domain:worksinprogress.co
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Hold up.
For years, on this very forum (well, fine, you have to come buck to the /r/SSC days), whenever someone pointed out the advances of the SJ movement, the response was something to the effect of "it's just a couple of crazy kids on college campuses / Tumblr", or alternatively there'd be an attempt to "steelman" the movement to make it look more reasonable than it actually is ("defund the police doesn't really mean defund the police"), something later dubbed "sanewashing" by other elements of the left.
His use of neutral language is not covering up any switch, it's taking what progressives who participated in Culture War commentary at face value, i.e. assuming their good faith. We can dispense with that assumption, but I'm not sure you'd be happy with that either.
John_Doe_Fletcher
anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy
2hr ago
Random people online were able to sense a threat that leading experts weren’t able to sense, and made arguments that leading academics did not make. Why?
My belief, based on my recollections of the time, is that "leading experts" and "leading academics" were the originators of the social justice memeplex, and therefore wouldn't make arguments against it even if they could conceive of them. In support of this, the common dismissal at the time of "it's just college students spending too much time on tumblr" highlights that this memeplex's breeding ground was immediately downstream of leading academics. Or perhaps more accurately, academia was the superfund site and Tumblr was the groundwater.
Sorry if the metaphor is too dramatic, I'm feeling bitter.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
10m ago
A shifting part of the culture war: beards and long hair.
Once upon a time, having a beard or long hair meant Something, and usually meant being a leftist/liberal. Even by the early 2000s when I was in college, facial hair was still coded as an academic/liberal kind of thing. Outside the university, anyone who had either was definitely left-of-center.
Now, though, if I meet a guy with a beard or long hair, those features tell me very little if not nothing about his political positions. Radical anarchists, normie libs, Joe Rogan listeners, fervent MAGA types, and just about every other political type could have a beard or long hair (the major exception being devout Mormons). Clothing, tattoos, general level of fitness, and other features are much better indicators now than facial/long hair. The mustache/goatee combo might be slightly right-coded because it’s popular with certain types of boomers and early Xers, but even that’s a weak indicator.
I suspect the change was in full swing by 2010 since Duck Dynasty started airing in 2012. All of the major male characters have long, shaggy beards, and most have long hair as well. This article from 2015 notes the upsurge of beards among the right. That means we’re at least 10 years into the change.
As big as the change has been among regular people, though, perhaps the even bigger change is politicians. I don’t remember any major politicians having facial hair prior to 2018ish. I remember Al Gore growing a beard, but that was only after he was VP.
JD Vance has a beard, and is the first Pres or VP to have facial hair since VP Charles Curtis (Hoover’s VP), who had a mustache. Vance had a beard when he ran for U.S. Senate in 2022, Ted Cruz has grown a beard since being a senator (but was clean-shaven when he initially ran for senate), and Ruben Gallego (D) of Arizona ran for U.S. Senate in 2024 with a beard.
Article about Vance’s beard
I think this comment probably sums it up:
“There’s not a single millennial out there who would find the question of whether a politician has facial hair to be relevant,” said Republican consultant Brad Todd. Is the stigma against beards subsiding? “I think it’s completely gone,” he said, “due in large part to the Silent Generation moving out of politics.”
With the WW2 veteran generation gone and the Silents almost gone from politics, their aversion to facial hair appears to have gone with them.
This article on politicians and beards has this interesting comment considering the former association of beards with leftism:
”The right has been leading in the beard movement recently, and I think the left has been trying to play catch-up,” [Professor Oldstone-Moore] added.
Obligatory link to “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. (Isolated bassist camera for those who want to see Entwistle's master class in playing)
The parting on the left
Is now parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight
faceh
13m ago
Indeed, once you clear the dozen other hurdles and expectations she'll have too.
I'm just pointing out that if you optimize for the 'wrong' thing, you could end up in a local maxima that gets you more likes in general, but actually filters out the women you'd really be happy to have.
And hey, if you get one and have to 'settle' a bit, its not so bad.
But if EVERYONE is optimizing for the same set of things, and the pool of women is fixed, you're really just creating a zero sum game that means you can get nothing at all despite (because of?) giving up on the things you really like.
I repeat, the pool of women is mostly fixed, so why do you want to optimize for the same thing every other guy is optimizing for?
