Isn't Greenwald kind of cool? Like, he's really edgy and anti-establishment. Indeed: anti-establishment seems to be the main coherent thread in his politics. Is he not cool because he just does everything too earnestly?
Reddit isn't cool. YA fiction isn't cool. The DSA certainly isn't cool.
What is cool? I hope that what is cool is hanging out, having a good time, and not reading the news or having strong political opinions. The teenagers I see in real life, rather than on the internet, seem to have a much better understanding of this.
It seems ironic to accuse the host of myopia and then anoint Twitter as the place where "all the networking journalists, academics, and business leaders" do their shopping. I've never used Twitter. Don't even read it, just barely know it exists. The same can be said for everybody above me in the corporate chain to the CEO. (Our company altogether employs about 6,000 and has offices in 14 countries).
We know Twitter exists, and a bunch of weird cultural flamefests occupy it, and it's possible if you have bad luck to be featured in one of them. But shop there for actionable insight? Never. As far as business goes, it's as relevant (i.e. not at all) as Saturday Night Live was to Exxon/Mobil's long-term strategy in the 1980s, or the Sunday funnies were to how FDR prosecuted the Second World War.
Of course, I would certainly think different if I were in the business of punditry, or news, or entertainment (if there's a difference), but I'm not, and most American business is not.
Twitter is horrible because the post-length limit is just long enough for tribal signaling, but not long enough for substance. It would be a very different place with a 500 character minimum and no quote-tweet function.
It's being plugged into a hivemind, and a hivemind that only wants the most shallow thoughts promulgated, and nodes in the hivemind are desperately afraid of being targeted for removal from the hivemind for wrongthink, and the best way to not get targeted for wrongthink (in the very short term) is to be the one doing the targeting.
There is the possibility that the initial post length has shaped the type of site it has become i.e. if it had always been 280 characters or longer, maybe twitter discourse would have evolved differently. Not saying I have a strong positive position on this, but its worth considering.
I wasn't a big John McCain fan, but I always thought the most statesmanlike thing he did was play a sizable role in the early 1990s rapprochement between Washington and Hanoi. It was precisely because he had strong personal reasons for disliking his former captors who had beaten him frequently that made this impressive.
Anyway, McCain didn't get in trouble for using a racial epithet against his torturers because he was famous for having been tortured, and already in the early 1990s he had risen above his feelings in the national interest.
Do most people actually intend that they refer to the Vietnam POW conspiracy theory? My impression was that the people who used them mostly just wanted to show generic patriotism & respect for the military.
Disagree. I'm a left of center Democrat who worked for the Federal Government for 20 years specifically out of a sense of patriotism. I'm a computer scientist; I would have made a lot more in the private sector.
Which side is "the aggressor side"? The people who tried to get Intelligent Design into schools, or the New Atheists? Harvey Weinstein or the people who brought suit against him? Derek Chauvin or the protestors in the streets?
> "Cancel culture" does not refer to getting TV shows cancelled. It refers to weaponized culture war antagonism to destroy individuals
I think his point is that, while "cancel culture" is used to refer to all of these, TV shows being cancelled is most annoying to the typical not-very-politically-engaged person & so complaints about it are more influential.
The coup de grace for #MeToo believe-women feminism came after Tara Reade's rape accusation against Joe Biden in March 2020. It was ebbing down already, but at that point it's almost like something clicked in a few editorial rooms across the US and the movement lost its last source of clout.
Arguably, something else happened in March 2020, but that something took its time to percolate into the newsrooms...
(I do believe that cancel culture lost its sharpest tooth with the end of #MeToo. Cancellation in 2016 on allegations of sexual assault would make people shunned and break families apart, while cancellation in 2020 merely ruins careers and politically charged friendships.)
Exactly, but it kicked the system into the basin of another attractor. Right now there is no interest in pushing the topic back into the mainstream (probably because a critical mass of "stakeholders" have gotten their hands burned), and it's not considered avantgarde any more, so I don't think it will come back in foreseeable time.
I think the gradual leftward movement (Scott has written about this elsewhere as "Moloch always swims leftward") happens because, every time we get increases to productivity from new tech or management techniques, we spend it on raising the amount of compassion for others we can afford to have. This spending is mostly not directly observable spending of money, but the continual imposition of new overhead costs, and the elimination of negative incentives on people to act in socially-beneficial ways. The potential problem is that we can spend all our dividends on re-distributing the pie, and never on making the pie bigger.
The USA and western societies have in general become a lot more leftist over time with increasing wealth, e.g. modern America is certainly much further to the left than it was in the era of the Wild West.
I think this mostly explains trends like increasing gay rights and conservative acquiescence to it. Gay rights are possible because of the welfare state. It's not like society spontaneously woke up one day and decided for no reason that although for all of human history homosexuality was strongly taboo, today would be different. What changed was the welfare state become firmly established and displaced the family/children as the primary caregivers in old age. If you live in a small village and everyone needs to sprog 5 times to ensure 2-3 children who can build a house for you to live in when you're old, being gay is practically an old-age death sentence because you won't have children, AND a huge affront to your whole community who really NEEDS those extra hands in the fields on to man the ramparts, and can't afford a stagnant population level. Then throw in "gay culture" with its general objections to being conspicuously manly and what that means in a world filled with warring tribes and the reasons to create a taboo get even stronger. The suppression in turn causes enormous uncertainty about how many of these people exactly there are, making it circular - everyone is afraid that if the taboo falls it'll turn out that 25% of men are gay and suddenly everything falls apart.
But now if you live in a massive country of tens of millions of people surrounded by a countryside filled with robot tractors and warfare is fought online, and you have lots of research telling you that the gay population is stable and relatively small, and old people don't need children anymore because the state will put them in a care home, well, suddenly the need for the taboo is gone and over time it's natural that it'd fade away.
There is a dark side to all this, namely, is the welfare state actually long term sustainable. The taboo against homosexuality fell slowly partly because the welfare state is quite new and because every so often a story about state pension schemes being bankrupt somehow sneaks through the leftist media. We should expect near blanket media suppression about bankrupt welfare schemes given the socialist tendencies of journalists and general disinterest in fiscal conservatism amongst modern conservative parties, so it's very hard to understand how stable the current situation is. If anything bad happens to the welfare state, however hard it is to imagine now, gay rights will be the first thing that gets the chop.
I think the "left/right" distinction only makes sense at certain moments in history, so using it to think about long-term trends leads to confusion. Here's a different way to think about it, which I made up just now, so caveat emptor:
Instead of left/right, use the 2-dimensional phase space of identity / diversity on one dimension, and perceived safety on the other. With "identity / diversity" I'm contrasting people who believe in "perfection", and therefore that history is progressing (in the Hegelian sense) toward an endpoint at which all people will be identical (e.g., Platonists, Christians, Marxists, Nazis, Social Justice), versus people who believe that societies are complex mechanisms which operate more efficiently with many different types of parts, and so diversity (perhaps even of wealth) and division-of-labor are beneficial. We might equally well call this dimension "identity / liberty"; diversity and liberty aren't the same thing, but liberty maximizes diversity more than any centrally planned system can.
On the low end of "safety" we have societies threatened with extinction. These are usually communal and anti-individualistic, emphasizing social cooperation and stability over all else. (Today we call people who feel this way "conservatives", though that term actually means "people who take Chesterton's fence seriously", which is quite different.)
Increasing safety, technology, and wealth are all a kind of surplus. Societies on the "identity" end of identity/diversity invest that surplus in making the members of society more identical, eliminating imbalances of wealth and power. Ancient Sparta would be an example. Sparta was the original inspiration for an entire lineage of ideologies which believe in "perfection", and was a direct inspiration for many of those thinkers or ideologies, including Plato, Rousseau, and the Nazis. It got its wealth surplus in the form of the conquest and enslavement of its neighbors, and exploited those slaves to free every Spartan citizen from work, both in order to train as soldiers, to eliminate wealth disparities, and to go through a long, government-controlled educational process of indoctrination into Spartan ideology.
