Good post. A point of clarification though: we are seeing (at least in America) the emergence of two orthodoxies/conventions. Which of the two holds more institutional power is up for debate, and of course either side is going to say that the other is the one with all the power.
I think the cultural shorthand for the -ists in question at the moment is “anti-PC” opposed with “woke” (in the non-pejorative sense; predictably enough it has also become a slur when used by those who oppose it).
These roughly align with a lot of other social dichotomies (e.g. they map approximately to right/left, respectively) in the US, although not quite coterminously. There’s a lot of fuzzy leakage around the edges on a lot of issues that primarily map directly to this split.
People want a political home. In countries without any type of per-capita representative voting system (where parties are split amount % of opinions like in MMP), they feel like they need to vote 'tactically.'
At least in America, at one time people could say, "I don't believe in everything x wants, but I do agree with core policies a, b and c and so I'm voting for them." Today we are much more polarized and people desperate for a political home may start internalizing and adopting policies they may not totally agree with just so they don't feel left out in the middle.
Cancel culture makes harder, if not impossible, to be in the middle. Are you against racism, but not for the specific BLM organization? You're opinion is not acceptable to the Democratic/politic-left. Is that a hill you're going to die on? If not, you move on and ignore it.
This gets into some pretty dangerous territory because now you cannot say certain beliefs publicly without fear of ostracization from your political home. You may be able to keep that belief secret, or you may just start to believe the opposite. Viewpoints within each false-dichotomy lose their diversity, and both sides could bend, consciously and subconsciously, to a narrow, homogeneous world view.
the mapped ideologies are dynamic (leaky), but the historically enduring dichotomy is simply power and its disciples vs. the disenfranchised.
"anti-PC" is power retaliating against change, and "woke" is the disenfranchised calling for change. conservative and progressive also map to this same dichotomy.
The conflict between "anti-PC" and "woke" in its entirety is in service of power. A perpetual screaming match between poor and middle-class people, about topics that have little to no bearing on profits, is ideal for corporate elites.
What do you mean? "Woke" is all about people with privilege trying to shield that privilege behind their correctthink as they attempt to disenfranchise the lower classes of their political rivals. "Woke" people do to Arkansas rednecks the same thing they accuse their opponents of doing to inner-city minorities.
"woke" people are more diverse than you claim, and certainly less privileged on average. perhaps the "privileged woke" people you speak about over-exert their privilege, but that's a conquence of privilege, not wokeness.
Wokeness and its methods are by their nature an amazing social shield and sword, so they attract the sort of people who want to cloak themselves in righteousness and tear into others.
possibly, but then, never attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance. i can't say how many such folks there might be, but in any case, it's more likely that they're pursuing their aims of fairness/justice badly, not maliciously.
Not OP, but I will point out one example that should not be too controversial: "Science!".
Note that label of science has been as politicized ( to the detriment of all of us ) as pretty much everything else. If you dare to question "Science!", you are, by default, backwood white trash racist or something along those lines, which happens to ignore that science encourages healthy debate and constantly questions underlying assumptions. This is literally how we get progress.
Now, there is an argument to be made that words of a PhD carry more weight than FB educated person, but I think everyone here met a person with no formal education, who was still sharper than most people in the room ( and vice versa, an educated person arguing that black is white and getting himself killed crossing the next pedestrian crossing ).
In the orthodoxy discussed in the article, people are taking it for granted that their beliefs are true and working diligently to ridicule those who don't agree.
In science, people hold many beliefs that have already been proven beyond a reasonable doubt and are working diligently to prove others.
This might be true for things like the conventional laws of physics. But there are many things scientists do not agree or argue over. Quantum physics and string theory are two examples. The 1994 book The Bell Curve is another example from social sciences.
And today, we have grave reproducibility crises in science. We have people trying to apply rules about the psychological and metaphysical worlds into the doctrine of hard science. In the current crisis, we have conflicting papers published almost every week, and there is a deep political climate that cannot be denied behind much of the current research.
Even for thing that we can agree on work under experiment, like a certain class of drug, we can't explain WHY it works. We can say drug x will stop a heart attack 99% of the time and is generally considered safe in 99% of human beings, but often we're guess at the very specific interactions, based on what we see in labs, because we have no real introspection into all the complex things happening at the micro-level within the incredible complex cell systems inside of us.
Maybe one day we'll be able to see what happens at that microlevel in human bodies, and that could lead us to discover the drug isn't working at all the way we thought it was.
_The Bell Curve_ is not an academic treatise, and was near-universally derided. If anything, it itself was an anti-orthodox work trying to restore the basis of ethnicity as an explainer for many different phenomenon.
Maybe I'm confused. Are you using _The Bell Curve_ as an example of pseudo-scientific pop publication gone wrong, or as a worthy scientific viewpoint which is worthy of debate and was unfairly crucified in academia?
James Corbett did some great videos years ago on the weaponization of science. It is very true. Science should be debate and argument and reproducibility problems, working back and fourth until we get the methodology right and every student can follow the instructions and get the same results.
Today, science has certainly become a new belief system over certain publications and ideas over others. In the US, there is no constitution protection for "science," only for religion. Many of the things currently placed under the umbrella of science are really religious beliefs (you could even argue to some extent that all scientific beliefs are religious; even if some things, like the laws of physics, can be proven to be absolutely true 100% of the time) and should be looked at under the lens of the 1st amendment, when they're clearly not.
If the COVID crisis has highlighted anything, it's that science literacy in the US is so bad that nobody really debates issues of science, they grab the label and bludgeon people with it.
What I find really distasteful is when people start with an argument like yours, then use it to argue their pet issue. eg to rail against the central dogma of genetics, the impossibility of evolution, or complain about "reproducibility/observability" and try to tear down whole areas of scientific research.
Scott Alexander describes this view as "blue tribe" and "red tribe" where blue has a subgroup "grey" that broadly follows blue but disagrees with a good portion of blue's more extreme actions.
There's also a "grey" subgroup in the red tribe. For instance, a lot of Trump supporters will privately admit that he's a bad guy and an ineffective leader, but preferable to a liberal president.
The problem is that the more extreme factions in both tribes wield the power and tend to punish what they see as heresy within their own camps before going after the other tribe. Most groups treat apostates worse than those who never believed in the first place.
'The right' holds this temporary power. But the arc of the last half-century remains unchanged: the platform of the democrats today will be the platform of GOP in 50 years. The right lost the universities and the culture long ago.
My point was not to draw a moral equivalence between two tribes, but rather point out that neither is a monolith, and both are currently controlled by their more extreme elements.
The Democratic party is being driven by those on the left flank of the party. Yes, the moderates are nominally in charge, but only so long as they drive the agenda of their more extreme members. It's similar to how John Boehner was an arguably more moderate Republican, nominally in charge of house. However, he got led around by the nose by the more extreme Freedom caucus who didn't have a lot of official control, but wielded a tremendous amount of soft power.
Right now, sure. But the political machinery is never in bed with the more radical people. Things are extreme now because it’s being driven that way by various parties.
As that calms down, compromises will be made and order will return. Recovery from economic catastrophe will be the priority.
Not entirely, because I'm speaking very broadly. You could probably name one of orthodoxies as the one colloquially known as social justice. It's the worldview that has gained significant traction over the course of the last five years.
The other one is harder to define because it's essentially not the social justice worldview.
In America, you tend to find the social justice worldview in urban and coastal areas, and you tend to find the latter in rural, interior locations.
Obviously this generalization breaks down in many ways, so [insert all the caveats].
My main beef with this is that even the philosophical father of social justice, John Rawls, would not recognize the means by which this movement is trying to achieve its ends as any form of justice and in any way aligned with his original position and veil of ignorance thought experiment.
The movement as currently practiced is one grand perversion with all the hallmarks of other populist illiberal (but believe they are liberal) movements that resulted in indisputable injustice.
Yep, definitely. It's why it's colloquial. In my view, the usage of that term today carries the same descriptive weight as terms like "free market". It's more evocative than literal.
Insisting on politeness about guilt-free homosexuality or abortion isn't going to get you very far in many particularly conservative Presbyterian churches or Baptist colleges.
Note well: those institutions explicitly instruct people to "love thy neighbor" and to "not cast stones". Those calls are just empirically only so effective and there will always be a significant percentage of people for whom those commandments don't work.
I therefore believe that politeness is probably a similarly ineffective solution to newer forms of orthodoxy (e.g., cancel culture).
Consider conservative college campuses. Not because I don't believe cancel culture exists at Harvard or wherever, but because it's a point of reference that is much more numerous and carries similar culture power within certain geographies/communities. In many of these institutions:
1. being an openly gay student can result in being expelled (or at least suspended and bullied into leaving by admin)
2. faculty need to submit statements of faith in their job applications. These statements of faith are not aptly named, since they're also political ideology litmus tests. E.g., supporting abortion publicly would definitely be cause for dismissal.
None of this is to dismiss or deny that maybe Harvard has its own orthodoxy, but I just have zero percent trust in someone like Jerry Falwell waxing poetic about free speech or cancel culture. His university cancels gay people.
The orthodoxy of silicon valley and elite college campuses exist in only a few relatively small parts of the country that are over-represented in places like HN.
I'm pointing this out for a specific reason: stifling social norms are nothing new. If you leave those places where implicit restriction on speech is a relatively new phenomenon and go to places where unspoken norms about what can/cannot be said has been the de facto norm for hundreds of years, you see why "simply giving it a name" and calls to "being polite" aren't going to help.
Try going to a conservative christian university and pointing out that "abortion is murder" is "orthodoxy" and that people who believe it are exercising an "orthodox privilege" not available to people who believe "abortion is a human right".
It an _NOT_ saying that cancel culture isn't a problem. It's more that it's _always_ been a problem, for hundreds of years, just not from the left in the USA until recently, and _history is a good tutor_.
The proposed solution probably isn't going to work.
I suppose its worthwhile to make a distinction between "small, private, Christian, conservative, seminary" and "large, public, secular, liberal, university".
I think its appropriate to advocate for gay students at these private schools. But I do question its significance to the economy, society, and public life relative to the university system. And constraining this problem to universities or silicon valley does it a disservice. This is becoming a general, corporate problem.
It's kind of like saying that corruption in the president's office isn't really that big of a deal because there are plenty of small town mayors that are also corrupt.
That's absolutely true, but the influence on society and the country of both aren't really the same.
The point is that if you say "X is how you address corruption" and "X" doesn't work even for mayors of small towns, then there's a good reason to think "X" also won't work in the president's office.
I'm not sure, I believe that it's pretty obvious how you do it: transparency, rules, enforcement. However, that's often costly, so you try to do it where matters. Corruption in the middle of nowhere is annoying when you live there, but the damage is limited. Corruption at the center of global power is quite different in the damage potential.
I believe the same is true for educational institutions. The one that will be visited by next account manager of the local branch of a national bank has less damage potential than the one that will be visited by the next CEO of that bank, the next President and the judges on the Supreme Court.
Nobody cares about private christian colleges. The fact that you have to speak of "private christian colleges", rather then naming any, is revealing. No one even knows their names. Harvard is the most powerful institution on earth. Try to name a more powerful one, and ask yourself where the people running it come from.
Harvard is not the most powerful institution on earth, nor do people from Harvard run all the more powerful institutions, nor, even if that were true would it mean Harvard itself is necessarily powerful.
To pick a random and specific example of an institution I consider more powerful than Harvard, how about... the Spanish Army?
Really, the Spanish Army? Harvard's endowment is like 3 times it's budget. The Spanish Army is ~120,000 people, There are 2-3 times as many Harvard alumni. After Harvard those alumni have become presidents, founders, etc. Soldiers who leave the Spanish Army get... a pension, I guess?
> Harvard's endowment is like 3 times it's budget.
That's like comparing GDP to net worth. It's not completely useless, but caveat emptor when comparing a first derivative to a zeroth derivative.
But yeah. The Spanish Military a strange example because a) it really depends on the community and b) we're talking about different types of power.
In terms of soft/cultural power, the Spanish Army might well be more influential than Harvard in Spain. But, again, only in a weird apples-and-oranges way.
I think maybe parent might have meant in terms of hard power. In a complete vacuum, the Spanish Army could probably topple the statue of John Harvard. But, again, it's completely unclear to me why that would be a useful/interesting/anything-other-than-amusing comparison.
The example I used in another thread, which I think actually works: In Utah, BYU is almost certainly more prestigious and powerful than Harvard.
Harvard was established as a christian college, a "church in the wilderness" to train strict Puritan clergy. Maybe both Harvard and the later christian colleges you mention can be orthodoxies.
> Maybe both Harvard and the later christian colleges you mention can be orthodoxies.
I literally said that _three different times_ in my post:
>> None of this is to dismiss or deny that maybe Harvard has its own orthodoxy
>> The orthodoxy of silicon valley and elite college campuses
>> Not because I don't believe this happens at Harvard or wherever
That's not the point. That point is that the proposed solution -- calling out an "orthodox privilege" and insisting on politeness -- is not going to work. How do I know? Because "cancel culture" is not even close to new. It's existed on college campuses, in media, etc. for hundreds of years on the right. History is a tutor for what will/won't work.
I think the difference is that "Private Christian Colleges" say up front that they are Christian colleges. The obvious implication is that you have to be a Christian, or agree with Christian principles to attend.
If UC Berkeley (say) was called "UC Berkeley Marxist College" then perhaps people would have a better idea of what to expect.
Which was organized by a subset of campus, in response to Milo giving a talk. Doesn't really support the notion of the institution of Berkeley being Marxist.
Alot of the "liberal suppression of free speech" stuff is ginned up grievance fodder for talk show hosts and attention seekers.
Universities are always little labs for weird behavior and disputes, it's part of their nature. There's always something that puts conservative farmers or whatever in a twist. In the Nixon era it was anti-war protestors. In the 90s it was affirmative action. Today, it's the various gender/sexuality issues.
The politics of universities is such that these movements grow and succeed, then become the power brokers. A family member was a leader in LGBT causes on campus in the 90s -- very much fighting an uphill battle for attention, respect and resources. Today, that org is very powerful and alumni of the 90s version are all middle aged folks in positions of real power.
From the other side of the pond, I'd like to add, it gets tiring. It's absolutely impossible to have a meaningful exchange with 95% pf the Americans on the Internet these days. Rare are the days I'm not called antifa/communist/libtard/fag and racist/bigot/trumpette/transphobic, often in the very same thread.
For any American trying to figure out what I'm talking about, there's a couple of Facebook groups that routinely explore this and related effects: "Things only Americans think are debatable" and "oh great, now we have to explain it for the americans."
I can totally understand why (and by who) this comment got downvoted, but I happen to share its feeling. I won't say it cannot happen everywhere, but the interactions on USA politics have become (newly?) extremely polarizing.
And two people can see the exact same event and read it two different ways. We're no longer in Plato's cave. We're literally watching the same movie, but seeing two different screens.
He talks about how it was once offensive to translate the Bible into English, or suggest God didn't exist, or suggest there was nothing wrong with homosexuality. People who suggested such things were deplatformed, and sometimes arrested or killed, but those who considered themselves enlightened and on the side of the righteous, the virtuous, the good.
O'Neill is literally a professional troll, to the extent that whenever there's a tragedy people make sport on twitter of predicting exactly what his contrarian take will be.
I don't know much about him as a person, but I do think he makes a good argument in this video, and argument I agree with in many ways.
ML King beat women and Gandhi slept naked with his nieces to see if he could resist lust. They also led millions of people to freedom. You're attacking the person here, and not his argument. That's called ad hominem.
I think this is broadly correct. In the old days when both the political and cultural spheres were conservative, it was clear what and who was unorthodox. Today, different institutions are both very liberal and very conservative so you can actually say anything you want and be considered both incredibly conventional and outrageously pointed, depending on who is listening and where you are saying it.
For example, you can be a powerful high-ranking advisor to the President and spew all sorts of nasty racist garbage, but you can inhabit a world of friendly media and cheering crowds and you'll never feel encumbered by anything. At the same time, you can be a regular Joe at a regular Office and say something mildly eye-brow raising and be fired.
Choose your crowd and you can in fact say whatever you want and pretend you're both a victim and victor. Demanding that a crowd put up with you, well that's a hard sell.
Almost. What you'd call "conservatism" is just slowed-down progressivism, delayed by 10-20 years but otherwise indistinguishable, and both "sides" are squarely within the liberal political theory.
Nothing is being conserved. Today's conservatives are espousing values that sound the same as 2005's liberals, and are not even as conservative as Bill Clinton.
... as a result of decades of clear harms, demonstrated in court cases establishing case law that eventually becomes codified through legislation. The "conservative" values you mention are in fact regressive, and so-called classical liberalism is centrist, not progressive.
I think there is a schism in people holding left-of-center (US context) views. I see liberals as placing a higher value on a consistent application of values and less emphasis on outcomes. I see progressives as more focused on outcomes than the means used to obtain them.
Cynically phrased, a critique of liberals from progressives would be that liberals are okay dithering and letting injustices stand. A liberal criticism of progressives is that they have adopted an “ends justify the means” philosophy. Additionally liberals might question whether the “ends” are good and on what authority that determination was made.
For much of my life it has felt that progressives and liberals were closely enough aligned to more be interchangeable in practice. But, I think the aforementioned cancel culture is one area where progressives see necessary change, while liberals see a sacrifice of ideals.
I’m not sure my definition of progressive vs. liberal is accurate historically speaking, but this is how I interpret the current left-left divide in at least the US.
> I think there is a schism in people holding left-of-center (US context) views. I see liberals as placing a higher value on a consistent application of values and less emphasis on outcomes. I see progressives as more focused on outcomes than the means used to obtain them.
> Cynically phrased, a critique of liberals from progressives would be that liberals are okay dithering and letting injustices stand. A liberal criticism of progressives is that they have adopted an “ends justify the means” philosophy. Additionally liberals might question whether the “ends” are good and on what authority that determination was made.
I think this is a very clear and succinct summation. It shows that both sides aren't exactly wrong, but they aren't exactly right either. That's what makes politics hard.
I'm kinda reminded of something I was taught about English Common Law: hundreds of years ago, it was basically the law in England, but it became so focused on consistent application that it ossified and failed to provide legal relief for many clear injustices. When that happened, someone could directly appeal to the King for relief, and out of those appeals developed a Equity, a whole different body of law. There's nothing wrong with consistent application of a process, but I think sometimes some people get so focused on it that they loose sight of the actual goal the process was meant to achieve.
many of today's liberals in the US are, in the parlance, neo-liberals, those who fled the obvious negative connotations of conservatism and its association with racism, sexism, etc. in the guise of conserving "values", but still sympathetic to those beliefs in private.
> neo-liberals, those who fled the obvious negative connotations of conservatism and its association with racism, sexism, etc. in the guise of conserving "values", but still sympathetic to those beliefs in private.
I think that's very much not what 'neo-liberal' means. I think that it means free-market liberalism — where 'liberalism' in the previous clause means 'classical liberalism,' as opposed to socialism, Communism or progressivism.
Many of the neo-liberals were, as I recall, leftists (for U.S. values of, anyway) who fled not conservatism but Communism/socialism as they saw that the math simply didn't work out.
yes, that's the historical context (free-marketization), but i'm referring to the more recent machinations of the last couple decades, as there aren't enough communists/socialists (in the US at least) to account for the rise of our current brand of (neo-)liberalism. that arose from nominal conservatives shifting away from unfavorable connotations. the free-marketization makes that transition easier ideologically.
Case in point: Southern California. This is the state were Reagan served as governor after all. Southern California used to be dependably republican, but no longer. But is this because of a fundamental shift (in population or beliefs), or just a lack of desire to be associated with the racial/social policies of the national republicans, with most non-racial views retained? I suspect the latter.
American politics are ridiculously small-c conservative across the board. Try and get the american left to buy in on any loosening up, if they catch even one tiny whiff of something a libertarian might also believe in it'll be seen as enemy action and the position must be resisted.
For example, I've heard it argued that the modern success of the LGBT movement can be traced back to Clinton getting a blowie and the dems deflecting from the perjury he committed by making it a public issue of sexual freedom/privacy. I'm not doing the argument justice here, but I tend to give it a bit of weight because the left is so comically bad at "sex positivity" that it's barely more than a new flavor of sex negativity with different boundaries.
I tend to be on the conservative end of this issue, so I mostly agree with you. However there have been some notable instances of people getting fired for expressing left-wing viewpoints - the ones I can recall were college professors.
So the door does swing both ways, but I do agree that the majority of "cancellations" nowadays are coming from one side.
Right-wing entities appear to sack people for left-wing views without external pressure, neutral entities are forced to sack people for right-wing views.
27% of transgender workers reported being fired, not hired, or denied promotion in 2016-2017 [2]. That's ~530,000 people [1], and really just the tip of the ice-berg. Until like 2 weeks ago that was completely legal federally, and in the states where it's most prevalent.
Three of my high school teachers were fired for being gay. One of them was outed by a parent who lived next door.
I was fired from my first job (at a secular for-profit company) for not tithing.
High-profile social media blowups are really trivial compared to the work-a-day homophobia and borderline theocracy that pervades vast swathes of America's land mass.
This is where I sort of miss the boat on the concern about cancel culture. Yes, those people shouldn't lose their jobs for expressing themselves. But also, where the hell has all this outrage been while LGBT people have been systematically excluded from any public-facing employment in huge swathes of the country?
"Cancel culture" is orthogonal to the issues you're describing, I think. Professional and social life is very unfair for people across many spectra of belief and being, sadly. I'd argue there's been growing outrage about both sorts of phenomena in the past few decades.
If some sort of culture deems you impure, you're likely to be outcast. Different people just happen to run up against different cultures.
Discrimination based on immutable attributes is inherently much more unfair, but unfairness is still a battle waged on many fronts.
This is fundamentally true for everything in the universe. Every single category breaks down. Even if I were to drill down into, say, five dimensions, your basic argument would still hold true.
If we took the raw complexity of reality into consideration, we'd never be able to move forward because we'd be stuck in an endless debate over categorization. It's why I included caveats at both the beginning and the end of my statement.
If we took the raw complexity of reality into consideration, we'd never be able to move forward because we'd be stuck in an endless debate over categorization.
Yeah, why let reality get in the way of a made up dichotomy?
Actually the argument is "why lose the forrest for the trees?".
Every day you make abstractions to better understand reality. For example, you don't devote equal attention to every blade of grass, you sum it as "this is a lawn" and move on.
If you didn't you'd be lost in the first few feet walking outside of your house, seeing everything as an equally important detail.
>There is more than one dimension in American culture or politics
Yes, but that's neither here nor there, if most of public discourse falls along two, at best three, lines.
>To try to compress American culture to one dimension is rarely useful and often a disservice to peoples' actual opinions or beliefs.
On the contrary, it's a very useful proxy, and the only sane way to make sense of a stream of 40% opinions towards one direction, 40% towards another, and some opinions all over the place... You prune the statistically irrelevant ones...
Unfortunately, when it comes to public policy (at the national level at least), the way our system is structured doesn’t leave room for anything except for two distinct positions.
That's true but but over the last few decades in the US it's been getting increasingly less true over time as various debates get partisan valence and ideological sorting gets stronger.
the greatest lie ever told was convincing the American people there is only a "left" and a "right"; a "correct" view and an "incorrect" view. just like sports teams, bad guys and good guys. one must win and one must lose. perhaps it wasn't always this polar but it feels like the vast majority of opinions are arrived at by simply listening to their pole's consensus and knee jerking to attack "the other", rather than critical thought.
and for politicians, this is the greatest job security they could ever imagine. probably 50%, if not far more, of their votes are gained simply via the letter next to their name. really, does any politician actually care about any national or local issues? why would they even waste energy to think about it. simply follow their tribe's consensus and ensure self preservation, salary, perks, social status and power.
> "we are seeing (at least in America) the emergence of two orthodoxies/conventions"
We have two loud extremes but, no, it's not a dichotomy. In particular, we need to distinguish between progressivism and old school liberalism since they have different core principles.
I'm from Argentina, and we have a "different but similar" thing going on here. Extreme, socialist left wing on one side, right wing on the other (note that our right wing could be considered left wing over there). So both could be considered orthodox, the country is basically 50/50, and it's like the article says: You are either X or Y. No middle ground.
People distort it as if it was some kind of sport. You either like this team or the other, you are either with us, or against us. And they defend every little thing, even if they know it's wrong, because it's their team.
> we are seeing (at least in America) the emergence of two orthodoxies/conventions.
This is a good description for something I have experienced emotionally for some time, but couldn't put a finger on until very recently.
I grew up in the South and moved out (escaped?) in large part to get away from people whose belief system didn't align with my own. I consider myself "liberal" in the sense that I am anti-hierarchical and think people with a diverse range of beliefs, preferences, and lifestyles deserve dignity and to live their lives unencumbered from shame.
When I was younger, that's what the liberal side felt like. Gay, black, woman, atheist, trans, just, like, really into LARPing? Whatever, fly your freak flag and the liberal camp is happy to have you. Where the conservative tribe demanded that you must submit to the authority and ideally be white, Christian, straight, and male, the liberal side said all are welcome. It felt welcoming. There were no purity tests because the whole concept of purity tests was antithetical to the philosophy. The whole shtick was that there was no out-group.
But that's not what it feels like now. If you are not sufficiently liberal/progressive in all the right ways, you risk being shunned. I think this is a reaction to the paradox of intolerance and the rise of the alt-right/authoritarianism/fascism/whatever the hell you want to call what's going on now.
Once you have a tribe that clearly considers you to be the out-group relative to them, it becomes very hard to not close ranks and define them to be your out-group. When you are actually, literally, under attack by an enemy group, accurate tribal signifiers are a necessity to determine who is a threat and who is not.
I don't know if there's an easy way to walk this back. Maybe if fascism and white supremacy die back things will settle down. It's a hard time for those of us who aren't naturally wired to be fighters.
This one, in additional with the previous essay about 2 different kind of centrists really make me curious of what unorthodox opinions PG is holding and can't say right now.
I do see your /s, but I'll answer anyway: I've decided that US cultural problems were a source of stress for no payoff, which I didn't need. I used to be much more involved until I realized I live a world away from the US and the societal problems don't affect me much (and I also realized that I didn't identify as black, white or any of the race options on the census), plus there are much more pressing problems at home.
As you can see from the fact that I commented in this thread, I don't always succeed :P
It is pretty clear, if you read Paul Graham's twitter feed, what is it that he wants to say but feels he cannot say. I see where his point of view completely, but having not seen the the other side of privilege: the very real and lived experiences and feelings where cancel culture stems from, I feel this is an issue where he is totally blindsighted. The problem in the US currently, I feel, is not cancel culture per se, but widespread and ever growing narcissism which makes one less questioning about their fundamental worldview than one should be.
Paul Graham is somewhat a victim of this himself.
For example, the assumption behind this very essay is that there is such a thing as a rigid, singular concept of "truth" in the moral, cultural and political sphere, that there is a "fact of the matter" whether a belief (say one PG holds) is correct or not. Or that that we live in a static world where such truths can even exist, and not, in a fluid, dynamic, politically messy world where contrasting viewpoints interact and produce something not something ever lasting, but something which is fragile and must always be fought for, this fight being a necessary feature for a functioning democracy.
But it's kind of moot what he, specifically, wants to say, no? Shouldn't we instead try to work towards a society where no opinion is taboo?
It seems to me that the biggest reason why some opinions are taboo is that we're worried (usually for good reason) they'll find supporters. Instead of making opinions taboo, we should work on an educational system that doesn't let harmful opinions take hold of people.
> Shouldn't we instead try to work towards a society where no opinion is taboo?
There will always be taboo opinions. For example, I can't imagine a civilized society where an opinion like "capital punishment for every minor fault is ok" is not taboo.
> Instead of making opinions taboo, we should work on an educational system that doesn't let harmful opinions take hold of people.
How? I think the problem is that this is impossible at all. Not every opinion is based on reason and education will not be a shield from them.
> I can't imagine a civilized society where an opinion like "capital punishment for every minor fault is ok" is not taboo.
This one isn't. Here, I can say "there should be capital punishment for every minor fault!" and nobody will bat an eyelid. Nobody will agree, which is why it's okay to say this.
"Taboo" means "opinions you can't talk about", not "opinions that won't be popular". Many taboo opinions are extremely popular, such as "homosexuality shouldn't be a crime" a few decades ago.
It's not taboo because you are not taking it seriously. Now, would a newspaper let me write this? Would my family treat me the same if I were serious with this opinion?
Maybe I don't have a good grasp of the cultural context, but it seems to me that you would be much better off tweeting "I believe that capital punishment should be used for even minor crimes" than something like "I think it's okay to own black people".
Hell, I spent a full thirty seconds wondering whether I should even post the latter under my name, even if it's clearly in a hypothetical context and I'm just mentioning it as an example.
> the assumption behind this very essay is that there is such a thing as a rigid, singular concept of "truth"
I don't think that assumption is required by the essay. It says that people with orthodox privilege believe that anything outside their orthodoxy must be untrue. So it merely claims that certain people believe (often falsely) that they can conclude something is untrue because it's unorthodox. A crisp universal definition of truth isn't necessary for them to believe this.
If one gets rid of those assumptions, the whole concept of orthodox privilege would be purely rhetorical.
Here is how this essay would change if you replace "truth" (which does not really exist in the political sphere) by "morally unacceptable to certain groups of people"
"They literally can't imagine a true statement that would get them in trouble." would be replaced by "They literally cannot image a statement which is morally acceptable to certain groups of people (to which they belong) would get them in trouble with those groups of people". Which is completely fair and reasonable.
The power of that article for me, and what makes it interesting, is he never says what it is he can't say. It lets the reader imagine all sorts of possibilities in their mind, and determine what outrages themselves.
"If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible. Here are just a few examples. I list below five types of nationalist, and against each I append a fact which it is impossible for that type of nationalist to accept, even in his secret thoughts:
BRITISH TORY: Britain will come out of this war with reduced power and prestige.
COMMUNIST: If she had not been aided by Britain and America, Russia would have been defeated by Germany.
IRISH NATIONALIST: Eire can only remain independent because of British protection.
TROTSKYIST: The Stalin régime is accepted by the Russian masses.
PACIFIST: Those who 'abjure' violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.
All of these facts are grossly obvious if one's emotions do not happen to be involved: but to the kind of person named in each case they are also INTOLERABLE, and so they have to be denied, and false theories constructed upon their denial."
(With hindsight, we see the irish nationalist was less conflicted than Orwell had been willing to admit to himself. Or am I missing something important, given that this was written in 1945 and not 1922?)
As far as Orwell's most famous book goes, my heterodoxy of the moment is that I'm convinced the frame story in 1984 was not a jeremiad of warning about a future to avoid, but instead a cathartic story about a past young EA Blair had suffered:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825457
> With hindsight, we see the irish nationalist was less conflicted than Orwell had been willing to admit to himself. Or am I missing something important, given that this was written in 1945 and not 1922?
Ireland spent the Second World War neutral, albeit sympathetic to the Axis (Eamon de Valera famously mourned Hitler's death!); what Orwell was trying to say is that the only reason Ireland had any neutrality to preserve is the U.K. was implicitly defending it: had the Axis powers won the war Germany or Italy would have soon enough made Ireland a puppet state.
And this is why Orwell is a superior writer, he gives actual examples so we know what he's actually talking about. I have no idea what "dangerous ideas" pg is always complaining about. Social Darwinism? Who knows?
It doesn't have to be beyond the pale. There are plenty of totally scientific and statistical facts, observed many times over by many different studies, that reveal uncomfortable truths you will be cancelled for talking about.
Whether it's IQ or crime demographics, or something more esoteric, we're increasingly entering into a time where you have to toe the line of orthodoxy or risk losing your livelihood. This means we can't actually get better studies into these areas, nor can we propose policy mechanisms that might actually work towards improving reality, because we are incapable of basing policies on unorthodox facts.
> Why? It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics.
This sentence usually ruffles some feathers, and is a good, even if weak, example of things you "can't say".
"Things you can't say" is interesting because the reason it's dangerous is that a mob might react badly to it. Who is to say that the specific wave washing over social media will hit some people with this orthodox privilege or not?
I think you can mine these things by looking at diverse conversations - including those you don't find online. What sentence would you be afraid might be misinterpreted?
Progressive statements from 2006 can today be considered dangerous.
People don’t care about context at all. But, interestingly, they’ll also gladly ignore massive taboos (from their POV) if it’s in their favor. For example because Bernie makes some good arguments for progressive causes that he was against immigration undercutting wages many years ago, is ignored today, but if someone else had that history as a politician they potentially would be brought down, if they were more moderate (in either party).
