I don't understand how the socio-political stance to which I have ostensibly been subscribed my entire adult life has become so religious. It seems like there has been a bedrock shift from encouraging good behavior to witch-hunting bad behavior. In just a few short years, every topic of discourse has taken a similar path. From "do this good thing" to "don't do this bad thing" to "punish anyone who does this bad thing" to "punish anyone who doesn't punish people enough for doing this bad thing".
Religion in America is majorly declining. The kinds of people who in previous generations would have been super obnoxious about Jesus things (not that he would have approved of their opinions) are now obnoxious about everything else. People blamed organized religion for how awful these kinds of folks were when actually it’s just a feature of humanity and the people just found new topics.
Likewise politicians, the news, and anyone else who benefits from attention are learning more and more that this kind of religious thinking can be egged on for more attention so they (intentionally or organically) egg it on for their own benefit.
The cure is for this kind of behavior to be shamed and shunned but only casually as to not give it the attention it deserves. Find the antics of the obnoxious boring instead of infuriating (like reality shows, I’m not upset they exist but I’m also not at all interested).
This is just kind of an obsolete feature of humanity, at one point very valuable to group cohesiveness and order when we were still at odds with nature and quite vulnerable. Now a bunch of bored suburbanites need to find something new to be interested in than moralizing nonsense.
i’ve been saying for a while this emerging “woke” or whatever you want to call it morality is now presenting much in the same way as the moral/Religious right was in the ‘80s-90s.
Their moral righteousness acts as an excuse to their actions whether right, wrong, evil, or good.
Ultimately the ugly aspects always seem to emerge and distract away from whatever good aspects their moral system might have for the world.
Ah, but you see, if this theory were right, then the US government would in effect be pushing a certain religion as a state religion and banning competing religions. And that certainly can't be right, because look, no one is even filing 1A lawsuits on this theory. So your theory must be wrong, QED.
Assuming from context that the socio-political stance you have in mind is something like American leftism, it's always had a strong religious element to it. The recent purity spiral is a difference only of quantity but not really one of quality (in other words, not a bedrock shift from the past).
Its roots are religious too, stemming from Puritanism brought to America's northeast, spreading westward to the burnt-over district [1] of western New York, and eventually the West Coast [2]. Puritan ideas like collective salvation and rooting out the bad thinkers showed up initially as literal witch hunts, and today as metaphorical witch hunts seeking to sniff out those who aren't true (enough) believers. It still takes the rough shape of Christian offshoot too, with a notion of original sin (think "White Guilt" or something related), has martyrs and saints, taboos, holidays and customs like any other religion.
The book Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt was really interesting and relevant to your point. Haidt claims that every moral framework has a set of sacred beliefs that are not unlike religious beliefs.
In other words every framework has a set of foundational axioms that have to be accepted on faith.
Social media. Being part of the mob that punishes and gets likes and gives people their dopamine fix. And as we know from all the other ways that humans get their dopamine fixes, they're not just going to sit by passively and wait for those situations to naturally occur. They're going to search them out with increasing urgency.
It's always been like this whenever there's a moral panic. We've just used computing and the internet to do what computing and the internet do best...make something ubiquitous, universal and highly scalable.
This is a perfectly natural outcome of social media platforms and algorithms engineered largely by an ideologically orthodox population set with an extremely high congruence to the HN crowd.
I miss the days when systemic racism was known more specifically as poverty. Poverty, combined with the war on drugs that incentivized violence, dads in jail, and a hostile learning environment. That was actually actionable...maybe a little too actionable. The institutional racism thing is just amorphous enough to pit the lower class against itself and preserve status quo. Alas I'm not sure students today appreciate the role of the war on drugs or comprehend the concept of class and so they just role play.
This appears in a publication that also earnestly argues that Pfizer and the FDA literally rigged the election, by skipping a testing step that would have shown the vaccine was extremely effective (subtle!) and thus depriving Trump of a press cycle just before the election that would have enabled him to take credit for ending the pandemic. In other words: Pfizer apparently deliberately tanked their own vaccine marketing, in collusion with Deep State Democrats, to hurt the Republicans.
Not only that, but it appears on the internet, which is known to be full of lies and manipulative propaganda!
Weren't we arguing just like two days ago about the need to argue stuff on the merits, rather than this kind of guilt by ideological association? If you think this specific article makes claims that are not true, just say so.
The threads on these stories are horrible and unproductive, and if we're going to have yet another anti-woke thread, it's better that we not do so on a story running on a Quillette publication, is I guess the case I'd make. I make no claims to having taken the piece itself apart!
Then you should have said that upthread instead of trying to discredit this guy (who appears to be exactly who he claims) because he wrote up his experience in a publication you don't like.
I thought that was what I was saying --- sane people have written (presumably by mistake) for Quillette, too. But, fair enough. I stand by what I'm saying, though: I don't have to engage with this piece, which I did read, to make an argument that stories from this publication create garbage threads, and that the bar for stories about this particular topic is higher, in the same sense as the "significant new information" threshold raises the bar for stories on AI.