These "identity" cultures move thru these different focuses of ideology as their surplus increases:
Strict communitarian focus on survival =>
Making all people within their culture identical (early Christianity, French Revolution, Marxism, Nazism) =>
Making all people in the world identical (Roman Christianity, International Marxism, Social Justice)
Societies on the "diversity" end, like Athens, invest that surplus in increasing liberties. They move thru these different ideological focuses as wealth increases:
Strict communitarian focus on survival =>
Currency, commerce, trade, individual wealth (Venice, the late middle ages in Italy and the Netherlands) =>
Individual liberties (Athens, the Renaissance, American Revolution, libertarianism) =>
Basic research and other re-investment => (industrial revolution, science)
Do cool stuff (put a man on the Moon, the Culture)
(But beware of using the Culture as an example. Remember it's fictional, and tries to combine both "identity" and "diversity" values, in a way I don't believe is possible.)
Interesting take. Not going to argue against it, but Social Justice being anti-diversity while (implied) anti-SJ would be pro-diversity was pretty funny feature arising from that setup. It seems to kinda make sense in your framework though and I think I have a sense of what you are pointing at. That idea of striving for perfection seems to capture it for me.
To rephrase my confusion: I thought it strange, that when society gains wealth through time, it translates into society also having and using more resources for empathy towards a wider range of people, but when an individual gains wealth, it seems to diminish their range of empathy.
I realize that there is a cynical (probably Marxist) way to view this: that "societal compassion" isn't really compassion at all – it is just capitalism widening the consumer base to reap more profits. So the confusion would arise from, well, confusing the two "emotions" to be the same and having similar effects, when in fact, society as an entity has no such, nor any other kind of, emotions.
"But the individuals of said society still do have such emotions!", I might object, "and to view their empathy as mere selfish profit seeking renders the all the concepts of empathy, compassion and unselfishness totally useless and meaningless".
I don’t know, and I’m getting sidetracked. What I’m still left wondering is, inspired by your concept of striving towards perfection, that if society is becoming more homogeneous by some meaningful metric, taken with the tendency to create schism via the “Narcissism of small differences”, it would seem that when people are expelled from the in-group, people from the fringes of society are assimilated in to accommodate that space. I’m visualizing flows that resemble what’s going on in magnetic fields.
But now it’s probably good time to get some sleep.
Er, what I should have said in my previous comment after "The potential problem" is that, every time we make the pie bigger, we use some of that extra pie to pay costs some individuals would otherwise have born which would have served as incentives, and the loss of those incentives shrinks the pie, or adds "bad stuff" to the pie. Or, we use that extra pie to pay the cost of implementing and obeying some new regulation which is supposed to prevent some harm, but which also introduces some harm, so we're spending our pie growth to produce net social harm. The pie of net total social goods - bads might still be growing, or might be shrinking. I think we can point to some clear cases where spending in order to reduce harm usually increases harm by that mechanism, such as medical insurance and medical regulation.
> I think New Atheism petered out because it basically won. Religion is much less influential today than it was 20 years ago.
I don't think New Atheism had too much effect on this. Surveys have shown that "atheist" and "no religion" affiliations have bee nsteadily declining for many decades, and New Atheism didn't really cause a blip at the time, but it obviously has some long-term effects contributing to the decline in all the books and everything that are now available.
The decline in religious affiliation are similar across countries. It actually seems more plausible that the rise of New Atheism as a movement was a *result* of declining interest in religion and a growing interest in secularism, rather than the result, ie. we only heard about this movement because this existing trend created a market where once there was none.
Your original claim: "Surveys have shown that "atheist" and "no religion" affiliations have bee nsteadily declining for many decades" Did you write "atheist" for "religious"?
It isn't that it faltered because it succeeded, it was that Christians had already had loss after loss after loss before the argument between them and New Atheists even started. It was less of a serious debate and more like a victory lap.
The weakest part of this fact-free speculation about "linguistic kill shots" is that "politically correct" has followed the same pattern as "woke." It started out being used unironically among the left, then became identified with intra-left snark, and then conservatives picked up on the snarky usage, which blew it up into the mainstream. Using "woke" as a pejorative is already starting to fall out of favor on the far-left now that conservative legislators and think tank flacks are using it to describe things like minimum wage hikes and free child care.
The first person I can recall using the term "politically correct" was rock star Joe Strummer in the early 1980s. He was laughing that The Clash's leftist fans were always complaining that The Clash wasn't "politically correct" enough, but he felt The Clash had done plenty for the left.
My impression from the Strummer interview was that "politically correct" meant in early 1980s Britain adherence to the Labour/Stalinist line of Arthur Scargill, head of the National Union of Mineworkers, rather than the more cultural angle it now implies.
The Stalinist roots are undeniable. Actually, in the Soviet Union, as late as the late 1980's, the term was in use. I recall reading about a Soviet conservative figure praising an anti-Glasnost article in the Soviet press as "politically correct", meaning it was correct according the party line.
I am much less sure about the expression "politically correct" having been given wide currency in the 1980s and early 1990s' Western non-Marxist Left. Which leftist figure back then was praised as being politically correct (say, McGovern or Jesse Jackson) as opposed to Republicans or squarer leftists (say, Blue Dog Democrats)? Has anyone ever said Gary Hart was not politically correct enough?
Is there any evidence that "politically correct" was ever said as a complement by *anyone*, left, right, Soviet, or even Stalinist? I can't remember this usage from my childhood in the US in the 80s--90s.
I first remember hearing the word associated with my dad's (then) right-centrist politics around 1990. Then by the time _PCU_ came out in 1994, everyone was aware of the word, although my sense at the time was it was mostly a badge of group identification for the kind of conservatives who define themselves by being anti-whatever the Democrats are doing.
Drucker recalled Stalinists and Nazis using it in the pre-WW II days, but he did not present quotes.
In the early 1990s, I remember conservatives complaining about leftiets' political correction. I do not recall leftists praising each other back in the for being "politically correct".
Ah, good point. I misunderstood your OP and assumed you meant the "Soviet conservative figure" was only damning with faint praise and not delivering a true compliment. Very American of me, I'm sure.
No, in my middle-class daily-local-paper-reading remembrance of the 80s/90s, (mainstream) leftists never used the term "politically correct" except occasionally to deride conservatives' worldview.
I don't think that someone using a term that is translated as "politically correct" is quite the same thing as the actual phrase "politically correct" being used (I assume that Soviet figure writing in the Soviet press would not be using English).
According to Google's Ngram, the term "politically correct" appeared occasionally in books in the 1930s, then was largely forgotten until the late 1980s, when it exploded in usage up until the mid-1990s. My impression is that its usage was spread by neoconservatives with personal or scholarly memory of 1930s Stalinism, but it was mostly applied by them to the rising postmodernist cultural left in the English Lit departments influenced by Derrida and Foucault rather than to the fading modernist economic left.
The early 1990s battles over political correctness were surprisingly literary in subject matter. My vague recollection is that the mandarins largely won the arguments at that time (in, say, the New York Times Magazine) because they had better taste in literature than did the French theorists. The big guns of the American novel back then, with the exception of Toni Morrison, were unenthusiastic about political correctness: Updike, Roth, Wolfe, McCarthy, Bellow, De Lillo, Pynchon etc. For example, Philip Roth's fine 2000 novel "The Human Stain" begins with an aged professor getting canceled for inadvertent political correctness that reads exactly like it was ripped from the headlines of a 2021 whoop-tee-doo (then the book goes off in an unexpected direction).
But far fewer people care as much these days about literary quality as they did back then.
I think the phrase 'political correctness' mostly got going from French communists attacking 'premature anti-fascists' who fought the Germans through the Hitler-Stalin pact. So it's always been a little gamy, a little ironic.
FWIW I remember "politically correct" being used in conversation among leftists in the late 80s/early 90s in precisely this way—first unironically, then more & more often ironically.
This film wasn't well received and doesn't seem well remembered, but was spoofing PC culture on college campuses back in 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCU_(film)
Earlier - "politically correct" was very common among my cohort in the mid 70's, said cohort being radical activists and hippies. It was so common it was usually abbreviated to just "PC". We had sufficient rad cred we could counter-signal by making fun of its silly excesses - my favorite joke was to refer to San Francisco's Fisherperson's Wharf.
