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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5635 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)

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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