07mk
11d ago
1a. HBD posits that certain traits critical to functioning on an individual and civilizational level are substantially heritable. Further, it posits that these traits are most common/developed in Whites/Asians.
1a isn't accurate. Sure, some versions of HBD posits stuff ab out civilizational level stuff. That's not what I mean by HBD, and I don't intend to defend that at all, as I don't find it scientific and, as such, entirely inappropriate in academia. The version I meant was studying associations between genetics, race, and intelligence (and other traits, obviously, but also obviously intelligence is the big one that causes most of the controversy). In any case, the point of studying HBD in academia would be to discover if that's true WITHOUT pre-emptively biasing oneself to either side (to the best of one's ability to remove one's biases, anyway). The point would be to actually do what academia is supposed to be doing.
I have issues with 1b as well, but that's moot given 1a.
Furthermore, the chain of logic in 2 is a fully general argument about anyone using logic and empirical evidence to support anything, which seems to be based on a misunderstanding of my statement. The full sentence from my earlier comment is this:
And, unlike the latter, the Hams of the world don't actively try to subvert the ability of other fields to do good scholarship by denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as tools of White Supremacy that must be discarded for us to get at the truth.
If you believe that the supposition being made here about "logic," "empirical evidence" and "White Supremacy" was that the former 2 are sometimes used as tools to justify the latter, then I apologize for not being clear in my sentence, though I admit I thought the meaning was fairly clear in context. I shall restate it as below, and I completely disavow entirely the notion that people never use logic and empirical evidence as tools in service of White Supremacy or Critical Race Theory or socialism or Nazism or egalitarianism or Creationism. I that's akin to what I stated, then I misstated and should have tried to clarify with you before defending my earlier statement:
And, unlike the latter, the Hams of the world don't actively try to subvert the ability of other fields to do good scholarship by denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as inventions of White Supremacy that must be discarded for us to get at the truth.
If Blacks and Whites are equal in their civilizational capacity, (insert the entire civil rights project here). If Blacks' civilizational capacity is substantially inferior to that of Whites, there is little reason to keep a large population of them in a White society; in fact, there is a strong incentive to kick them out of said society. Said Blacks would suffer greatly by being removed from the White society they inhabit, so they deny HBD and push their own counter-memes.
This kind of thinking seems to reflect a particular set of values that I don't think is anywhere near universal enough in modern Western society to make these logical jumps actually take place. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but I don't think that's been proven to any reasonable extent.
07mk
11d ago
Because we cooperate to gain value, and if our definitions of "value" is mutually incompatible, then when the cooperation is aimed at one of these spaces, it's at best burning value for nothing for the side whose values aren't being aimed for, and at worst burning value to lose value.
Having mutually incompatible values doesn't mean that we disagree about the value quality of literally every single thing. Multiple groups with mutually incompatible values can all gain value from a cease-fire. And also from abundance.
Bolded for the crucial bit. Power struggles cannot be so limited. People are always going to want more good things and fewer bad things. They are never going to want to perpetuate or multiply bad things at the expense of good things. Once the values get far enough apart, they are always going to recognize that if the bad things can be eliminated, the value that went to producing the bad things can instead produce more good things, and then try to make that happen.
Perhaps, but this just looks like a restatement of the supposition "tolerance can't work due to human nature." Perhaps tolerance really is like Communism in that way? It's not out of the question. But, indeed, people want more good things and fewer bad things - that's exactly why one would be motivated to tolerate others who have incompatible values with oneself and limit power struggles to mutually agreed-upon places; it's bad to live in a warzone or to expend resources and blood to crush one's enemies sufficiently to make it peaceful, and it's good to live peacefully. Depending on the specifics, which one's better than the other can change, since the blood lost in crushing one's enemies could be worth it and having to live around people whose values you disagree with could be sufficiently soul crushing to be not worth peace. I just don't think that's always the case, and I also don't think that's the case today in most of the West, or at least America. I do think we have many people actively trying to encourage others to suffer from observing the lack of suffering of [people they disagree with sufficiently], so I could see the argument that it will tip soon or has already tipped, though.
If this sort of spiral is to be prevented, you have to exert energy to maintain values-coherence, which involves policing the fringes and forcing them back to the center, which is not itself tolerant. Absent such enforced coherence, values drift apart, and the further apart they get the less value cooperation can deliver relative to defection or coordinated meanness.
