TRASHFUTURE - History 2.0 feat. Annie Kelly

Episode Date: August 6, 2019

Why call it history when you can call it ‘progress studies’? This week, Riley (@raaleh), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice @AliceAvizandum  join writer and PhD student Annie Kelly to discuss Steven Pinker-ized airport books, tech positivity, and Annie’s research into women members of the alt-right. You’ll love it. Annie’s New York Times article that gets referenced in the piece is available here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/opinion/sunday/tradwives-women-alt-right.html If you like this show, sign up to the Patreon and get a second free episode each week! You’ll also get access to our Discord server, where good opinions abound. https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *COME SEE MILO* If you're in Edinburgh for the Fringe, come see our boy perform his show: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/pindos *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We’ll be performing at the Birmingham Transformed festival on 8th August. Details to come in the next few weeks. If you’re in the West Midlands, come down to Brum for a night of delightful soup jokes. Get tickets here! https://ti.to/birmingham-transformed/birmingham-transformed-2019 *OTHER LIVE SHOW ALERT* Come see Trashfuture live at the Edinburgh Fringe! We’ll perform on August 10th at 21.30. The venue is Venue 277, PQA Venues @Riddle's Court, Edinburgh EH1 2PG. Tickets are £11.50 and there are a ton of discounts available. Get them here: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/trashfuture-live-at-the-fringe *SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT* Guess who’s going to play live at The World Transformed in Brighton this September? That’s right, your favourite podcast lads. Buy a ticket here: http://theworldtransformed.org If you want to buy one of our recent special-edition phone-cops shirt, shoot us an email at trashfuturepodcast[at]gmail[dot]com and we can post it to you. (£20 for non-patrons, £15 for patrons) Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front  

You had had your, your way and we had, we had rescheduled this episode for 10 a.m. on a Sunday. I imagine the cold open would just be, would be legitimately cold open because we wouldn't know what to say. Cause we just be banging our heads against. Pained groaning. I would have been fine. I, I watched the entirety of the first season of the Sopranos with my girlfriend

yesterday. It was great. The whole thing, the whole thing, 100% of the first season of the Sopranos. I've gained an entirely new admiration for Carmelo, largely based on, I never noticed Carmelo's clothes before, but my, my girlfriend has been, who shall remain nameless, has been pointing them out to me now saying she's wearing a teal blue two-piece suede suit with a vest on top. She's incredible.

I watched two episodes of the, of what we refer to as the depression anime that everybody's watched because I haven't seen it since I was 17 and Evangelion. Evangelion. Yeah. I haven't, I, I, I thought you were talking about Bojack Horseman. I mean that, that is, it is, it is a kind of anime in its own right. Yeah. My, my brother, I would describe as weeaboo, Icarus.

He loved Japanese culture so much that he moved to Japan and went completely insane. But he was into it when he was a college student. And back in those days, if I remember correctly, you could only get like fan subs of it. So I've, I've discovered it's just as weird and incomprehensible as it was in 2002. But now 9-11 doesn't have the same emotional heft. Yeah. I, what was it? I, I got my copy of Evangelion when I was a fat 13 year old.

I got an, I got like a bootleg one from Hong Kong that I purchased on eBay. And as I recall, the subtitles were okay, but a lot of them were very, very sort of non-specific. So angels were referred to as angelic ones. And that's what I thought the evil ones, the villains were in Evangelion until embarrassingly recently. I say embarrassing, of course, because the whole thing is very embarrassing. I didn't wait till it became cool on Netflix. Instead, I did some kind of bootleg Chinese self Netflix to get them for myself. So anyway, I'd like to apologize to everyone.

I just think it's great because I mean, people have asked me, they said, you know what, Nate, you should review Evangelion. And I was like, okay, cool, I'll give it some thought, maybe I'll watch it. And I realized I am going to watch 15 hours of a show about angsty teens who fight in robots. Yeah, if it wasn't for Twitter, I wouldn't know that this show existed at all. And I definitely, I feel incredibly resentful. I'm not even sure I would really know what anime was if it wasn't for Twitter, actually. So that's just, it's just one thing that that social media site has taken from me.

I'm on many. If you only know what anime is from Twitter profile pictures, you end up watching Evangelion and you're like, well, well, well, a guy who came to my mentions to tell me to go fuck myself. Hello and welcome back to trash future, the podcast about the one that you're listening to now. I'm still not going to say the intro because I've decided that's for live shows only. Speaking of live shows, you should come see us if you're in Scotland or the north of England or Northern Ireland or the south of England. Fuck it.

Make it all make the journey all the way up at the Edinburgh fringe on the 10th of August. Tickets at links will be available in the description. And of course, if you're in the Midlands or the south of England or fuck it, anywhere in the UK or outside the UK, also, you should come see us at Birmingham transformed. I'm doing plugs at the very beginning of this. Yeah, so you can't avoid them. Yeah, but also usually because we'll have had an hour of hour of sort of joking around, the plugs at the end of the episode usually contain lots of of hidden, hidden goofs,

hitting hidden and goofs and just for the jokes, goofs, goofs, boots, parody, japes. Anyway, oh yes, a lot, a lot of those were real fiat guys doing guys and girls rather doing bants in the end, which mostly just seems to be FHM level material about how, hey, wouldn't it be funny if women just didn't exist and the world was all guys, which seems to be the world FHM wants to create or wanted to create. It's closed now. Thank goodness. Anyway, I'm Riley.

You may remember me from all the other episodes of the show except the ones I wasn't on. I'm, of course, joined in studio by Nate on the boards. Hello, it's me. Yes, I actually am only watching Evangelion because I want to bond with Hussain, my wayward son. I want to understand his jokes more and I realized that already I've signed myself up for something. I had no idea how deep it was going to go. So in a way, maybe I am his dad. We have an extremely long car ride ahead of us this week in two legs,

one to Birmingham and one to Edinburgh. So we need something we can talk to Hussain about. Well, yeah, because otherwise you're just going to play techno the whole time. I'm going to do that anyway. I went to see Paula Temple on Friday night and my God, it was incredible. It was so awesome. Let's make a Paula Temple song, the outro music this time. Fine.

Yes. And of course we are joined by Alice in the wilds of Glasgow. Yes, rest in power FHM, the magazine for teenage boys who don't know that they're girls yet. And of course, Annie Kelly joins us from Norwich. Annie, how are you doing? Yeah, I did notice that that was pretty much the one area of the country you didn't mention in your shout-out. Well, it's because Norwich is like you and Graham Linehan.

Yeah, we're flatmates actually. Yeah, he's just riding his little donkey holding his flaming sword. His flaming gender sword. It's like the stand with the original cover with the figures fighting in the desert, but it's East Anglia or Norwich, all right. Yeah, we're defending the women of Norwich together. That's our role. So Annie, if you don't already know, and if you don't already know, then you're a goofy.

