This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Against Luxury Beliefs
I'll link Henderson's entire post about Luxury Beliefs for reference, but for the purposes of this post I'll be focusing on his brief definition:
Henderson speaks of luxury beliefs like Scott's Barber Pole theory of fashion, using many of the same examples. Put shortly: "Once a signal is adopted by the masses, the affluent abandon it."
He also frames it as a costly signal of wealth: "They can afford to (defund the police), because they already live in safe, often gated communities. And they can afford to hire private security... Expressing a luxury belief is a manifestation of cultural capital, a signal of one’s fortunate economic circumstances."
There are two contrasting claims here. The first is that luxury beliefs impose a genuine cost on the believer that he can afford to bear, like a wastefully pronking gazelle. The second is that the believer does not actually suffer that cost due to his existing position. The wealthy people in all-white gated neighborhoods on private islands bear no additional cost after all the criminals are released on the streets of a far-away city.
I believe Henderson is wrong that these beliefs are a luxury of the upper classes, and that they are rather highly costly expressions of loyalty from an upper-middle-class "Outer Party."
Henderson's income chart for defunding the police has three categories: <$50k, $50-100k, and >$100k. Thanks to rapid income growth and inflation, these categories no longer separate neatly into lower, middle, and upper class. Most of the people with incomes over $100k are not the estate-dwelling ultra-rich, but urban professionals in precarious social and economic positions. Indeed, crime-vulnerable city-dwellers are almost three times as likely to support defunding the police as rural people.
The most radical beliefs expressed in the great "uprising and cultural reckoning" of 2020 came directly from the most precarious and poor members of high status white collar classes: journalists, teachers, librarians, adjunct professors, social workers, petty officials, job-hopping employees of bloated tech companies. None of them were aping Obama or other members of a higher class. And all of these people suffer serious costs because of their beliefs, whether from direct violence from the underclass or indirectly from general social breakdown.
The day after John Kerry bought a beachfront mansion next to Obama's (his Martha's Vineyard one, not his Hawaii one), a woman in tech told me she had led a costly project to remove their business from the Netherlands "because the whole country will be underwater soon, thanks to the Climate Crisis."
Obama installed a 2500 gallon propane tank and whole-mansion backup generator; she had her husband destroy the portable generator that came with their new home, and suffered winter power outages in dignified silence.
Obama's children (and the children of all his class) live completely normal lives, just with more polo lessons and hedge fund internships.
Yesterday this woman instagrammed her Pride Month Announcement: a photo of her five year old son in a dress.
Henderson says that "Once a signal is adopted by the masses, the affluent abandon it." But Obama and the ultra-wealthy didn't create or model these dysfunctional and self-harming "luxury beliefs," only to abandon them once they became déclassé. They are entirely the product of a desperately status-poor and precarious outer party in a society where climbing the social latter requires winning a red queen's race of radicalism, caught in an increasingly rapid purity spiral. Those at the top pay little attention to the crab bucket below them, except perhaps to nudge the ladder a little further out of reach.
So why should we care? Because I think charging these people with hypocrisy is counterproductive, unless their name is Soros or their job title is "mayor" or higher. Most of them are not benefitting from these beliefs, and would be much happier not suffering under the constant pressure to one-up each other in expressing them.
Is "Luxury Beliefs" just the right-wing version of "voting against their own interests"? @hydroacetylene makes this more explicit:
Have you considered in your disagreements with your political opponents about policy the merest possibility that they might be right (or at least correctly accomplishing their own goals which may differ from yours)?
Absolutely not. Have you?
More options
Context Copy link
The actual policy changes after the 2020 protests have been pretty much entirely in the "tough-on-crime" direction. I understand there's serious disagreement over how or if to reform law enforcement, but most of BLM's recommendations haven't been implemented anywhere---and certainly not the recommendations of the prison abolition movement---so I don't see how you could possibly blame the murder rate on them.