I agree, at the edges, this obviously breaks down, so some shared set of values is needed. If a significant portion of the country considers things like "governance," "democracy," "peace," "stability," "survival," as having negative value, tolerating them becomes quite difficult in a democratic republic like the US. This is why the left's crusade against free speech or just generally tolerating honest discussions is so concerning. That said, I'd still insist on tolerating them, as long as they stay within the bounds of agreed upon mechanisms of power struggle. It's when they break that that it becomes justifiable to not tolerate them. But if they just want to write essays and films about how awesome it would be if we just committed civilizational murder-suicide, in an active effort to recruit more people to their cause, then, well, live and let die. Just don't let them kill.
07mk
11d ago
[modern academia] denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as tools of White Supremacy
If you believe the truth of HBD, this claim is objectively correct.
If you believe in logic, then no, that is not the case.
It is not in the short-term (or even medium-term) group interest of non-white groups to abandon the critical theory frame, even putting the matter of group dignity aside. If nonsense is the only thing keeping Liberia at bay, then nonsense shall be spread.
But it's not the only thing keeping Liberia at bay. In fact, it's doing the exact opposite.
07mk
11d ago
Define "tolerant".
In the context of free speech, it would be something like, "Impose no consequences on someone else on the basis of whatever opinions they might express" - e.g. in an alternate universe, if that person hadn't expressed that opinion, you would have treated that person indistinguishably to the real universe where they had.
I don't want to eliminate values I consider hostile to mine. I just don't want to live near them, as that is just going to result in lots of conflict. If "tolerance" means sharing power mechanisms and living space, my argument is quite simple:
The range of values humans can actually hold is wide enough that some points are mutually incompatible with other points.
Sharing power mechanisms and living space with the values-incompatible trades off directly with the things that make coordination/cooperation valuable.
1st bullet point seems obviously true to me. I'm not sure why that second bullet point would be the case. Why would it trade off directly with the things that make cooperation valuable? Cooperation can offer value in a lot of ways, but one is that when you're cooperating, one potential thing you're substituting is murdering each other (or imposing a pinprick's worth of pain, or anything in between). If we share living space and power mechanisms with people whose values are incompatible with ours, as long as the power struggles between groups with mutually incompatible values stay limited to the agreed upon power mechanisms, we're at least able to keep the living space a living space instead of a killing field, which seems valuable.
07mk
11d ago
It seems obvious to me that the thing producing this slide is a slide in core values between the tribes. As median tribal values diverge, as the gap between the median positions widens, the basis for mutual toleration disappears as well. We tolerate and cooperate with people because doing so is seen as an obvious net-positive.
The thing that gets me about this is that, as a leftist/progressive/blue tribe child deep in the blue tribe bubble in the 90s/00s, I was taught that tolerating people with whom we share no core values was an obvious net-positive, because it's only by tolerating such people that we learn the errors in our own values that we are inevitably and necessarily blind to.
Of course, I eventually figured out that the people who taught me this were simply liars who wanted to use this as a tool to force people with very different core values than ours to tolerate and even cooperate with us, without any desire to reciprocate. "When you are powerful, I ask for mercy, etc." and all that. Yet the argument remains just as valid as ever, and so I still insist on being tolerant of values that are are foreign to mine and especially tolerant of values that are hostile to mine.
It does seem like there's something in the human brain that makes crab-bucketing your own tribe to the top by crushing everyone else far more seductive than uplifting your own tribe to the top by improving itself, and I'm not sure if there's a way around that. The one thing I'd say is that I'm highly skeptical of enforcing tolerance through the oppression of an iron fist, because, as someone who wants tolerance, of course I'd believe that it's okay to achieve it by crushing people who disagree with me; I'm biased towards discounting their suffering and stretching logic to justify why they deserve to suffer, and as such, my judgment that "the cost of the suffering of those who were crushed is worth it for the gain in tolerance" isn't credible.
07mk
12d ago
As someone who doesn't regret his "obnoxious atheist" phase of his online life from about 15 years ago, it saddens me to say that I'd take that tradeoff in a heartbeat, because I can't honestly judge Ham's "scholarship" as any worse than the mountains of "scholarship" that is produced by modern academia. And, unlike the latter, the Hams of the world don't actively try to subvert the ability of other fields to do good scholarship by denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as tools of White Supremacy that must be discarded for us to get at the truth. So if we can reduce the latter at the cost of increasing the former, I'd see it as an absolute win.
