I like the idea that fascism is a mood, not an ideology. Of course it's not an ideology, they're anti-intellectual. Anti-intellectual for real, not just as a theory.
And I like the trait cluster approach more than definitions for cultural things, though how we chose our trait clusters is a worthy topic that I haven't seen explored.
A fictional Nazi in "The Man in the High Castle" explains it like this:
> Listen, I'm not an intellectual. Fascism has no need of that. What is wanted is the deed. Theory derives from action. What our corporate state demands from us is comprehension of the social forces of history. (...) Explains the underlying actuality of every event. Real issue in war was: old versus new. Money - that's why Nazis dragged Jewish question mistakenly into it - versus communal mass spirit, what Nazis call Gemeinschaft - folkness. Like Soviet. Commune. Right? (...) Too much philosophy in Germanic temperament; too much theater, too. All those rallies. You never find true Fascist talking, only doing - like me.
Emotionally, fascism is a rejection of *complexity*. Instinctively, you feel that life is not supposed to be complex or frustrating. You support your (clearly defined) tribe unconditionally, the tribe supports you; anything other than that is aberration or enemy action.
In far mode, you worship Nature. But in near mode, everyone likes convenient food, hot water, a car, or the proverbial trains running on time. So instead of rejecting civilization as a whole, you reject the idea that civilization needs to be complicated. You reject competition, because it is frustrating, and because you assume that the world is ultimately simple; therefore the right decision can always be made by an expert, you just need to make sure that the expert's values are aligned with the tribe. (An expert saying that something is complicated is probably just insufficiently aligned and tries to get more power at everyone else's expense. Put a gun to his head, and ask again.)
There are things that need to be produced, so people need jobs; but most jobs can be reduced to following orders, which is simple. Market competition is bad, the industry should be organized top-down by guilds, who in turn serve the state. Science is just another kind of a job, perhaps more mysterious but ultimately not too complex from the expert perspective, and should be organized the same way.
At the top, there should be a leader who decides global strategy, because multiple people disagreeing with each other is complex and inefficient. The required traits of the leader are value alignment and strategic thinking. The strategic thinking is kinda implied by the fact that he succeeded to become the leader, so if you believe that his values are aligned with the tribe, all problems are solved and the glorious future awaits.
But how does fascism ensure that an aligned leader ends up in power? "Strategic thinking" can serve a smart selfish backstabber just as well, who may be aligned to his close circle at best.
Speaking as a fascist: You fool! When the leader is genuine, you instinctively feel it in your heart and so does everyone else... except for those damned intellectuals who always try to sow doubt and discord...
I wouldn't think of racism as a defining characteristic of fascism, just as one form that nationalism can take. Mussolini's Italy, as I recall, treated Jews who had fought in the Italian army in WWI as not Jews — because they were Italians.
The problem is that he chose a bad book to review. The book doesn’t give him any alternative other than just parroting it’s glowing worship, or criticizing it without any good alternative.
I don't sense any fear - I just sense that he's trying to be objective, and with a book like this, the only way to be objective is to give a lot of criticism of Modi without any supporting evidence. I'm not saying this is a bad book, that he should criticize - I'm saying that the book is not a useful one to review, because it provides such a one-sided picture of things, so his review ends up feeling one-sided the opposite way.
What's wrong with the latter choice? A simple pan serves a highly constructive purpose, id est warning other people off from wasting their time and money. I don't see why it's necessary to have a better suggestion to tack on at the end. I mean, it's nice, but the absence of that coda doesn't vitiate the core purpose.
If I were advising Scott, I would have said not to even bother publishing a review of this book. Or maybe to just give the first paragraph or two up to the point where he says this book turns out to be a hagiography like the others. Then he could have just stopped, and asked for recommendations of more useful books to review, rather than going ahead with this one.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, and *I* would probably have made that decision (and I assume you're saying you would've). But I can think of a few reasons why Scott might not and did not:
(1) He wanted to yell at the publisher and author: "Stop writing books like this! They're fucking useless! And you, publisher, find something to write a better book on Modi, the guy is running 1/6 of the planet, you know, so it's pretty important."
(2) He wanted to see what the commentariat would have to add. Maybe saying the name "Modi" several times in row, even if interspersed with only peevish ruminating, would conjure some demon, in the comments, who would have fascinating and powerful data to share about Modi (or even Modi-era India).
Franco had to fight his way to power- or let the Germans and Italians do the fighting for him while he concentrated on getting his soldiers to rape working class women who were assumed to be 'Republican'.
Modi has been lucky and dexterous. Because he represents the numerically very significant 'Backward Castes', he will enter the Indian pantheon alongside Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore and Dr. Ambedkar.
I think Hannah Arendt's definition of the difference between standard dictatorship and totalitarianism is relevant here. Standard dictators aim at killing or jailing political opponents. They want you to stay out of political life, to not think about politic, to obey what the government tells you without questioning. Propaganda is used to convince people that every thing is fine and the government does a beautiful job.
By contrast, a totalitarian state wants everybody to engage in politics, and they make sure this happens through propaganda, youth organisation and so on. Propaganda is used to convince people that the government is facing a dire crisis under the threat of powerful enemies both inside and outside, and to urge citizens to mobilize against those threats.
In this light, fascism is a proto-totalitarianism of the right-wing variety. When it falls back to traditional dictatorship, you get Franco. When it keeps going you get Mussolini and then Hitler.
Which is not a problem, as the question was not about the difference between left-wing and right-wing totalitarianism but about the difference between right-wing totalitarianism and right-wing traditional dictatorships.
(Let me amend what I said in my first comment by adding that for Arendt, Mussolini's fascism was not a real totalitarianism.)
I know very little about Modi, but even the hit pieces I've read don't make him sound *totalitarian*, as opposed to authoritarian. In particular, under Arendt's definition, you'd expect compulsory participation in elections and political parties, or at least heavy pressure for participation, for example, involving not only carrots but also sticks.
According to Wikipedia, only one Indian state has compulsory voting (doesn't specify which one):
It also seems unlikely that there is heavy pressure to participate in political parties.
How else might totalitarianism in Arendt's sense be manifested, if not from more or less compulsory participation in politics? If you include compulsory education, then most states would qualify as totalitarian.
Is liberal totalitarianism possible? I'm struggling to think of how it would present, given that pluralism is inherent in liberalism. The closest manifestations I can think of are things like the French ban on religious symbols in public life (ostensibly to stave off even a whiff of partiality) and various forms of free speech extremism.
I can't think of historical examples, but if you're happy with hypotheticals I think a sufficiently quota-obsessed state might qualify. I.e. the name of diversity the only thing that matters is your demographic, be it racial, sexual, or religious (or the intersection of all three), and people are obsessed with any group of individuals containing as much "diversity" as possible
French Laicite would seem to me to be about keeping religion out of secular life more than about demonising it - private religion is perfectly permissible - but maybe that's my atheist bias
Under Arendt's definition of totalitarianism, compulsory voting would be totalitarian, and that is common enough in both liberal and communist regimes. I haven't found information about fascist regimes, but wouldn't be surprised if it was common in those as well:
I would include compulsory education as a sufficient condition for totalitarianism. You could argue that insofar as compulsory education is about ensuring basic literacy and numeracy, and illiterate and innumerate people impose externalities on society, compulsory education is not about enforcing participation in politics. But I think it's clear that most compulsory education is not about literacy and numeracy. I also think it's clear, though a lot of people deny it, that in most places and at most times, compulsory education is mostly about ideology. Naturally, the ideology changes from regime to regime.
I suppose I was thinking more of classical liberalism than the vague American pejorative referring to social progressivism. So a political philosophy whose core values are individual freedom and vigilance against the tyranny of the majority.
Moving on, I have no choice but to join those many people who deny that the main objective of all compulsory education is political indoctrination (though it always manages to catch a ride). I also don't think compulsory education is sufficient by itself to earn a regime the label of 'totalitarian'. By that definition virtually all countries in the world are totalitarian, which I'm sure you'll agree is a bit silly.
Now, compulsory voting is interesting, and comes much closer in theory. But even according to the link you provided, it's fairly rare and the countries that embrace it (Australia, Costa Rica, Luxembourg) don't seem very totalitarian in other ways.
Stanley G. Payne made a similar point about Franco - that he had to compromise and blend original Falangist fascism with existing right-wing Catholic conservatism (embodied in the Carlists) in order to gain and maintain power.
I think both Franco and Trump can be defined as ideological (in Trump's case, more like instinctive, although I think people around him, like Bannon and Miller, were more explicitly ideological) fascists who failed to create fascist governments.
This seemed to fix itself somehow? I think sci hub load balances requests to different servers and zero. was broken for me but then it decided to do moscow. which worked
This is hardly ever discussed openly even in India but a lot of anger and pro-Modi flocking is driven by very high Muslim birthrates especially in very low SES and high religiosity Muslim households and Christian missionaries successfully converting a lot of lower castes and tribes (called SC/STs) into Christianity.
Muslims were ~ 9% of Indian population post partition. They are now ~ 16%. Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh combined, were ~ 23% post partition. They are now ~ 1.5 % in Pakistan and ~ 6% in Bangladesh with rapes and genocide happening each day.
Yet, Hindus are fascist. The privileges of being a white skinned guy with a burden of trying to reform us savage Hindoos.
Hmm. Sounds like one way of ameliorating those demographic changes, if they're so undesirable, would be for India to dump 70% Muslim Jammu and Kashmir on Pakistan while encouraging the Hindus who live there to move into India proper. And yet Modi seems to be going in the opposite direction. Guess he's anti-Hindu.
Pakistan's Hindu population has not decreased since 1947, it actually slightly increased. The reason people think it decreased is because they couple up the demographics of Pakistan and Bangladesh before they separated.
I think most Muslims in India would be happier in Pakistan, and most Hindus in Pakistan would be happier in India, but the transaction costs of moving (getting jobs, getting visas, etc) are inhibiting that self-segregation process. Both governments should work to reduce those transaction costs.
You realise plenty of Indian Muslims loathe Pakistan? Especially after the civil war that created an independent Bangladesh. It's not as if Pakistan is a liberal paradise after all.
If they want a relatively liberal muslim country there are options: UAE, Kuwait, Turkey. No muslim-majority country is exactly a liberal paradise either.
Instead of emigrating away from India's anti-muslim bias they also have the option of renouncing a stupid religion that was constructed self-servingly by a bronze age warlord.
Some amount of social disapproval of islam qua islam is appropriate and serves as an incentive for people to abandon that toxic bronze age superstition.
It was a relatively backward part of the world (why wouldn't God reveal himself to the Chinese instead of some illiterate desert nomad?) but technically they probably had iron swords with which to slaughter the infidels during their megalomaniacal quest for world domination.
Pretty certain that Mohammed was post-Bronze Age, the seventh century being definitely an iron-using period. And in itself Islam can be extremely liberal or extremely oppressive, just like any other religion. It's just a lot easier to spot, other or identify as victims the visibly more devout and likely more oppressive religion. I don't get the feeling you've actually met many Muslims (or many of the non-hegemonising types) though, and would advise you find out more rather than make yourself look foolish.
Wow. What hatred for Hindus. There was a planned genocide of 59 Hindu devotees who were burnt to death by ~ 2000 strong Muslim mob. The riots should'nt happened, but were triggered due to this event.
Commenting without the context is so "Liberal" and "Progressive".
Christianity has existed in India for millenia. Low caste people picking Buddhism or Christianity to escape the system that condemns them to menial careers is not a new phenomenon. It certainly isn't genocide.
That is what missionaries who come to India say. Christian evangelicals committed horrible genocides in India. Read about what they did in Goa for example.
And, there are "Dalit Christians" in India, who feel discriminated against by other castes of Christians.
People in India talk about this all the time. Some of my relatives are convinced that Muslims already outnumber Hindus in India and official statistics are just lying to cover it up. This is exactly how a lot of people in Europe feel about their countries too.
I don't know about Muslims in particular, but Sweden's three most populous municipalities are all <55% Swedish among males aged 15–44*. For the whole country, that number is 63%, down by 10% in the last decade. So population replacement is quite advanced in parts of Europe. But unlike in India, this is still mainly driven by immigration, so it's more of an active choice on the part of Europe's rulers.
Balakrishan Moonje was NOT a founder of RSS. You got this wrong. He was a leader of Hindu Mahasabha and RSS and Hindu Mahasabha disagreed a lot on many issues. From an Indian perspective, the Germans and Japanese were fighting British so it made complete sense to talk to those. It is easy to sit in judgement in 2021, but to look at what options did Indians have in 1930s?
Also, people seem to ignore the man made famine caused by British in 1940s that killed nearly 10 million Indians. That is a bigger figure than the Jews killed by Germans but then Indians are Brown skinned and Jews had white so I guess those murders are legit and Nazism is worse than British for a British colony.
You mean the Bengal Famine of 1943? This is generally regarded as being partly man-made with the usual assortment of natural disasters for that region also contributing, but it was not "caused by the British" in the same sense that the Holocaust was caused by the Germans. Food supplies were constantly being disrupted during this time due to World War 2. The British did not cause that!
From what I have read on the subject, the Japanese had a lot more to do with actually causing the famine than the British; the British simply failed to do much to alleviate it.
It would not be the first time the British did something like that. Ireland in the potato famine years was subject to food diversions from Ireland to Britain, Wikipedia states India in 1943 was subject to food and materials diversions (cloth, medicine) to British control in order to support the British war effort at great cost to the people of India. I can take a few minutes to put up references for this later today. A multi-year countrywide phenomenon would have multiple interacting causes but it seems to me fair to say that British actions of commandeering local materials did contribute to it.
At great cost? In the very short term perhaps, but if the Axis powers had won, do you think things would have worked out better or worse for the people of India? I'm pretty sure they'd have been worse. Neither Hitler nor the Japanese would have treated the "backwards races" well, as the Indians (and Africans etc) would have been perceived by them.
That's why I find it pretty grotesque to draw comparisons here, as Bharat Sharma is doing. The idea that Britain "caused" a famine and "murdered" Indians implies some sort of deliberate policy based on racism or dislike of India in some way. Obviously that's not even remotely true. At the time in question, the British were fighting total war against an opponent that intended to enslave the entire population and use them for forced labour. That same opponent was trying as hard as possible to create a famine in Britain too, hence the desperate supply situation. It is an absurd and foolish reading of history to claim that it was OK for Indians - of any political affiliation - to be supporting the Axis powers. If Britain hadn't won then India would have been wiped out as a country and quite possibly de-populated.