I think "cancel culture" even moreso. Even the "left not liberal" types don't use that anymore because it's associated with Ted Cruz and the sort. "Woke" I think still has some legs. I do see cool irony bros using it. (i.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvVhCCWPgaI)
What do conservatives mean when they complain about someone or some institution being woke? I haven’t been able to nail it down.
Some object to the idea that any but a tiny minority are racist. I note Tim Scott being pulled over 7 times in six years, being detained for impersonating a US Senator, etc. and they agree that happens. So it’s more than a tiny minority? No and they get all huffy. I don’t really understand where they are coming from.
You identified something important: aesthetic. But what you fail to realise is that it's your fault for giving so much weight to aesthetics. Right wingers (yes, even center-right) are obsessed with 'anti-aesthetics', they hate elites who care too much about their appearance, they hate puritans who care about crafting ideal images of their personality. I'm not going to speculate why this might be, lest I get a 'not all conservatives!' from you, but it's quite clear the right hates aesthetics in a disproportionate amount. Maybe they are the 'have nots' when it comes to looking good?
I would, and I'm "elite" (as far as income/education goes) and live on the west coast of the US. I am always impressed by someone who takes first-class care of his machinery. It bespeaks a pride in one's work that further suggests reliability, trustworthiness, and self-discipline -- very valuable character traits. In my experience people who treat their tools with disrespect also treat their friends and colleagues that way, too.
"Aesthetics" or "theatrics"? I'd like to make that distinction as it's not that difficult to adopt an archetypal persona simply to attract attention and thus votes. Groups with different preferences will take different sorts of appearances as insincere, likely due to projection. The problem with that is, of course, that it's easiest to make a political career if you have no personal convictions, disregard any premise of personal authenticity and become willing to just follow the social desirability bias wherever that leads you.
Yeah, at least Marxists were tautologically right in the sense that owning the means of production gives you power that can, and often has, been used for oppression. But the above kind of essentialism is dangerous because of its closeness to racism, sexism and others forms of prejudice.
Are you for what criteria someone could use to conclude that an institution is woke?
Generalize the question. Under what conditions would we describe an institution as a Christian institution (school, business, club), an Islamist institution, a communist institution?
If it mandates its members be informed of its tenants, and those tenants are put forward as being not merely a set of tenants but the correct set of tenants (so excludes a course on comparative religions). It disciplines or expels members of the institution who compromise the integrity of those tenants with acts or statements of disbelief.
I love Grumpy Grandpa. He is very relatable to me: come down out of your solitude, everyone is an idiot panicking over stupid crap, just let me have my extensive selection of delicious dishes in peace, why are you two idiot lovebirds canoodling under my nose instead of teaching your idiot baby disciple? I do love the scenes where he shows up, goes "You're an idiot, and you're an idiot, and *you're* an *especially big* idiot" and then kicks their asses for them 😀
We need the people here to hurry up and start working for Substack via their advertised vacancies in order to implement our secret agenda of taking over the world - that is, of making commenting much more user-friendly and including features like editing, formatting, adding images, adding links and so forth.
Meh, nowadays I think tenants works. In fact tenets get in the way when people point out the hypocrisies, the tenants are always from the same pool and will never change.
I think they mean the institution has put "social justice" above its original purpose as an institution. A prime example would be Gillette running a cringeworthy feminist ad that alienated a lot of their customers.
If you believe Gillette was acting against its original purpose in creating that add, I have a bridge to sell you. Companies go woke in pursuit of not in spite of their original purpose, making profits.
I think they mean that an institution is not advocating wokeness because it's correct, but only because it's popular, i.e. they have zero scruples and would gladly burn the intellectual commons to see a few more likes or retweets or a quarter point stock increase or whatever the hell such people care about these days. I think most conservatives would acknowledge, at least in private, that women/minorities/etc have legit gripes with the system.
"I think most conservatives would acknowledge, at least in private, that women/minorities/etc have legit gripes with the system."
There was a time when there were legit gripes. Most conservatives, at least in private, would acknowledge that. There are no legit gripes now. As a matter of fact, the pendulum has swung quite a far bit the opposite direction, and you can see the proof of abominable and overwhelming statistical data in the behavior of black americans to asian americans. And that is but one example.
There is behavioral rot among women/minorities/etc that has set in now, such that these cultural behaviors are victimizing, not hallmarks of vicitimization.
It is obviously not true that most conservatives believe this, the median reTHUGlican thinks there is between "a lot" and "a moderate amount" of discrimination against blacks.
I’m not sure about that. If you point out Tim Scott’s experience they are will agree that Til Scott has been the victim of discriminatory behavior by the police. And they will agree when presented with any other individual case. But when taken in total all those individual cases can never mean there is a systemic problem.
Its also possible that Sen Scott is a particularly bad driver, which is statistically true of Black men in general. DWB isn't so much a real "discrimination" phenomena, as a "yes they are speeding more than other drivers" phenomena. See, e.g. the New Jersey turnpike study.
He claims that he, in the vast majority of cases, was not speeding. So your post simply comes down to disputing the factual assertions. You might as well say "It's also possible he's making the whole thing out of whole cloth, and he wasn't even stopped to begin with".
Anecdotes don't make anecdata, no. What you'd need to look at would be things like "how often does a member of this minority shoot at police" vs "how often are they shot by police"; "how often are they pulled over" vs "how overrepresented are they in actual criminality"; "how often and easily are they hired or accepted into university" vs "how well do they perform relative to other groups on a variety of metrics before/after being hired/accepted", etc.
Statistics, in other words; and not in isolation, but in relevant contexts.
Each statistic can be used in versus method to create a different picture.
“Frequency of hiring” vs “representation in crime” for example. All of the issues you’ve alluded to have a plethora more factors. E.g., “amount invested in education” or “number of parents in household”.
I believe that such conduct as using the term "reTHUGlican" should garner social reproach. This is not kind, necessary, or communicating an objective truth.
I think part of where the disagreement comes in is that the woke seem to view any disparities at all in outcomes as prima facie evidence of systemic racism/sexism/generic-isms and that any institution that produces these disparate outcomes is thus illegitimate and fair game for being torn down or radically altered to produce equal outcomes. The problems with this stance should be obvious.
I think everyone should agree that disparities of any sort are prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination.
The problem is the next step, in saying that prima facie evidence counts as ultima facie evidence that automatically justified tearing down or radically altering systems. Everyone *should* agree that once you have prima facie evidence of a problem, you should investigate further, and if you discover enough corroborating evidence of the problem, you should act to fix it.
But that idea doesn't appeal either to conservatives that want to preserve every structure, regardless of the evidence, or to radicals that want to transform everything as soon as they see even one piece of evidence.
There's definitely some of that on the right. I would say that on the left, though, there are a similar number of people who feel there is no need to investigate further or corroborate anything, instead jumping to the rather absurd conclusion that if there is any disparity at all in demographic outcomes, it must be attributable to animus, bigotry, oppression, etc.
There are also people on the left who believe that racism is a disparity of racial outcomes (ie that is what they define racism to be) and that this needs correcting in and of itself, regardless of whether it is caused by animus, bigotry, oppression, etc.
For some, that is the primary meaning of racism. This is why they get blank when someone starts talking about the causes to disprove that they are racist - the cause is relevant when you want to resolve the differential outcome, but the differential outcome is racist because that's what racism means - it means differential outcomes.
I’m not convinced that disparities of any sort are prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination. Disparities could be the result of Poisson clumping after random distribution. Or they could be the result of just chaotic social forces. Do you want to say that the fact that 75% of NBA players are Black is prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination?
Yes. "Prima facie" just means "on first glance". It's the sort of thing that warrants a look, but is nowhere near definitive proof. It absolutely *could* be something else.
People routinely mistake the meaning of "random." They think it means "uniform" when a far better definition would be "has fluctuations on every length scale." Uniform is a very *nonrandom* outcome, and almost always means some constraint is at work.
