Is this the new codeword for "champagne socialism"? Interesting how "trickle down economics" isn't provided as an example of a luxury belief, seems like it would fit the provided definition extremely well in the context of US politics.
Devil's advocate: maybe because the author perceives "tickle down economics" as a position adopted by many of the working class and may even aide in survival.
Sorry I was being oblique to signal some snark. You're sort of hitting my point directly: "luxury beliefs" are just whatever you personally believe to be (a) wrongly held and (b) limited to only the aristocracy (ie. not the opinion of "real Americans"). But concretely demonstrating both is kind of difficult and largely relies on your own subjective experience. It's a political cudgel, not a proper tool of inquiry.
Kind of falls apart at the end with the defund the police thing. If you ask poor people "do you want to defund the police" they'll mostly say no. If you ask them "would you rather see fewer police in your neighborhood, and more medical and social response teams instead?" they'll mostly say yes. So in a sense sure "defund the police" is a luxury belief but also... no.
Reminds me of one of my favourite quotes by Huxley:
"If you’re to do anything reasonable in this world, you must have a class of people who are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members can think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must have a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in which eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That’s the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric itself—often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages eccentricity in others"
It sounds like you're talking about an aristocracy, and the quote even uses that word, so I wonder: do you think the aristocracy is responsible for most of the progress in the world?
I'd argue rather that, historically, progress has generally involved removing or disempowering the aristocracy.
A casual check says the quoted text is from Huxley's Crome Yellow (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1999/1999-h/1999-h.htm) and that the speaker is a character known only as Mr. Scogan, which some suggest is an analogue of Bertrand Russell.
In Huxley's day, that was more true[1] than it is today. Look at someone like Lord Kelvin, for instance. State-sponsored science wasn't really a thing yet; most of it was done by people who had the time and money to pursue it.
[1] That is, it was true of scientific progress. As you say, social progress often involved finding a way to destroy the aristocracy's stranglehold on money and power.
Baron Kelvin of Largs became that because of his work, not the other way round.
His father was a University Professor.
Having said that, in the history of science there's a surprising number of people who got to focus on their hobby due to family wealth, and access to all the best toys allowed them to claim a lot of firsts.
Weird, my view of history is that most progress in philosophy, arts, science, engineering, etc has come from aristocracy members who had the means to pursue something other than working for their next meal. That the aristocracy also spent their time exploiting the poor masses doesn't change that.
Benjamin Franklin made a similar argument about civilization being dependent on a strong middle class of financially secure business owners who could afford time to engage in politics.
The key difference is that Franklin's middle class wasn't interheted status.
This piece does not really touch on the many confounding variables that are found when examining the correlation between esoteric beliefs and social status. Level of education, for instance, is a biggie, even when accounting for the perceived prestige of where one goes to school.
The author dismisses some concepts, like cultural appropriation, by saying that the working-class people he grew up with not only didn't trouble themselves with it but didn't even realize that it was a concept.
But just because someone with low education and/or low status doesn't know about or understand a topic doesn't make that topic merely a status symbol, any more than it makes calculus a status symbol.
I agree, in part, with the author that certain pockets of higher education can veer into navel gazing and ivory-tower perspectives, and it can lead students to adopt distorted views of the world. But I don't think it can be said that just because a point of view is more prevalent among higher-educated people (who may indeed have higher status) that means the idea is bunk.
Did he say that a topic was bunk because it was held by the upper class? I took his point that the prevalence of these luxury beliefs is higher among the upper-class in gross disproportion to the impact those beliefs have on people. E.g. cultural appropriation is sometimes used by people in power to pretend they have a connection to cultures where none really exists. It's a form of manipulation. The impact that has on the average person's life is minuscule. The impact of someone from the middle-class taking cultural clues from other cultures in non-existent, yet it's easy to find discussions about the alleged harm this causes among some social groups.
The luxury is in the time spent on relatively unimportant matters, much like spending millions of dollars on a bejeweled egg. That doesn't mean the egg doesn't exist.
The author is arguing extreme ideas like defund the police is self serving without anyone’s real interests in mind. Instead of calling it luxury beliefs, this the next phase of identity politics. A new litmus test.
Given that working class rubes like myself who finished college in a place my man can't even find in a map are somehow able to know what “cultural appropriation” or “gendered” or “heteronormative” mean, and do that by the same means as everyone else (reading about it) I'm going to presume that the good man has a very peculiar understanding of what "elite" means.
Indeed, I studied in the engineering and not the gender department (we barely had liberal arts IMO), and I too learned how to read. Maybe the cultural elite, like starbucks baristas and people who work in HR.
Nah, you see this belief that baristas and grad students are the real elite. It goes back to thinking class is a cultural thing. So your rural landed gentry is working class because they own a truck.
This guy's Twitter account is full of the worst replicating psychology stuff. He's an outrage merchant surfing the present wave. When I pointed out one such failure to replicate he blocked me.
Seems like the rich are spending lots on fancy cars and big houses. I’m not sure saying you support x or y belief is quite the same signal as a sports car.
TBH to me it feels like all the money in this world is spent on fancy cars, houses, and yachts. Anything funded from taxes, insurances, or contributions is basically "the limits are exhausted, the waiting times are in months, your case is not covered". Meantime all the cars and houses I see while driving and walking around? Wow.
The terrible argument, built over several pages, is that "defund the police" as a political conviction is a status symbol, because rich people live in gated communities and don't need police.
