Thursday, August 10, 2017

Damore, The Google Echo Chamber, And The Madness of Progressives.

So one of the main criticisms of the contemporary American left is that it shrilly levels false and unjustified accusations of prejudice at more-or-less the drop of a hat. I'd add: it's deeply irrationalist, and strongly tends to subordinate facts to dogma. 
   The left, of course, denies these things.
   If you doubt them, I'd recommend taking a look at the comments under this story at the Washington Post
   There really cannot be any reasonable doubt that a kind of madness has gripped the left.

3 Comments:

Anonymous John Plato said...

Will it make the debate worse if I suggest most of the extremes of SJW mania are driven by women? It's not like this sort of thing hasn't happened before... There are huge historic symmetries between the rise of the Prohibition movement at the end of the 19th Century and the rise of PC/SJWism near the end of the 20th:

A similar sense of prim moral rectitude; a call-out culture ("lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine..."); virtue-signalling among men required to retain middle-class status; overweening attempts to use government to regulate behavior, including the passing of the 18th Amendment, which criminalized the cocktail and turned ordinary folks into lawbreakers as they tried to evade the grasp of the moralists. The Volstead Act passed to enforce the 18th Amendment ultimately resulted in the deaths of thousands of citizens who drank liquor deliberately poisoned by the Feds or were gunned down in the crossfire of speakeasy raids.

It's not that men aren't prone to their own social manias, or didn't play a significant role in Prohibition -- they demonstrably are, and did. But the temperance movement was a women's movement, deeply intertwined with the fight for women's suffrage.

If anything, this suggests that things will get better eventually, but not before they get much, much worse.

12:37 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Will it make the debate worse if I suggest most of the extremes of SJW mania are driven by women? It's not like this sort of thing hasn't happened before... There are huge historic symmetries between the rise of the Prohibition movement at the end of the 19th Century and the rise of PC/SJWism near the end of the 20th:"

I have noticed this as well (and of course the SJW cliches always tend to be women...). It also ties into my own theory that PCs are basically secularized liberal, in the theological sense, Protestants. They were largely the ones driving Prohibition onwards, in tandem with more secular Progressive movements of the time.

12:48 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

I've wondered about that for a few years myself, JP. I mean, as you say, men have their own characteristic flaws. (And, FWIW, they tend to be more destructive.) It would seem miraculous if women didn't have *their* own.

And: women themselves almost universally agree about the "mean girl" phenomenon.

I don't think it's a thought that hasn't occurred to people before...which speaks in its favor. There's something rather masculine about conservatism, and something rather feminine about liberalism... And men might just f*cking kill you...while women might be more inclined to manipulate social forces against you. Much--though not all--of the PC/SJ phenomenon certainly does sound rather like the mean girl phenomenon...though I'm hardly an expert.

And, yeah, this is a politically incorrect thought *par excellence.* The public hating of Damore is nothing compared to what someone would experience were they to float *this* hypothesis and catch the public eye.

1:24 PM  

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