More options
Context Copy link
No. Having a luxury belief isn't against your own interests. The whole point is that it's not against your own interests because you have the resources to make it not be so.
Wanting to abolish the police when you live in a high crime neighborhood is voting against your own interests. Wanting to abolish the police when you live in a private gated community that has no crime anyway and you make money from selling private security services isn't against your own interests at all, and is a prime example of a luxury belief.
And it would be possible to have a luxury belief in the other political direction. For instance, claiming that it's wrong to work on Sundays for religious reasons, when you have a good job that never requires working on Sunday anyway.
Most of what hydroxyacetylene is saying seems to be disagreeing with how often luxury belief really happens.
I'm still confused; the context is talking about the not wealthy people trying to hold these "luxury beliefs" that they can't afford to and it's hurting them.
Wanting to abolish the police is voting against your interests only if abolishing the police actually increases crime that hurts you (worded vaguely because it's reasonable to claim, say, shoplifting in my neighborhood hurts me indirectly even though I'm not a direct victim of the crime). The progressive views on reforming law enforcement and the justice system usually talk about how they believe the desired changes would reduce crime (usually pointing to science saying so). I fully understand that most posters here disagree. But describing such things as "luxury beliefs" goes against the honest belief of those who hold them that they would make life better for everyone.
If a poor man wants to live in a rich man's mansion, we don't say "wants a mansion which would otherwise be a rich man's mansion, but which in this one case would be a poor man's mansion since a poor person would hypothetically be living in it".
It's just a semantics question. If you define a luxury belief as "is X for the person believing in it", then technically, it wouldn't be a luxury belief for that person, it would be a "thing which is a luxury belief when believed by other people, and which these people are imitating". But that's pedantry.
"Luxury belief" is not incompatible with honestly believing in something. What makes it a luxury belief is that you are, because you can afford to be, insulated from the bad consequences of that belief. You don't have to say "ha ha, I don't care what happens to poor people" in order for that to be true. You could just as well be sincerely (but incorrectly) generalizing from your own situation. Or you might just not be thinking things through at all.
I'm sure that most people in gated communities who want to abolish the police are sincere about it, and I'm also sure that abolishing the police wouldn't really hurt them.
I think we're talking past each other. For instance, I could just as easily describe "tough-on-crime" as a "luxury belief" because a common talking point of the pro-reform point of view is that doing so increases crime by unnecessarily putting people in prison so they build connections to criminals and pushing them away from the non-criminal economy, and therefore the rich isolated from crime can afford to revel in punishing criminals but the less isolated people in cities can't afford such beliefs. This would be an absurd way of structuring a political argument that is using the term "luxury beliefs" to sneak in an assumption that pro-reform view is correct. But I don't see any difference between that and any other uses of "luxury beliefs" in this thread.
If "tough on crime" was a belief commonly held by rich people and not poor people, that would be fair. I don't think it is.
There's nothing inherently impossible about a right-wing-coded luxury belief, see my example about working Sundays.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That’s a pretty good summation of my posts, although I guess you can say ‘wealthy democrats usually go to church on Sundays, have children only within marriage, stay married, avoid illegal drug use, and seriously expect their teenagers to keep their pants on, and do such things at much higher rates than working class households of either political persuasion while attesting that these things which they obviously expend effort into doing are not important’ is a demonstration of luxury beliefs.
In any case, the fact that they do those things is evidence for not doing them to be a bad decision.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is correct. Wokeness is humanities academia fed through the incentive structure of social media. It's purpose is not to signal distinctiveness between blue and red, but between impure blues and properly pure blues. It originates with the overproduced elites on the margin looking for ways to distinguish themselves or get their peers ejected so they can win the next round of musical chairs on their way to tenure. It took existing liberal ideas and upped the extremity to the necessary point to distinguish themselves from other blue tribers.