I don't have a dog in this particular ideological fight, for whatever that's worth. I'm sort of broadly dismissive of college in the first place, and, like everyone else on HN, have read a story a week on the excesses of DEI culture.
The idea behind it is to pre-emptively destroy the discussions so that one can point towards it and say "see, the submission should never have existed".
I'm posting both "woke" and "anti-woke" stories (among many many others), but the "anti-woke" stories always get treated like this, by a handful of posters.
The "woke" stories discussions are usually not much better, because of other effects, but sometimes stories from both sides get nuanced discussions. I haven't found out, yet, what makes the difference. Working hypothesis: the concrete commenters. So basically chance.
I am definitely one of the handful of posters that goes out of their way to zap these repetitive, unproductive, tedious, unpleasant, site-destroying threads off the site.
The guidelines on the site (and the moderation log of Dan's comments) ask you not to post ideological stories like this here, precisely to avoid this kind of drama. Please run this social experiment on Reddit instead. You can post ideological stuff! But it shouldn't be so much a theme of what you're posting that you're literally doing a statistical analysis of the results, friendo.
Come on, man. In this case you're creating thread drama, and then citing it as a reason to purge the site of similar stories.
The owners can moderate however they please. But the idea that HN threads on non-political topics are somehow the Algonquin Round Table is kind of risible.
We're all part of the moderation on this site! I'm comfortable just disagreeing with you that random threads on this site are just as bad as ideological threads are. They share a bunch of annoying pathologies, but not all of them; the political threads are distinctively stupid, and they spread like kudzu.
This thread --- my original comment, I mean --- is flagged, for what it's worth (I'm fine with that), so I think we're safe with respect to thread drama here.
I mean, I sort of get where you're coming from? But this is a garbage publication. I think it's worth pointing out that garbage publications exist! (If we weren't 10 comments into a flagged thread I'd come up with better words than "garbage publication").
I'm posting both "woke" and "anti-woke" stories (among many many others)
Indeed, you've certainly demonstrated the ability of quantity to steamroller quality by consistently submitting an average of 20 times a day. It's an impressive example of r- over K-selection, with a minimal degree of hard-to-digest technical content.
Tomte's phrasing is confusing, but I don't think this is what he meant. I think he's accusing others of making comments with the intent of derailing stories, and not claiming that this is why he is posting such stories. His comment on how "woke" and "anti-woke" stories are treated differently doesn't really make sense otherwise. I'm not sure, though. You might check with him and confirm.
Weren't we arguing just like two days ago about the need to argue stuff on the merits
We should certainly avoid genetic fallacies, but we should also avoid the idealistic fallacy of assuming that all discourse is rooted in the unselfish pursuit of truth for its own sake. Perverse motivations exist, both as described in the article and as observable in the partiality of the journal's editorship.
> that also earnestly argues that Pfizer and the FDA literally rigged the election
I just read the article you're referring to [1] and the headline is clearly an exaggeration, not meant to be taken literally. Nobody "rigged an election", Pfizer temporarily suppressed news about the vaccine's effectiveness because they worried it could sway the election. I can't speak to the article's precise accuracy, but it's certainly not unreasonable that a company would choose to delay announcing certain news in order to avoid being accused of taking sides in an election (whether or not that would ultimately turn out to be a good idea or not). As journalism goes, the article seems pretty normal.
I'm not really sure how to judge this sort of claim anymore. It doesn't really seem like a reasonable expectation that everyone will agree on whether something is "clearly" meant as an exaggeration. Moreover, I don't see how someone can in good faith claim the burden of deciding how to interpret a statement rests entirely with the reader but then reject those responses based on the interpretation being invalid; if someone doesn't want their statement to be interpreted in a certain way, they shouldn't purposely state it in a way that doesn't convey their real meaning. We're at a point where a lawsuit can get rejected on the basis that a program that describes itself as "the show that is the sworn enemy of lying" on a network with "news" in the name and claiming to be "fair and balanced" isn't actually meant to be taken as "stating actual facts"[1]; if we aren't willing to enforce even a minimal standard on what should be intended as a factual statement, we might as well just declare linguistic bankruptcy and just admit that the idea that the words in a sentence are related to the meaning is just a fantasy.
If it were a headline in the NYT or the New Yorker, I would definitely take issue with it.
But when I scroll Google News, headline exaggeration is just so common I'm almost blind to it now, like I don't care. Any headline I read, I think -- "what is the tiniest most innocent interpretation of this salacious headline" and boom, that's what the article is actually about.
In this particular case, Pfizer made a choice that could have affected who voted for Trump an eensy teensy tiny bit, and almost surely did by some infinitesimal amount, so it's not technically untrue to say they "affected" the election, and while "affecting" and "fixing" an election are different, they're close enough that the headline writer can supposedly claim plausible deniability about the difference, especially when you can argue that "fixing" an election is a point of view, an opinion, not a fact. (Yes I'm aware of how contorted this is, that's the whole point.)
