wemptronics
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User ID: 95
Charitably, the groomer accusation is downstream of the idea that programs such are are choosing to make kids more gay, because that is their preference. Literal pedophile accusations are real, and some people below defend it, but is less common. (Most common is mean shitposting.)
This seems like the classic equivocation on the word 'sexuality'...
I don't have a rigorous understanding of how people relate to sexuality and what the consequences of exposure are at age 4 versus 9. That might make me unqualified to argue about it here, but it doesn't make me, or the average parent, unqualified to say "Hey, wait a second, 'lace' and 'underwear' have sexual associations I'm aware of in this context. Why is that here?" Associations that a pregnant woman does not. Lace in a wedding book word search hits different.
doesn't transgress it except in the minds of folks who throw sex acts and the existence of LGBT people in the same mental bucket.
And I think this is a major disagreement. Pride is many things. Pride is civil rites. Pride is trans, and pride is transgressive. Pride is family friendly. Pride is debauchery, nudity, and a chance to get laid. Pride is identity. Even with the continued whitewash, to the distaste of some gays, Pride can be reasonably understood to be lots of things that 4th of July celebrations and Macy's Thanksgiving parade are not understood as.
But like, when people like the indoctrination, they just call it 'socialization' (or "Niceness and Civilization," as the case may be) and pretending gay people don't exist, aren't a normal part of society, or are inherently 'adult content' that's not a normal part of kid-friendly public life is, from my vantage, a far less neutral option than teaching kids what most of society broadly accepts.
I wouldn't ask schools to pretend gay people don't exist, but the memeplex that advocates for celebration is fuel and also not very normal. Milder forms of indoctrination look a lot like the golden rule. A page in a book that mentions a man has a husband, that's normalizing something. Instead, Montgomery County said, 'damn the torpedoes!'
The children's book industry needs to churn out an fleet of content the in class curriculum to replace other curriculum. Identity, orientation, inclusivity is too important. Mandate a book a year? Nay, a dozen books. They each should be read 1 time-- 3 times, no, 5 times a year. A single child that leaves Pre-K without an understanding of pride parades, drag queens, and how lace and leather fit might be associated is an unacceptable outcome. The culture war of it all.
I have most of a post written that is one half an unlimited amount of questions on the present state of trans medicine/research with the other half a fantasy counter-factual for what a more mild culture war could have looked. I already push enough belongs on my non-existent blog. But, they can't normalize stuff like this. They need to man the wheel of the zeitgeist. They need to crush opposition and old-fashioned bigotry along with it. Hopefully it's part of a normalization process.
Anyway you should post more often.
He fumbled through a rolodex. That's funny! I don't think it's implausible for one of the characters in Pride Puppy to be a sex positive, sex worker. We can make that canon. People latching onto the exchange are not being fair to Gorsuch with the out-of-context snippet. For the purpose of maximizing honesty here is that exchange:
JUSTICE GORSUCH: That's the one where they are supposed to look for the leather and things—and bondage, things like that, right?
MR. SCHOENFELD: It's not bondage.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: A sex worker?
MR. SCHOENFELD: It's a woman in a leather—
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Sex worker, right?
MR. SCHOENFELD: No.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: No?
MR. SCHOENFELD: That's not correct. No.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: I thought—I—gosh, I—I read it.
JUSTICE BARRETT: It's a drag queen in drag.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Drag—drag queen in—a drag queen.
MR. SCHOENFELD: So—correct. The leather that they're pointing to is a woman in a leather jacket, and one of the words is "drag queen" in this—
JUSTICE GORSUCH: And they're supposed to look for those?
MR. SCHOENFELD: It is an option at the end of the book, correct.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Yeah. Okay. And you've included these in the English language curriculum rather than the human sexuality curriculum to influence students, is that fair? That's what the district court found. Do you agree with that?
MR. SCHOENFELD: I think, to the extent the district court found that it was to influence, it was to influence them towards civility—the natural consequence of being exposed to—
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Whatever, but to influence them.
MR. SCHOENFELD: In the manner that I just mentioned, yes.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Okay. And responding to parents who are concerned—you agree that this—there was some intemperate language used?
MR. SCHOENFELD: I—I don't know that those were responding to parents who were concerned. This was after the fact for most of these comments. And this was in a very public setting which obviously got heated, and some intemperate comments were used, certainly. [Referencing the board meeting racist xenophobic white supremacist remarks]
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Yeah. And—and I wanted to understand your—your—your—your context that you were giving about the statement that some Muslim families—it's unfortunate that this—that this issue puts some Muslim families on the same side of an issue as white supremacists and outright bigots. I think, in response to Justice Sotomayor, you were trying to give some context to that.