Exempli gratia, if *every* lion herd ever observed had exactly 7 males for every female, we would rightly suspect some constraint on lion behavior, genetic or environmental, that produced that strangely uniform result. If I flipped a coin 1000 times and it came up H T H T H T.... et cetera, I would immediately know it was not a "fair" coin.
Likewise, if in every human occupation the ratio of races or sexes (or any other random feature) were *exactly* the same as that ratio among all humans, it would be pretty strong evidence for powerful constraints on human behavior -- it would be highly nonrandom.
Any time you divide people into groups the groups will tend to be somewhat different along every conceivable axis. We should routinely expect to see disparities of some sort everywhere we look merely due to different groups having different skills, cultural attributes, physical attributes and interests.
In fact if we *didn't* find disparities of any sort then *that* is what should constitute "prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination".
I suspect there's something more specific and quantitative we can say here, about what effect size we should expect to see, with values quite a bit larger or smaller than that being prima facie evidence of something systemic.
It is prima facie evidence. I believe there has been plenty of investigation. I believe that they've found the situation is complicated, and depends a lot on the particular role on the team.
I may have lost track of the terminology, but I think prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination is the obvious and explicit systems of discrimination, e.g. Jim Crow laws. And they have to be obvious, because if they aren't then too many people won't remember who they are supposed to discriminate against.
Absent such, disparities of outcome between different cultures should be treated as prima facie evidence of cultures optimized for achieving different outcomes. Then, as you say, you start looking for something more conclusive.
"I think everyone should agree that disparities of any sort are prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination."
This attitude assumes that no group has any intrinsic differences. It also adds the term "systemic" for no reason. And finally, even if you establish that there was discrimination somewhere in the chain of causality, that doesn't establish that the institution currently under consideration engages in discrimination. If the black people are underrepresented at a college, that doesn't point to the college being racist, that points to racism affecting pre-college education.
I say that it is a defeasible null hypothesis that intrinsic differences among groups would amount to small effects, rather than large effects, so that if we see a large effect, that is prima facie evidence (but not in any way conclusive evidence) that something more than just intrinsic differences are at work.
When I say "systemic discrimination", I think I mean the same thing as what you're saying - we don't know if any particular individual at any point in the chain has discriminatory attitudes, or if the effect is the result of interactions among multiple parts of the system. We don't know if it's the employer or the university or social attitudes or neighborhood funding of schools or historic wealth gaps or something else.
The point is that we don't need to accuse any individual of harboring evil attitudes - discrimination can be the result of the system, and that means we may be able to address it at the systemic level without having to call anyone a bad person.
It's not so much about the idea of individual racism, most people accept that individuals can be racist. I think the animus is towards the idea of "systemic racism", the idea that we're all complicit in racism for historical reasons. Accepting systemic racism means its not enough to be "not-racist", you have to be actively anti-racist or you're perpetuating racial inequity, and actively opposing all existing social structures definitely sounds demanding and difficult.
In theory we all agree that the government should treat all citizens equally. But when the police focus on young black men at the expense of tiny elderly Asian ladies some say that only makes sense. Of course the police should focus on those who are more likely to commit crimes. Of course the TSA should focus more on 22 year old Pakistani guys and less on frail 85 year old widows.
Ok. But then how would you feel as a 22 black accountant or sitting US Senator being stopped at rates vastly higher than you white co-workers?
Honestly not sure how I'd feel if I were black, but my current politics would attribute that kind of treatment to a combination of individual bigotry and stereotypes about what low-income people look like. You could definitely describe that as systemic racism and I probably would describe it as such, my point was that the "woke" understanding of race is very inconvenient to accept.
I was mostly trying to explain why people might object to the woke framing of this as "systemic racism". It's not that I don't think it's not true, but John McWorter describes my own views on the limitations of attributing complex social problems to "systemic racism" pretty well - the solution isn't just "less racism".
How often would Tim Scott & co have to be pulled over by different people at different times before you’d agree that there was something systemic going on?
Based on that, I agree that systemic racism exists, in this case and many others. My point was just that that doesn't actually solve anything or help anyone.
Acknowledging a problem doesn't solve it. And we should be distrustful of anyone who claims that they know how to solve a problem as difficult as systemic racism. I don't see why any of that means we should stop talking about and thinking about systemic racism.
Ideally, we'd be working off high-quality statistical data rather than anecdotes about individuals, but I admit we don't always have the luxury.
If we *are* gonna judge by Tim Scott, the manner in which he was selected matters quite a lot. I'd be very surprised if my sister won a million dollars in the lottery- that's really rare! I would *not* be surprised if *someone* one a billion dollars in the lottery- there are a *lot* of "someones."
Also...
I've heard Tim Scott's name a couple of times. As politicians go, I have no strong feelings about him, but that antecedent is doing *a lot* of work.
My prior here is that various kinds of dishonesty are absolutely crucial to making it as a high-level national politician, at least in the US. I used to say that a politician saying something was evidence that they wanted you to believe it, but immaterial to the question of whether it was true. I stopped saying it when I realized how much of politics-speak consists not only of lies, but lies which are not intended by the speaker to be believed. High-simulacra statements which are intended less as truth-claims than as moves in a rhetorical game.
So, when I google "Tim Scott pulled over," google seems to give me articles reporting that [politician] is making claims. When I google "Tim Scott pulled over evidence," I get what looks to be more of the same. It's totally possible google is failing me, but I don't *currently* see any reason to think Scott's claim is true.
I want to be clear that my logic here *isn't* "Scott's claim is implausible, so probably he's lying." It's "Scott is a [high-level, USian] politician, so almost certainly a habitual liar, and so we shouldn't update on his claims without an *explicit theory* for why they're valid evidence which *does not* rely on [politician] being truth-tracking generally."
(I feel some social obligation to nod at the possibility that Scott is an exception to the rule, but it's mostly formality at this point. I don't think you *could* make it that far in politics if you were honest, and I *doubly* don't think you could without making waves I'd hear about.)
Isn't Greenwald kind of cool? Like, he's really edgy and anti-establishment. Indeed: anti-establishment seems to be the main coherent thread in his politics. Is he not cool because he just does everything too earnestly?
Leftists who criticize the left are the worst kind of traitors and are as cool as black socks and loafers at the beach. See: Jimmy Dore.
He has a kind of cool in a certain community. But Greenwald and Taibbi definitely don't have the cultural relevance that they did 5 or 10 years ago.
Reddit isn't cool. YA fiction isn't cool. The DSA certainly isn't cool.
What is cool? I hope that what is cool is hanging out, having a good time, and not reading the news or having strong political opinions. The teenagers I see in real life, rather than on the internet, seem to have a much better understanding of this.
It turns out that the twitter character limit (which has been raised to 280 characters) matters much less than you might think.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/twitters-doubling-of-character-count-from-140-to-280-had-little-impact-on-length-of-tweets/
People are spreading out a little, and there's probably more use of threaded tweets.
It seems ironic to accuse the host of myopia and then anoint Twitter as the place where "all the networking journalists, academics, and business leaders" do their shopping. I've never used Twitter. Don't even read it, just barely know it exists. The same can be said for everybody above me in the corporate chain to the CEO. (Our company altogether employs about 6,000 and has offices in 14 countries).
We know Twitter exists, and a bunch of weird cultural flamefests occupy it, and it's possible if you have bad luck to be featured in one of them. But shop there for actionable insight? Never. As far as business goes, it's as relevant (i.e. not at all) as Saturday Night Live was to Exxon/Mobil's long-term strategy in the 1980s, or the Sunday funnies were to how FDR prosecuted the Second World War.
Of course, I would certainly think different if I were in the business of punditry, or news, or entertainment (if there's a difference), but I'm not, and most American business is not.
Twitter is horrible because the post-length limit is just long enough for tribal signaling, but not long enough for substance. It would be a very different place with a 500 character minimum and no quote-tweet function.