But I don't think increasing the former would reduce the latter anyway, so I think the plan would be bad if implemented with Creationism. As someone else alluded to, if we could get good HBD research along with the nonsense critical theory "research," it would be a strict improvement, since it'd be helping to reduce the dilution of academia's truth discovery by the critical theory nonsense.
Broadly, the anti-free-speech perspective is that ‘having an advantage in the realm of ideas’ != ‘having an advantage in the realm of propagating ideas’.
Indeed, and the immediate obvious question this raises is, "Did this idea propagate to me because it has an advantage in the realm of ideas, or because it has an advantage in the realm of propagating ideas?" I could embrace hubris, declare that I'm the one who won't get zombified if bit, the one where when I complain that the umpire's strike zone is too big when my favorite baseball team is on offense, it's because the ump's zone really is too big, the one that can truly reliably judge this idea as "better," not merely "better at propagating itself." In which case, I suppose just shutting down all opposing opinions and enforcing it with an iron fist seems like a pretty attractive solution. Of course, there's the issue that the idea that this is a viable solution could have propagated to me because it's good at propagating itself, even if it isn't actually good. And if I'm wrong on that, then my attempts to crush my enemies could be disastrous. So I'm cynically motivated to open up this idea to criticism, so as to tear away its weaknesses, harden its strengths, and make it more capable of crushing my enemies when implemented.
But also, if I decide that it matters to me that the ideas that I propagate are actually ideas that are better, not merely ones that were better at convincing me, then I should open up these ideas to quite a lot of criticism, certainly at least within the ballpark of what I would judge as "too much," because the fact that I already believe these ideas means that I can't be relied on not to underestimate how much criticism is warranted.
07mk
12d ago
You discuss school and jobs, but I don't think any of that applies to entertainment media. Yes, it's usually good that we force children to go to school. It might even be good if we were to force adults to go to work, even ones that are independently wealthy or happy enough to subsist on welfare. But entertainment media? We currently have no way of forcing adults to watch certain pieces of media that we think would be good for them. Adults have pretty free choice - today more than ever - to seek out entertainment media as they wish, and though "high art" stuff are very very niche, they're still a significant niche.
This indicates that people actually seek this stuff out voluntarily. Where I see gen-AI being a boon for this is that we can have far higher throughput of art that is considered "good" by whatever "high art" standards are held by people with taste and discernment and [whatever characteristic that true connoisseurs have], and also for far more custom artworks that provide exactly the right amount of challenge to enrich someone's life without being so challenging as to make them shut down and reject it.
And building on that, there's also the fact that it's quite possible to train AI on media that makes people go, "I expected that to be really bad, but it barely piqued my interest enough to check it out, and I'm glad I did," versus ones that make people go, "I expected that to be really bad, and there was nothing about it that piqued my interest, so I decided not to check it out," versus ones that make people go, "I expected that to be really bad, but it barely piqued my interest enough to check it out, and I regret doing so," as well as many other combinations of similar concepts. And I don't see why some near-future gen-AI couldn't generate media that creates reactions similar to the first one while avoiding the latter ones fairly consistently.
07mk
12d ago
Correct. So those who are against free speech on the basis of conflict theory are openly admitting that they don't believe that they have an advantage in the realm of ideas. And people are absolutely allowed to believe, "My ideas are bad, but it should win over the good ideas anyway, and I will make it so through smashing the skulls of the proponents of the good ideas." But I don't think that's something they actually believe. I think they actually believe that their ideas are good, i.e. have an advantage in the realm of ideas. And I think their behavior indicates that they're deathly insecure about this belief and are deathly fearful of what might happen if someone checks.
07mk
12d ago
So if the fallacy of the left is to expect that any inequality of the racial distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness, the fallacy of the right is to believe that any inequality of the political distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness.
There's a distinct asymmetry here, though. In that there are loads of documented recent evidence of people in power explicitly and openly encouraging unfairness of the latter kind, while you have to go back quite a few decades before you encounter anywhere near the same density of such official documentation (well, at least in the direction that is being discussed, anyway; certainly there's no shortage of recent official documentation that explicitly calls for discriminating against members of white/Asian races in academia). Perhaps, more importantly, diversity of political orientation is material to an organization's ability to perform academic research (and more generally to discover truth) in a way that one's race isn't. As such, there's an argument in favor of AA in cases of political orientation that doesn't exist for race or other immutable-characteristic-based ones.