> Perhaps the solution is to appeal to politeness. If someone says they can hear a high-pitched noise that you can't, it's only polite to take them at their word, instead of demanding evidence that's impossible to produce, or simply denying that they hear anything. Imagine how rude that would seem.
Alright then! Can we apply this to the Master/Slave and Blacklist/Whitelist debates, and to the use of the "Lena" image?
It is applied. More often that not, the argument is not that these words don't have a single true opposition. But that it's negligent to take this opposition and extrapolate it to the world.
> If someone says they can hear a high-pitched noise that you can't, it's only polite to take them at their word, i
Sorry, no, no way. It might be polite to agree that they believe they hear a noise, but it cannot be the motivation to go and destroy all electronic devices in immediate vicinity. This is so easily exploitable. Replace "can hear a noise" with "can see a witch" and imagine the consequences.
Denying someone's lived experience is obnoxious. Excusing that obnoxiousness by introducing a false slippery slope seems like an excuse to not be conscientious.
So if someone says their lived experience is pain and suffering from the existence of cancel culture, you fully embrace that and want to do everything you can to help them stamp out cancel culture?
Or how about this one: what if someone says their lived experience has always been a negative interaction with every member of some specific racial group. You then believe them and accept their racist views as legitimate?
I just can't accept that you actually believe what you are claiming. We all must evaluate and judge so called lived experience on its merit, not blindly accept it as legitimate.
I think you are missing the point, and the point of the original "appeal to politeness" argument.
It is polite and appropriate to give someone the benefit of the doubt and "believe them" as in follow their line of thinking and investigate the point of view that they have.
However - giving someone the benefit of the doubt and trying to see their point of view doesn't mean you follow their every command and accept every proposed solution. It just means you listen, and try to work with them to solve the problem.
There's a world of difference between accepting someone's claims of their experience at face value and accepting that these claims justify the demanded changes.
There's no conflict in acknowledging that someone does hear a high-pitched noise in the presence of a particular device and at the same time do not accept that this would be a sufficient reason to prohibit such devices or turn off a particular device; and at the same time one can acknowledge that the term 'blacklist' is offensive or triggering to some people and at the same time not accept that a term being offensive or triggering to some people is sufficient justification to require the world to change that term.
No, because someone claiming they hear a noise doesn't affect anyone except them, and the people they directly interact with. An equivalent example would be someone claiming they hear a noise, and demanding that everyone in the world acknowledge that the person hears the noise, whether or not they ever interact with the person who hears the supposed noise.
Because it's not sincere, and only sanctimony and bullying. If the people who claim to be triggered by magic words were sincere, then surely they themselves would avoid doing things that offend other such emotionally fragile groups e.g. religious conservatives. If they did, then at least I could take them seriously, but as it is, all I can manage is contempt.
The post points to a true thing, Orthodox Privilege definitely exists and we see examples of it quite often. However, to some extent it exists within bubbles.
For example the orthodox position to the statement 'All lives matter' is 'this is a racist dog whistle' within one bubble and 'this is an obviously true statement' within another.
Dogwhistles work because they are not obviously false.
The statement is not racist in its text, but in its subtext and context. The statement is only raised for the purpose of preventing action from being taken or change being made, in regard to investigation into and prevention of unnecessary deaths of black people. The statement that lots of white people are killed by US police is similarly both true and a distraction.
It's a bit like turning up to a 9/11 memorial and saying "all plane crashes matter". Or somebody responding to a bug report by closing it WONTFIX with "all bugs matter".
(There's a separate debate as to whether "X lives matter" should be considered a descriptive or normative statement!)
(I should probably stop refreshing this and watching the wild upvote/downvote swing too)
I think the orthodoxy in the dominant, pro-Trump faction of the GOP would say "All Lives Matter" is not racist or a dogwhistle. (I think there are few that would openly consider themselves racist, thus making their orthodox opinion on the phrase: 'we are not being racist'. Even if I personally disagree with that self-classification.)
I think that their usage of the "* Lives Matter" statement was probably a little distracting. They're trying to say that "Orthodoxy" isnt neccesarily universal and that different (large) bubbles have their own orthodoxies
Au contraire, Saying "Black Lives Matter" is a distraction. The actual problem is police violence and overreach - not just police killings, but even things like swatting, civil forfeiture, police buying surplus army gear, drug war, etc. etc. - and focusing attention on just one tiny issue, then proposing a braindead solution ("defund the police" - do you really want to live in a society with no police? like e.g. CHAZ?) is the worst way to solve the problem.
OP was comparing the two statements in terms of 'orthodox privilege'.
Meaning they were not claiming that they both have the same ethical standards or logical consistency. But rather that 'orthodox privilege' can be extrapolated into 'bubbles' or sub-cultures. The 'orthodox privilege' in PGs article is also mostly descriptive rather than normative.
You were arguing based on ethics and logic. I agree with your conclusion and I sympathize with your reaction. But it seems you missed what OP was going for: describing what people might think/say/do and why that might be rather than what they _should_ do.
> The statement is only raised for the purpose of preventing action from being taken or change being made, in regard to investigation into and prevention of unnecessary deaths of black people. The statement that lots of white people are killed by US police is similarly both true and a distraction.
I'd respectfully disagree on this issue. I think it's possible to be worried about police abuse of force from the context of being a person who is a mere citizen and thus has a lot less rights than the police. No ethnic group has a truly zero chance of dying at the police's hand. Do white people have it better? Yes absolutely. But it's not as though the police only use excessive force against black people.
I think you're missing the possibility that there are conservatives who want police use of force reform too but want to do so in a color/ethnicity agnostic way. The idea that non-black people say 'All lives matter' only to prevent change is probably not correct. And the reactions like the one I quoted above only serve to divide folks rather than find common ground. It's pretty tragic.
> The idea that non-black people say 'All lives matter' only to prevent change is probably not correct
Isn't it? Which genuine pre-existing police reform campaigns are using that phrase? Do you have any examples?
> And the reactions like the one I quoted above only serve to divide folks rather than find common ground
People are told that "all lives matter", in that specific phrasing, is divisive, and keep using it. If you say "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights", you're quoting from the universal declaration of human rights and uncontrovesial (in the west!)
> I think you're missing the possibility that there are conservatives who want police use of force reform too but want to do so in a color/ethnicity agnostic way
Are there? Who? More importantly, how? And I don't think any of the specific BLM proposals are actually race-specific, are they?
Make a distinction between the BLM organisation and the BLM movement. The BLM organisation is an openly marxist group who are riding the coat-tail of the movement to "overthrow" western civilisation. And if you don't think so go read their statement of purpose on their website and tell yourself that is just "reforming the police".
If that were true, then you would see significant anti-police violence protests under the banner of "all lives matter." I will happily acknowledge that people who are protesting, or agitating for change, by using that phrase are (likely) not using it as a dogwhistle. But I've seen no one who does that. I've only seen the phrase used as a response to people fighting for black lives.
> I think you're missing the possibility that there are conservatives who want police use of force reform too but want to do so in a color/ethnicity agnostic way.
I agree with this, in that evidence seems to show that the problems with criminal justice and excessive use of force are amenable to color/ethnicity agnostic solutions, and that this would have the most positive impact by far on non-white minorities for obvious reasons. I also think BLM is doing a fine job of raising awareness about the issue but it's less clear that they have good solutions, whereas conservatives have been looking at this area for a long time but haven't done nearly enough to advertise the social equality angle. So this seems to be a case where orthodoxy privilege and lack of respect for intellectual diversity is hurting both sides.
> She tweeted on Tuesday: “White lives don’t matter. As white lives” and “Abolish whiteness”,
I'm sorry but no amount of "academic context" makes these sentences any less racist.
> It's a bit like turning up to a 9/11 memorial and saying "all plane crashes matter". Or somebody responding to a bug report by closing it WONTFIX with "all bugs matter".
No it isn't, your argument is fallacious, no organization came with a "9/11 plane crash matters" slogan at first place.
"black lives matter" is a bad slogan because it both doesn't mean what it says and is divisive by nature. "black lives matter" is black people telling white people that "black lives matter too". It's incredibly patronizing. The great majority of white people do understand that black lives do matter, as much as white lives and that police brutality does affect all races.
If you design a slogan in such a way that it is divisive by nature, then disallow anybody else from fighting for their own cause or even broader causes, then you are not seeking a solution involving everybody, but just more racial strife, as you are claiming the exclusivity on victimhood.
Nobody can come here telling me that no white people has ever been beaten or killed by the police abusing their power.
> If that were true, why has it been happening for so many decades?
You mean white people also getting killed by the police? Good question.
> Fairly sure MLK had something to say about this, and that it was impossible to "not be divisive" when talking about race.
The civil right act didn't grant special rights to minorities, it just made both segregation and racial discrimination illegal. This is a non divisive way to solve race issues.
Divisive slogans claiming the monopoly on victimhood solve nothing.
> You mean white people also getting killed by the police? Good question.
Where was the campaign against white people getting killed by the police (or vigilantes! the original campaign was in re Trayvon Martin, who was killed by George Zimmerman) before 2013, or indeed in the present day?
> Where was the campaign against white people getting killed by the police (or vigilantes! the original campaign was in re Trayvon Martin, who was killed by George Zimmerman) before 2013, or indeed in the present day?
Where was the campaign against sex abuse in Hollywood before metoo as well? Now imagine women in metoo telling men to shut up about sex assault because metoo is only for female victims?
This is the difference between a unifying movement and a divisive one. Especially when the latter is making a loud point about silencing anybody that attempts at broader reach. "Respect all lives", "End police brutality" doesn't make the case for black lives weaker at first place.
> Now imagine women in metoo telling men to shut up about sex assault because metoo is only for female victims?
This is a very bad example, as there's always a "what about male victims of sexual assault" faction that only appears when a women makes an allegation and doesn't actually do anything for male victims of sexual assault.
> "Respect all lives", "End police brutality" doesn't make the case for black lives weaker at first place.
Those are fine. It's the specific confrontational wording: a group of people saying "we matter" confronted with "no, you're not special, stop saying the word Black, it makes us uncomfortable".
> Those are fine. It's the specific confrontational wording: a group of people saying "we matter" confronted with "no, you're not special, stop saying the word Black, it makes us uncomfortable".
but "all lives matter" isn't fine? as for the rest of your sentence, that's not what is happening. What is happening is people specifically telling others that "white people lives don't matter, as white lives" as quoted from the article I linked, which you did not address.
> This is a very bad example, as there's always a "what about male victims of sexual assault" faction that only appears when a women makes an allegation and doesn't actually do anything for male victims of sexual assault.
No, this is a perfect example as to how to come with a slogan that pushes unity instead of strife, when a phenomenon concerns everybody.
Even current popular use of the term "dogwhistle" has become a dogwhistle in and of itself.
In current contemporary use, members of the blue tribe use it to communicate to other members of the blue tribe that they believe they have identified a member of the red tribe and want other members of the blue tribe to join them in the tar-and-feathering of the suspected red tribe member.
Both the blue tribe and the red tribe are mirror images of one another in far more ways than members of either are willing (capable?) of acknowledging.
What evidence is there that it is a "racist dog whistle?" What "action" has the phrase prevented from being taken?
Is it "racist" in the DiAngelo definition, a reflection of white people's innate racism and thus like anything a white person might say or do outside of the anti-racist activity of contemplating one's own racism?
Is it a "dog whistle" because it summons racists like a bat signal, "Hey white supremacists, time to do some racism!" How is it that so many people who can hear a particular phrase immediately denounce it as a "racist dog whistle?" Is the denouncement part of systemic racism whereby white people can pretend to be allies and yet still demonstrate their white supremacy bonafides because they can hear the signal?
> The statement is only raised for the purpose of preventing action from being taken or change being made, in regard to investigation into and prevention of unnecessary deaths of black people.
Have you considered the possibility that a lot of people agree that action should be taken, and that statistically-speaking, that positive action will reduce unnecessary deaths for all people, regardless of their race or ethnicity?
If a software bug is reported to affect a certain subset of users more often than others, but upon investigation, it turns out the bug is a duplicate of another more fundamental bug that affects all users relatively equally, are we preventing action (or discrediting that subset of users who reported the bug) by marking it as a duplicate and giving priority to the fundamental issue so as to fix it for everyone?
Just as Black Lives Matter supporters often claim that the phrase is misunderstood by those who question it, All Lives Matter is misunderstood by many who think it takes something away from the black community. It's not a denial of anything, but rather a recognition that the problems actually do statistically affect everyone, and singling out one race (when all are affected) actually does more harm than good when it comes to ending racism.
That would be believeable if all lives matter didn't get thrown around by the same people who say blue lives matter and who systematically refuse to take action on police violence that affects everyone.
You don't counter protest a movement you agree with because you dislike it's semantics. You use semantics as an excuse to ignore a movement that ultimately makes you uncomfortable. MLKs letter from a Birmingham jail being ever relevant.
Perhaps you could re-read the article this discussion is about. You're misrepresenting (and projecting other ideas onto) a viewpoint that you seem to fundamentally misunderstand.
Semantics do matter, especially when specifics are used to highlight division, and that division is used to justify more violence (such as murders committed by the very people who are protesting).
- Politicians that state "all lives matter" by and large do not support action to reduce police violence in general.
- Groups that state "all lives matter" often exist to directly counterprotest groups that state "black lives matter".
- Groups that state that "all lives matter" often also state "blue lives matter" and espouse support for the police in favor of protestors.
Do you disagree with those statements? If you agree with those statements, why would someone who believes that police violence is a problem choose to associate themselves with the police over other people protesting police violence?
It is more pragmatic to support the group that causes you more concern, if you have two concerns that are temporarily at odds. Ergo, if you, aware of the above, say "all lives matter", you know that you are associating yourself with people who condone police violence against everyone. This would imply that you believe the "danger of racism" in the BLM movement is of greater concern than police violence.
Please critique my logical progression there.
To be clear, while you may have only the best intentions when you say "All Lives Matter", it is naive to believe that everyone else who says the same does. When you choose to use a politically charged slogan you should be aware of the message that sends. You ultimately cannot choose how people will interpret your words, and that they see your words by their association instead of your intention is not the recipients fault.
You're saying that "because X group said Y and X group also does Z, Y supports Z".
Your premise is based on a genetic fallacy, and your argument implies a false dichotomy. Your claims are hasty generalizations with insufficient evidence.
I'm not making an argument about beliefs, but about perception.
I don't support everything Joe Biden does, but I still throw my support behind the democratic party because there are only two realistic options in the US today, and the other one is far worse.
If you're going to choose to say "All Lives Matter", you are choosing to involve yourself in a binary. And ignoring the context of that binary (that "All Lives Matter" is a reactionary statement that came about only in response to the statement/movement "Black Lives Matter") is done at one's own risk.
> Your claims are hasty generalizations with insufficient evidence.
So you disagree that "All Lives Matter" is a reactionary statement that only came into being post-"Black Lives Matter"?
Edit:
On Blue Lives/ All Lives people minimizing violence against black people[0].
And Tim Scott, who is known for being an "All Lives Matter" proponent, opposes ending Qualified Immunity (and indeed his proposed bill on police reform does almost nothing). Whereas Colorado's QI-ending bill was sponsored by Leslie Herod, who joined a Black Lives Matter march.
In the House, the Qualified-Immunity ending bill[1] is sponsored by only Democrats, among them many who are openly pro-Black Lives Matter, and, well Republicans don't seem to be[2]. Swallwell supports ending QI, Gaetz does not. Swallwell says Black Lives Matter. Gaetz refuses to say that, instead saying that All Lives Matter. Is that enough evidence?
> I'm not making an argument about beliefs, but about perception.
* sigh * I miss the day when we could state our beliefs and defend them on principle rather than on perception, trying to guess which groups may choose to be offended.
> * sigh * I miss the day when we could state our beliefs and defend them on principle rather than on perception
Yeah, this was never the case for large swaths of people.
Truly the good days in history, where Civil Rights activists noted that, ethically, segregation was problematic. Everyone agreed and racism was solved. They didn't need to worry about offending anyone, people just understood them. Legislation followed swiftly without much kerfuffle. There was no worry about offending the sensibilities of the "white moderate" (letter from a Birmingham Jail really showing up today!)
Missing the days when you didn't need to worry about how your views were perceived is itself a privilege.
Please stop putting words in other people's mouths or implying that someone is associated with racism when they're stating their beliefs and defending those beliefs with principles. It takes a more nuanced understanding of reality to accept the fact that someone can miss certain aspects of the past while at the same time acknowledging the imperfections of the past.
The freedom to express ideas - even controversial ones - is at the heart of a truly free society. A viewpoint based on sound principles can be true, while also being offensive to someone or a group of people. That doesn't make the viewpoint wrong. A doctor who objectively describes how a person's weight may be detrimental to their health is stating a medical fact, even though it may be deeply offensive to the patient.
To imply that taking offense (over "semantics" used by some people who express their views) is somehow equivalent to the unjust laws mentioned in Letter from Birmingham Jail is, in its own way, a mockery of what Martin Luther King Jr was fighting for. He defended free speech, even when it was offensive at the time. In our time, we speak up about our beliefs and some see them as offensive, but those freedoms should be defended all the same. Publicly shaming people based on false interpretations, and in many cases causing harm to them (as we've seen in the news recently in response to conservative viewpoints being expressed) is an obstruction of those liberties.
If you disagree with someone, debate them on principle. On the other hand, if you pretend that what they're saying is invalid because someone else chooses to be offended by it, you are no longer talking about objective reality. Without a basis in objective reality, public discourse becomes nothing short of a shouting match with rules that change with the wind. We've seen an explosion of that kind of behavior recently on social media.
Instead of being so adamant about picking sides and being "right", let's all listen a little more - to all viewpoints. Let's not paint someone as the devil because they disagree with us (or because we've given them a label based on other people with that viewpoint), but instead offer them a bit of respect and understand that their intentions may be just as honorable as our own, albeit colored by different circumstances and experience.
> Please stop putting words in other people's mouths or implying that someone is associated with racism when they're stating their beliefs and defending those beliefs with principles.
Saying "the slogan you choose to support will be perceived as being associated with racism" is a statement of fact. You can argue that that association is wrong, and you are free to try and change that association, but in the meantime, you should acknowledge that fact.
> It takes a more nuanced understanding of reality to accept the fact that someone can miss certain aspects of the past while at the same time acknowledging the imperfections of the past.
I agree. You seem to have missed my point. Claiming broad things about the past having been a certain way misses the nuance that for many people it wasn't actually that way. It's a privileged view on history. Having privilege isn't racist. Let's all be a little less defensive, shall we?
> The freedom to express ideas - even controversial ones - is at the heart of a truly free society. A viewpoint based on sound principles can be true, while also being offensive to someone or a group of people. That doesn't make the viewpoint wrong. A doctor who objectively describes how a person's weight may be detrimental to their health is stating a medical fact, even though it may be deeply offensive to the patient.
I agree. So please stop taking umbrage when I correctly point out that certain slogans are associated with racism. I'm stating facts.
> If you disagree with someone, debate them on principle.
We're having a discussion about semantics. "All lives matter " and "black lives matter" are political slogans. Which one you choose to associate with sends signals that are based on context.
If you believe that it is more important to express that all lives matter than that black lives matter because a "race blind" statement is more powerful (or something, you haven't actually taken the time to explain the principles on which you're operating anywhere in this thread), you're free to express that view! You can do it! We have strong protections on your freedom to express ideas, even controversial ones. But because of that, others are also free to express their own ideas, such as criticism of yours, like that you are ignoring context.
> Instead of being so adamant about picking sides and being "right", let's all listen a little more - to all viewpoints.
I don't want to listen to nazis. I don't have anything to gain from listening to nazis. It is physically uncomfortable for me to listen to nazis. It makes me anxious. It is ultimately a waste of my time to listen to them.
I'm not saying that all views I disagree with are nazis, but the implication that free expression requires others to listen to you is a dangerous one. We can all draw the line somewhere on who we listen to. You have no right to my time or my audience, and it is not reasonable to substitute your right to speak with my right to ignore you. The opposite is also true, you're well within your rights to ignore me, and I support that for you.
Broadly, I think it's ironic how much your responses are colored based on things I didn't say. You haven't actually taken the time to respond to my thoughts or words, nor does it seem that you even took the time to ponder on them. You instead ranted about only tangentially related topics. And that's your right! You can do that. I can't stop you, you're welcome to ignore me.
But all those nice words about "debate" and "listening" to other viewpoints ring a little hollow when you don't actually engage with any critique.
80 to 90% of the times I’ve seen this phrase, it’s been used in response to Black Lives Matter. As opposed to being used in the positive for, say, universal healthcare, food assistance programs, and initiatives to house the homeless.
Wait, so more than 1 in 10 times you've heard this, someone was saying it in an unrelated context to BLM? What were the separate contexts? I've never even remotely heard this term when not used as a response to "black lives matter."
Probably less than that, to be honest. People sometimes say it when it comes to banning abortion, but those same people don’t seem to care for childcare programs or maternal mortality rates.
Note: above comments relative to the insanity that is the USA, of course.
I made the mistake of saying "but police brutality is a general problem, why make it specific to black people rather than try to solve all of it? Isn't it true that all lives matter?", and the person I was talking to basically heard "I'm racist", so it's not only true that it's both true and a racist dog-whistle, but it's also true that after the whistle has been blown, it doesn't matter what else you say.
The whistle should be a red flag, rather than surefire proof that you now know everything the person is going to say, therefore you shouldn't listen any more. I think one of the problems in the US is the pervasiveness of the mindset of "I think you're X, therefore I refuse to listen to anything else you say".
Unfortunately, given the prevalence of bad-faith debaters and sockpuppet accounts, we've got very used to a block-on-sight approach. It saves a lot of time.
That's an unfortunate reaction to what should have been a teachable moment. You're not wrong, in so far as all lives truly do matter. The statement "Black lives matter" seems to have an implicit "more than yours" tacked on in a lot of people's heads, and that's what seems to grate.
It's not that Black lives matter _more_, it's that systemic institutionalized racism dating back to the origins of the US make it so that Black lives matter _less_ than white lives when dealing with organs of power.
> It's not that Black lives matter _more_, it's that systemic institutionalized racism dating back to the origins of the US make it so that Black lives matter _less_ than white lives when dealing with organs of power.
This is definitely true, I'm just puzzled as to why you'd focus efforts on solving a subset of the problem rather than the whole problem. Wouldn't that lead to fragmented movements of "<race> lives matter" rather than one single effort?
To the extent that the problem can be solved, the solution isn't going to be race-specific! There's no subsetting going on here.
The people complaining are black. They want their lives to matter. If you can't campaign for that without there being something in it for you as well .. why not?
Black Lives Matter is, among many other things, a hook to draw attention to systemic institutionalized racism from white voters who haven't ever questioned their privilege (the teachable kind, not the kind PG is talking about).
The legislative programs that people are advancing in the wake of this attention do indeed focus on solving the problem for everyone, not just Black people. For example, Colorado recently passed a police reform bill that does a lot of beneficial things, none of them specifically targeted at the Black community[1].
> Black Lives Matter is, among many other things, a hook to draw attention to systemic institutionalize racism from white voters who haven't ever questioned their privilege (the teachable kind, not the kind PG is talking about).
Ahh, okay, that makes more sense, thanks. I wasn't aware of that.
It's not just a hook - black people are oftentimes the testing grounds for unjust programs that expand in scope to engulf other peoples (e.g. the prison industrial complex). The full tag line should be "All lives will matter when Black Lives Matter" because they are at the intersections of so many institutional inequities.
Something I've said for a while is that many "conspiracy theories" are distorted, garbled versions of "what if the US did to white people things that it has done to black people".
Yes, and also you're wrong. The efforts that will solve this problem for Black people will solve the problem for everyone else, too, or else it's not an acceptable solution.
People are focusing on Black Lives Matter as a rallying cry because the police system is expressing its terrifying lawlessness through overtly racist terror-inducing acts.
The problem won't go away without massive reform to the system. And asking "what about these other people?" in the general context is not useful; asking "what about these other people in the specific context of 'will this proposed solution work for these other people, too?'" is very useful.
I hear what you're saying, but I think you misunderstand what the protesters are saying.
“Black lives matter” is not just asserting that black lives are among the lives that matter. Like, it IS asserting this and that observation IS somewhat banal and that IS kind of the point.
The banality of the statement is meant to invite you to think, “wait, why do we even have to say this?” which exposes a deeper meaning.
That deeper meaning is more like “We occasionally get hunted and killed out in the streets like rabid dogs by the very institutions that are supposed to protect people from violence—and this can only be understood as the culmination of America’s vast history of trying to ignore and bury and forget about its racist history rather than talk about it and address it, to the point where that «we don’t wanna talk about it» inclination has metastasized into an active implication that our lives are valueless to the culture at large. And we cannot breathe this stifling choking smog of «oh well another black man was shot but let’s not put it in the news, they don’t matter enough for that» any more, as happens when death transitions from stories into statistics. Fuck that. We DO matter.”
In turn the deeper meaning of “Blue lives matter” is “we respect our police enough to give them unconditional arbitration of who lives and who dies in cases where they feel their lives are at stake and sorry black people but we don't see a way for your needs to not die be satisfied without good honest police officers losing their lives because some of y’all shoot them—like, not the majority, I am sure most of you are good, but like when I think of inner city gang members shooting the police I think of black men stereotypically. Fix your gang problems first and then you won’t get shot by police.” You can see why that seems to have a kernel of truth but really came across as tone-deaf (see how it takes a statistical view rather than a story view?) and not understanding that most of these actual stories are about getting shot in the back while walking away or being strangled slowly while being totally immobilized and protesting that you are being strangled and could they please not do that, others involve very young innocent children being killed as collateral damage or worse.
Meanwhile “all lives matter” is a similarly banal statement but it serves the function, when used as a response to “black lives matter,” of saying that “no, you know, I really like our racist history being buried, I liked it when we didn't talk about race. We should focus on the global human condition and forget the specific gruesome stories of what’s happening to folks of your race right now as just the smaller problem of what’s happening to you right now. But I find myself very worried that if I am sharing these black stories someone is going to get mad at me for not sharing the Mexican stories of police injustice and then the poor white stories of police injustice and, well, can’t we just go back to a time where we didn’t talk about the race problem that we were having?”
The basic response to this I suppose is “we have been trying the ‘all lives matter’ approach for hundreds of years and we don’t seem to be improving, meanwhile cultures with similar race dynamics, like South Africa, are actually processing their difficulties over much shorter time scales, possibly because they are willing to talk about it and be frank. There is no reason to believe at this point that the mentality of ‘all lives matter’ leads to a better outcome for the black lives that are hemorrhaged today in such quantities that it becomes numb statistics rather than individual stories if we don’t make a point of getting outraged over every single damn death.”
Every time I see the thin blue line flag or a "support our police" sign (or both combined, as in several yards just outside of town) I get angry. It's willfully ignoring everything you just wrote about, at best.
I think people are operating with incomplete, non-overlapping sets of information.
A day or two ago, a police officer in my area was killed on duty in a gunfight. Some of the reactions on Twitter were deranged and vile, literally celebrating that an officer was killed. I saw the same shit the day or two before when a police department near me tweeted about one of their police dogs dying, apparently of old age.
People deliberately try to ambush and murder police on a fairly regular basis. It doesn’t get reported much—partly because it doesn’t fit any popular media narrative, partly, I suspect, to not encourage copycats, and partly because it’s not really news. In 2013 a man in Southern California—you might recognize his name but I won’t give him the dignity of using it—carried out a brief campaign of murdering police officers and their families in a self-declared campaign of “unconventional and asymmetric warfare” against the LAPD.
I used to personally be very strongly biased against the police. I’m less so now, and part of the reason for that is that I’ve had the opportunity to see dozens of dashcam and bodycam videos of actual officer-involved shootings. The vast majority of the shootings I’ve seen were situations where the officer’s life was very much at risk.
I can even pick out patterns when people post videos of police not shooting people, presumably because those people are white. It’s not because they’re white, it’s because while they might have a bladed weapon and occasionally lunge in an officer’s direction, cops usually hold their fire and maintain distance until the guy breaks into a full-on sprint to try and close that distance.
I’m not trying to minimize or dismiss the actual police brutality that takes place, and I agree that we need higher standards and accountability. But from actually listening to some of the people on that side of the issue and seeing their evidence, I can understand where they’re coming from.
Sure. Stories are important. It's really not all that common, though, if we're being honest. According to this random memorial page[1] 48 police officers were killed in the line of duty last year in the US, an annual fatality rate of 0.006% assuming 800,000 active officers.
The numbers aren’t that low for lack of trying, though. The majority of attempts fail because the police are better-equipped and better-trained than the people trying to kill them. That’s part of why there are so many officer-involved shootings in the first place.
The first half clarified some things for me, thank you. The second half is replying to the dog-whistle "all lives matter", which is not what I was talking about.
I think my misconception was that I thought BLM is a movement against police brutality, where it's actually more general than that. Under that light, it makes sense.
I'll admit that the phrase "black lives matter" makes me nervous, but not because I feel like it implies other lives do not matter. I was taught to never single out a group based on race, and that it was supremely rude behavior. On a fairly irrational level the phrase makes me nervous because it goes against what I was taught was polite behavior.
I've seen a good metaphor to this: imagine if somebody told you the Amazonian forest needs saving and you said "but all forests matter". While an obviously true statement, you just (unwittingly) downplayed the imminence of one over the other and missed on the particularities.
That's not a good metaphor because there isn't a single entity destroying all the forests. If, say, Exxon, was destroying all the forests, I'd for sure not be trying to save the Amazon but trying to stop Exxon instead.
There isn't a single entity killing black people in the US (police forces are highly localised, and the original campaign was about a vigilante murder and not caused by the police per se, but the failure of the justice system to convict a murderer)
I think you're projecting your perspective of the relative dangers to the Amazon rainforest and the {other} rainforest in that metaphor. In your head one class is in real trouble, and other class is in lesser trouble. Try to exercise your metaphor from the perspective other forests are in equal or greater danger:
eg:
Imagine if someone told you the Pacific Temperate rain forest needs saving and you responded with "sure, but we're prioritizing resources for the Amazon first - its got it way worse"
You just (wittingly) downplayed the imminence of one over the other and missed on the particularities because of how you perceived their relative danger.
Now consider your original metaphor without the bias about which forest is worst off in reality. You might find that "all forests matter" might be a more valid response in that context because they don't want to dis-proportionally favor one at the cost of the others.
Exactly this. A lot of people who say 'All lives matter' as a response rather pointedly refuse to say 'Black lives matter' because that would be admitting that the problems of institutional racism that devalues black lives are real problems that need to be addressed.
Step outside your statement for a second and consider it in light of PG's essay. Is it possible you yourself are afflicted with orthodox privilege, to the extent where you can't see any legitimate critiques of your own standpoint?
If you continue to allow these statements to polarize and force a false dichotomy that demonizes a group and lionizes another, well, you're not really helping heal the divides either.
Dude, watch any video of a Republican politician saying 'All lives matter' and refusing to say 'Black lives matter' and then come back and tell me it's a false dichotomy.
I've seen what you're talking about, but the false dichotomy I am referring to is between the real political implementations of the Republicans and Democrats, which don't really seem that different from my outside-of-America perspective. Neither party seems capable of fixing anything, or building the infrastructure they promise, or really protecting the Americans they purport to represent. The same moneyed interests continue to exert the same amount of control regardless. The same foreign policies and the same sabre rattling happens.
The actual _people_ have much wider divergence of opinions, for sure. I don't expect a Republican to go around chanting the slogans of people who have declared themselves to be their enemies; why would they?
Just because neither party is progressive doesn't mean that the conservative choice isn't far, faaaaar better than the regressive one.
And yes indeed it would be awesome to revamp the US political system, but that won't happen anytime soon short of armed revolt, and keeping people alive in the meantime is still important.
And I'd say neither party is truly conservative, otherwise we wouldn't be seeing this absolute shambles from an ostensibly "law and order" President. Nothing is being conserved. Nobody has taken away gay marriage, abortion, legal weed, etc. Nobody sent in the Army to destroy CHAZ.
The reality is that in the American system the President is not very powerful, and the permanent bureaucracy and moneyed interests have a lot more control over policy than one might thing at first glance.
> And I'd say neither party is truly conservative, otherwise we wouldn't be seeing this absolute shambles from an ostensibly
An incompetent conservative is still conservative. And the trump admin did try to erode many of these things: protections for gay and transgender workers[0], abortion[1], etc. That reversing supreme court decisions (which most of these were based on) is exceedingly difficult worked against his goals, but denying that he tried is ignorant.
