naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
Well, now that we are actually having a substantive conversation about it:
The explanation cannot be merely that he won the 2016 election, since many of the other people you mention (Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden) also won presidential elections.
I personally think the character of the 2016 election matters a lot to this calculus. Hillary Clinton's election was supposed to not only be a sure thing, but the ushering in of a new era: America's First Woman President. And post-awokening, people didn't just want this to be true (as they perhaps wanted it to be true decades earlier)--a large number of people (especially young, especially female, especially college-educated types) felt entitled to it. When Al Gore lost in 2000, the brouhaha over Florida was wild--and yet there was nothing like this happening, at least not where I could see it.
It made for a sobering contrast with 2008, when America's First Black President won his own anticipated victory. Even country music stars were singing his praises. In a nation that has become culturally obsessed with "firsts," with shattering "glass ceilings," and with otherwise celebrating people not for what they actually contribute, but merely for their membership in politically important minorities, 2016 was not a defeat--it was a heist. No less important a figure than former president Jimmy Carter said:
There’s no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election, and I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.
The much celebrated congressman from Georgia, John Lewis, skipped the inauguration, saying:
I don't see this president-elect as a legitimate president.... I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.
No wonder there were peaceful but fiery protests come inauguration time. The list goes on, but the point is that Democrats did not respond to Clinton's loss in a normal way. Florida's 2000 problems were bad, but at least they were Florida's problems--they were not specifically cultural problems, or problems caused by one or both of the candidates seeking victory at any price. There was a legitimate dispute based on plausible evidence. What happened in 2016, though, was a defection; Democrats responded by abandoning even a pretense of respecting the rule of law. For them to lose was no longer a political setback, but a failure of democracy! Catastrophe! Devastation! Revolution!
The parallel case of 2020 simply cannot be understood outside that context. Reactionaries gonna react. When you slap the "defect" button in an iterated game, your opponent is all but guaranteed to follow suit, and in this case I think that is substantially what Republicans did.
Maybe Trump's personality makes this all worse, somehow. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if Clinton had lost instead to Rubio or something. But then again--would Clinton have lost, to anyone else? Trump's ability to rally disaffected blue collar labor and increase the Republican share of black and Hispanic votes proved important. So it's difficult to guess how things might have been different, absent Trump.
But it does seem to me that Democrats were much more interested in (and expectant of) a Clinton victory; until he won, Trump was, to them, a joke (at least mostly). Losing the election is one thing; even casting protest votes in Congress against certifying a presidential election has become old hat despite the breathlessness with which the media reported on it in 2020. But being denied the apparent moral victory of being personally involved in electing America's First Woman President was (for many) apparently so, so much more than just another loss. It was, one might say, a crime.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
And even if they find out eventually, buying 6 months or a year or three years of time can be very important for a kid trying to build a secondary support network.
Six months or three years can also be exceptionally damaging to a kid who is confused or being taking advantage of by others, be they teachers, peers, or otherwise. The idea that government employees would conceal information from parents about children is so horrifying to me. To talk casually about "buying" time for children to deceive their parents strikes me as deeply misguided.
There is good reason why people sometimes call this "grooming": because the most common kind of adult who keeps secrets about a child from that child's parents is someone who is taking advantage of that child for their own purposes, "grooming" them to some role. If I ever had a child whose teacher presumed to know better than me what was best for my child, that would not be a problem to lightly overlook. If this involved core aspects of my child's identity, I would seek that teacher's dismissal. If it involved my child's sex and sexuality, I would be willing to burn through substantial personal resources to impose serious and lasting costs beyond mere dismissal. I cannot imagine a reasonable and loving parent feeling otherwise. There is nothing so special about transsexual activism as to exempt it from these feelings, and that is why transsexual activism continues to be a catastrophically losing issue for Democrats who swing at that particular tar baby.
I understand that some parents are wrong about what is best for their children, and that some parents are abusive, and so on. But this does not meaningfully distinguish them from teachers, who are also often wrong, abusive, and so on--and teachers have less reason to love children and see to their best interests. As Aristotle notes in the Politics--"how much better it is to be the real cousin of somebody than to be a son after Plato's fashion!"
I have seen enough cases of ROGD, as well as the results of decisive parental action against ongoing ROGD, to believe that the evidence of my own eyes is that schools should absolutely never conceal relevant facts from parents. Not for six months; not for six days. Better that a few children face harsh discipline at home, than many be subjected, with the aid of government actors, to the (often, lifelong) suffering brought on by politically popular social contagions.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
Sorry to do two posts back to back, but the Fourth Circuit has dropped a steaming pile of dog shit on my front porch and I'm kind of mad about it. (Is that too heated? Honestly I feel like I'm soft pedaling it.)
Porter v. Board of Trustees of North Carolina State University is a case on academic freedom and speech by government employees. Stephen Porter was a tenured professor of education in the university's "higher ed" program. His statistical research on higher education has dealt at times with questions of faculty and student body demography. After complaining that
NC State’s diversity initiatives resulted in “abandoning rigorous methodological analysis in favor of results-driven work aimed at furthering a highly dogmatic view of ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ and ‘inclusion’”
he found himself removed from the higher ed program for being "insufficiently collegial." He sued. And now, barring a reversal by SCOTUS, he has lost. More from the article:
In the 2006 case Garcetti v. Ceballos, the Supreme Court held that when government employees speak “pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.” But, critically, Garcetti made an exception for faculty at public institutions engaged in “speech related to scholarship or teaching.”
The Fourth Circuit’s decision considerably narrows this exception, effectively placing faculty speech about shared institutional governance and decision-making beyond the First Amendment. The court reasoned that Porter did not speak as an academic, but rather “in his capacity as an employee,” concluding Porter’s speech “was not a product of his teaching or scholarship” and is, therefore, “unprotected.”
This analysis suggests that the Fourth Circuit has quite perplexingly decided that "intramural" speech does not qualify for the Garcetti academic exception. Essentially, in the Fourth Circuit, academic freedom apparently extends to lectures and publications, but not "when professors speak and write as citizens of the campus community and officers of an educational institution." This is an especially awkward position, however, when the professor in question teaches and researches higher education specifically. Imagine being free to make assertions about higher education policy in the classroom and in your writing, but not being free to repeat those things at a faculty meeting, or to university administrators! The author also notes that this may reflect a circuit split with the Ninth, which is good news for any planned appeal.
But the age of that split (the Ninth Circuit case was decided in 1976) also highlights how much the American Left has changed in the last 50 years, and how right-coded Free Speech has become--even, maybe the speech of tenured university professors (who are of course overwhelmingly left-identifying). As one commenter over at Brian Leiter's blog observes:
It seems to me that the dissent attends carefully and sensibly to the relevant facts but that the majority does not. On page 43, the dissent offers this explanation for the majority’s failure:
“My friends in the majority ... have developed a new ‘bad man’ theory of the law: identify the bad man; he loses. ... The majority’s threadbare analysis willfully abandons both our precedent and the facts in search of its desired result. ... that cynicism breaks new ground.”
A second commenter adds further context:
Curiously, the two judges in the majority (Wynn and Thacker) are Obama appointees, whereas the one judge in dissent (Richardson) is a Trump appointee. As the preceding comment observes, the argumentation in the dissenting opinion is far better than that in the majority opinion.
Leiter himself then weighs in on Richardson:
I see that Judge Richardson is a UChicago Law graduate (before my time), who clerked for Judge Posner.
Posner, of course, is the father of the Law and Economics movement, which is not universally embraced by conservative lawyers but is very often a right-coded jurisprudence. So here we have a flip from the stereotypical expectations, with leftist judges constraining the academic freedom of a tenured university professor (as well as government employee freedom of speech generally--they give a narrower interpretation than the conservative Supreme Court furnished in 2006!) and a right-wing judge dissenting.
Naturally, most analysis seems to agree that this is a results-oriented decision; the "real issue" is not academic freedom or freedom of speech at all, it's the total inviolability of the gospel of DEI. Porter committed a heresy, and got slapped down for it, and the high priests of the church of DEI confirmed his punishment. All other details are irrelevant. This does not mean Republicans are now going to be the champions of academic freedom, or that Democrats have abandoned that position. It's just pure, unadulterated who, whom, as the dissent seems to grasp.
I hate when judges add fuel to the cynical fires of "there is no principle, there is only power." I have seen judges choose principle over their preferred results. I know that something like reasoned objectivity is broadly achievable, if we value it. But it seems to be happening less and less, and certainly the forcefulness with which DEI has been rammed down our collective cultural throat seems best described as oppressive ideological totalitarianism.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
YOU KNOW WHAT NOBODY HATES EACH OTHER ABOUT YET? BIRD-WATCHING.
