domain:betonit.substack.com
What can we learn about optimal cultural leadership in light of the 2013-2021 social justice period?
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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
Editing for clarity
The question is geared toward users who believe that wokeness constituted a threat — to institutions, America, truth, etc. I suppose there are some users who do not believe that wokeness was a threat. I can’t recall seeing such a comment in years on this forum, but if you’re such a user, you are of course welcome to comment and critique in any way that you’d like. Feel free to comment on the premise, the points, a tangent.
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Why were the individuals leading the fight against wokeness outside of the traditional framework of understanding and designating cultural authority? The study of philosophy, the study of history, the study of great works, the study and authority of religion — these things did not create any of the influential “fighters” publicly arguing against wokeness. If they couldn’t detect, grasp, and eliminate the threat, then how important should we consider these pursuits and domains? Why did they fail when they were needed? Are these pursuits less valuable in moral formation than generally conceived? Many conservatives believe that these mainstays of Western education are important to study; yet the students of these were impotent against the threat. There are conservatives who studied these, and who teach these.
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”Institutional capture” doesn’t factor in here because there are non-woke members of these domains, perhaps a few percent or a few tens of percents, but none of them were to be found among the influential critics of wokeness.
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It appears to me that temperament played a larger role than anything else in deciding who was instrumental in tackling the threat. Do you agree? Do you disagree? From Peterson to Musk, the great “defenders” against it were passionate and somewhat crazy personalities. They cried publicly. They had strange personal lives. If that’s the case, should temperament be considered a greater deal in the selection of authority?
I think this clarifies. There’s a mismatch between “the study of Western things leads to great moral conduct!” and the reality of how everyone behaved during a mass movement which veered toward moral hysteria. “Traditional education” did not avail anything. This is interesting, provided of course that you agree with the premise.
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.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
22hr ago
Life is fragile and can be snuffed out at any moment. The day she crashed her bike I hugged her as tightly as her scrapes would allow. Not all parents are so lucky.
Ok, cool, but what policy do we implement to fix it? Because there are very much people out there trying to use this tragedy to implement a variety of policies. It's amazing how many anti-gubmint conservatives turn into nanny state liberals when a natural disaster occurs. Which is why it's important not to get too caught up in tragedies, it quickly becomes a con designed to get you to buy into an agenda.
I'm sure the crash was awful for your daughter and you both, but I'm having trouble parsing how you told the story. Are you taking an excessive parental responsibility when you say that you "forgot" to teach her about the brakes? Because it's just hard for me to imagine not going over the brakes before you even get on the bike in a "parts of the bike" kind of way, or a curious kid just asking what x does. I'm kind of assuming you did tell her about the brakes, but didn't drill using them enough that she remembered how to use the brakes quickly under pressure.
But regardless, what policy could prevent such a bike accident? Kids can't ride bikes! Parents can't teach their kids to ride bikes, they have to be enrolled in a Licensed Bicycle School! Kids can only ride bikes with complex and expensive Automatic Emergency Braking systems! The latter two are of course equivalent to "poor/disinterested kids can't ride bikes."
So sure, hug your kid. But keep your priorities straight.
PokerPirate
13hr ago
I've noticed the growth of a certain type of middle-aged-white-guy-dad who has a shortly trimmed beard and short hair. This is the style that requires the least maintenance (trim beard once/week, cut hair once every 2-3 months), and so seems to be popular amongst the very practical.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
16hr 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
16hr 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.
At the risk of a self-dox, I have an advanced degree in Applied Math, and multiple published papers and patents related to the use of machine learning in robotics and signal processing. I was introduced to the rationalist community through a mutual friend in the SCA and was initally excited by the opportunity to discuss the philosophical and engineering challenges of developing artificial intelligence. However as time went on i largely gave up trying to discuss AI with people outside the industry as it became increasingly apparent to me that most rationalists were more interested in the use of AI as a conceptual vehicle to push thier particular brand of Silicon Valley woo than they were the aforementioned philosophical and engineering challenges.
The reason i don't talk about it is in large part that i find it difficult to speak honestly without sounding uncharitable. I believe that the "wordcels" take these bots seriously because they naturally associate "the ability to string words together" with intent/sentience while simultaneously lacking sufficient background knowledge and/or understanding of algorithmic behavior to recognize that everthing the OP describes lies well within the bounds of expected behavior. See the post from a few weeks ago where people thought that GPT was engaged in "code-switching". What the lay-man interperts as intent is to the mathematician the functional output of the equation as described.
hydroacetylene
17hr ago
Part of adversary proof production for the modern U.S. would almost certainly be near-shoring; Mexico has one of the largest manufacturing sectors in the world and it’s probably easier to convert a pickup truck factory into a humvee factory than to build a new factory.