I think right wingers really misunderstand the role of the institutional democratic party in wokeness. The Democratic Party has to get the votes of an aging electorate in an electoral system designed to over represent rural people. Academia, the entertainment industry and social media back in the 2010s all have much stronger incentives to appeal to the sensibilities of young educated people then the Democratic Party. The Democratic party gets dragged in the direction of wokeness by it's young election campaign staff working a year or two as a career stepping atone but the people invested in it's long term success understand who they have to appeal to.
Obama wasn't pro-gay Marriage in 2008. He ran on an 'all of the above' energy policy and presided over a massive shale boom and a 74% increase in oil production. He isn't responsible for the shale drilling revolution, but he didn't stop it either. He's a competent politician who understands that increasing gas prices is political suicide and the path to cutting emissions is keeping gas prices stable while subsidizing clean energy.
People forget that after George Floyd mainstream Democratic outlets weren't pushing defund the police they were pushing 'eight can't wait', a series of modest police reforms like banning chokeholds and shooting at moving vehicles. Deray McKessen went on Pod Save America, the Bill Simmons podcast and GQ, he got written up by Vox and endorsed by Ariana Grande and Oprah. This got rolled into the George Floyd Justice in Policing Bill the Democratic house passed in 2020 which had a national registry of police misconduct and an end to qualified immunity but didn't cut police funding. But this activist campaign for police reforms got absolutely wiped out by the attention grabbing divisiveness of 'Defund the Police' which took over Twitter and social media. Obama as a competent politician criticized the slogan as an expensive signal saying "do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?"
Might be against the rules to high-five, but this struck me as spot on.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I agree to an extent. At the same time, plenty of people in ‘Obama’s class’ have trans kids. I know a few and know of more; it just doesn’t make the news that, say, Jamie Dimon has a trans kid (he doesn’t as far as I know). Elon Musk has a trans kid. Jennifer Pritzker is trans. Are there many ultra-rich trans people? No, but there aren’t many in general. The ultra-rich aren’t, by and large, secretly conservative in their politics even if wealthier people by and large practice more socially conservative lifestyles than the very poor.
Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Bernard Arnault, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Stephen Schwarzmann, Henry Kravis, Warren Buffett, even Elon Musk when he isn’t 🤔posting to own the libs on Twitter have extremely “normie” political views in public and in private. At most, they’re socially conservative to the level of tens or hundreds of millions of Americans. Maybe 1% of billionaires are secretly harboring ultra-edgy politics, but the same is true of everyone else. For the most part, the super rich and super powerful watch the same media as everyone else, send their kids to elite colleges that teach exactly what you think they do, and are fully invested in the general ideological current of the present.
More options
Context Copy link
Speaking of this, recent allegations around Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, who is said to have both donated to 'defund the police' groups and also invested in a private security firm. Not a whisper of this on his Wikipedia article, but it is doing the rounds on, for lack of a better term, right-wing media sourced to "an independent journalist" Lee Fang. Fuller version of the story here:
How to eat your cake and have it? Social progressive cred on one hand, return on investment on the other.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes this is a fantastic description of something of a core what I think the "woke" is. The affluent talking down on regular people. The culture war has never been liberals vs conservatives. The recent boycotts are not conservative campaigns, in essence is the less affluent go "WTF" and not buying any of it. The affluent don't shop at Target or drink Bud Light. The virtue signaling is worthless for the less affluent because they know they won't have a higher status if they follow the signaling.
I've also considered why all of this virtue signaling is backfiring right now. And I have three interacting reasons which more or less (perhaps not at all but hey I'm only a midwit on the internet with a pseudonym)
The woke thumb on the scale disappeared from Twitter when Elon took over. So the attempts at socially engineering the tiny percentage of people who has had the time for Twitter and not have the promotions and/or punishments to the adherence to the message isn't trickling in to peoples media. The coordination for the journalists is simply gone to affect their biases in reporting.
The cheap access to credit that has propped up non-profitable aspects of woke has dried up. So Buzzfeed News and Vice has been dependent on that a lot of money has sloshed around in the monetary system, and in hard times the bottom line actually matters. All of a sudden DEI becomes corporate waste because it doesn't help the bottom line.