MR. SCHOENFELD: I don't think I was speaking directly about that comment. I think that comment was given—or was made—in June, which was several months after the decision to withdraw the opt-outs was made. I don't have context for that statement, no.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Okay. And then the legal question. Why isn't discrimination against religion a burden on religion? If—if—if—if a state—now this is hypothetical, not—moving away from the record. If—if state actors intentionally discriminate against religion, what secular purpose, valid secular purpose could that serve? And how—how wouldn't that be a burden?
MR. SCHOENFELD: So I—I don't know—I mean, it depends on the hypothetical, what the state is doing and whether there is a secular purpose. That's hard to imagine one. But if the state is discriminating—
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Against Muslims or Catholics or Protestants or whatever.
MR. SCHOENFELD: I think this Court has recognized that when an enactment that discriminates on its face—or has recognized with respect to an enactment that discriminates on its face—it is intrinsically coercive. That's how the Court has performed the burden inquiry. If you are privileging one religion over another, you are coercing people to subscribe to that particular set of beliefs in order to—
JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that's a burden.
MR. SCHOENFELD: Yeah. Absolutely.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Thank you
4 year olds to BDSM, when – at least in the examples provided – that's simply not happening.
There is no 'BDSM bondage' that I could find in Pride Puppy, but there is a "drag queen" in a word search exercise at the end of the book and clearly a couple illustrated in the pages. They also arbitrarily slot (drag) queen under 'Q' instead of 'D', because they didn't have enough Q's.
Not all of the books from curriculum are in the dropbox link:
Pride Puppy (Pre-K), Uncle Bobby's Wedding (K-5), Intersection Allies: We Make Room for All (K-5), My Rainbow (K-5), Prince & Knight (K-5), Love, Violet (K-5), Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope (K-5), Cattywampus (Grade 6-), The Best at It (Grade 6-), Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World (Grade 7-), Hurricane Child (7-), The Stonewall Riots: Coming Out in the Streets (8-), Troublemaker for Justice: The Story of Bayard Rusin (8-)
If one's actual objections are "don't normalize Pride marches," "don't normalize homosexuality," "don't normalize trans," etc. it's possible to have a discussion on the merits of those issues. But it's tremendously dishonest to cloak one's actual objection to the former with trumped-up talk of introducing 4 year olds to BDSM, when – at least in the examples provided – that's simply not happening.
We are having those conversations right here in this thread! Most comments that do not claim there is pornography in Pride Puppy.
or is it people wearing leather and undies in ways that would be perfectly appropriate for a Halloween costume at an event with kids present?
There is a reasonable association from the introduction of "lace", "leather", and drag queens -- concepts that we adults are familiar with and associate with sex -- to queer identity and ideology. Then either from or to sexual identity and sexual orientation. To suggest these are isolated concepts unrelated to sexuality stretches my credulity. Sanitizing something for children doesn't make it about something else. These are children's stories. Most have fairly normal lessons in some way, but nearly all are in the setting of LGBTQ+ acceptance. In the case of Born Ready: The Trust Story of a Boy Named Penelope trans ID.
Bobby Goes To The Single's Resort in Cancun could be a story sanitized for the consumption of 5 year olds. It can avoid nudity, be made wholesome, and even have a standard children's moral to the story. After, Bobby Hangs Out With El Farrio the Pick-up Artist. The last in the series: Bobby Goes to Leningrad. Bobby gets cold in Leningrad. When he feels better, he learns how to spell, sews his own jacket, and when he gets hungry he eats his evil neighbor.
I haven't looked deeply into it, but my impression of research is that the anti-racist HR trainings are neutral to slightly counterproductive if you're judging by race relations. The real need for HR training comes from discrimination lawsuits. In that way they are productive so long they cover an employer's ass.
Or in the case of HR programs, you don’t start our thinking of minority coworkers as weird, you don’t say “there’s a black person in accounting” or something.
I think you may be typical minding here and it's driving you towards Democrats are the real racist.
You don't think of minority coworkers as weird, but you do notice minority coworkers. HR is correct that people are hard wired to notice the minority black lady in HR. That noticing leaves space for meaning and association. Mundane HR training attempts to provide a mild positive association via 'diversity'. Anti-racist programming goes further in the celebration of diversity, then adds a less benign negative association for white people, objectivity, being on time, etc.