The thing about protest is that it has the capacity to be misunderstood. They misunderstood you. You misunderstood them.
> it denies that anything unfair is happening to people because of their skin color.
Like you did here. In my experience, an "all lives matter" activist is quite happy to both acknowledge racism and have a discussion on the nuance of racial treatment in the United States.
Where the two sides really differ is in their general view of America. Whether its optimistic or pessimistic. Whether its isolated or systematic. Whether its "racial" or "cultural".
To be blunt, its absurd to label a movement which has millions of adherents as a "racist dog whistle". Its either an overt, racist megaphone or just a difference in opinion.
Say you are a Mongolian tourist and you arrive in America and people are getting upset about "all lives matter", you would think that it is an utterly bizarre thing to get upset about.
In fact, the angry reaction to "all lives matter" precisely is what encourages its use. Because if you take as premise, that "all lives matter" is true then it becomes easy to cast anybody who gets angry about a true statement as unreasonable.
You might think that there are no Mongolian tourists in America, especially right now, but you might be surprised how little many people pay attention to current events.
[Disclaimer for the internet mob, I have never and would never use the phrase.]
The problem with the slogan black lives matter is that it is so obviously a straw man as are all "____ lives matter" slogans. Except for some truly tiny pockets in the US, the overwhelming majority of people believe black lives matter, even most that use the expression "all lives matter" in earnest. My observation is that almost everyone I've seen use the term "all lives matter" is doing so as a response to a straw man. Most people who have been arguing on the internet long enough can agree that as satisfying as a straw man argument is to use, it's almost invariably counterproductive to convincing your interlocutor of responding positively to whatever point you're trying to make. Why? Because by responding with a straw man, you've demonstrated that you're not going to interpret any response from your interlocutor charitably and that's just getting off on the wrong foot.
The slogans black lives matter, all lives matter, blue lives matter, etc., are all straw men slogans/arguments that communicate to whomever you're speaking with that you're not planning on interpreting them charitably.
I know lots of people who think black lives matter some, but who don't think they matter as much as white lives. Like going around and murdering black people is clearly unethical, but overpolicing and imprisoning them for nonviolent crime isn't. Yet they can't imagine doing the same to white people.
> but overpolicing and imprisoning them for nonviolent crime isn't. Yet they can't imagine doing the same to white people.
was and is (relatively) commonly stated. I claim that to believe this is alright, you must implicitly value black safety less than white safety. I'm open to counterarguments.
I don’t think anyone actually supports the idea of “overpolicing and imprisoning [black people in particular] for nonviolent crime”.
I think your understanding of the situation is that black people are “overpoliced” and disproportionately imprisoned for nonviolent crimes. This is why you want to change the situation, which is a logical conclusion.
I think people who disagree with you about the conclusion you reach didn’t get there by sharing your understanding of the situation, shrugging their shoulders, and saying it was fine. I think they perceive the underlying situation itself differently than you do. It’s not a difference in values. They might be wrong, but people are wrong about things all the time.
If I tell someone that "Black people are incarcerated at a 3x higher rate for drug crimes they commit at the same rate as white people", and they argue that that is Black people's fault, what should I conclude? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23667342)
I don’t think the person you were arguing with was expressing, as a value statement, the idea that black and white people should be policed differently purely based on their race. I think you’re jumping to that conclusion a little. And I don’t really want to continue this because I have a hard time trusting that you’re going to listen to me in good faith, either.
> I don’t think the person you were arguing with was expressing, as a value statement, the idea that black and white people should be policed differently purely based on their race.
I agree. But that's not what I asked. The statement I originally made was that
"overpolicing and imprisoning <black people> for nonviolent crime isn't. Yet they can't imagine doing the same to white people."
Which I do think is fairly clearly demonstrated. There's a subtle shift, but a relevant one. Creating new systems of oppression based on race is racist, but letting existing systems that treat races unfairly is okay, even though the results would be the same.
I want to reiterate: I don't believe this person claims that black people should be policed different purely based on their race, but it does seem that this person is comfortable with that being the way the world operates.
And way back, the statement we started from was "black lives matter". And in general I hold that to mean "black lives matter just as much as any other race".
How do we square the value statement "black lives matter just as much as any other race" with the acceptance of over-policing of black communities as justified? I don't see how we can. But again, I'm open to other interpretations.
> How do we square the value statement "black lives matter just as much as any other race" with the acceptance of over-policing of black communities as justified?
Many black communities are disproportionately victimized by violent crime, and increasing the police presence there protects them from that crime and hence saves many of their lives.
Maybe it hasn’t worked out that way, but here we are again arguing how we perceive the situation, not the underlying values we’re trying to optimize for. I might listen to you mention the drug charges and say, “fine, let’s legalize weed”. I might listen to you talk about how black people distrust their local police departments and vice versa and I might counter by advocating for community-oriented policing. You might convince me that none of that works and the basic concept was wrong-headed. But nowhere in this process do we actually disagree about the basic value you mentioned.
> Many black communities are disproportionately victimized by violent crime, and increasing the police presence there protects them from that crime and hence saves many of their lives.
Sure, and that was the common understanding 20-30 years ago. (see: Dem and black community support for various crime bills, "Superpredator", etc.). But our understanding of the situation has evolved (based on evidence, I should add!).
> I might listen to you mention the drug charges and say, “fine, let’s legalize weed”. I might listen to you talk about how black people distrust their local police departments and vice versa and I might counter by advocating for community-oriented policing. You might convince me that none of that works and the basic concept was wrong-headed. But nowhere in this process do we actually disagree about the basic value you mentioned.
But now you're arguing for a bunch of policies supported by various sects of Black Lives Matters supporters, all of which could be summed up in various ways as "reduce police interactions with black people".
My point is that there are people who don't accept that. Who insist that nothing should change. The argument goes something like this:
(1) Because black people commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime
(2) police will naturally interact more with black people so
(3) black people will also be arrested more for nonviolent crimes, and therefore
(4) nothing needs to change.
This breaks down somewhere between one and two, for a variety of reasons. The amount of violent crime isn't proportional to the amount of overpolicing, a lot of the forms of overpolicing don't actually reduce violent crime, etc. These are the people who I think it's reasonable to have suspicion of. People who agree that some form of action is necessary, cool! But people who think the status quo is fine and dandy, that's the group where I can't quite square things (and I'll note that the person who I linked earlier was in that group).
> But now you're arguing for a bunch of policies supported by various sects of Black Lives Matters supporters, all of which could be summed up in various ways as "reduce police interactions with black people".
I think community-oriented policing is actually intended to increase police interactions by adding more non-adversarial interactions in order to establish trust.
I don’t think “reduce police interactions with black people” is necessarily desirable if that includes things like ignoring 911 calls from black neighborhoods. In fact, that strikes me as deliberate failure to provide equal protection under the law, and could be even more ruinous to black communities than the status quo.
“Reduce police interactions with black people” is yet another thing that might sound like a good idea at the time, but would ultimately lead, in my opinion, to unintended negative consequences for the very black lives it’s intended to protect. Even if your ideal solution would turn out to have fewer police interactions, setting that as a goal is just begging for Goodhart’s Law to manifest itself.
Also, I think you’re minimizing nonviolent crime. DUI, car theft, burglary, and arson are all “nonviolent crimes”. We can’t just ignore them. A neighborhood where these things happen frequently is made more dangerous and impoverished by them. So when you talk about having more police presence in black neighborhoods resulting in more non-violent criminals behind bars, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you drive drunk through a black neighborhood, you might run over a black kid, and that black kid’s life sure as hell matters so I hope the police are around to catch you before that happens.
If you’re talking about drug crimes and arguing that the enforcement of those laws is worse than the offense, then maybe you should just repeal those laws. And if I disagreed with you about drug laws I might argue the point with you.
> People who agree that some form of action is necessary, cool! But people who think the status quo is fine and dandy, that's the group where I can't quite square things
We got into this mess by agreeing that some form of action was necessary. Stopping to make sure we aren’t just making things worse is reasonable.
> We got into this mess by agreeing that some form of action was necessary. Stopping to make sure we aren’t just making things worse is reasonable.
That isn't what I said. You can agree that the status quo is bad while being unsure of how to fix it (noticing flaws is a lot easier than finding solutions!). I'm speaking about people who believe the status quo is okay.
I think you can believe the status quo is better than the set of changes you are proposing without devaluing the lives of black people.
“Okay” is a relative term. Fundamentally, no state of affairs on earth can ever be truly “okay” because humanity is imperfect. No human society is capable of perfect justice. No human society ever has or ever will achieve perfect justice. That means injustice will always exist.
> noticing flaws is a lot easier than finding solutions
Yes, thank you. That’s my point. We’re all noticing flaws in the status quo. And a lot of people, yourself included, are proposing changes to the status quo. Changes which, in and of themselves, will also have flaws. But I think, as a conventional shorthand for “the best of all possible worlds because humanity is imperfect and damned”, you can just say the status quo is “okay” in that scenario.
> But I think, as a conventional shorthand for “the best of all possible worlds because humanity is imperfect and damned”
Then I'd reject this on moral grounds:
Which is a better society: that everyone is approximately equally happy, or that overall happiness is greater, but at the cost of an inequality in happiness based on birthright?
I'd claim that the second system is inherently unequal and therefore we should prefer the first even if it is, in a strictly utilitarian sense, better.
That’s beside the point though. I wasn’t making the argument that some people choose to trade off between different values in different ways. I was making the argument that, even if you hold those values constant, you will never achieve any of them perfectly.
To put it in concrete terms: every possible human society has some inequalities based on birthright. Or, as I stated it, perfect justice is impossible.
It’s not a question of prioritizing certain values over others, although those questions can and do arise. It’s a question of achieving any one of those values in the real world.
Sure, but given that it may not be possible to achieve perfect equality, I'm not sure how it follows that we are at a global (or even local) maximum of equality, which seems to be what you shorthand "okay" to mean.
And I think that it's pretty obvious that we aren't at such a maximum.
Like, holding values constant, "make marijuana legal" would reduce inequality. It might have some second order effects that are problematic in general, but it would reduce policing inequality. I don't see a counterargument to that.
> Sure, but given that it may not be possible to achieve perfect equality, I'm not sure how it follows that we are at a global (or even local) maximum of equality, which seems to be what you shorthand "okay" to mean.
The only way to prove that we aren't at a global or local maximum is to make the case for some specific set of changes. If this isn't the best of all possible worlds, show me a possible world that's better. Even if we agree about the values, we can still disagree about factual and counterfactual questions enough that maybe I won't believe your better world is possible, or that your possible world is better.
> Like, holding values constant, "make marijuana legal" would reduce inequality. It might have some second order effects that are problematic in general, but it would reduce policing inequality. I don't see a counterargument to that.
The original value we were trying to maximize was the value of black lives, because your claim is that nobody can possibly support the status quo while believing that black lives as as valuable as white lives. So let's try and stay consistent here--you're the one shifting values on me all of a sudden! :)
I happen to agree with you about cannabis, but as I said before, that's the same as saying that cannabis should be legal irrespective of racial equality. And that's because we agree that cannabis usage is less of a threat to black lives than the enforcement of cannabis prohibition. I think the number of black people killed in police encounters due solely to the prohibition of cannabis is probably very marginal. I might be wrong, but again that's not a values difference.
> The original value we were trying to maximize was the value of black lives
Wait now hold on! I'm not trying to maximize the value of black lives. My claim is that black lives are currently given less value than white (or broadly, other) lives. The goal isn't to maximize the value of black lives, but to bring parity to white lives. Maximizing the value of black lives is a very different position.
Or in other words, Black Lives Matter is about maximizing equality. I claim that Marijuana legalization is one such change that will reduce inequality, and will have few enough side effects that they don't make it unacceptable to implement.
tl;dr: We were looking to increase the societal value of black lives, but that is done within the lens of achieving equality.
> I think the number of black people killed in police encounters due solely to the prohibition of cannabis is probably very marginal. I might be wrong, but again that's not a values difference.
I would agree, but (at least if you take the systemic view of racial injustice that I do) the long term impacts of things like incarceration due to the inconsistent enforcement of petty drug charges do have far reaching consequences that make other kinds of change difficult to consider/analyze.
> The goal isn't to maximize the value of black lives, but to bring parity to white lives. Maximizing the value of black lives is a very different position.
Fair. Though they are effectively the same until parity is reached.
> I would agree, but (at least if you take the systemic view of racial injustice that I do) the long term impacts of things like incarceration due to the inconsistent enforcement of petty drug charges do have far reaching consequences that make other kinds of change difficult to consider/analyze.
And here we are back at (hypothetical) differences over our respective understanding of the situation, particularly in comparing the social impacts of drug use and incarceration. I still don’t think any difference in values is necessarily implied.
Being utilitarian is a moral position just like your position and a utilitarian would be justified on rejecting your position on moral grounds as well.
Two people have have a moral position and disagree because they are fundamentally working from different axioms.
Again this isn't very charitable. I've had many of the same discussions and very few people I've debated this with come to the conclusion that things don't need to change. Most agree that things need to change, but they conclude that different changes are warranted than you do.
Many people today focus the change on step 2 ("police will naturally interact more with black people") with policies like defund the police, while others might focus on changes that change the step 1 ("Because black people commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime"), while others even still will focus on things the are priors to even step 1.
Disagreement on the change required is perfectly normal and to be expected. Just because people disagree on the change and don't see things exactly as you do doesn't mean they don't care or are bad people.
> it does seem that this person is comfortable with that being the way the world operates.
This isn't a very charitable interpretation.
There is no lack of injustice in the world. There are more injustices in the world than any single human can possible wrap their head around much less devote attention to caring about.
Just because someone prioritizes other concerns does not mean they are uncaring about a concern you care about, just as you prioritizing the concern you care about do not imply that you're unconcerning about the injustice the other person is prioritizing.
It's possible to come to conclusions about that situation that aren't explained by racism. Correlation is not causation.
If I live in a neighborhood that has a greater incidence of violence, it's reasonable to assume that such a neighborhood might experience more policing. A neighborhood that has more policing in inherently one where you're more likely to be caught afoul of any law, violence not withstanding.
I had friends that lived in the boonies that saw a police officer maybe once a month if that. At the time I lived in the suburbs. I saw a cop maybe once a week. Now that I live in a city I see a police officer roughly once a day or every other day. If you see cops more often, it's more likely that you'll commit a crime in their presence and be incarcerated.
To get a more definitive answer on the magnitude of effect racism has, it would be important to control for other factors so you have a more fair comparison.
For example, if you take people of race X, Y and Z that are all of the same socioeconomic status and live in the same neighborhood, what is the likelihood that each are arrested for non-violent crimes?
The meta point here is that policies can disproportionately affect people with certain characteristics without any intent to disproportionately impact people with certain characteristics.
Racism may very well be the cause of the phenomena you've highlighted, but the data presented thus far is mostly inconclusive and at best suggests an amount of racism that explains far less of the discrepancy than accompanying confounding factors.
The sundry multivariate analysis I've seen (example [0]) attempted generally arrive at the conclusion that yes there is some racism, but that the magnitude of the impact of racism on outcomes is greatly overstated relative to other explanations. That doesn't mean that we still shouldn't address that injustice, but it does mean that there may be lower hanging fruit we might want to address first if our goal is a maximal improvement in justice instead of a modest improvement in justice. Not that we should eventually address all injustices, but resources are finite and it's fair to have a discussion about how to prioritize tackling different injustices and come to agreement on criteria we use to prioritize tackling different injustices.
Basically of that 3x rate, what percent is explained by racism and what is explained by other factors? What are those other factors and what is the contribution factor of each towards the 3x discrepancy.
You are confusing disagreement with racism. Saying "Black Lives Matter" has the connotation that the police force has "systemic racism" against black people, and the phrase "All Lives Matter" is intended to explicitly affirm the literal aspect of the phrase while disagreeing with the connotative element. Disagreement with important, factual claims is not racism.
I know folks, including black folks, who disapprove of the Black Lives Matter messaging and try to redirect BLM conversation towards specific issues while promoting the use of 'all lives matter'
Your statement
> Placed in the context of BLM, it denies that anything unfair is happening to people because of their skin color.
simply doesn't reflect the actual beliefs of many people who use the term. I, for one, am absolutely certain that racism exists and gets people arrested or killed. However, I have seen people become fed up with the narrative being promoted by BLM that frames the issue as being a 'black only' problem. To keep those people on the side of progress it's important to make sure we're not excluding them from the discussion.
It's also worth noting that BLM is not just a movement, but there are organized entities operating under the brand. [1]Many people disagree with those organizations for reasons that have nothing to do with racism or police brutality. Nonetheless, those people are called racist and accused of using dog whistles.
When you use a catch-phrase associated with racists, and you are trying to be an effective communicator, and you are not a racist: then you use a different phrase next time.
If you're not trying to communicate effectively, or if you are trying to communicate your sympathy with racism, you keep using that phrase.
Everyone is responsible for their own heuristics to judge other people. Other people are not responsible for behaving in accordance to your heuristics, it is your error if you misjudge them.
Therefore, if someone uses a phrase also used by racists/communists/some other baddies, and does not fall into that category, it is your error to guess that someone does. It is just victim-blaming for error of judgement.
Words are tools of communication. They have meanings. Those meanings shift over time, and according to context.
In the context of a programming discussion, "Just hash the string and see if you get a match" is a reasonable and meaningful thing to say. In the context of cooking breakfast, it's meaningless drivel.
Reasonable people try to use words that their current audience will understand in the current context. If they make a mistake, they learn from it.
Unreasonable people insist that they are being victim-blamed.
> Words are tools of communication. They have meanings. Those meanings shift over time, and according to context.
This is exactly correct. Not everyone's experiences are the same, leading different people to wrap a situation or a statement in different context.
When some people hear BLM they wrap it in the context of the ideology of the founders, or in the riots they see on television, or in the intense anti-[insert group] hate on social media. Those people aren't racists, and they would happily work with you to combat corruption in our politics and policing. They want the world to be better, they simply disagree with how the movement is organized.
> Unreasonable people insist that they are being victim-blamed.
People who said 'All lives matter' early on were labeled racists and attacked mercilessly on social media and television. I don't believe these people are all unreasonable.
There’s an interesting corollary of that: multiple “Black Lives Matter” organizations believe in ending capitalism and dismantling the family. By your argument, nobody should use the phrase “black lives matter” either unless they, like the founders of that BLM org, actually are literal Marxists.
Maybe you are a Marxist and you think it’s a grand idea to abolish capitalism and the nuclear family. But actually, effective communication is a little beside the point here. If you effectively communicated that you wanted to abolish capitalism and the nuclear family, nobody would care or pay attention. If you instead hid those ideas under a slogan specifically chosen to be as undeniable as possible, you can sneak a lot of things in pretty fast.
There's a time and follower threshold where it goes from being a bubble to a cultural norm. IMO that threshold has been greatly lowered by all of social media allowing for a relatively quick (compared to hundreds of years of human communication) amassing of followers to form a bubble. In this way, you can mint your own orthodoxy. Having a large number of people following some idea is a powerful force in recruiting others.
And although the threshold has gone down for new bubbles, it has also gone down for when they get removed. It's become normal to churn through a bunch of different bubbles and seeing which one sticks around long enough.
You're right, except that _the majority_ tends to be one of the bubbles ;-)
It's why I worry about the left promoting and abusing cancel/outrage culture.
Ironically, if you want to protect minorities, then liberal values need to be protected because it is liberal values that protect minorities against the _tyranny of the majority_.
As an example, on the one hand, as a European, I agree with banning hate speech if it is well defined, and I think the western European countries have a good track record in not abusing censorship. On the other hand, censorship can easily be extended to "fake news", or it could be interpreted that a critique of religion is hate speech, the same religion that promotes hate speech in the Bible, with organizations behind it that support conservative values, actively pushing for legislation against minorities.
Why do minorities think that if censorship starts to be more common, that it will be in their / our favor, given the entire history of the human race? It's a mystery to me.
And I understand the current phenomenon in the US. The justice system in the US is dysfunctional because systemic racism exists, and it's unjust. So people are taking matters into their own hands. With a dysfunctional justice system, the outcome is predictable.
However, that outcome will not be positive. Sorry but I don't believe in mobs with pitchforks; the instances in history where popular revolts worked to enact positive change are rare and far between.
Do we even have a single American orthodoxy? I think orthodox privilege, like everything now, is politicized and partisan. You're either a Democrat or Republican, your whole constellation of viewpoints are very predictable given that one label.
On the Far Left, we have cancel culture and accusing others of racism... Those on the Far Left will not be castigated by their own orthodox community, because the far left is collectively agreeing to see racism in more places than it is likely to exist. Those within the moderate left are then punished by not conforming to the extreme orthodoxy for saying not all implicitly racist actions are done by racists.
Similarly, those on the right will be castigated by their own orthodox community of religious or gun/freedom figures who place devotion to those causes most highly. Any GOP figure is taking a great risk criticizing Trump now, because there is a great amount of orthodoxy behind his policies and the packing the courts with judges...in order to ensure the country is more conservative for longer, at any cost (even Trump).
Here on HN, we have our own orthodoxy, too. Those who work with Rust find safe haven for their views, and the downvote brigade on HN will descend if you even mention the word Trump.
If you work with Java now you will probably not do so well on HN, especially if its for a new product. Yet we ought to know mature reliable platforms are a better place to be than the latest hotness that is still changing and evolving and missing major libraries and features. After all its about the product not the underlying technology. You don't see Java talked about much on HN anymore yet its everywhere running the modern web.
> You're either a Democrat or Republican, your whole constellation of viewpoints are very predictable given that one label.
If you don't see that those are actually two sides of the same orthodoxy, and that the truly unorthodox opinions are outside of either of those two, I don't know what to tell you beyond "you should check your orthodox privilege". ;-)
When it comes to realpolitik, the Democrats and Republicans are basically only different in terms of the speed at which they implement neoliberal policies and fight neocon wars. The general direction of "progress" is the same.
One of the most important thinkers today on the right is George Will, who is anti-Trump and an atheist. If you look at the National Review, there are lots of writers on the right who are either full anti-Trump or at least don't like him. So I think even within "the right," it's hard to pin down what the orthodox position is.
But yes - on HN, supporting Trump is a big no-no, no matter what the reason (even if roughly half the country voted for him).
I guess a weak form of this fallacy would be "there is nothing true you can't say, provided that you are very careful about how you say it." That is, assuming that the people who get in trouble were speaking too bluntly or imprecisely.
Lots of things at work are sacred, I have to avoid talking about them openly. This makes meetings uncomfortable for me when the very orthodox-privilege leader wants you to open up.
Things like Agile for instance can’t be discussed unless you have a near orthodox view.
Excellent essay. I think the qualifier for an unorthodox view/idea/opinion is that it’s a little bit scary to say in public.
Something like... I think the coronavirus reaction is way overblown. It’s not nearly as dangerous as the media would lead you to believe, and wearing masks is basically ineffective and is just a thing to make people feel like they’re doing something.
Maybe I've internalized what "orthodox privilege" means but ... yes things that go against the grain often receive push back.
Is that bad? Isn't that sometimes just the nature of having to prove a different idea in the face of another idea that may be proven?
On the other hand let's say it is Orthodox Privilege then we get to the next step, give it a name and ... tell others they're engaging in 'orthodox privilege'?
Any kinda 'you're doing <insert privilege term>' seems like a non starter.
In the meantime anyone and everyone who gets push back seems to already feel they're oppressed by 'the system' or 'the media' and anyone who views their ideas as poor somehow is biased, pushing an agenda, something is wrong with them.
I feel like a lot of 'privilege' talk sort of leaked out of good / valid ideas and areas of academic study and now are sort of used as a magic wand (or sometimes a baseball bat) that really don't solve anything when talking to other people outside of say macro study and etc.
There is an awful lot of people who go on TV or their popular youtube channel to promote their book and speaking tour in which they complain about being silenced.
> I feel like a lot of 'privilege' talk sort of leaked out of good / valid ideas and areas of academic study and now are sort of used as a magic wand (or sometimes a baseball bat) that really don't solve anything
Absolutely not denying what you or pjc50 are saying (there are far too many who cry wolf, or benefit "inappropriately"), but I can imagine the case where some people may be in the honest situation where they feel they have been silenced because they cannot say what they would like to say.
Individual 1: "I'm being silenced."
Group: "What would you like to say that you think you're being silenced about?"
Individual 1: "I cannot say for fear..."
The comment sounds like a perfect example of siding with orthodox privilege...
We did hear from victims of silencing back in the day just as well (and not just in the sense of state censorship, which many Americans have this bizarro notion that only it matters).
From Lenny Bruce and Charlie Chaplin, to rap groups, from the Hayes code to book authors (including of masterpieces like "Junky"), from Hoover and McCarthy, to Jello Biafra, and from records getting thrown out of record store chains because they angered some group, all the way back to Galileo being silenced, black leaders (despite having large followings otherwise), etc.
People do lose gigs, have talks cancelled, have book contracts dropped, shows demonetised, and so on because of mob reaction, or because of some angry special interest group, or because of some vocal bloggers, or whatever.
Is the argument that they aren't completely stomped, so they should be thankful?
Or that how someone be a victim of silencing and still be able to talk about their silencing and have it know?
I feel like it goes both ways. I don't buy into the idea that 'any' friction is 'orthodox privilege' or anything else. In the meantime it is standard operating procedure / so easy for most humans to assume that any real friction is some sort of system or an act of bad faith.... and couldn't possibly be because of something else.
>People do lose gigs, have talks cancelled, have book contracts dropped, shows demonetised, and so on because of mob reaction, or because of some angry special interest group, or because of some vocal bloggers, or whatever.
Does it matter whether the reason for the "cancellation" came from a mob, or only what the reason actually is?
If a group of crazy incoherent people get a Nazi cancelled by shouting "they're a Nazi!", and the person really is a Nazi, does it matter that they're a bit crazy and incoherent?
>If a group of crazy incoherent people get a Nazi cancelled by shouting "they're a Nazi!", and the person really is a Nazi, does it matter that they're a bit crazy and incoherent?
On principle, for me, it does.
For one, I don't want "groups of crazy incoherent people" dictating their terms.
Second, I want all voices able to being heard, and adult audiences judging for themselves if they like to hear them. This includes access to book deals, speaking halls, conference spaces, etc. This includes Nazis or people in favor of the extinction of all mankind, fans of royal government against democracy, fans of Bieber, the KKK AND black panthers, and so on. As long as they don't act illegally/violently.
Third, the tricky part is not agreeing with silencing a Nazi (which many will agree, some will disagree because they favour free exchange of ideas, whatever they are, but in any case it would be popular to do so).
The tricky part is determining who is the "Nazi" (that is, the person to be silenced). And on that front, the tide turns very easily. Under Hoover a open leftist could lose their job. In the 50s a black rights supporter in the South could loose business deals, concert and writing gigs, get cancelled, etc. You think that this can happen from now on only on the "bad" side? Doesn't history taught you how fast the tides can turn? There was Obama just 4 years ago, and now it's Trump, for example...
I'm not going to pretend that when people who say incredibly stupid, harmful, and provably falsifiable things that they deserve a pass for it. They can say what they want in the venue they want if they can find the support for it. People have a right to speech. They don't have a right to a venue or a platform, and they don't have a right from the consequences of their speech. If you're going to say something that is incredibly stupid and insensitive, then you shouldn't be surprised when you aren't invited to speak in most venues.
The venn diagram circle of those who believe that people with power deserve to have the right to reach the most people with their speech almost completely overlaps the circle of those who are currently whining about being demonetized because they're saying stupid, harmful, and reprehensible things.
This is literally the world they championed. They just thought that they would be the ones making the decisions.
Well, one approach is to find people in the same reference class who have spoken and, for speaking, faced serious consequences. For example, they got formally punished (kicked out of a group, demoted, fired) for it, and a sympathetic journalist gave them a platform to tell their story about it later.
This Twitter thread (oh lord, how did I end up citing Twitter multiple times in this conversation?), by the founder of an online magazine that seems to specialize in stories of this sort, has a long list of examples. https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1282215876553400321
how about considering that the people telling you they're being silenced is a group of privileged folks unaccustomed to being pushed back upon publicly, with "cancel culture" as the reactive appellation for that push back?
The fact that the set of people complaining about this includes people famous for openly discussing controversial ideas that they have received pushback and worse for in the past sort of refutes that.
Do you really think this is the first time anyone has pushed back against Noam Chomsky? Salman Rushdie had a fatwa declared on his life over a book he wrote. I think these people are very well accustomed to being pushed back upon publicly.
no, most of the noise is from people who aren't as well-known or intellectually rigorous as chomsky and rushdie (whether you agree with them or not). these well-known rhetoriticians expect and likely welcome the pushback (obviously the counterarguments, not the threats on their lives). theirs is the exceptional context, not the exception that invalidates the general condition.
The fact remains that both Chomsky and Rushdie signed the Harpers open letter and are hence two of the people publicly advocating on behalf of the people who have been silenced. You simply can’t honestly claim that this is an overreaction from people who aren’t used to pushback.
no, it's a rejection of your argument from authority, not a supporting claim of "overreaction from people who aren’t used to pushback". if you think there are other substantial coutnerclaims, please make them.
You said: “the people telling you they're being silenced is a group of privileged folks unaccustomed to being pushed back upon publicly, with "cancel culture" as the reactive appellation for that push back?”
Which I interpreted as: “the only people who complain about cancel culture are unaccustomed to pushback” and disproved by counterexample.
It occurs to me now that perhaps you didn’t mean “all”. You meant “some”. That’s called nutpicking and it means your original claim wasn’t substantial enough to discuss in the first place.
This logic only follows if we assume censorship is applied to everyone, equally, all the time.
Someone saying "hey, look there are a lot of instances of people being censored over there, we should be concerned about it because it could affect us" cannot be refuted on the basis that the speaker isn't being censored.
It's like refuting someone saying that a bunch of people are ill on the basis that the speaker isn't ill themselves. Illness is something that occurs to individuals, not to society. Same with censorship. It isn't some absolute where people are totally censored or totally free to speak their mind. It's distributed unevenly across society. When understood as a distribution rather than something binary, it becomes obvious that instances of free speech about censorship doesn't disprove the existence of censorship, nor does it say anything about whether or not we are becoming a more censorious society.
I agree it's hard for people to be truly silenced nowadays. If you have something you really want to say, you can probably find friends and jobs and news outlets that allow it.
But the question of orthodoxy is, which things can you say without optimizing your life for them? If you have an average job and average friend groups, which opinions can you express without a risk of losing them? The answer will vary depending on exactly what's "average" in your area, but in most places it's going to be a much smaller set than the opinions you could in principle say.
> There is an awful lot of people who go on TV or their popular youtube channel to promote their book and speaking tour in which they complain about being silenced.
I'm going to quote Paul Graham's Twitter here:
"Many fans of cancel culture have mentioned that it's mostly powerful people publishing opinions about it, as if that were some kind of contradiction.
Of course it's mostly powerful people who are speaking openly about a phenomenon that gets less powerful people fired."
I think there is a lot of yin and yang to that though.
1. Folks who shout they are being silenced, to some extent obviously aren't and usually follow that up with some direction to ... their ideas they're being silenced.
2. Anyone who is really silenced, who do we hear about it from? Group 1.
Outside of say a government straight up banning speech or outright removing it... I have real trouble weeding out who / what is truly being silenced and what the issue really is.
And I'm highly skeptical about Group 1's ability to tell me honestly about Group 2.
In certain high profile cases certain groups tried hard to silence certain people but - for better or worse - failed horribly, kind of like an Streisand effect, only
- not initiated by the person themselves but by someone else
- and working for the benefit of the person who was attempted silenced.
Many aren't arguing that they themselves are being silenced. They are arguing that others are being silenced either out of sympathy for those being silenced or recognition that the force silencing the less powerful may one they have the power to silence the person speaking out.
Those of us that still have a voice should be pro-active in speaking out for those that don't lest we one day find ourselves without a voice as well.
"They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up." – Martin Niemöller
I think a lot of people’s reaction today might be more like: “First they came for the communists, and because a lot of people spoke out about it, I assumed they didn’t actually come for the communists and I got sick of hearing all of their dumb communist whining, and that’s why it’s actually a good thing that we came for the communists.”
It’s kind of funny since before the Nazis, Communists were the original archetype of a violent fringe political movement that had lots of people murdered for no good reason. People were terrified of Communists and resolutely devoted themselves to making sure to stop Communism as fervently as possible, by any means necessary. Considering the millions of people murdered by Communists this is even a completely understandable and justifiable impulse. This is exactly why the Nazis exploited this fear.