It's being plugged into a hivemind, and a hivemind that only wants the most shallow thoughts promulgated, and nodes in the hivemind are desperately afraid of being targeted for removal from the hivemind for wrongthink, and the best way to not get targeted for wrongthink (in the very short term) is to be the one doing the targeting.
The post length was doubled, but very few people use it.
Also, it's possible to do longer texts by linking tweets, but, again, this isn't done very commonly.
I don't know whether twitter could be somewhat defanged just be having a half hour wait between sending a post and having it become visible.
There is the possibility that the initial post length has shaped the type of site it has become i.e. if it had always been 280 characters or longer, maybe twitter discourse would have evolved differently. Not saying I have a strong positive position on this, but its worth considering.
I wasn't a big John McCain fan, but I always thought the most statesmanlike thing he did was play a sizable role in the early 1990s rapprochement between Washington and Hanoi. It was precisely because he had strong personal reasons for disliking his former captors who had beaten him frequently that made this impressive.
Anyway, McCain didn't get in trouble for using a racial epithet against his torturers because he was famous for having been tortured, and already in the early 1990s he had risen above his feelings in the national interest.
But do remember--those POW/MIA dolchstosselegend flags are still flying everywhere.
Do most people actually intend that they refer to the Vietnam POW conspiracy theory? My impression was that the people who used them mostly just wanted to show generic patriotism & respect for the military.
Generic patriotism is considered equivalent to nazism in this woke age. Anyone in favor of the irredeemably racist USA must be The Other.
Disagree. I'm a left of center Democrat who worked for the Federal Government for 20 years specifically out of a sense of patriotism. I'm a computer scientist; I would have made a lot more in the private sector.
Which side is "the aggressor side"? The people who tried to get Intelligent Design into schools, or the New Atheists? Harvey Weinstein or the people who brought suit against him? Derek Chauvin or the protestors in the streets?
Cuomo and Scott Stringer still had #MeToo s.
If Cuomo _really_ had a #MeToo he would be unemployed right now.
He's an elected official. He can only be fired by voters and isn't up for reelection until next year.
New York does not have a recall like California? Pity.
Hello from the future. This has not aged well. It turns out you can be forced to resign without a vote or a recall.
> "Cancel culture" does not refer to getting TV shows cancelled. It refers to weaponized culture war antagonism to destroy individuals
I think his point is that, while "cancel culture" is used to refer to all of these, TV shows being cancelled is most annoying to the typical not-very-politically-engaged person & so complaints about it are more influential.
The coup de grace for #MeToo believe-women feminism came after Tara Reade's rape accusation against Joe Biden in March 2020. It was ebbing down already, but at that point it's almost like something clicked in a few editorial rooms across the US and the movement lost its last source of clout.
Arguably, something else happened in March 2020, but that something took its time to percolate into the newsrooms...
(I do believe that cancel culture lost its sharpest tooth with the end of #MeToo. Cancellation in 2016 on allegations of sexual assault would make people shunned and break families apart, while cancellation in 2020 merely ruins careers and politically charged friendships.)
I think that's just more a case of "don't bite the hand that feeds you"
Exactly, but it kicked the system into the basin of another attractor. Right now there is no interest in pushing the topic back into the mainstream (probably because a critical mass of "stakeholders" have gotten their hands burned), and it's not considered avantgarde any more, so I don't think it will come back in foreseeable time.
I think the gradual leftward movement (Scott has written about this elsewhere as "Moloch always swims leftward") happens because, every time we get increases to productivity from new tech or management techniques, we spend it on raising the amount of compassion for others we can afford to have. This spending is mostly not directly observable spending of money, but the continual imposition of new overhead costs, and the elimination of negative incentives on people to act in socially-beneficial ways. The potential problem is that we can spend all our dividends on re-distributing the pie, and never on making the pie bigger.
Interesting. That certainly feels right to me, but it makes me to think leftism would correlate with wealth, when indeed the opposite is true.
The USA and western societies have in general become a lot more leftist over time with increasing wealth, e.g. modern America is certainly much further to the left than it was in the era of the Wild West.
I think this mostly explains trends like increasing gay rights and conservative acquiescence to it. Gay rights are possible because of the welfare state. It's not like society spontaneously woke up one day and decided for no reason that although for all of human history homosexuality was strongly taboo, today would be different. What changed was the welfare state become firmly established and displaced the family/children as the primary caregivers in old age. If you live in a small village and everyone needs to sprog 5 times to ensure 2-3 children who can build a house for you to live in when you're old, being gay is practically an old-age death sentence because you won't have children, AND a huge affront to your whole community who really NEEDS those extra hands in the fields on to man the ramparts, and can't afford a stagnant population level. Then throw in "gay culture" with its general objections to being conspicuously manly and what that means in a world filled with warring tribes and the reasons to create a taboo get even stronger. The suppression in turn causes enormous uncertainty about how many of these people exactly there are, making it circular - everyone is afraid that if the taboo falls it'll turn out that 25% of men are gay and suddenly everything falls apart.
But now if you live in a massive country of tens of millions of people surrounded by a countryside filled with robot tractors and warfare is fought online, and you have lots of research telling you that the gay population is stable and relatively small, and old people don't need children anymore because the state will put them in a care home, well, suddenly the need for the taboo is gone and over time it's natural that it'd fade away.
There is a dark side to all this, namely, is the welfare state actually long term sustainable. The taboo against homosexuality fell slowly partly because the welfare state is quite new and because every so often a story about state pension schemes being bankrupt somehow sneaks through the leftist media. We should expect near blanket media suppression about bankrupt welfare schemes given the socialist tendencies of journalists and general disinterest in fiscal conservatism amongst modern conservative parties, so it's very hard to understand how stable the current situation is. If anything bad happens to the welfare state, however hard it is to imagine now, gay rights will be the first thing that gets the chop.
I think the "left/right" distinction only makes sense at certain moments in history, so using it to think about long-term trends leads to confusion. Here's a different way to think about it, which I made up just now, so caveat emptor:
Instead of left/right, use the 2-dimensional phase space of identity / diversity on one dimension, and perceived safety on the other. With "identity / diversity" I'm contrasting people who believe in "perfection", and therefore that history is progressing (in the Hegelian sense) toward an endpoint at which all people will be identical (e.g., Platonists, Christians, Marxists, Nazis, Social Justice), versus people who believe that societies are complex mechanisms which operate more efficiently with many different types of parts, and so diversity (perhaps even of wealth) and division-of-labor are beneficial. We might equally well call this dimension "identity / liberty"; diversity and liberty aren't the same thing, but liberty maximizes diversity more than any centrally planned system can.
On the low end of "safety" we have societies threatened with extinction. These are usually communal and anti-individualistic, emphasizing social cooperation and stability over all else. (Today we call people who feel this way "conservatives", though that term actually means "people who take Chesterton's fence seriously", which is quite different.)
Increasing safety, technology, and wealth are all a kind of surplus. Societies on the "identity" end of identity/diversity invest that surplus in making the members of society more identical, eliminating imbalances of wealth and power. Ancient Sparta would be an example. Sparta was the original inspiration for an entire lineage of ideologies which believe in "perfection", and was a direct inspiration for many of those thinkers or ideologies, including Plato, Rousseau, and the Nazis. It got its wealth surplus in the form of the conquest and enslavement of its neighbors, and exploited those slaves to free every Spartan citizen from work, both in order to train as soldiers, to eliminate wealth disparities, and to go through a long, government-controlled educational process of indoctrination into Spartan ideology.
These "identity" cultures move thru these different focuses of ideology as their surplus increases:
Strict communitarian focus on survival =>
Making all people within their culture identical (early Christianity, French Revolution, Marxism, Nazism) =>
Making all people in the world identical (Roman Christianity, International Marxism, Social Justice)
Societies on the "diversity" end, like Athens, invest that surplus in increasing liberties. They move thru these different ideological focuses as wealth increases:
Strict communitarian focus on survival =>
Currency, commerce, trade, individual wealth (Venice, the late middle ages in Italy and the Netherlands) =>
Individual liberties (Athens, the Renaissance, American Revolution, libertarianism) =>
Basic research and other re-investment => (industrial revolution, science)
Do cool stuff (put a man on the Moon, the Culture)
er, those last 2 lines should say:
Basic research and other re-investment (industrial revolution, science) =>
Do cool stuff (put a man on the Moon, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, the Culture)
(But beware of using the Culture as an example. Remember it's fictional, and tries to combine both "identity" and "diversity" values, in a way I don't believe is possible.)
