orbital
1mo ago
I feel like we can think of meritocracy and inclusion as two axes.
Is it dumb to only consider the inclusion axis?
Obviously, someone with negative merit would be a terrible choice.
But should we neglect the inclusion axis and only look at the merit axis?
I think that’s also a mistake when we’re speaking about a representative democracy with very different communities inside of it.
But that brings the question, what’s the relative importance that we should assign to the merit axis and to the inclusion axis?
This part is tricky and has been the source of missteps for the left which has lost them a lot of political and cultural capital.
orbital
1mo ago
FWIW I tend to agree with you in practice. DEI attached to an ideology that merit doesn’t matter or even in a more toxic form, that measures of merit are relics of white supremacy and patriarchy are pretty obviously ridiculous, and a road to ruin for any organization or institution that gets infected by this.
But I think you can also steelman the DEI ethos and get at some core realities underlying it.
Namely, there’s all sorts of implicit biases and lived experiences that might make it likely that for example, a black president/VP combo would prioritize issues that affect black communities and leave white guys feeling somewhat unrepresented, whether for legitimate reasons or even just illegitimate vibes based reasons.
This obviously is a framing that I set up to convey to white guys such as myself some of the gut level reactions that people who historically were never really represented in the way that us white guys have experienced as the norm.
Once you flip that, I think even conservatives would start to understand some typically progressive language, such as the importance of having diverse voices at the table, the dynamics of inclusion vs marginalization, equity for different groups when in comes to what decisions are made by the power structure, etc.
These terms have all become sort of strawmen and the well has become poisoned by all the crazy excesses that have gone on.
But at the core, IMO these are fundamental concepts of any race or cultural relations in a society and the typically dominant group would very quickly find themselves having to wrangle with similarly coded language if suddenly they were excluded.
So I could foresee a future in which conservative white guys see a need to argue for inclusion, I think it’s just a part of being in any multicultural society that representation at the seats at the table of power is going to be one of the primary sources of resentment.
And going all the way with this, it can even make sense why in some cases the inclusion of different groups at the table in some cases supercedes pure meritocracy in a democracy.
This is essentially why we aim to have representatives from all districts of a state. Say there’s a state with a blue tech hub but also an underdeveloped and neglected red district with some Appalachia or Deep South type issues regarding education, infrastructure, health, addiction, etc.
We should have some representatives from that community even if they aren’t at the top of the meritocracy.
That way they have a seat at the table and can at least provide a voice for that communities needs. Otherwise it’s just the tech hub guys and the backwoods are out of sight out of mind.
But there’s this delicate balancing act where meritocracy still has to form a fundamental pillar. Part of what I see the left wrangling with is trying to arrive at the synthesis of how to balance tribal desires for inclusion especially in a system where bias exists with meritocracy and the consequences of not giving it its due.
I think that flipping the frame to consider other examples helps think through the problem better. For example, how do we increase the representation of conservatives in academia? Should we? Is it pure meritocracy or are there a bunch of subtle factors and biases that led to the current state of affairs? Wading into the weeds of all this helps illuminate the culture war better IMO.
orbital
1mo ago
Yeah, the male sex is famously averse to having sex for purposes other than child rearing
orbital
1mo ago
Kind of a shame that us Americans have taken a word which is pretty fun and lighthearted form of obscenity in the rest of the Anglosphere and made it like the be all end all of the worst things a person can say.
I’m still salty that I once was banned from /r/askanAmerican for using the word cunt with an Australian who came to ask a question.
orbital
1mo ago
This probably comes off as trying to paint a political gotcha, but really I just think that turning this frame around is kind of insightful, so hear me out…
Is Kamala choosing a midwestern white guy a form of DEI?
Let’s go through some scenarios.
If the ticket was two women it’d be seen as overly feminine, there’s no male voice. I do believe personally that this could be an issue and I suspect the political right would agree.
If it was two black people, white people wouldn’t feel represented.
Even choosing the gay white gay is sort of problematic and probably won’t happen even though he’s midwestern and an excellent speaker.
I’m a white guy who is critical of DEI and particularly its excesses, but having the shoe be on the other foot does give more of a felt sense of where this idea comes from originally.
For the average white guy, he wouldn’t feel represented if the president and vice president were both black. He’d probably suspect that deep down the needs of his community are not a priority.
If it was two women, he likely wouldn’t feel that his demographic is being represented well either. There needs to be a masculine voice in there.
Kamala Harris picking a white midwestern guy is essentially done so that the ticket has more diversity and inclusion. An all black ticket would be seen as problematic among white people. An all female ticket would be seen as problematic among men. A black woman and a gay guy probably doesn’t cut it to pander to the straight white male demographic in the way that it needs to so they feel comfortable to pull the lever.