I gotta say I really don't see a lot of 'arguing other people are being silenced' as much as alluding to it, and then citing their own circumstances, so that's still kinda Group 1.
As far as 'they came first for the communists'... I just don't see that as a situation ... at least not generally in the geography or areas I'm thinking of outside big state sponsored acts. Not at scale, and not anything more than people disagreeing or wanting to host someone else's content ... and frankly when you dive into it, it's often not just some banal content, or just someone with a new idea. It just never pans out that way...
I'm not sure I buy into any friction anywhere being 'orthodox privilege' or persecution.
That’s an excellent counter-argument in the general sense of promoting freedom of speech.
It’s a fairly bad counter-argument in the case of specific celebrities claiming loudly on national TV or in the national press that they personally are being silenced.
My position is not at all settled. I pity, rather than envy, the famous; their adoring audiences can turn on them in an instant if their preferences are not socially acceptable, which prevents them from being true to themselves.
There's an amusing parallel with the justification Foucault gives for his focus in the first volume of "The History of Sexuality".
He points out that, for a very long time, people speaking/writing about sexuality have tended to make some sort of gesture at the fact that we can't or aren't supposed to talk about these things.
In both these cases, individuals are talking about broader societal trends. It's not a contradiction if they aren't talking about their own specific experience (i.e. "I'm silenced, therefore I can't talk, listen to me talk about how silenced I am"). An 18th-century writer discussing sex may contribute to the counter-argument that by virtue of their writing about sex, it isn't as taboo a subject as they imply. But in and of itself, it isn't proof that such a trend does not exist.
I didn't really try to make an argument, nor even say I agree with Foucault here--just that I see a parallel and it amuses me.
Caveats: 1) I read this over a year ago, 2) found it enough of a slog that my understanding feels pretty fuzzy, and 3) am still undecided/chewing on the main argument
My impression is that Foucault wasn't trying to deny a trend, but to highlight a number of other trends (including the explosion of discourse around sexuality) to open the reader up to challenging or re-framing their received knowledge about sexuality at the time. His focus is very much on all of the power and control dynamics at this nexus. It's a little hard to distill what I mean by that--because it includes actual sex and sexuality, the science/study of it, who is speaking, whose sex is being spoken about, what kind of sex it is, social/class dynamics, etc.
> Isn't that sometimes just the nature of having to prove a different idea in the face of another idea that may be proven?
Orthodoxy is a numbers game not necessarily an accuracy game. Orthodox opinions may be accurate or inaccurate; what makes them orthodox is that they are held by at least a plurality of people in a given setting.
Orthodox ideas have not necessarily been proven and aren't necessarily parsimonious, so they should not necessarily enjoy the privilege of the null hypothesis. Null hypotheses require a lower burden of proof than alternative hypotheses.
If an orthodox position was never proven but is simply widely held, it should have the same burden of proof as an alternative hypothesis. However the way orthodoxy works its burden of proof is lower owing to its greater popularity.
I just wonder with these discussions usually the issue is that when people disagree it is SO EASY to believe that someone else is 'biased' or in this case using some kind of 'orthodox privilege' .... that's where the 1:1 disagreement often is. We find it handy to believe that someone else is being unreasonable because ... <insert new term for why they are being that way>.
We live in a world where we're inundated by folks who say they're being silenced or etc for all sorts of reasons. This just seems to be a new term for folks to use.
Privilege isn't necessarily bad; it's the lack of access and opportunity that is afforded by privilege that is a problem.
Consider the thread the other day regarding the privilege of beauty: it's not bad to be beautiful, and it's not bad to find beauty aesthetically pleasing, but it becomes a problem when individuals are denied access and opportunities because they lack beauty but where beauty should not be a factor.
I think the issuenis two fold for priveledge - one is that connotationally it sounds like an attack and has occassions of being used as a cudgel. The very name has an implicit "undeserved" applied to it and guilt. Even without any selfish evangalists the terms are pretty needlessly confrontational when they need to be winning others over.
Pointing out "we don't experience it that way" is a very good instance of the concept of privledge. It is good communication period given that they would lack your baseline that the "nice polite old lady" down the street screams racial slurs at them whenever they pass by. Lacking evidence they would have little reason to think that.
But dismissing a point of view entirely because the source is privileged? Bad. Heck even if the view was laughably naive and wrong like "children work in sweatshops instead of going to school afford candy ans junk food since that was what I did when farm working as a kid" is good to know where their points of view actually came from.
When it comes to privledge sometimes they may really know more and not simply have social status denied to others. Someone with an upper middle class upbringing may result in being ignorant at what bread, milk, and eggs are supposed to cost but know that credit card debt should be avoided whenever possible and how to diversify investments and maintain properly liquid buffers for emergencies. Someone from a poorer upbringing obviously wouldn't have the investing skill set due to lacking the prerequisites let alone the education and experience.
It isn't fair but it is real and knowing that is the first step to fixing it. Pretending sensible investing is just a bigotted social construct of priveledge doesn't help while promoting financial education does.
The access/opportunity/etc are what is being referred to as privilege, not the quality granting it. In a world where being beautiful doesn't come with advantages, there is no "privilege of beauty", just beauty
> Privilege isn't necessarily bad; it's the lack of access and opportunity that is afforded by privilege that is a problem.
I think that this is something that people who bear privilege (like me, a currently economically comfortable white man) don't realise. I have this privilege; I'm not a bad person for having it, and someone who tells me that I have it isn't accusing me, only reminding me. I can still be a good and empathetic person, and I try to be. It's just important to realise that what I perceive as empathy, by imagining myself in someone else's shoes and proceeding from that premise, cannot fully succeed, since my privilege means that there are shoes that I will never fully understand what it's like to occupy. I should thus pause before thinking I understand such a situation—that's what "check your privilege" means—and make sure that I listen to someone who knows more, from experience or science, in preference to my genuine, well intentioned, but in this respect uninformed feelings.
It’s only a “privilege”, by definition, if you have it and others don’t. So the main point about checking your privilege is recognizing the advantages your privileges confer and how to use those advantages to help those without.
That sounds awfully paternalistic and feeding some kind of narcisistic ego need. "I'm soo privileged and soo good I'm going to help those poor inferior bastards."
But the problem with that is the people with the privilege are blind to what the problems are.
It took a simple conversation with someone of color for me to even begin to understand this. The conversation was something like:
"The 15th time the guy behind the deli counter calls over your head to the person behind you in line instead of you really understand that you are not only different, but invisible to people because of your difference."
Sure, we've all had something happen a few times. But this is an everyday occurrence to people who aren't a part of the dominant group.
To me, a WASP, I couldn't even fathom that ever happening. It's just not part of my lived experience. How could someone just skip over the next person in line? It doesn't make any sense.
But, that was, and is, my privilege blinding me to the daily plight of so many people.
So yes...we should work to "raise everyone up", but simply being the person with privilege blinds us to the problem entirely.
I once had a colleague (who is a nice guy, and we got along) who said during lunch that there are some things that we all can agree on, like how rent control is a good thing. I offered one objection off the top of my head (that prices serve as a mechanism for aggregating data, and any price controls serve to throw out data, and we should use as much data as possible when making decisions about how to allocate scarce resources). Before I spoke up, this colleague couldn't imagine that there would be any counter arguments to his position. Another colleague later thanked me for speaking up and sharing that different take.
Maybe that's not a good reason to not have rent control, or maybe it is a good reason, but on balance it's not good enough. The problem isn't the debate, the push back, it's Graham's point "privilege makes you blind." The problem is when there are limits to your imagination that an issue you see as simple might be more complex or that the person you're sharing a meal with might have a different, but still legitimate, way of seeing the world.
This is a very good example of blindness. It is possible to advocate that rent control is desirable, and in some quarters it easily forms a supermajority majority political opinion — but anyone advocating rent control should at least be aware of a strong consensus that it is harmful, to the tune of 80-90% of surveyed economists. (I don't have JSTOR at the moment or I'd drag one up — ideally one more recent than Whaples' surveys from the 1990s, though those are an okay starting point too.)
I am reasonably confident that I suffer blindness on some important issue. You should be confident that you suffer it, too.
To be fair you have to take economist's views with a grain of salt. The only thing their models really account for is money, so they often end up coming to the conclusion that whatever maximizes money is the best.
This example doesn't seem to illustrate blindness as much as difference in priorities.
X% of surveyed economists probably don't disagree that rent controls will have the effect that rent control proponents claim. They likely believe it will have other effects in addition, and that these other effects are, in aggregate, worse than what benefits might also be offered.
By contrast, advocates for rent control probably don't believe that the economists are just making stuff up - they just believe that the downsides of the stuff the economists are talking about are less than the upsides of rent control.
Neither side is blind: they just don't agree on how to weight difference aspects of the results of a policy decision.
X% of surveyed economists probably don't disagree that rent controls will have the effect that rent control proponents claim. They likely believe it will have other effects in addition, and that these other effects are, in aggregate, worse than what benefits might also be offered.
Rent control proponents believe that imposing rent control will lower rents. With the goal of making housing more affordable. Economists know that it will benefit a few but in the process reduce supply and therefore increase average rents. Creating the very problem that you're trying to solve.
By contrast, advocates for rent control probably don't believe that the economists are just making stuff up - they just believe that the downsides of the stuff the economists are talking about are less than the upsides of rent control.
That doesn't match my experience. It is not that advocates for rent control believe that rent control is a net positive despite what economists say. They actively do not believe that rent control reduces supply and increases average prices.
That has held true in both position papers and personal conversations that I've had with people.
Tangentially related. In research, learning positive facts about something makes negative facts harder to remember. And vice versa. This cognitive quirk helps explain why it is hard for people in general to believe that there really are downsides to the things that they support.
I'm not entirely sure that rent control proponents believe it will lower rents. In my experience, most of them acknowledge that it will reduce supply and may increase prices in some areas.
My experience with rent control proponents (being one myself despite the pure economics problems with it) is that most of them believe that there needs to be a "reserve" of properties that are available for lower income people...service workers, teachers, etc...to rent in or near the place where they work.
The basic reason for that is, until recently, the number of people who want to live in a city like SF, NYC, etc. greatly outstrips the supply of housing. Basically, no matter how much housing you build, there is an endless supply of people willing to pay $X to live here, but $X is way over what is reasonable for a cashier, barista, bartender, teacher, etc. to afford.
Now, there might be better ways to solve that problem, but one of the "easier" and more politically possible ones in cities like SF is rent control. The reality is that SF basically can't build enough housing to satiate demand in any realistic timeframe. So what do you do? Bitch about zoning laws and NIMBY's all day and make more and more workers move to Stockton and Tracy? Or do you actually try to do something that is possible to accomplish about that problem (recognizing it isn't perfect)?
Anyway...rent control is interesting in many ways. Just felt like the number of people I've spoken to about it who believes it lowers rents generally rounds to basically zero.
Poster I replied to cited colleague believing "there are some things that we all can agree on, like how rent control is a good thing." This remains substantially different than fact: there is broad disagreement. Stating otherwise is the problem.
I further disupte your characterization of the relation of economists to policy priorities, as I believe there are substantial conflict in the forecasted outcomes of rent control, not broad factual agreement between politicians and the cited American economists. However, this is not particularly relevant to the point of this thread, and we will likely not effectively resolve the matter in this forum.
That's an interesting example, but I think to some extent it contradicts the idea of orthodox privilege. When you offered that alternative, it doesn't seem like you were chastised or marginalized; instead, you were thanked for offering a useful perspective (one I agree with!).
There are definitely going to be examples of people going too far, and making wedge issues out of things that shouldn't be wedge issues. But I think it's worth noting that in general, the opinions that are heavily stigmatized are ones that are insulting or hurtful toward specific people or groups.
In this case, it's true, I was not chastised or marginalized.
With a different group of people, I could have been though. I've seen articles written to the effect of "if you are against rent control, you must hate the hard working people who benefit from it."
I picked a somewhat less controversial example, where I did speak up. As a mostly conservative, Catholic person in tech, there are plenty of other times where I understand my perspective is not welcomed, and have not bothered to speak up For a just a few examples: people claiming Catholic nuns are slave labor; people printing random quotes from the Bible and making fun of it without actually studying it; people making derogatory comments about religious people. In all of these cases, the people in question made the comments assuming that everyone around them saw the world a certain way (i.e., was not religious).
I think the anti-religious bias in a lot of technology and leftist spaces is a real problem, and I absolutely take your point on that.
> I've seen articles written to the effect of "if you are against rent control, you must hate the hard working people who benefit from it."
I have too. But I have hardly met anyone who will really be offended at me expressing that rent control can backfire (and I have, among extremely left-wing people). I think the people who are trying to make that a wedge issue are themselves extremists. They exist, but they don't represent a big enough group of people to matter most of the time.
It is incredibly frustrating to try to hold a position like "I disapprove of the way Israel has been treating the Palestinians" and being told that means I'm a Nazi and want to kill all Jews.
It's ironic that a system intended to give voice to people who historically didn't get heard is instead being used to shut down all dissent.
> Is that bad? Isn't that sometimes just the nature of having to prove a different idea in the face of another idea that may be proven?
It isn't necessarily bad. Novel ideas should face a higher standard of proof than orthodox ideas because a lot more is known about how orthodox ideas really work (including their faults) than about novel ideas.
But there are a couple of ways in which this push back can get really pernicious:
1) By focusing on person rather than the idea. If the orthodoxy views the world as filled with people who are rotten to the core but successfully mimicry as decent, it makes sense to watch everybody for the slightest transgressions and attack the person with full strength when you notice one.
2) By emphasizing ideological unity. Suppose someone has an unorthodox idea and the orthodoxy denounces it. In a pernicious orthodoxy everybody must join in with the denouncing. You are already suspect merely if you don't join. If you try to say something like "hey, actually this has some merit", you are the next target. In extreme cases (e.g. Stalinism) you are the next target if you didn't denounce vigorously enough.
And of course the very idea that orthodoxy can be wrong must itself be orthodox! Otherwise from the POV of orthodoxy there is absolutely no point in engaging in real argument with those who question it.
I think you misunderstood what is meant by orthodox privilege. It's not just that orthodox ideas are easier to speak, it's that someone who is largely orthodox doesn't realize how hard it is to express unorthodox ideas, because they personally feel free to say whatever they want.
Pushback and civil disagreement isn’t what Paul is writing about here. The use of the notion of “privilege” as a baseball bat might be something Paul’s trying to turn around onto the typical bat-wielders here, but it’s not a convincing move to me either.
I don't really understand what this concept is adding that ideas like "blinkeredness" don't already cover, as orthodox in this case (as has been pointed out by others here) is context-dependent.
I've read it a couple of times and am still a bit unsure of what new idea it's getting at.
"For example, how can it be that a large number of reasonable, intelligent people worry about something they call "cancel culture," while other reasonable, intelligent people deny that it's a problem?"
I'm not sure the other side of this issue are reasonable and intelligent. It seems to me that anyone who swallows the orthodoxy of the day wholesale is unreasonable and unintelligent.
They seem like the kind of people that have always led mobs.
What seems to have changed is that now they have a voice on Twitter. They finally have a modern platform on which to organize their mob behavior, and cancel culture is the result.
Sneaky use of orthodox. There has always been the problem of finding words so that the targeted group doesn't know they are talked about.
I don't really think the solution of being polite is working for anonymous internet comments for obvious reasons, but for other places it has been the classical solution.
This is such a strange post. Mr. Graham speaks in vague generalities, then finally hones in on a specific idea seemingly out of the blue:
> For example, how can it be that a large number of reasonable, intelligent people worry about something they call "cancel culture," while other reasonable, intelligent people deny that it's a problem?
Why “cancel culture” when there’s any number of issues this is equally true for? Why is it only “reasonably intelligent people” oppose it in this example.
This post just seems intellectually lazy. Making sweeping generalizations and then throwing in some appeal to popularity is not a well made point.
There are true statements that are rightly unacceptable because placed in certain rhetorical contexts, there's an implied argument that they're making which has been rejected by society.
For example, JK Rowling's statement that "there used to be a word for people who menstruate" was essentially true (menopause aside), but had a hefty implied message about the legitimacy of transgender women, one which is rightly considered offensive to most of modern society.
Edit: Since people are nitpicking, here's an even starker example: Can you imagine contexts where it would be rightly offensive for an African-American to be told the true statement "My ancestors used to enslave people like you"?
I like how brush under the rug menopause, as if making your point where you say "except for this obvious exception that makes this statement unequivocally false!"
The word "women" has always referred to female assigned sex, there is nothing wrong with that inherently but it wasn't entertaining some deeper truth about the world.
It is assigned. I wouldn't expect the right-leaning HN crowed to understand the basics behind the science, but when a person is intersex and is magically assigned male that is not an observation.
Moreover, what you're really saying is that transgender people don't exist, so you've leaked your power level already.
You're trying to argue your position based on the 0.018% of the population that is intersex. If a baby is born with a perfectly normal penis, you're saying the doctor has a choice as to whether select male or female?
Unfortunately, I studied engineering at school, not sociology so I have no idea what a "leaking a power level" is unless it has something to do with batteries.
> Unfortunately, I studied engineering at school, not sociology so I have no idea what a "leaking a power level" is unless it has something to do with batteries.
Snrk. That's an amusing interpretation of the phrase. I shall steal it for future use.
It's an internet meme. To hide one's power level means to conceal details of oneself, hobbies, skills, affiliations, etc[1]. Conversely, if one is leaking their power level, they are letting slip details about themselves. Consider that if you interrupted an argument amongst co-worker to correct their misconceptions about furries, what that might reveal about your interests when your co-workers don't know you're a furry.
Given the context, GP is accusing you of being transphobic, and that such is betraying your affiliation with the alt-right.
Thank you for the explanation. I think quite a large number of people would share the view I espoused (EG JK Rowling) and would not readily be categorised as alt-right.
It is neither 'assigned' nor 'observed'. There are countless number of animals born every day that have well-defined sex, although nobody assign or observe that. Humans are just subset of animals, so same definitions apply.
> Moreover, what you're really saying is that transgender people don't exist
This subthread is about sex, not gender. AFAIK, transgender people just have different gender that one associated with their biological sex.
Many people would, out of habit or expedience, refer to "women" instead of "people who menstruate." However, in this specific context, Rowling's implication is that trans women are not women. "Most of modern society" would probably be disturbed by that implication.
Look, there are not a lot of great polls about people's opinion on whether sex and gender are different. PRRI has a poll on general support for trans people (https://www.prri.org/research/americas-growing-support-for-t...), which suggests that 62% of Americans support letting trans people serve in the military and a plurality oppose bathroom bills. It also shows that a majority of Americans believe that there are only two genders, but only 43% of Americans believe that "strongly," and of course you could believe that sex and gender are different while also believing in only two genders. I don't see clear proof one way or another, but this poll suggests that probably about half of Americans believe that gender can differ from sex. (I'll admit that for non-Americans, it's probably much lower.)
Most of modern society freely says things like "women menstruate", and would be hopelessly confused by the idea that such a banal statement has transphobic implications.
Absolutely. But the question isn't how ordinary people would perceive it; it was how Rowling intended it. Rowling's goal was to say that trans women are not women. She used a dogwhistle instead of saying that directly. But what other purpose could she have been trying to accomplish there?
She explained her purpose in a longer blog post (https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-...). She thinks (and I tend to agree) that phrases like "people who menstruate" are terribly degrading, and emphasizes at length that "trans rights are human rights".
She does also have some concerns about trans women in women-only spaces, but depending on which polls you read, either a slim majority or large plurality of people agree with her concerns.
I have read that article. She argues obliquely that trans women are not women[1], and she suggests that trans women are often dangerous predators[2]. Her statement that "trans rights are human rights" is an intentional dismissal of that opinion as a form of virtue signaling[3]. She may believe that some trans women are women, but in general she believes that there is a "material difference" between trans women and women.
As for the term "people who menstruate," I could see how that could be true. I could also see a term that's designed to specify a subset of women (pre-menopausal cis women who menstruate) as well as a subset of trans men. It is not being used as a general replacement for "women"; it is specifying the relevant people more precisely than the word "women" would. Isn't that specificity and accuracy what we want to see?
[1] "I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria."
[2] ", I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside."
[3] "It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow."
I think your assessment of her opinions is correct, but again, I think this is something that most people believe. It's widely acknowledged that it's rude to go up to a trans woman and say "hey you are not a woman", but the idea that there's no material difference between trans women and cis women is not widely accepted.
> I think this is something that most people believe
I think it's about 50/50. The one good, recent poll I found on the issue seems to suggest that (I mentioned it at more length in the other subthread here). So I definitely don't think that there's an overwhelming consensus, but I do think that it's a pretty standard opinion.
As for the "material difference" thing, sure. I think almost everyone would agree with that. My problem is that I believe Rowling is using it as a dogwhistle to argue that (most) trans women are not meaningfully women.
I'm not here to argue the merits of JK Rowlings' statement but I do think you're vastly overestimating your group if you think "most of modern society" is on your side in this subject.
I've read (one of) JK Rowlings' latest blog entries, and while I don't personally agree with her statements they seemed far, far more reasonable and debatable than what the internet made of it.
The internet made it seem like she was going to war against transgenders...
What does this even mean? Like, how can someone not be "legitimate"? Does it mean "illegal" as in illegal alien? Is anyone claiming that trans citizens should be deported? Or does it mean "imaginary"? Trans people obviously exist.
JKRowling is simply pointing out that the word "woman", which used to have the clear and simple meaning of "female human" (or sometimes "adult female human"), was now not only redefined & politicized to basically mean "opinion" (or "a woman is someone who thinks they're a woman" which is a clearly nonsensical recursive definition) and is used for Orwellian speech control.
Maybe, but it appropriates the word "woman" for political purposes. Could just as easily have been "a blurb is someone who thinks they're a blurb" if the intention wasn't a sneaky subjugation of people's existing speech & thought patterns (basically a real-life "dark pattern"). That itself is reason enough to oppose it, IMO.
You could claim that the word "woman" was chosen because it represents an existing concept that some people want to approximate because of their feelings, but a more appropriate response would be to point out that these feelings are factually incorrect. Maybe it's easier to see the absurdity if you consider a non-politicized version "a tree is someone who thinks they're a tree" (laughably wrong) or differently-politicized "a Jew is someone who thinks they're a Jew" (this is somewhat less incorrect, because it's referring to a social "fact" that can change, not a physical fact).
That's how most things work though? You can't "appropriate" a word for political purposes, when the root word is political in the first place.
A conservative is someone who thinks they're a conservative, a centrist is someone who thinks they are a centrist. Other people can try to label you one way or another, but ultimately, you decide what you are. It's inherently self-referential.
> "a Jew is someone who thinks they're a Jew" (this is somewhat less incorrect)
But that's not incorrect at all, that is exactly how it works in real life. "A Christian is someone who believes they're a Christian", is a wholly true statement. Just as, "an atheist is someone who believes they are an atheist".
There's a bunch of these statements of identity that are, effectively, 100% self referential. No one can tell you who you are, ultimately you have to decide that for yourself.
> Maybe it's easier to see the absurdity if you consider a non-politicized version
It's not. Even in a non-political, meaningless context, it's 100% equally as self-referential.
I consider the question of how far language should adapt for transgender people to be a reasonable one. Transgender proportion of population is on the same order as blindness. Many would consider it excessive to remove all non-eyesight uses of "vision", analogies like "I see what you mean", etc from our discourse.
It's absolutely fine that you disagree with JK Rowling. It's also fine that she disagrees with you. Talk about it! Don't throw slurs at each other. Don't make personal attacks.
> a hefty implied message about the legitimacy of transgender women, one which is rightly considered offensive to most of modern society.
Based on Pew polling, most Americans agree with Rowling[0].
>Overall, roughly half of Americans (54%) say that whether someone is a man or a woman is determined by the sex they were assigned at birth, while 44% say someone can be a man or a woman even if that is different from the sex they were assigned at birth.
Any ideology that considers truth to be unacceptable is a menace. Feelings cannot matter more than facts. Anyone who tries to tell you different should be immediately and permanently suspect.
Often times when I have any kind of nuanced debate, this kind of tribalism comes to the surface. If you disagree on some small point you're obviously the opposition in it's entirety. The other side of the debate comes up with an entire fiction in their mind that has no bearing on reality and nothing to do with any stated phrase or real position. I have had people tell me I'm against marijuana legalization because I support lowering the fees for concealed carry licenses.
You can't accurately construct a message about someone elses mental state without talking to them at length. When you assume people imply things, you're actually sharing YOUR mental state. When you take a message to mean significantly more than what the words themselves mean, you're not filling in the gaps with reality but your perception of reality.
Rowling's statement wasn't even explicitly true before the rise of transgender visibility. It excludes women who don't conform. I've lived with pre-menopausal women who didn't menstruate regularly and felt that they were "wrong" somehow because of it (some had underlying medical issues, some did not). To use Graham's analogy, even ignoring transgender issues, the orthodoxy there was privileged against the multitude of female experience.
Rowling's statement is true if your experience leads you to prioritize the orthodox. It's patently false if your experience deviates from the experiences that created it. The struggle in the conservation of orthodox values (e.g. sisterhood of women) and the visibility of heterodox experience (e.g transgender issues & the lived experience of women who's bodies don't conform to the stereotypes being used) has a lot of truth on both sides.
Sure, but in this case it’s also true. I’ve never done anything to oppress or abuse my privilege, but I am afraid of being fired for not holding “the right opinions” - opinions that are shared with the majority of Americans. Wildly mild stuff, like thinking riots are bad or immigrants shouldn’t openly shit on America all day at work.
> It's safe for them to express their opinions, because the source of their opinions is whatever it's currently acceptable to believe. So it seems to them that it must be safe for everyone. They literally can't imagine a true statement that would get them in trouble.
It seems to me that this stems from two interrelated issues:
1. People defaulting to their tribal position (red/blue in the US) without thinking deeply and engaging in rational discussion of issues.
2. A lack of empathy.
What is "currently acceptable to believe" is determined by your ingroup. And rather than trying to understand why someone in the outgroup would hold a different opinion, the ingroup paints all of them as crazy/stupid/X-ist. While the red tribe is generally more criticized in this regard, the blue tribe is just as complicit (look at the smug superiority of John Oliver and other political comedians).
While this tribal fighting occurs, power is consolidated. The people with keen insights (that may be construed as controversial) will make them privately, rather than take on public risk. In the words of Jessica Livingston, "I don't have time to fight with people who are trying to misunderstand me." [1]
I hope that there is a solution to this problem, so that the internet can reach its potential to democratize access to information and data, rather than becoming a mechanism to virtue signal acceptable tribal beliefs.
It's less a lack of empathy and more a redefinition of it, at least on the woke blue tribe side. In those circles, not rejecting ideas outside the orthodoxy and dehumanizing those who hold them is seen as a failure of empathy because the correct ideas are, by definition, required in order to treat the people who matter with decency. I'm not familiar enough with other groupthinks to know if this applies there too, but probably not.
That's why I really don't like the "white privilege". Poor white people are just as fucked as any other minority in the US yet they're being lumped with the rich white people as if they have the same privileges
When you're poor as fuck and having a shit life and everyone keeps telling you how privileged you are, you stop believing those people and turn to alternative sources for information
If you don't view BLM within the overarching framework of socialism, then you are susceptible to misinterpreting the movement, as I believe you have done.
If you think BLM protesters aspire to white levels of wealth inequality then you are mistaken. This would imply that the many, many people on the streets are demanding that they let a selected proportion of black people through the glass ceiling, just enough so that wealth inequality is racially equal.
We could combine the two phrases here: all black lives matter.
It's an "all other things being equal" sort of thing, unless you're actually having a discussion that acknowledges intersectionality.
To use your example, if you're poor as fuck, is it worse if you're white or if you're not? For many, it's worse if you're not white - and that's white privilege.
Agree that lumping people into buckets isn't helpful. But I think the idea behind privilege is that if you're poor and white you on average have a different experience than being poor and black (namely not having to deal with as much racism) even though you both still have to deal with poverty and other biases/stereotypes.
On some statistical measure, sure, but on an individual level it alienates everyone who clearly has an objectively awful or even subpar life despite being held responsible for privilege they clearly don't hold.
Regardless of whether one judges this individual should be held responsible for this privilege or not, the alienation means that those who don't fit stereotypes are excluded.
Colin Quinn had a bit about a poor white plumber literally eating shit while being told to "acknowledge your privelage".
I agree that group categorizations aren't going to be universally relevant at the individual level. It is challenging to talk about larger trends without using group identities though unfortunately.
But they're not! At this point I think we should just scrap the word privilege and call it "shit I don't have to deal with because I'm X" since it's apparently too politically charged to have a discussion about it.
Just one example.
As a white person I have never in my life cared about getting a receipt from any store I shop at, have ever been accused of shoplifting, have never had the self-checkout person have even the slightest suspicion even when I was broke in college and ringing up way too many bananas, and when the sensor things beep the workers apologize and tell me to just go.
This is not the experience of black Americans where children have to be taught to always get and keep their receipts because they get stopped so frequently.
You can fix that by going into stores dressed as a homeless person or any other out-group that contain white people that the store owner/employees in-group has likely an negative emotional response to.
For maximal negative response, portrait yourself as a male with, low social economic status, different race, different biological markers, and signals of different cultural values. As per research this will likely result in activation of fear, disgust and low activation of empathy.
The OP's point holds true. Consider a clean and showered young male that is not dressed like a homeless person. This is generally quite achievable for most of the poor population.
This individual will experience problems if his skin is black that he wouldn't experience if his skin is white.
You're probably mostly concerned with the American experience, so this might be tangential to you.
I grew up as a white ex-pat in a Philippines. While I don't think I ever tried to abuse it, but I could definitely get away with a lot of things even if I dressed as a hobbo/gangster.
In most places in the US, the black guy with nice suit will be less likely to have that experience than a homeless looking white guy. But a black guy with a nice suit will experience it more than a white guy with a nice suit.
I'm merely talking about controlling for variables. If you keep the outfit the same and only change the skin color you'll see a difference. I have no idea which direction the change starts to lean when you change clothing, smell, age and or other factors all at the same time.
Sure, but economically equivalent white and black people have different experiences. That's a privilege under the definition.
That more affluent-appearing black people are treated like less affluent looking white people isn't proof that white privilege doesn't exist. It's the opposite.
You're technically right, but the argument that "given otherwise identical circumstances, white people are less oppressed than black people" (or whatever) has the issues that a) "otherwise identical circumstances" almost never exist and b) this argument is often even being used when the otherwise circumstances are clearly not identical (I remember an online discussion where people were called out for criticising Beyoncé, who must have it really hard as a black woman - which, sure, she might have, but she's also crazy rich and a prominent media figure, so she also has privilege; and then again, even not having privilege doesn't mean you should be immune to criticism).
I don't question the notion of privilege as much as how often it's applied to shut down dissenting opinion.
Privilege isn't a binary thing. You aren't privileged or not. Many people have some forms of privilege and not others.
An affluent white woman and a homeless black man have very different life experiences, each has privileges that the other doesn't.
Fighting about which is more privileged is silly (even if it may seem obvious to you). What's ultimately important is to understand situations in which those privileges will affect the experiences of those people.
As for Beyonce, that's so vague that I can't know. If she was describing the challenges of being black in the recording industry, then yes using her success to claim she can't understand the challenges she's had to overcome is ridiculous. But in other contexts, that she's affluent is relevant.
I don't disagree with you. Understanding privilege is important. But you may not have witnessed the ridiculous discussions that I have sometimes seen.
The context was that people were complaining about her sexualised persona and what kind of image that projects onto young women. I don't necessarily agree with that criticism (I think it's kinda complex, but I also don't think that sex or being sexual is "wrong" or anything), but I thought that the criticism of "she's a black woman, so if she wants to be sexual, that's her way of reasserting her black femininity and may not be criticised" is frankly ridiculous, when she's clearly benefiting financially so well from it.
> Fighting about which is more privileged is silly
And yet that seems to be the game people have to play in order for their statements to have any currency.
I even know people who had to take an "oppression index" in college to see who in the class had the least privilege. Interestingly, the person who had the least privilege was also the most ideologically opposed to the concept, for what it's worth.
> I'm sorry if I don't put much trust in third hand stories like this, it's easy for them to be blown out of proportion.
Fair enough, but consider the new SAT "Adversity" score[1]. Is that not essentially the same thing, but on a larger scale? It's still reducing the "vector" that oppression is supposed to be (from an intersectionality perspective) to a "scalar" value that is useful for sorting people into a hierarchy.