I wanted to post this over at /r/slatestarcodex but it's obviously CW material and surely someone should bring it to Scott's attention, as it wins him quite a large number of prophet points I suspect...
NPR reports that these American birds and dozens more will be renamed, to remove human monikers.
And the next day half the world’s newspaper headlines are “Has The Political Correctness Police Taken Over Bird-Watching?” and the other half are “Is Bird-Watching Racist?”. And then bird-watchers and non-bird-watchers and different sub-groups of bird-watchers hold vitriolic attacks on each other that feed back on each other in a vicious cycle for the next six months, and the whole thing ends in mutual death threats and another previously innocent activity turning into World War I style trench warfare.
The story is... well, pretty much exactly what you think it is, I bet.
Get ready to say goodbye to a lot of familiar bird names, like Anna's Hummingbird, Gambel's Quail, Lewis's Woodpecker, Bewick's Wren, Bullock's Oriole, and more.
That's because the American Ornithological Society has vowed to change the English names of all bird species currently named after people, along with any other bird names deemed offensive or exclusionary.
I don't really care? Except that I do care, to just this extent, as I've written before:
When stuff like this happens, one of my first reactions is to reflect on the fact that everyone gets forgotten eventually. Some of us get statues or scholarship funds or university chairs carrying our name or likeness a little farther into the future than might otherwise have occurred, but the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" was always destined to go away someday. Roads and schools and landmarks get renamed, statues are left to crumble.
And yet I concur with you--this sort of thing makes me uncomfortable. But it can't be because they are ending the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" that I had never heard of and could have predicted would eventually vanish anyway. I have wondered in the past whether similar cases bothered me because I didn't approve of the deliberate social engineering that tossing things down the memory hole reveals, but I find even that objection does not quite do it for me. I find that I'm not in principle opposed to people making the world over in their own preferred image, provided they do so within certain rational constraints. So I wondered if I should simply chalk my discomfort up to personal political bias, but this felt wrong, too--for example, I found myself bothered by the tearing down of Confederate statues even though I am not from the American South and had no other discernible reason to favor their preservation by reason of political bias.
At present the best I've managed to come up with is that I am bothered by the publicity of destruction. That is--what would have happened if the ALSC had, beginning last year, simply not mentioned the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" to anyone ever again? Simply conduct business as usual, and if asked by anyone about the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" respond only that the Award was "undergoing some conceptual reorganization in hopes of better-serving our community, but while we workshop it we'd love your participation in some of our alternative programs" or something.
Of course, they don't do this, because someone decided that they would get more attention (=dollars) with a press release on their "core values of diversity and inclusion" coupled with a prima facie sacrificial offering to signal sincerity. If you look very hard at what's happening, it's the memetic equivalent of sacrificing sick animals and weeds instead of the firstling of the flock--there's no real sacrifice taking place here--but the gods of social justice are so far pleased. This is probably because it establishes a precedent, so when they come calling for greater sacrifices--how long before the residents of Seattle demand to live in a state that isn't named for a slave owner?--the practice of signaling your allegiance by tossing things down the memory hole in a way that also alienates you from the Other Tribe has already become so ingrained that no resistance to such demands remains.
Both ideas and people fade, but it is one thing to lose your struggle against time, and something else entirely to be thrown into a volcano by someone trying to prove their loyalty to Moloch.
I am not an ornithologist. I'm not even a bird-watcher. The closest I've ever come is snapping an occasional photo of a bird that catches my attention. These changes have nothing to do with me... except, of course insofar as they represent the continued burning-down of the contributions of "my" culture to humanity's broader understanding of the world. The active removal--dare I say "erasure?"--of the past, so as not to offend the sensibilities of the present.
(But mostly, I'm once more astonished by Scott's peculiar prescience...)
If you have been even peripherally involved in higher education in the United States, then you've heard of Title IX. But if you haven't, here's the U.S. government's blurb:
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) enforces, among other statutes, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Title IX protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance. Title IX states:
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
Title IX is most famous for requiring equal athletic opportunities for men and women, without regard for whether this makes (among other things) any financial sense at all. But Title IX also imposes a variety of reporting requirements on college and university faculty and staff, such that essentially every campus has a Title IX Coordinator (or similar), and many campuses maintain entire offices of Title IX administrative staff. Do they do real, important work? I would argue virtually never--these are bullshit jobs par excellence--with one enormous caveat: they serve as a lightning rod for both civil liability and federal intervention.
(Well isn't that real and important, then? Yes, yes, it's a fair point. But I still think jobs that exist solely to push unnecessary government paperwork are inescapably bullshit jobs. Hiring government actors--executive and judicial--to punish universities for failing to meet politically-imposed quotas on social engineering goals, so that universities must hire administrators to give themselves cover, is the very picture of government stimulating the economy by paying one group of people to dig holes, and another group to follow behind them, filling the holes back up again. But this is not the point of my post.)
The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights fields several thousand sex discrimination complaints every year. Less than 10,000, but close--the DoE's OCR fielded a record 9,498 complaints last year. But that's not the headline.
Here's the headline:
1 Person Lodged 7,339 Sex Discrimination Complaints With Ed Dept. Last Year
You probably read that right.* More than 77% of all sex discrimination complaints filed with the OCR are filed by a single person, at a rate of about 20 complaints per day--and this same individual was responsible for a similar number and percentage of complaints in 2016, and possibly other years as well. Of this person, the office says:
“This individual has been filing complaints for a very long time with OCR and they are sometimes founded ... It doesn’t have to be about their own experience [but] ... There’s not a lot I can tell you about the person.”
* I reserve the right to rapidly backtrack my commentary if it turns out that this "single person" being reported in their system is named "Anonymous" or "No Name Given" or something equally stupid. I am proceeding on the assumption that Catherine Lhamon is neither that stupid, nor being deliberately misleading, and that she did in fact say the things she is quoted here as saying. But I'm including this caveat because I still find it hard to believe that what is being reported is even possible. Part of me still thinks there must be some mistake.
On one hand, like... I'm kind of impressed? There's someone who has decided to make their mark on the world, clearly. That's some tenacity. On the other hand, what the fuck? Surely in any sane world someone would tell this person, "you are abusing the process, and we are going to change the rules to rate-limit your nonsense."
That is... well, not the plan, apparently:
The surge in complaints comes at a time when the agency faces significant challenges: It shrank from nearly 1,100 full-time equivalent staff in FY 1981 to 546 last year and is dealing with a host of issues that reflect the strain placed on schools and students by the pandemic.
Biden, in his March budget address, sought a 27% increase in funding — to $178 million — for the civil rights office to meet its goals. Lhamon, whose 2021 confirmation Senate Republicans tried to block, said she’s grateful for the president’s support and hopes Congress approves the increase.
In FY 1981 the office was still dealing with the fallout of the American government forcibly engineering feminist aims into higher education. At a current budget of $140 million (an average of $250,000 per employee), with very nearly half of its complaints (across all topics, not just sex discrimination) coming from a single individual, what is that additional $38 million supposed to accomplish?
It seems like no matter how dim my view of the federal government gets, there's always some new piece of information out there waiting to assure me that I've yet to grasp the depth of the graft, ineptitude, and corruption of Washington, D.C. I am skeptical that Title IX has accomplished anything of value that would not have been independently accomplished by market forces and social trends. But even if that's wrong, and the early days of Title IX were an important government intervention, I cannot imagine how this particular situation could possibly exist within a sane regulatory framework.
Have you heard of the Female Athlete Triad (FAT)?
If you are a female athlete, or closely associate with female athletes, there's a very good chance that you've heard of the FAT, which has possibly the single most fantastically inapposite acronym in the history of acronyms. On the other hand, if you are neither a female athlete nor closely associated with female athletes, there's a good chance you've never heard of the FAT. The short version is, female athletes often show up at physician's offices experiencing menstrual dysfunction, low energy availability, and decreased bone mineral density. Sometimes this is also associated with that most famous of social contagions, the eating disorder--but often not!
The FAT is an important part of understanding female athletic health. Coaches and trainers (if they're worth anything at all) know to watch for certain warning signs, especially amenorrhea, anemia, and low body weight. Athletes exhibiting even one of these symptoms should, to the best of my understanding, be placed on lighter workout regimes or even excluded from practice altogether; athletes exhibiting all three should be excluded from athletic participation until more detailed medical examination can be done.