Annie is a writer and PhD doer on anti-feminism in the alt-right, especially online, which means she sees just some of the best posts. Yeah, I'm a connoisseur of racism and sexism at this point. That might be how I start introducing myself, actually. Yeah, just get some business cards. Racist, sexist? No problem, Annie Kelly. It's the Lionel Hertz thing.

Racist, sexist? No problem. So we've got a couple of bits for you today. Milo is back from holiday, but is now at the fringe. And so has to be doing sort of strange comedy shows at all hours of the day. And Hussein is fine. He's just on deadline. He's going to be on the show that we're doing later today that will come out, I think, next Tuesday.

So you will get to hear from him again, we promise. However, today we are going to discuss a couple of things. The first, the second of which being anti-feminism, tradwives, alt-right, all that kind of fun shit. But the first of which is a delightful little article that's written by two extremely special boys for The Atlantic, which just loves to publish insane, hackery sort of 50% of the time, where it's just like it mostly The Atlantic is pretty bad. Like it's a it's running nonsense publication.

It was credited with spreading like broken window theory policing, which was just the intellectual scaffolding that led to massive crackdowns on minorities and cities in the 1990s, all this stuff. But sometimes they just print these incredible what if flights of fancy. I cannot wait to see what a little amuse-bouche you have discovered for us. The article is entitled, We Need a New Science of Progress. And it's by Tyler Cowan and Patrick Collinson. Now, without looking at the notes, can you all please guess for me what you think Tyler Cowan

and Patrick Collinson do? I never look at the notes. They work at the Tony Blair, Yasha Monk Institute of Being Smart Online. One does. So specifically, one works at the Mercados Center and runs a blog called Marginal Revolution, Small Steps to a Better World. That's Tyler Cowan. The Mercados Center, if you don't know, is kind of like the Adam Smith Institute of the United

States. It's a dark money think tank that squats in George Mason University and is all about promoting market-based solutions to literally everything. Like they want to privatize libraries and shit, turn them all into the idea store, like they have in Whitechapel. When you say squat, I just assumed that they did a sort of 60s radical SDS thing and took over a building and they're just hanging banners out of the windows demanding free markets and, I don't know, death care. Well, it's one of these things where it is a think tank that's at George Mason University,

but there has been some, I believe there have been some controversy about how officially affiliated it is. Yes, so I'm right. We've never been like an official disavowal by George Mason University yet. If you were captured, the dean would disavowal knowledge if you're active. They're their SEAL team six for think tanks. George Mason is pretty conservative though. I mean, it's in one of the bougie suburbs of DC that's just full of Republican,

Libertarian geniuses. It doesn't surprise me at all that they have that if they did have squatters, they would be squatters who'd be like privatized air. Yeah, they'd be like one type of squatter that's not cool. What do we think Patrick Collinson is? So we've got one think tank nerd who's got a boar's born with a bow tie. What do we think Patrick Collinson is? That name seems somewhat familiar.

So I'm imagining he's, he's got to be bald. That's basically all I've got. Professional. He seems familiar. He's a bald guy. Let me ask one question to narrow this down. Is his Twitter profile picture a screenshot of himself on television being interviewed? I feel like it probably is.

No. He's the other kind of unbearable psycho and he's actually not bald. Is it his Twitter profile, like a picture of him with like a gleaming white background, like iPod white behind him? I'm going to his Twitter right now. No, it's just a very, very high quality picture of him. I'll give you his bio. It's failabillist, optimist.

Oh no. He's a panker guy. It's tech. He's tech. He's the CEO of a massive Silicon Valley vampire capitalist. Only tech guys talk like that. Yep. Yep.

So he runs a payment interface called Stripe. So you know about them, didn't they ban all of their sex workers off their platform? That sounds like something they would do. So yeah, these are the guys who are have taken to the pages of the Atlantic to fantasize about a science of progress. And I of course refer you to the Steven Pinker episode you did with Felix, where Steven Pinker referred it to himself as an optorealist and a serious possibleist and suggested that we need to get together to study progress based on the rationality internet.

If only we could get together to study progress on some sort of plane or island. Yes, if only we could get together to really understand development. I do like that it briefly on the side with Pinker, his Epstein thing that it came out was that he got kicked off of the island and was made sort of persona non grata by Epstein for disagreeing with him about maybe he and Toby Young can get together as the two people who Epstein knows, but he wanted to be friends with him. Oh my. Okay.

So shall we talk about the new science of progress, which by the way, I'd like to add has never been studied before. No thinker has ever tried to think about a combination of sociological, economic and political factors that come together to produce technological progress and what consequences it might have in the long term. Why are you waving around that enormous copy of the Grunge Reese? I have a giant foam finger that just says, read Marx. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those ideas that like, once someone says it, you're like,

oh my God, that's so obvious. Why didn't anyone else think of that before? You know, we should be studying progress, but literally no one has. So I'm excited to delve further into this. Until now, until we have invented this field that they want to call progress studies, all academic research has just been about how many angels can dance in the head of a pig. It's been medieval scholasticism and trivia the entire time. Yeah, there's lots of progress on the question of whether women do or don't have souls at the

minute. I'm feeling very frustrated that my PhD research into the quickening is now going to be disregarded. So wait, from Highlander. So progress itself is understudied. By progress, we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised the standards of living over the past couple of centuries. Do you think the fall of the Roman Empire had stuff like this?

Like tablets going around talking about how great it's been and how that's surely going to continue forever? What, how Romulus Augustulus failed forward. And I partnered with foreign experts from Germany. See, I was thinking the same thing, but not about the Roman Empire, but rather about, if you were living in, say, like the Brezhnev era and the Soviet Union, I mean, you imagine that people must have known, like, wow, this shit fucking sucks, that everything is not going well.

Like, but did they have, do they have like success optimists in the Soviet Union that they had to listen to? Steven Pinkovich. Malcolm Gladwell writes a book called Parastroika. Why opening up is the key to strength. Your lamp is heavy because it's better. For a number of reasons, there is no broad based intellectual movement focusing on understanding the dynamics of progress or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up.

We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of progress studies. Epic studies. Wonderful. I love to be a PhD in awesomeness. Yeah, it's I fucking love science, but at academic department. My PhD thesis was just a really well edited and extremely long overhead video of me using a hot plate to make like an epic bacon meal.

Yes, it's what this tastes like to me is, I think it was an essay in the Simpsons, one of the essay contests where Lisa goes to Washington to write an essay. And then her opponent says, how to make America take one dash of ingenuity, three cups of pride, and stir until thick with family values. And that's what this is, but about like Uber. Yeah, which by the way is apparently about to post a $4.5 billion quarterly loss, which probably means that everything's going great in the economy as well as the world. How do you lose money in an economy where everything is insanely overvalued?

Look, they are, that's because they're disruptors and they're innovators. If we had all gotten degrees in progress studies, we would know the answer to this question. That's true, like the alt-right tried to warn us, there's two kinds of study in universities. There's this and then there's grievance studies. And if you don't want to be grievance studies. 20 billion a year, then that money could then be used for socialism and that's bad. So you've got to lose the money. You've got to plug up the volcano with bills of cash.

