atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
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User ID: 2162
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
4mo ago
Someone recently showed me some LSAT practice questions and I cannot get over how amazing of a test it is. If you're like I was and not familiar with the style, I encourage you to look some up---either some quick internet search or do some short test-prep site quiz like this.
I have never before seen something that I more wished the general population was better at. Can you imagine a world in where significantly more people had the reading comprehension and understanding of arguments to answer these accurately? It feels like 90% of what's annoying about politics and political discussion would just disappear---all the obnoxious bad-faith argumentative games wouldn't work anymore because everyone would see through them, we'll actually be able to have national discussions about substance instead of the nonsense that happens now, etc. Why is studying LSAT-style questions not part of the mandatory school curriculum? Wouldn't pushing for this be one of the best ways to "raise the sanity waterline"?
Now for the controversial point---I've also never been so tempted by the idea of a poll test. I know the two main reasons why disenfranchising a large group is bad: first, democracy isn't about making the best decision, but about making sure that every group feels heard by the system so that they don't violently rebel when it decides against them. Second, it's important to give the rulers of a country incentives to keep everyone happy so that institutions stay inclusive for all the standard Why Nations Fail reasons. However, I never thought I would see a test that so perfectly measures the skills needed to accurately judge political arguments! Maybe if we're in the world where practicing the questions is part of everyone's years of mandatory schooling and the LSAT-score threshold is low enough that almost anyone could cross it if they took that part of school seriously?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
4mo ago
I think you should take the responses and general lack of sympathy here as a wake-up call about what exactly right-wing rule in the US means for you these days. I've found this forum to be a very good representation of the substantive ideas underlying what becomes right-wing politics/the mindset of people pushing those ideas.
In this case: anything, no matter the cost, as long as it hurts the woke! Scientific progress? I don't care about your fake tears and sad puppies.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
4mo ago
Second, we had a moderate disaster back in 2021
Wikipedia claims >$195 billion in property damage. As a comparison, Hurricane Harvey is listed as $125 billion and the 2011 Japan earthquake as $360 billion, though in 2011 dollars.
If these numbers are correct(?), this is closer to "one of the most expensive natural disasters in human history" than "a moderate disaster".
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
3mo ago
I could drop to zero net income and live off my current wealth for years without having to work a day
Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful?
Does anyone else find this morally despicable? "It's ok for me to be able to never have to work another day, but wouldn't it wonderful if we make the country so much poorer that everyone else has to spend the rest of their lives doing manual labor?"
Are you one of the three genuinely principled civil libertarians who is also routinely incensed at, e.g., Democrat governors blatantly ignoring court orders regarding the 2nd Amendment?
In defense of those you would call unprincipled hypocrites, one of the main reasons people care about protecting civil liberties is that these prevent loopholes that in the long run would allow the government to become tyrannical. People just don't find the "take guns away -> tyranny that the populace otherwise would have been able to violently oppose" story that compelling.
On the other hand, they might find the slippery slope of "disappear without due process illegal immigrants/terrorists -> disappear without due process anyone the administration claims is illegal/a terrorist -> disappear without due process anyone the administration thinks should have their citizenship stripped -> disappear without due process anyone who opposes the administration" dramatically more plausible, especially given the administration's comments on denaturalization. You are of course free to try to convince them otherwise on the factual point, but you can't really call them a hypocrite until you do.
Relatedly, you would find much more consistency if you were checking for people being incensed about debanking.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
4mo ago
There are a lot of cultural reasons to prefer the US to the UK
- The UK is much more aristocratic and hereditarian---there's a royal family, a House of Lords, everyone is judged by the accent they developed while growing up, most politicians didn't just go to the same few universities, but literally the exact same high school, etc.
- Social conversation in the UK sometimes feels like its 50% a competition about how cleverly you can insult the other person. This is really distracting if you ever want to talk about something substantive. Despite it being mostly in good humor, the constant negativity is really draining.
- The above two points also enforce quite a bit of social conformism. Having unusual hobbies or interests for your social class is much harder than in the US.
- Ambition and particularly hard work are looked upon much more favorably in the US.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2mo ago
A criterion like 3/4's of your life spent in the US if you're under 18 and 3/4's of your childhood in the US if you're over 18 would be much better. On the other side of it, there are people whose parents moved when they were infants, are fully connected to the US and have no memory of living outside, and don't get citizenship.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
4mo ago
Too bad certain people made it partisan and now are shocked that there is a price for ideological capture.
Right so scientists and scientific progress at at best acceptable collateral damage in your crusade to punish these people as much as possible and at worst enemies just because being in the same industry makes you think that they're the same people. This is exactly what I was talking about.