The FAT may be somewhat controversial in that attention to it arguably holds women back--a woman who cares more about a gold medal than about having children someday is rather unlikely to care much about amenorrhea (and may even see it as a blessing). But there are other consequences, too--like stress fractures, osteoporosis, bradycardia, and so forth. So people in charge of caring for female athletes--parents, yes, but also coaches and trainers--have for decades been generally regarded as under obligation to monitor women and girls for amenorrhea, anemia, and body weight/eating issues.
Why should you care? Well, recently there has been some culture war brouhaha over Florida (surprised?) weighing certain laws or regulations regarding the monitoring of menstrual health in teen athletes (really, just some standard questions on a standard form). Despite the AP's surprisingly helpful writeup, the Florida High School Athletic Association held an emergency meeting to "reconsider" their forms immediately, rather than waiting for their scheduled meeting later this month.
Certain folks in my social feeds have been going nuts about how monitoring menstrual health is a sneaky way of excluding trans athletes, or secretly learning who has gotten an illegal (?) abortion, and of course--it's all on Ron DeSantis, somehow. Time magazine, for example, seems happy to selectively report on the matter, as does Florida Politics. Advocate asks "why!?" Apparently, people have been asking "why!?" for months.
They've also been getting the same answer for months: "this is to make sure athletics is not endangering these girls' health." This is nothing new, and is something many states check. Should states check this sort of thing? I can imagine a certain sort of libertarian declaring that, no, this is unnecessary. But by and large it is the not the libertarians asking these questions--it seems to primarily be the people looking for something, anything to prevent Ron DeSantis from becoming President in 2024.
And they're even, apparently, willing to ignore and/or unwind a thirty-year-old staple of youth sports medicine to get the rhetoric they're after.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
There are of course a million angles on this, but the one that just got me was the "Republicans pounce" headline from NBC:
Forget the sense of defilement (in the old "despoil their temples" sense of defilement), the sense of entitlement on display (both in the video's creation and in the staffer's "I dindu nuffin" and "I play the gay card" and "I'm gonna sue" responses), how this impacts stereotypes of gay men as oversexed wantons, comparisons to the consequences of the January 6 2021 "riots," jokes about whose chair that was and what she's going to do about it...
Forget all that. Somehow, the headline is Republicans pounce. I don't know how something can be so simultaneously brazen and banal, but there it is. Totally unapologetic partisan propaganda from a major news network, just the most painfully obvious and insanely unprofessional bullshit approach to burying the lede, and I know they do this all the time but come on. We've got full-on video of gay sex in a Senate hearing room and these so-called "journalists" can't see it as anything but an opportunity to run interference for the Democrats?
I'm a big fan of the Free Press, in the old "fourth estate" sense. But I'm not sure there are any legacy media outlets left that aren't simply Democratic political action committees that murdered the First Amendment and now prance about wearing its desiccated skin, cultural wolves in political sheep's clothing.
It is... interesting... to see all this discussion about "progressive male role models" given that the progressive memespace has long been, and mostly still is, dominated by gender eliminativists. The elevation of fringe-of-a-fringe transsexual issues to the "cause du jour" has of course introduced irreconcilable metaphysics into the discourse, but coalition building has ever been thus. The philosophical work underpinning extant views on gender goes back over a century, to Nikolay Chernyshevsky's declaration that
people will be happy when there will be neither women nor men
and philosophical feminism has been broadly gender-eliminativist pretty much ever since.
All of that to say: progressives can't do "male role models" because progressives are fundamentally opposed to the existence of men. Sure, sure--ask your local progressive, they might very well deny it. But this is the standard motte and bailey that exists between thought leaders and political movements everywhere, the disconnect between political theory and political practice. You can't read feminism without stumbling over gender eliminativism, and progressivism is avowedly feminist. "Eliminate gender" is right up there with "abolish the family" on a list of things progressives explicitly and actually want to accomplish, even if these are things they're willing to compromise on for the moment, for the movement.
And you can't really believe that gender needs to be abolished, while simultaneously believing that anyone needs male role models. At best you might say something like, "well, we have to meet the little troglodytes where they are, so we need some... mannish... role models--but not too mannish! Nothing, you know, toxic, nothing overtly heteronormative..." and you've already lost the plot.
This is just another clear case of progressive dreams running headlong into the unyielding embrace of biological reality. People are incredibly plastic! And yet we are not, apparently, infinitely plastic. "Cultural construction" can do a lot, but it cannot lightly obliterate thousands of years of natural selection.
Talk of "misogyny" simply misses the point, and the problem. The only really committed misogynists I've ever met have been women. The men I know who seem to hate women, very obviously genuinely love women--but are angry that they have been denied access to women, by whatever means and for whatever reason. Sometimes it's literally just their own unrealistic expectations. Sometimes they have been badly mistreated by women. Sometimes they are bewildered by the refusal of women in their lives to behave as women. You cannot use "role models" to train people away from this kind of behavior; heterosexual men denied access to women will never just accept that fact. At best, maybe you build sexbots sufficiently indistinguishable from tradwives or something, allowing biological women to pursue whatever bland "non-binary" life they imagine lies at the end of the eliminativist project, but until those bots can do particularly biological things like have babies, there will still be men who dedicate their lives to finding a woman--and, sometimes, going off the rails when faced with sufficiently brutal failure.
Or so it seems to me. I think the progressive response is probably retrenchment on the idea that, surely, anyone can be taught to be anything, given sufficiently quality teaching methods. ("We just need more government!") But their real goal isn't to make better men, it's to make a world where there are no men, in the sense that the social gender binary has been eradicated. Recruiting masculine role models to achieve that end is flatly contradictory.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Let me give you a slightly different example.
In higher education, the gossip right now is revolving around perceptions that students are cheating more, less inclined to come to class, more fragile with feedback and being challenged, less prepared for university-level work, etc. I'm not aware of any specific, careful empirical data here, and there is certainly a tendency among professors to complain about their worst cases. But certainly my own experience has aligned with that of the gossip.
I grew up hearing all kinds of stories about how those who grew up during the Great Depression had a tendency toward hoarding, "upcycling," and so forth. "Post traumatic stress disorder" has come to encompass a lot more than shell-shock these days. What's weird, to me, about post-COVID sociological changes is how just wildly unnecessary the whole mess appears to have been. My students aren't skipping class and sloughing assignments because they lost their families to the plague; they're skipping class and sloughing assignments because most of them spent a year or two living under government lockdowns, being assured all the while that this would not impact their life progression. But it already has.
Did you know that six U.S. states just waived the bar exam for law graduates to become lawyers. The bar exam, which is supposed to be the line between "competent" and "incompetent" representation, and state governments just said--eh, just wave everyone through.
Someone will undoubtedly say--well what were they supposed to do? I get it, really. People spent two years or more improvising at every turn. Mistakes were bound to be made. But it is depressing to me that so much of that improvising involved total abandonment of anything approaching ordinary common sense in favor of absolutely maximum panicking. That sort of thing is bound to have long term impacts.
It seems to me the slatestarcodex subreddit has been fully normified.
It's Eternal September everywhere, and the SSC modteam barely exists on reddit anymore. Baj hasn't posted on reddit in five months, Cheeze occasionally moderates but was pretty low-participation already by the time I became a moderator, Zorba is busy with this place when he's not busy with life, Scott himself is a token mod to satisfy Bakkot's aesthetic, and Bakkot seems to be one of those people who refuses to ever give up control of anything even when he no longer contributes to its well-being nor even especially pays attention to it. HarryPotter5777 does most of the modding (which is not much) but this appears to be more a small extension of their moderation of other communities.
The topic of exiling the Motte from SSC has been done to death, but I think in retrospect what was exiled was not "the Culture War thread," it was "the spirit of open discourse." Obviously you can't have the CW thread without that spirit, but I am increasingly persuaded that you can't have the spirit of open discourse with topic bans. You can't have Free Speech with an asterisk; the asterisk strangles the life out of the conversation, quickly or slowly. The whole enterprise withers on the vine; if anything does remain, it's mostly just virtue signalling.
It's frankly frustrating, because damned if I'm not tempted to slap some of the more annoying people around here with topic bans, sometimes! And there are still occasionally some good threads that crop up on the SSC sub from time to time, and in other places in the diaspora. But even Astral Codex Ten is a shadow of Scott circa 2015, because he's muzzled himself (or allowed himself to be muzzled) in spite of his increased freedom and wealth (or perhaps because of it--he now has something substantial to lose!). Respectability and stultification seem repeatedly to arrive hand-in-hand.
E: Ill remove if consensus building.
