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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5634 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 12, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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There's a very common notion in class-first left-wing circles that identity politics sharply ticked up right after Occupy Wall Street in order to keep people divided and away from actually threatening things (the stronger version of this is that it was deliberately coordinated)

Has anyone run into an actual attempt to prove or disprove this with data? (Besides that one chart of NYT's mentions of 'isms' going up)

That presumes OWS has "threatened things" in any noticeable manner, which is an extremely implausible assumption. OWS was half trust fund kids in search for a noble cause and half anarchists looking for shit to stir up. The latter moved on to antifa (which eventually aligned itself with idpol because why not, as good excuse to set shit on fire as any) and the former I imagine moved to the position of VP DIE or similar because that's exactly a position I'd expect somebody with a lot of energy, best credentials parents' money can buy, absolute conviction in one's moral superiority and absolutely no useful skills to occupy.

I've heard the theory that OWS was basically a poorly coordinated but earnest leftist response to the Tea Party phenomenon, which gained momentum only a few months earlier. I find that somewhat more believable, although I'm admittedly rather ignorant of the whole thing. In short, many leftists were understandably irritated by the spectre of right-winger reactionary Whites successfully organizing large public protests with a populist economic message and large media attention, and were inclined to demonstrate that they are capable of the whole thing as well.

As far as I can tell, OWS was largely a flash in the pan, and petered out rather quickly, precisely because the lack of a coordinated and thought-out effort and public image, so I don't think that much endeavor was put into it.

As far as I can tell, OWS was largely a flash in the pan, and petered out rather quickly, precisely because the lack of a coordinated and thought-out effort and public image

Probably. But also probably due to a lack of any sort of institutional or elite support. The Tea Party seems to have found a way to slot in the usual GOP structure.

OWS...couldn't. Not just cause the Dems were bailing out the banks but because they were never going to be truly hostile to them whereas distrusting the government has a proud conservative legacy.

The piece of evidence in favor of this theory that I think is the clearest smoking gun is the classic Hillary Clinton quote that surely was shaped by the brightest minds in the Democrat establishment who were working on her campaign:

“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow….would that end racism? Would that end sexism?”

Now was the purpose of this to stop real progress, or just a cynical way to undercut a political opponent? Most practically it's the latter but if you look at what the campaigns represent it does kind of fit the theory. You could argue on the merits why breaking up the banks is unwise... but instead the play was an appeal to identity politics.

i recently watched judas and the black messiah, the film about fred hampton. i'm sure there was a certain degree of sanitizing on the ethics and crimes of the that-era BPP, not that i think any better of the cops they encountered. more true innocents murdered than anyone will talk about; misrepresenting events like the shootout involving jake winters and raising him as a martyr. they make the argument they're at war and i don't find the specific reasoning specious, but there's a lack of commitment, a lack of courage, at going all-in on that. if you say you're at war, your soldiers the righteous revolutionaries, the cops the uniformed soldiers of the oppressors, don't downplay it. they downplayed it. true to life, i guess.

seeing the rainbow coalition formed was very interesting. i found that part of the film the most compelling. i have nothing but contempt for the marxist/-leninist ethos, but it's easy to sympathize with those movements of the 60s and before versus 2023.

anyway, daniel kaluuya won an oscar for the performance. he was very good, in particular his capture of hampton's manner of speaking. i found this part of a hampton speech strong in the film and your comment reminded me of it.

We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism"

It’s an interesting idea, though I haven’t seen any.

I’d second @johnfabian in doubting polls or Google Trends. At best they’re only going to suggest a symptom.

Maybe you could try to measure date of adoption of idpol party planks. I.e. flag each point in these. Local groups would be better for a large sample size. But this is still basically a word-frequency study.

I don't know how the medium version of this hypothesis could possibly be verified. It must remain in the company of models like historical materialism that may be true, seem like they could be true, but who knows.

There is some evidence for the weakest possible version. Take this story, where Whole Foods encourages ethnic diversity as a bulwark against unionization risk. There were also leaked emails from Amazon about strategizing to fight a union vote by dividing whites and blacks, which I'm having trouble finding. (TOMT? If anyone knows what I'm talking about please confirm I did not imagine this story.) So it has actually happened at least once. How many such incidents are required to infer that this is the true primary motive behind institutions embracing DEI?

For the strong version, no evidence of such coordination exists, and the idea of such coordination existing without us finding out is IMO crazy.

I don't know how the medium version of this hypothesis could possibly be verified. It must remain in the company of models like historical materialism that may be true, seem like they could be true, but who knows.

"Historical materialism" another of these terms people love to shit on, without knowing where it came from.

How hard core non-materialist conception of history looks like?

