CrispyFriedBarnacles
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User ID: 2417
CrispyFriedBarnacles
4d ago
British writer Louise Perry, in one of her podcast discussions after her book "The Case Against the Sexual Revolution", made an observation about this. And she noted, basically, that her conservative critiques about the sexual revolution weren't interpreted as being tied to regressive evangelical Christianity in Britain, because that wasn't a movement with any particular force there. So it meant she was free to make something like a secular argument for a return to older Christian ethnics, and for it to be received that way in Britain. Whereas in America, because of the contours of the culture wars (and honestly because of the physical contours of the country, with evangelical Christianity often being coded as a Southern thing, meaning racist low-educated poor losers of the Civil War etc etc etc), that kind of argument is automatically slotted into a pre-existing fight. And I think she had the sense that it was much easier to advance that sort of argument and have it be engaged with in Britain as a result. In a way, it reminds me of the Charles Murray argument that a lot of well-credentialed American progressives of a certain sort seem entirely unwilling to preach what they practice; in their personal lives, they are thrifty and monogamous and live up mostly to a 1950s-ish life script (once they admittedly exhaust a non-martial serial monogamy phase in their 20s), but they're largely unwilling to advocate those positions more broadly.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
5d ago
Oh, I am well aware of why libraries are hotbeds of woke - it's for precisely the same reason that certain fields in universities are (and with substantial cultural and demographic overlap). Although I understand the general comparison to religious soup kitchens here, though, I believe there are actually also severe constraints on how and in what ways religious charities can be overtly religious or proselytize when dealing with public money, aren't there? I have that general sense, and Claude suggests there are indeed extremely strict behavior limits imposed on such charities. And I know the question of, say, if Catholic adoption services could reject gay potential parents has been a culture war flash point previously, for example.
Recognizing the social dynamics of why libraries have been taken over by a very specific, very radicalized niche subculture seems like the start of the conversation when it comes to public funding and public goods, not the end of it, at least to me anyway. It feels very similar to the issue with universities, where the people who dominate them use some extremely narrow, extremely particular definitions of "inclusive" and "global" that, in practice, exclude way, way too many people in a destabilizing and social mission undermining way.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
7d ago
My mom was an elementary school teacher, and her general experience was that you can teach bright kids all sorts of ways, and it will mostly work out eventually.
On the other hand, there are a lot of slower kids who will struggle to learn but who can, eventually, pick things up via rote learning like phonics. It's slow and perhaps not fun, but they can do it eventually. But a lot of other methods of instruction (which are often supposed to avoid beating the joy of learning out of students the way rote learning theoretically does) often end up just failing complete with slower students, because the cognitive machinery simply isn't there. And while learning phonics might not be fun, being illiterate for the rest of your life is way, way less fun.
All of this is vexing if you happen to be a bright kid who struggled through boring methods of instruction, because you probably were ill-served by that kind of instruction. And you probably would have done better (and maybe we all would have benefited, for that matter!) with personal instruction that could lean into your natural capacities. School actually really does suck for lots of bright kids.
But there really is a serious problem with Ed schools producing all sorts of novel instructional methods based on blank slate ideology and theoretically serving the moral goal of equity and anti-racism that, in practice, just hurt the students they're supposed to help because their (highly ideological) diagnosis of the problem starts wrong and then stays wrong. And all the rest of us are externalities to that process.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
7d ago
I don't mean China as the people of China, here, or their material conditions. I mean China as the political entity run by the CCP. And by "rotted out from within", I meant the CCP having their sovereignty dissolved and capacity to act undermined... which is very clearly what liberalization is supposed to do to political regimes. I've seen this discussed at great length by western political intellectuals in the past; this isn't some kind of giant secret. Globalization and integrating China into the global economic order was supposed to weaken their government and dissolve the insularity of Chinese culture.
My wife takes our kids to our local public library. The YA section is overflowing with [unasked for aggressive child targeting LGBTQ evangelism] graphic novels (I get that that's a unkind way to describe this shit, but they are overtly targeting my early middle school aged daughter - I didn't start this). There are giant, proudly displayed pride flags up all the time. Jack Turban "hooray for trans!" book endcaps. Lots of community "witchy knitting circle!" outreach. I am not exaggerating here. We live in a purple area, politically, although our particular corner of it is more like 66% blue. I legitimately find it all very frustrating - if I took my kids to a "pray the gay away" church, it would horrify my wife, but our local library is quite literally that, and then some, for a different ideology (or secular religion, really), and one that appalls me. But, you know, it's a public library. Reading is good. Libraries are good. This is currently a really vexed issue for me, actually.
