It's incredibly offensive. They're projecting how English works on gendered nouns onto other language (Spanish) and then getting worked up over it. It's astounding that the people pushing the term don't see the irony.
Also nicely ironic that the language Latin is gendered. So "Latin America" in English is "America latina" in standard Spanish, and Google wants to translate it to "Americae" in Latin ("Americas", plural, feminine gender, nominative case.)
I have seen some concern about this issue in El Salvador. But "latinx"? Not once. It's unpronounceable in Spanish. You only see the letter X in indigenous place-names like Mexico or Oaxaca, and there it's pronounced kind of like a fricative version of our H, which can't work at the end of the word. I've heard native English speakers say it's pronounced "lah-TINKS", which is so obviously foreign it's painful.
Two solutions I've seen native speakers employ: Sometimes in written language, the @ symbol will be used because it's like an A and an O overlayed ("latin@s"). When speaking, the only thing that could work would be E, "latines", which at least would be pronounceable and would rhyme. Did the idiot who thought of "latinx" think about rhyming? Spanish speakers write poetry and music too.
> But "latinx"? Not once. It's unpronounceable in Spanish. You only see the letter X in indigenous place-names like Mexico or Oaxaca, and there it's pronounced kind of like a fricative version of our H, which can't work at the end of the word. I've heard native English speakers say it's pronounced "lah-TINKS", which is so obviously foreign it's painful.
That's pretty ironic. I never made that connection, though I only have a basic familiarity with Spanish phonetics.
My understanding is that "latinx" is pretty much exclusively a performative English-speaking white liberal thing. It's not very pronounceable in English, either. I've never actually heard it spoken, but mentally I read it as "latin-ex." Personally, I don't think I'd ever even try to use "lah-TINKS," since I'd be afraid it'd be interpreted as an ethnic slur.
This video gives some background to the term, and pronounces it latin-ex: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bs339gW_xqU (I tried to pick a short video without any adverts.)
Fundamentally languages have been evolving in a reductive manner, which is why adding syllables to terms like in "Latino/Latina -> Latin-x -> Latinx+" won't last. People will quickly eschew these terms for things that are easier to pronounce.
There's no malice in this - just a natural evolution of language towards efficiency.
As such its an endless cycle: new stuff is introduced to everyday language then reduced to something simpler - often using words that fell out of use, shadowing them with new meaning.
It's quite possible the new word for "Latinx+", whatever it is, will simply be considered genderless - if societal pressure manages to displace the old terms.
People have been trying to change gender terms forever. It's nothing recent. I recall discussions about the use of the non gendered pronoun 'e' years ago.
As far as I'm aware, the motivation behind this had nothing to do with social justice for trans people, but more as a potential alternative to the awkward/ambiguous singular they. (Or at least that's how I would've interpreted it back then, having been a teenager with no real concept of or experience with LGBT issues.)
> a potential alternative to the awkward/ambiguous singular they
Spivak pronouns go back a very long way, though they were most popularized in the early '80s by Spivak using them in technical documentation. The popularity of singular they as a general purpose pronoun is much more recent.
In English I’ve understood it is common to use a singular they as a non gendered pronoun. In Swedish the newly introduced hen is in quite widespread use instead of han/hon (he/she).
If that is your concern, just use the noun. “The politician made a statement to the press. The politician was shocked.” Or if that is too inelegant, reformulate the sentence: “The politician expressed his shock to the press.” Or use the verb to carry the information that you are referring to the singular: “They was shocked.”, but I guess that would be painful to read for some native English speakers.
Yeah, but there’s no good solution there. If you use a pronoun that can apply to multiple subjects or objects in a sentence, it will always be ambiguous.
> If you use a pronoun that can apply to multiple subjects or objects in a sentence, it will always be ambiguous.
My point exactly. There's nothing inherently unique about singular "they" in that respect.
Sure, there are certain circumstances in which a gendered pronoun removes ambiguity, just as honorifics or age/social status based pronouns would remove ambiguity in many instances involving multiple male subjects/objects if English used them (like some other languages do), but that really isn't a reason not to use singular "they" with the same degree of care to avoid ambiguity one also has to use "he" and "she".
Gendered nouns are kind of silly and antiquated when you think about it though, and many languages have a neuter gender too (e.g. German). The "X" suffix is an attempt by younger Spanish speakers to introduce a neuter gender to their native language.
English doesn't have gendered nouns, but we do have gendered pronouns, which not all languages have. Chinese doesn't have gendered pronouns, which is why you'll often hear native Chinese speakers accidentally refer to a woman in English as "he".
Today, young English speakers are trying to popularize "they" as an English neuter pronoun, and it's not too absurd: we already use "they" this way when the gender of the person is unknown. For example, if you found a random wallet, you might say, "Someone lost their wallet," and it would be acceptable.
Intentionally changing language isn't unprecedented either: in the 1970s, feminists successfully introduced "Ms." as a female equivalent to "Mr." to denote a woman who may or may not be married, (instead of Miss and Mrs.).
Ultimately, most language evolution is driven by young people: they're bending their native tongue to better describe their world. And that's a good thing. Language is supposed to be fluid and dynamic. We shouldn't be constraining our thoughts to a static unchanging language invented by our ancestors to describe their world that no longer exists. It's a tool meant to serve us, we're not meant to limit ourselves to it.
> Chinese doesn't have gendered pronouns, which is why you'll often hear native Chinese speakers accidentally refer to a woman in English as "he".
This is interesting because I've heard this explanation before from an international student. You still have 他/he 她/she despite them being pronounced the same, so the gendered pronouns still do exist, but the mistake of switching he/she in conversation is still commonly made.
It's not like Vietnamese where Em ấy or Ẻm (both meaning he/she for someone younger than the speaker) where a genderless pronoun is used, and yet I've seen he/she mixed up a lot less often.
I guess that if you speak Chinese as a first language you're not expecting to need to distinguish between 他 and 她when speaking, so it's harder to remember when speaking a language that has two different pronunciations.
I believe older Chinese used 他as a fever neutral pronoun and using 她 is a fairly recent change to mimic western languages.
> Today, young English speakers are trying to popularize "they" as an English neuter pronoun, and it's not too absurd: we already use "they" this way when the gender of the person is unknown.
I can understand why 'they' is chosen as a way to introduce neutrality of gender but it pains me that this also introduces of ambiguity of plurality. We _really_ need a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun. We're lucky that our first and second-person pronouns and our plural pronouns by fluke of language evolution just happen to already be gender neutral. It's just this last one -- third-person singular -- that is causing all this discussion, political fights, and newspaper column inches. It seems absurd to me when we could just call each other ze/zim (or whatever, the actual word doesn't really matter) and call it a day. If it turns out that the only way we can shut up about pronouns is to sacrifice 'they', then I guess that's an acceptable loss. But it does feel like all we need is a tiny tweak of the language to iron out this wrinkle by introducing something new (or taking one from another language, if that's more palatable).
Somewhat similar, here in Scotland we often say "youse" to mean "you and those with you", or "youse two" to mean "you two".
A similar concept exists in Mandarin Chinese, where "ni3" means "you" and "ni3men" to mean "you and those with you", but there is also "ta1" as a gender-neutral, singular "they" (that is, he/she), and "ta1men" as a gender-neutral, plural "they".
There are suggestions for neutral pronouns in English but in my experience they get even more resistance than they/them for being ridiculous/fake/made up/not real/etc. xyr/xym or ve/vem of zir/zem are all things I’ve seen ridiculed.
> We're lucky that our first and second-person pronouns and our plural pronouns by fluke of language evolution just happen to already be gender neutral.
Is it "a fluke"? You generally know a lot about the first and second person in a conversation. You know yourself and you see who you're talking to. There's no need for more precision for the first or second person. When trying to point to a specific individual other than one of the two interlocutors, however, finer distinctions help. That doesn't seem like "a fluke" to me. That actually seems to make quite a lot of sense.
It's worth bearing in mind that singular-they is almost as old as plural-they in usage. I think it's more likely we can settle into an existing valid usage (that spent a while being argued against by style guides in the 19th century) than gain acceptance on something completely new.
> I can understand why 'they' is chosen as a way to introduce neutrality of gender but it pains me that this also introduces of ambiguity of plurality.
Me too, deeply, but I've solved this: What we need to do is update plural they/them/theirs to theys/thems/theirses.
> The "X" suffix is an attempt by younger Spanish speakers to introduce a neuter gender to their native language.
That's not what I've seen. "Latinx" isn't pronouncable in Spanish. The actual attempt to introduce a neutral gender uses the suffix -e. For example "les estudiantes ruidoses" or "mis amigues".
> The "X" suffix is an attempt by younger Spanish speakers to introduce a neuter gender to their native language.
Did it really come from native Spanish speakers or is it an exonym? It is not the preferred term for the vast majority of Hispanic people even in the US.[1]
> Today, young English speakers are trying to popularize "they" as an English neuter pronoun
A Comedy of Errors (William Shakespeare, c.1594), Act 4, Scene 3:
> There's not a man I meet but doth salute me. As if I were their well-acquainted friend
Singular 'they' even when the gender is known has been popular in the English language for hundreds of years. Even longer than singular 'you'.
>> There's not a man I meet but doth salute me. As if I were their well-acquainted friend
> Singular 'they' even when the gender is known has been popular in the English language for hundreds of years. Even longer than singular 'you'.
It seems to me that the negation qualifies your Shakespeare example for OED's explanation of "I. 2. Often used in reference to a singular noun made universal by every, any, no, etc., or applicable to one of either sex (= ‘he or she’)." That is distinct from a reference to a single, specific individual, which using "they" as a singular gender-non-specific pronoun with unrestricted usage would necessarily include (things like "Peter said *they wanted some tea"). Presumably this is what was meant by GP.
> The "X" suffix is an attempt by younger Spanish speakers to introduce a neuter gender to their native language.
This isn’t true. The term is enormously unpopular with latinos, only 3% use it. The entire spanish language uses gendered nouns, and unlike german has no neuter. The term may have originated with puerto rican academics but it is mostly used by English speakers.
> Today, young English speakers are trying to popularize "they" as an English neuter pronoun, and it's not too absurd: we already use "they" this way when the gender of the person is unknown. For example, if you found a random wallet, you might say, "Someone lost their wallet," and it would be acceptable.
It's actually reasonably weird to propose since usages historically mattered. Also that's what gives you collocations, idioms, etc. If you look at grammars of English, you find plenty of examples of similar generalizations that people consistently refuse to make, such as the lack of "I could X" in the sense of "I was able to X", even though though nobody bats an eye at "I couldn't X" in the sense of "I wasn't able to X".
Languages also evolve due to political/social movement pressures. With words taking on new meanings so that the old connotations and slogans can be attached to these new meanings.
I speak Spanish and frequently talk to native speakers from all over Latin America, given that I use Spanish in my job and have a number of Latin friends. I’ve still yet to meet a native speaker who likes “Latinx”, although I did hear one on the radio once. (A college student).
I'm glad that the Economist points out at the end that 'wokeness' has become a favorite of business, and the reason is pretty obvious, as a movement it's self-defeating because all identitarian politics eventually ends in infighting, with its subjective, choice and preference based worldview it's actually ill-equipped to move anything.
It might exist in academia or PR departments or journalism or facebook pages and twitter threads but it does very little to affect material relations and power structures, so it's if anything the Left and not anyone else who should be concerned with it.
It's always surprising to me that this seems to be such a Conservative topic of concern who if anything should be glad that it occupies so much mindspace.
To an extent left and right are asymmetrical---leftist groups tend to be groups organized around being leftist as their main purpose, while "rightist" groups (churches, police unions, gun enthusiasts) tend to be rightist incidentally. Neo Nazis feel like the exception that proves the rule.
Maybe we need a new definition for these extreme groups? I've always found using left and right to describe authoritarian hellscapes to be a little off...
And to be honest I've always found using left and right when viewed from an American perspective to not work either. In my country the furthest "right" mainstream party would sit a mile to the left of your democrats while the republicans would be considered "extreme right" bordering on illegal.
You can look at the political compass the Libertarians are always using. Then you learn that Stalin is a left-authoritarian and Hitler is a right-authoritarian and the lesson is that all authoritarianism is a hellscape.
But even that is just a toy model. If Alice is pro-choice and anti-gun, those are in opposite quadrants. If Bob is the exact opposite, do we say that they're both in the middle, even though they disagree on everything?
> In my country the furthest "right" mainstream party would sit a mile to the left of your democrats while the republicans would be considered "extreme right" bordering on illegal.
The thing about the US is that the federal government is a kleptocracy, so both parties never actually do the things they say they're going to do.
If you judge the Democrats by what they say, they're pretty far to the left. But then they don't do that.
If you judge the Republicans by what they say, they're pretty far to the right. But then they don't do that.
People who want to claim that the country is far to the right then point to what the Democrats actually do and what the Republicans say they want to do. But, for example, the US has government spending as a percentage of GDP in line with the Netherlands or Australia and not dramatically less than the UK or Germany. If you take all the law books full of regulations in the US and put them on a scale, not many countries could match them. If you go back to the political compass, it's maybe more authoritarian than some of Western Europe -- certainly more people are in prison -- but left vs. right? By what objective measure?
It's not government spending as an absolute number, it's who - specifically which class - benefits from the money.
It's the difference between building useful infrastructure and giving a huge handout to a billionaire who is already one of the richest people on the planet.
The US generally leans authoritarian, and bullying at all levels is endemic. That includes the nominal "left", although the far right in the US tends to be far worse. Because while the US left is irrational about a few things, the US far right is hopelessly irrational about almost everything - and armed with it.
Yours is a well-written comment and I'd give it more than one upvote if I could. I wonder if the reality of Democrats' rather strong indifference to progressive economics and meaningful reform--and the GOP spending taxpayer dollars like a drunken sailor--rubs some folks the wrong way.
Well to be a conservative in america (ie, to want to conserve american forma of constitutionalism) is to be a Europeans leftist, because the American constitution is a left wing document when seen through the eyes of European politics.
The Nazis murdered all of the leftists in their party. Using the word "socialist" in the name as a marketing tool does not make them leftist in any sense at all.
>if you have a right/left clock Hitler stays at 11:59 and Stalin at 00:01
Stalin is so "left" that he's touches shoulder with extreme "right". Stalin and Hitler where so extreme that you cannot talk about right or left (hence the 2 minute difference)
Having a wiki page is not usually a good proxy for academic consensus, especially for a controversial topic and especially when "Criticism" is a big chunk of the article.
My "proof" is the fact that every academic I know in history, sociology, and political science laughs whenever the topic is brought up. This is across institutions.
Conservatives moved to the Republican party by the sixties. Look up Strom Thurman for example.
The Nazis had help from the left at their inception, but murdered them later to gain approval from finance and law enforcement grous to consolidate power. Look up the Night of the Long Knives. The Nazis that accomplished everything we're decidedly right-wing, despite recent attempts to reverse that impression.
> Conservatives moved to the Republican party by the sixties. Look up Strom Thurman for example.
The primary thing that happened in the 60s was that the Democrats stopped opposing the Civil Rights Act. The Republicans didn't start opposing it then, they voted for it, and it passed. It was the process of racism losing the support of both parties when it used to have one.
Strom Thurmond was a racist, butthurt that the Democrats finally betrayed him. His constituents kept reelecting him and the US only has one other party.
The problem with the narrative that the parties switched places is that most of their policies didn't change. When Strom Thurmond switched parties, Democrats didn't go from supporting the New Deal to opposing it. They didn't switch from pro-life to pro-choice or vice versa. Their policies are much the same as they were when they were the party of the Klan.
Which implies that racism and left vs. right are independent.
> The problem with the narrative that the parties switched places is that most of their policies didn’t change. When Strom Thurmond switched parties, Democrats didn’t go from supporting the New Deal to opposing it.
To the extent there was a switch, it was between the pre-New Deal alignment and the alignment after the end of the double (New Deal and Civil Rights) realignments, Thurmond was from a constituency that was with the Democrats before either realignment and that left with the Civil Rights realignment.
> Their policies are much the same as they were when they were the party of the Klan.
Their politics on racial issues aren’t the same as before the Civil Rights realignment, and their policies on economic issues and the role of the federal government outside of race aren’t the same as before the New Deal realignment; those two realignments overlapped, as the New Deal realignment hadn’t finished shaking out when the Civil Rights realignment (which itself took almost exactly 30 years to settle out after the usually-cited 1964 kickoff) started. Note that the rumblings of the Civil Rights realignment, while usually timed to 1964, were evident earlier, but no one else was welcoming the disaffected Democrats until after 1964, and the tension was very much with the new people and ideas being brought in due to the New Deal realignment.
> Their politics on racial issues aren’t the same as before the Civil Rights realignment
Residential zoning in the US came out of racism. Restrict multi-family zoning to keep black people out of white neighborhoods. Then use that to create separate school districts for rich suburban white kids and poor urban black kids and maintain de facto segregation after de jure segregation was made unconstitutional.
Predominantly Democrats control the high population density areas where these policies are relevant and it's still ongoing.
Today Democrats promote the construction of abortion clinics and subsidizing the procedure. Before they promoted the construction of abortion clinics for the explicitly stated purpose of encouraging black women to get abortions. It's a changed in the stated justification but it's not actually a policy change.
I think at this point a lot of modern Democrats don't even realize what the intended purpose of these policies was, because they don't like to talk about that for obvious reasons, but they're still the party's policies.
Republicans didn't have kkk members sitting in congress in the 21st century. Democrats did.
We can say they changed their ways til the cows come home but the democrats never extend such mercy to other politicians (for example, franken was expelled for much less than byrd)
No, not because of that, but they where a threat to the NSDAP.
They feared a strong democracy the most and had to take a stand against the 2nd strongest party the SPD. It was like in the USSR not about left or right, but about having 100% power in one party/person.
The NSDAP was about as left-wing as Tucker Carlson.
There seems to be an ahistorical reading popular with especially Americans today that because the NSDAP called itself a "worker party" and had some left-sounding campaign promises (though mostly in the 1920s) it was a "left-wing party".
Germany had been a monarchy until the end of the first world war. "Right wing" in Weimar Germany meant "monarchist", not "free market". The monarchy was overthrown by a left-wing coalition that rapidly split into the more centrist SPD (anti-monarchists who just wanted a free republic but not challenge the social hierarchy itself) and the various socialist tendencies (anarchists, Trotskyists, Marxists, Bolsheviks, etc). The SPD also famously allowed the (monarchist and right-wing) Freikorps to kill one of the most influential socialist groups. That's all before the NSDAP was even a thing.
The NSDAP started out as a fairly uninteresting nationalist workers' party. It went through several iterations and multiple names that increasingly brought a focus on nationalism and a hyperfixation on an imagined betrayal by the leftists causing the defeat in the Great War that ultimately became part of the Jewish conspiracy theory and the idea of Cultural Bolshevism (which you may know as "Cultural Marxism"). To the NSDAP the clear enemy were the communists, the Bolshevists, but in general "the left" including the SPD. They continued using leftist rhetoric in some of their material for a while because it worked but much like Tucker Carlson ranting about coastal elites and big corporations their answer wasn't to dismantle capitalism or tax the rich.
In the end, the NSDAP heavily vilified the communist DKP and the left-wing SPD as well as the "international Jewish bankers" (who in their mind unlike the "good, German bankers" were a nomadic people in a profession they turned parasitic by extracting the wealth from the German people and bringing it outside the nation - so to them it wasn't capitalism itself that was the problem or even banking). The right-wing conservatives liked this and even pardoned Hitler after his failed coup because they thought they could use the NSDAP to crack down on the still growing socialist movements and prevent a second communist revolution like in Russia. The Enabling Act was signed by the Christian conservative "center party". The plan worked, though not quite as intended. They did however crack down on unions and many of the first people sent to the camps were socialists and queers. They also nearly invented the idea of "public-private partnerships" although they wouldn't have called them that.
Party politics change over time and thinking that "the left" must always have been what the Democrats do and "the right" what the GOP does is not only extremely centric to American history but also ignores that even today the US political spectrum has more than two parties (not to mention the vast differences between local chapters) and none of the parties can or could ever be neatly summed up as "left" or "right".
EDIT: Before someone feels like they have to point this out: yes, the SA in particular (the security volunteers of the Nazis who went on to become their paramilitary street gang) had some people with actually somewhat leftist ideas in them and some members of the NSDAP were openly gay. Upon rising to power however the NSDAP purged (i.e. murdered) most of these people. But even the "leftist" ideas tended to be hypernationalist and be tainted by their social views (e.g. eugenics, anti-Semitism, Aryanism and homophobia). This is in part why most leftists today reject any "red-brown alliance" out of principle.
EDIT2: Since some people are prone to misunderstand points made in lengthy replies: I'm not saying Tucker Carlson or the GOP would have agreed with the NSDAP. I'm saying neither Tucker Carlson, the GOP...
No, I think you missed the point, it’s not a comparison today and the past, but in the past.
In the 1930’s the Democrats were the party of segregationists (clearly not a left wing position), but also the party of FDR expansion of social programs (clearly a left wing position).
There is a two part explanation. First parties are coalitions, and the segregationists might or might not have been the same people pushing the social programs. Secondly the parties in the US were much less aligned on ideological grounds at that time than they are now. Today the Republican Party is almost entirely conservative and the Democratic Party liberal, but back then the parties were much more mixed.
Bismark, a far right monarchist, introduced the first universal healthcare insurance system as a result of a combination of fear of the left and christian morality. The notion that government spending is unique to the left is a modern US conceit.
In Europe a significant proportion of the right are Christian democrats of various flavours who consider some degree of state welfare to be moral duty, and/or other non-free market conservatives, to the point where the US style right are considered extremists many places.
> The idea that Nazis are right-wing is also kind of a modern conceit.
No, its not. I mean, except in the sense that Nazi’s are generally considered part of modern history and thus any description of them could be described as a “modern conceit”.
> When FDR was President the Democrats were the party of the Klan. Does that mean the New Deal is a right-wing program, or that the KKK is a left-wing organization?
No. It means that US parties of the time leading up to the New Deal were more strongly regional than consistently ideological (the Democratic Party had very different Northern and Southern constituencies and ideologies even before the New Deal coalition), and that the New Deal itself was the trigger for the largest, longest partisan realignment (or one of the two, though the other one was arguably only possible because the New Deal realignment was still shaking out) in US history, which only finally settled down after the secondary Civil Rights realignment to a fairly stable divisions – with a clear ideological left/right configuration – in the 1990s.
> Or maybe politics can’t be divided perfectly along a one dimensional axis
It can’t, but that doesn’t mean that any of the well-known axes of politicis don’t have things, including modern and historical political parties, that clearly fit on one side. The Nazis being one that fits clearly on the right (also, the authoritarian.)
It's not at all a modern conceit. Hitler gained power with the support of the right wing parties. Von Papen, who ensured Hitler got the chancellorship was linked to Zentrum, a right wing party that was the forerunner of Germany's current right wing CDU. The only party to vote against Hitler in the Reichstag were the social democrats (because KPD had been banned).
NSDAP had an economically left, socially right opposition originally (the Strasserists), but those who hadn't been expelled already were arrested or murdered during the Night of the Long Knives.
Meanwhile Hitler was repeatedly praised by right wing commentators and papers and seen as an enemy by the left.
To spread the fiction that the Nazis we're not seen as right wing at the time is offensive, and simply not supported by the facts.
> The idea that Nazis are right-wing is also kind of a modern conceit
This is absurd. Not only the nazi mindset fits squarely into all the far-right / ultranationalist ideas, but the nazi party even made an alliance with the fascist party in Italy.
The quakers are today so small as to be completely irrelevant. And the existence of the quakers proves the commenters points that right wing groups tend to be right wing only incidentally. They have another main purpose. He gives churches as an example. People go to church for religion. Coincidentally, many of them also happen to be conservative. That there are churches where this is not true only emphasizes this point that right wing groups tend to form incidentally.
> But aren't neo Nazi's fringe and rarer than wokies?
Depends on your definition. They may be rare if you only include self-identified Nazis. However, if you expand that to include members of the Far Right and general White Surpemacists then they're not only not fringe but they become as mainstream as Hannity, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon and all of the Q-anon grifters.
White supremacists -as in people who believe most of the same thing as actual literal nazis, are by no means rare these days.
But if you mean people traipsing around in black SS uniforms then sure yeah those guys are rare, sure.
In online arguments I've seen people use definitions ranging all the way from "members of the National Socialist Worker's Party of 1930s and 1940s Germany" to "literally anyone talking in a loud voice" but the most practical distinction between run of the mill fascists and nazis I've seen is that nazis are fascists who also believe in the Jewish conspiracy - which describes a lot more people than most people unaware of far-right memes would probably think.
Of course that leaves the question of how you define fascism, which is a whole 'nother can of worms.
I'd loosely define 'fascism' as 'rule through sheer power by the deserving, over those who don't deserve power or self-rule'. The basic concept is, not everybody deserves to rule. Some people deserve to rule, and others have to BE ruled against their wishes, forever.
Maximum observed 'forever' seems to be under a decade, once the full fascism kicks in and is unavoidable. I don't believe fascism is sustainable, and what we see as 'woke' is a typical reaction to these attempts at rule. (Yes, I'm suggesting that power structures lean more towards fascism than they used to, and that this creates 'woke' as a reaction to this pressure)
I'd loosely define 'Nazi' as 'fascist with specific focus on seizing power through propaganda, media, and politics, particularly with use of anything that's new media'. In the 30s and 40s, of course, this was radio. There had always been massed political rallies (though the use of epic film propaganda was also new, as there'd be no Riefenstahl without the existence of film) but there hadn't been broadcast radio. Generalized, 'Nazi' means fascism plus modern media, and I'd be comfortable focusing that down a little to specify the media's used to rally 'the people' against enemies, specifically internal enemies in an ill-defined way.
Rallying people against 'woke' through coordinated use of social media is EXACTLY Nazi, in technique.
> White supremacists -as in people who believe most of the same thing as actual literal nazis, are by no means rare these days
The conflation of white supremacism and naziism is pretty much entirely political maneuvering. They believe very different things about the state, forms of government, gay people, culture, land use and many other things. Not to mention that only a small number of people termed white supremacists actually are (it conflates believing in racial differences (which are often not just white>everything) with believing in racial segregation with believing that the "white" ethnic group will form a better society),
Pretty scary that believing in racial segregation is no longer a fringe belief. In any case, you can’t tell me with a straight face that white people who believe in segregation, in the US, envision a society where there is no power imbalance between ethnic groups. These people want white people to be in charge, which is what white supremacy means in practice.
>Some would just want the USA split into a few smaller countries.
"Just" strikes me as an inappropriate adverb to use in this context. You are talking about splitting up the US into racially segregated states. Even in a bizarre hypothetical where this was somehow done with the best of intentions (lol), the amount of chaos and human suffering it would cause is almost impossible to imagine.
This sort of utterly insane belief should not be "pretty fringe". It should be virtually non-existent, in a reasonably sane and healthy society.
It's a real sea change in our culture that racial segregation is now openly considered or even advocated on relatively mainstream forums such as HN. That some of the people in question might not meet some overly pedantic definition of 'white supremacist' is hardly any consolation.
The far right has never taken its own ideology seriously – it's all a means to an end. They tie sympathetic intellectuals up in knots trying to parse and categorize the finer gradations of racist nonsense, and then do whatever they hell they want once they're in power.
> The far right has never taken its own ideology seriously – it's all a means to an end. They tie sympathetic intellectuals up in knots trying to parse and categorize the finer gradations of racist nonsense,
This really doesn't match my experience given how much time they spend arguing/discussing amongst themselves.
Perhaps then you can point me to an intellectually coherent defense of the idea that the US should be split up into racially segregated ethnostates.
Bickering and infighting hardly constitute evidence that intellectually serious work is being done in good faith. The far right has no more use for its 'useful idiots' once it attains power than the Communist party did for its pet intellectuals.
They take their political project seriously, but you won’t find an intellectually serious defense of far right ideology because they are simply not interested in doing that. I am not sure why people are so keen to provide cover for these people by keeping up the pretense that they have some kind of coherent political ideology that can be rationally debated. No-one who is nuts enough to advocate for racially segregated ethnostates within the USA is in that category.
And defunding the police isn't nuts? It's not like the Woke left makes much more sense. Since when is a coherent political ideology a precondition to anything?
Well if everything is about racist white oppressors and colored victims, it could follow that some white people will want a country of their own where they don't have to oppress anyone or be called racist just for being white?
> Depends on the people. Some would just want the USA split into a few smaller countries.
That doesn’t mean they don’t still want White America in charge; moving a group out of the bounds of the state [0] doesn’t suddenly mean there is no power dynamic, as such dynamics are evident between states.
[0] in the international sense, not in the US-domestic sense
I think all reasonable beings should care about describing things accurately and not conflating different things. For instance, arguments against one of them might not hold against another.
Note that this is far from just a blue tribe thing, it's pretty universal across all politics around the world to deliberately conflate the views of your stupidest enemies and your smartest.
No, this is known alt-right maneuvering, consistent with Nazi doctrine. You can replace that with 'fascist' if you like :)
Fussing about debatey details while repeatedly planting the desired concepts and trying to get anything you can, conceded so you can place a marker and push further, is very Nazi. It's foundational alt-right strategy, along the lines of 'hiding your power level'. This is not mysterious.
The reason it looks like that to you, is because fascists believe nothing… but power (and that only they should hold power, forever: it's not a thing to be shared or handed back and forth). So anything might be claimed, but outside the practical seizing of power, nothing matters.
This is VERY common. Hence people's concern about the matter.
Nothing. You are just on a forum that is populated mostly by people on the left of the political spectrum in the US, and you alluded to fact that contradicts their current moral panic about the danger of "Nazi" groups in the US. And, yes, they are much rarer.
That article goes directly from people complaining about discrimination to Mao's Great Leap Forward, but it seems like wanting to be treated with a reasonable level of dignity at work is unlike causing a major famine that kills millions of people. Politics leads to ideological thinking which generates mostly garbage.
Heh. If you replaced “leftist movements” with “human movements” then I’d be with you. Witness the ever developing criteria for identifying and excising “RINOs” from the Trump movement. Find any decently sized organization with humans in it, and you will find a subset of its members actively attempting to identify and excise inpure members. The fallacy you are demonstrating is the notion that such behavior is relegated to a particular other group, as though ostracizing behavior doesn’t predate the very concept of “left” vs “right”.
Identitarian does not mean what you think it means. In fact, it's basically the exact opposite. I also have no idea what you mean when you say it has no ability to change anything. Are you talking about identity politics? Politics that specifically aim to better the position of people in certain subgroups? Because there are many political movements that have been wildly successful in doing that, women's suffrage, the US civil rights movement, universal male suffrage, the LGBTQ movement. There's a lot of politics based on group identity that has been successful.
I don’t think these movements have been based on identity but rather the concept of lacking something. This group lacks X, thus we should seek to give them X. But X does not necessarily equal the identity.
What I find heartbreaking in all this identity issue is the ever-increasing number of dimensions. Simple math shows that at about 20 or so there’s going to be about one gender identity per person or two. Which is absolutely correct as all people are unique and beautiful in their own ways. But instead of being able to freely move across the spectrum that is being a “man” or a “woman”, each person would be locked in their own tiny identity. And, as we see, crossing the identity barriers is hard for many many reasons. I can’t see this increasing happiness of people. Everyone is or should be looking for their identity for most of their lives, creating additional barriers on this journey is unlikely to be beneficial.
>Identitarian does not mean what you think it means.
From context it should be clear that I'm talking about identarianism in the literal sense of the term (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/identitarianism), not the European right-wing political movement that confusingly shares the same label.
>women's suffrage, the US civil rights movement, universal male suffrage
the keyword in those movements is 'suffrage' and 'civil' not 'man' or 'woman'. The reason they were successful is because they were republican movements. Women's suffrage wasn't about women with a capital W having a sort of privileged identity, it was about the opposite, women being treated like equal citizens. Identity politics is the opposite, it is the creation of separate, distinct, protected spaces for groups of people based on some set of features.
Rather than gaining access to the commons, aspiring to universal values which was the goal of desegregation in the civil rights era, women's rights and so forth, identity politics seeks to carve out virtual spaces that are only even understandable if you share said identity. The notion of the a citizen proper goes out of the window.
And the gay rights movement is a good example of that shift, whereas historically it was focused on access to civil rights, nowadays you have clashes between different queer groups. Which part do we include, are TERFS reationary? Are asexuals queer? There is at least half a dozen fronts in this war already about who deserves to be part of the rainbow label.
I agree, and I'm concerned about the divide and conquer-type of impact it's having in societal discourse. This effect seems way too convenient (and beneficial) for the ruling class, and in that respect, I'm afraid academia may be inadvertantly working against the common interest of the working classes by pushing these worldviews.
You've nailed it. Analysis of social movements often doesn't take the intent of the ruling class into account nearly enough, and for good reason - part of their program is to deflect attention away from themselves and make it look organic.
He already said -the ruling class. The specific names aren't irrelevant since they change regularly...but the dynamic (divide and conquer) doesn't appear to.
Sure, but as soon as you start naming names, it's pretty obvious that a lot of the people proposing alternative pronouns that don't really catch on or making claims about their workplace are little-known ordinary middle class people without any real power, and some of the people declaring "war on woke" own media empires and sit in parliaments. Which places a different complexion on the "divide and conquer"...
Occupy Wall Street died when infected with identitarians.
Unions, as weak and pathetic as they are, become a whole lot more interested in pronouns, systemic racism and illegal immigration than fighting for a decent wage and decent working conditions for their paying members.
Politically, there is no more discourse on behalf of the poor or working classes, only for identitarian version thereof. With the obvious effect that the shunned identities naturally don't support erst left wing policies that exclude them on identity marker basis.
Wokeness is a huge win for the ruling class. Divide and conquer at its best.
Unions have been on the decline for decades going back to the deregulatory and anti-labor policies of Neo liberal governments and that probably has a lot more to do with the problem than pronouns
It doesn't work like that. The people in power find people with an agenda that suits their agenda (woke identity politics that divide any populist movement). Then they elevate those people to places of more power or reach or status. This comes in the forms of grants, promotions, publications, and opening doors (making connections).
You don't need to convince or coerce people to fit your agenda. You simply find them and elevate them.
Goldman Sachs is happy to sponsor floats for the gay pride parade (which incidentally is by now a huge commercial opportunity anyways), they were far less happy about the Occupy Wallstreet movement.
Why would anyone imagine or posit without sources that there is definitely a connection between these two movements? (In other words -- that an entity would be hypocritical for not supporting both)
It just illustrates that if your definition of "radical left" is people super concerned with identity politics, pronouns, dead naming, gay rights and so on, then this is a very convenient and non threatening definition to the rich and powerful. In contrast the people that marched on the opening of the new European Central Bank in Frankfurt and had paramilitary skirmishes in the morning are far less amendable to corporate sponsorship and feel good diversity and inclusion messaging, such as modifying your corporate logo to feature the rainbow flag.
They literally and figuratively want to burn down / destroy the capitalist system, which is a far more dangerous leftist position than demanding a carbon tax or "breaking the glass ceiling", diversity training etc., which only make sense if you take the capitalist system for granted.
Let's take another company then. Say McDonalds. They probably have gay people. They probably have homophobes. They probably have pro-capitalists and anti-capitalists.
Tavistok Institute, other tax exempt foundations used as cover for agendas by the oligarchs, etc.
For a more concrete example of this type of influence, I often refer to the Norman Dodd interview. Norman Dodd was the chief investigator for the 1953 Special Committe on Tax Exempt Foundations (aka the Reece Committee). During his investigation he sent a research assistant Catherine Casey to analyze the minutes of the foundations. Apparently Norman thought she would be good to send because she was not sympathetic to the investigation, and was generally defensive of the tax exempt foundations. After actually spot-reading the minutes though, apparently it shook her so badly that she was never able to return to practicing law, and Carroll Reece had to tuck her away in a job at the FTC, and Norman Dodd says she ultimately lost her mind as a result of what she discovered. (sorry for my poorly done quick transcription)
"... finally of course the war is over. At that time their interest shifts over to preventing what they call a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914 when WW1 broke out. And they arrive at that point, they come to the conclusion that to prevent a reversion we must control education in the United States, and they realize that's a pretty big task. To them it is too big for them alone, so they approach the Rockefeller foundation, with a suggestion that; that portion of education which could be considered domestic, be handled by the Rockefeller foundation and that portion which is international should be handled by the endowment, and they then decide that the key to the success of these two operations lay in the alteration of the teaching of American history, so they approach four of the then most prominent teachers of American history in the country, people like Charles and Mary Bird. Their suggestion to them is will they alter the manner in which they present this subject and they get turned down flat. So they then decide it is necessary for them to do as they say, "build our own stable of historians". And then they approach the Gugenheim foundation which specializes in fellowships, and say "when we find young men in the process of studying for doctorates in the field of American history, and we feel they are the right caliber, will you grant them fellowships on our say so?" and the answer is yes. So under that condition, eventually they assemble 20, and they take this 20 potential teachers of American history, to London, and there they are briefed into what is expected of them, when as and if they secure appointments in keeping with the doctorates they will have earned. That group of 20 historians ultimately becomes the nucleus of the American Historical Association, and towards the end of the 1920's, the endowment grants to the American Historical Assocation, 400,000 for a study of our history in a manner which points to, what can this country look forward to in the future. That culminates in a 7 volume book study, the last volume of which is of course in essence a summary of the contents of the other 6, and the essence of the last volume is "The future of this country belongs to collectivism adminsitered with characteristic American efficiency."..."
So what I posit is that "wokeism", more than just a divide and conquer tool, is something that enables the further shifting of the overton window over time towards collectivism.
Now understand that the very article itself eminates from a publication with heavy connections to this same kind of subtle influence and control. I find it quite fascinating when viewing sources like the Economist with this sort of scrutiny the kind of insight that can be elucidated simply by trying to understand what they aren't saying and what they are trying to hide, or how they are trying to influence things.
I think people have vastly different work situations and that helps drive the divide. "Woke" ideas are just not that intimidating if you trust your boss and have a sensible employer. Other places it could seem much more of a threat to you personally. This difference in experience is less explicit than in the past when workplaces were more political places. Management can act benevolent whilst subtly gaslighting their people.
It's called recuperation and it doesn't even require nefarious intent.
These days anti-capitalism is literally sold as a commodity. Anti-consumerism has become a consumer identity. While this helps deradicalization by diverting the radical energy away from actual causes towards consumption, it also tends to make a good profit.
The problem isn't the worldviews. The problem is that you can't fight capitalism through consumption. You can't fight hierarchies by acting within the system of hierarchy, you have to step outside.
As an example, the Black Panthers (not the Marvel movie) not only offered social programs and free food in Black communities, they also built coalitions with other racial groups who tried to do the same in their communities. While at a glance acting only within their racial lines (i.e. racial identity politics) they actively worked against racial division through mutual solidarity.
Solidarity across divisions is important, but it can only work if you acknowledge the existence of the divisions and the power imbalances these divisions reinforce.
