"While this makes a bit of sense, I’m sort of skeptical. Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, and John Derbyshire are still on Twitter. Spencer has over 70K followers. I can’t deny that many far-right people have been banned. But it seems more like Twitter enforces the rules somewhat harder on the right than the left for PR reasons, without having a concerted campaign to ban the right in any kind of useful/consistent way."
Twitter has been less censorious than other places. Facebook doesn't allow Spencer, for example.
The banning doesn't have to be done in a "useful/consistent way" to be effective. Here's Vox gloating about how no-platforming "worked" in the case of Milo and Alex Jones.
It's clear censorship has destroyed the voices of the most prominent people of the far right, so why wouldn't it work to stop a movement?
"Also, even if they did ban everyone to the right of Ben Shapiro, why wasn’t there a mass movement in favor of Ben Shapiro and others like him?"
Because the extremists are where you get the energy from. If Ben Shapiro is the most extreme person in your universe, and all he's arguing for is going back 10 years, that's not going to be "edgy," which is what gets the cycle started. The right end of the political spectrum has been unnaturally truncated, instead of being allowed to grow organically, which is necessary for these internet cultures to rise.
Even before dating apps got big, I didn't know many couples that met the "sitcom way" of the guy asking out the girl at random (i.e. seeing someone at a grocery store, gym, etc.). There are a few cases here and there, but it's primarily friends that are on the far, far right hand of the extraversion bell curve. The vast majority of couples I know (pre-dating apps) came about from hanging out as a part of a friend group, drunkenly hooking up one night, then going further from there.
"My concern is more about there being a culture of fear, where people who oppose whatever the wokest 10% of the population thing are scared into silence"
This is a complicated thing to try and solve, the fear isn't just made up of fear of social rejection, but also fear that speaking out might harm the good things that have come from whatever movement is in question. That's not an unfounded fear, there are a lot of countries around the world for example where gay rights are being undermined and removed. There's a big information deficit for all involved about what influence their raising their voice might have.
I am once again asking people to stop constructing weird fictional narratives about a dead gay comedy forum.
SA was never some even-handed centrist discussion board. Like most of the 00s internet forums it was about 75% lefties broadly construed and the remainder was mostly libertarian (not well-disposed towards McCain). Something like 50 accounts lost their McCain ban bet and only a few of those were actual regulars. It was not some great epoch-shifting exodus.
And they most likely didn't go to 4chan. By the time 2008 rolled around, 4chan had been a separate website from SA for years (and had spun off of an entirely different subforum with not much overlap to the politics boards). They mostly ended up at various spinoff forums where they accreted all the other bitter people who got banned over the next few years over things like "faggot" becoming dispreferred nomenclature and just memed themselves into fash.
4chan went right-wing because there was a coordinated effort by Stormfront to colonize it and make it right-wing. There were explicit threads about this on Stormfront, and the userbase there was much bigger than the userbase of McCain supporters on SA ever was.
>This captures a fear I have too. Yes, lots of people make fun of conservatives for freaking out over some proposal made half-jokingly by a tiny magazine with three subscribers, and acting like it’s the unified will of the entire Democratic establishment. But some non-zero fraction of the time, the ridiculous thing ends up taking over, and after it’s taken over it’s too omnipresent to protest. The window between “it has been seriously mooted” and “people are terrified of being seen not to whole-heartedly endorse it” is razor-thin, and it’s hard to blame people who aren’t confident of hitting that window, and sometimes that looks like arguing against it before the the mooting could be honestly described as “serious”.
At the risk of litigating a particular instance beyond the point of relevance, I think that quite a lot hinges on the specifics of what the proposal actually *is*, and judging it carefully and consistently. If the fear is that certain language will become common, showing its use throughout society is good evidence. If the fear is that it will be *compulsory*, it is poor evidence. Equivocating between the two is a huge epistemic problem - this isn't just politics, it's a concrete logical error - and leaves one in a position where one can feel threatened so long as any examples of their opposition exist. With only a little effort you can find examples of such all over the political spectrum, and I am extremely skeptical of ad-hoc proofs that the outgroup definitely does it more.
tl;dr: If you can't commit to a specific prediction, you're probably motte-and-bailey'ing yourself.
I think you're not giving quite enough credit to the difference between socialism and wokeness in terms of its being a threat. Regardless of what people say, no one is ever canceled just for being white or just for being male (except maybe in the rare case where the head of a woman's organization is a man, and they finally decide he needs to be demoted to a VP role so that a woman can be in charge - and that's not a "cancelling"). Most people don't like the idea of benefiting just from their race or sex, and so don't worry too much about losing that benefit.
But if you're rich, or a manager, socialists *do* want to cancel you for that. You might not lose your job, but you *will* have your money and/or power taken away from you. Wokeness doesn't want to take away what very many people really don't want taken away from them. Socialism does.
I agree I was meandering from the topic -- I'm generally trying to put the culture war into a broader perspective, in part as this might make it more solvable, but mainly because I really do think that wokeness is the tip of an iceberg. I'm far from buying the Lomez/ZeroHP/Kaschuta worldviews wholesale, but I'm seeing some of the same things they are seeing: Western culture, tech *and* academia have lost their virility and are on the decline (with a few holdouts, like blockchain, biotech, SpaceX, and maybe these little bits of right-wing creativity I've mentioned; but a few swallows do not a summer make). Taking this as given, it doesn't surprise me that classically liberal ideas are losing popularity and are getting replaced by zero-sum tribalism: The Enlightenment has always been a trade where you paid your spiritual security for adventure and progress; with the latter gone, the trade is looking more and more like a scam. It's just that I'm still hoping the upside can be brought back, perhaps at the cost of inviting some unsavory characters back into the project...
There's also a tiny thing of socialism already having killed tens (or maybe hundreds?) of millions in the 20th century, and wokeness, with all its disgusting totalitarian excesses, haven't yet. So maybe there's still a bright side to it - at least being banned on Twitter is not literal gulags, and however much the socialists might be salivating over those, American society can go as far as "gimme free stuff", but no further yet.
"I’d treated it as kind of mysterious that the George Floyd protests erupted when they did, as intensely as they did; anti-racism talk was trending down, police had been killing black people in approximately equally bad ways since forever, it seemed weird that this was the spark that ignited a conflagration. I think I figured maybe it was just that everyone was on edge because of the pandemic. But several commenters pointed out that no, the George Floyd video was a new low in terms of obvious, enraging, terrifying police brutality."
I never wrote this down anywhere, but I remember thinking that I expected something major to happen. I would not have guessed at the scale of last summer's protests and riots, but I did have an intuitive sense that things had reached a breaking point. Each previous incident had garnered more and more attention and outrage but not changed much, racism was (as Scott noted) in the air, and the pandemic had people itching to get outside and do stuff. But I think primarily it was just "the straw that broke the camel's back."
> I don't feel like non-political boards like /sp/ have changed much in tone in the last +10 years.
Hard disagree, /pol/ has absolutely leaked to the other boards at this point. /tg/'s MtG threads went from reasonable-ish discussions on a trans character to multiple posters going "BLACK MAN ON CARD REEE" during spoiler seasons. The /sp/ game threads I've seen had racist shit talk about blacks and "beaners".
I got into an Internet argument with someone over J.R. Rowling and her transgender views. I knew exactly what I was getting myself into, but I was curious what would happen. I actually bothered to read what Rowling wrote, which I interpreted as being:
"I believe in transgender rights, but I don't believe we should erase the idea of gender, because a lot of hard-fought gains for women have been made over many decades and erasing the idea of gender will destroy that. Also, I believe that the designation of being a "women" in the UK should be stronger than just a man stating they believe they are a woman. There needs to be a stronger commitment to gender reassignment before they should be allowed to be considered a woman, and consequently use a woman's bathroom."
Boy, they were having none of that. As far as the trans-supporters were concerned, she was anti-trans, even though Rowling specifically mentioned support for trans rights. And they said I was anti-trans because I dared to explain what Rowling was saying, even though I said I believed in trans rights and I didn't agree with everything Rowling wrote, I was just trying to explain what I believe Rowling meant.
Trans-activists seem to believe that if you don't check every single box in terms of supporting all the demands of trans people, then you are anti-trans. They are ironically completely binary on a topic that itself proclaims fluidity.
I privately got several messages from people that said they agreed with me and that they are getting sick of trans issues being pushed down into younger and younger education. I think a lot of moderates are getting sick of ultra-wokeness being shoved down everyone's necks, to the point where something may actually be done. In SF, the fight with the SFUSD Board of Education is coming to a head. There is growing support for the recall of several members after a disastrous push to rename dozens of schools named after "racists" around SF at the cost of $1M. It turns out they never bothered to consult with historians, they just googled names and ended up while they refused to do anything about bring kids back into the classroom. And they put their efforts into this at the expense of trying to get kids back into the classroom in a safe way. In fact, so many people have been outraged by this and other acts of wokeness that many people I know might actually muster up enough indignation to sign an Internet petition that might lead to something sometime in the future!
I spent a lot of time on SA for ten+ years up until a year or so ago and it had great forums about "serious" subjects. I never ventured into the "comedy" parts of the forums but I regularly participated in all sorts of threads on computer programming, cars, investing, etc. It, as of a year ago, was a shadow of it's former self, but it was so large and influential that a shadow of it's former self was still pretty large. IIRC, at any given moment it was not uncommon to see several thousand users active.
> Yes, lots of people make fun of conservatives for freaking out over some proposal made half-jokingly by a tiny magazine with three subscribers, and acting like it’s the unified will of the entire Democratic establishment. But some non-zero fraction of the time, the ridiculous thing ends up taking over, and after it’s taken over it’s too omnipresent to protest.
I just want to point out that I can specifically recall taking this sort of position years ago when some liberal person made a point about far-right conservatism and now it seems like the far right has vastly more sway than I ever thought possible.
To that anonymous liberal person I was arguing with so many years ago: you were right and I was wrong!
"While this makes a bit of sense, I’m sort of skeptical. Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, and John Derbyshire are still on Twitter. Spencer has over 70K followers."
This analysis is missing something I can't quite articulate - Molineux and Milo were just enthralling in a way that Spencer et al are not. My brain is informing me that the problem is that Spencer et al are too far off the grid and Shapiro is too centrist, while Molyneux et al were in the edginess sweet spot, but I'm not sure that's right.
All I can really offer is my personal experience that if I had gotten sucked down the rabbit hole it would have been because of Molyneux and Milo. Spencer is interesting to gawk at, but he's not attractive like them. And Shapiro isn't a rabbit hole at all.
> I have a hard time feeling sorry for people who used the n-word in a tweet five years ago. I think it’s kind of silly to waste your energy trying to destroy their lives, but also kind of silly to waste your energy supporting them super-hard.
You do realize that approximately 100% of this concern has been for teenagers using the word in the friendly hip hop way and getting fired/rejected from colleges years later for this horrible crime, right? No IDW types are rising to the defense of repentant racists AFAIK, and there isn't a movement to save them. Protecting *the intent* behind language as something that matters seems like an important line to hold in the fight against wokeness, at least to me.
As for George Floyd, it *was* a particularly bad video, and the fact that only videos of black people getting killed rise to public attention means since Trayvon a whole generation of black and white people on the left thinks that unjustified police violence is pretty much just something that happens to black people and happens all the time. The concept of the media being biased *towards* coverage of white-on-black violence in our systemically racist country is so unthinkable to these people that the current climate is *proof* of an epidemic. You can show up with the Washington Post data base, FBI crime stats, similarly horrifying videos of Tony Timpa and Daniel Shaver but they are still pretty unknown and you can't say anything without raising scary Trump supporter alarms for 90% of liberals.
