Jump to content

Recommended Posts

Posted
1 hour ago, TwiceHorn said:

Marine biologist.  But screenwriter may be worse.

image.jpeg.f4496e2f1ab6680d32d1c98e795c6f64.jpeg

 

 

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?

source(4).gif.f47b118284b5d8a2f8f81da029a04b06.gif

  • Hook 'Em 1
  • Like 1
  • Fuck Around and Find Out 1
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.
  Hide contents

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.

  • Fuck Around and Find Out 1
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.
  • Hook 'Em 2
  • Fuck Around and Find Out 1
Posted

I too haven’t yet read the article due to Christmas chaos, but I will eventually. Some uninformed thoughts:

I’m a late genX college professor who got into higher education a bit later than most, so my professor job search and doctoral experience was firmly millennial.

1. Early 2010s at a world-famous doctoral program, one of our professors gave a few lectures about how to get a professor gig. He repeatedly made a point that if you’re part some underrepresented group, make sure to communicate that in your application materials. He cynically said to just send a picture along but made no mention of how to pick the right tree for the picture. At least in his view, it mattered.

2. It took me a few years to find a professor gig. A big part of the problem was the lack of assistant professor openings due to fallout from 2008 and the huge reliance on adjuncts. At the same time, the jobs that were filled were filled by people with objectively weaker CVs. I couldn’t even get an interview.
 

Now a decadish into the professor game I’ll still say, I was better on paper than many of the people getting hired for these jobs. Having served on hiring committees, they simply weren’t better candidates. Maybe there are other reasons, existing relationships for example, but the experience was frustrating and felt unfair. I didn’t turn my angst into a fandom of racist podcasters or whatever kids these days are listening to, but it could’ve happened if not for NPR putting out old episodes of Car Talk.
 

My current gig is a better fit for me and everything worked out for the best, but those years were frustrating.

 

  • Hook 'Em 1
Posted
13 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

Why do you keep talking about angry millennial white men? White millennial men are the least racist generation of white men there is. 

I’m talking about millennial males because that’s who the essay is about, and it’s who I saw this happening to at that time. I infer they are angry because men under 50 shifted from supporting both Clinton and  Biden by about 10 to a narrow Trump majority in 24.
I never said anything about them being racist, and as I made clear earlier I think this phenomenon was general to millennial men, but particularly the white ones. 

13 hours ago, TexasEd said:

I'll agree that there is a population of white males that believe they have been shafted because they believe the things that Rush, Hannity, Trump and others have told them.

No, and I don’t think it’s productive to assign them motives, for two reasons:

1) Millennials never listened to Rush or Hannity. I know what you are getting at about media, but it doesn’t apply to them. 
2) Their behavior shifted. Trump didn’t win them over. Democrats lost them. 
 

But there’s a broader point here and it had a lot of do with my purpose in starting this thread. And I’m going to put it in all caps not to yell at you, but to catch the eye of people skimming a long post.

80% OF THE AMERICAN ADULT POPULATION IS GETTING SHAFTED. And on top of that, another 19% is mostly doing OK but only because they have been conscripted as Janissaries in service of the top 1%. 

Most progressives (who, not for nothing, live securely within that 19%) would read that paragraph and nod their head. But for some reason, progressives (broadly speaking) look at 28% of those people getting shafted and say, essentially, “fuck ‘em.”

Posted (edited)
14 hours ago, Dahobbs said:

We can commit to helping the disadvantaged poor, including the white males in that group, without agreeing that DEI policies have systematically and unfairly hurt a subcategory of white males. If that is all you want, you got it. 

I never said anything about DEI policies or the disadvantaged poor, not sure what you are referring to there. 

Edited by Bozo_Casanova
Posted (edited)
13 hours ago, austingirl said:

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.

Good post, agree about all of this. But I am fascinated by the virality of it, because it has resonated with so many people. Some of that is because it’s been picked up and amplified by the right wing social media ecosystem, but initially it was apparently organic and I don’t think that happens unless people recognize their own lives in something. Even the whining, silly as it is, speaks to the despair some readers are feeling about their future. 
 