> if we aren't willing to enforce even a minimal standard on what should be intended as a factual statement
Honestly I lament it just as much as you do. But when news is provided by for-profit corporations and this kind of exaggeration drives clicks... how are we ever going to go back? I don't see the solution here, so I guess I've just kind of given up on even trying to believe headlines. No different from "our fabric softener is 70% more effective than the leading competitor!" You just kind of stop being annoyed by everything being extreme exaggeration and cherry-picking, because how else are you going to preserve your mental health and not just be angry at everything you read all the time, you know?
Pretty sure withholding information (that they presume is accurate) about such a big topic is the act of swaying an election. Not the other way around.
I vouched this out of dead because it was an intriguing story. I'm not really sure the resulting discussion will be productive, but it is at least ostensibly a thought-provoking piece regarding culture in academia whose author seems to be an earnest person. The publication may be crap, but I guess a story like this may have trouble finding a publication willing to run it, given that it is naturally going to be controversial.
I think it’s a matter of moderation, as good a job as they (or just dang, i don’t know who is responsible these days) have been doing there’s a new challenge where i see a lot of things downvoted to hell or flagged for no good reason. The voice of the petty moralizer needs to be restricted and reasonable moderate folks need to be able to talk about these issues.
As someone who spent 12 years of my life in academia (postsecondary, university life), this is nothing like the “culture in academia” I know.
This is not even an excess of leftism (IMO), but rather something much simpler: an excess in stupidity left to self-amplify, largely unmoderated.
I don’t think it’s even a social current— rather, I think there has always been very prevalent stupidity, and social currents are changing what the object of focus of this ever-present stupidity is.
The author of this post, the only academic involved in the story apparently, doesn’t seem to agree with the stupidity. So I’m not sure how this is all of a sudden perceived to be a problem in academia.
I would describe this whole thing, on the contrary, as a complete failure to engage with academic thinking.
I'm struggling to figure out what you are trying to say, but I think what you are mostly taking issue with is the phrasing "culture in academia." Fair enough. I don't really believe all of academia is necessarily like this. Doesn't match my experience either.
That having been said, writing this off as "just stupidity" and "[not] a social current" seems too reductive. Just because there's a million poorly-written articles about how "wokeism" is ruining America doesn't mean that there is no discussion to be had about the deeper fringes of ideologies. The truth is that the description of the behavior of those students sounds like situations that I've observed too, not in academics, and while I do believe a majority of people find these situations frustrating, it still seems that nobody has figured out how to reel it in and stop it from happening. Especially the mutiny part. I sincerely do not believe that a majority of people would like to act this way, but I think a majority of people would fear to speak out against it.
My best attempt at drawing a conclusion is that people have become very paranoid and distrustful of one another, especially younger folks. I feel a great sense that people are constantly trying to signal that they are one of "the good ones," and maybe even a bit of resentment towards people who don't also put forth effort into signalling this. When it comes to discourse, it feels like even in circles that are less generally flippant, people have resorted to taking eachother at their worst/weakest interpretations when it comes to sensitive issues. Why? I honestly have no idea. I think the rise in mental health issues might account for at least some of it, but I'm not sure if anyone knows for sure why even that is actually happening. I can tell you that I don't believe it is a global liberal "wokeism" conspiracy. (I would, in fact, consider myself to be very liberal, anyways.)
Do I have any conclusion or point here? Not really. It provokes a lot of thoughts for me, but I have no idea what to do with them.
> As someone who spent 12 years of my life in academia (postsecondary, university life), this is nothing like the “culture in academia” I know.
This isn't something that just happened overnight. I studied and worked in academia for over 20 years. in 1997 this would have been unheard of. But by 2018 (when I left) there was a noticeable reluctance for people to espouse opinions which would be in opposition to the prevailing groupthink. It's been a long and slow slide, but this is hardly the first time this has been reported upon. It's been a problem for years in the US, and it's just as bad in the UK. I personally think this is a travesty, and a complete perversion of the freedom of thought and diversity of opinion which academia is intended to foster, and it's one of the reasons I would not return to academia. Not being able to speak your mind is like something out of East Germany. But by the time I left, people were so worried about being punished for their opinions that if someone told a joke, there would be a noticeable delay while each member of the audience worked out if it was "acceptable" to laugh at it or not. What kind of environment is that to work in? A terrible one, with little trust in one's coworkers that you won't reported for an "unaccceptable" thought. That's not the environment I started out in.
But objectively this is pretty much how universities behave and it isn't just single instances that report the problem. It is pretty widely spread and all indications point to an atmosphere of silencing dissent.
That was not the claim. The claim was "objective facts are a tool of white supremacy".
It sounds like manufactured outrage to me. Even if it's not, it's an unattributed quote at least 3 jumps from its origin. If it can turn from "objective facts are a tool" to "objective fact does not exist" in one jump, who knows what the original workshop presenter intended.
I think the students in this particular instance were repeating something they heard without any of the context or reasoning behind it.
It’s not that objective facts are always the tool of white supremacy - but rather that facts on their own can be used to reinforce white supremacist culture.
Right-wing media folks can point to a fact about black people being convicted of violent crimes at a higher rate than others in a way that carries the implication (or sometimes explicit point) that the black people or their culture must be the cause.