With regard to my first point, consider the NYT opinion piece arguing against the Adversity score[2]. The author spends the first two paragraphs establishing his own adversity/lack of privilege before he begins to actually make an argument. I don't think there's anything wrong with him doing so, and I think it's rhetorically effective, but do you think his opinion would be given a platform if he did not have that adversity score?
> My experiences, as a cis-het-white-affluent person would disagree. ;)
Perhaps because you benefit from (in Paul Graham's words) "orthodox privilege"? That is, your ideas are not questioned on the basis of your identity because they are the "right" opinions[3]. For someone to question the orthodoxy, they must first establish their own adversity or risk being discounted (or worse).
> Fair enough, but consider the new SAT "Adversity" score[1]. Is that not essentially the same thing, but on a larger scale? It's still reducing the "vector" that oppression is supposed to be (from an intersectionality perspective) to a "scalar" value that is useful for sorting people into a hierarchy.
I don't know that the SAT adversity score claims to be an explicit demarcation of privilege. It wouldn't, for example, encode racial privilege since none of the signifiers are the test takers race. Some may be racially correlated, but I think we've already established that those are different. As far as I can tell it really only applies at the granularity of a high school and not a particular student (although I may very well be mistaken here, it's hard to tell).
But this is mostly moot since the Adversity Score plan was withdrawn[1].
> but do you think his opinion would be given a platform if he did not have that adversity score?
Broadly, yes[1]. Worth noting that Williams is and has been a staff writer at the NYT for quite some time, he was also the author (like the actual author, not just a signatory) of the Harper's letter that's been in the news. He's got quite the platform, even when it comes to non-race related things.
> Perhaps because you benefit from (in Paul Graham's words) "orthodox privilege"? That is, your ideas are not questioned on the basis of your identity because they are the "right" opinions[3]. For someone to question the orthodoxy, they must first establish their own adversity or risk being discounted (or worse).
That's a bit of a catch-22 now isn't it. My opinions will be discounted due to my privilege, but if they aren't, that's also due to my privilege. But I also don't think this is true: there's all kinds of things that I do question with my more progressive friends. But they're usually around economic policy, or procedures (I'm pragmatic, many people I know are not, so there's ongoing debate I see about reformist vs. revolutionary action with regard to the issue du jour).
Being a reformist as opposed to a revolutionary is absolutely impacted by my privileges, and I recognize that. I'm much more comfortable with the world the way things are than some of my "colleagues" in this context, so reformism is safer to me. But some people aren't treated as well by the system today, so they are much more willing to throw the whole thing out, deal with the chaos for a while, and build something new from the ashes.
That's clearly worse for me, but probably gets them to where they're more equal faster. Interestingly, I'm not even sure which of those two opinions would be considered orthodoxy among progressive circles. But I don't think people discount my opinions on the subject because I have some privileges. In some cases I think they're actually valued more.
Am I missing something because I feel like we're agreeing? Because everything you mentioned are good examples of other forms of privilege, or I guess lack thereof.
I'm always so surprised in internet discussions that people will readily acknowledge lots of forms of privilege but then turn around and be like "white privilege" or "male privilege" -- naaah anything like that can be explained by these other 300 types of privilege. Like "black privilege" and "female privilege" exist too -- it's just a language for describing how the different facets of ourselves change how we're treated.
Privilege being the word for describing when that facet helps you not experience "worse than normal" treatment than people without it might -- contrasted with "advantage", when you get "better than normal" treatment for having it.
> Like "black privilege" and "female privilege" exist too -- it's just a language for describing how the different facets of ourselves change how we're treated.
In my experience, a lot of people who use the word “privilege” will get very very very upset at that claim. To them, “privilege” is fundamentally connected to groups. It wouldn’t make sense for both male privilege and female privilege to exist; the whole point is that males are collectively privileged relative to females.
I think what you’re describing is a better fit for reality.
To me it is biology. A set of factors contribute to fear and disgust when people meet and an other set of factors trigger empathy and cooperation. We can use the word privilege to mean, in a given environment, having more triggers than someone else for the positive effects and less triggers for the negative effects. The resulting individual experience is the sum of interactions.
Some trait has stronger effect than others such as social economic status and kinship. Close to that comes gender, although sometimes it can also be the strongest factor. Research into this subject generally show a strong environmental aspect to this as well.
I would not use "white privilege" in an online discussion because it often than not lead the discussion away from the complexity of in-group and out-group interactions and into the realm of blame and over simplification. The most insightful thing anyone can really make about white privilege is that being rich, healthy, appeasing appearance, surrounded by a strong majority of in-group members (preferable kinship) that have similar cultural values, then being white is also a benefit as long as the other in-group members are also majority white.
Sure, but that doesn't invalidate the racial part of it. Yes a white person who appears to be homeless or a meth addict will be looked at suspiciously. But a black person is much more likely to be profiled simply because of their skin color than a white person. That is white privilege.
White privilege doesn't mean all white people are born with trust funds from the left over plantation money.
> As a white person I have never in my life cared about getting a receipt from any store I shop at
I agree with your meaning overall, but this is not a great example. I'm a white dude, and I worry about getting receipts any time I am going to one store after buying from another (while walking). I'm hyper-aware in stores of whether it would appear to an observer that I was shoplifting, having been accused of such more than once when young, so I take visible steps like tying off the bags I'm carrying from the previous store, consider whether the store I'm entering is likely to sell items I have in the bag I'm carrying, and so on.
> Poor white people are just as fucked as any other minority in the US...
Poor whites are still more privileged via historicity of assets vs comparable poor blacks, and they are more likely to capture gains from federal assistance programs. They are also far less likely to be imprisoned for drugs or other judicial hurts.
When there was an opioid crisis the nation responded with sympathy and urgency. When we had weed, we decided to have a war against drug users and send black and latino people to jail en masse, and there they sit still.
Does anyone remember the term "super-predator"? That's not an allusion to poor people in general, but rather a reference for black people.
> Poor whites are still more privileged via historicity of assets
At the point you reach “poor”, the assets are gone, so this doesn’t work.
> When there was an opioid crisis the nation responded with sympathy and urgency. When we had weed, we decided to have a war against drug users and send black and latino people to jail en masse, and there they sit still.
The opioid epidemic was never solved, let alone “urgently”. I remember it emerging as a campaign issue in 2016. 2019 had a record high number of deaths by opioid overdose and it looks like things are going up as well. The US government reports that “fentanyl trafficking offenders have increased by 3,940.9% since fiscal year 2015.” ( https://www.ussc.gov/research/quick-facts/fentanyl-trafficki... ) so it doesn’t seem like they’re taking a hands-off enforcement approach either.
To some degree there is a difference, but that’s because we already tried the War on Drugs and learned from our mistakes.
> Does anyone remember the term "super-predator"? That's not an allusion to poor people in general, but rather a reference for black people.
Like everything, it’s more complicated than that.
Here’s Mother Jones on “superpredators”: ( https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/very-brief-hi... ). The term refers to a criminological observation that many violent juvenile criminals fit a specific type that is particularly dangerous and untreatable. It turns out that the cause for this was childhood lead exposure and that the super predator theory was out of date already by the time it was developed.
It also turns out that childhood lead exposure disproportionately affected black children.
The Clinton-era crime bills that led to mass incarceration also had a fair amount of support among black leaders. One reason for this was that crime was much higher in the early 90’s, and black people were disproportionately the victims of that crime. Cracking down on crime (including drugs) was seen as a benefit to the black community rather than a detriment. ( https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/04/09/473648819... )
The problem is when a stupid college kid from an elite institution without significant life experience tells you about privilege and is trying to educate you. Even with mostly leftist views I would fully support the redneck uprising that comes after and you don't need to be a psychologist to understand the reaction. I doubt there is any deeper truth about racism to be learned here...
I don't have a problem with the term itself. I do think that if you are white, college-educated, and urban you are an exceptionally poor candidate to discuss it or indeed use it with the rural white poor. There's a little bit too much just-world-fallacy subtext about why you, who are white, are doing so much better economically than they, who are also white, and why they ought to submit to your moral guidance.
Honestly, trying to get the message out via local religious leadership is probably the best bet.
There are plenty of kinds of privilege. Being white means that when you're pulled over (if you manage to afford a car), you know it's not because you're white. Being white means that when you turn on the TV, you mostly see folks of your race represented. Being white means being told that throughout history, your race is what made the modern world what it is. Being white means being able to always find the company of people of your race [1]. Being white means that when you write good school essays, you're not continually asked who wrote them for you. Being white means that BLM protests can be the first time you understand how Black people are treated.
There are similarly privileges from being born in the US, from being straight, from being male, from being able-bodied and from being cis-gendered.
Being poor doesn't eliminate those and is still disenfranchising, but not having the above privileges _and_ being poor is even worse.
I believed this for years, and in spite of all the stuff going on now, I think it still holds true.
And the trouble is, saying that "It's about class, not race" is considered problematic in recent books like White Fragility. So this opinion, which can be debated and talked about and discussed in debt, is now considered wrong, taboo and even a 'dog whistle' to say you're actually racist.
And I want to acknowledge that there is a difference in lived experience. A poor white person may not get followed around in a store by security like a non-poor black person. There are some things we have difficulty understanding because we don't have the lived experience.
But we're in danger of closing off the conversation before we even get to the topic of those lived experiences, and we're told that if we can't have those lived experiences, our opinions are also invalid.
There are two issues. First, I don't think it's one or the other: race privilege exists, and class privilege exists too.
Second there are actual dog-whistles disguised as reasonable viewpoints, and it's incredibly hard to distinguish them. Suppose you're talking to a random person, with no context on who they are, probably on a site where a comment took five minutes to write and doesn't fully develop the ideas. First time you find that, you might think it's just someone with a different opinion. But as time goes on and you notice that certain arguments are used not to promote debate but to derail conversations, you get suspicious and start seeing everything as dog-whistles.
In other words, public debate is degraded by people that don't present arguments honestly and by people who are either way too worried or not worried at all about those dishonest people
You are starting to get to the root of it. For years, people with liberal or progressive viewpoints tried to have good-faith discussions and debates with conservatives only to get back absolute garbage. Arguments like:
"If you let gay people marry, what's next allowing adults to marry children?"
or
"You never complain when black people kill each other, so you are just pretending to care about police brutality"
These are undeniably bad faith arguments - all strawmen, slippery slopes, and other ugly rhetorical devices. In most cases this was all you would get back in return for trying to have a good faith debate with conservatives.
So yes, after a while, we started to assume that people who disagreed with us were acting in bad faith and were essentially trolls.
This is extremely unfortunate. It is harmful to the discourse. It casts a wide net that catches the honestly curious or unorthodox thinkers (people that I may think are incorrect but arguing from a position of good faith). But, it has also been extremely effective. In one generation, the relatively brutal tactics have helped us make real progress on gay rights and drug-decriminalization in the United States.
Cancellation tactics work as an effective tool for combating bad faith arguments and trolls, so until conservatives want to come to the table for real discussion and debate, that is how things will continue to be. I look forward to a time when this is not necessary.
To be clear though, the well of intellectual discourse was poisoned long ago by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Sean Hannity, et al, and a million internet trolls. The only part of this they don't like is that now they are losing the horrible game they invented.
Why are those “garbage”? It’s true that gay rights have led towards the push for other things like trans rights. And it’s true that liberal media will run front page stories on (relatively rare) police brutality against black people but don’t run stories on (relatively common) black on black violence.
> It’s true that gay rights have led towards the push for other things like trans rights
I fail to see the equivalence between trans rights and "adults marrying children"-rights. What you're saying is closer to "it's true that abolishing slavery has led towards the push for other things like voting rights for everyone". Which is technically true but is also the way things should be going in order to have a more just society.
> And it’s true that liberal media will run front page stories on (relatively rare) police brutality against black people but don’t run stories on (relatively common) black on black violence.
One is a crime committed by law enforcement. The other is just regular crime. You figure out which one is more newsworthy or in the public interest (not that most media care about the latter).
Also if "all lives matter" we shouldn't be talking about "black-on-black" or "x-on-y" crimes. Crimes are crimes and the skin color of the perpetrator or victim is irrelevant (unless it's specifically a hate crime, for which there are legal definitions).
Wait, you’re giving your opinion as if it’s fact. Some people disagree that trans rights will make society better.
And if what you’re saying is true, that these stories are only notable because they involve police brutality, why don’t we get front page news articles when a black cop shoots a black guy? You’re blind if you don’t see that news publishers have an agenda.
News publishers do have an agenda, but it doesn't go too far beyond "get clicks, make money". They publish whatever kinds of stories will get traffic from their readers. And they know the preconceived notions and biases of their readers. News publishing is a tough business these days unfortunately. There are news orgs that do good investigative journalism and uncover important stories but even they need money to survive.
I will assume good faith and bite, even though I am skeptical.
Because murder for money, passion, etc. is unfortunately extremely common in the US, but abuse of power by civil servants is much more newsworthy, and honestly more disturbing.
If the head of the FBI was caught taking bribes from drug dealers, wouldn't that be far more newsworthy than a common drug bust? Of course it would be. Abuse of government power is a real threat to civil society.
But it was never just about “abuse of power”, the narrative was that “black people are being killed unjustly by police officers”. From the beginning a motto of the protests was “black lives matter”.
Yeah, this. I would go further back to when Christians got co-opted into politics in a big way in the 80's.
As far as the current "cancel culture" goes I was thinking about this the other day and I think that it's not that people don't want to hear counter-arguments, it's that we don't want to hear them again, after they have been put down so many times.
The "what about black-on-black crime?" question is one of my pet peeves: someone always has to trot out that undead zombie chestnut. Enough already.
(edit: while i was typing the above somebody has already trotted out the dead horse and started beating it in a sib comment.)
Facts can be maliciously used to derail conversations and debates on purpose, or be used without proper context to push a certain view. Not everything is black or white.
"white privilege" does not mean "if you're white you have no problems", it means "you less frequently encounter obstacles that were erected because of the color of your skin".
I think a problem with this line of thinking is if treats people like averages (stereotypical) -but people are not the average. People don’t see the nuance. So it’s kind of like the other side of the coin of traditional stereotyping.
So on the one hand we’re saying let’s not stereotype people, but in the other hand let’s stereotype a subset of people.
Stereotyping is when you say that "people of a group all (do|are) X". The concept of "white privilege" is describing how society treats people; it's not describing how those people are. It's saying "people of a group all encounter X". That's a very different thing.
again. Stereotyping is when you say this is how a person is. Describing white privilege is describing how a person is treated by society. They're different.
Society isn’t homogeneous. How I’m treated in my neighborhood isn’t the same as another one or another country. Yes, on average, if you belong to certain group and display certain signifiers (positive or negative) those will elicit certain responses —but they’re not universal. If you’re a middle class kid (on average) and you go to an ethnic business (that’s outside your ethnicity) that hires people of lesser means and you apply for a job, you’re likely to lose out to someone of the same stratum as the rest of the employees (they may think you’re out of place, you wouldn’t take it serious, you’d want more money, who knows...)
No one said this scenario was racist. What I’m saying is outside you social circle whatever cachet you think you carry due to whatever membership you have falls off.
I agree that poor white people should not have their problems dismissed. However, there are some differences between poor white people and poor black people. For one, there's a lot more poor black people per population. The average black family has a tenth of the wealth of the average white family.
Second, poor black people face large amounts of racism, both systematic and personal. They live in particularly poor neighborhoods due to redlining. They face significantly harder times getting hired for jobs. They encounter police brutality.
Again, the solution is not to dismiss the problems of poor white people. However it's also important to acknowledge that at a macro level, poor black people need more help to counter systematic effects.
Imagine we have two countries. Both have poor people, but one country has an average household wealth that is a tenth of the other country's. One country was brutally colonized, had its citizens enslaved for hundreds of years, faced segregation for a 100 years after that, and only passed significant civil rights legislature in the last 70 years.
The other country had full rights for all men for 150 years, then full rights for all citizens for 100 years after that. The other country reaped the rewards of its colonized counterpart. It grew wealthy on it. Yes, there are poor people in the country, but its citizens have never been enslaved. They have never been made to be second class citizens. They have never lived under fear of lynching and false conviction.
At a personal and present level, there is not a gigantic difference from a poor white family and a poor black family. But that ignores the larger context of history and of quantity.
> That's why I really don't like the "white privilege". Poor white people are just as fucked as any other minority in the US
No, they aren't. Particularly, they aren't as fucked as equally poor members of a number of other races, for a whole variety of reasons (direct racism is one of them, but not the only one.)
Conversely, even rich members of other races face disadvantages relative to rich Whites because of their race.
It's true that wealth is itself a form of privilege, and poor whites, while they may participate in White privilege, don't participate in the privilege of wealth.
The world has been hard up for terminology to describe what’s bad about the forces that have dragged down SSC and driven Weiss away from NYT. “Cancel culture” was a good start, as evidenced by those who have been rankled by the suggestion of its existence. My fave part of this essay is that it offers a shiny new tool, “orthodox privilege,” that allows us to enumerate the case for a countervailing force against this age of outrage.
It's not clear to me the difference between "cancel culture" and legitimate outrage.
The complaints about cancel culture feel vague: a mob, a loud minority making demands, a court of public opinion, etc.
Aren't those present for for both legitimate and illegitimate criticism? I guess I don't know how the "cancel cancel culture" folks want the "cancel culture" folks to express themselves when they see an injustice but aren't represented in positions of power that can affect change.
It seems like it's those in positions of power and privilege that don't like protests, cancel culture, or anything that could upset their status and net worth.
I'm just confused by the outrage and attempt to cancel the folks who are outraged and attempting to cancel people.
I understand from history that it can go too far: political arrests, burning books, etc. But no cancelling seems like an extreme where were asking folks to let people stay in positions of power no matter what they say or believe.
So why not be mad at "kneejerk bosses" who are actually doing the cancelling? People use social media to complain and toss out accusations all the time. There will always be overreach but there are remedies for that. And the right to free speech (including outrage) seems important.
> SDG&E said in a statement: “We hold all SDG&E employees to a high standard and expect them to live up to our values every day. We conducted a good faith and thorough investigation that included gathering relevant information and multiple interviews, and took appropriate action.”
If he was fired due to a falty or biased investigation he could sue. It's not ideal, but he's not powerless either. The Covington kid was a good example of that.
> People use social media to complain and toss out accusations all the time. There will always be overreach but there are remedies for that.
Yeah, no. I think internet outrage mobs intended to attack people’s livelihoods are actually a problem, and not the type of thing we should placidly accept as part of the world.
> If he was fired due to a falty or biased investigation he could sue.
One person's mob is another person's protest movement. It just seems less a problem with the number of people or the methods and more an issue with a difference of opinion about the content.
I haven't seen folks on the right vigorously defending those on the left or visa versa. They brutally denounce the other side and actively seek to remove them from positions of power or limit their voice. "Cancel cancel culture" feels more like "don't come after folks like me" rather than "don't go after anyone", which is fine, but I just don't see a consistent application across the political spectrum.
Some people are hypocrites. But I don’t see all of them that way. I don’t even see this as a left vs. right issue unless you go out of your way to define it that way. For instance, two of the more outspoken opponents of cancel culture, Bret Weinstein and Joe Rogan, both publicly support Bernie Sanders. Alternatively, consider the TERF wars where trans activists try to cancel “trans-exclusionary radical feminists”. Radical feminists are on the right now? One of the signatories of the Harpers letter was Noam Chomsky.
If you go according to how we would have classified these people before the controversy of cancel culture itself, we would have to say that it was between two different factions of the left, with the right piling on later.
If all you see is hypocrisy I don’t disagree with you because people are that way a lot of the time. But maybe it’s because consistently opposing cancel culture seems like a deliberate partisan choice by itself these days. Joe Rogan has guests from the entire political spectrum and interacts with all of them in charity and good faith to the point of borderline naivety. And if you want to see an example the other way around, let me share this: https://reason.com/2018/08/02/sarah-jeong-new-york-times-rac...
> It's not clear to me the difference between "cancel culture" and legitimate outrage.
Legitimate outrage is "I think an opinion you currently hold or thing you currently do is bad, so I'm going to try to cut you off from society until you walk back the opinion or stop doing the thing."
Cancel culture is "I think an opinion you once held or thing you once did is bad, so I'm going to try to cut you off from society forever, even if it wasn't considered bad at the time, and even if you've since walked it back/stopped/apologized."
In a nutshell, cancel culture is refusing to forgive.
Paul Graham as always says the things I want to say, more clearly and concise, and with the privilege wealth brings of being able to more freely speak.
This article seems to praise people for not being "conventional minded," as if being unorthodox in itself is something to be cherished and rewarded. That is too low of a bar to clear. There are lots of opinions and viewpoints that are unorthodox for good reason -- because they are just bad ideas, or are factually untrue no matter how many times you argue it. It's as if PG is saying to us "Think Different," and just stopping there. What he should be saying is "Think Different, but be prepared to prove it," as well as "Be a little tolerant of people who are doing their best to prove it."
The problem is that, unless you're speaking to someone with whom you have a great deal of trust, that second part -- the earnestness of their unorthodoxy -- is difficult to prove.
Absolutely agree with you.
Sometimes your unorthodox opinion just sucks.
Also, was anybody else bracing themselves for what "unorthodox" was code for while reading? I think I'm so used to seeing this argument used in an attempt to justify stuff like blatant racism, antisemitism, etc. that I'm sort of conditioned to look for that.
By the way, not saying that's what's going on here, but it was just an interesting reaction I noticed in myself. Ironically, similar to what another commenter posted, the whole article is one of those things which is obviously true, but may completely miss the point depending on context.
I think that’s exactly the kind of subtle thing he is trying to capture in this essay: we read ‘unorthodox’ and we get ready, almost as a subconscious reflex, to dismiss whatever comes next as, like you put it, ‘blatant Xism’, or as Paul puts it, false.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 441 ms ] threadThese roughly align with a lot of other social dichotomies (e.g. they map approximately to right/left, respectively) in the US, although not quite coterminously. There’s a lot of fuzzy leakage around the edges on a lot of issues that primarily map directly to this split.
At least in America, at one time people could say, "I don't believe in everything x wants, but I do agree with core policies a, b and c and so I'm voting for them." Today we are much more polarized and people desperate for a political home may start internalizing and adopting policies they may not totally agree with just so they don't feel left out in the middle.
Cancel culture makes harder, if not impossible, to be in the middle. Are you against racism, but not for the specific BLM organization? You're opinion is not acceptable to the Democratic/politic-left. Is that a hill you're going to die on? If not, you move on and ignore it.
This gets into some pretty dangerous territory because now you cannot say certain beliefs publicly without fear of ostracization from your political home. You may be able to keep that belief secret, or you may just start to believe the opposite. Viewpoints within each false-dichotomy lose their diversity, and both sides could bend, consciously and subconsciously, to a narrow, homogeneous world view.
"anti-PC" is power retaliating against change, and "woke" is the disenfranchised calling for change. conservative and progressive also map to this same dichotomy.
Note that label of science has been as politicized ( to the detriment of all of us ) as pretty much everything else. If you dare to question "Science!", you are, by default, backwood white trash racist or something along those lines, which happens to ignore that science encourages healthy debate and constantly questions underlying assumptions. This is literally how we get progress.
Now, there is an argument to be made that words of a PhD carry more weight than FB educated person, but I think everyone here met a person with no formal education, who was still sharper than most people in the room ( and vice versa, an educated person arguing that black is white and getting himself killed crossing the next pedestrian crossing ).
TLDR; "Science!" is one such orthodoxy.
In science, people hold many beliefs that have already been proven beyond a reasonable doubt and are working diligently to prove others.
This might be true for things like the conventional laws of physics. But there are many things scientists do not agree or argue over. Quantum physics and string theory are two examples. The 1994 book The Bell Curve is another example from social sciences.
And today, we have grave reproducibility crises in science. We have people trying to apply rules about the psychological and metaphysical worlds into the doctrine of hard science. In the current crisis, we have conflicting papers published almost every week, and there is a deep political climate that cannot be denied behind much of the current research.
Even for thing that we can agree on work under experiment, like a certain class of drug, we can't explain WHY it works. We can say drug x will stop a heart attack 99% of the time and is generally considered safe in 99% of human beings, but often we're guess at the very specific interactions, based on what we see in labs, because we have no real introspection into all the complex things happening at the micro-level within the incredible complex cell systems inside of us.
Maybe one day we'll be able to see what happens at that microlevel in human bodies, and that could lead us to discover the drug isn't working at all the way we thought it was.
Science is iterative.
Maybe I'm confused. Are you using _The Bell Curve_ as an example of pseudo-scientific pop publication gone wrong, or as a worthy scientific viewpoint which is worthy of debate and was unfairly crucified in academia?
Today, science has certainly become a new belief system over certain publications and ideas over others. In the US, there is no constitution protection for "science," only for religion. Many of the things currently placed under the umbrella of science are really religious beliefs (you could even argue to some extent that all scientific beliefs are religious; even if some things, like the laws of physics, can be proven to be absolutely true 100% of the time) and should be looked at under the lens of the 1st amendment, when they're clearly not.
What I find really distasteful is when people start with an argument like yours, then use it to argue their pet issue. eg to rail against the central dogma of genetics, the impossibility of evolution, or complain about "reproducibility/observability" and try to tear down whole areas of scientific research.
The "Progressive" camp, that has a few sub-genres that prioritize or disagree on different things.
The "Conservative" camp, that is more consistent at a high level.
The problem is that the more extreme factions in both tribes wield the power and tend to punish what they see as heresy within their own camps before going after the other tribe. Most groups treat apostates worse than those who never believed in the first place.
They just are not the same level of extreme. Quite the opposite, the democratic party is significantly more choosing toward center figures.
It also tend to choose less extreme tactics to get their way - there was no democratic goverment shutdown etc.
Having president, majority of supreme court, senate or house suggests you are not cornered. And both parties are represented in those.
Neither of them is president, not even nominated and neither managed to control the party. Neither sets agenda in any way.
The other voted the more extreme element for president.
Or maybe they drive very little.
As that calms down, compromises will be made and order will return. Recovery from economic catastrophe will be the priority.
The other one is harder to define because it's essentially not the social justice worldview.
In America, you tend to find the social justice worldview in urban and coastal areas, and you tend to find the latter in rural, interior locations.
Obviously this generalization breaks down in many ways, so [insert all the caveats].
My main beef with this is that even the philosophical father of social justice, John Rawls, would not recognize the means by which this movement is trying to achieve its ends as any form of justice and in any way aligned with his original position and veil of ignorance thought experiment.
The movement as currently practiced is one grand perversion with all the hallmarks of other populist illiberal (but believe they are liberal) movements that resulted in indisputable injustice.
Sit down, shut up, your crown bequeathe.
Group B would say that they "Support Free Speech". Group B would also say that people who disagree with Group B are Maoists
Insisting on politeness about guilt-free homosexuality or abortion isn't going to get you very far in many particularly conservative Presbyterian churches or Baptist colleges.
Note well: those institutions explicitly instruct people to "love thy neighbor" and to "not cast stones". Those calls are just empirically only so effective and there will always be a significant percentage of people for whom those commandments don't work.
I therefore believe that politeness is probably a similarly ineffective solution to newer forms of orthodoxy (e.g., cancel culture).
Consider conservative college campuses. Not because I don't believe cancel culture exists at Harvard or wherever, but because it's a point of reference that is much more numerous and carries similar culture power within certain geographies/communities. In many of these institutions:
1. being an openly gay student can result in being expelled (or at least suspended and bullied into leaving by admin)
2. faculty need to submit statements of faith in their job applications. These statements of faith are not aptly named, since they're also political ideology litmus tests. E.g., supporting abortion publicly would definitely be cause for dismissal.
None of this is to dismiss or deny that maybe Harvard has its own orthodoxy, but I just have zero percent trust in someone like Jerry Falwell waxing poetic about free speech or cancel culture. His university cancels gay people.
The orthodoxy of silicon valley and elite college campuses exist in only a few relatively small parts of the country that are over-represented in places like HN.
I'm pointing this out for a specific reason: stifling social norms are nothing new. If you leave those places where implicit restriction on speech is a relatively new phenomenon and go to places where unspoken norms about what can/cannot be said has been the de facto norm for hundreds of years, you see why "simply giving it a name" and calls to "being polite" aren't going to help.
Try going to a conservative christian university and pointing out that "abortion is murder" is "orthodoxy" and that people who believe it are exercising an "orthodox privilege" not available to people who believe "abortion is a human right".
It an _NOT_ saying that cancel culture isn't a problem. It's more that it's _always_ been a problem, for hundreds of years, just not from the left in the USA until recently, and _history is a good tutor_.
The proposed solution probably isn't going to work.
I think its appropriate to advocate for gay students at these private schools. But I do question its significance to the economy, society, and public life relative to the university system. And constraining this problem to universities or silicon valley does it a disservice. This is becoming a general, corporate problem.
That's absolutely true, but the influence on society and the country of both aren't really the same.
The point is that if you say "X is how you address corruption" and "X" doesn't work even for mayors of small towns, then there's a good reason to think "X" also won't work in the president's office.
I believe the same is true for educational institutions. The one that will be visited by next account manager of the local branch of a national bank has less damage potential than the one that will be visited by the next CEO of that bank, the next President and the judges on the Supreme Court.
wheaton cedarville liberty byu gove city college of the ozarks point loma king's college convenant oral roberts...
Brand recognition is not always a good measure of power. Those institutions have a lot more cultural/political power in many circles than harvard.
Do you really doubt that the BYU alumni network is a lot more powerful than the Harvard alumni network in SLC, for example?
The same is true for other colleges in their own conservative regions.
To pick a random and specific example of an institution I consider more powerful than Harvard, how about... the Spanish Army?
That's like comparing GDP to net worth. It's not completely useless, but caveat emptor when comparing a first derivative to a zeroth derivative.
But yeah. The Spanish Military a strange example because a) it really depends on the community and b) we're talking about different types of power.
In terms of soft/cultural power, the Spanish Army might well be more influential than Harvard in Spain. But, again, only in a weird apples-and-oranges way.
I think maybe parent might have meant in terms of hard power. In a complete vacuum, the Spanish Army could probably topple the statue of John Harvard. But, again, it's completely unclear to me why that would be a useful/interesting/anything-other-than-amusing comparison.
The example I used in another thread, which I think actually works: In Utah, BYU is almost certainly more prestigious and powerful than Harvard.
I literally said that _three different times_ in my post:
>> None of this is to dismiss or deny that maybe Harvard has its own orthodoxy
>> The orthodoxy of silicon valley and elite college campuses
>> Not because I don't believe this happens at Harvard or wherever
That's not the point. That point is that the proposed solution -- calling out an "orthodox privilege" and insisting on politeness -- is not going to work. How do I know? Because "cancel culture" is not even close to new. It's existed on college campuses, in media, etc. for hundreds of years on the right. History is a tutor for what will/won't work.
If UC Berkeley (say) was called "UC Berkeley Marxist College" then perhaps people would have a better idea of what to expect.
Universities are always little labs for weird behavior and disputes, it's part of their nature. There's always something that puts conservative farmers or whatever in a twist. In the Nixon era it was anti-war protestors. In the 90s it was affirmative action. Today, it's the various gender/sexuality issues.
The politics of universities is such that these movements grow and succeed, then become the power brokers. A family member was a leader in LGBT causes on campus in the 90s -- very much fighting an uphill battle for attention, respect and resources. Today, that org is very powerful and alumni of the 90s version are all middle aged folks in positions of real power.
For any American trying to figure out what I'm talking about, there's a couple of Facebook groups that routinely explore this and related effects: "Things only Americans think are debatable" and "oh great, now we have to explain it for the americans."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA
He talks about how it was once offensive to translate the Bible into English, or suggest God didn't exist, or suggest there was nothing wrong with homosexuality. People who suggested such things were deplatformed, and sometimes arrested or killed, but those who considered themselves enlightened and on the side of the righteous, the virtuous, the good.
ML King beat women and Gandhi slept naked with his nieces to see if he could resist lust. They also led millions of people to freedom. You're attacking the person here, and not his argument. That's called ad hominem.
For example, you can be a powerful high-ranking advisor to the President and spew all sorts of nasty racist garbage, but you can inhabit a world of friendly media and cheering crowds and you'll never feel encumbered by anything. At the same time, you can be a regular Joe at a regular Office and say something mildly eye-brow raising and be fired.
Choose your crowd and you can in fact say whatever you want and pretend you're both a victim and victor. Demanding that a crowd put up with you, well that's a hard sell.