Interesting take. Not going to argue against it, but Social Justice being anti-diversity while (implied) anti-SJ would be pro-diversity was pretty funny feature arising from that setup. It seems to kinda make sense in your framework though and I think I have a sense of what you are pointing at. That idea of striving for perfection seems to capture it for me.
To rephrase my confusion: I thought it strange, that when society gains wealth through time, it translates into society also having and using more resources for empathy towards a wider range of people, but when an individual gains wealth, it seems to diminish their range of empathy.
I realize that there is a cynical (probably Marxist) way to view this: that "societal compassion" isn't really compassion at all – it is just capitalism widening the consumer base to reap more profits. So the confusion would arise from, well, confusing the two "emotions" to be the same and having similar effects, when in fact, society as an entity has no such, nor any other kind of, emotions.
"But the individuals of said society still do have such emotions!", I might object, "and to view their empathy as mere selfish profit seeking renders the all the concepts of empathy, compassion and unselfishness totally useless and meaningless".
I don’t know, and I’m getting sidetracked. What I’m still left wondering is, inspired by your concept of striving towards perfection, that if society is becoming more homogeneous by some meaningful metric, taken with the tendency to create schism via the “Narcissism of small differences”, it would seem that when people are expelled from the in-group, people from the fringes of society are assimilated in to accommodate that space. I’m visualizing flows that resemble what’s going on in magnetic fields.
But now it’s probably good time to get some sleep.
Er, what I should have said in my previous comment after "The potential problem" is that, every time we make the pie bigger, we use some of that extra pie to pay costs some individuals would otherwise have born which would have served as incentives, and the loss of those incentives shrinks the pie, or adds "bad stuff" to the pie. Or, we use that extra pie to pay the cost of implementing and obeying some new regulation which is supposed to prevent some harm, but which also introduces some harm, so we're spending our pie growth to produce net social harm. The pie of net total social goods - bads might still be growing, or might be shrinking. I think we can point to some clear cases where spending in order to reduce harm usually increases harm by that mechanism, such as medical insurance and medical regulation.
> I think New Atheism petered out because it basically won. Religion is much less influential today than it was 20 years ago.
I don't think New Atheism had too much effect on this. Surveys have shown that "atheist" and "no religion" affiliations have bee nsteadily declining for many decades, and New Atheism didn't really cause a blip at the time, but it obviously has some long-term effects contributing to the decline in all the books and everything that are now available.
"Surveys have shown that "atheist" and "no religion" affiliations have bee nsteadily declining for many decades"
Cite? Or did you misspeak?
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/godzooks/2020/05/religious-affiliation-decline-united-states-survey-atheism/
The decline in religious affiliation are similar across countries. It actually seems more plausible that the rise of New Atheism as a movement was a *result* of declining interest in religion and a growing interest in secularism, rather than the result, ie. we only heard about this movement because this existing trend created a market where once there was none.
Your original claim: "Surveys have shown that "atheist" and "no religion" affiliations have bee nsteadily declining for many decades" Did you write "atheist" for "religious"?
Ah, sorry, I meant steadily increasing, not declining. Or equivalently, yes, "religious affiliation has been declining".
It isn't that it faltered because it succeeded, it was that Christians had already had loss after loss after loss before the argument between them and New Atheists even started. It was less of a serious debate and more like a victory lap.
The weakest part of this fact-free speculation about "linguistic kill shots" is that "politically correct" has followed the same pattern as "woke." It started out being used unironically among the left, then became identified with intra-left snark, and then conservatives picked up on the snarky usage, which blew it up into the mainstream. Using "woke" as a pejorative is already starting to fall out of favor on the far-left now that conservative legislators and think tank flacks are using it to describe things like minimum wage hikes and free child care.
The first person I can recall using the term "politically correct" was rock star Joe Strummer in the early 1980s. He was laughing that The Clash's leftist fans were always complaining that The Clash wasn't "politically correct" enough, but he felt The Clash had done plenty for the left.
My impression from the Strummer interview was that "politically correct" meant in early 1980s Britain adherence to the Labour/Stalinist line of Arthur Scargill, head of the National Union of Mineworkers, rather than the more cultural angle it now implies.
Peter F. Drucker's historical account of political correctness is in line with your recollection of its Stalinist roots. https://books.google.com/books?id=81nUZ-eoYusC&pg=PA99&lpg=PA99&fbclid=IwAR3FwtweSIC-9ra5e_uSlw0R6QmCMfiIeQEmeZvGr7huxi2i_MxkxbQ5FeM#v=onepage&q&f=false
Thanks.
The Stalinist roots are undeniable. Actually, in the Soviet Union, as late as the late 1980's, the term was in use. I recall reading about a Soviet conservative figure praising an anti-Glasnost article in the Soviet press as "politically correct", meaning it was correct according the party line.
I am much less sure about the expression "politically correct" having been given wide currency in the 1980s and early 1990s' Western non-Marxist Left. Which leftist figure back then was praised as being politically correct (say, McGovern or Jesse Jackson) as opposed to Republicans or squarer leftists (say, Blue Dog Democrats)? Has anyone ever said Gary Hart was not politically correct enough?
Is there any evidence that "politically correct" was ever said as a complement by *anyone*, left, right, Soviet, or even Stalinist? I can't remember this usage from my childhood in the US in the 80s--90s.
I first remember hearing the word associated with my dad's (then) right-centrist politics around 1990. Then by the time _PCU_ came out in 1994, everyone was aware of the word, although my sense at the time was it was mostly a badge of group identification for the kind of conservatives who define themselves by being anti-whatever the Democrats are doing.
As I said, there is evidence for use in the late Soviet Union. Example: https://books.google.com.br/books?id=BXoxAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA205&dq=%22Nina+andreyeva%22+%22politically+correct%22&hl=pt-BR&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiUxMLhysTwAhXBrJUCHWLmCmcQ6AEwAHoECAAQAw#v=onepage&q=%22Nina%20andreyeva%22%20%22politically%20correct%22&f=false
Drucker recalled Stalinists and Nazis using it in the pre-WW II days, but he did not present quotes.
In the early 1990s, I remember conservatives complaining about leftiets' political correction. I do not recall leftists praising each other back in the for being "politically correct".
Ah, good point. I misunderstood your OP and assumed you meant the "Soviet conservative figure" was only damning with faint praise and not delivering a true compliment. Very American of me, I'm sure.
No, in my middle-class daily-local-paper-reading remembrance of the 80s/90s, (mainstream) leftists never used the term "politically correct" except occasionally to deride conservatives' worldview.
I don't think that someone using a term that is translated as "politically correct" is quite the same thing as the actual phrase "politically correct" being used (I assume that Soviet figure writing in the Soviet press would not be using English).
According to Google's Ngram, the term "politically correct" appeared occasionally in books in the 1930s, then was largely forgotten until the late 1980s, when it exploded in usage up until the mid-1990s. My impression is that its usage was spread by neoconservatives with personal or scholarly memory of 1930s Stalinism, but it was mostly applied by them to the rising postmodernist cultural left in the English Lit departments influenced by Derrida and Foucault rather than to the fading modernist economic left.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=politically+correct&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3
The early 1990s battles over political correctness were surprisingly literary in subject matter. My vague recollection is that the mandarins largely won the arguments at that time (in, say, the New York Times Magazine) because they had better taste in literature than did the French theorists. The big guns of the American novel back then, with the exception of Toni Morrison, were unenthusiastic about political correctness: Updike, Roth, Wolfe, McCarthy, Bellow, De Lillo, Pynchon etc. For example, Philip Roth's fine 2000 novel "The Human Stain" begins with an aged professor getting canceled for inadvertent political correctness that reads exactly like it was ripped from the headlines of a 2021 whoop-tee-doo (then the book goes off in an unexpected direction).