As an example in the negative, unions in the early 20th century US often failed because they rejected Black workers who then had no other economical option but to become scabs when white unionized workers went on strike (because they didn't get any of the union benefits and had no union covering their backs if they had joined the strike).
There's a widespread misconception these days that "left solidarity" means that all members of "the left" have to be equally "woke". They all have to believe in exactly the one leftist ideology you think is best, they all have to treat all marginalized groups exactly the way you think they must be treated and so on. This is where the leftist memes of the circular firing squad and purity spirals come from. THIS is harmful and divisive.
However the answer is not to "not be woke". The answer is to better embrace pragmatic alliances and understand that you can have a shared struggle even if it doesn't perfectly overlap. There's a place for close-nit communities but "the left" is not a clubhouse.
As another final example, there's a famous incident in the UK (recently portrayed in the movie "Pride") where gay activists joined striking coal miners because both groups were facing violent opposition from the police. The collaboration helped foster class consciousness in the gay activists and queer acceptance among the coal miners. They didn't become one cohesive ideologically perfect group but their solidarity made them more powerful in their shared struggle than either group would have been on their own.
You, i like you. I did not know about the Union stuff nor the movie "Pride", so thank you. You are saying what i've been trying to say, staying factual and mesured.
I'm curious what any possible alternatives might be to the practical problems "wokeness" tries to present itself as a solution to.
I don't think the problem of racism and sexism (two classic "woke" topics) are "Left" problems, which is why it strikes me as odd that I don't see ideas about how to deal with them coming from everyone, beyond a straight denial they exist, or that it's actually the fault of the folks experiencing the discrimination somehow.
The most virulent forms of racism are a symptom of material conditions, eg., that poor black people live uniformly in one area, and rich white people in another. This creates a competition for local resources, including demands on police time and attention. This competition reporduces racism, in that it is very hard not to have racism when "looking out for one's own" is a racial matter.
What we have in Wokeism is a pseudo-politics, in that, it make no material demands. The woke concern is against alleged "implicit" forms of racism which "harm" graduates jockying for position within large corporate structures.
It reads a little like "what happens when the upper middle-class discover that they too may, possibly, have been discriminated against".
Sure, I was just clarifying what GP wrote as the reply seemed to have missed/not understood a key nuance.
Also providing a little context to what I assumed was meant by “material demands”, based on the quote from GP below.
> The most virulent forms of racism are a symptom of material conditions, eg., that poor black people live uniformly in one area, and rich white people in another.
> What we have in Wokeism is a pseudo-politics, in that, it make no material demands.
That’s because “Wokeism” doesn’t exist. Being “woke”, was never a descriptor of a politics but of the state of being aware of and engaged in social and political issues affecting a disadvantaged (originally, specifically Black American) community. It’s now morphed into a label assigned by outside group to anyone whose politics the speakers disagrees with for being too focussed, or focussed in the wrong way, on identity issues. So, yes, there is no coherent material program of Wokeism, because Wokeism isn’t a thing.
Now, within the broad mass that any user of the term labels “Wokeism”, there are many groups that have within them extensive, coherent lists of material demands,
Wokeism has come to refer to a type of (basically religious) revival which is happening across the western middle class. it sometimes includes a political project of 'equality'.
Whether you like the term or not, it is very hard to simply deny the revolution in identity construction currently taking place.
Watch the latest CIA advert which emphasises neauvox-oppressed identity markers over. It emphases how the CIA allows you to 'be yourself' qua how you are a member of an oppressed group.
Whatever you want to call /that/, this is what
I am talking about.
If you ignore the American political spectrum for a hot minute and get down to the core of it, a practical definition of "left" and "right" is "no hierarchy" vs "hierarchy". This holds true in economics as well as social issues:
Racism is a system of hierarchy where one race is inherently good and normal and others are deviations from that, or at least every race is good or bad in some ways and there is an implied value judgement in every assertion about them. Not every person doing a racism necessarily fully commits to racial pseudoscience but if pressed they'll have to justify their conceptions by citing them. Racial mixing of course is unacceptable as it goes against this order and since the racial social castes are a natural order, any attempt to overcome them is bad and anyone making it further than their kind is expected to should either be celebrated for their excellence (and everyone else be held to their standard to demonstrate their insufficiency) or be viewed with suspicion because they probably cheated or got handouts.
Sexism is a sexual hierarchy with women being one way, men another and everyone who doesn't neatly fit into either category being deviant and a troublemaker. It's not so much about one sex being better at all things than the other, much like racism, but about there being a natural order and everything being well as long as people follow it.
Economic right wing thought posits that there is a natural order in that poverty is largely a failure of the individual and can be overcome with sheer will so wealth is the just spoils of success and personal quality and charity is the only acceptable form of welfare because it is for the wealthy to decide how to allocate their deserved riches.
This is also why right-wing people have recently picked up the term "Marxist" (or even "Neomarxist") to describe not just socialists but also progressives in general, even when they lean economically more right-wing than left.
The question of how you align within that spectrum is mostly a question of whether you think a natural order exists and/or should be enforced in each of these dimensions (and there are probably more). Most Democrats don't want to abolish private ownership, they just want more regulations to shift some of the wealth to the lower classes, i.e. balance out the hierarchy rather than getting rid of it. They are however more likely to be opposed to the idea of a natural order in social questions.
> practical definition of "left" and "right" is "no hierarchy" vs "hierarchy"
Absolutely not: it's the left that's usually the favor of giving more power to the most oppressive and monopolic hierarchy there is, the government, while the right is fighting to dismantle it.
Yeah, I think that was the intended reading of that reply given the obviously similar phrasing.
However there's a word for anti-authoritarian leftists. We're called anarchists. Not all leftists are anarchists and not all leftists are anti-authoritarian. Even authoritarian leftists (or "statists") generally believe in the end goal being the ideal of a stateless, classless society.
Statists just tend to believe the only way to get there is with an intermediary socialist state established through a communist revolution and led by a vanguard party who directs the economic, social and philosophical evolution of the people towards bringing about communism. The differences between those groups are largely about what that intermediary state should look like and at what point it can be dissolved.
Some of the aspirationally communist states of the 20th century justified their continued existence with communism having to be rolled out globally simultaneously for it to b successful. Some instead argued that what they had achieved was "real socialism", heavily implying that's as good as it gets and any critics were utopian idealists who'd rather tear down the local optimum in the hope of an unachievable ideal. The USSR opened its markets and collapsed under the dual load of its bureaucrat aristocracy and capitalist oligarchs, China pivoted to Dengism to contain their "capitalist experiments" with the promise of a greater good coming from the temporary toleration of exploitation.
But for anarchists (and mutualists, who fall somewhere between anarchism and statism) the biggest problem tends to be that they usually either start out or end up surrounded by nation states with standing armies who want none of their nonsense.
The most promising approach seems to be dual power, i.e. building anarchist structures[0] within existing states through cooperation and solidarity so that when they inevitably collapse in the future, the people can fall back on those structures as an alternative to just reasserting the old (hierarchical) power structures.
[0]: To preempt the obvious joke: contrary to the portrayal of "anarchy" in most media today, anarchists don't believe in no organizations, just no hierarchical power structures, i.e. usually they agree with consent-driven forms of bottom-up organizing. The one exception tend to be egoists (see Stirner), but most anarchists try to ignore them because they're weird.
You're thinking of Stalinist/Leninist authoritarian communism, which certainly doesn't encompass all of left-wing ideology, only a niche.
When Stalin came to power, one of the first things he did was too purge all the anarchists and other non-authoritarian socialists. Thus most leftists despise Stalin and what he did. Mao, too.
Lenin was a political opportunist and Stalin most likely faked Lenin's will to appoint himself after his death. The Bolsheviks also murdered/incarcerated plenty of leftists and disempowered the pre-existing worker coops and trade unions through centralization.
Anarchists, syndicalists and other leftists were literally building decentralized structures before the Bolsheviks swooped in and decided the public would need decades of ideological education before it could be trusted to make any decisions about their lives and "helpfully" started making the decisions for them. It doesn't help that many of the leftists outside Russia who were critical of Bolshevism were murdered by German paramilitaries and later more indirectly by the USSR while trying to fight fascism in Spain.
Saying you have a good understanding what "left" is because you were born in the USSR is like saying you have a good understanding of what pasta is because you've been eating Yum Yum noodles for a decade.
Have you read Kropotkin? Bakunin? Proudhon? Bookchin? There is a wide range of leftist thought outside the very narrow niche within Marxist-Leninist-Maoism that still uncritically defends the USSR.
You try to explain the consequences of communism with "few bad apples"; well, at least it's not a "no true scottsman", I have to give credit for that. However, there have been so many cases of leftists coming to power and building a state, and the only one I know that didn't end is tragedy was Israel — and even it resulted in financial crisis and eventual move to capitalism.
Of course, it's opportunists and sociopaths who come to power. You're absolutely right about that. But it would be silly to explain all these outcomes as fault of particular individuals, even if they are at fault. It's the principles behind the system itself, which make it vulnerable to this kind of attack.
Essentially, the problem is with this: every kind of leftism makes moral behaviour nor a matter of personal choice and responsibility, but something mandated by the state or a quasi-state organisation. This sounds very good in theory, especially for the people who are sensitive to the wrongs of the world. But in practice, it makes those organisations infallible and creates in their place a perfect vessel for said opportunists and sociopaths.
State power is like The Ring from LOTR. It's very seductive to use it for good, but absolute power corrupts absolutely. It should be not used, but destroyed.
You do know that anarchist ideology is literally defined by the opposition to states and state-lile structures, right?
It seems odd to tar specifically anti-statists with wanting to create a state. Anarchy being literally the antonym of hierarchy, statism is the complete antithesis of anti-authoritarian left-wing politics.
I guess by "the left" you mean Democrats? They're mostly liberals, not leftists, and want to maintain the hierarchies but ease some of the most obvious impacts through regulations.
The idea that "left means more government" is also very ahistorical and feels uniquely like a product of modern American political discourse. The origin of the left-right distinction is literally the abolition of feudalism, i.e. replacing a fixed hierarchy by birthright with egalitarian democratic elections. By 1776 standards the founding fathers were left-wing radicals. The right would have literally defended the Crown.
If you understand left-right as Democrat-Republican, your view doesn't hold true either. Republicans generally want to void labor protections, reduce taxes, cut social welfare and lift environmental regulations, but they also always want to increase the military, intelligence and police budgets. Republicans also tend to want the state to enforce their idea of morality, e.g. by prohibiting (secular or non-Christian) same-sex marriages, criminalizing abortion or restricting sex education and access to contraceptives. They want to enforce what they see as the natural order through punishment whereas "the left" wants to counteract it through support. Prison abolitionists tend to be on the left, not the right.
The government isn't hierarchy. The government is an institution that interacts with hierarchy. As are large corporations for that matter. Reducing the government budget and shifting more economic power to corporations doesn't reduce hierarchies, it only takes power from elected officials to unelected shareholders.
If you believe in an unregulated free market capitalism, you literally support the hierarchy of the market and you believe in a natural order. Or to put it in words that feel less icky if you think of yourself as an anarcho-capitalist: that people should vote with their dollars on what goods and services should thrive or fail.
If you believe money is power and you believe it's good and natural for some people to have many orders of magnitude more money than other people, you believe in a natural order. This is what leftists call a hierarchy and leftists don't like it.
Note: I'm not saying leftists don't want a big government. I'm saying leftists (even outside anarchism) want to get rid of the state. They just disagree on how to get there. And for reformists that answer usually involves using the state one way or another.
> The idea that "left means more government" is also very ahistorical and feels uniquely like a product of modern American political discourse. The origin of the left-right distinction is literally the abolition of feudalism, i.e. replacing a fixed hierarchy by birthright with egalitarian democratic elections. By 1776 standards the founding fathers were left-wing radicals. The right would have literally defended the Crown.
Look at how many Black Americans supported the Loyalist side. Many of the American Founding Fathers were slave owners and supported the continuation of slavery. The British Empire promised freedom to American slaves who supported the Empire, and it mostly delivered on that promise. Both sides were very racist, if judged by contemporary standards, but I think there is a decent argument to be made that the racism of the British was on the whole a lot milder than that of the Americans.
The British Empire, including what is now Canada, officially abolished slavery in 1833; the United States would not finally abolish it for another 30+ years. (And it took a bloody civil war for America to do it; the Empire’s abolition of slavery was largely peaceful.) But in actual fact, slavery was de facto rendered legally unenforceable in most of (what is now) Canada by a series of court decisions in the 1790s, so in practice slavery was abolished in Canada over 60 years prior to its abolition in the US.
While there was widespread social discrimination against Black people in 19th and 20th century Canada, it was generally much milder than in much of the United States. The British and Canadian legal systems generally accepted the theoretical legal equality of all citizens regardless of race, even though it often failed to enforce that theoretical equality in practice; by contrast, the legal systems of many American states contained explicit discrimination against Black citizens.
Lynching was a great scourge on American history, of which Black people were the disproportionate (but not exclusive) victims. Many Americans defended lynching as a form of democracy. Judges, law enforcement and prosecutors in the US were very sensitive to public opinion – in part due to their widespread direct election – and were often loathe to properly investigate, prosecute and convict lynching cases if public opinion appeared to approve of the act. Likewise, many American jurors believed that it was appropriate for them to defer to public opinion in deciding cases, and return "not guilty" verdicts in popularly approved lynchings even when the evidence clearly pointed to guilt.
By contrast, the British Empire strongly objected to people taking the law into their own hands, and would-be lynchers in Canada faced far greater odds of successful prosecution for murder (and its then near-mandatory death penalty) than in the US. British culture–including among politicians, law enforcement, prosecutors, judges and jurors–prioritised upholding the rule of law over popular opinion to a much greater extent than American culture did. Due to this cultural difference, lynching was extremely rare in Canadian history – a mere handful of isolated incidents, compared to many thousands in the US.
So, who were the "egalitarians" and "left-wing radicals" in the American Revolution? I think we should seriously consider the possibility that the American Revolution was in fact a reactionary right-wing movement, widely supported by slave owners who lived in fear that the British Empire might forcibly liberate their slaves, and not really a "left-wing" one.
Black Americans weren't loyalists because they believed in the divine right of kings, though. I'm not sure why you've decided to spend the majority of your reply on explaining why the American revolution was bad for Black people to address an off-hand comment.
Chattel slavery was directly tied to scientific racism, which is literally a system of hierarchy and the belief that the system is both natural and good (e.g. the "white man's burden" ideology that slavery is good for the slaves because they're unfit to survive on their own).
You won't find any political movement that neatly fits into the "left-right" spectrum. In retrospect even the often lauded direct democracy of ancient Greece was deeply undemocratic because it was restricted by its very narrow definition of citizenship. Under scientific racism Black slaves were barely considered human and even if you only consider white people the US still didn't let women vote until the suffragettes fought for it and won.
My point wasn't that the founding fathers should be considered leftists. My point was that the original historical definition of leftism was opposition to the king of France during the French revolution because that's how the seating happened to be arranged in the National Assembly in 1789 (notably before the American revolution, but close enough to make the point).
As feudalism became less relevant, the meaning began to shift by becoming more generalized. I'm not arguing about morality here but definitions. The 18th century definition of left and right was almost entirely about royalty and the aristocracy. The generalized definition I summarized evolved considerably later.
> Black Americans weren't loyalists because they believed in the divine right of kings, though.
White loyalists didn’t believe in the Divine Right of Kings either. That ideology was promoted by the Catholic King James II, who was overthrown in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. The Hanoverian monarchy (to which George III belonged) was ideologically opposed to it because if true it would mean the 1688 revolution was illegitimate, and hence Hanoverian rule of Britain would be illegitimate too. The main supporters of Divine Right of Kings were Catholics and the Jacobite rebels in Ireland and Scotland, not Protestant supporters of the British government. In fact, some Jacobites supported the American Revolution - such as Hugh Mercer.
> Chattel slavery was directly tied to scientific racism,
The Atlantic slave trade was already well underway when the theory of “scientific racism” was first being developed. And it didn’t become widely popular until the mid-19th century, by which time slavery was approaching its end. It was a post hoc rationalisation for chattel slavery, not a cause.
> My point was that the original historical definition of leftism was opposition to the king of France during the French revolution because that's how the seating happened to be arranged in the National Assembly in 1789 (notably before the American revolution, but close enough to make the point).
The French Revolution was (in part) a revolution against the “Divine Right of Kings”, but the American Revolution wasn’t, since the British had already rejected that ideology in the revolution of 1688. If you define “leftism” as merely rejecting that then both sides in the American Revolutionary War were “leftist”, and the British Empire was a “leftist” empire
> I'm curious what any possible alternatives might be to the practical problems "wokeness" tries to present itself as a solution to.
The obvious solution is meritocracy and race/sex blindness. That's the world I wish to live in - non-discrimination & equality of opportunity, not "positive" discrimination (it's always positive for someone) and (enforced) equality of outcome. But the Woke Left has been quite hostile to those concepts recently...
Edit: added "Woke" before "Left" because presumably there's other (liberal) Left that would support meritocracy.
This is something I genuinely am curious about: how do you get equality of opportunity without first getting equality of outcome in a system where money opens doors and inheritance exists? Just-freed black people started with nothing when white slave owners had farms to pass onto their children. If (I think it is) obvious that wealth provides more opportunity, there’s no way for black people to ever have equal opportunity as the original white population.
(Edit: this isn’t to say I agree with equal outcome. I think there’s a lot of nonsense stuff in that sphere. But I’ve never myself been able to answer how to consider how to make equality of opportunity happen if we started from an unequal space and inheritance exists which persists inequality.)
This is wrong on so many levels but I don't blame you as it's the false narrative that's most pervasive in most media.
First of all, "starts with nothing" isn't specific to black population. Many (most?) immigrants also start with nothing, yet often outperform locals (including whites) (the important question that almost noone is asking, is why?). Among those are Nigerians, so clearly "because they're not black" isn't the correct answer.
Your question already contains the "correct" (IMO) answer, which is: help poor people. To the extent that poverty correlates to being black (or any other categorical characteristic), both solutions are equivalent, except that mine is (1) non-discriminatory (e.g. it helps white homeless people as well), (2) self-correcting (when "racial equality of outcome" is reached and poverty is no longer correlated with skin color, my solution will continue to do "good"), and (3) non-wasteful (why would society spend any amount of resources helping e.g. Obama's daughters, who are by "inheritance" (of political connections) some of the most privileged people on this planet?).
Edit: I might have been too focused on the "race" part of your comment. If you're wondering about inherited inequality in general, well, yeah, that's one of the paradoxes of meritocracy & similar concepts, e.g. assortative mating - the end (stable) state is a society ruled by the (hereditary) "intelligent" class. But I think that's unlikely to happen naturally because there seems to be quite a lot of genetic variation in intelligence (and other traits our society treats as "superior", e.g. height, beauty, etc.); if anything, that's more likely to happen because of genetic manipulation/embryo selection, which doesn't exactly require a meritocratic society...
There is no such thing as equality of outcome. There will always be hierarchies. We can shift the core currency from $$$ to political favor or even ritualized victimhood, but we can't eliminate hierarchies. Remember the Soviet nomenklatura:
> Members of the so-called nomenklatura , numbering perhaps a million, have special holiday retreats, access to special medical facilities and--most resented by ordinary Russians--access to special stores that sell imported and Soviet-made goods that are simply not available in the regular stores. Many also have cars and chauffeurs.
> As a practical matter, the privileges are hereditary, since children of the elite have an inside track on admission to the top universities--graduation from which guarantees them good jobs and a place on the nomenklatura list.
Furthermore, 'inequality of outcome' is often times a good thing. We all want a good plumber, a good surgeon, a good baker, a good teacher, a good farmer, a good engineer, either as a service provider or a colleague. Having an 'equality of outcome' system where randoms are promoted to 'good plumber' by fiat in practice makes plumbing dysfunctional. See the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Which leaves open some hard problems:
* Competency leaning hierarchies, vs. power leaning hierarchies.
* Low gini hierarchies vs. high gini hierarchies.
* Low skill societies vs high skill societies.
* Skill acquisition. Help broad swaths of the population acquire proficiency in useful $skill.
Note that in practice equality of outcome systems have been successful only in flattening hierarchies by essentially bulldozing them into the ground, bringing everyone down (other than the new hierarchy leaders) into material, spiritual and skill poverty.
Hold on hold on. This comment presupposes that blacks have ways been disadvantaged. That's not true at all. Before the civil rights movement of the 60s, black incomes were increasing at a faster rate than whites and were on track to surpass the white income. Blacks even had more kids born within wedlock. The ghettoization of the African American community is a recent development. For most of the post bellum period, African Americans were on a swift upward trajectory. They were much like Asians today, who also often started with nothing in this country (due to currency export restrictions) and whose education achievement and incomes surpass whites...
Indeed poor black immigrants to this country do extremely well also.
All this is detailed extensively in the vision of the anointed by Thomas sowell (an accomplished black man from this era)
A core problem is what this means. A lot of people insist that we previously lived in a meritocracy and that things like admissions tests are pure representations of this meritocracy, so that moving away from these systems is an attack on a purely level playing field of meritocracy.
But we don't all agree with this. The same people who you criticize do not agree that we have achieved equality of opportunity. Not even close. For a very clear example, we see wealth opening huge numbers of doors for people regardless of actual merit, either through access to training, or access to connections, or as a backstop that enables people to take risks.
What you consider hostility to these concepts, other people think are essential to achieving these concepts.
Noone (sensible) is claiming that any system is a meritocracy. "Meritocracy" is just an ideal, like "equality", "fairness", or "airplanes not crashing", and it's unlikely we'll ever achieve this ideal, but that doesn't make it not worth fighting for.
So, while obviously objective exams aren't "meritocracy", they are without doubt more meritocratic than not having objective exams.
If "these people" really wanted to move towards greater meritocracy (as opposed to abandoning meritocracy), they'd support things like, abolishment of "extracurricular activities" in college admissions, or legacy admissions, or maybe even things China's limit on the amount of tutoring kids can do (I personally thing this is both too extreme and ultimately counterproductive, but at least we can all agree that it's with the right goal in mind - increasing meritocracy).
I agree that "wealth" is a problem, but the answer is having more objective measures, not less.
> So, while obviously objective exams aren't "meritocracy", they are without doubt more meritocratic than not having objective exams.
This is where we disagree dramatically. And this is why it is so frustrating to have people tell me that I "hate excellence" for supporting policy changes. By holding this assumption it enables you to both
1. Hold that meritocracy is an ideal
2. Conclude that people pushing for changes must oppose meritocracy
But I simply do not agree. To me, admissions exams are like the Leetcode interviews that people decry here. The test something, but that thing is largely disconnected from actual work and instead just becomes an obstacle course.
> If "these people" really wanted to move towards greater meritocracy (as opposed to abandoning meritocracy), they'd support things like, abolishment of "extracurricular activities" in college admissions, or legacy admissions, or maybe even things China's limit on the amount of tutoring kids can do (I personally thing this is both too extreme and ultimately counterproductive, but at least we can all agree that it's with the right goal in mind - increasing meritocracy).
I am involved in local politics to change the admissions program for a public magnet school. "Woke" activists proposed a merit lottery, a system where all students who met a minimum GPA and math-level requirement could be entered into a random lottery for admissions. This was criticized by opponents for being "anti-meritocratic" and even "racist against asians".
The eventually enacted policy maintains a "holistic" application, which does not consider race but does include these other topics. This received precisely the same criticism from opponents. Activists on the "woke" side preferred the merit lottery to this outcome.
So what I see here is that activists, at least in the situations that I am personally involved in, do support things like the abolishment of extracurricular activities in admissions systems.
Ideas like merit lottery are very interesting and worthy of consideration on rational, liberal, universalist grounds, some of which you've hinted at here.
Sadly, when they are promoted on the grounds of obtuse academic wokeness or identity politics, people instinctively infer that the real goal of such policies is to hand out undeserved benefits to minorities at the expense of a legitimate meritocracy.
We've heard, and continue to hear, vastly, vastly more about the identity politics grounds than the more worthy ones, and in my observation, that's not entirely or even mostly the fault of the critics of merit lottery. It took me years to find any sustained, serious public promotion of the good reasons to do these things.
Instead, what made headlines was garbage like "I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group [Asians] owns admission to these [selective] schools" from the NYC school chancellor. A clear attitude that all racial groups are entitled to proportional representation in selective schools regardless of performance.
Carranza got lots of support for his attitude, including from a majority of the NYC city council. So I question the idea that the identity politics angle is all being drummed up from the ether by the media, and I'm frankly suspicious when people are so eager to downplay this obvious and very influential phenomenon. If people want to tolerate it for coalitional reasons, sure whatever, but let's not pretend it isn't happening.
Without more information about the specific case, it's impossible to determine which side was actually supporting meritocracy and which was simply promoting their political cause disguised as meritocracy.
What was the minimum GPA? Who can apply? Are admissions limited to a geographical area or not? Who determines the GPA? If the answer is "teachers", how easily can that be gamed? Why not a similar but much more objective and harder to game system, e.g. admissions exam followed by a random selection above a, say, 80% cutoff point (e.g. first narrow the pool with an exam, then halve it again randomly)?
> but that thing is largely disconnected from actual work and instead just becomes an obstacle course.
This assertion is AFAIK quite nebulous. SATs and similar tests are correlated with IQ and with probability someone finishes university and with later life outcomes. Some say that high school GPA are better predictors, which might be true, but the real question is, how easy are they to game? A metric is only really useful if it doesn't change substantially when it becomes a goal. You might disagree regarding SATs (there's quite some disagreement and proper research into this topic is both hard and very politicised) but whatever other solutions you're proposing, should first be assessed based on how subjective (easy to manipulate/game) they are.
Same thing as Leetcode interviews, really. Everyone knows they suck, noone has come up with anything better yet.
3.5 GPA and enrollment in Algebra I in 8th grade. Admissions are geographical because the school is a public school in Fairfax County, though students from neighboring counties can apply and attend.
Of course GPA isn’t flawless. You’ll find that activists also seek to solve pipeline problems at lower grades. But this is a rapid retreat from “an objective measure is obviously better” to “this specific measure is better than proposed alternatives.”
Using exam score cutoffs was discussed. Generally, people prefer gpa to exams because there isn’t the same explicit cottage industry of exam prep (yes, private tutoring obviously exists) and it includes a wider range of material than what is included on the test. Exam score cutoffs was also deemed unacceptable and similarly called racist and destructive by the same opponents of the proposed policy.
Having thought about this a while longer, I've changed my mind.
I don't really see any purpose in randomization, except anti-meritocracy pro-diversity. It is potentially excusable at the edges to account for the inherent noise of measurement (i.e. is 3.4 GPA really that different from 3.6 GPA) but there's no real reason that someone with 4 GPA shouldn't have a greater shot at admission than someone with 3.5 GPA.
Of course, if your distrust in GPA is so great that you oppose even that, then... what even the point of GPA in the first place? We should be working towards improving the metrics, not eliminating them.
But otherwise, this whole randomisation business is like, "Would you like to be operated on by the surgeon, or by the nurse? Oh, wait, let's flip a coin."
> But otherwise, this whole randomisation business is like, "Would you like to be operated on by the surgeon, or by the nurse? Oh, wait, let's flip a coin."
We are discussing high school education admissions right now. The kids being evaluated are 13. What is schooling for? Do admissions exist to make sure that some unqualified kid never gets access to a strong education? That conservative approach can make sense for life-or-death interactions like surgery, but nobody dies if a "less qualified" kid is sent to TJ (actually, since suicide rates have increased as the school has gotten more competitive, it might actually save lives).
GPA measures several things at the same time. It most explicitly measures what you have done. But in admissions we want some measure of future potential. This is not aligned perfectly with what somebody has done in the past. Were we to change grading to a continuous evaluation of future potential then I'd be much more accepting of a stricter hierarchy in admissions, but I am extremely skeptical that such a metric would be achievable without introducing tremendous biases.
My GPA in middle school was about a 4.0. But when I review my life, the reason it was so high included many many things that were unrelated to my future potential as a student.
We can also take a step back and consider why we even have limited-access accelerated education in the first place. GMU is just down the street. Even discussing the idea of opening up accelerated education to anybody who wants it is also considered being "an enemy of excellence" by opponents.
Finally, your note about surgeons and nurses is interesting, given the history. Prior to understanding of germ theory, it would have been preferable to be operated on by a nurse. Obviously, this is an extreme example but it clearly demonstrates how widespread understanding of "merit" can actually be totally broken.
I think we share a lot of frustrations regarding the present state of the education system, but I still don't understand exactly what part randomisation is supposed to solve (except your anecdotal point about suicides, which I would easily counter with equally anecdotal or suicide rates might increase further as you'd be adding stress of randomisation on top of stress of performance). It appears to me that a lot of the problems you highlight would actually be solved with more/better metrics (including SATs / IQ tests, as these predict future performance).
I agree though that there's no good reason for gatekeeping education. In fact, in my ideal world, you'd have per-subject fast tracks available for anyone (or, more generally, non-age-specific schooling). For example, I always excelled at (and was interested in) math (other subjects, like physics and chemistry, I just excelled at but wasn't that interested in), so I think both I (individually, in future earnings) and the society (collectively, in future value/invention/...) would benefit tremendously if I was given harder math classes at an earlier age. There's a lot of kids like me, and in other subjects as well. But this would require better metrics and identifying such students earlier (even without any rate-limiting, simply to identify talent and steer it in the right direction).
Randomization expands access to qualified students who cannot access the same preparatory material or have divergent mental behaviors that do not hinder their ability to learn but do impact their ability to take tests.
The recent admitted class for TJ has seen absolutely enormous increases in the population of economically disadvantaged students as well as students on the autism spectrum or with other neuroatypical situations.
It therefore (in my mind) provides a more just system of allocation limited access to accelerated education, while we live in a world with such limited access.
> I agree though that there's no good reason for gatekeeping education. In fact, in my ideal world, you'd have per-subject fast tracks available for anyone (or, more generally, non-age-specific schooling).
My experience has been that promoting these policies receives even greater criticisms that me and my friends are racists who hate excellence. It is ridiculous to me that FCPS has a gated system for accelerated learning when there is a commuter-focused college right there. But if I go to school board meetings and suggest that we take resources and allocate them for this purpose, I'm called an "asian-hater".
My family saw a similar thing happen to them many years ago. The local GT programs were drawing students only from a select few (almost entirely white) schools and it turned out that a lot of this was due to how students were identified as candidates. My parents sought to change things, which did not deny any access to white students but instead expanded access and funding so that simply more people had access to accelerated education and... my parents were called "white traitors" by neighbors.
This is why I get so worked up about this stuff when people claim that support for a particular form of admissions exam is by definition support for promoting merit or promoting excellence.
A "Merit lottery" is a half measure when a true lottery is the least discriminatory way to go about things. Every position within society should just be to do a true lottery everywhere such an idea can be applied.
Water treatment plant workers? President? Honors program students? All of these roles are subject to countless forms of discrimination against people for lacking intelligence, lacking the right identity, lacking educational attainment, lacking all sorts of things.
What I tire of this "faux egalitarian, faux equality of opportunity, meritocracy" stuff which almost invariably discriminates against the less intelligent while trying to establish equality over an arbitrary list of attributes such as race or ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation which have been deemed to be especially important, whereas discrimination against the lazy and unintelligent is taken for granted as righteous, and discrimination against the unattractive and short is tolerable. This is in spite of the fact people are born lazy, stupid, short, and ugly, and this will never change.
Thus the only two resolutions I see to the problem are simply thus. Kill absolutely everybody, thus establishing perfect equity and equality. The other solution is to use lotteries absolutely everywhere except for perhaps a special class of lottery runners (an unfortunate meritocracy), in dating, in work, in schooling, that made it so that everybodies outcomes in life was absolutely arbitrary, and thus equal and equitable.
I think the spectral signature of wokeness is that affluent white people whose knowledge of racial discrimination is at most anecdotal and second hand started treating racism as The Problem whose solution must get almost absolute priority, even at a cost of traditional civil liberties or putting other things (healthcare?) on the backburner.
It looks like a weird neurotic guilt attack that is probably counterproductive to any future common prosperity. Pushing "Latinx" on Hispanics and discriminatory quotas on Asian students is almost guaranteed to generate some weird backlash. Import of the same ideas to Europe whose racial dynamics is absolutely different (black people from Africa sail here on their own and "we"* mostly want to stop this movement, so pretty much the opposite of American slave history) is almost guaranteed to wake up some old demons.
* Of course there is not a uniform opinion on this among 400 million people, but the last five years have been spent tightening borders, not opening them, and even some lefty parties like Danish Social Democrats joined in.
Yet it's really unsurprising that a number of affluent people love to talk about race, gender, environment, and many other topic except wealth inequality.
TLDR: Actually address the fundamental problems (spoiler: sexism and racism are not the fundamental problems, they are aggravating factors) that allow sexism and racism to cause issues for disadvantaged groups.
Most of the discussions around systemic racism and sexism fundamentally boil down to the topic either poverty or violence from police.
Poverty:
Specific groups are over-represented in the impoverished population, sometimes across generations. We, correctly, have identified systemic bias as an contributing factor to these trends.
Imagine a hypothetical society where the means of comfort (good food, safe and adequate housing, new clothing, entertainment, etc...) are available to people that need them, regardless of whether or not one is employed. Now ask yourself, would racism and sexism have the same bite that it currently has? If one's ability to live comfortably is not based on systemic bias, one would be disingenuous if they said "yes".
Life gets a lot easier when one can ignore shitty racists and sexists without fear of losing their means of survival. It would be nice if racists and sexists didn't exist, but if everyone had the means to ignore them without fear of repercussions, that's almost as good.
Violence from police:
A few observations from the last few years of police violence and the BLM movement:
-There is a large portion of shitty individuals within
various police forces that enjoy victimizing victimizable individuals
-Racialized groups are more victimizable than the average
-Police violence, although concentrated against minorities, also victimizes everyone to some degree, regardless of race or gender.
What practical solutions have come out of all of the years of outrage and protests? Instead of using "master/slave" software terminology, my company now encourages "leader/follower", while all of management is patting its back for "fighting systemic racism". Huh?
Here are some actual practical solutions to this issue:
-federally-mandated body cameras for all overt police officers that are always-on, and record to multiple external and publicly-viewable archives
-police review bodies with actual teeth to punish criminality amongst police officer
-a legal mechanism to permanently bar an individual from any kind of policing, country-wide
-removing "verbal evidence from a trusted officer" as admissible evidence in court
"Wokeness" is just yet another socially-acceptable form of discrimination, where us commoners have been pitted against each other playing some stupid "privilege points" game based on physical appearance. It's divisive, and is not actually moving us towards a healthier society. We should be looking towards our government to solve the actual issues that are aggravated by (and not caused by) sexism and racism.
In the case of violence-based examples above, the hypothetical society doesn't address the issue of past harm (decades or centuries of a disadvantaged position in society).
It also doesn't address non-economic forms of harm (like media underrepresentation, leadership underrepresentation, etc.)
The conservative approach to racism would be to equalize opportunity (to the extent the government is allowed
to) and replace the instincts that lead to racism with strong civic nationalism and then wait a very very long time, which is a solution that acknowledges that social change takes a long time.
You claim this is denial, but that's a biased reframing of the stated solution. This is a potential solution, but is not acceptable to the 'woke'
> It might exist in academia or PR departments or journalism or facebook pages and twitter threads but it does very little to affect material relations and power structures, so it's if anything the Left and not anyone else who should be concerned with it.
Are you sure? It feels like it has a much stronger influence, at least in Western Europe.
The influence exerted is usually orthogonal to the traditional goal of improving the conditions of the working class. Instead identity politics focuses on a platform of "more POC female dictators" rather than one that actually fights to make a material difference in people's lives.
It also destroys any form of class consciousness, replacing it with one based on race. The white middle class get the catharsis of flagellating themselves but the people struggling to pay rent or working two jobs are understandably defensive when you try to tell them how privileged they are.
I agree completely. It reminds me of when German trade unions found out that their members are much more conservative than their apparatchiks and their response was "we'll teach them" and they pressed full force ahead, predictably losing 20% of their members in the past 20 years.
Inflation is much higher than wage increases, rent is exploding in the cities while jobs are being migrated into the cities, but thank god we have committees for identifying more and more absurd diversions and divisions.
Because it's caustic and corrosive like few cultural movements are.
I've always said about self-appointed woke commissars that what they really want is to eat at the cool kids' table. But they can't do that because they are often profoundly mentally ill. So what they do instead is take over the nerds' table and exploit whatever good nature they find there to turn it into their personal fiefdom. Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.
(This is also why wokesters are such bloody corporatists. A corporation is a power nexus, and power is the flame to which they are the moth. It was always about power.)
The thing is they have been profoundly successful! Wokeness has gone for the throat of just about every nerd hobby: first it was science fiction, then video games, then comics, and more recently open source and tabletop RPGs. TSR/WotC laughed off the right's assault on D&D during the "Dark Dungeons" era when they tried associating it with Satanism. But they sure crumpled to accusations of racism from the other side of the aisle and today you can't assign traits such as strength or aggression to fictional nonhuman races because orcs are "coded as black" or some shit.
The result is that nearly everything about these hobbies is in ruins. You cannot write traditional science fiction without aligning yourself with fascists or those perceived to be fascists. The X-Men are no longer heroes, just jerks with superpowers and an axe to grind. Nerds are such soft targets, destroying what they love was easy.
So yeah, they've done nothing to address class inequality or challenge existing power structures, but they have demonstrated that they can dissolve our cultural fabric with proven techniques. Do not be surprised if conservatives are concerned with this -- conservatism is about protecting and preserving a culture. Not everything is money and power to them.
> TSR/WotC laughed off the right's assault on D&D during the "Dark Dungeons" era when they tried associating it with Satanism.
Well, there was a period of many years when WotC stopped printing the creature type "Demon" out of deference to that assault.
(And if I recall correctly, TSR replaced the terms "devil" and "demon" with "Baatezu" and "Tanar'ri". I don't know whether they had yet been bought out by WotC.)
And let’s be honest:
The “satanic panic” had no basis in fact. The idea that role playing gamers were going to do actual magic (or even think they were doing magic) is clearly nonsense.
But if you use human ethnicities as the basis for your games monsters… yeah, that’s a real problem.
It doesn’t mean you have to ban D&D, but it does mean it should address those issues.
Same with rock music. I don’t care if bands write about demons and wizards, but maybe try not to objectify women so much.
“squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.”
Again, not saying we have to “cancel” Tolkien, but we should be aware of the issues and do better in future.
Same register as the vastly more mediatized Atlantic slave trade. This raises a fundamental question: Is it possible to mend centuries of abject & violent abuse across racial lines, where the most common interaction with members of the other racial group was through a slaver's whip. Not sure that 'do better' scolding, especially if inconsistently applied, is sufficient.
If you go to YouTube via a CGNAT with all cookies cleared you'll always get one or two top suggestions with extremely well endowed women in the thumbnail.
That is the woke Google who delivers what everybody wants to see. But it is easier to go after the nerds because they are "icky".
