Tanista
10hr ago
But the morality they adopted wasn't egalitarian therapy culture with the State as mother, it was woke culture with the State as HR lady. By 2020, centre-left politicians thought they were in politics to raise the relative social status of historically oppressed groups at the expense of white males.
- Both of these are forms of nurturing. Who hasn't been told "you have to take your brother as well"? Who hasn't seen someone torn into by a teacher for being cruel or insufficiently kind towards that kid in class with some issue? Who hasn't seen attempts by the nurturing elements in school to try to raise the self-esteem or status of some of the unfortunates?
- Progressives attempted a synthesis of both of these positions in 2020 under Biden: strong identity politics to show support to minorities combined with infrastructure spending in an attempt to recreate some sort of FDR coalition of working class people who stick with the party because of how it serves their material interests. For various reasons it seems to have failed.
It might be a question of methods. I think to most Democrats being a good person for selfless and societal reasons was part of the messaging, but were they "gentle and firm"? Seems to me that the mainstream left decided that shame and blame was more effective. They were, of course, almost completely wrong on medium- and long-term time horizons, though not the short-term one.
Shame and blame are unavoidable because progressives, like all of us, always have to reckon with the fact that some people just point blank don't agree with them sometimes. Progressives did create a powerful media machine. Maybe not the sort of grassroots one here but there was control of a significant amount of the media space directly. They did basically try to spend the credibility of all sorts of industries and institutions to push their messages.
What happens when that doesn't seem to convince conservatives? Well, once you have a media machine the temptation to shame and censor is nearly irresistible, because of the very mindset in this post: problems are a result of conservatives imposing the wrong linguistic frame so why not just...stop them imposing any frame whatsoever?
Lakoff seems to avoid the manichean view of modern progressives but he shares the same impulses: political differences are based on messaging or the wrong sort of education as opposed to deep disagreement on values or even a pragmatic judgment that progressive policies are not in one's interests.
Yet I wonder. DO we in fact have a shifted attitude toward some of these issues? Health care yes! Conservatives were very resistant to "health care is a human right" but I think that attitude is everywhere now.
Another theory is that conservatives have given up on fighting healthcare for the same reason that fiscal conservatives across the West are unable to cut the budget or stop many deeply unwise policies (e.g. the triple lock in the UK): once the government starts giving people things it's very, very hard to stop it.
It sounds like you do. In your view, was the right-wing reaction then comparable to the left-wing reaction we saw with Kirk, in terms of scale or significance or whatever axes seemed relevant to you?
It's similar to the segment of left-wingers claiming that they wouldn't kill Kirk but his dead is an outcome of his policies and behavior and/or that a lack of respect are the norms he himself lived by when others were in trouble (e.g. wrt Nancy Pelosi's husband). As I said the line is usually "he agreed with this, not me"
Doesn't work for anyone who outright says he should be killed for opposing the Civil Rights Act but most have more deniability.
In terms of scale of course it isn't similar. But then, it's hard to think of a similarly prominent media figure on the Left being killed or even coming as close as Trump. Kirk is basically as high as it goes for RW influencers. Given the use of Karmelo Anthony (that news is significantly more avoidable than Kirk or Luigi I think) I figured scale wasn't the sina qua non
By what standard of the ancient world are we judging him according to this?
His own? He manifestly failed at his self-appointed task of reform and was criticized even within his time for his behavior. Which, even then, was necessarily norm-breaking for a republican.
@Sunshine's point is damning actually: proscription worked for Augustus because he wanted to permanently destroy the constitutional order. Sulla was trying to fix a republic and picked the tools of a tyrant and expected it to work out.
Presumably a leftist similar in some way to Charlie Kirk has been killed at some point in the last ten years. Can you point to an example of "a lot of rightwingers" who were "gleefully dancing on the grave"?
How a Young Activist’s Murder Has Been Gleefully Distorted Online
It took only a few hours for the death of Ryan Carson, stabbed before dawn in a random assault as he waited for a bus in Brooklyn, to become an indictment of his politics so vitriolic that it threatened to overwhelm the grief. In the view of his online adversaries, Mr. Carson, a 31-year-old progressive activist, died at the hands of his own misbegotten ideology — “brainwashed” into believing he could help the poor and wayward.