I still think this would cast MAGA as hypocrites and unprincipled, but mainly because (a) they're unprincipled hypocrites anyway for independent reasons and (b) the people who would judge MAGA as unprincipled based on this are motivated to be sloppy in their thinking in order to judge as such no matter what, anyway.
07mk
13d ago
"I'm not worried about bad CONSOOOM, because the future has so much better CONSOOOOM!" This is no future at all. @2rafa nailed it with the Wall-E references and @IGI-111 brought up a worthy pondering point from the Matrix. Purpose in life is not the pursuit - or even attainment! - of pure pleasure. Especially when that pure pleasure is actually a pretty paltry fake world.
This is a pretty common perspective, and one that I just can't fully grok. Pleasure is pretty great, but pleasure is evidently not the only thing people go for. People will pursue all sorts of things when it comes to the capabilities of AI-generated media, and that will include pleasure, but that will also include things like meaning, depth, insight, or whatever other fancy-sounding term people like to use when they describe the value they get out of things they consider high art (I chose those terms because they apply to me with respect to works of fiction I consider great in some "high art" sense, such as The Shawshank Redemption or Crime and Punishment).
And the great potential for gen-AI I see is its ability to create these things without having to have someone intelligent and eloquent and talented enough to think about it and put it together. Films of the quality of The Shawshank Redemption was only possible due to the hard work of many extremely talented individuals working together to express something meaningful.
And yet, the film is just a sequence of grids of pixels flashing 24 times a second in sync with audio, and there's no rule of the universe saying that AI couldn't have generated those pixels and those sound waves (more generically, the precise sequence of 1s and 0s contained in an 8K transfer or whatever onto digital media), and the film would be no less inspirational, no less insightful, no less meaningful if it had been created that way. Likewise if it had turned out that Dostoevsky was an avid juggler who wrote Crime and Punishment by labeling balls with letters, then adding a letter every time he dropped a ball during his practice sessions, this wouldn't change the meaning contained within the novel at all.
And I see no reason to believe that gen-AI won't be able to order pixels or letters in a way to create new works of fiction that also provide insights and meaning of similar depth, around other topics, merely by training on what sequences of letters or pixels cause people to respond with, "Wow, that's really meaningful and deep!" versus "Wow, that's such vapid slop!" and everything in between and around. Because I don't think there's anything magical happening in the mind when someone thinks of something, notices that their mind judges that thing as "meaningful, deep, inspiring, etc." and then writes it down with intent to convey that sense to others.
And so instead of meaningful, deep, [insert other positive word here] works of art being limited by how few talented/skilled artists there are and how little time they have to produce art due to needing all that sleep and food, it'd be limited by how fast and common AI software and hardware are. These limits seem to be far looser than human ones, and so I see great hope for a future world where novel works of art that provide real, true, deep meaning will be as commonly encountered as a toilet or a microwave oven is today. There's potential downsides from being overexposed to too many works of art with too much meaning and depth and insight into the human condition, like how the downsides of social media and negative effects of overexposure to other people's approval and disapproval were both underestimated. But that doesn't seem like an awful problem to have.
07mk
13d ago
the woke parasitism reduced the value of their output (by diluting it with nonsense)
Depends on what you mean by "value," doesn't it? If you consider the primary value of universities to be truth discovery/generation, then yes, woke parasitism reduced the value of the output to arguably negative (even the good stuff is no longer credible, because the ability to discriminate between the good stuff and the bad stuff has been corrupted). But if you consider the primary value of universities to be to validating your worldview and political ideology, then, depending on your ideology, it substantially increased the value. In fact, in that case, it took it from negative to positive, since truth discovery was an existential threat to your ideology.
07mk
13d ago
This is what I don't understand. If I'm a cynical conflict theorist who wants nothing more than to utterly crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentations of their women, then I have a great motivation to become as strong as possible. In order to become as strong as possible, I need to train myself against adversity - true adversity, not a strawman adversity that just sits there while I pepper it with punches and my buddies all slap me on the back for what a badass I'm being. For that, I need both challenges to my ideas and criticism of my arguments. True challenges, true criticism, the sort that is motivated by a genuine desire to crush me and my ideas and the sort that actually has a real chance of changing my mind (this, of course, requires me to keep an open mind - so as to better improve myself to better crush my enemies and erase them from history).
I don't see how one accomplishes this without free speech. Without critics feeling free to yell their most malicious criticisms towards me without a single fear of consequence, I can't trust that my ideas or I have been properly tested, and so I have less confidence in my ability to crush my enemies, and I'm more vulnerable to being crushed by my enemies instead. I don't want that. So I want free speech.