The idea is that this is a gross oversimplification and eschews many important factors about US history a la slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, etc that have disproportionally affected black communities which has caused generational poverty.
So just saying some fact uncritically is often a tool used by white supremacists (and others in countless contexts).
I’m mostly just responding because this lunacy isn’t what people who have studied and wrote about this extensively (such as the author) espouse - or at least it’s a massive oversimplification
Are you aware that black people commit crimes at higher rates in countries that have no history of slavery or the various other social problems that have existed in the US?
While I'm usually a strong supporter of objective facts, I would want to call into question this particular statistic though - is it possible that the number for black people is higher because they are discriminated against often by law enforcement a lot more than lighter-skinned folks?
I'm a dark skinned non-African person, and I've been pulled over for my stuff and questioned by law enforcement in multiple non-US cities at multiple times of my life. In fact, even in my home country India, I'm often treated with more disdain than my lighter-skinned relatives by law enforcement and what not.
You point to racist policies. These can very well have a racist motivation behind them, some certainly do. But they aren't from a culture, there are specific racist actors behind them.
I believe the strategy to be afraid of "tools" white supremacists might happen to use is infantile. Real and convinced white supremacists are rare, so far so good. If every action you take is informed by fear, it won't lead to solid decisions.
Power is the end goal. A student says they were harmed, uses moral outrage to force a change, thereby reinforcing the behavior. Cancel culture and BLM are about exerting power and making others do something they don't want to do.
Every single element of this story is so far outside my experience that I have no idea what to think of it. Hours long summer seminars with a college professor? One who hosts them at his home and provides lunch?
17 year olds plotting a mutiny is the only thing in this that I can relate to.
How did this get coopted to a black studies association? Going back 30-40 years we see classical studies, like "Ethics and Society in the Ancient(?) World".
It was the most astounding intellectual experience. You have no idea. 250 pages of reading per night, two college professors per seminar (two of whom are now quite famous). The students were genuinely diverse and formed their own community.
The house is more like a frat house- two floors of common spaces including the seminar rooms, a commercial kitchen etc and two floors of bedrooms
This an opportunistic editorial choice, given the very solid conservative credentials of the journal staff: https://compactmag.com/about/
Certainly, the left is no way immune from cult dynamics. A recent example is Black Hammer, an organization devoted to the idea of a new black militancy that would rekindle the flame once tended by groups such as the Black Panthers in the 1960s. Their purity spiral was so tightly would that they were able to recruit rapidly but quickly developed an adversarial relationship with other radical left groups, before the organization imploded and the core membership ended up getting arrested. Wikipedia's summary of the organization's rise and fall is basically accurate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hammer_Party
Cult dynamics are a fixture of radical politics, there's an endless supply of new recruits burning with idealistic fervor that are ripe targets for recruitment into political-capital ponzi schemes (several of which launder the political capital back into financial capital). On the left you have the ReEvolutionary Communist Party (which operates a small network of bookstores) and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (which reliably turns out crowds at protests about The Current Thing and can be recognized by their distinctive signage and their practice of designating hot young girls as chant leaders. Those organizations finance 'revolutionary theorists' Bob Avakian and Gloria La Riva respectively, both of whom are holdovers from 1970s radicalism and maintain a relatively low public profile while providing members with wraparound ideological and activist infrastructure to keep them busy. There are numerous smaller ones, as well as large groups that are primarily ideological but significantly less centralized or cultish, like the Democratic Socialists of America, arguably the left's equivalent of the Libertarian party.
The radical right is also awash in cults, but supported by orders of magnitude more money and integration with institutions like churches and larger political organizations. This topic is abundantly covered in media nowadays due to the ascent of Trumpism, though often in a shallow and superficial way. Just as the worst aspects of the political left model the toxicity of authoritarian communism, many right wing radical groups peddle one variant or another of Christian nationalism, a transnational movement whose aggregate popularity encompasses about 1/3 of the US: https://www.prri.org/research/a-christian-nation-understandi...
This ideological split long predates social media and is (arguably) rooted in dichotomies and interregional antagonisms that precede the founding of the US. While legislative action is only a proxy for these competing social tendencies, it's a somewhat useful one and the long-term nature of teh conflict is startlingly well-visualized here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
The Black Hammer Party is another damning indictment of horseshoe theory and the lack of intelligence among the far left and far right; being aggravated by foreign intelligence succeeding in weakening Western societies. There are legitimate grievances in America (housing and healthcare) where the existential discontent is being enflamed into batshit crazy on both sides. Neither Hitler nor Stalin helped humanity.
I recently read an interesting chapter in a book from the 60's that seems relevant. The chapter is "Reactionary Aspects in Black Power", and it's in Julius Lester's book "Revolutionary Notes". Here's a sample quote:
The liberal establishment realized that as long as blacks were talking about blackness, as long as blacks were cussing white folks, as long as blacks were only reclaiming themselves, they were not the threat which they could be. A threat did not exist until blacks moved from blackness to an understanding of White Power (the system) and organized to destroy it. Suddenly the Establishment began seeing virtue in blackness and began encouraging it, as did even funding groups, whose programs were essentially cultural. Too many blacks thought that having won the right to assert their blackness meant more than it actually did. Blackness became an end to be achieved, when in actuality blackness is only the starting point. It is one weapon in the liberation struggle. For too many blacks it has become the struggle itself.