"But scientists vote XX% democrat! They have to be the evil woke!"---well it shouldn't be that surprising that scientists overwhelmingly vote against the party of creationism and appointing anti-vaxxers as HHS secretary even if they might have had serious concerns with woke overreach. If you don't believe me, you can listen to Richard Hanania.
Why would you counterprotest a protest against the knifing of schoolgirls? Well, apparently the original protests were racist.
Really? You can't think of any other reason why the counterprotestors might have felt the need to counterprotest?
Saying that there were counterprotests against the knifing of schoolgirls is an extremely disingenuous interpretation of events. The counterprotests were against violence by far-right mobs. These groups pointed to a bad thing that happened, made some mostly vibes-based links to their pet issue, and then committed extreme acts violence about their pet issue claiming justification from the bad thing. Saying that opposing these group is supporting the bad thing is extremely sloppy. I think someone helping run a website with a goal of helping people move past shady thinking should hold themselves to a higher standard.
Let me try to guess what's going on here? There's a really obnoxious bait-and-switch that white supremacists tend to do (it's really important here to emphasize "supremacist"). Everything is at first justified through the lens of something like meritocracy or "master morality ---look at how inferior these examples of other races are, or look how "multiculturalism" is just "slave morality" where the strong are forced to support weak parasites (since Nietzsche is on everyone's mind again from the recent ACX post) .
However, when push comes to shove, it becomes very clear that their true motivation is not any kind of meritocracy or "master morality" at all---it's just wanting the members of the group they're part of to have increased status for the sole reason of having been born into that group. This is of course decidedly anti-meritocratic.
Posts like the OP's are a great way to highlight this contradiction (I tried something similar with this question posted on the old site). If you're actually going to judge some people as superior to others because of their achievement and greatness, no reasonable judgement is going to come out the way white supremacists (and racialists more generally) say it will. It really emphasizes that they have no basis for their positions besides naked, defecting-in-the-prisoner's-dilemma selfishness.
Of course, all the liberals hate the argument because you're judging some people as inherently worth more than others and all the racial conservatives hate it because the judgement is actually by merit instead of what they want: arbitrarily putting the group they were born into on top. See also the Nietzsche article's description (section X) of why everyone gets mad a Richard Hanania despite him being the only actual "honest-to-goodness Nietzschean master moralist".
In summary, think of this as "Ok, Mr. white supremacist, I'll grant you your stated motivation that we should follow some kind of 'master morality' and judge some people as superior and therefore of greater worth than others, let's see where that actually takes us. Oh, it should actually make you sound like Richard Hanania, supporting skilled immigration and all, instead of whatever you are. You really don't have any grounding in your policy preferences besides naked selfishness in favor of your birth group do you?". Whether the OP actually believes that you should rank people this way is less interesting.
Vivek Ramaswamy gave an interesting talk at Yale's Buckley institute a few days after the election. What I specifically want to focus on is the part starting at 34:35, where he describes what he thinks is a divide in the Republican party between two different notions of American national identity. The first is that being American is about following a common set of values---meritocracy, free speech, self-governance, etc. The second (starting 39:12) is that being American is about having deep, ancestral ties to a particular piece of land---"blood and soil". He sees the coming years as an almost factional fight within the Republican party between these two notions of identity.
This topic is very close to my heart---I think the majority of my interaction with this forum has been very unsuccessfully arguing in favor of the ideals-based notion of identity. Ramaswamy fervently supports the same and I hope hearing his much better-argued case (from a much more authoritative source) is far more compelling than anything I've tried to say.
However, what I'm actually interested in is what people here think the outcome of the factional fight is going to be. What do you see in Trump's choices of appointees? Is Ramaswamy going to be pushed out or is he going to be an influential figure moving forward? Which side do you think various major figures in the Republican party land on?
Just to put my cards on the table, I personally think Ramaswamy is delusional that it's even a fight and that the Republican party is fully dominated by the blood-and-soil side. This is in fact the main reason I vote Democrat and if I believed the ideals side was going to win, I would immediately become a die-hard Trump supporter. I believe that if you actually hold the ideals-based notion of identity, then the Matt Yglesias/Noah Smith-wing of the Democratic party is the right political home for you. As for why I believe this, I always thought that support for legal, skilled immigration was the best litmus test for this divide---if you are on the ideals side, then it is a no-brainer win-win and if you're on the blood-and-soil side, then it is very dangerous. Both what happened in the last Trump administration and experience talking to right-wingers here seemed to very strongly demonstrate that US Republicans are very against skilled immigration.