Enslaving populations and using them for forced labour was the nazi project concerning Eastern European peoples. I should be surprised to learn that such plans existed for Britons, too. AFAIK, Hitler and his crew were disappointed about all the Northern Europeans not aligning with them because they had included them in their aryan identity thing but still had hopes to win their hearts if they only killed and subdued enough of them. Sounds crazy, I know. As a matter of fact, British POW were treated comparatively humane in nazi Germany while Russians had much lower chances of survival.
Their plans changed throughout the war period. Hoping the British would join them and partition the world between them was the case up to about 1941. After it became clear that would never happen, detailed post-invasion plans were never drawn up, although they got as far as deciding on how the country would be partitioned, who they'd recruit for their Vichy government, who would run the secret police, and lists of hundreds of thousands of people who would be immediately sent to forced labour camps.
But that was the original plans. Remember that by 1945 the Royal Air Force had been levelling entire German cities. After the invention of chaff German air defences collapsed and Dresden was destroyed. It was worse than a nuclear attack, just done with traditional explosives: the firestorm alone destroyed six and a half square kilometers of the city. If the war had turned at that point and Hitler had won, he would not have treated the population at all kindly. A few sources attest to this:
"It's a common misconception that the Nazis would have somehow treated the population of Britain with more sympathy and respect than civilians in mainland Europe. While there may have been less of the visceral contempt they had for Jews and Russians, Hitler's top brass had brutal plans in place for Britons. Specifically, British men. If the invasion had succeeded, all healthy men from their teens to their mid-40s would have been eligible for being rounded up and sent across the channel to work in punishing slave labour camps and factories. Somehow, the Nazis would then have had to prop up the stricken economy and infrastructure of an abruptly-depleted Britain - perhaps by putting more women into work."
Speech by SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Richard Darre – 1940
"As soon as we beat England we shall make an end of you Englishmen once and for all. Able- bodied men and women between the ages of 16 and 45 will be exported as slaves to the Continent. The old and weak will be exterminated. All men remaining in Britain as slaves will be sterilised; a million or two of the young women of the Nordic type will be segregated in a number of stud farms where, with the assistance of picked German sires, during a period of 10 or 12 years, they will produce annually a series of Nordic infants to be brought up in every way as Germans. These infants will form the future population of Britain. They will be partially educated in Germany and only those who fully satisfy the Nazi’s requirements will be allowed to return to Britain and take up permanent residence. The rest will be sterilised and sent to join slave gangs in Germany. Thus, in a generation or two, the British will disappear.”
Would it have really happened? Nobody can know. But faced with this future it is not really surprising that a famine far away, in a place where 2/3rds of the population was malnourished even in normal times, was not the highest priority.
The British actively moved food supplies from Bengal to Britain. Churchil's hatred for Brown people in general and Hindus in particular, is well known.
Madhushree Mukherjee's book exposes the planned famine by White Anglo Saxon Protestant - Winston Churchill.
Look mate, I hate Winston Churchill as much as the next nationalist, but ease off on the accusations of "it's because we're brown". The Brits sat back and watched my people starve, and if we take some figures (it's hard to get accurate estimations of what the population of pre-Famine Ireland was), then nearly half our population died or emigrated. Estimations were that total population for the entire island was around eight million. Over the years since 1845-1847 (the official period of the Famine), the population of the Republic dropped to between three and four million.
The difference here between the British colonial famines is that they are allegedly natural disasters which were not part of policy, but the Holocaust was deliberate policy to get rid of the particular sets of undesirables that the Nazis marked out as wreckers, saboteurs, and generally not wanted in the Brave New World they were going to create.
I have never looked into it personally, but it was my understanding that 19th-century and early-20th century Britain *did* in fact treat "the Irish" as a race apart… I will grant that this may to some extent be a case of 21st-century identity politics trying to force a round peg into a square hole, but — I dunno. It's hard not to look at John Tenniel's caricatures of Irishmen as these ape-like subhuman brutes, and not think that "racism" fairly describes (part of) the anti-Irish sentiment.
It will be wonderfully post-modern and a fitting end to current trends if the word "racist" stops having anything to do with anybody's skin color and just because a generic synonym for "mean."
"Do your homework!"
" Mom! You're so racist!"
Maybe that conversation has already occured in some leafy suburban tract.
I see what you mean. That being said, let me nit-pick at your choice of words there: I think if you define racism as being primarily concerned with "skin colour" you're already some of the way to diluting the meaning. Racism strictly and conservatively defined refers to belief in the superiority of some perceived human "race"/ethnicity over another. Skin colour is one marker around which races are often drawn, but not by far the only one; anti-semitism in its 'classic', Nazi form is clearly a central example of "racism", but the perceived race is defined in a way having nothing to do with skin colour at all.
Hence my tentative reading of 19th-century anti-Irish sentiment as "racist"… If the English were caricaturing the Irish as a physically repellent "breed" of men, in part based on some stereotypical physical traits (e.g. red hair), then that seems pretty much the same thing as anti-semitism talking about the ‘Jewish race’ with its attendant caricatures of repellent rat-man with stereotypically hooked noses. I will grant that it is a more distant relative to the American-style white-versus-black sort of racism; but if we agree that the Nazis were racist in respect to Jews, I think we do in fact have to also say (a segment of) the English were racist with regard to Irishmen.
I would say a functional definition of "race" has to include a nontrivial collection of genetic distinctions *in addition* to whatever the "signal" distinction is. It so turns out this is most obvious when you compare people with black and white skin (where "white" pretty much just means "not black" so it includes brown, red, and yellow people).
There are characteristics We Do Not Discuss, to be sure, but that to one side, black women at age 75 on average live ~15% longer than white women, black women are more likely that whites women to suffer from eclampsia in pregnancy, black men are more likely than whites to have high blood pressure, and blacks are less likely to be born with Down's or cleft lip. That is, there are a range of differences that are purely (or mostly) genetic, which have very little to do with culture or individual choice. Taking note of these distinctions is functional: you can let it inform your medical models, for example, and be more aggressive in monitoring blood pressure in black pregnant women, and more aggressive about pushing genetic testing in white. You can also let it usefully influence your research priorities, for example being sure you test whether your new BP med works equally well in blacks and whites, 'cause you know can't extrapolate easily from one to the other.
But are there any such differences between Jewish Germans and Aryan Germans circa 1935? Were there any such genetic differences between Irish and Brits circa 1880? I haven't heard that there are.
So we have more than just public whimsy or political utility as a decision critierion. We can for example say it's positive and functional to identify "racial" differences when they are sufficiently strong and general that they can productively influence medical decisions trees (for the benefit of all races), and we can say it's just people being tribal assholes when they can't.
Even if we granted such genetic differences between races on medical matters — I fail to see what relevance this has to the question of defining racism. You still end up with a spectrum, where the exact boundaries will be arbitrary; some definitions of "race" will be medically useful and some will not, but (as per "The Categories Were Made For Man…") you can't really say some will be *true* and some will be *false*.
The way "race" categories are drawn in the context of "racism" (that is to say, people of a given ethnicity deciding another set of people are a disgusting outgroup who must not be allowed to interbreed with them because that would be icky, result in stupid children, and probably make God angry or something) seems to have precisely nothing whatsoever with HBD-type differences in immune systems; if we are analysing the psychology of racism, I do not think that whatever actual scientifically-verifiably "race differences" may allegedly exist even enter *into* it, doubly so if the races which they allow one to distinguish are different from the boundaries racists drew.
Furthermore, it seems to me that the word "race" is so tightly bound with "racism" (not just in a "race is what nasty racists care about" sense but in a "racisms are the ones who have largely defined the word race") as for it to be counter-productive to try to redefine it for something 'innocent'. I am fairly skeptical of HBD in any case, but I think the P.R. of "innocent" HBD that's only trying to talk about medical issues would be *much* improved if it just stopped talking about "race" and found its own coinage to talk about the clusters of populations which *it* defines. Their boundaries may resemble those of the classic "races" if you squint, but they are being defined based on fundamentally different criteria and for fundamentally different aims, and you're just shooting yourselves in the foot by tying yourselves to the word "race".
It's like, I dunno, if Lavoisier, having discovered the chemical phenomenon of "combustion", had still dubbed it "phlogiston". It's confusing even if loosely the same word had previously applied to loosely the same phenomenon — and it obscures the way in which the purported discovery is something radically new and scientific, rather than a survivance of old, "ick"-factor-based biases.
There's a book that argues that the Irish famine was actually a genocide: https://www.amazon.com/Famine-Plot-Englands-Irelands-Greatest/dp/1137278838. Admittedly, I've only read a summary of it, but I disagree that it was an intentional genocide in the same way the Holocaust was. I think we need another word for horrors like the potato famine and the Bangladeshi famine. To me, they are to genocides as manslaughter is to murder. They're still crimes against humanity, since the people in charge did less to ameliorate them than they could've due to prejudice, but they lack the same element of intention and pre-planning as the Holocaust.
"To me, they are to genocides as manslaughter is to murder." This is a very apt analogy and I will make a note of it for future use.
(The same could be said about the semantic argument over whether the British maintained "concentration camps" in the Zulu wars. Sure, they invented the name concentration camp for what they were doing, but they didn't have gas ovens.)
Thank you! I know less about the Zulu wars than I know about the Irish famine (perhaps partly due to ethnic narcissism, since I'm of mostly Irish heritage, and most of my immigrant ancestors came to the US in the wake of the famine). But I agree that it's also important to preserve distinctions between camps where people are forcibly rounded up and treated horribly and camps tailor-made for mass murder. It's certainly worth learning about all these crimes against humanity and trying to prevent them from re-occurring. But the focus on killing as many Jews and Roma as possible (also gays and disabled people, though killing them en masse isn't technically genocide) during the Holocaust was different than the other atrocities mentioned in the thread. And if we let the connotations of these terms creep beyond these terrible horrors, we might see a sort of "boy who cried wolf" effect whereby accusations of genocide are ignored even when it's legitimately happening.
It isn't true that the British "sat back and watched people starve" during the Irish famine years. Very large amounts of money were spent by the British government on imported maize from the USA and from Britain to help alleviate shortages in Ireland, not to mention the promise to buy any cure for the potato blight and supply to Irish farmers for free.
More could certainly have been done, but the claim that the brutal Brits callously and deliberately starved the Irish is just propaganda.
While the Irish Famine was a tragedy, I think it's seriously misleading to group deaths and emigration together as if they're remotely comparable - maybe if the only data available is gross population estimates before and after you have no choice, but I doubt there aren't estimates of the death toll specifically. It must be awful to need to migrate or starve, but migrating is definitely a much, much less bad fate than starving.
According to Edmund Spenser in 1596, we were Scythians. Now we debate: Are/were Scythians white? 😁
"Irenius
Before wee enter into the treatise of theire Customes, yt is first needfull to consider from whence they sproung, for from the sundrie mannors of the nations, from whence that people which nowe are called Irishe were derived, some of the customes which nowe remayne amongest them have benn fetcht, and since they have benn contynwed amongest them; for not of one nacyon was that people as yt is, but of sondrie people of different condicons and manners: But the chief which have first possessed, and inhabited yt, I suppose to be Scythians.
Eudoxus
How commeth it then to passe, that the Irish doe derive themselves from Gathelus the Spaniard.
Irenius
They doe indeed, but (I conceive) without any good ground. For if there were any such notable transmission of a colony hether out of Spaine, or any such famous conquest of this kingdome by, Gathelus, a Spaniard, as they would faine believe, it is not unlikely, but the very Chronicles ofSpaine (had Spaine then beene in so high regard as they now have it) would not have omitted so memorable a thing, as the subduing of so noble a realme to the Spaniard, no more then they doe now neglect to memorize their conquest of the Indians, especially in those times, in which the same was supposed, being nearer unto the flourishing age of learning and writers under the Romanes. But the Irish doe heerein no otherwise, then our vaine English-men doe in the Tale of Brutus, whom they devise to have first conqured and inhabited this land, it being as impossible to proove, that there was ever any such Brutus of Albion or England, as it is, that there was any such Gathelus of Spaine. But surely the Scythians (of whom I earst spoke) which at such tyme as the Northerne Nations overflowed all Christendome, came downe to the Sea coste, where enquiringe for other countryes abroade, and gettinge intelligence of this Countrye of Irelande, finding shippinge convenient, passed over thither, and arived in the North parte thereof, which is now called Ulster, which first inhabiting, and afterwardes stretchinge themselves forth into the Ilande as theire nombers encreased, named yt all of themselves Scuttenlande, which more briefly is called Scutland, [or] Scotland."
Though some of us were Spanish? Maybe?
"Irenius
After this people thus planted in the north or before, (for the certaintie of tymes in thinges soe farre from all knowledge cannot bee justlie avouched), another nation cominge out of Spaine aryved in the West part of Irelande, and findinge it waste, or weakelie inhabited, possessed yt; who whether they were native Spaniards, or Gaules or Affricans or Goaths, or some other of those Northerne Nations which did spread all over-spred all Christendome, it is impossible to affirme, onlie some naked conjectures may be gathered; but that out of Spaine certenlie they came, that doe all the Irishe Cronicles agree."
It is harde to saye: for whether they at theire first comminge into the land, or afterwardes by tradinge with other Nations which hade letters, learned them of them, or devised them amongest themselves, [it is very doubtful. But that they had letters anciently, it is nothing doubtful,] for the Saxons of Englande are saide to have theire letters, and Learninge, and learned men, from the Irishe; and that also appeareth by the likenes of the Carracter, for the Saxons carracter is the same with the Irishe. Now the Scythians never, I cann reade, of oulde had letters among them: therefore yt seemeth that they had them from the nacyon which came out of Spaine, for in Spaine there was (as Strabo wryteth) letters auncyently used, whether brought unto them by the Phenicians, or the Persians, which as yt appeareth by him) had some footinge there, or from Marseles, which is saide to have been inhabited by the Greekes, and from them to have had the Greeke carracter; of the which Marsilianns yt is said, that the Gaules learned them first, and used only for the furtherance of theire trades and private busines: for the Gaules (as is stronglie to be proved by many au ncyent and authenticall wryters) first inhabite all the sea coste of Spaine even unto Cales and the mouth of the Streights, and peopled also a greate parte of Italie, which appeareth by sundrie Citties and havens in Spaine called of them, as Portingalia, Gallecia, Galdunum; and also by sundrie nacons therein dwellinge, which yet have reseaved theire owne names of the Gaules, as the Rhegnie, Presamarie, Tamariti, Cineri, and divers others. All which Pompeius Mela, beinge himselfe a Spaniarde, yet saith to have descended from the Celtics of Fraunce, whereby yt is to be gathered, that that nacon which came out of Spain into Ireland were auncientlie Gaules, and that they brought with them those letters which they had learned in Spain, first into Ireland, the which some allso saye doe muche resemble the olde Phenicon carracter, beinge likewise distinguished with pricke and accent, as theires auncyentlie; but the further enquirie thereof needeth a place of longer discourse than this our shorte conference."