Holy SHIT! The first question in that Anna Khachiyan interview is the greatest thing ever. By the time I finished reading it I was in love. There is not enough money in the world to send Niccolo I'm-typing-on-a-phone-so-I-can't-look-up-whatever-his(her?)-last-name-is for a subscription. Thanks Darij.
The introduction was great too, but it's Red Scare fan service. If you aren't already involved you're not going to get the jokes. The rest of the interview brightened my day even though I had my identity stolen and spent twelve hours when I should have been working tracking down what the hell happened and placing all kinds of traps around my finances that I'm positive won't come back and bite me on my ass
> I have a hard time feeling sorry for people who used the n-word in a tweet five years ago.
It occurs to me to wonder how soon it will be first rude and then unforgivable to say (literally) "the n-word". After all, we know what word you mean here, and all your sly euphemism doesn't excuse it. And if that time comes, current events show us that the fact that you said it back in 2021 will not buy you any understanding.
One strange thing about the discourse around terms like "birthing persons" which may not have been obvious to you or others on the periphery is that anti-trans people routinely portray such attempts to be inclusive as attempts to be inclusive of trans women (usually with associated rhetoric about "erasing women"), when in fact they are attempts to be inclusive of transmasculine people (Ozy of Thing of Things being one such person you and older commenters may be familiar with). I'm unsure why this disconnect with the actual stated (and to me obvious if you actually think about it for 30 seconds) intent is so common and consistent across a wide variety of anti-trans groups, but it is.
By and large such inclusivity attempts are a supplement rather than a replacement (essentially, if you have a transmasculine pregnant person in front of you, maybe don't use heavily female-gendered terms for them which might make them uncomfortable), but some people do go farther in terms of trying to universalize it, and I wish they wouldn't because right now it mostly just makes people mad at us trans/non-binary people for little benefit. I like gender-neutral language, I want people to use more of it, but I also want to not start unhelpful fights and language evolution is a complicated process that doesn't respond very well to artificial pushes in a particular direction.
> The window between “it has been seriously mooted” and “people are terrified of being seen not to whole-heartedly endorse it” is razor-thin
One area I worry about regarding this is mask requirements. I think we're in a narrow window where we can say, now that everyone can get vaccinated, mask requirements are dumb and need to end. There's a medically reasonable response of "wait a few weeks for everyone who wants a vaccine to be done with theirs and rates to go down some", but I worry we have a narrow window and if we don't push back hard right now we'll be stuck with mask mandates and other covid laws forever, just like we are with the TSA.
I wonder if the liberal mainstream might give fourth-wave feminism a milder version of the "New Atheism treatment" over the trans issue. Clearly many/most feminists are ardent trans rights supporters - just as many/most New Atheists became social justice evangelists - but there's enough of a gender critical contingent that I feel as though the ideology itself - particularly the 70s-era feminist philosophy that more or less formed the basis upon which essentially all subsequent feminist thought and activism is predicated - might be in danger of coming under suspicion.
John S bringing up Rodney King to show that rioting is uncorrelated with extremity of the catalyzing incident of police misconduct totally ignores the relative scarcity of video in the 1990's. Rodney King's beating is not an extreme example of police misconduct in today's world of ubiquitous smartphone footage, but when footage was so rare this was the most extreme example of state indifference to clear misconduct audiences would be exposed to.* If anything the Rodney King example suggests that the rise of BLM is a product of the ubiquity of cell phone video, and the ease of viral streaming.
And look, I hate to say it, but framing violent riots by the urban underclass as "internet fashion, go figure"" is peak confusing twitter for real life. No one is less likely to read an essay from some lefty professor on how riots are the voice of the voiceless than someone who actually lives in the shitty part of Kenosha.
Police violence against civil rights protestors in the 1960's was similarly a shocking expose of police violence, but less an expose of police hypocrisy, as violently enforcing Jim Crow is what they were supposed to do.
> This captures a fear I have too. Yes, lots of people make fun of conservatives for freaking out over some proposal made half-jokingly by a tiny magazine with three subscribers, and acting like it’s the unified will of the entire Democratic establishment. But some non-zero fraction of the time, the ridiculous thing ends up taking over, and after it’s taken over it’s too omnipresent to protest. The window between “it has been seriously mooted” and “people are terrified of being seen not to whole-heartedly endorse it” is razor-thin, and it’s hard to blame people who aren’t confident of hitting that window, and sometimes that looks like arguing against it before the the mooting could be honestly described as “serious”.
But naturally this could never, *ever* apply to racists going from Just Trying To Talk About Genetics to anywhere else, goodness me no.
Just read a book by Lee Kuan Yew. Coming from “multiculturalism will destroy America” to this comment section is quite jarring. When the East looks over the ashes of the West, they will wonder what compelled such a successful culture to allow itself to be destroyed from within by such degeneracy...let’s hope Scott is right that this is all just a passing phase!
"When I was dating more, I had some success using OKCupid, where most people would write long essays about who they were and what kind of relationship they wanted. Tinder was always more of a mystery; usually just a photo plus a one-sentence cryptic description like '25, Aquarius, hit me up! <3' I sometimes considered lowering my standards enough to “swipe right” on one of these people, but was never actually able to sacrifice that amount of dignity. Then OKCupid became a much worse Tinder clone and my useful options collapsed to zero (don’t worry, I’ve since found someone great through my community). While in theory dating apps are a great solution to this problem, in practice they’re surprisingly terrible."
This roughly matches my experiences using both OKCupid and Tinder in the past, including not finding OKCupid useful after it became a Tinder clone. I'm thinking of getting back onto the dating market now that I'm vaccinated, but it will need to be mostly online since I know very few women in real life. Does anyone have suggestions for dating apps/sites that aren't surprisingly terrible?
"I had never heard this story before and it sounds just ridiculous enough to potentially be true"
Not quite true I think. It is correct that a lot of disgruntled goons (as somethingawful posters called themselves) ended up on 4chan. Disgruntled as in permanently banned, naturally, and somethingawul moderators were known for being a tad impulsive sometimes, let's put it this way.
But on the other hand making political predictions and staking your account on that prediction was a long-running tradition, this game commenced come each presidential election cycle, and I think for other elections as well, and knowing goons, probably for other stuff too - like oscars etc.
The thing is - people getting in the game knew the risks. If you predict wrong, your account gets banned, I am sure people here can appreciate this setup.
And to clarify, SA accounts were paywalled, registrering an account was like $20, and if you got banned, you could immediately re-register your username with another twenty (unless you were permabanned, which was a different form of ban, or probated for, like, 10000 days, or permaprobated)
So I doubt a significant percentage of 4channers were born out of betting against Obama. A lot of folks did get banned for posting in a right-wingy way, that's correct - SA moderation was known for its left-wing slant - but a lot of folk got banned for posting paedofilia, another big no-no, as well, so you know. Mileage may vary and all that.
My brief follow-up would be that it seems a lot like evil people start tiny movements without much membership. They aren't real groups. Disaffection and stigma pushes lost millennial boys into their orbit, most eventually get fed up/horrified and leave, but the groups are sticky and end up legitimized and enlarged by the process. Don't know if I communicated that well in my first post.
I believe the google search results for trans might be biased as opposed to feminism or racism since it would also include porn searches which would dwarf any other kind of searches. That's why lgbt, transphobia and terf are better terms to search, and as you said that shows better trending.
The question of socialism can be easily explained by not considering the ruling class to be unified. I know, ironic.
In a broadly Turchinian view, we need to distinguish an established elite from aspiring elites (and within those, regular elite aspirants from counter-elites, but counter-elites operate outside mainstream institutions, so they need not be included in this particular equation; it suffices to say they leave to create their own alternative institutions, like Substack). At present, aspiring elites can be considered roughly equivalent to urban intelligentsia. (Professional-Managerial Class in modern parlance.) Degree inflation and all, people are forced to get a diploma for regular jobs, so not everyone college-educated is in this group, but many are, and it's still very large. Way too large for the limited number of positions available to it, and they're in a constant, brutal fight for status. (They're also in a constant class war, trying to create as much demand for cushy specialist jobs as possible. I'd give HR and diversity consultants as obvious examples, but they're only a small fraction of the whole process, and as a whole it isn't culturally coded woke, job market for economists works the same way. But again, that's another story.)
And brutal means brutal. Once someone discovered moral outrages can fire people and create job/promotion opportunitiess, it was only a matter of time before they became commonplace. This required a unified, shared ideology, and the one most conductive to the task won out. Or rather, keeps winning out. Once older elite aspirants establish themselves, they're becoming a target of the next wave of challengers, and the ideological tools must change to reflect that. You don't take feminists down with misogyny, you take them down with transphobia.
So, why not socialism? First, because the aspiring elites are aspiring to be elites. Diversity quotas in elite positions are in their interest, actual egalitarianism is not. And they're taking over current institutions, which are, and have been for 200+ years, liberal, so the aspirants will themselves be liberal. (Those who dream of soviet union with themselves at the top of politburo would still need to defect to counter-elites to get there.) Second, because the elite aspirants are not actually in charge, the elites, i.e. wealthy stockholders, are. They'd very much like to be in charge instead of stockholers, and they'll make some noises to that effect, socialism-flavored or not (mostly merely etatism-flavored, some will call that socialism due to a flawed conceptual apparatus, but it's really not), but they can only go so far until the stockholers intervene, and in the meantime they're still employed to serve whatever immediate interests the stockholders currently have.
Also, as a somewhat more general comment to the recent string of culture war articles: I don't really disagree with the whole cultural part of the analysis, but I feel detaching it from wider context took away any predictive power it might have had. In particular, we socialists are simply fighting a different battle from elite aspirants, one for the souls and attention of common people. (So far, we're losing badly, though I would lie if I denied the memetic progress we made in the last few years. But even that progress is frankly irrelevant, society as a whole has recently started moving leftward, it will continue to do so with our help or not, for purely material reasons, and socialist ideas will be rediscovered, memetically proficient and fashionable or not. That post-2008 surge in interest in socialism? Is it really explained by Obama being called names, or perhaps by the biggest economic downturn in decades? I'd venture the latter.)
> Some commenters got into a subthread about a claim that transgender advocates wanted to rename “Mother’s Day” to “Birthing Person’s Day”, with the predictable response that nobody really wanted to do that and it was a fake conservative talking point / hyperbole / satire / attempt to scare people. Someone else pointed out that a Congresswoman was now using “birthing person” instead of “mother” and this seemed non-fake and non-nutpicking, and someone else pointed out that using “birthing person” was different from demanding other people use it, or changing the name of an entire holiday.
This won't happen. Not because it'd be wierd, but because this fails to make sense even from a woke perpsective. Trans advocates don't advocate renameing womens bathrooms to people-with-vaginas bathroom. They advocate for allowing transwomen to use womens bathrooms. When it comes to Mothers day, you would expect them to act analogously . They recognise that "birthing people" is a different set of people as "mothers" (and you do too if you believe adoptive mothers are a thing), but they'd much rather have mothers day celebrate all parents that happen to be female than people that happen to give birth.
The idea that they would come up with "birthing people day" is exactly how conservatives think progressivism works, not how it actually works.
> I … have to admit that I didn’t watch the video. I heard the summary, I don’t have much of a stomach for horrible things, I figured I didn’t have to watch this poor man die.
...it had the wrong ratio of enticing-to-horrifying.
> Women are not particularly oppressed when compared to groups that are more oppressed than them
Is this a joke sentence? Maybe I just missed the tone.
I've no real love for feminism, but ciswomen have had their ordinary places nuked. Even /r/2Xchromosomes, whose title is literally about 2X, can't work for ciswomen. My wife has to find tiny little places on Facebook to talk about women's issues. And I don't mean "how do we stop Handmaid's Tale," I mean just plain-jane women talking about everyday ordinary stuff. And the places get destroyed every few months and new ones need to be found, like some kind of terror cells.