A liberal I will learn her name, meet her, then judge how annoying of an HR lady she is is a common mode of operation. It's how most middle-class Americans I interact with engage. I prefer it, I want to keep it, but it's not natural.
As we've I've seen, the programming works. You really can cram coding into minds and get NYT editorials printed. You can really make Ford, Goldman Sachs, and POTUS bend the knee to deploy the new program. Force demands resistance so, yeah, there's resistance and counter-culture among the contrarians, vagabonds, individualists, and independent minded. Caveat is that the kids seem to be rejecting it now, because the kids think Dad is lame. Round and round.
Wouldn't a society with actual pro-social norms apply pressure to dissuade the weirdos from their weirdo behavior
Yes. I think it is pro-social to quietly accept and tolerate hard weirdos, while pushing soft or potential weirdos towards normality. I like hard weirdos inasmuch as they don't proselytize weirdoism. They do all sorts of interesting stuff.
Now, most my life we have only progressively accepted, encouraged, or celebrated weirdoism. A reported increase in queer attraction (no longer identification) would be less concerning if it did not coincide with declining birth rates, the dissolution of family, and so on. Weirdo-normie stasis is clearly difficult for society to manage in a liberal way and that's a bummer. Perhaps we could use weirdo accreditation or a weirdo quota system. If we figure out the brain we might be able to better define the weirdo population through brain scans. Make sure no normies are stealing weirdo valor.
wemptronics
7d ago
Age-appropriate sex ed is important for children to know how to report sexual abuse (and to know that they should)
A good point. It's probably not necessary for schools to educate kids on the existence intersex genitals to do the sexual abuse bit. Proofs: My Body is Nobody's Body but Mine!
Necessary to cultivate a society with pro-social norms that promote things like being polite enough to weirdos by discouraging things like bashing fags for fun. A reasonable idea for policymakers might be to check the trends. Allegedly even the per capita rate of "queer hate crimes" has increased despite a massive increase in queer identifying people. Lots of problems with hate crimes and expanding definitions. Nor does the rate of hate crimes account for positive increase in feel goods for queer people or advocates.
One thing about the leather-bondage drag queen exposure is, as far as I know, it's still uncontroversial to refer to these things as fetishes. Fetishes are differentiated from sexual orientation for reasons which include twin studies support that differentiation. I guess that's another pernicious thing smuggled placed on top of the load bearing pillar of "identity" and acceptance of all identified identities.
This looks like it is intentional for the purpose of denying the ability to opt out.
From how the school board meetings were relayed to Kavanaugh above, yeah, seems pretty bad. Charitably, these people were just bad at their job when designing curriculum. They didn't anticipate the resistance. Although when they encountered the resistance, rather than reverse course, they fought it all the way to SCOTUS.
wemptronics
7d ago
What is the difference between a sincere belief derived from a religious framework vs a sincere belief derived from a philosophical one and why is religion given more weight in this regard? If i said that I believe in the supremacy of the biological imperative, and that queer doctrine is blasphemous in this regard, is this considered to be philosophical and therefore unreasonable?
My understanding is that, legally speaking, religious belief and expression is a uniquely protected category in the US. Political or philosophical beliefs are not. If you oppose queer doctrine on political grounds, then you can't expect SCOTUS to grant you their time. Religious beliefs grant you special protections from the government.
What if I said I sincerely believe that the imperative is a facet of God's will? Has my belief now become acceptable in the court's eyes now that I've rhetorically laundered it?
I think a metaphysical grounding helps your case. Unless I'm mistaken, this is one of the ways to differentiate a religious and philosophical belief. But I know someone will have a more complete answer for you. This seems like it should be one of the more thoroughly investigated ideas in US law.
We are at risk, because I am paraphrasing after reading most of the transcript yesterday, making some notes, and editing them into a post today while referencing some stuff. Here is that exchange:
JUSTICE ALITO: But, Mr. Baxter -- before we move away from the book that Justice Sotomayor was referring to, Uncle Bobby's Wedding, I've read that book as well as a lot of these other books. Do you think it's fair to say that all that is done in Uncle Bobby's Wedding is to expose children to the fact that there are men who marry other men?
MR. BAXTER: No, Your Honor...
JUSTICE ALITO: Yeah, the book has -- the book has a clear message, and a lot of people think it's a good message, and maybe it is a good message, but it's a message that a lot of people who hold on to traditional religious beliefs don't agree with. I don't think anybody can read that and say, well, this is just telling children that there are occasions when men marry other men, that Uncle Bobby gets married to his boyfriend, Jamie, and everybody's happy and everything is -- you know, it portrays this -- everyone accepts this except for the little girl, Chloe, who has reservations about it. But her mother corrects her: No, you shouldn't have any reservations about this.