It ignores the evidence is a 10% increase in a single poll, in which the majority was not of the inverse opinion that police is without fault, they just had a slightly different outlook on necessary police reform being possible in the current structures. It's yet another deliberate misunderstanding of "defund the police" (not a maybe understandable accidental misunderstanding).
Would be interesting to have this poll broken down by race, putting those most affected by broken windows policing and police violence first. And also those who coined the term.
"Among Democrats, Black (38%) and Hispanic (39%) adults are more likely than White adults (32%) to say spending on police in their area should be increased. There is no significant difference across these racial and ethnic groups in the share of adults who say spending should be decreased" (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/10/26/growing-s...)
Starts off with an interesting premise and makes me think, hey, maybe I should re-examine my priors, let's see the evidence. And then the evidence turns out to be something about people who "make more than $100K," and goes on to assert that they "live in gated communities" and "can afford private security." In 2023, "making over 100K" just means that you're usually on-time with your monthly housing payment.
Author may indeed be going somewhere with this, but I'd like to see stronger support for the thesis.
If we're talking a security firm paying minimum wage hired by the HOA to do rounds at a gated townhouse complex, that's not some unattainable luxury for someone making "just" $100K.
“A survey from YouGov found that Americans in the highest income category were by far the most supportive of defunding the police.”
“By far” means “10% more” in the actual graph the author cites, which comes from an online poll that had 1500 respondents. I’m no statistician but that seems like a small difference and small sample size to be the key piece of “data” here.
This article follows most tropes of behavioral science blog articles: broad moral statements taking a vaguely contrarian stance, analogies comparing humans to random animals (gazelles?), and “gotcha” survey data with questionable sample sizes. I find it difficult to take it seriously.
It's a pretty typical result from social science. 1500 respondents is a fairly large sample size--I've seen papers where you're talking closer to ~50.
Going from 22% to 32% is a 10 percentage point difference, but a 46% increase. I agree that the conclusion at the end is flimsy, and there are undoubtedly confounding factors--but the statistics are pretty well in line with what you'd expect in social sciences.
Yeah, but think about the error bars there. You’re looking at an MoE of around 3% for the entire sample, and more for these subgroups. The real difference could be just a couple percentage points and still be within the confidence interval.
I completely agree--many times, papers from the social sciences appear as exercises in "wringing signal from a sea of noise." They're not always successful or convincing! But often there is wide latitude because of the inherent noise...don't ask me why! I got out of economics for a reason!
Also, it's not quite clear how much of a material difference exists between the middle answer and the defund the police answer. The slogan has some optics issues, but diverting funds from overfunded surplus military gear filled police departments to social support networks is not likely to be controversial with the middle group either.
If they they have a good confidence, there error could be around 3% up or down. So that's not bad.
And, yes, I think Defund the Police was primarily espoused and driven by people who would be little affected by the outcome of such performative stances.
The people who live in the places where the police got defunded suffer greater crime rates and disorder --which is why we see people at the grass roots asking for more police.
It's known that lawless places will suffer from lawlessness and then engender vigilantism --this is evident is most war-torn places where 'warlords'/gansters control neighborhoods.
Few cities reduced police budgets at all certainly nobody in any meaningful way defunded the police and even cities short of officers have funding for additional officers they lack people far more than money.
Also in case you didn't notice police don't do much to protect normal folks from crime. They'll be there 15 minutes after whatever happened happened to file a report if they aren't too busy screwing with law abiding citizens.
Personally Ive seen little help when needed and plenty of harassment.
> Yes, the police harass, sometimes I get harassed but that presence is what puts a lid on crime.
> I’ll put up with some harassment in exchange for fewer criminals running free.
Maybe you have a specific harassment:imprisonment ratio in mind, but to me this just says "bring on the police state".
> We can seek redress from the police, we cannot seek redress from criminals.
You can seek it, unless of course they kill you. But will you actually find it? Police departments are famous for investigating themselves and finding that they did nothing wrong.
I was harassed repeatedly made to stand with my hands on a patrol car for 15 minutes in case I had developed a record since last week when I was just walking home from my job at night. I was ultimately falsely arrested for using bad language whilst walking away, prepared a reasonable defense then a excellent appeal both of which were ignored. They showed it as dropped then re-raised it when I had left town.
If I was willing to spend 30 days in jail lose thousands of dollars income and spend thousands more I might be able to win it when appeals took it out of that fucked up state.
Realistically I can't do anything about it.
On the other hand they didnt really investigate the 2 attempts to burn down my apartment building attempted homicide x 50 x 2 nor arrest the ex co-worker who tried to murder one of his fellows in a walmart parking lot.
I was left to organize a neighborhood patrol of the premises in the one case and get a psycho to chase me to get him off a guy who can only run by pressing x.
We live in the worst of all possible worlds where police are available to shoot teens but aren't available to do their jobs. If you wonder why you can't hire enough cops wonder no more. It's not liberals pissing in their cornflakes a lot of good folks don't choose to be a part of an obvious shit show.
In closing it's been said those who would give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither but more importantly they get neither. A police state isn't a particularly safe place.
Also notably the rural/urban divide is even wider, so even taking the data at face value it appears that it also be justified that high earners are more likely to be in urban areas, and that high-earner rural residents are more likely to spend time in urban areas, and that people more exposed to multiculturalism are more likely to espouse concern with policing.