The affluent managed to isolate themselves with everything that they consume through their media thinking that their project is going just fine. But they manage to censor out the real thoughts of less affluent people and not knowing that their social engineering only worked on themselves. People don't watch the tv-shows or movies they promote because they aren't any good, not because they are "conservative". And we would be doing ourselves big disservice buying into their narrative. The little mermaid live remake is not made for children solely based on the run length of the movie and the art style. Anyone blaming the "right" for failing just don't understand children should be catereted to when making a family movie.
I’d add a fourth which is that the entire thing feels coercive from the bottom. It’s always couched as “of course this is just human decency” and with accusations of various forms of bigotry— the implied threat being that “bad things might happen if people found out you’re a bigot”. And increasing needs to perform, especially as connected to schools and jobs, again is coercion from the bottom-view. As are the incessant training modules that nag about privilege to a working class that knows it’s not true.
The truest meme I’ve ever seen was a 4chan meme. The left side is a kid with an old outdated computer in his bedroom, and this is labeled privileged white male. On the right is a very large skyscraper with a corporate logo, and this is labeled the oppressed. And this is what I think is driving the wars. It’s the sneering at the lower class that’s driving the rebellion. It’s a way to punch down at those poor stupid people that aren’t good enough to be elite like them. Their stupid backwards religion, their stupid folkways, their sexual prudishness, and their stupid, backwards desire for autonomy are proof they’re unworthy. It’s not like even if they agreed that a Yale graduate would actually want to get to know an auto service tech from Georgia. But being able to sneer at him makes this class hatred much more socially tenable. It’s not that he ugh works with his hands, no. It’s that he believes in crime-think.
More options
Context Copy link
Also their most likely heterosexual parents, I'd be more inclined to take my kids if everyone is easy on the eyes.
More options
Context Copy link
I think the money aspect is the one that really affects the DEIB project. When there's lots of cheap cash sloshing around, you can afford diversity co-ordinators and hiring people in programming socks because it's a small amount of the budget and you need those sweet, sweet ESG scores. When money gets tight, people start considering their spending. Maybe they can't afford that trip to Disneyworld after all. Certainly they will look at cancelling their streaming service subscriptions. Or maybe they buy your competitor's cheap watery beer because you were a bit too clumsy openly expressing your disdain for them, and all of a sudden the best time of the year for sales starts looking the opposite.
This is when companies discover that in reality, the trans population is 0.1% of the total, and there are a lot more ordinary people who might be okay with Pride parades but get a bit woozy when faced with Fairy Godmother Apprentices interacting with their young daughters, no matter how fabulous the TikTok mommies think he is.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
dutchdikes.net › dike-map
Not to excessively dunk on this one woman, but this problem was solved hundreds of years ago using obvious methods.
"Why are the Netherlands not literally underwater right now?"
I'd like to ask anyone in tech if there's another reason companies might be relocating server infrastructure from the fiber hub in the Netherlands, because I've heard of others doing it recently.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’ve got a couple of interesting(to me at least) observations about this general phenomenon-
ultra progressive positions are much, much less popular than you think they are. Defunding the police is probably less popular than sodomy laws or Texas style abortion bans. Most of the trans agenda polls at like 70-30 against. These positions are held by much smaller fractions of the population you think holds them than commonly believed.
I have a pet theory that wealthy educated people are simply more extreme most of the time. Your automechanic in Jacksonville statistically votes straight (R) in every election he shows up for, but he probably doesn’t support a six week abortion ban or permitless carry. And likewise shaniqua working at the McDonald’s he takes his lunch break at has far more political similarities with him than with the politicians she votes for. On the other hand college educated and high income Americans largely agree with the agendas of the parties they vote for. Both fundamentalist Christianity and ultra progressive spaces are mostly made up of high income people with college degrees, and realistically that indicates some impressive partisan polarization among wealthy degree holders.