This is the reality right now. Dictatorships and Juntas arise if enough voters (nerds in this case) are apathetic.
The totalitarian (and corporate) Steering Councils that pop up in some OSS projects are rarely elected by a majority. Nasty politicians and the mentally ill apply and get 30% of the votes. The rest of the voters do not apply or care enough to vote them out.
Historically, even Hitler never had a majority in an election. He got total power by the enabling act:
>> "It's always surprising to me that this seems to be such a Conservative topic of concern who if anything should be glad that it occupies so much mindspace."
I think most people who self-ID as conservative really believe what they claim to believe about wanting to work with people who have other views to make a better world where they don't have to worry so much.
There are people within their own spheres who encourage their fears because they know it's a distraction. A lot of them do seem to be wising up to it, but only because the firestarters overplayed their hand. The people who once persuaded people to see this as some majority, overwhelming force did so by sounding more reasonable than the people they complained about.
Once the agitators went off the deep end, I think most people are reasonable enough to see it for what it is even if the realization takes a while to propagate past the scripts people have developed in a half decade or so getting mad online about it.
A similar thing happened on "my" side when people started to catch on to all the plainclothes cops in protests trying to turn them into riots.
it's because you don't have any idea how destructive purging undesirable factions from your body politic are to society as a whole. it is perfectly fine if you remain ignorant of this, the rest of us are not.
Well given that they have to redefine terms under new names and to create a newspeak for all of this, it was not long until it had spread unchallenged from the social-sciences classrooms in universities to the workplace and we now see rejected concepts that were left in the past to later resurface under a redefinition under newspeak.
A great way to confuse the general public and push an agenda to create a culture of silencing anyone opposed to view points someone disagrees with.
Plenty of examples in the article if you have already read it.
Example of enforcing this with cancellations:
> Even as students began scouring the words of academics, administrators and fellow students for microaggressions, the oppressive slights embedded in everyday speech, and found them, complacency ruled.
which was later enforced...
> When invited speeches from people such as Christine Lagarde, then head of the International Monetary Fund, were cancelled after student activists accused her of complicity in “imperialist and patriarchal systems”
Also...
> James Bennet, who resigned as editorial-page editor of the New York Times after one such row, now works for The Economist; he was not involved in this article.
The 'row' in question [0] lead to the editor's resignation [1] because he defended it.
Well its not me who said this was new, nor did I say it was 'exclusive to liberals' or any particular side of the political spectrum. I just used the examples listed in the article.
Maybe you should direct this to the person who wrote the article at the Economist.
The only thing new or unique about this supposedly "cancel culture" stuff is that it's liberals making effective use of public moral arguments instead of conservatives.
I think this is the result of the gradual femininization of our culture. It started with the feminist/gender-studies types and slowly caught on.
Not because people necessarily wanted to change, but cancel culture makes it so that you can't risk nonconforming.
At first it was little things like switching to softer language and giving kids participation trophies so that they don't feel bad. Now it's spread to the point that they feel the need to invent words like Latinx just in case a couple of latinos feel left out.
People on this forum/website might not like it but you're basically dead on. Everyone can see this is what's happening. Outside of this bubble, normal people see it. Our enemies abroad see it. The only people trying to suppress us talking about it are the people trying to inflict it upon us.
Being feminine is not "totally a-ok" for men. Please talk to some men and ask if they enjoy being called feminine. I guarantee you most if not all (Straight) men would hate someone saying they're feminine.
If you don't believe me, flip it around and think about how a woman would feel if someone told them they act like a man. Most would not take kindly to it.
It's unfortunate the top level comment was flagged so I can't check exactly what it said, wasn't it about feminization of _society_, not men?
My point was just that being feminine isn't inherently a bad thing, and also not the right word to describe society being overly sensitive. Not that men should be expected to be feminine or that that would be a good thing.
Femininity can be toxic just like masculinity. Right now we have a society where masculinity is considered toxic and anything feminine is considered good and morally correct. It creates an imbalance, and that was the point of my post.
Lets take mental health for example. If someone has triggers the feminine approach would be to comfort them and try to create an environment where that person isn't exposed to their triggers. The masculine approach would be to tell them to toughen up.
Thing is you need a bit of both. You need to give people some level of support but at the same time exposure to their trigger can help them overcome it in some scenarios. Or in other words "toughen up".
I see masculinity and femininity as a yin and yang type thing.
> Now it's spread to the point that they feel the need to invent words like Latinx just in case a couple of latinos feel left out.
It's worse than that: surveys of actual Hispanic people report support for the word "latinx" in the single-digit percentages. The word is solely about making the moral crusaders themselves feel holier. No actual social problem is solved by shoving this word into our lexicon.
Just another instance of a decade-long line of little examples of petty linguistic tyranny that don't solve any problems but that do make activists feel righteous and help them signal holiness to each other.
Not if you know the person's marital status you don't. In many circles this will be seen as incredibly impolite.
But let's keep screaming at people for saying "guys".
Edit: I can imagine all the refutations coming, but please consider whether you think most people are well-mannered to begin with. The vast majority of us below a certain age are not. If you aren't receiving thank you notes (physical, verbal, text, email all fine) for gifts from said person let's not include them in polite society.
Maybe you're unaware, or maybe you enjoy cognitive dissonance...
But, as a single example of a near endless amount
Prepubescent boys literally used to be called girls in English. Boys were called girls for many centuries before they were ever called anything else. But keep on about the new age "feminization" boogieman.
Lol they flagged it again. They overpowered the vouch to make sure you can't be seen as legitimate.
You know, when the government ultimately is seen as the thing that must be stopped and the people who are willing to make a stand do. Guess who is second on that stop.
Heck, even if they get what they want, the first act of every new socialist government ever is to round up and imprison or execute their own troublemakers.
Can't have experienced, organized threats to the new order.
It really comes down to priorities. Are you rich? Then most of your needs are taken care of and you now need to search for something else to divert your attention.
Not rich? Need to worry about your job? Paying bills? Housing? Food? You have not fuckin time to care about anything else than to just survive.
I don't think it's that at all. There are plenty of tradies and other well-off groups without university education that just do not give a shit about this stuff.
From the article:
"What links these developments is a loose constellation of ideas that is changing the way that mostly white, educated, left-leaning Americans view the world."
It's moved from academic circles to "regular" middle-to-upper-middle class society for sure. You can argue that they're "elite" in some respects, but at the same time you're looking at an "elite" 30-40% of the population compared to the single-sigit percentage of people who espoused these beliefs 20 years ago.
While you are semantically correct, you're ignoring the actual phenomenon that is being discussed.
Whether or not a literal majority of white, middle-class, left-leaning Americans believe in Critical Race Theory or The Patriarchy is irrelevant. 20 years ago it was only discussed in Academia, whereas now these theories hold a significant influence over many peoples' political, business and social lives.
While I agree that it's no longer confined to Liberal Arts departments, I don't agree that it has influence on many people's lives (although that depends on how we define 'many'.)
Wokeness is generally treated as a joke among virtually every American whose employment is not dependent on 'public opinion', SNL's Levi's Woke Jeans skit is a classic take on that.
I don't know whether politicians are catering to over the top wokeness in order to be all-inclusive for votes, or if they believe (because they let someone else do their homework) that the majority of their constituency demands it.
>Wokeness is generally treated as a joke among virtually every American whose employment is not dependent on 'public opinion'
I'm not American (in case the username didn't give that away!), but I have definitely seen "woke" culture infiltrate into people's lives, especially in the corporate context.
A couple of incidents people I know personally have experienced include a guy being fired after a dumb sexist joke made at height of #metoo (to be fair, he was socially retarded in general) and another guy whose joke email was forcibly retracted by HR for using Christian Imagery in an "Easter Celebration" message (this guy was not socially retarded; school captain in fact).
Compare and contrast to the blue collar guys I know who openly make racist/homophobic jokes to just about everyone.
Point is, maybe amongst the people you know, in the city that you live, "wokeness" is treated as a joke. But in corporate culture in Melbourne (Australian equivalent of Portland, OR), it's this looming, oppressive spectre.
> It didn't. It lives entirely in elite society. If you aren't a member of an elite social strata it doesn't impact you and nobody gives a damn.
That seems to be a highly reductive concept you're using for "elite", basically meaning "people you imagine who you don't agree with". What constitutes "elite", to you?
How about the row after row of suburban homes in Livermore with BLM signs? Those are all median income neighborhoods, but I'm guessing you'd call them "elite"?
How about an expensive golf club in Little Rock filled with upper income, mostly white, mostly male players working the local social environment? Not "elite", I'm guessing?
I'll note that the linked article doesn't engage in this kind of tribalism or reductionism, and is actually pretty clear about what it means by things like "woke". That's something you added to the discussion, and I don't think it works well.
>How about the row after row of suburban homes in Livermore with BLM signs? Those are all median income neighborhoods, but I'm guessing you'd call them "elite"?
If your interlocutor is an advanced-level mental gymnast, they will tell you that the people in these suburban homes are simply aping the customs of the so-called "elites", acting as their servants. So yes, "elite" in the post you're replying to really is being used to mean "people you imagine who you don't agree with".
I recommend anyone who spends a lot of time thinking about this type of thing to take a break for a few months in a country that doesn't indulge it, e.g. Russia.
This probably isn’t the argument you think it is. Many reactionaries seem have a romanticized view of Russian culture and probably would be fine there.
No, actually they have no idea how Eastern European cultures are, less Russia. They would stick out like a sore thumb, they would be shunned, treated with distance for being foreigners. Being 'christian' wouldnt do literally sh*t.
The only places where they would be getting treated normally would be ironically places with more woke Russians - ie Russian liberals, educated, woke people. Who would not shun others for being foreigners and who would not exhibit automatic/traditional Russian behaviors of suspecting/shunning strangers and being closed to them.
> They would stick out like a sore thumb, they would be shunned, treated with distance for being foreigners. Being 'christian' wouldnt do literally sh*t.
I agree. In fact I think that their religion would only serve to exacerbate things since (unless I'm very wrong) Russians are largely Orthodox Catholics and these people are largely protestant and evangelical
Yep. They have no idea how great the divide in between Orthodox and other branches of Christianity is. Even muslims are more normalized in Orthodox regions since they have been living side by side for ~1000 years. And Protestanism, Evangelicals etc? They are much more 'further out' than these right wingers realize.
As an Eastern European I have friends and coworkers who are educated(PhDs even), but at the same time highly conservative, xenophobic and against wokeness in general.
Some of them even lived and worked abroad, but of course learned nothing from that experience.
Conservative foreigners would feel right at home with this crowd, but they might be surprised how liberal they are comparing to the locals.
Yes, i know that conservatism runs pretty deep in Eastern European culture, and its a behavior model more than a creed or ideology.
The American conservatives would feel 'at home' with such people as you described, however such people would not be accepting them how they seem to think they would.
Interesting you mention Russia. The leadership of Russia spends a lot of time thinking about how to denigrate LGBTQ+ folks. Racism is alive and thriving in Russia. They even recently went through the trouble of decriminalizing first time domestic violence. Could you elaborate on why you think a trip to Russia would be useful to [eta:American] progressives?
He did not say progressives, he said " anyone who spends a lot of time thinking about this type of thing", which I interpreted as the conservatives which can't stop talking about this.
Isnt it just that HR thinks if people believe they are working towards a greater cause, then they will be more willing to take the 3.2% comp adjustments every year?
The elite have always had a disconnected culture from the masses. Things like a taste for golf or the influence of certain clubs over high levels of government. That isn't unusual. That people from that culture then get to control the rest of a country because someone has to, and it may as well be the elites.
So the cultural disconnect isn't new or a problem. The problem is that this ideology seems to be (1) heavily focused on race and (2) be the most credible home for a resurgence of the ideas that powered the communist disasters of last century.
It is deviant from cultural norms. And that is fine and dandy, elite cultures are always deviant. The problem is this culture looks bad. It has abandoned some excellent ideals of tolerance and liberty.
It is amusing how wokeism not being defined allows it to be just about anything. Gay and trans people have a history of being locked out of most social groups and in all recent history have lower incomes and political influence than most, yet now they are portrayed as elites because of a like to recognition higher learning. Wouldn't it be easier to admit that people confuse you and that makes you upset?
> Many of psychology's concepts have undergone semantic shifts in recent years. These conceptual changes follow a consistent trend. Concepts that refer to the negative aspects of human experience and behavior have expanded their meanings so that they now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before. This expansion takes “horizontal” and “vertical” forms: concepts extend outward to capture qualitatively new phenomena and downward to capture quantitatively less extreme phenomena. The concepts of abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice are examined to illustrate these historical changes. In each case, the concept's boundary has stretched and its meaning has dilated. A variety of explanations for this pattern of “concept creep” are considered and its implications are explored. I contend that the expansion primarily reflects an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm, reflecting a liberal moral agenda. Its implications are ambivalent, however. Although conceptual change is inevitable and often well motivated, concept creep runs the risk of pathologizing everyday experience and encouraging a sense of virtuous but impotent victimhood.
The full article has a bit more nuance. It points out that intolerance to minor forms of harm has both pros and cons.
> This expansion takes “horizontal” and “vertical” forms: concepts extend outward to capture qualitatively new phenomena and downward to capture quantitatively less extreme phenomena.... Although conceptual change is inevitable and often well motivated, concept creep runs the risk of pathologizing everyday experience and encouraging a sense of virtuous but impotent victimhood.
Also the dilution in the "downward" direction denies the people with the original, more-serious issues the vocabulary to deal with their unique problems and will eventually engender skepticism in large parts of the general public (e.g. if "abuse" expands to encompass extremely common experiences, saying "I was a abused" ceases to have much meaning, and you end up with nonsense like "Were you just abused, or were use abused abused?").
And in the meantime it creates injustices in the other direction, e.g. when Julian Assange is accused of "rape" which the public understands to mean a particular very serious thing, but Sweden uses a definition that encompasses much more than that very serious thing. Meanwhile a thousand articles are published containing his name and the word "rape" together in the headline.
We need a separate word for leering, groping, fondling, sex with dubious consent, and violently beating someone during penetration without consent.
Rape used to mean only the last thing and it was regarded as basically the worst form of assault short of murder since it included every possible form of assault.
Today it's moved to fondling and people are trying to make it include leering. Using the same legal punishments for something that is clearly different makes very little sense and normalizes rape in the long term.
Funny how you are getting downvoted, I can guess the thinking behind it.
But you are right. The way rape is being treated now is like saying an accidental traffic accident manslaughter should be punished like a serial killer. It’s just not the same and it’s not fair.
This in no way makes groping or leering acceptable. But it’s still completely different to violent rape penetrative assault.
> Rape used to mean only the last thing and it was regarded as basically the worst form of assault
No, it did not. That's why you find courts always charged offenders for multiple different crimes when they are carried out together: rape, assault, kidnapping, life threats...
It's much clearer in German. Rape = Vergewaltigung. It contains gewalt = violence. Stuff like "rape by deception" as a court ruled in Israel because a Jewish Israeli woman had sex with a man she though to be Jewish but wasn't shouldn't be considered rape (I'd argue being the wrong ethnicity while having consensual sex shouldn't be a crime at all).
Now we have rape and we also have rape rape, like, the real rape.
And quantitatively speaking, surely there is some amount of money, which when lost in divorce, is tantamount to the original definition of rape.
(That is, a thought experiment whereby a person might decide a certain amount of money is worth the allowance/aversion of rape of the said bargainer-- such a threshold is different for each person but arguably represents an approximation of a financial quantification of rape-- which, perhaps that amount of money, when lost in divorce, can thereby arguably be considered financial rape)
Especially given that in public health administration, life and health is quantified in monetary terms.
> I contend that the expansion primarily reflects an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm, reflecting a liberal moral agenda.
I don't feel comfortable with anyone using the term "liberal moral agenda" unironically because of culture-specific connotations: for starters, it's a very US-specific phrase which will have attached meanings that would be lost or misinterpreted by people unfamiliar with how the term "liberal" specifically relates to US political discourse - and the hugely negative (to downright toxic) connotations attached to the label "liberal moral agenda" by the reactionary right-wing - which all make conversations like these impossible to have.
One of the privileges of occupying a position of hegemony is that you get to instruct your subjects in how they are allowed to refer to power, and pathologize expressions that are offensive to it. Liberals have all these rules about how you are allowed to describe liberals—the idea that we should observe similar courtesies when describing the “reactionary right-wing” as you pejoratively put it is, naturally, absurd.
So even an anodyne description like “liberal moral agenda” of what is objectively a moral agenda informed by liberal priorities becomes verboten, simply because it allows its adversaries to vocalize their opposition to it. Depriving the opposition of their own vocabulary and replacing it with one of your making is a classic move—anyone who fails to update their dictionary marks themselves as an enemy.
Someone is indeed making conversation impossible to have, but whose fault is that, exactly?
> I contend that the expansion primarily reflects an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm
Or maybe once you've weaponized a concept, it's tempting to use it as much as you can.
When being a nerd stopped being shameful and started being cool, all the cool kids started calling themselves nerds for liking Avengers and Harry Potter - why wouldn't you claim the social points that are just lying around?
And when you live in a society that rewards victimhood, when calling someone a bully gives you power over them - of course people will jump at any chance to call themselves a victim.
I have noticed this with “victim blaming”. I understood it to refer fairly specifically to sexual assault victims being blamed for “asking for it” by wearing a skirt or whatever.
Now I see it being used in relationship advice subreddits and agony aunt columns to basically mean “don’t dare disagree with me” when someone decides that they were the victim in some some dispute.
> Why do some social problems seem so intractable? In a series of experiments, we show that people often respond to decreases in the prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their concept of it. When blue dots became rare, participants began to see purple dots as blue; when threatening faces became rare, participants began to see neutral faces as threatening; and when unethical requests became rare, participants began to see innocuous requests as unethical. This “prevalence-induced concept change” occurred even when participants were forewarned about it and even when they were instructed and paid to resist it. Social problems may seem intractable in part because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them.
See syllogisms. Technically a battle against "whiteness" is not the same as a battle against "white". But in practice the syllogism makes the two indifferentiable.
It definitely seems as though specifying your preferred gender pronouns is no longer optional. This is required "in solidarity". Being an otherwise progressive person, I don't feel great about this and how quickly it happened.
Can you elaborate? Pronouns have never been "optional" for casual conversation. You're saying you now feel, I guess, compelled to declare them or something? Or are you mad that people expect you to use pronouns they want you to use? What's the beef here?
This kinda sounds like knee-jerk conservatism. It's different and new and forces you to learn new habits (true), and therefore it's bad and an erosion of civil society (false). This kind of skew has happened REPEATEDLY in society in the past, you just didn't notice.
To be glib: how many times have you used the word "negro" in the past year?
Specifically I meant specifying your own preferred gender pronouns in certain contexts. When enough of your peers do it, it feels downright strange to not do it even if you don't imagine anyone would have any problem deducing your gender and you wouldn't feel offended if they did happen to use the wrong gender for you. Of course it is completely fine for people to share preferred prounouns. But as pg has said the problem is with the things you not allowed to say, or alternately the things you are required to say and/or do.
Being required to, say, share drinking fountains or pools with people of another race should not be compared to this. One is about allowing people to co-exist with you, the other is about complying with a strongly encouraged communal display of ideology. There are obvious comparisons to make but you can use your imagination about what those are.
> Being required to, say, share drinking fountains or pools with people of another race should not be compared to this.
Indeed. And I didn't. I said "negro". Generations of people genuinely thought that was a neutral term. They were pissed as all fuck when all of a sudden it became a symbol of centuries of oppression. And they used language exactly like yours to express their exasperation. But the words changed anyway. And we all got over it, and civil society didn't dissolve.
And at the end of the process, most of us look back and think of it as largely a good thing that we went and, well, cancelled that old word as a symbol. The new one is better, simply because it was born out of the self-determinism of the oppressed.
Which is to say: get over yourself and declare your pronouns. (I'm a he/him, FWIW). Your grandkids will be ashamed that you fought it.
Sounds like you're describing the word "Negro" as a [scapegoat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoat): it was cast as a symbol of evil so that it could be canceled as such.
I guess that's a way to see the basic tension there: some folks might argue that using scapegoats can help society move on, while others might object on the basis that the goat wasn't actually evil.
Alternatively, we can see switching away from the word "Negro" as a rebranding effort, to retire prior literature and reduce historical associations.
Either way.. I guess that what can seem weird about such social-engineering maneuvers is that they don't make any sense if we assume that people are ideal logical-thinkers; mechanically, they're more like side-channel attacks or emotional manipulation. And.. I guess folks might vary in how agreeable they might find well-intentioned emotional-manipulation.
> some folks might argue that using scapegoats can help society move on, while others might object [...]
Right, but in this particular instance what actually happened is that we just moved on by building consensus around a new paradigm. No one uses the word anymore, and nothing awful happened.
Therefore I argue that similar hand wringing about gender pronouns is going to turn out equally bland. It's fine. Just relax. Society isn't falling apart, you're just being socially awkward. And in fifty years everyone will think the antiwoke conservatives were just being ridiculous.
Eh.. do you have your astrological-signs on your profiles? If not, why not add them in solidarity with those who are deeply emotionally invested in seeing the world through that lens? Not only would it help them feel validated, knowing your astrological-sign would help them better understand you and know how to interact with you.
At the same time.. not everyone wants to have to play along. A lot of new identity-trends emerge (and reemerge over time and in different places), giving adherents ways to self-conceptualize who they are as well as rules for how to interact with others. Some trends get really popular and can get a lot of true-believers, while others don't really get into them.
Can you understand how both sides feel? This is, can you understand both what it'd feel like to be someone deeply invested in the latest trend in spirituality, and can you likewise understand what it'd feel like to want to give the latest trend in spirituality a pass?
If this is the first trend you've seen, then it may seem like this big, huge thing that everyone should adopt. But you ask about 50-years from now? ..that's a long time for a trend to remain relevant, even if you're currently in a sub-culture that's super into it.
I think it might have been that one of the great thinkers of nineteenth century abolitionism weighed in on exactly this subject and had something relevant to say? I mean... it's not like he was quoting someone on reddit here.
Fredrick Douglass appears to have liked the term "Negro" [1]:
> The form of the negro —[I use the term
negro, precisely in the sense that you use the term Anglo Saxon; and I believe, too, that the former
will one day be as illustrious as the latter] [...]
Would you happen to recall where you may've seen Douglass complaining about it?
Id recommend getting outside of your social circle/geo a bit more. I’ve never once experienced this in Denver, and have only ever seen gender pronouns be a thing on linkedin.
>> It definitely seems as though specifying your preferred gender pronouns is no longer optional. This is required "in solidarity". Being an otherwise progressive person, I don't feel great about this and how quickly it happened.
> Id recommend getting outside of your social circle/geo a bit more. I’ve never once experienced this in Denver, and have only ever seen gender pronouns be a thing on linkedin.
I've started to see them in email signatures at work, but only in situations where such specification was entirely unnecessary. Though most cases have consistent enough formatting that there may be some corporate-standard signature template that has it now.
I would love to have more pronouns in signatures. I cannot count the times I used Google picture search to figure out the gender of students from cultures I am not well educated about (Chinese, Indian, Arabic, Vietnamese ...). Many foreign students adopted a western name to mitigate such problems. Yikes!
The western name thing is all about pronunciation.
It also helps when you realize all other personal information on a candidate might be redacted, except for a name.
It predates the current cultural climate by decades.
> in situations where such specification was entirely unnecessary
Doing it in situations where such specification is entirely unnecessary is precisely how you normalize it not being weird.
If the only people that had listed pronouns were ones that needed it, it would "other" them, and make pronoun preferences WEIRD and UNUSUAL.
If we recognize that even before the cultural mainstream of transness, EVERYONE already had preferred pronouns (just the ones that happen to match their gender), then we can normalize it.
As a teacher, I face the same situation. My roster says “Christine” but the student sets their name to “Chris” in the CMS and has traditionally masculine features, dress, and haircut. Do I go with “he” or “she”? Best to get pronouns out of the way during an introduction and dissipate the awkwardness.
Sometimes I wonder if people who have the biggest issue with displaying pronouns don’t meet a lot of new people, especially new trans people. Displaying pronouns makes the process so much easier and less awkward!
But why not just say if a person is a man or a woman, why does it have to be pronouns. When I see pronouns, I then assume they believe in an ideology where people can actually change sex and basic reality is denied. Where people can simply declare the reality they want, and force others to play along. Why does everyone have to play along with this ideology, aka, the pronoun game.
That's your fault, not the fault of the concept of pronouns. In the thread above, teachers and people working in international companies both explained benefits to having pronouns listed that have nothing to do with gender expression. So, your assumption is flawed.
Secondly, let's consider your terminology: "Basic reality"; "force others to play along"; "pronoun game". Consider this scenario:
You: "Hi, are you Matthew?"
Matthew: "Yes, but actually I prefer Matt, could you call me Matt?"
Do you:
A: "Sure, no problem. Hey Matt, Joe said we should discuss Project Foobar, etc"
B: "No. Your name is Matthew, this is basic reality. Why are you forcing me to play along with your PREFERRED NAME GAME?"
I think we all know the answer to this question.
How is this different from: A new coworker starts on your team named Chris. They seem to have some masculine features but they also have long hair, are wearing makeup and a dress. But you are pretty sure they were born male.
You: "Hey, let's organize Chris's Welcome Lunch. Does anyone know his food preference?"
Your coworker: "Actually their pronouns are she/her."
Do you
A: "Sure, does anyone know her food preference?"
B: See B above.
If you think the situations are completely different, here's a third scenario. Chris is a butch woman with short hair, not a transgender person.
You: "Hey, let's organize Chris's Welcome Lunch. Does anyone know his food preference?"
Your coworker: "Actually, Chris is a woman."
What's the difference? Why is your opinion on gender expression, transgender "ideology", chromosomes, or anything else of the sort matter at all?
This is just basic human socialization 101. Treat people like they ask you to be treated in situations where there is no extra cost to you. That's it. It requires no more difference or effort to remember than in any other social circumstance separate from pronouns.
Appendix:
Yes, I am aware of the extreme exceptions. I'm sure you can find me some angry tweets from trans people who overreacted to some situation or another. But let's remember the context. People are angry because the basic human decency I described above is NOT offered to them. So yes, there are misunderstandings and chips on shoulders. But we don't need to base policy or perspective of opinions based on extreme outliers on twitter.
I actually believe I am God. So please address me as “My Lord” or “My Saviour”. If you don’t then you are clearly a violent oppressor of mentally alternative individuals. Crazy people are people too you know and deserve the same respect and non-violence as the next guy/girl/entity/abstract/mutation/…
There are some key differences that this and the "attack helicopter" memers miss.
There are people who believe they are God (There are people who believe htey are Attack Helicopters, I'm sure). But they are very few and far between. We ignore them, we marginalize them. Or, best case, we treat them.
Now, I'm not trying to open the pandora's box on the medical community's perspective on transgenderism. We can have this conversation after, but I am deliberately focusing on pronouns for a start.
Because when it comes to pronouns, in English-language society, we DO treat people based on gendered pronouns - male and female ones. Basically 100% of our time, 50% one, 50% the other.
So a person who is asking to be addressed as "My saviour" is asking for unique preferential treatment that you are likely not offering anyone else in life.
A person who is asking to be addressed as the gender pronouns of the other gender is asking to be treated the same way that you already treat 50% of the people you encounter, just to be re-categorized. And that's not a big ask because in the VAST Majority of cases you encounter, that person will already be presenting MOSTLY as the gender that they are asking to be treated as.
Now, you might say that being asked to be treated as a different gender than you are born is just as unusual as being asked to be treated as a God. But we don't even need to get into the statistics of prevalence to recognize that the numbers are not relevant. You already have to go through life learning 1) people's names, 2) people's nicknames, 3) people's gender when they are ambiguous or deliberately provocative. This is common metadata you remember about people.
Part of existing in society is learning other human's social characteristics, and incorporating them into how you interact with them. Pronouns are not meaningfully different.
I feel triggered by your disagreement. People who believe they are God is clearly a minority. And therefore deserve special treatment. I might be a God but I have feelings too you know.
I sure am glad that I wrote a well considered nuanced response and tried to come up with helpful analogies for our debate, only to get trolled back in response.
Sadly it's not a surprising experience for me anymore dealing with people that argue against progress.
To clarify: you’re ok with the words “man” and “woman”, but not “he”, “him”, “she” and “her”? I think you need to work on that, because you seem to be projecting a lot for something that really doesn’t matter.
This is a legitimate issue, and I'm not even the political/social-justice type.
(I don't mean the company forcing putting pronouns in your username, but for trans/non-binary people to put it in their profile name)
Had an instance at a job once where someone joined, I spoke with them and they were really nice + helpful. Maybe 2 months later, I went looking for them and they didn't seem to be at the company anymore.
Turns out they had changed their username to another gender along with profile pic, now used a different pronoun.
I felt like an ass when I read back to intros and learned that they didn't prefer the pronouns their name/pic implied when they joined. Quite literally "assumed their gender" and they never corrected me about it. Hope it didn't bug them, but it probably did.
I've heard from more than one transgendered person that passed that they felt that it outs them as transgendered to go around labeling pronouns.
Many people, including those who are not transgendered, are also uncomfortable with being forced to hyper-identify with their gender. For many their gender is just a small aspect of them, and especially in a professional context where their gender has no role being forced to put on a gender-show feels sexually invasive.
If everyone shared their pronouns than trans people wouldn't be singled out. Besides, the primary beneficiaries are trans people who don't "pass", including nonbinary people like myself for whom "passing" is an invalid concept.
Listing your pronouns isn't hyper-identifying with your gender, it is merely identifying your pronouns so that other people don't get them wrong. Gender is complex territory that goes much deeper than pronouns.
It's a motivation people have, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it could achieve that goal. Another perspective is that bringing gender to the front and center will cause people to question the gender of people they're interacting with in situations where its completely irrelevant.
Oh I'm totally against forced pronoun labeling, if you read my other reply in this thread.
I'm just saying that the general concept of it if you're trans/non-binary (and WANT a particular pronoun used) is helpful for people who otherwise wouldn't know.
I think it's become commonplace enough that people don't jump to the conclusion you're trans/non-binary if you put a pronoun next to your username.
> Many people, including those who are not transgendered, are also uncomfortable with being forced to hyper-identify with their gender.
Preaching to the choir, my partner is intergender but biologically female/female-presenting. I like to think I have at least some degree of understanding.
Its probably also good for people with gender identity within the traditional binary who have names that don’t have obvious and correct gender loading in the culture of the individuals who might be addressing them. (Even if there are photos in profiles, people can also have androgynous or non-gender-stereotypical appearance without trans or nonbinary identity.)
I’ve experienced that when I went to a LGBT students event with my partner at their university, though that’s an environment where one might expect that to happen.
The only place I have really seen this take off is on US headquartered social media sites (I live in Australia) that have added pronouns as an optional field.
It's definitely optional. I have yet to have anyone in real life try and pull me up over it, except for my 11 year old daughter. If a virtue signaller tried to give me a hard time about it, they can "talk to the hand".
My wife is a history professor at a major university. Literally in the belly of the beast as far the reactionaries are concerned. Specifying gender pronouns there remains optional, for both students and faculty. Many people do it willingly but it is not universal.
In my US company, we've been strongly encouraged to use pronouns on our very first day of work (actually, even before that).
I consider myself progressive as well. If this helps with inclusion, I'm glad to use them. But it brings a mccarthysm vibe that makes me uncomfortable and slightly worried.
If a company asked this I would put "gavinray [I don't give a flying fuck what you call me]".
Happy to use other people's pronouns if it makes them happy, it really makes no difference to me, and clearly it's a big deal to some people so I've no problem obliging.
But if you ask for something this stupid, company-wide, IMO you're due what you ask for.
Because there's my pronoun. Call me he/she/they, or a goddamn Attack Helicopter, I really don't care.
I have had to go out of my way to break the habitual "Hey guys" -> "Hey all/Hey folks" though, and I don't find that one unreasonable.
I think you're missing the point a bit, but I understand why one would. The point of asking everyone to label their pronouns isn't some sense of hollow solidarity for trans people, it's so that trans people can be given the decency and space to label their pronouns in a way that isn't ostracizing and isolating.
Yes, you don't care what pronouns people use for you. You're privileged in that you've never struggled with gender and gender identity in a society that shames and ridicules you for it. Giving people space to be themselves (in a very basic human-rights sort of way) shouldn't be narrowly dismissed as stupid and "a big deal to some people".
I think it depends to some extent on one's dialect of English–and that includes regional and subcultural dialects, as opposed to merely national variants. If one grows up in a region/subculture in which its use in a gender-neutral way is common, it is natural and automatic to view some uses of it as gender-neutral. If one grows up in a region/subculture in which gender-neutral use of the term is rare, viewing it as gender-neutral is much less natural and automatic.
It is also worth pointing out while sometimes its plural uses can be perceived and intended as gender-neutral (especially vocative plural uses), singular uses are almost always gender-specific, and even many plural uses are gender-specific too. A person who says "hey guys" is quite possibly intending it in a gender-neutral way; if the same person were to say "most guys are like that", that plural use is obviously talking about males only
The fact that the term is still gender-specific in many contexts, even among speakers and listeners who sometimes use and understand it in a gender-neutral way, leads some people to consciously choose to reject it as a gender-neutral term – sometimes even people who may have grown up with its gender-neutral use
Here's what I mean: Let's assume you are male (gavin). That means that in professional settings when people refer to you they would say "he".
What happens if one person - just one coworker - kept referring to you as "she". "Yes, I'm working on her (Gavin's) pull request".
I simply don't believe that you wouldn't notice it or wonder what's going on.
Oh sure, maybe it wouldn't BOTHER you, but it would STAND OUT. It would come up.
And if there were no political agenda behind you saying you don't mind being an attack helicopter, you might ask "Why do you keep saying she/her? I'm a man"
Now let's raise this up a notch. What if you asked this person why they keep calling you she/her - when they are the only ones, and it stands out, and their answer was "Because fuck you, that's why. I don't care what your pronouns actually are. I'm deliberately trying to choose the opposite to bother you. Is it working?"
Hmmm...you could ignore that. You probably would. I believe that you have enough confidence and security to just ignore that. But it's fucking weird, and needlessly hostile, no? You would wonder what you did to earn this hostility and if the person is going to question your motivations/actions, sabotage you professionally, or generally be an enemy.
THIS IS WHAT TRANS PEOPLE FACE. If you are transgender, trying to transition, but you are making all the steps (hormones, surgery, makeup, social expression, clothing), but you are not quite passing, and ask your coworkers to use your PREFERRED pronouns, and MOST do (which they will), but one fucking asshole Bob deliberately doesn't and says "NO. You are born male. So I will use your male pronouns.", that is exactly the same level of hostility and unprofessionalism.
People (including myself, a cis hetero male) put pronouns in their public profiles to normalize it so that it's not just trans people that have to face the burden of having to ask for their preferred pronouns.
When you put "i don't give a flying fuck what you call me" as your pronoun, you are not just mocking their struggle, you are giving a strong signal that you are going to be Fucking Asshole Bob to any trans person that approaches you and asks you to use their preferred pronouns.
Legitimately who cares? It's not like you have to sacrifice anything by just saying you'd like to be called he or whatever. It's an incredibly easy thing to do.
This is not something I or anyone I know wants enforced by policy or "if you know what's good for you." It's nice and helps normalize the practice for people who need that acceptance, and it stands out in a good way, but the lack of stated preference isn't a negative indicator.
Now, when someone flips out on me because I default to they/them in text when someone has no stated preference and there's no way to tell, that's a negative indicator. It's clear they have a preference and refuse to state it just to be difficult. But it's a rare occurrence.
I'm Fab (he/him/his, or in German er/seiner/ihm/ihn/ sein/seine/seines/seiner/seinem/seinen/seins/sich/ der/dessen/dem/den/ dieser/dieses/diesem/diesen/ jener/jenes/jenem/jenen/derjenige/etc.)
Where does it feel like it's no longer optional? I don't see your preferred pronouns here just for example. In all of my social circles the overwhelming opinion expressed by progressives is that not specifying your pronouns is as valid a preference as any other. I've even seen that specifically stated in diversity and inclusion training. Making people feel like they have to specify pronouns is the opposite of being inclusive and progressive so I'm glad I've never come across this.
It seems like this question could be asked at any period of social conflict historically in the West.
How did ideas that were once extremely radical like women's equality in the social sphere (to include holding office and suffrage), desegregation, slavery abolition, and many more work their way from the intelligensia (academics, philosophers) to the masses? How did "Marxism" jump from academia to workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? The fact that businesses are supportive of such causes is somewhat new, but is likely explained by the same forces that lead to the masses embracing these ideas.
Largely, this seems to be the molding of our social sphere by market forces. The northern competitors to the agricultural South found slavery abolition to be inline with their material interests. Likewise, as the industrial revolution shook up familial units and proletarianization of women moved wives into the factories, equality in the social sphere was no longer resisted by structures that had a material basis. Desegregation could assist in curbing a growing black nationalist movement through assimilation and a reduction in direct antagonism. Ideas are often forged in the conflicts and conditions of the day that they arise in.
Had this article been written in the '90s about the "extreme" gay rights movement, or in the '60s about the "woke" Civil Rights Movement, how many would actually stand by their critique a decade later? Businesses seem to understand that showing token support for progressive issues is better for their brand than silence or reactionary opposition to progressivism (which, let's face it, never holds up well for long.) While I doubt any corporate co-option for social issues actually materially benefits those movements, I can't help but find myself even more cynical about the reactionaries complaining about how "extreme" or "woke" their positions are.
Yeah, I tend to think "woke" as a sneer word is just the new "PC/politically correct" as a sneer word.
Corporations wouldn't be engaging in this kind of token support for progressive issues if they did not believe such issues were broadly popular. Such organizations rarely do anything for free. The token support is a reflection of something in the culture.
Most of the "backlash" to "woke stuff" is a working-through of the cognitive dissonance this notion brings for certain people/organizations. They cannot believe that such ideas can have even token support among the broader public. So it gets framed as some sort of virus, or as an orgy of cynical virtue signalling. But in order to virtue signal, you need somebody who understands (and ideally even shares) the virtue that is being signalled.
Your entirely reasonable comment being flagged currently is an example of this cognitive dissonance at work.
There are many valid critiques of so-called "wokeness" but most of them come from angles that reactionaries generally dislike.
If this were true, Hollywood and sports wouldn’t be seeing record low numbers. Dollars from customers remain a robust measure, even with a culturally detached “elite”.
An example is the public supporting Johnny Depp, while the “Woke” are arrayed around Amber Heard and her defamation. It turns out that the public at large doesn’t agree with leftwing misandry — and are repulsed by everyone from the ACLU to Hollywood execs protecting a privileged abuser like Ms Heard.
We see some of the same Woke abusers around Andrew Cuomo.
Your post seems to be an example of what you’re lamenting: a passionate defense of a bigoted ideology that doesn’t resonate with the general public — being “Woke”.
> Most of the "backlash" to "woke stuff" is a working-through of the cognitive dissonance this notion brings for certain people/organizations. They cannot believe that such ideas can have even token support among the broader public.