Shock, horror: an Elizabethan writer doesn't like the Spanish 🤣
"Eudoxus
Whence commeth it that the Irishe do soe greatlie covett to to fetch themselves from the Spaniards, since the olde Gaules are a more auncyent and much more honorable nation?
Irenius
Even of a very desier of newfanglenes and vanitie, for beinge as they are nowe accompted, the most barbarous Nation in Christendome, they to avoide that reproache woulde deryue them selves from the Spaniards, whom they now see to bee a very honorable people, and next borderinge unto them: But all that is most vaine; for from the Spaniard, that now is, is come from as rude and salvage nations as they, there beinge, as yt may be gathered by corse of ages and veiwe of theire owne histories (though they therein labored much to enoble themselves) scarse any dropp of the oulde Spanishe bloode left in them; for all Spain was first conquered by the Romaynes, and filled with Colonies from them, which were still encreased, and the native Spaniarde still cutt of. Afterwards the Carthaginians in all the longe Punicke Warres havinge spoiled all Spain, and in the ende subdued yt whollie tothem selves, did, (as yt is likelye) roote out all that were affected to the Romaynes. And lastly the Romaines, havinge againe recovered that countrye and beate out Hanniball, did doubtles cutt of all that had favored the Carthaginians, soe that betwixte them both, to and fro, there was scarse a native Spaniard left but all inhabited of Romaynes. All which tempests of troubles being overblowen, there longe after arose a newe storme more dreadfull then all the former, which over-ranne all Spain, and made an infinite confusion of all thinges; that was, the comming downe of the Gothes, the Hunnes, and the Vandalles, and lastly all the Nations of Scythia, which, like a mountaine flud, did overflowe all Spain, and quite drowned and washt away whatever relicts there were left of the land-bred people, yea and of all the Romaynes too. The which Northerne Nations findinge the complexion of that soile, and the vehement heate there farf different from theire natures, toke no felicitie in that country but from thence passed over, and did spread themselves into all Countries in Christendome, of all which there is none but hath some mixture or sprincklinge, yf not [thorough] peoplinge, of them. And yet after all those the Mores and Barbarians, breakinge over out of Africa, did finally possesse all Spain, or the moste parte therof, and treade downe under theire foule heathenishe feete what ever little they founde there yet standinge. The which, though afterwards they were beaten out by Ferdinando of Arragon, and [Isabell] his wife, yet they were not soe clensed, but that through the marriages which they had made, and mixture of the people of the land, during their long contynuance there, they had left no pure drop of Spanish bloode, nor of Romayne nor Scythian. Soe that all nacons under heaven, I suppose, the Spaniard is the most mingled, most uncerten, and most bastardlie; wherefore most foolishly doe the Irish thinke to enoble themselves by wrestinge theire auncestrie from the Spaniard, whoe is unable to deryve himselfe from any nacon certen."
Okay, now I am going to avow that we Irish *are* Spanish! Take that, Spenser!
According to whom? My mom has done a lot of genealogy research, and I've looked at the Census records for several of my ancestors who immigrated to the US from Ireland in the 19th century. They're all listed as white. Perhaps the British used a different classification, but I think the difference is that "white" in the 19th century didn't mean "amorphous blob of interchangeable European heritage" that it does today. Differences between "white" ethnicities were seen as a bigger deal.
I've always assumed Spenser is evidence that you could find strong narcotics in sixteenth-century Ireland. Although the Scythian ancestry thing is not one of his attempts to confuse the historical record, although it was the Picts in Bede and some Old Irish works. The confusion is understandable though: the Picts did stop off in Ireland and intermarried before the Irish helpfully pointed them in the direction of Scotland; and the Dal nAríada and a few other Ulster tribes were considered Cruithne, the Old Irish ethnonym for Picts.
I get the point you're aiming at here, and I even agree with it to an extent, but you really might want to ease up on the way you are putting it forward.
For one thing, people really weren't falling all over themselves to help the beloved "white" Jewish minority in the 1940s. For another, I don't think history does look all that kindly on the British colonization of India. But most of all, there actually is a meaningful distinction between a famine and a policy of rounding up an ethnic subgroup from across an entire continent and gassing them in ovens. I don't believe exercises in comparative suffering are generally all that useful, but there is a reason Nazis inspire a unique horror.
People aren't indifferent to the famine so much as ignorant of it. Americans, you may recall, actually fought in WWII. They have a lot of direct experience with Nazis. In contrast, we don't get a lot of Indian political history in school in the U.S. We don't get German political history either, for that matter. We get U.S. history. Maybe that's unfortunate, but it's also a more accurate and benign explanation of attitudes than "no one cares about brown people."
Yeah, its very much the historically literate American's view that 'yeah, the British were awful, but there was just something special about the Nazis', and the specialness of the Nazis isn't actually captured simply by numbers of dead, but about how they went about it. Though it wouldn't be special if it wasn't a death count that was at least in the mid 7 figures, and plausibly over ten million.
> and the specialness of the Nazis isn't actually captured simply by numbers of dead, but about how they went about it.
Humans have been exterminating other tribes who compete for their resources since the dawn of time. The subjective specialness you place on this event is part of your cognitive bias, nothing to do with reality unfortunately.
> But most of all, there actually is a meaningful distinction between a famine and a policy of rounding up an ethnic subgroup from across an entire continent and gassing them in ovens. I don't believe exercises in comparative suffering are generally all that useful, but there is a reason Nazis inspire a unique horror.
Every genocide is unique in some way, and there were other genocides that included gassing. I don't understand why you mention that it was an ethnic minority, as if that makes their lives more valuable. Obviously the extreme importance given to the killing of Jews in WW2 is at least in part due to all the movies, media etc. made about it, and because it was useful for other political purposes.
Bengal suffered two big famines because of a transition to elected Governments. Shurawardy must take the blame for the War famine but Mujib was innocent of the 1974 famine and was trying to take back control from corrupt elements when he and his family was massacred. The fact is the Muslim League was a disaster for Muslims of the sub-continent.
They’re not quite as numerous as the pro-CCP “wolf warriors” but I do notice that anything slightly critical of the BJP on the internet similarly attracts a legion of attackers.
I've just realized I'm the perfect Modi voter. I mean, apart from not being Indian.
I started out very anti-Modi - see the link below. I have to say that I've come to like him more and more. Largely because... well, to be honest, for the same reason that Modi says many of his supporters like him. He's hated by a media whose standards of honesty start with the hitpiece on Scott and go downhill from there. I've also become utterly disillusioned with liberal secularists - I go way back in the Atheism movement, back to the days of Hitchens & Dawkins and when it all started going to hell with A+. So that probably makes me less harsh on Modi than I might otherwise be. He seems to have been less the 'hard ass Hindu nationalist' that I feared.
So, I get why Scott is suitably skeptical of this book. But I found myself reading the review and nodding and going, "well, makes sense to me".
"I didn't intend this, and I don't consider it fair compensation for the level of reputational damage they did me."
Why would one care about this reputational damage? The NYT clearly jumped the shark crying wolf on racism and facism during the Trump years, and frankly anyone who is oblivious to this doesn't have an opinion on these issues worth caring about. (Obviously there are exceptions when it comes to career when you might have to care about about the reputation conferred by people whose opinions you don't respect. I am not aware that this is the case here.)
This piece by Freddie is instructive on just how insane the NYT has gotten on these issues:
If you read the NYT piece Scott was talking about you'll notice that it never once calls him a racist, sexist or an elitist. Scott is making a very basic mistake here.
It claimed Scott is "aligned" with a guy who argues that white people are genetically more intelligent than black people, and that he thinks feminists are the embodiment of evil. Tedious semantic games add no value here - his summary of the article was fair.
Scott clearly said "It accused me of being racist, sexist, elitist, all kinds of negative things". When you look at the evidence you'll see that the NYT never "accused" Scott of any of those things.
Saying that someone is aligned with Charles Murray isn't the same thing as calling them a racist. This is obvious, and it's obvious to anybody who reads things carefully.
If you disagree, you should be able to find some evidence that the NYT called Scott a "racist" or a "sexist" or an "elitist" - this is Scott's claim. It has no evidence. If Scott wants people to believe that the NYT did such a thing, he should easily be able to find some evidence. So far, no such evidence exists.
> This is obvious, and it's obvious to anybody who reads things carefully.
Please consider that not everyone 'reads things carefully'. Consider that it might be _misleading,_ i.e. that people, perhaps those people who don't read things carefully—might get misled, and often this is intentional.
The NYT can't be held responsible for someone who misreads their text and subsequently believes things that the NYT never said. In this case, Scott's audience seems to be mass misreading because Scott's priming them to be adversarial towards this particular article and saying that it "accuses" him of being racist, sexist and elitist, when no such accusations exist. In this case, responsibility for the misreading lies on Scott Alexander's shoulders, not the NYT.
(I didn't say misreading, I said misleading. I do not mean that someone might be _misunderstanding_ the text, it's that someone might be taking the writer's _implications_ at face value without bothering to determine if they are a correct interpretation of the facts.)
At any rate, what do you believe the author's intent was in including such paragraphs?
It is facially ludicrous and absurd to deny that the false parallels and ‘alignments’ being drawn between Murray and Scott, or Scott and Nazis, or Scott and eugenicists, or Scott and the alt-right, are being drawn just because they happen to be apt to make some other innocent point. It was done in bad faith with intent to smear him personally and mislead the ignorant, and to say they are not responsible for those interpretations is carrying water for the worst kind of yellow journalism.
This is, IMO, your fundamental error here. Communicating correctly is the responsibility of both parties in any exchange. If you write a text that is *very obviously* prone to misleading people, you do actually bear some responsibility for the misconceptions that creates.
The NYT wrote an article that was *very obviously* prone to being misread in such a way that people would think Scott agreed with Murray's racist opinion. I guess if you are very nitpicky, you could say that's not "calling" him a racist, but rather "insinuating" it and I would agree that's a better word (but is it "accusing"? Scott's original phrase. I'm not sure)
Regardless, they certainly bear responsibility for the misreading
> Saying that someone is aligned with Charles Murray isn't the same thing as calling them a racist.
Oh come off it. It's obvious to everyone what the NYT was trying to do.
Next you'll be telling us that if someone says "Can you pass the salt?" they're inquiring into your ability to pass the salt and not asking for the salt.
The NYT didn't even call Murray a racist. The emotional outrage that Rationalists are feeling here doesn't seem to be based on any actual statement that the NYT article made. It's all based on assumptions about the supposed intentions of the writers. Making up supposed nefarious-intentions of the writer based on zero evidence is not arguing in good-faith.
This is a much better suggestion than the one the are currently following of putting forth really sorry arguments against his position. I was pretty up in the air before. Pretty soon I'll be 100% marxist.
Thanks for the positive feedback. Often it feels like I am not making much progress here. I am happy to talk about Marxism if you have any questions about it.
> Scott clearly said "It accused me of being racist, sexist, elitist, all kinds of negative things"
Above, in the sentence after this, Scott links to his original post where he outlines in detail why he finds the article misleading and/or dishonest. If you follow the link, you'll see that Scott doesn't claim they accused him of any of these things, and that this is just shorthand for the bias the NYT used in their reporting. I think it is fair for him to use shorthand here to summarize what he references via link, though I can see why reasonable people may disagree.
For example, Scott is concerned in his original post that the NYT ties him to Peter Thiel and other (elite) tech figures. There is no falsehood in noting the relationship, but the NYT writer makes an editorial choice (reflecting their bias) to call out this relationship and not any others.
You may want to take your concerns to that discussion, as this post is about Modi, not about Scott and/or the NYT.
It's an inaccurate "shorthand" since the article never called Scott Alexander racist, sexist or elitist. Shouldn't we try to be precise in our language and be more charitable to the outgroup (the NYT in this case)?
Dogwhistles are for being racist, not for calling someone racist. The whole point of the dogwhistle is that you have to hide it. Why would someone have to hide an accusation of racism if, according to this community, it is as easy as ever to call someone racist?
Like, for the past four years I've been reading people in the SSC comments arguing that no, Donald Trump isn't actually a racist (at least by current Republican standards), none of the veiled references in his speeches should be taken as targeting a particular ethnicity, the fact that his most prominent supporters seem really racist shouldn't reflect on him personally, etc. etc.
But apparently if the New York Times makes a veiled reference, that's something we need to take extremely seriously.
I didn't know that, strictly speaking, a community can believe anything, or that if someone denies the existence of a dog whistle in a particular case, then that means that dog whistles don't exist.
Speaking personally, I suspect that Trump knew the effect of what he was saying.
Dude, the NYT never wrote a "retaliatory" hit piece on Scott, and the folks here are having a shared fever dream if they think the NYT gives a fuck about an obscure blogger one way or the other. But you'll never convince anyone here of that fact. "Rationalism" is just another tribe.
Well, the central point of that article was that some contrarian asshole directed (with a wink and a nod) his followers to attack a poor journalist and his paper, who only wanted to tell the whole truth to their readers, so in that sense it's fair to call it retaliatory. I agree that "rationalists" still perceive it as more adversarial than it really was, IMO mostly because of the "hostile media effect". It was amusing to read several replies here and on the subreddit from people who found out about the blog through the article and thought that it sounded interesting and felt that the overall tone was positive.
I don't think that's an accurate summary of the central point of the article at all, but even if it were, *it would still be a better representation of what transpired* than "world's most esteemed journalistic organization publishes hit piece to teach rando blogger a lesson." As Will Wilkinson has pointed out, it really does raise journalistic questions when some corner of the internet goes absolutely bananas for seemingly no good reason at all.