07mk
13d ago
Main thing about running LLMs locally is that GPU VRAM is probably the limiting factor in most cases. 3090/4090 with 24GB of VRAM or 5090 with 32GB are OK, but for hobbyists really into it, they've made custom GPUs like soldering 24GB more VRAM to a 3090, or using dual-3090 for 48GB of VRAM (spreading it out over multiple GPUs works for LLMs). The speed differences matter, of course, but 3090 with 48GB of VRAM will likely enable more than 5090 with 32GB due to being able to fit bigger models.
07mk
13d ago
This was my thinking too. The New York Yankees used to have a rule against beards that they would enforce on their 8-figure salary professional baseball players, with the rationale being purely about uniformity and discipline. It seems that it would make at least as much sense in the military where people must have smaller egos for the apparatus to function and where their actions actually have consequences more meaningful and often more deadly than a baseball game.
Now, the rationale to begin with, does it make sense? I don't think there's any way to do the moral calculus on that in an accurate way. It's sensible on its face, at least.
Goodhart's Law becomes an issue here, though. It's been common knowledge for at least a decade that leftists have been adding more and more letters to the whole "rainbow coalition" in a way that appears absurd to the outsiders in the more and more fine granularity with which it divides minorities and also groups disparate minorities together. As such, anyone motivated to appear as a leftist would know to use the proper absurdly-long acronyms for this, and so this signals a desire to appear leftist, rather than leftism itself.
07mk
18d ago
"People who disagree with trans ideology are a dangerous threat to trans people" appears to be a mainstream, possibly a supermajority-support Blue Tribe position.
Within the Blue Tribe enclave in which I reside, it doesn't appear that way to me. I'd say that it's a mainstream opinion, but certainly a minority one, and not a big minority. That said, a supermajority would support the statement "People who disagree with trans ideology are being unjust or oppressive towards trans people," certainly publicly and likely privately as well.
Now, I could see a way in which your apparent observation makes sense; a supermajority of Blue Tribers, when surrounded by other Blue Tribers and interrogated in a leading way, would eventually be pressured to appearing as if they genuinely support (which, let's be clear, makes one exactly as responsible for genuinely supporting it as actually genuinely supporting it) "People who disagree with trans ideology are a dangerous threat to trans people," where "dangerous threat" implies literal physical violence. To be completely fair, from the outside, this would appear almost indistinguishable from a supermajority of Blue Tribers supporting the statement.
There are a lot of Blue Tribers who equate "oppression" with "dangerous threat," but because of how loose the definition of "oppression" has become (in 2025, arguably, it means nothing more than "something that is currently being applied to a [person that I like or that is an opponent to someone that I dislike]"), most Blue Tribers tend to grok that it's just not a big deal. The notion that "We're all racists/misogynists/White Supremacists/homophobes - and that's OK" (of course, just because we're all equal doesn't mean some of us aren't more equal than others) has become close to the water that we swim in in the Blue Tribe.
Trans themselves appear to be overwhelmingly Blue Tribe/leftist, like 99%+
I'd suggest this is a selection effect in terms of which trans people are most likely to make lots of noise or be otherwise noticeable. I'd guess a majority is Blue Tribe/leftist, certainly, but 99%? I'd want to see the actual stats and methodology.
07mk
18d ago
Hard disagree. Cleaning house with half as much enthusiasm as fighting the outgroup is an eminently reasonable standard for any movement to hold itself to (I'd argue that it's too low by at least 50%, but it's in the right order of magnitude), at least if they want to be considered meaningfully better than the outgroup; it's this very ability to credibly signal that one is cleaning house at least as much as they're cleaning things outside the house that justifies believing that we're better than the outgroup. Otherwise, we're just arguing about how chocolate is just such a better flavor than vanilla.
07mk
19d ago
I find that rather perverse. Our commitment to lack of political violence in favor over our own pride or reputation ought not be contingent upon the behavior of people we have determined as being politically inferior to us, because that commitment is a good in itself. Otherwise, that commitment becomes merely a tool to cynically use to help one's tribe win instead of a principle of how no amount of opinions in politics ought to rise to violence.