That's how it works. So here's how progress studies would work. These are, before digging into progress studies would entail, it's still worth noting that we need a lot of progress. This is like a slightly upgraded version of the shoes are like some things, but unlike others. Yeah, this is like, if someone did a really half-hearted parody of Tony Robbins, it would sound like this. We haven't yet cured all diseases.

We don't know yet how to solve climate change. We're still a very long way from enabling most of the world's population to live as comfortably as the wealthiest people do today. And we don't understand how best to predict or mitigate all kinds of natural disasters. And we aren't able to travel as cheaply or quickly as we'd like. We could be far better than we are at educating young people. The list of opportunities for improvement is extremely long. It's almost as if some of them are in conflict with one another.

No, never. Could be. No, because what you're saying, what you're doing is actually grievance studies. Progress studies would say, how can we make an app that solves this problem without having to engage in any kind of messy conflict? You're right. We just haven't worked out the right sort of technocratic solutions to these things at all. Yeah.

So as yet, we don't know how to solve climate change. Yes, we fucking do. We have to stop taking all of the oil out of the ground and stop burning the oil. We have taken out of the ground. That's how we solve it. It's not a technical problem. You're wrong about that. We have to keep doing everything we're doing and, in fact, increase it and then hope

that someone invents the, I don't know, the carbon suck 5000. Yeah. That's gettingyourcarbonsuck.com. Yes. That's why we... That's why we... That's why we... That's why we...

...two C's. Yeah, that's why we need progress studies because otherwise, we'd have to engage in grievance studies, which would fix the problem, but wouldn't do it with apps and would be mean about it. Yeah. It might make people feel bad. Yeah. And then in that case, we're just as bad as the carbon.

Those are major challenges they go on. A lot of progress can also come from smaller advances. You know the ones that won't do anything? Thousands of lesser improvements that together build on one another can represent an enormous advance for society. For example, and this is my favorite part. This is where, Annie, a long time ago, you had a tweet that I really liked, which is about the best boy role in films,

and that imagine him on a date saying what he does, proudly puffing out his chest and straightening his little bow tie. I know, it's the cutest job title imaginable. This is where these writers become the best boy. For example, if our discoveries and inventions improve standards of living by 1% a year, children will, by adulthood, be 35% better off than their parents. Wow, 35%, great.

They're 35% better, Nate, 35%. We always joke about this, that the technocrats expect people to be doing the Microsoft Windows 95 dance when they hear that things will get 4% worse and not 5% worse. And it's like, the idea that this is somehow going to inspire some great level of devotion or even interest, it's like, I don't know, I just, this seems like it's a book, an idea, a discipline,

all written for people who read books in airports and buy books with the idea that I only have enough time to read this while I'm on a plane so it can't be anything deep and the margins need to be really, really nearer. Oh yeah, just stick to Tom Clancy by that point, or like some military fiction name, something like the engagement of the Paris Doctrine. The engagement protocol. Yeah, the Paris engagement protocols.

It's either like two words that mean kind of the same thing, like the engagement protocol, or it's the name of a city and then one of those words. Yeah, so I vote everyone of our listeners to look around your room and reflect in your life. Now imagine if it was precisely 35% better or 1% better per year, and to think concretely what kind of change that would be. For example, you might have more kitchen gadgets,

you might have a 1% nicer cutting board. Have you considered that maybe you could have a 2% fluffier sofa? All of these can add together to produce a much improved flight. Trash huge would be exactly the same, but the Elon Musk stand is 35% wider. Not even taller, just it's just broad. It's just a thick piece of cardboard. Well, also I was thinking about this because,

I mean in personal note, 2016 in personal terms was a really good year for me, in the sense that like I got- Your guy got elected. Oh my gosh, fuck you. I had a job that allowed me to achieve a certain degree of stability. I finished grad school, I got married, my brother, I was able to get my brother out of basic situation

being homeless and was in much better shape. But at the same time, just because I'm having a good year doesn't mean that we're not all frogs in the pot and the temperature is going up, you know what I mean? And so in a way, it's sort of like, if you don't address the macro level problems here, and instead you're just like, what if things were 10% better?

Like what does that even mean? 1% better at a time. 1% per year, they get 35% better over the course of your total lifetime. So we have 35% better as a ceiling of how batch better it can be though. Yeah, and I guess I look at it too, and I think about all of the things that I've watched get worse over the course of my lifetime, like they don't-

most of this stuff didn't happen overnight, but there was this uninterrupted decline. And it's like anybody who's not feeling that now isn't paying attention to it. So I mean, I realize that I'm arguing like, we're making fun of the article, and I'm sort of arguing of the larger thematic point, but the idea that, I mean,

this is no different than those clickbait articles where they're like things to be cheerful about. It's like 10% of people are living in slightly less dire poverty in the world, and it's like, great, but they're all going to die from climate change. Yeah, exactly. But you don't understand though, we have this graph that is of goodness,

and the goodness is going up, so there's more of it. And why are you against that? And why are you trying to point out the guy creeping up behind me with a sledgehammer marked climate change in a Ben Garrison kind of way? The world might be all on fire right now, but there are more jelly beans in my jar at home than there were last year,

and that means the world's getting better. Yeah, it's like, this is social science, but done in the style of like a toothpaste ad. It makes your teeth 10% whiter. No, it's the fig McFlurry again. It's fancy little boys getting treats. So, I'll carry on. He then goes to...

They then go to a geographic explanation of this, some for some reason. The treat distribution. Just how productive can a cultural ecosystem be? Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Why was the early... Lack of unions.

Why was the early 20th century science in Germany and Central Europe so strong? In both cases, the military industrial complex. Yeah, the military industrial complex, and the fact that they favored places where they knew they didn't have to worry about unions. And suddenly we have to build all of these semiconductors in one place.

Can we deliberately engineer the conditions most hospitable to this kind of advancement or effectively tweak the systems that surround us today? Most of these weren't good conditions. Well, no, but we can still engineer them. These guys just don't want to, because it requires the government to do stuff. Yeah, for example, Annie,

yeah, it might not be good conditions, but now we have Uber for ambulances called Ambulance. You know, so thank you to this all. Thank them. God, the moment I discovered Ambulance was like the moment I knew this podcast was a perfect fit for me, because it was just... Is Ambulance actually real?

I thought that was real. Ambulance is real. No, it's not a joke. It's real. We talked about it on an episode last year. It's like it sells itself as like a stepping stone for people who are EMT qualified to get jobs, but it's just a terribly run.

