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Occam's razor would suggest that I'm a loser eating cheetos in my mom's basement, arguing on the internet in between World of Warcraft raids.
Oh, uh, I definitely wouldn't call it my approach or particularly effective. The block hosting the methadone clinic at my alma mater had the worst reputation on campus and was always a mess. Then again, who knows what the counterfactual would be like?
I've only driven through San Francisco once so you would know better than me.
You likely won't find much of substance after scratching the surface, I'm afraid. I identify with the left because they speak to the problems I care about; if someone had a realistic alternative that was more effective without committing atrocities (i.e. gassing the homeless to clean up the streets) I'd be on board. If rationalism could actually proselytize to the masses to focus more on data and results, we might get somewhere. Like, you say you care about black homeownership? How do you not know that it's largely unchanged in 50 years despite all the policies we've tried? Maybe we shouldn't hold such strong opinions about things we haven't seriously researched in any meaningful capacity...
Good, bad, it seems like reality, no? Many people are rabidly woke. People want to do the right thing, people want to feel good about themselves and many need ideology as a part of that identity. I'd like us to all have a nice dispassionate discussion about how to run society led by the relevant technocrats who haven't been captured by one interest or another, but that isn't the world we live in - and many problems are big and complex enough that even the people who study them 24/7 don't know the answer.
That being said, I don't think the liberal project has been a failure on every count. Poverty is down. Global poverty and death/disability from many preventable diseases is way down. 20 million fewer uninsured Americans from 15 years ago. Broad social acceptance of interracial and same-sex marriage. Sometimes you tell a compelling story and the world is a better place. Sometimes, you tell a compelling story that diverges from reality and you bonk your head against the wall for a decade or two before society finally lumbers back to the drawing board.
Really elaborating on my views would take a longer post than this.
Quite the opposite, I'm afraid. Although Kendi doesn't get my goat the way it does many people here - I'm not sure I agree with his worldview, but it's certainly an interesting one that makes me question how far I'd be willing to go for equality. I strongly support affirmative action and even quotas for some positions (largely political), but I'm not interested in Harrison Bergeroning society into homogeneity. Many of the quotes that do circulate (I mostly remember the 'white people are literally aliens' one) are cherry-picked to generate ridicule and outrage.
Don't think I've read the other authors.
Agreed.
The failures are what gets highlighted, because we're American and our failure mode is to bitch about every single thing the government and opposition do endlessly (as opposed to China whose failure mode is the global times assuring me everything is fantastic until the day there's no food on the shelves and the condo I paid for is never going to be built). As I've said, I don't think it's all been negative. As for the actual, undeniable failures like the mess of a crime rate or vaccines ending the pandemic, I think they'll collapse under their own weight - as they should! Just always more slowly than I'd predict, the way I thought everyone would give up on mask mandates and lockdowns after widespread vaccination in summer of 2021.
And of course, some failures whose causes aren't so tightly connected to their consequences will slip through the cracks to plague us for decades to come. Such is life.
Then by what metrics would you like to judge the success or failure of the progressive project? Female GDP per capita is outstripping that of men, as is their education level. The number of female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies has gone up 15 fold in the last quarter century. Fraction of Asian and Hispanic CEOs have both roughly doubled in the same time. Difficult to measure things like inclusion, awareness, so on and so forth, but I imagine many kinds of speech not deemed 'progressive' are absent from the workplace relative to 2000. Congress is much more representative than it was. We have minor improvements like wellness/pumping rooms, changing stations, improved accessibility for disabled people, so on and so forth.
I'm not convinced this is the case. I could be completely missing the mark here, but my impression is that China is much more matter-of-fact about differences in ability between individuals. They nevertheless straight up give bonus points on the gaokao to minorities among other things. I'm not well versed enough in Chinese culture to confidently say this is true rather that government propaganda, but I think it's an interesting model nonetheless. I don't think affirmative action is necessarily rooted in or dependent on blank slatism, nor do I think it's success should necessarily be measured by equality of outcomes (as I assume you mean when you say AA is failing).
I'd support and prefer class-based affirmative action.
Some people here want me to defend the liberal project starting with FDR, others with Carter, still others with Obama. FCfromSSC likes to bring up an ex-domestic terrorist who was blowing up mailboxes in the 70s only to be hired as a professor in the 90s, and my man, I'm sorry but those bombs were going off long before I was born.
Why don't you found it? I find people more receptive when they're convinced you care about the same outcomes as them, and just think you have a better way to achieve them.
I don't think it's serious enough to be concerned about insofar as I doubt I need to worry about mobs invading my neighborhood to lynch white people. I think the real problem is that it doesn't seem to be particularly useful for improving the outcomes of minorities, while simultaneously making significant fractions of the populace hostile to any kind of diversity/equity talk.
Thanks, I'll try to take a look. Stuff can get lost in the shuffle, particularly if it's not a substack sending me regular emails (I gave up on my RSS feed about a decade ago, but maybe the blog is undergoing a renaissance and I should reevaluate).
Likely not much. But it sounds like you're asking about what to do with the lowest strata of society rather than two overlapping normal distributions of academic achievement, no? Nudge the scores of one distribution as the Chinese do on the Gaokao and you're closer to 'equity,' per the progressive goals.
You're asking me to step fairly far outside my areas of expertise so what follows is likely rooted in my biases rather than reality, but I'll try.
Probably half-hog. The receptionists at my company have college degrees. How is that anything other than welfare for white people who can afford to go to college and get bullshit degrees?
Then there is another (albeit small) class of jobs where I think accurate representation of the racial diversity of the population is inherently important for stability: federal, state and local politicians would all fall under this umbrella. Likely police and bureaucrats. I'm very hesitant to include positions like judges, but I think the argument could be made.
But even if you're correct and forcing diversity quotas on these positions would make our society significantly less efficient, ask yourself: is it worse for society to reduce the average MCAT/GRE/LSAT/???? scores of doctors/engineers/whatever by some number of points, or to have a group of chronic, racially segregated undercasts that periodically riot and defect on society because they feel like it's abandoned them? m
It's remarkable how most of what I wrote applies to both African Americans and poor rural whites, yet the right and left favor one or the other. Point to /r/stupidpol I guess.
Both are instances of much larger majorities showing violent tendencies to much smaller minority populations, which is the inverse of the situation in America. Genocide is much less of a concern to me (in America, of course) than politically-motivated sectarian violence, which is why I get twitchy when people start hinting about all the guns they have or AR-15 wielding proud boys start convoying around Seattle or antifa members start shooting rando conservatives.
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Hi! Can you please stop radicalizing me in the direction of violent extremism? Thanks!
I don't think you ever needed my help on that front, friend.
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