07mk
19d ago
This is actually a great point that didn't even occur to me. We've seen what leftists can do to punish people who say things they don't like. I am personally against all cancel culture everywhere for any reason, and I would fight this tooth and nail. But I would admit that a pro-cancel culture leftist who proved that they were willing to direct the cancel culture apparatus towards leftists glorifying anti-rightist violence - or even not maximally disapproving of it - is someone who has proven a commitment to reducing political violence. It'd be a deranged sort of commitment, but a true commitment nonetheless.
I think what the left should be doing is taking full-throated ownership of these murders pre-emptively, in a way that shocks the right with how quickly we're jumping to conclusions that we caused this murder, sans evidence of such. This sends a costly signal that we take the potential for violence to be caused by our violent rhetoric seriously, that we consider it more important than our reputation or pride.
And then take steps to implement policies that are supported by the attacked or rejected by the attacker. I've said similarly before; we need to send a signal to the other side that we take political violence as seriously as they do, that we consider it unacceptable to engage in it, irrespective of the political beliefs involved. So the signal must be costly for our political preferences, in favor of liberal democracy. Committing to an incentive gradient that discourages political murder, even if it means some of our political preferences don't get met seems like one of the most obvious costly signals for something like this.
EDIT: It also occurred to me later that a presentation of a certain attitude to actively seek out costly and effective signals I think would also be almost necessary. Most CW arguments involve someone nitpicking some suggested fix, finding problems here and there for why it wouldn't work, and such. And any specific fix can be nitpicked to death by someone who's motivated to appear as if they're goodwilled - this is the grain of truth in the whole "tone policing" complaints that became en vogue in SocJus spaces around 15 years ago. A full rejection of that attitude and embracing the attitude that, "If this particular costly action wouldn't properly send the signals in a way as to accomplish our goals, then we'll spend twice as much, work twice as hard and long to find some other costly action that would signal what we want in such a way as to accomplish our goals." I consider it a sort of "first derivative" commitment. We're not committing to a particular action, we're committing to a particular way of choosing our action, based on a commitment to do what it takes to figure out a way to reduce political violence, in a way that is costly to our political desires.
07mk
19d ago
As long as these concessions are specific to the people decrying the violence, in a way that's contradictory or at least counterproductive to the goals of those celebrating the violence, I think such concessions would work very well. These would actually be possible, since there are many substantial disagreements between the peace-wanting left and the bloodthirsty left.
07mk
19d ago
No, ANTI ICE clearly indicates an anti-global warming leftist who wanted to protest internal combustion engines for producing so much CO2.
07mk
19d ago
As a complete non-sequitur, as someone who was a child when Ice Ice Baby hit, I recall hearing from people older than me that his "word to your mother" was considered a legit controversial line at the time. Which I found confusing and silly. I also recall that Zinedine Zidane, one of the best French soccer players of his era, in his retirement game, got red carded for obviously intentionally head-butting an opposing player, and some of his fans defended him on the basis that the opposing player apparently made some insult about Zidane's mother. Finally, one of many things that I recall about the 1980 film The Terminator in terms of how the culture it depicts is different from the culture I'm familiar with was one of the detectives responding to a playful insult with a simple "yo mama" in a completely unironic way (others include the 80s hair and waiting on hold for 911).
Of course, mothers being sacred is a common trope in reality, but I found it curious just how seriously some people seemed to take it, to the extent that some off-hand insult directed at a generic "your" mother causes offense, or that it would justify headbutting someone during your send-off game after one of the best soccer careers anyone's ever had. It just seems strange when the syllables coming out of someone's mouth are clearly intentionally designed to upset you, the response is to be upset instead of ignoring.
Perhaps this isn't so much about mothers as it's about the talk about honor culture and all that that are happening elsewhere in this comment section. That there's a perception that it's not only justified but actually your duty to respond to someone obviously fitting themselves into the role of "intentional provoker" by fitting into the separate role of "the one who is provoked to shut them down," lest you sully your honor, instead of just saying "I have better things to do than LARP with you."
I'm not sure how this is baffling given the behavior of the "progressive left" over the past 15 years. Responding polite, non-accusatory, and measured constructive criticism for the purpose of self-improvement from their less extreme allies as if they were Nazis has been standard operating procedure for about that long.
The surprising thing to me now is that Klein actually decided to meaningfully criticize them, given how hard he was supporting them until very recently, even while some of his peers like Yglesias had already started doing so years ago. The stuff around Klein and Weiss recently are the only signals I've seen that indicates that the failures of the progressive left to actually support progress is actually facing meaningful backlash.
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