In a feminized society that systematically elevates victims, status seekers must either LARP as victims (Singapore scions doing undergrad at Yale who march as "people of color") or make an ostentatious show of allyship, publicly subordinating their interest to that of the "oppressed".
The article only touches two unorthodox beliefs: that we should defund the police (really a preference, not a belief) and that success is largely attributable to luck.
But the elites are more likely to believe conventional wisdom on climate change, on whether vaccines work, on whether the Holocaust happened, on whether digesting genetically modified organisms changes the consumer's DNA, any number of things. Heterodox beliefs in these areas do seem consistent with the hypothesis of in-group signaling, but not with signaling status.
Wanting to defund the police is likely correlated with not needing the police -- but that's likely simple ignorance, not status signaling.
Why the elites would be more likely to say luck is important is not obvious to me, but a single example does not justify the sweeping generalization that this article makes.
> Wanting to defund the police is likely correlated with not needing the police -- but that's likely simple ignorance, not signaling.
Or with police being a net-negative to your life. Like living in a disproportionately policed area.
Or having a disproportionately policed skin color.
The poll is pretty clear, defund the police doesn't mean anarchy, it means replacing it. The how's a bit up in the air, but it's more about how irredeemable the current system seems to someone.
The police are there for when limited violence needs to be meted out to prevent greater harm. They are not counsellors, social workers, or doctors. More funding needs to go to those professionals instead of giving the police military-grade weapons.
Hey could you show me an example or two of a pro-hamas rally that has happened on a college campus recently?
I've been going to pro-palestine rallies because they're experiencing a genocide funded and supplied by my tax money, so I kind of consider protesting against it a right and obligation of mine. Haven't seen much mention of hamas at them though but maybe I'm not at the right ones.
You could also stand to interrogate a little more the connection between poverty in "the hood" and the global struggle against colonialism. American black people and palestinians have a long history of mutual solidarity. Aren't you curious about why?
> You could also stand to interrogate a little more the connection between poverty in "the hood" and the global struggle against colonialism. American black people and palestinians have a long history of mutual solidarity. Aren't you curious about why?
Honestly for me... no. My parents grew up in poverty in a British colony, and they're extremely well off and their children more so. It gave us a lot of advantages. If they grew up here in the United States as a colonized people, they would have had even more advantages, and if I'm being honest, my entire family looks at the black community with confusion as to why they don't take advantage of the fact they're born in America, which puts them lightyears ahead of my parent's upbringing and poverty.
My mom ended her career by a desire to give back and taught in inner city public schools. Honestly, that was enlightening and explained a lot of why kids aren't doing well. Although both my parents and those kids grew up / are growing up poor. My grandparents wouldn't have tolerated what my mom found in the schools. At the end of the day culture matters.
OK. I mean if you're not curious about it I'm not going to try to convince you? Generations of activists and scholars have found a relationship here but if you're certain they're wrong to that's your project. Not sure why you even wrote anything past the first sentence here.
Yours is an under-rated comment. When my belief is sound, I go and advocate for it articulately and logically, engaging with people where they are to bring them along. When my belief is weak, I malign them for not a-priori reaching the same conclusion w/o my effort.
I don't think the OP meant that the rallies were explicitly to support Hamas vs Palestine, but more that there is a general sentiment that the attack on Oct 7th was justified.
In my mind, framing anything as "pro-palestinian" too simplistic. I am a strong supporter of Israel and I am also very pro-palestinian in the sense that I hope for a solution that enables them to live in peace and prosperity.
The "nuance" is to peel back to the root causes of what's happening so things can be fixed. When people equate "responding to terrorism" with "genocide" (a stretch...) you're not talking about the issue in a way that can enable any sort of evolution.
Maybe that's a form of "luxury belief" that's being talked about here - you can throw around righteous terms w/o having to worry about solving the problem or being impacted by a lack of solution...
I know lots of people who are quite poor and are also very invested in the human rights of Palestinians. I know lots of people who are quite poor and very interested in reining in police violence. Your opinions and experiences aren't universal.
They aren't speaking about protest in the interest of the human rights of Palestinians.
See the fact that protestors aren't suggesting that Hamas give themselves up as a means of protecting the lives of their Palestinian human shields.
Protestors want October 7th and no consequences, or limited consequences on the terms of those who would see the perpetrators keep power. Specifically, to be able to slaughter masses of civilians and then run behind their human shields with impunity and forever.
Human shields that should move as far South as possible. Human shields who widely support Hamas and their actions.
Hamas has the ability to end all of this in this very hour, should they care enough about the Palestinians. They only need to give up.
Protestors have the ability to demand that Hamas end this conflict in this very hour, should they actually first care about Palestinians and not the continuity of War.
All Hamas has to do is give themselves up. Or at least move camp to an area that is away from the civilians.
Hamas won't, and neither will their "pro-Palestinian" supporters demand it.
Which is a primary problem with ostensible "pro-Palestinian protest" in the context of the current conflict.
Terrorists can't slaughter 1300+ civilians, declaring civilians combatants, and then credibly declare the deaths of their specific human shields to be a human rights issue that is the responsibility of their enemies. Unless they are in the process of giving up. The same paradigm applies to the nature of their support.
The deaths of Palestinians are a Human rights issue. But the cause and responsibility is on Hamas and its support. They can give up in this very hour. Or simply move camp. Anything else is an ongoing illustration of their deceit that doesn't care an ounce for Palestinian Life.