Anyway, I'm not saying burn it down, exactly, but if Hercules came along to reroute a river through it to clean it out, I wouldn't shed any tears. And I grew up loving my time in libraries, too. Very depressing.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
9d ago
Imagine it was 1984, and you were an ethnic Latvian, living in what would later be Latvia, and you were well aware of the impact Moscow had on the cultural formation of your children and surrounding community. And then an ethnic Russia, mid conversation one day, brought out some spread sheets to show off how efficiently the Soviet Ministry of Education was being run, and thus anyone who had any problems with the system was misinformed by fake news. You would probably recognize that there was a crucial gap between the actual, deep issues and the argument being presented.
My entire life, since my childhood in the 80s, all the conservatives I know had had dismantling the federal department of education right up there with ending Roe vs. Wade. There was never a time when the adults in my life didn't despise that Department as an organ of cultural domination and social engineering. It was on the same level for the kinds of conservatives I knew as Universal Health Care or Real Gun Control or First Female President is for liberals.
This is absolutely straight up who/whom stuff.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
16d ago
I don't know if he is on the path to leaving, but I want to pull on what seems like the subtext here: is it the case that a large subset of Americans overtly identifying their national identity with historical European Christianity bad for the Jews, like Ben Shapiro? Right? Like, I assume that you are suggesting that Walsh taking this stance puts him at odds with the owners of Daily Wire.
I want to put it this way, because I think that topic is itself interesting and non-obvious. If you look at the original neocons, a LOT of them were Jewish (and many former trotskyites), and, in the 80s, a lot of them seemed to think that some version of very pro-Israel evangelical Christianity in America as the default public religion, as long as certain kinds of separation of church and state were followed and anti-semitism was still heavily stigmatized, was, in fact, Good For The Jews (tm). I read the interesting book "The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy" by Murray Friedman not too long ago, and it takes up exactly this topic. And in particular, some of those thinkers might well have come to see an ideology of secular, leftist third worldism (especially after the 7 days war) as Bad for the Jews, and a default European evangelical Christianity as a bulwark against that, given the deep chasms between that form of Christianity and secular, leftist third worldism, as well as that strain of Christianity instilling certain kind of salutary personal moral discipline in citizens anyway. And certainly we are seeing a repeat of history with the current leftwing Israel-is-Genociding-Palestinians stuff, the deeper internal Black-vs-Jew power fight within the Democratic party, and the response of some American Jews to all that.
If you go down this road, I think it raises a bunch of other, bigger, interesting questions. Recoiling against antisemitism is, itself, rooted in certain Christian-derived values (Tom Holland's Dominion is a really strong book on a lot of these ideas). Is the rise of China and its ability to avoid being rotted out from within by Western liberalism and capitalism, China with its internal culture that is unabashed racialist in a way that late 19th century would find recognizable... is that rise Good for the Jews? Would a world run by the current culture of China be hospitable to Jewish people and Jewish power?
I'm reminded of an observation that Glenn Loury has made. He made the point that it wasn't at all obvious that it was in the best interest for African American descendants of slaves for America to be flooded by immigrants. And his point was that, while there was this naive belief that everyone would team up against White-y, over in reality, because of the Civil Rights movement, American blacks could make a certain kind of moral claim on other white Americans whose ancestors have been here for a while. "I'm not so doing well, but your ancestor enslaved me." But it seems deeply unlikely that newer immigrants from East Asia or South Asia, as they gain power, are likely to be moved by such claims. Far more like is for them to see the deep pathologies of black communities not through a lens of guilt, but rather through a lens of disgust.
Obvious Jewish people aren't a monolith, and there are more Jewish opinions than there are Jewish people. But, in America, for a bunch of reasons, the concerns of powerful Jewish people do matter a huge amount. And I think it is the case that there are probably versions of "America was founded as a white Christian nation" that some such people could find useful and tolerable, and there are some such versions that aren't. I'm not sure where Walsh's current views fit on that front (and, of course, Catholicism is it's own deeply interesting, deeply complicated topic here too, for that matter).
CrispyFriedBarnacles
18d ago
Here's a theory I've been toying with - let me start with an analogy, though.