You specified that it "seems to me" and you didn't say "everyone knows," so I think you're good.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
it doesn't go far enough in developing a positive public perception of Jews
What bothers me about extant accounts of rampant anti-semitism (in the United States) is the same thing that bothers me about claims like "police are murdering unarmed black men by the thousands"--they're just empirically false. Anti-semitism (in the sense of being anti-Jew) is indeed rampant in many countries in the Middle East--and yet Americans are much more likely to report unfavorable feelings toward evangelicals, and much less likely to report favorable feelings toward Muslims... and so on, and so forth. In fact, in the U.S. no religion is viewed more favorably, on balance, than Jews.
I don't much care about the Holocaust. I don't deny that it happened, I certainly do not share your doubts (as I've encountered them in the past, anyway) about most of the empirical claims made by prominent historians on these matters. But I do think the Holocaust was not special. Wholesale slaughter of ethnic, religious, and political outgroups is the story of human history, and Jews are neither the most recent victims, nor the most numerous. I think it is a better world where we are driven to do that sort of thing less, preferably never, and to whatever extent "Holocaust education" creates that world, I don't have any serious complaints about it. But I do find it absurd to lean on past slaughters in pursuit of present aims. I had nothing to do with slavery in the American South, I had nothing to do with World War II. The people still fighting those battles, from whatever side they fight them, are boring to me.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Boise Pride cancels "Drag Kids" event after a number of sponsors withdrew, with a predictable dose of corporate doublespeak.
I have a lot of thoughts about this, but what is actually bothering me most right now is the coverage. Particularly this gem:
Several opponents of the festival on social media repeatedly referred to supporters as “groomers” – a nod to the unfounded QAnon conspiracy theory that Democrats and the elite run an underground pedophilic, satanic, sex cult.
As far as I can tell, this is a publicly-funded news organization actively spreading outright disinformation--FUD, really--about the term "groomer." It reminds me of when "cultural Marxism" became an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory" practically overnight (no big deal, the term "critical theory" recaptured the energy). It reminds me of the sudden fluidity of online dictionary definitions every time a Democrat politician tells an obvious lie. It reminds me of Clarence Thomas being referred to by Harry Reid as a white man.
"Groomer" is effective rhetoric, so I can understand why certain groups want it killed. But like... how is "Drag Kids" even remotely plausibly not grooming? Some of the talking points I see floating on Twitter are, like, "What about child beauty pageants?" But this moves me not a single iota--I hate child beauty pageants for exactly the same reason. It's weird! It's creepy! Or to put it in less emotionally-charged terms: it's not something kids do, when they grow up in loving, healthy, stable environments. At best it's a symptom of deeper troubles; at worst, it's a direct cause of some of those troubles. I mean, yes, emotional and physical and sexual abuse, but also just long term psychological problems. Have you seen the stats on child movie stars? Olympic athletes? I don't think it's necessarily fair to insist that we strip away the culture war angles entirely, but if I'm steelmanning "Drag Kids" the best I can come up with is "this is a new manifestation of an old and widespread form of child abuse, namely, using children for adult entertainment, often by putting inappropriate pressure on them to participate." Are we really going to say Hollywood isn't rife with child abuse? (Hmm, they're also mostly Democrats...) And when someone says "Drag Kids is sexualizing children" only to be met with "no, you're making it sexual, you right-wing pervert, we're just having silly fun"--it's maddening. Like, really? I'm supposed to believe that you're putting your kid in a leather thong for silly fun? Be serious. If that's not grooming, nothing is.
Am I ranting? This feels pretty ranty. But I do have a serious question. What's the appropriate mistake-theory response to strategic abuses of language? How should I react, if not with ranting, to a transparent attempt to tar people who clearly want to protect children from manifest harms as mere conspiracy theorists? I am a bit old school, I learned to hate the phrase "think of the children" before many of you were born, but surely sometimes we do, in fact, need to protect children. Not incorporating child-sexualizing events into our civic religion seems like a pretty obvious way to do that.
And, I suppose, someone will point out that Boise Pride's "Drag Kids" grooming hour did indeed get canceled! The system works! The subtext there being--what am I complaining about? Well, in brief, I'm still complaining about the news coverage, which has very big "Republicans pounce" energy. I would like to be able to seriously criticize that sort of thing without actively culture warring, but I don't feel like I have a lot of good mistake-theory tools to respond with. Maybe that's the point, I guess--to try to maneuver people into a position where they feel sheepish for acting like an "aggressor" in the face of kids having "silly fun." Which seems, to me, like an especially evil way of being a conflict theorist.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Is Holocaust denial becoming a more tolerated topic on this forum?
Tolerated by whom?
Revisionists occasionally popped their head up at the subreddit, but as far as I remember, their comments were always downvoted.
Some very highly-upvoted comments in the subreddit were in this vein. IIRC, at least one of those was removed by AEO.
The problem with Holocaust deniers from my perspective is that they're boring. I've been shown a lot of interesting evidence over the years that some number less than exactly six million Jews were killed by Nazi Germany. I've also been shown a lot of interesting evidence over the years that there is basically no way the Germans were directly responsible for the deaths of less than several million Jews as the result of an explicit ethnic cleansing program, which makes the other stuff seem like motivated nitpicking. The religious fervor with which the Holocaust now often operates to shield specific Jews from cogent criticism is often absurd. But the level of ethnic criticism directed toward Jews as a group is even more absurd, especially given the diverse range of orthodoxies and ethnicities contained within the word "Jewish."
There is a phenomenon I have observed, over the years, where young people will discover something (often, sex/romance) that they've never experienced before, that they have arguably been denied for various (good!) reasons over the years but which, as emerging adults, they find very important to their worldview. They then become instant evangelists, full of zeal for the amazing, eye-opening, perspective-shifting truth they've uncovered. I've seen it a lot among the newly-atheist and the newly-political. I've seen it a fair bit in connection with particular diets, with natural childbirth, with animal rights activism. It's very popular right now in connection with race and gender. But I think the same thing happens the first time certain individuals learn that there might be some propaganda and/or nuance to account for in connection with the Holocaust. Suddenly a piece of Sacred Social Machinery appears Broken, and to a certain kind of contrarian mind, it's blood in the water: the frenzy begins.
It's enough of a pattern that I suspect it's built in, somehow, to our social consciousness. I can gin up a just-so evo-psych story if you like, but you can probably imagine it yourself. Doubting the dogmas you've received, and then coming to terms with the world around you, is a story at least as old as human civilization itself. But there aren't a lot of spaces where that sort of thing is tolerated "out loud," so to speak. The stronger the narrative, then, the more likely we are to field its doubters here. It's Eternal September everywhere, but we're one of the only social groups I know that explicitly takes a gentle hand to heretics of all kinds--even our own.
Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs just seem to have something off in their brains to me.
It's super consistent behavior, though; they like attention and they found a larger audience, or they tend to follow the crowd and the crowd changed directions, or, less charitably but perhaps more accurately, they like to bully others and they found a less costly way to be horrible.
I grew up in a religious community. I was always unorthodox, and was treated poorly by a lot of people who were regarded as "upstanding" for their piety. I expressed doubts about God as a kid, so no one is surprised to hear me say such things as an adult. But the same individual people who were most likely to mete out social punishment for my little heresies are still the people most likely to mete out social punishment for my heresies, only now they're various shades of woke and my heresies are political instead of theological.
Whether they've stayed in the faith or separated from it, basically all of them are ultra-orthodox woke advocates now (mostly for LGBT issues, but depending on their circumstances also for a rainbow of disabilities, with autism--or "autism"--and obesity being common pet projects in addition to the usual vapid strains of so-called anti-racism). The ones who haven't blocked me on their social media feeds are still the same bullies they've always been (I assume the same is true for the ones who took the step of blocking me, but I can't guarantee it). No amount of hair dye or piercings can hide the fact that they are still doing everything they can to punish independent thought or questioning of the party line. That it's a different party line is irrelevant except, perhaps, as a "born again" bona fide. As the Wizard sings--"the most celebrated are the rehabilitated..."
Freddie deBoer's "Planet of Cops" tells the story well, though I don't think he ever quite twigs to the shared identity of the conservative cops he complains about, and the woke cops he sees as imitating them. When he criticizes religious conservatives as natural cops, he memorably cites William Burroughs:
William Burroughs summarized the whole social conservative movement perfectly as “decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.”
And my response is: it's still the "decent church-going women" (and, often, men), they still wear mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces. Often, literally the same actual people. They just left their old church and joined your new, political not-a-church.
Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs are some of the most internally consistent people in the world. If feeling morally superior to others and reveling in hating and even seeking the extermination of the right people is something you enjoy, the difference between Nazis and Twitter SJWs is little more than a palette swap.