It was more than that, but not much more (...) and the right's reaction had all the hallmarks of a moral panic
Several European countries passed gender self-ID laws, last year the town hall where I live was draped in "TRANS DAY OF REMEMBRANCE" banners, the whole "Gender Affirming Care" thing is a fiasco based on no evidence, and a failure of scientific institutions to do proper filtering, there's people being harassed by the police or outright arrested for not buying the gender ideology, or for mild jokes... Yes please go on and tell me how these things are indicative of a moral panic. I guess it's completely normal for sweeping reforms in accordance with a specific ideology to take place, when the influence of said ideology is nothing but a moral panic.
And at the national level, this rhetoric was soundly rejected within the Democratic party.
No it hasn't. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, probably not even you, has ever rejected it. What happened is that Democrats noticed that it's losing them the election, so they're trying to turn the volume down, but they did absolutely nothing to reject it.
Academics did not adequately argue against the mass movement. It is not the case, for instance, that the experts in western history, literature, or philosophy were more likely to argue against the mass movement in any substantive way. This is problematic: if learning the best of western culture does not lead to protecting said culture in any genuine sense when it matters the most, then how great is the actual utility of such learning?
Probably shouldn't have let so many activists and grievance scholars critical of Western civ into the henhouse.
Maybe this is where being Western gets you into trouble. Others would accept that, while their beliefs are true, education is a matter of indoctrinating people into viewing those alleged facts through the right lens. Westerners think argument will lead to the correct conclusion so why does it matter? Some people allowed themselves to be anesthetized by claims of institutional neutrality.
Random people online were able to sense a threat that leading experts weren’t able to sense, and made arguments that leading academics did not make. Why?
People did sense it, the ones in spaces with the activists just had to be terrified. The "why not transracialism?" argument everyone uses online, for example, led to a huge shitstorm for Rebecca Tuvel. I think someone like Weinstein didn't know what he was getting into, and Peterson just has a naturally grandiose personality and an ideology that reacts very badly to being shamed (if you're charitable, his psychological background makes him very suspicious of moral tyrants)
The other problem is that a lot of the more established people in institutions who could say something hate the enemies of the modern social justice movement more than they do the socjus types (agreeing with them on what they think are the important points and being baffled when it's not enough), and would rather be in denial than grant them an inch . Trace more or less summed up the dynamics when one set of consistent deniers ran into problems getting hired elsewhere (I suppose when you already have a job and seniority it doesn't seem worth it to rock the boat)
What lesson can be taken from this? Don't fall asleep at the wheel while the pipeline for educating your kids and new elites is taken over by your enemies. That's about it.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
22m ago
Yes, this. This is who I am, this is who I deliberately signaled that I am. The kind of person I filtered for is someone who not only doesn't have a problem with this, but sees it as a positive. The woman who I eventually found and married is the kind of woman who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much. We have literally never gone out on a restaurant date just the two of us, because neither of us enjoys that environment and only go in a group when socially pressured by friends and family.
I thought my girlfriend and I were the most introverted couple out there, but we like going to restaurants and visiting scenic sites. Though I admit, there's a lot of "watch youtube on the couch."
It's interesting that a lot of dating advice is "be attractive" "be extraverted", and introverts have a hard time dating. I wonder at times how introverted women are meeting men. Perhaps the answer is "they aren't"; I have a theory that introverted women make up a majority of the "women going their own way" and not dating. I don't know that I've ever dated, or seriously considered dating, or asked out, a woman I would consider extraverted, and I wonder at times whether this contributed to my limited success back when I was on the market.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
just now
Ah, Kodaka's works, one of my favorite subjects.
But this phrase, that an artist should "express themselves", makes me nervous, increasingly nervous, for reasons that I don't fully understand myself and have never been able to entirely articulate.
That's because the implication, which is "[express themselves] within the service of a greater whole", has been lost. (Can't imagine why that would be more likely to apply to artists from highly conformist cultures at all.)
This is also the problem with 'modern' art, by the way: when the creation of a thing is not only fundamentally selfish (it isn't interested in how you'll view it), but the work itself doesn't serve any other aesthetic purpose. It's the "doesn't owe you femininity" of the art world.
Ever notice that, especially evident with how the Western world interacts with other Kodaka VNs, that 'how the presentation will be perceived' is a central element of every ambiguous-gender character (Chihiro [Danganronpa] and Halara [Rain Code])? Progressive critique falls over itself complaining about what pronoun to use [which is the exact opposite of this], but most of their character arcs again involve that perception and service to a greater whole, where their presentation is merely an incidental/a tool to do other things.