This was a very enlightening comment, thanks.
However, I think there's a very good reason people think of used-car salesman lying as reflecting much more poorly on character than lawyer lying. The used-car salesman style demonstrates sloppiness with and disregard of details---this is a huge red flag if you want your leaders to have any sort of ability to understand technical or scientific questions. Conversely, being able to pull off lawyer-style, technically-true lying is a great demonstration of being good with details.
Lawyer-style lying is never going to lead to travesties like sharpiegate, which actually harmed the ability of the National Hurricane Center to function as a scientific organization. This sort of thing is very dangerous if you want government policy to accurately reflect reality.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
4mo ago
There are entire books on how to study for the LSAT. I presume that would be a place to start, though it might be good to hear from someone who actually took the test.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
4mo ago
Talk to some lawyers and see if you still think the LSAT weeds out bad-faith political arguments
Right, part of the reason I'm posting this is that I don't really talk to that many lawyers and that I think they're a few here that might be able to give a more informed view. Is it correct to extend what you're saying bit to that the bad-faith arguments can be arbitrarily subtle and training people to catch more obvious bad faith also trains them to hide their own bad faith better?
There is no way it would stay neutral
Oops, I guess I forgot this other very important anti-poll test argument that they're way too easy to corrupt. Embarrassingly enough, it's actually probably the textbook one too through various Jim Crow examples. Thanks for making it.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
I don't really like either extreme. I have lots of evidence already of one side existing, its depressing to get evidence of the other extreme existing as well.
Here's one person's experience that might make at least part of it not so depressing: I've spent a lot of times in universities in extremely left-leaning areas (Like Jill Stein beating Trump extreme). There are routinely literal communists in my circles. I've never not been able to pull an IRL political argument back from extremes through tying everything back to core ideals like egalitarianism (and playing word games to avoid certain triggering phrases)---no standardized testing isn't a white supremacist plot, which alternatives do you think are going to be less biased? Rent control isn't as obviously good as you think it is, you have to be careful not to screw over people trying to move in, have you looked at what the actual minority groups you're speaking for think about police funding? Do you really trust elite college admissions committees to implement a non-transparent, "holistic" affirmative action policy without sneaking in a bunch of details that turn it into something mostly benefiting the privileged under the cover of tokenism? etc.
I therefore thought that both extremes were basically covered by the Lizardman Constant. Reading this forum has been one of the biggest shocks I've experienced to my beliefs about the world in the last 5-10 years (second to the Ukraine invasion I guess)---here are a large number intelligent people I share a country with who actually just have irreconcilable value differences; people who have such crazy policy preferences to me not because they disagree about facts like the far-left people I meet, but because they honestly believe that people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as.
Despite what you think, the point is there weren't struggle sessions in math/hard-science departments. As the OP said, all you ever had to do was write in your grants about how things you liked anyways, like organizing events where older and younger graduate students could meet each other and become friends, also helped "underrepresented groups" sometimes. You could extremely easily just not be interested in politics and ignore everything outside of writing this paragraph.
Also, if you were upset about what was happening in humanities departments, you didn't really have any option except getting in bed with the creationists and Obama-birther conspiracy theorists.
The chaos and funding issues the administration is creating is not at all the same thing. Now you have to desperately scrub every appearance of links to crazies like Tema Okun and Robin DiAngelo just because they're associated with the same industry as you. It's not even clear which buzzword in which random context sets the censors off.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
4mo ago
Yup, it's really a testament to the strength and dynamism of the economy in Texas. You have to condemn the grid mismanagement that led to the blackout, but it's really amazing to have a place that can just eat a cost like that as if it were nothing. I feel similarly about Hurricane Harvey on this second point.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
but plainly, that hasn't happened so far, certainly not on any appreciable scale
I don't think this is generally accepted---certainly not to the point of "plainly". There's a very prevalent narrative that the rise of the alt right in Europe/US is exactly the widespread social instability you would see because of this---for example see here:
"One in three young men in Germany has never had a girlfriend. Are you one of them?" Krah asks and continues with advice: "Don't watch porn, don't vote green, go outside into the fresh air. Be confident. And above all don't believe you need to be nice and soft. Real men stand on the far right. Real men are patriots. That's the way to find a girlfriend!"
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
Like hell they have.
I'm sorry, this is complete and utter bullshit. Polling has consistently shown that Americans overwhelmingly support the diversity of their country---Here's a recent one (see page 5). MLK has an effective shrine in DC and judging people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin is like commandment 1 of the national religion. A majority of the country thinks immigration should be kept at current levels or increased and basically has since about 2005.