Lester's insider theory (at least in this chapter) is that by the late 60's Black Power had already lost its way and was being actively encouraged toward a direction less dangerous to the established powers. To me at least, the effects sound parallel to what Lloyd describes here.
I couldn't find the chapter online as a standalone, but a scan of the book is available for free checkout if you sign up at Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/revolutionarynot00lest. It's a short chapter, and is on pages 104 to 108. It's a fun quick read even if getting to it is not trivial.
> There is no hierarchy of oppressions—except for anti-black oppression, which is in a class of its own.
> Trust black women.
> Prison is never the answer.
> Black people need black space.
> Allyship is usually performative.
> All non-black people, and many black people, are guilty of anti-blackness.
> There is no way out of anti-blackness.
Of these, I'd say 1, 4, and 5 make sense with caveats. The rest are spot on from what I know.
1. Experience does convey some authority on what you experienced, but making apt use of it requires thought.
4. I'd say American prison is seldom the answer. Once we get to a point where inmates aren't treated like cattle, I'd agree with this otherwise.
5. If we construe 'black space' as a space in which one's culture and history can be appreciated absent external influence, I'd say that makes sense. But white people shouldn't be scared to talk to a black person because they're afraid of intruding on their space. That's just fucked up.
---
There are parents who are rich/powerful and are able to prepare their children for similar power, there are parents who live vicariously through their children; and unfortunately there are parents who are both. This leads to children holding the reins of entire institutions like colleges, and we pride ourselves in their emotionality towards important issues, but we forget that they're still children. The logic is knee-jerk, it's emotional, and it's not well thought out.
As an example saying the n-word is unilaterally banned in most contexts (in the eyes of these 𝚠̶𝚑̶𝚒̶𝚝̶𝚎̶ elite). And not as a curse word, but as a hate crime. Nevermind that the person who is most likely to use that word, is probably black. So all this is doing is preserving the delicate sensibilities of the person in power and forcing the black person, again, to conform.
I have hope for the coming generation that treats race as a joke, but not its history. But until it's normal to stop taking skin color so seriously on every aspect of human experience, and we can have a conversation about black racism, we've still some work to do.
I suspect that the breakdown occurred higher up in the organization.
The TASPs ran quite well for almost 70 years, and there was a process around them.
They were originally created as a way to identify great HS students and funnel them into the Telluride House at Cornell, and for many years students regularly turned down Harvard and Yale to go do this; many of them became College Scholars, and the Telluride House had a reputation for having many of the best students on campus.
The endowment did quite well (they were early adopters of indexing and the Yale model) and they started the TASS programs. This created a different funnel of almost exclusively black students not recruited based on a standardized test score or 'elitist' credentials, and this group gradually took over the organization and co-opted the giant pot of money. This led to a schism where the 'elitists' left, and the result is the current groupthink as well as the difficulty in recruiting factota (the college students who help the HS students).
> From Wild Wild Country to the Nxivm shows to Scientology exposés, the features of cults have become familiar in popular culture. There is sleep deprivation. Ties to the outside world are severed. The sense of time collapses, with everything cult-related feeling extremely urgent. Participants are emotionally battered. In this weakened state, participants learn about and cling to dogmatic beliefs. Any outsider becomes a threat.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadReligion in America is majorly declining. The kinds of people who in previous generations would have been super obnoxious about Jesus things (not that he would have approved of their opinions) are now obnoxious about everything else. People blamed organized religion for how awful these kinds of folks were when actually it’s just a feature of humanity and the people just found new topics.
Likewise politicians, the news, and anyone else who benefits from attention are learning more and more that this kind of religious thinking can be egged on for more attention so they (intentionally or organically) egg it on for their own benefit.
The cure is for this kind of behavior to be shamed and shunned but only casually as to not give it the attention it deserves. Find the antics of the obnoxious boring instead of infuriating (like reality shows, I’m not upset they exist but I’m also not at all interested).
This is just kind of an obsolete feature of humanity, at one point very valuable to group cohesiveness and order when we were still at odds with nature and quite vulnerable. Now a bunch of bored suburbanites need to find something new to be interested in than moralizing nonsense.
Their moral righteousness acts as an excuse to their actions whether right, wrong, evil, or good.
Ultimately the ugly aspects always seem to emerge and distract away from whatever good aspects their moral system might have for the world.
Such is the human condition I guess.
Its roots are religious too, stemming from Puritanism brought to America's northeast, spreading westward to the burnt-over district [1] of western New York, and eventually the West Coast [2]. Puritan ideas like collective salvation and rooting out the bad thinkers showed up initially as literal witch hunts, and today as metaphorical witch hunts seeking to sniff out those who aren't true (enough) believers. It still takes the rough shape of Christian offshoot too, with a notion of original sin (think "White Guilt" or something related), has martyrs and saints, taboos, holidays and customs like any other religion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burned-over_district [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Nations
In other words every framework has a set of foundational axioms that have to be accepted on faith.
