Politics in Media - The Good, the Bad, and the Preachy

Regardless, it doesn't help one's case if they (accidentally?) end up invoking antisemitic propaganda phrases.

One has to be careful about which phrases and words they pick — like I said, there are a lot of dogwhistles out there.

Edited by M84 on Sep 19th 2019 at 10:46:17 PM

If the research is indeed in favor of mining, then it can be valid to complain about political perceptions and poor optics, but "cultural marxism" is a terrible term to use for that problem.

The fuck?!?

@ M84 & @ Draghinazzo

If it is indeed antisemitic propaganda -which is strange because there's practically no jewish presence here- it's not done intentionally; as I said before, if there's a better term, I would like to hear it.

Edit:

@ Robrecht

I think that term flew around when I mentioned the Black Book of the New Left, the one that I have yet to read but apparently is not worth reading from the impression that I got from the people of this forum.

Edit 2:

Just to make things clear, I'm glad that I get to talk with you guys about this because the rift between the humanities and engineerings is plain out depressing, especially when we engineers end up using terms that turn away the other side from a constructive discussion because we don't know its dark roots or its real meaning.

Edited by raziel365 on Sep 19th 2019 at 8:02:48 AM

Fucksake, this is why I keep telling people to read up on the meaning of terms instead of just assuming you know what it means.

You'd be surprised (or not I guess) at how rightwing engineers tend to skew.

Not at all, which is why is also tend to wince whenever we get into the leftwing = good rightwing = evil generalization because the majority of the people with whom I interact tends to the right, you'll forgive me if I don't want to call my collegues evil.

Aside from that, our curriculum tends to teach us into thinking in a, and I quote a psychologist I once met, rigid and cold way to get the job done; there's also the bit about being more concerned with the big picture instead of the small one, which is why we also tend to butt heads with the people from humanities or sociology.

In the USA at least, the problem manifests in the way the field is biased against anyone who isn't a white man. In the USA there's a strong bias against women and minorities in the STEM fields. This starts as early as grade school, where boys are encouraged to skip grades in math if they excel while girls are not encouraged.

As a result, the hiring pool in STEM careers in the USA has for a very long time been overwhelmingly white and male. This led people to erroneously believe that white men are the ones best suited to be engineers because they are white men. This is why Silicon Valley for too long has been something of a monochrome sausage party. There's a reason "techbro" is a perjorative.

The "Google Memo" (Wikipedia entry) was perhaps the most blatant manifestation of the problem.

Edited by M84 on Sep 19th 2019 at 11:21:38 PM

While I won't deny that there's still a misognist element in engineering here in Perú, that generation is being replaced slowly but surely by a more equal numbered generation of engineers. It's true that the difference of number between male and female engineers is still noticeable but the barriers that were put against women are being chipped away.

I will admit though that there's a meme between (male) engineers that part of the reason why the ratio of genders is not 50/50 also has to do with the fact that a good deal of women don't tend to like engineering studies and would rather study other things.

Edited by raziel365 on Sep 19th 2019 at 8:34:25 AM

I'm an administrator on a science and futurism focused group (Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur), and we did have a problem where we wanted a female mod so that we could better know if a statement made by one of our members was unacceptably misogynistic or not. However, we genuinely had a lot of trouble finding a candidate, because of how overwhelmingly male our group's membership was.

We did end up finding one or two, though. Currently, we have about three female moderators, I think.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Sep 19th 2019 at 8:38:29 AM

In the USA at least, that's also something of a self fulfilling prophecy. Women don't like studying in those fields in large part because their male colleagues and professors aren't particularly respectful towards them. So they go into other fields not because they hate math and science and engineering but because they're a bit less likely to get shit for studying those fields.

Edited by M84 on Sep 19th 2019 at 11:40:07 PM

@Raziel

Cultural Marxism is a unfortunate term. You'd better go with "Disproportional Academical Influence of Left Leaning Intellectuals", the issue is that it really don't has the "Bite" of Cultural Marxism.