But that's the thing: a lot of the woke stuff isn't publicly supported. Latinos don't care for "Latinx" [1]. Enforcing more gender-speech in Germany has decreased the support in the general population, also among women. [2]
It's the media that is going crazy over it and really, really wants it. And the politicians are willingly following. The electorate does not.
On the first point, a ~recent (2020) poll suggests most Latino people don't even know that "Latinx" is a word. Your post contradicts itself somewhat there. It says "the media are going crazy" over "woke stuff", but seems to make the assumption that "Latinx" is being actively pushed on Latino people, which seems like it isn't true--since if it were, far more of them would actually know it was a word. I suspect the prevalence of "Latinx" in the media is largely due to its being held up so frequently as an example of the putative derangements of wokeness (there are several examples of this in this thread).
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-08-11/...
On the second point, I simply don't know enough about the specifics of that debate, and I can't read German.
I remain convinced that corporations specifically show token support for social-progressive issues because they see some benefit to it; that is, they see some amount of broad support for these ideas in society.
> It says "the media are going crazy" over "woke stuff", but seems to make the assumption that "Latinx" is being actively pushed on Latino people, which seems like it isn't true--since if it were, far more of them would actually know it was a word.
You might have misunderstood my point. I'm saying the media cares, not the Latinos. They don't care, otherwise they'd be out there saying they want to be called Latinx -- instead, they don't even know that there's a debate. Similarly, most people of most cultures don't care for the concept of cultural appropriation, yet there's a fuzz in the corporate media about it.
Since German has gendered nouns with the male form usually doubling as the neutral form (e.g. teacher = Lehrer, female teacher = Lehrerin), there's been a push by the media, academics and politicians to gender (e.g. to say either Lehrende = "those who teach" or use things like Lehrer_innen which is supposed to also include transsexuals, non-binary and intersex). The public is opposed to it, but the corporate media and politicians are forcing the issue and the opposition gets stronger.
The only group that is split on the issue are those still in education, where indoctrination has become much more severe.
> How did "Marxism" jump from academia to workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries?
Easy. Useful idiot to destabilize country. This is how Russian Empire was destroyed and never recovered. Even Germany after two world wars is much better than current CIS countries. Why? Because the red plague forever maimed their progress.
one theory is that this is a product of the capital vs labor struggle...as madison wrote, "divide et impera" is how the elite can rule america...wokeness might be considered a divide et impera tactic to turn labor factions against each other, thus empowering elites, i.e., Capital
As someone who lives in a formerly fascist country and was born in a socialist country that borrowed many fascist tools, I can tell you all one thing: Taking control of the language is a telltale sign of a fascist movement. Whoever tries to control the language automatically stands on the wrong side of history. It is not an accident that the woke movement attacks liberties so vehemently. It is also not an accident that it seems to pile one more extreme demand on top of the other, look how currently feminism gets cleansed, this is just the internal power struggle (think Röhm purge or Trotzkists). Do not make the mistake to think this movement is out there to improve anything for anyone. It is solely a revolutionary movement trying to survive and radicalize until it can get to power.
I don't agree with this fully. The most extensive language reform movement in the last 100 years was by Ataturk in Turkey. I don't think it falls into the above category. I think it is due to some form of idealism, and there are such people at all points along the political spectrum.
Language reform ain't language control. Reforming a language can have negative impact, for sure, but it normally has a positive goal that lies in the language itself: Simplified orthography (latest German reform), reviving a dead language (Hebrew), or simplification of writing (simplified Chinese). And yes I see the irony that this last reform was issued by Mao.
In contrast, language control is about eliminating certain forbidden words, either hoping to eliminate certain facts or thoughts by litery making them unspeakable or by creating rules that every normal person will violate sooner or later, allowing it to denounce everyone when necessary.
You call it 'wokeness' in US. Rest of the world calls it 'manners' or 'civilized behavior'. In actual civilized countries, such things have been legislated a long time ago - most of the 'freehdumbs' which many Americans freely enjoyed in denigrating, insulting, harassing other Americans would land you in court in civilized countries. In countries where there arent such laws, it will cause you to get a broken nose because no one will tolerate abuse like how some Americans expect other people to tolerate it for the sake of their own 'freehdum'.
Some Americans are going to extreme in some angles does not change the fact that a lot of you call civilized manners 'wokeness'. Like how many old, racist boomers complain about not being able to talk sht about minorities, immigrants and stuff.
Incredible stuff.
But it tells why US is in the shthole it is in - like how Texas implemented a totalitarian state in which American Taliban can snitch on other people via state-run mechanisms. Something which did not even exist in East Germany - who preferred to spy on people normally, by funding actual spies instead of turning everyone into snitches.
> Rest of the world calls it 'manners' or 'civilized behavior'.
Latinax+, Womxn is manners and civilized behavior? In actual civilized countries you'd get confused look or cuckoo sign. This insanity doesn't exist in Europe yet(thank God), but woke idiots are working hard, no worries.
"Latinax, Womxn" -> Yeah, you totally invalidated the concept of wokeness by two phrases, good job. Despite i have explicitly mentioned that some extreme arguments dont invalidate concept of civilized behavior.
> In actual civilized countries you'd get confused look or cuckoo sign
You wouldnt. Dont make up stuff.
> This insanity doesn't exist in Europe yet(thank God)
Because Europe is not US. You cant rail about others, speak hatefully about minorities, immigrants, less harass people who wear masks or other bullsh*t and expect the state not to drag you to court to persecute your ass.
Just give a try to exercising the 'freehdums' which American right is exercising and see how fast youll get prosecuted in Europe.
Of course, not in reactionary countries like Poland or Hungary. I said civilized countries.
That's not an example. And, there has been pretty strong and large persecutions of football clubs for actions which their fans did in the middle of a crowded stadium. FIFA rules - without even justice taking action, FIFA kicks the butt of such clubs whose fans go out of civilized limits.
The fact that you speak about FIFA in a positive light tells me you’ve never seen a football game, let alone been to a football stadium where racist abuse is being hurled. In Italy it’s especially bad, with banana peels being thrown on the pitch to abuse black players. FIFA doesn’t do anything about this. They take a “see no evil” approach to individual instances while professing to “kick out racism”.
You seem to think football is a niche sport in Europe. It’s not. It’s by far the most popular one. If racism is endemic in it, that indicates a wider malaise. Don’t try to excuse it by saying “no only a minority of fans…”
Please, just stop talking on a subject you’re clearly out of your depth on. And please stop this nonsense about racism only existing in America. It’s just not true.
Yeah, definitely i have never been to a football game, let alone have been to a football stadium. Good job divining that out about a random stranger on internet. What a discovery.
And then you moved on to build an entire argument about your false divination, making your arguments totally baseless.
You dont need another person to discuss - you seem to be capable of just making up arguments for the other person. So i wont be replying to your argument since you can continue making arguments and replying to them yourself. Good day.
> Because Europe is not US. You cant rail about others, speak hatefully about minorities, immigrants, less harass people who wear masks or other bullsh*t and expect the state not to drag you to court to persecute your ass.
All across Europe some parts of the press are happy to speak hatefully about minorities and immigrants.
I don’t think any of this stuff is prosecuted (or that it should be). At least the French and Spanish examples were widely condemned but I think it says a lot they were published in the first place.
Every single reference you gave either reports outrage or investigations about such actions by any media outlet or persona. Whether any of those investigations or outrage will cause a public prosecutor to carry them into court, is another matter. That is, if a citizen or resident does not carry them to the court first. Barring those who issue apologies for their actions, which mostly happens.
Such stuff should be prosecuted. The state of American society, the delirium that engulfed the segments who were allowed to keep living back in 150 years ago, actual fascists organizing openly with open statements about 'cleansing others' -> Such things show that if you let the extremists do whatever for 'freedom', you end up with a big pile of sh*t in your hands.
It’s always been in real life. Funny enough, there are some cultural remnants of certain leftists from the 90s/00s where they were the ones railing against “political correctness” in attempt to shock the religious right of the time. The way I see it things have simply reversed as the religious right seemingly lost ground over the past years and progressives became more prominent.
Not applicable. The 'wokeness' in US largely encompasses things like minorities not tolerating being denigrated, debased, harassed anymore. Not even talking about things like nudity in beaches, abortion and other bullsh*t in which US still stays back 150 years in the past in US.
No, it's more of a virtue signaling scheme and a "luxury belief" that brown and black people can't think for themselves, and white liberal upper middle class knows what's best for them. Such as, for example, abolishing the police in high crime lower income neighborhoods and other loony bin shit like that, which does absolutely nothing to help anyone they pretend to care for. These tend to be the same folks who would move out in an instant if black folks started moving into their neighborhood, and won't spare a dime to actually help any of them with anything. It's words, Twitter and Facebook, and little else best I can tell. Purely performative virtue signaling.
A large part of those blacks and browns are in that woke movement. Bar the evangelist blacks in American south. Who seem to have some kind of stockholm syndrome.
You dont even know what abolishing police means apparently. And yet you have strong opinions about such stuff.
They want to abolish AMERICAN police and bring about European style, civil-service policing. And yeah, for that, you need to abolish the medieval-sheriff-remnant abomination that is the police concept in US.
And there is nothing wrong with 'virtue signaling': Decent, civilized behavior should be promoted, and reactionary, backwards behavior should be derided. Otherwise the society cannot find its balance, and ends up promoting reactionaries who openly declare that they want to take the society 200 years back. Like what happened in Texas about abortion, making people snitch on other people for abortion - real big brother stuff.
I would take an extreme woke over the mildest conservative any day. The former doesnt want to take me to 200 years back in time.
Performative virtue signaling, as practiced in the US is wrong IMO. It is aimed at extracting social approval out of like-minded peers without effecting any positive change. Indeed it's getting to the point where _the mere absence_ of virtue signaling behavior draws reprisals and Twitter lynch mobs. Virtue under the barrel of a gun is not virtue at all.
Moreover, negative change is occurring: murders are up nationwide last year due to "abolishing police" in lower income neighborhoods and releasing repeat criminals from jail "on their own recognizance", a dozen times in a row. Black on black violence is a topic that can't even be raised on the left, and yet it affects both blacks and whites disproportionately. Why is that? Because it needs heavy police enforcement to combat it. A gangbanger couldn't care less about your "social worker".
Presumably because yellow should work for everyone. There will always be some people who are offended that a choice exists, even if they don’t plan to take it.
Be happy that you don't have to prove your skin color to Slack yet. You're currently still able to appropriate minority skin colors, but I guess we're just one white guy using a brown-skin thumbs-up ("it's literally the brown thumbs, it's the modern brown shirts") before Slack mandates skin color tests.
It is interesting. On the one hand, I can see how the previous model could be sightly alienating to anyone who's skin color doesn't obviously map to "Simpsons Yellow". However, whether people pay attention to it or not, the new interface quantifies approval in a way which can be segmented by skin color, which seems kind of odd.
This is just feminine culture. The whole gender/trans movement is to blur the lines between men and women so modern feminist trash can be foisted on everyone.
On a related point, what I'm uncertain about are the reasons for the increase in transgender kids in the west. I understand there's been a massive increase in cases for transmen in the UK and USA for example.
Is this because we can identify these conditions much better now? Maybe. I don't have the background to say for sure.
There is a real fear in society though that woke schools of thought are a harmful influence to the above rise. Again we need to be careful here.
Personally what I do know is that growing up I had for a time quite severe identity issues (not about gender) but it was also a time when society encouraged the view of everyone being unique and mysterious and don't put labels on things. There wasn't anyway near this current level of identity politics and wokeness.
I appreciate it's a bit of a stretch but in some ways it does feel now in society there is a growing pressure to box people's identities in more. Im so glad I grew up without the internet and could just be, and be a confused kid growing up without labels.
It follows directly from more acceptance of being transgender in society. It is not pleasant to have to sit with gender dysphoria for years - and then when you eventually do treat it, to have to spend thousands undoing changes to your body. Much better to treat it before it becomes a problem.
Alternative explanation: there have always been as many transgender kids, but they hid it because they knew they'd get bullied by everyone, including their own parents.
This. It's amazing what you find in the shadows, in the periphery of our culture, when you simply look. For a long time, we just refused to see what was right in front of us. There's a long tradition of transgenderism, and anthropologists have been writing about it for a while.
But that's not the whole story. Kids are also very malleable, open to peer pressure and easily assume identities that earn them acceptance by their peers.
Exactly. Transphobia often leads to trauma after getting ostracized by one's peers. I've never seen evidence of "wokeness" being nearly as nasty. You don't get bullied or singled out for not being trans.
I doubt that. Resonable people recognice that there is a diffrence between a personal preference of who to fuck, and telling others who they should prefer to fuck.
But I don't know that it actually is. There's no “everyone will be fine with this” – implied is a “most people are reasonable”, so it isn't the right form of argument to be a No True Scotsman.
No. One of my friend is lesbian and active LGBTQ+ member (pro-bono doctor for the one who needs it in her community now, that's what i mean by active), and she knows i only date biologically born women, her friends knows it, never had any issue with them.
I’m a homosexual man. I’ve been called out by woke friends because I’ve said that generally gay men are not attracted to vaginas. I’ve been called closed minded and a right wing asshole for saying that I would not date trans men, and that heterosexual intercourse will never be gay.
I have to keep these opinions quiet now because of the negative social backlash I’ve gotten.
I can’t believe we live in times where we have people in the lgbt community who criticize homosexual men as being “genital fetishists” for being attracted to only men of the same sex.
The left is eating itself up, and it's an absolute joy to behold - because this was never about equality and justice, it was always, and has always (as ALL relationships between humans) being about POWER.
This has always been a POWER GRAB masquerading as "civility".
Saying that political thinking, of any stripe, is about power is pretty much a tautology. Similarly, equality and justice are about power relations, so there isn’t the contradiction you seem to believe there either.
Politics is the process of distributing power, and left wing politics aims to distribute power more widely, whereas right wing politics aims to concentrate it.
> Saying that political thinking, of any stripe, is about power is pretty much a tautology.
I never stated that (you did). I merely pointed out the fact that humans are largely hypocrites and duplicitous by nature. ALL interactions between humans is underpinned by power.
In the past, the power grab was explicit, nowadays said power is sought after behind the veneer of "civility" and "niceness".
It is basic human nature that I'm criticising. The left are just as bad as the right - but at least, with the right - you can see them coming, because they are mostly explicit (at least relative to the left).
The left are just as power hungry as the right, but are very well versed in this "we are nice, caring people" act - this is why I (a seeker of the truth - and nothing but the truth), am enjoying their dirty inner workings coming to light.
I don't think that quoting you as below substantially changes the meaning of what you wrote, and seems to very directly say that "the left" is "about power". As I said, this is tautological, but you present it as though it were a concealed truth.
> The left ... was never about equality and justice, it was always ... being about POWER
It feels more than a little reductive to attribute this behaviour to "the left" as a whole, when in fact it is a very small number of people. Perhaps you feel it is appropriate in your own context, but again this is a (common) presentation that purports to dismiss an entire "wing" of political thought, but actually just presents crude stereotypes.
Finally, I think the idea that the right present their attempts at power in a more naked fashion just isn't borne out by the evidence. Right wing policies are frequently presented as being dictated by either reason or common sense (often depending on the audience), and those of their opponents dismissed as unrealistic. This is the same kind of veneer you decry on the left, just a different colour - one that some find more appealing.
You've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. (Indeed this comment is basically a parody of the genre.) That's against the purpose of HN, as anyone who's read the site guidelines should know. Where we draw the line is when an account is using HN primarily for that. Since your account has, I've banned it.
I can guarantee that the backlash you got was less about your personal opinion, but for calling a relationship between a cis men and a trans man straight.
It's just a really shitty thing to do, and it's not even accurate. Attraction models do not solely work based on genitals, there's a lot of other characteristics that go into that.
I don't like what GP is saying either; it's sneaking some very judgmental opinions under the umbrella of "they want to force me to have sex with X", which is bad faith.
But you don't know how his argument with his friends went, so it's a little arrogant to tell him "they were probably mad at you because you said X".
The problem is with the generalization, which is present in the entire comment. I can't imagine the original conversation was significantly less abrasive.
Generalization is the problem. It is not accurate to say that all gay relationships require two penises.
It is also wrong to call a lesbian transphobic because she finds testicles unattractive and vaginas attractive. She is entitled to be honest about her sexuality.
I can't believe I need to say this, but there are trans women with vaginas and without testes.
Nobody says you're not allowed to have genital preferences. Chromosome preferences (with everything else equal) however seem legitimately transphobic to me. They're more a rejection of trans people than stemming from a preference in attraction.
OK, but I'm trans and I'd say your "woke" friends are talking nonsense and I hope that they will all actually wake up and realise what inane nonsense they're talking.
Now what? Are trans people not allowed to have different opinions and ideas about anything? As a gay man, would you say that all gay men see everything in the same way? For example, if I ask 100 gay men their opinion on gay marriage, will I get 100 identical answers, or...?
What I'm trying to say is, whenever someone says something stupid to you, remember that they are just one person expressing one opinion and that this opinion may well change as time goes by. Don't assume that all of society, or all of one particular segment of society, has the exact same, or even similar, view.
Also to be blunt, I doubt this "negative social backlash" you've gotten is as bad as that, or even that it's the kind of backlash you get outside of Twitter. But maybe I'm old. I transitioned in the 90's when most transwomen I knew identified as gay men. Try that one for a woke debate, some day. Anyway we didn't have Twitter back then so you wouldn't be called a "genital fetishist" to your face for not liking vag else most transwomen would have been decried as "genital fetishists". Eeew, fish and all that.
My point is I think that people will come up with all sorts of dumb ways of thinking when something becomes an "issue". We're still at the point in the curve, with trans issues, where they are "issues" whereas being gay has more or less been assimilated in mainstream culture (and that's part of why gay men are being attacked by "woke" folk). Wait it out. In a few years people will be reading all those woke tweets and blogs and tumblrs and laughing, mostly good-heartedly.
What kind of backlash do you want to see? If we're talking about arguing with idiots on twitter 24/7 then I don't think most people are prepared to do that.
And why does there need to be a "backlash" even? Do we absolutely need to have a big old culture war everytime somebody says something stupid?
> I’ve been called closed minded and a right wing asshole for saying that I would not date trans men, and that heterosexual intercourse will never be gay.
You're conflating two very different things here: "I would not do this", and "If someone does this they're not really gay".
Well there's definitely some people who think that, they say as much on their videos. One I watched claimed the only way to get rid of transphobia was for straight people to understand that you don't get to care about what kind of genitals your date has. You ll find out in bed.
Interesting! Do I lose the ability to chose based on other things, then? Like, I prefer brunettes, would that be permitted, or should I be hair-color blind and just take what I’m given? I know you’re not an advocate for it, just interesting that some people hold this conviction!
Hopefully it doesn’t! Would you like to point out how I imply that trans people are deceptive?
Sure, but my preference for being solely with brunettes is not as strong as my preference for being solely with straight people, so the deception is not equal in its merited response. Perhaps this is bigoted, but I’m sincerely interested in your conviction.
Well, trans is not really a hard factor for attraction. Fully cis-passing trans women exist, even in intimate relationships, and I'd wager not all things that go into that even matter to most people.
Feel free to exclude based on physical criteria common in trans people, be it from masculine features, to larger frames to a set of genitals you're not attracted to, but "trans people" as category is way to broad. Because they can functionally be cis women. Unless you have a breeding fetish I guess.
Insisting on a separate category feels like people are holding on to bioessentialist feeling that trans women must be men, which would make a cis man gay. Pair that with toxic masculinity and you have one of the reasons for violence particularly against trans women.
(I have no personal stake at this, like many trans people I mostly date other trans people, less complicated and your partner has less of a hard time relating to you)
Hey, thanks for taking the time to explain so in depth. I definitely get what you’re saying, and I don’t know that I’ve thought about it like this before (to be fair, I’ve only ever been with my wife, so it isn’t a situation that would ever be relevant, and probably that’s why I haven’t).
I mean, you can decide if it ever goes that far, but trans people do not owe you disclosure about their genitals just like you do not owe your partners your entire medical history.
It's probably still the right thing to do, purely because the trans panic defense is still a thing and it would be unsafe, but I see no moral obligation here.
Do we not owe disclosure of certain things as part of our social contract? I would expect a partner to disclose certain things that are non-obvious, but potentially relevant to a relationship/hookup. But maybe I’m wrong, or painfully backwards. I would like to know, though, if you believe we owe no disclosure at all, prior to an engagement?
If you are not into trans women, the onus is on you to disclose that, not on the trans woman. This is because there is a long history of violence against trans women who disclose it, so as a cis man you need to do your part.
If someone starts a conversation with you and then asks you on a date, you have no obligation to tell them anything.
However if a person driving a Ferrari wearing a 5k suit and a 50k watch asks someone on a date, that person may be under the impression that they are going on a date with a rich person and that they will not be going to McDonald's.
I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with taking your date to McDonald's. Plenty of people love McDonald's. But it is not the same thing and that date may not go well.
And that implies that gay people do not exist. A lesbian who says testicles are gross does not actually have a genetic sexual desire for biological women.
I'm trans and I'd be fine with it and I think of the arguments that it's transphobic as misguided at best, malicious at worst. There seems to be a vocal contigent of transwomen who identify as lesbians who try to argue that a lesbian who is not trans and doesn't want to have sex with a transwoman (even one with male genitalia) is transphobic. This sounds to me like a kind of very, very bad pickup line.
On the other hand, I'd like to know what the OP, shtps, would think if they dated a transwoman without knowing she was trans and later found out about it. People have committed violent crimes because they didn't know, or at least claimed they didn't know as a defense.
So there is something there that needs clearing up. If you're attracted to someone and then later find something about them and decide you're not attracted to them after all, that's not the fault of the person you initially found atttractive. Agreed?
I want to start a family in the traditional sense like my parents and grandparents have done before me, so I would be disappointed to find out I was dating a transwoman. Similarly I'd be disappointed to find out if a woman didn't want children or wanted to live a lifestyle incompatible with my own. It isn't going to work out and I'd have to ultimately call it off.
It's not about 'who's at fault' really. It will sooner or later come up and it is better sooner than later for both parties. If I'm dating a woman and she doesn't mention that she already has children, which is a big deal for me, then we're both just wasting our times because that's something I can't compromise on.
I don't know why this even needs to be stated, but violence is not an option in either of these cases.
I'm a little bit confused. At first you talked about "dating" someone, now you're talking about starting a family. These seem to be different, not necessarily mutually exclusive, but not necessarily identical, goals. Can you explain?
It needs to be stated that violence is not an option because many times violence has been used against trans women and the defense of the perpetrator was "I didn't know she was trans".
Sure. Dating is essentially the way we assess a suitable potential partner. The end goal in (hetero) dating essentially boils down to starting a family and this is also implied and assumed unless stated otherwise.
I guess nowadays people also informally call "having casual sex" dating. I'm also not sexually attracted to trans women if that's what you're getting at. We would not even be able to have sex.
Ok, we're on the same page regarding the violence.
If you have these preferences then the onus is on you to disclose them. As long as you say "I would like to be in a relationship with someone who can have children with me" on your first date, and not discriminate between e.g. trans women and cis women who can't give birth, it's ok.
Attraction doesn't work like this. You're not attracted to chromosomes, you're attracted to femininity.
I could understand if you'd find some to most trans women not attractive, but a categorical exclusion seems transphobic to me.
There are trans women where you really can not tell, even if you're in an intimate relationship. At that point it moves from being a genuine preference to bigotry.
But I can see what you're actually asking: Is anyone going to yell at you because you're not dating them. The answer is no.
Unless you real question was not a question, but more of an implication that something that literally never happens must happen on a grand scale. Damn the woke mob forcing me to fuck trannies!
As a trans person I do not believe in a firm sex/gender distinction. The evidence clearly suggests gender identity (unlike race) has a major biological component.
The David Reimer case is not really "evidence" of anything. At best it's more like a hint or a suggestion. "Evidence" should mean there is a scientific theory and someone conducted an experiment to prove or disprove it and, hey, look at the evidence, it tells us something about the theory. The Reimer case was a complete destruction of a person's life, but it was not perpetrated as an experiment of any kind. Although if I remember correctly the perpetrator did claim he was testing a theory, the unethical and haphazard, disorganised way in which he went about it completely discredits any pretense to science.
So, other, actual evidence, please? A citation in a journal would do. E.g. Yu & Yu 2017 "Gender identity has a biological component" or something of the sort. Something we can accept is "evidence" in a mainstream, standard sense, not in the sense given to "evidence" by the internet, like "I know of something that agrees with my personal beliefs so it's evidence that I'm right".
I think I’m woke, but it seems obvious to me that everybody has sexual preferences that go way beyond the gender of their partner. Some prefer tall and dark, some prefer petite blondes. Some people prefer big black and beautiful. How can we make moral judgement about people’s sexual preferences?
I guess the alternative would be that you have to be willing to have sex with everybody of your preferred sex? Are there people who actually think this?
Sure but go spend about 9 minutes around the kubernetes Twittersphere (a group with a large amount of white trans people) and you’ll see very quickly just how nasty it can be in its own way
I don't know if that's true anymore entirely, in a broader context.
(I am sure that trans people far more often have far worse experiences still)
I've heard stories, both online and from my sisters (who live in a pretty woke neighborhood and have a pretty woke circle of friends) about kids and teens who were "criticized" for being "too gender conforming" by "concerned" parents and friends alike. And stories about teens and grownups being ostracized and called names for politely rejecting trans or same sex people flirtations[1].
While I don't think these anecdotes are outright bullying, of course, it shows a certain direction, and it shows certain parental and peer group pressures building up in certain cohorts of society. All this can cause a certain amount of trauma and confusion[0], especially in kids and teens who haven't had a chance to explore and form their personality and identity on their own to a sufficient degree yet, when e.g. you as a kid get a sense that your parents are unhappy about you or when friends and peers call or at least insinuate you are "a bit of a" transphobe or homophobe because your brain is interested in the opposite sex and opposite sex genitalia.
[0] I am NOT saying all trans people are just confused. But I do think that some kids and younger teens are in fact just confused. Well, all kids and teens are constantly confused about everything, that's part of growing up, which is to a great part trial and error and trying to make sense of things and experiences. But this kind of confusion I am talking about relates to the old stories of "My parents wanted a boy and only got me, a girl, so I tried to be as much a boy as I could growing up trying to please them", but with a new slant to it, that might possibly involve hormone therapy at worst.
[1] One more slightly related anecdote, I am directly biased here: When I was like 17 or 18 (still in school, so, long ago), I was at a party and had a guy hit on me. I am a guy myself, but straight. Fine no worries, I told him nicely I am not interested. He (admittedly quite drunk) would then follow me around for some time, trying to convince me with zingers like "only a man knows how to suck another man's cock to perfection, I can show you, follow me!". The following days people would ask me why I "hate gays". What happened after that guy struck out with me is that he went around telling people I am a "gay hater". It took quite some effort to explain myself to people that I in fact do not hate gays and am not "grossed out" by gays, etc, just do not find them to be sexually attractive partners for me personally. I am sure some of my peers still thought I am a rampant homophobe afterwards. The more you defend yourself, the more guilty you look and all that. I am convinced this affected some of my friendships negatively and certainly messed with my mind[2]. I dread to imagine what it's like growing up now in some hyper-woke community, socialized by shit storms and parents and teachers who think math is racist and it's OK to punch "nazis".
[2] One openly bisexual girl from my grade remarked to me "Now you got a glimpse at what it is like for me a lot of the time". True that, only a glimpse, but bad enough for me already.
While this is technically true I think one should be careful to insinuate that this is an underlying cause. I don't think most people would say the same about homosexuality for example. It's just a more elaborate way of saying "it's a phase".
Saying it's cultural influence doesn't mean it's just a phase. I'm sure most people have life long personality traits that came from cultural influences.
Moreover, even if being gay or trans is just the result of cultural influence doesn't mean we should respect it any less. That said, it's worth asking the question isn't it?
However there are things appearing such as clustering of cases (for want of a better word) amoung groups of friends. Times did a piece on it a few years back can't find it. Anyway that would suggest that prevalence stats might muddied somewhat.
Friends tend to be similar -- you are the average of your 5 closest friends and that -- it is true that my ADHD diagnosis came about because a friend was diagnosed. We became a friend group in college because we were all outcasts in high school haha. Turns out for a few of us the root cause of the social outcasting was different brain wiring
A lot of the things they described had a "wait that's a symptom??" reaction. I have since suggested to a couple of friends to get checked for ADHD in a similar manner if they seem like they might be struggling with it. Worst case they're now in the mental healthcare system and have access to a therapist who can figure out what they're struggling with
When you find a good place you tell your mates about it
Makes sense to me that people would be more comfortable coming out of their closets if they have friends who have already blazed the way.
There's also the little detail that people tend to cluster based on interests and personality traits in the first place, so I could see many ending up in the same circles even if none of them were out yet.
• People with shared experiences often cluster together in friend groups. (There are autistic friend groups, yet you'd get laughed out of the village for saying “Sally caught autism off her friends”.)
• People tend to come out around people it's safe to come out around.
• Seeing your friends coming out as [whatever] might make you properly consider whether you might also like guys, or Minecraft, or not being a woman.
And they're the same effects in anyone with a socially-frowned-upon interest. Think of the tabletop-RPG-playing “nerds” of yore.
Slightly more morbid take on that: Folks aren't killing themselves thinking they're broken or wrong as often as they would have before treatment was more known/widespread
If social stigma is no longer an issue, why aren't we seeing transitioning across the entire adult population in equal proportion, and not primarily in children?
It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if adults with decades of experiencing living with that stigma would choose differently from young people without those decades of experience.
Probably because it’s much harder for adults to change their identities.
They have lives, responsibilities and dependants. Unlike children they can’t change their identities on a whim without repercussions, or negative impacts on people they care about.
I imagine that many people would rather ignore their “true” identity, than risk losing a spouse they care about, or disrupting their children’s futures.
What do you reckon is the reason for the increase in gay kids in the west after the decriminalization of homosexuality in most western countries? Hint: it's the decriminalization and social acceptance allowing gay people to come out of the closet rather than having to pretend they're straight for fear of consequences.
The kids aren't being transed. I know there are several mostly British authors having extremely loud voices spreading FUD about "rapid onset gender dysphoria" but that's not even a thing. It's based on a paper that used answers from parents about trans kids. Follow-up research has demonstrated that to the kids it was anything but rapid. You might as well invent a phenomenon of "rapid onset body size" to explain why grandparents will insist "how can you already be so big, it feels like you were a tiny baby only such a short while ago".
You're overthinking this, but to ease your mind: people aren't undergoing HRT and surgery because all the cool kids are doing it. They might experiment with neopronouns and gender identity labels for a bit but there's literally no demonstrable harm in that.
Also if you think identity politics is a new thing: US politicians literally put God on the dollar bills to appeal to Christian conservatives (prior to that the national motto was always "E pluribus unum", not "In God we trust"). We just don't tend to think of things as identity politics when we take the identity for granted.
EDIT: That you see more trans people is a good thing actually. Visibility is the result of social acceptance. And social acceptance is the biggest contributor to reducing suicidality and improving quality of life. Trans people haven't been killing themselves because they're trans, they've been killing themselves because everyone kept telling them they're not. You can't trans a kid any more than you can make them gay.
It's the proper way to treat depression caused by social rejection, which is as I understand it the bulk of the motivation for suicide among trans people.
Your argument would be valid if I didn't qualify the context. I wasn't talking about depression and at no point did I indicate that I was.
Also the proper way to treat depression is to identify the underlying cause, which can be simply rooted in brain chemistry but can also be environmental.
If you're suicidal because your family and social circles reject you for who you are and society in general treats you unfavorably and you are constantly harassed or fetishized by strangers, the problem isn't your brain chemistry.
The question isn't whether or not to treat gender dysphoria as a mental disorder (though in part, of course that is a question too, though one that seems to have been settled) but whether social rejection and harassment are harmful or helpful for trans people. And I'm saying evidence shows it's incredibly harmful and drastically increases suicidality and decreases quality of life (because otherwise social acceptance wouldn't measurably have the opposite effect).
If your concern is health (and mental health) outcomes, not making sure people stick to the gender and presentation they grew up with, the best course of action for trans people seems to be to accept them for who they say they are and make them feel welcome and valid.
There are of course other arguments against accepting trans people but those can be disproven separately and there's no reason to shift the goal posts if we're just talking about suicidality and quality of life.
PS: Of course trans people can also be depressed independently of their transness and in that case they will need to be treated for depression as well. But the specific suicidality rate that is talked about with regard to trans people seems to be evidently linked to their social acceptance, which tracks with other groups. Alan Turing was literally driven to suicide because he was sentenced to chemical castration for not being able to deny being gay.
On the other hand, there's no easy way to count the suicides who were closet-trans or just dysphoric without having the words for it. I've now known at least two adults with histories of depression who have transitioned and report being much happier.
No, the parent said that the numbers of trans people have increased. That's not true. The numbers of trans people able to get treatment is the thing that increased. We went from not counting, to counting. So we didn't increase the number of trans people, we just started counting the trans people that always existed.
I'm pretty sure that it's clear that he meant diagnosed cases. Otherwise the text doesn't make sense. You don't ask "Could the reason for more people with X be more people with X?".
I'm pretty sure this is the exact opposite of reality though - there have been clinics for trans children in the UK for decades, and one of the main things affecting the availability of treatment is that the number of cases referred to them skyrocketed recently.
That book relies on the concept of ROGD, which is something that doesn't exist. Anybody pushing ROGD, or supporting other people who push ROGD, is anti-science and anti-fact.
You should consider why you feel comfortable pushing something that's obviously bollocks, just because it supports your anti-trans activism.
Totally off topic, and I have no strong opinion on the whole transgender and ROGD thing (i learned that acronym from your comment), but:
> anti-science and anti-fact
This combination of words doesn't make sense to me. Science constantly discovers new "facts" that invalidate old "facts". I understand stuff like "the current scientific consensus", but I don't understand how you can call people who question the current scientific consensus on something "anti-fact". Especially in the context of psychology and psychiatry, where lately the facts have been superseding themselves rather rapidly.
Tldr, if you're pro science, shouldn't you by definition be ever so mildly sceptical of facts?
EDIT: note, I'm not trying to attack you personally nor weasel in some alt right talking point. I've seen words like "anti-fact" used a lot lately, I think I understand where it comes from, especially in the context of American hyper-polarized politics. I guess i wrote.my comment hoping to contribute to slightly more constructive language, at least from the sane side of the aisle.
That's not how constructive language is done. You don't improve "hyper-polarized politics" by saying one pole represents sanity and the other the opposite.
I guess, on second thought, there's a place for saying, quietly, among yourselves, "I agree that the opposition is crazy, but it's probably going to be more productive if we engage them like rational people." But that's not a useful public stance.
My reply is the only one which links to a publication which attempts to directly answer OP's question and includes both praise and criticism of said publication.
I think therefore that anyone can judge for themselves whether said publication is "anti-science" or "anti-fact" and your help is not required. I feel perfectly comfortable allowing people to think for themselves, especially since this publication is not obviously bollocks: it was awarded both the Economist and Times book of the year prizes.
Finally, based on what I've seen from the scientific community around politicised topics like this one, any link (especially from US-affiliated organisations) should be by default open to questioning and not unassailable proof. Although given that it's psychology it should probably just be outright ignored for a couple of decades until they manage to form a coherent opinion.
> Anybody pushing ROGD, or supporting other people who push ROGD, is anti-science and anti-fact.
This is an interesting case [2]. The concept of ROGD was introduced in an article in a scientific journal [1], by an assistant professor in Brown University. Then there was a strong reaction from people from outside the scientific community (blogosphere, activists). Later, there's been scientific debate back and forth [2]. But it is interesting, if people from outside the scientific community can win the public debate and get to decide what is science and what is not.
There have also been strong reactions against ROGD within the scientific community [1]. Like much science, the study has its own share of methodological flaws and biases that should make anyone sensible person the results of the study with skepticism
Depending on how much your surroundings insist on putting labels and associated limitations based on what is between your legs on you during growing up; the puberty experience of one half of society can be more awful. This may also get reflected in current numbers of transmen vs transwomen. A transition is an extreme decision taken based on an unbearable amount of such psychological pain.
Wondering what started the labeling too though, I’ve also been teached the value of individualism and fended off any label applied to me.. maybe it’s about realizing that most people out there want to apply labels, so a response to their rigid labels is coming up with unlimited new labels.
I understand this might get downvoted and while I agree with the parent I also blame the contraceptive pill, dysregulation of hormone systems (various reasons), environmental toxins and the general malleability of people when it comes to sexuality at very young ages and for reasons we don’t understand. In my father’s generation the vast majority of men by the time they were 25 years old could grown thick beards now I’d say it’s a minority. We should be more curious about where these changes have come from.
It is equally dangerous to ignore environmental factors. We also know that male fertility is on a sharp decline but don't know why, this may be related and should be investigated.
And we know biphenol/phthalate chemicals mimic estrogen in the body and have been in just about everything for the last couple generations. At least it has to be considered. Hormones
Nope, what you’re doing is totally misrepresenting what I’ve said. I’m saying if there are more effeminate men you’ll have on average more people who are transgender. Myself I can barely grow a beard and have man boobs that I’m trying to get rid of and hardly any body hair (yet my Dad has a full beard and hairy chest, I’m asking why is there this big difference in just one generation) but hopefully I still count as a first class citizen!
I don’t think you’re trying to discuss these things honestly. Are you really saying sexual characteristics aren’t controlled by hormones and these sexual characteristics don’t have any effect on how humans think about their gender?
We all start off genderless until testosterone washes over the male unborn foetus starting some of the gender characteristics like penises and brain changes. I think (it’s hard to tell as you’re so muddled in your thinking) you’re taking the bell curve of differences and how those differences manifest and attempting to make up concrete rules. Statistics doesn’t work that way.
If testosterone is the defining characteristic of being male, I have no idea why trans people born male need take hormones to reduce testosterone levels.
I really don’t get your argument at all. Testosterone and other androgens can increase masculine features. In a purely statistical sense gender and sexual apparatus are heavily correlated, but then I see gender as being more of a spectrum than a binary anyway. I think these things can be influenced by the environment a lot, if you believe you’re a bunch of chemical reactions happening in a biological system how can what we be anything apart from hormones, genetics and culture interacting to express a gender?
If you've never been fit enough to do something like a muscle up then you have no idea what having testosterone feels like.
I'm saying this as a former blob who got fit during covid by accident. You are your body and your body happens to have a mind, not the other way around.
Be aware that men are coming under the same pressure on appearance that women have had for decades.
I'm in my 50's, and can remember a time when there wasn't this awareness of men's bodies. While it was admirable to be fit, and women certainly appreciated muscles and a lack of a beer gut, it wasn't seen as that important. Men could be flabby and still seen as physically attractive.
Moobs are normal. Not being able to grow a thick beard is normal. Body hair, or any hair, or not, is normal (I could count the number of hairs on my chest in my 20's and never once considered this to be unusual or in any way affecting my masculinity). I have friends who were balding in their mid-20's and that was normal.