SOTOMAYOR ...
It's more accurate to say Alito doesn't worry too much about determining the goodness of the book. Maybe it is good, maybe it is not not good. The concern is whether someone can make a religious objection to it. He thinks that is a pretty obvious, yes. This is a moral formation rather than information.
I agree "inclusivity" in the context of education has a clear progressive meaning. "Civility" I think we should hang on to or fight for. It is possible to be civil while maintaining moral disagreements. Happens all the time here and that's good. The well is poisoned enough that it's reasonable to want to* detach all the goodness terminology from progressive mantras.
- Though probably not possible
In lieu of the normal SCOTUS Mottezins... wake up, honey, the Culture War went to court again. Arguments for Mahmoud v. Taylor just dropped (PDF). A less oppressive SCOTUSblog write up here.
Obligatory disclaimer that I do not know anything. The gist of the case:
- In 2022 Montgomery County, a suburb of DC, approved a number of LGBTQ books for the curriculum. They include these books and other materials from ages as early as 3-4 and up.
- A bunch of parents cite religious reasons to opt-out of this part of the curriculum. This is in line with Montgomery's historical policy and the policy of neighboring counties. Opt-outs for religious reasons are normal for things like sex education and health classes that include it around the country.
- Depending who you believe, so many parents chose to opt-out that the district had no choice but to change policy, or the district was so ideologically wedded to the material that they changed the policy. Either way, the county says no more opt-outs. Lawsuit commences. It goes up the chain and here we are.
I know we have some skeptics of "woke" curriculum, so for a probably not unbiased overview of the material, BECKET, the religious freedom legal advocacy non-profit backing the plaintiffs, provides examples in an X thread. They also provide a dropbox link to some of the material in question. In one tweet they claim:
For example, one book tasks three- and four-year-olds to search for images from a word list that includes “intersex flag,” “drag queen,” “underwear,” “leather,” and the name of a celebrated LGBTQ activist and sex worker.
Another book advocates a child-knows-best approach to gender transitioning, telling students that a decision to transition doesn’t have to “make sense.”
Teachers are instructed to say doctors only “guess” when identifying a newborn’s sex anyway
The Justices had read the books in question. Kavanaugh acknowledged Schoenfeld, representing Montgomery County, had "a tough case to argue".
The county asserted that mandatory exposure to material, like a teacher reading a book out loud, is not coercion (or a burden?) that violates a free exercise of religion. Sotomayor seemed to support this position. Schoenfeld, arguing for Montgomery County, said these books that are part of a curriculum that preach uncontroversial values like civility and inclusivity. Alito, skeptical, said Uncle Bobby's Wedding had a clear moral message beyond civility or inclusivity.
The liberal justices were interested in clarification on what Baxter, arguing for the parents, thought the limits were to. What limits are placed on parents with regards to religious opt-outs? Kagan was worried about the opening of the floodgates. Sotomayor drew a line to parental objection to 'biographical material about women who have been recognized for achievements outside of their home' and asked if the opt-out should extend to material on stuff like inter-faith marriage. Baxter didn't give well-defined lines, but said nah, we figured this out.
Sincerity of belief is one requirement for compelled opt-outs. The belief can't be "philosophical" or "political" it has to a sincere religious belief. Age was discussed as another consideration. Material that may offend religious belief to (the parents of?) a 16 year old does not apply the same sort of burden as it does to a 5 year old, because a 16 year old is more capable of being "merely exposed" rather than "indoctrinated". A word Eric Baxter, arguing for the parents, used several times and Justice Barrett used twice.
Eric Baxter also stabbed at the district's position that there was ever an administrative issue at all. Chief Justice Roberts agreed and seemed to question whether the school's actions were pretext. Baxter had one exchange (pg. 40-42 pdf) with Kavanaugh who, "mystified as a life-long resident of the county [as to] how it came to this", asked for background.
Baxter: That's right. Hundreds of parents complained. These were mostly according to news articles mostly families from Muslim faith and Ethiopian Orthodox who were objecting.
B: When they-- when they spoke to the Board, the Board accused them of using their religious beliefs as another reason to hate, accused a young Muslim girl of parroting her parents' dogma, and then accused the parents of aligning with racist xenophobes and white supremacists.
B: And so, again, there's no question in this case that there is a burden, that it was imposed with animosity, and that it's discriminating against our clients because of their religious beliefs.
