deadpantroglodytes
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User ID: 568
In short, it doesn't require you to think that competence or effort are fake. It requires you to believe that discrimination is real.
This is not credibile. If it were true, I would expect progressives to participate in efforts to measure skill, qualifications, and merit. In fact, despite the many difficulties of doing so (Good heart's law, etc ), the urgency should inspire tireless ingenious effort to that end. Instead, everywhere I look, the opposite is true: progressives direct their energy towards frustrating the project of improving meritocracy, often enough ridiculing the goal itself.
The historical treatment of black Americans is a stain on our country and the progress we've made combatting discrimination fills me with pride. The job is not complete, but is close.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
This is not, I'm afraid, relevant to Fruck's (accurate) judgement.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
"Strategically dishonest" - I don't think you can read his entire body of recent work and come to this conclusion, if you have any exposure to American progressives, or even the mainstream.
For example, the first paragraph of another recent article, "Man Needs Sex and Violence, Not Top-Down 'Meaning'" ends like this:
Me and the boxer became friends after that (last I heard he had impregnated some black girl in Chicago).
This is not how someone that cares about respectability writes in the USA 2023. The fact that he would include the impregnated girl's race at all will stop most left-of-center readers from going any further. The fact that he doesn't think her race is gratuitous opens a chasm of inferential distance between Hanania and the mainstream media, and he, as a self-confessed occasional troll, knows it.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
I was hoping the search would yield videos of guitarists that do more than look at their instruments, and that audiences find engaging.
That expectation was absolutely reasonable not long ago - five years ago? A decade? Hard to recall. Judging from the response here, people don't believe it, but it's true that, even with shitty searches like that, Google could often approximate my intentions.
deadpantroglodytes
8mo ago
the only annoying part is that "meritocracy" is both of these things at the same time
I somehow missed this response, but two months later, I need to recognize what an excellent line this is.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
Thank you. That is an excellent rant, but the comment I was looking for was a fairly long list of media statements that were clearly wrong and/or unfair, similar to "Rittenhouse the white supremacist", though the examples were generally less controversial, thus better for the project of persuasion.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
Why should there be such a middle ground? "Cancellation" aims to make someone unemployable, which is several steps short of murder but absolutely moving in the same direction, and not in the slippery-slope sense.
I oppose the "walk of shame" on the grounds that it is intimidation.
My principle is that we should not seek the destruction of people that disagree with us (neither literal, social, nor professional destruction) unless we're willing to kill or die on the relevant hill. (In case this comes off as melodramatic, I don't mean this in the "I'm an internet tough guy" sense, but nearly the opposite: I think few hills are relevant in this way.)
Edit: "nor", not "or" and added parenthetical clarification.
deadpantroglodytes
3d ago
Yes, something along those lines:
I guess the idea is the exchange might object to Pornhub but not the third party?
When big money's at stake, plausible deniability is usually all that's needed to keep things moving.
Jad is funny and winning, the two of you had good chemistry, and I appreciated how he responded to your gentle pushback (about the emptiness of the term "extremism", about legal tactics, etc.). He tells funny stories, communicates how broken the news is in a way that's very accessible, and makes interesting observations (for example, about why Substack can't solve the weaknesses of the legacy media).
I generally prefer reading, like many others here, and Jad's sound could have been better, but I really loved this episode. It's the first Bailey episode I'm sharing with normal friends, which I can do in part because he's insulated from some predictable attack angles by virtue of being Arab-American. On top of that, his humor plays better than the (understandably) strident confrontational attitude of many other people in similar positions (like, say, Ayaan Hirsi Ali). Anyway, great job, from a non-podcast type.
deadpantroglodytes
10mo ago
This is mostly wrong. It's trivial to decompile a large share of contemporary software - the opportunity is there, but it is vanishingly uncommon for competitors to seize those opportunities. Similarly, my company had a large multinational client who availed themselves of the right to purchase our source code and walk after five years of business. They took the source code, then came back into the fold a few years later after throwing resources at their fork, being unhappy with the results, and missing our on all the great stuff we'd added in the same period.
The reason why is that most software is in a state of perpetual improvement.
Here's a list heavily biased towards the last fifty years:
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In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall. Discovery coupled with novelistic drama among our closest relatives. Over the years, Jane Goodall's power over me has attenuated as she's embraced expansive, unfocused activism, but her early research on Chimpanzees is astonishing. I can't think of anyone that can match her powers of observation. Mid way through the book, it develops a novelistic density that made me laugh and cry. I think the follow-up is even better, "Through a Window: Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe", but it hardly makes sense to read it on its own. Don't let anyone tell you that Bonobos are the sexually adventurous primates.