I am a person who started reading this blog due to the NYT piece (although I was vaguely aware of SSC already). I like Scott's writing. But I've worked in Silicon Valley long enough to know that the people who criticize others for not being as rational as they are are the first ones to go red-faced and screaming when their ego is even slightly threatened.
Thanks for pointing me towards Wilkinson's post. I haven't seen it before, decent critiques of "rationalism" are hard to come by, and this was better than most. I still think that the NYT would've easily indulged Scott's request for pseudonymity if he was more ideologically palatable to them (there are precedents), so claims about adherence to some lofty standards of journalism aren't too convincing. Of course, his reaction seemed unreasonable enough to warrant a story in it's own right, but I'd say that the New Yorker piece from the last year did a far better job at it, while still managing to avoid spitefully mentioning his full name.
The New York Times is still clearly influential among many people, and I don't think it's wise to immediately dismiss all those people as having opinions not worth caring about. At least not wise for a minor internet celebrity who doesn't like hateful comments and messages.
To me you de facto renounce your credibility on these issues when you take the NYTs word for it on them. You may have all sorts of other valuable opinions, but not on who is an awful person as defined by their racism, sexism, fascism etc.
Do recall that Scott is a practicing psychiatrist - if the NYT piece cost him patients, that would be real reputational damage. The opinion of the common man does matter even if you don't think it's likely to be correlated to reality.
Reputational damage included Scott having to reshape his career, since he wanted to keep his being a psychiatrist who also did counselling separate from his reputation as a blogger.
He's landed on his feet (money coming in from substack, private practice just prescribing so far as I know), but it was a big change that he wasn't looking for.
"Reputational damage"? Did Scott ever show any sort of evidence that there was any "reputational damage" beyond his feelings being hurt?
This incident is quickly becoming a founding mythology and religious conviction of internet Rationalism. So much so that Scott is claiming things like "It accused me of being racist, sexist, elitist" - if you read the NYT article in question you can very plainly see that this never happened.
Considering that Scott had himself revealed his name and that the information was easily available through a Google search I do not consider this a "dox" - just the printing of accurate information. Since there's a lot of inaccurate journalism out there, I think the NYT should be applauded for getting Scott's name correct.
I think outing his pseudonym was really a bad move by the NYTimes, but apart from that the article didn’t seem particularly problematic. It oversimplified some things, as one does in a short article, and I think it very much mischaracterized what I think of as my favorite essay (“I Cam Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup”), but it’s also absolutely true that this blog is a safe space for anti-feminists and human biodiversity types.
Right, it wasn't lies but selective focus to "problematize" Scott to the NYTs 90+% liberal readership. There was a ton of areas of Scott's oeuvre the article could have focused on. The NYT chose those they knew would infuriate their readers.
Similarly, in their recent bio on Andrew Sullivan, they focused on his engagement with IQ and race, despite his long career writing covering a vast range of topics and his leadership on gay marriage.
> There was a ton of areas of Scott's oeuvre the article could have focused on. The NYT chose those they knew would infuriate their readers.
Yes. That's how the news - and media more broadly - works. And if you think that's bad, I invite you to open a newspaper from a century ago!
Being a savvy reader means knowing this going in when you read *anything* subject to the same selection pressures. Being a Bayesian means not discovering this fact for the first time, multiple times. Update and move on.
Doesn't that prove the point that his blog has in fact been a point of congregation for these people, and his views aren't a million miles from there? Probably "safe space" was an exaggeration, but it's far closer of a connection than the vast majority of blogs with this size of readership.
To be fair to Scott, he intended it to be a safe space for discourse, and when some topics are banned everywhere else decent, all the witches will flock to whatever "safe havens" still remain. And even though his own views may stray from leftist orthodoxy, I'd describe them to still be pretty far from "those people", in ways that count.
Yes, I think that is totally fair. I think it is both true that he is far from "those people" in ways that count, but he's also closer to them than nearly anyone that people reading the New York Times are likely to encounter (including mainstream Republicans).
In my observation (filtered through my own biases and memory, needless to say) the SSC readership has always seemed less political in general than the ACX readership.
And this community does have a certain temperament that might make the aforementioned folks feel more welcome, if nothing else. My most vivid impression of this came via the paroxysmal reaction (on the occasion of book review talk) to some poor bugger who tried to suggest that we read more women authors.
If it's the one I'm thinking of about the book reviews, they pointed out that only one out of 17 book reviews was of a book by a woman, and then refused to suggest any books.
This didn't go over well, though I don't remember the reaction as being all that strong.
In any case, I asked for recommendations for books by women which would be worthy topics for book reviews and got quite a few suggestions.
> Reputational damage included Scott having to reshape his career, since he wanted to keep his being a psychiatrist who also did counselling separate from his reputation as a blogger.
IMO, the privacy needs of a good clinician are fundamentally incompatible with being a high-profile blogger - doubly so when there's overlap in topics. The NYT article was the proximate effect in this timeline, but the pseudoanonymity was always unstable.
One problem a lot of readers forget is what Scott's circle was. He lives in San Francisco, nearly all his family members are very left leaning, and I'm sure several were long time subscribers of the NYT. I wouldn't be surprised if family gatherings got intensely awkward, and various people he considered friends cut him off.
"I'm not a far-right demagogue and I don't want to be a head of government. But I did manage to piss off the New York Times last year, and they wrote a retaliatory hit piece against me. It accused me of being racist, sexist, elitist, all kinds of negative things."
I searched for "racist" in the New York Times piece and here's what I got:
"He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists."
Now, if you actually read this (have you actually read the article?) it never actually calls you a racist. It simply says that you have linked to another blog that they say is racist. Now, I notice that you've since deleted the link to Nick Land's blog, but it is a simple fact that you used to have his blog "xenosystems" linked prominently on your own blog roll and anyone can easily look at archives to confirm this, e.g.:
The article never says you are sexist, merely that you wrote an essay about the Blue Tribe and that liberals tend to get upset at sexists:
"The essay was a critique of what Mr. Siskind, writing as Scott Alexander, described as “the Blue Tribe.” In his telling, these were the people at the liberal end of the political spectrum whose characteristics included “supporting gay rights” and “getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots.”"
Is this what you're upset at? That they quoted your "analysis" of the "Blue Tribe"? Where did they call you a sexist?
The word "elitist" never seems to even be mentioned in the article ; let alone accusing you of being one! Where did they accuse you of being an elitist?
Anybody can read the article and see that your claims about the NYT calling you "racist", "sexist" or "elitist" are simply untrue. So the question here is; what are you actually upset about?
I'm asking where exactly is the passage that "accuses" Scott of being racist, sexist or elitist. He claimed that there were accusations there. Scott quoted no sections and I have already shown that the piece in question does not contain any such accusations.
"Nuance" does not involve completely inaccurate statements such as Scott Alexander's claim that the NYT accused him "of being racist, sexist, elitist, all kinds of negative things"
These are falsehoods that Scott is spreading, not "nuance".
But he did align himself with Charles Murray in that post. I'm not sure how it's implied that it means Scott agrees with Charles Murray's view on IQ and race. In any case, if Scott feels he has been misrepresented it here, it would be productive to write a longer piece about what he does and doesn't agree with Murray on, rather than simply complaining that someone wrote the true statement that he agrees with Murray.
I think that means you've read too many articles and they want you to pay for more. That's capitalism for you. I rarely read the NYT so I don't have this problem.
You're an academic, right? Maybe you have institutional access?
Carl Marks correctly observed that you need capitalism to generate wealth. He then said that there should be ' Revolution' (fancy way of saying mass murdering spree) to re distribute the wealth. But has he mentioned WHEN should the state pivot from capitalism to socialism and then communism? I have a communist friend who says that China's state capitalism is actually part of Marxist plan and once enough wealth is generated the communist party will start re distributing it
How does it imply that? It simply says that he aligned himself with Charles Murray, which he did. The NYT even links to the article in question for all their readers.
And the article never even calls Murray a racist, simply that he proposed there was a link between race and IQ. Again, nowhere does it say that Scott is a racist, which is what Scott claimed.
When writing, you don't actually begin by defining all the words you use. You rely on other people who speak the same language using many of the same definitions. That's why we call it "the same language". Pretending that they didn't call him racist because they didn't define their terms would be like me saying you have a very low IQ, then saying I never called you "stupid" because I use the word "stupid" in its original Latin sense of meaning "stunned".
Proposing a link between race and IQ is widely seen as racist. Maybe it shouldn't be, but we can't deny reality. Try arguing for such a link for any length of time in any mainstream discussion space, you'll be quickly branded a racist. (don't actually do that, or do it at your own risk). The wikipedia page on Charles Murray includes several citations for accusations of racism.
It can be "widely seen" as racist, but that's not what the NYT said about Scott Alexander and Charles Murray. Nowhere did they include the claim that Scott Alexander is racist. Scott Alexander claimed that the NYT contained such accusations, when a quick read will confirm that no such accusations are present.
Would you agree with me on this point? It seems as though Scott Alexander is making a very basic mistake.
For a less obvious example of dishonesty, the bit quoting me starts with a quote, then has "The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. The only people who struggled to be heard, Dr. Friedman said, were “social justice warriors.”"
That makes it sound to a careless reader as though the white supremacist and neo-fascist is something I said, since it is put between a real quote and what purports to be a description of my views.
And I doubt I said "struggled to be heard," although I might have said that that was a position that most commenters were unsympathetic to. That's Metz's wording, although it is attributed to me, which is why the first part of the sentence is not in quotation marks.
This all looks above board and accurate to me. Where you are being directly quoted and where you aren't is clearly indicated using quotation marks.
Struggled to be heard is not in quotation marks, so he's not indicating that you directly said it. Anybody who knows how quotation marks are used will know that, which I assume is most English speakers. It's a paraphrase.
If you truly feel that you've been misrepresented I suggest that you contact the NYT and request a retraction.
I like the idea that fascism is a mood, not an ideology. Of course it's not an ideology, they're anti-intellectual. Anti-intellectual for real, not just as a theory.
And I like the trait cluster approach more than definitions for cultural things, though how we chose our trait clusters is a worthy topic that I haven't seen explored.
A fictional Nazi in "The Man in the High Castle" explains it like this:
> Listen, I'm not an intellectual. Fascism has no need of that. What is wanted is the deed. Theory derives from action. What our corporate state demands from us is comprehension of the social forces of history. (...) Explains the underlying actuality of every event. Real issue in war was: old versus new. Money - that's why Nazis dragged Jewish question mistakenly into it - versus communal mass spirit, what Nazis call Gemeinschaft - folkness. Like Soviet. Commune. Right? (...) Too much philosophy in Germanic temperament; too much theater, too. All those rallies. You never find true Fascist talking, only doing - like me.
Emotionally, fascism is a rejection of *complexity*. Instinctively, you feel that life is not supposed to be complex or frustrating. You support your (clearly defined) tribe unconditionally, the tribe supports you; anything other than that is aberration or enemy action.
In far mode, you worship Nature. But in near mode, everyone likes convenient food, hot water, a car, or the proverbial trains running on time. So instead of rejecting civilization as a whole, you reject the idea that civilization needs to be complicated. You reject competition, because it is frustrating, and because you assume that the world is ultimately simple; therefore the right decision can always be made by an expert, you just need to make sure that the expert's values are aligned with the tribe. (An expert saying that something is complicated is probably just insufficiently aligned and tries to get more power at everyone else's expense. Put a gun to his head, and ask again.)
There are things that need to be produced, so people need jobs; but most jobs can be reduced to following orders, which is simple. Market competition is bad, the industry should be organized top-down by guilds, who in turn serve the state. Science is just another kind of a job, perhaps more mysterious but ultimately not too complex from the expert perspective, and should be organized the same way.
At the top, there should be a leader who decides global strategy, because multiple people disagreeing with each other is complex and inefficient. The required traits of the leader are value alignment and strategic thinking. The strategic thinking is kinda implied by the fact that he succeeded to become the leader, so if you believe that his values are aligned with the tribe, all problems are solved and the glorious future awaits.
But how does fascism ensure that an aligned leader ends up in power? "Strategic thinking" can serve a smart selfish backstabber just as well, who may be aligned to his close circle at best.
Speaking as myself: of course.
Speaking as a fascist: You fool! When the leader is genuine, you instinctively feel it in your heart and so does everyone else... except for those damned intellectuals who always try to sow doubt and discord...
Good quote.
I wouldn't think of racism as a defining characteristic of fascism, just as one form that nationalism can take. Mussolini's Italy, as I recall, treated Jews who had fought in the Italian army in WWI as not Jews — because they were Italians.
The problem is that he chose a bad book to review. The book doesn’t give him any alternative other than just parroting it’s glowing worship, or criticizing it without any good alternative.
I don't sense any fear - I just sense that he's trying to be objective, and with a book like this, the only way to be objective is to give a lot of criticism of Modi without any supporting evidence. I'm not saying this is a bad book, that he should criticize - I'm saying that the book is not a useful one to review, because it provides such a one-sided picture of things, so his review ends up feeling one-sided the opposite way.
What's wrong with the latter choice? A simple pan serves a highly constructive purpose, id est warning other people off from wasting their time and money. I don't see why it's necessary to have a better suggestion to tack on at the end. I mean, it's nice, but the absence of that coda doesn't vitiate the core purpose.
If I were advising Scott, I would have said not to even bother publishing a review of this book. Or maybe to just give the first paragraph or two up to the point where he says this book turns out to be a hagiography like the others. Then he could have just stopped, and asked for recommendations of more useful books to review, rather than going ahead with this one.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, and *I* would probably have made that decision (and I assume you're saying you would've). But I can think of a few reasons why Scott might not and did not:
(1) He wanted to yell at the publisher and author: "Stop writing books like this! They're fucking useless! And you, publisher, find something to write a better book on Modi, the guy is running 1/6 of the planet, you know, so it's pretty important."
(2) He wanted to see what the commentariat would have to add. Maybe saying the name "Modi" several times in row, even if interspersed with only peevish ruminating, would conjure some demon, in the comments, who would have fascinating and powerful data to share about Modi (or even Modi-era India).
I second this. In particular, the comparison between Franco and Modi would be interesting.
