what is standing in her way?
People normally engage with the world using preconstructed schemata, so once a set of expectations is in place, everyone's pleasure or disappointment in you gets measured in terms of those expectations. For most people, a pet cat that decided it loved playing catch-the-Frisbee would just be a fucked-up and confusing pet, even if it was really good at Frisbee. Because Frisbee time is what you want from your dog, not from your cat.
What people want from the office hot girl is cute mannerisms, new outfits, and opportunities to flatter her (and smugly affirm your own superiority) by overpraising her work. Nobody expects actual valid professional ideas from the office hot girl, and if she volunteered any, she almost certainly wouldn't get genuine interest or constructive critique. Similarly, what pro-DEI people want from their diverse colleague is fierceness and funkiness, unusual hair and activist politics, and the opportunity to appear younger and more hip by ostentatiously approving of her. Nobody expects or wants actual good work ideas from that person, either, and they would almost certainly be confused and annoyed if they bothered to listen in the first place.
Solid professional ideas are what you expect from Bob down the hall who is neither a hot dateable woman engineer nor a brave diverse woman engineer, but just an engineer. So everyone listens seriously to Bob's engineering ideas, hopes they will be good, and is pleased with Bob when he meets those expectations.
(When the hot woman engineer turns 40 or gets chubby, she will be nothing - literally will be able to say a thing in a meeting and have nobody hear it at all, until Bob repeats it and people listen with interest. Same with the strong diverse woman engineer if a more fashionable political category turns up. This is why women like the one who wrote the OP's article seek permission to be Bob instead.)
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
18hr ago
it's no surprise that the religions with this disadvantage are dying.
Source for this? It seems to me that Christianity is growing again as the more 'scientific' ideologies are on the decline.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
A better fit for the SSQ Sunday thread, surely. Or add more of your own commentary.
FtSoA
21hr ago
Ideology is the mind killer, almost always.
Well, not mine.
I also doubt there are very smart committed liberal hegemonists. I've yet to see a single one. Feel free to provide an example though.
By some definition of "liberal hegemonist" I would fit the bill. But I also believe in the "constrained vision," so that keeps a lid on a lot of wild ideas.
People who believe in the "unconstrained vision" and apply that not only to domestic policy, but to international policy, are bound to do some stupid shit.
But, I do firmly believe that the US is better off if it exists in a world order that is trending towards liberal democracy and capitalism.
I call it "Neoliberal Neorealism."
HughCaulk
10m ago
Best take on this site.
The dating discourse here tends towards “communism for pussy” as I’ve said before. Funny that on a mostly libertarian leaning site, many posters write screeds about the “top 20% of men”, kinda like you’d see on some socialist forum about the “top 1% of earners”. Libertarianism for what I do have, communism for what I don’t!
You want more wealth and income? Better work for it! Want more pussy? Better work for it!
Good news is that they are somewhat correlated, so you can do a two birds one stone situation here.
oats_son
1hr ago
The whole post was written pretty facetiously, so it was easy for me to classify that as a joke. I understand, though, if you can't see it that way because of some report forcing your hand or something. The Jewposters may have battered the gate enough at this point that you are quick to sound the alarm. I hope it doesn't result in a soft "no more Jew jokes" rule.
Tree
2hr ago
We need phrases like that because the last years have shown that if you leave people any wiggle room, they will lie every chance they get. I hear ‘it’s just a white lie’ all the time now, and there are no limits and no brakes on its runaway use. The thing I found most shocking about the woke establishment is not that they would lie (about corona, discrimination, race), but that they would casually justify it if caught. And maga/trump casually lie even more, and then deny, so there’s not even the attempt at coherence left.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
4hr ago
Not being against the Gays is one of the more salient points
No, this is not true at all from my perspective. Not only is it not one of the things Buddhism offers, Buddhism itself is strongly against gays, and also women. If you look into the roots of the Buddhist tradition there is far stronger sentiment and prohibitions against sexual perversion than in mainstream Christianity.
That being said, I do think the modern Church has a perhaps too myopic focus on sexual sin sometimes.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
4hr ago
Great comment. Yeah I do think that the Western folk religion is quite dominant sadly, especially given how uhhh.... poor it seems to be at actually improving people's lives or leading to useful social organization.
I had to laugh at the (often imagined.) All too true.
MayorofOysterville
9hr ago
During the Bush administration it was pretty close to at least being co-equal, but by that time it's foundations were crumbling at it could never last and indeed didn't.
shoeonfoot
14hr ago
Sorry to resurrect this thread but I've only now gotten a chance to read this post and all the responses carefully. I'm curious what you make of this thread. I'll copy it below in case you don't want to click the link.
Why the Epstein story matters so deeply to the political right—and why sweeping it under the rug is not just offensive, but a civilizational betrayal:
This isn’t just about Epstein. It’s about what his case reveals: a nexus of unaccountable power, intelligence cover, institutional rot, and elite impunity. The story touches every nerve the American right has been warning about for a century.
Since FDR, the right has feared the unchecked expansion of the administrative state. But the real danger wasn’t just bureaucracy—it was the fusion of that bureaucracy with the intelligence community, financial elites, and transnational interests.
Epstein is the singular window into this world. A man with no clear source of wealth, deep ties to U.S. and foreign intelligence, and access to the most powerful people in the world—running a blackmail operation under institutional protection.
The CIA won’t talk. The FBI walked away. The media refused to dig. And Israel—whose alleged involvement through cutouts like Wexner is whispered about but never investigated—remains off limits. That silence says more than any report ever could.