The difference between 30 years ago and now is not in men's bodies. It's in our attitudes to men's bodies.
Men (and women, as always) are being taught to hate our bodies because businesses can profit from that emotion. We are being told that no-one will love us unless we're taller, stronger, hairier. We're being fed images of "perfect" men as aspirational targets that we should aspire to match (and to get there we need to buy a bunch of products, obviously).
We need to learn that all bodies are different, and all are acceptable. It's normal to have flabby bits. If you have to hate something, don't hate your body, hate the people telling you that your body is not good enough.
Interestingly, the Forbes article you're referencing is partially based on this paper: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26126... which confirms a link between advertising and voluntary testosterone testing (entirely supporting my point). Men are being targeted by advertising that encourages them to think about their bodies differently.
No, actually testosterone levels have been dropping, sperm counts have been dropping, and American men are vastly more obese and overweight than they were even 50 years ago. That is a change.
Just watch one of those old “Berlin in the 1920s” or “NYC in the 1970s” videos. You’ll quickly notice the almost complete lack of overweight people.
Diet, sedentary jobs, lack of walkable cities, and (for better or worse) removal of shame culture. If you’ve spent any time in east Asia, you’ll notice that being overweight is strongly looked down upon by society at large. This shaming doesn’t exist in America.
As to shaming, I suspect causation goes the other direction, fat shaming has decreased because the number of fat people has increased.
Looking at the time frame, I don’t think the other things you mention fit either. They just haven’t changed that much since the 70s. And they don’t explain wild and lab animals also being fatter now.
I think you’re right. What about general propensity to obesity (as in genetically, or whatever) being more prevalent?
I know people that eat far worse than me, and do far less than me, but are still far skinnier than me.
I have never had my testosterone checked. I knew one guy who had has checked, and it was by a female doctor who put him on pills.
I've always wondered where that testosterone level database is?
Maybe they test in the military? I don't know, but would like to know.
I just found a study, but didn't dig into it:
"Travison and his team analyzed data from the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, a long-term investigation of aging in about 1,700 Boston-area men. Data from the men were collected for three time intervals: 1987-1989, 1995-1997, and 2002-2004."
>Just watch one of those old “Berlin in the 1920s” or “NYC in the 1970s” videos. You’ll quickly notice the almost complete lack of overweight people.
Being fat in the 80s is being skinny today. It's uncanny rewatching movies where the fat kid everyone picked on then would be on the average to skinny side today.
Whenever I bring that up I get someone popping out of the wood work saying that the 80s had heroin chik, unrealistic body expectations and on and on.
But the fattest state in 2000 (Mississippi) is skinnier than the skinniest state today (Colorado) [0]. And in 1990 the fattest state (again Mississippi) was half as fat as Colorado is today.
Forget being transgendered the majority of the US would look barely human to anyone from the 80s.
> It's uncanny rewatching movies where the fat kid everyone picked on then would be on the average to skinny side today.
The distribution of body types in film (in the 1980s and otherwise) represents the fashions of the motion picture industry, not (except coincidentally) broader society. The relation of that fashion to broader society is very much not consistent.
> Forget being transgendered the majority of the US would look barely human to anyone from the 80s.
Being an actual person from the 1980s (70s, in fact) I can say with some confidence that this is not true.
So obesity rates haven’t increased dramatically? If that’s your argument, I’m afraid you’re simply misinformed.
And no, there are plenty of videos of normal people that have nothing to do with “the fashions of the motion picture industry.” Millions of video clips are available right now online.
>The distribution of body types in film (in the 1980s and otherwise) represents the fashions of the motion picture industry, not (except coincidentally) broader society. The relation of that fashion to broader society is very much not consistent.
>>Whenever I bring that up I get someone popping out of the wood work saying that the 80s had heroin chik, unrealistic body expectations and on and on.
>>But the fattest state in 2000 (Mississippi) is skinnier than the skinniest state today (Colorado) [0]. And in 1990 the fattest state (again Mississippi) was half as fat as Colorado is today.
Dear god you can at least read the part of the post where I already answered that point.
I am guessing it is mostly exercise and diet related.
People 50-70 years ago on average lived a very different life style in the US. The fear was that people weren’t getting enough food in the United States and the modern food industry was born and kind of over corrected and now obesity is the problem we are trying to solve.
On top of that I am shocked by how little the average American exercises, and I just don’t mean going to the gym and running, I mean basic, walking and doing something, anything physical.
It’s likely something environmental. Wild animals and even lab animals on strict diets are fatter now than they were in the 70s. A recent article discussed on HN proposed plastics and lithium contamination as two possible culprits.
While I do not disagree with anything you say, you also completely ignore that chemical pollution in our drinking water and food has been shown to cause changes in us.
Instead of completely ignoring their point and just telling them to accept themselves as they are, why should we not also be looking at our environment and asking if it is impacting us?
> Myself I can barely grow a beard and have man boobs that I’m trying to get rid of and hardly any body hair
Do you by chance sit around at a PC all day and get less exercise than you really should? I'm not sure I'd pin this on a biology thing just yet, there's so many things that could cause that
Losing weight and getting exercise gave me all sorts of "manly" traits. Turns out sitting around letting your muscles go to goo can mess with your systems a bunch. I have to shave too often now if anything haha
However if we wanted to turn this into a hypothesis our first stumble is that not all gender dysphoric people are overweight, so it's probably not that
I do four hard weight focused workouts per week of 1.5h each so 6h of exercise. I probably need to address diet, but even so, lots of fresh home cooked meals in there. Maybe need to do more cardio but that tends to set off my SVT. Thanks for asking.
I'm not saying that you said it, I'm saying we can probably rule it out as a hypothesis because there's no correlation that I know of. Admittedly I have never looked into it so only know the people I know
It came up as a thought because you mentioned manboobs, which I have personal experience with hence the rest of my comment, but aside from that my words are my own
> However if we wanted to turn this into a hypothesis our first stumble is that not all gender dysphoric people are overweight, so it's probably not that
Like all the “why are people gay‽”-type nonsense, I also think it's not that – but people are complicated. There is not going to be a single factor for anything, so I don't think that's a valid reason to discard the hypothesis. “There is no real correlation in the first place” would be.
There seemingly are some environmental factors out there diluting testosterone levels (certain plastic seem like a risk, for instance), but pubescent boys are not taking contraceptive. That's a weird specific bogeyman to call out.
Don't downplay the influence of interracial mixing in the Americas, where I will perhaps incorrectly assume you live. Large amounts of body hair are not a universal male trait. Europeans and Mediterraneans are much hairier than Native Americans. If your ancestors were mostly on one side of that, then sure, they were hairier. Many of my more distant ancestors had no body hair at all.
You may notice a tradeoff here, as the same sensitivity to DHT in your hair follicles that causes facial hair to proliferate also causes male pattern baldness, and Europeans go bald much more often.
Anecdotally, in the startup where I worked there was one summer in 2017 when 3 white women (a significant percent of the women in the office at the time) all suddenly came out as non-binary and asked to be called they/them. If that's not some kind of freaky bandwagon thing going on then I don't know what is. It was like a competition to see who could get the most oppression points or something. Now I'm in a different company, with a lot of folks who are pretty clearly biologically female claiming the non-binary identity. Most confusing of all to me are the non-binary people who still self-describe as lesbians. Do they think gender is a thing or not?
I'm expecting a pretty harsh backlash against all this gender politics at some point. I'm not sure when or how it will manifest, but even some of my LGB friends privately tell me they think it's gone too far. For the most part, though, they are too afraid to say anything in public because they don't want to get attacked and possibly lose their jobs over it. It's clear that the gender radicals have wielded online bully tactics to gain full control over the range of acceptable discourse.
LGBT are often portrayed as some kind of monolithic entity in mainstream media, but the reality is that there's a lot of ideological tension in the mix between the cis and trans people. The only place I see these tensions spilling into the open is in the UK, where the LGB Alliance and Stonewall organizations are at odds. Wondering when the same will happen in the US.
Let me lay out the tension for those who may not be familiar. On the one side you have LGB people who mostly say their sexuality is immutable and based on attraction to specific sexes. "Baby, I was born this way" in the words of Lady Gaga. As an example, maybe you're a lesbian which means a woman who is attracted to other women; for most of history this was understood to mean a person of the female sex attracted to another person of the female sex. Meanwhile you have trans activists trying to stretch the meaning of words like "man" and "woman" to the point that they don't really mean anything anymore. Anybody can be a woman if that's how they identify today, which has the effect of broadening what it means to be a lesbian in a way that some lesbians may not agree with. The status quo today is that if you're a lesbian and not willing to include the "female penis" in your sexual orientation, you're at risk of being called a TERF/transphobe. This seems like an irreconcilable difference of views.
Despite what you might think if you've read this far, I do not hate trans people. I have sympathy for them and whatever lack of self-acceptance has led them into their current path. I make an effort to use preferred pronouns and be respectful to those I work with. But I'm also extremely concerned about what the collateral damage to LGB people will be when Republicans capitalize on woke extremism at the ballot box.
> Anecdotally, in the startup where I worked there was one summer in 2017 when 3 white women (a significant percent of the women in the office at the time) all suddenly came out as non-binary and asked to be called they/them. If that's not some kind of freaky bandwagon thing going on then I don't know what is.
Have you considered that they may have been talking about it privately, and decided to come out at the same time to reduce the risk of being singled out for it? I don't see how the timing implies a "bandwagon". It seems obvious that doing that together is less scary than alone.
Interesting, i think the same is happening in France, a schism between cis and trans of the LGBTQ community.
For what it's worth, i think the gender fight in the media is not worth it for anybody. I dont see an end anytime soon, and i'd rather have gay marriage settle, add counseling in schools for kids who need it, and then maybe the LGBTQ+ community can start fighting this gender fight. Transversal fights are surely worth it (as Fred Hampton and the BPP proved), but i think this one we might want to avoid until we fix the rest.
In Spain this thing is not quite of the same dimension (even though there's a lot of propaganda being pumped by leftist parties) but I already encountered some cases.
Also, I'm hearing more and more what It would be conservative opinions from the gay people I have more trust with. Which is quite unexpected for me.
Also, your statement about trans people having a "lack of self-acceptance" is laughably incorrect. Coming out as trans is one of the most radical acts of self-acceptance there is.
I’m not sure why there would be a backlash. Why would anybody else care if I identify as male, female, or nonbinary? And frankly, why should I care about what those people think?
> On a related point, what I’m uncertain about are the reasons for the increase in transgender kids in the west.
Broad acknowledgement (though there remains some sharp and often violent denial, so while better than the best the current situation isn’t at the limit of this) that gender identity can differ from socially ascribed gender and that such a difference is cause for realigning socially ascribed gender to gender identity means that people whose gender identity differs from their socially ascribed gender both are likely to have:
(1) a framework for understanding the source of their discomfort that would not exist absent the degree of acceptance, and
(2) a license to identify their understanding of the source of their discomfort to others that woud not exist without the degree of acceptance, and
(3) a hope of relief that would not exist without the social norm of realigning ascribed gender to match gender identity.
Naturally, this means that more people aren’t just going to keep quiet and attempt to fit into the box society has assigned them at whatever pain it takes, as would previously have been the case because there was no visible alternative.
> but it was also a time when society encouraged the view of everyone being unique and mysterious and don't put labels on things.
I'm glad, for your sake, that you felt like this about society, but I can assure you that at no time that any living person grew up was it the case; and, particularly, the labels put on those who failed to outwardly conform to gender norms tended to be quite harsh.
> I appreciate it’s a bit of a stretch but in some ways it does feel now in society there is a growing pressure to box people’s identities in more.
The question would be, how many people who declare up front that they're transgender are actually medically diagnosed with such condition and how many just jumped on the bandwagon of what is fancy on the internet right now?
Disclaimer - personally, I'm sceptical about the concept and scientific grounds behind transgenderism and I expect my comment to be downvoted.
Preempting downvotes, because you know your comment is not acceptable to the majority, feels like a very cynical device designed to limit that behaviour.
I'd be cautious about referring to what is acceptable to the "majority" and claiming that the concept receives a broad support, as in reality it seems that it's quite the opposite.
If you want to go deep down the rabbit hole here, break your brain, probably ruin your career and seriously damage your ability to interact with woke culture ever again, you can listen to an interview with the author of the book, "The Transgender Industrial Complex" in which the author alleges with copious documentation that the transgender movement is complete astroturf.
He did deep research to discover where the transgender movement came from and the enormous amounts private foundations spent on astroturfing thousands of organizations, academic researchers that cite each other and cultural influencers to jumpstart the movement:
I think it's fascinating to think that our entire culture could just be made up by a bunch of mischievous billionaires fucking with us. It's like we're just cattle in the matrix being programmed from above. It almost makes the real world seem magical.
Cultures through history had genders we would call transgender.[1]
Your source's references include "How The Jews Of Weimar Germany Ensured The Rise Of National Socialism" and "Plandemic Documentary: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19".
The "Myth of the 20th Century" is a podcast that is banned on all podcast services because they will interview people on extremely controversial topics. If you play the game of "this person believes X and a crazy person also believes X, therefore they're crazy," then you shouldn't listen to this podcast and just go about your life as you normally would. This is only if you want to deeply question your reality, and possibly ruin your life by becoming aware of things that go against the mainstream.
But you at least have to admit that it seriously undercuts the credibility of that site if they engage in every conspiracy theory out there. It's very hard not to simply dismiss somebody else's arguments if they believe that the Holocaust and Covid are just made up. Human attention is limited.
I haven't read the links you posted but from the title it doesn't sound like either of them imply the holocaust or COVID were made up. IMO GP's comment applies doubly here, you're just conditioned to have a kneejerk reaction over any non-mainstream opinion.
The Plandemic "documentary" nonsense alleges that there is a decades-long conspiracy involving Big Pharma, the CDC, Google, climate scientists, John Oliver, and Bill Gates to cause the pandemic in order to benefit from the vaccines. They go on to make other specific allegations. Here's a sample.
1. That Italy's COVID-19 epidemic is linked to influenza vaccines and the presence of coronaviruses in dogs.
2. That SARS-CoV-2 was created "between the North Carolina laboratories, Fort Detrick, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and the Wuhan laboratory.
3. That flu vaccines increase the chance of contracting COVID-19 by 36%.
4. That despite the goal of preventing coronaviruses, flu vaccines contain coronaviruses.
5. That "Wearing the mask literally activates your own virus. You're getting sick from your own reactivated coronavirus expressions."
And more.
Are you conditioned to having a kneejerk reaction when people call out bullshit? Automatically posting a dismissive comment without bothering to read the provided sources sounds like a kneejerk reaction to me.
Why would you want to dismiss someone's research because you disagree with one of their premises? Do you automatically assume they've fudged their findings to fit? Because that sounds like source picking as well.
Ockham's razor would suggest that if somebody finds documentaries about flu vaccines containing coronaviruses and a blog post highlighting the Jewishness of all the people it considers guilty of "debasing" Weimar Germany compelling, they are relatively unlikely to have spotted truths everyone else missed involving transgenderism, Davos billionaires and 14th century Jewish practices because of greatness of medical knowledge or lack of bias...
The vagrant around the corner from me is banned from all stores in the area for his controversial refusal to abide by "no shirt, no shoes, no service". He's extremely not mainstream. You should only listen to him if you want to deeply question your reality and possibly ruin your life by becoming aware of the things that go against the mainstream narrative pushed by the drugstore-industrial complex. Showering every day is a myth pushed by the trillion dollars advertising industry. I consider being banned from places a sign of credibility, and refuse to believe the official story that we were banned for "smelling like shit".
The United States has legal slavery today (prison labor), and it's hard to see the push to keep schools open during the pandemic as anything other than sacrificing children on the altar of the market.
I don't think so man, I think you're being influenced. Paying people to be gay just doesn't make sense. I'm not going seriously argue this with you, you need help.
Being gay, or bisexual has always been with us, and the author acknowledges that, but the transgender thing as it exists today is what the author is claiming is made up.
At no point did they say anyone was being paid to be gay. Only you stated that, twice. They are saying people can be influenced. Take LGBT representation in contemporary media. A casual interpretation would be that nearly 1 out of 4 people are gay, lesbian, etc., since nearly every popular TV show has one or more of these characters. However, when you look at the actual numbers, they tell a much different story.
This is similar to what happened with the 2020 protests around George Floyd. Many people thought, and many still do, that unarmed black men were being hunted by police. Surely hundreds or even thousands a year were being murdered by the police, yet according to the WaPo database of police shootings only 13 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019. Why do people believe in the myth of endemic police killings? Because the media continues to push that narrative.
Read this USAToday “fact-check” trying to debunk the 13 unarmed black men statistic by saying things like the WaPo database is incomplete and may not show the whole picture, or conflating the number of unarmed black men shot with the percentage of total black men shot, etc. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/23/fac...
You are clearly brainwashed, just talk to people you know around get off the Internet and talk to some real human beings. People aren't being paid to hate the police, that's delusional thinking for anyone who's ever lived in an American city.
Did you just use the sentence “only 13 unarmed black men were shot by police”? That’s still outrageous. For context in the same year the UK police had 13 occasions total where officers fired their weapons, resulting in 3 fatalities. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/319246/police-fatal-shoo...)
Yes the UK police might be better than the US police. Without knowing how many unarmed men of other ethnicities suffered the same fate (and the frequency of the respective ethnicities), it's a meaningless number. It could be "only 13 unarmed black men" because it isn't unusual for the US police to shoot unarmed men.
On second thoughts, I guess you're right: it doesn't make sense to use the quantifier "only 13" without knowing all the other numbers. This might be trivializing the matter.
I said “only” in relation to the myth that hundreds of unarmed black men were being shot by the police. I’m not saying 13 is good, but it’s objectively better than more than 13. There was a poll some months ago, which I can’t find, that asked people with different political beliefs to estimate how many unarmed black men were killed by police in the previous year and the liberal and progressive left had outrageous numbers. These are the same people watching the mainstream media constantly pushing the narrative that it’s open season on black men.
Transgendered behavior has been recorded for quite some time. Advertising as a trillion dollar business is relatively new. How about applying Occams Razor? The simpler explanation of transgenderism is that the confluence of nature and nurture is as complex as all other biological processes we know about and leads to all sorts of expressions of gender self identification. I know it’s tempting to succumb to the notion that the universe is so orderly that aberrations must be explained by some overarching conspiracy (or godlike behavior), but that does fly in the face of observed behavior.
Every trans person I know knew this about themselves as a young child. They were not "influenced." Many of them had no idea that being trans was possible and thought they were gay, if they knew what that was.
Perhaps it's not that they've been influenced into becoming trans, but that more people than we knew were already trans, but didn't have the confidence to show it because society was so unaccepting?
I think you've got cause and effect mixed up here.
This is fairly obvious if you read fashion magazines. It is presented constantly in the same way that bell-bottoms or skateboarding shoes used to be. Which doesn’t mean that it’s all made up, but it does certainly appear to be amplified by the media.
What you describe as "fascinating" is just a crazy conspiracy theory. The link you give also just throws homosexuality and bisexuality in there as well and while not exactly saying that all those things are "unhealthy for a society" basically alledges this in the first few sentences.
These guys interviewing him are right-wing Christians, who are the only people who would ever interview this guy, as he wouldn't get past the woke filter on just about any other podcast, so you'll just have to accept that they're going to have that point of view to begin with.
The guy has a lot of documentation for where this all came from out of nowhere. I bought the book and it's fascinating how much documentation the guy has on how the whole thing got astroturfed in no time. I don't know how old you are, but before the early 2000s, the only place that I ever encountered "transexuals" was in San Francisco sex clubs. Then all of a sudden, in the span of less than 10 years they're everywhere. How the heck did that all happen? Reading through his research is a really interesting deep dive into how to bootstrap a radical cultural change from scratch.
Using an obviously derogatory term for trans people really doesn't help your point at all. It hints to the possibility that you have a personal belief that sees trans people as unnatural and because of that belief it's easier for you to believe in an outlandish conspiracy theory than simply accepting that the reason for an increase in visible trans people is acceptance by society.
Edit for context since OP has edited his comment without acknowledging it: Where it now says ""transsexuals"" it said "trannies" before.
You're right, I don't take the transexual movement seriously. I edited my language as that's the word they called themselves back in the sex club days and I wouldn't want to hurt someone. In fact, their was a nightclub where you could meet Transexuals in the late 1990s in San Francisco called "Trannyshack" that was pretty obscure back then, but is now hugely famous now that the "transexual" movement has grown into an industry. "Transexuals" are just as big of victims of all this as everyone else and why cause them more trauma by calling them something that offends them. I would call someone walking around in a full body fury costume by whatever they're comfortable with too.
There are plenty of popular rap songs that use what Americans call 'the n-word' quite liberally as an in-group identifier. Use that word in polite conversation and you get labelled, quite rightly, a bigot.
A gay man might jokingly call himself a poof (or one of his straight close friends might in the same vein based on a mutual understanding), but again, you don't use such words in a polite, neutral setting without coming across as a very nasty person.
Some women are trying to reappropriate the word 'slut' from its negative connotations (cf. The Ethical Slut, Easton and Hardy, 2009) and some use it proudly, but again, anyone calling any woman who has an active sex live with more than one lover a slut will be met with derision.
Not a native speaker here. How come it's supposed to be a derogatory term? I mean, you would say "granny" because "grandmother" is too long. So saying "tranny" instead of "transsexual" makes sense, it even has more syllables.
There's no consistent grammatical rule. Certain words and phrases are obvious warning signs about the speaker, but you have to be somewhat immersed in the culture to notice. Usually the literal meaning of the word / phrase really is an innocent neutral descriptor.
No one ever starts a sentence with "The Jews control" and ends it with "the home owners association on our block and have done a phenomenal job managing it."
No one ever says "The Japs" followed by "have really contributed to our culture in the form of anime".
No one ever says "that n***" followed by "is an inspiration to us all and we are proud to have him in our community."
No one ever uses the word "tranny" followed by something well thought out and respectful of transexual people.
None of these words/phrases have an offensive dictionary meaning, but they are all rightfully associated with offensive speech.
Both are diminutives. The thing with diminutives is that they can show both affection and disrespect.
It's usually the first if referring to familiar people and the second if referring to strangers. Even exactly the same word can cut both ways. "Dear" is affectionate towards family members, calling a coworker "dear" is condescending.
Also, as other posters have said, rule-based logic can only get you so far. It's all in the context.
Have you considered that oppression of trans people causes them to hide and the more widespread acceptance of other LGB identities causes trans people to let themselves be more visible in everyday life? Just because you didn't see them before doesn't mean they weren't there.
Rofl... Yes - only in San Francisco... Yeah you're obviously either very uneducated or willfully ignorant about global history and culture. In countries and times that weren't dominated by the christian ideas of moral oppression - that lead to criminalization or at a minimum being outcast because of a social stigma and fear of violence of everyone not straight - LGBT were and are a visible part of society - not especially visible because nobody cared about making them especially visible because it was normal and accepted. Now after the first wins against oppression due to activism the right produces this fear and panic of the 'wokeness' to again demonize these people and 'liberals'. It's the new fear of socialists basically - a useful buggyman for reactionaries and religious fundamentalists. I wouldn't even know what woke meant wouldn't I be on social media and being confronted by all this alt-right nonsense troll-posts where they blow up a noname 'dumb woke' liberal strawman-post on a daily basis.
> I don't know how old you are, but before the early 2000s, the only place that I ever encountered "transexuals" was in San Francisco sex clubs.
The way I remember the pre-2000s there was definitely mention of trans people in popular culture. The big difference is being trans was being treated as the punchline, or otherwise derogatory. (The first example that comes to mind is Tone-Lōc's 'Funky Cold Medina', and also that Aerosmith song https://www.songfacts.com/blog/interviews/desmond-child)
> I think it's fascinating to think that our entire culture could just be made up by a bunch of mischievous billionaires fucking with us.
Not "could" but "is".
That's how media works, if all media agree to say something wrong during some period of time, that will become true. (Example : Aztrazeneca vaccines, masks, ...). And most media belongs to billionaires. The only thing is that they don't belong to the same billionaires and thus don't most of the time push in the same direction which creates some diversity
I'm not saying this is the case here, but media and propaganda are very close things
Let me help,
Someone gets into a new school, he finds someone relatable that someone introduces him to a group of people who faces the same or similar issues like he does.
They grow up and when financially independent go through surgeries, hormone therapy etc. and come out as LGBTQ.
Should this be questionable?
If yes then, How do the majority of kids who are interested in programming/computers become software engineers? should be too.
What's the evidence it's sudden? Everyone cites a single study by Lisa Littman. She didn't ask any trans children. Just their parents. And she selected for parents who didn't accept their children coming out as trans. Children don't tell their parents everything. And parents don't hear things they don't want to sometimes.
Imagine you're afraid to do something. Someone else does it. Nothing too bad happens. Wouldn't it encourage you?
I'm fairly open-minded to a critical take on trans issues, so I gave the linked podcast a listen, and I just want to report back that it's pretty straight-up conspiracy theory thinking. For example, the author of the book notes that it was only two weeks between the SCOTUS gay marriage decision and Caitlyn Jenner's cover on Vanity Fair - saying it was "obviously coordinated". There's talk of "putting pieces together", etc. If you're not conspiracy theory inclined, you can save yourself the trouble.
There was a recent podcast that goes into deep detail of the causes of this phenomenon. How immense social, political, and even legal pressure suppresses those critical to transgender theory.
Look for stories of people who are post-op or have gone a large portion of their life as trans. Sometimes they end up figuring out it's not for them. In most of those cases, it's not really that they were tricked or coerced, it's just that they get more help than people who do not identify as trans, but after they fully transition it disappears. In some rare cases a young person is pushed by someone.
You see the same thing with people who attempt suicide. People who attempt suicide have better life outcomes in general because they are given more help. Notably suicide is infectious and can trigger copycats.
This doesn't mean I think transexualism is fake -- there's a really interesting nature article where they use ML to identify the sex of brains separate from the body's apparent sex. But there definitely are incentives to ID as trans.
It's not a new thing. In some parts of the world at least transgendered women
typically transitioned during their puberty, at 13 or 14. A great source for
this observation is 'Travesti: Sex, Gender and Culture among Brazilian
Transgendered Prostitutes' by anthropologist Don Kulick, who followed a group of
trans sex workers in Salvador. Most of them transition from young boys to
teenage sex workers after a sexual encounter with an adult male. From personal
(though anecdotal) experience this is a common pattern in many cultures of the
so-called Global South, if we include in that South East Asia. Basically for
most of the 20th century, most transwomen who transitioned, transitioned in
their puberty and went straight into sex work.
What has changed recently is that many more trans women transition later in
life, after having lived for many decades as men, having married and had
children and careers well outside sex work etc. Perhaps because of a more
general shift of ideas about gender and sexuality (gay men are nowadays not
considered effeminate or feminine just because they fancy men) most transwomen
in western countries were generally of this later kind.
Then the wheel shifted again. My guess (and it's just a guess) is that the
number of people transitioning later in life and in a context that had nothing
to do with underage sex and sex work, helped convince society that transition
does not have to mean sex work (although in most of the world, it still does,
by and large, so what I say applies to more western societies) and that gave
more space to younger trans women and also young trans men to express their
identity without fearing that a life of humiliation and inevitable sex work
awaited them.
In my part of the world, when I was transitioning in the late 90's a trans woman
who was not into sex work was something unheard of and indeed I had to immigrate
to be able to do anything with my life. As to concerns about giving young
children puberty blockers etc, I would have to say that this is much better than
13 year olds taking cross-sex hormones without medical supervision and then
going to the red light district to display their budding breasts with pride.
I hope all this doesn't come across as "wokeness". My concern about other trans
women has always been the limited opportunities they've had in life, in my part
of the world, and the squalid, degrading and dangerous conditions in which they
had to survive as a result (google a bit about the transgendered community in
Istanbul if you have strong nerves). I tend to think of all the outrage
about identity issues on Twitter as a pleasant change of tone from the grim
darkness that was before.
I think it is just about growing knowledge and acceptance on one side and growing need to demarcate yourself on the other. Everything is a spectrum, right?
I remember ~20 years ago, when I knew nothing of being trans-gender as a concept, and I bearly heard of some people being trans-sexuals.
These days I am fairly on board with the concept of gender as being a role in society you choose to play, that is often informed by your sex, but doesn't have to.
I suspect your last sentence is going to offend some people.
There are a lot of people who don’t feel strongly gendered, I’m one of them, and I suspect you are too from that sentence. Seeing gender as a social role makes sense to us.
However, there are other people who do feel strongly gendered, and for them gender isn’t just a social role but part of their core identity. I suspect at least half of cis folks and nearly all trans folks fit into that group.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 388 ms ] threadHave they considered... Latin. As in, Latin America, for instance?
Two solutions I've seen native speakers employ: Sometimes in written language, the @ symbol will be used because it's like an A and an O overlayed ("latin@s"). When speaking, the only thing that could work would be E, "latines", which at least would be pronounceable and would rhyme. Did the idiot who thought of "latinx" think about rhyming? Spanish speakers write poetry and music too.
That's pretty ironic. I never made that connection, though I only have a basic familiarity with Spanish phonetics.
My understanding is that "latinx" is pretty much exclusively a performative English-speaking white liberal thing. It's not very pronounceable in English, either. I've never actually heard it spoken, but mentally I read it as "latin-ex." Personally, I don't think I'd ever even try to use "lah-TINKS," since I'd be afraid it'd be interpreted as an ethnic slur.
Tune into NPR for an hour and you're sure to hear it.
Interestingly, in both of those cases it was originally pronounced like our “sh”, which is a sound that doesn’t exist in Spanish.
There's no malice in this - just a natural evolution of language towards efficiency.
As such its an endless cycle: new stuff is introduced to everyday language then reduced to something simpler - often using words that fell out of use, shadowing them with new meaning.
It's quite possible the new word for "Latinx+", whatever it is, will simply be considered genderless - if societal pressure manages to displace the old terms.
To replace she vs he.
As far as I'm aware, the motivation behind this had nothing to do with social justice for trans people, but more as a potential alternative to the awkward/ambiguous singular they. (Or at least that's how I would've interpreted it back then, having been a teenager with no real concept of or experience with LGBT issues.)
Spivak pronouns go back a very long way, though they were most popularized in the early '80s by Spivak using them in technical documentation. The popularity of singular they as a general purpose pronoun is much more recent.
“The politician made a statement to the press. They were shocked”
Who does “they” refer to there?
My point exactly. There's nothing inherently unique about singular "they" in that respect.
Sure, there are certain circumstances in which a gendered pronoun removes ambiguity, just as honorifics or age/social status based pronouns would remove ambiguity in many instances involving multiple male subjects/objects if English used them (like some other languages do), but that really isn't a reason not to use singular "they" with the same degree of care to avoid ambiguity one also has to use "he" and "she".
English doesn't have gendered nouns, but we do have gendered pronouns, which not all languages have. Chinese doesn't have gendered pronouns, which is why you'll often hear native Chinese speakers accidentally refer to a woman in English as "he".
Today, young English speakers are trying to popularize "they" as an English neuter pronoun, and it's not too absurd: we already use "they" this way when the gender of the person is unknown. For example, if you found a random wallet, you might say, "Someone lost their wallet," and it would be acceptable.
Intentionally changing language isn't unprecedented either: in the 1970s, feminists successfully introduced "Ms." as a female equivalent to "Mr." to denote a woman who may or may not be married, (instead of Miss and Mrs.).
Ultimately, most language evolution is driven by young people: they're bending their native tongue to better describe their world. And that's a good thing. Language is supposed to be fluid and dynamic. We shouldn't be constraining our thoughts to a static unchanging language invented by our ancestors to describe their world that no longer exists. It's a tool meant to serve us, we're not meant to limit ourselves to it.
This is interesting because I've heard this explanation before from an international student. You still have 他/he 她/she despite them being pronounced the same, so the gendered pronouns still do exist, but the mistake of switching he/she in conversation is still commonly made.
It's not like Vietnamese where Em ấy or Ẻm (both meaning he/she for someone younger than the speaker) where a genderless pronoun is used, and yet I've seen he/she mixed up a lot less often.
I believe older Chinese used 他as a fever neutral pronoun and using 她 is a fairly recent change to mimic western languages.
I can understand why 'they' is chosen as a way to introduce neutrality of gender but it pains me that this also introduces of ambiguity of plurality. We _really_ need a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun. We're lucky that our first and second-person pronouns and our plural pronouns by fluke of language evolution just happen to already be gender neutral. It's just this last one -- third-person singular -- that is causing all this discussion, political fights, and newspaper column inches. It seems absurd to me when we could just call each other ze/zim (or whatever, the actual word doesn't really matter) and call it a day. If it turns out that the only way we can shut up about pronouns is to sacrifice 'they', then I guess that's an acceptable loss. But it does feel like all we need is a tiny tweak of the language to iron out this wrinkle by introducing something new (or taking one from another language, if that's more palatable).
plural: theys
A similar concept exists in Mandarin Chinese, where "ni3" means "you" and "ni3men" to mean "you and those with you", but there is also "ta1" as a gender-neutral, singular "they" (that is, he/she), and "ta1men" as a gender-neutral, plural "they".
Is it "a fluke"? You generally know a lot about the first and second person in a conversation. You know yourself and you see who you're talking to. There's no need for more precision for the first or second person. When trying to point to a specific individual other than one of the two interlocutors, however, finer distinctions help. That doesn't seem like "a fluke" to me. That actually seems to make quite a lot of sense.
In the south they use "y'all" and in the west we're starting to use "you guys" to try to compensate.
If the two types of "they" begin to cause frequent clashes, I imagine we'll see some new term pop up to add some specificity.
Wikipedia's summary is fine here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Me too, deeply, but I've solved this: What we need to do is update plural they/them/theirs to theys/thems/theirses.
Is it? I mostly see non-Spanish people using "latinx".
That's not what I've seen. "Latinx" isn't pronouncable in Spanish. The actual attempt to introduce a neutral gender uses the suffix -e. For example "les estudiantes ruidoses" or "mis amigues".
Did it really come from native Spanish speakers or is it an exonym? It is not the preferred term for the vast majority of Hispanic people even in the US.[1]
> Today, young English speakers are trying to popularize "they" as an English neuter pronoun
A Comedy of Errors (William Shakespeare, c.1594), Act 4, Scene 3:
> There's not a man I meet but doth salute me. As if I were their well-acquainted friend
Singular 'they' even when the gender is known has been popular in the English language for hundreds of years. Even longer than singular 'you'.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
> Singular 'they' even when the gender is known has been popular in the English language for hundreds of years. Even longer than singular 'you'.
It seems to me that the negation qualifies your Shakespeare example for OED's explanation of "I. 2. Often used in reference to a singular noun made universal by every, any, no, etc., or applicable to one of either sex (= ‘he or she’)." That is distinct from a reference to a single, specific individual, which using "they" as a singular gender-non-specific pronoun with unrestricted usage would necessarily include (things like "Peter said *they wanted some tea"). Presumably this is what was meant by GP.
This isn’t true. The term is enormously unpopular with latinos, only 3% use it. The entire spanish language uses gendered nouns, and unlike german has no neuter. The term may have originated with puerto rican academics but it is mostly used by English speakers.
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
Not true - Latinx was invented by English speakers and the vast majority of "Latinx" people don't use or like the term.
No, they're not. In WALS (https://wals.info/chapter/30), almost half of the languages have gendered nouns.
> Today, young English speakers are trying to popularize "they" as an English neuter pronoun, and it's not too absurd: we already use "they" this way when the gender of the person is unknown. For example, if you found a random wallet, you might say, "Someone lost their wallet," and it would be acceptable.
It's actually reasonably weird to propose since usages historically mattered. Also that's what gives you collocations, idioms, etc. If you look at grammars of English, you find plenty of examples of similar generalizations that people consistently refuse to make, such as the lack of "I could X" in the sense of "I was able to X", even though though nobody bats an eye at "I couldn't X" in the sense of "I wasn't able to X".
It might exist in academia or PR departments or journalism or facebook pages and twitter threads but it does very little to affect material relations and power structures, so it's if anything the Left and not anyone else who should be concerned with it.
It's always surprising to me that this seems to be such a Conservative topic of concern who if anything should be glad that it occupies so much mindspace.
https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...
Seems like your own linked article says it's not just a leftist thing?
And to be honest I've always found using left and right when viewed from an American perspective to not work either. In my country the furthest "right" mainstream party would sit a mile to the left of your democrats while the republicans would be considered "extreme right" bordering on illegal.
But even that is just a toy model. If Alice is pro-choice and anti-gun, those are in opposite quadrants. If Bob is the exact opposite, do we say that they're both in the middle, even though they disagree on everything?
> In my country the furthest "right" mainstream party would sit a mile to the left of your democrats while the republicans would be considered "extreme right" bordering on illegal.
The thing about the US is that the federal government is a kleptocracy, so both parties never actually do the things they say they're going to do.
If you judge the Democrats by what they say, they're pretty far to the left. But then they don't do that.
If you judge the Republicans by what they say, they're pretty far to the right. But then they don't do that.
People who want to claim that the country is far to the right then point to what the Democrats actually do and what the Republicans say they want to do. But, for example, the US has government spending as a percentage of GDP in line with the Netherlands or Australia and not dramatically less than the UK or Germany. If you take all the law books full of regulations in the US and put them on a scale, not many countries could match them. If you go back to the political compass, it's maybe more authoritarian than some of Western Europe -- certainly more people are in prison -- but left vs. right? By what objective measure?
It's the difference between building useful infrastructure and giving a huge handout to a billionaire who is already one of the richest people on the planet.
The US generally leans authoritarian, and bullying at all levels is endemic. That includes the nominal "left", although the far right in the US tends to be far worse. Because while the US left is irrational about a few things, the US far right is hopelessly irrational about almost everything - and armed with it.
Absolutely correct, if you have a right/left clock Hitler stays at 11:59 and Stalin at 00:01, they are the same. National SOCIALIST Party...hello?
Just in modern times being National means right-wing. But with that logic the CCP must be pretty right-wing.
Stalin is so "left" that he's touches shoulder with extreme "right". Stalin and Hitler where so extreme that you cannot talk about right or left (hence the 2 minute difference)
Seams pretty much accepted too me.
>Horseshoe theory is not something taken seriously among academics.
Show me proof for that.
My "proof" is the fact that every academic I know in history, sociology, and political science laughs whenever the topic is brought up. This is across institutions.
Gosh..you must be einstein of sociology ;)
The Nazis had help from the left at their inception, but murdered them later to gain approval from finance and law enforcement grous to consolidate power. Look up the Night of the Long Knives. The Nazis that accomplished everything we're decidedly right-wing, despite recent attempts to reverse that impression.
The primary thing that happened in the 60s was that the Democrats stopped opposing the Civil Rights Act. The Republicans didn't start opposing it then, they voted for it, and it passed. It was the process of racism losing the support of both parties when it used to have one.
Strom Thurmond was a racist, butthurt that the Democrats finally betrayed him. His constituents kept reelecting him and the US only has one other party.