What in the fresh hell, Pennsylvania?
Has the Motte discussed John Fetterman? If so, I missed it... I admit there are enough races I'm watching across the country that it is hard to keep track of them all. But in case you, too, have missed it, John Fetterman is the Democratic candidate for the seat of outgoing Senator Pat Toomey, one of 7 Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment circus. Seven days before winning the Primary, John Fetterman had a stroke.
I am not a medical doctor. For all I know, Fetterman will make a full recovery, eventually. But as of right now, the guy is one step above monosyllabic. Which made tonight's debate absolutely excruciating to watch. Over the course of the night, PredictIt shifted ten cents in favor of Fetterman's opponent, the Wizard of Mehmet Oz. And yet most media accounts of the debate are steadfastly reporting only the substance, such as it was. No surprise--the media has been carrying water for Fetterman for weeks. But like... really? You can't report a single sentence saying, "Fetterman was clearly not up to the task." Watching people hit Twitter to unironically praise him for "doing really well, for a stroke victim!" is shocking. The level of partisanship required to vote for Fetterman at this point simply boggles the mind. On the flip side, #Festerman was briefly trending on Twitter before (I presume) someone elbowed their censors.
Of course, we can trust our outspoken President to just tell it like it is. Perhaps President Biden understands better than anyone, given the possibility that he, too, might simply be functioning as a sock puppet for the Democratic establishment. The counterargument that criticizing Fetterman's cognition is some kind of "ableism" is just hollow. This is not a man who can do the job of Senator, at least not right now, and to pretend otherwise just seems exploitative to me. (And calling that a "bad faith" argument seems willfully ignorant. The man can barely speak, that's much more than an "auditory processing" problem.)
Of course, voting has been open for a month in Pennsylvania, and the state has already declared its intention to turn a blind eye to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling as it counts undated ballots. So in addition to potentially electing someone with the mental faculties of a young child to high federal office, Pennsylvania is also setting up a judicial crisis for its election process.
And all because Oz is, well, a Trumpist. If this is what midterms look like, 2024 is going to be... just something else. I can't even imagine. It's simply too much.
tl;dr: Do any of you read Portugese?
I am having one of those moments where I feel like I must be losing my mind, because the alternative is that the world is even stupider than I already thought, which is just too depressing to countenance. I was doing some research on education for what are, ultimately, culture war purposes (I think parents are more important than teachers, and I think people to my political Left get this horribly wrong all the time) and I came across a citation that seemed potentially useful. I found it in this document (PDF warning) as both the title and on page one:
Politics are an important influence in schools; as Paulo Freire stated in his 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “all education is political; teaching is never a neutral act” (p.19).
Now, any time I see a reference to critical theory from the 1960s, it piques my interest, because it has been my experience that a lot of people work very hard to obfuscate the origins of what is currently being called "Wokism," and used to be called "cultural Marxism" (not to be confused with the conspiracy theory that "Cultural Marxism" is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory--I assume Paulo Freire was not a Jew, but I admit I do not know for sure). Anyway I immediately went looking for a copy of Paulo Freire's seminal work so I check the quote out in context. Fortunately, the author of the paper appears to be a music professor at McGill, so the citation is right there for my use!
Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.
I fire up the Internet Archive and find a 1972 edition of the book (the UK printing, apparently) and turn to page 19, which... does not contain the quote. I pull up other editions--there's a 30th anniversary edition, a 50th anniversary edition, someone clearly regards this as an important text--and not only does the quote in question appear nowhere in these pages, but chunks like "education is political" or "neutral act" also return no results. Maybe the text search is wrong? Maybe the scan is bad? Hmm, no, a quick sampling finds the OCR did a bang-up job, actually.
Googling the full quote generates a number of results. The University of Sheffield's "Education Matters" blog gives the citation "Freire (1970: 19)." But no--the 1970 printing also lacks the quote. Dr. Fatima Nicdao (she/her) suggests it's actually (1968), but that's the Portugese date of publication, as near as I can tell. Anti-Racism in Higher Education: An Action Guide for Change is also pretty sure the quote appears on page 19, as does Reframing Assessment to Center Equity: Theories, Models, and Practices and Developing and Evaluating Quality Bilingual Practices in Higher Education, to name only three of the books that agree on this citation. You may notice that all of these books were published in the last two years.
At this point I'm thinking, "I've got to be missing something. Maybe I'm making this too difficult for myself. I haven't even checked Wikipedia!" There I find the following:
There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the "practice of freedom", the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
— Jane Thompson, drawing on Paulo Freire
(emphasis added)
At this point I am feeling increasingly confident that the quotation is spurious. Now, it seems pretty clear to me that Freire would agree with the quotation! I don't think any of these people are misrepresenting his view (though they might be oversimplifying it). I'm able to date the quote "teaching is never a neutral act" back as far as 1998, in a book entitled (of course) White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America Similarly, "all education is political" goes back at least as far as a textbook from 1996:
What are some examples of Freire's idea that all education is political?
As an aside, page 181 of that textbook is also of historic interest, and reads as part of a chapter on "Teaching to Empower Minority Students":
The emphasis on empowerment is part of a broader educational development referred to as critical theory. Critical theory developed from Paolo Freire's work, a reconsideration of the work of Dewey, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Lois Weis, Alma Flor Ada, Jim Cummins, Stanley Aronowitz, and others. The following concepts are central to critical theory, and are useful in trying to comprehend and analyze your own teaching experience.
(Here is the list, for the curious, with definitions elided.)
Consciousness ...
Culture ...
Domination ...
Empowerment ...
Ethics ...
Hegemony ...
Hidden Curriculum ...
Ideological Domination ...
Ideologies ...
Social Class ...
Social Construction of Knowledge ...
Anywhow, I am terminally crippled with self-doubt, and proving a negative is hard. Part of me is certain that the very first reply to this rant is going to be "oh here's a direct link to the page where he wrote that, you just missed it." But I cannot find any evidence at all that Paolo Freire ever actually wrote the sentence, "all education is political; teaching is never a neutral act." Certainly those words do not seem to appear in any English-language translation of anything he has written. Which, who cares, right? Spurious quotations are totally an Internet thing, Abraham Lincoln said so.
But I care, because now instead of finding an academically useful citation I've spent three hours going down the rabbit hole of a spurious quotation. How can so many people be publishing stuff with this quote in it, and none of them paused long enough to check their source? I mean, I guess this is in the end just a particularly academic example of the old "too good to check." But I'm frustrated in part because none of the foregoing accomplishes what I actually intended to accomplish today, which was to make progress on a scholarly paper. There's no place for me to publish a peer-reviewed essay entitled "Spurious Quotations in Education Theory: Jesus Christ You Critical Theorists Are the Worst Academics Alive, Check Your God Damn Sources For Once, You're a Fucking Embarrassment to the Profession."
So please. Embarrass me, instead. Find evidence that Freire actually wrote the quoted phrase. Somewhere, anywhere, in any language! Because right now I'm feeling extremely uncharitable toward my outgroup on this, and it's such a petty thing, I know, but it just feels emblematic of the entire critical enterprise of focusing on "whatever works" over and above any commitment to truth, facts, history, academic rigor, professionalism, or even taking two seconds to check the damn source.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’
I quite enjoyed this interview with Alex Byrne, a professor of philosophy at MIT. As an epistemologist his career was built on arguments about the nature of color (or colour, if you prefer) but in the past six years or so he has taken up questions about gender, eventually having a book dropped by Oxford over it. I was not previously aware that he is married to academic biologist Carole Hooven, an apparent victim of "cancel culture" over her writing on the biology of sex.
No one who has followed trans advocacy lately will find much of surprise in the interview, I suspect, but from a professional standpoint I really appreciated him laying this out:
Philosophers talk a big game. They say, ‘Oh, of course, nothing’s off the table. We philosophers question our most deeply held assumptions. Some of what we say might be very disconcerting or upsetting. You just won’t have any firm ground to stand on after the philosopher has done her work and convinced you that you don’t even know that you have two hands. After all, you might be the victim of an evil demon or be a hapless brain in a vat.’
But when the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing. When there is the real prospect of being socially shamed or ostracised by their peers for questioning orthodoxy, many philosophers do not have the stomach for it.
