Tanista
3d ago
The audience is primed to just not be outraged when they hear claims about American racism. They are not primed to behave this way when faced with attacks on this allied group. That's all there is to it.
And yes, it is an attack. Being vague about it won't change it.
Even if they were ignorant of it, there's an entire other side of the political spectrum that reacts very badly to these sorts of claims. They just don't care (or even enjoy their outrage). The same dynamics aren't at play here.
Tanista
3d ago
Three is related to two, and it's that there was an OBVIOUS deflection RIGHT THERE! Just say that Pete polled poorly with blacks - which is a bloc we need to keep heavily shifted in our favor - for a variety of reasons.
Lol, lmao even. The point is to accuse the American people as such of racism and sexism and homophobia, precisely because it's broad enough that anyone can duck the charge and it'll likely be read as an attack on your enemies.
The point is very much not to accuse a loyal - the most loyal - voting bloc of the same even if you could objectively prove it. That way has its risks (Dan Savage iirc got a ton of shit for basically stating the point out loud and criticizing black homophobia).
This is all progressive stack thinking: Kamala cannot fail so we'll say that the audience failed her due to bigotry. By the same logic black women cannot fail the Democrats.
Tanista
3d ago
It also just doesn't work for the Veep to be the driving personality.
It's one thing if she was some grey eminence but she had a mediocre time as Senator, an awful time as a campaigner in 2020 and her record as a prosecutor was of dubious value. What does she bring then to balance the impression that her Veep should be President instead?
Tanista
3d ago
She basically hid from the public and she had no iconic or easy-to-understand policy goals.
All of these things were baked in by that point. Kamala had no policy because as VP she couldn't walk away from Biden, especially taking his people and endorsement. She had no policy because she ran away from the only thing she could have been said to be successful at (being a prosecutor) due to George Floyd and she couldn't flip flop again. She couldn't escape the things she did in that time like the quote that gave us the they/them ad.
She was simply an awful candidate, notwithstanding her (justified imo) insecurity and incompetence in the social realm.
Tanista
3d ago
Kamala may have been polite in public and even funny and personable in her best moments but I don't know about kind.
I think even in the primary there was criticism of her treatment of staff.
Tanista
3d ago
Cops are not just blamed for cases where there's misconduct. People of a certain ideological stripe assume there is misconduct in situations like the OP because of cops' failure to maintain equitable arrest records or to fix the underlying problems of those they police.
Teachers similarly get criticism for the state of students despite not having control of their lives for the majority of their time. The school might get leaned on for disciplinary gaps (as Obama did) or apparent bias, teachers might get blamed for being lazy or unmotivated due to the outcomes of some group of students and so on.
It's also just that government officials are easy to blame while parents are at least technically your customers. On schooling this flips and the liberals are the ones defending schoolteachers and their unions from criticism for failing kids. You get it on both sides.
I am not black, I did not grow up as a black child in a black household, so I don't know first hand what they are taught. But it seems to be some combination of "the police are dangerous and will shoot you, they are your enemy" and "a real man fights their enemies instead of submitting to them like a weakling." Which even if taught as separate messages, and the latter is implicit in the culture rather than explicit, combine to create this sort of behavior.
Seems like there're three groups we discuss here when one of these cases pop off: simply mentally ill people who can't help themselves, underclass blacks who seem to have a reckless attitude towards what they may rightly see as their enemies if they're caught up in crime, and well-off blacks who fear being harmed less, despite all of the stuff about "The Talk", and so feel justified in making it an issue then and there. I suppose we can say the general PMC/celebrity disdain for being told what to do by a working class rando mixing explosively with the general sense that authority is racist.
I don't think these groups are the same or have the same motives. Henry Louis Gates and Tyreek Hill are closer to Karens than someone like Michael Brown.
Tanista
4d ago
Meaning scripture isn't telling you to meekly submit, but instead 'If someone seeks to enslave you, force them to break the law'.
Striking someone just once isn't a violation of the law?
Cancel culture was always a thing, but it became a Thing with the emergence of a faction of illiberal progressives that had the clout to actually apply pressure and a desire to do so. This inversion of the 'proper' order of things was deeply upsetting to the many conservatives who saw themselves as rightful hegemons of American culture.
Losing hegemony was being mocked on every late night show as the party of schoolmarms and people who hated the poor. Utterly losing swathes of the academy and other important cultural institutions. Decisively losing a cultural issue like gay marriage and so on. It wasn't fun and people did complain.
When you declare such and such is beyond the pale and is not even to be seen let alone heard you're not denying them hegemony. You are denying that they should even have the same stake in the country and where its discourse goes.
Tanista
5d ago
This might be a small scale question itself but wasn't it about non-resistance to active persecution in the original text?