Not all protests exist to further concrete political proposals (ex. suggestions to Hamas). Expressions of mass grief, community solidarity, and elevation of an issue which harms your neighbors are all important outcomes for people meeting en masse. You're welcome to impute whatever motives you want onto people you disagree with, but that doesn't mean you actually understand.
I suppose if I equate “retributive genocide” and “just consequences” then I can see where you’re coming from. The US made similar statements as they poured white phosphorus on Afghani children after 9/11 and I thought it was a thin argument then. I don’t find it much more convincing now.
Overall I try not to lie, but given how different our experiences seem to be I’m not sure if there’s much I can say on the internet to convince you of that. Have a good one!
Will you state that Hamas should give up as a means of ending the conflict?
To test your moral and semantic consistency.
Your "retributive genocide" label doesn't hold if the conflict ends as soon as Hamas is eleminated, which it would. And which they can effect in this instant by giving up.
Not that people are obligated to or widely accepting of the morally and logically inconsistent labels of Hamas supporters. Hamas who began this conflict with a massive war crime.
Your straw man attempt is unskilled and indicative of your weak position.
You lie a lot. To yourself and to your readers. I never said "just consequences". You won't launder Hamas propaganda through this conversation. Every innocent death is an injustice on the head of Hamas and its supporters: many being Palestinian. Hamas can give up in this hour. Or better yet they can invent a time machine, return to October 6th, and cancel their plan for the massive war crime that started this.
The penalty for which, and which would save the most Palestinian lives, is Hamas giving up in the nearest possible moment.
They could have given up immediately in order to save the most possible Palestinian lives. Or moved out from behind their human shields, immediately. They didn't. Every moment that they do not is for the continuity of their war at the calculated expense of Palestinian civilian lives.
Let's see a single pro Palestine protest whose primary message is toward that single most effective goal.
inbfre your not so covert Hamas support and October 7th justifications.
Sure happy to: Oct 7 was a crime and the perpetrators should face justice. Hamas should immediately disarm and leave civilian areas. I don't like reactionary Islamism, I don't believe violent terror creates political progress. Fighting this war is not productive and is harming civilians. Again: you're welcome to impute whatever motives on me or others that you want, but that doesn't make them correct.
With all that said, I will also say: the presence of Hamas members in civilian areas does not give the Israeli military legal right to kill civilians. What is being done to (and has been done to for decades) the citizens of the West Bank and Gaza by the state of Israel is a crime and its perpetrators should face justice. West Bank settlers need to leave immediately and return the stolen property to its owners. The open air prison that is the West Bank should close and the rights of its occupants should be restored. War crimes don't fix war crimes.
The most direct way to stop the mass death of Palestinian civilians is for the people killing them to stop doing that. The idea that the only response to the violence of one political faction (Hamas) is greater amounts of retributive violence until conditions are met is just the “take hostages” paradigm at another scale. The fact that any attempt to move beyond that paradigm gets labeled as like “pro terrorist propaganda” is the same stupid nonsense that embroiled the US in a costly and atrocious war for 2 decades.
// The idea that the only response to the violence of one political faction (Hamas) is greater amounts of retributive violence
This seems to be the crucial flaw in your analysis - I don't see a cycle of "retributive" violence. Israel asserts the goal is to "solve this threat" not "kill as many as possible." If they could remove the threat w/o affecting civilians, they would do that. This is a qualitatively different than the Hamas strategy of intentionally targeting kindergartners as happened in Oct 7.
From where I'm sitting the historical contours are somewhat different. I understand what is asserted by Israel, but I think an examination of their historical treatment of Palestinians makes it pretty clear that they're interested in basically removing them from the area at any cost. In my own opinion, this history makes their claims about not wanting to harm civilians not very credible. I've drawn a lot of parallels with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and I think that this is another place where history is repeating itself. The US claimed over and over again that it was fighting "justly" and would not be committing violence if it wasn't the cleanest way to resolve the threat, but retrospective analysis shows that this isn't really what was happening on the ground.
>I don't believe violent terror creates political progress.
That's an understatement, especially for the situation under discussion. October 7th has forever destroyed any chance at diplomatic progress on the Palestinian cause. There will be zero political currency to make it happen.
One of the more curious phenomenons of this period is to watch Palestinians and their supporters speak of the future as if October 7th didn't happen.
And that there is some chance of diplomacy toward Palestinian statehood or an improvement in their condition going forward. There won't be, at least given their radicalized state that seems to be the status quo for the forseeable future. Life is going to be a misery for Palestinians, at least for generations more to come.
That isn't an emotional comment. It's an objective one that has the best interest of innocent Palestinians at heart, in terms of suggesting that they move away from radicalization and toward relocating to a region where they can actually have a quality of life.
Those whose rhetoric serves to keep Palestinians radicalized, such as yourself, in-part will be responsible for their continued abject misery. Situations permanently change and this is one of them.
>the presence of Hamas members in civilian areas does not give the Israeli military legal right to kill civilians.
You're confused as to how war works, absent proof of large scale targeting of only civilians.
Hamas just engaged in unspeakable evil to the end of beginning a real War. This isn't a joke. And it has chosen to hide in a dense urban area of one of its cities. Which is another act of unspeakable evil. Civilians should move South.
But no Army, especially one objectively guilty of an operation that was intended to be a massive and the most brutal of war crime, has ever been able to start a war and then hide among its civilians toward preventing its eradication. By claiming that the collateral damage incurred by going after them is a war crime. Leaving Hamas to commit future atrocities on target populations.