Baxter also pointed at ongoing opt-out polices in neighboring counties and different ones in Montgomery itself. He clarified the relevance of Wisconsin v. Yoder where it was found strict scrutiny should be applied to protect religious freedom. One example of an ongoing opt-out policy in Montgomery allowed parents to opt their children out of material that showed the prophet Mohammed.
ACB: .....What is your take on that and how we think about this, whether this really is just about exposure and civility and learning to function in a multi-cultural and diverse society and how much of it is about influence or as Petitioners would say indoctrination?
Schoenfeld: .....The school the express directive from the school is you don't need to understand your peers, you don't need to agree with them, you don't need to affirm with them, but you do need to treat them with respect.
Thots and Q's:
- Is it necessary to introduce concepts that include queer and gender ideology to children in public school? Why, why not? At what age would the introduction be appropriate or inappropriate?
The eternal fight over what the state uses to fill children's minds in a land of compulsory attendance is main conflict, even if this legal question is one of what a compromise should look given religious freedoms.
- A competent school district should account for the addition of new, potentially controversial or sensitive material.
It can do so in a few different ways and avoid a trip to SCOTUS. I support preaching civility and inclusivity to children. There are thousands children's books that preach these things without drag queens or bondage. In an ideal world, knowledge of and tolerance for queer people can also be taught without, what I would call, the excess. Schools can also program curriculum to account for opt-outs when it comes to touchy subjects.
Sex education can be crammed into 1 hour classes for a week of the year. This allows parents to opt-out without placing an unmanageable burden on the administration. A curriculum that requires teachers to read a number of controversial book at least 5 times each a year is a curriculum designed to, intentionally or not, make opt-outs onerous. In this case it was so onerous and so controversial that Montgomery was compelled to change the policy. Which is an administrative failure even if one doesn't believe it to be ideologically motivated.
- It may be worth pointing out that coverage from outlets like NPR didn't include the name of the case or a description of the plaintiffs that brought it.
I've seen it argued both ways. That outlets notoriously don't link cases or share case names, but in this case the plaintiffs -- a mixture of Muslim, Christian, Jewish parents -- the absence is notable. Were this an evangelical push we could expect some evangelical bashing.
All of this handwringing about how to execute a delicate social dance to obfuscate universally-understood truths, and it’s all taking place without the input, and without the buy-in, of the core group being spoken about... Black people, writ large, are not going to stop seeing themselves as a distinct group with an inherently fraught cultural relationship with White America!
Hmm ouch. Yeah, I agree that the ethnic identity and in-group loyalty is the largest hurdle to moving towards an alternative and Matt can't create any orders that to dismantle that. He isn't going to change anything by telling NHJ to stfu. But, NHJ is probably more famous among white liberals than black people anyway. So, step one: don't manufacture more NHJ's. It's okay to not indulge in NHJ's and Kendi's. They're wrong, unserious, and worsen race relations. White liberals can accept it in that order. Changing this perception is something even if it isn't an overhaul.
The disparities aren't going away and because of this we can't achieve a colorblind wonderland. We can work towards something closer to it though. Instead of manufacturing a Kendi as the prototypical black intellectual they could elevate some sort new form. A Glenn Loury/Coleman Hughes/Pastor hybrid rather than indulging in the Uncle Tom othering. They don't need to be conservative, in fact they can't be seen as conservative for awhile, but there are potentially new types of black identity that could be constructed as the Black Thinker. The next Rev. Al Sharpton can resonate, but not incite because we see where that's gotten us. Turn the knob a few notches a decade at a time.
If Matt can provide white liberals a different program that is not inconsequential. Even if white liberals are hopelessly disconnected from actual, real black people and only expose themselves to the black professorate. If the program helps fade disparity of outcomes equity stuff, nudging it a little further back, then that could be a substantial improvement for degrees of colorblindness given what I've lived through. There have been taboos regarding black people that haven't always advantaged them, but I know what you're saying.
But what worries me about this is, what happens if we apply this sort of thinking to the sort of liberal enlightenment-style thinking that people like Lindsay and myself espouse? If we push things like free speech, free inquiry, freedom of/from religion, the scientific method, critical thinking, democracy, and such too much, are we destined to have a pendulum swing in the other direction, such that we'll get extreme forms of authoritarian or irrational societies in the future? Have we been living in that future the last couple decades with the rise of identity politics that crushed the liberalism of the 90s?