I have less data on this, but I've heard from friends that lesbian spaces have also been annihilated. Lesbians are outnumbered by transwomen who want to date ciswomen, and they aren't allowed to just filter them out.
One of my culture-war hypothesis is that the tech companies are banning all of the non-crazy far-right people and the influential right-wing people, while still keeping around the crazies. This provides a double advantage. First, they can deflect criticism of opinion-based censorship by pointing at the remaining fringe speakers. Secondly, the only right-wing speakers which can be found are so crazy as to be generally repellant to even the moderate right.
This is why people like Alex Jones and Denis Prager needed to be taken off the platform. They were either popular (and thus influential), or moderate enough that they could result in convincing people.
I’m too old too understand a lot of this. I think in some sense I’m just not supposed to get it. My generation established its own identity by behaving in ways that our elders wouldn’t get - See “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand” - I would really like to understand how some of my old hippie friends are wearing red hats though. I guess I’ll reread “Kill All Normies”. Have a 50th high school reunion coming up in July. That’s not a lot of time to get a handle on this. Really, I don’t care about agreeing with it. It would be a comfort to simply understand what is going on in people’s heads.
<i>>> After 2016 (when my gf of 4 years and I broke up), I exclusively went on dates using dating apps. I have never asked out a coworker, a girl at a bar, or a girl at the gym, and I don't know a single couple in my peer group who met that way either. For some reason, portrayal of dating in the media has yet to catch up.</i>
Go read romance novels (porn for chicks). Zero of them feature a meet-cute on an app. Maybe not quite literally zero, but .0002% rounds down to zero. Top guys figure out how to date offline.
I think there's a narrative here where certain people are congratulating themselves on succeeding at derailing a new extremist right-wing movement.
However, the new extremist right-wing movements, insofar as they have been "defeated", are a figment of the imagination, either in beliefs, popularity, or appeal. MRAs, for example, aren't right-wing; they're left-wing. And they have (appropriately!) increasingly faded into the background as their causes have become mainstream; think about how domestic abuse violence against men is treated today, as compared to how it was treated twenty years ago.
Deplatforming has not eroded the right-wing movement; it has created a new, much more powerful, right-wing movement. My company now includes some ordinary, fairly bright right-wing people who have beliefs that, a decade ago, would have been constrained to a few very crazy, very online people. They have lost all trust in the institutions that once could be relied upon to hold these kinds of beliefs in check; they have lost all trust that there is any objectivity in terms of what information reaches them, and thus have no constraint on what kind of beliefs about the world make sense.
This has not been a successful strategy for the illiberal left; this last election is not proof that their strategy works, it is proof of how badly it is going. They are creating a monster, which they empower more and more with each iteration of the process. And frankly, a lot of the liberal left are moving to the right; the idea that opposing this insane process is right and good has not-so-quietly entered the mainstream.
> First, how does the wokeness vs. socialism calculus in self-interested people really come out? White male executives might reasonably worry that if their companies became super-woke, they could get cancelled, or miss out on promotions that go to minorities instead. On the other hand, it’s very easy for the same white male executive to say “Oh, yeah, there should be Medicare for all and higher taxes on the rich”, knowing that all this will get abstracted over the whole country, and his own pronouncement will earn him signaling points but not really affect the chance of those things happening too much.
It's not the executives making these decisions, it's the people above them, billionaires like Jeff Bezos or Jack Dorsey. People like that have no reason to care about "missing out on promotions", but they do care about a government that would clip the wings of tech billionaires, as it would reduce their own power, wealth, and status.
"On the other hand, it’s very easy for the same white male executive to say “Oh, yeah, there should be Medicare for all and higher taxes on the rich”, knowing that all this will get abstracted over the whole country, and his own pronouncement will earn him signaling points but not really affect the chance of those things happening too much."
I'm surprised to the point of "what am I missing" that more CEO types don't already do this. Particularly the M4A thing - it'd have a very modest impact on their own personal wealth and likely improve their companies' bottom line, what's the danger of even signaling toward it?
"So maybe it was just a really moving video."
It was genuinely one of the roughest things I have ever seen, and I am very online. Other effects absolutely factor in, but I wouldn't underplay the power of a really intense video.
"But it seems more like Twitter enforces the rules somewhat harder on the right than the left for PR reasons, without having a concerted campaign to ban the right in any kind of useful/consistent way."
While this makes a bit of sense, I’m sort of skeptical. Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, and John Derbyshire are still on Twitter. Spencer has over 70K followers. I can’t deny that many far-right people have been banned. But it seems more like Twitter enforces the rules somewhat harder on the right than the left for PR reasons, without having a concerted campaign to ban the right in any kind of useful/consistent way.
Also, even if they did ban everyone to the right of Ben Shapiro, why wasn’t there a mass movement in favor of Ben Shapiro and others like him? I feel like far-right people can still find lots of far-right celebrities to follow, and Jones and Molyneux weren’t even central examples of far-rightists. Surely there are still enough unbanned rightists to satisfy almost anybody; this makes it hard for me to believe this had too big an effect.
This is not the same, Ben Shapiro is deliberately a funny, family-friendly right-wing pundit (or at least, as funny a pundit can be. Y'all may claim he's "cringe" or whatever - but Jon Stewart was a thing and basically epitomized the Smug Champagne Socialist archetype - I never hear the same complaints there , wonder why?.
The family friendly pundit is not the person who provides energy for a movement, particularly under young people. Take a look at the success of 'the Squad' - they're totally mindkilled, routinely display raw ignorance of the topics they discuss, and are generally not very respectable. However - they are *popular*, and they are popular because they have staked out an identitarian position in respect to their relationship with the established order. They are combative firebrands and not too concerned with how legitimate their ideological or technical positions are.
As a movement , whether or not you like those people - you *need* those people because they drive energy to the project as well as "create space" within the Overton window.
"Also, even if they did ban everyone to the right of Ben Shapiro, why wasn’t there a mass movement in favor of Ben Shapiro and others like him?"
Not sure if anyone said this, but maybe because Shapiro and the like forgo the strongest alternative explanation to systemic racism for racial disparities, HBD? And in terms of foreign policy and economics Shapiro is on the opposite side to the alt-right. A mass movement based on failed Bush-neocon policy?
In Sweden, an NHS language guideline recommends avoiding the word for "woman". Official information says things like "Pregnancy pay can be paid to a pregnant person if [...] ze is unable to work while ze is pregnant" and "This is the case whether the one giving birth is a woman or a man". On the one hand, I would think that expressions such as "people with uteruses" would be too cumbersome to become widespread, but, on the other hand, unwieldy expressions for cripples and morons have managed to become commonplace, so it is not unthinkable.
>Women are not particularly oppressed when compared to groups that are more oppressed than them. This makes it kind of hard to sustain a feminist movement; you’re selecting for people who have accepted the social justice paradigm where issues should be about how oppressed relevant groups are, but you also want to focus your energies on a less-than-maximally-oppressed group. This makes it easy for other people to chide and hijack you, and it sounds like feminism keeps getting chided and hijacked.
I would say globally speaking, the "maximally oppressed" groups would be people of the lowest caste in North Korea, citizens of Zimbabwe, factory farm animals, etc. Any way for us to accelerate a transition towards focusing on their problems?
I have a couple hypotheses of the causes of the rise and fall of online culture wars.
1. Boredom. Going down a new rabbit hole is fun, but eventually you get bored of it and look for something else. (Maybe this also acts in the form of the aggregate boredom of the public reducing the virality of old topics).
2. Reaction. A movement's overreach incubates its own opposition and causes it to lose momentum. Salient examples of overreach that get widespread media coverage update the priors of naive individuals to make them harder to recruit. This sorta seemed to happen in all three of the culture war phases. This also definitely happened with communism back in the 20th century. But somehow the dallas cop murders etc didn't slow down BLM. Clearly some movements are more susceptible than others to this sort of weakmanning. Maybe it's that the media are eager to distance the movement from the overreach when the media like the movement, and eager to pin the overreach on the movement when they dislike the movement. So the one kid who panicked and hit the gas at charlottesville when someone pointed a gun at him is the fault of every white person who wants to continue to have a homeland not ruled by foreigners, but the dallas cop murders and dozens of 2020 cop murders are just a freak occurrence with absolutely nothing to do with BLM going around chanting "Pigs in a blanket, fry em like bacon".
Regarding the idea of hitting on women being viewed as creepy, I will second the idea that this didn't fade away but rather has become entrenched as the new norm, at least in educated circles . Allow me to quote from the 2018 Atlantic article, "Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?" (Simon is a 32-year-old grad student who has recently re-entered the dating pool):
“My first instinct was go to bars,” Simon said. But each time he went to one, he struck out. He couldn’t escape the sense that hitting on someone in person had, in a short period of time, gone from normal behavior to borderline creepy.
...“I play volleyball,” he added. “I had somebody on the volleyball team two years ago who I thought was cute, and we’d been playing together for a while.” Simon wanted to ask her out, but ultimately concluded that this would be “incredibly awkward,” even “boorish.”
At first, I wondered whether Simon was being overly genteel, or a little paranoid. But the more people I talked with, the more I came to believe that he was simply describing an emerging cultural reality.
This shift seems to be accelerating amid the national reckoning with sexual assault and harassment, and a concomitant shifting of boundaries. According to a November 2017 Economist/YouGov poll, 17 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 now believe that a man inviting a woman out for a drink “always” or “usually” constitutes sexual harassment.
...quite a few [women] suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. “Creeper! Get away from me,” one woman imagined thinking.
In the early days of internet culture (the mid-to-late 90s), there were constant debates between Christians and atheists for three reasons: First, atheism was just starting to become a mainstream and socially acceptable position. A lot of devout Christians were quick to argument simply because they'd never actually talked to an avowed atheist before and were genuinely surprised that anyone didn't believe in God, while a lot of atheists were quick to argument because they'd spent their entire lives getting flak for their views and finally had a place where they could fight back. Second, the internet was just starting to open up to the general public; previously, it had largely been the province of tech geeks who were disproportionately atheistic compared to the rest of the population, and the sudden influx of normie Christians was a recipe for conflict. Third, and perhaps most importantly, people just didn't have anything better to talk about. After all, times were good! We were living in a time of unprecedented peace and economic prosperity. In a sense, those early internet debates on theism were a luxury afforded by the lack of real material concerns during the Pax Americana. The conflict was *casual*.
That changed in the 2000s. The core conflict of the 2001-2008 era wasn't Christianity vs. New Atheism. It was Bush's coalition of pro-Jesus, pro-America, pro-war jingoists vs. everyone else (particularly liberals and libertarians, many of whom were atheists or at least secularists themselves). After 9/11 and the Iraq War, there was a real sense that the conflict wasn't between Islamic fundamentalism and secular liberalism, but between Islamic fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism. Yes, the anti-war crowd also talked about how Cheney was dragging us into war for oil, or how Bush just wanted to avenge the hit that Saddam placed on his dad, but there was a very real sense that Christianity itself was one of the driving factors behind American foreign interventionism. The debates over God's existence became less abstract and more heated as they became a proxy for Bushism vs. an unlikely alliance of liberals, libertarians, leftists, pacifists, and tech bros. The conflict was *partisan*, and internet atheism was only one part of it.