Yours are the ethics of the utilization of Human Shields toward engaging in War and War Crimes.
Luckily, the wider West has the baseline level of moral clarity enough to see through these "thin" arguments. If Hamas thought it was going to commit 10/7 and then use its civilians as legal shields, then it is finding out that it is mistaken. And it is further criminal for the attempt.
But it can end the War now by giving up now.
>retributive violence
An obvious falsehood given the already repeated constraints. See my prior posts.
> until conditions are met is just taking the “take hostages” paradigm to another scale.
Your logic car was teetering on its wheels and now has flipped into doing a double barrel roll down the highway.
This is a terrible attempt at inverting what is actually happening. Additionally, it mocks the vicitims of Hamas terror.
Hamas can free the Israeli hostages. Hamas can free Gaza immediately by removing itself from it, after starting a war.
The only stupidity here is how fiercely you are defending the continued actions, and their results, of the most potent terrorist threat in decades. On a public message board.
I don't want a single further civilian Palestinian to so much as get a scratch. They should all immeidately move South for the duration of this conflict, and work toward shaking off their Hamas rulers.
> Those whose rhetoric serves to keep Palestinians radicalized, such as yourself, in-part will be responsible for their continued abject misery.
What a fucked up thing to say. As if rhetoric from some far-away Westerners is what keeps these people radicalized and miserable.
You can eliminate Hamas down to the last man, but if conditions in Gaza don't change, you'll just get Hamas 2.0. And Hamas 3.0 after you eliminate those. I'm stating the obvious, but it's not possible to deradicalize a group of people by bombing them and depopulating their largest city.
> Yours are the ethics of the utilization of Human Shields toward engaging in War and War Crimes.
And yours are the ethics of shooting the hostage to kill the hostage taker. Which certainly has precedent in warfare, and may be necessary to ensure national security depending on who you ask — but let's not mince words here. You don't get to wash the blood from your hands by pointing to the hidden terrorists behind the corpses of bombed-out families. (Even if you're legally allowed to label it "collateral damage.")
// Not all protests exist to further concrete political proposals (ex. suggestions to Hamas). Expressions of mass grief, community solidarity, and elevation of an issue which harms your neighbors are all important outcomes for people meeting en masse
This too smells like a "luxury belief" to me. If you're actually experiencing the problem, you want to solve stuff. You want to be practical and pragmatic because your ass is on the line -- or die as a martyr while prolonging people's suffering, but hopefully the former.
In contrast to that, things like wallowing in "mass grief" and generating a lot of noise and energy in a way that isn't aiming at making anything better is exactly the kind of thing one can easily engage in when shielded from the outcomes and failure on the actual issue.
> This too smells like a "luxury belief" to me. If you're actually experiencing the problem, you want to solve stuff
This is kind of broad and I don't think it's super fair to what I'm trying to say. You might want to solve stuff very badly, but simultaneously want to hold space for communal grief. There are examples of this all over the place (look at any community response to a mass shooting). Waving that away as "noise and energy" is IMO a kind of tech-bro, solutionist impulse that ignores the very real function that it serves in creating bonds between people or like entrenching a shared culture. Solutions come from coherent political movements, coherent political movements come from people who know and trust each other. Being together, in physical space, airing the same grievances and seeing how many people stand with you is incredibly empowering and an important step in producing the kind of mass movements that bring change. You can call that a luxury belief if you want, but I would encourage you to talk with poor people who actually organize political movements (although maybe you do and we just run in different circles) because I think your mind will be changed.
This is an interesting read but at the same time I'm puzzled at the length this is going to in order to avoid engaging with ideas the author disagrees with.
This seems similar to the "virtue signaling" attack. But instead of opponents being charged with hypocrisy, they are accused of being (1) privileged, (2) vain, and (3) either senseless or indifferent towards the well-being of others. It seems to me this is suggesting these people don't ever deserve to take part in democracy, which is worrying.
On language, in Britain there was (and still is to an extent) a whole host of words that would mark you as 'non-U' (aspirant middle class) rather than 'U' (upper class).
It is still evident today if you know or interact with any truly upper-class people. There are still variations in the names for some things which persist even now.
The defund the police point here is really weak. The author is taking a pretty small difference across very coarsely divided economic categories, and then ascribing the difference to their pet theory, without any effort to address the myriad other candidate hypotheses for why this difference would exist.
And to look at a “100k and up” bracket and say “oh, well they can afford to live in gated communities and hire private security” is just absurd. No, the vast majority of that bracket cannot.
With a cynical viewpoint like this, how would you know the difference between "luxury beliefs expressed just to keep others down and make me look fancy" vs "earnestly held beliefs based on learning, and perhaps I could learn something by considering these beliefs"? Perhaps evaluate the beliefs based on their merit, rather than whose beliefs they are?
"so, translated beliefs could be just expensive status symbols coming from dishonesty and having too much of free time. So here are examples of leftist beliefs, see?"
Is someone earning $100k/year really reflective of the elite? I don't really think that cuts it anymore and I would be surprised if the real elite are actually calling to defund the police.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 364 ms ] thread"If you’re to do anything reasonable in this world, you must have a class of people who are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members can think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must have a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in which eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That’s the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric itself—often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages eccentricity in others"
I'd argue rather that, historically, progress has generally involved removing or disempowering the aristocracy.