Seriously, I'm astounded how you can make this claim. Americans have been choosing this expanded, non-race dependent version of identity for decades. Like the taboo is so strong---when was the last time that being publicly outed as a white supremacist wouldn't ruin an American's life?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
4mo ago
Do you think Musk is a Creationist?
No, but the current speaker of the house is. When creationists get in that high of a position, you can't call them strawmen.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
4mo ago
As I was commenting below, where in the world did you get the impression that DiAngelo and Okun were welcomed and not forced on us by general university politics?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
4mo ago
I specifically mentioned math and hard sciences (excluding biology) because that's what I could speak about authoritatively. Maybe the Watson stuff really was a struggle session, or maybe there was some more stuff going on behind the scenes. In math, I've known of old professors who've said similar things without much consequence. Generally, the line is that political views are fine, but unambiguously treating colleagues and particularly younger students/postdocs badly because of these political views is not---when I say some stuff going on behind the scenes, maybe Watson was crossing the line. Yes, most will say that there should be censure for crossing the line and fine, if just wanting colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy is what you call hopelessly woke, then you win the argument. Many on this forum explicitly do not want colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy, so.....
The affirmative action point is similar. I've explained before what affirmative action I've seen in math departments: e.g. people would realize that graduate students in some group do disproportionately well post-graduation and conclude that the admissions process must be missing talent in that group. They then implement a brute-force hack to give people from that group an extra leg up in the admissions process and calibrate the magnitude until outcomes are around the same. You can argue that this clumsy shortcut isn't a good idea, but it's still for the sole purpose of achieving meritocracy.
given that these people were unbothered by what was going on in the last 10 years.
and how the hell do you know that people weren't unbothered? It was so easy to get people to denounce Okun and DiAngelo by pointing out the right perspectives. I guess people didn't reorient their entire career towards nasty political fights in other departments instead of doing the science that they were much more interested in so screw them, right? You can't expect everyone to be willing to expose themselves to all the nastiness Sokal got. Unless you're doing that serious work to build your own groups, yes, your only choice is to join a coalition that's already there, with the creationists and birthers and all.
The first issue is fascinating: there is a serious disagreement between the left and the right in the US about what freedom of religion actually means. I think the left qualifies it in a sort of paradox-of-tolerance way: you don't get to excuse intolerant views by claiming that they are part of your religion. Otherwise, religion just becomes a giant loophole in the rules that make the pluralistic society of the US actually work: believe whatever you want as long as it doesn't make you impose anything on other people. All the recent fights about LGBT rights vs. religious freedom are a pretty strong demonstration of this actual fundamental values difference.
Therefore, for a lot of the left, the actual answer here is bluntly that these parts of Christianity are actually bigoted---drop them or deal with the justified condemnation. Omar/Miller's particular fight is just an important reminder that the divide on how much deference to give religious beliefs doesn't cleanly split left/right. If you feel that this divide is important, maybe you should rethink whether certain politicians are actually on your side or not. I personally much preferred the political alignment from back in the day of internet atheism fights.
I don’t understand why Trump isn’t more popular
It's pretty commonly accepted that the housing issue is caused by restrictions on building new housing. It's been Democratic leaders like Scott Weiner and Gavin Newsom that have been pushing hard to remove these restrictions. Trump's party on the other hand has been actively fighting against this, calling it some kind of war on the suburbs.
It used to be almost all white and now it’s just insanely wealthy tech workers who are probably majority Indian and Asian
However, I get the impression that being priced out isn't what you (or the original poster) are mainly focused on here, rather this demographic change. Well, that's easy to address---contrary to what you might think if you spend a lot of time in places like this forum, most Americans and definitely most Californians care that people have similar values and ideals as them rather than that they look superficially similar. "Why aren't more people being radicalized because my personal and unpopular aesthetic preference isn't being satisfied?"---that question answers itself.
Not the OP, but I'll bite too: I am uncomfortable with any powerful enough identity group whose membership is assigned rather than chosen trying to express solidarity in a way that excludes people not of the group. This tends to lead to very anti-meritocratic outcomes. "Whites" just seems to be the most powerful such group in the current day.
I would also be uncomfortable with the concept of solidarity for following identity groups in order:
though there's a significant drop-off in my level of worry each step down. This is also based on factual beliefs about the world that I could easily be convinced out of with the right evidence.
I would not be concerned with solidarity among Navajo. Sure this is bad in theory, but it's not really likely to have any significant material impacts to anyone so it's not worth wasting effort on. Maybe I would feel differently if I lived in northeastern Arizona however---I don't really know what the situation is like there.
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