It's always been like this whenever there's a moral panic. We've just used computing and the internet to do what computing and the internet do best...make something ubiquitous, universal and highly scalable.
We are all chasing the Maxima.
Seems like a legit source.
Weren't we arguing just like two days ago about the need to argue stuff on the merits, rather than this kind of guilt by ideological association? If you think this specific article makes claims that are not true, just say so.
I don't have a dog in this particular ideological fight, for whatever that's worth. I'm sort of broadly dismissive of college in the first place, and, like everyone else on HN, have read a story a week on the excesses of DEI culture.
I'm posting both "woke" and "anti-woke" stories (among many many others), but the "anti-woke" stories always get treated like this, by a handful of posters.
The "woke" stories discussions are usually not much better, because of other effects, but sometimes stories from both sides get nuanced discussions. I haven't found out, yet, what makes the difference. Working hypothesis: the concrete commenters. So basically chance.
The guidelines on the site (and the moderation log of Dan's comments) ask you not to post ideological stories like this here, precisely to avoid this kind of drama. Please run this social experiment on Reddit instead. You can post ideological stuff! But it shouldn't be so much a theme of what you're posting that you're literally doing a statistical analysis of the results, friendo.
The owners can moderate however they please. But the idea that HN threads on non-political topics are somehow the Algonquin Round Table is kind of risible.
This thread --- my original comment, I mean --- is flagged, for what it's worth (I'm fine with that), so I think we're safe with respect to thread drama here.
I mean, I sort of get where you're coming from? But this is a garbage publication. I think it's worth pointing out that garbage publications exist! (If we weren't 10 comments into a flagged thread I'd come up with better words than "garbage publication").
Indeed, you've certainly demonstrated the ability of quantity to steamroller quality by consistently submitting an average of 20 times a day. It's an impressive example of r- over K-selection, with a minimal degree of hard-to-digest technical content.
We should certainly avoid genetic fallacies, but we should also avoid the idealistic fallacy of assuming that all discourse is rooted in the unselfish pursuit of truth for its own sake. Perverse motivations exist, both as described in the article and as observable in the partiality of the journal's editorship.
I just read the article you're referring to [1] and the headline is clearly an exaggeration, not meant to be taken literally. Nobody "rigged an election", Pfizer temporarily suppressed news about the vaccine's effectiveness because they worried it could sway the election. I can't speak to the article's precise accuracy, but it's certainly not unreasonable that a company would choose to delay announcing certain news in order to avoid being accused of taking sides in an election (whether or not that would ultimately turn out to be a good idea or not). As journalism goes, the article seems pretty normal.
[1] https://compactmag.com/article/how-pfizer-fixed-the-election
I'm not really sure how to judge this sort of claim anymore. It doesn't really seem like a reasonable expectation that everyone will agree on whether something is "clearly" meant as an exaggeration. Moreover, I don't see how someone can in good faith claim the burden of deciding how to interpret a statement rests entirely with the reader but then reject those responses based on the interpretation being invalid; if someone doesn't want their statement to be interpreted in a certain way, they shouldn't purposely state it in a way that doesn't convey their real meaning. We're at a point where a lawsuit can get rejected on the basis that a program that describes itself as "the show that is the sworn enemy of lying" on a network with "news" in the name and claiming to be "fair and balanced" isn't actually meant to be taken as "stating actual facts"[1]; if we aren't willing to enforce even a minimal standard on what should be intended as a factual statement, we might as well just declare linguistic bankruptcy and just admit that the idea that the words in a sentence are related to the meaning is just a fantasy.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...
If it were a headline in the NYT or the New Yorker, I would definitely take issue with it.
But when I scroll Google News, headline exaggeration is just so common I'm almost blind to it now, like I don't care. Any headline I read, I think -- "what is the tiniest most innocent interpretation of this salacious headline" and boom, that's what the article is actually about.
In this particular case, Pfizer made a choice that could have affected who voted for Trump an eensy teensy tiny bit, and almost surely did by some infinitesimal amount, so it's not technically untrue to say they "affected" the election, and while "affecting" and "fixing" an election are different, they're close enough that the headline writer can supposedly claim plausible deniability about the difference, especially when you can argue that "fixing" an election is a point of view, an opinion, not a fact. (Yes I'm aware of how contorted this is, that's the whole point.)
> if we aren't willing to enforce even a minimal standard on what should be intended as a factual statement
Honestly I lament it just as much as you do. But when news is provided by for-profit corporations and this kind of exaggeration drives clicks... how are we ever going to go back? I don't see the solution here, so I guess I've just kind of given up on even trying to believe headlines. No different from "our fabric softener is 70% more effective than the leading competitor!" You just kind of stop being annoyed by everything being extreme exaggeration and cherry-picking, because how else are you going to preserve your mental health and not just be angry at everything you read all the time, you know?
This is not even an excess of leftism (IMO), but rather something much simpler: an excess in stupidity left to self-amplify, largely unmoderated.