We are destined to push, pull, and change, but not always or usually on an pendulating axis. A forking, mutating spiral is cooler to think about anyway. If you can shove a helical shape in there then, baby, you got a stew goin'. A monarchy can lead to dysfunctional, parasitic decadence that allows its dismantling. A more liberal system that replaces it keeps some things, discards others, then passes on the scientific method through the next 300 years of political evolution.
My favorite modern opposites attract phenomena is the Antifa/Proud Boys duking it out in Portland or wherever some years ago. It seemed a perfect example of conflict attraction. Is the scientific method at risk? Humans consistently commit themselves to science-y endeavors. Perhaps it is safe until we survive the human battery farms as luddites.
Your concern is a good reason to maintain a broad, coherent consensus. I admit it is tough in a society that leverages polarization to stumble around. Even if principled, the no, stop, don't politicize X warnings are a conservation. No, stop, we need shared national identity and mythos. A counter-example might be that science didn't prune the consensus tree to accommodate evangelicals on evolution. That seems to have been mostly okay and now we don't argue about evolution much. Consensus maintained. Or we got bored and less religious.
Now that I think about it, it sounds like I'm instead answering "is conflict theory total?" with a desire to say, "No. Also, here's a bunch of reasons to be conservative and keep stuff the way I like." Heh.
Have we been living in that future the last couple decades with the rise of identity politics that crushed the liberalism of the 90s?
Maybe. Postliberal will come, or has come, but we do have a hand in defining it such that it might not be Patrick Deneen's vision or any other particular one.
Humanity repeats common mistakes in different contexts and time. Which is banal, but the point is it doesn't make critical thinking a guaranteed battle ground. Degrees of authoritarianism might swing back and forth for reasons. That does usually hit certain individual freedoms. Focus should be or should have been on keeping the important bits regardless of the change that comes. Which is always coming, common mistakes along with it.
Matthew Yglesias befriends Richard Hanania, leans against Joseph Overton, symptoms worsen from a case of the noticing, and everyone gets mad.
Matty is full steam ahead with Democratic Party's Abundance rebrand. Build stuff, hope, and change. Yglesias has infrequently expressed a practical or tactical acceptance of noble lies. Depending who you ask, Matt has the freedom to tell it like it is, is an amoral deviant, or he is a sophisticated engagement maximizer.
This week Yglesias published an essay titled "The troubling rise of Hitler revisionism" on substack. The title points towards a surge of interest in revisionists like Darryl Cooper who have been (post delete guy strikes again!) discussed a few times. Matt's article isn't fully a refutation of revisionism or a celebration of Agatha Christie-- who revised her own anti-semitic (I didn't notice) caricatures later in life. He makes a couple points there. This is an acknowledgment as a set-up for broader cultural trends. I will format slightly.
I completely understand what people mean when they say Donald Trump is racist, and I understand why they say it. It’s also true that he’s had Black cabinet secretaries in both of his administrations, which was a bridge too far for JFK. FDR wouldn’t endorse an anti-lynching bill, and Woodrow Wilson worked to increase the level of segregation in the federal civil service... And I think the desire to promulgate revisionist accounts of World War II is intimately tied to a niche (but growing) audience on the right that may not want to bring back segregation but does want to undo the shift that made Christie rethink her anti-semitism.
And the force of this is that while nearly everyone agrees that left-wing racial justice politics went too far 5-10 years ago, there’s big debate on the right about the implications of that.
Ibram Kendi said it wasn’t good enough to not be racist, you had to be anti-racist in a very specific way. And there’s a counter-view, perhaps most forcefully articulated by Nathan Cofnas, that it’s not good enough to reject Kendi’s brand of anti-racism, you need to work to rehabilitate racism so that people can hold their heads high and believe in a hierarchy of races. On this view, you (allegedly) don’t need to be hateful — you can acknowledge that Lazarus is one of the decent Jews, even while maintaining that most Jews are not decent — but it is necessary to destigmatize racism. Cofnas has a literalist’s way of going about this, doing blog posts urging conservatives to stop citing Thomas Sowell on race. But I think coming in through the side door, trying to problematize Winston Churchill and normalize Hitler while destabilizing the pop culture consensus that Nazis are really bad, is probably a more potent way of achieving the same result.
Under the set-up is The Controversy. Yglesias has written against things like disparate impact before, though not in these terms. "Taboos can be good":
I have noticed that Black people are significantly overrepresented in the top ranks of professional basketball, and my guess is that you have noticed this as well. You need to be more of an NBA fan, though, to have noticed that residents of the former Yugoslavia are also overrepresented. I’m not sure why people from the Balkans outperform other people experiencing a lack of melanin. I am also not sure why Black Americans outperform white ones. You could imagine these dual outperformances having similar underlying causes or very different ones. I have not looked into it, and frankly I don’t intend to, because I am happy living in a society where it is considered unseemly and inappropriate to preoccupy oneself with such questions.