The morally vacant critics on what we used to know as Twitter were not alone in attacking him and the girlfriend who witnessed his murder. Writing in The American Conservative and attempting to claim a place on the frontiers of decency, Declan Leary offered that he would not “celebrate” Mr. Carson’s death, as others were doing. Still, he expressed the belief that Mr. Carson carried partial “blame” not just for what happened to him but also for the death of “countless others killed by the chaos he defended.”
To this day right wingers on Twitter still bring up the image of him trying to run and tripping on the bench right before he was stabbed as a sort of Always Sunny meme. A lot of them took a similar line that leftists took with Kirk - "I don't agree with this but he did".
Anthony Karmelo's murder of a fellow student at a track meet
It seemed like the Left as a whole just avoided this like the plague. It seemed to be a specifically black tribal thing.
Tanista
1d ago
If Ezra Klein snaps somebody would find some one occasion where he said a less than maximally progressive thing
I mean, you can find people right now claiming that Klein is a "neoliberal" or some other sneer word instead of a leftist. The entire debate over Abundance seems tinged with this.
Sulla’s proscriptions were actually successful, and he didn’t have to be overly concerned with ordinary people
Sulla wasn't successful at anything other than enriching his cronies and buying enough breathing room to not have to face revenge for his actions.
His reforms were soon rolled back and the power of the tribunes returned. Apparently, despite the lack of telecommunications, the Roman people understood what it meant to hobble that office and wanted it so badly that even his own former cronies played along to their advantage.
It's actually a story with the opposite moral: he was right about being wronged, right about the problem and put in a situation where taking the high road would mean he personally lost but his own escalation destroyed any chance for his solution to work, no matter how much everyone could see something had to give. Even if you can pull off the coup de grace, it won't necessarily end the way you hope. Taking the L may be the best move.
And there’s where the core of liberalism lost the plot in thinking “groups don’t have rights, only individuals do.”
This isn't even true, which is even worse. In places like Canada (also just attempted in the UK) people in the right groups get differing sentences because of their alleged group-specific troubles
But I think the algorithmic Web 2.0 sites that have swallowed the internet have turned everything into a supposedly life and death struggle. It can't just be that a group of people whose interests you care about will have lives that are about 90% as good as they might have in a counterfactual world where your political tribe got everything they wanted, you need to catastrophize about that missing 10% of well-being, and make up outrages and scandals to justify hating the opposing side.
It's zero sum because people understand that it's at least theoretically possible to get all you want by appealing to rights without convincing the other side. So there's less incentive to be sensible.
The activists like Chase Strangio have done far more damage than any online crazy like Gretchen Felker-Martin. You can ignore crazies.
Tanista
4d ago
What gets me about it is that all of this, this entire culture war, just seems like such an utterly trivial thing to escalate into a shooting war.
I disagree actually. All of those examples are just proof that we can't suspend judgment on values. They all matter a lot. To what you can say, do, to the very composition of the republic (what could be more important?).
The only question is whether the groups debating it come to some sort of compromise, one crushes the other or both sides are given enough space to live their lives in a manner congruent with their values and away from the tribe with inimical values.
Part of the problem with many of these values issues is that the last of these has been removed from the game (the internet doesn't help here) and values are often zero sum (even within the left-wing coalition some of the tension between rights claims don't seem resolvable in a way that satisfies both sides)
It didn't feel like this to me a decade ago, back then these people felt marginal and broadly mocked.
Part of the problem is precisely that they were mocked. Whether they were prophets or actively brought about their worst fears, I think there's a backlash effect where people feel that attempts to keep things within some reasonable window were actively used against them by defectors on the other side. Once you get burned on "no one is saying/doing X" you become less charitable.
Tanista
5d ago
I feel like this should be my handle at this point but: It's Just Twitter.
Remember learn to code? No? Why would you?
What sounds like innocuous career advice is, in many cases, part of targeted harassment. The phrase “learn to code” was added to Know Your Meme four days ago, where it’s described as “an expression used to mock journalists who were laid off from their jobs, encouraging them to learn software development as an alternate career path.” Part of the Know Your Meme entry explains that those posting the phrase “believe those news organizations have been shitting on blue-collar workers for years.” Additionally, writer Talia Lavin posted screenshots from 4chan that suggest the “learn to code” tweets were a targeted attack by the notorious online message board. “Learn to code” is more than internet schadenfreude. It’s also the most recent rallying cry of an anti-media faction.