But after Obama's election, partisan politics in the U.S. took a different turn. Obama continued the military interventionism of his predecessor, which promptly killed the narrative that we were fighting in the name of Christian crusader-imperialism (of all the things he's been accused of being, I don't think anyone ever accused Obama of being too fanatically Christian). And aside from Obamacare, things didn't change all that much domestically either. Plus, the 2008 financial crisis (which, in my opinion, actually had even more of an impact on Americans and U.S. politics than 9/11) caused the first notable decline in standards of living since the 70s. People became less inclined to focus on abstract theological issues or even the very real problems of Afghanis and Iraqis half a world away, shifting their focus to home.
Combine worsening socioeconomic conditions (which affected everyone, but were perceived as disproportionately affecting racial minorities and women), the leftover remnants of the Bush-era Culture War (especially the debates over women's rights, abortion, and gay marriage), a newfound emphasis on race as a result of having the country's first Black President, and the advent of new forms of social media that encouraged controversy and polarization and echo chambers, and you have the perfect storm of factors to result in something like the left-identitarian movement of the late 2000s and early 2010s. While feminism may have been the "big sister" in the left-identitarian alliance, this was also around the same time that critical race theory and LGBT identity movements became popularized, along with the notion of "intersectionality" (i.e. the idea that the struggles of racial minorities, women, queer people, disabled people, etc. were all actually the same struggle). The conflict was now *cultural* first and foremost.
So what happened in 2015-2016? I don't think it's as simple as racial issues replacing feminism as the topic of the day, but rather a total repudiation of the idea that making the ruling class more diverse (in terms of race or gender) was a goal worth fighting for. The earlier model of liberal identitarianism, which largely sought to secure equal success for minority groups within the existing system, was replaced by a radical form of revolutionary far-left identitarianism that sought to topple the existing system altogether. This also happened to result in feminism taking a step down and anti-racism moving to the forefront - largely because upper-middle-class White feminism was a particularly egregious example of supposed liberal hypocrisy, and because race was more easily tied into both socioeconomic concerns and the "anti-colonialist" sentiments that tied anti-capitalism, anti-liberalism, and minority activism together - but that was simply a side effect of the real change in emphasis. The modern left has no love for pro-establishment women like Hillary Clinton or for pro-establishment gays like Pete Buttigieg, but they don't have much love for pro-establishment racial minorities like Cory Booker or Kamala Harris either. Even Obama is increasingly viewed as a weak and ineffectual figure at best, and a warmongering corporate shill at worst.
It's not that revolutionary socialism tried to replace left-identitarianism and failed, it's that aspects of revolutionary socialism were incorporated into left-identitarian ideology; many left-identitarians are now socialists, communists, or anarchists themselves, and almost all of them are at least nominally opposed to capitalism, which wasn't the case back in 2012. Sure, there are still some non-identitarian socialists like Chapo Trap House and the "dirtbag left," and some non-socialist identitarians like Noah Berlatsky and Charlotte Clymer, but they've become outliers, with both groups increasingly facing mockery and disdain from their fellow leftists. The conflict is now *structural.*
I will now give the left wing perspective on who is winning the culture war.
In leftist circles, it is accepted as true gospel that any amount wokeness and canceling people on twitter is purely symbolic.
Poor people still don't have equal access to health care or education, the wealth gap is still increasing, unions still keep not existing.
A mob of fascists invade the capitol, and three weeks later the so-called "left wing" of American politics is making nice.
All these incredibly canceled right wing figured get to be cry about it from the shelves of bookstores, or during prime time on the largest news network on the planet; and I bet ya'll can't even name one socialist as big as ben shapiro.
There has been no action on climate change. There has been no legislation on police brutality. Conservative have 6 of the 9 seats on the supreme court.
Conservatives almost won the house of reps, despite losing the popular vote for the legislature by 15%.
End Summary.
To people on the left, it looks like they are just barely hanging on by their fingernails, and anyone talking about "culture wars" and "canceling" is deploying rhetoric to hide the fact that they are on a 50 year winning streak.
Consider also that maybe dating has gotten more civilized as time has gone on. Like maybe it's not just that people are older -- also dating, as an institution, which was not that old before, really, has matured.
I feel like the Greta Thunberg/misanthropic/zero-sum/"let's go back to the stone age" type movements were on the rise between 2018-2020 or so. But that kind of ended with the pandemic. In 2019 I probably would've guessed Thunbergism would become the next culture war.
"My more intense feminist friends aren’t any less feminist, but they’re no longer interested in spending their time flogging the same points they did a decade ago. Been there, done that. And, frankly, we’re just not getting unwanted male attention at 35+ the way we did at 22. And of course if we’re still single and looking the men we encounter are older and wiser, too."
This part of the post is legitimately horrifying to me. If a woman still believes in idiotic shit with the same intensity and conviction at 35 as she did at 20, that's *terrible*. I would have hoped that at 35 any sane person would have figured out that unwanted attention is just a price you pay for liberty and complaining about it is bitchy and imbecilic. Clinging to the worst ideas of your youth instead means that you *didn't learn anything*. Likewise, the men she encounters seem in no way to have become wiser as they aged, since wisdom (or even just increased common sense) would imply no longer caring what some judgmental, nagging harridan thought about their hitting on a girl they liked. If you still think that the opinion of the worst women in society matters by age 30, you're a coward, and all you learned is to be a whipped dog.
Rather, what's being described here is our generation *hardening in its folly*, which God willing is not true outside the minuscule cohort of writers of thinkpieces about why they're still single in their 30s, but is a ghastly prospect. I hope they are wrong, and that people at large have obtained far brighter, happier fates than this.
Well, OTOH, I recently watched a street reporter interviewing people (mostly men, though one of them was gay) about whether they still directly asked people out on the street, and they got quite a lot of people answering that they indeed still do... (though nobody seems to whistle women any more, while they also interviewed one older person reminiscing that that he did it a lot in his youth), though I suspect that the "reporting" was heavily biased in the direction of "interesting stories" ?
You're dealing with something that adheres to a model of critical mass; at some point the reaction can't be stopped and you're just going to irradiate everything. Randomly throwing "birthing people" onto the fire didn't burn down the entire forest, but it put out a lick of flame and you felt it.
I sort of agree with Richard: Alex Jones is gasoline compared to Ben Shapiro's wet newspaper; no matter how much people want Ben Shapiro to ignite and immolate them, it's not going to happen. Any social pyromaniac is going to go left currently anyway, BLM is much more flammable than whatever the Mises Institute is pushing. You're dealing with a fire, not a hydra.
Philosophy bear here. I have been meditating on Scott's critiques of what I said. There's definitely a lot of interest here, which is why I really like Scott's stuff, he's got a sharp critical faculty that stops me from getting lazy.
I flatly disagree with him on canceling people- I really do think that treating people as disposable in that way is upstream of many of the more specific problems he points to- e.g. chilling effects, and that we have to make a point to oppose the destruction of people based on what has been called "offense archaeology", even if we don't like them much. I'm increasingly starting to think that even people who have done quite terrible things shouldn't be bullied about it years after the fact. I make an exception for people who hold formal positions of power which they are still abusing in the same way.
I thought his critique of my Marxist explanation of why socialism didn't take off was interesting and insightful, but ultimately I do think entrenched interests have to be at least part of the explanation.
His first counterargument I took to be of the form "if this is true, then why didn't white men band together against liberal anti-racism and liberal feminism in the same way- weren't their interests- or at least their perceived interests- threatened there?", I would argue a number of factors distinguish the cases:
Firstly, one feature of "the powers that be" in our society is that they are all -every single one of them- wealthy. There are some women among them, and some non-white people, but zero poor people. That means the ruling clique is perfectly unified on the necessity of stopping socialism in terms of their interests, in a way they aren't unified against liberal anti-racism and liberal feminism. This could explain part of the difference in response to anti-racism/feminism on the one hand, and socialism on the other.
Secondly, there's a selection effect that means that the kind of people who become very powerful in our society with regards to media ownership and access to communications must all value money very deeply. It stands to reason that they will therefore be more likely to go on the defence against threats to their money than threats to other kinds of status because selection for the position of "large media shareholder" is based much more on concern for wealth (threatened by socialism) than, say, concern for social status (threatened by anti-racism and feminism).
Thirdly, with regards to white and male members of the middle managers the literary class etc- how were they gotten on board with liberal feminism & liberal anti-racism but not socialism? It is possible to get these types to support liberal feminism and anti-racism on the basis that "they are one of the good ones", and chivalrously supporting the weak will make them look good etc. Even men who later get, say, metood, probably in many cases believed that they had nothing to fear from feminism because they didn't recognise their own past sins. Everyone thinks they're one of the good ones, till their vices are unveiled. There's no story you can tell yourself though about how your "being one of the good ones" will protect you from higher marginal tax rates.
Now Scott raised a second point against my Marxist theory of why socialism didn't take off, which was that he hasn't seen that much anti-Marxist material in the media. I would reply that, for the most part, it's been about denying coverage than negative coverage, but if you want to see a run of negative coverage around the broad American socialist movement, look around the time of the 2016/2020 primaries. There the strategy was not so much to refute socialism, as to constantly change the topic, i.e., to the real or imagined bad behaviour of certain socialists on Twitter etc. The strategy seems to be not to give socialism the same kind of media oxygen (liberal) feminism and (liberal) anti-racism have gotten.
Anyway, I'm working on a blog post on exactly this topic. I would love to hear what others think.
"Anyone’s life getting destroyed is sad, but there are many people whose lives got destroyed for other reasons beyond their control, and I don’t want to privilege the people whose lives got destroyed because they said the n-word as targets for sympathy. My concern is more about there being a culture of fear, where people who oppose whatever the wokest 10% of the population think are scared into silence"
I'm not entirely sure why, but this response rings hollow, or off, or something. You care about a macro concern but not the micro issue (not that that is always wrong or anything). I don't want to generate a lot of sympathy for KKK marchers either, but in the interest of free speech (legal version), I find it important that our legal system go to bat for them when the government oversteps. Likewise, in the interest of free speech (philosophical version) aka non-culture-of-fear, I find it important that our extralegal system have a level of tolerance for disliked expression. As the level of punishable transgression decreases and/or level of acceptable punishment increases, like a risk assessment matrix, you get closer to conditions promoting a culture of fear. Some of that movement may represent the implementation of changing societal standards, but some of that just represents the will of a minority that happens to be in charge at the time and puts us on a path dependency. Add to it prevalence-induced concept change (yes, basically just a slippery slope), and you've got a recipe for a culture sliding in a way you don't like. At the macro level, this is your (legitimate!) worry. At the micro level, you (and I) are just another example of someone saying "where my country gone" after we didn't care about someone else's micro world.
"Women are not particularly oppressed when compared to groups that are more oppressed than them."
Women can't walk alone at night. The B slur is the only universally acceptable one left. Marital rape was legal until the late 90's. *We tell girls that their sex means they are required to have certain dreams and not others.* I don't see how women's oppression is not the most ingrained, violent, and normalized one.
"Oppression" to my mind refers to a system of resource extraction from one group by another. Everything else is marginalization (just as depressing, but not oppression.) We don't have many oppressed groups in the U.S. today! Women's bodies, workers' labor, native people's land and resources. Only the latter two of these have a history of international revolutionary campaigns or laws formalizing recognition and remittance (however helpful those have actually been)
What word is the Google Ngrams chart for? "transgender"?
Nick Denton is not even particularly close to being a billionaire, though he is a wealthy man.
"While this makes a bit of sense, I’m sort of skeptical. Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, and John Derbyshire are still on Twitter. Spencer has over 70K followers. I can’t deny that many far-right people have been banned. But it seems more like Twitter enforces the rules somewhat harder on the right than the left for PR reasons, without having a concerted campaign to ban the right in any kind of useful/consistent way."
Twitter has been less censorious than other places. Facebook doesn't allow Spencer, for example.