And by why Latin Americans use the term Cultural Marxism without antisemitism is the same of why we use the word "Sandwich"—it's a easy shorthand.

As for "Left=Good, Right=Evil" that mainly comes because, honestly, the ideas of the Right are hardly something easy to idealize, between Traditionalism (which is losing ground every day) and a love for Capitalism (which fails because it's hard to sell the idea that MORE Capitalism is the solution), there's few things that are atractive.

Said this, there's also a content of a difference between the moderate Right and Left (we still are in the Lat Am context BTW).

The Right acusses the Left to be naive idealists whose plans don't work. The Left acusses the Right to be evil.

@Drag: I will try to summarize the political context. Peruvian Leftist Intellectuals are very influenced for Jose Carlos Mariategui, a Marxist writer that did a extensive analysis of the Peruvian national reality. Add the fondness for our "Benevolent dictator", Jose Velazco Alvarado, whose economical reforms and expropiations where very popular.

Like, my teacher of Social Sciences outright told us that he wanted a Millitary Rule of a Velazco-figure. Yeah, welcome to Peru. And he meant like "Actual tanks rolling in the streets with the Soldiers killing delinquents (BTW. He meant soldiers killing criminals of their same race, so it isn't racist and thus it's obviously Ok—Sidenote: But if you thought Brazilian Racism has dogwhisles, Peruvian Racism needs dictionaries). Thought he has left Communism years ago, he just want some nice Authoritarian Social Democracy.

You know, that certainly explain how much we took to admit that Chavez was a bad guy.

As a note. I'm not sure if I had a right to.complain, I've had wackiest ideas. Some very inmoral, I'm ashamed of them

Back to Peruvian Leftism, add some HARSH rejection after the Epic Fail of Alan Garcia's First government (AKA: Venezuela crisis before the Venezuela crisis) and of course, the Shining Path (and the MRTA). Which lead to a new Red Scare in a war that is considered Evil Versus Evil (And we got a Japanese-Peruvian dictator against a Chinese-Peruvian terrorist. And two from the Andean Highlands carrying the ethnic cleansing and mass murder of people from the Andean Highlands Peru is wacky like this).

Peruvian Leftist was discredited.for a long time. And while it seemed to have a revival with Ollanta "Chavez is my bud" Humala, he ended (Thanks God) to be a moderate in practique (Militar, Leftist, Chavez' fan, His Brother is the Nazbol gang for Native Americans). Seriously, Ollanta deserves praise for being the Only Sane Man of his family that has the two.most insane persons in the country. Ollanta's however dissapointed.like...everyone, The Frente Amplio got third place in the elections, but the two final candidates were the Polish Jew PPK vs the Daughter of the Japanese Peruvian dictator, Keiko Fujimori (add more weirdness? The leader of the Andean rights Left is French).

The Peruvian Left is winning popularity, but they're also getting.more criticism that can't be brushed with "We're not the Shining Path" because nobody is mentioning that.

The issue.with Minery is that it ties a lot with the issue of Land Ownership. Peruvian Andeans take land ownership Very seriously (I include myself on this, I support Tia Maria, but I have sympathy for protestors).

Add that Tia Maria is sold as a project for.Globalisation...something that the Latnoamerican Left loathes (The Latinoamerican Left it's very protectionist)

Edited by KazuyaProta on Sep 19th 2019 at 12:45:33 PM

There's a Venn Diagram really about hateful angry nerds and people in reasonably educated fields.

Perhaps not a bigger percentage than the mainstream populace as a whole but probably not smaller.

@Raziel: Don't forget that studying Engineering means that you wouldn't met any female for.years

Or the Endless Protests.

Finally, you have to add the outright impossibility of trying to establish order in the midst of some of the conflicts without being put as the Designated Villain by the media.

Not to mention the plain disregard for the chain of command. To give you usonian posters an idea, imagine if a congressman or congresswoman called Obama while he was POTUS -quick apology by the way- a dumb monkey who doesn't know his place.

And yes, our current president is also being insulted not only by his race but also as if the position was wothless.