Made in Abyss is also a pretty good example of this (and an even better one if it makes you uncomfortable)- it's extremely offensive to Western sensibilities, and it would be to mine as well if the work was just one big centerfold of a naked limbless Riko- but the fact the author thinks that way is harnessed into a narrative that flat out doesn't work if the main characters either aren't children or have the invincibility child characters usually have.
I got weirdly obsessed with one of the girls and wanted to waifu her
Which one? The first one, the tomato, the tomboy, the onii-chan, the girlboss, the swordswoman, the one that makes fun of the audience for being Danganronpa-obsessed, Hulkamania Sister!, the ahegao-faced one, or the enemy (not that one, the other one)?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2hr ago
This is the result of the much-discussed "march through the institutions". By the time social justice began to come out in the open, the institutions -- even religious ones -- had largely already been taken over by progressives.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
3hr ago
What can we learn about optimal cultural leadership in light of the 2013-2021 social justice period?
-
Religious leaders did not adequately stand up against the mass movement. Although many conservatives see value in religious institutions as a cultural defense, mainstream Catholicism and Protestant denominations did not substantively address the social justice craze. In some cases they placated or even promoted it.
-
Academics did not adequately argue against the mass movement. It is not the case, for instance, that the experts in western history, literature, or philosophy were more likely to argue against the mass movement in any substantive way. This is problematic: if learning the best of western culture does not lead to protecting said culture in any genuine sense when it matters the most, then how great is the actual utility of such learning?
-
The main “public critics” of the period have little in common except that they were passionate and somewhat neurotic men. Yarvin, Peterson, Weinstein, Scott Adams(?). My memory of who was most dominant in this period is somewhat hazy, maybe someone with a better memory can correct me. There were more psychologists among critics than philosophers. You had people like Stefan Molyneux passionately criticizing the proto-movement well before its zenith. His Twitter attests to his neuroticism.
-
Random people online were able to sense a threat that leading experts weren’t able to sense, and made arguments that leading academics did not make. Why?
It’s difficult to come away with clear takeaways. IMO: (1) it is beneficial to increase anonymous discussion, as this laid the groundwork for future criticism, and allowed for arguments to spread which would otherwise be banned. (2) It may be essential to increase the number of passionate and neurotic men, over men with other skills, as the major critics were more often passionate and somewhat crazy. A “passionate” temperament is occasionally inaccurate, and may result in behavior that leads institutions to weed them out — but their utility in sensing and addressing threats compensates for the occasional bout of craziness.
There is a funny review of Jordan Peterson from 2013, possibly the first time anyone commented about his personality online. It was made on the anonymous literature board of 4chan in 2013, long before his rise to fame.
he's craaaaazy. he so crazy. I had a class immediately following one of his lectures like, his was from 1:15-3:15 in Room 101., and my different classes was from 3:25-5:25 in Room 101 too. ok? So... he would totally bug out if someone opened the door early. Like, screaming fits and stuff. my prof (who was just a postdoc and wasn't going to get tenured at u of t) encouraged us all to fuck with his head because in addition to being a rageaholic spaz, peterson would also leave the podium really dirty. also, he lectures in a cape for some reason. he went on this ontario talk show with his daughter talking about how they're both clinically depressed bla bla, I feel bad that she's his dad, that must be hard to deal with
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Religious leaders pushed back against LGBT in the Catholic and evangelical cases; mainline Protestants no.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
59m ago
Whites had the nation you are envisaging and even more than that.
This assumes more continuity of people and culture than is advisable.
actually this makes us feel pretty bad when we look at in comparison to our theoretical national values.
When appealing to those national values and the ideals of the Founders, modern folk do tend to forget John Adams' ominous line- "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." And so we reap that failure mode.
If the rule brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
Or one of those other pithy lines, like "liberalism is not a suicide pact." A libertarian arguing for open borders is not a result of mental illness. For any other ideology, the root cause is at least mental illness adjacent. By extension, "white guilt" (and many other racial sicknesses) should be in the DSM.
There's a really nasty lesson here; that moral "improvement" has incredibly high costs for a culture. Either a culture has to be fully right and never commit even a single evil act, or go Full Evil and salt the earth behind you; anything in between tends to result in a blood curse.
The things you complain about are already the tat for white peoples tit! (so to speak!)
Sounds like a subcategory of Onlyfans, or an Aella stunt. English is funny.