The other thing that seems often left out of these discussions is diversion of civilian goods(probably through rationing). Civilian boots, food, fuel, mechanical parts- it can all get diverted to the army. This is part of why I think it unlikely the modern U.S. will engage in a full blown war anytime soon- thé cuts to civilian standard of living would be a no go.
ArmedTooHeavily
14hr ago
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.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
16hr 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.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
21hr ago
A world with no fraud would have to be a high-trust society, would it not?
No, it could be a panopticon. No trust at all, but everything is verified.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
23hr ago
· Edited 21hr ago
I don't think the law is bad. As Zvi said:
TikTok is not purely an op. TikTok is a legitimate highly predatory business, and also TikTok is an op.
There have been surveys showing that most TikTok users would prefer that TikTok not exist (they're still there because everyone is there and that imposes social costs on anyone who's not), never mind the non-users. It's got massively-negative externalities - and at least part of those externalities are malicious attempts by the PRC to destroy the USA.
It is one of the roles of government to destroy things with massively-negative externalities. This is one of the primary clauses of the social contract - "we'll deal with the villains in an orderly fashion, so don't murder them in the streets". Yes, not all TikTok bans would be net-positive; Zvi was an opponent of the RESTRICT Act, for instance. But this one looks good; the scum just managed to bribe their way out.
functor
11hr ago
Beards being leftists are hardly a universal rule. European nobility and royalty have historically often been bearded. Beards are masculine.
What is dying is the 80s Reagan conservatism/enterprise institute style conservatism. The strange mix of trying to cosplay southern baptist and business elite at the same time isn't working anymore. The conservative INC aesthetic won't work forever and will have to change. Mitt Romney and JD Vance have a larger age gap than most men have between them and their fathers. Most guys aren't looking and dressing like their dad.
The left transformed in less than 50 years from Russian revolution to hippy movement. It shouldn't be shocking that the right can morph in a similar timespan.
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 personality type where he's prone to grandiosity about his positions and importance, and his ideology makes him very contemptuous of public shaming and struggle sessions (if you're charitable, his background in psychology 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, instead of admitting you're a coward you cope by claiming it's no big deal)
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.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
17hr ago
Probably because this is my background but I would conceive of it as analogous to computer security. When you are talking about adversary-proofing your production you need to have in mind, what adversary? What capabilities does that adversary have? How are they going to try and attack my production? You need to start with a Threat model and go from there. Talking about "adversary-proof" in a vacuum is as useless as talking about a "secure" computer in a vacuum. Secure from what?
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. Specifically, these parts are often imported from countries which we believe have a substantial likelihood of being adversaries in the future (primarily China). So it would be sensible to talk about adversary-proofing the United States supply chain for computer chips from China. If China decided to invade Taiwan tomorrow and we were unable to source chips from there, what are the alternatives? Same question for the case of China cutting off exports of all rare earth minerals. Crucially the answers to these questions may be different depending on who we are modeling as our adversaries and what their capabilities are.
WhiningCoil
17hr ago
Overwhelmingly, every time it's put to a vote, people vote for less immigration. People vote against affirmative action policies. People vote against racial carve outs. Don't pretend the call is coming from inside the house, and whites are inflicting this on themselves. The government is running amok, either because racial spoils are easy to lie about but still deliver votes, or because some unaccountable aspect of it has been captured by racial interest groups. Might be worth looking into that "Critical Race Theory" thing. Whenever it comes up, I always hear it's defenders claim "They aren't teaching that in schools, it's only a legal theory".
Yeah, from the legal realist perspective this whole debate is pretty settled. It'd be nice if "X shall Y" meant something. It doesn't. Even if you want to cordon off immigration law as enforcement discretion -- pretty hard to do honestly, given the only enforcement in this law is the fed AG going after companies -- we have other examples. King v. Burwell is best-known for its denouement, but earlier parts of the case dismissed challenges to the continuous delays in the employer mandate as unredressable, and it wasn't even a surprise then. That, likewise, included a disclaimer that the government would surrender any possibility of future lawsuit on the matters in the covered time period.
Without explicit mechanism for private modes of action available to actual people (and that's not a guarantee!), or a one-off 'special solicitude' from SCOTUS, "shall" means less than a Zoomer saying "literally". Yes, businesses acting in violation of the law could theoretically get punished under a different administration, despite this 'dispensation' -- it wouldn't even trigger the various rules against ex post facto laws for a bunch of reasons, though there would possibly be some due process concerns -- but anyone paying the slightest bit of attention knows that it's either not going to happen, or will only happen if a Dem President wants to (threaten to) completely crush some disfavored business.