There was word Twitter was taking down “learn to code” tweets because they fall under the umbrella of abusive content, but a Twitter spokesperson clarified its position in an email: “It’s more nuanced than what was initially reported. Twitter is responding to a targeted harassment campaign against specific individuals—a policy that’s long been against the Twitter Rules.” Twitter also directed me to its policy on targeted harassment, which prohibits “behavior that encourages others to harass or target specific individuals or groups with abusive behavior.” I also asked Twitter whether it was able to identify coordinated efforts directed at the mass of recently laid-off writers, or whether it could tell where those efforts were coming from, but the company did not respond as of publishing.
They broke any attempt to coordinate what is basically a mean-spirited joke (assuming it was coordinated in the first place - if it's anything like reddit and "brigading" there's a lot of crying wolf). No way would they allow this sort of thing. Elon not only allows it, he signal-boosts it.
YMMV on which is better.
She was in a school shirt which I would say is a big no no
Funny, I was just completing a mandatory training at work about the social media policy.
Reading it now (they actively make it so you can pass without ever reading these things which is really counterproductive), it explicitly says: all communication, "regardless of whether they are posting on personal devices or accounts", is subject. It goes even further "even private posts can violate the policy if they are seen by others".
Like...maybe the rules in Canada are different for legal reasons. But even a message in a totally private chat gives them license to fire you and I don't think my workplace is particularly strange here for a large entity. Which is understandable, given that nobody cares at all come outrage time if it was on a Discord with three people.
If you are wearing a work shirt I don't even know why there'd be a debate. You're (rightly) fucked. What moral principle can spare you? Would it be acceptable to wear a Coca-Cola shirt as an employee and then start dropping slurs?
The issue is that the premises they're working from are highly-exaggerated, making it quite unlikely that there actually will be a Reichstag Fire Decree (or Nuremberg Laws, etc.).
The steelman is not that they're worried about Hitler, it's that they're worried about another Willie Horton situation. Which, from the left-wing view, was a opportunistic racial attack that not only cost Democrats the election but actively led to destructive tough-on-crime policies instead of left-wing policies that would have helped remove the causes of crime.
To many African-American people, the scars from that campaign attack remain fresh. Whatever Mr. Bush’s intentions, they said, the campaign encouraged more race-based politics and put Democrats on the defensive, forcing them to prove themselves on crime at the expense of a generation of African-American men and women who were locked up under tougher sentencing laws championed by President Bill Clinton, among others.
The logic is not really that different from not wanting to cover terrorists or shooters on the grounds that it inflames the public and makes them want cures worse than the disease.
We don't really need to bring in the Nazis. There's a perfectly American fear here.
Tanista
8d ago
what archaeological evidence would you expect the Exodus to leave behind?
Which Exodus? Hundreds of thousands of people into Canaan? Or maybe just the Levites? Just between those two positions you have an incredible difference in how likely you'd be to find evidence.
Tanista
8d ago
"And by the way I’m not here to say you’re racist, I don’t think you are. We have not called you one." Of course, after that he went on to explain all the racially damaging things he thought Sam had done. To Ezra, I guess Sam was (is) effectively a racist, not an intentional racist. That was really the progressive argument in a nutshell for about 10 years.
Smearing someone as a useful idiot for racists at best then psychoanalyzing them for not taking it well...if we're talking about gall, that's up there.
This is one of the reasons I find it hard to be sympathetic now that the worm has turned and people are angry at having to share Twitter with people they think are too interested in the topic. People were absolutely brazen about being bad faith.
Tanista
9d ago
Britain is sending cops at God knows how many people for their tweets but we're supposed to draw the twin conclusions that:
- The state is just neutrally defending "liberty"
- The current status quo is unassailable.
Tanista
9d ago
In addition though, I simply think that modern liberty is good. I'm a sort of reluctant conservative I'll admit, but even in the traditional conservative picture of the world, I think that personal freedoms from the state and even to a certain extent within traditional communities are great. To me, the project of the conservative in the modern world is not to sort of force us via governmental apparatus back into some halycon pre-modernity days. Instead, the conservative impulse should be focused towards explaining and convincing people in a deep and genuine way that living in a more traditional way is better for society, and better for people in particular.
This whole thing is based on assumptions I don't think retvrners share.