I don’t think it’s even a social current— rather, I think there has always been very prevalent stupidity, and social currents are changing what the object of focus of this ever-present stupidity is.
The author of this post, the only academic involved in the story apparently, doesn’t seem to agree with the stupidity. So I’m not sure how this is all of a sudden perceived to be a problem in academia.
I would describe this whole thing, on the contrary, as a complete failure to engage with academic thinking.
That having been said, writing this off as "just stupidity" and "[not] a social current" seems too reductive. Just because there's a million poorly-written articles about how "wokeism" is ruining America doesn't mean that there is no discussion to be had about the deeper fringes of ideologies. The truth is that the description of the behavior of those students sounds like situations that I've observed too, not in academics, and while I do believe a majority of people find these situations frustrating, it still seems that nobody has figured out how to reel it in and stop it from happening. Especially the mutiny part. I sincerely do not believe that a majority of people would like to act this way, but I think a majority of people would fear to speak out against it.
My best attempt at drawing a conclusion is that people have become very paranoid and distrustful of one another, especially younger folks. I feel a great sense that people are constantly trying to signal that they are one of "the good ones," and maybe even a bit of resentment towards people who don't also put forth effort into signalling this. When it comes to discourse, it feels like even in circles that are less generally flippant, people have resorted to taking eachother at their worst/weakest interpretations when it comes to sensitive issues. Why? I honestly have no idea. I think the rise in mental health issues might account for at least some of it, but I'm not sure if anyone knows for sure why even that is actually happening. I can tell you that I don't believe it is a global liberal "wokeism" conspiracy. (I would, in fact, consider myself to be very liberal, anyways.)
Do I have any conclusion or point here? Not really. It provokes a lot of thoughts for me, but I have no idea what to do with them.
This isn't something that just happened overnight. I studied and worked in academia for over 20 years. in 1997 this would have been unheard of. But by 2018 (when I left) there was a noticeable reluctance for people to espouse opinions which would be in opposition to the prevailing groupthink. It's been a long and slow slide, but this is hardly the first time this has been reported upon. It's been a problem for years in the US, and it's just as bad in the UK. I personally think this is a travesty, and a complete perversion of the freedom of thought and diversity of opinion which academia is intended to foster, and it's one of the reasons I would not return to academia. Not being able to speak your mind is like something out of East Germany. But by the time I left, people were so worried about being punished for their opinions that if someone told a joke, there would be a noticeable delay while each member of the audience worked out if it was "acceptable" to laugh at it or not. What kind of environment is that to work in? A terrible one, with little trust in one's coworkers that you won't reported for an "unaccceptable" thought. That's not the environment I started out in.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/feb/13/free-speech...
What is the end goal of a lunacy like this? Who is served by convincing people that objective fact does not exist?
That was not the claim. The claim was "objective facts are a tool of white supremacy".
It sounds like manufactured outrage to me. Even if it's not, it's an unattributed quote at least 3 jumps from its origin. If it can turn from "objective facts are a tool" to "objective fact does not exist" in one jump, who knows what the original workshop presenter intended.
It’s not that objective facts are always the tool of white supremacy - but rather that facts on their own can be used to reinforce white supremacist culture.
Right-wing media folks can point to a fact about black people being convicted of violent crimes at a higher rate than others in a way that carries the implication (or sometimes explicit point) that the black people or their culture must be the cause.
The idea is that this is a gross oversimplification and eschews many important factors about US history a la slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, etc that have disproportionally affected black communities which has caused generational poverty.
So just saying some fact uncritically is often a tool used by white supremacists (and others in countless contexts).
I’m mostly just responding because this lunacy isn’t what people who have studied and wrote about this extensively (such as the author) espouse - or at least it’s a massive oversimplification
I'm a dark skinned non-African person, and I've been pulled over for my stuff and questioned by law enforcement in multiple non-US cities at multiple times of my life. In fact, even in my home country India, I'm often treated with more disdain than my lighter-skinned relatives by law enforcement and what not.
Which is what exactly? To me this sounds made up.
You point to racist policies. These can very well have a racist motivation behind them, some certainly do. But they aren't from a culture, there are specific racist actors behind them.
I believe the strategy to be afraid of "tools" white supremacists might happen to use is infantile. Real and convinced white supremacists are rare, so far so good. If every action you take is informed by fear, it won't lead to solid decisions.
17 year olds plotting a mutiny is the only thing in this that I can relate to.