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Chimpanzee Politics by Franz de Waal. What can I say? I chose my username for good reason. This is a retrospective analysis of the author's years studying a chimpanzee colony in a Dutch zoo. I read it fifteen or twenty years ago, browsing Amazon's recommendations for good science writing, before reading Jane Goodall, and it changed my life. The backbone of the story is a contest for political supremacy among the chimps, but that hardly describes what it offers. It covers many other aspects of their lives: the way they play, how they deceive each other, juvenile sexual development, how they comfort each other, and much much more.
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. I *really *love cities. Jacobs carefully builds an argument for what enables their greatness, based on common-sense observations.
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The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen. Funny, sad, and deeply intertwined with the fabric of America.
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Wolf Hall, by Hillary Mantel. This is a staggering work of imagination that constructs a plausible version of history that more or less inverts the very popular conception of the good Thomas (More) and bad Thomas (Cromwell). One reviewer wrote something along the lines of "I know every twist and turn of this story from high school history and I still can't wait to find out what happens next."
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The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry. This is an account of why humans torture, go to war (instead of, e.g., settle disputes via chess), and create things. I can't think of many better examples of how to build an argument. In retrospect, it shares a lot with the best of Scott's writings and the best of the Motte.
Add to those, authors I love, whose work I cannot narrow down to a single recommendation: Nietzsche, David Mitchell, P.G. Woodhouse (especially the Wooster and Jeeves stories).
deadpantroglodytes
8mo ago
I wasn't bored, but as a movie it sucked: it's an artless piece of relentless exposition, a paint-by-numbers Wikipedia adaptation. Nolan doesn't understand the most important unit of cinematic language, the scene, and tries to hide it with garish sound design and 60s-era hallucinations.
It had at least three times too many characters as a movie can really handle. He should have started by cutting Oppenheimer's brother, who adds nothing substantial to the film. If there's no way to tell the story without them, Nolan should have just told a different story, one better suited to the strengths of motion pictures.
deadpantroglodytes
8mo ago
I agree with you, without reservation. Moreover, I loved reading your post I was responding to - the historical perspective is useful and relevant in Hanania's case.
But I stand by my point, which is that while Hanania has come a long way, I don't think it's reasonable to describe him as a convert. Moreover, as you observe, progressive activists would welcome converts - from whatever ideological distance. But the price of conversion is complete submission, not apology or even renouncing myriad specific offenses. I don't think any American intellectual is willing to pay that price, whether it's because of pride, tribal instincts, or the manifest philosophical defects of the social justice worldview, which means we may never see CCP-style conversions. (At least I'm crossing my fingers that it never comes to that.)
deadpantroglodytes
8mo ago
Most historical ideological movements were quite happy to adopt former foes if they agreed to repent. Yes, you had to convert or die, but at least you could convert.
This isn't right: progressive activists are more than happy to accept converts, as long as they abase themselves completely and become zealous true-believers. If you continue to challenge their authority or their most important commitments, you have not actually repented in a meaningful way.
Consider Peter Boghossian's one-time collaborator Émile P. Torres, turned dogged antagonist of rationalism and BFF of Timnet Gebru. Hanania didn't do this: he merely renounced some of his earlier beliefs. It's as if Martin Luther trimmed his sails a bit and decided he would only stand behind sixty-three of his theses after all, and, by the way, the Pope still isn't legitimate.
It was a big change for him, but as far as progressives are concerned, he hasn't even started to repent.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
Am I wrong to have read the HBD bit at the end as sarcasm? We're supposed to speak plainly here, but every now and then some artiface slips through.
I will just say I'm not trying to "own" anyone. Moreover, "Black Americans should be entitled to the full benefits of American citizenship in the way that white Americans already are" is my own central example of a hill worth dying on.
Having said that, even if the students really think that's at stake here and are willing to (literally) fight for it, I would like that to be clearer and better understood.
Edit - turning down the heat.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
I'm sure I'm testing your patience, but I sense I haven't expressed myself clearly, so I'll try again. My position is at the intersection of The Spirit of the First Amendment and Be Nice, at Least Until You Can Coordinate Meanness:
Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Does not get doxxing. Does not get harassment. Does not get fired from job. Gets counterargument. Should not be hard.