Not least that liberalism is a debate of values managed by a neutral-ish state (as opposed to an imperialistic one that takes sides and actively destroys social arrangements it doesn't agree with). That there is such a a thing as unproblematic or fixed visions of "modern liberty" (the current version must be unrecognizable to many past liberals) and so on.
If you don't agree with those assumptions all of this is at best naive and at worst a cover.
There's no fair debate when one side has the swords.
When asked, neither party usually says that's the reason
The Canadian government will just state that business lobbying drove the approvals for temporary foreign workers, and Carney is being admirably clear that it is reason the program cannot simply be stopped despite the widespread belief it was abused after COVID
“When I talk to businesses around the country their No. 1 issue is tariffs, and their No. 2 issue is access to temporary foreign workers,” Carney told reporters.
The debate didn't really get moralized like down south, presumably because the PM had all the tools he needed to achieve his ends without dipping into asylum seekers, who seem especially aggravating.
However, a lot of the democratic party has reversed the causality on the nature of the government programs they want to keep open. Those programs are not preserved if the government shuts down; rather, a government shut down obligates those programs being closed
I think the other way to read this that isn't confused is that Democrats think Trump being visibly responsible for closing down those programs will generate sufficient public backlash to preserve them or at least force Trump into paying a larger price than letting him walk to his goals slowly would extract.
Trump is not really super ideologically driven on most things and has shown himself willing to bend on things that are unpopular.
What Ezra did was the equivalent of walking onto a debate stage and try to lecture an astronomer that the Earth is flat. Maybe he’ll end up appeasing everyone in his political circle who’s got blinders onto the world. To everyone else, he looked like a moron; because he was one.
I wasn't making a moral defense of Klein, I think his behavior speaks for itself. But I think you're underselling just how many people have these same beliefs. Most people don't care and/or instinctively side with Klein (or know they should if they know what's good for them).
In this environment, this behavior can work or fill an important niche. Who is more likely to get a say in polite circles? Some Vox writer posting about an exciting study on some teaching intervention that showed IQ improvements or a more Murrayist take?
Ironically, his conclusions are also very much in line with policy works like Ezra in the first place. It goes to show Ezra has likely never read a word of anything Murray ever wrote.
I don't think you give Klein enough credit. He is a higher class of commentator than Seder. He reads. By his own account he has read and reviewed Murray, and at least knows Murray is for UBI:
The other thing you brought up his UBI work. The reason I bring this up is that, the reason Charles Murray’s work is problematic, is that he uses these arguments about IQ — and a lot of other arguments he makes about other things — to push these points into the public debate, where he is very, very, very influential. He’s not by any means a silenced actor in Washington. He gives Congressional testimony. He won the Bradley Prize in 2016 and got a $250,000 check for it. His book on UBI, it is completely of a piece with this. I reviewed that book when it came out. It’s an interesting book, people should read it, but it is a way of cutting social spending. According to Murray’s own numbers, he says it would cut social spending by a trillion dollars in 2020. To give you a sense of scale, Obamacare costs two trillion dollars over 10 years.
This is another book in a different way that is a huge argument for cutting social spending, which in part he justifies by saying, we are trying to redress racial inequality based on an idea that it is a product of American history, when in fact it is some combination of innate and environmental, but at any rate, it is not something we’re going to be able to change, and so we should stop trying, or at least stop trying in the way we have been.
Because Klein is cleverer than Seder he can see that Murray is offering a poisoned chalice. Vox is about enhancing the arguments of left-wingers so they can advance their agenda. Focusing on the short-term gain of having Republicans agree with you on one program when it undercuts the central pillars of that agenda would be deeply unwise. Social constructionism is far more useful to Klein than Murray's tactical (in his mind) retreat. Setting up a test that could obviate the need for any left-wing policy by attacking the basic assumptions is also incredibly unwise.
Klein doesn't want to cut social spending. Klein doesn't believe that such spending cannot solve persistent problems or that the government should accept that it can at best ameliorate some human capital gaps. Why would he want to? The alternate thesis is what allows his side to accrue power and, hopefully, fix problems. What's Vox's reason for being if the answer is that there's no clever move to be made, let's just stop people starving?
Harris understandably had no patience for engaging in the discussion given how the conversation started, but Klein basically states that not moving towards a more socialist and redistributive position when citing these facts is itself suspect:
This is something you brought up earlier when you brought up that quote from Murray about luck, and I think it’s an important conversation. I think that if you follow Murrayism on this, if you were doing it without the political commitments he brings to it, it actually takes you to a very radical and interesting place.