To also address what @Kazuya mentioned, most of the people with whom I have spoken that can be counted as rightwing do not even act as if capitalism is the biggest thing in the world, we just take as a cold fact that rocking the economic boat too much will lead us to yet another financial disaster, and the previous generation have already painted it in glowing colours how much the 80s sucked.

Honestly, I have already told my friends that if they ever go to the highlands they must never say that they are engineers or the like lest they face a stoning.

For the record, you can meet a few girls, not many but it's not a dry well.

Edited by raziel365 on Sep 19th 2019 at 10:50:21 AM

You know what?

I'm not going to be silent about this...

This 'advice' is literally the recommendation from Nazis on Stormfront and /pol/ on how one can keep using the concept of 'Cultural Marxism' to get people to accept anti-semitic ideas now that the actual term 'Cultural Marxism' is more and more being outed as a dog whistle.

There's some more diversity in the tech field in the USA these days too. But it's still far from fair. And of course there's still plenty of workplace discrimination ongoing.

I'm reminded, of all things, of an episode of Kim Possible "Grudge Match". It featured a female robotics genius who was never taken seriously because she looked like a supermodel. She went so far as to build an android to pass off as the genius and pose as "his" girlfriend.

Edited by M84 on Sep 20th 2019 at 7:27:51 PM

Yeah, you're just saying the same thing but avoiding using the exact same phrasing. It's almost like "I'm not a racist, I'm just realistic about race". Same damn thing.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Sep 20th 2019 at 12:24:29 PM

So essentially in Peruvian academia there's a nonzero chance that the professors are actual bonafide literal tankies?

To get weirder, he was pretty open in that "Communism failed" and even said "We have capitalism for a long while" (Para rato: Slang to things that will last a long time). Then he went about how we need more Benevolent Authoritarianism while using Velazco as a idol. I sometimes wish that he got his war against Pinochet's Chile, so the apology would stop. Thought to be frank, he likely would get even more apologists because Peruvian's extreme revanchism

Peruvians are neither Left of right, we're just extremely authoritarian .

Edited by KazuyaProta on Sep 20th 2019 at 7:52:59 AM

I do wonder sometimes if certain countries (or specifically certain societies/cultures) are primed to lean more authoritarian because of what their culture has entailed over its existence. Maybe it has something to do with more liberal countries having a longer history and tradition of prising power away from the top while some countries don't?

A fictional example I found notable was at the end of World War Z was the Russians re-adopted the Tsardom rather than remaining a democratic (even today it's only democratic on paper) country after the zombie apocalypse, with the author explicitly stating (in-universe through a Russian character) that Russians prefer it when someone strong is in charge.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Sep 20th 2019 at 2:07:37 PM

It's likely, like, one of the issues in Iraq is that, unlike with, for example, Germany, there was no democratic status quo to rebuild, so everything has to be build from scratch.

Heck, many of the issues of Eastern Europe come because they went from Fascism to Communism and are hardly adapting to the NATO-style Liberal Democracy.

Back to Peru, we have a extremely shaky democracy (20 years without a coup is a record for us) AND also a massive inequality (The government aparatus is very centered on the Urban Coast).

Edited by KazuyaProta on Sep 20th 2019 at 10:15:49 AM

That's a bit misleading, to be honest - while both are democratic, the FRG had nothing in common with the Weimar Republic except the flag.

Heck, it was an explicit goal of the fathers and mothers of the Basic Law to avoid recreating Weimar, to the point that some people call the Basic Law "the anti-Weimar constitution".

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Sep 20th 2019 at 7:43:12 PM

I'd say that authoritarial leanings here in Peru are not inmediately identified as evil because, truth be told, the country is half a chaotic mess and the half a still fledging state.

If the institutions were sturdier and more reliable you'd not have that sentiment, or at least there'd be no reason to ask for an iron fist or anything of the like.

Unless we're talking about the Weimar Republic itself, which was built directly after the Kaiser abdicated. In which case, it kinda stands up. And then post WW 2, well... I think at that point it's easy to try and distance yourself as much as possible from what happened.