The problem with the narrative that the parties switched places is that most of their policies didn't change. When Strom Thurmond switched parties, Democrats didn't go from supporting the New Deal to opposing it. They didn't switch from pro-life to pro-choice or vice versa. Their policies are much the same as they were when they were the party of the Klan.
Which implies that racism and left vs. right are independent.
To the extent there was a switch, it was between the pre-New Deal alignment and the alignment after the end of the double (New Deal and Civil Rights) realignments, Thurmond was from a constituency that was with the Democrats before either realignment and that left with the Civil Rights realignment.
> Their policies are much the same as they were when they were the party of the Klan.
Their politics on racial issues aren’t the same as before the Civil Rights realignment, and their policies on economic issues and the role of the federal government outside of race aren’t the same as before the New Deal realignment; those two realignments overlapped, as the New Deal realignment hadn’t finished shaking out when the Civil Rights realignment (which itself took almost exactly 30 years to settle out after the usually-cited 1964 kickoff) started. Note that the rumblings of the Civil Rights realignment, while usually timed to 1964, were evident earlier, but no one else was welcoming the disaffected Democrats until after 1964, and the tension was very much with the new people and ideas being brought in due to the New Deal realignment.
Residential zoning in the US came out of racism. Restrict multi-family zoning to keep black people out of white neighborhoods. Then use that to create separate school districts for rich suburban white kids and poor urban black kids and maintain de facto segregation after de jure segregation was made unconstitutional.
Predominantly Democrats control the high population density areas where these policies are relevant and it's still ongoing.
Today Democrats promote the construction of abortion clinics and subsidizing the procedure. Before they promoted the construction of abortion clinics for the explicitly stated purpose of encouraging black women to get abortions. It's a changed in the stated justification but it's not actually a policy change.
I think at this point a lot of modern Democrats don't even realize what the intended purpose of these policies was, because they don't like to talk about that for obvious reasons, but they're still the party's policies.
Republicans didn't have kkk members sitting in congress in the 21st century. Democrats did.
We can say they changed their ways til the cows come home but the democrats never extend such mercy to other politicians (for example, franken was expelled for much less than byrd)
They sent trade unionists and Esperantists to concentration camps, because they were also deemed to be leftists.
>because they were also deemed to be leftists
No, not because of that, but they where a threat to the NSDAP. They feared a strong democracy the most and had to take a stand against the 2nd strongest party the SPD. It was like in the USSR not about left or right, but about having 100% power in one party/person.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/05/right-need...
There seems to be an ahistorical reading popular with especially Americans today that because the NSDAP called itself a "worker party" and had some left-sounding campaign promises (though mostly in the 1920s) it was a "left-wing party".
Germany had been a monarchy until the end of the first world war. "Right wing" in Weimar Germany meant "monarchist", not "free market". The monarchy was overthrown by a left-wing coalition that rapidly split into the more centrist SPD (anti-monarchists who just wanted a free republic but not challenge the social hierarchy itself) and the various socialist tendencies (anarchists, Trotskyists, Marxists, Bolsheviks, etc). The SPD also famously allowed the (monarchist and right-wing) Freikorps to kill one of the most influential socialist groups. That's all before the NSDAP was even a thing.
The NSDAP started out as a fairly uninteresting nationalist workers' party. It went through several iterations and multiple names that increasingly brought a focus on nationalism and a hyperfixation on an imagined betrayal by the leftists causing the defeat in the Great War that ultimately became part of the Jewish conspiracy theory and the idea of Cultural Bolshevism (which you may know as "Cultural Marxism"). To the NSDAP the clear enemy were the communists, the Bolshevists, but in general "the left" including the SPD. They continued using leftist rhetoric in some of their material for a while because it worked but much like Tucker Carlson ranting about coastal elites and big corporations their answer wasn't to dismantle capitalism or tax the rich.
In the end, the NSDAP heavily vilified the communist DKP and the left-wing SPD as well as the "international Jewish bankers" (who in their mind unlike the "good, German bankers" were a nomadic people in a profession they turned parasitic by extracting the wealth from the German people and bringing it outside the nation - so to them it wasn't capitalism itself that was the problem or even banking). The right-wing conservatives liked this and even pardoned Hitler after his failed coup because they thought they could use the NSDAP to crack down on the still growing socialist movements and prevent a second communist revolution like in Russia. The Enabling Act was signed by the Christian conservative "center party". The plan worked, though not quite as intended. They did however crack down on unions and many of the first people sent to the camps were socialists and queers. They also nearly invented the idea of "public-private partnerships" although they wouldn't have called them that.
Party politics change over time and thinking that "the left" must always have been what the Democrats do and "the right" what the GOP does is not only extremely centric to American history but also ignores that even today the US political spectrum has more than two parties (not to mention the vast differences between local chapters) and none of the parties can or could ever be neatly summed up as "left" or "right".
EDIT: Before someone feels like they have to point this out: yes, the SA in particular (the security volunteers of the Nazis who went on to become their paramilitary street gang) had some people with actually somewhat leftist ideas in them and some members of the NSDAP were openly gay. Upon rising to power however the NSDAP purged (i.e. murdered) most of these people. But even the "leftist" ideas tended to be hypernationalist and be tainted by their social views (e.g. eugenics, anti-Semitism, Aryanism and homophobia). This is in part why most leftists today reject any "red-brown alliance" out of principle.
EDIT2: Since some people are prone to misunderstand points made in lengthy replies: I'm not saying Tucker Carlson or the GOP would have agreed with the NSDAP. I'm saying neither Tucker Carlson, the GOP...
In the 1930’s the Democrats were the party of segregationists (clearly not a left wing position), but also the party of FDR expansion of social programs (clearly a left wing position).
In Europe a significant proportion of the right are Christian democrats of various flavours who consider some degree of state welfare to be moral duty, and/or other non-free market conservatives, to the point where the US style right are considered extremists many places.
No, its not. I mean, except in the sense that Nazi’s are generally considered part of modern history and thus any description of them could be described as a “modern conceit”.
> When FDR was President the Democrats were the party of the Klan. Does that mean the New Deal is a right-wing program, or that the KKK is a left-wing organization?
No. It means that US parties of the time leading up to the New Deal were more strongly regional than consistently ideological (the Democratic Party had very different Northern and Southern constituencies and ideologies even before the New Deal coalition), and that the New Deal itself was the trigger for the largest, longest partisan realignment (or one of the two, though the other one was arguably only possible because the New Deal realignment was still shaking out) in US history, which only finally settled down after the secondary Civil Rights realignment to a fairly stable divisions – with a clear ideological left/right configuration – in the 1990s.
> Or maybe politics can’t be divided perfectly along a one dimensional axis
It can’t, but that doesn’t mean that any of the well-known axes of politicis don’t have things, including modern and historical political parties, that clearly fit on one side. The Nazis being one that fits clearly on the right (also, the authoritarian.)
NSDAP had an economically left, socially right opposition originally (the Strasserists), but those who hadn't been expelled already were arrested or murdered during the Night of the Long Knives.
Meanwhile Hitler was repeatedly praised by right wing commentators and papers and seen as an enemy by the left.
To spread the fiction that the Nazis we're not seen as right wing at the time is offensive, and simply not supported by the facts.
This is absurd. Not only the nazi mindset fits squarely into all the far-right / ultranationalist ideas, but the nazi party even made an alliance with the fascist party in Italy.
Amazing.
Depends on your definition. They may be rare if you only include self-identified Nazis. However, if you expand that to include members of the Far Right and general White Surpemacists then they're not only not fringe but they become as mainstream as Hannity, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon and all of the Q-anon grifters.
White supremacists -as in people who believe most of the same thing as actual literal nazis, are by no means rare these days.
But if you mean people traipsing around in black SS uniforms then sure yeah those guys are rare, sure.
Of course that leaves the question of how you define fascism, which is a whole 'nother can of worms.
Maximum observed 'forever' seems to be under a decade, once the full fascism kicks in and is unavoidable. I don't believe fascism is sustainable, and what we see as 'woke' is a typical reaction to these attempts at rule. (Yes, I'm suggesting that power structures lean more towards fascism than they used to, and that this creates 'woke' as a reaction to this pressure)
I'd loosely define 'Nazi' as 'fascist with specific focus on seizing power through propaganda, media, and politics, particularly with use of anything that's new media'. In the 30s and 40s, of course, this was radio. There had always been massed political rallies (though the use of epic film propaganda was also new, as there'd be no Riefenstahl without the existence of film) but there hadn't been broadcast radio. Generalized, 'Nazi' means fascism plus modern media, and I'd be comfortable focusing that down a little to specify the media's used to rally 'the people' against enemies, specifically internal enemies in an ill-defined way.
Rallying people against 'woke' through coordinated use of social media is EXACTLY Nazi, in technique.
The conflation of white supremacism and naziism is pretty much entirely political maneuvering. They believe very different things about the state, forms of government, gay people, culture, land use and many other things. Not to mention that only a small number of people termed white supremacists actually are (it conflates believing in racial differences (which are often not just white>everything) with believing in racial segregation with believing that the "white" ethnic group will form a better society),
Also, it's still pretty fringe.
"Just" strikes me as an inappropriate adverb to use in this context. You are talking about splitting up the US into racially segregated states. Even in a bizarre hypothetical where this was somehow done with the best of intentions (lol), the amount of chaos and human suffering it would cause is almost impossible to imagine.
This sort of utterly insane belief should not be "pretty fringe". It should be virtually non-existent, in a reasonably sane and healthy society.
It's a real sea change in our culture that racial segregation is now openly considered or even advocated on relatively mainstream forums such as HN. That some of the people in question might not meet some overly pedantic definition of 'white supremacist' is hardly any consolation.
The far right has never taken its own ideology seriously – it's all a means to an end. They tie sympathetic intellectuals up in knots trying to parse and categorize the finer gradations of racist nonsense, and then do whatever they hell they want once they're in power.
This really doesn't match my experience given how much time they spend arguing/discussing amongst themselves.
Bickering and infighting hardly constitute evidence that intellectually serious work is being done in good faith. The far right has no more use for its 'useful idiots' once it attains power than the Communist party did for its pet intellectuals.
That doesn’t mean they don’t still want White America in charge; moving a group out of the bounds of the state [0] doesn’t suddenly mean there is no power dynamic, as such dynamics are evident between states.
[0] in the international sense, not in the US-domestic sense
Note that this is far from just a blue tribe thing, it's pretty universal across all politics around the world to deliberately conflate the views of your stupidest enemies and your smartest.
https://youtu.be/tbud8rLejLM
Fussing about debatey details while repeatedly planting the desired concepts and trying to get anything you can, conceded so you can place a marker and push further, is very Nazi. It's foundational alt-right strategy, along the lines of 'hiding your power level'. This is not mysterious.
The reason it looks like that to you, is because fascists believe nothing… but power (and that only they should hold power, forever: it's not a thing to be shared or handed back and forth). So anything might be claimed, but outside the practical seizing of power, nothing matters.
This is VERY common. Hence people's concern about the matter.
What I find heartbreaking in all this identity issue is the ever-increasing number of dimensions. Simple math shows that at about 20 or so there’s going to be about one gender identity per person or two. Which is absolutely correct as all people are unique and beautiful in their own ways. But instead of being able to freely move across the spectrum that is being a “man” or a “woman”, each person would be locked in their own tiny identity. And, as we see, crossing the identity barriers is hard for many many reasons. I can’t see this increasing happiness of people. Everyone is or should be looking for their identity for most of their lives, creating additional barriers on this journey is unlikely to be beneficial.
From context it should be clear that I'm talking about identarianism in the literal sense of the term (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/identitarianism), not the European right-wing political movement that confusingly shares the same label.
>women's suffrage, the US civil rights movement, universal male suffrage
the keyword in those movements is 'suffrage' and 'civil' not 'man' or 'woman'. The reason they were successful is because they were republican movements. Women's suffrage wasn't about women with a capital W having a sort of privileged identity, it was about the opposite, women being treated like equal citizens. Identity politics is the opposite, it is the creation of separate, distinct, protected spaces for groups of people based on some set of features.
Rather than gaining access to the commons, aspiring to universal values which was the goal of desegregation in the civil rights era, women's rights and so forth, identity politics seeks to carve out virtual spaces that are only even understandable if you share said identity. The notion of the a citizen proper goes out of the window.
And the gay rights movement is a good example of that shift, whereas historically it was focused on access to civil rights, nowadays you have clashes between different queer groups. Which part do we include, are TERFS reationary? Are asexuals queer? There is at least half a dozen fronts in this war already about who deserves to be part of the rainbow label.
Who's they? Name names.
Unions, as weak and pathetic as they are, become a whole lot more interested in pronouns, systemic racism and illegal immigration than fighting for a decent wage and decent working conditions for their paying members.
Politically, there is no more discourse on behalf of the poor or working classes, only for identitarian version thereof. With the obvious effect that the shunned identities naturally don't support erst left wing policies that exclude them on identity marker basis.
Wokeness is a huge win for the ruling class. Divide and conquer at its best.
You don't need to convince or coerce people to fit your agenda. You simply find them and elevate them.
They literally and figuratively want to burn down / destroy the capitalist system, which is a far more dangerous leftist position than demanding a carbon tax or "breaking the glass ceiling", diversity training etc., which only make sense if you take the capitalist system for granted.
For a more concrete example of this type of influence, I often refer to the Norman Dodd interview. Norman Dodd was the chief investigator for the 1953 Special Committe on Tax Exempt Foundations (aka the Reece Committee). During his investigation he sent a research assistant Catherine Casey to analyze the minutes of the foundations. Apparently Norman thought she would be good to send because she was not sympathetic to the investigation, and was generally defensive of the tax exempt foundations. After actually spot-reading the minutes though, apparently it shook her so badly that she was never able to return to practicing law, and Carroll Reece had to tuck her away in a job at the FTC, and Norman Dodd says she ultimately lost her mind as a result of what she discovered. (sorry for my poorly done quick transcription)
"... finally of course the war is over. At that time their interest shifts over to preventing what they call a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914 when WW1 broke out. And they arrive at that point, they come to the conclusion that to prevent a reversion we must control education in the United States, and they realize that's a pretty big task. To them it is too big for them alone, so they approach the Rockefeller foundation, with a suggestion that; that portion of education which could be considered domestic, be handled by the Rockefeller foundation and that portion which is international should be handled by the endowment, and they then decide that the key to the success of these two operations lay in the alteration of the teaching of American history, so they approach four of the then most prominent teachers of American history in the country, people like Charles and Mary Bird. Their suggestion to them is will they alter the manner in which they present this subject and they get turned down flat. So they then decide it is necessary for them to do as they say, "build our own stable of historians". And then they approach the Gugenheim foundation which specializes in fellowships, and say "when we find young men in the process of studying for doctorates in the field of American history, and we feel they are the right caliber, will you grant them fellowships on our say so?" and the answer is yes. So under that condition, eventually they assemble 20, and they take this 20 potential teachers of American history, to London, and there they are briefed into what is expected of them, when as and if they secure appointments in keeping with the doctorates they will have earned. That group of 20 historians ultimately becomes the nucleus of the American Historical Association, and towards the end of the 1920's, the endowment grants to the American Historical Assocation, 400,000 for a study of our history in a manner which points to, what can this country look forward to in the future. That culminates in a 7 volume book study, the last volume of which is of course in essence a summary of the contents of the other 6, and the essence of the last volume is "The future of this country belongs to collectivism adminsitered with characteristic American efficiency."..."
So what I posit is that "wokeism", more than just a divide and conquer tool, is something that enables the further shifting of the overton window over time towards collectivism.
Now understand that the very article itself eminates from a publication with heavy connections to this same kind of subtle influence and control. I find it quite fascinating when viewing sources like the Economist with this sort of scrutiny the kind of insight that can be elucidated simply by trying to understand what they aren't saying and what they are trying to hide, or how they are trying to influence things.
https://youtu.be/YUYCBfmIcHM?t=1506
These days anti-capitalism is literally sold as a commodity. Anti-consumerism has become a consumer identity. While this helps deradicalization by diverting the radical energy away from actual causes towards consumption, it also tends to make a good profit.
The problem isn't the worldviews. The problem is that you can't fight capitalism through consumption. You can't fight hierarchies by acting within the system of hierarchy, you have to step outside.
As an example, the Black Panthers (not the Marvel movie) not only offered social programs and free food in Black communities, they also built coalitions with other racial groups who tried to do the same in their communities. While at a glance acting only within their racial lines (i.e. racial identity politics) they actively worked against racial division through mutual solidarity.
Solidarity across divisions is important, but it can only work if you acknowledge the existence of the divisions and the power imbalances these divisions reinforce.
As an example in the negative, unions in the early 20th century US often failed because they rejected Black workers who then had no other economical option but to become scabs when white unionized workers went on strike (because they didn't get any of the union benefits and had no union covering their backs if they had joined the strike).
There's a widespread misconception these days that "left solidarity" means that all members of "the left" have to be equally "woke". They all have to believe in exactly the one leftist ideology you think is best, they all have to treat all marginalized groups exactly the way you think they must be treated and so on. This is where the leftist memes of the circular firing squad and purity spirals come from. THIS is harmful and divisive.
However the answer is not to "not be woke". The answer is to better embrace pragmatic alliances and understand that you can have a shared struggle even if it doesn't perfectly overlap. There's a place for close-nit communities but "the left" is not a clubhouse.
As another final example, there's a famous incident in the UK (recently portrayed in the movie "Pride") where gay activists joined striking coal miners because both groups were facing violent opposition from the police. The collaboration helped foster class consciousness in the gay activists and queer acceptance among the coal miners. They didn't become one cohesive ideologically perfect group but their solidarity made them more powerful in their shared struggle than either group would have been on their own.
I don't think the problem of racism and sexism (two classic "woke" topics) are "Left" problems, which is why it strikes me as odd that I don't see ideas about how to deal with them coming from everyone, beyond a straight denial they exist, or that it's actually the fault of the folks experiencing the discrimination somehow.
What we have in Wokeism is a pseudo-politics, in that, it make no material demands. The woke concern is against alleged "implicit" forms of racism which "harm" graduates jockying for position within large corporate structures.
It reads a little like "what happens when the upper middle-class discover that they too may, possibly, have been discriminated against".
A plain reading of this seems false. Wokism definitely makes demands.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism
I don't think this has anything to do with wokriem
Also providing a little context to what I assumed was meant by “material demands”, based on the quote from GP below.
> The most virulent forms of racism are a symptom of material conditions, eg., that poor black people live uniformly in one area, and rich white people in another.
That’s because “Wokeism” doesn’t exist. Being “woke”, was never a descriptor of a politics but of the state of being aware of and engaged in social and political issues affecting a disadvantaged (originally, specifically Black American) community. It’s now morphed into a label assigned by outside group to anyone whose politics the speakers disagrees with for being too focussed, or focussed in the wrong way, on identity issues. So, yes, there is no coherent material program of Wokeism, because Wokeism isn’t a thing.
Now, within the broad mass that any user of the term labels “Wokeism”, there are many groups that have within them extensive, coherent lists of material demands,
Whether you like the term or not, it is very hard to simply deny the revolution in identity construction currently taking place.
Watch the latest CIA advert which emphasises neauvox-oppressed identity markers over. It emphases how the CIA allows you to 'be yourself' qua how you are a member of an oppressed group.
Whatever you want to call /that/, this is what I am talking about.
Racism is a system of hierarchy where one race is inherently good and normal and others are deviations from that, or at least every race is good or bad in some ways and there is an implied value judgement in every assertion about them. Not every person doing a racism necessarily fully commits to racial pseudoscience but if pressed they'll have to justify their conceptions by citing them. Racial mixing of course is unacceptable as it goes against this order and since the racial social castes are a natural order, any attempt to overcome them is bad and anyone making it further than their kind is expected to should either be celebrated for their excellence (and everyone else be held to their standard to demonstrate their insufficiency) or be viewed with suspicion because they probably cheated or got handouts.
Sexism is a sexual hierarchy with women being one way, men another and everyone who doesn't neatly fit into either category being deviant and a troublemaker. It's not so much about one sex being better at all things than the other, much like racism, but about there being a natural order and everything being well as long as people follow it.
Economic right wing thought posits that there is a natural order in that poverty is largely a failure of the individual and can be overcome with sheer will so wealth is the just spoils of success and personal quality and charity is the only acceptable form of welfare because it is for the wealthy to decide how to allocate their deserved riches.
This is also why right-wing people have recently picked up the term "Marxist" (or even "Neomarxist") to describe not just socialists but also progressives in general, even when they lean economically more right-wing than left.
The question of how you align within that spectrum is mostly a question of whether you think a natural order exists and/or should be enforced in each of these dimensions (and there are probably more). Most Democrats don't want to abolish private ownership, they just want more regulations to shift some of the wealth to the lower classes, i.e. balance out the hierarchy rather than getting rid of it. They are however more likely to be opposed to the idea of a natural order in social questions.
Absolutely not: it's the left that's usually the favor of giving more power to the most oppressive and monopolic hierarchy there is, the government, while the right is fighting to dismantle it.
If you consider US democrats to be "left", you are sadly mistaken.
However there's a word for anti-authoritarian leftists. We're called anarchists. Not all leftists are anarchists and not all leftists are anti-authoritarian. Even authoritarian leftists (or "statists") generally believe in the end goal being the ideal of a stateless, classless society.
Statists just tend to believe the only way to get there is with an intermediary socialist state established through a communist revolution and led by a vanguard party who directs the economic, social and philosophical evolution of the people towards bringing about communism. The differences between those groups are largely about what that intermediary state should look like and at what point it can be dissolved.
Some of the aspirationally communist states of the 20th century justified their continued existence with communism having to be rolled out globally simultaneously for it to b successful. Some instead argued that what they had achieved was "real socialism", heavily implying that's as good as it gets and any critics were utopian idealists who'd rather tear down the local optimum in the hope of an unachievable ideal. The USSR opened its markets and collapsed under the dual load of its bureaucrat aristocracy and capitalist oligarchs, China pivoted to Dengism to contain their "capitalist experiments" with the promise of a greater good coming from the temporary toleration of exploitation.
But for anarchists (and mutualists, who fall somewhere between anarchism and statism) the biggest problem tends to be that they usually either start out or end up surrounded by nation states with standing armies who want none of their nonsense.
The most promising approach seems to be dual power, i.e. building anarchist structures[0] within existing states through cooperation and solidarity so that when they inevitably collapse in the future, the people can fall back on those structures as an alternative to just reasserting the old (hierarchical) power structures.
[0]: To preempt the obvious joke: contrary to the portrayal of "anarchy" in most media today, anarchists don't believe in no organizations, just no hierarchical power structures, i.e. usually they agree with consent-driven forms of bottom-up organizing. The one exception tend to be egoists (see Stirner), but most anarchists try to ignore them because they're weird.
When Stalin came to power, one of the first things he did was too purge all the anarchists and other non-authoritarian socialists. Thus most leftists despise Stalin and what he did. Mao, too.
Anarchists, syndicalists and other leftists were literally building decentralized structures before the Bolsheviks swooped in and decided the public would need decades of ideological education before it could be trusted to make any decisions about their lives and "helpfully" started making the decisions for them. It doesn't help that many of the leftists outside Russia who were critical of Bolshevism were murdered by German paramilitaries and later more indirectly by the USSR while trying to fight fascism in Spain.
Saying you have a good understanding what "left" is because you were born in the USSR is like saying you have a good understanding of what pasta is because you've been eating Yum Yum noodles for a decade.
Have you read Kropotkin? Bakunin? Proudhon? Bookchin? There is a wide range of leftist thought outside the very narrow niche within Marxist-Leninist-Maoism that still uncritically defends the USSR.
Actually, yes. Lenin, Trotsky, Lenin and Mao too.
You try to explain the consequences of communism with "few bad apples"; well, at least it's not a "no true scottsman", I have to give credit for that. However, there have been so many cases of leftists coming to power and building a state, and the only one I know that didn't end is tragedy was Israel — and even it resulted in financial crisis and eventual move to capitalism.
Of course, it's opportunists and sociopaths who come to power. You're absolutely right about that. But it would be silly to explain all these outcomes as fault of particular individuals, even if they are at fault. It's the principles behind the system itself, which make it vulnerable to this kind of attack.
Essentially, the problem is with this: every kind of leftism makes moral behaviour nor a matter of personal choice and responsibility, but something mandated by the state or a quasi-state organisation. This sounds very good in theory, especially for the people who are sensitive to the wrongs of the world. But in practice, it makes those organisations infallible and creates in their place a perfect vessel for said opportunists and sociopaths.
State power is like The Ring from LOTR. It's very seductive to use it for good, but absolute power corrupts absolutely. It should be not used, but destroyed.
It seems odd to tar specifically anti-statists with wanting to create a state. Anarchy being literally the antonym of hierarchy, statism is the complete antithesis of anti-authoritarian left-wing politics.
The right doesn't want to dismantle government at all. It wants to own it.
The idea that "left means more government" is also very ahistorical and feels uniquely like a product of modern American political discourse. The origin of the left-right distinction is literally the abolition of feudalism, i.e. replacing a fixed hierarchy by birthright with egalitarian democratic elections. By 1776 standards the founding fathers were left-wing radicals. The right would have literally defended the Crown.
If you understand left-right as Democrat-Republican, your view doesn't hold true either. Republicans generally want to void labor protections, reduce taxes, cut social welfare and lift environmental regulations, but they also always want to increase the military, intelligence and police budgets. Republicans also tend to want the state to enforce their idea of morality, e.g. by prohibiting (secular or non-Christian) same-sex marriages, criminalizing abortion or restricting sex education and access to contraceptives. They want to enforce what they see as the natural order through punishment whereas "the left" wants to counteract it through support. Prison abolitionists tend to be on the left, not the right.
The government isn't hierarchy. The government is an institution that interacts with hierarchy. As are large corporations for that matter. Reducing the government budget and shifting more economic power to corporations doesn't reduce hierarchies, it only takes power from elected officials to unelected shareholders.
If you believe in an unregulated free market capitalism, you literally support the hierarchy of the market and you believe in a natural order. Or to put it in words that feel less icky if you think of yourself as an anarcho-capitalist: that people should vote with their dollars on what goods and services should thrive or fail.
If you believe money is power and you believe it's good and natural for some people to have many orders of magnitude more money than other people, you believe in a natural order. This is what leftists call a hierarchy and leftists don't like it.
Note: I'm not saying leftists don't want a big government. I'm saying leftists (even outside anarchism) want to get rid of the state. They just disagree on how to get there. And for reformists that answer usually involves using the state one way or another.
Look at how many Black Americans supported the Loyalist side. Many of the American Founding Fathers were slave owners and supported the continuation of slavery. The British Empire promised freedom to American slaves who supported the Empire, and it mostly delivered on that promise. Both sides were very racist, if judged by contemporary standards, but I think there is a decent argument to be made that the racism of the British was on the whole a lot milder than that of the Americans.
The British Empire, including what is now Canada, officially abolished slavery in 1833; the United States would not finally abolish it for another 30+ years. (And it took a bloody civil war for America to do it; the Empire’s abolition of slavery was largely peaceful.) But in actual fact, slavery was de facto rendered legally unenforceable in most of (what is now) Canada by a series of court decisions in the 1790s, so in practice slavery was abolished in Canada over 60 years prior to its abolition in the US.
While there was widespread social discrimination against Black people in 19th and 20th century Canada, it was generally much milder than in much of the United States. The British and Canadian legal systems generally accepted the theoretical legal equality of all citizens regardless of race, even though it often failed to enforce that theoretical equality in practice; by contrast, the legal systems of many American states contained explicit discrimination against Black citizens.
Lynching was a great scourge on American history, of which Black people were the disproportionate (but not exclusive) victims. Many Americans defended lynching as a form of democracy. Judges, law enforcement and prosecutors in the US were very sensitive to public opinion – in part due to their widespread direct election – and were often loathe to properly investigate, prosecute and convict lynching cases if public opinion appeared to approve of the act. Likewise, many American jurors believed that it was appropriate for them to defer to public opinion in deciding cases, and return "not guilty" verdicts in popularly approved lynchings even when the evidence clearly pointed to guilt.
By contrast, the British Empire strongly objected to people taking the law into their own hands, and would-be lynchers in Canada faced far greater odds of successful prosecution for murder (and its then near-mandatory death penalty) than in the US. British culture–including among politicians, law enforcement, prosecutors, judges and jurors–prioritised upholding the rule of law over popular opinion to a much greater extent than American culture did. Due to this cultural difference, lynching was extremely rare in Canadian history – a mere handful of isolated incidents, compared to many thousands in the US.
So, who were the "egalitarians" and "left-wing radicals" in the American Revolution? I think we should seriously consider the possibility that the American Revolution was in fact a reactionary right-wing movement, widely supported by slave owners who lived in fear that the British Empire might forcibly liberate their slaves, and not really a "left-wing" one.
Chattel slavery was directly tied to scientific racism, which is literally a system of hierarchy and the belief that the system is both natural and good (e.g. the "white man's burden" ideology that slavery is good for the slaves because they're unfit to survive on their own).
You won't find any political movement that neatly fits into the "left-right" spectrum. In retrospect even the often lauded direct democracy of ancient Greece was deeply undemocratic because it was restricted by its very narrow definition of citizenship. Under scientific racism Black slaves were barely considered human and even if you only consider white people the US still didn't let women vote until the suffragettes fought for it and won.
My point wasn't that the founding fathers should be considered leftists. My point was that the original historical definition of leftism was opposition to the king of France during the French revolution because that's how the seating happened to be arranged in the National Assembly in 1789 (notably before the American revolution, but close enough to make the point).
As feudalism became less relevant, the meaning began to shift by becoming more generalized. I'm not arguing about morality here but definitions. The 18th century definition of left and right was almost entirely about royalty and the aristocracy. The generalized definition I summarized evolved considerably later.
White loyalists didn’t believe in the Divine Right of Kings either. That ideology was promoted by the Catholic King James II, who was overthrown in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. The Hanoverian monarchy (to which George III belonged) was ideologically opposed to it because if true it would mean the 1688 revolution was illegitimate, and hence Hanoverian rule of Britain would be illegitimate too. The main supporters of Divine Right of Kings were Catholics and the Jacobite rebels in Ireland and Scotland, not Protestant supporters of the British government. In fact, some Jacobites supported the American Revolution - such as Hugh Mercer.
> Chattel slavery was directly tied to scientific racism,
The Atlantic slave trade was already well underway when the theory of “scientific racism” was first being developed. And it didn’t become widely popular until the mid-19th century, by which time slavery was approaching its end. It was a post hoc rationalisation for chattel slavery, not a cause.
> My point was that the original historical definition of leftism was opposition to the king of France during the French revolution because that's how the seating happened to be arranged in the National Assembly in 1789 (notably before the American revolution, but close enough to make the point).
The French Revolution was (in part) a revolution against the “Divine Right of Kings”, but the American Revolution wasn’t, since the British had already rejected that ideology in the revolution of 1688. If you define “leftism” as merely rejecting that then both sides in the American Revolutionary War were “leftist”, and the British Empire was a “leftist” empire
The obvious solution is meritocracy and race/sex blindness. That's the world I wish to live in - non-discrimination & equality of opportunity, not "positive" discrimination (it's always positive for someone) and (enforced) equality of outcome. But the Woke Left has been quite hostile to those concepts recently...
Edit: added "Woke" before "Left" because presumably there's other (liberal) Left that would support meritocracy.
(Edit: this isn’t to say I agree with equal outcome. I think there’s a lot of nonsense stuff in that sphere. But I’ve never myself been able to answer how to consider how to make equality of opportunity happen if we started from an unequal space and inheritance exists which persists inequality.)
First of all, "starts with nothing" isn't specific to black population. Many (most?) immigrants also start with nothing, yet often outperform locals (including whites) (the important question that almost noone is asking, is why?). Among those are Nigerians, so clearly "because they're not black" isn't the correct answer.
Your question already contains the "correct" (IMO) answer, which is: help poor people. To the extent that poverty correlates to being black (or any other categorical characteristic), both solutions are equivalent, except that mine is (1) non-discriminatory (e.g. it helps white homeless people as well), (2) self-correcting (when "racial equality of outcome" is reached and poverty is no longer correlated with skin color, my solution will continue to do "good"), and (3) non-wasteful (why would society spend any amount of resources helping e.g. Obama's daughters, who are by "inheritance" (of political connections) some of the most privileged people on this planet?).
Edit: I might have been too focused on the "race" part of your comment. If you're wondering about inherited inequality in general, well, yeah, that's one of the paradoxes of meritocracy & similar concepts, e.g. assortative mating - the end (stable) state is a society ruled by the (hereditary) "intelligent" class. But I think that's unlikely to happen naturally because there seems to be quite a lot of genetic variation in intelligence (and other traits our society treats as "superior", e.g. height, beauty, etc.); if anything, that's more likely to happen because of genetic manipulation/embryo selection, which doesn't exactly require a meritocratic society...
> Members of the so-called nomenklatura , numbering perhaps a million, have special holiday retreats, access to special medical facilities and--most resented by ordinary Russians--access to special stores that sell imported and Soviet-made goods that are simply not available in the regular stores. Many also have cars and chauffeurs.
> As a practical matter, the privileges are hereditary, since children of the elite have an inside track on admission to the top universities--graduation from which guarantees them good jobs and a place on the nomenklatura list.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-03-17-me-22368-...
Furthermore, 'inequality of outcome' is often times a good thing. We all want a good plumber, a good surgeon, a good baker, a good teacher, a good farmer, a good engineer, either as a service provider or a colleague. Having an 'equality of outcome' system where randoms are promoted to 'good plumber' by fiat in practice makes plumbing dysfunctional. See the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Which leaves open some hard problems:
* Competency leaning hierarchies, vs. power leaning hierarchies.
* Low gini hierarchies vs. high gini hierarchies.
* Low skill societies vs high skill societies.
* Skill acquisition. Help broad swaths of the population acquire proficiency in useful $skill.
Note that in practice equality of outcome systems have been successful only in flattening hierarchies by essentially bulldozing them into the ground, bringing everyone down (other than the new hierarchy leaders) into material, spiritual and skill poverty.
Indeed poor black immigrants to this country do extremely well also.
All this is detailed extensively in the vision of the anointed by Thomas sowell (an accomplished black man from this era)
A core problem is what this means. A lot of people insist that we previously lived in a meritocracy and that things like admissions tests are pure representations of this meritocracy, so that moving away from these systems is an attack on a purely level playing field of meritocracy.
But we don't all agree with this. The same people who you criticize do not agree that we have achieved equality of opportunity. Not even close. For a very clear example, we see wealth opening huge numbers of doors for people regardless of actual merit, either through access to training, or access to connections, or as a backstop that enables people to take risks.
What you consider hostility to these concepts, other people think are essential to achieving these concepts.
Noone (sensible) is claiming that any system is a meritocracy. "Meritocracy" is just an ideal, like "equality", "fairness", or "airplanes not crashing", and it's unlikely we'll ever achieve this ideal, but that doesn't make it not worth fighting for.
So, while obviously objective exams aren't "meritocracy", they are without doubt more meritocratic than not having objective exams.
If "these people" really wanted to move towards greater meritocracy (as opposed to abandoning meritocracy), they'd support things like, abolishment of "extracurricular activities" in college admissions, or legacy admissions, or maybe even things China's limit on the amount of tutoring kids can do (I personally thing this is both too extreme and ultimately counterproductive, but at least we can all agree that it's with the right goal in mind - increasing meritocracy).
I agree that "wealth" is a problem, but the answer is having more objective measures, not less.
This is where we disagree dramatically. And this is why it is so frustrating to have people tell me that I "hate excellence" for supporting policy changes. By holding this assumption it enables you to both
1. Hold that meritocracy is an ideal
2. Conclude that people pushing for changes must oppose meritocracy
But I simply do not agree. To me, admissions exams are like the Leetcode interviews that people decry here. The test something, but that thing is largely disconnected from actual work and instead just becomes an obstacle course.
> If "these people" really wanted to move towards greater meritocracy (as opposed to abandoning meritocracy), they'd support things like, abolishment of "extracurricular activities" in college admissions, or legacy admissions, or maybe even things China's limit on the amount of tutoring kids can do (I personally thing this is both too extreme and ultimately counterproductive, but at least we can all agree that it's with the right goal in mind - increasing meritocracy).
I am involved in local politics to change the admissions program for a public magnet school. "Woke" activists proposed a merit lottery, a system where all students who met a minimum GPA and math-level requirement could be entered into a random lottery for admissions. This was criticized by opponents for being "anti-meritocratic" and even "racist against asians".
The eventually enacted policy maintains a "holistic" application, which does not consider race but does include these other topics. This received precisely the same criticism from opponents. Activists on the "woke" side preferred the merit lottery to this outcome.
So what I see here is that activists, at least in the situations that I am personally involved in, do support things like the abolishment of extracurricular activities in admissions systems.
Sadly, when they are promoted on the grounds of obtuse academic wokeness or identity politics, people instinctively infer that the real goal of such policies is to hand out undeserved benefits to minorities at the expense of a legitimate meritocracy.
Instead, what made headlines was garbage like "I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group [Asians] owns admission to these [selective] schools" from the NYC school chancellor. A clear attitude that all racial groups are entitled to proportional representation in selective schools regardless of performance.
Have you spent time with activist groups?
What was the minimum GPA? Who can apply? Are admissions limited to a geographical area or not? Who determines the GPA? If the answer is "teachers", how easily can that be gamed? Why not a similar but much more objective and harder to game system, e.g. admissions exam followed by a random selection above a, say, 80% cutoff point (e.g. first narrow the pool with an exam, then halve it again randomly)?
> but that thing is largely disconnected from actual work and instead just becomes an obstacle course.
This assertion is AFAIK quite nebulous. SATs and similar tests are correlated with IQ and with probability someone finishes university and with later life outcomes. Some say that high school GPA are better predictors, which might be true, but the real question is, how easy are they to game? A metric is only really useful if it doesn't change substantially when it becomes a goal. You might disagree regarding SATs (there's quite some disagreement and proper research into this topic is both hard and very politicised) but whatever other solutions you're proposing, should first be assessed based on how subjective (easy to manipulate/game) they are.
Same thing as Leetcode interviews, really. Everyone knows they suck, noone has come up with anything better yet.
Of course GPA isn’t flawless. You’ll find that activists also seek to solve pipeline problems at lower grades. But this is a rapid retreat from “an objective measure is obviously better” to “this specific measure is better than proposed alternatives.”
Using exam score cutoffs was discussed. Generally, people prefer gpa to exams because there isn’t the same explicit cottage industry of exam prep (yes, private tutoring obviously exists) and it includes a wider range of material than what is included on the test. Exam score cutoffs was also deemed unacceptable and similarly called racist and destructive by the same opponents of the proposed policy.
I don't really see any purpose in randomization, except anti-meritocracy pro-diversity. It is potentially excusable at the edges to account for the inherent noise of measurement (i.e. is 3.4 GPA really that different from 3.6 GPA) but there's no real reason that someone with 4 GPA shouldn't have a greater shot at admission than someone with 3.5 GPA.