[1] That is, it was true of scientific progress. As you say, social progress often involved finding a way to destroy the aristocracy's stranglehold on money and power.
His father was a University Professor.
Having said that, in the history of science there's a surprising number of people who got to focus on their hobby due to family wealth, and access to all the best toys allowed them to claim a lot of firsts.
The key difference is that Franklin's middle class wasn't interheted status.
The author dismisses some concepts, like cultural appropriation, by saying that the working-class people he grew up with not only didn't trouble themselves with it but didn't even realize that it was a concept.
But just because someone with low education and/or low status doesn't know about or understand a topic doesn't make that topic merely a status symbol, any more than it makes calculus a status symbol.
I agree, in part, with the author that certain pockets of higher education can veer into navel gazing and ivory-tower perspectives, and it can lead students to adopt distorted views of the world. But I don't think it can be said that just because a point of view is more prevalent among higher-educated people (who may indeed have higher status) that means the idea is bunk.
The luxury is in the time spent on relatively unimportant matters, much like spending millions of dollars on a bejeweled egg. That doesn't mean the egg doesn't exist.
It ignores the evidence is a 10% increase in a single poll, in which the majority was not of the inverse opinion that police is without fault, they just had a slightly different outlook on necessary police reform being possible in the current structures. It's yet another deliberate misunderstanding of "defund the police" (not a maybe understandable accidental misunderstanding).
Would be interesting to have this poll broken down by race, putting those most affected by broken windows policing and police violence first. And also those who coined the term.
Author may indeed be going somewhere with this, but I'd like to see stronger support for the thesis.
This hugely depends on where you live. To 90% (conservatively low) of the world's population making over 100k a year is insane levels of luxury.
This is super dependent on where you live. You may need to step away from city centers for a little bit to see it.
“By far” means “10% more” in the actual graph the author cites, which comes from an online poll that had 1500 respondents. I’m no statistician but that seems like a small difference and small sample size to be the key piece of “data” here.
This article follows most tropes of behavioral science blog articles: broad moral statements taking a vaguely contrarian stance, analogies comparing humans to random animals (gazelles?), and “gotcha” survey data with questionable sample sizes. I find it difficult to take it seriously.
Going from 22% to 32% is a 10 percentage point difference, but a 46% increase. I agree that the conclusion at the end is flimsy, and there are undoubtedly confounding factors--but the statistics are pretty well in line with what you'd expect in social sciences.
And, yes, I think Defund the Police was primarily espoused and driven by people who would be little affected by the outcome of such performative stances.
The people who live in the places where the police got defunded suffer greater crime rates and disorder --which is why we see people at the grass roots asking for more police.
It's known that lawless places will suffer from lawlessness and then engender vigilantism --this is evident is most war-torn places where 'warlords'/gansters control neighborhoods.
Also in case you didn't notice police don't do much to protect normal folks from crime. They'll be there 15 minutes after whatever happened happened to file a report if they aren't too busy screwing with law abiding citizens.
Personally Ive seen little help when needed and plenty of harassment.
Yes, the police harass, sometimes I get harassed but that presence is what puts a lid on crime.
I’ll put up with some harassment in exchange for fewer criminals running free.
We can seek redress from the police, we cannot seek redress from criminals.
The reason we need police is the same reason we can’t have nice things: people can’t self govern in a harmonious way.
> I’ll put up with some harassment in exchange for fewer criminals running free.
Maybe you have a specific harassment:imprisonment ratio in mind, but to me this just says "bring on the police state".
> We can seek redress from the police, we cannot seek redress from criminals.
You can seek it, unless of course they kill you. But will you actually find it? Police departments are famous for investigating themselves and finding that they did nothing wrong.
If I was willing to spend 30 days in jail lose thousands of dollars income and spend thousands more I might be able to win it when appeals took it out of that fucked up state.
Realistically I can't do anything about it.
On the other hand they didnt really investigate the 2 attempts to burn down my apartment building attempted homicide x 50 x 2 nor arrest the ex co-worker who tried to murder one of his fellows in a walmart parking lot.
I was left to organize a neighborhood patrol of the premises in the one case and get a psycho to chase me to get him off a guy who can only run by pressing x.
We live in the worst of all possible worlds where police are available to shoot teens but aren't available to do their jobs. If you wonder why you can't hire enough cops wonder no more. It's not liberals pissing in their cornflakes a lot of good folks don't choose to be a part of an obvious shit show.
In closing it's been said those who would give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither but more importantly they get neither. A police state isn't a particularly safe place.
The article only touches two unorthodox beliefs: that we should defund the police (really a preference, not a belief) and that success is largely attributable to luck.
But the elites are more likely to believe conventional wisdom on climate change, on whether vaccines work, on whether the Holocaust happened, on whether digesting genetically modified organisms changes the consumer's DNA, any number of things. Heterodox beliefs in these areas do seem consistent with the hypothesis of in-group signaling, but not with signaling status.
Wanting to defund the police is likely correlated with not needing the police -- but that's likely simple ignorance, not status signaling.
Why the elites would be more likely to say luck is important is not obvious to me, but a single example does not justify the sweeping generalization that this article makes.
Or with police being a net-negative to your life. Like living in a disproportionately policed area.
Or having a disproportionately policed skin color.
The poll is pretty clear, defund the police doesn't mean anarchy, it means replacing it. The how's a bit up in the air, but it's more about how irredeemable the current system seems to someone.