How did "if someone slaps you turn the other cheek to also be slapped" turn into "oh, I forgive you, but I make no promises for that judge over there or that cop I just called"?
Tanista
5d ago
The same goes for religious claims, ethical claims, all sorts of claims for which no empirical verification is possible.
I think there's a difference between censoring speech made for claims that we cannot really settle beyond raw power or tolerance and censoring research that theoretically can settle those claims. It leads to a strange agreement between the censor and their victim on the stakes in a way that doesn't have to be true in other case.
Maybe Frankfurt's distinction between lying and bullshit - lying at least acknowledges the concept of truth even as you point people away from it, bullshit denies that the truth is meaningful in the first place.
Yes, statements can be truth-apt without being empirically verifiable in practice. OrAnd there are cases where the stakes or what would settle the issue are themselves in doubt. In which case there's nothing for it but philosophy I suppose , since that's the role it can maintain in a world where science is ascendant.
I think a lot of the actual culture war debates do not escape empiricism in practice though, even if people try to insist that it's just a matter of differing definitions floating in the ether.
I could honestly never get into it either and I was very sympathetic towards that side of the Left. I think I did hear one full episode on Robin DiAngelo.
Going off that and my general sense of that side of the left: it all seems to be about feeding a demographic left behind by to the longhousing/PMCing of the Democratic party after the Hillary/Bernie fight, combined with a deeper resentment about the state of the economy from the downwardly mobile middle class types who read enough theory to be able to make it a socialist issue.
Tanista
6d ago
I expect a red/black/blue millet system would make everyone happy.
Except for any group that derives its power from managing the relations between all of the others surely? Or any group that thinks it has more to gain from pooling resources with other groups? Between the two there's enough power/numbers to veto any such proposal.
Science is not exempt from politics and emotion. Otherwise, empirical research into race and sex differences, or even just IQ, wouldn't be as touchy as it is.
They're not "touchy", there's just an effort to censor one (or more) side. Maybe because there is in fact a fact of the matter one can appeal to.
The claim was not that the process of science cannot be corrupted. The claim was that there's at least some theoretical yardstick some evidence that could be offered on many issues or some prediction that could be validated. The people who do things like try to stop genetic data being available for intelligence research or studies being done on smoking or gun deaths aren't evidence for the other side, they are proof for the claim: both sides seem to have some sense of where the confirming or disconfirming evidence is, one side has simply decided to defect.
And nothing can really eliminate the risk of defection so it's hardly damning for science that some do.
Tanista
6d ago
This seems like the worst possible example - “Are transwomen women?” seems to be a question where 90% or the disagreement about the meaning of the word “woman” and only 10% about ground truth.
How is the meaning of the word "woman" separate from the ground truth? The argument of the gender critical side is that the trans definition of woman is simply incoherent and anything close to the traditional definition simply returns false for the TWAW claim.
If anything, the idea that these things can be split has been mercifully killed by trans activists themselves: they claim some sort of sharp distinction but in practice what's happened is that anyone claiming the right to the term "woman" has at least a claim on all female privileges and rights no matter how self-evidently absurd it is.
So either the definition of trans is self-evidently incoherent or it's making a claim about the underlying facts (e.g. trans-identifying males are closer to females in their offending patterns in prison).
Your first instinct-- well, not your first instinct, because you're a conservative, but the first instinct of someone further left than you-- will be to take money from the rich people and give it to the poor people.
The richest of the rich would suffer a little as they're paying disproportionately more, but they're far at the reducing-rate-of-utilitarian-returns section of the scale. So given that they're also recieving the UBI, the only way they move from rich to poor is if they're wasters...
Part of the reason progressives don't seem to win with this argument in practice is that it depends on assumptions that prove dubious in practice: that only the richest of the rich will suffer (when social democracies as we know them today tax more across the board) or that taxing to create such broad benefits is costless.
Yes, UBI avoids the problem of means-tested systems that still end up giving disproportionate money to dubious cases. But it does so by simply ducking the problem of the bill that makes them want to discriminate in the first place.
Using the meme definition of insanity, this "transfer money to particular poor households" scheme is definitely it. Wealth-transfer research has promising results. Wealth-transfer-to-poor-people research has less promising results. Why do these leftists keep insisting that we trying to find even worse-off people to give the money too?
Maybe because leftists share the impulse that you categorized as conservative? That if the government is going to take a lot of your money out of your hands it should be some sort of emergency or going to a case so self-evidently worse off that it justifies the effort and isn't either a gain at the margins or an active loss to people seemingly incapable of making good use of it.
That isn't it solely - some seem deeply skeptical of UBI as a suggested welfare replacement, presumably because they're skeptical that you'll get a high enough UBI for unfortunates - but worth considering.