We’re probably not that long away from the point where white men feel the need to make a case for inclusion so that decision making bodies have more diverse voices at the table to better represent the communities that might otherwise not be prioritized.
orbital
1mo ago
“Don’t have sex unless you want to procreate” is just a really unpopular stance towards sex in the western world
orbital
1mo ago
That’s all well and good but ever since Al Qaeda the strategy of roping the behemoth into a long and costly quagmire has been shown to be effective, particularly for Islamist groups who can play the insurgency game against a superior foe year after year. That’s what the Houthis are, that’s what all the other Iran proxies are. Going in with the attitude you describe makes it easy for these types to rope a dope into another forever conflict. Israel lives in all this and has no choice in the matter. But the US is wise to only intervene in small ways like if international shipping is affected. Stay out of it. There’s bigger threats elsewhere that are more pressing to actual American interests. It might be naive of me but I feel that we could forget about the entire region and it probably wouldn’t even matter that much.
orbital
1mo ago
I think you’re right, but I do wonder how much we saw this sort of thing in other deeply polarized times.
Or if it’s unique to the particulars of our current media ecosystem.
orbital
1mo ago
“Some of the news organizations in our media ecosystem are partisan and have shitty practices”
….
“I don’t see the difference between the US and a communist state”
I mean come on.
orbital
1mo ago
Which is exactly what you’d expect partisans to do in a political campaign
This is just watering down the meaning of “1984” and “communist state” the same way the other side does with “Nazis”
orbital
1mo ago
The novelty and suddenness of Kamala being sprung into the election is her biggest asset. It was perfect to get people’s dopamine systems charged up.
A lot of people are tired of Trump and Biden and she offered a huge psychological release.
The main way she can screw it up is if people get tired of her before the election, which is also very possible.
What exactly is the communist style 1984 propaganda dream that’s happening now? All I see is people making memes on twitter trying to pump up the likely candidate who they want to see win.
It just seems like typical political campaign stuff. Ignore your candidates flaws and pump them up as awesome. It’d be strange if that wasn’t occurring, a bunch of different partisans engaged in a mutual information war is what we would expect to see when looking at a representative democracy in an election year.
orbital
1mo ago
I thought it had to do with that most blind people are not fully blind like you mention so they can sort of fuzzily perceive that there is a woman wearing blue
orbital
1mo ago
Sure I can definitely agree that the fact that the attempt to overthrow the peaceful transfer of power eventually fizzled out was a good thing.
Society doesn’t tend to collapse from this sort of thing, so I wouldn’t be surprised at that point. The majority of countries in the world today probably lack a tradition of peaceful transfer of power to varying degrees. But once you interrupt that process, it’s hard to put it back together.
I highly prefer to just vote rather than “I take power illegitimately then you take power illegitimately then…”
orbital
1mo ago
which act works more harm on the commonweal - Donald Trump classifying payments to Stormy Daniels as "legal expenses" in his personal books, or a mob of 34 people ransacking a convenience store like a swarm of locusts?
Definitely the one where the mob goes into the government building to try and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
Stable institutions of power transfer and robust checks and balances against those who would hijack that are among the only thing that prevents us from sliding into third world style governmental dysfunction.
Someone who would throw wrenches into that system to try to make it malfunction is a “bad person” like the OP claim, and one of the bigger societal risks out there. It’s a much more important case than a street felon.
orbital
1mo ago
It’s possible to believe that his decision making isn’t a particular concern but that his ability to speak under pressure is.
Personally I’m not afraid he’s going to cause some catastrophic error in the next 6 months, but I also don’t think he has it in him to effectively campaign especially while governing at the same time.
To be fair I think that even if Whitmer wanted the job, and was the most qualified, it’d probably be smart to still choose someone else anyway, and the same for Buttigieg.
The optics (u/dasfoo below is making a point to differentiate this from DEI, Perhaps that’s fair) of this just doesn’t work well.
Two women, that’s a very feminine government.
A woman and a gay guy, the right wing attacks about the decline of the west to DEI write themselves!
But I wrote below that I think merit and inclusion should be thought of as two axes.
Let’s say for the sake of the argument that Buttigieg is the most meritous candidate (tbh this is my opinion, if the game we’re talking about is to rhetorically dismantle your enemies talking points on national tv and flip it on them, he’s extraordinarily gifted).
But high merit pairs with low inclusion for him. He represents the Midwest but he’s likely to make straight independent and center right guys feel not represented by a woman/gay guy ticket.
Thus the inclusion axis dictates that it should be a straight white guy. And the electoral map dictates that he should be from a swing state to make that state feel included. When inclusion wins over merit, that to me is what we usually mean by DEI.
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