I'm not trying to establish a legal standard. I think what the students are doing is and should be legal. But I also think it is appalling: trying to coerce someone into silence is callow, cowardly, and repulsive. That's an emotional reaction that I wish more people shared, because I think our society would be far better for it, but I don't really think I can make other people feel the same way.
However, it might be possible to convince people that harming or trying to harm people that disagree with you may be emotionally satisfying, but it is not an alternative to violence; instead it increases the chance of violence. Based on my observations and understanding of human psychology, I would say that de-platforming Milo, Trump, Charles Murray, & etc. have radicalized orders of magnitude more people than, e.g., 4chan or /r/TheDonald. I wish I could bring more neutral evidence to bear than my own priors, but I'm not sure what that would look like or who would listen.
When speech is directed towards organizing a person's destruction, it's over the line.
Another thing worth mentioning is that I'm promoting this as a normative idea, not a legal one, so I'm not trying to set up a technical test. I think de-platforming Milo was a stupid own goal, but to the extent that he tried to destroy people's lives, he sucked too.
Edit: I want to add that I'm not conflating speech with violence, a lame rhetorical habit. I'm saying that preventing someone from making a living or even just hurting their prospects pushes them into a corner; preventing them from having their say leads them to lose faith in dialogue, making violence look like the only solution; isolating them socially means they've got nothing to lose.
deadpantroglodytes
3mo ago
Yeah, I don't think there's a plausible story to explain a widespread deep-state conspiracy. But there are other plausible theories (completely unsubstantiated, to be clear). They would involve either
- an informant with bad judgement going full Leeroy Jenkins or
- an undercover agent assessing the crowd, deciding they didn't pose a real threat, and doing their best to goose the crowd on
In the absence of evidence, those are idle speculation, but I'm a little surprised they didn't come up (or at least not more clearly).
deadpantroglodytes
8mo ago
As another data point, in my affluent blue bubble, hyphenated children's names are everywhere, partly because of the relatively large number of same-sex couples, but not remotely exclusively.
This includes mine, and while I have to admit that hyphenated names can be a mouthful (paving the way for endless jokes about fitting names on, e.g., swim caps), I love them for surfacing family history. I've always loved the extravagance of Spanish names for that reason, even if they are usually truncated for daily use.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
As an aside, I appreciate the link. I've been listening to Huberman a bit lately because I'm starved for good advice about how to deal with an alcoholic family member, and it's been very hard to come by a trustworthy assessment of his podcasts (like Ritchie).
I wrote "we should not seek the destruction of people that disagree with us (neither literal, social, nor professional destruction)". Your response:
Is the walk of shame supposed to be social destruction?
Were you intentionally dodging the substance here? I don't even have to speculate on their intentions with respect to social destruction: the law students are calling for their teacher (the dean of the law school) to be fired. If you don't agree they're trying to destroy her professionally and that the walk of shame was part of that, we don't have enough common ground to discuss this.
Presuming that was an oversight, I agree there has to be a gradient of offenses and responses. There's an entire universe of proportionately calibrated responses that don't involve silencing or attacking the speaker:
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Ignore them.
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Participate in the Q&A, ask sharp questions.
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Organize a local event featuring a speaker or speakers providing a counterpoint.
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Publish something critical of the ideas.
I'm aware that people often characterize boycotts, de-platforming, and collective shaming as an alternative to violence, but I think the opposite is true: these things all escalate towards violence. Their widespread currency fuels the volatile, scary environment in which we live. I would prefer to see our society establish different norms that would support engagement and follow the examples of Ira Glasser and Daryl Davis.
Edit: "walk of shame wasn't part of that" -> "walk of shame was part of that"
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
Here's a longshot: I'm trying to see if anyone else read (or wrote!) a comment on the National Review website ... from a few years ago.
A few months after Trump won the election, I started reading NR's investigation coverage. I stopped when they started paywalling Kevin Williamson, so the comment would have appeared somewhere between April 2017 and July 2021. The comment was an extremely persuasive compendium of offenses the mainstream media had committed against red America. In retrospect, I realize that it might have been copy/pasted from the motte, or perhaps written afresh by someone here (I didn't start reading the motte until 2020).
Does this sound familiar to anyone, or does anyone know of a similar resource?
That's unfair: atokenliberal's username is a wry commentary on the average orientation of The Motte, plus his/her posting history demonstrates both a solid degree of self-awareness and a reasonable theory of mind of his/her political opponents.
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