Basically, a guy is running it out of his flat in New York, and it's just, it's like a huge shell game, like fake ambulance service. Oh my God. So this, these kinds of questions are exactly what progress studies can investigate. It would consider the problem as broadly as possible, and then would study successful people, organizations,

distributions, policies, and cultures that have arisen today. That's called history. Fucking Herodotus over here has invented a field of study that's been around since fucking Antiquity. Yeah, but now it's looking forward. Oh Christ. And it would attempt to concoct policies and prescriptions that would help improve our ability

to generate useful progress in the future. That's called history. I feel as if I'm going insane here, but like... I mean, I feel like this is useful in the sense that this audience is, that they're trying to pander to, or that they think would be infused with such a concept, has basically, they have, they never read, they've never finished a book that they were assigned

to read in the various expensive schools they went to, like they've never actually read a book in their life. They've just been given the Cliff Notes version, and so they're like, oh, the idea that you can learn from the past, I've never heard of this before. This is historiography for people who have only read two history books, and they're both by Richard Overie. I've got so many great surprises for you

in the next two paragraphs. I mean, to put it in perspective, remember when everybody in the liberal establishment was quaking in their boots, because supposedly Steve Bannon was this mad genius, whereas like, when they leaked his emails, he really writes like a angry 14-year-old. But he's a student of history. Exactly, and it's like, I've heard references to Steve Billanon,

who's read, that he's read all these like classical, like scholars of antiquity, and every single time, it always comes back to the exact same point, which is that he claims to have read the Peloponnesian War, and the point he always raises is, let's build a Trojan horse. That's the one thing he remembers. Well, it's like the old Russian proverb.

The fox knows a lot of tricks, and the hedgehog knows one that works. It's like that old Russian proverb, dissolve bodies in the hot tub with acid. I think what you're thinking of is the old Russian proverb, is all unhappy families are different, so try to have a happy one. Okay, so here's the next paragraph.

Now, progress studies has antecedents, both within fields and institutions. The economics of innovation, for example, is a critical topic, and should assume a much larger place than economics. The Center for Science and Imagination at the Arizona State University, affiliated with Stephen Pinker,

seeks to encourage optimistic thinking about the future through fiction. Literally, I think the place where he was photographed with Jeffrey Epstein. Yes, it is! It was at a dinner for that center. They just want to envision a future when everyone has a private island.

I mean, how is that not a positive future? You know, when you can just take off on a plane and go wherever you want, where there's no laws, I mean, come on. Yeah, where the law is holding you back from your full potential don't apply. Now, that is the thing. Of this paragraph, that's the starter.

Here's the main course. This discipline observes almost certainly correctly that imagination and ambition themselves play a central role in progress. Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson have called for an applied history movement to better draw lessons from history and apply them to real-world problems.

Great, so now we have actual historians who don't want to do history and want to invent a sexy History 2.0. Yeah, History 2. I mean, yeah, it's kind of just like actual historians who just hate all other historians and are just like, we want, you know, to draw better lessons from history,

but not the lessons that historians are currently giving us. No, those lessons are inconvenient and bad. So, I mean, Niall Ferguson, I think this is public knowledge, but he has handsomely paid to speak at hedge funds and private equity funds to talk about how historically the left is wrong and bad and why business and low taxes are good

and this is justified by history. I mean, he is absolutely a historian for hire. And we also found out that he's incredibly thin-skinned because if you make fun of him, he'll literally like sick his fucking PhD student goons on you to try to end your life with skin. He's always been a court historian. If I remember correctly,

his first big work of scholarship was like a family history of the crop arms manufacturing family. So... Well, here is actually an excerpt from the article by Niall Ferguson about what he thinks applied history is and why it could be helpful. Oh, good.

I went and I found this clip. So, we're going out of the doofus, the doofus fancy best boy article and into Niall Ferguson's article. The US government's response to the 2008 financial crisis illustrates the value of this approach. So, what do we think... What lesson do we think he's taking

from the response to the financial crisis? Do you think it's what you do or what you don't do? Straw poll. Nate. What you don't do. Alice? Alice? Yeah, I think it's not jailing any bankers.

What are they taking a positive or negative lesson from the response to the financial crisis? Of course positive. They're the only fucking freaks who could. Annie? Yeah, I'm going to agree with Alice here. I think they're going to take a positive lesson from it. The US government's response to the financial crisis

illustrates the value of this approach. That September saw the biggest shock to the world economy since the Great Depression. But in a stroke of luck, the chairman of the Federal Reserve at the time, Ben Bernanke, was a student of financial crises. As he wrote in his 2015 memoir, the context of history proved invaluable.

Bernanke's Fed acted decisively using unprecedented tools that stretched the Fed's legal powers, such as buying up mortgage-backed and treasury securities. Bernanke's knowledge of the Depression also informed the Fed's efforts to backstop other central banks. Thank you, Ben, that recovery rocked. Now there aren't Nazis everywhere. Yeah, I know.

And now everything's okay now. Yeah, it's a good thing he read all those... It's a good thing he read about Tom Joed or whatever. It's a good thing they didn't just give money to people. It was good that they put it all through the banks. Thank you for learning that lesson. They backed up so that the holders of those mortgage-backed securities and CDOs wouldn't be left basically

with worthless equities and securities. They made the poll and then they got the control of the boards. They didn't actually do anything about the mortgages themselves. So basically it's like, oh, good, I'm glad the pension funds invested. It was such a deliberate squandering of that crisis. You end up with... Well, same with the automakers. You end up with federal control of the boards of these huge corporations

and you just kind of just give it away. Well, famously, I remember hearing the story that, because obviously they stopped all of those securities from going bankrupt. So institutional investors who had been investing in them because of their incredibly inflated credit ratings or... I'm not quite sure if the term is correct there. They were fine, but the people who had underwater mortgages or who were getting foreclosed on,

if you called the government's hotline to get mortgage relief, all it did was connect you to the bank that was foreclosing on you. Yeah, well, but here's the thing, Nate. If they actually did help you with your mortgage, that would be an infringement on your personal responsibility and then you wouldn't be motivated to do anything. And the people who were made whole again on that and who did invest in these immensely overvalued assets,

they learned the lesson and they're never going to do it again and the next one will not be much worse as a result of this. Well, the thing about this, Al, is that they invested smartly and that they should have been rewarded for that. And if we took the money from the people who invest smartly and then use it to derogate the personal responsibility of people who had mortgages, then what would happen is everyone would become dependent

on the government and that would be like slavery. Hey, real quickly, what were the kind of racial distributions of those two populations like? Oh, it's racist material. Sorry, Alis, it's racist to ask. I see. Yeah, it's racist to ask that. Also, the other thing is that it's good that Ben studied

the Great Depression, which wasn't fixed by a gigantic program of public works and public spending. Never. No such thing. Okay, so I want to go back to the article. A lot of excellent climate research in environmental science, physics, chemistry, oceanography, mathematics, and modeling, computer science, biology, ecology, and other fields

was being pursued before he recognized quote-unquote climate science as a discipline unto itself. But this is no research. Didn't mean anything because society's breaking. And it's still an interdisciplinary effort. Like you don't stop being a biologist because you study the effects of climate change on biology. Yeah, but they didn't call it progress studies.

It's all in the name. It's a branding exercise. I study the planet's bad making. It does kind of seem like there's some actual progress in this article itself because they've moved on from rediscovering or discovering the concept of studying history to discovering the concept of interdisciplinarity. Which is like, they're moving quite fast through this.