But far fewer people care as much these days about literary quality as they did back then.
I think the phrase 'political correctness' mostly got going from French communists attacking 'premature anti-fascists' who fought the Germans through the Hitler-Stalin pact. So it's always been a little gamy, a little ironic.
FWIW I remember "politically correct" being used in conversation among leftists in the late 80s/early 90s in precisely this way—first unironically, then more & more often ironically.
this is what I remember as well.
This film wasn't well received and doesn't seem well remembered, but was spoofing PC culture on college campuses back in 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCU_(film)
And, of course, there is Roger Ebert on PBS calling political correctness the "fascism of the 90s": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__L9DzZIkwI
PCU used to run on Comedy Central almost every day. Can you even imagine that now! Jeremy Piven ftw
Earlier - "politically correct" was very common among my cohort in the mid 70's, said cohort being radical activists and hippies. It was so common it was usually abbreviated to just "PC". We had sufficient rad cred we could counter-signal by making fun of its silly excesses - my favorite joke was to refer to San Francisco's Fisherperson's Wharf.
I think "cancel culture" even moreso. Even the "left not liberal" types don't use that anymore because it's associated with Ted Cruz and the sort. "Woke" I think still has some legs. I do see cool irony bros using it. (i.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvVhCCWPgaI)
What do conservatives mean when they complain about someone or some institution being woke? I haven’t been able to nail it down.
Some object to the idea that any but a tiny minority are racist. I note Tim Scott being pulled over 7 times in six years, being detained for impersonating a US Senator, etc. and they agree that happens. So it’s more than a tiny minority? No and they get all huffy. I don’t really understand where they are coming from.
You identified something important: aesthetic. But what you fail to realise is that it's your fault for giving so much weight to aesthetics. Right wingers (yes, even center-right) are obsessed with 'anti-aesthetics', they hate elites who care too much about their appearance, they hate puritans who care about crafting ideal images of their personality. I'm not going to speculate why this might be, lest I get a 'not all conservatives!' from you, but it's quite clear the right hates aesthetics in a disproportionate amount. Maybe they are the 'have nots' when it comes to looking good?
I would, and I'm "elite" (as far as income/education goes) and live on the west coast of the US. I am always impressed by someone who takes first-class care of his machinery. It bespeaks a pride in one's work that further suggests reliability, trustworthiness, and self-discipline -- very valuable character traits. In my experience people who treat their tools with disrespect also treat their friends and colleagues that way, too.
"Aesthetics" or "theatrics"? I'd like to make that distinction as it's not that difficult to adopt an archetypal persona simply to attract attention and thus votes. Groups with different preferences will take different sorts of appearances as insincere, likely due to projection. The problem with that is, of course, that it's easiest to make a political career if you have no personal convictions, disregard any premise of personal authenticity and become willing to just follow the social desirability bias wherever that leads you.
Yeah, at least Marxists were tautologically right in the sense that owning the means of production gives you power that can, and often has, been used for oppression. But the above kind of essentialism is dangerous because of its closeness to racism, sexism and others forms of prejudice.
Are you for what criteria someone could use to conclude that an institution is woke?
Generalize the question. Under what conditions would we describe an institution as a Christian institution (school, business, club), an Islamist institution, a communist institution?
If it mandates its members be informed of its tenants, and those tenants are put forward as being not merely a set of tenants but the correct set of tenants (so excludes a course on comparative religions). It disciplines or expels members of the institution who compromise the integrity of those tenants with acts or statements of disbelief.
For the sake of clarity: "tenets".
Bah! I feel dumb now. Thanks.
Hardly! Rejoice, for you are slightly less ignorant than you were an hour ago. :-)
Oh don't feel any more dumb than the usual run of people; everybody does it!
Irrelevant to this conversation but I wish I was YeBaiYi too.
I love Grumpy Grandpa. He is very relatable to me: come down out of your solitude, everyone is an idiot panicking over stupid crap, just let me have my extensive selection of delicious dishes in peace, why are you two idiot lovebirds canoodling under my nose instead of teaching your idiot baby disciple? I do love the scenes where he shows up, goes "You're an idiot, and you're an idiot, and *you're* an *especially big* idiot" and then kicks their asses for them 😀
Oh, I’d love to be able to edit my own typos!
We need the people here to hurry up and start working for Substack via their advertised vacancies in order to implement our secret agenda of taking over the world - that is, of making commenting much more user-friendly and including features like editing, formatting, adding images, adding links and so forth.
Meh, nowadays I think tenants works. In fact tenets get in the way when people point out the hypocrisies, the tenants are always from the same pool and will never change.
I think they mean the institution has put "social justice" above its original purpose as an institution. A prime example would be Gillette running a cringeworthy feminist ad that alienated a lot of their customers.
If you believe Gillette was acting against its original purpose in creating that add, I have a bridge to sell you. Companies go woke in pursuit of not in spite of their original purpose, making profits.
Can you come up with any plausible cost-benefit analysis for that ad?
I think they mean that an institution is not advocating wokeness because it's correct, but only because it's popular, i.e. they have zero scruples and would gladly burn the intellectual commons to see a few more likes or retweets or a quarter point stock increase or whatever the hell such people care about these days. I think most conservatives would acknowledge, at least in private, that women/minorities/etc have legit gripes with the system.
"I think most conservatives would acknowledge, at least in private, that women/minorities/etc have legit gripes with the system."
There was a time when there were legit gripes. Most conservatives, at least in private, would acknowledge that. There are no legit gripes now. As a matter of fact, the pendulum has swung quite a far bit the opposite direction, and you can see the proof of abominable and overwhelming statistical data in the behavior of black americans to asian americans. And that is but one example.
There is behavioral rot among women/minorities/etc that has set in now, such that these cultural behaviors are victimizing, not hallmarks of vicitimization.
“ There are no legit gripes now.”
None, none at all....
"There are no legit gripes now."
It is obviously not true that most conservatives believe this, the median reTHUGlican thinks there is between "a lot" and "a moderate amount" of discrimination against blacks.
I’m not sure about that. If you point out Tim Scott’s experience they are will agree that Til Scott has been the victim of discriminatory behavior by the police. And they will agree when presented with any other individual case. But when taken in total all those individual cases can never mean there is a systemic problem.
Its also possible that Sen Scott is a particularly bad driver, which is statistically true of Black men in general. DWB isn't so much a real "discrimination" phenomena, as a "yes they are speeding more than other drivers" phenomena. See, e.g. the New Jersey turnpike study.
He claims that he, in the vast majority of cases, was not speeding. So your post simply comes down to disputing the factual assertions. You might as well say "It's also possible he's making the whole thing out of whole cloth, and he wasn't even stopped to begin with".
Anecdotes don't make anecdata, no. What you'd need to look at would be things like "how often does a member of this minority shoot at police" vs "how often are they shot by police"; "how often are they pulled over" vs "how overrepresented are they in actual criminality"; "how often and easily are they hired or accepted into university" vs "how well do they perform relative to other groups on a variety of metrics before/after being hired/accepted", etc.
Statistics, in other words; and not in isolation, but in relevant contexts.
Everyone of your examples lacks relevant context.
Each statistic can be used in versus method to create a different picture.
“Frequency of hiring” vs “representation in crime” for example. All of the issues you’ve alluded to have a plethora more factors. E.g., “amount invested in education” or “number of parents in household”.
I believe that such conduct as using the term "reTHUGlican" should garner social reproach. This is not kind, necessary, or communicating an objective truth.
It's funny though, which is the secret fourth option
I think part of where the disagreement comes in is that the woke seem to view any disparities at all in outcomes as prima facie evidence of systemic racism/sexism/generic-isms and that any institution that produces these disparate outcomes is thus illegitimate and fair game for being torn down or radically altered to produce equal outcomes. The problems with this stance should be obvious.
I think everyone should agree that disparities of any sort are prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination.
The problem is the next step, in saying that prima facie evidence counts as ultima facie evidence that automatically justified tearing down or radically altering systems. Everyone *should* agree that once you have prima facie evidence of a problem, you should investigate further, and if you discover enough corroborating evidence of the problem, you should act to fix it.