Nothing is being conserved. Today's conservatives are espousing values that sound the same as 2005's liberals, and are not even as conservative as Bill Clinton.
Current public policy reflects the left’s view on these matters, and a new one joins the list every few years.
Cynically phrased, a critique of liberals from progressives would be that liberals are okay dithering and letting injustices stand. A liberal criticism of progressives is that they have adopted an “ends justify the means” philosophy. Additionally liberals might question whether the “ends” are good and on what authority that determination was made.
For much of my life it has felt that progressives and liberals were closely enough aligned to more be interchangeable in practice. But, I think the aforementioned cancel culture is one area where progressives see necessary change, while liberals see a sacrifice of ideals.
I’m not sure my definition of progressive vs. liberal is accurate historically speaking, but this is how I interpret the current left-left divide in at least the US.
> Cynically phrased, a critique of liberals from progressives would be that liberals are okay dithering and letting injustices stand. A liberal criticism of progressives is that they have adopted an “ends justify the means” philosophy. Additionally liberals might question whether the “ends” are good and on what authority that determination was made.
I think this is a very clear and succinct summation. It shows that both sides aren't exactly wrong, but they aren't exactly right either. That's what makes politics hard.
I'm kinda reminded of something I was taught about English Common Law: hundreds of years ago, it was basically the law in England, but it became so focused on consistent application that it ossified and failed to provide legal relief for many clear injustices. When that happened, someone could directly appeal to the King for relief, and out of those appeals developed a Equity, a whole different body of law. There's nothing wrong with consistent application of a process, but I think sometimes some people get so focused on it that they loose sight of the actual goal the process was meant to achieve.
progressives eschew that subtle hypocrisy.
I think that's very much not what 'neo-liberal' means. I think that it means free-market liberalism — where 'liberalism' in the previous clause means 'classical liberalism,' as opposed to socialism, Communism or progressivism.
Many of the neo-liberals were, as I recall, leftists (for U.S. values of, anyway) who fled not conservatism but Communism/socialism as they saw that the math simply didn't work out.
For example, I've heard it argued that the modern success of the LGBT movement can be traced back to Clinton getting a blowie and the dems deflecting from the perjury he committed by making it a public issue of sexual freedom/privacy. I'm not doing the argument justice here, but I tend to give it a bit of weight because the left is so comically bad at "sex positivity" that it's barely more than a new flavor of sex negativity with different boundaries.
In regards to opinion safety the answer is clear: you don't get fired in a twitter shitstorm for expressing left-wing orthodoxy.
So the door does swing both ways, but I do agree that the majority of "cancellations" nowadays are coming from one side.
Three of my high school teachers were fired for being gay. One of them was outed by a parent who lived next door.
I was fired from my first job (at a secular for-profit company) for not tithing.
High-profile social media blowups are really trivial compared to the work-a-day homophobia and borderline theocracy that pervades vast swathes of America's land mass.
This is where I sort of miss the boat on the concern about cancel culture. Yes, those people shouldn't lose their jobs for expressing themselves. But also, where the hell has all this outrage been while LGBT people have been systematically excluded from any public-facing employment in huge swathes of the country?
[1] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-ad...
[2] https://www.lgbtmap.org/file/LGBT-Workers-3-Pager-FINAL.pdf
If some sort of culture deems you impure, you're likely to be outcast. Different people just happen to run up against different cultures.
Discrimination based on immutable attributes is inherently much more unfair, but unfairness is still a battle waged on many fronts.
There's plenty of leftist fights. Trots vs Leninists, Authoritarians vs Anarcho-syndicalists, Red Scare vs TrueAnon, etc.
Easy, just track the opinions that can get you fired and unpersoned. Let's not kid ourselves on who holds the real power in America and the West.
There is more than one dimension in American culture or politics.
There are two political parties. That doesn't mean there are two groups, nor two orthodoxies.
To try to compress American culture to one dimension is rarely useful and often a disservice to peoples' actual opinions or beliefs.
This is fundamentally true for everything in the universe. Every single category breaks down. Even if I were to drill down into, say, five dimensions, your basic argument would still hold true.
If we took the raw complexity of reality into consideration, we'd never be able to move forward because we'd be stuck in an endless debate over categorization. It's why I included caveats at both the beginning and the end of my statement.
Yeah, why let reality get in the way of a made up dichotomy?
Every day you make abstractions to better understand reality. For example, you don't devote equal attention to every blade of grass, you sum it as "this is a lawn" and move on.
If you didn't you'd be lost in the first few feet walking outside of your house, seeing everything as an equally important detail.
Yes, but that's neither here nor there, if most of public discourse falls along two, at best three, lines.
>To try to compress American culture to one dimension is rarely useful and often a disservice to peoples' actual opinions or beliefs.
On the contrary, it's a very useful proxy, and the only sane way to make sense of a stream of 40% opinions towards one direction, 40% towards another, and some opinions all over the place... You prune the statistically irrelevant ones...
and for politicians, this is the greatest job security they could ever imagine. probably 50%, if not far more, of their votes are gained simply via the letter next to their name. really, does any politician actually care about any national or local issues? why would they even waste energy to think about it. simply follow their tribe's consensus and ensure self preservation, salary, perks, social status and power.
We have two loud extremes but, no, it's not a dichotomy. In particular, we need to distinguish between progressivism and old school liberalism since they have different core principles.
People distort it as if it was some kind of sport. You either like this team or the other, you are either with us, or against us. And they defend every little thing, even if they know it's wrong, because it's their team.
This is a good description for something I have experienced emotionally for some time, but couldn't put a finger on until very recently.
I grew up in the South and moved out (escaped?) in large part to get away from people whose belief system didn't align with my own. I consider myself "liberal" in the sense that I am anti-hierarchical and think people with a diverse range of beliefs, preferences, and lifestyles deserve dignity and to live their lives unencumbered from shame.
When I was younger, that's what the liberal side felt like. Gay, black, woman, atheist, trans, just, like, really into LARPing? Whatever, fly your freak flag and the liberal camp is happy to have you. Where the conservative tribe demanded that you must submit to the authority and ideally be white, Christian, straight, and male, the liberal side said all are welcome. It felt welcoming. There were no purity tests because the whole concept of purity tests was antithetical to the philosophy. The whole shtick was that there was no out-group.
But that's not what it feels like now. If you are not sufficiently liberal/progressive in all the right ways, you risk being shunned. I think this is a reaction to the paradox of intolerance and the rise of the alt-right/authoritarianism/fascism/whatever the hell you want to call what's going on now.
Once you have a tribe that clearly considers you to be the out-group relative to them, it becomes very hard to not close ranks and define them to be your out-group. When you are actually, literally, under attack by an enemy group, accurate tribal signifiers are a necessity to determine who is a threat and who is not.
I don't know if there's an easy way to walk this back. Maybe if fascism and white supremacy die back things will settle down. It's a hard time for those of us who aren't naturally wired to be fighters.
This one, in additional with the previous essay about 2 different kind of centrists really make me curious of what unorthodox opinions PG is holding and can't say right now.
/s
As you can see from the fact that I commented in this thread, I don't always succeed :P
Paul Graham is somewhat a victim of this himself.
For example, the assumption behind this very essay is that there is such a thing as a rigid, singular concept of "truth" in the moral, cultural and political sphere, that there is a "fact of the matter" whether a belief (say one PG holds) is correct or not. Or that that we live in a static world where such truths can even exist, and not, in a fluid, dynamic, politically messy world where contrasting viewpoints interact and produce something not something ever lasting, but something which is fragile and must always be fought for, this fight being a necessary feature for a functioning democracy.
It seems to me that the biggest reason why some opinions are taboo is that we're worried (usually for good reason) they'll find supporters. Instead of making opinions taboo, we should work on an educational system that doesn't let harmful opinions take hold of people.
There will always be taboo opinions. For example, I can't imagine a civilized society where an opinion like "capital punishment for every minor fault is ok" is not taboo.
> Instead of making opinions taboo, we should work on an educational system that doesn't let harmful opinions take hold of people.
How? I think the problem is that this is impossible at all. Not every opinion is based on reason and education will not be a shield from them.
This one isn't. Here, I can say "there should be capital punishment for every minor fault!" and nobody will bat an eyelid. Nobody will agree, which is why it's okay to say this.
"Taboo" means "opinions you can't talk about", not "opinions that won't be popular". Many taboo opinions are extremely popular, such as "homosexuality shouldn't be a crime" a few decades ago.
Hell, I spent a full thirty seconds wondering whether I should even post the latter under my name, even if it's clearly in a hypothetical context and I'm just mentioning it as an example.
I don't think that assumption is required by the essay. It says that people with orthodox privilege believe that anything outside their orthodoxy must be untrue. So it merely claims that certain people believe (often falsely) that they can conclude something is untrue because it's unorthodox. A crisp universal definition of truth isn't necessary for them to believe this.
"They literally can't imagine a true statement that would get them in trouble." would be replaced by "They literally cannot image a statement which is morally acceptable to certain groups of people (to which they belong) would get them in trouble with those groups of people". Which is completely fair and reasonable.
> I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.
"If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible. Here are just a few examples. I list below five types of nationalist, and against each I append a fact which it is impossible for that type of nationalist to accept, even in his secret thoughts:
BRITISH TORY: Britain will come out of this war with reduced power and prestige.
COMMUNIST: If she had not been aided by Britain and America, Russia would have been defeated by Germany.
IRISH NATIONALIST: Eire can only remain independent because of British protection.
TROTSKYIST: The Stalin régime is accepted by the Russian masses.
PACIFIST: Those who 'abjure' violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.
All of these facts are grossly obvious if one's emotions do not happen to be involved: but to the kind of person named in each case they are also INTOLERABLE, and so they have to be denied, and false theories constructed upon their denial."
(With hindsight, we see the irish nationalist was less conflicted than Orwell had been willing to admit to himself. Or am I missing something important, given that this was written in 1945 and not 1922?)
As far as Orwell's most famous book goes, my heterodoxy of the moment is that I'm convinced the frame story in 1984 was not a jeremiad of warning about a future to avoid, but instead a cathartic story about a past young EA Blair had suffered: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825457
Ireland spent the Second World War neutral, albeit sympathetic to the Axis (Eamon de Valera famously mourned Hitler's death!); what Orwell was trying to say is that the only reason Ireland had any neutrality to preserve is the U.K. was implicitly defending it: had the Axis powers won the war Germany or Italy would have soon enough made Ireland a puppet state.
Whether it's IQ or crime demographics, or something more esoteric, we're increasingly entering into a time where you have to toe the line of orthodoxy or risk losing your livelihood. This means we can't actually get better studies into these areas, nor can we propose policy mechanisms that might actually work towards improving reality, because we are incapable of basing policies on unorthodox facts.
This sentence usually ruffles some feathers, and is a good, even if weak, example of things you "can't say".
I think you can mine these things by looking at diverse conversations - including those you don't find online. What sentence would you be afraid might be misinterpreted?
Norms change. Nobody knows how but one day something is okay to talk about and the next it’s not.
People don’t care about context at all. But, interestingly, they’ll also gladly ignore massive taboos (from their POV) if it’s in their favor. For example because Bernie makes some good arguments for progressive causes that he was against immigration undercutting wages many years ago, is ignored today, but if someone else had that history as a politician they potentially would be brought down, if they were more moderate (in either party).
Alright then! Can we apply this to the Master/Slave and Blacklist/Whitelist debates, and to the use of the "Lena" image?
Edit: guess not :(
Sorry, no, no way. It might be polite to agree that they believe they hear a noise, but it cannot be the motivation to go and destroy all electronic devices in immediate vicinity. This is so easily exploitable. Replace "can hear a noise" with "can see a witch" and imagine the consequences.
Denying someone's lived experience is obnoxious. Excusing that obnoxiousness by introducing a false slippery slope seems like an excuse to not be conscientious.
Or how about this one: what if someone says their lived experience has always been a negative interaction with every member of some specific racial group. You then believe them and accept their racist views as legitimate?
I just can't accept that you actually believe what you are claiming. We all must evaluate and judge so called lived experience on its merit, not blindly accept it as legitimate.
There's no conflict in acknowledging that someone does hear a high-pitched noise in the presence of a particular device and at the same time do not accept that this would be a sufficient reason to prohibit such devices or turn off a particular device; and at the same time one can acknowledge that the term 'blacklist' is offensive or triggering to some people and at the same time not accept that a term being offensive or triggering to some people is sufficient justification to require the world to change that term.
For example the orthodox position to the statement 'All lives matter' is 'this is a racist dog whistle' within one bubble and 'this is an obviously true statement' within another.
The statement is not racist in its text, but in its subtext and context. The statement is only raised for the purpose of preventing action from being taken or change being made, in regard to investigation into and prevention of unnecessary deaths of black people. The statement that lots of white people are killed by US police is similarly both true and a distraction.
It's a bit like turning up to a 9/11 memorial and saying "all plane crashes matter". Or somebody responding to a bug report by closing it WONTFIX with "all bugs matter".
(There's a separate debate as to whether "X lives matter" should be considered a descriptive or normative statement!)
(I should probably stop refreshing this and watching the wild upvote/downvote swing too)
Meaning they were not claiming that they both have the same ethical standards or logical consistency. But rather that 'orthodox privilege' can be extrapolated into 'bubbles' or sub-cultures. The 'orthodox privilege' in PGs article is also mostly descriptive rather than normative.
You were arguing based on ethics and logic. I agree with your conclusion and I sympathize with your reaction. But it seems you missed what OP was going for: describing what people might think/say/do and why that might be rather than what they _should_ do.
I'd respectfully disagree on this issue. I think it's possible to be worried about police abuse of force from the context of being a person who is a mere citizen and thus has a lot less rights than the police. No ethnic group has a truly zero chance of dying at the police's hand. Do white people have it better? Yes absolutely. But it's not as though the police only use excessive force against black people.
I think you're missing the possibility that there are conservatives who want police use of force reform too but want to do so in a color/ethnicity agnostic way. The idea that non-black people say 'All lives matter' only to prevent change is probably not correct. And the reactions like the one I quoted above only serve to divide folks rather than find common ground. It's pretty tragic.
Isn't it? Which genuine pre-existing police reform campaigns are using that phrase? Do you have any examples?
> And the reactions like the one I quoted above only serve to divide folks rather than find common ground
People are told that "all lives matter", in that specific phrasing, is divisive, and keep using it. If you say "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights", you're quoting from the universal declaration of human rights and uncontrovesial (in the west!)
> I think you're missing the possibility that there are conservatives who want police use of force reform too but want to do so in a color/ethnicity agnostic way
Are there? Who? More importantly, how? And I don't think any of the specific BLM proposals are actually race-specific, are they?
https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/
I agree with this, in that evidence seems to show that the problems with criminal justice and excessive use of force are amenable to color/ethnicity agnostic solutions, and that this would have the most positive impact by far on non-white minorities for obvious reasons. I also think BLM is doing a fine job of raising awareness about the issue but it's less clear that they have good solutions, whereas conservatives have been looking at this area for a long time but haven't done nearly enough to advertise the social equality angle. So this seems to be a case where orthodoxy privilege and lack of respect for intellectual diversity is hurting both sides.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/25/abolish-wh...
> She tweeted on Tuesday: “White lives don’t matter. As white lives” and “Abolish whiteness”,
I'm sorry but no amount of "academic context" makes these sentences any less racist.
> It's a bit like turning up to a 9/11 memorial and saying "all plane crashes matter". Or somebody responding to a bug report by closing it WONTFIX with "all bugs matter".
No it isn't, your argument is fallacious, no organization came with a "9/11 plane crash matters" slogan at first place.
"black lives matter" is a bad slogan because it both doesn't mean what it says and is divisive by nature. "black lives matter" is black people telling white people that "black lives matter too". It's incredibly patronizing. The great majority of white people do understand that black lives do matter, as much as white lives and that police brutality does affect all races.
If you design a slogan in such a way that it is divisive by nature, then disallow anybody else from fighting for their own cause or even broader causes, then you are not seeking a solution involving everybody, but just more racial strife, as you are claiming the exclusivity on victimhood.
Nobody can come here telling me that no white people has ever been beaten or killed by the police abusing their power.
If that were true, why has it been happening for so many decades?
> If you design a slogan in such a way that it is divisive by nature
Fairly sure MLK had something to say about this, and that it was impossible to "not be divisive" when talking about race.
You mean white people also getting killed by the police? Good question.
> Fairly sure MLK had something to say about this, and that it was impossible to "not be divisive" when talking about race.
The civil right act didn't grant special rights to minorities, it just made both segregation and racial discrimination illegal. This is a non divisive way to solve race issues.
Divisive slogans claiming the monopoly on victimhood solve nothing.
Where was the campaign against white people getting killed by the police (or vigilantes! the original campaign was in re Trayvon Martin, who was killed by George Zimmerman) before 2013, or indeed in the present day?
Where was the campaign against sex abuse in Hollywood before metoo as well? Now imagine women in metoo telling men to shut up about sex assault because metoo is only for female victims?
This is the difference between a unifying movement and a divisive one. Especially when the latter is making a loud point about silencing anybody that attempts at broader reach. "Respect all lives", "End police brutality" doesn't make the case for black lives weaker at first place.
This is a very bad example, as there's always a "what about male victims of sexual assault" faction that only appears when a women makes an allegation and doesn't actually do anything for male victims of sexual assault.
> "Respect all lives", "End police brutality" doesn't make the case for black lives weaker at first place.
Those are fine. It's the specific confrontational wording: a group of people saying "we matter" confronted with "no, you're not special, stop saying the word Black, it makes us uncomfortable".
but "all lives matter" isn't fine? as for the rest of your sentence, that's not what is happening. What is happening is people specifically telling others that "white people lives don't matter, as white lives" as quoted from the article I linked, which you did not address.
> This is a very bad example, as there's always a "what about male victims of sexual assault" faction that only appears when a women makes an allegation and doesn't actually do anything for male victims of sexual assault.
No, this is a perfect example as to how to come with a slogan that pushes unity instead of strife, when a phenomenon concerns everybody.
I'm happy to dismiss that particular incident as trolling, or at least a "what did you expect the response to this to be" incident.
In current contemporary use, members of the blue tribe use it to communicate to other members of the blue tribe that they believe they have identified a member of the red tribe and want other members of the blue tribe to join them in the tar-and-feathering of the suspected red tribe member.
Both the blue tribe and the red tribe are mirror images of one another in far more ways than members of either are willing (capable?) of acknowledging.
Is it "racist" in the DiAngelo definition, a reflection of white people's innate racism and thus like anything a white person might say or do outside of the anti-racist activity of contemplating one's own racism?
Is it a "dog whistle" because it summons racists like a bat signal, "Hey white supremacists, time to do some racism!" How is it that so many people who can hear a particular phrase immediately denounce it as a "racist dog whistle?" Is the denouncement part of systemic racism whereby white people can pretend to be allies and yet still demonstrate their white supremacy bonafides because they can hear the signal?
Have you considered the possibility that a lot of people agree that action should be taken, and that statistically-speaking, that positive action will reduce unnecessary deaths for all people, regardless of their race or ethnicity?
If a software bug is reported to affect a certain subset of users more often than others, but upon investigation, it turns out the bug is a duplicate of another more fundamental bug that affects all users relatively equally, are we preventing action (or discrediting that subset of users who reported the bug) by marking it as a duplicate and giving priority to the fundamental issue so as to fix it for everyone?
Just as Black Lives Matter supporters often claim that the phrase is misunderstood by those who question it, All Lives Matter is misunderstood by many who think it takes something away from the black community. It's not a denial of anything, but rather a recognition that the problems actually do statistically affect everyone, and singling out one race (when all are affected) actually does more harm than good when it comes to ending racism.
You don't counter protest a movement you agree with because you dislike it's semantics. You use semantics as an excuse to ignore a movement that ultimately makes you uncomfortable. MLKs letter from a Birmingham jail being ever relevant.
Semantics do matter, especially when specifics are used to highlight division, and that division is used to justify more violence (such as murders committed by the very people who are protesting).
I made a few claims, which I'll summarize:
- Politicians that state "all lives matter" by and large do not support action to reduce police violence in general.
- Groups that state "all lives matter" often exist to directly counterprotest groups that state "black lives matter".
- Groups that state that "all lives matter" often also state "blue lives matter" and espouse support for the police in favor of protestors.
Do you disagree with those statements? If you agree with those statements, why would someone who believes that police violence is a problem choose to associate themselves with the police over other people protesting police violence?
It is more pragmatic to support the group that causes you more concern, if you have two concerns that are temporarily at odds. Ergo, if you, aware of the above, say "all lives matter", you know that you are associating yourself with people who condone police violence against everyone. This would imply that you believe the "danger of racism" in the BLM movement is of greater concern than police violence.
Please critique my logical progression there.
To be clear, while you may have only the best intentions when you say "All Lives Matter", it is naive to believe that everyone else who says the same does. When you choose to use a politically charged slogan you should be aware of the message that sends. You ultimately cannot choose how people will interpret your words, and that they see your words by their association instead of your intention is not the recipients fault.
You're saying that "because X group said Y and X group also does Z, Y supports Z".
Your premise is based on a genetic fallacy, and your argument implies a false dichotomy. Your claims are hasty generalizations with insufficient evidence.
I don't support everything Joe Biden does, but I still throw my support behind the democratic party because there are only two realistic options in the US today, and the other one is far worse.
If you're going to choose to say "All Lives Matter", you are choosing to involve yourself in a binary. And ignoring the context of that binary (that "All Lives Matter" is a reactionary statement that came about only in response to the statement/movement "Black Lives Matter") is done at one's own risk.
> Your claims are hasty generalizations with insufficient evidence.
So you disagree that "All Lives Matter" is a reactionary statement that only came into being post-"Black Lives Matter"?
Edit:
On Blue Lives/ All Lives people minimizing violence against black people[0].
And Tim Scott, who is known for being an "All Lives Matter" proponent, opposes ending Qualified Immunity (and indeed his proposed bill on police reform does almost nothing). Whereas Colorado's QI-ending bill was sponsored by Leslie Herod, who joined a Black Lives Matter march.
In the House, the Qualified-Immunity ending bill[1] is sponsored by only Democrats, among them many who are openly pro-Black Lives Matter, and, well Republicans don't seem to be[2]. Swallwell supports ending QI, Gaetz does not. Swallwell says Black Lives Matter. Gaetz refuses to say that, instead saying that All Lives Matter. Is that enough evidence?
[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/10/us/all-lives-matter-reenact-g...
[1]: congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/7120/cosponsors?searchResultViewType=expanded
[2]: https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/06/17/eric-swalwell...
* sigh * I miss the day when we could state our beliefs and defend them on principle rather than on perception, trying to guess which groups may choose to be offended.
I guess I'm old fashioned.
Yeah, this was never the case for large swaths of people.
Truly the good days in history, where Civil Rights activists noted that, ethically, segregation was problematic. Everyone agreed and racism was solved. They didn't need to worry about offending anyone, people just understood them. Legislation followed swiftly without much kerfuffle. There was no worry about offending the sensibilities of the "white moderate" (letter from a Birmingham Jail really showing up today!)
Missing the days when you didn't need to worry about how your views were perceived is itself a privilege.
The freedom to express ideas - even controversial ones - is at the heart of a truly free society. A viewpoint based on sound principles can be true, while also being offensive to someone or a group of people. That doesn't make the viewpoint wrong. A doctor who objectively describes how a person's weight may be detrimental to their health is stating a medical fact, even though it may be deeply offensive to the patient.
To imply that taking offense (over "semantics" used by some people who express their views) is somehow equivalent to the unjust laws mentioned in Letter from Birmingham Jail is, in its own way, a mockery of what Martin Luther King Jr was fighting for. He defended free speech, even when it was offensive at the time. In our time, we speak up about our beliefs and some see them as offensive, but those freedoms should be defended all the same. Publicly shaming people based on false interpretations, and in many cases causing harm to them (as we've seen in the news recently in response to conservative viewpoints being expressed) is an obstruction of those liberties.
If you disagree with someone, debate them on principle. On the other hand, if you pretend that what they're saying is invalid because someone else chooses to be offended by it, you are no longer talking about objective reality. Without a basis in objective reality, public discourse becomes nothing short of a shouting match with rules that change with the wind. We've seen an explosion of that kind of behavior recently on social media.
Instead of being so adamant about picking sides and being "right", let's all listen a little more - to all viewpoints. Let's not paint someone as the devil because they disagree with us (or because we've given them a label based on other people with that viewpoint), but instead offer them a bit of respect and understand that their intentions may be just as honorable as our own, albeit colored by different circumstances and experience.
I'm not going to respond again to this thread.
Saying "the slogan you choose to support will be perceived as being associated with racism" is a statement of fact. You can argue that that association is wrong, and you are free to try and change that association, but in the meantime, you should acknowledge that fact.
> It takes a more nuanced understanding of reality to accept the fact that someone can miss certain aspects of the past while at the same time acknowledging the imperfections of the past.
I agree. You seem to have missed my point. Claiming broad things about the past having been a certain way misses the nuance that for many people it wasn't actually that way. It's a privileged view on history. Having privilege isn't racist. Let's all be a little less defensive, shall we?
> The freedom to express ideas - even controversial ones - is at the heart of a truly free society. A viewpoint based on sound principles can be true, while also being offensive to someone or a group of people. That doesn't make the viewpoint wrong. A doctor who objectively describes how a person's weight may be detrimental to their health is stating a medical fact, even though it may be deeply offensive to the patient.
I agree. So please stop taking umbrage when I correctly point out that certain slogans are associated with racism. I'm stating facts.
> If you disagree with someone, debate them on principle.
We're having a discussion about semantics. "All lives matter " and "black lives matter" are political slogans. Which one you choose to associate with sends signals that are based on context.
If you believe that it is more important to express that all lives matter than that black lives matter because a "race blind" statement is more powerful (or something, you haven't actually taken the time to explain the principles on which you're operating anywhere in this thread), you're free to express that view! You can do it! We have strong protections on your freedom to express ideas, even controversial ones. But because of that, others are also free to express their own ideas, such as criticism of yours, like that you are ignoring context.
> Instead of being so adamant about picking sides and being "right", let's all listen a little more - to all viewpoints.
I don't want to listen to nazis. I don't have anything to gain from listening to nazis. It is physically uncomfortable for me to listen to nazis. It makes me anxious. It is ultimately a waste of my time to listen to them.
I'm not saying that all views I disagree with are nazis, but the implication that free expression requires others to listen to you is a dangerous one. We can all draw the line somewhere on who we listen to. You have no right to my time or my audience, and it is not reasonable to substitute your right to speak with my right to ignore you. The opposite is also true, you're well within your rights to ignore me, and I support that for you.
Broadly, I think it's ironic how much your responses are colored based on things I didn't say. You haven't actually taken the time to respond to my thoughts or words, nor does it seem that you even took the time to ponder on them. You instead ranted about only tangentially related topics. And that's your right! You can do that. I can't stop you, you're welcome to ignore me.
But all those nice words about "debate" and "listening" to other viewpoints ring a little hollow when you don't actually engage with any critique.
Stripped of context, it is obviously true, and utterly harmless.
Placed in the context of BLM, it denies that anything unfair is happening to people because of their skin color.
80 to 90% of the times I’ve seen this phrase, it’s been used in response to Black Lives Matter. As opposed to being used in the positive for, say, universal healthcare, food assistance programs, and initiatives to house the homeless.
Note: above comments relative to the insanity that is the USA, of course.
The whistle should be a red flag, rather than surefire proof that you now know everything the person is going to say, therefore you shouldn't listen any more. I think one of the problems in the US is the pervasiveness of the mindset of "I think you're X, therefore I refuse to listen to anything else you say".
It's not that Black lives matter _more_, it's that systemic institutionalized racism dating back to the origins of the US make it so that Black lives matter _less_ than white lives when dealing with organs of power.
This is definitely true, I'm just puzzled as to why you'd focus efforts on solving a subset of the problem rather than the whole problem. Wouldn't that lead to fragmented movements of "<race> lives matter" rather than one single effort?
The people complaining are black. They want their lives to matter. If you can't campaign for that without there being something in it for you as well .. why not?
The legislative programs that people are advancing in the wake of this attention do indeed focus on solving the problem for everyone, not just Black people. For example, Colorado recently passed a police reform bill that does a lot of beneficial things, none of them specifically targeted at the Black community[1].
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/colorado-passes-sweeping-police...
Ahh, okay, that makes more sense, thanks. I wasn't aware of that.
Unethical medical experiments? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
The ""FEMA camps"" meme? Hurricane Katrina response.
People are focusing on Black Lives Matter as a rallying cry because the police system is expressing its terrifying lawlessness through overtly racist terror-inducing acts.
The problem won't go away without massive reform to the system. And asking "what about these other people?" in the general context is not useful; asking "what about these other people in the specific context of 'will this proposed solution work for these other people, too?'" is very useful.
“Black lives matter” is not just asserting that black lives are among the lives that matter. Like, it IS asserting this and that observation IS somewhat banal and that IS kind of the point.
The banality of the statement is meant to invite you to think, “wait, why do we even have to say this?” which exposes a deeper meaning.
That deeper meaning is more like “We occasionally get hunted and killed out in the streets like rabid dogs by the very institutions that are supposed to protect people from violence—and this can only be understood as the culmination of America’s vast history of trying to ignore and bury and forget about its racist history rather than talk about it and address it, to the point where that «we don’t wanna talk about it» inclination has metastasized into an active implication that our lives are valueless to the culture at large. And we cannot breathe this stifling choking smog of «oh well another black man was shot but let’s not put it in the news, they don’t matter enough for that» any more, as happens when death transitions from stories into statistics. Fuck that. We DO matter.”
In turn the deeper meaning of “Blue lives matter” is “we respect our police enough to give them unconditional arbitration of who lives and who dies in cases where they feel their lives are at stake and sorry black people but we don't see a way for your needs to not die be satisfied without good honest police officers losing their lives because some of y’all shoot them—like, not the majority, I am sure most of you are good, but like when I think of inner city gang members shooting the police I think of black men stereotypically. Fix your gang problems first and then you won’t get shot by police.” You can see why that seems to have a kernel of truth but really came across as tone-deaf (see how it takes a statistical view rather than a story view?) and not understanding that most of these actual stories are about getting shot in the back while walking away or being strangled slowly while being totally immobilized and protesting that you are being strangled and could they please not do that, others involve very young innocent children being killed as collateral damage or worse.
Meanwhile “all lives matter” is a similarly banal statement but it serves the function, when used as a response to “black lives matter,” of saying that “no, you know, I really like our racist history being buried, I liked it when we didn't talk about race. We should focus on the global human condition and forget the specific gruesome stories of what’s happening to folks of your race right now as just the smaller problem of what’s happening to you right now. But I find myself very worried that if I am sharing these black stories someone is going to get mad at me for not sharing the Mexican stories of police injustice and then the poor white stories of police injustice and, well, can’t we just go back to a time where we didn’t talk about the race problem that we were having?”
The basic response to this I suppose is “we have been trying the ‘all lives matter’ approach for hundreds of years and we don’t seem to be improving, meanwhile cultures with similar race dynamics, like South Africa, are actually processing their difficulties over much shorter time scales, possibly because they are willing to talk about it and be frank. There is no reason to believe at this point that the mentality of ‘all lives matter’ leads to a better outcome for the black lives that are hemorrhaged today in such quantities that it becomes numb statistics rather than individual stories if we don’t make a point of getting outraged over every single damn death.”
A day or two ago, a police officer in my area was killed on duty in a gunfight. Some of the reactions on Twitter were deranged and vile, literally celebrating that an officer was killed. I saw the same shit the day or two before when a police department near me tweeted about one of their police dogs dying, apparently of old age.
People deliberately try to ambush and murder police on a fairly regular basis. It doesn’t get reported much—partly because it doesn’t fit any popular media narrative, partly, I suspect, to not encourage copycats, and partly because it’s not really news. In 2013 a man in Southern California—you might recognize his name but I won’t give him the dignity of using it—carried out a brief campaign of murdering police officers and their families in a self-declared campaign of “unconventional and asymmetric warfare” against the LAPD.
I used to personally be very strongly biased against the police. I’m less so now, and part of the reason for that is that I’ve had the opportunity to see dozens of dashcam and bodycam videos of actual officer-involved shootings. The vast majority of the shootings I’ve seen were situations where the officer’s life was very much at risk.
I can even pick out patterns when people post videos of police not shooting people, presumably because those people are white. It’s not because they’re white, it’s because while they might have a bladed weapon and occasionally lunge in an officer’s direction, cops usually hold their fire and maintain distance until the guy breaks into a full-on sprint to try and close that distance.