Goodguy
1hr ago
As someone who thinks that no organized religion that I am aware of is accurate to reality, I am actually glad that religious leaders did not do more against wokism. I think that this helped anti-wokism to plausibly portray itself as being rooted in reason rather than in superstitions or religious emotions. And for me, that is what I want anti-wokism to be rooted in. One of my main problems with wokism, besides what I consider to be its deleterious effects on public attitudes towards things important things like policing, is that I consider it to simply be inaccurate. This is something that would annoy me about wokism even if it had no deleterious impacts on my life in any way. So I do not want to use other things things that I consider to be untrue, like organized religion, to battle it.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2hr ago
Religious leaders did not adequately stand up against the mass movement.
Academics did not adequately argue against the mass movement.
They ARE the movement bruh.
This is problematic: if learning the best of western culture does not lead to protecting said culture in any genuine sense when it matters the most, then how great is the actual utility of such learning?
People have been asking this for at least a century. "The Nazis listened to Wagner and read Goethe and they still plunged the entire planet into total war, how is that possible?"
Philosophy in the Socratic tradition (and if we can speak of a "western tradition" at all, as distinct from other traditions, then we must start with Socrates) never promised wisdom. It promised a love of wisdom; it promised a critique of those who pretend to wisdom. But wisdom itself is for the gods alone. So it is unsurprising when mortals do things that are unwise.
The main “public critics” of the period have little in common except that they were passionate and somewhat neurotic men.
You have to be something of a weirdo to violate social consensus as publicly and flagrantly as Peterson did.
Random people online were able to sense a threat that leading experts weren’t able to sense, and made arguments that leading academics did not make.
Because the experts wanted it to happen, they couldn't perceive it as a threat if it wasn't threatening to them in the first place.
PokerPirate
2hr ago
Flagged as consensus building.
What you call "optimal cultural leadership" is really just "how to make my outgroup not get in power". And your use of neutral language to cover this switch up is bad rhetoric.
A very large percentage of Americans still find the "social justice craze" to be a good thing, including many of the academics/religious leaders/politicians you are critiquing for not being anti-social justice craze from early on. It's fine for you to be anti-social justice craze. But you shouldn't be assuming that everyone else is or that it is the norm around here.
FWIW, I would be very interested in reading an ideologically neutral account of the failures of conservative leadership to account for the rise of wokism, and what lessons can be learned in order to better spread/suppress future ideologies.
SSCReader
36m ago
If the rule brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
I mean America is pretty great in my opinion.
Moral improvement should have costs surely? If being moral was easy and cheap then everyone would do it. If you want to be moral you are explicitly making decisions that are worse practically, because if they were better practically you wouldn't have to be moral to choose them. Being moral mean soften looking at the most efficient choice and not making it. You risk your life to dive into the river to save the child and so on and so forth.
The ancestors of America brought the wolf in (as per Jefferson), they could later have chosen to be immoral and kill/deport all the wolves. Or moral and have to contend with what enslaving a race means for race relations and the future when you let them go. They chose the latter. That means their descendants have to deal with that choice, for better or for ill. Being immoral is often better practically. But it isn't what America was founded to aspire to. I don't think that's a nasty lesson in as much as a lesson about reality. Choices have consequences. Being better than you were does not immunize you against previous choices. It's easy to go back and think we should have just killed them all. It probably would be easier. But morality isn't about being easier it's about being better, however you measure that.
"Jefferson wrote that maintaining slavery was like holding “a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”17 He thought that his cherished federal union, the world’s first democratic experiment, would be destroyed by slavery. To emancipate slaves on American soil, Jefferson thought, would result in a large-scale race war that would be as brutal and deadly as the slave revolt in Haiti in 1791. But he also believed that to keep slaves in bondage, with part of America in favor of abolition and part of America in favor of perpetuating slavery, could only result in a civil war that would destroy the union."
America you will note, managed to not have the union destroyed, not have a full scale race war and has not as yet been destroyed. And part of the reason for that is because efforts were made to make up for slavery. The Civil Rights Act, Affirmative Action and the like were promises to ADOS that they didn't need to resort to a race war to get their place in America. The white guilt you speak of as a mental illness was vital in charting a course that has made great strides.
Is it perfect? Not at all. Racial resentment did not vanish. Black people are still poor compared to whites. But assuming you think genocide is bad, the outcome has to be measured against that. Not against perfection.