I mean, maybe there is something to it. They clearly know that stuff. Which just doesn't own on myself. When I was trying to make that last joke, I nearly said climateology and then I realized that that's a real thing. So that's the level I'm operating on today. Planetology is a field of study from the Dune books. As you if you recall, Liet Kynes is a planetologist who

becomes who becomes culturally fremen and is crucial to Paul Atreides making his escape from the heart of this. Actually appropriation though, sir. It's an appropriating Dune culture. Yeah. Okay. An important distinction between our proposed progress studies and a lot of existing scholarship is that mere comprehension is not the goal.

Oh my god. The success of progress studies will come from its ability to identify effective progress increasing intervention. But the more good of the thing and then the more thing happened, the more good it is and the more thing is good to think that fucking hell. The point is to make the graphs better.

Right now, the graphs of society have been trending down for a while and progress studies aims to reverse that trend. This graph is looking like a sad face, but if we turn it upside down, then it looks like the little man is smiling. In that sense, progress studies is closer to medicine than biology. The goal is to treat not merely to understand. Yeah, I make the numbers go up on the graph of

how good everything is. I'm basically a doctor. I'm just imagining these people watching 9-11. They're like, well, now we have tablets. There's a lot less paper to burn. I mean, this wouldn't happen. Also, look, Eddie, you're in academia, right? You're not trying to solve anything.

You're not trying to have any academic impact. You're just basically carving on rice, right? No, I just want to sit around and talk about how interesting it is, yeah. Yeah, and it's a good thing these guys came along because otherwise you wouldn't have known that maybe if you release all your research out into the wild, maybe you could change some graphs.

I'm not going to lie, reading this article is really fucking me up because I'm realizing I'm going to have to do a whole new extra chapter now just to be like, oh, and I guess I should probably do something with this. Yeah, because it's not as though the impediment to being able to use anything academically is, of course, the fact that academics just aren't asking the right questions. It's not that there's any kind of, say, set of powerful

interests arrayed against making this kind of progress. No, it's not that most of these quality of life-improving inventions that have popped up throughout the 20th century were also the product of the military industrial complex, like the fucking microwave. No, that could be it either. All those people, they just need to see that they're wrong and then they'll be like, oh, I was wrong.

I'll just stop opposing this because things are good and they need to get better. Everyone who's just against progress because they're doing grievance studies just has to change majors. That's it. It's weird because it gets to the point where you almost feel as though it's difficult to lampoon

this because it's so on its face ridiculous. It's hard for me to get into the mindset of someone dumb enough that I can say the thing that is dumb but also smart with enough credulity that it's going to come across as a joke because literally, I don't know. Everything you've read to me makes me feel as though this is just a really horrible simulation where they haven't updated the AI and these people have four different responses.

They can possibly give like, it's the fucking Sims. They're NPCs. Like, the right was sort of correct in the wrong direction again. So, I'm going to read one more paragraph than this and then we're going to move on. If we look to history, the organization of intellectual fields is generally recognized realms of effort and funding has mattered a great deal.

Areas of study have expanded greatly since the early European universities were formed to advance theological thinking. Thanks, guys. Yeah, this is a rare case of the paragraph where you just say the correct thing, being embedded and did later a bit rather than just out at the start.

Yeah, also completely pointless. Yeah, wow, universities have been updated since the 15th century. It turns out there was this thing called history and acknowledging that may completely derail our argument. But anyway. Organized study of philosophy in the natural sciences later spawned deeper examination of, tame a few, maths, physics, chemistry, biology,

and even economics. Each discipline in turn, with its subfields, has spawned many subsequent transformative discoveries. Our point, quite simply. Webster's English Dictionary defines academia as. Our point, quite simply, is that this progress has yet to reach a natural end. Cue the end of history, Siren.

And a more focused explicit study of progress in general should be one of the next steps. We have to get better at getting better, guys. I was not joking with the sort of brain word slurry earlier. It really is just more good, better, mate. Good, more thing, good, mate. See, I feel like this basically treats progress, improvement, however you want to describe it,

as like a perfectly atomized thing that has no relation to any kind of movement of capital or force. It's the moral arc of the universe, as Ababia so far. It's like everything that's good and that's going to move us forward is a priori good, and everyone will recognize that when they see it. So there's no fight to be had. It's just good, and everyone knows it.

Explicitly like depoliticizing progress as well. So now it's kind of like shipping it of kind of any kind of political background, or kind of like construct. This is basically hedge fund, Juche. What's really funny is that any study of history will show you that the same stuff keeps happening, and all of these people already existed

in this 18th century when they were thinking about how fewer of their sheeps were getting stolen thanks to enclosure. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Do I have to go read you all the paragraph about how things get one to 4% better a year again? It's countable, people. It's a science.

It's got numbers. At least the original Whig historians were like, oh, well, the Romans, and then there's basically us now. Yeah, they didn't have numbers. Everyone knows that words can lie, in our opinion. Numbers are fact. You can't make those up. It could be 1% better a year until 35%, and then it stops.

God, I would say read a book, but get a calculator. Okay, so that's the progress article. I really loved it. It's one of my favorite things I've ever read. I have to change my degree, major. It's just so happy. It's just so pleased. You understand why I feel like they're the best boys

adjusting their bow ties. It's just so cute. Anyway. I love to do this same thing after the collapse and do... Well, the number of sun-bleached skeletons keeps increasing year on year. And actually, that's quite a positive sign for the recovery of the wasps.

Yeah, if anything, this mutation giving me a third ear just helps me hear good ideas faster and better. So I can learn from my mistakes. Anyway, shall we talk about feminism and the alt-right? All right, I'll buy... Like a progress section. Go to progress section of the podcast and anti-progress section. It's very balanced.

You've got to hear both sides. We have to hear both sides. As Birch Barlow said on The Simpsons, only turkeys have left wings. Sorry, I'm real Simpsons-y today. Every other day. No, I'm also Warhammer-y on other days. One of the things I find very interesting,

and this is about a lot of what you've written as well, has been about how the alt-right is primarily a heteronormative cisgendered white male reaction to the idea that they can't do whatever they want anymore, right? Yeah, I mean, and sure. One thing I try and make clear in my research is that it's built around those identities as concepts, but it's also more than willing to diversify,

if that's a strange way of putting it. Oh, like progress. Like a hedge fund. Like progress, yeah. I mean, they're more than willing to utilize diversity for their own goals, do you know? So which is why you always see these people... I don't know, I'm trying to think like Candace Owens

and the various women of the alt-right, kind of Faith Goldie, Lauren Southern, stuff like that. They rise up the ranks to real totemic levels, right? Because they're very happy to understand diversity as a tool, I suppose, even as they kind of are anti-diversity ideologically. This seems quite cynical of them. Are you suggesting that the alt-right

may be kind of acting in bad faith here? You know, I would never seek to kind of impugn anyone's motives, but there certainly is an impression you get when you read enough of them. You see this, you even see this sort of the same thing, sort of crop up when people talk about, oh, the Corbinistas say that they're all about diversity, and they're criticizing Pretty Patel, an Asian woman taking a high office of state.

