Good read, but I think you misread Hanania at the end. My read from his article about hating pronouns more than genocide is the opposite, where he is arguing that people shouldn't use their intuitive moral repulsion to something as a measure of its badness. He hates wokeness and thinks it's bad, but most anti-wokes exaggerate how bad it is because they're ruled by their hatred of wokeness.
I would think that climate change deserves at least 5-10% of the badness of factory farming, given the chance that it could cause more war and most likely the extinction of some species of animals in the future. (Even if you think those probabilities are small.) The unpredictability of the results combined with the global scale is pretty scary.
I don't endorse this argument at all, but the smarter catastrophists about wokeness will say that its ultimate telos is to turn rich countries into something closer to the third world in terms of overall dysfunction and ethnic favoritism, thereby by-their-lights permanently curtailing the kind of scientific and technological innovation necessary to push humanity forward. So "making it so you get fired if you say something offensive" is bad, but what's really bad is replacing meritocracy in the world's most important countries with widespread mediocrity (and possibly omnipresent crime) because it favors allegedly marginalized groups, and *then* making this system impossible to change from within because you'll get fired for speaking out. And even this might be OK if other countries could then pick up the slack after we've ground to a halt, but they'll claim that no one else, or too few countries, is/are up to the task, or maybe China is but it'll use its newfound dominance to impose its own kind of authoritarian panopticon on the world, or something. I don't know.
I don't agree with this kind of thinking for a variety of reasons, chiefly among which is that this process, if it's happening at all, just isn't happening quickly enough to avoid being interrupted by other grand forces of history (genetic engineering, AI, etc.) swooping in and making all of this stuff completely irrelevant. But the first time this catastrophic vision was proposed to me, I was a bit arrested - it hadn't been obvious to me how any thinking person could consider it capital-I Important at all.
Hey BB. I'm not sure how you'd label me... a disaffected turned reactionary temperamentally moderate liberal otherwise mugged by the escalating excesses of the left over the past decades... a populist centrist... an anti-puritanical contrarian...
I supported Bernie in 2016. But I am one of those anti-woke people for Trump. It seems perfectly rational to me within my own interests. Wokeness has permeated almost everything Biden has done. Crime, losing control of the border, DEI initiatives... As a white guy I'm disadvantaged in the job market. And, as an agnostic I like James Lindsay anti-religious right background.
Factory farming isn't the best thing. But you need to generate broad popular support for reform. Otherwise, just like climate change, it will end up cross polarized into a the rich limosine liberal champaign socialists want the middle class eating bugs and lab grown meat of dubious quality while enjoying their own wagyu beef.
Aside from crime (which seems to be trending downward), didn’t DEI initiatives and increased illegal immigration predate Biden? The rise in illegal immigration for example started under Trump.
More importantly, I fail to see the connection between many of Biden’s policies (e.g. infrastructure bill, CARES, CHIP act, IRA, increased antitrust enforcement) with wokeism.
Look, I agree that wokeism has sometimes gone too far but are you sure you’re not supporting Trump because you find wokeism personally distasteful and disadvantageous to you? Rather than trying to objectively consider what policies have the most positive or negative impact.
Wokeness as a modern force took off primarily under Obama.
Trump as a human individual probably has no strong interest in fighting wokeness, but the woke system being committed to destroying his life means he must fight it or perish.
Most of those with means to "destroy" Trump are state & federal prosecutors and judges. I don't think wokeness much affects their motivations. They tend to talk about how nobody is above the law in this country, not about muh white intersectional blah-blah.
But suppose wokeness is the key factor. It seems pretty clear that a president can throw wrenches in the justice system more easily than he can fight wokeness in a widespread way that changes the hearts of prosecutors and judges in time to prevent a conviction. Why would he focus on the latter?
In his first term he failed to beat wokeness back or even slow it to a halt in most areas of life. I doubt his second term will be different.
The state prosecutors and judges are also the people giving minimal or no sentencing to minority criminals while pursuing every avenue available for their ideological enemies. They may be cynically motivated or they may be true believers - it matters not.
Throwing wrenches in the Justice system will accomplish nothing, but neither will trying to change the hearts and minds of the woke. If Trump relies on these approaches he will of course fail.
The schedule F plan is to massively cull the amount of woke bureaucracy in government.
On a more fundamental level, Trump inspires faith in his persona in voters rather than faith in a declining, failing system, or faith in progressive tenets. Faith is the engine with which he could conceivably have enough momentum to rescind Title IX, or more. If an imperial cult of a president sounds vulgar and fascist, don’t forget it also has precedent in this country with FDR.
Mostly agreed, but i think you underrate the potential of a much more broadly defined genus of wokeness. I think the general pool of culturally viral extreme egalitarian victor-blaming worldviews are a problem, they impact more immediately material spheres (like foreign policy) through the power wielded by their adherents, and longterm pose a threat of significant but unknown scale. Im vegan, i talk to other vegans, the amount of times ive heard vegans voice support for human extinction is scary. Just heard the founder of PETA express similar sentiments of the Peter Singer podcast yesterday. And its far bigger than veganism, its antinatalists, its extreme anti-imperialists who would wipe out the first world if they could, arguably a lot of anti technology sentiment falls under this umbrella too. I highly doubt itll actually be the end of us, but vicious egalitarianism has killed millions, torn apart many societies before, and wokeness will surely not be its last incarnation.
Good read, but I think you misread Hanania at the end. My read from his article about hating pronouns more than genocide is the opposite, where he is arguing that people shouldn't use their intuitive moral repulsion to something as a measure of its badness. He hates wokeness and thinks it's bad, but most anti-wokes exaggerate how bad it is because they're ruled by their hatred of wokeness.