I've been going to pro-palestine rallies because they're experiencing a genocide funded and supplied by my tax money, so I kind of consider protesting against it a right and obligation of mine. Haven't seen much mention of hamas at them though but maybe I'm not at the right ones.
You could also stand to interrogate a little more the connection between poverty in "the hood" and the global struggle against colonialism. American black people and palestinians have a long history of mutual solidarity. Aren't you curious about why?
Honestly for me... no. My parents grew up in poverty in a British colony, and they're extremely well off and their children more so. It gave us a lot of advantages. If they grew up here in the United States as a colonized people, they would have had even more advantages, and if I'm being honest, my entire family looks at the black community with confusion as to why they don't take advantage of the fact they're born in America, which puts them lightyears ahead of my parent's upbringing and poverty.
My mom ended her career by a desire to give back and taught in inner city public schools. Honestly, that was enlightening and explained a lot of why kids aren't doing well. Although both my parents and those kids grew up / are growing up poor. My grandparents wouldn't have tolerated what my mom found in the schools. At the end of the day culture matters.
With that attitude it's no surprised both groups have become -- as they say -- marginalized.
Some context https://archive.ph/DzIup
Some more extreme examples https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/support-hamas-terror-anti...
Don't pretend to read minds. The general sentiment is what people say it is, no more and no less.
In my mind, framing anything as "pro-palestinian" too simplistic. I am a strong supporter of Israel and I am also very pro-palestinian in the sense that I hope for a solution that enables them to live in peace and prosperity.
The "nuance" is to peel back to the root causes of what's happening so things can be fixed. When people equate "responding to terrorism" with "genocide" (a stretch...) you're not talking about the issue in a way that can enable any sort of evolution.
Maybe that's a form of "luxury belief" that's being talked about here - you can throw around righteous terms w/o having to worry about solving the problem or being impacted by a lack of solution...
See the fact that protestors aren't suggesting that Hamas give themselves up as a means of protecting the lives of their Palestinian human shields.
Protestors want October 7th and no consequences, or limited consequences on the terms of those who would see the perpetrators keep power. Specifically, to be able to slaughter masses of civilians and then run behind their human shields with impunity and forever.
Human shields that should move as far South as possible. Human shields who widely support Hamas and their actions.
Hamas has the ability to end all of this in this very hour, should they care enough about the Palestinians. They only need to give up.
Protestors have the ability to demand that Hamas end this conflict in this very hour, should they actually first care about Palestinians and not the continuity of War.
All Hamas has to do is give themselves up. Or at least move camp to an area that is away from the civilians.
Hamas won't, and neither will their "pro-Palestinian" supporters demand it.
Which is a primary problem with ostensible "pro-Palestinian protest" in the context of the current conflict.
Terrorists can't slaughter 1300+ civilians, declaring civilians combatants, and then credibly declare the deaths of their specific human shields to be a human rights issue that is the responsibility of their enemies. Unless they are in the process of giving up. The same paradigm applies to the nature of their support.
The deaths of Palestinians are a Human rights issue. But the cause and responsibility is on Hamas and its support. They can give up in this very hour. Or simply move camp. Anything else is an ongoing illustration of their deceit that doesn't care an ounce for Palestinian Life.
Overall I try not to lie, but given how different our experiences seem to be I’m not sure if there’s much I can say on the internet to convince you of that. Have a good one!
To test your moral and semantic consistency.
Your "retributive genocide" label doesn't hold if the conflict ends as soon as Hamas is eleminated, which it would. And which they can effect in this instant by giving up.
Not that people are obligated to or widely accepting of the morally and logically inconsistent labels of Hamas supporters. Hamas who began this conflict with a massive war crime.
Your straw man attempt is unskilled and indicative of your weak position.
You lie a lot. To yourself and to your readers. I never said "just consequences". You won't launder Hamas propaganda through this conversation. Every innocent death is an injustice on the head of Hamas and its supporters: many being Palestinian. Hamas can give up in this hour. Or better yet they can invent a time machine, return to October 6th, and cancel their plan for the massive war crime that started this.
The penalty for which, and which would save the most Palestinian lives, is Hamas giving up in the nearest possible moment.
They could have given up immediately in order to save the most possible Palestinian lives. Or moved out from behind their human shields, immediately. They didn't. Every moment that they do not is for the continuity of their war at the calculated expense of Palestinian civilian lives.
Let's see a single pro Palestine protest whose primary message is toward that single most effective goal.
inbfre your not so covert Hamas support and October 7th justifications.
With all that said, I will also say: the presence of Hamas members in civilian areas does not give the Israeli military legal right to kill civilians. What is being done to (and has been done to for decades) the citizens of the West Bank and Gaza by the state of Israel is a crime and its perpetrators should face justice. West Bank settlers need to leave immediately and return the stolen property to its owners. The open air prison that is the West Bank should close and the rights of its occupants should be restored. War crimes don't fix war crimes.
The most direct way to stop the mass death of Palestinian civilians is for the people killing them to stop doing that. The idea that the only response to the violence of one political faction (Hamas) is greater amounts of retributive violence until conditions are met is just the “take hostages” paradigm at another scale. The fact that any attempt to move beyond that paradigm gets labeled as like “pro terrorist propaganda” is the same stupid nonsense that embroiled the US in a costly and atrocious war for 2 decades.