I’m not trying to minimize or dismiss the actual police brutality that takes place, and I agree that we need higher standards and accountability. But from actually listening to some of the people on that side of the issue and seeing their evidence, I can understand where they’re coming from.
[1]: https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2019
I think my misconception was that I thought BLM is a movement against police brutality, where it's actually more general than that. Under that light, it makes sense.
eg: Imagine if someone told you the Pacific Temperate rain forest needs saving and you responded with "sure, but we're prioritizing resources for the Amazon first - its got it way worse"
You just (wittingly) downplayed the imminence of one over the other and missed on the particularities because of how you perceived their relative danger.
Now consider your original metaphor without the bias about which forest is worst off in reality. You might find that "all forests matter" might be a more valid response in that context because they don't want to dis-proportionally favor one at the cost of the others.
If you continue to allow these statements to polarize and force a false dichotomy that demonizes a group and lionizes another, well, you're not really helping heal the divides either.
The actual _people_ have much wider divergence of opinions, for sure. I don't expect a Republican to go around chanting the slogans of people who have declared themselves to be their enemies; why would they?
And yes indeed it would be awesome to revamp the US political system, but that won't happen anytime soon short of armed revolt, and keeping people alive in the meantime is still important.
And I'd say neither party is truly conservative, otherwise we wouldn't be seeing this absolute shambles from an ostensibly "law and order" President. Nothing is being conserved. Nobody has taken away gay marriage, abortion, legal weed, etc. Nobody sent in the Army to destroy CHAZ.
The reality is that in the American system the President is not very powerful, and the permanent bureaucracy and moneyed interests have a lot more control over policy than one might thing at first glance.
An incompetent conservative is still conservative. And the trump admin did try to erode many of these things: protections for gay and transgender workers[0], abortion[1], etc. That reversing supreme court decisions (which most of these were based on) is exceedingly difficult worked against his goals, but denying that he tried is ignorant.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/06/12/trump-trans...
[1]: https://www.jurist.org/news/2020/01/trump-administration-urg...
> it denies that anything unfair is happening to people because of their skin color.
Like you did here. In my experience, an "all lives matter" activist is quite happy to both acknowledge racism and have a discussion on the nuance of racial treatment in the United States.
Where the two sides really differ is in their general view of America. Whether its optimistic or pessimistic. Whether its isolated or systematic. Whether its "racial" or "cultural".
To be blunt, its absurd to label a movement which has millions of adherents as a "racist dog whistle". Its either an overt, racist megaphone or just a difference in opinion.
> its absurd to label a movement which has millions of adherents as a "racist dog whistle"
It's entirely possible (and historically true!) for millions of people to be overtly racist.
You can't strip phrases like that of context. "All lives matter" isn't just a statement, it is a direct response to black lives matter (too).
Anybody who's been half paying attention to the news for the past few years understands that and is not making an utterly harmless assertion.
In fact, the angry reaction to "all lives matter" precisely is what encourages its use. Because if you take as premise, that "all lives matter" is true then it becomes easy to cast anybody who gets angry about a true statement as unreasonable.
You might think that there are no Mongolian tourists in America, especially right now, but you might be surprised how little many people pay attention to current events.
[Disclaimer for the internet mob, I have never and would never use the phrase.]
The slogans black lives matter, all lives matter, blue lives matter, etc., are all straw men slogans/arguments that communicate to whomever you're speaking with that you're not planning on interpreting them charitably.
I know lots of people who think black lives matter some, but who don't think they matter as much as white lives. Like going around and murdering black people is clearly unethical, but overpolicing and imprisoning them for nonviolent crime isn't. Yet they can't imagine doing the same to white people.
> but overpolicing and imprisoning them for nonviolent crime isn't. Yet they can't imagine doing the same to white people.
was and is (relatively) commonly stated. I claim that to believe this is alright, you must implicitly value black safety less than white safety. I'm open to counterarguments.
I think your understanding of the situation is that black people are “overpoliced” and disproportionately imprisoned for nonviolent crimes. This is why you want to change the situation, which is a logical conclusion.
I think people who disagree with you about the conclusion you reach didn’t get there by sharing your understanding of the situation, shrugging their shoulders, and saying it was fine. I think they perceive the underlying situation itself differently than you do. It’s not a difference in values. They might be wrong, but people are wrong about things all the time.
Is willful ignorance acceptable?
I agree. But that's not what I asked. The statement I originally made was that
"overpolicing and imprisoning <black people> for nonviolent crime isn't. Yet they can't imagine doing the same to white people."
Which I do think is fairly clearly demonstrated. There's a subtle shift, but a relevant one. Creating new systems of oppression based on race is racist, but letting existing systems that treat races unfairly is okay, even though the results would be the same.
I want to reiterate: I don't believe this person claims that black people should be policed different purely based on their race, but it does seem that this person is comfortable with that being the way the world operates.
And way back, the statement we started from was "black lives matter". And in general I hold that to mean "black lives matter just as much as any other race".
How do we square the value statement "black lives matter just as much as any other race" with the acceptance of over-policing of black communities as justified? I don't see how we can. But again, I'm open to other interpretations.
Many black communities are disproportionately victimized by violent crime, and increasing the police presence there protects them from that crime and hence saves many of their lives.
Maybe it hasn’t worked out that way, but here we are again arguing how we perceive the situation, not the underlying values we’re trying to optimize for. I might listen to you mention the drug charges and say, “fine, let’s legalize weed”. I might listen to you talk about how black people distrust their local police departments and vice versa and I might counter by advocating for community-oriented policing. You might convince me that none of that works and the basic concept was wrong-headed. But nowhere in this process do we actually disagree about the basic value you mentioned.
Sure, and that was the common understanding 20-30 years ago. (see: Dem and black community support for various crime bills, "Superpredator", etc.). But our understanding of the situation has evolved (based on evidence, I should add!).
> I might listen to you mention the drug charges and say, “fine, let’s legalize weed”. I might listen to you talk about how black people distrust their local police departments and vice versa and I might counter by advocating for community-oriented policing. You might convince me that none of that works and the basic concept was wrong-headed. But nowhere in this process do we actually disagree about the basic value you mentioned.
But now you're arguing for a bunch of policies supported by various sects of Black Lives Matters supporters, all of which could be summed up in various ways as "reduce police interactions with black people".
My point is that there are people who don't accept that. Who insist that nothing should change. The argument goes something like this:
(1) Because black people commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime (2) police will naturally interact more with black people so (3) black people will also be arrested more for nonviolent crimes, and therefore (4) nothing needs to change.
This breaks down somewhere between one and two, for a variety of reasons. The amount of violent crime isn't proportional to the amount of overpolicing, a lot of the forms of overpolicing don't actually reduce violent crime, etc. These are the people who I think it's reasonable to have suspicion of. People who agree that some form of action is necessary, cool! But people who think the status quo is fine and dandy, that's the group where I can't quite square things (and I'll note that the person who I linked earlier was in that group).
I think community-oriented policing is actually intended to increase police interactions by adding more non-adversarial interactions in order to establish trust.
I don’t think “reduce police interactions with black people” is necessarily desirable if that includes things like ignoring 911 calls from black neighborhoods. In fact, that strikes me as deliberate failure to provide equal protection under the law, and could be even more ruinous to black communities than the status quo.
“Reduce police interactions with black people” is yet another thing that might sound like a good idea at the time, but would ultimately lead, in my opinion, to unintended negative consequences for the very black lives it’s intended to protect. Even if your ideal solution would turn out to have fewer police interactions, setting that as a goal is just begging for Goodhart’s Law to manifest itself.
Also, I think you’re minimizing nonviolent crime. DUI, car theft, burglary, and arson are all “nonviolent crimes”. We can’t just ignore them. A neighborhood where these things happen frequently is made more dangerous and impoverished by them. So when you talk about having more police presence in black neighborhoods resulting in more non-violent criminals behind bars, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you drive drunk through a black neighborhood, you might run over a black kid, and that black kid’s life sure as hell matters so I hope the police are around to catch you before that happens.
If you’re talking about drug crimes and arguing that the enforcement of those laws is worse than the offense, then maybe you should just repeal those laws. And if I disagreed with you about drug laws I might argue the point with you.
> People who agree that some form of action is necessary, cool! But people who think the status quo is fine and dandy, that's the group where I can't quite square things
We got into this mess by agreeing that some form of action was necessary. Stopping to make sure we aren’t just making things worse is reasonable.
That isn't what I said. You can agree that the status quo is bad while being unsure of how to fix it (noticing flaws is a lot easier than finding solutions!). I'm speaking about people who believe the status quo is okay.
“Okay” is a relative term. Fundamentally, no state of affairs on earth can ever be truly “okay” because humanity is imperfect. No human society is capable of perfect justice. No human society ever has or ever will achieve perfect justice. That means injustice will always exist.
> noticing flaws is a lot easier than finding solutions
Yes, thank you. That’s my point. We’re all noticing flaws in the status quo. And a lot of people, yourself included, are proposing changes to the status quo. Changes which, in and of themselves, will also have flaws. But I think, as a conventional shorthand for “the best of all possible worlds because humanity is imperfect and damned”, you can just say the status quo is “okay” in that scenario.
Then I'd reject this on moral grounds:
Which is a better society: that everyone is approximately equally happy, or that overall happiness is greater, but at the cost of an inequality in happiness based on birthright?
I'd claim that the second system is inherently unequal and therefore we should prefer the first even if it is, in a strictly utilitarian sense, better.
To put it in concrete terms: every possible human society has some inequalities based on birthright. Or, as I stated it, perfect justice is impossible.
It’s not a question of prioritizing certain values over others, although those questions can and do arise. It’s a question of achieving any one of those values in the real world.
And I think that it's pretty obvious that we aren't at such a maximum.
Like, holding values constant, "make marijuana legal" would reduce inequality. It might have some second order effects that are problematic in general, but it would reduce policing inequality. I don't see a counterargument to that.
The only way to prove that we aren't at a global or local maximum is to make the case for some specific set of changes. If this isn't the best of all possible worlds, show me a possible world that's better. Even if we agree about the values, we can still disagree about factual and counterfactual questions enough that maybe I won't believe your better world is possible, or that your possible world is better.
> Like, holding values constant, "make marijuana legal" would reduce inequality. It might have some second order effects that are problematic in general, but it would reduce policing inequality. I don't see a counterargument to that.
The original value we were trying to maximize was the value of black lives, because your claim is that nobody can possibly support the status quo while believing that black lives as as valuable as white lives. So let's try and stay consistent here--you're the one shifting values on me all of a sudden! :)
I happen to agree with you about cannabis, but as I said before, that's the same as saying that cannabis should be legal irrespective of racial equality. And that's because we agree that cannabis usage is less of a threat to black lives than the enforcement of cannabis prohibition. I think the number of black people killed in police encounters due solely to the prohibition of cannabis is probably very marginal. I might be wrong, but again that's not a values difference.
Wait now hold on! I'm not trying to maximize the value of black lives. My claim is that black lives are currently given less value than white (or broadly, other) lives. The goal isn't to maximize the value of black lives, but to bring parity to white lives. Maximizing the value of black lives is a very different position.
Or in other words, Black Lives Matter is about maximizing equality. I claim that Marijuana legalization is one such change that will reduce inequality, and will have few enough side effects that they don't make it unacceptable to implement.
tl;dr: We were looking to increase the societal value of black lives, but that is done within the lens of achieving equality.
> I think the number of black people killed in police encounters due solely to the prohibition of cannabis is probably very marginal. I might be wrong, but again that's not a values difference.
I would agree, but (at least if you take the systemic view of racial injustice that I do) the long term impacts of things like incarceration due to the inconsistent enforcement of petty drug charges do have far reaching consequences that make other kinds of change difficult to consider/analyze.
Fair. Though they are effectively the same until parity is reached.
> I would agree, but (at least if you take the systemic view of racial injustice that I do) the long term impacts of things like incarceration due to the inconsistent enforcement of petty drug charges do have far reaching consequences that make other kinds of change difficult to consider/analyze.
And here we are back at (hypothetical) differences over our respective understanding of the situation, particularly in comparing the social impacts of drug use and incarceration. I still don’t think any difference in values is necessarily implied.
Two people have have a moral position and disagree because they are fundamentally working from different axioms.
Again this isn't very charitable. I've had many of the same discussions and very few people I've debated this with come to the conclusion that things don't need to change. Most agree that things need to change, but they conclude that different changes are warranted than you do.
Many people today focus the change on step 2 ("police will naturally interact more with black people") with policies like defund the police, while others might focus on changes that change the step 1 ("Because black people commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime"), while others even still will focus on things the are priors to even step 1.
Disagreement on the change required is perfectly normal and to be expected. Just because people disagree on the change and don't see things exactly as you do doesn't mean they don't care or are bad people.
This isn't a very charitable interpretation.
There is no lack of injustice in the world. There are more injustices in the world than any single human can possible wrap their head around much less devote attention to caring about.
Just because someone prioritizes other concerns does not mean they are uncaring about a concern you care about, just as you prioritizing the concern you care about do not imply that you're unconcerning about the injustice the other person is prioritizing.
If I live in a neighborhood that has a greater incidence of violence, it's reasonable to assume that such a neighborhood might experience more policing. A neighborhood that has more policing in inherently one where you're more likely to be caught afoul of any law, violence not withstanding.
I had friends that lived in the boonies that saw a police officer maybe once a month if that. At the time I lived in the suburbs. I saw a cop maybe once a week. Now that I live in a city I see a police officer roughly once a day or every other day. If you see cops more often, it's more likely that you'll commit a crime in their presence and be incarcerated.
To get a more definitive answer on the magnitude of effect racism has, it would be important to control for other factors so you have a more fair comparison.
For example, if you take people of race X, Y and Z that are all of the same socioeconomic status and live in the same neighborhood, what is the likelihood that each are arrested for non-violent crimes?
The meta point here is that policies can disproportionately affect people with certain characteristics without any intent to disproportionately impact people with certain characteristics.
Racism may very well be the cause of the phenomena you've highlighted, but the data presented thus far is mostly inconclusive and at best suggests an amount of racism that explains far less of the discrepancy than accompanying confounding factors.
The sundry multivariate analysis I've seen (example [0]) attempted generally arrive at the conclusion that yes there is some racism, but that the magnitude of the impact of racism on outcomes is greatly overstated relative to other explanations. That doesn't mean that we still shouldn't address that injustice, but it does mean that there may be lower hanging fruit we might want to address first if our goal is a maximal improvement in justice instead of a modest improvement in justice. Not that we should eventually address all injustices, but resources are finite and it's fair to have a discussion about how to prioritize tackling different injustices and come to agreement on criteria we use to prioritize tackling different injustices.
Basically of that 3x rate, what percent is explained by racism and what is explained by other factors? What are those other factors and what is the contribution factor of each towards the 3x discrepancy.
[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-ana...
Your statement
> Placed in the context of BLM, it denies that anything unfair is happening to people because of their skin color.
simply doesn't reflect the actual beliefs of many people who use the term. I, for one, am absolutely certain that racism exists and gets people arrested or killed. However, I have seen people become fed up with the narrative being promoted by BLM that frames the issue as being a 'black only' problem. To keep those people on the side of progress it's important to make sure we're not excluding them from the discussion.
It's also worth noting that BLM is not just a movement, but there are organized entities operating under the brand. [1]Many people disagree with those organizations for reasons that have nothing to do with racism or police brutality. Nonetheless, those people are called racist and accused of using dog whistles.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdpIIiBe7Wc
If you're not trying to communicate effectively, or if you are trying to communicate your sympathy with racism, you keep using that phrase.
Language is a tool.
Therefore, if someone uses a phrase also used by racists/communists/some other baddies, and does not fall into that category, it is your error to guess that someone does. It is just victim-blaming for error of judgement.
In the context of a programming discussion, "Just hash the string and see if you get a match" is a reasonable and meaningful thing to say. In the context of cooking breakfast, it's meaningless drivel.
Reasonable people try to use words that their current audience will understand in the current context. If they make a mistake, they learn from it.
Unreasonable people insist that they are being victim-blamed.
This is exactly correct. Not everyone's experiences are the same, leading different people to wrap a situation or a statement in different context.
When some people hear BLM they wrap it in the context of the ideology of the founders, or in the riots they see on television, or in the intense anti-[insert group] hate on social media. Those people aren't racists, and they would happily work with you to combat corruption in our politics and policing. They want the world to be better, they simply disagree with how the movement is organized.
> Unreasonable people insist that they are being victim-blamed.
People who said 'All lives matter' early on were labeled racists and attacked mercilessly on social media and television. I don't believe these people are all unreasonable.
Maybe you are a Marxist and you think it’s a grand idea to abolish capitalism and the nuclear family. But actually, effective communication is a little beside the point here. If you effectively communicated that you wanted to abolish capitalism and the nuclear family, nobody would care or pay attention. If you instead hid those ideas under a slogan specifically chosen to be as undeniable as possible, you can sneak a lot of things in pretty fast.
And although the threshold has gone down for new bubbles, it has also gone down for when they get removed. It's become normal to churn through a bunch of different bubbles and seeing which one sticks around long enough.
It's why I worry about the left promoting and abusing cancel/outrage culture.
Ironically, if you want to protect minorities, then liberal values need to be protected because it is liberal values that protect minorities against the _tyranny of the majority_.
As an example, on the one hand, as a European, I agree with banning hate speech if it is well defined, and I think the western European countries have a good track record in not abusing censorship. On the other hand, censorship can easily be extended to "fake news", or it could be interpreted that a critique of religion is hate speech, the same religion that promotes hate speech in the Bible, with organizations behind it that support conservative values, actively pushing for legislation against minorities.
Why do minorities think that if censorship starts to be more common, that it will be in their / our favor, given the entire history of the human race? It's a mystery to me. And I understand the current phenomenon in the US. The justice system in the US is dysfunctional because systemic racism exists, and it's unjust. So people are taking matters into their own hands. With a dysfunctional justice system, the outcome is predictable.
However, that outcome will not be positive. Sorry but I don't believe in mobs with pitchforks; the instances in history where popular revolts worked to enact positive change are rare and far between.
On the Far Left, we have cancel culture and accusing others of racism... Those on the Far Left will not be castigated by their own orthodox community, because the far left is collectively agreeing to see racism in more places than it is likely to exist. Those within the moderate left are then punished by not conforming to the extreme orthodoxy for saying not all implicitly racist actions are done by racists.
Similarly, those on the right will be castigated by their own orthodox community of religious or gun/freedom figures who place devotion to those causes most highly. Any GOP figure is taking a great risk criticizing Trump now, because there is a great amount of orthodoxy behind his policies and the packing the courts with judges...in order to ensure the country is more conservative for longer, at any cost (even Trump).
Here on HN, we have our own orthodoxy, too. Those who work with Rust find safe haven for their views, and the downvote brigade on HN will descend if you even mention the word Trump.
If you don't see that those are actually two sides of the same orthodoxy, and that the truly unorthodox opinions are outside of either of those two, I don't know what to tell you beyond "you should check your orthodox privilege". ;-)
When it comes to realpolitik, the Democrats and Republicans are basically only different in terms of the speed at which they implement neoliberal policies and fight neocon wars. The general direction of "progress" is the same.
But yes - on HN, supporting Trump is a big no-no, no matter what the reason (even if roughly half the country voted for him).
Things like Agile for instance can’t be discussed unless you have a near orthodox view.
Something like... I think the coronavirus reaction is way overblown. It’s not nearly as dangerous as the media would lead you to believe, and wearing masks is basically ineffective and is just a thing to make people feel like they’re doing something.
;)
Is that bad? Isn't that sometimes just the nature of having to prove a different idea in the face of another idea that may be proven?
On the other hand let's say it is Orthodox Privilege then we get to the next step, give it a name and ... tell others they're engaging in 'orthodox privilege'?
Any kinda 'you're doing <insert privilege term>' seems like a non starter.
In the meantime anyone and everyone who gets push back seems to already feel they're oppressed by 'the system' or 'the media' and anyone who views their ideas as poor somehow is biased, pushing an agenda, something is wrong with them.
I feel like a lot of 'privilege' talk sort of leaked out of good / valid ideas and areas of academic study and now are sort of used as a magic wand (or sometimes a baseball bat) that really don't solve anything when talking to other people outside of say macro study and etc.
> I feel like a lot of 'privilege' talk sort of leaked out of good / valid ideas and areas of academic study and now are sort of used as a magic wand (or sometimes a baseball bat) that really don't solve anything
Yes, unfortunately.
So many people are a victim of being silenced now.
As evidenced by how many people you hear about constantly telling you about it...
Until they're deplatformed.
Individual 1: "I'm being silenced." Group: "What would you like to say that you think you're being silenced about?" Individual 1: "I cannot say for fear..."
We did hear from victims of silencing back in the day just as well (and not just in the sense of state censorship, which many Americans have this bizarro notion that only it matters).
From Lenny Bruce and Charlie Chaplin, to rap groups, from the Hayes code to book authors (including of masterpieces like "Junky"), from Hoover and McCarthy, to Jello Biafra, and from records getting thrown out of record store chains because they angered some group, all the way back to Galileo being silenced, black leaders (despite having large followings otherwise), etc.
People do lose gigs, have talks cancelled, have book contracts dropped, shows demonetised, and so on because of mob reaction, or because of some angry special interest group, or because of some vocal bloggers, or whatever.
Is the argument that they aren't completely stomped, so they should be thankful?
Or that how someone be a victim of silencing and still be able to talk about their silencing and have it know?
Does it matter whether the reason for the "cancellation" came from a mob, or only what the reason actually is?
If a group of crazy incoherent people get a Nazi cancelled by shouting "they're a Nazi!", and the person really is a Nazi, does it matter that they're a bit crazy and incoherent?
On principle, for me, it does.
For one, I don't want "groups of crazy incoherent people" dictating their terms.
Second, I want all voices able to being heard, and adult audiences judging for themselves if they like to hear them. This includes access to book deals, speaking halls, conference spaces, etc. This includes Nazis or people in favor of the extinction of all mankind, fans of royal government against democracy, fans of Bieber, the KKK AND black panthers, and so on. As long as they don't act illegally/violently.
Third, the tricky part is not agreeing with silencing a Nazi (which many will agree, some will disagree because they favour free exchange of ideas, whatever they are, but in any case it would be popular to do so).
The tricky part is determining who is the "Nazi" (that is, the person to be silenced). And on that front, the tide turns very easily. Under Hoover a open leftist could lose their job. In the 50s a black rights supporter in the South could loose business deals, concert and writing gigs, get cancelled, etc. You think that this can happen from now on only on the "bad" side? Doesn't history taught you how fast the tides can turn? There was Obama just 4 years ago, and now it's Trump, for example...
The venn diagram circle of those who believe that people with power deserve to have the right to reach the most people with their speech almost completely overlaps the circle of those who are currently whining about being demonetized because they're saying stupid, harmful, and reprehensible things.
This is literally the world they championed. They just thought that they would be the ones making the decisions.
This Twitter thread (oh lord, how did I end up citing Twitter multiple times in this conversation?), by the founder of an online magazine that seems to specialize in stories of this sort, has a long list of examples. https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1282215876553400321
Do you really think this is the first time anyone has pushed back against Noam Chomsky? Salman Rushdie had a fatwa declared on his life over a book he wrote. I think these people are very well accustomed to being pushed back upon publicly.
Which I interpreted as: “the only people who complain about cancel culture are unaccustomed to pushback” and disproved by counterexample.
It occurs to me now that perhaps you didn’t mean “all”. You meant “some”. That’s called nutpicking and it means your original claim wasn’t substantial enough to discuss in the first place.
Someone saying "hey, look there are a lot of instances of people being censored over there, we should be concerned about it because it could affect us" cannot be refuted on the basis that the speaker isn't being censored.
It's like refuting someone saying that a bunch of people are ill on the basis that the speaker isn't ill themselves. Illness is something that occurs to individuals, not to society. Same with censorship. It isn't some absolute where people are totally censored or totally free to speak their mind. It's distributed unevenly across society. When understood as a distribution rather than something binary, it becomes obvious that instances of free speech about censorship doesn't disprove the existence of censorship, nor does it say anything about whether or not we are becoming a more censorious society.
But the question of orthodoxy is, which things can you say without optimizing your life for them? If you have an average job and average friend groups, which opinions can you express without a risk of losing them? The answer will vary depending on exactly what's "average" in your area, but in most places it's going to be a much smaller set than the opinions you could in principle say.
I'm going to quote Paul Graham's Twitter here:
"Many fans of cancel culture have mentioned that it's mostly powerful people publishing opinions about it, as if that were some kind of contradiction.
Of course it's mostly powerful people who are speaking openly about a phenomenon that gets less powerful people fired."
1. Folks who shout they are being silenced, to some extent obviously aren't and usually follow that up with some direction to ... their ideas they're being silenced.
2. Anyone who is really silenced, who do we hear about it from? Group 1.
Outside of say a government straight up banning speech or outright removing it... I have real trouble weeding out who / what is truly being silenced and what the issue really is.
And I'm highly skeptical about Group 1's ability to tell me honestly about Group 2.
- not initiated by the person themselves but by someone else
- and working for the benefit of the person who was attempted silenced.
Many aren't arguing that they themselves are being silenced. They are arguing that others are being silenced either out of sympathy for those being silenced or recognition that the force silencing the less powerful may one they have the power to silence the person speaking out.
Those of us that still have a voice should be pro-active in speaking out for those that don't lest we one day find ourselves without a voice as well.
"They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up." – Martin Niemöller
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-so...
As far as 'they came first for the communists'... I just don't see that as a situation ... at least not generally in the geography or areas I'm thinking of outside big state sponsored acts. Not at scale, and not anything more than people disagreeing or wanting to host someone else's content ... and frankly when you dive into it, it's often not just some banal content, or just someone with a new idea. It just never pans out that way...
I'm not sure I buy into any friction anywhere being 'orthodox privilege' or persecution.
It’s a fairly bad counter-argument in the case of specific celebrities claiming loudly on national TV or in the national press that they personally are being silenced.
My position is not at all settled. I pity, rather than envy, the famous; their adoring audiences can turn on them in an instant if their preferences are not socially acceptable, which prevents them from being true to themselves.
He points out that, for a very long time, people speaking/writing about sexuality have tended to make some sort of gesture at the fact that we can't or aren't supposed to talk about these things.
You can find a gloss of this "repressive hypothesis" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Sexuality#Volum...
In both these cases, individuals are talking about broader societal trends. It's not a contradiction if they aren't talking about their own specific experience (i.e. "I'm silenced, therefore I can't talk, listen to me talk about how silenced I am"). An 18th-century writer discussing sex may contribute to the counter-argument that by virtue of their writing about sex, it isn't as taboo a subject as they imply. But in and of itself, it isn't proof that such a trend does not exist.
Caveats: 1) I read this over a year ago, 2) found it enough of a slog that my understanding feels pretty fuzzy, and 3) am still undecided/chewing on the main argument
My impression is that Foucault wasn't trying to deny a trend, but to highlight a number of other trends (including the explosion of discourse around sexuality) to open the reader up to challenging or re-framing their received knowledge about sexuality at the time. His focus is very much on all of the power and control dynamics at this nexus. It's a little hard to distill what I mean by that--because it includes actual sex and sexuality, the science/study of it, who is speaking, whose sex is being spoken about, what kind of sex it is, social/class dynamics, etc.
Orthodoxy is a numbers game not necessarily an accuracy game. Orthodox opinions may be accurate or inaccurate; what makes them orthodox is that they are held by at least a plurality of people in a given setting.
Orthodox ideas have not necessarily been proven and aren't necessarily parsimonious, so they should not necessarily enjoy the privilege of the null hypothesis. Null hypotheses require a lower burden of proof than alternative hypotheses.
If an orthodox position was never proven but is simply widely held, it should have the same burden of proof as an alternative hypothesis. However the way orthodoxy works its burden of proof is lower owing to its greater popularity.
I just wonder with these discussions usually the issue is that when people disagree it is SO EASY to believe that someone else is 'biased' or in this case using some kind of 'orthodox privilege' .... that's where the 1:1 disagreement often is. We find it handy to believe that someone else is being unreasonable because ... <insert new term for why they are being that way>.
We live in a world where we're inundated by folks who say they're being silenced or etc for all sorts of reasons. This just seems to be a new term for folks to use.
Consider the thread the other day regarding the privilege of beauty: it's not bad to be beautiful, and it's not bad to find beauty aesthetically pleasing, but it becomes a problem when individuals are denied access and opportunities because they lack beauty but where beauty should not be a factor.
Pointing out "we don't experience it that way" is a very good instance of the concept of privledge. It is good communication period given that they would lack your baseline that the "nice polite old lady" down the street screams racial slurs at them whenever they pass by. Lacking evidence they would have little reason to think that.
But dismissing a point of view entirely because the source is privileged? Bad. Heck even if the view was laughably naive and wrong like "children work in sweatshops instead of going to school afford candy ans junk food since that was what I did when farm working as a kid" is good to know where their points of view actually came from.
When it comes to privledge sometimes they may really know more and not simply have social status denied to others. Someone with an upper middle class upbringing may result in being ignorant at what bread, milk, and eggs are supposed to cost but know that credit card debt should be avoided whenever possible and how to diversify investments and maintain properly liquid buffers for emergencies. Someone from a poorer upbringing obviously wouldn't have the investing skill set due to lacking the prerequisites let alone the education and experience.
It isn't fair but it is real and knowing that is the first step to fixing it. Pretending sensible investing is just a bigotted social construct of priveledge doesn't help while promoting financial education does.
I think that this is something that people who bear privilege (like me, a currently economically comfortable white man) don't realise. I have this privilege; I'm not a bad person for having it, and someone who tells me that I have it isn't accusing me, only reminding me. I can still be a good and empathetic person, and I try to be. It's just important to realise that what I perceive as empathy, by imagining myself in someone else's shoes and proceeding from that premise, cannot fully succeed, since my privilege means that there are shoes that I will never fully understand what it's like to occupy. I should thus pause before thinking I understand such a situation—that's what "check your privilege" means—and make sure that I listen to someone who knows more, from experience or science, in preference to my genuine, well intentioned, but in this respect uninformed feelings.
It took a simple conversation with someone of color for me to even begin to understand this. The conversation was something like:
"The 15th time the guy behind the deli counter calls over your head to the person behind you in line instead of you really understand that you are not only different, but invisible to people because of your difference."
Sure, we've all had something happen a few times. But this is an everyday occurrence to people who aren't a part of the dominant group.
To me, a WASP, I couldn't even fathom that ever happening. It's just not part of my lived experience. How could someone just skip over the next person in line? It doesn't make any sense.
But, that was, and is, my privilege blinding me to the daily plight of so many people.
So yes...we should work to "raise everyone up", but simply being the person with privilege blinds us to the problem entirely.
We can't make everyone share the same aesthetic interests, and so we cannot be equally beautiful to all observers.
But we can try to ensure that beauty, and other ultimately irreconcilable privileges, are not overwhelming factors in our quality of life.
I once had a colleague (who is a nice guy, and we got along) who said during lunch that there are some things that we all can agree on, like how rent control is a good thing. I offered one objection off the top of my head (that prices serve as a mechanism for aggregating data, and any price controls serve to throw out data, and we should use as much data as possible when making decisions about how to allocate scarce resources). Before I spoke up, this colleague couldn't imagine that there would be any counter arguments to his position. Another colleague later thanked me for speaking up and sharing that different take.
Maybe that's not a good reason to not have rent control, or maybe it is a good reason, but on balance it's not good enough. The problem isn't the debate, the push back, it's Graham's point "privilege makes you blind." The problem is when there are limits to your imagination that an issue you see as simple might be more complex or that the person you're sharing a meal with might have a different, but still legitimate, way of seeing the world.
I am reasonably confident that I suffer blindness on some important issue. You should be confident that you suffer it, too.
X% of surveyed economists probably don't disagree that rent controls will have the effect that rent control proponents claim. They likely believe it will have other effects in addition, and that these other effects are, in aggregate, worse than what benefits might also be offered.
By contrast, advocates for rent control probably don't believe that the economists are just making stuff up - they just believe that the downsides of the stuff the economists are talking about are less than the upsides of rent control.
Neither side is blind: they just don't agree on how to weight difference aspects of the results of a policy decision.
X% of surveyed economists probably don't disagree that rent controls will have the effect that rent control proponents claim. They likely believe it will have other effects in addition, and that these other effects are, in aggregate, worse than what benefits might also be offered.