Franco had to fight his way to power- or let the Germans and Italians do the fighting for him while he concentrated on getting his soldiers to rape working class women who were assumed to be 'Republican'.
Modi has been lucky and dexterous. Because he represents the numerically very significant 'Backward Castes', he will enter the Indian pantheon alongside Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore and Dr. Ambedkar.
I'd like to see it, too.
I think Hannah Arendt's definition of the difference between standard dictatorship and totalitarianism is relevant here. Standard dictators aim at killing or jailing political opponents. They want you to stay out of political life, to not think about politic, to obey what the government tells you without questioning. Propaganda is used to convince people that every thing is fine and the government does a beautiful job.
By contrast, a totalitarian state wants everybody to engage in politics, and they make sure this happens through propaganda, youth organisation and so on. Propaganda is used to convince people that the government is facing a dire crisis under the threat of powerful enemies both inside and outside, and to urge citizens to mobilize against those threats.
In this light, fascism is a proto-totalitarianism of the right-wing variety. When it falls back to traditional dictatorship, you get Franco. When it keeps going you get Mussolini and then Hitler.
That definition of totalitarian is fine as far as it goes, but it applies equally well to the fascist, liberal, and socialist varieties thereof.
Which is not a problem, as the question was not about the difference between left-wing and right-wing totalitarianism but about the difference between right-wing totalitarianism and right-wing traditional dictatorships.
(Let me amend what I said in my first comment by adding that for Arendt, Mussolini's fascism was not a real totalitarianism.)
You suspect that Scott's friend thinks Modi is a fascist and perhaps Franco wasn't because Modi is more totalitarian?
Yeah I suspect something like that.
I know very little about Modi, but even the hit pieces I've read don't make him sound *totalitarian*, as opposed to authoritarian. In particular, under Arendt's definition, you'd expect compulsory participation in elections and political parties, or at least heavy pressure for participation, for example, involving not only carrots but also sticks.
According to Wikipedia, only one Indian state has compulsory voting (doesn't specify which one):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting#Modern_era
It also seems unlikely that there is heavy pressure to participate in political parties.
How else might totalitarianism in Arendt's sense be manifested, if not from more or less compulsory participation in politics? If you include compulsory education, then most states would qualify as totalitarian.
Is liberal totalitarianism possible? I'm struggling to think of how it would present, given that pluralism is inherent in liberalism. The closest manifestations I can think of are things like the French ban on religious symbols in public life (ostensibly to stave off even a whiff of partiality) and various forms of free speech extremism.
I can't think of historical examples, but if you're happy with hypotheticals I think a sufficiently quota-obsessed state might qualify. I.e. the name of diversity the only thing that matters is your demographic, be it racial, sexual, or religious (or the intersection of all three), and people are obsessed with any group of individuals containing as much "diversity" as possible
French Laicite would seem to me to be about keeping religion out of secular life more than about demonising it - private religion is perfectly permissible - but maybe that's my atheist bias
Bake the cake, bigot.
Under Arendt's definition of totalitarianism, compulsory voting would be totalitarian, and that is common enough in both liberal and communist regimes. I haven't found information about fascist regimes, but wouldn't be surprised if it was common in those as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting#Modern_era
I would include compulsory education as a sufficient condition for totalitarianism. You could argue that insofar as compulsory education is about ensuring basic literacy and numeracy, and illiterate and innumerate people impose externalities on society, compulsory education is not about enforcing participation in politics. But I think it's clear that most compulsory education is not about literacy and numeracy. I also think it's clear, though a lot of people deny it, that in most places and at most times, compulsory education is mostly about ideology. Naturally, the ideology changes from regime to regime.
I suppose I was thinking more of classical liberalism than the vague American pejorative referring to social progressivism. So a political philosophy whose core values are individual freedom and vigilance against the tyranny of the majority.
Moving on, I have no choice but to join those many people who deny that the main objective of all compulsory education is political indoctrination (though it always manages to catch a ride). I also don't think compulsory education is sufficient by itself to earn a regime the label of 'totalitarian'. By that definition virtually all countries in the world are totalitarian, which I'm sure you'll agree is a bit silly.
Now, compulsory voting is interesting, and comes much closer in theory. But even according to the link you provided, it's fairly rare and the countries that embrace it (Australia, Costa Rica, Luxembourg) don't seem very totalitarian in other ways.
Add me to the undersigned on this request.
Stanley G. Payne made a similar point about Franco - that he had to compromise and blend original Falangist fascism with existing right-wing Catholic conservatism (embodied in the Carlists) in order to gain and maintain power.
I think both Franco and Trump can be defined as ideological (in Trump's case, more like instinctive, although I think people around him, like Bannon and Miller, were more explicitly ideological) fascists who failed to create fascist governments.
a paragraph in, already love it. You at your best. Your first sci hub link is broken - I think this is an alternate? https://ur.booksc.eu/dl/49215412/6b6cd0?openInBrowser or https://moscow.sci-hub.st/4804/2e0ba571e47b3f3d311829e07139660e/10.2307@4408848.pdf
This seemed to fix itself somehow? I think sci hub load balances requests to different servers and zero. was broken for me but then it decided to do moscow. which worked
This is hardly ever discussed openly even in India but a lot of anger and pro-Modi flocking is driven by very high Muslim birthrates especially in very low SES and high religiosity Muslim households and Christian missionaries successfully converting a lot of lower castes and tribes (called SC/STs) into Christianity.
Muslims were ~ 9% of Indian population post partition. They are now ~ 16%. Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh combined, were ~ 23% post partition. They are now ~ 1.5 % in Pakistan and ~ 6% in Bangladesh with rapes and genocide happening each day.
Yet, Hindus are fascist. The privileges of being a white skinned guy with a burden of trying to reform us savage Hindoos.
Source on genocides happening each day???
Damn , how do I learn more about these daily genocides
On another note , how do you like your beef
Well, in the post Scott describes a riot that killed 790 people as "genocide", so the bar has been set pretty low.
Putting aside the unreliably of that statistic, what exactly is the bar for genocide?
Hmm. Sounds like one way of ameliorating those demographic changes, if they're so undesirable, would be for India to dump 70% Muslim Jammu and Kashmir on Pakistan while encouraging the Hindus who live there to move into India proper. And yet Modi seems to be going in the opposite direction. Guess he's anti-Hindu.
Pakistan's Hindu population has not decreased since 1947, it actually slightly increased. The reason people think it decreased is because they couple up the demographics of Pakistan and Bangladesh before they separated.
The overall population of Pakistan has tripled since 1947.
Most Muslim countries are not nice to minorities. The Jewish population most Arab countries dropped by 99-100% since 1948:
https://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/Issues/Pages/Jewish-refugees-expelled-from-Arab-lands-and-from-Iran-29-November-2016.aspx
I think most Muslims in India would be happier in Pakistan, and most Hindus in Pakistan would be happier in India, but the transaction costs of moving (getting jobs, getting visas, etc) are inhibiting that self-segregation process. Both governments should work to reduce those transaction costs.
You realise plenty of Indian Muslims loathe Pakistan? Especially after the civil war that created an independent Bangladesh. It's not as if Pakistan is a liberal paradise after all.
If they want a relatively liberal muslim country there are options: UAE, Kuwait, Turkey. No muslim-majority country is exactly a liberal paradise either.
Instead of emigrating away from India's anti-muslim bias they also have the option of renouncing a stupid religion that was constructed self-servingly by a bronze age warlord.
Some amount of social disapproval of islam qua islam is appropriate and serves as an incentive for people to abandon that toxic bronze age superstition.
I know you mean Bronze Age metaphorically, but most of the world was well past bronze at that point.
It was a relatively backward part of the world (why wouldn't God reveal himself to the Chinese instead of some illiterate desert nomad?) but technically they probably had iron swords with which to slaughter the infidels during their megalomaniacal quest for world domination.
Pretty certain that Mohammed was post-Bronze Age, the seventh century being definitely an iron-using period. And in itself Islam can be extremely liberal or extremely oppressive, just like any other religion. It's just a lot easier to spot, other or identify as victims the visibly more devout and likely more oppressive religion. I don't get the feeling you've actually met many Muslims (or many of the non-hegemonising types) though, and would advise you find out more rather than make yourself look foolish.
I've met plenty of smart, nice people who were born into a muslim family, but none of them take the religion seriously because it's bonkers.
So the people the Hindu faith shits upon decide to opt out of being shit upon, and this is some national crisis justifying massive riots?
Wow. What hatred for Hindus. There was a planned genocide of 59 Hindu devotees who were burnt to death by ~ 2000 strong Muslim mob. The riots should'nt happened, but were triggered due to this event.
Commenting without the context is so "Liberal" and "Progressive".
Christianity has existed in India for millenia. Low caste people picking Buddhism or Christianity to escape the system that condemns them to menial careers is not a new phenomenon. It certainly isn't genocide.
That is what missionaries who come to India say. Christian evangelicals committed horrible genocides in India. Read about what they did in Goa for example.
And, there are "Dalit Christians" in India, who feel discriminated against by other castes of Christians.
Details!!
You might want to learn about the Goa Inquisition.
Right now Modi is passing laws banning interfaith marriage.
People in India talk about this all the time. Some of my relatives are convinced that Muslims already outnumber Hindus in India and official statistics are just lying to cover it up. This is exactly how a lot of people in Europe feel about their countries too.
I don't know about Muslims in particular, but Sweden's three most populous municipalities are all <55% Swedish among males aged 15–44*. For the whole country, that number is 63%, down by 10% in the last decade. So population replacement is quite advanced in parts of Europe. But unlike in India, this is still mainly driven by immigration, so it's more of an active choice on the part of Europe's rulers.
* https://affes.wordpress.com/2021/08/17/man-15-44-ar-i-kommunerna-2002-2020/
Balakrishan Moonje was NOT a founder of RSS. You got this wrong. He was a leader of Hindu Mahasabha and RSS and Hindu Mahasabha disagreed a lot on many issues. From an Indian perspective, the Germans and Japanese were fighting British so it made complete sense to talk to those. It is easy to sit in judgement in 2021, but to look at what options did Indians have in 1930s?
Also, people seem to ignore the man made famine caused by British in 1940s that killed nearly 10 million Indians. That is a bigger figure than the Jews killed by Germans but then Indians are Brown skinned and Jews had white so I guess those murders are legit and Nazism is worse than British for a British colony.
You mean the Bengal Famine of 1943? This is generally regarded as being partly man-made with the usual assortment of natural disasters for that region also contributing, but it was not "caused by the British" in the same sense that the Holocaust was caused by the Germans. Food supplies were constantly being disrupted during this time due to World War 2. The British did not cause that!
From what I have read on the subject, the Japanese had a lot more to do with actually causing the famine than the British; the British simply failed to do much to alleviate it.
As the British often do.
They have their own priorities, I guess.
How did the Japanese cause it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Japanese_invasion_of_Burma
It would not be the first time the British did something like that. Ireland in the potato famine years was subject to food diversions from Ireland to Britain, Wikipedia states India in 1943 was subject to food and materials diversions (cloth, medicine) to British control in order to support the British war effort at great cost to the people of India. I can take a few minutes to put up references for this later today. A multi-year countrywide phenomenon would have multiple interacting causes but it seems to me fair to say that British actions of commandeering local materials did contribute to it.
And Deiseach posted this much more completely than I did, I did not see the comment.
At great cost? In the very short term perhaps, but if the Axis powers had won, do you think things would have worked out better or worse for the people of India? I'm pretty sure they'd have been worse. Neither Hitler nor the Japanese would have treated the "backwards races" well, as the Indians (and Africans etc) would have been perceived by them.
That's why I find it pretty grotesque to draw comparisons here, as Bharat Sharma is doing. The idea that Britain "caused" a famine and "murdered" Indians implies some sort of deliberate policy based on racism or dislike of India in some way. Obviously that's not even remotely true. At the time in question, the British were fighting total war against an opponent that intended to enslave the entire population and use them for forced labour. That same opponent was trying as hard as possible to create a famine in Britain too, hence the desperate supply situation. It is an absurd and foolish reading of history to claim that it was OK for Indians - of any political affiliation - to be supporting the Axis powers. If Britain hadn't won then India would have been wiped out as a country and quite possibly de-populated.
Enslaving populations and using them for forced labour was the nazi project concerning Eastern European peoples. I should be surprised to learn that such plans existed for Britons, too. AFAIK, Hitler and his crew were disappointed about all the Northern Europeans not aligning with them because they had included them in their aryan identity thing but still had hopes to win their hearts if they only killed and subdued enough of them. Sounds crazy, I know. As a matter of fact, British POW were treated comparatively humane in nazi Germany while Russians had much lower chances of survival.
Their plans changed throughout the war period. Hoping the British would join them and partition the world between them was the case up to about 1941. After it became clear that would never happen, detailed post-invasion plans were never drawn up, although they got as far as deciding on how the country would be partitioned, who they'd recruit for their Vichy government, who would run the secret police, and lists of hundreds of thousands of people who would be immediately sent to forced labour camps.
But that was the original plans. Remember that by 1945 the Royal Air Force had been levelling entire German cities. After the invention of chaff German air defences collapsed and Dresden was destroyed. It was worse than a nuclear attack, just done with traditional explosives: the firestorm alone destroyed six and a half square kilometers of the city. If the war had turned at that point and Hitler had won, he would not have treated the population at all kindly. A few sources attest to this:
https://yesterday.uktv.co.uk/hitlers-england/article/6-plans-hitler-had-britain/
"It's a common misconception that the Nazis would have somehow treated the population of Britain with more sympathy and respect than civilians in mainland Europe. While there may have been less of the visceral contempt they had for Jews and Russians, Hitler's top brass had brutal plans in place for Britons. Specifically, British men. If the invasion had succeeded, all healthy men from their teens to their mid-40s would have been eligible for being rounded up and sent across the channel to work in punishing slave labour camps and factories. Somehow, the Nazis would then have had to prop up the stricken economy and infrastructure of an abruptly-depleted Britain - perhaps by putting more women into work."
https://bbm.org.uk/the-battle/nazi-plans/
Speech by SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Richard Darre – 1940
"As soon as we beat England we shall make an end of you Englishmen once and for all. Able- bodied men and women between the ages of 16 and 45 will be exported as slaves to the Continent. The old and weak will be exterminated. All men remaining in Britain as slaves will be sterilised; a million or two of the young women of the Nordic type will be segregated in a number of stud farms where, with the assistance of picked German sires, during a period of 10 or 12 years, they will produce annually a series of Nordic infants to be brought up in every way as Germans. These infants will form the future population of Britain. They will be partially educated in Germany and only those who fully satisfy the Nazi’s requirements will be allowed to return to Britain and take up permanent residence. The rest will be sterilised and sent to join slave gangs in Germany. Thus, in a generation or two, the British will disappear.”