In my opinion, it is completely correct to observe that dogmatic accounts of disparate impact à la Kendi are dangerous and bad.
But I also think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to worry that stereotyping will lead to discrimination. And parsing the difference between “taste-based” and “statistical” discrimination doesn’t really change the fact that people are individuals, and they reasonably do not want to be discriminated against. Conversely, I think there is a broadly accurate stereotype that people who roam around the world articulating unflattering statistical observations about ethnic groups they don’t belong to mostly are, in fact, bigots with bad intentions.
Years ago, there was a take that what some disparage as “political correctness” is really nothing more than the basic habit of being polite. I don’t think that holds up to much scrutiny. What is true, though, is that politeness is a virtue, and that the habit of bending over backwards to try to be polite to people who are disadvantaged or groups that have historically been discriminated against makes sense.
And while not everything that right-wingers attack as “woke” or “PC” is just politeness, much of it is, and the impulse in some quarters of the right to say that we need to become a ruder, crueler society that no longer observes politeness norms is bad. The mistake of anti-racist excess was in going beyond trying to downplay ethnic differences to insist on measures that in fact reify them and increase their salience. But going in the other direction, and doing it in a mean-spirited way, isn’t going to solve anything and poses massive downside risks.
Norms that lead kids to spout the latest /pol/ memes to their classmates sound unpleasant. I, too, enjoy polite norms. Matt describes "bending over backwards" not as extra virtuous but as making sense. Asking people to bend over backwards doesn't make sense to me. Norms that involve individuals bending over backwards require coercion to enforce or an understanding of reward.
The comments to the substack article include two I wanted to comment on:
A: "For whatever excesses the Great Awokening may have had, once it ended there was always a risk of overcorrection in the other direction." It's extremely disturbing to me that anybody would need that risk pointed out to them.
B: I think it's because people don't really understand how big that risk is. They think it's just a small possibility. Unfortunately I think the opposite is true. The more off-course and disruptive a political movement becomes, it will almost by necessity give rise to a counter-movement that is equally if not more disruptive in opposition. The question people should always ask themselves is, "what kind of opposition do I want to create?"
I think this is true, but it's really not the people that must consider this a risk. It's elites and power that embrace a movement, eschew old taboos, and adopt new ones that take this risk. They mainly consider falling out of favor, but they also (should) consider how it demands resistance from competing elites and power. In our world the power pretty thoroughly embraced a movement with certain taboos which were themselves taboo a few years earlier.
Rather than coerce people into adopting a version of extra virtue, my proposed path forward includes seeking answers to questions like "why black basketball players outperform white ones?" Matt doesn't fully explain his position, but "intelligence research isn't worth the social costs" is not an uncommon one. Rather than fighting the power, as one might surmise from reactions to his post, I think Matt doesn't know he is asking for more of the same. Calling social coercion politeness sounds a lot nicer than what it is. If there's truth in uncomfortable answers, then it has to be buried. Instead, I think it is up to the Yglesi-i of the world to synthesize those answers into something that can become polite, then help normalize that.
That is a big project and I don't expect to see it happen in my lifetime. My small hope is we land on a stable normie consensus that better balances politeness with the incorporation of reality, science, and hard truths. Intuitively, pivoting the culture from identity groups towards individualism seems like step one, but that might just be my preference speaking. In sum, a not insignificant amount of moderate Democrats -- arguably a wing of the moderate Dems -- read and respect Yglesias and he has stepped into a soft HBD position.
If you're interested you should register an account. The only real barrier to entry is dealing with dedicated volunteers who have mastered the blade of bureaucracy. A battle of will.
I’m curious if any of you have noticed similar patterns on other Wikipedia pages for controversial figures. Is this a systemic issue?
Yes. Did you read one of The Motte's forsaken progeny write on an English Wiki's power admin last year?
Wikipedia seems to make generally correct decisions as edit wars escalate in areas with controversy. That's around a 70% generally, not a 90% generally. It is an ideologically slanted correct decision similar to the ideological slanted factual reporting of [news agency]. If you list 10 areas of controversy undergoing various versions of edit wars I can generally guess which side of it is the status quo. That one is a 90%+ generally that approaches almost always.
Do we need a new Wikipedia built by uncompassionate LLMs?
The ones today learn quite a bit from Wikipedia I imagine.