Most of the professional philosophers I've met over the years pride themselves on "challenging" their students' beliefs. This has most often come up in the context of challenging religious dogmas, including faith in God. They (we, I guess I have to say) boast of teaching "critical thinking" through the practice of Socratic inquiry, and assuredly not through any crass indoctrination! And yet in my life I have been to dozens of philosophical conferences, and I cannot remember a single one where I did not at some point encounter the uncritical peddling of doctrinaire political leftism. And perhaps worse: when I have raised even mild pushback to that peddling, usually by raising questions that expose obvious contradictions in a relatively innocuous way, it has never inspired a serious response. Just... uncomfortable laughter, usually. Philosophers--professional argument-makers!--shy away from such argumentation. And yet they do not hesitate to skulk about in the background, wrecking people's careers where possible rather than meeting them in open debate.
I do have some wonderful colleagues and I think there are still many good philosophy professors out there; Byrne appears to be numbered among them. But I have to say that my own experiences conform to his descriptions here. I suspect a lot of it is down to the administration-driven replacement of good philosophers with agenda-driven partisans, which appears to be happening across most departments of higher education, these days. But that is only my best guess.
Don't sleep on this excellent Caplan piece. The man is a national treasure.
In "Lawsuits are the Hitman of the State," Caplan makes the case that the Texas "Heartbeat Act" is functionally equivalent to workplace discrimination laws that punish racist or sexist remarks.
(One thing I would be interested to see further discussion from Caplan on is the development of the idea that having a "job" is a "right," but he doesn't go into that in this piece. Basically, the Constitution is a document of enumerated powers, meaning the federal government can't--in theory--do anything the Constitution doesn't explicitly allow it to do. But the judicially-crafted breadth of the Fourteenth Amendment, combined with loose interpretation of the Commerce and Tax-and-Spend clauses, metastasized through the 20th century into today's rather grabby American legal system. This has given rise to the idea that you haven't just got a right to your own labor, but that you have a right to personally profit from other people's capital, at their expense, even if you contribute nothing of value to the enterprise.)
Something I really like about Caplan is how concise he manages to be while making absolutely cutting points:
The government starts with the blatantly illegal goal of banning “bigots from expressing their opinions in a way that abuses or offends their co-workers.” Then instead of respecting those limits, the government’s judicial branch gets creative: “Murder’s illegal? Fine, we’ll hire hitmen instead.” By affirming liability, it dangles piles of cash in front of potential plaintiffs to terrorize employers into banning what the government, legally, must allow.
Precedent on what counts as "government action" is remarkably unhelpful in understanding these things. Georgia v. McCollum (1992) is all about how a defendant in voir dire acts as an organ of the state when they select their own jury, and therefore are forbidden from considering race when seeking to exclude potential jurors. This, even though in virtually every other regard, as Justice O'Connor then noted, "our [past] decisions specifically establish that criminal defendants and their lawyers are not government actors when they perform traditional trial functions." Whether any particular action counts as "government action" proscribed by the Fourteenth Amendment does not seem to depend at all on who actually took the action, in other words, but only on how the Court wants the case to come out.
So I think Caplan is dead on, here--the Civil Rights movement basically shredded any kind of principled interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, in pursuit of socially-engineered results.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
This is a great write-up, thanks. I really enjoyed it.
I see two somewhat separate theses competing for dominance here. One is something like "Klaus Schwab is nobody important, it's kind of stupid to worry about him." The other is something like "the papers people give at WEF are not important, it's kind of stupid to worry about them." I'm well persuaded of the former (in fact until I read your post, I had never consciously heard of Klaus Schwab and could certainly not have named him as the organizer of WEF); am I still an embarrassment if I am skeptical of the latter?
The reason I ask is that I am sometimes inspired to revisit old documents from seemingly trivial or irrelevant conferences, and I repeatedly find the words of John Maynard Keynes remarkably insightful:
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas….
I have lived long enough to notice that American culture is now at the bottom of a great many slippery slopes which I was personally assured, by very apparently sensible people, were not slippery slopes at all. Is there a grand conspiracy out there plotting to feed me bugs? Surely not. Is there a prospiracy to make it expensive-to-impossible to keep meat on my menu? Yes, definitely. Is there a grand conspiracy out there plotting to put me in a pod? I can't imagine. Is there a prospiracy to shrink people's houses generally? Well, yes, there definitely is.
These various prospiracies do not rely on the cunning of Klaus Schwab or, really, anyone else. At this point, they are mostly--though not entirely!--academic scribblings. Which I can certainly dismiss as academic scribblings--if I'm not at all worried that some government bureaucrat or other might suddenly take them up. For example, this article from January 2022 did not start a culture war spat over gas stoves, but a recent critical comment from a Biden appointee on the Consumer Product Safety Commission did. I'm sure it's nothing! And as long as I continue to be sure it is nothing, then I am no obstacle to gas stove critics making it into something, possibly in such a way that by the time I say anything at all, I have already definitively lost on the issue.
Of course, this isn't always what happens--sometimes crazed academic scribblings never become more than that. But it is difficult to know for certain which ideas will take hold in advance. If I should not be concerned about what people talk about at the WEF, pray tell--what should I be concerned about? How can I know which objectionable academic plots at merely fanciful, and which I must strangle in the crib if I am to ensure they never harm me or mine? You have suggested that conservatives who worry about liberal globalists have a "complete inability to figure out where political and economic power actually lie," so maybe you can tell me--where does political and economic power actually lie, if not with the academic conferences that have been deliberately and successfully shaping broad swathes of American and global culture pretty much as they please--since the 1960s or 1970s at latest?
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Uh...
You've gotten reported twice in the ten minutes this post has been up. I immediately recognized you from your mountain of AAQCs back in the old country, but this is apparently just your third post here on the new site, and it reads like artificially-breathless marketing copy, to the point that I immediately checked to see if this was copypasta. At minimum, even though you never outright say "vote for Vivek!" this seems like a pretty clear example of recruiting for a cause.
You're free to make your case for Vivek, of course, but phrases like "multi-disciplinary genius," "dazzlingly bright young maverick," and "young and daring patriot" are, in their own brightly-smiling way, egregiously obnoxious--it's pure, unapologetic rhetoric of the kind people use to subtly build consensus and conformity. I did hesitate to even say anything; given how often I'm forced to moderate a black-pilled flame-out, someone making a positive case is automatically a breath of fresh air. But this doesn't read like @Sizzle50 making a good argument, this reads like @Sizzle50 writing ad copy.
Content advisory: untagged spoilers for like a dozen movies below!
The other day I watched A Man Called Otto, Tom Hanks' 2022 remake of a Swedish movie (En man som heter Ove, based on a book of the same name) about an elderly man whose suicide attempt is interrupted by an Iranian immigrant, who gradually teaches him to live again. The Hanks edition hits a variety of CW notes; the Iranian is replaced with a Hispanic woman, the Swedish ending depicting Ove's reunion with his deceased wife in the afterlife is gone, and a homosexual character is replaced with a trans character (hashtag-gay-erasure). But there is one CW note in particular that really stood out to me. At the end of the movie, Otto dies and leaves his house and his car to the Hispanic woman, as well as enough money to fund the education of her three Hispanic children.
Maybe this would not have stood out to me had I not coincidentally recently re-watched the 2013's middling dystopic sci-fi, Elysium. If you've not seen this one, it is a story about an unusually talented blue collar laborer played by Matt Damon, presumably because everyone liked him as an unusually talented blue collar laborer in Stillwater, Good Will Hunting, and, uh, that artist guy in Titanic maybe? (Kidding!) Anyway this time blue-collared Matt lives in a Los Angeles peopled entirely by Mexicans (except for him), who spend most of their time trying to cross the border of space (illegally) so they can get high-tech medical treatment aboard the space station where all the billionaires moved when Earth got too crowded or warm or, who knows. For unimportant reasons, Matt finds that he's dying, so he goes to his coyote uh human trafficker spaceship launching ex (crime) boss to... Jesus Christ, who wrote this movie? Anyway, the moral of the story is that Matt gives his life to save the life of a young Hispanic girl while also making everyone on Earth a "citizen" so that suddenly the boundless healthcare resources the billionaires have been hoarding for no reason at all can be immediately deployed to cure all illness on Earth, the end.
So this got me thinking about other movies I've seen with the same central beat: selfish single white male with nothing to lose learns to care again by temporarily filling the role of mentor or savior to a not-white young person, then gives (often, loses) everything so the not-white youngster can inherit a brighter future. Gran Torino (2008). Snowpiercer (2013).
But while many lists of "problematic white savior" movies include these titles, I feel like there's a distinction to be drawn where the not-white character is treated as a successor, rather than as a success. In Finding Forrester (2000), there's a not-white successor, but the "white savior" doesn't especially give anything up. In The Blind Side (2009) the "white savior" isn't looking for a successor (despite the professed concerns of the NCAA).