Would it have really happened? Nobody can know. But faced with this future it is not really surprising that a famine far away, in a place where 2/3rds of the population was malnourished even in normal times, was not the highest priority.
The British actively moved food supplies from Bengal to Britain. Churchil's hatred for Brown people in general and Hindus in particular, is well known.
Madhushree Mukherjee's book exposes the planned famine by White Anglo Saxon Protestant - Winston Churchill.
https://www.amazon.in/Churchills-Secret-War-British-Ravaging/dp/0143441639/
Look mate, I hate Winston Churchill as much as the next nationalist, but ease off on the accusations of "it's because we're brown". The Brits sat back and watched my people starve, and if we take some figures (it's hard to get accurate estimations of what the population of pre-Famine Ireland was), then nearly half our population died or emigrated. Estimations were that total population for the entire island was around eight million. Over the years since 1845-1847 (the official period of the Famine), the population of the Republic dropped to between three and four million.
https://www.wesleyjohnston.com/users/ireland/past/famine/demographics_pre.html
This year is the first time since the census of 1851 that our population has reached above five million (for the Republic of Ireland).
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2021/0831/1243848-cso-population-figures/
And last I heard, we were regarded as white.
The difference here between the British colonial famines is that they are allegedly natural disasters which were not part of policy, but the Holocaust was deliberate policy to get rid of the particular sets of undesirables that the Nazis marked out as wreckers, saboteurs, and generally not wanted in the Brave New World they were going to create.
I have never looked into it personally, but it was my understanding that 19th-century and early-20th century Britain *did* in fact treat "the Irish" as a race apart… I will grant that this may to some extent be a case of 21st-century identity politics trying to force a round peg into a square hole, but — I dunno. It's hard not to look at John Tenniel's caricatures of Irishmen as these ape-like subhuman brutes, and not think that "racism" fairly describes (part of) the anti-Irish sentiment.
It will be wonderfully post-modern and a fitting end to current trends if the word "racist" stops having anything to do with anybody's skin color and just because a generic synonym for "mean."
"Do your homework!"
" Mom! You're so racist!"
Maybe that conversation has already occured in some leafy suburban tract.
I see what you mean. That being said, let me nit-pick at your choice of words there: I think if you define racism as being primarily concerned with "skin colour" you're already some of the way to diluting the meaning. Racism strictly and conservatively defined refers to belief in the superiority of some perceived human "race"/ethnicity over another. Skin colour is one marker around which races are often drawn, but not by far the only one; anti-semitism in its 'classic', Nazi form is clearly a central example of "racism", but the perceived race is defined in a way having nothing to do with skin colour at all.
Hence my tentative reading of 19th-century anti-Irish sentiment as "racist"… If the English were caricaturing the Irish as a physically repellent "breed" of men, in part based on some stereotypical physical traits (e.g. red hair), then that seems pretty much the same thing as anti-semitism talking about the ‘Jewish race’ with its attendant caricatures of repellent rat-man with stereotypically hooked noses. I will grant that it is a more distant relative to the American-style white-versus-black sort of racism; but if we agree that the Nazis were racist in respect to Jews, I think we do in fact have to also say (a segment of) the English were racist with regard to Irishmen.
I would say a functional definition of "race" has to include a nontrivial collection of genetic distinctions *in addition* to whatever the "signal" distinction is. It so turns out this is most obvious when you compare people with black and white skin (where "white" pretty much just means "not black" so it includes brown, red, and yellow people).
There are characteristics We Do Not Discuss, to be sure, but that to one side, black women at age 75 on average live ~15% longer than white women, black women are more likely that whites women to suffer from eclampsia in pregnancy, black men are more likely than whites to have high blood pressure, and blacks are less likely to be born with Down's or cleft lip. That is, there are a range of differences that are purely (or mostly) genetic, which have very little to do with culture or individual choice. Taking note of these distinctions is functional: you can let it inform your medical models, for example, and be more aggressive in monitoring blood pressure in black pregnant women, and more aggressive about pushing genetic testing in white. You can also let it usefully influence your research priorities, for example being sure you test whether your new BP med works equally well in blacks and whites, 'cause you know can't extrapolate easily from one to the other.
But are there any such differences between Jewish Germans and Aryan Germans circa 1935? Were there any such genetic differences between Irish and Brits circa 1880? I haven't heard that there are.
So we have more than just public whimsy or political utility as a decision critierion. We can for example say it's positive and functional to identify "racial" differences when they are sufficiently strong and general that they can productively influence medical decisions trees (for the benefit of all races), and we can say it's just people being tribal assholes when they can't.
> But are there any such differences between Jewish Germans and Aryan Germans circa 1935?
You've never heard of Tay-Sachs disease?
Even if we granted such genetic differences between races on medical matters — I fail to see what relevance this has to the question of defining racism. You still end up with a spectrum, where the exact boundaries will be arbitrary; some definitions of "race" will be medically useful and some will not, but (as per "The Categories Were Made For Man…") you can't really say some will be *true* and some will be *false*.
The way "race" categories are drawn in the context of "racism" (that is to say, people of a given ethnicity deciding another set of people are a disgusting outgroup who must not be allowed to interbreed with them because that would be icky, result in stupid children, and probably make God angry or something) seems to have precisely nothing whatsoever with HBD-type differences in immune systems; if we are analysing the psychology of racism, I do not think that whatever actual scientifically-verifiably "race differences" may allegedly exist even enter *into* it, doubly so if the races which they allow one to distinguish are different from the boundaries racists drew.
Furthermore, it seems to me that the word "race" is so tightly bound with "racism" (not just in a "race is what nasty racists care about" sense but in a "racisms are the ones who have largely defined the word race") as for it to be counter-productive to try to redefine it for something 'innocent'. I am fairly skeptical of HBD in any case, but I think the P.R. of "innocent" HBD that's only trying to talk about medical issues would be *much* improved if it just stopped talking about "race" and found its own coinage to talk about the clusters of populations which *it* defines. Their boundaries may resemble those of the classic "races" if you squint, but they are being defined based on fundamentally different criteria and for fundamentally different aims, and you're just shooting yourselves in the foot by tying yourselves to the word "race".
It's like, I dunno, if Lavoisier, having discovered the chemical phenomenon of "combustion", had still dubbed it "phlogiston". It's confusing even if loosely the same word had previously applied to loosely the same phenomenon — and it obscures the way in which the purported discovery is something radically new and scientific, rather than a survivance of old, "ick"-factor-based biases.
There's a book that argues that the Irish famine was actually a genocide: https://www.amazon.com/Famine-Plot-Englands-Irelands-Greatest/dp/1137278838. Admittedly, I've only read a summary of it, but I disagree that it was an intentional genocide in the same way the Holocaust was. I think we need another word for horrors like the potato famine and the Bangladeshi famine. To me, they are to genocides as manslaughter is to murder. They're still crimes against humanity, since the people in charge did less to ameliorate them than they could've due to prejudice, but they lack the same element of intention and pre-planning as the Holocaust.
"To me, they are to genocides as manslaughter is to murder." This is a very apt analogy and I will make a note of it for future use.
(The same could be said about the semantic argument over whether the British maintained "concentration camps" in the Zulu wars. Sure, they invented the name concentration camp for what they were doing, but they didn't have gas ovens.)
Thank you! I know less about the Zulu wars than I know about the Irish famine (perhaps partly due to ethnic narcissism, since I'm of mostly Irish heritage, and most of my immigrant ancestors came to the US in the wake of the famine). But I agree that it's also important to preserve distinctions between camps where people are forcibly rounded up and treated horribly and camps tailor-made for mass murder. It's certainly worth learning about all these crimes against humanity and trying to prevent them from re-occurring. But the focus on killing as many Jews and Roma as possible (also gays and disabled people, though killing them en masse isn't technically genocide) during the Holocaust was different than the other atrocities mentioned in the thread. And if we let the connotations of these terms creep beyond these terrible horrors, we might see a sort of "boy who cried wolf" effect whereby accusations of genocide are ignored even when it's legitimately happening.
Boer war rather than Zulu wars - we just burnt Zulu homes, rather than rounding them up and mistreating them...
(They were very different sorts of war to be fair).
I've heard the term "ethnicide" or "ethnocide" used to describe what you're referring to
It isn't true that the British "sat back and watched people starve" during the Irish famine years. Very large amounts of money were spent by the British government on imported maize from the USA and from Britain to help alleviate shortages in Ireland, not to mention the promise to buy any cure for the potato blight and supply to Irish farmers for free.
More could certainly have been done, but the claim that the brutal Brits callously and deliberately starved the Irish is just propaganda.
While the Irish Famine was a tragedy, I think it's seriously misleading to group deaths and emigration together as if they're remotely comparable - maybe if the only data available is gross population estimates before and after you have no choice, but I doubt there aren't estimates of the death toll specifically. It must be awful to need to migrate or starve, but migrating is definitely a much, much less bad fate than starving.
We weren't white at the time. We started being white in the 20th century.
According to Edmund Spenser in 1596, we were Scythians. Now we debate: Are/were Scythians white? 😁
"Irenius
Before wee enter into the treatise of theire Customes, yt is first needfull to consider from whence they sproung, for from the sundrie mannors of the nations, from whence that people which nowe are called Irishe were derived, some of the customes which nowe remayne amongest them have benn fetcht, and since they have benn contynwed amongest them; for not of one nacyon was that people as yt is, but of sondrie people of different condicons and manners: But the chief which have first possessed, and inhabited yt, I suppose to be Scythians.
Eudoxus
How commeth it then to passe, that the Irish doe derive themselves from Gathelus the Spaniard.
Irenius
They doe indeed, but (I conceive) without any good ground. For if there were any such notable transmission of a colony hether out of Spaine, or any such famous conquest of this kingdome by, Gathelus, a Spaniard, as they would faine believe, it is not unlikely, but the very Chronicles ofSpaine (had Spaine then beene in so high regard as they now have it) would not have omitted so memorable a thing, as the subduing of so noble a realme to the Spaniard, no more then they doe now neglect to memorize their conquest of the Indians, especially in those times, in which the same was supposed, being nearer unto the flourishing age of learning and writers under the Romanes. But the Irish doe heerein no otherwise, then our vaine English-men doe in the Tale of Brutus, whom they devise to have first conqured and inhabited this land, it being as impossible to proove, that there was ever any such Brutus of Albion or England, as it is, that there was any such Gathelus of Spaine. But surely the Scythians (of whom I earst spoke) which at such tyme as the Northerne Nations overflowed all Christendome, came downe to the Sea coste, where enquiringe for other countryes abroade, and gettinge intelligence of this Countrye of Irelande, finding shippinge convenient, passed over thither, and arived in the North parte thereof, which is now called Ulster, which first inhabiting, and afterwardes stretchinge themselves forth into the Ilande as theire nombers encreased, named yt all of themselves Scuttenlande, which more briefly is called Scutland, [or] Scotland."
Though some of us were Spanish? Maybe?
"Irenius
After this people thus planted in the north or before, (for the certaintie of tymes in thinges soe farre from all knowledge cannot bee justlie avouched), another nation cominge out of Spaine aryved in the West part of Irelande, and findinge it waste, or weakelie inhabited, possessed yt; who whether they were native Spaniards, or Gaules or Affricans or Goaths, or some other of those Northerne Nations which did spread all over-spred all Christendome, it is impossible to affirme, onlie some naked conjectures may be gathered; but that out of Spaine certenlie they came, that doe all the Irishe Cronicles agree."
No, hang on, the Spaniards were Gauls!
"Irenius
It is harde to saye: for whether they at theire first comminge into the land, or afterwardes by tradinge with other Nations which hade letters, learned them of them, or devised them amongest themselves, [it is very doubtful. But that they had letters anciently, it is nothing doubtful,] for the Saxons of Englande are saide to have theire letters, and Learninge, and learned men, from the Irishe; and that also appeareth by the likenes of the Carracter, for the Saxons carracter is the same with the Irishe. Now the Scythians never, I cann reade, of oulde had letters among them: therefore yt seemeth that they had them from the nacyon which came out of Spaine, for in Spaine there was (as Strabo wryteth) letters auncyently used, whether brought unto them by the Phenicians, or the Persians, which as yt appeareth by him) had some footinge there, or from Marseles, which is saide to have been inhabited by the Greekes, and from them to have had the Greeke carracter; of the which Marsilianns yt is said, that the Gaules learned them first, and used only for the furtherance of theire trades and private busines: for the Gaules (as is stronglie to be proved by many au ncyent and authenticall wryters) first inhabite all the sea coste of Spaine even unto Cales and the mouth of the Streights, and peopled also a greate parte of Italie, which appeareth by sundrie Citties and havens in Spaine called of them, as Portingalia, Gallecia, Galdunum; and also by sundrie nacons therein dwellinge, which yet have reseaved theire owne names of the Gaules, as the Rhegnie, Presamarie, Tamariti, Cineri, and divers others. All which Pompeius Mela, beinge himselfe a Spaniarde, yet saith to have descended from the Celtics of Fraunce, whereby yt is to be gathered, that that nacon which came out of Spain into Ireland were auncientlie Gaules, and that they brought with them those letters which they had learned in Spain, first into Ireland, the which some allso saye doe muche resemble the olde Phenicon carracter, beinge likewise distinguished with pricke and accent, as theires auncyentlie; but the further enquirie thereof needeth a place of longer discourse than this our shorte conference."
Shock, horror: an Elizabethan writer doesn't like the Spanish 🤣
"Eudoxus
Whence commeth it that the Irishe do soe greatlie covett to to fetch themselves from the Spaniards, since the olde Gaules are a more auncyent and much more honorable nation?