MathWizard
Good things are good
38m ago
There's a difference between someone sharing all of your interests, and someone who is willing to tolerate all of your interests. Even if they don't share the same hobbies, you don't want to date someone who fundamentally is unwilling to accept a part of you. If someone is going to be scared off by me liking anime, I want to scare them off instantly, not 5 dates later when they find out. Now, granted, there is some middle ground where some people might be willing to accept anime in someone who they already know is sane and not a pedophile but would screen it off on a stranger, but that still indicates some level of judgemental that I personally would rather filter out too.
And beyond the truly negative stereotypes, it signals that you're the kind of guy who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much.
Yes, this. This is who I am, this is who I deliberately signaled that I am. The kind of person I filtered for is someone who not only doesn't have a problem with this, but sees it as a positive. The woman who I eventually found and married is the kind of woman who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much. We have literally never gone out on a restaurant date just the two of us, because neither of us enjoys that environment and only go in a group when socially pressured by friends and family. When given the choice, we usually stay home and play games, where we both want to be.
Positives and negatives are subjective and high variance. And ultimately are scored from the single unique perspective of the person you end up with. They are not averaged. Your value as a romantic partner is not the average value ascribed to you by women collectively, but the value from the perception of the one person you actually end up with. So if you have niche interests and traits with high variance, where rather than everyone slightly disliking them, some people strongly dislike them and other rarer people strongly like them, then you want to filter for and find the people who like them, and then they become positive traits.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1hr ago
I'm not a mod and I don't speak for them, I only speak for myself and my own opinions.
There obviously is an anti-woke consensus here, I don't see what point there is in denying that. That doesn't mean that wokes aren't welcome, it simply means they're not in the majority. The rules about neutrality and consensus building made more sense in the early days when this was all new and the ideological split was closer to even, but now we've gotten to the point where the regulars have been here for 10 years, and they all know each other's positions fairly well. Nitpicking someone about consensus building this late in the game seems a bit silly. As though every post in a 10+ year dialogue has to assume that we're starting from a totally clean blank slate.
I think it's good to still have the rule about consensus building on the books to deal with particularly obnoxious violations (like, saying "obviously we all know that [woke position] is wrong..."), but I don't think it should be enforced that stringently.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
To take a common example, the United States imports a lot of the goods used in our defense industry. Particularly computer chips and the parts used in their production.
In theory, defense supply chains aren't supposed to do this. In practice, counterfeit components do sneak in unexpectedly (and there are safeguards to reduce this risk), but I don't think Lockheed (or its subcontractors) are allowed to design in Chinese (or even Taiwanese) bolts and capacitors into an F-35 without a whole lot of paperwork, if at all. There are domestic component manufacturers for those, but often they're not used for vanilla commercial products because they are pricey. There is a reason "mil-spec" components are expensive: maybe part of it is grift, but part of it is supply chain management.
hydroacetylene
7m ago
I can remember a time when males with long hair were… seen poorly, and usually tilted progressive. But beards seem to have been just unfashionable and not particularly lib coded.
Rov_Scam
10m ago
I understand what you're saying, and I'm happy for you, but GP was giving generalized advice. Like I said, most people aren't that selective. I can't imagine giving someone dating advice that consists of "list all your fringe interests that won't impress women at best and turn them off at worst and plug away for years with little success in the hopes of attracting your one true love". It's not what most people are looking for. And while I understand not wanting to get too involved before finding out it's a dealbreaker, it's not like you're going to keep it a secret. Like I said in my post, when you're online dating, you are your profile, and you're going to be your profile until she meets you in person. The profile is to get your foot in the door; after you actually meet, you're a real person, and discussing hobbies and interests is fair game for a first date, and you can tell her whatever you want on that front. And if you think that one date is too much of an investment to be worth the risk, then online dating just isn't for you, period.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13m ago
At which point I pointed out that only white people generally have the power of enabling that to happen, so the issue is not with Indians or Mexicans and so forth
But white people don't have the power to enable it (his point about them voting against it proves that). If you want to say it's not really the Indians' or Mexicans' fault I more or less agree, but I don't see how you can make that claim with resorting to advanced racism.
ArmedTooHeavily
45m ago
They have a strategic stockpile of rice! (What a thing for a government to choose to do, have the expertise to manage, etc.) Which they've opened, and only slightly pushed prices a bit.
as an aside to your point, strategic grain reserves are pretty common.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
51m ago
Not much to expand on, the race of the people making the decisions is irrelevant to what you're discussing. What were you even trying to point out by mentioning it?
I would like to register profound disagreement here. We should absolutely not relax any rules because "everybody knows we all agree." Allowing consensus building will degrade the quality of commentary significantly.
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