Which would be fine if Vladeck were some naive rando who still thought the text of the law mattered, or predicating his analysis as clearly on the "ought" side of the is-ought dividing line. But no. The House of Representatives couldn't challenge these rules even if it specifically involved the government's taxation power; claiming that a random competitor might succeed in a challenge of an enforcement discretion letter raises serious questions about anyone with nontrivial knowledge of relevant caselaw's competence or honesty. And Vladeck works as a professor of law, at a school that charges thousands of dollars a credit-hour to listen to him!
OliveTapenade
9hr ago
I continue to be baffled that anybody takes these bots seriously, or sees Grok or xAI or their competitors as anything other than nonsense generators. A slight change to the flavour of the nonsense doesn't really change my opinion any. Perhaps it moves me in the direction of thinking that Musk is childish and temperamental, but I already thought that, so it doesn't make much difference.
HughCaulk
9hr ago
I think wokism is the logical conclusion of blank slate, everyone-is-equal democracy. Blank slate meaning that everyone is born the same, there are no genetic or inborn advantages in intelligence or drive between demographics, and that everyone is equal. This is a sort of immaculate conception myth that all modern liberal democracies believe, not just woke people.
Progressives or “wokists” take this to the logical conclusion: since demographics are clearly not equal in terms of educational achievement, wealth accumulation, property ownership, etc, but since they were exactly equal at birth, it logically HAS to be some systematic form of oppression to cause these sort of disparities.
The logic is sound, but the premise is flawed. Human Bio-diversity is a thing. Ever watch the NBA or NFL? It’s predominantly black, but there aren’t many who have an issue with this. At the upper echelons of business, it’s predominantly white and Asian. Many have problems with this, and a lot of flawed programs are devised as a result like DEI and Affirmative Action.
Unfortunately, you aren’t really allowed to talk about these things in polite company, but most people fundamentally understand this.
hydroacetylene
10hr ago
I'm continuing to register my prediction that AGI will prove useless due to being deranged, and this problem will prove unfixable. The singularity will be a million copies of Chris Langen refusing to do anything useful when they could schizopost instead.
sodiummuffin
11hr ago
The reason people thought there was a "client list" to begin with was because of people using "Epstein list" to refer to the lists of everyone who ever flew to a party hosted on his island or were mentioned in the court documents in any context.
The Independent: The Epstein List: Full list of names revealed in unsealed court records
BBC: Jeffrey Epstein list: Who is named in court filings?
Newsweek: Jeffrey Epstein List in Full as Dozens of Names Revealed
Yeah of course it didn't exist, I personally saw the rumor of its existence develop from people saying "Epstein list" to imply things that the actual Epstein lists clearly did not imply.
yunyun333
12hr ago
Epstein DID kill himself. Also there's no client list. Stop asking questions
The US Department of Justice and FBI have concluded that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein did not have a so-called client list that could implicate high-profile associates, and that he did take his own life - contradicting long-held conspiracy theories about the infamous case.
According to a two-page Department of Justice (DoJ) and FBI memo, investigators found no "incriminating list" of clients and "no credible evidence" that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals. Investigators also released footage they say supports the medical examiner's conclusion that Epstein died by suicide while being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. The memo adds that investigators "did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties".
Some have claimed the conclusions reached in the memo contradict statements from Attorney General Pam Bondi in a Fox News interview that aired in February. "The DoJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients, will that really happen?", Bondi was asked on Fox, to which she replied: "It's sitting on my desk right now to review". White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said on Monday the attorney general was referring to all the files that are related to Epstein's crimes, rather than a specific list.
Well, there you go. It's been almost 6 years since Epstein did/didn't kill himself, and now we can close the book on the whole sordid mess (his primary accuser also happened to die by suicide (?) a few months ago). Epstein just wasn't a diligent record keeper. In unrelated news, Netanyahu nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
13hr ago
I think the reason that most institutions didn’t actually stand up against it is that most of them had been infected with nihilistic thinking decades ago, maybe centuries. The idea that nothing really mattered and nothing is really true left the traditional institutions with no footing with which to push back. The churches had long been ecumenical institutions that often hold to nothing as essential to Christianity. They’ve fallen to the point that many of them no longer hold things like the Trinity, Solus Christus, or the need for genuine repentance as essential. Fewer hold that the Bible defines sin or the proper way to live. So from the position that nothing is true or matters, how do you assert that something is wrong?
Academics has been nihilistic and post-rational for about the same amount of time. It’s no longer a search for truth, it’s an opinion laundering operation with a bunch of job training programs attached. How does a professor defend against demands from the woke? He can’t point to facts, he’s long since abandoned them. An institution that cannot defend a definition of woman is not going to stand for much of anything.
Goodguy
15hr 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.
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.
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