For decades, the right has asked: Who really governs? Who watches the watchers? Epstein gave us a glimpse. And what we saw was not a “conspiracy theory”—it was conspiratorial governance: intelligence services operating with total impunity.
This isn’t just about criminal sexual behavior—though the abuse of underage girls is itself an unspeakable crime, and one that demands real justice. But the fact that such crimes were instrumentalized for power is what makes this even more sinister.
The use of sexual blackmail to compromise institutions and shield a network of elites is not a subplot—it’s the playbook. This was kompromat as statecraft, and it operated in the open, protected by the very agencies tasked with protecting us.
The reason the Epstein story haunts the right is that it confirms our deepest suspicions: —Our intelligence agencies are political actors. —Our elites are compromised. —Our allies are unaccountable. —And our institutions lie to preserve their power.
Worse still: every time the Epstein story is buried, the very institutions doing the burying destroy their own legitimacy. The cover-up corrodes the foundation they claim to defend—rule of law, transparency, democratic accountability.
This is what Eisenhower warned of—not just a “military-industrial complex,” but the seamless merger of state power, private capital, and foreign intelligence. Epstein is a grotesque fruit of that fusion. Ignoring it won’t make it go away.
The right sees Epstein not as an aberration, but a revelation. A moment when the mask slipped. When the postwar liberal order—underwritten by secrecy, mutual blackmail, and “strategic alliances”—showed its true face.
So no—we won’t move on. Not because we’re obsessed with scandal, but because the Epstein case is the Rosetta Stone for understanding the modern American regime. And the regime knows it.
That’s why it must be buried. That’s why we must never let it be.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
22hr ago
Uh, I haven't specifically been keeping track of most suggestions I'm afraid. I tried to go through my chat history for specific examples, but came up short since it doesn't save conversations more than a week or two old. It did note some flaws that I personally agree with, such as a predilection towards run-on sentences or instances where I'm being unclear. Most of the time, I would have run across and then fixed the flaws myself, but this approach saves me a lot of time. Unlike most authors, I spend far less time editing than writing by default. I should probably be doing more of that, and the LLMs help.
I think I get the most utility when I ask the model to rewrite whole essays for clarity, or to see how some other author would have approached that. This occasionally produced novel (to me) insights, or particular turns of phrase I might feel tempted to steal.
This seems like a great example of vibes based thinking from both ends.
The change is made because it has some slight vibes of being woke (since the column is called gender) so that's good enough to score an easy win. And it's without much effort, which a lot of them seem to be really lazy and uncaring with this work given how they've messed up multiple times this same way with the Enola Gay or that Army Corp biologist page that included fish gender. I'm not even kidding
Nobody wants to do an in-depth investigation or look through data because that's boring and the only benefit is that you might have to say "sorry boss I looked at it and I didn't find woke" when you can instead go and say "Boss we removed 200k instances of woke"
And then people online are upset without even knowing the details because it has the vibes of being against the Trump admin despite it most likely not being any data deletion and just a change in header.
georgioz
4hr ago
It most certainly does not. The average human alive has twice as many female ancestors as men.
This is an often cited fact, but it hides more than it shows. Historically women had lower life expectancy compared to men thanks to horrible death rate during child birth. Yes, they may have managed to reproduce - but so what. It was their family, mostly males who took care of now motherless children. Without men these children would not survive.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
14hr ago
I can already see the framework, the jewish tricks are practically manifesting before my eyes:
This is an odd and derogatory thing to drop into the middle of your post. I am not quite sure what you're getting at, or if this was meant as some kind of ironic joke that I missed, but you seem to be playing on the trope of "Jews are responsible for everything related to social degeneracy and porn." You're either failing to speak clearly, or if you really want to pin this, of all things, on the Jews, you need to provide some kind of evidence for the claim that "Jews" are behind this.
Slight overreaction by Reddit - but:
Data is schema and schema is data. The bigger deal for me isn't the change itself, but that they went forward with the change without publishing why or how - breaking data integrity processes. Transparency, even for mundane changes, is critical for maintaining confidence in data sets. Now I don't have the slightest bit of confidence for any sycophant that has been employed since January to realize the gravity of modifying data sets, especially if they didn't prompt the LLM that was helping them along the way to ask, "Is this standard practice / a good idea?" vs. "You are a woke destroyer, LLM, please find all instances of woke". Maybe it's gender<->sex today, but tomorrow it might be our glorious Minister of Health removing all adverse cases from the chelation therapy trials for autistic children because he's already shown an extreme disregard for evidence-based decision making.
I'll file this under my increasingly robust "Our cause is righteous, and therefore we cannot err." prior for this administration and pretty much everyone associated with it. Processes, standards, even facts themselves should not stand in the way in implementing their vision of the world, because they are morally correct. That's what's different about Trump 47 compared to Trump 45. To tie it in with other current events, it also explains the complete about-face on the Epstein topic. Republicans would rather cover it up and have it disappear because their cause is righteous, and even a pedophile-in-chief[1] should not halt progress towards whatever pet religious-ethnostate vision of America they have.
[1] Maybe Trump probably isn't directly implicated, but maybe it's double blackmail and we're witnessing a stalemate due to mutually assured destruction :shrug:. But honestly that would surprise me too because, as I said above, I'm not sure if anything would change the opinions of the 20% of Americans who view Trump as the avatar of their precise political alignment who (by the definition of the word avatar) could do no wrong, and maybe the 10% who hold their nose and vote for Trump as well. Maybe it's just literally that the people implicated in the files bought a bunch of $TRUMP shitcoins and now Trump is on their side. Who knows.
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