And I don't think that it's quite the same phenomenon as "expendable man dies for the woman he loves." Never mind that I already mentioned Titanic (1997)--the Bond movie No Time To Die (2021) might be what I'm talking about if Bond had died to save Nomi instead of Madeleine, but (to the best of my recollection!) he did not. I suppose Luke Skywalker biting it to preserve Palpatine's bloodline might be an example of what I'm talking about--definitely would if Rey was not-white, and definitely would if the sequels had focused more on Finn becoming a Jedi.
So I feel like I've identified four clear examples of the trope I'm spotting (to review: A Man Called Otto, Elysium, Gran Torino, Snowpiercer). I know better than to expect TVTropes to have a "non-straight-white-hypercapable-male successor" trope, but I did look around and do not think that Changing of the Guard, Take Up My Sword, Taking Up the Mantle, White Man's Burden, or similar tropes quite apply. Likewise, many people will identify the trope I have in mind as a (correspondingly problematic) "white savior" story, except that most "white savior" stories aren't BIPOC successor stories. Rather, this is taking the expendability of men--long a cultural staple in the West--and mixing it up with a not-even-remotely-subtle hint at White Replacement.
I think the reason I even noticed the pattern is that I have a long fascination with Rudyard Kipling's infamous poem, "The White Man's Burden." Specifically, the people I know who regard the poem as highly racist almost always also talk a great deal about "privilege," without ever seeming to notice the noblesse oblige implied by the idea of checking that privilege. There seems to be a deeply unresolved contradiction in "woke" spaces, whereby whites are simultaneously obligated to elevate others, and forbidden from even imagining they have the capacity to do so. In the trope I'm trying to track, the acceptable excuse seems to be that the (grizzled, lonely, etc.) white man gets something from the successor, namely a "new lease on life," such that he can then return the favor by then literally dying and dedicating his entire legacy to assure the future of someone else's children, children who are not even his co-ethnics.
(TVTropes does have a Cuckold page, but this is also not quite what I'm talking about... I think!)
So here are your discussion questions for the day:
-
Is there a name for this trope already? Have I missed a TVTropes pages somewhere? A RibbonFarm article? An obscure media studies dissertation?
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I can't watch every movie, or even remember all the movies I've watched. Can you think of any other movies/TV shows/other media to add to the four I've identified?
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I also can't think of any inverted examples. Can you think of any media in which the trope is inverted? How often do hypercompetent heroes "of color" learn to love whites and then give up their lives to ensure that several white children can afford to go to college? (Does the Wizard from Shazam! count, maybe, kinda?)
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Perhaps most importantly... is there any possibility at all that the phenomenon isn't blatantly deliberate agenda-pushing?
Naturally, you are not limited to these questions--this is a discussion board, not a MOOC. But I've managed to stump myself so I'm interested in what you all make of this.
Lots of big Supreme Court decisions this week, all important in various ways--none, if you ask me, likely to be nearly as impactful as imagined by either their proponents or opponents. But I was struck by a particular take on the religious freedom in commerce case that I saw popping up in a few places today.
Very roughly, here's the deal: American courts can only decide "cases and controversies." This is a procedural thing, basically you need a plaintiff who has actually been harmed in some cognizable way before you can file a lawsuit. Sometimes this means you need someone willing to engage in a little civil disobedience, breaking the law for the express purpose of getting prosecuted. "Plaintiff shopping" is something activist lawyers have been doing for centuries. But to layfolk this can look a little suspicious, in much the way that forum shopping can seem suspicious. In fact American law is mostly indifferent to this kind of gamesmanship, and in some cases we even regard it as a clever thing to do (at least, when our ingroup pulls it off).
The CNN story presents itself as a "just the facts" observation that--hey, here's a party to the facts of this case who claims he didn't do what the record says he did! Isn't that interesting? Gosh, how "concerning," he says! Nobody even thought to contact him in six years!
"I don’t necessarily think that would be a tipping point in this case at all, but at the very least … a case of this magnitude should be corroborated, should be fact checked along the way."
No one is saying this changes anything, oh, no! Just, isn't it suspicious? (Is that... winking I hear?) Well, regardless, Stewart is only identified by his first name; CNN was able to contact him "through information in court filings." Although, in another funny coincidence,
Stewart, who previously worked for CNN, said that he is a web designer himself...
Now, CNN is only a mid-sized comedy troupe, but it does rival some legitimate news organizations in size and scope. Still, what are the odds, huh?
I've got several friends in my social feeds sharing the story, now, making snide remarks about how Lorie Smith clearly ginned up this whole case out of nothing. Of course, the CNN story doesn't actually say that; it just reminds the reader how suspicious it is for a plaintiff to have, shall we say, gussied up their case.
But the point of this post is not to take the piss out of CNN. Rather, what struck me was one other remarkable coincidence. There is another incredibly famous LGB rights case from the Supreme Court in which the actual facts of the case are completely irrelevant to the holding: Lawrence v. Texas.
That link is to a New Yorker article called "Extreme Makeover." If you're not familiar with Lawrence v. Texas, this was the 2003 SCOTUS case in which Justice Kennedy declared that the government has no business telling you who you can have sex with, as long as it's consensual and you're in the privacy of your home. Much like the later Obergefell case, Kennedy's opinion in Lawrence is packed with paeans to the sanctity of love and the primacy of intimacy--so packed, indeed, that there is essentially no room for coherent legal analysis! But here's the crazy bit:
There was no gay sex in Lawrence. Indeed, there was no gay couple in Lawrence.
The plaintiffs were gay men, charged under Texas' anti-sodomy statute. If you haven't heard the story, you really must read the New Yorker article. But in short, Lawrence and Garner were not together, sexually or otherwise, before or after the case. But since they were the two charged under the anti-sodomy statute, and activist lawyers wanted a case to take to the Supreme Court...
Each of the legal experts who were subsequently brought into the case knew instantly that it could end up at the high court. The challenge would be in finding a story about love and personal dignity to tell about Lawrence and Garner.
And so:
High-powered lawyers would represent Lawrence and Garner, as long as they agreed to stop saying they weren’t guilty and instead entered a “no contest” plea. By doing so, the two were promised relative personal privacy, and given a chance to become a part of gay-civil-rights history. The cause was greater than the facts themselves. Lawrence and Garner understood that they were being asked to keep the dirty secret that there was no dirty secret.
That’s the punch line: the case that affirmed the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private spaces seems to have involved two men who were neither a couple nor having sex. In order to appeal to the conservative Justices on the high court, the story of a booze-soaked quarrel was repackaged as a love story. Nobody had to know that the gay-rights case of the century was actually about three or four men getting drunk in front of a television in a Harris County apartment decorated with bad James Dean erotica.
Perhaps better court-watchers than myself had some idea of what was going on, but I did not know anything about any of this until the New Yorker article ran nine years later. Does it make any difference? Well, maybe it makes you suspicious. Maybe not. Maybe you're thinking, "hmm, isn't tu quoque an informal fallacy?" Well, I'm not really staking a claim either way. I don't like forum shopping, I don't like plaintiff shopping, but I don't think I have anything like a thoroughly-developed account of why--it's more like a general distaste for gamesmanship. But without gamesmanship, American jurisprudence might scarcely exist at all! So I don't know.
But taking CNN's "just asking questions" article at face value, it makes me wonder where all the real gay people are, and why we can't seem to get a gay rights case in front of SCOTUS with parties who aren't being puppeted, Chicago-style. Okay, that's a bit of hyperbole, but still, two points form a line. So long as Congress remains sufficiently split that impeachment and amendments are off the table, the Supreme Court is the last word on American law. Why bother with the democratic process, if you can convince five unelected and unaccountable moral busybodies to make the law instead? All it takes is a bit of theater, apparently.
It doesn't necessarily end well for the puppets, of course--from the New Yorker again:
At a press conference after the decision was announced, Lawrence read a brief prepared statement and Garner said nothing. Some advocates hoped that Garner might have a career as a gay-rights spokesman. After he gave a drunken speech at a black-tie dinner in the plaintiffs’ honor, that idea was scratched. The case is called Lawrence v. Texas. John Lawrence died last November [2011]. Almost no one took note. Garner died five years earlier, at the age of thirty-nine. When Lambda Legal proved unable to raise funds for a proper memorial or burial, Harris County cremated him and sent his ashes home to his family in a plastic bag. There was no funeral.
I don't know what the moral of the story is. Being disillusioned with the legal process is nothing new or insightful. But this was what occurred to me when I read the CNN piece, and saw people sharing it around as proof positive of the Court's perfidy. No, silly people, the Court is not fundamentally deceptive. The Court is always and altogether--albeit willfully, like a moviegoer whose suspension of disbelief is essential to the process, like a wrestling fan whose kayfabe is the lifeblood of the art form--deceived.