The banning doesn't have to be done in a "useful/consistent way" to be effective. Here's Vox gloating about how no-platforming "worked" in the case of Milo and Alex Jones.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/5/18125507/milo-yiannopoulos-debt-no-platform
It's clear censorship has destroyed the voices of the most prominent people of the far right, so why wouldn't it work to stop a movement?
"Also, even if they did ban everyone to the right of Ben Shapiro, why wasn’t there a mass movement in favor of Ben Shapiro and others like him?"
Because the extremists are where you get the energy from. If Ben Shapiro is the most extreme person in your universe, and all he's arguing for is going back 10 years, that's not going to be "edgy," which is what gets the cycle started. The right end of the political spectrum has been unnaturally truncated, instead of being allowed to grow organically, which is necessary for these internet cultures to rise.
"...and this seemed non-fake and non-nutpicking..."
Typo?
Even before dating apps got big, I didn't know many couples that met the "sitcom way" of the guy asking out the girl at random (i.e. seeing someone at a grocery store, gym, etc.). There are a few cases here and there, but it's primarily friends that are on the far, far right hand of the extraversion bell curve. The vast majority of couples I know (pre-dating apps) came about from hanging out as a part of a friend group, drunkenly hooking up one night, then going further from there.
"My concern is more about there being a culture of fear, where people who oppose whatever the wokest 10% of the population thing are scared into silence"
This is a complicated thing to try and solve, the fear isn't just made up of fear of social rejection, but also fear that speaking out might harm the good things that have come from whatever movement is in question. That's not an unfounded fear, there are a lot of countries around the world for example where gay rights are being undermined and removed. There's a big information deficit for all involved about what influence their raising their voice might have.
I am once again asking people to stop constructing weird fictional narratives about a dead gay comedy forum.
SA was never some even-handed centrist discussion board. Like most of the 00s internet forums it was about 75% lefties broadly construed and the remainder was mostly libertarian (not well-disposed towards McCain). Something like 50 accounts lost their McCain ban bet and only a few of those were actual regulars. It was not some great epoch-shifting exodus.
And they most likely didn't go to 4chan. By the time 2008 rolled around, 4chan had been a separate website from SA for years (and had spun off of an entirely different subforum with not much overlap to the politics boards). They mostly ended up at various spinoff forums where they accreted all the other bitter people who got banned over the next few years over things like "faggot" becoming dispreferred nomenclature and just memed themselves into fash.
4chan went right-wing because there was a coordinated effort by Stormfront to colonize it and make it right-wing. There were explicit threads about this on Stormfront, and the userbase there was much bigger than the userbase of McCain supporters on SA ever was.
>This captures a fear I have too. Yes, lots of people make fun of conservatives for freaking out over some proposal made half-jokingly by a tiny magazine with three subscribers, and acting like it’s the unified will of the entire Democratic establishment. But some non-zero fraction of the time, the ridiculous thing ends up taking over, and after it’s taken over it’s too omnipresent to protest. The window between “it has been seriously mooted” and “people are terrified of being seen not to whole-heartedly endorse it” is razor-thin, and it’s hard to blame people who aren’t confident of hitting that window, and sometimes that looks like arguing against it before the the mooting could be honestly described as “serious”.
At the risk of litigating a particular instance beyond the point of relevance, I think that quite a lot hinges on the specifics of what the proposal actually *is*, and judging it carefully and consistently. If the fear is that certain language will become common, showing its use throughout society is good evidence. If the fear is that it will be *compulsory*, it is poor evidence. Equivocating between the two is a huge epistemic problem - this isn't just politics, it's a concrete logical error - and leaves one in a position where one can feel threatened so long as any examples of their opposition exist. With only a little effort you can find examples of such all over the political spectrum, and I am extremely skeptical of ad-hoc proofs that the outgroup definitely does it more.
tl;dr: If you can't commit to a specific prediction, you're probably motte-and-bailey'ing yourself.
I think you're not giving quite enough credit to the difference between socialism and wokeness in terms of its being a threat. Regardless of what people say, no one is ever canceled just for being white or just for being male (except maybe in the rare case where the head of a woman's organization is a man, and they finally decide he needs to be demoted to a VP role so that a woman can be in charge - and that's not a "cancelling"). Most people don't like the idea of benefiting just from their race or sex, and so don't worry too much about losing that benefit.
But if you're rich, or a manager, socialists *do* want to cancel you for that. You might not lose your job, but you *will* have your money and/or power taken away from you. Wokeness doesn't want to take away what very many people really don't want taken away from them. Socialism does.
Trebuchet is basically restating Rod Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility: “That will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.”
Thank you for the kind words -- but I think you melded my comment with one by walruss in the same thread? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture#comment-1936798 if I've got the right link.
I agree I was meandering from the topic -- I'm generally trying to put the culture war into a broader perspective, in part as this might make it more solvable, but mainly because I really do think that wokeness is the tip of an iceberg. I'm far from buying the Lomez/ZeroHP/Kaschuta worldviews wholesale, but I'm seeing some of the same things they are seeing: Western culture, tech *and* academia have lost their virility and are on the decline (with a few holdouts, like blockchain, biotech, SpaceX, and maybe these little bits of right-wing creativity I've mentioned; but a few swallows do not a summer make). Taking this as given, it doesn't surprise me that classically liberal ideas are losing popularity and are getting replaced by zero-sum tribalism: The Enlightenment has always been a trade where you paid your spiritual security for adventure and progress; with the latter gone, the trade is looking more and more like a scam. It's just that I'm still hoping the upside can be brought back, perhaps at the cost of inviting some unsavory characters back into the project...
There's also a tiny thing of socialism already having killed tens (or maybe hundreds?) of millions in the 20th century, and wokeness, with all its disgusting totalitarian excesses, haven't yet. So maybe there's still a bright side to it - at least being banned on Twitter is not literal gulags, and however much the socialists might be salivating over those, American society can go as far as "gimme free stuff", but no further yet.
"I’d treated it as kind of mysterious that the George Floyd protests erupted when they did, as intensely as they did; anti-racism talk was trending down, police had been killing black people in approximately equally bad ways since forever, it seemed weird that this was the spark that ignited a conflagration. I think I figured maybe it was just that everyone was on edge because of the pandemic. But several commenters pointed out that no, the George Floyd video was a new low in terms of obvious, enraging, terrifying police brutality."
I never wrote this down anywhere, but I remember thinking that I expected something major to happen. I would not have guessed at the scale of last summer's protests and riots, but I did have an intuitive sense that things had reached a breaking point. Each previous incident had garnered more and more attention and outrage but not changed much, racism was (as Scott noted) in the air, and the pandemic had people itching to get outside and do stuff. But I think primarily it was just "the straw that broke the camel's back."
> I don't feel like non-political boards like /sp/ have changed much in tone in the last +10 years.
Hard disagree, /pol/ has absolutely leaked to the other boards at this point. /tg/'s MtG threads went from reasonable-ish discussions on a trans character to multiple posters going "BLACK MAN ON CARD REEE" during spoiler seasons. The /sp/ game threads I've seen had racist shit talk about blacks and "beaners".
I got into an Internet argument with someone over J.R. Rowling and her transgender views. I knew exactly what I was getting myself into, but I was curious what would happen. I actually bothered to read what Rowling wrote, which I interpreted as being:
"I believe in transgender rights, but I don't believe we should erase the idea of gender, because a lot of hard-fought gains for women have been made over many decades and erasing the idea of gender will destroy that. Also, I believe that the designation of being a "women" in the UK should be stronger than just a man stating they believe they are a woman. There needs to be a stronger commitment to gender reassignment before they should be allowed to be considered a woman, and consequently use a woman's bathroom."
Boy, they were having none of that. As far as the trans-supporters were concerned, she was anti-trans, even though Rowling specifically mentioned support for trans rights. And they said I was anti-trans because I dared to explain what Rowling was saying, even though I said I believed in trans rights and I didn't agree with everything Rowling wrote, I was just trying to explain what I believe Rowling meant.
Trans-activists seem to believe that if you don't check every single box in terms of supporting all the demands of trans people, then you are anti-trans. They are ironically completely binary on a topic that itself proclaims fluidity.
I privately got several messages from people that said they agreed with me and that they are getting sick of trans issues being pushed down into younger and younger education. I think a lot of moderates are getting sick of ultra-wokeness being shoved down everyone's necks, to the point where something may actually be done. In SF, the fight with the SFUSD Board of Education is coming to a head. There is growing support for the recall of several members after a disastrous push to rename dozens of schools named after "racists" around SF at the cost of $1M. It turns out they never bothered to consult with historians, they just googled names and ended up while they refused to do anything about bring kids back into the classroom. And they put their efforts into this at the expense of trying to get kids back into the classroom in a safe way. In fact, so many people have been outraged by this and other acts of wokeness that many people I know might actually muster up enough indignation to sign an Internet petition that might lead to something sometime in the future!
I spent a lot of time on SA for ten+ years up until a year or so ago and it had great forums about "serious" subjects. I never ventured into the "comedy" parts of the forums but I regularly participated in all sorts of threads on computer programming, cars, investing, etc. It, as of a year ago, was a shadow of it's former self, but it was so large and influential that a shadow of it's former self was still pretty large. IIRC, at any given moment it was not uncommon to see several thousand users active.
> Yes, lots of people make fun of conservatives for freaking out over some proposal made half-jokingly by a tiny magazine with three subscribers, and acting like it’s the unified will of the entire Democratic establishment. But some non-zero fraction of the time, the ridiculous thing ends up taking over, and after it’s taken over it’s too omnipresent to protest.
I just want to point out that I can specifically recall taking this sort of position years ago when some liberal person made a point about far-right conservatism and now it seems like the far right has vastly more sway than I ever thought possible.
To that anonymous liberal person I was arguing with so many years ago: you were right and I was wrong!
"While this makes a bit of sense, I’m sort of skeptical. Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, and John Derbyshire are still on Twitter. Spencer has over 70K followers."
This analysis is missing something I can't quite articulate - Molineux and Milo were just enthralling in a way that Spencer et al are not. My brain is informing me that the problem is that Spencer et al are too far off the grid and Shapiro is too centrist, while Molyneux et al were in the edginess sweet spot, but I'm not sure that's right.
All I can really offer is my personal experience that if I had gotten sucked down the rabbit hole it would have been because of Molyneux and Milo. Spencer is interesting to gawk at, but he's not attractive like them. And Shapiro isn't a rabbit hole at all.
Trebuchet's comment sounds a lot like Rod Dreher's Law of Merited Impossibility: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.”
> I have a hard time feeling sorry for people who used the n-word in a tweet five years ago. I think it’s kind of silly to waste your energy trying to destroy their lives, but also kind of silly to waste your energy supporting them super-hard.
You do realize that approximately 100% of this concern has been for teenagers using the word in the friendly hip hop way and getting fired/rejected from colleges years later for this horrible crime, right? No IDW types are rising to the defense of repentant racists AFAIK, and there isn't a movement to save them. Protecting *the intent* behind language as something that matters seems like an important line to hold in the fight against wokeness, at least to me.
As for George Floyd, it *was* a particularly bad video, and the fact that only videos of black people getting killed rise to public attention means since Trayvon a whole generation of black and white people on the left thinks that unjustified police violence is pretty much just something that happens to black people and happens all the time. The concept of the media being biased *towards* coverage of white-on-black violence in our systemically racist country is so unthinkable to these people that the current climate is *proof* of an epidemic. You can show up with the Washington Post data base, FBI crime stats, similarly horrifying videos of Tony Timpa and Daniel Shaver but they are still pretty unknown and you can't say anything without raising scary Trump supporter alarms for 90% of liberals.