I suspect that the online conventions did not allow for nuance in discussions, and the politically correct faction took over
The house is more like a frat house- two floors of common spaces including the seminar rooms, a commercial kitchen etc and two floors of bedrooms
Certainly, the left is no way immune from cult dynamics. A recent example is Black Hammer, an organization devoted to the idea of a new black militancy that would rekindle the flame once tended by groups such as the Black Panthers in the 1960s. Their purity spiral was so tightly would that they were able to recruit rapidly but quickly developed an adversarial relationship with other radical left groups, before the organization imploded and the core membership ended up getting arrested. Wikipedia's summary of the organization's rise and fall is basically accurate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hammer_Party
Cult dynamics are a fixture of radical politics, there's an endless supply of new recruits burning with idealistic fervor that are ripe targets for recruitment into political-capital ponzi schemes (several of which launder the political capital back into financial capital). On the left you have the ReEvolutionary Communist Party (which operates a small network of bookstores) and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (which reliably turns out crowds at protests about The Current Thing and can be recognized by their distinctive signage and their practice of designating hot young girls as chant leaders. Those organizations finance 'revolutionary theorists' Bob Avakian and Gloria La Riva respectively, both of whom are holdovers from 1970s radicalism and maintain a relatively low public profile while providing members with wraparound ideological and activist infrastructure to keep them busy. There are numerous smaller ones, as well as large groups that are primarily ideological but significantly less centralized or cultish, like the Democratic Socialists of America, arguably the left's equivalent of the Libertarian party.
The radical right is also awash in cults, but supported by orders of magnitude more money and integration with institutions like churches and larger political organizations. This topic is abundantly covered in media nowadays due to the ascent of Trumpism, though often in a shallow and superficial way. Just as the worst aspects of the political left model the toxicity of authoritarian communism, many right wing radical groups peddle one variant or another of Christian nationalism, a transnational movement whose aggregate popularity encompasses about 1/3 of the US: https://www.prri.org/research/a-christian-nation-understandi...
This ideological split long predates social media and is (arguably) rooted in dichotomies and interregional antagonisms that precede the founding of the US. While legislative action is only a proxy for these competing social tendencies, it's a somewhat useful one and the long-term nature of teh conflict is startlingly well-visualized here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
The liberal establishment realized that as long as blacks were talking about blackness, as long as blacks were cussing white folks, as long as blacks were only reclaiming themselves, they were not the threat which they could be. A threat did not exist until blacks moved from blackness to an understanding of White Power (the system) and organized to destroy it. Suddenly the Establishment began seeing virtue in blackness and began encouraging it, as did even funding groups, whose programs were essentially cultural. Too many blacks thought that having won the right to assert their blackness meant more than it actually did. Blackness became an end to be achieved, when in actuality blackness is only the starting point. It is one weapon in the liberation struggle. For too many blacks it has become the struggle itself.
Lester's insider theory (at least in this chapter) is that by the late 60's Black Power had already lost its way and was being actively encouraged toward a direction less dangerous to the established powers. To me at least, the effects sound parallel to what Lloyd describes here.
I couldn't find the chapter online as a standalone, but a scan of the book is available for free checkout if you sign up at Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/revolutionarynot00lest. It's a short chapter, and is on pages 104 to 108. It's a fun quick read even if getting to it is not trivial.
I think elements of the "threat" remain today, despite being complete overshadowed by "diversity initiatives".
> There is no hierarchy of oppressions—except for anti-black oppression, which is in a class of its own.
> Trust black women.
> Prison is never the answer.
> Black people need black space.
> Allyship is usually performative.
> All non-black people, and many black people, are guilty of anti-blackness.
> There is no way out of anti-blackness.
Of these, I'd say 1, 4, and 5 make sense with caveats. The rest are spot on from what I know.
1. Experience does convey some authority on what you experienced, but making apt use of it requires thought.
4. I'd say American prison is seldom the answer. Once we get to a point where inmates aren't treated like cattle, I'd agree with this otherwise.
5. If we construe 'black space' as a space in which one's culture and history can be appreciated absent external influence, I'd say that makes sense. But white people shouldn't be scared to talk to a black person because they're afraid of intruding on their space. That's just fucked up.
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There are parents who are rich/powerful and are able to prepare their children for similar power, there are parents who live vicariously through their children; and unfortunately there are parents who are both. This leads to children holding the reins of entire institutions like colleges, and we pride ourselves in their emotionality towards important issues, but we forget that they're still children. The logic is knee-jerk, it's emotional, and it's not well thought out.
As an example saying the n-word is unilaterally banned in most contexts (in the eyes of these 𝚠̶𝚑̶𝚒̶𝚝̶𝚎̶ elite). And not as a curse word, but as a hate crime. Nevermind that the person who is most likely to use that word, is probably black. So all this is doing is preserving the delicate sensibilities of the person in power and forcing the black person, again, to conform.
I have hope for the coming generation that treats race as a joke, but not its history. But until it's normal to stop taking skin color so seriously on every aspect of human experience, and we can have a conversation about black racism, we've still some work to do.
They were originally created as a way to identify great HS students and funnel them into the Telluride House at Cornell, and for many years students regularly turned down Harvard and Yale to go do this; many of them became College Scholars, and the Telluride House had a reputation for having many of the best students on campus.
The endowment did quite well (they were early adopters of indexing and the Yale model) and they started the TASS programs. This created a different funnel of almost exclusively black students not recruited based on a standardized test score or 'elitist' credentials, and this group gradually took over the organization and co-opted the giant pot of money. This led to a schism where the 'elitists' left, and the result is the current groupthink as well as the difficulty in recruiting factota (the college students who help the HS students).
This sounds exactly like having a baby