Irenius
Even of a very desier of newfanglenes and vanitie, for beinge as they are nowe accompted, the most barbarous Nation in Christendome, they to avoide that reproache woulde deryue them selves from the Spaniards, whom they now see to bee a very honorable people, and next borderinge unto them: But all that is most vaine; for from the Spaniard, that now is, is come from as rude and salvage nations as they, there beinge, as yt may be gathered by corse of ages and veiwe of theire owne histories (though they therein labored much to enoble themselves) scarse any dropp of the oulde Spanishe bloode left in them; for all Spain was first conquered by the Romaynes, and filled with Colonies from them, which were still encreased, and the native Spaniarde still cutt of. Afterwards the Carthaginians in all the longe Punicke Warres havinge spoiled all Spain, and in the ende subdued yt whollie tothem selves, did, (as yt is likelye) roote out all that were affected to the Romaynes. And lastly the Romaines, havinge againe recovered that countrye and beate out Hanniball, did doubtles cutt of all that had favored the Carthaginians, soe that betwixte them both, to and fro, there was scarse a native Spaniard left but all inhabited of Romaynes. All which tempests of troubles being overblowen, there longe after arose a newe storme more dreadfull then all the former, which over-ranne all Spain, and made an infinite confusion of all thinges; that was, the comming downe of the Gothes, the Hunnes, and the Vandalles, and lastly all the Nations of Scythia, which, like a mountaine flud, did overflowe all Spain, and quite drowned and washt away whatever relicts there were left of the land-bred people, yea and of all the Romaynes too. The which Northerne Nations findinge the complexion of that soile, and the vehement heate there farf different from theire natures, toke no felicitie in that country but from thence passed over, and did spread themselves into all Countries in Christendome, of all which there is none but hath some mixture or sprincklinge, yf not [thorough] peoplinge, of them. And yet after all those the Mores and Barbarians, breakinge over out of Africa, did finally possesse all Spain, or the moste parte therof, and treade downe under theire foule heathenishe feete what ever little they founde there yet standinge. The which, though afterwards they were beaten out by Ferdinando of Arragon, and [Isabell] his wife, yet they were not soe clensed, but that through the marriages which they had made, and mixture of the people of the land, during their long contynuance there, they had left no pure drop of Spanish bloode, nor of Romayne nor Scythian. Soe that all nacons under heaven, I suppose, the Spaniard is the most mingled, most uncerten, and most bastardlie; wherefore most foolishly doe the Irish thinke to enoble themselves by wrestinge theire auncestrie from the Spaniard, whoe is unable to deryve himselfe from any nacon certen."
Okay, now I am going to avow that we Irish *are* Spanish! Take that, Spenser!
Sure but according to the English we were an alternative human race, descended from dogs as white men evolved from apes. Racism is generally dumb
According to whom? My mom has done a lot of genealogy research, and I've looked at the Census records for several of my ancestors who immigrated to the US from Ireland in the 19th century. They're all listed as white. Perhaps the British used a different classification, but I think the difference is that "white" in the 19th century didn't mean "amorphous blob of interchangeable European heritage" that it does today. Differences between "white" ethnicities were seen as a bigger deal.
I've always assumed Spenser is evidence that you could find strong narcotics in sixteenth-century Ireland. Although the Scythian ancestry thing is not one of his attempts to confuse the historical record, although it was the Picts in Bede and some Old Irish works. The confusion is understandable though: the Picts did stop off in Ireland and intermarried before the Irish helpfully pointed them in the direction of Scotland; and the Dal nAríada and a few other Ulster tribes were considered Cruithne, the Old Irish ethnonym for Picts.
I get the point you're aiming at here, and I even agree with it to an extent, but you really might want to ease up on the way you are putting it forward.
For one thing, people really weren't falling all over themselves to help the beloved "white" Jewish minority in the 1940s. For another, I don't think history does look all that kindly on the British colonization of India. But most of all, there actually is a meaningful distinction between a famine and a policy of rounding up an ethnic subgroup from across an entire continent and gassing them in ovens. I don't believe exercises in comparative suffering are generally all that useful, but there is a reason Nazis inspire a unique horror.
People aren't indifferent to the famine so much as ignorant of it. Americans, you may recall, actually fought in WWII. They have a lot of direct experience with Nazis. In contrast, we don't get a lot of Indian political history in school in the U.S. We don't get German political history either, for that matter. We get U.S. history. Maybe that's unfortunate, but it's also a more accurate and benign explanation of attitudes than "no one cares about brown people."
Yeah, its very much the historically literate American's view that 'yeah, the British were awful, but there was just something special about the Nazis', and the specialness of the Nazis isn't actually captured simply by numbers of dead, but about how they went about it. Though it wouldn't be special if it wasn't a death count that was at least in the mid 7 figures, and plausibly over ten million.
> and the specialness of the Nazis isn't actually captured simply by numbers of dead, but about how they went about it.
Humans have been exterminating other tribes who compete for their resources since the dawn of time. The subjective specialness you place on this event is part of your cognitive bias, nothing to do with reality unfortunately.
> But most of all, there actually is a meaningful distinction between a famine and a policy of rounding up an ethnic subgroup from across an entire continent and gassing them in ovens. I don't believe exercises in comparative suffering are generally all that useful, but there is a reason Nazis inspire a unique horror.
Every genocide is unique in some way, and there were other genocides that included gassing. I don't understand why you mention that it was an ethnic minority, as if that makes their lives more valuable. Obviously the extreme importance given to the killing of Jews in WW2 is at least in part due to all the movies, media etc. made about it, and because it was useful for other political purposes.
Surely the famine was due to the Japanese invasion when Bengal became the front line in the Indian theatre? Why are the British mainly to blame?
Another way to ask the question is: would the Bengal famine have happened if the Japanese had not invaded the Raj?
Bengal suffered two big famines because of a transition to elected Governments. Shurawardy must take the blame for the War famine but Mujib was innocent of the 1974 famine and was trying to take back control from corrupt elements when he and his family was massacred. The fact is the Muslim League was a disaster for Muslims of the sub-continent.
One thing people might enjoy while they are thinking about India is to watch some Arnab Goswami; something like India's Tucker Carlson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXj4MvChMJ4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UirrsA0J6Wo
On a related note, this is the view from Pakistan - courtesy of one crazy guy who is supposed to be talking about variations in Pakistani regional cuisine but who has a tendency towards racist digression: https://www.quora.com/How-would-you-describe-the-cuisine-or-food-culture-of-Pakistan-Does-it-vary-from-one-province-to-another/answer/Ram-Patel-Sharma
I love how he never even tried to answer the question.
Buckle up and prepare to get flamed by Modi zealots :)
They’re not quite as numerous as the pro-CCP “wolf warriors” but I do notice that anything slightly critical of the BJP on the internet similarly attracts a legion of attackers.
Some alternatives to this book (more critical than this):
1. Gujarat Files by Rana Ayyub
2. Undercover by Ashish Khetan
I've just realized I'm the perfect Modi voter. I mean, apart from not being Indian.
I started out very anti-Modi - see the link below. I have to say that I've come to like him more and more. Largely because... well, to be honest, for the same reason that Modi says many of his supporters like him. He's hated by a media whose standards of honesty start with the hitpiece on Scott and go downhill from there. I've also become utterly disillusioned with liberal secularists - I go way back in the Atheism movement, back to the days of Hitchens & Dawkins and when it all started going to hell with A+. So that probably makes me less harsh on Modi than I might otherwise be. He seems to have been less the 'hard ass Hindu nationalist' that I feared.
So, I get why Scott is suitably skeptical of this book. But I found myself reading the review and nodding and going, "well, makes sense to me".
https://skepticink.com/prussian/2014/05/21/the-default-of-liberal-secularism/
This guy manages to misspell Gandhi right in the first paragraph, like really?
Apart from that he has hit the nail on its head...
Educated class confuses -
- Writing fluently with saying something truthful and original.
This is a very fluently written piece.
If our contemporary élite education teaches nothing else, it teaches symbol manipulation.
"I didn't intend this, and I don't consider it fair compensation for the level of reputational damage they did me."
Why would one care about this reputational damage? The NYT clearly jumped the shark crying wolf on racism and facism during the Trump years, and frankly anyone who is oblivious to this doesn't have an opinion on these issues worth caring about. (Obviously there are exceptions when it comes to career when you might have to care about about the reputation conferred by people whose opinions you don't respect. I am not aware that this is the case here.)
This piece by Freddie is instructive on just how insane the NYT has gotten on these issues:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/who-tells-them-what-they-dont-want
If you read the NYT piece Scott was talking about you'll notice that it never once calls him a racist, sexist or an elitist. Scott is making a very basic mistake here.
It claimed Scott is "aligned" with a guy who argues that white people are genetically more intelligent than black people, and that he thinks feminists are the embodiment of evil. Tedious semantic games add no value here - his summary of the article was fair.
Scott clearly said "It accused me of being racist, sexist, elitist, all kinds of negative things". When you look at the evidence you'll see that the NYT never "accused" Scott of any of those things.
Saying that someone is aligned with Charles Murray isn't the same thing as calling them a racist. This is obvious, and it's obvious to anybody who reads things carefully.
If you disagree, you should be able to find some evidence that the NYT called Scott a "racist" or a "sexist" or an "elitist" - this is Scott's claim. It has no evidence. If Scott wants people to believe that the NYT did such a thing, he should easily be able to find some evidence. So far, no such evidence exists.
> This is obvious, and it's obvious to anybody who reads things carefully.
Please consider that not everyone 'reads things carefully'. Consider that it might be _misleading,_ i.e. that people, perhaps those people who don't read things carefully—might get misled, and often this is intentional.
This is how dishonest smears often work.
The NYT can't be held responsible for someone who misreads their text and subsequently believes things that the NYT never said. In this case, Scott's audience seems to be mass misreading because Scott's priming them to be adversarial towards this particular article and saying that it "accuses" him of being racist, sexist and elitist, when no such accusations exist. In this case, responsibility for the misreading lies on Scott Alexander's shoulders, not the NYT.
(I didn't say misreading, I said misleading. I do not mean that someone might be _misunderstanding_ the text, it's that someone might be taking the writer's _implications_ at face value without bothering to determine if they are a correct interpretation of the facts.)
At any rate, what do you believe the author's intent was in including such paragraphs?
It is facially ludicrous and absurd to deny that the false parallels and ‘alignments’ being drawn between Murray and Scott, or Scott and Nazis, or Scott and eugenicists, or Scott and the alt-right, are being drawn just because they happen to be apt to make some other innocent point. It was done in bad faith with intent to smear him personally and mislead the ignorant, and to say they are not responsible for those interpretations is carrying water for the worst kind of yellow journalism.
This is, IMO, your fundamental error here. Communicating correctly is the responsibility of both parties in any exchange. If you write a text that is *very obviously* prone to misleading people, you do actually bear some responsibility for the misconceptions that creates.
The NYT wrote an article that was *very obviously* prone to being misread in such a way that people would think Scott agreed with Murray's racist opinion. I guess if you are very nitpicky, you could say that's not "calling" him a racist, but rather "insinuating" it and I would agree that's a better word (but is it "accusing"? Scott's original phrase. I'm not sure)
Regardless, they certainly bear responsibility for the misreading
> subsequently believes things that the NYT never said
It's perfectly possible to say things without saying them literally, as you well know.
> Saying that someone is aligned with Charles Murray isn't the same thing as calling them a racist.
Oh come off it. It's obvious to everyone what the NYT was trying to do.
Next you'll be telling us that if someone says "Can you pass the salt?" they're inquiring into your ability to pass the salt and not asking for the salt.
The NYT didn't even call Murray a racist. The emotional outrage that Rationalists are feeling here doesn't seem to be based on any actual statement that the NYT article made. It's all based on assumptions about the supposed intentions of the writers. Making up supposed nefarious-intentions of the writer based on zero evidence is not arguing in good-faith.
Marx bro, you’re still here!. . . People, don’t bother debating with him.
This is a much better suggestion than the one the are currently following of putting forth really sorry arguments against his position. I was pretty up in the air before. Pretty soon I'll be 100% marxist.
Thanks for the positive feedback. Often it feels like I am not making much progress here. I am happy to talk about Marxism if you have any questions about it.
> Scott clearly said "It accused me of being racist, sexist, elitist, all kinds of negative things"
Above, in the sentence after this, Scott links to his original post where he outlines in detail why he finds the article misleading and/or dishonest. If you follow the link, you'll see that Scott doesn't claim they accused him of any of these things, and that this is just shorthand for the bias the NYT used in their reporting. I think it is fair for him to use shorthand here to summarize what he references via link, though I can see why reasonable people may disagree.
For example, Scott is concerned in his original post that the NYT ties him to Peter Thiel and other (elite) tech figures. There is no falsehood in noting the relationship, but the NYT writer makes an editorial choice (reflecting their bias) to call out this relationship and not any others.
You may want to take your concerns to that discussion, as this post is about Modi, not about Scott and/or the NYT.
It's an inaccurate "shorthand" since the article never called Scott Alexander racist, sexist or elitist. Shouldn't we try to be precise in our language and be more charitable to the outgroup (the NYT in this case)?
> a guy who argues that white people are genetically more intelligent than black people,
Oh no! He claims something that is supported by decades of psychometric research, the horror /s
Hello back marxbro! Are you still claiming that North Korea is a good place to live?
The NYT piece doesn't come out and say, but one need not be a dog to hear that particular whistle.
Dogwhistles are for being racist, not for calling someone racist. The whole point of the dogwhistle is that you have to hide it. Why would someone have to hide an accusation of racism if, according to this community, it is as easy as ever to call someone racist?
I don't think veiled accusations (which is what a dog whistle is) are limited to racial accusations.
Dogwhistling is typically used when being racist, because you actually have to hide that behaviour in society. Obviously it's not limited to that.
But again why would they need to hide their accusation under a veil? It's easy to call someone racist in society and the NYT do it all the time.
Because they are insinuating that he is a racist, but also want to avoid a slander suit.
So what's the "accusation" then? Because I certainly don't see any accusations that Scott is racist, sexist or elitist in the piece.
Does this community even believe in dogwhistles?
Like, for the past four years I've been reading people in the SSC comments arguing that no, Donald Trump isn't actually a racist (at least by current Republican standards), none of the veiled references in his speeches should be taken as targeting a particular ethnicity, the fact that his most prominent supporters seem really racist shouldn't reflect on him personally, etc. etc.
