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In this NYT article, race isn't mentioned, so I assumed it was either a black-on-black or black-on-white killing, but apparently it was white-on-black! It's unusual for the NYT to not mention race in such a situation. Could it be that they're finally downplaying all races in their
crime reporting, and not just the ones that it's offensive to speak negatively about? That sounds too good to be true, but I want to believe.
As more hopeful news on another topic that's also of great interest here, This NYT was published recently. The comments are even more hopeful. As an even crazier example that I realize will be very hard for people here to believe, I figured out sometime last month that a large majority of my department at a liberal university in a county that went for Biden almost 90-10 is very strongly oppposed to Harvard in the ongoing supreme court fight over affirmative action (just to qualify it's more "we're against affirmative action as Harvard is currently practicing" it instead of "we're against affirmative action period").
To get to the fight-y, culture war part, I've tried to argue over and over on the old site that certain of this places extreme, bogeyman views are usually straw-men used to tar the entire American left. These views get outsize attention because of all the standard media/clickbait reasons and were never really supported that much. If you just talk to normal people and don't raise suspicion that you're not on board with the egalitarian ideal that people's fates should be mostly decided by their choices instead of their birth, you'll probably also find this.
The standard kumbayah, everyone-should-band-together-against extremists model isn't really so bad: 80% of people on either side mostly agree with each other on values. Such normal people on different sides of the political divide nevertheless have serious factual disagreements that lead to very different policy preferences. The problem is that each side attracts a 20% of moral aliens with bizarre value systems that happen to make them want far more extreme versions of these policy preferences. To achieve their goals, the best thing the aliens can do is disguise themselves as normals to convince at least the normals on their side. As a nice bonus, this might also make the other side suspect that everyone supporting these preferences is an alien, giving them even more support out of solidarity against "unfair" accusations. For the left, this has hopelessly tarred any kind of diversity initiative, for the right, any kind of tough-on-crime thing.
The best way to fight this is to be really careful in distinguishing who you have factual disagreements with vs. who you have values disagreements with. Both sides need to police themselves and kick out the aliens with bad values even if these aliens might agree with them on object-level policy questions. Also, be much more cautious before concluding someone on the other side is an alien. On the other hand, be really careful to emphasize to the other side that your values aren't alien---this is really hard because there'll be a lot of enemy action from the aliens who want to keep their side extreme. I can't say I'm super successful at it here, but I try to emphasize that I care about egalitarianism at the bottom and that my disagreements with the majority of the American right are due to factual disagreements about what's necessary to actually achieve true egalitarianism.
Surely you're joking. That NYT headline reads "A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected by Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up." and you regard this as uplifting? Sure, Lysenkoism is installed in every single science institution of importance, but a token Trotskyist was allowed a footnote in Pravda to snark at this.
I work in academia, I do this on a daily basis. These are not even radicals. But they believe so fervently in the core tenets of progressivism (oppression is always unidirectional, outcome disparities disfavouring "oppressed" groups are sufficient proof of a lack of procedural fairness, women are oppressed - all evidence to the contrary is proof of this, all group differences disfavouring "oppressed" groups are 100% environmental in origin) that no amount of contrary evidence will ever convince them. Whenever I get them to agree in arduous discussions that Lysenkoism cannot be correct, they greet me with a cheery "good thing we got rid of that bourgeois geneticism, eh comrade?" the next morning. And from this, all other injustices of progressivism flow.
Check the comments and how unanimously against the rejection NYT readers are. The article is also very much not saying that these policies have already been installed in every hard science department, only that they are starting to be and facing huge amounts of pushback. There's a huge difference between these two so it's really important to be precise.
I find this specific part very hard to believe. Can you give more details on the exact thing you got them to agree on that they immediately went back on? Given the imprecision in your previous paragraph, I'm suspicious that something subtly different might have happened. Which specific people in academia are you talking about? What kind of institution? Which departments?
I am not going to reveal any more information that could lead to my doxxing. I don't see why it's relevant either. I know quite a few academics, at every career level, in different fields. They are very, very similar in this regard.
I hope you will forgive my paranoia, but I am not going to repeat heresy here in a context where I have been asked about the particularities of my employment. My above post already contains a list of items that all have been the content of such discussions.
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