It looks like this:

(context: Australian and Californian discoveries of gold in mid 19th century)

https://archive.org/details/historyofeurope108alis/page/326/mode/2up

In February 1849, the population of Europeans in the State was 2000 ; in June 1852 it was already 182,000 ; and in 1856 it had risen to 560,000. Soon after this great discovery had been made, a similar vein of prosperity was opened in Australia.

Gold was there discovered in 1849, in the alluvial plains near Ballarat, and this led to a general search in the vicinity, and the precious article was soon found in great quantities. The effects were immediately the same as they had been in California. Population and wealth enormously increased ; the emigration to it in 1854 rose to 87,000 persons; the exports turned £14,000,000, being about £28 a-head; and the gold obtained amounted to the enormous value of £15,000,000.

The annual supply of gold and silver for the use of the globe was, by these discoveries, suddenly increased from an average of £10,000,000 to one of £35, 000, 000! The words of poetic genius were more than realised. Methinks, as I gaze around, I see the scheme of the All-beneficent Father disentangling itself clear through the troubled history of mankind.

How mysteriously, while Europe rears its populations and fulfils its civilising mission, these realms, which have been concealed from its eyes, divulged to us just as civilisation needs the solution to its problem ; a vent for feverish energies, baffled in the crowd, offering bread to the famished, hope to the desperate, in very truth ; enabling the new world to redress the balance of the old. Here the actual Aeneid passes before our eyes.

" A race from whence New Albion's sons shall come, And the long glories of a future Rome"

Most of all did Great Britain and Ireland experience the wonderful effects of this great addition to the circulating medium of our globe. That which, from the effects of the erroneous legislation of man, for five-and-twenty years had been awanting - a currency commensurate to the increased numbers and transactions of

the civilised world, was now supplied by the beneficent hand of Nature.

The era of a contracted currency, and consequent low prices and general misery, interrupted by passing gleams of prosperity, was at an end. Prices rapidly rose, and rose steadily ; wages advanced in a similar proportion ; exports and imports enormously increased, while crime and misery as rapidly diminished.

Yes. The Creator wisely arranged geological processes so gold deposits would accumulate in these remote lands, and then stood watch over them, smiting any dirty pagan or greasy papist who tried to touch them.

They were there since the day of creation waiting for good Anglo-Saxon protestants, coming exactly at the right time when British Empire needed increased supply of money. Awesome.

This was writted not by some obscure preacher, but by one of most esteemed historians of the time. His works, forgotten today, were frequently reprinted (Internet Archive is full of their various editions).

No one, not even the most devoted believers, could and would think and write like this today. We are all historical materialists now, Marx(PBUH) be praised. ;-)

I don't have any problem with historical materialism and believe it's probably mostly right on the money. It's not, however, something we can really verify.

You can say "changes in the mode of production in the late modern period of proto-industrialization caused the liberal revolutions of the 18th-19th century and their attendant changes in ideology and governmental structure." But you could also say "Ideas of the early Englightenment caused intellectual foment in the 18th-19th century, leading to innovation in economic organization and the reconsidering of political structures."

How do we adjudicate these claims? And even if we can prove the materialist interpretation for this particular case, does that generalize to proving materialism is the driving force of history everywhere? It sure seems like the ideas of some figures (take Jesus Christ) were pretty influential to later history, not just the type of slave plantation and tax farming system they were using in 1st century BC Rome.

Likewise, even if we eventually find a ton of evidence that lots of billionaires were cynically pushing idpol, there will inevitably be cases where idpol was pushed from sincere belief. How many examples of the first prove the model? How many counterexamples of the second disprove the model?

What "data" would one even be looking for? All of it would be some survey of word usage in media, or of public opinion polling. For example take a look at Gallup's polling on race relations. Again, pretty coincidental timing in the sudden plunge towards the abyss. Does it suggest anything? I'm not sure how much I would read into it. I was pretty shocked when I first saw it (could you convince anyone that 20+ years ago black Americans thought race relations were better than white Americans?). At best I would say that you might extrapolate that the confrontational approach to ameliorating racism is backfiring. But certainly it makes you wiggle your eyebrows a bit.

What "data" would one even be looking for? All of it would be some survey of word usage in media, or of public opinion polling.

I imagine it'd be a lot of that*, just not one particular chart/source.

I imagine timing would be important. The most obvious counterpoint I can think of is other stuff happened that led to more wokeness (e.g. Trayvon Martin's death - which is closer to the dip)

The question would be then seeing if any of those events match The Charts' dip better than OWS' moment in the sun.

EDIT: Unless we had whistleblowers in campaigns and newsrooms at the time, who backed the strong claim by saying they saw the edicts come down.

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