Not sure why changes like this don't fall afoul of the NOTNEWS rule. This isn't an ongoing conflict that is important enough to keep up-to-date. This is a not particularly accomplished reporter. She is mostly a controversial reporter famous for her controversy. They could make policy that has a 60 day embargo on changes to living people who aren't heads of state or some such. Tying edits to the American news cycle is fundamentally flawed. Which loops back around to the problems with the reputable sources system.
Wikipedia, like this place in some ways, is an impossible project. It's pretty cool it is as good at it is.
This is a high-grade well akshually post from Scott and I like it. Is Scott going to catalog all the lame sloganeering that gets thrown around as rhetorical javelins? Top 10 Memes Shitposters Use to Own the Libs now on ACX. If example tweets are not People of Consequence, then a moderator at The Motte who is already mildly annoyed might ask him to steelman the usage. My guess is he saw someone he respected use the phrase and that bugged him.
The personal is political, facts don't care about feelings, and the purpose of a system is what it does. It's a bludgeon to attack perceived dysfunction in systems that are usually guarded in some way.
A reading program's purpose is to help kids learn to read good. The local teacher's union advocates for more teachers to work it, the National Association for Reading Good pushes its adoption in various districts, and a city politician decides to make it a campaign promise to increase funding to the city's program. Yet, in places where the program exists reading scores trend downwards. The purpose of a system is what it does!
We shouldn't rely on fashionable quips to think for us, but it's a phrase with meaning that points at a commonly understood dynamic. As a commenter at SSC sub said, "It's a similar phrase to 'actions speak louder than words.'" Akshually, actions don't literally speak at all.
This morning I sought out and read two pieces on this news. The first was a short report from NPR which side stepped the Equal Pay Equality Act connection:
The Labour-run Birmingham City Council is effectively bankrupt because of a settlement over historic pay discrimination. As a result, it's had to make significant budget cuts of 300 million pounds ($383 million) over two years and is only providing services required by law, including waste collection.
The second was a BBC piece which more thoroughly reports on the immediate union dispute. The BBC article also more thoroughly avoids mentioning the equal pay lawsuit that set off the crisis. I do believe I am better informed by reading it, but only because I already read the broader context elsewhere. If I search "equal pay" on the BBC's website I can find articles like this one from a week ago, but the connection is almost a side note. It's a reality, not something to get upset about.
That leads me to a culture war observation: there is no Root Causeism to be found in these articles. Surely this is a case where the Root Cause is clear and could be addressed by fixing the legislation to avoid such judgments. If a city doesn't pay out hundreds of millions of dollars because a judge interprets a law a certain way, then a city is better positioned to avoid giving trash men an 8k/yr pay cut.
There are no professors, experts, or city officials quoted regarding the incredible judgment that led the city to the crisis. My expectation, were this a story on a knife crime crisis, the BBC would have criminologists to point at poverty or something. This is a union fight story, not a legislative or judicial horror show story, and those may be two different things in the UK's information environment. I feel demoralized thinking about it and I don't even live there.
wemptronics
21d ago
Has there been a topic moratorium in years? As I understood them, the topic moratoriums were put in place to soothe a plurality of people uninterested in (or uncomfortable with) the 10th weekly HBD/trans thread. A vestige from a more complex environment where mods had to account for significant differences to keep the peace. Most of those interests are gone along with the contributors that enjoyed those efforts. Unlike the dark arts behind HBD poasts this is an active and developing news item that has immediate and potentially long-lasting impacts on the world.
Taking the grill pill is fine. Welcome. Embrace the grill pill and accept what will be. To fully transcend you must let go the desire to rain on other parades.
I don't think most Dems support or have a "fiery passion" for open borders, but I have seen plenty of evidence for the policy preferences. Who needs to see more? Loose, executive bound grey immigration policy subject to change is where we are. Open the tap, close it a little, obfuscate what you want to hide, and figure out issues whenever-- or never. If Trump's term passes without any lasting changes I'll probably try to become more apathetic on the issue. I would like to see something done with asylum. Additional brrrrrr: drive forever electoral growth by printing limitless political capital in perpetuity.
The Democrats win back the Whitehouse, signal or even campaign on concessions in whichever areas are electorally expedient, then quietly reverse policies they don't like. They pivot focus to whatever and its business as usual. It can and will happen again.
I would expect the hardline immigration and demographic critics to be loudest in demanding legislative backing. The politicians I can understand, but interested voters and advocates I don't. A political crisis that requires permanent intervention, but never any resolution is exhausting for normies.
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