Of course, if your distrust in GPA is so great that you oppose even that, then... what even the point of GPA in the first place? We should be working towards improving the metrics, not eliminating them.
But otherwise, this whole randomisation business is like, "Would you like to be operated on by the surgeon, or by the nurse? Oh, wait, let's flip a coin."
We are discussing high school education admissions right now. The kids being evaluated are 13. What is schooling for? Do admissions exist to make sure that some unqualified kid never gets access to a strong education? That conservative approach can make sense for life-or-death interactions like surgery, but nobody dies if a "less qualified" kid is sent to TJ (actually, since suicide rates have increased as the school has gotten more competitive, it might actually save lives).
GPA measures several things at the same time. It most explicitly measures what you have done. But in admissions we want some measure of future potential. This is not aligned perfectly with what somebody has done in the past. Were we to change grading to a continuous evaluation of future potential then I'd be much more accepting of a stricter hierarchy in admissions, but I am extremely skeptical that such a metric would be achievable without introducing tremendous biases.
My GPA in middle school was about a 4.0. But when I review my life, the reason it was so high included many many things that were unrelated to my future potential as a student.
We can also take a step back and consider why we even have limited-access accelerated education in the first place. GMU is just down the street. Even discussing the idea of opening up accelerated education to anybody who wants it is also considered being "an enemy of excellence" by opponents.
Finally, your note about surgeons and nurses is interesting, given the history. Prior to understanding of germ theory, it would have been preferable to be operated on by a nurse. Obviously, this is an extreme example but it clearly demonstrates how widespread understanding of "merit" can actually be totally broken.
I agree though that there's no good reason for gatekeeping education. In fact, in my ideal world, you'd have per-subject fast tracks available for anyone (or, more generally, non-age-specific schooling). For example, I always excelled at (and was interested in) math (other subjects, like physics and chemistry, I just excelled at but wasn't that interested in), so I think both I (individually, in future earnings) and the society (collectively, in future value/invention/...) would benefit tremendously if I was given harder math classes at an earlier age. There's a lot of kids like me, and in other subjects as well. But this would require better metrics and identifying such students earlier (even without any rate-limiting, simply to identify talent and steer it in the right direction).
The recent admitted class for TJ has seen absolutely enormous increases in the population of economically disadvantaged students as well as students on the autism spectrum or with other neuroatypical situations.
It therefore (in my mind) provides a more just system of allocation limited access to accelerated education, while we live in a world with such limited access.
> I agree though that there's no good reason for gatekeeping education. In fact, in my ideal world, you'd have per-subject fast tracks available for anyone (or, more generally, non-age-specific schooling).
My experience has been that promoting these policies receives even greater criticisms that me and my friends are racists who hate excellence. It is ridiculous to me that FCPS has a gated system for accelerated learning when there is a commuter-focused college right there. But if I go to school board meetings and suggest that we take resources and allocate them for this purpose, I'm called an "asian-hater".
My family saw a similar thing happen to them many years ago. The local GT programs were drawing students only from a select few (almost entirely white) schools and it turned out that a lot of this was due to how students were identified as candidates. My parents sought to change things, which did not deny any access to white students but instead expanded access and funding so that simply more people had access to accelerated education and... my parents were called "white traitors" by neighbors.
This is why I get so worked up about this stuff when people claim that support for a particular form of admissions exam is by definition support for promoting merit or promoting excellence.
Water treatment plant workers? President? Honors program students? All of these roles are subject to countless forms of discrimination against people for lacking intelligence, lacking the right identity, lacking educational attainment, lacking all sorts of things.
Thus the only two resolutions I see to the problem are simply thus. Kill absolutely everybody, thus establishing perfect equity and equality. The other solution is to use lotteries absolutely everywhere except for perhaps a special class of lottery runners (an unfortunate meritocracy), in dating, in work, in schooling, that made it so that everybodies outcomes in life was absolutely arbitrary, and thus equal and equitable.
It looks like a weird neurotic guilt attack that is probably counterproductive to any future common prosperity. Pushing "Latinx" on Hispanics and discriminatory quotas on Asian students is almost guaranteed to generate some weird backlash. Import of the same ideas to Europe whose racial dynamics is absolutely different (black people from Africa sail here on their own and "we"* mostly want to stop this movement, so pretty much the opposite of American slave history) is almost guaranteed to wake up some old demons.
* Of course there is not a uniform opinion on this among 400 million people, but the last five years have been spent tightening borders, not opening them, and even some lefty parties like Danish Social Democrats joined in.
Sometimes it's an unconscious bias, sometimes is attention seeking, sometimes it's a deflection tactic.
E.g. some "affluent white people" might talk all day about discrimination and never touch the painful topic of wealth inequality across the world.
*BUT* this does not invalidates the valuable goals a whole movement.
If you cherry-pick some examples to dismiss a whole movement you are making a strawman.
That's a big generalization.
Yet it's really unsurprising that a number of affluent people love to talk about race, gender, environment, and many other topic except wealth inequality.
Most of the discussions around systemic racism and sexism fundamentally boil down to the topic either poverty or violence from police.
Poverty:
Specific groups are over-represented in the impoverished population, sometimes across generations. We, correctly, have identified systemic bias as an contributing factor to these trends.
Imagine a hypothetical society where the means of comfort (good food, safe and adequate housing, new clothing, entertainment, etc...) are available to people that need them, regardless of whether or not one is employed. Now ask yourself, would racism and sexism have the same bite that it currently has? If one's ability to live comfortably is not based on systemic bias, one would be disingenuous if they said "yes".
Life gets a lot easier when one can ignore shitty racists and sexists without fear of losing their means of survival. It would be nice if racists and sexists didn't exist, but if everyone had the means to ignore them without fear of repercussions, that's almost as good.
Violence from police:
A few observations from the last few years of police violence and the BLM movement:
-There is a large portion of shitty individuals within various police forces that enjoy victimizing victimizable individuals
-Racialized groups are more victimizable than the average
-Police violence, although concentrated against minorities, also victimizes everyone to some degree, regardless of race or gender.
What practical solutions have come out of all of the years of outrage and protests? Instead of using "master/slave" software terminology, my company now encourages "leader/follower", while all of management is patting its back for "fighting systemic racism". Huh?
Here are some actual practical solutions to this issue:
-federally-mandated body cameras for all overt police officers that are always-on, and record to multiple external and publicly-viewable archives
-police review bodies with actual teeth to punish criminality amongst police officer
-a legal mechanism to permanently bar an individual from any kind of policing, country-wide
-removing "verbal evidence from a trusted officer" as admissible evidence in court
"Wokeness" is just yet another socially-acceptable form of discrimination, where us commoners have been pitted against each other playing some stupid "privilege points" game based on physical appearance. It's divisive, and is not actually moving us towards a healthier society. We should be looking towards our government to solve the actual issues that are aggravated by (and not caused by) sexism and racism.
You claim this is denial, but that's a biased reframing of the stated solution. This is a potential solution, but is not acceptable to the 'woke'
Are you sure? It feels like it has a much stronger influence, at least in Western Europe.
It also destroys any form of class consciousness, replacing it with one based on race. The white middle class get the catharsis of flagellating themselves but the people struggling to pay rent or working two jobs are understandably defensive when you try to tell them how privileged they are.
Inflation is much higher than wage increases, rent is exploding in the cities while jobs are being migrated into the cities, but thank god we have committees for identifying more and more absurd diversions and divisions.
I've always said about self-appointed woke commissars that what they really want is to eat at the cool kids' table. But they can't do that because they are often profoundly mentally ill. So what they do instead is take over the nerds' table and exploit whatever good nature they find there to turn it into their personal fiefdom. Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.
(This is also why wokesters are such bloody corporatists. A corporation is a power nexus, and power is the flame to which they are the moth. It was always about power.)
The thing is they have been profoundly successful! Wokeness has gone for the throat of just about every nerd hobby: first it was science fiction, then video games, then comics, and more recently open source and tabletop RPGs. TSR/WotC laughed off the right's assault on D&D during the "Dark Dungeons" era when they tried associating it with Satanism. But they sure crumpled to accusations of racism from the other side of the aisle and today you can't assign traits such as strength or aggression to fictional nonhuman races because orcs are "coded as black" or some shit.
The result is that nearly everything about these hobbies is in ruins. You cannot write traditional science fiction without aligning yourself with fascists or those perceived to be fascists. The X-Men are no longer heroes, just jerks with superpowers and an axe to grind. Nerds are such soft targets, destroying what they love was easy.
So yeah, they've done nothing to address class inequality or challenge existing power structures, but they have demonstrated that they can dissolve our cultural fabric with proven techniques. Do not be surprised if conservatives are concerned with this -- conservatism is about protecting and preserving a culture. Not everything is money and power to them.
Well, there was a period of many years when WotC stopped printing the creature type "Demon" out of deference to that assault.
(And if I recall correctly, TSR replaced the terms "devil" and "demon" with "Baatezu" and "Tanar'ri". I don't know whether they had yet been bought out by WotC.)
But if you use human ethnicities as the basis for your games monsters… yeah, that’s a real problem.
It doesn’t mean you have to ban D&D, but it does mean it should address those issues.
Same with rock music. I don’t care if bands write about demons and wizards, but maybe try not to objectify women so much.
But they don't? The concept of an orc (big, strong and dumb) does not depend on the existence of any real races.
“squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.”
Again, not saying we have to “cancel” Tolkien, but we should be aware of the issues and do better in future.
Same register as the vastly more mediatized Atlantic slave trade. This raises a fundamental question: Is it possible to mend centuries of abject & violent abuse across racial lines, where the most common interaction with members of the other racial group was through a slaver's whip. Not sure that 'do better' scolding, especially if inconsistently applied, is sufficient.
That is the woke Google who delivers what everybody wants to see. But it is easier to go after the nerds because they are "icky".
The totalitarian (and corporate) Steering Councils that pop up in some OSS projects are rarely elected by a majority. Nasty politicians and the mentally ill apply and get 30% of the votes. The rest of the voters do not apply or care enough to vote them out.
Historically, even Hitler never had a majority in an election. He got total power by the enabling act:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
He was also mentally ill and a meth addict later in life. Please remember such cases before falling into apathy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars
I think most people who self-ID as conservative really believe what they claim to believe about wanting to work with people who have other views to make a better world where they don't have to worry so much.
There are people within their own spheres who encourage their fears because they know it's a distraction. A lot of them do seem to be wising up to it, but only because the firestarters overplayed their hand. The people who once persuaded people to see this as some majority, overwhelming force did so by sounding more reasonable than the people they complained about.
Once the agitators went off the deep end, I think most people are reasonable enough to see it for what it is even if the realization takes a while to propagate past the scripts people have developed in a half decade or so getting mad online about it.
A similar thing happened on "my" side when people started to catch on to all the plainclothes cops in protests trying to turn them into riots.
A great way to confuse the general public and push an agenda to create a culture of silencing anyone opposed to view points someone disagrees with.
That's what's bothersome. It's not just advocacy. It's mandatory advocacy. That generates a backlash.
The push for transgender bathroom privileges just before the 2016 elections may have pushed Trump over the top.
Can you give me some examples of the viewpoints you're referring to here?
Example of enforcing this with cancellations:
> Even as students began scouring the words of academics, administrators and fellow students for microaggressions, the oppressive slights embedded in everyday speech, and found them, complacency ruled.
which was later enforced...
> When invited speeches from people such as Christine Lagarde, then head of the International Monetary Fund, were cancelled after student activists accused her of complicity in “imperialist and patriarchal systems”
Also...
> James Bennet, who resigned as editorial-page editor of the New York Times after one such row, now works for The Economist; he was not involved in this article.
The 'row' in question [0] lead to the editor's resignation [1] because he defended it.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/03/new-york-times...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/business/media/james-benn...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_controversy
Maybe you should direct this to the person who wrote the article at the Economist.
Not because people necessarily wanted to change, but cancel culture makes it so that you can't risk nonconforming.
At first it was little things like switching to softer language and giving kids participation trophies so that they don't feel bad. Now it's spread to the point that they feel the need to invent words like Latinx just in case a couple of latinos feel left out.
Ain't nothin' wrong with flowers and dresses and whatnot even if people on this website might not like it!
If you don't believe me, flip it around and think about how a woman would feel if someone told them they act like a man. Most would not take kindly to it.
My point was just that being feminine isn't inherently a bad thing, and also not the right word to describe society being overly sensitive. Not that men should be expected to be feminine or that that would be a good thing.
Femininity can be toxic just like masculinity. Right now we have a society where masculinity is considered toxic and anything feminine is considered good and morally correct. It creates an imbalance, and that was the point of my post.
Lets take mental health for example. If someone has triggers the feminine approach would be to comfort them and try to create an environment where that person isn't exposed to their triggers. The masculine approach would be to tell them to toughen up.
Thing is you need a bit of both. You need to give people some level of support but at the same time exposure to their trigger can help them overcome it in some scenarios. Or in other words "toughen up".
I see masculinity and femininity as a yin and yang type thing.
It's worse than that: surveys of actual Hispanic people report support for the word "latinx" in the single-digit percentages. The word is solely about making the moral crusaders themselves feel holier. No actual social problem is solved by shoving this word into our lexicon.
Tyranny! Blame the activists!
Oh, wait, we almost all use Ms. now.
But let's keep screaming at people for saying "guys".
Edit: I can imagine all the refutations coming, but please consider whether you think most people are well-mannered to begin with. The vast majority of us below a certain age are not. If you aren't receiving thank you notes (physical, verbal, text, email all fine) for gifts from said person let's not include them in polite society.
In my social and professional circles, that disappeared last century.
When I was living in the Southern US, manners and how you address people goes an extremely long way.
But, as a single example of a near endless amount
Prepubescent boys literally used to be called girls in English. Boys were called girls for many centuries before they were ever called anything else. But keep on about the new age "feminization" boogieman.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Franklin...
You know, when the government ultimately is seen as the thing that must be stopped and the people who are willing to make a stand do. Guess who is second on that stop.
Can't have experienced, organized threats to the new order.
Not rich? Need to worry about your job? Paying bills? Housing? Food? You have not fuckin time to care about anything else than to just survive.
It's moved from academic circles to "regular" middle-to-upper-middle class society for sure. You can argue that they're "elite" in some respects, but at the same time you're looking at an "elite" 30-40% of the population compared to the single-sigit percentage of people who espoused these beliefs 20 years ago.
Whether or not a literal majority of white, middle-class, left-leaning Americans believe in Critical Race Theory or The Patriarchy is irrelevant. 20 years ago it was only discussed in Academia, whereas now these theories hold a significant influence over many peoples' political, business and social lives.
Wokeness is generally treated as a joke among virtually every American whose employment is not dependent on 'public opinion', SNL's Levi's Woke Jeans skit is a classic take on that.
I don't know whether politicians are catering to over the top wokeness in order to be all-inclusive for votes, or if they believe (because they let someone else do their homework) that the majority of their constituency demands it.
I'm not American (in case the username didn't give that away!), but I have definitely seen "woke" culture infiltrate into people's lives, especially in the corporate context.
A couple of incidents people I know personally have experienced include a guy being fired after a dumb sexist joke made at height of #metoo (to be fair, he was socially retarded in general) and another guy whose joke email was forcibly retracted by HR for using Christian Imagery in an "Easter Celebration" message (this guy was not socially retarded; school captain in fact).
Compare and contrast to the blue collar guys I know who openly make racist/homophobic jokes to just about everyone.
Point is, maybe amongst the people you know, in the city that you live, "wokeness" is treated as a joke. But in corporate culture in Melbourne (Australian equivalent of Portland, OR), it's this looming, oppressive spectre.
That seems to be a highly reductive concept you're using for "elite", basically meaning "people you imagine who you don't agree with". What constitutes "elite", to you?
How about the row after row of suburban homes in Livermore with BLM signs? Those are all median income neighborhoods, but I'm guessing you'd call them "elite"?
How about an expensive golf club in Little Rock filled with upper income, mostly white, mostly male players working the local social environment? Not "elite", I'm guessing?
I'll note that the linked article doesn't engage in this kind of tribalism or reductionism, and is actually pretty clear about what it means by things like "woke". That's something you added to the discussion, and I don't think it works well.
If your interlocutor is an advanced-level mental gymnast, they will tell you that the people in these suburban homes are simply aping the customs of the so-called "elites", acting as their servants. So yes, "elite" in the post you're replying to really is being used to mean "people you imagine who you don't agree with".
Given the site we’re on, it’s almost certain.
The only places where they would be getting treated normally would be ironically places with more woke Russians - ie Russian liberals, educated, woke people. Who would not shun others for being foreigners and who would not exhibit automatic/traditional Russian behaviors of suspecting/shunning strangers and being closed to them.
I agree. In fact I think that their religion would only serve to exacerbate things since (unless I'm very wrong) Russians are largely Orthodox Catholics and these people are largely protestant and evangelical
Some of them even lived and worked abroad, but of course learned nothing from that experience.
Conservative foreigners would feel right at home with this crowd, but they might be surprised how liberal they are comparing to the locals.
The American conservatives would feel 'at home' with such people as you described, however such people would not be accepting them how they seem to think they would.
What about old liberal ideals?
So the cultural disconnect isn't new or a problem. The problem is that this ideology seems to be (1) heavily focused on race and (2) be the most credible home for a resurgence of the ideas that powered the communist disasters of last century.
It is deviant from cultural norms. And that is fine and dandy, elite cultures are always deviant. The problem is this culture looks bad. It has abandoned some excellent ideals of tolerance and liberty.
Being a member of the elite is a better predictor than sexual orientation at any rate.
Abstract:
> Many of psychology's concepts have undergone semantic shifts in recent years. These conceptual changes follow a consistent trend. Concepts that refer to the negative aspects of human experience and behavior have expanded their meanings so that they now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before. This expansion takes “horizontal” and “vertical” forms: concepts extend outward to capture qualitatively new phenomena and downward to capture quantitatively less extreme phenomena. The concepts of abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice are examined to illustrate these historical changes. In each case, the concept's boundary has stretched and its meaning has dilated. A variety of explanations for this pattern of “concept creep” are considered and its implications are explored. I contend that the expansion primarily reflects an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm, reflecting a liberal moral agenda. Its implications are ambivalent, however. Although conceptual change is inevitable and often well motivated, concept creep runs the risk of pathologizing everyday experience and encouraging a sense of virtuous but impotent victimhood.
The full article has a bit more nuance. It points out that intolerance to minor forms of harm has both pros and cons.
Also the dilution in the "downward" direction denies the people with the original, more-serious issues the vocabulary to deal with their unique problems and will eventually engender skepticism in large parts of the general public (e.g. if "abuse" expands to encompass extremely common experiences, saying "I was a abused" ceases to have much meaning, and you end up with nonsense like "Were you just abused, or were use abused abused?").
We need a separate word for leering, groping, fondling, sex with dubious consent, and violently beating someone during penetration without consent.
Rape used to mean only the last thing and it was regarded as basically the worst form of assault short of murder since it included every possible form of assault.
Today it's moved to fondling and people are trying to make it include leering. Using the same legal punishments for something that is clearly different makes very little sense and normalizes rape in the long term.
But you are right. The way rape is being treated now is like saying an accidental traffic accident manslaughter should be punished like a serial killer. It’s just not the same and it’s not fair.
This in no way makes groping or leering acceptable. But it’s still completely different to violent rape penetrative assault.
No, it did not. That's why you find courts always charged offenders for multiple different crimes when they are carried out together: rape, assault, kidnapping, life threats...
Now we have rape and we also have rape rape, like, the real rape.
And quantitatively speaking, surely there is some amount of money, which when lost in divorce, is tantamount to the original definition of rape.
(That is, a thought experiment whereby a person might decide a certain amount of money is worth the allowance/aversion of rape of the said bargainer-- such a threshold is different for each person but arguably represents an approximation of a financial quantification of rape-- which, perhaps that amount of money, when lost in divorce, can thereby arguably be considered financial rape)
Especially given that in public health administration, life and health is quantified in monetary terms.
I don't feel comfortable with anyone using the term "liberal moral agenda" unironically because of culture-specific connotations: for starters, it's a very US-specific phrase which will have attached meanings that would be lost or misinterpreted by people unfamiliar with how the term "liberal" specifically relates to US political discourse - and the hugely negative (to downright toxic) connotations attached to the label "liberal moral agenda" by the reactionary right-wing - which all make conversations like these impossible to have.
(Of course there's a liberal moral agenda- there's an X moral agenda for every X).
One of the privileges of occupying a position of hegemony is that you get to instruct your subjects in how they are allowed to refer to power, and pathologize expressions that are offensive to it. Liberals have all these rules about how you are allowed to describe liberals—the idea that we should observe similar courtesies when describing the “reactionary right-wing” as you pejoratively put it is, naturally, absurd.
So even an anodyne description like “liberal moral agenda” of what is objectively a moral agenda informed by liberal priorities becomes verboten, simply because it allows its adversaries to vocalize their opposition to it. Depriving the opposition of their own vocabulary and replacing it with one of your making is a classic move—anyone who fails to update their dictionary marks themselves as an enemy.
Someone is indeed making conversation impossible to have, but whose fault is that, exactly?
Or maybe once you've weaponized a concept, it's tempting to use it as much as you can.
When being a nerd stopped being shameful and started being cool, all the cool kids started calling themselves nerds for liking Avengers and Harry Potter - why wouldn't you claim the social points that are just lying around?
And when you live in a society that rewards victimhood, when calling someone a bully gives you power over them - of course people will jump at any chance to call themselves a victim.
Now I see it being used in relationship advice subreddits and agony aunt columns to basically mean “don’t dare disagree with me” when someone decides that they were the victim in some some dispute.
> Why do some social problems seem so intractable? In a series of experiments, we show that people often respond to decreases in the prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their concept of it. When blue dots became rare, participants began to see purple dots as blue; when threatening faces became rare, participants began to see neutral faces as threatening; and when unethical requests became rare, participants began to see innocuous requests as unethical. This “prevalence-induced concept change” occurred even when participants were forewarned about it and even when they were instructed and paid to resist it. Social problems may seem intractable in part because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them.
This kinda sounds like knee-jerk conservatism. It's different and new and forces you to learn new habits (true), and therefore it's bad and an erosion of civil society (false). This kind of skew has happened REPEATEDLY in society in the past, you just didn't notice.
To be glib: how many times have you used the word "negro" in the past year?
Being required to, say, share drinking fountains or pools with people of another race should not be compared to this. One is about allowing people to co-exist with you, the other is about complying with a strongly encouraged communal display of ideology. There are obvious comparisons to make but you can use your imagination about what those are.
Indeed. And I didn't. I said "negro". Generations of people genuinely thought that was a neutral term. They were pissed as all fuck when all of a sudden it became a symbol of centuries of oppression. And they used language exactly like yours to express their exasperation. But the words changed anyway. And we all got over it, and civil society didn't dissolve.
And at the end of the process, most of us look back and think of it as largely a good thing that we went and, well, cancelled that old word as a symbol. The new one is better, simply because it was born out of the self-determinism of the oppressed.
Which is to say: get over yourself and declare your pronouns. (I'm a he/him, FWIW). Your grandkids will be ashamed that you fought it.
I guess that's a way to see the basic tension there: some folks might argue that using scapegoats can help society move on, while others might object on the basis that the goat wasn't actually evil.
Alternatively, we can see switching away from the word "Negro" as a rebranding effort, to retire prior literature and reduce historical associations.
Either way.. I guess that what can seem weird about such social-engineering maneuvers is that they don't make any sense if we assume that people are ideal logical-thinkers; mechanically, they're more like side-channel attacks or emotional manipulation. And.. I guess folks might vary in how agreeable they might find well-intentioned emotional-manipulation.
Right, but in this particular instance what actually happened is that we just moved on by building consensus around a new paradigm. No one uses the word anymore, and nothing awful happened.
Therefore I argue that similar hand wringing about gender pronouns is going to turn out equally bland. It's fine. Just relax. Society isn't falling apart, you're just being socially awkward. And in fifty years everyone will think the antiwoke conservatives were just being ridiculous.
At the same time.. not everyone wants to have to play along. A lot of new identity-trends emerge (and reemerge over time and in different places), giving adherents ways to self-conceptualize who they are as well as rules for how to interact with others. Some trends get really popular and can get a lot of true-believers, while others don't really get into them.
Can you understand how both sides feel? This is, can you understand both what it'd feel like to be someone deeply invested in the latest trend in spirituality, and can you likewise understand what it'd feel like to want to give the latest trend in spirituality a pass?
If this is the first trend you've seen, then it may seem like this big, huge thing that everyone should adopt. But you ask about 50-years from now? ..that's a long time for a trend to remain relevant, even if you're currently in a sub-culture that's super into it.
And that was prior civil war, when he advocated against slavery. Which, quite a few people argued is a good thing.
> The form of the negro —[I use the term negro, precisely in the sense that you use the term Anglo Saxon; and I believe, too, that the former will one day be as illustrious as the latter] [...]
Would you happen to recall where you may've seen Douglass complaining about it?
---
1: Frederick Douglass, "The claims of the Negro, ethnologically considered", 1854-07-12. PDF-page 16: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/rbc/rbaapc/079...
Really? Plenty of my friends on social media and a few work colleagues state their pronouns, but I've never even remotely felt that I need to.
Is it perhaps that you are quite suggestible?
> Id recommend getting outside of your social circle/geo a bit more. I’ve never once experienced this in Denver, and have only ever seen gender pronouns be a thing on linkedin.
I've started to see them in email signatures at work, but only in situations where such specification was entirely unnecessary. Though most cases have consistent enough formatting that there may be some corporate-standard signature template that has it now.
> Many foreign students adopted a western name to mitigate such problems
It has more to do with pronunciation.
Doing it in situations where such specification is entirely unnecessary is precisely how you normalize it not being weird.
If the only people that had listed pronouns were ones that needed it, it would "other" them, and make pronoun preferences WEIRD and UNUSUAL.
If we recognize that even before the cultural mainstream of transness, EVERYONE already had preferred pronouns (just the ones that happen to match their gender), then we can normalize it.
Edit: I didn’t see the last bit. Why did it factor into leaving? Were they aggressive about it or something?
Sometimes I wonder if people who have the biggest issue with displaying pronouns don’t meet a lot of new people, especially new trans people. Displaying pronouns makes the process so much easier and less awkward!
That's your fault, not the fault of the concept of pronouns. In the thread above, teachers and people working in international companies both explained benefits to having pronouns listed that have nothing to do with gender expression. So, your assumption is flawed.
Secondly, let's consider your terminology: "Basic reality"; "force others to play along"; "pronoun game". Consider this scenario:
You: "Hi, are you Matthew?"
Matthew: "Yes, but actually I prefer Matt, could you call me Matt?"
Do you:
A: "Sure, no problem. Hey Matt, Joe said we should discuss Project Foobar, etc"
B: "No. Your name is Matthew, this is basic reality. Why are you forcing me to play along with your PREFERRED NAME GAME?"
I think we all know the answer to this question.
How is this different from: A new coworker starts on your team named Chris. They seem to have some masculine features but they also have long hair, are wearing makeup and a dress. But you are pretty sure they were born male.
You: "Hey, let's organize Chris's Welcome Lunch. Does anyone know his food preference?"
Your coworker: "Actually their pronouns are she/her."
Do you
A: "Sure, does anyone know her food preference?"
B: See B above.
If you think the situations are completely different, here's a third scenario. Chris is a butch woman with short hair, not a transgender person.
You: "Hey, let's organize Chris's Welcome Lunch. Does anyone know his food preference?"
Your coworker: "Actually, Chris is a woman."
What's the difference? Why is your opinion on gender expression, transgender "ideology", chromosomes, or anything else of the sort matter at all?
This is just basic human socialization 101. Treat people like they ask you to be treated in situations where there is no extra cost to you. That's it. It requires no more difference or effort to remember than in any other social circumstance separate from pronouns.
Appendix:
Yes, I am aware of the extreme exceptions. I'm sure you can find me some angry tweets from trans people who overreacted to some situation or another. But let's remember the context. People are angry because the basic human decency I described above is NOT offered to them. So yes, there are misunderstandings and chips on shoulders. But we don't need to base policy or perspective of opinions based on extreme outliers on twitter.
There are people who believe they are God (There are people who believe htey are Attack Helicopters, I'm sure). But they are very few and far between. We ignore them, we marginalize them. Or, best case, we treat them.
Now, I'm not trying to open the pandora's box on the medical community's perspective on transgenderism. We can have this conversation after, but I am deliberately focusing on pronouns for a start.
Because when it comes to pronouns, in English-language society, we DO treat people based on gendered pronouns - male and female ones. Basically 100% of our time, 50% one, 50% the other.
So a person who is asking to be addressed as "My saviour" is asking for unique preferential treatment that you are likely not offering anyone else in life.
A person who is asking to be addressed as the gender pronouns of the other gender is asking to be treated the same way that you already treat 50% of the people you encounter, just to be re-categorized. And that's not a big ask because in the VAST Majority of cases you encounter, that person will already be presenting MOSTLY as the gender that they are asking to be treated as.
Now, you might say that being asked to be treated as a different gender than you are born is just as unusual as being asked to be treated as a God. But we don't even need to get into the statistics of prevalence to recognize that the numbers are not relevant. You already have to go through life learning 1) people's names, 2) people's nicknames, 3) people's gender when they are ambiguous or deliberately provocative. This is common metadata you remember about people.
Part of existing in society is learning other human's social characteristics, and incorporating them into how you interact with them. Pronouns are not meaningfully different.
Sadly it's not a surprising experience for me anymore dealing with people that argue against progress.
This is a legitimate issue, and I'm not even the political/social-justice type.
(I don't mean the company forcing putting pronouns in your username, but for trans/non-binary people to put it in their profile name)
Had an instance at a job once where someone joined, I spoke with them and they were really nice + helpful. Maybe 2 months later, I went looking for them and they didn't seem to be at the company anymore.
Turns out they had changed their username to another gender along with profile pic, now used a different pronoun.
I felt like an ass when I read back to intros and learned that they didn't prefer the pronouns their name/pic implied when they joined. Quite literally "assumed their gender" and they never corrected me about it. Hope it didn't bug them, but it probably did.
Many people, including those who are not transgendered, are also uncomfortable with being forced to hyper-identify with their gender. For many their gender is just a small aspect of them, and especially in a professional context where their gender has no role being forced to put on a gender-show feels sexually invasive.
Listing your pronouns isn't hyper-identifying with your gender, it is merely identifying your pronouns so that other people don't get them wrong. Gender is complex territory that goes much deeper than pronouns.
One reason for encouraging general pronoun labeling is to alleviate that exact concern.
I'm just saying that the general concept of it if you're trans/non-binary (and WANT a particular pronoun used) is helpful for people who otherwise wouldn't know.
I think it's become commonplace enough that people don't jump to the conclusion you're trans/non-binary if you put a pronoun next to your username.
Preaching to the choir, my partner is intergender but biologically female/female-presenting. I like to think I have at least some degree of understanding.I think when you want something you should ask for it, for sure!
Out of curiosity, would that make you bisexual?
I consider myself progressive as well. If this helps with inclusion, I'm glad to use them. But it brings a mccarthysm vibe that makes me uncomfortable and slightly worried.
Happy to use other people's pronouns if it makes them happy, it really makes no difference to me, and clearly it's a big deal to some people so I've no problem obliging.
But if you ask for something this stupid, company-wide, IMO you're due what you ask for.
Because there's my pronoun. Call me he/she/they, or a goddamn Attack Helicopter, I really don't care.
I have had to go out of my way to break the habitual "Hey guys" -> "Hey all/Hey folks" though, and I don't find that one unreasonable.
Yes, you don't care what pronouns people use for you. You're privileged in that you've never struggled with gender and gender identity in a society that shames and ridicules you for it. Giving people space to be themselves (in a very basic human-rights sort of way) shouldn't be narrowly dismissed as stupid and "a big deal to some people".
I thought "guys" (plural) was already considered gender neutral?
I think it depends to some extent on one's dialect of English–and that includes regional and subcultural dialects, as opposed to merely national variants. If one grows up in a region/subculture in which its use in a gender-neutral way is common, it is natural and automatic to view some uses of it as gender-neutral. If one grows up in a region/subculture in which gender-neutral use of the term is rare, viewing it as gender-neutral is much less natural and automatic.
It is also worth pointing out while sometimes its plural uses can be perceived and intended as gender-neutral (especially vocative plural uses), singular uses are almost always gender-specific, and even many plural uses are gender-specific too. A person who says "hey guys" is quite possibly intending it in a gender-neutral way; if the same person were to say "most guys are like that", that plural use is obviously talking about males only
The fact that the term is still gender-specific in many contexts, even among speakers and listeners who sometimes use and understand it in a gender-neutral way, leads some people to consciously choose to reject it as a gender-neutral term – sometimes even people who may have grown up with its gender-neutral use
Here's what I mean: Let's assume you are male (gavin). That means that in professional settings when people refer to you they would say "he".
What happens if one person - just one coworker - kept referring to you as "she". "Yes, I'm working on her (Gavin's) pull request".
I simply don't believe that you wouldn't notice it or wonder what's going on.
Oh sure, maybe it wouldn't BOTHER you, but it would STAND OUT. It would come up.
And if there were no political agenda behind you saying you don't mind being an attack helicopter, you might ask "Why do you keep saying she/her? I'm a man"
Now let's raise this up a notch. What if you asked this person why they keep calling you she/her - when they are the only ones, and it stands out, and their answer was "Because fuck you, that's why. I don't care what your pronouns actually are. I'm deliberately trying to choose the opposite to bother you. Is it working?"
Hmmm...you could ignore that. You probably would. I believe that you have enough confidence and security to just ignore that. But it's fucking weird, and needlessly hostile, no? You would wonder what you did to earn this hostility and if the person is going to question your motivations/actions, sabotage you professionally, or generally be an enemy.
THIS IS WHAT TRANS PEOPLE FACE. If you are transgender, trying to transition, but you are making all the steps (hormones, surgery, makeup, social expression, clothing), but you are not quite passing, and ask your coworkers to use your PREFERRED pronouns, and MOST do (which they will), but one fucking asshole Bob deliberately doesn't and says "NO. You are born male. So I will use your male pronouns.", that is exactly the same level of hostility and unprofessionalism.
People (including myself, a cis hetero male) put pronouns in their public profiles to normalize it so that it's not just trans people that have to face the burden of having to ask for their preferred pronouns.
When you put "i don't give a flying fuck what you call me" as your pronoun, you are not just mocking their struggle, you are giving a strong signal that you are going to be Fucking Asshole Bob to any trans person that approaches you and asks you to use their preferred pronouns.
Now, when someone flips out on me because I default to they/them in text when someone has no stated preference and there's no way to tell, that's a negative indicator. It's clear they have a preference and refuse to state it just to be difficult. But it's a rare occurrence.
How did ideas that were once extremely radical like women's equality in the social sphere (to include holding office and suffrage), desegregation, slavery abolition, and many more work their way from the intelligensia (academics, philosophers) to the masses? How did "Marxism" jump from academia to workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? The fact that businesses are supportive of such causes is somewhat new, but is likely explained by the same forces that lead to the masses embracing these ideas.
Largely, this seems to be the molding of our social sphere by market forces. The northern competitors to the agricultural South found slavery abolition to be inline with their material interests. Likewise, as the industrial revolution shook up familial units and proletarianization of women moved wives into the factories, equality in the social sphere was no longer resisted by structures that had a material basis. Desegregation could assist in curbing a growing black nationalist movement through assimilation and a reduction in direct antagonism. Ideas are often forged in the conflicts and conditions of the day that they arise in.
Had this article been written in the '90s about the "extreme" gay rights movement, or in the '60s about the "woke" Civil Rights Movement, how many would actually stand by their critique a decade later? Businesses seem to understand that showing token support for progressive issues is better for their brand than silence or reactionary opposition to progressivism (which, let's face it, never holds up well for long.) While I doubt any corporate co-option for social issues actually materially benefits those movements, I can't help but find myself even more cynical about the reactionaries complaining about how "extreme" or "woke" their positions are.
Corporations wouldn't be engaging in this kind of token support for progressive issues if they did not believe such issues were broadly popular. Such organizations rarely do anything for free. The token support is a reflection of something in the culture.
Most of the "backlash" to "woke stuff" is a working-through of the cognitive dissonance this notion brings for certain people/organizations. They cannot believe that such ideas can have even token support among the broader public. So it gets framed as some sort of virus, or as an orgy of cynical virtue signalling. But in order to virtue signal, you need somebody who understands (and ideally even shares) the virtue that is being signalled.
Your entirely reasonable comment being flagged currently is an example of this cognitive dissonance at work.
There are many valid critiques of so-called "wokeness" but most of them come from angles that reactionaries generally dislike.
An example is the public supporting Johnny Depp, while the “Woke” are arrayed around Amber Heard and her defamation. It turns out that the public at large doesn’t agree with leftwing misandry — and are repulsed by everyone from the ACLU to Hollywood execs protecting a privileged abuser like Ms Heard.
We see some of the same Woke abusers around Andrew Cuomo.
Your post seems to be an example of what you’re lamenting: a passionate defense of a bigoted ideology that doesn’t resonate with the general public — being “Woke”.
It’s time for leftwing fox bigotry to die.
But that's the thing: a lot of the woke stuff isn't publicly supported. Latinos don't care for "Latinx" [1]. Enforcing more gender-speech in Germany has decreased the support in the general population, also among women. [2]
It's the media that is going crazy over it and really, really wants it. And the politicians are willingly following. The electorate does not.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
[2] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/grosse-mehrh...
On the second point, I simply don't know enough about the specifics of that debate, and I can't read German.
I remain convinced that corporations specifically show token support for social-progressive issues because they see some benefit to it; that is, they see some amount of broad support for these ideas in society.
You might have misunderstood my point. I'm saying the media cares, not the Latinos. They don't care, otherwise they'd be out there saying they want to be called Latinx -- instead, they don't even know that there's a debate. Similarly, most people of most cultures don't care for the concept of cultural appropriation, yet there's a fuzz in the corporate media about it.
Since German has gendered nouns with the male form usually doubling as the neutral form (e.g. teacher = Lehrer, female teacher = Lehrerin), there's been a push by the media, academics and politicians to gender (e.g. to say either Lehrende = "those who teach" or use things like Lehrer_innen which is supposed to also include transsexuals, non-binary and intersex). The public is opposed to it, but the corporate media and politicians are forcing the issue and the opposition gets stronger.
The only group that is split on the issue are those still in education, where indoctrination has become much more severe.
Easy. Useful idiot to destabilize country. This is how Russian Empire was destroyed and never recovered. Even Germany after two world wars is much better than current CIS countries. Why? Because the red plague forever maimed their progress.
Former KGB agent Yuri explains:
https://youtu.be/IQPsKvG6WMI?t=55
It's about the power of a self appointed elite group to dictate terms to other.
In contrast, language control is about eliminating certain forbidden words, either hoping to eliminate certain facts or thoughts by litery making them unspeakable or by creating rules that every normal person will violate sooner or later, allowing it to denounce everyone when necessary.