Is it good for me, as a random American citizen, for the Chinese government to become more efficient, effective, capable, and trusted by its residents, to the point where such residents are willing to sacrifice personal things for some greater common good? Should I applaud any such efforts, or even figure out how to participate in various international organizations that could somehow encourage such things?
I think it's obviously that the answer isn't trivially "yes", because I have no reason to assume that an effective Chinese government actually has my values and concerns and best interest in mind. In fact, it's fairly likely that their values and goals might have some very zero sum consequences for me and my loved ones. The more effective the Chinese government is, the worse for me... at least possibly. This is not a crazy thing to think. And indeed, every empire that has leaned on divide et impera seems to have a similar view, because they very frequently find ways to keep their competitors divided and low trust to prevent exactly that kind of efficiency.
One of the consequences of the Reagan revolution is that it cemented a certain kind of public rhetoric about the American Federal government in relation to citizens. We've been habituated to that rhetoric being what it means to be conservative. "Of course we need good government, of course we have a shared common good... but the problem is waste. The problem is corruption. The problem is big government is too distant from local communities. The problem is that do-gooder liberals have real difficulty understanding second order consequences, and they often don't understand economics at all. Let's shrink government and make it better, let's get of waste, let's give taxes back to responsible taxpayers who work and raise families and follow the law and participate in the military."
But that rhetoric, successful as it was, still pushed the idea that there was a shared, consensus common good, and that an effective central government simply needed to be pointed correctly in the direction of the revised common good. It needed to be pruned, it needed to be tended. But that rhetoric intentionally papered over a lot serious fissures. This is especially true if you pay more attention to the kinds of people who might be labeled paleocons in their inclination. If you read about the history of forced busing in the seventies, for example, you might personally read it as a story of good intentions not being enough to achieve a desirable outcome - the right thing was done the wrong way. That's a very public Reagan conservative way to talk about it. But for a LOT of people who lived through it, they actually experienced it as the government and its utopian bureaucrats, as external tyrannical forces, actively ethnic cleansing them. For people who experienced it that way, having the government be more effective or efficient, and having it cut waste, is arguably a worse outcome, not a better one. Destroying the capacity of the government to function, if that's your view of things, is a feature, not a bug.
I'm not exactly saying Musk believes something like this in relation to either the Federal government or international institutions. But I am saying that this issue - whether or not the Federal government is intrinsically a foe, or if it can be a friend - seems much more live on the Right in positions of actual power these days than it ever has been in my lifetime. All my years growing up, seeing the government as an outside, malign force of extreme power was a really widely held position by the adults around me, but they were accustomed to getting lip service from their politicians about the issue but never any actual movement. And the issue is that all the adults around me were like the ones who were on the receiving end of forced busing and other similar liberal projects. They did not experience the Federal Government as a solution to a problem, but more like a God like Zeus at his worse - it had to be placated and otherwise avoided as much as possible.
Anyway, this is a long winded way of saying, if there is interest in wrecking government, then it's absolutely possible for public rhetoric that involves conspicuously lazy fact checking, repeated at very high volume and frequency, to be a feature, not a bug. Because anything that bolsters public trust in shared public discussion helps build trust in shared public institutions. And anything that pollutes the media environment and invites skepticism reduces that kind of shared public resource. This is part of why the high profile failures of Federal institutions during 2020 and Covid were much more damaging for pro-centralizing, pro-institution progressives; they need public trust for public authority to gain the power they want and to achieve their goals in a way that some other political strands simply don't. It's likewise why the public radicalization of so many professors and prestige journalists, spewing all their misinformed, polarized, clickbait political opinions on twitter for the last 15 years, was probably a mistake of historical proportions for the legitimacy of the American academy and legacy press - I'm supposed to implicitly trust well-credentialed voices in a way that I don't trust Alex Jones, but it turns out a lot of "smart" people sound about as epistemically rigorous as Alex Jones when you get them away from the very narrow slices of knowledge where they actually maintain rigor, and it turns out that a lot of them have very different values from me, and are deep in a Schmittian friend-foe distinction that they used to be able to hide much better, maybe even from themselves. Elon Musk being exactly as epistemically lazy as those other voices doesn't redeem them; instead, arguably it just reinforces my skepticism. There are serious asymmetries at play here about the consequences of public distrust. I'm thinking very specifically here, too, of the 2016 Adam Curtis documentary HyperNormalisation, by the way, which makes a very specific argument that established political forces under Putin in Russia had mastered a form of flooding the media environment with conflicting sensational garbage to get people to become very skeptical and disengage from political engagement more broadly.