Holy SHIT! The first question in that Anna Khachiyan interview is the greatest thing ever. By the time I finished reading it I was in love. There is not enough money in the world to send Niccolo I'm-typing-on-a-phone-so-I-can't-look-up-whatever-his(her?)-last-name-is for a subscription. Thanks Darij.
The introduction was great too, but it's Red Scare fan service. If you aren't already involved you're not going to get the jokes. The rest of the interview brightened my day even though I had my identity stolen and spent twelve hours when I should have been working tracking down what the hell happened and placing all kinds of traps around my finances that I'm positive won't come back and bite me on my ass
> I have a hard time feeling sorry for people who used the n-word in a tweet five years ago.
It occurs to me to wonder how soon it will be first rude and then unforgivable to say (literally) "the n-word". After all, we know what word you mean here, and all your sly euphemism doesn't excuse it. And if that time comes, current events show us that the fact that you said it back in 2021 will not buy you any understanding.
One strange thing about the discourse around terms like "birthing persons" which may not have been obvious to you or others on the periphery is that anti-trans people routinely portray such attempts to be inclusive as attempts to be inclusive of trans women (usually with associated rhetoric about "erasing women"), when in fact they are attempts to be inclusive of transmasculine people (Ozy of Thing of Things being one such person you and older commenters may be familiar with). I'm unsure why this disconnect with the actual stated (and to me obvious if you actually think about it for 30 seconds) intent is so common and consistent across a wide variety of anti-trans groups, but it is.
By and large such inclusivity attempts are a supplement rather than a replacement (essentially, if you have a transmasculine pregnant person in front of you, maybe don't use heavily female-gendered terms for them which might make them uncomfortable), but some people do go farther in terms of trying to universalize it, and I wish they wouldn't because right now it mostly just makes people mad at us trans/non-binary people for little benefit. I like gender-neutral language, I want people to use more of it, but I also want to not start unhelpful fights and language evolution is a complicated process that doesn't respond very well to artificial pushes in a particular direction.
> The window between “it has been seriously mooted” and “people are terrified of being seen not to whole-heartedly endorse it” is razor-thin
One area I worry about regarding this is mask requirements. I think we're in a narrow window where we can say, now that everyone can get vaccinated, mask requirements are dumb and need to end. There's a medically reasonable response of "wait a few weeks for everyone who wants a vaccine to be done with theirs and rates to go down some", but I worry we have a narrow window and if we don't push back hard right now we'll be stuck with mask mandates and other covid laws forever, just like we are with the TSA.
I wonder if the liberal mainstream might give fourth-wave feminism a milder version of the "New Atheism treatment" over the trans issue. Clearly many/most feminists are ardent trans rights supporters - just as many/most New Atheists became social justice evangelists - but there's enough of a gender critical contingent that I feel as though the ideology itself - particularly the 70s-era feminist philosophy that more or less formed the basis upon which essentially all subsequent feminist thought and activism is predicated - might be in danger of coming under suspicion.
John S bringing up Rodney King to show that rioting is uncorrelated with extremity of the catalyzing incident of police misconduct totally ignores the relative scarcity of video in the 1990's. Rodney King's beating is not an extreme example of police misconduct in today's world of ubiquitous smartphone footage, but when footage was so rare this was the most extreme example of state indifference to clear misconduct audiences would be exposed to.* If anything the Rodney King example suggests that the rise of BLM is a product of the ubiquity of cell phone video, and the ease of viral streaming.
And look, I hate to say it, but framing violent riots by the urban underclass as "internet fashion, go figure"" is peak confusing twitter for real life. No one is less likely to read an essay from some lefty professor on how riots are the voice of the voiceless than someone who actually lives in the shitty part of Kenosha.
Police violence against civil rights protestors in the 1960's was similarly a shocking expose of police violence, but less an expose of police hypocrisy, as violently enforcing Jim Crow is what they were supposed to do.
> This captures a fear I have too. Yes, lots of people make fun of conservatives for freaking out over some proposal made half-jokingly by a tiny magazine with three subscribers, and acting like it’s the unified will of the entire Democratic establishment. But some non-zero fraction of the time, the ridiculous thing ends up taking over, and after it’s taken over it’s too omnipresent to protest. The window between “it has been seriously mooted” and “people are terrified of being seen not to whole-heartedly endorse it” is razor-thin, and it’s hard to blame people who aren’t confident of hitting that window, and sometimes that looks like arguing against it before the the mooting could be honestly described as “serious”.
But naturally this could never, *ever* apply to racists going from Just Trying To Talk About Genetics to anywhere else, goodness me no.
Just read a book by Lee Kuan Yew. Coming from “multiculturalism will destroy America” to this comment section is quite jarring. When the East looks over the ashes of the West, they will wonder what compelled such a successful culture to allow itself to be destroyed from within by such degeneracy...let’s hope Scott is right that this is all just a passing phase!
"When I was dating more, I had some success using OKCupid, where most people would write long essays about who they were and what kind of relationship they wanted. Tinder was always more of a mystery; usually just a photo plus a one-sentence cryptic description like '25, Aquarius, hit me up! <3' I sometimes considered lowering my standards enough to “swipe right” on one of these people, but was never actually able to sacrifice that amount of dignity. Then OKCupid became a much worse Tinder clone and my useful options collapsed to zero (don’t worry, I’ve since found someone great through my community). While in theory dating apps are a great solution to this problem, in practice they’re surprisingly terrible."
This roughly matches my experiences using both OKCupid and Tinder in the past, including not finding OKCupid useful after it became a Tinder clone. I'm thinking of getting back onto the dating market now that I'm vaccinated, but it will need to be mostly online since I know very few women in real life. Does anyone have suggestions for dating apps/sites that aren't surprisingly terrible?
"As an academic, I'm worried about campus in particular, and things like this are making me sit on suitcases"
Is "sit on suitcases" a saying? I searched around but couldn't find anything.
"I had never heard this story before and it sounds just ridiculous enough to potentially be true"
Not quite true I think. It is correct that a lot of disgruntled goons (as somethingawful posters called themselves) ended up on 4chan. Disgruntled as in permanently banned, naturally, and somethingawul moderators were known for being a tad impulsive sometimes, let's put it this way.
But on the other hand making political predictions and staking your account on that prediction was a long-running tradition, this game commenced come each presidential election cycle, and I think for other elections as well, and knowing goons, probably for other stuff too - like oscars etc.
The thing is - people getting in the game knew the risks. If you predict wrong, your account gets banned, I am sure people here can appreciate this setup.
And to clarify, SA accounts were paywalled, registrering an account was like $20, and if you got banned, you could immediately re-register your username with another twenty (unless you were permabanned, which was a different form of ban, or probated for, like, 10000 days, or permaprobated)
So I doubt a significant percentage of 4channers were born out of betting against Obama. A lot of folks did get banned for posting in a right-wingy way, that's correct - SA moderation was known for its left-wing slant - but a lot of folk got banned for posting paedofilia, another big no-no, as well, so you know. Mileage may vary and all that.
My brief follow-up would be that it seems a lot like evil people start tiny movements without much membership. They aren't real groups. Disaffection and stigma pushes lost millennial boys into their orbit, most eventually get fed up/horrified and leave, but the groups are sticky and end up legitimized and enlarged by the process. Don't know if I communicated that well in my first post.
I believe the google search results for trans might be biased as opposed to feminism or racism since it would also include porn searches which would dwarf any other kind of searches. That's why lgbt, transphobia and terf are better terms to search, and as you said that shows better trending.
The question of socialism can be easily explained by not considering the ruling class to be unified. I know, ironic.
In a broadly Turchinian view, we need to distinguish an established elite from aspiring elites (and within those, regular elite aspirants from counter-elites, but counter-elites operate outside mainstream institutions, so they need not be included in this particular equation; it suffices to say they leave to create their own alternative institutions, like Substack). At present, aspiring elites can be considered roughly equivalent to urban intelligentsia. (Professional-Managerial Class in modern parlance.) Degree inflation and all, people are forced to get a diploma for regular jobs, so not everyone college-educated is in this group, but many are, and it's still very large. Way too large for the limited number of positions available to it, and they're in a constant, brutal fight for status. (They're also in a constant class war, trying to create as much demand for cushy specialist jobs as possible. I'd give HR and diversity consultants as obvious examples, but they're only a small fraction of the whole process, and as a whole it isn't culturally coded woke, job market for economists works the same way. But again, that's another story.)
And brutal means brutal. Once someone discovered moral outrages can fire people and create job/promotion opportunitiess, it was only a matter of time before they became commonplace. This required a unified, shared ideology, and the one most conductive to the task won out. Or rather, keeps winning out. Once older elite aspirants establish themselves, they're becoming a target of the next wave of challengers, and the ideological tools must change to reflect that. You don't take feminists down with misogyny, you take them down with transphobia.
So, why not socialism? First, because the aspiring elites are aspiring to be elites. Diversity quotas in elite positions are in their interest, actual egalitarianism is not. And they're taking over current institutions, which are, and have been for 200+ years, liberal, so the aspirants will themselves be liberal. (Those who dream of soviet union with themselves at the top of politburo would still need to defect to counter-elites to get there.) Second, because the elite aspirants are not actually in charge, the elites, i.e. wealthy stockholders, are. They'd very much like to be in charge instead of stockholers, and they'll make some noises to that effect, socialism-flavored or not (mostly merely etatism-flavored, some will call that socialism due to a flawed conceptual apparatus, but it's really not), but they can only go so far until the stockholers intervene, and in the meantime they're still employed to serve whatever immediate interests the stockholders currently have.
Also, as a somewhat more general comment to the recent string of culture war articles: I don't really disagree with the whole cultural part of the analysis, but I feel detaching it from wider context took away any predictive power it might have had. In particular, we socialists are simply fighting a different battle from elite aspirants, one for the souls and attention of common people. (So far, we're losing badly, though I would lie if I denied the memetic progress we made in the last few years. But even that progress is frankly irrelevant, society as a whole has recently started moving leftward, it will continue to do so with our help or not, for purely material reasons, and socialist ideas will be rediscovered, memetically proficient and fashionable or not. That post-2008 surge in interest in socialism? Is it really explained by Obama being called names, or perhaps by the biggest economic downturn in decades? I'd venture the latter.)
> Some commenters got into a subthread about a claim that transgender advocates wanted to rename “Mother’s Day” to “Birthing Person’s Day”, with the predictable response that nobody really wanted to do that and it was a fake conservative talking point / hyperbole / satire / attempt to scare people. Someone else pointed out that a Congresswoman was now using “birthing person” instead of “mother” and this seemed non-fake and non-nutpicking, and someone else pointed out that using “birthing person” was different from demanding other people use it, or changing the name of an entire holiday.
This won't happen. Not because it'd be wierd, but because this fails to make sense even from a woke perpsective. Trans advocates don't advocate renameing womens bathrooms to people-with-vaginas bathroom. They advocate for allowing transwomen to use womens bathrooms. When it comes to Mothers day, you would expect them to act analogously . They recognise that "birthing people" is a different set of people as "mothers" (and you do too if you believe adoptive mothers are a thing), but they'd much rather have mothers day celebrate all parents that happen to be female than people that happen to give birth.
The idea that they would come up with "birthing people day" is exactly how conservatives think progressivism works, not how it actually works.
> I … have to admit that I didn’t watch the video. I heard the summary, I don’t have much of a stomach for horrible things, I figured I didn’t have to watch this poor man die.
...it had the wrong ratio of enticing-to-horrifying.
> Women are not particularly oppressed when compared to groups that are more oppressed than them
Is this a joke sentence? Maybe I just missed the tone.