Rent control proponents believe that imposing rent control will lower rents. With the goal of making housing more affordable. Economists know that it will benefit a few but in the process reduce supply and therefore increase average rents. Creating the very problem that you're trying to solve.
By contrast, advocates for rent control probably don't believe that the economists are just making stuff up - they just believe that the downsides of the stuff the economists are talking about are less than the upsides of rent control.
That doesn't match my experience. It is not that advocates for rent control believe that rent control is a net positive despite what economists say. They actively do not believe that rent control reduces supply and increases average prices.
That has held true in both position papers and personal conversations that I've had with people.
Tangentially related. In research, learning positive facts about something makes negative facts harder to remember. And vice versa. This cognitive quirk helps explain why it is hard for people in general to believe that there really are downsides to the things that they support.
My experience with rent control proponents (being one myself despite the pure economics problems with it) is that most of them believe that there needs to be a "reserve" of properties that are available for lower income people...service workers, teachers, etc...to rent in or near the place where they work.
The basic reason for that is, until recently, the number of people who want to live in a city like SF, NYC, etc. greatly outstrips the supply of housing. Basically, no matter how much housing you build, there is an endless supply of people willing to pay $X to live here, but $X is way over what is reasonable for a cashier, barista, bartender, teacher, etc. to afford.
Now, there might be better ways to solve that problem, but one of the "easier" and more politically possible ones in cities like SF is rent control. The reality is that SF basically can't build enough housing to satiate demand in any realistic timeframe. So what do you do? Bitch about zoning laws and NIMBY's all day and make more and more workers move to Stockton and Tracy? Or do you actually try to do something that is possible to accomplish about that problem (recognizing it isn't perfect)?
Anyway...rent control is interesting in many ways. Just felt like the number of people I've spoken to about it who believes it lowers rents generally rounds to basically zero.
I further disupte your characterization of the relation of economists to policy priorities, as I believe there are substantial conflict in the forecasted outcomes of rent control, not broad factual agreement between politicians and the cited American economists. However, this is not particularly relevant to the point of this thread, and we will likely not effectively resolve the matter in this forum.
There are definitely going to be examples of people going too far, and making wedge issues out of things that shouldn't be wedge issues. But I think it's worth noting that in general, the opinions that are heavily stigmatized are ones that are insulting or hurtful toward specific people or groups.
With a different group of people, I could have been though. I've seen articles written to the effect of "if you are against rent control, you must hate the hard working people who benefit from it."
I picked a somewhat less controversial example, where I did speak up. As a mostly conservative, Catholic person in tech, there are plenty of other times where I understand my perspective is not welcomed, and have not bothered to speak up For a just a few examples: people claiming Catholic nuns are slave labor; people printing random quotes from the Bible and making fun of it without actually studying it; people making derogatory comments about religious people. In all of these cases, the people in question made the comments assuming that everyone around them saw the world a certain way (i.e., was not religious).
> I've seen articles written to the effect of "if you are against rent control, you must hate the hard working people who benefit from it."
I have too. But I have hardly met anyone who will really be offended at me expressing that rent control can backfire (and I have, among extremely left-wing people). I think the people who are trying to make that a wedge issue are themselves extremists. They exist, but they don't represent a big enough group of people to matter most of the time.
It's ironic that a system intended to give voice to people who historically didn't get heard is instead being used to shut down all dissent.
It isn't necessarily bad. Novel ideas should face a higher standard of proof than orthodox ideas because a lot more is known about how orthodox ideas really work (including their faults) than about novel ideas.
But there are a couple of ways in which this push back can get really pernicious:
1) By focusing on person rather than the idea. If the orthodoxy views the world as filled with people who are rotten to the core but successfully mimicry as decent, it makes sense to watch everybody for the slightest transgressions and attack the person with full strength when you notice one.
2) By emphasizing ideological unity. Suppose someone has an unorthodox idea and the orthodoxy denounces it. In a pernicious orthodoxy everybody must join in with the denouncing. You are already suspect merely if you don't join. If you try to say something like "hey, actually this has some merit", you are the next target. In extreme cases (e.g. Stalinism) you are the next target if you didn't denounce vigorously enough.
And of course the very idea that orthodoxy can be wrong must itself be orthodox! Otherwise from the POV of orthodoxy there is absolutely no point in engaging in real argument with those who question it.
I've read it a couple of times and am still a bit unsure of what new idea it's getting at.
I'm not sure the other side of this issue are reasonable and intelligent. It seems to me that anyone who swallows the orthodoxy of the day wholesale is unreasonable and unintelligent.
They seem like the kind of people that have always led mobs.
What seems to have changed is that now they have a voice on Twitter. They finally have a modern platform on which to organize their mob behavior, and cancel culture is the result.
I don't really think the solution of being polite is working for anonymous internet comments for obvious reasons, but for other places it has been the classical solution.
> For example, how can it be that a large number of reasonable, intelligent people worry about something they call "cancel culture," while other reasonable, intelligent people deny that it's a problem?
Why “cancel culture” when there’s any number of issues this is equally true for? Why is it only “reasonably intelligent people” oppose it in this example.
This post just seems intellectually lazy. Making sweeping generalizations and then throwing in some appeal to popularity is not a well made point.
For example, JK Rowling's statement that "there used to be a word for people who menstruate" was essentially true (menopause aside), but had a hefty implied message about the legitimacy of transgender women, one which is rightly considered offensive to most of modern society.
Edit: Since people are nitpicking, here's an even starker example: Can you imagine contexts where it would be rightly offensive for an African-American to be told the true statement "My ancestors used to enslave people like you"?
The word "women" has always referred to female assigned sex, there is nothing wrong with that inherently but it wasn't entertaining some deeper truth about the world.
Moreover, what you're really saying is that transgender people don't exist, so you've leaked your power level already.
Unfortunately, I studied engineering at school, not sociology so I have no idea what a "leaking a power level" is unless it has something to do with batteries.
and prepare for the down votes
Snrk. That's an amusing interpretation of the phrase. I shall steal it for future use.
It's an internet meme. To hide one's power level means to conceal details of oneself, hobbies, skills, affiliations, etc[1]. Conversely, if one is leaking their power level, they are letting slip details about themselves. Consider that if you interrupted an argument amongst co-worker to correct their misconceptions about furries, what that might reveal about your interests when your co-workers don't know you're a furry.
Given the context, GP is accusing you of being transphobic, and that such is betraying your affiliation with the alt-right.
1. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/power-level
And I explicitly ask about sex. Not gender
/edit: if you downvote fine. let it pamper your ego. but please answer my question.
> Moreover, what you're really saying is that transgender people don't exist
This subthread is about sex, not gender. AFAIK, transgender people just have different gender that one associated with their biological sex.
Look, there are not a lot of great polls about people's opinion on whether sex and gender are different. PRRI has a poll on general support for trans people (https://www.prri.org/research/americas-growing-support-for-t...), which suggests that 62% of Americans support letting trans people serve in the military and a plurality oppose bathroom bills. It also shows that a majority of Americans believe that there are only two genders, but only 43% of Americans believe that "strongly," and of course you could believe that sex and gender are different while also believing in only two genders. I don't see clear proof one way or another, but this poll suggests that probably about half of Americans believe that gender can differ from sex. (I'll admit that for non-Americans, it's probably much lower.)
She does also have some concerns about trans women in women-only spaces, but depending on which polls you read, either a slim majority or large plurality of people agree with her concerns.
As for the term "people who menstruate," I could see how that could be true. I could also see a term that's designed to specify a subset of women (pre-menopausal cis women who menstruate) as well as a subset of trans men. It is not being used as a general replacement for "women"; it is specifying the relevant people more precisely than the word "women" would. Isn't that specificity and accuracy what we want to see?
[1] "I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria."
[2] ", I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside."
[3] "It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow."
I think it's about 50/50. The one good, recent poll I found on the issue seems to suggest that (I mentioned it at more length in the other subthread here). So I definitely don't think that there's an overwhelming consensus, but I do think that it's a pretty standard opinion.
As for the "material difference" thing, sure. I think almost everyone would agree with that. My problem is that I believe Rowling is using it as a dogwhistle to argue that (most) trans women are not meaningfully women.
I've read (one of) JK Rowlings' latest blog entries, and while I don't personally agree with her statements they seemed far, far more reasonable and debatable than what the internet made of it.
The internet made it seem like she was going to war against transgenders...
edit: for anyone looking to read it as well, I read this one: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-...
the majority is still in the mindset of sex=gender
There used to be a word for this as well; we called it "putting words in other people's mouth".
One can criticize aspects of a movement without being against the whole movement, or the people in the movement.
>one which is rightly considered offensive to most of modern society
What hubris.
What does this even mean? Like, how can someone not be "legitimate"? Does it mean "illegal" as in illegal alien? Is anyone claiming that trans citizens should be deported? Or does it mean "imaginary"? Trans people obviously exist.
JKRowling is simply pointing out that the word "woman", which used to have the clear and simple meaning of "female human" (or sometimes "adult female human"), was now not only redefined & politicized to basically mean "opinion" (or "a woman is someone who thinks they're a woman" which is a clearly nonsensical recursive definition) and is used for Orwellian speech control.
This is a perfectly meaningful recursive definition.
You could claim that the word "woman" was chosen because it represents an existing concept that some people want to approximate because of their feelings, but a more appropriate response would be to point out that these feelings are factually incorrect. Maybe it's easier to see the absurdity if you consider a non-politicized version "a tree is someone who thinks they're a tree" (laughably wrong) or differently-politicized "a Jew is someone who thinks they're a Jew" (this is somewhat less incorrect, because it's referring to a social "fact" that can change, not a physical fact).
A conservative is someone who thinks they're a conservative, a centrist is someone who thinks they are a centrist. Other people can try to label you one way or another, but ultimately, you decide what you are. It's inherently self-referential.
> "a Jew is someone who thinks they're a Jew" (this is somewhat less incorrect)
But that's not incorrect at all, that is exactly how it works in real life. "A Christian is someone who believes they're a Christian", is a wholly true statement. Just as, "an atheist is someone who believes they are an atheist".
There's a bunch of these statements of identity that are, effectively, 100% self referential. No one can tell you who you are, ultimately you have to decide that for yourself.
> Maybe it's easier to see the absurdity if you consider a non-politicized version
It's not. Even in a non-political, meaningless context, it's 100% equally as self-referential.
Insert the "what is a sandwich" meme - https://talkthetalkpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/sa...
It's absolutely fine that you disagree with JK Rowling. It's also fine that she disagrees with you. Talk about it! Don't throw slurs at each other. Don't make personal attacks.
Based on Pew polling, most Americans agree with Rowling[0].
>Overall, roughly half of Americans (54%) say that whether someone is a man or a woman is determined by the sex they were assigned at birth, while 44% say someone can be a man or a woman even if that is different from the sex they were assigned at birth.
Any ideology that considers truth to be unacceptable is a menace. Feelings cannot matter more than facts. Anyone who tries to tell you different should be immediately and permanently suspect.
[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/08/transgender...
I think my statement still stands if we replace "most" with "44% and growing"
You can't accurately construct a message about someone elses mental state without talking to them at length. When you assume people imply things, you're actually sharing YOUR mental state. When you take a message to mean significantly more than what the words themselves mean, you're not filling in the gaps with reality but your perception of reality.
Rowling's statement is true if your experience leads you to prioritize the orthodox. It's patently false if your experience deviates from the experiences that created it. The struggle in the conservation of orthodox values (e.g. sisterhood of women) and the visibility of heterodox experience (e.g transgender issues & the lived experience of women who's bodies don't conform to the stereotypes being used) has a lot of truth on both sides.
It seems to me that this stems from two interrelated issues:
1. People defaulting to their tribal position (red/blue in the US) without thinking deeply and engaging in rational discussion of issues.
2. A lack of empathy.
What is "currently acceptable to believe" is determined by your ingroup. And rather than trying to understand why someone in the outgroup would hold a different opinion, the ingroup paints all of them as crazy/stupid/X-ist. While the red tribe is generally more criticized in this regard, the blue tribe is just as complicit (look at the smug superiority of John Oliver and other political comedians).
While this tribal fighting occurs, power is consolidated. The people with keen insights (that may be construed as controversial) will make them privately, rather than take on public risk. In the words of Jessica Livingston, "I don't have time to fight with people who are trying to misunderstand me." [1]
I hope that there is a solution to this problem, so that the internet can reach its potential to democratize access to information and data, rather than becoming a mechanism to virtue signal acceptable tribal beliefs.
[1] https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-sound-of-silence
When you're poor as fuck and having a shit life and everyone keeps telling you how privileged you are, you stop believing those people and turn to alternative sources for information
If you think BLM protesters aspire to white levels of wealth inequality then you are mistaken. This would imply that the many, many people on the streets are demanding that they let a selected proportion of black people through the glass ceiling, just enough so that wealth inequality is racially equal.
We could combine the two phrases here: all black lives matter.
To use your example, if you're poor as fuck, is it worse if you're white or if you're not? For many, it's worse if you're not white - and that's white privilege.
Regardless of whether one judges this individual should be held responsible for this privilege or not, the alienation means that those who don't fit stereotypes are excluded.
I agree that group categorizations aren't going to be universally relevant at the individual level. It is challenging to talk about larger trends without using group identities though unfortunately.
Just one example.
As a white person I have never in my life cared about getting a receipt from any store I shop at, have ever been accused of shoplifting, have never had the self-checkout person have even the slightest suspicion even when I was broke in college and ringing up way too many bananas, and when the sensor things beep the workers apologize and tell me to just go.
This is not the experience of black Americans where children have to be taught to always get and keep their receipts because they get stopped so frequently.
For maximal negative response, portrait yourself as a male with, low social economic status, different race, different biological markers, and signals of different cultural values. As per research this will likely result in activation of fear, disgust and low activation of empathy.
This individual will experience problems if his skin is black that he wouldn't experience if his skin is white.
Do you think a white person dressed in gangster clothes would be unscathed?
My current opinion is that the biggest factor is not race but likelihood of fitting a stereotype of "criminal" based on dress code
I grew up as a white ex-pat in a Philippines. While I don't think I ever tried to abuse it, but I could definitely get away with a lot of things even if I dressed as a hobbo/gangster.
That more affluent-appearing black people are treated like less affluent looking white people isn't proof that white privilege doesn't exist. It's the opposite.
I don't question the notion of privilege as much as how often it's applied to shut down dissenting opinion.
An affluent white woman and a homeless black man have very different life experiences, each has privileges that the other doesn't.
Fighting about which is more privileged is silly (even if it may seem obvious to you). What's ultimately important is to understand situations in which those privileges will affect the experiences of those people.
As for Beyonce, that's so vague that I can't know. If she was describing the challenges of being black in the recording industry, then yes using her success to claim she can't understand the challenges she's had to overcome is ridiculous. But in other contexts, that she's affluent is relevant.
The context was that people were complaining about her sexualised persona and what kind of image that projects onto young women. I don't necessarily agree with that criticism (I think it's kinda complex, but I also don't think that sex or being sexual is "wrong" or anything), but I thought that the criticism of "she's a black woman, so if she wants to be sexual, that's her way of reasserting her black femininity and may not be criticised" is frankly ridiculous, when she's clearly benefiting financially so well from it.
And yet that seems to be the game people have to play in order for their statements to have any currency.
I even know people who had to take an "oppression index" in college to see who in the class had the least privilege. Interestingly, the person who had the least privilege was also the most ideologically opposed to the concept, for what it's worth.
My experiences, as a cis-het-white-affluent person would disagree. ;)
> I even know people who had to take an "oppression index" in college to see who in the class had the least privilege.
I'm sorry if I don't put much trust in third hand stories like this, it's easy for them to be blown out of proportion.
Fair enough, but consider the new SAT "Adversity" score[1]. Is that not essentially the same thing, but on a larger scale? It's still reducing the "vector" that oppression is supposed to be (from an intersectionality perspective) to a "scalar" value that is useful for sorting people into a hierarchy.
With regard to my first point, consider the NYT opinion piece arguing against the Adversity score[2]. The author spends the first two paragraphs establishing his own adversity/lack of privilege before he begins to actually make an argument. I don't think there's anything wrong with him doing so, and I think it's rhetorically effective, but do you think his opinion would be given a platform if he did not have that adversity score?
> My experiences, as a cis-het-white-affluent person would disagree. ;)
Perhaps because you benefit from (in Paul Graham's words) "orthodox privilege"? That is, your ideas are not questioned on the basis of your identity because they are the "right" opinions[3]. For someone to question the orthodoxy, they must first establish their own adversity or risk being discounted (or worse).
---
[1]https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-adversity-score Curiously, a '0' means "most hardship" and a "100" means "least hardship", which is the inverse of what you would expect.
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/opinion/sat-adversity-sco...
[3]which is not to say that you do not hold these opinions sincerely and rationally. I'm sure you do.
I don't know that the SAT adversity score claims to be an explicit demarcation of privilege. It wouldn't, for example, encode racial privilege since none of the signifiers are the test takers race. Some may be racially correlated, but I think we've already established that those are different. As far as I can tell it really only applies at the granularity of a high school and not a particular student (although I may very well be mistaken here, it's hard to tell).
But this is mostly moot since the Adversity Score plan was withdrawn[1].
> but do you think his opinion would be given a platform if he did not have that adversity score?
Broadly, yes[1]. Worth noting that Williams is and has been a staff writer at the NYT for quite some time, he was also the author (like the actual author, not just a signatory) of the Harper's letter that's been in the news. He's got quite the platform, even when it comes to non-race related things.
> Perhaps because you benefit from (in Paul Graham's words) "orthodox privilege"? That is, your ideas are not questioned on the basis of your identity because they are the "right" opinions[3]. For someone to question the orthodoxy, they must first establish their own adversity or risk being discounted (or worse).
That's a bit of a catch-22 now isn't it. My opinions will be discounted due to my privilege, but if they aren't, that's also due to my privilege. But I also don't think this is true: there's all kinds of things that I do question with my more progressive friends. But they're usually around economic policy, or procedures (I'm pragmatic, many people I know are not, so there's ongoing debate I see about reformist vs. revolutionary action with regard to the issue du jour).
Being a reformist as opposed to a revolutionary is absolutely impacted by my privileges, and I recognize that. I'm much more comfortable with the world the way things are than some of my "colleagues" in this context, so reformism is safer to me. But some people aren't treated as well by the system today, so they are much more willing to throw the whole thing out, deal with the chaos for a while, and build something new from the ashes.
That's clearly worse for me, but probably gets them to where they're more equal faster. Interestingly, I'm not even sure which of those two opinions would be considered orthodoxy among progressive circles. But I don't think people discount my opinions on the subject because I have some privileges. In some cases I think they're actually valued more.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/us/sat-adversity-score-co...
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherrim/2019/09/11/the-s...
I'm always so surprised in internet discussions that people will readily acknowledge lots of forms of privilege but then turn around and be like "white privilege" or "male privilege" -- naaah anything like that can be explained by these other 300 types of privilege. Like "black privilege" and "female privilege" exist too -- it's just a language for describing how the different facets of ourselves change how we're treated.
Privilege being the word for describing when that facet helps you not experience "worse than normal" treatment than people without it might -- contrasted with "advantage", when you get "better than normal" treatment for having it.
In my experience, a lot of people who use the word “privilege” will get very very very upset at that claim. To them, “privilege” is fundamentally connected to groups. It wouldn’t make sense for both male privilege and female privilege to exist; the whole point is that males are collectively privileged relative to females.
I think what you’re describing is a better fit for reality.
To me it is biology. A set of factors contribute to fear and disgust when people meet and an other set of factors trigger empathy and cooperation. We can use the word privilege to mean, in a given environment, having more triggers than someone else for the positive effects and less triggers for the negative effects. The resulting individual experience is the sum of interactions.
Some trait has stronger effect than others such as social economic status and kinship. Close to that comes gender, although sometimes it can also be the strongest factor. Research into this subject generally show a strong environmental aspect to this as well.
I would not use "white privilege" in an online discussion because it often than not lead the discussion away from the complexity of in-group and out-group interactions and into the realm of blame and over simplification. The most insightful thing anyone can really make about white privilege is that being rich, healthy, appeasing appearance, surrounded by a strong majority of in-group members (preferable kinship) that have similar cultural values, then being white is also a benefit as long as the other in-group members are also majority white.
White privilege doesn't mean all white people are born with trust funds from the left over plantation money.
I agree with your meaning overall, but this is not a great example. I'm a white dude, and I worry about getting receipts any time I am going to one store after buying from another (while walking). I'm hyper-aware in stores of whether it would appear to an observer that I was shoplifting, having been accused of such more than once when young, so I take visible steps like tying off the bags I'm carrying from the previous store, consider whether the store I'm entering is likely to sell items I have in the bag I'm carrying, and so on.
Poor whites are still more privileged via historicity of assets vs comparable poor blacks, and they are more likely to capture gains from federal assistance programs. They are also far less likely to be imprisoned for drugs or other judicial hurts.
When there was an opioid crisis the nation responded with sympathy and urgency. When we had weed, we decided to have a war against drug users and send black and latino people to jail en masse, and there they sit still.
Does anyone remember the term "super-predator"? That's not an allusion to poor people in general, but rather a reference for black people.
At the point you reach “poor”, the assets are gone, so this doesn’t work.
> When there was an opioid crisis the nation responded with sympathy and urgency. When we had weed, we decided to have a war against drug users and send black and latino people to jail en masse, and there they sit still.
The opioid epidemic was never solved, let alone “urgently”. I remember it emerging as a campaign issue in 2016. 2019 had a record high number of deaths by opioid overdose and it looks like things are going up as well. The US government reports that “fentanyl trafficking offenders have increased by 3,940.9% since fiscal year 2015.” ( https://www.ussc.gov/research/quick-facts/fentanyl-trafficki... ) so it doesn’t seem like they’re taking a hands-off enforcement approach either.
To some degree there is a difference, but that’s because we already tried the War on Drugs and learned from our mistakes.
> Does anyone remember the term "super-predator"? That's not an allusion to poor people in general, but rather a reference for black people.
Like everything, it’s more complicated than that.
Here’s Mother Jones on “superpredators”: ( https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/very-brief-hi... ). The term refers to a criminological observation that many violent juvenile criminals fit a specific type that is particularly dangerous and untreatable. It turns out that the cause for this was childhood lead exposure and that the super predator theory was out of date already by the time it was developed.
It also turns out that childhood lead exposure disproportionately affected black children.
The Clinton-era crime bills that led to mass incarceration also had a fair amount of support among black leaders. One reason for this was that crime was much higher in the early 90’s, and black people were disproportionately the victims of that crime. Cracking down on crime (including drugs) was seen as a benefit to the black community rather than a detriment. ( https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/04/09/473648819... )
I don't have a problem with the term itself. I do think that if you are white, college-educated, and urban you are an exceptionally poor candidate to discuss it or indeed use it with the rural white poor. There's a little bit too much just-world-fallacy subtext about why you, who are white, are doing so much better economically than they, who are also white, and why they ought to submit to your moral guidance.
Honestly, trying to get the message out via local religious leadership is probably the best bet.
There are similarly privileges from being born in the US, from being straight, from being male, from being able-bodied and from being cis-gendered.
Being poor doesn't eliminate those and is still disenfranchising, but not having the above privileges _and_ being poor is even worse.
[1] https://nationalseedproject.org/Key-SEED-Texts/white-privile...
And the trouble is, saying that "It's about class, not race" is considered problematic in recent books like White Fragility. So this opinion, which can be debated and talked about and discussed in debt, is now considered wrong, taboo and even a 'dog whistle' to say you're actually racist.
And I want to acknowledge that there is a difference in lived experience. A poor white person may not get followed around in a store by security like a non-poor black person. There are some things we have difficulty understanding because we don't have the lived experience.
But we're in danger of closing off the conversation before we even get to the topic of those lived experiences, and we're told that if we can't have those lived experiences, our opinions are also invalid.
Second there are actual dog-whistles disguised as reasonable viewpoints, and it's incredibly hard to distinguish them. Suppose you're talking to a random person, with no context on who they are, probably on a site where a comment took five minutes to write and doesn't fully develop the ideas. First time you find that, you might think it's just someone with a different opinion. But as time goes on and you notice that certain arguments are used not to promote debate but to derail conversations, you get suspicious and start seeing everything as dog-whistles.
In other words, public debate is degraded by people that don't present arguments honestly and by people who are either way too worried or not worried at all about those dishonest people
"If you let gay people marry, what's next allowing adults to marry children?" or "You never complain when black people kill each other, so you are just pretending to care about police brutality"
These are undeniably bad faith arguments - all strawmen, slippery slopes, and other ugly rhetorical devices. In most cases this was all you would get back in return for trying to have a good faith debate with conservatives.
So yes, after a while, we started to assume that people who disagreed with us were acting in bad faith and were essentially trolls.
This is extremely unfortunate. It is harmful to the discourse. It casts a wide net that catches the honestly curious or unorthodox thinkers (people that I may think are incorrect but arguing from a position of good faith). But, it has also been extremely effective. In one generation, the relatively brutal tactics have helped us make real progress on gay rights and drug-decriminalization in the United States.
Cancellation tactics work as an effective tool for combating bad faith arguments and trolls, so until conservatives want to come to the table for real discussion and debate, that is how things will continue to be. I look forward to a time when this is not necessary.
To be clear though, the well of intellectual discourse was poisoned long ago by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Sean Hannity, et al, and a million internet trolls. The only part of this they don't like is that now they are losing the horrible game they invented.
I fail to see the equivalence between trans rights and "adults marrying children"-rights. What you're saying is closer to "it's true that abolishing slavery has led towards the push for other things like voting rights for everyone". Which is technically true but is also the way things should be going in order to have a more just society.
> And it’s true that liberal media will run front page stories on (relatively rare) police brutality against black people but don’t run stories on (relatively common) black on black violence.
One is a crime committed by law enforcement. The other is just regular crime. You figure out which one is more newsworthy or in the public interest (not that most media care about the latter).
Also if "all lives matter" we shouldn't be talking about "black-on-black" or "x-on-y" crimes. Crimes are crimes and the skin color of the perpetrator or victim is irrelevant (unless it's specifically a hate crime, for which there are legal definitions).
And if what you’re saying is true, that these stories are only notable because they involve police brutality, why don’t we get front page news articles when a black cop shoots a black guy? You’re blind if you don’t see that news publishers have an agenda.
Trans rights are human rights.
> why don’t we get front page news articles when a black cop shoots a black guy?
They don't exclusively front-page "white cop shoots black civilian" stories. Here's some prominent counter-examples just off the top of my head.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/07/justine-damo...
https://www.vox.com/2016/7/7/12116288/minnesota-police-shoot... (Cop was Latino)
News publishers do have an agenda, but it doesn't go too far beyond "get clicks, make money". They publish whatever kinds of stories will get traffic from their readers. And they know the preconceived notions and biases of their readers. News publishing is a tough business these days unfortunately. There are news orgs that do good investigative journalism and uncover important stories but even they need money to survive.
Because murder for money, passion, etc. is unfortunately extremely common in the US, but abuse of power by civil servants is much more newsworthy, and honestly more disturbing.
If the head of the FBI was caught taking bribes from drug dealers, wouldn't that be far more newsworthy than a common drug bust? Of course it would be. Abuse of government power is a real threat to civil society.
And was that narrative false? Or is it a problem because it's "liberal media" that's pushing the narrative? I'm not seeing your actual issue here.
As far as the current "cancel culture" goes I was thinking about this the other day and I think that it's not that people don't want to hear counter-arguments, it's that we don't want to hear them again, after they have been put down so many times.
The "what about black-on-black crime?" question is one of my pet peeves: someone always has to trot out that undead zombie chestnut. Enough already.
(edit: while i was typing the above somebody has already trotted out the dead horse and started beating it in a sib comment.)
A grammar fix: it is "discussed in depth", not "in debt."
So on the one hand we’re saying let’s not stereotype people, but in the other hand let’s stereotype a subset of people.
It’s like saying “well, we’re not targeting women, we’re only targeting people who visit gynecologists”.
Second, poor black people face large amounts of racism, both systematic and personal. They live in particularly poor neighborhoods due to redlining. They face significantly harder times getting hired for jobs. They encounter police brutality.
Again, the solution is not to dismiss the problems of poor white people. However it's also important to acknowledge that at a macro level, poor black people need more help to counter systematic effects.
Imagine we have two countries. Both have poor people, but one country has an average household wealth that is a tenth of the other country's. One country was brutally colonized, had its citizens enslaved for hundreds of years, faced segregation for a 100 years after that, and only passed significant civil rights legislature in the last 70 years.
The other country had full rights for all men for 150 years, then full rights for all citizens for 100 years after that. The other country reaped the rewards of its colonized counterpart. It grew wealthy on it. Yes, there are poor people in the country, but its citizens have never been enslaved. They have never been made to be second class citizens. They have never lived under fear of lynching and false conviction.
At a personal and present level, there is not a gigantic difference from a poor white family and a poor black family. But that ignores the larger context of history and of quantity.
No, they aren't. Particularly, they aren't as fucked as equally poor members of a number of other races, for a whole variety of reasons (direct racism is one of them, but not the only one.)
Conversely, even rich members of other races face disadvantages relative to rich Whites because of their race.
It's true that wealth is itself a form of privilege, and poor whites, while they may participate in White privilege, don't participate in the privilege of wealth.
commit to what you want to say. he's had no problem in the past doing that.
The complaints about cancel culture feel vague: a mob, a loud minority making demands, a court of public opinion, etc.
Aren't those present for for both legitimate and illegitimate criticism? I guess I don't know how the "cancel cancel culture" folks want the "cancel culture" folks to express themselves when they see an injustice but aren't represented in positions of power that can affect change.
It seems like it's those in positions of power and privilege that don't like protests, cancel culture, or anything that could upset their status and net worth.
I'm just confused by the outrage and attempt to cancel the folks who are outraged and attempting to cancel people.
I understand from history that it can go too far: political arrests, burning books, etc. But no cancelling seems like an extreme where were asking folks to let people stay in positions of power no matter what they say or believe.
Happy to be wrong about this.
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
> SDG&E said in a statement: “We hold all SDG&E employees to a high standard and expect them to live up to our values every day. We conducted a good faith and thorough investigation that included gathering relevant information and multiple interviews, and took appropriate action.”
If he was fired due to a falty or biased investigation he could sue. It's not ideal, but he's not powerless either. The Covington kid was a good example of that.
Yeah, no. I think internet outrage mobs intended to attack people’s livelihoods are actually a problem, and not the type of thing we should placidly accept as part of the world.
> If he was fired due to a falty or biased investigation he could sue.
Not really true.
I haven't seen folks on the right vigorously defending those on the left or visa versa. They brutally denounce the other side and actively seek to remove them from positions of power or limit their voice. "Cancel cancel culture" feels more like "don't come after folks like me" rather than "don't go after anyone", which is fine, but I just don't see a consistent application across the political spectrum.
If you go according to how we would have classified these people before the controversy of cancel culture itself, we would have to say that it was between two different factions of the left, with the right piling on later.
If all you see is hypocrisy I don’t disagree with you because people are that way a lot of the time. But maybe it’s because consistently opposing cancel culture seems like a deliberate partisan choice by itself these days. Joe Rogan has guests from the entire political spectrum and interacts with all of them in charity and good faith to the point of borderline naivety. And if you want to see an example the other way around, let me share this: https://reason.com/2018/08/02/sarah-jeong-new-york-times-rac...
Legitimate outrage is "I think an opinion you currently hold or thing you currently do is bad, so I'm going to try to cut you off from society until you walk back the opinion or stop doing the thing."
Cancel culture is "I think an opinion you once held or thing you once did is bad, so I'm going to try to cut you off from society forever, even if it wasn't considered bad at the time, and even if you've since walked it back/stopped/apologized."
In a nutshell, cancel culture is refusing to forgive.
It reminds me of the debate about elderly Nazis being sent to prison.
The problem is that, unless you're speaking to someone with whom you have a great deal of trust, that second part -- the earnestness of their unorthodoxy -- is difficult to prove.
I think that's why he specifically said, uttering things that are unorthodox and true.
Also, was anybody else bracing themselves for what "unorthodox" was code for while reading? I think I'm so used to seeing this argument used in an attempt to justify stuff like blatant racism, antisemitism, etc. that I'm sort of conditioned to look for that.
By the way, not saying that's what's going on here, but it was just an interesting reaction I noticed in myself. Ironically, similar to what another commenter posted, the whole article is one of those things which is obviously true, but may completely miss the point depending on context.
Check your privilege ;)