As I say, I have no idea how Musk actually fits in in all of this. But it's a theory.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1mo ago
I get the impression that the election results have been deflating for the Democrats, not just because they lost, but because of who they lost.
Democrats REALLY liked the idea that, regardless of the vote totals, the voters who would make up the future (minorities and young people) were overwhelmingly on their side. And so losing young men, and having a severe dent put in Hispanic votes, has been really demoralizing and disorienting.
And it's specifically demoralizing in the context of taking radical action. "We have to take direct action because, even though old white Fox News voters have a slight voting edge, our base of marginalized voters, full of righteous fury, demand it - they can't wait any longer!" is a great motivator to direct action for a certain kind of progressive. "White middle aged upper middle class Karens are super pissed and are going to take to the streets after being repudiated by their sons", on the other hand, is... I don't know. Whatever it is, it's not at all the same kind of moral justification story.
All of which is to say, I think its finally sinking in that certain aspects of left-of-center radicalism are REALLY unpopular to a much bigger part of the voting base than had been previously accepted, and its unpopular with groups that left-of-center types don't feel as comfortable writing off. And yet those same people are still, also, uncomfortable with crossing the radicals in their coalition, too. So they are left in a bind about how to respond to the current moment.
Also, I think there is also a sense in those circles that their media / communication situation is much more damaged than they had realized. To make protesting valuable, you need favorable coverage that reaches the kinds of audiences you care about, and that requires a favorable media apparatus with serious reach. I get the sense that Democratic thought leaders, right now, have a sense that they've lost that, with legacy media having less and less reach and less and less trust, and with new social media like Tik-Tok and X and huge bro podcasts being less than sympathetic at this point. And worse still, the corners of social media that are more sympathetic to them, the corners that actually have audiences, are also often steeped in the Pro-Palestine / Anti-Israel stuff that massively fractures the Democratic coalition by driving Jews crazy.
Those are some thoughts, anyway.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1mo ago
This might be a little meta, bit here's a theory about what's happening with Trump et al, and why I'm dubious about reasoned debate even being particularly clarifying.
I remember, back when Tumblr grew popular, being struck by the rise of a specific rhetorical tone. It was a kind of outraged, indignant, wounded "How DARE you defend yourself while I was attacking you!" It was the cry bully tone. I found it deeply infuriating, and it leaked out into all sorts of social media spaces and even into more mainstream media. And in the background, all the various intersectional theories were key to justifying it, because those theories were the basis for the attackers feeling, really and truly, that they were just fighting back and calling out injustice - hence the wounded tone on encountering resistance. There was a strong, assumed element of moral grievance backing it all up. But if you weren't actually onboard with all the foundational intersectional theories, it was enormously off-putting.
And then, despite all that, it was incredibly effective for about 12 years, and cancel culture rose, and 2020 happened, and DEI happened, and Woke Hollywood and Wokeness in games happened, and insanity at universities happened (and is still deeply entrenched), and after a while it became clear that, at least in the short term, people doing the cry bullying stuff actually knew what they were doing, at least in some tacit sense... or at least the people who developed their foundational theories did. Because it turns out that most normal people want to engage with reason and discussion when faced with conflict, and most normal people are very conflict averse and very cowed by public claims of public morality and public offense. And so, it turns out that being extremely unreasonable, confrontational, and obnoxious can be surprisingly effective. It's an accurate read about a weakness in how normal people react to drama. Actually, even more so, in this particular case, it's also an especially accurate read of the dynamics between radical "marginalized" activists and normal well-credentialed liberals who want, more than anything in the world, to publicly show that they're not low status conservatives, at any cost.
The dynamics here remind me of why people buy guard dogs. At least as far as I understand, and this is obviously not from experience, it is (relatively) easy to threaten people with weapons like guns. You point the weapon at someone, you use loud and menacing tones with specific instructions to push people around and force them to do things so they can avoid being hurt. Threatening dogs, on the other hand, especially if there are a few of them, especially if they're bred to be guard dogs, is an entirely different matter. The dogs are, in some deep sense, unreasonable. They literally can't be reasoned with. So they function as facts about the world that have to be navigated around, rather than as potential debate partners. And I think that's the logic that unreasonable activists have latched on to. They understand the power of being willing to gun the engine, tear the steering wheel out of the car, and lean in hard to being totally unreasonable. And in the short term, that works great - until the circle firing squads start forming once you've run off everyone who wants to be reasonable, and until enough opponents recognize the trick and then coordinate to massively punish this illiberal defection.