I've no real love for feminism, but ciswomen have had their ordinary places nuked. Even /r/2Xchromosomes, whose title is literally about 2X, can't work for ciswomen. My wife has to find tiny little places on Facebook to talk about women's issues. And I don't mean "how do we stop Handmaid's Tale," I mean just plain-jane women talking about everyday ordinary stuff. And the places get destroyed every few months and new ones need to be found, like some kind of terror cells.
I have less data on this, but I've heard from friends that lesbian spaces have also been annihilated. Lesbians are outnumbered by transwomen who want to date ciswomen, and they aren't allowed to just filter them out.
One of my culture-war hypothesis is that the tech companies are banning all of the non-crazy far-right people and the influential right-wing people, while still keeping around the crazies. This provides a double advantage. First, they can deflect criticism of opinion-based censorship by pointing at the remaining fringe speakers. Secondly, the only right-wing speakers which can be found are so crazy as to be generally repellant to even the moderate right.
This is why people like Alex Jones and Denis Prager needed to be taken off the platform. They were either popular (and thus influential), or moderate enough that they could result in convincing people.
I’m too old too understand a lot of this. I think in some sense I’m just not supposed to get it. My generation established its own identity by behaving in ways that our elders wouldn’t get - See “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand” - I would really like to understand how some of my old hippie friends are wearing red hats though. I guess I’ll reread “Kill All Normies”. Have a 50th high school reunion coming up in July. That’s not a lot of time to get a handle on this. Really, I don’t care about agreeing with it. It would be a comfort to simply understand what is going on in people’s heads.
<i>>> After 2016 (when my gf of 4 years and I broke up), I exclusively went on dates using dating apps. I have never asked out a coworker, a girl at a bar, or a girl at the gym, and I don't know a single couple in my peer group who met that way either. For some reason, portrayal of dating in the media has yet to catch up.</i>
Dating apps kind of work if you're a guy willing to date at least -2 points below where you should: https://theredquest.wordpress.com/2019/06/03/oh-i-was-wrong-about-the-tinder-thing-it-is-that-bad/. The top chicks I've dated, I've met in real life. The guys who really want to do dating well still talk to girls in real life. Online dating works poorly, but good enough for this guy.
Go read romance novels (porn for chicks). Zero of them feature a meet-cute on an app. Maybe not quite literally zero, but .0002% rounds down to zero. Top guys figure out how to date offline.
I think there's a narrative here where certain people are congratulating themselves on succeeding at derailing a new extremist right-wing movement.
However, the new extremist right-wing movements, insofar as they have been "defeated", are a figment of the imagination, either in beliefs, popularity, or appeal. MRAs, for example, aren't right-wing; they're left-wing. And they have (appropriately!) increasingly faded into the background as their causes have become mainstream; think about how domestic abuse violence against men is treated today, as compared to how it was treated twenty years ago.
Deplatforming has not eroded the right-wing movement; it has created a new, much more powerful, right-wing movement. My company now includes some ordinary, fairly bright right-wing people who have beliefs that, a decade ago, would have been constrained to a few very crazy, very online people. They have lost all trust in the institutions that once could be relied upon to hold these kinds of beliefs in check; they have lost all trust that there is any objectivity in terms of what information reaches them, and thus have no constraint on what kind of beliefs about the world make sense.
This has not been a successful strategy for the illiberal left; this last election is not proof that their strategy works, it is proof of how badly it is going. They are creating a monster, which they empower more and more with each iteration of the process. And frankly, a lot of the liberal left are moving to the right; the idea that opposing this insane process is right and good has not-so-quietly entered the mainstream.
> First, how does the wokeness vs. socialism calculus in self-interested people really come out? White male executives might reasonably worry that if their companies became super-woke, they could get cancelled, or miss out on promotions that go to minorities instead. On the other hand, it’s very easy for the same white male executive to say “Oh, yeah, there should be Medicare for all and higher taxes on the rich”, knowing that all this will get abstracted over the whole country, and his own pronouncement will earn him signaling points but not really affect the chance of those things happening too much.
It's not the executives making these decisions, it's the people above them, billionaires like Jeff Bezos or Jack Dorsey. People like that have no reason to care about "missing out on promotions", but they do care about a government that would clip the wings of tech billionaires, as it would reduce their own power, wealth, and status.
"On the other hand, it’s very easy for the same white male executive to say “Oh, yeah, there should be Medicare for all and higher taxes on the rich”, knowing that all this will get abstracted over the whole country, and his own pronouncement will earn him signaling points but not really affect the chance of those things happening too much."
I'm surprised to the point of "what am I missing" that more CEO types don't already do this. Particularly the M4A thing - it'd have a very modest impact on their own personal wealth and likely improve their companies' bottom line, what's the danger of even signaling toward it?
"So maybe it was just a really moving video."
It was genuinely one of the roughest things I have ever seen, and I am very online. Other effects absolutely factor in, but I wouldn't underplay the power of a really intense video.
"But it seems more like Twitter enforces the rules somewhat harder on the right than the left for PR reasons, without having a concerted campaign to ban the right in any kind of useful/consistent way."
Evidence for this very much needed.
First of all you write:
While this makes a bit of sense, I’m sort of skeptical. Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, and John Derbyshire are still on Twitter. Spencer has over 70K followers. I can’t deny that many far-right people have been banned. But it seems more like Twitter enforces the rules somewhat harder on the right than the left for PR reasons, without having a concerted campaign to ban the right in any kind of useful/consistent way.
Also, even if they did ban everyone to the right of Ben Shapiro, why wasn’t there a mass movement in favor of Ben Shapiro and others like him? I feel like far-right people can still find lots of far-right celebrities to follow, and Jones and Molyneux weren’t even central examples of far-rightists. Surely there are still enough unbanned rightists to satisfy almost anybody; this makes it hard for me to believe this had too big an effect.
This is not the same, Ben Shapiro is deliberately a funny, family-friendly right-wing pundit (or at least, as funny a pundit can be. Y'all may claim he's "cringe" or whatever - but Jon Stewart was a thing and basically epitomized the Smug Champagne Socialist archetype - I never hear the same complaints there , wonder why?.
The family friendly pundit is not the person who provides energy for a movement, particularly under young people. Take a look at the success of 'the Squad' - they're totally mindkilled, routinely display raw ignorance of the topics they discuss, and are generally not very respectable. However - they are *popular*, and they are popular because they have staked out an identitarian position in respect to their relationship with the established order. They are combative firebrands and not too concerned with how legitimate their ideological or technical positions are.
As a movement , whether or not you like those people - you *need* those people because they drive energy to the project as well as "create space" within the Overton window.
"Also, even if they did ban everyone to the right of Ben Shapiro, why wasn’t there a mass movement in favor of Ben Shapiro and others like him?"
Not sure if anyone said this, but maybe because Shapiro and the like forgo the strongest alternative explanation to systemic racism for racial disparities, HBD? And in terms of foreign policy and economics Shapiro is on the opposite side to the alt-right. A mass movement based on failed Bush-neocon policy?
Are conservative mass movements even a thing?
In Sweden, an NHS language guideline recommends avoiding the word for "woman". Official information says things like "Pregnancy pay can be paid to a pregnant person if [...] ze is unable to work while ze is pregnant" and "This is the case whether the one giving birth is a woman or a man". On the one hand, I would think that expressions such as "people with uteruses" would be too cumbersome to become widespread, but, on the other hand, unwieldy expressions for cripples and morons have managed to become commonplace, so it is not unthinkable.
>Women are not particularly oppressed when compared to groups that are more oppressed than them. This makes it kind of hard to sustain a feminist movement; you’re selecting for people who have accepted the social justice paradigm where issues should be about how oppressed relevant groups are, but you also want to focus your energies on a less-than-maximally-oppressed group. This makes it easy for other people to chide and hijack you, and it sounds like feminism keeps getting chided and hijacked.
I would say globally speaking, the "maximally oppressed" groups would be people of the lowest caste in North Korea, citizens of Zimbabwe, factory farm animals, etc. Any way for us to accelerate a transition towards focusing on their problems?
I have a couple hypotheses of the causes of the rise and fall of online culture wars.
1. Boredom. Going down a new rabbit hole is fun, but eventually you get bored of it and look for something else. (Maybe this also acts in the form of the aggregate boredom of the public reducing the virality of old topics).
2. Reaction. A movement's overreach incubates its own opposition and causes it to lose momentum. Salient examples of overreach that get widespread media coverage update the priors of naive individuals to make them harder to recruit. This sorta seemed to happen in all three of the culture war phases. This also definitely happened with communism back in the 20th century. But somehow the dallas cop murders etc didn't slow down BLM. Clearly some movements are more susceptible than others to this sort of weakmanning. Maybe it's that the media are eager to distance the movement from the overreach when the media like the movement, and eager to pin the overreach on the movement when they dislike the movement. So the one kid who panicked and hit the gas at charlottesville when someone pointed a gun at him is the fault of every white person who wants to continue to have a homeland not ruled by foreigners, but the dallas cop murders and dozens of 2020 cop murders are just a freak occurrence with absolutely nothing to do with BLM going around chanting "Pigs in a blanket, fry em like bacon".
Regarding the idea of hitting on women being viewed as creepy, I will second the idea that this didn't fade away but rather has become entrenched as the new norm, at least in educated circles . Allow me to quote from the 2018 Atlantic article, "Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?" (Simon is a 32-year-old grad student who has recently re-entered the dating pool):
“My first instinct was go to bars,” Simon said. But each time he went to one, he struck out. He couldn’t escape the sense that hitting on someone in person had, in a short period of time, gone from normal behavior to borderline creepy.
...“I play volleyball,” he added. “I had somebody on the volleyball team two years ago who I thought was cute, and we’d been playing together for a while.” Simon wanted to ask her out, but ultimately concluded that this would be “incredibly awkward,” even “boorish.”
At first, I wondered whether Simon was being overly genteel, or a little paranoid. But the more people I talked with, the more I came to believe that he was simply describing an emerging cultural reality.
This shift seems to be accelerating amid the national reckoning with sexual assault and harassment, and a concomitant shifting of boundaries. According to a November 2017 Economist/YouGov poll, 17 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 now believe that a man inviting a woman out for a drink “always” or “usually” constitutes sexual harassment.
...quite a few [women] suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. “Creeper! Get away from me,” one woman imagined thinking.
In the early days of internet culture (the mid-to-late 90s), there were constant debates between Christians and atheists for three reasons: First, atheism was just starting to become a mainstream and socially acceptable position. A lot of devout Christians were quick to argument simply because they'd never actually talked to an avowed atheist before and were genuinely surprised that anyone didn't believe in God, while a lot of atheists were quick to argument because they'd spent their entire lives getting flak for their views and finally had a place where they could fight back. Second, the internet was just starting to open up to the general public; previously, it had largely been the province of tech geeks who were disproportionately atheistic compared to the rest of the population, and the sudden influx of normie Christians was a recipe for conflict. Third, and perhaps most importantly, people just didn't have anything better to talk about. After all, times were good! We were living in a time of unprecedented peace and economic prosperity. In a sense, those early internet debates on theism were a luxury afforded by the lack of real material concerns during the Pax Americana. The conflict was *casual*.
That changed in the 2000s. The core conflict of the 2001-2008 era wasn't Christianity vs. New Atheism. It was Bush's coalition of pro-Jesus, pro-America, pro-war jingoists vs. everyone else (particularly liberals and libertarians, many of whom were atheists or at least secularists themselves). After 9/11 and the Iraq War, there was a real sense that the conflict wasn't between Islamic fundamentalism and secular liberalism, but between Islamic fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism. Yes, the anti-war crowd also talked about how Cheney was dragging us into war for oil, or how Bush just wanted to avenge the hit that Saddam placed on his dad, but there was a very real sense that Christianity itself was one of the driving factors behind American foreign interventionism. The debates over God's existence became less abstract and more heated as they became a proxy for Bushism vs. an unlikely alliance of liberals, libertarians, leftists, pacifists, and tech bros. The conflict was *partisan*, and internet atheism was only one part of it.