But apparently if the New York Times makes a veiled reference, that's something we need to take extremely seriously.
I didn't know that, strictly speaking, a community can believe anything, or that if someone denies the existence of a dog whistle in a particular case, then that means that dog whistles don't exist.
Speaking personally, I suspect that Trump knew the effect of what he was saying.
Dude, the NYT never wrote a "retaliatory" hit piece on Scott, and the folks here are having a shared fever dream if they think the NYT gives a fuck about an obscure blogger one way or the other. But you'll never convince anyone here of that fact. "Rationalism" is just another tribe.
Well, the central point of that article was that some contrarian asshole directed (with a wink and a nod) his followers to attack a poor journalist and his paper, who only wanted to tell the whole truth to their readers, so in that sense it's fair to call it retaliatory. I agree that "rationalists" still perceive it as more adversarial than it really was, IMO mostly because of the "hostile media effect". It was amusing to read several replies here and on the subreddit from people who found out about the blog through the article and thought that it sounded interesting and felt that the overall tone was positive.
I don't think that's an accurate summary of the central point of the article at all, but even if it were, *it would still be a better representation of what transpired* than "world's most esteemed journalistic organization publishes hit piece to teach rando blogger a lesson." As Will Wilkinson has pointed out, it really does raise journalistic questions when some corner of the internet goes absolutely bananas for seemingly no good reason at all.
I am a person who started reading this blog due to the NYT piece (although I was vaguely aware of SSC already). I like Scott's writing. But I've worked in Silicon Valley long enough to know that the people who criticize others for not being as rational as they are are the first ones to go red-faced and screaming when their ego is even slightly threatened.
Thanks for pointing me towards Wilkinson's post. I haven't seen it before, decent critiques of "rationalism" are hard to come by, and this was better than most. I still think that the NYT would've easily indulged Scott's request for pseudonymity if he was more ideologically palatable to them (there are precedents), so claims about adherence to some lofty standards of journalism aren't too convincing. Of course, his reaction seemed unreasonable enough to warrant a story in it's own right, but I'd say that the New Yorker piece from the last year did a far better job at it, while still managing to avoid spitefully mentioning his full name.
How is mentioning someone's full name "spiteful"? Isn't that just an accurate reporting of the facts?
The New York Times is still clearly influential among many people, and I don't think it's wise to immediately dismiss all those people as having opinions not worth caring about. At least not wise for a minor internet celebrity who doesn't like hateful comments and messages.
To me you de facto renounce your credibility on these issues when you take the NYTs word for it on them. You may have all sorts of other valuable opinions, but not on who is an awful person as defined by their racism, sexism, fascism etc.
Do recall that Scott is a practicing psychiatrist - if the NYT piece cost him patients, that would be real reputational damage. The opinion of the common man does matter even if you don't think it's likely to be correlated to reality.
Reputational damage included Scott having to reshape his career, since he wanted to keep his being a psychiatrist who also did counselling separate from his reputation as a blogger.
He's landed on his feet (money coming in from substack, private practice just prescribing so far as I know), but it was a big change that he wasn't looking for.
"Reputational damage"? Did Scott ever show any sort of evidence that there was any "reputational damage" beyond his feelings being hurt?
This incident is quickly becoming a founding mythology and religious conviction of internet Rationalism. So much so that Scott is claiming things like "It accused me of being racist, sexist, elitist" - if you read the NYT article in question you can very plainly see that this never happened.
That was because of the doxing not the other stuff, right?
Fair point. I have no idea how things would have played out without the doxing.
Was there a "doxing"? I thought Scott Alexander was upset that they printed his name?
Revealing the real name of a person speaking under a pseudonym is the literal definition of "doxing"
Considering that Scott had himself revealed his name and that the information was easily available through a Google search I do not consider this a "dox" - just the printing of accurate information. Since there's a lot of inaccurate journalism out there, I think the NYT should be applauded for getting Scott's name correct.
I think outing his pseudonym was really a bad move by the NYTimes, but apart from that the article didn’t seem particularly problematic. It oversimplified some things, as one does in a short article, and I think it very much mischaracterized what I think of as my favorite essay (“I Cam Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup”), but it’s also absolutely true that this blog is a safe space for anti-feminists and human biodiversity types.
Right, it wasn't lies but selective focus to "problematize" Scott to the NYTs 90+% liberal readership. There was a ton of areas of Scott's oeuvre the article could have focused on. The NYT chose those they knew would infuriate their readers.
Similarly, in their recent bio on Andrew Sullivan, they focused on his engagement with IQ and race, despite his long career writing covering a vast range of topics and his leadership on gay marriage.
> There was a ton of areas of Scott's oeuvre the article could have focused on. The NYT chose those they knew would infuriate their readers.
Yes. That's how the news - and media more broadly - works. And if you think that's bad, I invite you to open a newspaper from a century ago!
Being a savvy reader means knowing this going in when you read *anything* subject to the same selection pressures. Being a Bayesian means not discovering this fact for the first time, multiple times. Update and move on.
I thought Scott once banned the term human biodiversity, so much so that people started saying things like "buman hiodiversity".
Doesn't that prove the point that his blog has in fact been a point of congregation for these people, and his views aren't a million miles from there? Probably "safe space" was an exaggeration, but it's far closer of a connection than the vast majority of blogs with this size of readership.
To be fair to Scott, he intended it to be a safe space for discourse, and when some topics are banned everywhere else decent, all the witches will flock to whatever "safe havens" still remain. And even though his own views may stray from leftist orthodoxy, I'd describe them to still be pretty far from "those people", in ways that count.
Yes, I think that is totally fair. I think it is both true that he is far from "those people" in ways that count, but he's also closer to them than nearly anyone that people reading the New York Times are likely to encounter (including mainstream Republicans).
In my observation (filtered through my own biases and memory, needless to say) the SSC readership has always seemed less political in general than the ACX readership.
And this community does have a certain temperament that might make the aforementioned folks feel more welcome, if nothing else. My most vivid impression of this came via the paroxysmal reaction (on the occasion of book review talk) to some poor bugger who tried to suggest that we read more women authors.
If it's the one I'm thinking of about the book reviews, they pointed out that only one out of 17 book reviews was of a book by a woman, and then refused to suggest any books.
This didn't go over well, though I don't remember the reaction as being all that strong.
In any case, I asked for recommendations for books by women which would be worthy topics for book reviews and got quite a few suggestions.
> Reputational damage included Scott having to reshape his career, since he wanted to keep his being a psychiatrist who also did counselling separate from his reputation as a blogger.
IMO, the privacy needs of a good clinician are fundamentally incompatible with being a high-profile blogger - doubly so when there's overlap in topics. The NYT article was the proximate effect in this timeline, but the pseudoanonymity was always unstable.
One problem a lot of readers forget is what Scott's circle was. He lives in San Francisco, nearly all his family members are very left leaning, and I'm sure several were long time subscribers of the NYT. I wouldn't be surprised if family gatherings got intensely awkward, and various people he considered friends cut him off.
Has Scott said anything like this? I would like actual proof, not just speculation.
Any friends he lost he's better off without
"I'm not a far-right demagogue and I don't want to be a head of government. But I did manage to piss off the New York Times last year, and they wrote a retaliatory hit piece against me. It accused me of being racist, sexist, elitist, all kinds of negative things."
That's an interesting claim Scott. But let's have a look at the actual evidence. The article is here so that anybody can read it and confirm my analysis. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html
I searched for "racist" in the New York Times piece and here's what I got:
"He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists."
Now, if you actually read this (have you actually read the article?) it never actually calls you a racist. It simply says that you have linked to another blog that they say is racist. Now, I notice that you've since deleted the link to Nick Land's blog, but it is a simple fact that you used to have his blog "xenosystems" linked prominently on your own blog roll and anyone can easily look at archives to confirm this, e.g.:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200121045328/https:/slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
The article never says you are sexist, merely that you wrote an essay about the Blue Tribe and that liberals tend to get upset at sexists:
"The essay was a critique of what Mr. Siskind, writing as Scott Alexander, described as “the Blue Tribe.” In his telling, these were the people at the liberal end of the political spectrum whose characteristics included “supporting gay rights” and “getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots.”"
Is this what you're upset at? That they quoted your "analysis" of the "Blue Tribe"? Where did they call you a sexist?
The word "elitist" never seems to even be mentioned in the article ; let alone accusing you of being one! Where did they accuse you of being an elitist?
Anybody can read the article and see that your claims about the NYT calling you "racist", "sexist" or "elitist" are simply untrue. So the question here is; what are you actually upset about?
This piece is really great, a good point for the New-Yorker.
Ah, an "implication". An implication so subtle that nobody can find me the quote which Scott Alexander very clearly claims exists.
"It accused me of being racist, sexist, elitist"
If you believe that this is true you should be able to find a quote from the NYT where they make this accusation.
Where is the phantom implication you are talking about?
I'm asking where exactly is the passage that "accuses" Scott of being racist, sexist or elitist. He claimed that there were accusations there. Scott quoted no sections and I have already shown that the piece in question does not contain any such accusations.
I guess expecting a Marxist to get nuance is too much to ask.
"Nuance" does not involve completely inaccurate statements such as Scott Alexander's claim that the NYT accused him "of being racist, sexist, elitist, all kinds of negative things"
These are falsehoods that Scott is spreading, not "nuance".
You have been shown the quote multiple times now. You just chose to go "Lalalalala, don't wanna hear" when this happened.
Multiple people have been wrong and I have addressed their arguments each time.
We need a way to report comments.
I've been saying this for some time.
Ah, trying to censor and cancel me.
Do you understand what an implication is?
Yes
But he did align himself with Charles Murray in that post. I'm not sure how it's implied that it means Scott agrees with Charles Murray's view on IQ and race. In any case, if Scott feels he has been misrepresented it here, it would be productive to write a longer piece about what he does and doesn't agree with Murray on, rather than simply complaining that someone wrote the true statement that he agrees with Murray.
Your link goes to a paywalled text.
I think that means you've read too many articles and they want you to pay for more. That's capitalism for you. I rarely read the NYT so I don't have this problem.
You're an academic, right? Maybe you have institutional access?
https://web.archive.org/web/20210215053502/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html
I think this should get around the paywall, for those who wish to confirm that I am correct and that Scott is making a very basic mistake.
So have to pay to read the article which required the author's time and energy is ' Capitalism ' !
are you one of those who think socialism means everything is free ?
Just a little tongue-in-cheek joke. I hope Cade Metz is getting paid handsomely. I'm a Marxist.
Carl Marks correctly observed that you need capitalism to generate wealth. He then said that there should be ' Revolution' (fancy way of saying mass murdering spree) to re distribute the wealth. But has he mentioned WHEN should the state pivot from capitalism to socialism and then communism? I have a communist friend who says that China's state capitalism is actually part of Marxist plan and once enough wealth is generated the communist party will start re distributing it
"Carl Marks correctly observed that you need capitalism to generate wealth."
Can you quote where Carl Marks said that?
For one example of what you claim doesn't exist in the article:
"In one post, [Siskind] aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in "The Bell Curve.""
That makes it sound as though Scott was agreeing with Murray about HBD, when in fact he was agreeing with him about UBI.
This is covered in more depth in Scott's response to the NYT article https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article
As far as I can tell that article does not say anything similar to "It accused me of being racist, sexist, elitist, all kinds of negative things."
These are new claims by Scott. They are the kinds of things that require evidence.
It was done implicitly, not explicitly. Scott writes "It accused me of being racist, sexist, elitist, all kinds of negative things."
Not "it contained explicit categorization of me as XYZ".
Where is this accusation?
How does it imply that? It simply says that he aligned himself with Charles Murray, which he did. The NYT even links to the article in question for all their readers.
And the article never even calls Murray a racist, simply that he proposed there was a link between race and IQ. Again, nowhere does it say that Scott is a racist, which is what Scott claimed.
"the article never even calls Murray a racist, simply that he proposed there was a link between race and IQ."
That is "racist" according to any definition you can find in use by US media today.
The NYT article didn't say that, though.
When writing, you don't actually begin by defining all the words you use. You rely on other people who speak the same language using many of the same definitions. That's why we call it "the same language". Pretending that they didn't call him racist because they didn't define their terms would be like me saying you have a very low IQ, then saying I never called you "stupid" because I use the word "stupid" in its original Latin sense of meaning "stunned".
"In one post, [Siskind] aligned himself with Charles Murray" is true
"Charles Murray who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in "The Bell Curve."" AFAIK is true
Putting that in one sentence suggests that he aligned with CM on exactly this topic, making it technically true but highly misleading.
How is that misleading? They even link to Scott's article in question.
The statements are both true and there is no implication that Scott is a racist there. There's not even an implication that Murray is a racist.
Proposing a link between race and IQ is widely seen as racist. Maybe it shouldn't be, but we can't deny reality. Try arguing for such a link for any length of time in any mainstream discussion space, you'll be quickly branded a racist. (don't actually do that, or do it at your own risk). The wikipedia page on Charles Murray includes several citations for accusations of racism.
It can be "widely seen" as racist, but that's not what the NYT said about Scott Alexander and Charles Murray. Nowhere did they include the claim that Scott Alexander is racist. Scott Alexander claimed that the NYT contained such accusations, when a quick read will confirm that no such accusations are present.
Would you agree with me on this point? It seems as though Scott Alexander is making a very basic mistake.
sure, but when you claim A,A->B so B and B bad, ~A doesn’t necessarily mean B is false.
For a less obvious example of dishonesty, the bit quoting me starts with a quote, then has "The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. The only people who struggled to be heard, Dr. Friedman said, were “social justice warriors.”"
That makes it sound to a careless reader as though the white supremacist and neo-fascist is something I said, since it is put between a real quote and what purports to be a description of my views.
And I doubt I said "struggled to be heard," although I might have said that that was a position that most commenters were unsympathetic to. That's Metz's wording, although it is attributed to me, which is why the first part of the sentence is not in quotation marks.
This all looks above board and accurate to me. Where you are being directly quoted and where you aren't is clearly indicated using quotation marks.
Struggled to be heard is not in quotation marks, so he's not indicating that you directly said it. Anybody who knows how quotation marks are used will know that, which I assume is most English speakers. It's a paraphrase.
If you truly feel that you've been misrepresented I suggest that you contact the NYT and request a retraction.
Did you ever request a retraction, David Friedman?