Most progressives do not follow progressive beliefs in their personal lives- your median teacher is probably in a heterosexual marriage, seriously expects her children to abstain from promiscuity and not have sex at all until adulthood, goes to church every Sunday, and spent a few years out of the workforce to do childcare in spite of holding to progressive orthodoxy on political questions. Indeed, my own mother hit all the points above- I recall her both saying it was unfortunate that the state of Texas didn’t pass out condoms to high schoolers, and that I would be kicked out if I so much as kissed a girl(or boy, which she was clear she was fine with ‘but it would break your dad’s heart’) in the same conversation when I was beginning high school. In a real sense the far right are just rich college educated people who preach the values they live and the far left are just rich college educated people who live the values they preach(well ish, see below). This is partly because living progressive values is an impressively dumb decision that takes real and quasi-religious commitment, but still.
People who actually live far left woke lifestyles are a lot less functional and much poorer than people who don’t. Can’t remember the source, but LGBT people are actually really poor when you adjust for geography(functionally all of them live in cities) and trans people in particular are basically minimum wage slaves. Drug use, promiscuity, disability- all the things that wokes celebrate- all of them are associated with being poor and dysfunctional. Being non-binary and well educated seems mostly associated with having a heck of a lot of debt and probably some mental problems. And that’s without getting into things that have race as a confounder.
When I was growing up (c. 2010, middle-class Northeastern suburb), it was considered unusual but admirable to choose not to date in high school. The median parent understood that teenagers got horny and had sex, but wanted their children to know about the potential consequences. It produced a lot of rather deliberate teenagers. One friend sat down with a sheet of paper talking about the pros and cons of having sex, discussed at length potential contraceptives and failure rates, and considered getting an IUD. She was a senior in high school.
More options
Context Copy link
I've seen commentary around this that the face of LGBT movement in the gay marriage activism was white guys, but the reality was that most LGBT people are POC, poor(er), and often involved in sex work. The two middle-class guys with a lot of disposable income and the gayby engendered via surrogacy were not the majority or the reality (hence, I suppose, why Pete and Chasten got pilloried as not being 'real' gays).
Wait, I thought it was well known that gay men tend to be economically ahead of straight men?
Gay men are behind straight married men, and to the extent that they’re ahead of men in general it’s because almost all of them live in cities which have higher wages but also higher prices.
Compared to urban straight men they’re behind.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm confused... do you mean to say they don't live the values they preach, i.e. they preach leftism, but live like conservatives?
The claim is that most liberals preach leftism, but live like conservatives, while extreme leftists actually practice what they preach and suffer the consequences.
More options
Context Copy link
I think he is saying that yes. It is basically the thesis of Charles Murray's book Coming Apart
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The ultra progressive opinion on anything is always going to have low support because it's the vanguard. The ultra progressive opinion that gay marriage should be legal had low support in 1960 because that's where the front lines were back then. As progressives push forward then opinions shift and the ultra progressive opinions of yesterday become the "just being a good person" of today. The fact that defunding the police is even on the table is a massive victory for progressives given that it would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. The public will fall in line when the time comes for the Supreme Court or an Executive Order to mandate gender affirming care in schools or to disband police departments because of disparate impact. When that happens we'll be able to comfort ourselves that the ultra progressive push to make misgendering a hate crime only has 30% support.
Eugenics was also a progressive belief. We don’t remember progressive failures because progressives manage to relabel them as “right wing”.
The eugenics side won didn't they? It was the law of the land in the 20s and 30s. The progressives changed their mind on it after WW2 because it was associated with the Nazis, but it wasn't stopped by opposition from outside the progressive camp.
Who cares who stopped it and how if it still eventually failed?
Of course, probably the biggest "progressive ideology that was widely predicted to inevitably win but then failed" was not eugenics but Marxism-Leninism.