Yeah. As though, because for them, I feel like what it is, and we'll get into the sort of the women on the alt-right thing shortly, but I think this is worth saying. For them, it seems like there is diversity as an end in itself, which is something the left wants because the left is silly, and then there are policies that actually promote the well-being of people who have traditionally been the targets

of the wrath and ranker of a white supremacist and patriarchal society, which can be promoted by people who are of the target groups. And it says, though, they don't understand that those things are different. Yeah. No, that's absolutely it. But of course, they do. They do when those policies are for people.

Well, demographics they like, let's say. Yeah. It's not that, sorry, I didn't say they don't understand that those aren't different. It's that they're willing to be performatively stupid about those things. They're willing to pretend that they don't know they're not different. Yeah, it's like, you know, when Milo Unopolis was still kind of a figure in the headlines and, you know, he was kind of getting banned

from college campuses and stuff like that. And, you know, you kind of see all of these. It's a good thing we all argued against. Oh, sorry. Sorry. You see all of these right-wing guys be like, oh, so the left, you know, don't want a gay Jewish man speaking, interesting, and all of that kind of stuff.

So I noticed this too, because a lot of guys that I was in the military where they're no surprise now, like alt-right trolls, which is generally like shit lords online. And I saw that line deployed a number of times, being like, oh, you don't like this man? Like, well, how is it the liberals are trying to silence a gay man? It's like, look, if the gay man is speaking and saying that it's good to be racist and you should docks undocumented immigrants so that they get deported,

like it doesn't matter if he's gay or not. But they're like, oh, that makes you homophobic, right? Like, see, I'm more local than you. It's like, well, no, it doesn't because this isn't about individuals. This is about aggregate effects of things. Yeah, you just, it's magic the gathering to these people. You triggered that trap card. Which is also what I call Blair White.

So here's, so basic. So moving on to sort of how women have worked within the alt-right and how the alt-right has welcomed certain types of women into its ranks, so to speak. I think we need to go back to the ideas of Helen Andelin, who wrote this book called Fascinating Womanhood in the Mid-Century. And it's like an anti-feminist manifesto by this woman. She says, one need is fundamental. A wife must feel loved and cherished by her husband.

Without love, her life is an empty shell. This is going to be the Borat voice episode, isn't it? She must be loved and cherished by her husband. Without his love, her life is a little critzily. Without husband, what is wife? Hey, you know what? You can't be a wife without a husband or a wife. Damn, woke.

I took it and I turned it on you. God, look at you. Dan Hodges right here. So let's sort of, can we go into kind of what the basis of books like Fascinating Womanhood are, what they're doing? So Fascinating Womanhood is probably still one of the most influential books for the women of the alt-right and particularly the kind of a trad-wife subset. It's still getting quoted everywhere and things like that. And, you know, there's something I kind of find quite deeply sad about Fascinating Womanhood

because we kind of see all of these sort of self-help kind of trends kind of crop up over and over again for women. But Fascinating Womanhood is like probably the one that is most explicit, which is a bit like here's how to make your boyfriend or your husband or whatever love you and care about you, which like, I don't know, always seems like a kind of quite tragic like starting point for these sorts of things where it's like, you know, well done, got a boyfriend, you've got a husband. Now here's how to make him not treat you like shit.

And the answer in Fascinating Womanhood is usually just treat yourself like shit for him. And so, you know, it's kind of sort of like, you know, if he says something that, you know, upsets you or if, you know, he says something that, you know, seems cruel to you, don't bring it up, you know, kind of wait, wait. I think they sort of like say it says something like, you know, he'll have his reasons. And if you kind of try and approach him about how he's making you feel, that will just feel like nagging to him. So, you know, instead, kind of just kind of repress that sort of emotion.

And then I think it says something like, and if you still feel upset in like a week or so, then maybe it's okay to kind of broach the subject. But you always kind of have to start with a, you know, this is a, this is a me problem. I'm not attacking you kind of thing. I have critical support for this because this is the kind of philosophy that led to a ton of wives poisoning their husbands and getting away with it. Yeah. This is real out of far now hours.

I mean, that's a really good point, Alice, because this is what I find really interesting about kind of the, the, the, the child wife movement and kind of, you know, saying, oh, things were so much better in the fifties. Gender relations were so much better in the fifties. These people never watched Chicago. Yeah. Or like, you know, you sort of want to be like, well, but it, but clearly, you know, they always kind of talk about how this was the secret to happiness for women and women are so unhappy now, but you're sort of a bit like, but women weren't happy because that's why it's not,

why it's not like that anymore. They weren't happy, but they weren't being annoying about it. Yeah, like that's basically it. It's sort of like, I mean, you know, if it had been this kind of absolute perfect kind of, you know, utopia of gender relations, then why did it change? Why did it stop, you know, kind of, and there's always this sort of understanding that, I guess that feminists are kind of these sort of like sleeper agents somehow. Do you know, there's kind of like, you know, there's real women and then there's feminists

who weren't happy with it. It's like nationalism, right? It has to be wounded. It has to have been stolen. Yeah. It kind of seems kind of like this just sort of strange contradiction, I suppose, where, you know, all, this is the secret for happiness for all women, even modern feminists, they say, are lying to themselves when they say they don't really want to be a tried wife with, you know, a kind of nice big home and six kids and stuff like that. What I remember actually about reading excerpts from Fascinating Womanhood is, it says that when you are going to confront your husband, you should always endeavor to be

cute while doing it. So you should hold your, it says, you should hold your breath and stomp your feet while you make your point. So you look like a child. Yes. Yeah. That's awesome. That's, that's not like, you went with King, but I was just going to go with non stuff. Like, I mean, it's funny because there's been actual studies on this and, you know, because there's the kind of manhating feminist sort of kind of trope that's out there. But what has actually been studied is that women who hold more traditional views of gender and kind of more sort of benevolent views and kind of, you know, how women should behave. So I think they, you know,

score highly on beliefs, like even if both couples are working, it's still the women's responsibility to take care of the home. It's still the woman's responsibility to put dinner on the table, all of these kind of things. They also have the highest hostility to men, much higher than people with more than women with more gender kind of egalitarian sort of beliefs. And you're kind of like, that makes sense, right? Because you kind of believe that your role is to kind of act as this kind of quite submissive servant character. You're going to get resentful. That's just what happens. And then poison your husband. And then you poison your husband. Well, it's basically like a guide to marriage as written by the writers of King of Queens,

it seems like. Like this is the NBC can't miss Super Thursday lineup of what gender is, because your husband is a feckless is a combination of kind of a feckless idiot, but also the stern powder familias. And you love and hate him at the same time. And this is a healthy way to carry on a marriage. You shouldn't get a job because then you won't be able to make his roast, but also poison it. Well, something that I've also noticed too from encounters with people like this in real life as well as stuff online is that there does seem to be an argument that the kind of shred wife people want to make or the people in that sort of milieu want to make that the problems with the modern economy or is that because women are working. And so that in