Which, again, is fertile ground. The nexus of limited opportunity and despair is supposed to be the progressive wheelhouse. But instead, we look at this one group and recoil. 

This is an aside- the point above about “the disadvantaged poor” is very telling, because that’s who affluent progressives aren’t.
In other words they want to do sympathy, not empathy. When they see somebody like them having a bad time, except less privileged and 10 years younger, and it seems to give them the ick.

Edited by Bozo_Casanova
Posted
36 minutes ago, Mole said:

Now a decadish into the professor game I’ll still say, I was better on paper than many of the people getting hired for these jobs. Having served on hiring committees, they simply weren’t better candidates. Maybe there are other reasons, existing relationships for example, but the experience was frustrating and felt unfair. I didn’t turn my angst into a fandom of racist podcasters or whatever kids these days are listening to, but it could’ve happened if not for NPR putting out old episodes of Car Talk.

Prepare to have your personal lived experience DESTROYED with FACTS and LOGIC

Posted
17 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

I never said anything about DEI policies or the disadvantaged poor, not sure what you are referring to there. 

The article is about DEI policies hurting white, millennial males. Again, I don't think you actually know what point you're trying to make. Ostensibly you've asked us to agree that this is happening and that a well intentioned policy is having negative consequences. Many posts have pointed out while we may understand why he feels that way, the objective facts simply don't support it. For some reason, you seem to find these responses unacceptable and disappointing. It seems the only response you want is complete agreement this bad thing is happening. 

I get that anecdotes exist. I get that people may feel that they are being treated unfairly. I empathize with the anger and resentment that feeling can create. But I also think it is mistake to blindly agree with what I believe is a faulty analysis of the problem. I can commit to addressing actual problems that contribute to their lot in life, including inequity in how the fruits of labor are distributed. 

This isn't me rejecting someone's "personal lived experience" as you want to say. Again, I empathize with the way they are feeling. But just because they feel that way doesn't make it true. Are there individual instances of unfair treatment at companies that had poorly implemented DEI policies? Sure, I believe there are. Is there widespread unfair discrimination against white, millennial men? No. That statistics don't support that. Those men just don't have the same level of unfair privilege that they've had before. 28% of the population doesn't get to have 70% of the good jobs. And it especially doesn't get to do it when entering fields where it only makes up 10% of the applicants. 

What does unfairly affect a lot of white, millennial men is the refusal of the wealthy to share in the fruits of everyone else's labor. If they did so, you'd have more, better paying jobs, and more opportunities for advancement. I'm down for fixing that. And I'm down for telling them I understand your frustration, but this is how we address that issue, not blaming the DEI boogie man. 

Again, I ask you, what are you trying to accomplish here? Why are you disappointed in what I see as a pretty thoughtful discussion? If you don't believe there has been systematic discrimination against these men, why are you insisting that we agree with them?

Posted
13 hours 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.
  Hide contents

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.”

 

this is an excellent post and makes me feel better about starting this thread. 

Posted
20 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

Ostensibly you've asked us to agree that this is happening and that a well intentioned policy is having negative consequences.

No, I've asked you to accept that members of a demographic cohort seems to *feel* that it has happened to them personally or recognize that it was happening around them. People on this thread keep talking about policy and DEI.  also wouldn't use the word policy to describe what I saw or what the essay is about. It seemed like more  of a social phenomena, and something distinct from DEI efforts in corporate America, such as they were. 

26 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

Many posts have pointed out while we may understand why he feels that way, the objective facts simply don't support it.

So you get the reasons why, but those reasons don't exist. They are similar to Rats Of Unusual Size in this way.  Got it. 

28 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

This isn't me rejecting someone's "personal lived experience" as you want to say. Again, I empathize with the way they are feeling. But just because they feel that way doesn't make it true. Are there individual instances of unfair treatment at companies that had poorly implemented DEI policies? Sure, I believe there are. Is there widespread unfair discrimination against white, millennial men? No. That statistics don't support that.

The disconnect, in a nutshell. I can't do better than this. 



×
×
  • Create New...