I would think that climate change deserves at least 5-10% of the badness of factory farming, given the chance that it could cause more war and most likely the extinction of some species of animals in the future. (Even if you think those probabilities are small.) The unpredictability of the results combined with the global scale is pretty scary.
(Also this should go without saying, but AOC obviously does not literally think the world will end in 12 years.)
I don't endorse this argument at all, but the smarter catastrophists about wokeness will say that its ultimate telos is to turn rich countries into something closer to the third world in terms of overall dysfunction and ethnic favoritism, thereby by-their-lights permanently curtailing the kind of scientific and technological innovation necessary to push humanity forward. So "making it so you get fired if you say something offensive" is bad, but what's really bad is replacing meritocracy in the world's most important countries with widespread mediocrity (and possibly omnipresent crime) because it favors allegedly marginalized groups, and *then* making this system impossible to change from within because you'll get fired for speaking out. And even this might be OK if other countries could then pick up the slack after we've ground to a halt, but they'll claim that no one else, or too few countries, is/are up to the task, or maybe China is but it'll use its newfound dominance to impose its own kind of authoritarian panopticon on the world, or something. I don't know.
I don't agree with this kind of thinking for a variety of reasons, chiefly among which is that this process, if it's happening at all, just isn't happening quickly enough to avoid being interrupted by other grand forces of history (genetic engineering, AI, etc.) swooping in and making all of this stuff completely irrelevant. But the first time this catastrophic vision was proposed to me, I was a bit arrested - it hadn't been obvious to me how any thinking person could consider it capital-I Important at all.
Hey BB. I'm not sure how you'd label me... a disaffected turned reactionary temperamentally moderate liberal otherwise mugged by the escalating excesses of the left over the past decades... a populist centrist... an anti-puritanical contrarian...
I supported Bernie in 2016. But I am one of those anti-woke people for Trump. It seems perfectly rational to me within my own interests. Wokeness has permeated almost everything Biden has done. Crime, losing control of the border, DEI initiatives... As a white guy I'm disadvantaged in the job market. And, as an agnostic I like James Lindsay anti-religious right background.
Factory farming isn't the best thing. But you need to generate broad popular support for reform. Otherwise, just like climate change, it will end up cross polarized into a the rich limosine liberal champaign socialists want the middle class eating bugs and lab grown meat of dubious quality while enjoying their own wagyu beef.
Aside from crime (which seems to be trending downward), didn’t DEI initiatives and increased illegal immigration predate Biden? The rise in illegal immigration for example started under Trump.
More importantly, I fail to see the connection between many of Biden’s policies (e.g. infrastructure bill, CARES, CHIP act, IRA, increased antitrust enforcement) with wokeism.
Look, I agree that wokeism has sometimes gone too far but are you sure you’re not supporting Trump because you find wokeism personally distasteful and disadvantageous to you? Rather than trying to objectively consider what policies have the most positive or negative impact.
Immigration overall went down during trumps term.
Wokeness as a modern force took off primarily under Obama.
Trump as a human individual probably has no strong interest in fighting wokeness, but the woke system being committed to destroying his life means he must fight it or perish.
Most of those with means to "destroy" Trump are state & federal prosecutors and judges. I don't think wokeness much affects their motivations. They tend to talk about how nobody is above the law in this country, not about muh white intersectional blah-blah.
But suppose wokeness is the key factor. It seems pretty clear that a president can throw wrenches in the justice system more easily than he can fight wokeness in a widespread way that changes the hearts of prosecutors and judges in time to prevent a conviction. Why would he focus on the latter?
In his first term he failed to beat wokeness back or even slow it to a halt in most areas of life. I doubt his second term will be different.
The state prosecutors and judges are also the people giving minimal or no sentencing to minority criminals while pursuing every avenue available for their ideological enemies. They may be cynically motivated or they may be true believers - it matters not.
Throwing wrenches in the Justice system will accomplish nothing, but neither will trying to change the hearts and minds of the woke. If Trump relies on these approaches he will of course fail.
Then I'm not sure how you see him successfully fighting the "woke system" in a way that affects the rest of us.
The schedule F plan is to massively cull the amount of woke bureaucracy in government.
On a more fundamental level, Trump inspires faith in his persona in voters rather than faith in a declining, failing system, or faith in progressive tenets. Faith is the engine with which he could conceivably have enough momentum to rescind Title IX, or more. If an imperial cult of a president sounds vulgar and fascist, don’t forget it also has precedent in this country with FDR.
Mostly agreed, but i think you underrate the potential of a much more broadly defined genus of wokeness. I think the general pool of culturally viral extreme egalitarian victor-blaming worldviews are a problem, they impact more immediately material spheres (like foreign policy) through the power wielded by their adherents, and longterm pose a threat of significant but unknown scale. Im vegan, i talk to other vegans, the amount of times ive heard vegans voice support for human extinction is scary. Just heard the founder of PETA express similar sentiments of the Peter Singer podcast yesterday. And its far bigger than veganism, its antinatalists, its extreme anti-imperialists who would wipe out the first world if they could, arguably a lot of anti technology sentiment falls under this umbrella too. I highly doubt itll actually be the end of us, but vicious egalitarianism has killed millions, torn apart many societies before, and wokeness will surely not be its last incarnation.
Or things could get out of hand.
https://theconversation.com/zombie-fires-in-the-arctic-smoulder-underground-and-refuse-to-die-whats-causing-them-221945
I do not think that will end the world.
Maybe not literally literally literally but teotwawki to some extent even now. and we're not a quarter of the way into this century.