- I'm using fuzzy language in a few cases because some of these concepts/thresholds are strictly subjective... I concede that even in my "ideal" economic system there would be plenty for people to fight over and disagree about
I actually think it's better without the concession to fuzziness. After all, what your UBI proposal has going for it here is that we theoretically know what everyone is going to get and so the spending is predictable. If we start adding new expectations you risk ending up with the very problem of throwing good money after bad to raise some people to a standard they seem incapable of in addition to the big bill.
Tanista
9d ago
I think you and I will just fundamentally disagree on this.
Probably not but at least we validated the stereotype that men are always thinking about Rome.
His main failure as a reformer came from him not being able to stay in power long enough to cement them. Something that I don't point to as proof of his incompetence or idiocy.
Nobody said he was incompetent. Like Caesar he was obviously a great man. I admitted from the start that he was wronged and that he could clearly see some of the problems in the constitution as it stood.
I said his program was hindered from the beginning by his means and probably ill-conceived because of the fundamental contradiction. This defense, imo, is just leaning on the same contradiction. This worked for Augustus because he was trying to institute monarchic rule.
A Republican system depends on others buying into it and continually making the choice to restrict their own use of power. This cannot necessarily be achieved by Sulla just hanging around. If anything that increases the chance for the system to collapse into monarchy.
Sulla revealed the secret of the Republic - that generals can order their men to commit violence against the state and thus capture it - and somehow thought he'd put it back in the bottle. It went about as well as the realization that the emperor could be made outside of Rome.
I suppose we can say that this is all in hindsight. That it's easy to say it's wrong now precisely because we can appeal to Sulla's experience. Maybe, at the time, it seemed just as likely that he'd be a new Cincinnatus.
But it is what it is. We should also consider that his motives, like Caesar's, were not pure. Both of them did what they did to defend their own dignity and interests. I'm more sympathetic to Caesar, since the risks were so much greater for him. But in both cases it wasn't just concern for the Republic.
On another hand the plebeians were easily manipulated by wild demagogues like Gracchus, Saturnius and Sulpicius who had only self-interest on the agenda.
As opposed to the rational decisions of people like Cato whose level of obstinacy precipitated the very outcome they were supposedly against? Even when people like Pompey tried to respect at least the form of republican politics they were blocked and so made common cause with the populists. If anything one could argue that the Senators were playing games with things that were essential to the livelihood and comfort of the plebes. If they had been willing to take steps to address them rather than vetoing their enemies things might have been different.
The man died peacefully in his own bed.
He died, what? A few years after resigning? If Cicero had died within a similar timespan he would never have faced a reckoning for killing Catiline and it might have looked like a move with all upside too.
Tanista
9d ago
Huh, seems like the traditional failure mode the right wing is accused of facing is the opposite. Just throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Fewer/no services, let people (even those who might prudently use any additional help) fend for themselves.
Tanista
9d ago
I'd concede that not every individual would benefit from the cash-- I don't give money to homeless people directly because I reasonably suspect they would misuse it-- but that's a rule-proving exception.
I'm not sure that it is.
I think the left-wing position needs to reckon with the fact that some percentage of people have problems that can't easily be solved and, even worse, risk becoming disproportionate consumers (of welfare or police resources or park space, etc. ) whenever you liberalize controls on them or make systems more generous and less skeptical.
And perhaps worse than that, that you can move people on the bubble into that category.
Deciding which particular individual you want to give cash to re-introduces the hated administrative burden; better to do something like a UBI or the libertarian negative tax rate.
I remember going through a WaPo list of 800 Trump Lies From the Biden Debate, and concluding that most of their examples were insults (FACT CHECK: JOE BIDEN IS NOT A PALESTINIAN), extremely biased nitpicking
The Kyle Rittenhouse fact-check is a classic
Not even a "misleading", which imo is far more defensible, just a straight up, red FALSE so everyone who googled and skimmed leaves with the wrong impression.
Tanista
10d ago
By this analogy, it's pretty clear that these center-left politicians in question were mothers who were being told both by their older child and by tons of independent observers that she was being abusive and refused to entertain the possibility, because by their model of parenting, what appeared to the child and to independent observers as "abusive" was actually "nurture." Perhaps they're correct that it is actually "nurture;" however, the lack of concern for the possibility that it might not be is a reflection of an utter lack of motivation to actually nurture that older child
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.
Tanista
10d 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.
Rock stopped performing that joke
That might be the difference. Rock was able to publicly acknowledge the issues making these sorts of jokes and how others could use them and toe the line of offering well-meaning criticism instead of validating racists
Cosby was apparently unapologetic, and was constantly lecturing black Americans despite the mother of logs in his own eye up until he was cancelled.
More options
Context Copy link