order to solve the current crisis of under employment and wage stagnation and things along those lines and the gap in productivity between productivity and earnings, it's like, well, women should just be tradwives instead. Which for one is insane, but also for another, completely disregards the fact that the problems of capital squeezing out labor aren't going to change just because it's all dudes in the office. It's not like, dudes, well, now that I know that I'm only employing dudes, I can just give them all raises because I love my dudes. I mean, have you ever worked at like a company that's had cutbacks and stuff like that? Because I have and all that happens when like you lose a section of the workforce, it's just like,

oh, you're doing half of their job now. Do you know? Then that's for pretty much the same money, maybe like a kind of like slight raise before, but like, you know, it's not, you're not getting double the wages, do you know? That never happens. Yeah. So as for the work, like in my experience with the like the subgenre of this, the Islamic tradwife, the guys who have that more conservative jurisprudence about this, always, always, always emphasize work first. There's a million threads on like Islam QA and stuff, which is like any sort of quotidian problem. And they'll be like, well, you're working in a mixed environment and you know, that's hurrah. And it's, you know, it's bad for men and women. And like, it's always the first thing.

So this is actually up from a, because I am a real fan of tradwife internet content, both the blogs and the cooking photos. So this is from a blog post, a post that I think it really, it's from a couple of years ago. It's probably, I think, one of the best tradwife posts from, for encapsulating this idea. And the post is called submission and respect. Okay, that one is, that one is kank. Like Modern society has marriage all wrong. Women act like men leading the home and men take the role of women with compliance. Men are brainwashed into believing that if there is a problem, they can just walk out and divorce seems more desirable than marriage these days.

Men take the role of women with enthusiasm when I'm pegging them. Honestly, I am convinced feminism is to blame for the majority of the problem, because our men are being attacked from every witch way. As wives, we love to come together invent quote, quote, about how dumb, careless and unkind our male counterparts are, because which man is not empty-headed and insensitive? Every sitcom from the Simpsons to modern families just shows men in such a detestable light. Well, women have commended the home with all their brilliance, command rather. Men have to consider women equal to themselves or they are bigots.

Yes. Satisfaction cannot be gained by trying to act like something a woman is not. Telling a wife submission and respect lead to a healthy and joy-filled marriage is so taboo, but that's exactly what I'm saying. I mean, if you're into BDSM, great, but I don't feel as though being married needs to also bring with it the idea that you are constantly submitting and have zero agency. But I mean, hey, you know what? What do I know? I'm not goody housewife, or whatever the fuck these people call themselves.

Oh yeah, they're all terfs too. Yeah, I can only imagine they're all terfs, yeah. Because this seems like terfdom is the air they breathe. Oh yeah. So that's the lead up, but here's what I find very interesting about this post, and it's the second paragraph. The biggest hurdle of my marriage has been giving up control to my incredible husband and letting him lead as he sees fit, because I was never taught how to be a traditional wife, much less a godly one. My parents divorced when I was young,

and other than their example, I had no role models of marriage. I never even knew that being a good wife was a skill I was able to learn. I just assumed being a desirable partner would happen if I was with the right person, but I quickly found out this is definitely not how marriage works. Those two things aren't related. Not having a model of how a healthy relationship works doesn't mean you have to have a model of how a submissive patriarchal one works. But also, I like this idea where she just assumed that being a desirable partner would happen if I was with the right person, but I quickly found out this is definitely not

how marriage works. Maybe, maybe, maybe, that first thing you said is right. You will become, you will have a happy marriage if the two people are right together, not if you beat yourself into submission on his behalf. And I think, Annie, you really, you're one of your, this is, I'm contrasting this to one of your posts here, posts, one of your section from the New York Times article you wrote. Which is just an advanced form of post. I was going to say, yeah, that's just sort of my long post, yeah. This is an effort post you did for the New York Times.

A frustrated yearning for a mythic past of material abundance at a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to build careers and achieve financial security is not gender specific, but young people face ever more obstacles, higher demands, and continually dwindling benefits in the form of in-work benefits, job security, and pay. We shouldn't underestimate how some young white women, when faced with this bleak economic landscape, and then presented with a rosy image of 1950s domestic bliss, may look back to 1960s era feminism as having cheated them out of a family and luxurious lifestyle supported by this single income. The men on the alt-right point to diversity initiatives and mass immigration

as having dismantled their careers prospects, the women are furious they have to consider career prospects at all. And I think these two points go together quite well because this is someone who seems to be desperately seeking stability in what appears to be an unstable life through the complete abdication of any kind of control. Well, no, everything is perfect. We love to live in our little dormitories with all of our furniture that we rents a week at a time and then go to our WeWork. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, and this is kind of, because I think there has been some really good journalistic kind of output about, you know, the kind of alienation that is driving men,

young men to the alt-right. And I think there's been much less about the women. I think, you know, for obvious reasons, because the women are less scary because they're not going to kill anyone, you know, you know, yeah. But that sort of, but it also kind of strikes me as a real missing gap that, you know, all of this stuff that we talk about being enacted upon young white men is being enacted on young white women too, you know. And there's no kind of female gene that makes them less prone to kind of like far-right radicalization, you know. It just comes out in a very different way because the gender hierarchy and the alt-right is so rigid. And I think, you know, there's like, particularly in the kind of

the concept of the family and things like that, I think there really are things that we shouldn't just leave to the far-right to be the only ones kind of pointing out, like the fact that, you know, for people, for women who want to start a family, it's incredibly difficult. And I think there's like, I can't remember though, some Pew research study or something that said that even the young women in their 20s to 30s who have had children, haven't had as many as they'd like, and this sort of thing. And that does seem like, I think, that's going to be a real point of kind of psychological loss for people. And it's certainly something that it seems like it's kind of just that little, that little schism,

that kind of little wound, I suppose, in people that the alt-right is all too happy to exploit and kind of saying pointing to all the wrong things for whose fault it is. The birth-right hysteria thing, like that's a hugely reinforcing thing is for them to be able to point to that and say, look, who is outbreeding you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, precisely. And that's the thing that, you know, that's why the alt-right is concerned about it. They don't care that, you know, that women, you know, might want some children, you know, want more children than they have. They've got then that sort of makes them sad. They don't care about kind of women's psychological health in

any sense. But they do very, very much care about demographics, racial demographics. If you want a vision, I think, of an increasingly clear vision of why the right, both the soft right, the hard right, you know, why both Rand Paul and Josh Hawley or whatever are all concerned with white birth-rates, it's because their ideal society is basically Oliver Twist, where there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of white, specifically white children, but with dirty, sooty faces who are ready to clean a chimney, even if it means it claims some of their arms, because that's who you build character. Well, the Urchin economy really did move things, move fast and break things, mostly arms sometimes

legs. Nick, can you mark that please? Yeah, this is an underexplored area of progress studies as the Urchin economy. This girl is actually three percent better a year ago. The post, not your post, Annie, the bad post, the bad posting concludes, it is obviously not America's agenda to have healthy marriages in our community. We are currently too worried about bathrooms for all and the correct pronouns. Can you put in more horns, please? To educate school-age boys and girls and how to be successful in their proper roles. And I think that's very interesting, though, that they see this as