Some Americans are going to extreme in some angles does not change the fact that a lot of you call civilized manners 'wokeness'. Like how many old, racist boomers complain about not being able to talk sht about minorities, immigrants and stuff.
Incredible stuff.
But it tells why US is in the shthole it is in - like how Texas implemented a totalitarian state in which American Taliban can snitch on other people via state-run mechanisms. Something which did not even exist in East Germany - who preferred to spy on people normally, by funding actual spies instead of turning everyone into snitches.
Latinax+, Womxn is manners and civilized behavior? In actual civilized countries you'd get confused look or cuckoo sign. This insanity doesn't exist in Europe yet(thank God), but woke idiots are working hard, no worries.
> In actual civilized countries you'd get confused look or cuckoo sign
You wouldnt. Dont make up stuff.
> This insanity doesn't exist in Europe yet(thank God)
Because Europe is not US. You cant rail about others, speak hatefully about minorities, immigrants, less harass people who wear masks or other bullsh*t and expect the state not to drag you to court to persecute your ass.
Just give a try to exercising the 'freehdums' which American right is exercising and see how fast youll get prosecuted in Europe.
Of course, not in reactionary countries like Poland or Hungary. I said civilized countries.
Casual racism is global, by the way.
That's not an example. And, there has been pretty strong and large persecutions of football clubs for actions which their fans did in the middle of a crowded stadium. FIFA rules - without even justice taking action, FIFA kicks the butt of such clubs whose fans go out of civilized limits.
Tell me how Italy isn't civilized though, please.
Edit: The most watched/participated in global sport isn't representative? You're not exactly selling me on your argument here.
This is before the fact that a 'Mussolini flag' does not target any ethnicity, religion, nationality, minority or the like.
Try flying a Nazi flag in a football game Germany and see what will happen to your club.
But lots of other European countries are struggling with issues of race and religion in public life. Whether it's Greece or Denmark or elsewhere.
You seem to think football is a niche sport in Europe. It’s not. It’s by far the most popular one. If racism is endemic in it, that indicates a wider malaise. Don’t try to excuse it by saying “no only a minority of fans…”
Please, just stop talking on a subject you’re clearly out of your depth on. And please stop this nonsense about racism only existing in America. It’s just not true.
And then you moved on to build an entire argument about your false divination, making your arguments totally baseless.
You dont need another person to discuss - you seem to be capable of just making up arguments for the other person. So i wont be replying to your argument since you can continue making arguments and replying to them yourself. Good day.
All across Europe some parts of the press are happy to speak hatefully about minorities and immigrants.
See:
UK - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/the-sun-and-d...
France - https://www.france24.com/en/20200830-outrage-in-france-after...
Spain - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/10/22/spanish-newspaper-...
I don’t think any of this stuff is prosecuted (or that it should be). At least the French and Spanish examples were widely condemned but I think it says a lot they were published in the first place.
Such stuff should be prosecuted. The state of American society, the delirium that engulfed the segments who were allowed to keep living back in 150 years ago, actual fascists organizing openly with open statements about 'cleansing others' -> Such things show that if you let the extremists do whatever for 'freedom', you end up with a big pile of sh*t in your hands.
Looks like about 1% of the population were snitches for the Stasi. You can decide for yourself if that's "a lot" or not.
How did fundamentalism jumped to real life?
It’s always been in real life. Funny enough, there are some cultural remnants of certain leftists from the 90s/00s where they were the ones railing against “political correctness” in attempt to shock the religious right of the time. The way I see it things have simply reversed as the religious right seemingly lost ground over the past years and progressives became more prominent.
The problem here is that you are making stuff up in order to build perfect demographic of your enemies.
You dont even know what abolishing police means apparently. And yet you have strong opinions about such stuff.
They want to abolish AMERICAN police and bring about European style, civil-service policing. And yeah, for that, you need to abolish the medieval-sheriff-remnant abomination that is the police concept in US.
I would take an extreme woke over the mildest conservative any day. The former doesnt want to take me to 200 years back in time.
Moreover, negative change is occurring: murders are up nationwide last year due to "abolishing police" in lower income neighborhoods and releasing repeat criminals from jail "on their own recognizance", a dozen times in a row. Black on black violence is a topic that can't even be raised on the left, and yet it affects both blacks and whites disproportionately. Why is that? Because it needs heavy police enforcement to combat it. A gangbanger couldn't care less about your "social worker".
Here's the most liberal city in the United States, Washington DC: https://twitter.com/DCPoliceUnion/status/1433950562505142272. If this is progress, I don't want it.
What’s this got to do with Abortion law that Texas passed?
We can talk about X without diverting the conversation to Y - which deserves its own discussion.
Have fun.
I have to keep these opinions quiet now because of the negative social backlash I’ve gotten.
I can’t believe we live in times where we have people in the lgbt community who criticize homosexual men as being “genital fetishists” for being attracted to only men of the same sex.
This has always been a POWER GRAB masquerading as "civility".
Politics is the process of distributing power, and left wing politics aims to distribute power more widely, whereas right wing politics aims to concentrate it.
I never stated that (you did). I merely pointed out the fact that humans are largely hypocrites and duplicitous by nature. ALL interactions between humans is underpinned by power.
In the past, the power grab was explicit, nowadays said power is sought after behind the veneer of "civility" and "niceness".
It is basic human nature that I'm criticising. The left are just as bad as the right - but at least, with the right - you can see them coming, because they are mostly explicit (at least relative to the left).
The left are just as power hungry as the right, but are very well versed in this "we are nice, caring people" act - this is why I (a seeker of the truth - and nothing but the truth), am enjoying their dirty inner workings coming to light.
> The left ... was never about equality and justice, it was always ... being about POWER
It feels more than a little reductive to attribute this behaviour to "the left" as a whole, when in fact it is a very small number of people. Perhaps you feel it is appropriate in your own context, but again this is a (common) presentation that purports to dismiss an entire "wing" of political thought, but actually just presents crude stereotypes.
Finally, I think the idea that the right present their attempts at power in a more naked fashion just isn't borne out by the evidence. Right wing policies are frequently presented as being dictated by either reason or common sense (often depending on the audience), and those of their opponents dismissed as unrealistic. This is the same kind of veneer you decry on the left, just a different colour - one that some find more appealing.
It’s becoming more and more mainstream, and there’s no party to turn to in order to help halt this nonsense.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
It's just a really shitty thing to do, and it's not even accurate. Attraction models do not solely work based on genitals, there's a lot of other characteristics that go into that.
But you don't know how his argument with his friends went, so it's a little arrogant to tell him "they were probably mad at you because you said X".
It is also wrong to call a lesbian transphobic because she finds testicles unattractive and vaginas attractive. She is entitled to be honest about her sexuality.
Nobody says you're not allowed to have genital preferences. Chromosome preferences (with everything else equal) however seem legitimately transphobic to me. They're more a rejection of trans people than stemming from a preference in attraction.
Now what? Are trans people not allowed to have different opinions and ideas about anything? As a gay man, would you say that all gay men see everything in the same way? For example, if I ask 100 gay men their opinion on gay marriage, will I get 100 identical answers, or...?
What I'm trying to say is, whenever someone says something stupid to you, remember that they are just one person expressing one opinion and that this opinion may well change as time goes by. Don't assume that all of society, or all of one particular segment of society, has the exact same, or even similar, view.
Also to be blunt, I doubt this "negative social backlash" you've gotten is as bad as that, or even that it's the kind of backlash you get outside of Twitter. But maybe I'm old. I transitioned in the 90's when most transwomen I knew identified as gay men. Try that one for a woke debate, some day. Anyway we didn't have Twitter back then so you wouldn't be called a "genital fetishist" to your face for not liking vag else most transwomen would have been decried as "genital fetishists". Eeew, fish and all that.
My point is I think that people will come up with all sorts of dumb ways of thinking when something becomes an "issue". We're still at the point in the curve, with trans issues, where they are "issues" whereas being gay has more or less been assimilated in mainstream culture (and that's part of why gay men are being attacked by "woke" folk). Wait it out. In a few years people will be reading all those woke tweets and blogs and tumblrs and laughing, mostly good-heartedly.
And why does there need to be a "backlash" even? Do we absolutely need to have a big old culture war everytime somebody says something stupid?
You're conflating two very different things here: "I would not do this", and "If someone does this they're not really gay".
It feels like a motte-and-bailey fallacy to me.
Is is deception if you prefer brunettes, but the person you're about to be intimate with has dyed their hair?
Sure, but my preference for being solely with brunettes is not as strong as my preference for being solely with straight people, so the deception is not equal in its merited response. Perhaps this is bigoted, but I’m sincerely interested in your conviction.
Feel free to exclude based on physical criteria common in trans people, be it from masculine features, to larger frames to a set of genitals you're not attracted to, but "trans people" as category is way to broad. Because they can functionally be cis women. Unless you have a breeding fetish I guess.
Insisting on a separate category feels like people are holding on to bioessentialist feeling that trans women must be men, which would make a cis man gay. Pair that with toxic masculinity and you have one of the reasons for violence particularly against trans women.
(I have no personal stake at this, like many trans people I mostly date other trans people, less complicated and your partner has less of a hard time relating to you)
Best of luck!
It's probably still the right thing to do, purely because the trans panic defense is still a thing and it would be unsafe, but I see no moral obligation here.
However if a person driving a Ferrari wearing a 5k suit and a 50k watch asks someone on a date, that person may be under the impression that they are going on a date with a rich person and that they will not be going to McDonald's.
I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with taking your date to McDonald's. Plenty of people love McDonald's. But it is not the same thing and that date may not go well.
If you're saying it to prove a point I mean yeah people see through that
https://medium.com/@QSE/when-you-say-i-would-never-date-a-tr...
Others would say they're not saying that, but that your preference is influenced by transphobic culture:
https://www.curvemag.com/blog/transgender/the-often-misunder...
I'm sure others would be fine with it.
On the other hand, I'd like to know what the OP, shtps, would think if they dated a transwoman without knowing she was trans and later found out about it. People have committed violent crimes because they didn't know, or at least claimed they didn't know as a defense.
So there is something there that needs clearing up. If you're attracted to someone and then later find something about them and decide you're not attracted to them after all, that's not the fault of the person you initially found atttractive. Agreed?
It's not about 'who's at fault' really. It will sooner or later come up and it is better sooner than later for both parties. If I'm dating a woman and she doesn't mention that she already has children, which is a big deal for me, then we're both just wasting our times because that's something I can't compromise on.
I don't know why this even needs to be stated, but violence is not an option in either of these cases.
It needs to be stated that violence is not an option because many times violence has been used against trans women and the defense of the perpetrator was "I didn't know she was trans".
I guess nowadays people also informally call "having casual sex" dating. I'm also not sexually attracted to trans women if that's what you're getting at. We would not even be able to have sex.
Ok, we're on the same page regarding the violence.
I could understand if you'd find some to most trans women not attractive, but a categorical exclusion seems transphobic to me.
There are trans women where you really can not tell, even if you're in an intimate relationship. At that point it moves from being a genuine preference to bigotry.
But I can see what you're actually asking: Is anyone going to yell at you because you're not dating them. The answer is no.
Unless you real question was not a question, but more of an implication that something that literally never happens must happen on a grand scale. Damn the woke mob forcing me to fuck trannies!
Not being attracted to this or that person is perfectly natural. Reminder: a lot of trans people "pass" perfectly.
"ostracized by the woke community" in another strawman.
Perhaps there's something else going on?
As a trans person I do not believe in a firm sex/gender distinction. The evidence clearly suggests gender identity (unlike race) has a major biological component.
Case studies like David Reimer are pretty definitive, in my opinion.
So, other, actual evidence, please? A citation in a journal would do. E.g. Yu & Yu 2017 "Gender identity has a biological component" or something of the sort. Something we can accept is "evidence" in a mainstream, standard sense, not in the sense given to "evidence" by the internet, like "I know of something that agrees with my personal beliefs so it's evidence that I'm right".
I guess the alternative would be that you have to be willing to have sex with everybody of your preferred sex? Are there people who actually think this?
(I am sure that trans people far more often have far worse experiences still)
I've heard stories, both online and from my sisters (who live in a pretty woke neighborhood and have a pretty woke circle of friends) about kids and teens who were "criticized" for being "too gender conforming" by "concerned" parents and friends alike. And stories about teens and grownups being ostracized and called names for politely rejecting trans or same sex people flirtations[1].
While I don't think these anecdotes are outright bullying, of course, it shows a certain direction, and it shows certain parental and peer group pressures building up in certain cohorts of society. All this can cause a certain amount of trauma and confusion[0], especially in kids and teens who haven't had a chance to explore and form their personality and identity on their own to a sufficient degree yet, when e.g. you as a kid get a sense that your parents are unhappy about you or when friends and peers call or at least insinuate you are "a bit of a" transphobe or homophobe because your brain is interested in the opposite sex and opposite sex genitalia.
[0] I am NOT saying all trans people are just confused. But I do think that some kids and younger teens are in fact just confused. Well, all kids and teens are constantly confused about everything, that's part of growing up, which is to a great part trial and error and trying to make sense of things and experiences. But this kind of confusion I am talking about relates to the old stories of "My parents wanted a boy and only got me, a girl, so I tried to be as much a boy as I could growing up trying to please them", but with a new slant to it, that might possibly involve hormone therapy at worst.
[1] One more slightly related anecdote, I am directly biased here: When I was like 17 or 18 (still in school, so, long ago), I was at a party and had a guy hit on me. I am a guy myself, but straight. Fine no worries, I told him nicely I am not interested. He (admittedly quite drunk) would then follow me around for some time, trying to convince me with zingers like "only a man knows how to suck another man's cock to perfection, I can show you, follow me!". The following days people would ask me why I "hate gays". What happened after that guy struck out with me is that he went around telling people I am a "gay hater". It took quite some effort to explain myself to people that I in fact do not hate gays and am not "grossed out" by gays, etc, just do not find them to be sexually attractive partners for me personally. I am sure some of my peers still thought I am a rampant homophobe afterwards. The more you defend yourself, the more guilty you look and all that. I am convinced this affected some of my friendships negatively and certainly messed with my mind[2]. I dread to imagine what it's like growing up now in some hyper-woke community, socialized by shit storms and parents and teachers who think math is racist and it's OK to punch "nazis".
[2] One openly bisexual girl from my grade remarked to me "Now you got a glimpse at what it is like for me a lot of the time". True that, only a glimpse, but bad enough for me already.
Moreover, even if being gay or trans is just the result of cultural influence doesn't mean we should respect it any less. That said, it's worth asking the question isn't it?
People had precisely this same concern about gay people over the past few decades. And the same concern about things like heavy metal music.
When your argument rhymes so well with these obviously broken prior arguments, it is worth re-evaluating.
A lot of the things they described had a "wait that's a symptom??" reaction. I have since suggested to a couple of friends to get checked for ADHD in a similar manner if they seem like they might be struggling with it. Worst case they're now in the mental healthcare system and have access to a therapist who can figure out what they're struggling with
When you find a good place you tell your mates about it
There's also the little detail that people tend to cluster based on interests and personality traits in the first place, so I could see many ending up in the same circles even if none of them were out yet.
• People with shared experiences often cluster together in friend groups. (There are autistic friend groups, yet you'd get laughed out of the village for saying “Sally caught autism off her friends”.)
• People tend to come out around people it's safe to come out around.
• Seeing your friends coming out as [whatever] might make you properly consider whether you might also like guys, or Minecraft, or not being a woman.
And they're the same effects in anyone with a socially-frowned-upon interest. Think of the tabletop-RPG-playing “nerds” of yore.
Who said that? It's probably becoming less of an issue, but it's definitely not disappeared.
They have lives, responsibilities and dependants. Unlike children they can’t change their identities on a whim without repercussions, or negative impacts on people they care about.
I imagine that many people would rather ignore their “true” identity, than risk losing a spouse they care about, or disrupting their children’s futures.
The kids aren't being transed. I know there are several mostly British authors having extremely loud voices spreading FUD about "rapid onset gender dysphoria" but that's not even a thing. It's based on a paper that used answers from parents about trans kids. Follow-up research has demonstrated that to the kids it was anything but rapid. You might as well invent a phenomenon of "rapid onset body size" to explain why grandparents will insist "how can you already be so big, it feels like you were a tiny baby only such a short while ago".
You're overthinking this, but to ease your mind: people aren't undergoing HRT and surgery because all the cool kids are doing it. They might experiment with neopronouns and gender identity labels for a bit but there's literally no demonstrable harm in that.
Also if you think identity politics is a new thing: US politicians literally put God on the dollar bills to appeal to Christian conservatives (prior to that the national motto was always "E pluribus unum", not "In God we trust"). We just don't tend to think of things as identity politics when we take the identity for granted.
EDIT: That you see more trans people is a good thing actually. Visibility is the result of social acceptance. And social acceptance is the biggest contributor to reducing suicidality and improving quality of life. Trans people haven't been killing themselves because they're trans, they've been killing themselves because everyone kept telling them they're not. You can't trans a kid any more than you can make them gay.
That’s not the proper way to treat depression. No amount of social acceptance will lower the suicide rates of people with mis/untreated depression.
Also the proper way to treat depression is to identify the underlying cause, which can be simply rooted in brain chemistry but can also be environmental.
If you're suicidal because your family and social circles reject you for who you are and society in general treats you unfavorably and you are constantly harassed or fetishized by strangers, the problem isn't your brain chemistry.
The question isn't whether or not to treat gender dysphoria as a mental disorder (though in part, of course that is a question too, though one that seems to have been settled) but whether social rejection and harassment are harmful or helpful for trans people. And I'm saying evidence shows it's incredibly harmful and drastically increases suicidality and decreases quality of life (because otherwise social acceptance wouldn't measurably have the opposite effect).
If your concern is health (and mental health) outcomes, not making sure people stick to the gender and presentation they grew up with, the best course of action for trans people seems to be to accept them for who they say they are and make them feel welcome and valid.
There are of course other arguments against accepting trans people but those can be disproven separately and there's no reason to shift the goal posts if we're just talking about suicidality and quality of life.
PS: Of course trans people can also be depressed independently of their transness and in that case they will need to be treated for depression as well. But the specific suicidality rate that is talked about with regard to trans people seems to be evidently linked to their social acceptance, which tracks with other groups. Alan Turing was literally driven to suicide because he was sentenced to chemical castration for not being able to deny being gay.
No, there hasn't. You've been lied to.
There was no treatment for trans children (in the UK). Then a clinic opened up. We went from zero trans boys to some trans boys.
Anti trans campaigners misuse percentages to show an "alarming" rise, when in fact we've simply gone from "none" to "some".
You should consider why you feel comfortable pushing something that's obviously bollocks, just because it supports your anti-trans activism.
https://www.caaps.co/rogd-statement
> anti-science and anti-fact
This combination of words doesn't make sense to me. Science constantly discovers new "facts" that invalidate old "facts". I understand stuff like "the current scientific consensus", but I don't understand how you can call people who question the current scientific consensus on something "anti-fact". Especially in the context of psychology and psychiatry, where lately the facts have been superseding themselves rather rapidly.
Tldr, if you're pro science, shouldn't you by definition be ever so mildly sceptical of facts?
EDIT: note, I'm not trying to attack you personally nor weasel in some alt right talking point. I've seen words like "anti-fact" used a lot lately, I think I understand where it comes from, especially in the context of American hyper-polarized politics. I guess i wrote.my comment hoping to contribute to slightly more constructive language, at least from the sane side of the aisle.
> sane side of the aisle
That's not how constructive language is done. You don't improve "hyper-polarized politics" by saying one pole represents sanity and the other the opposite.
I think therefore that anyone can judge for themselves whether said publication is "anti-science" or "anti-fact" and your help is not required. I feel perfectly comfortable allowing people to think for themselves, especially since this publication is not obviously bollocks: it was awarded both the Economist and Times book of the year prizes.
Finally, based on what I've seen from the scientific community around politicised topics like this one, any link (especially from US-affiliated organisations) should be by default open to questioning and not unassailable proof. Although given that it's psychology it should probably just be outright ignored for a couple of decades until they manage to form a coherent opinion.
This is an interesting case [2]. The concept of ROGD was introduced in an article in a scientific journal [1], by an assistant professor in Brown University. Then there was a strong reaction from people from outside the scientific community (blogosphere, activists). Later, there's been scientific debate back and forth [2]. But it is interesting, if people from outside the scientific community can win the public debate and get to decide what is science and what is not.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid-onset_gender_dysphoria_c...
[1] https://www.gdaworkinggroup.com/blog/2018/12/5/psychology-to...
Wondering what started the labeling too though, I’ve also been teached the value of individualism and fended off any label applied to me.. maybe it’s about realizing that most people out there want to apply labels, so a response to their rigid labels is coming up with unlimited new labels.
You're effectively presenting a transgender person as a second class person, or a mistake.
You're also aligning the ability to grow a beard with being a 1st class citizen.
How is this true?
How will these men mean there are more transgender people in the world?
Also gender is independent of sexual apparatus.
What exactly do you think being transgender means?
If you've never been fit enough to do something like a muscle up then you have no idea what having testosterone feels like.
I'm saying this as a former blob who got fit during covid by accident. You are your body and your body happens to have a mind, not the other way around.
I'm in my 50's, and can remember a time when there wasn't this awareness of men's bodies. While it was admirable to be fit, and women certainly appreciated muscles and a lack of a beer gut, it wasn't seen as that important. Men could be flabby and still seen as physically attractive.
Moobs are normal. Not being able to grow a thick beard is normal. Body hair, or any hair, or not, is normal (I could count the number of hairs on my chest in my 20's and never once considered this to be unusual or in any way affecting my masculinity). I have friends who were balding in their mid-20's and that was normal.
The difference between 30 years ago and now is not in men's bodies. It's in our attitudes to men's bodies.
Men (and women, as always) are being taught to hate our bodies because businesses can profit from that emotion. We are being told that no-one will love us unless we're taller, stronger, hairier. We're being fed images of "perfect" men as aspirational targets that we should aspire to match (and to get there we need to buy a bunch of products, obviously).
We need to learn that all bodies are different, and all are acceptable. It's normal to have flabby bits. If you have to hate something, don't hate your body, hate the people telling you that your body is not good enough.
Testosterone levels have been decreasing for decades, in significant amounts. https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2017/10/02/youre-not-t...
Interestingly, the Forbes article you're referencing is partially based on this paper: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26126... which confirms a link between advertising and voluntary testosterone testing (entirely supporting my point). Men are being targeted by advertising that encourages them to think about their bodies differently.
Just watch one of those old “Berlin in the 1920s” or “NYC in the 1970s” videos. You’ll quickly notice the almost complete lack of overweight people.
Looking at the time frame, I don’t think the other things you mention fit either. They just haven’t changed that much since the 70s. And they don’t explain wild and lab animals also being fatter now.
I have never had my testosterone checked. I knew one guy who had has checked, and it was by a female doctor who put him on pills.
I've always wondered where that testosterone level database is?
Maybe they test in the military? I don't know, but would like to know.
I just found a study, but didn't dig into it:
"Travison and his team analyzed data from the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, a long-term investigation of aging in about 1,700 Boston-area men. Data from the men were collected for three time intervals: 1987-1989, 1995-1997, and 2002-2004."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17436...
Being fat in the 80s is being skinny today. It's uncanny rewatching movies where the fat kid everyone picked on then would be on the average to skinny side today.
Whenever I bring that up I get someone popping out of the wood work saying that the 80s had heroin chik, unrealistic body expectations and on and on.
But the fattest state in 2000 (Mississippi) is skinnier than the skinniest state today (Colorado) [0]. And in 1990 the fattest state (again Mississippi) was half as fat as Colorado is today.
Forget being transgendered the majority of the US would look barely human to anyone from the 80s.
[0] https://stateofchildhoodobesity.org/adult-obesity/
No, its not.
> It's uncanny rewatching movies where the fat kid everyone picked on then would be on the average to skinny side today.
The distribution of body types in film (in the 1980s and otherwise) represents the fashions of the motion picture industry, not (except coincidentally) broader society. The relation of that fashion to broader society is very much not consistent.
> Forget being transgendered the majority of the US would look barely human to anyone from the 80s.
Being an actual person from the 1980s (70s, in fact) I can say with some confidence that this is not true.
And no, there are plenty of videos of normal people that have nothing to do with “the fashions of the motion picture industry.” Millions of video clips are available right now online.
They’ve increased to “a very large minority, even in the fattest state”.
What used to be “fat” has not become “thin”, its just “fat" has become more common.
> And no, there are plenty of videos of normal people that have nothing to do with “the fashions of the motion picture industry.”
Yes, and they’ll show that overweight and obese people are greater proportions of the total. That I didn’t argue against.
The ridiculous hyperbole is what I took issue with.
>>Whenever I bring that up I get someone popping out of the wood work saying that the 80s had heroin chik, unrealistic body expectations and on and on.
>>But the fattest state in 2000 (Mississippi) is skinnier than the skinniest state today (Colorado) [0]. And in 1990 the fattest state (again Mississippi) was half as fat as Colorado is today.
Dear god you can at least read the part of the post where I already answered that point.
marcus_holmes correctly points out that in some cultures men are under more pressure to fit into a gender stereotype around being really muscular.
(And it's well known that women receive even more pressure to be slim and so on)
This is true regardless of the worsening food quality and availability making people fat. Or environmental factors reducing sperm count and so on.
People 50-70 years ago on average lived a very different life style in the US. The fear was that people weren’t getting enough food in the United States and the modern food industry was born and kind of over corrected and now obesity is the problem we are trying to solve.
On top of that I am shocked by how little the average American exercises, and I just don’t mean going to the gym and running, I mean basic, walking and doing something, anything physical.
Instead of completely ignoring their point and just telling them to accept themselves as they are, why should we not also be looking at our environment and asking if it is impacting us?
Do you by chance sit around at a PC all day and get less exercise than you really should? I'm not sure I'd pin this on a biology thing just yet, there's so many things that could cause that
Losing weight and getting exercise gave me all sorts of "manly" traits. Turns out sitting around letting your muscles go to goo can mess with your systems a bunch. I have to shave too often now if anything haha
However if we wanted to turn this into a hypothesis our first stumble is that not all gender dysphoric people are overweight, so it's probably not that
Who said this?
I do four hard weight focused workouts per week of 1.5h each so 6h of exercise. I probably need to address diet, but even so, lots of fresh home cooked meals in there. Maybe need to do more cardio but that tends to set off my SVT. Thanks for asking.
It came up as a thought because you mentioned manboobs, which I have personal experience with hence the rest of my comment, but aside from that my words are my own
Like all the “why are people gay‽”-type nonsense, I also think it's not that – but people are complicated. There is not going to be a single factor for anything, so I don't think that's a valid reason to discard the hypothesis. “There is no real correlation in the first place” would be.
Don't downplay the influence of interracial mixing in the Americas, where I will perhaps incorrectly assume you live. Large amounts of body hair are not a universal male trait. Europeans and Mediterraneans are much hairier than Native Americans. If your ancestors were mostly on one side of that, then sure, they were hairier. Many of my more distant ancestors had no body hair at all.
You may notice a tradeoff here, as the same sensitivity to DHT in your hair follicles that causes facial hair to proliferate also causes male pattern baldness, and Europeans go bald much more often.
I'm expecting a pretty harsh backlash against all this gender politics at some point. I'm not sure when or how it will manifest, but even some of my LGB friends privately tell me they think it's gone too far. For the most part, though, they are too afraid to say anything in public because they don't want to get attacked and possibly lose their jobs over it. It's clear that the gender radicals have wielded online bully tactics to gain full control over the range of acceptable discourse.
LGBT are often portrayed as some kind of monolithic entity in mainstream media, but the reality is that there's a lot of ideological tension in the mix between the cis and trans people. The only place I see these tensions spilling into the open is in the UK, where the LGB Alliance and Stonewall organizations are at odds. Wondering when the same will happen in the US.
Let me lay out the tension for those who may not be familiar. On the one side you have LGB people who mostly say their sexuality is immutable and based on attraction to specific sexes. "Baby, I was born this way" in the words of Lady Gaga. As an example, maybe you're a lesbian which means a woman who is attracted to other women; for most of history this was understood to mean a person of the female sex attracted to another person of the female sex. Meanwhile you have trans activists trying to stretch the meaning of words like "man" and "woman" to the point that they don't really mean anything anymore. Anybody can be a woman if that's how they identify today, which has the effect of broadening what it means to be a lesbian in a way that some lesbians may not agree with. The status quo today is that if you're a lesbian and not willing to include the "female penis" in your sexual orientation, you're at risk of being called a TERF/transphobe. This seems like an irreconcilable difference of views.
Despite what you might think if you've read this far, I do not hate trans people. I have sympathy for them and whatever lack of self-acceptance has led them into their current path. I make an effort to use preferred pronouns and be respectful to those I work with. But I'm also extremely concerned about what the collateral damage to LGB people will be when Republicans capitalize on woke extremism at the ballot box.
Have you considered that they may have been talking about it privately, and decided to come out at the same time to reduce the risk of being singled out for it? I don't see how the timing implies a "bandwagon". It seems obvious that doing that together is less scary than alone.
For what it's worth, i think the gender fight in the media is not worth it for anybody. I dont see an end anytime soon, and i'd rather have gay marriage settle, add counseling in schools for kids who need it, and then maybe the LGBTQ+ community can start fighting this gender fight. Transversal fights are surely worth it (as Fred Hampton and the BPP proved), but i think this one we might want to avoid until we fix the rest.
https://transsafety.network/posts/gcs-and-the-right/
I am a trans person and quite frankly your suggestion to wait in line is deeply insulting.
Also, I'm hearing more and more what It would be conservative opinions from the gay people I have more trust with. Which is quite unexpected for me.
You can only say you have a real gay friend when they show you their Nazi Furry dungeon and start talking about degenerates.
The number of homofascists in the closet is hilariously large.
https://transsafety.network/posts/gcs-and-the-right/
Also, your statement about trans people having a "lack of self-acceptance" is laughably incorrect. Coming out as trans is one of the most radical acts of self-acceptance there is.
Broad acknowledgement (though there remains some sharp and often violent denial, so while better than the best the current situation isn’t at the limit of this) that gender identity can differ from socially ascribed gender and that such a difference is cause for realigning socially ascribed gender to gender identity means that people whose gender identity differs from their socially ascribed gender both are likely to have:
(1) a framework for understanding the source of their discomfort that would not exist absent the degree of acceptance, and
(2) a license to identify their understanding of the source of their discomfort to others that woud not exist without the degree of acceptance, and
(3) a hope of relief that would not exist without the social norm of realigning ascribed gender to match gender identity.
Naturally, this means that more people aren’t just going to keep quiet and attempt to fit into the box society has assigned them at whatever pain it takes, as would previously have been the case because there was no visible alternative.
> but it was also a time when society encouraged the view of everyone being unique and mysterious and don't put labels on things.
I'm glad, for your sake, that you felt like this about society, but I can assure you that at no time that any living person grew up was it the case; and, particularly, the labels put on those who failed to outwardly conform to gender norms tended to be quite harsh.
> I appreciate it’s a bit of a stretch but in some ways it does feel now in society there is a growing pressure to box people’s identities in more.
That’s, literally, the opposite of the case.
Disclaimer - personally, I'm sceptical about the concept and scientific grounds behind transgenderism and I expect my comment to be downvoted.
And furthermore, if you weren't expecting the majority to disagree you've just certified the comment as disingenuous anyway.
He did deep research to discover where the transgender movement came from and the enormous amounts private foundations spent on astroturfing thousands of organizations, academic researchers that cite each other and cultural influencers to jumpstart the movement:
https://myth20c.wordpress.com/2021/02/23/the-transgender-ind...
I think it's fascinating to think that our entire culture could just be made up by a bunch of mischievous billionaires fucking with us. It's like we're just cattle in the matrix being programmed from above. It almost makes the real world seem magical.
Your source's references include "How The Jews Of Weimar Germany Ensured The Rise Of National Socialism" and "Plandemic Documentary: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history
The links posted are from http://radiochristianity.com.
They are explicitly holocaust deniers. http://radiochristianity.com/holocaust-deprogramming-course/
The Plandemic "documentary" nonsense alleges that there is a decades-long conspiracy involving Big Pharma, the CDC, Google, climate scientists, John Oliver, and Bill Gates to cause the pandemic in order to benefit from the vaccines. They go on to make other specific allegations. Here's a sample.
1. That Italy's COVID-19 epidemic is linked to influenza vaccines and the presence of coronaviruses in dogs.
2. That SARS-CoV-2 was created "between the North Carolina laboratories, Fort Detrick, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and the Wuhan laboratory.
3. That flu vaccines increase the chance of contracting COVID-19 by 36%.
4. That despite the goal of preventing coronaviruses, flu vaccines contain coronaviruses.
5. That "Wearing the mask literally activates your own virus. You're getting sick from your own reactivated coronavirus expressions."
And more.
Are you conditioned to having a kneejerk reaction when people call out bullshit? Automatically posting a dismissive comment without bothering to read the provided sources sounds like a kneejerk reaction to me.
This is similar to what happened with the 2020 protests around George Floyd. Many people thought, and many still do, that unarmed black men were being hunted by police. Surely hundreds or even thousands a year were being murdered by the police, yet according to the WaPo database of police shootings only 13 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019. Why do people believe in the myth of endemic police killings? Because the media continues to push that narrative.
Read this USAToday “fact-check” trying to debunk the 13 unarmed black men statistic by saying things like the WaPo database is incomplete and may not show the whole picture, or conflating the number of unarmed black men shot with the percentage of total black men shot, etc. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/23/fac...
On second thoughts, I guess you're right: it doesn't make sense to use the quantifier "only 13" without knowing all the other numbers. This might be trivializing the matter.
I think you've got cause and effect mixed up here.
The guy has a lot of documentation for where this all came from out of nowhere. I bought the book and it's fascinating how much documentation the guy has on how the whole thing got astroturfed in no time. I don't know how old you are, but before the early 2000s, the only place that I ever encountered "transexuals" was in San Francisco sex clubs. Then all of a sudden, in the span of less than 10 years they're everywhere. How the heck did that all happen? Reading through his research is a really interesting deep dive into how to bootstrap a radical cultural change from scratch.
Edit for context since OP has edited his comment without acknowledging it: Where it now says ""transsexuals"" it said "trannies" before.
A gay man might jokingly call himself a poof (or one of his straight close friends might in the same vein based on a mutual understanding), but again, you don't use such words in a polite, neutral setting without coming across as a very nasty person.
Some women are trying to reappropriate the word 'slut' from its negative connotations (cf. The Ethical Slut, Easton and Hardy, 2009) and some use it proudly, but again, anyone calling any woman who has an active sex live with more than one lover a slut will be met with derision.
This is no different.
No one ever starts a sentence with "The Jews control" and ends it with "the home owners association on our block and have done a phenomenal job managing it."
No one ever says "The Japs" followed by "have really contributed to our culture in the form of anime".
No one ever says "that n***" followed by "is an inspiration to us all and we are proud to have him in our community."
No one ever uses the word "tranny" followed by something well thought out and respectful of transexual people.
None of these words/phrases have an offensive dictionary meaning, but they are all rightfully associated with offensive speech.
It's usually the first if referring to familiar people and the second if referring to strangers. Even exactly the same word can cut both ways. "Dear" is affectionate towards family members, calling a coworker "dear" is condescending.
Also, as other posters have said, rule-based logic can only get you so far. It's all in the context.
The way I remember the pre-2000s there was definitely mention of trans people in popular culture. The big difference is being trans was being treated as the punchline, or otherwise derogatory. (The first example that comes to mind is Tone-Lōc's 'Funky Cold Medina', and also that Aerosmith song https://www.songfacts.com/blog/interviews/desmond-child)
Not "could" but "is".
That's how media works, if all media agree to say something wrong during some period of time, that will become true. (Example : Aztrazeneca vaccines, masks, ...). And most media belongs to billionaires. The only thing is that they don't belong to the same billionaires and thus don't most of the time push in the same direction which creates some diversity
I'm not saying this is the case here, but media and propaganda are very close things
Has everyone forgotten famous hacker Sophie Wilson?
Almost every trans person will tell you they were in denial for years. If that period shortens, it will manifest like this.
See also: better diagnosis of autism.
They grow up and when financially independent go through surgeries, hormone therapy etc. and come out as LGBTQ.
Should this be questionable?
If yes then, How do the majority of kids who are interested in programming/computers become software engineers? should be too.
Imagine you're afraid to do something. Someone else does it. Nothing too bad happens. Wouldn't it encourage you?
Big Pharma marketing initiatives, as they have to sell hormone blockers and other drugs to help transition
transgender people are their revenue, even if someone isn’t actually transgender, but has doubts/insecurities, money doesn’t smell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSKQfATa-1I
You see the same thing with people who attempt suicide. People who attempt suicide have better life outcomes in general because they are given more help. Notably suicide is infectious and can trigger copycats.
This doesn't mean I think transexualism is fake -- there's a really interesting nature article where they use ML to identify the sex of brains separate from the body's apparent sex. But there definitely are incentives to ID as trans.
What has changed recently is that many more trans women transition later in life, after having lived for many decades as men, having married and had children and careers well outside sex work etc. Perhaps because of a more general shift of ideas about gender and sexuality (gay men are nowadays not considered effeminate or feminine just because they fancy men) most transwomen in western countries were generally of this later kind.
Then the wheel shifted again. My guess (and it's just a guess) is that the number of people transitioning later in life and in a context that had nothing to do with underage sex and sex work, helped convince society that transition does not have to mean sex work (although in most of the world, it still does, by and large, so what I say applies to more western societies) and that gave more space to younger trans women and also young trans men to express their identity without fearing that a life of humiliation and inevitable sex work awaited them.
In my part of the world, when I was transitioning in the late 90's a trans woman who was not into sex work was something unheard of and indeed I had to immigrate to be able to do anything with my life. As to concerns about giving young children puberty blockers etc, I would have to say that this is much better than 13 year olds taking cross-sex hormones without medical supervision and then going to the red light district to display their budding breasts with pride.
I hope all this doesn't come across as "wokeness". My concern about other trans women has always been the limited opportunities they've had in life, in my part of the world, and the squalid, degrading and dangerous conditions in which they had to survive as a result (google a bit about the transgendered community in Istanbul if you have strong nerves). I tend to think of all the outrage about identity issues on Twitter as a pleasant change of tone from the grim darkness that was before.
A link to that book:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo362138...
I remember ~20 years ago, when I knew nothing of being trans-gender as a concept, and I bearly heard of some people being trans-sexuals.
These days I am fairly on board with the concept of gender as being a role in society you choose to play, that is often informed by your sex, but doesn't have to.
There are a lot of people who don’t feel strongly gendered, I’m one of them, and I suspect you are too from that sentence. Seeing gender as a social role makes sense to us.
However, there are other people who do feel strongly gendered, and for them gender isn’t just a social role but part of their core identity. I suspect at least half of cis folks and nearly all trans folks fit into that group.