When a moderator says to you:
All of this is to say: whatever you are up to, you have attracted the attention of the mods, and while this post in itself is borderline (you basically repost the article with minimal commentary), you are starting to look like a bad actor. Whatever game you are playing, start being upfront and stop looking like someone who's not posting in good faith (and is likely a previously banned poster).
And not even a day later you again repost identitarian bait, with minimal commentary, as a top-level post, I have to assume you have opted to ignore the warning.
I want to emphasize: in absolute terms, this post is "not bad." It's not great, it does challenge both "speak plainly" and "avoid low-effort participation," as well as "make your point reasonably clear and plain" (though this post is in that regard maybe a slight improvement on the last one). That it does those things as a top level post is an aggravating factor. The CW thread is not a dumping ground for posts other people have written on topics that are maximally inflammatory. It's a place to test your thinking, which to a great extent demands that you do some thinking in an open and public way. Gradually accruing the annoyance of the sub by being a one-note piano while evading effortful engagement with others is, if nothing else, egregiously obnoxious.
So let's start the banning at 48 hours.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
What should be done about racial gaps in IQ?
Progressives have this insane tendency to assume that if it really is true that blacks aren’t as smart as whites on average, then the only logical thing to do would be to murder all of our fellow black citizens in Treblinka-style death camps. Why? Because, they apparently reason, only Nazis, as they’ve so often said, think blacks have lower mean IQs, so if it turns out that the IQ Nazis are right, well, that means Hitler should be our role model.
This article is not the worst thing I've ever read on the subject, but it's frustrating how readily people go to the strawmen/weakmen/worst-case-scenario in these discussions.
If you don't personally think of native intelligence as high-status, then you aren't going to much care if (say) Asians are more likely to have it than Native Americans. In fact many people throughout history have treated native intelligence as either neutral or low-status; in some circumstances it might be bad to be smart (recall the manioc example from The Secret of Our Success). Because the "Information Age" has imbued nerds with social cachet they haven't always enjoyed, this is less often the case today than it has been in the past.
Progressives are (like most Westerners) far too quick to run to the Nazi analogy, but their underlying concerns are more, I think, a combination of their own eugenic instincts and their concern that social programs not be dismantled. Because progressives tend to think of intelligence as high-status, they also think of it as the sort of thing that should be distributed "fairly" (i.e., as equally as possible, whatever that means). But because progressives also tend to think we should "follow the science," specifically through government intervention in the human condition, they tend to jump immediately from facts to action plans. Tell a progressive that you've developed a low-cost, low-energy, non-polluting technology that turns dirty water into clean water, and they're immediately wondering how that technology can be deployed to benefit of humanity. Tell a progressive that you've found the genetic cause of a particular disease, and they're immediately wondering how we can turn that discovery into a treatment. The progressive mindset is fundamentally one of engineering the human condition.
To a deeply conservative mind, the proposition that "some people are stupid, it runs in families just like eye, hair, and skin color" is not only so blindingly obvious that researching it seems like a huge waste of time money, but also just a fact of life from which no particular conclusions need be drawn. Oh, sure, maybe you have second thoughts about marrying the handsome boy when you realize he's kind of dull; you think "do I really want to have this guy's dull children?" But this is not substantially more eugenic than secretly hoping that your children get your wife's red hair.
But the deeply conservative mind is living in the human world, not attempting to renovate it. So when a progressive is presented with mountains of meticulously-assembled peer-reviewed evidence that (1) IQ is substantially predictable along the lines of racial heritage and (2) IQ substantially influences the quality of a community's culture and economy, they don't just shrug their shoulders like a conservative. They start to wonder--how can we use this information to engineer the human condition? And the human mind, in its wonderfully inventive way, starts making suggestions: sterilize the idiots! Increase high-intelligence immigration from other nations! Uh... date white men and Asian women, perhaps?
In this way, progressive opposition to the very expression of the data on these matters is a kind of "telling on themselves," so to speak. It's not that they think the only logical thing to do would be to murder anyone with a low-IQ; it's that even a cursory grasp of HBD painfully illustrates the incredible shortcomings of progressivism as an ideology. If it turns out that your life is good, not because of anything the government has done for you, but because you live among the right sort of people, then huge swathes of social policy are just pointless and wasteful expenditures, fruitless attempts to engineer the human condition that can never, ever succeed until we literally engineer the humans themselves. This is incompatible with Western liberalism, and further exposes the daylight between "liberal" and "progressive." It threatens to unravel such entrenched political interests that the only possible response from the ingroup is to taboo the subject entirely.
Over the summer, Arizona lawmakers passed a universal educational voucher program, to my understanding the first in the nation. It attaches state education dollars to students rather than to specific schools, allowing parents to choose where to send the money the state spends on educating their children.
This was immediately challenged by, well, the whole education establishment. Kathy Hoffman, Arizona's State Superintendent of Public Instruction, was officially tasked with overseeing the program; instead, she doxxed parents who signed up for it. Arizona's teacher's union was immediately mobilized to work with the far-left non-profit "Save Our Schools" organization, which sought to gather signatures to put a repeal of the scholarship law on the next election ballot.
Arizona's Secretary of State excitedly tweeted her receipt of the supposedly over 140,000 signatures (almost 120,000 were required). Her statement that
is a bit confusing to me, I don't know how Arizona referendum law works but the idea that a petition to add an issue to the ballot could function to suspend the operation of a signed law raises several questions in my mind. However, as the Secretary of State maybe this was her call to make? Anyway she was too glib by half. The libertarianish Goldwater Institute, which had posted watchdogs on the filing process, immediately noted that fewer than 90,000 signatures had actually been filed. "Save Our Schools" Facebook page calls this "questionable" and notes that only the Secretary of State can make the final determination, but apparently the Secretary of State's office only received 8,175 petition sheets with a maximum of 15 signatures per sheet. Off their Facebook page, SOS concedes that they have likely fallen short. Their explanation of the miscount? "Well we were just estimating." Apparently Arizona's schoolteachers aren't so great with math!
SOS receives preferred treatment in the news reporting, but poking around some parent sites it looks like they have been predictably underhanded pretty much the whole way. Despite the support of both the Secretary of State and the Superintendent of Schools, both of whose offices are supposed to be effecting the law rather than repealing it, the voucher program is likely to proceed (which may only attract even more anti-choice money to the state's lobbies, I guess). With almost 11,000 applicants pending, it's likely to generate some very happy parents--along with at least some frustrated ones. I doubt we've heard the end of this.
But the victory here may encourage other states to follow suit. I feel like this is one more symptom of the present educational paradigm unraveling. COVID showed parents both how much, and how little, public schools do for them, personally. I know many parents who were relieved to send their children back to school. But I know many others who have simply decided to not. It's a bit of a homeschooling renaissance, it seems, and now in Arizona there are public education dollars attached to that. A family with three children could get something like $21,000 per year to help educate them.
The substance of the opposition is that this deprives neighborhood schools of much-needed funding, "skims the cream," hasn't got enough oversight, and empowers uncredentialed teachers to teach. These are basically all the same criticisms teacher's unions offer against charter schools, which are booming business in Arizona--Arizona's BASIS charter schools are regularly ranked among the best in the country (I count four of their Arizona campuses in the US News top 30). Basically, it looks like public education simply can't compete, and is desperately scrambling to protect its monopoly and union largess.
Parents, apparently, are not buying these arguments, at least in Arizona. And indeed I have never seen any evidence that these arguments have any merit; to the contrary, I am persuaded by The Case Against Education that our existing K-12 system cannot be upended fast enough. So I have been, and will be, watching Arizona's voucher experiment with great interest!
But in case I have not sounded appropriately unhinged thus far--I do have to ask. What would have been the outcome, if the Goldwater Institute had not posted watchdogs on the counting process? The Arizona news media seems to want to cast SOS as the watchdogs, here, but SOS appeared to be quite happy to smear their numbers in their own favor, and they have at least two powerful allies within the government who swallowed their claims whole, declaring the law "on hold" even when the math obviously didn't add up. This kind of narrative-crafting is really disturbing to me, and the fact that the Secretary of State seemed happy to take SOS at their word, to the point of tweeting about it, even as the Goldwater Institute knew instantly from the math that this wasn't going to fly... well, the whole thing seems awfully shady.
(This is where I deleted a paragraph borrowing a jack about "finding" a thousand more pages in a box somewhere...)
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