But that idea doesn't appeal either to conservatives that want to preserve every structure, regardless of the evidence, or to radicals that want to transform everything as soon as they see even one piece of evidence.
There's definitely some of that on the right. I would say that on the left, though, there are a similar number of people who feel there is no need to investigate further or corroborate anything, instead jumping to the rather absurd conclusion that if there is any disparity at all in demographic outcomes, it must be attributable to animus, bigotry, oppression, etc.
There are also people on the left who believe that racism is a disparity of racial outcomes (ie that is what they define racism to be) and that this needs correcting in and of itself, regardless of whether it is caused by animus, bigotry, oppression, etc.
For some, that is the primary meaning of racism. This is why they get blank when someone starts talking about the causes to disprove that they are racist - the cause is relevant when you want to resolve the differential outcome, but the differential outcome is racist because that's what racism means - it means differential outcomes.
I’m not convinced that disparities of any sort are prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination. Disparities could be the result of Poisson clumping after random distribution. Or they could be the result of just chaotic social forces. Do you want to say that the fact that 75% of NBA players are Black is prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination?
Yes. "Prima facie" just means "on first glance". It's the sort of thing that warrants a look, but is nowhere near definitive proof. It absolutely *could* be something else.
People routinely mistake the meaning of "random." They think it means "uniform" when a far better definition would be "has fluctuations on every length scale." Uniform is a very *nonrandom* outcome, and almost always means some constraint is at work.
Exempli gratia, if *every* lion herd ever observed had exactly 7 males for every female, we would rightly suspect some constraint on lion behavior, genetic or environmental, that produced that strangely uniform result. If I flipped a coin 1000 times and it came up H T H T H T.... et cetera, I would immediately know it was not a "fair" coin.
Likewise, if in every human occupation the ratio of races or sexes (or any other random feature) were *exactly* the same as that ratio among all humans, it would be pretty strong evidence for powerful constraints on human behavior -- it would be highly nonrandom.
Any time you divide people into groups the groups will tend to be somewhat different along every conceivable axis. We should routinely expect to see disparities of some sort everywhere we look merely due to different groups having different skills, cultural attributes, physical attributes and interests.
In fact if we *didn't* find disparities of any sort then *that* is what should constitute "prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination".
I suspect there's something more specific and quantitative we can say here, about what effect size we should expect to see, with values quite a bit larger or smaller than that being prima facie evidence of something systemic.
Is the prevalence of blacks in football and basketball prima facie evidence of systemic racism against whites?
You can't make an argument that they are oppressed with all the multimillion-dollar salaries.
What's good for the goose should be good for the gander.
Should we start investigating further?
It is prima facie evidence. I believe there has been plenty of investigation. I believe that they've found the situation is complicated, and depends a lot on the particular role on the team.
Football is a crippling sport, which makes having a chance to play it a little more complicated.
I may have lost track of the terminology, but I think prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination is the obvious and explicit systems of discrimination, e.g. Jim Crow laws. And they have to be obvious, because if they aren't then too many people won't remember who they are supposed to discriminate against.
Absent such, disparities of outcome between different cultures should be treated as prima facie evidence of cultures optimized for achieving different outcomes. Then, as you say, you start looking for something more conclusive.
"I think everyone should agree that disparities of any sort are prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination."
This attitude assumes that no group has any intrinsic differences. It also adds the term "systemic" for no reason. And finally, even if you establish that there was discrimination somewhere in the chain of causality, that doesn't establish that the institution currently under consideration engages in discrimination. If the black people are underrepresented at a college, that doesn't point to the college being racist, that points to racism affecting pre-college education.
I don't think we actually disagree.
I say that it is a defeasible null hypothesis that intrinsic differences among groups would amount to small effects, rather than large effects, so that if we see a large effect, that is prima facie evidence (but not in any way conclusive evidence) that something more than just intrinsic differences are at work.
When I say "systemic discrimination", I think I mean the same thing as what you're saying - we don't know if any particular individual at any point in the chain has discriminatory attitudes, or if the effect is the result of interactions among multiple parts of the system. We don't know if it's the employer or the university or social attitudes or neighborhood funding of schools or historic wealth gaps or something else.
The point is that we don't need to accuse any individual of harboring evil attitudes - discrimination can be the result of the system, and that means we may be able to address it at the systemic level without having to call anyone a bad person.
It's not so much about the idea of individual racism, most people accept that individuals can be racist. I think the animus is towards the idea of "systemic racism", the idea that we're all complicit in racism for historical reasons. Accepting systemic racism means its not enough to be "not-racist", you have to be actively anti-racist or you're perpetuating racial inequity, and actively opposing all existing social structures definitely sounds demanding and difficult.
I’m not sure about that.
In theory we all agree that the government should treat all citizens equally. But when the police focus on young black men at the expense of tiny elderly Asian ladies some say that only makes sense. Of course the police should focus on those who are more likely to commit crimes. Of course the TSA should focus more on 22 year old Pakistani guys and less on frail 85 year old widows.
Ok. But then how would you feel as a 22 black accountant or sitting US Senator being stopped at rates vastly higher than you white co-workers?
Honestly not sure how I'd feel if I were black, but my current politics would attribute that kind of treatment to a combination of individual bigotry and stereotypes about what low-income people look like. You could definitely describe that as systemic racism and I probably would describe it as such, my point was that the "woke" understanding of race is very inconvenient to accept.
I was mostly trying to explain why people might object to the woke framing of this as "systemic racism". It's not that I don't think it's not true, but John McWorter describes my own views on the limitations of attributing complex social problems to "systemic racism" pretty well - the solution isn't just "less racism".
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/can-we-please-ditch-the-term-systemic
How often would Tim Scott & co have to be pulled over by different people at different times before you’d agree that there was something systemic going on?
Significantly more than average?
Based on that, I agree that systemic racism exists, in this case and many others. My point was just that that doesn't actually solve anything or help anyone.
Acknowledging a problem doesn't solve it. And we should be distrustful of anyone who claims that they know how to solve a problem as difficult as systemic racism. I don't see why any of that means we should stop talking about and thinking about systemic racism.
You can’t fix a problem unless you admit it’s a problem.
Ideally, we'd be working off high-quality statistical data rather than anecdotes about individuals, but I admit we don't always have the luxury.
If we *are* gonna judge by Tim Scott, the manner in which he was selected matters quite a lot. I'd be very surprised if my sister won a million dollars in the lottery- that's really rare! I would *not* be surprised if *someone* one a billion dollars in the lottery- there are a *lot* of "someones."
Also...
I've heard Tim Scott's name a couple of times. As politicians go, I have no strong feelings about him, but that antecedent is doing *a lot* of work.
My prior here is that various kinds of dishonesty are absolutely crucial to making it as a high-level national politician, at least in the US. I used to say that a politician saying something was evidence that they wanted you to believe it, but immaterial to the question of whether it was true. I stopped saying it when I realized how much of politics-speak consists not only of lies, but lies which are not intended by the speaker to be believed. High-simulacra statements which are intended less as truth-claims than as moves in a rhetorical game.
So, when I google "Tim Scott pulled over," google seems to give me articles reporting that [politician] is making claims. When I google "Tim Scott pulled over evidence," I get what looks to be more of the same. It's totally possible google is failing me, but I don't *currently* see any reason to think Scott's claim is true.
I want to be clear that my logic here *isn't* "Scott's claim is implausible, so probably he's lying." It's "Scott is a [high-level, USian] politician, so almost certainly a habitual liar, and so we shouldn't update on his claims without an *explicit theory* for why they're valid evidence which *does not* rely on [politician] being truth-tracking generally."
(I feel some social obligation to nod at the possibility that Scott is an exception to the rule, but it's mostly formality at this point. I don't think you *could* make it that far in politics if you were honest, and I *doubly* don't think you could without making waves I'd hear about.)
There is no "how often." You can't prove something is *systemic* by noting what is happening to an *individual*. The two are opposites.