something that school should be doing, because the other of it, the vision of, the reason capital supports this vision is because they want an Urchin economy. The reason that I think a lot of white nationalists support this vision, especially the people who are, have been alienated by capital, is that they're desperate to return to a Norman Rockwell painting. They're desperate to return to a fantasy past and not even a real Norman Rockwell painting. A Norman Rockwell painting, they imagine, because Norman Rockwell painted plenty of fairly searing indictments of the American racism, for instance. Oh, they're doing the thing where they look at Norman Rockwell and they're like,

yes, I want to live in the unironic version of this painting. They're looking at the kind of searing indictments of racism and just like, ha, looks cool. They're doing the American Psycho Fight Club Wolf of Wall Street thing where they're like, this is awesome and not for the reason that the author intended. I want to put a link to Rockwell's The Problem We All Live With in the description, because it's a painting of Ruby Bridges being escorted to school by US Marshals. And they're clearly like, yeah, sounds good. Yeah. So I'll go back to Annie's article here, Annie's effort post.

Tradwives like to point to the ways in which the half-finished work of the sexual revolution has brought about not only male but female discontents and likes of pickup artists and in sales. And then I guess I'll add this here, mass murderers, that the sexual revolution has brought about a consequence-free life of pleasure for young women while socially awkward or unattractive men are left behind. But the existence of Tradwives points to a more nuanced reality. Female fears of objectification and sexual violence remain as potent as ever. The Tradwife subculture exploits them by blaming modernity for such phenomena, then offers chastity, marriage, and motherhood as an escape. As one such YouTube commentator,

a teenager, told her audience, traditionalism does quote, what feminism is supposed to do in preventing women from being made into sexual objects and quote, treated like a whore. Well, like I'm so old, I remember when this had currency on the left and like Ariel Levy was writing female chauvinist pigs about how women were having too much sex and like it was betraying the gains of the 60s or whatever. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it was really interesting to me to see the difference between the responses to MeToo from the kind of female outright versus the male outright. Do you know, because it seemed to me like the female outright had like a real a real kind of, I suppose, like delight in those headlines, like, you know, the kind of

really sort of prurient ones, which had all of these kind of like quite graphic details of sexual assault and stuff like that. And they were kind of posting them and like collages of them, literal collages on social media and stuff like that, like being like, share this around, you know, like, this is what's happening to you. This was what's happening to your daughters and stuff like that. And it kind of, I think, brings me back to that understanding of that kind of traditional gender, the kind of traditional wife or the traditional women's like innate. So I suppose like hostility to men, where there's, there's absolutely, they kind of, you know, give no credence to the idea that kind of men can be in any way educated not to sexually assault.

Which I think kind of comes out in the aerial levy and that kind of brand of sort of the 90th resurgence of some radical feminism as well, where it's like, men aren't going to change, lost cause. What we can do is kind of keep women, you know, under lock and key, which is, you know, kind of shockingly kind of patriarchal argument, which is less surprising when it comes from traditional wives who are, you know, very explicitly pro patriarchy, more shocking when it comes from feminists. Well, like, I forgot what I was going to say. I was thinking about this, Alice, and Annie, because of the extent to which it seems like

what I perceived to be the sort of alt-right women response to some of the Me Too stuff was more, it serves you libs right. Like there was this extent to which they were kind of delighting in this to be like, see if you've fallen so far from traditional morality and this is what you get, so ha ha, you know, as though any right wing movement isn't founded on and, you know, filled to the brim with examples of misogyny and sexual abuse and sort of like, you know, called to personality. Not to be the guy or girl who like identifies fallacies and then decides that wins an argument, but it really is the just world fallacy. And from my backgrounds in law, that's always something

that in, to get a little bit grim here, sexual offences trials, for instance, you want more women on a jury because women are less likely to convict men because it requires a certain sort of implicit understanding that if this horrible thing happened, the victim must have done something wrong. And so by being a liberal, by not being a tradwife, by, you know, hanging around with degenerates, quote unquote, or whatever, that they have brought this upon themselves. And there is this kind of weird phenomenon, which it's like, it bothers me because I see, I see left wing people fall for this as well. So it's like where they're saying, you know,

oh, well, look at where all the sexual assault is happening. It's in the Hollywood, it's male feminists, it's the liberals and men and all this kind of stuff. And you just sort of know it's happening and it's probably happening to a much greater extent in right wing and nationalist circles, all of this stuff. It's just the women have absolutely no chance of speaking out because they know exactly what will happen to them if they do. Do you know? Women in. So, Annie, did you know that we're going to edit out all of your bits on this podcast? And Alice is too, actually. It's just going to be Nate and I talking. It's just going to be lots of

just do talk, do chat. I just remembered what I was going to say. And that's, there is this weird kind of horseshoe theory where some of these tradwives have the same view of men as Valerie Solanas. Yeah, who wasn't wrong in fairness? Yeah, it's that it's, they imagine there is this eternal conflict and the con and we must, and we must hate each other because God put us on this earth to hate each other. All right. I think we're, we're getting, we're getting pretty close to time here folks. So, it only, it only remains for me to say, Annie, thank you very much for calling in today.

Oh, thank you so much for having me on guys. It's been really fun. Indeed. Thank you all for listening. And like I said earlier, you can definitely still come see us at the Edinburgh Fringe and Birmingham transformed. Alice will be at Birmingham transformed and I believe Olga will be at the Edinburgh Fringe. And also, we still have some t-shirts left, but not for anyone who's very small or anyone who's very big. No, we have, we have mediums and larges. The incel cosmology of men is just totally screwed out of our shirts. No manlet shirts, no hefty larges. No manlet shirts. We have plenty of mediums and plenty of larges. We also have a decent number of double XLs, but XL and small

are low size and XS we're completely out of. So, so small kings, I'm sorry, we don't have any shirts for you. Behind the scenes, send me a medium because Milo sent me an XL and I've lost a ton of weight since then. So, thank you. Why don't we bring it up to Birmingham? Oh, okay, sure. So, yeah, thank you very much for listening. Buy a shirt, come see us. And of course, we have a Patreon five bucks a month gets you all of this sweet little bonus content, this sweet, sweet little lumps of content that I know you all crave. It's a Findom. I will call you a swine. We actually, we should put up a tier where I can call you a swine or a hog by name. Yeah, Alice Findoms you. That could be a fun tier. Okay,

all right, awesome. Any, do you have anything to plug before we're out? No, I don't think so. I'm just, I'm just in it for the discourse. So, we'll link your New York Times op-ed in the show notes though. So, at least more people can read it and be like, wait a minute, she published something. More people can read it and yell at me on Twitter. That's my favorite thing. How about this? If you're in it for the discourse, everybody reply to Annie. Just reply to her. Just tell her how your days go. Send me whatever dumb shit. I'll read it. All right, later everyone. Bye.