I never said it would last forever, everything eventually changes or fails. It's worth caring about because of all the lives it destroys. It doesn't matter if bolshevism eventually fails in 1991 if you got purged in 1937. It doesn't matter if progressives get bored of the trans thing in 2085 if they pumped your kids full of hormone blockers and gave them a sex change in 2030.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I was talking with a friend about this recently. He mentioned that John F. Kennedy would be considered a conservative now. And that's true, if he was time-warped here with the same beliefs. But give him a couple weeks to grok the new reality, and (I bet) he would pretty quickly throw his old political compass out the window and buy into whatever the new hotness is.
Progressivism isn't a scalar, it's a vector. It's an arrow pointing left that will always point left no matter how far left we go.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not sure how you define fundamentalist Christian but unless you mean Mormon, Orthodox, and probably Society of St Pius X Catholics, most fundamentalist Christian denominations have historically tended to be below average in college degrees, (note AG, all the baptists, Church of Christ at the bottom) which fits with my experience. Lots of business owners but they're mostly business that don't require a degree landscaping, junk removal, tradesmen, real estate, and similar businesses and tons of NCOs and retired NCOs.
Even within the SSPX there will be people whose grandparents or great-grandparents decided during Vatican II that their families were going to pursue a moral traditionalist interpretation of Catholicism and just went with it (and who now merely see it as their family’s church) and the more zealous converts who regularly read First Things and go on tradcath forums and decide to deliberately pursue membership of their local SSPX congregation for pure ideological reasons in the 21st century.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’ll defend the idea even at lower levels simply because the stakes are a lot lower at 100K even if you’re not super-rich. They’re somewhat protected by living in better areas, and often are protected by distance (and lack of easily accessible public transportation) from the effects of crime, for example. And generational wealth can help mitigate the damage of unwed parenthood in ways the poor can’t. Wealth, even if it’s not great wealth, is a potent social insulation.
Secondly, you absolutely wouldn’t expect the secure to be signaling, in fact if anything I’d expect them to counter-signal barber-pole fashion. The precarious position of the PMC especially on the low ends, requires careful attention to creating the impression of the right opinions, the right tastes, and the right brands. Those who have already arrived, who are wealthy and powerful no longer need to signal, in fact to signal would be as tacky as walking around wearing a huge Gucci label on your shirt.
More options
Context Copy link
I am generally inclined to agree with your assessment of “luxury beliefs” and who practices them.
A great recent example is the mayoral election in Chicago, which is one of the most direct elections on the issue of crime. Looking at only white voters (to account for demographic confounding), the wealthy voted for Vallas, while the status-poor voted for Johnson. If you read between the lines, it’s well broken out in this FiveThirtyEight article. Their Bo-Ho is essentially what you characterize as the “Outer Party.”
Henderson’s original conception does better capture their insulation, though. Bo-Ho Chicago crime has risen dramatically since 2020, and their votes have contributed to that, but it would be unfair to say that they are the ones paying for it. The costliness of the signal is dramatically reduced by their geographical isolation from the areas devastated by their policies. 2019 saw 25 white homicide victims, while the peak in 2020 was only 32. In contrast to black homicide victims going from 415 to 627, it’s clear the white Johnson voters aren’t really “reaping what they’ve sown.”
More options
Context Copy link
What if there's a class characteristic of gullibility? People like this probably did very well in school, learning what they were supposed to learn and answering it back on the test. In a functioning society that's all you need to do - the media isn't going to lie about enormously important issues. But in a dysfunctional society, you have to adopt a certain level of scepticism.
I know one such individual, who was completely terrified by COVID to the point she was spraying her shoes with disinfectant in 2020. While COVID was real and dangerous, there was no sound reasoning behind the surface spray plot thread. Everyone knew it was airborne from when it was spreading on cruise ships.
Yeah I feel like this is people who believe the media and update their public opinions vs those who prefer to rely on what their lying eyes tell them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
From his article:
75000 is less than 100000, so those "precarious positions" may be more precarious than the ultra rich, but still far less precarious than the other categories.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link