If you say that our IQ is genetic and environmental, but at any rate, it’s not our fault, because we don’t choose either one of those, and there’s not much we can do about it. Not just our IQ, but something you’ve said is that, you know, a lot of traits come down like this — the big five personality traits, determination. Look, you can connect genetic inheritance to divorce. I think it’s a .2 or .4 correlation. So, if you begin to believe that, actually you begin to ask the question of, should, do we deserve what we have? Should society be vastly more redistributed than it actually is? Should we be much less within this construct that what we’re getting, we’re getting because of hard work and determination and intelligence and the application of our talents? In fact, we need to move to something that is, I’m not literally advocating this, but more in the range of full socialism.
What I think is so interesting about the way he takes this debate — and I recognize this is not somewhere you took the debate, but I do think this is a useful thing to talk about — is that if you really did believe things immutable, if you really did believe that this was our inheritance both environmental and genetic and we can’t do much about it, then I think the implications of that are radical, and the implications aren’t that you take away help from people. It’s that you say pretty much what all of us has is primarily illegitimate. We didn’t do anything to earn it. I just happened to be born with the collection of talents that got me where I am. And as such, what we should spread around in society is much more vast.
Funnily enough, I don’t ever see people take that attitude on this. Again, the history of these ideas in America is they tend to be used to justify the status quo, not radically more generous versions of the status quo, but I do think that’s interesting, and I don’t understand why people don’t take that leap. I think that the implication of this is, it’s luck, and if you want to believe that — and, again, I don’t believe they’re immutable, I don’t think that’s what the evidence shows — but if you do believe they’re luck, I don’t think it takes you where he went in your conversation.
Believing in HBD is itself bad, but using it to cut state spending...beyond the pale.
I don’t know what anyone has to consult Murray over.
Murray seems to be the Bart Ehrman of intelligence research. Attacked because he's prominent, but there is also an incentive to make it a lot more about him than may be necessary, since it gives a certain view a convenient avatar to attack and to thus marginalize amongst your audience by proxy.
Tanista
10d ago
I understand the backdrop people like him are coming from, but he is a ‘horrible’ advocate for the cause.
Is he? Refusing to engage with these claims is the cause. Giving them too much legitimacy would be the opposite of being a good advocate.
It's not an accident that the wonky side of the Left wing media system reacted much like the rest when this topic came up. The point of having wonks is so you can get some answer for how science can serve your values while drawing the line on what beliefs are worth taking seriously or investigating. So Vox will have Turkheimer on to both admit that IQ is correlated with X, Y and Z but also that anyone who suggests a gap with origins in genetics or one we can't easily change is suspect because of how far out ahead of their skis they are.
The point of Vox is that you don't need to consider Charles Murray because you already have the answers.
Tanista
10d ago
That podcast episode kicked off the downward spiral of /r/SamHarris
Before that, the sub had a functional moratorium on all IQ topics on grounds of non-relevance to Sam Harris' work. After that...well, that went out the window and nothing good followed.
It really did seem to outrage people that a) it came up and b) we let the discussion go (I was a mod at the time). And those people never left and never got over Harris having the sheer gall.
But this wasn't the first place this happened. There really is something odd going on with reddit where a lot of subs end up degenerating into snark subs critical of the central figure.
That debate and its aftermath had a significant impact on my perception of the social left. They weren't actually in favor of using objective truths to solve real world problems. They were only in favor of promoting specific moral "truths" while suppressing any evidence they deemed to be immoral.
It was especially a blow because of who Ezra Klein was supposed to be. Vox was supposed to be the smart, wonky wing of the Democrat's base. You're supposed to be able to get the counter-intuitive take or someone chasing the data to the end. But, on this issue, they took the Rutherfordian line of "just don't worry about it" (at best).
Colors the whole thing.
This is complicated by the fact that the younger child is also dead certain that they need this sort of nurturing and said child is sometimes clearly worse off . One might even grant that you're making the better off child slightly worse off and still believe the trade off is not only worth it but fair.
And there are, of course, observers and experts on both sides. There are plenty of others who will insist that the problem is that they haven't directed enough attention and effort to an underperforming child.
Imagine a mother steeped in a certain ideology, she reads only so many books a year but the ones on parenting involve figures with impressive degrees egging her on. She has some reason to continue.
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