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Posted
1 hour ago, TwiceHorn said:

Marine biologist.  But screenwriter may be worse.

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1 hour ago, austingirl said:

To set my POV, I'm an elder millenial (b. 1981) white woman with a journalism degree who has exclusively worked in big tech marketing and PR my entire career. I understand what Bozo is getting at re: addressing why so many younger men are disillusioned with progressive politics and that we need to better address it if we want to win them over from the MAGA side. This article, however, is a poor avenue for a good discussion around this because the author is a whiny ass bitch. For much of this article, I kept thinking "no shit, that's something every generation of non-white, non-male has felt at some point. It's not poignant just because now YOU personally are feeling this pain." Some of it made me laugh out loud at the lack of self-awareness. Allow me to provide examples:

I also have two boys - Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Straight white males. What do I say when they ask about their hopes and dreams? Something along the lines of: "The world isn't fair, but in the vast majority of scenarios you already have a leg up being straight white boys. You do have to work hard, and you might get passed up sometimes for objectively unfair reasons. You might lose when you deserve to win. This happens to most people and is not unique to you or your circumstances. When it happens to you - and it will - you will not improve things by getting angry and spiraling and creating viral TikToks about it. All that gets you is surrounded by more anger and hatred. Look for ways to effect change without wallowing in your hurt. Talk to people in real life and not just online."

I don't know what to say to guys like Jacob Savage. I'm sorry that attempts to reverse hundreds of years of discrimination against others have resulted in you feeling like sometimes you got passed over for jobs because of who you are?

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Posted
1 hour ago, washparkhorn said:

If "the medium is the message,” an opinion piece in Compact magazine about the problems that younger white males face forces one to think about what it means to publish that piece in this specific media. 

Compact is not a neutral place. Its main point as a medium is:

  • The Liberal Consensus is no longer effective. The goal is to dismantle the dominant liberal worldview, which encompasses both progressive and neoliberal viewpoints.
  • Combining leftist economic ideas with rightist social and cultural concerns is okay.
  • It gives intellectual and political legitimacy to ideas that mainstream conservative (National Review) and leftist (Jacobin) outlets think are wrong.
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The medium (Compact) has a big effect on how this specific grievance is understood. It changes the meaning of "grievance" from a personal one to a systemic one. In right-wing circles, the same issue could be called "liberal wokeness is attacking white men," which is about cultural victimhood.  In Compact, the message of the medium changes it to:

1. The situation is a sign of bigger problems with liberalism and late capitalism. The assertion is that young white men are not only victims of anti-white rhetoric but also suffer from economic dispossession, the disintegration of community institutions, and an isolating culture fostered by elite liberalism. The enemy is not "Black Lives Matter" itself, but the neoliberal system that uses identity politics to keep working-class people from working together.

2. It shows that a political realignment is both possible and needed. The message from the medium is that the far right is now getting these white men who are worried about money and don't fit in with their culture. But they should really be part of a new, illiberal populist group. The piece is a way to get people to join that group and support it. It says, "Your complaints are valid, but the answer from the right isn't good enough." We can give you what you want: economic populism and a critique of the power of the elite.

3. It says that a topic that was once off-limits is now important enough to talk about. Most major media either thinks that "white male grievance" is only important to far-right extremists or that it should be ignored or made fun of. It says “This is a serious demographic and political analysis, not just white bigotry.”

4. It shows what "reactionary left" or "left conservatism" is like in real life. It says: "We have broken the old political categories." This doesn't make sense with your old left/right map. 

The Meta-Message is about political strategy and worries about demographics on a bigger scale. It knows that the traditional base of leftist politics (a united working class) is falling apart. It wants to win back some people who feel left out by the left by addressing their cultural fears on non-liberal grounds and promising economic salvation. The main point is a cold political calculation: to build a successful populist alliance against the liberal elite, you need to meet the needs of the largest, most politically active group of people right now, even if it makes cosmopolitan libs uncomfortable.

If "the medium is the message," then this piece says, "The pain of young white men is the best proof that capitalism has failed in every way: economically, culturally, and spiritually." It's not a right-wing problem. If we want to build a new, strong political coalition that goes beyond the dead left-right divide and gets rid of the crooked elite, we need to talk about it seriously and without liberal taboos.”

The play is about forming coalitions and making political triangulations. The medium gives it an ideological context that turns a complaint that could be seen as conservative into what can be called a “revolutionary critique.”

 

Yeah, as noted on the thread where this first came up, this is a "common good" site.

They're the more intelligent and polite variant of MAGA.  The common-gooders do analyze problems pretty well, but their solutions are too moralistic for and probably most of us.

Posted
But that’s not the point, which is the point. 

Oh, I get the point. The point is that opposition (left) messaging is utterly missing these types. I agree, it clearly is.

So, we need to speak to whiny babies the way you talk to whiny babies when you want to manipulate them. Tell them the sweet lies they want to hear, and tell them that everything that they find upsetting is actually the fault of someone else. I suggest blaming the Dutch, but I’m willing to workshop it.
Hoping? I’m hoping that progressives begin to admit the possibility that their political project should go back to welcoming and advocating for any person who is getting the short end of the stick. 

Sure. But they think they are getting the short end of the stick because OTHER people struggling to make it are maybe not living as shitty lives as they did before.
The author doesn’t want advocacy for him. He wants advantages that he thinks he’s entitled to. See below.
#3 the data does not match his argument.  I posted the statistical data that shows that during the timeline he documents the hiring of women in that field matched the percentages of those attaining degrees in that field.  So Ascribing the outcome to DEI without taking into account the pool of candidates available is leaving out a significant factor in that outcome that was inconvenient for the author.
 
If he wanted to continue to see a 57:43 M:F ratio in hiring when the new graduate pool was 34:66 what he was really arguing for was more male bias not an even playing field. 

BINGO BINGO BINGO. They do NOT want equality. They want a return to the bias in their favor. Women are getting hired at a 60% clip because the pool of qualified grads is 60% women (again, I offered my observations from law and trained pastors; the pool of quality grads has a materially lower percentage of white males than it did 30 years ago).
If 30% of the quality grads are white males, then the pool of new hires should have a similar percentage.
The author doesn’t want that. He wants a return to not just higher percentages from a day when there were more quality white male grads, he wants a return to the inherent advantage that built in bias also gave them.
I'm not sure progressives have adopted a political project that wouldn't. A broader point, and perhaps where you're missing what the other posters are saying, is that not every person who claims they were wronged has actually been wronged. We want to be a big tent political movement, yes. At the same time, we lose credibility when there's an obvious strike and we call it a ball. When I see white millennial men unable to receive undeserved career opportunities at the same rate their Gen X and Boomer counterparts received them, I don't feel sorry for them, I feel sorry for the qualified nonwhite and women Gen X and Boomers who got passed over.

Also a bingo. It comes down to the fact that they don’t want equality, they want the advantage and favorable bias their parents and grandparents had.

Should we try to appeal to them to get their votes? Absolutely. Lie and tell them whatever they want to hear, shameless, impossible lies absolutely work.

Then go about policies aimed at changing systems as a whole and at weakening oligarchs. Everyone will benefit. But that benefit will probably be equal, and we know that won’t be enough for the whiny titty baby crowd, the bunch of specialest, fragilest snowflakes to ever exist. They will bitch and cry till they get the full suite of biases and advantages in their favor again. How do we know? Because when given ANY power (see this admin), that’s exactly the policy outcome they pursue.
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