But after Obama's election, partisan politics in the U.S. took a different turn. Obama continued the military interventionism of his predecessor, which promptly killed the narrative that we were fighting in the name of Christian crusader-imperialism (of all the things he's been accused of being, I don't think anyone ever accused Obama of being too fanatically Christian). And aside from Obamacare, things didn't change all that much domestically either. Plus, the 2008 financial crisis (which, in my opinion, actually had even more of an impact on Americans and U.S. politics than 9/11) caused the first notable decline in standards of living since the 70s. People became less inclined to focus on abstract theological issues or even the very real problems of Afghanis and Iraqis half a world away, shifting their focus to home.
Combine worsening socioeconomic conditions (which affected everyone, but were perceived as disproportionately affecting racial minorities and women), the leftover remnants of the Bush-era Culture War (especially the debates over women's rights, abortion, and gay marriage), a newfound emphasis on race as a result of having the country's first Black President, and the advent of new forms of social media that encouraged controversy and polarization and echo chambers, and you have the perfect storm of factors to result in something like the left-identitarian movement of the late 2000s and early 2010s. While feminism may have been the "big sister" in the left-identitarian alliance, this was also around the same time that critical race theory and LGBT identity movements became popularized, along with the notion of "intersectionality" (i.e. the idea that the struggles of racial minorities, women, queer people, disabled people, etc. were all actually the same struggle). The conflict was now *cultural* first and foremost.
So what happened in 2015-2016? I don't think it's as simple as racial issues replacing feminism as the topic of the day, but rather a total repudiation of the idea that making the ruling class more diverse (in terms of race or gender) was a goal worth fighting for. The earlier model of liberal identitarianism, which largely sought to secure equal success for minority groups within the existing system, was replaced by a radical form of revolutionary far-left identitarianism that sought to topple the existing system altogether. This also happened to result in feminism taking a step down and anti-racism moving to the forefront - largely because upper-middle-class White feminism was a particularly egregious example of supposed liberal hypocrisy, and because race was more easily tied into both socioeconomic concerns and the "anti-colonialist" sentiments that tied anti-capitalism, anti-liberalism, and minority activism together - but that was simply a side effect of the real change in emphasis. The modern left has no love for pro-establishment women like Hillary Clinton or for pro-establishment gays like Pete Buttigieg, but they don't have much love for pro-establishment racial minorities like Cory Booker or Kamala Harris either. Even Obama is increasingly viewed as a weak and ineffectual figure at best, and a warmongering corporate shill at worst.
It's not that revolutionary socialism tried to replace left-identitarianism and failed, it's that aspects of revolutionary socialism were incorporated into left-identitarian ideology; many left-identitarians are now socialists, communists, or anarchists themselves, and almost all of them are at least nominally opposed to capitalism, which wasn't the case back in 2012. Sure, there are still some non-identitarian socialists like Chapo Trap House and the "dirtbag left," and some non-socialist identitarians like Noah Berlatsky and Charlotte Clymer, but they've become outliers, with both groups increasingly facing mockery and disdain from their fellow leftists. The conflict is now *structural.*
Prior: I am at least .65 of a leftist.
I will now give the left wing perspective on who is winning the culture war.
In leftist circles, it is accepted as true gospel that any amount wokeness and canceling people on twitter is purely symbolic.
Poor people still don't have equal access to health care or education, the wealth gap is still increasing, unions still keep not existing.
A mob of fascists invade the capitol, and three weeks later the so-called "left wing" of American politics is making nice.
All these incredibly canceled right wing figured get to be cry about it from the shelves of bookstores, or during prime time on the largest news network on the planet; and I bet ya'll can't even name one socialist as big as ben shapiro.
There has been no action on climate change. There has been no legislation on police brutality. Conservative have 6 of the 9 seats on the supreme court.
Conservatives almost won the house of reps, despite losing the popular vote for the legislature by 15%.
End Summary.
To people on the left, it looks like they are just barely hanging on by their fingernails, and anyone talking about "culture wars" and "canceling" is deploying rhetoric to hide the fact that they are on a 50 year winning streak.
Consider also that maybe dating has gotten more civilized as time has gone on. Like maybe it's not just that people are older -- also dating, as an institution, which was not that old before, really, has matured.
I feel like the Greta Thunberg/misanthropic/zero-sum/"let's go back to the stone age" type movements were on the rise between 2018-2020 or so. But that kind of ended with the pandemic. In 2019 I probably would've guessed Thunbergism would become the next culture war.
"My more intense feminist friends aren’t any less feminist, but they’re no longer interested in spending their time flogging the same points they did a decade ago. Been there, done that. And, frankly, we’re just not getting unwanted male attention at 35+ the way we did at 22. And of course if we’re still single and looking the men we encounter are older and wiser, too."
This part of the post is legitimately horrifying to me. If a woman still believes in idiotic shit with the same intensity and conviction at 35 as she did at 20, that's *terrible*. I would have hoped that at 35 any sane person would have figured out that unwanted attention is just a price you pay for liberty and complaining about it is bitchy and imbecilic. Clinging to the worst ideas of your youth instead means that you *didn't learn anything*. Likewise, the men she encounters seem in no way to have become wiser as they aged, since wisdom (or even just increased common sense) would imply no longer caring what some judgmental, nagging harridan thought about their hitting on a girl they liked. If you still think that the opinion of the worst women in society matters by age 30, you're a coward, and all you learned is to be a whipped dog.
Rather, what's being described here is our generation *hardening in its folly*, which God willing is not true outside the minuscule cohort of writers of thinkpieces about why they're still single in their 30s, but is a ghastly prospect. I hope they are wrong, and that people at large have obtained far brighter, happier fates than this.
Well, OTOH, I recently watched a street reporter interviewing people (mostly men, though one of them was gay) about whether they still directly asked people out on the street, and they got quite a lot of people answering that they indeed still do... (though nobody seems to whistle women any more, while they also interviewed one older person reminiscing that that he did it a lot in his youth), though I suspect that the "reporting" was heavily biased in the direction of "interesting stories" ?
You're dealing with something that adheres to a model of critical mass; at some point the reaction can't be stopped and you're just going to irradiate everything. Randomly throwing "birthing people" onto the fire didn't burn down the entire forest, but it put out a lick of flame and you felt it.
I sort of agree with Richard: Alex Jones is gasoline compared to Ben Shapiro's wet newspaper; no matter how much people want Ben Shapiro to ignite and immolate them, it's not going to happen. Any social pyromaniac is going to go left currently anyway, BLM is much more flammable than whatever the Mises Institute is pushing. You're dealing with a fire, not a hydra.
Philosophy bear here. I have been meditating on Scott's critiques of what I said. There's definitely a lot of interest here, which is why I really like Scott's stuff, he's got a sharp critical faculty that stops me from getting lazy.
I flatly disagree with him on canceling people- I really do think that treating people as disposable in that way is upstream of many of the more specific problems he points to- e.g. chilling effects, and that we have to make a point to oppose the destruction of people based on what has been called "offense archaeology", even if we don't like them much. I'm increasingly starting to think that even people who have done quite terrible things shouldn't be bullied about it years after the fact. I make an exception for people who hold formal positions of power which they are still abusing in the same way.
I thought his critique of my Marxist explanation of why socialism didn't take off was interesting and insightful, but ultimately I do think entrenched interests have to be at least part of the explanation.
His first counterargument I took to be of the form "if this is true, then why didn't white men band together against liberal anti-racism and liberal feminism in the same way- weren't their interests- or at least their perceived interests- threatened there?", I would argue a number of factors distinguish the cases:
Firstly, one feature of "the powers that be" in our society is that they are all -every single one of them- wealthy. There are some women among them, and some non-white people, but zero poor people. That means the ruling clique is perfectly unified on the necessity of stopping socialism in terms of their interests, in a way they aren't unified against liberal anti-racism and liberal feminism. This could explain part of the difference in response to anti-racism/feminism on the one hand, and socialism on the other.
Secondly, there's a selection effect that means that the kind of people who become very powerful in our society with regards to media ownership and access to communications must all value money very deeply. It stands to reason that they will therefore be more likely to go on the defence against threats to their money than threats to other kinds of status because selection for the position of "large media shareholder" is based much more on concern for wealth (threatened by socialism) than, say, concern for social status (threatened by anti-racism and feminism).
Thirdly, with regards to white and male members of the middle managers the literary class etc- how were they gotten on board with liberal feminism & liberal anti-racism but not socialism? It is possible to get these types to support liberal feminism and anti-racism on the basis that "they are one of the good ones", and chivalrously supporting the weak will make them look good etc. Even men who later get, say, metood, probably in many cases believed that they had nothing to fear from feminism because they didn't recognise their own past sins. Everyone thinks they're one of the good ones, till their vices are unveiled. There's no story you can tell yourself though about how your "being one of the good ones" will protect you from higher marginal tax rates.
Now Scott raised a second point against my Marxist theory of why socialism didn't take off, which was that he hasn't seen that much anti-Marxist material in the media. I would reply that, for the most part, it's been about denying coverage than negative coverage, but if you want to see a run of negative coverage around the broad American socialist movement, look around the time of the 2016/2020 primaries. There the strategy was not so much to refute socialism, as to constantly change the topic, i.e., to the real or imagined bad behaviour of certain socialists on Twitter etc. The strategy seems to be not to give socialism the same kind of media oxygen (liberal) feminism and (liberal) anti-racism have gotten.
Anyway, I'm working on a blog post on exactly this topic. I would love to hear what others think.
"Anyone’s life getting destroyed is sad, but there are many people whose lives got destroyed for other reasons beyond their control, and I don’t want to privilege the people whose lives got destroyed because they said the n-word as targets for sympathy. My concern is more about there being a culture of fear, where people who oppose whatever the wokest 10% of the population think are scared into silence"
I'm not entirely sure why, but this response rings hollow, or off, or something. You care about a macro concern but not the micro issue (not that that is always wrong or anything). I don't want to generate a lot of sympathy for KKK marchers either, but in the interest of free speech (legal version), I find it important that our legal system go to bat for them when the government oversteps. Likewise, in the interest of free speech (philosophical version) aka non-culture-of-fear, I find it important that our extralegal system have a level of tolerance for disliked expression. As the level of punishable transgression decreases and/or level of acceptable punishment increases, like a risk assessment matrix, you get closer to conditions promoting a culture of fear. Some of that movement may represent the implementation of changing societal standards, but some of that just represents the will of a minority that happens to be in charge at the time and puts us on a path dependency. Add to it prevalence-induced concept change (yes, basically just a slippery slope), and you've got a recipe for a culture sliding in a way you don't like. At the macro level, this is your (legitimate!) worry. At the micro level, you (and I) are just another example of someone saying "where my country gone" after we didn't care about someone else's micro world.
"Women are not particularly oppressed when compared to groups that are more oppressed than them."
Women can't walk alone at night. The B slur is the only universally acceptable one left. Marital rape was legal until the late 90's. *We tell girls that their sex means they are required to have certain dreams and not others.* I don't see how women's oppression is not the most ingrained, violent, and normalized one.
"Oppression" to my mind refers to a system of resource extraction from one group by another. Everything else is marginalization (just as depressing, but not oppression.) We don't have many oppressed groups in the U.S. today! Women's bodies, workers' labor, native people's land and resources. Only the latter two of these have a history of international revolutionary campaigns or laws formalizing recognition and remittance (however helpful those have actually been)