New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity

I would say new segregationism is specifically the third and fourth points.

Only black women are allowed to date black rappers: https://hiphopwired.com/playlist/bobby-shmurda-girlfriend-tw...

Only black translators being allowed to translate the work of black writers: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/amanda-gorman-catalan-...

Only black people are allowed to have a particular hairstyle on their Animal Crossing characters: https://boundingintocomics.com/2021/01/28/nintendo-allegedly...

I should say that as far as i can tell, this sort of belief is extremely fringe. The nature of the world today is that a handful of people can get loud on Twitter and get a lot of attention for it.

I agree with the overall point, there are plenty of sane people on the left, thank God.

However, I want to defend the idea that some right wing opinions make a lot of logical sense on their own; their being valid does not require right-wing-specific value systems.

Let's take one of the points you're criticizing.

> someone who doesn't work and doesn't contribute to society doesn't deserve govt handouts

Here's the logic: the products and services we enjoy every day are all the product of someone else's work. None appear out of thin air. If they're provided by the government, they are still funded by taxes on the fruit of someone else's work. Why would someone who does not produce anything be entitled to any of it? The basic value behind this point is plain fairness, which everybody agrees on.

That being said, I will concede the above point needs refining and nuance before it can be used as a principle to guide public policy. For instance, it makes sense that society should help people who cannot work because of some handicap. The value here is common decency, which is neither specific to the right or the left.

Another refinement: what about people who are out of work and haven't found their next position? It's probably productive to help them with unemployment benefits: we can bet they will be back on their feet faster if they worry less about immediate money problems. The value here is efficiency. Of course, these benefits should be delivered under certain conditions, because the overall point regarding fairness still stands. They are not entitled to the fruit of someone else's work if they refuse to give back.

So here's the refined point:

In a fair society, people who are able to work but willingly refuse to do so should be not entitled to the fruits of someone else's work. However, people who are unable to work, whether permanently or temporarily, are excluded from this point and may be helped through the means of redistribution.

The final point is maybe a bit centrist, but still fairly right-leaning in its position. It's very logical, and only buttressed by the shared values of fairness, efficiency and common decency.

> It's not about ideas. It's about tribes.

wonder what percentage of our likelihood to survive depend on ensuring we still are part of the tribe (e.g. signalling)? I think all communication other than the functional coordination of mundane things (can you pick the kids up today? how much for X etc) would fall into that category. Why otherwise bother with any of it at all?

It seems there is perhaps a relation between the amount of tribalism and uncertainty in life people face? It's easier to take risks and care about art and talk about very complex topics in a distanced way with people from opposing views when we're not in the thick of it?

> It's impossible to have a good-faith discussion with these people.

To clarify: obviously bigotry, racism, sexism, etc are all real and occur. I am specifically addressing the baseless, knee-jerk accusations towards dissenting opinion. As are you, from what I gather.

I think there is something to be said for the idea that secular ideologies (be they libertarian, MRA, "classical liberal", environmentalist, feminist, woke, intersectionalist, etc) have replaced the religions of yore for large parts of the population. With those secular religions come all the incidentals of religious community: social control, virtue signalling, one-upmanship, splinter factions, standard texts...

You are not so much having a discussion as questioning articles of faith, which people don't generally budge on, can take very personally and which can be somewhat impervious to reality. That's also why it devolves into ad hominems: where you might have been called a bigot before for disagreeing with, say Christian orthodoxy, you are now called a racist/misogynist/transphobe/etc for disagreeing.

In short, I think the "culture war" is a real thing. It's just not nearly as new, widespread or tangible as Fox News (for instance) would have us believe. For some reason, academia and tech seem to be disproportionately affected. For tech specifically: maybe because we sectorally skew young and tend to live on the Internet more, increasing exposure to fringe bubbles?

The shift on trans rights isn't simply a shift to the left though - it's more like the mainstream/"liberal" view on trans rights has shifted and the left-wing progressive activists have been dragged along behind it, whilst insisting all the way that they were a vital spearhead of trans rights and that not agreeing uncritically with them about everything and censoring dissenting views is an attack on trans people's existence.

For example, one of the last things the UK's more left-wing party did when they were in power was add a special exemption to anti-discrimination law to deny trans women access to rape and domestic violence services. (As in, this was literally the stated goal.) Pretty much the entire mainstream progressive activism community covered for them and the lobbying group who campaigned for this, demanding that everyone shut up about how the law got there, until 2019 when the same group started lobbying the Conservatives for similar purposes. Similarly, only half a decade or so ago the folks currently trying to cancel J K Rowling and insisting everyone support beating up random elderly lesbians for holding transphobic views were just as confident in their insistence trans women were misogynist bigots for just speaking out about what TERFs were actually doing because supposedly feminist women couldn't have any affect on the real world and so the only reason to blame them for anything was hatred of women. Even the term TERF itself was apparently only coined in 2008, though the ideas it describe go back decades before then.

This becomes even more true the further you go back, to the point that maybe a couple of decades ago, probably three at the most, trans rights seems to have been outside the normal range of progressive activist viewpoints entirely in the sense that - at least in the UK - the people who rose to positions of dominance and influence did so by shunning anyone who actually treated trans women as people, and worse. I mean this very literally, not in the usual hyperbolic sense where any dissent from the activist canon of views is spun as dehumanising trans women - it seems people had a choice between being willing to talk to trans women or gaining connections and influence.