This seems to be the crucial flaw in your analysis - I don't see a cycle of "retributive" violence. Israel asserts the goal is to "solve this threat" not "kill as many as possible." If they could remove the threat w/o affecting civilians, they would do that. This is a qualitatively different than the Hamas strategy of intentionally targeting kindergartners as happened in Oct 7.
That's an understatement, especially for the situation under discussion. October 7th has forever destroyed any chance at diplomatic progress on the Palestinian cause. There will be zero political currency to make it happen.
One of the more curious phenomenons of this period is to watch Palestinians and their supporters speak of the future as if October 7th didn't happen.
And that there is some chance of diplomacy toward Palestinian statehood or an improvement in their condition going forward. There won't be, at least given their radicalized state that seems to be the status quo for the forseeable future. Life is going to be a misery for Palestinians, at least for generations more to come.
That isn't an emotional comment. It's an objective one that has the best interest of innocent Palestinians at heart, in terms of suggesting that they move away from radicalization and toward relocating to a region where they can actually have a quality of life.
Those whose rhetoric serves to keep Palestinians radicalized, such as yourself, in-part will be responsible for their continued abject misery. Situations permanently change and this is one of them.
>the presence of Hamas members in civilian areas does not give the Israeli military legal right to kill civilians.
You're confused as to how war works, absent proof of large scale targeting of only civilians.
Hamas just engaged in unspeakable evil to the end of beginning a real War. This isn't a joke. And it has chosen to hide in a dense urban area of one of its cities. Which is another act of unspeakable evil. Civilians should move South.
But no Army, especially one objectively guilty of an operation that was intended to be a massive and the most brutal of war crime, has ever been able to start a war and then hide among its civilians toward preventing its eradication. By claiming that the collateral damage incurred by going after them is a war crime. Leaving Hamas to commit future atrocities on target populations.
Yours are the ethics of the utilization of Human Shields toward engaging in War and War Crimes.
Luckily, the wider West has the baseline level of moral clarity enough to see through these "thin" arguments. If Hamas thought it was going to commit 10/7 and then use its civilians as legal shields, then it is finding out that it is mistaken. And it is further criminal for the attempt.
But it can end the War now by giving up now.
>retributive violence
An obvious falsehood given the already repeated constraints. See my prior posts.
> until conditions are met is just taking the “take hostages” paradigm to another scale.
Your logic car was teetering on its wheels and now has flipped into doing a double barrel roll down the highway.
This is a terrible attempt at inverting what is actually happening. Additionally, it mocks the vicitims of Hamas terror.
Hamas can free the Israeli hostages. Hamas can free Gaza immediately by removing itself from it, after starting a war.
The only stupidity here is how fiercely you are defending the continued actions, and their results, of the most potent terrorist threat in decades. On a public message board.
I don't want a single further civilian Palestinian to so much as get a scratch. They should all immeidately move South for the duration of this conflict, and work toward shaking off their Hamas rulers.
What a fucked up thing to say. As if rhetoric from some far-away Westerners is what keeps these people radicalized and miserable.
You can eliminate Hamas down to the last man, but if conditions in Gaza don't change, you'll just get Hamas 2.0. And Hamas 3.0 after you eliminate those. I'm stating the obvious, but it's not possible to deradicalize a group of people by bombing them and depopulating their largest city.
> Yours are the ethics of the utilization of Human Shields toward engaging in War and War Crimes.
And yours are the ethics of shooting the hostage to kill the hostage taker. Which certainly has precedent in warfare, and may be necessary to ensure national security depending on who you ask — but let's not mince words here. You don't get to wash the blood from your hands by pointing to the hidden terrorists behind the corpses of bombed-out families. (Even if you're legally allowed to label it "collateral damage.")
This too smells like a "luxury belief" to me. If you're actually experiencing the problem, you want to solve stuff. You want to be practical and pragmatic because your ass is on the line -- or die as a martyr while prolonging people's suffering, but hopefully the former.
In contrast to that, things like wallowing in "mass grief" and generating a lot of noise and energy in a way that isn't aiming at making anything better is exactly the kind of thing one can easily engage in when shielded from the outcomes and failure on the actual issue.
This is kind of broad and I don't think it's super fair to what I'm trying to say. You might want to solve stuff very badly, but simultaneously want to hold space for communal grief. There are examples of this all over the place (look at any community response to a mass shooting). Waving that away as "noise and energy" is IMO a kind of tech-bro, solutionist impulse that ignores the very real function that it serves in creating bonds between people or like entrenching a shared culture. Solutions come from coherent political movements, coherent political movements come from people who know and trust each other. Being together, in physical space, airing the same grievances and seeing how many people stand with you is incredibly empowering and an important step in producing the kind of mass movements that bring change. You can call that a luxury belief if you want, but I would encourage you to talk with poor people who actually organize political movements (although maybe you do and we just run in different circles) because I think your mind will be changed.
Protesting military action might actually save some lives.
This seems similar to the "virtue signaling" attack. But instead of opponents being charged with hypocrisy, they are accused of being (1) privileged, (2) vain, and (3) either senseless or indifferent towards the well-being of others. It seems to me this is suggesting these people don't ever deserve to take part in democracy, which is worrying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
It is still evident today if you know or interact with any truly upper-class people. There are still variations in the names for some things which persist even now.
And to look at a “100k and up” bracket and say “oh, well they can afford to live in gated communities and hire private security” is just absurd. No, the vast majority of that bracket cannot.