Power in the business world works like this all the time, too, of course - higher management slashes jobs or unceremoniously kills even promising projects for all sorts of reasons, little people get randomly punished through no fault of their own, and being willing to be seen as dicks is actually a major part of the job, because, well, that's just sort of what business is, right? Such people might need to project a certain amount of public reasonableness, but internally, in the hierarchy, saying "no" doesn't need justification, mostly. That's what power is. You get to be the immovable fact of the world, and someone else has to compromise and reason their way around that fact and make the best of things.
Republicans and conservatives have had it hammered in to their heads, the last decade and a half, that preemptively being reasonable, when your opponents have been supine to deeply unreasonable, monstrous people who hate you and are taking active steps to harm you, is a losing game theoretic move. Being willing to be unreasonable and confrontational, to be seen as a dick, to be the immovable fact of the world that other people have to compromise and reason their way around, is a super power and the only sensible move, at least in certain contexts. And in large measure, this is because being that unreasonable forces other people, through their actions, to reveal the actual distance between their rhetoric, on the one hand, and their actual capabilities, values, and priorities, on the other. It makes other people make hard choices. And lurking in the background is something even deeper; it's the willingness to say, "When you were doing something ill-advised, and then I stepped in and said no, I'm taking responsibility for saying no, but I'm not taking responsibility for you getting things to this situation in the first place. The damage that is about to happen is on you." That dynamic has played out especially in relation to the immigration crisis.
Anyway, that's my meta read on the current Trumpian moves, and that kind of flipping over the tea table always generates collateral damage.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1mo ago
Here, let me try an alternate frame, the Male Feminist as Something Like a Victim:
Many male feminists are fish swimming in water and unable to see it; they've been raised to accept certain social frames as authoritative, and so they grant authority to those social frames. They want to be Good Boys in a simple kind of way. However, the frames are full of huge amounts of problems.
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No one is in charge. Sex positive feminists say very different things from sex negative feminists. Extremists get lots of air time, way out of proportion to reason. The abstractions used by any particular ideologue turn into a broken mess on contact with any particular woman. A lot of men want simple rules, vigorously followed, for their moral systems, and that is not an accurate description of the messy, decentralized tangle of messages they get if they grow up under what currently passes as feminist discourses. But it takes a certain amount of critical distance to be able to recognize all this.
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Women are people, and so on the ground, many of them don't know what they want, some don't like to take responsibility for their own actions, many are also confused and conflicted by the various messy social messages they think they're getting, and so on. One of the most useful observations I picked up from early online proto PUA stuff 20 years ago was that feminist activists don't really know what women want, they often think women are wrong for wanting what they want in a false consciousness kind of way, they don't actually speak for women even when they claim they do, and you get a lot farther paying to women as particular individuals and thinking about the turbulent mess in their own heads rather than whatever cultural marxist abstractions feminists are inclined to reach towards. BUT if you're a certain unreflective male feminist, all of this giant mess is opaque to you. It's easier to try to find an authoritative voice and latch on to it. But that doesn't actually survive contact with real people.
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Lots of strands of feminism are just flatly, nakedly wrong (and sometimes hateful, and often viciously incurious) about male sexuality, male emotions, male concerns, male compulsions and weaknesses, and so on. Many are wrong about basic things on fundamental biological levels, and they have deeply wrong-headed norms and advice that stem from that ignorance. This isn't a giant problem if you have some critical distance from those schools of thought and can ignore ideas that are fatally undermined by their anti-biology ignorance and biases. But if you're an unreflective Male Feminist, you're loading up programs about the world and yourself in your head that are actively harmful and at odds with reality to you and those around you.
A sex pest male feminist might well be a hypocrite or liar, I'm not trying to argue that isn't possible. I think there are lots of different varieties out there. But I have the strong suspicion that there are a lot of guys who have loaded up a bunch of simplistic feminist claims in their head as authoritative about morality and gender in the world, and then when the actual messy reality of their own physical biology shows up, and the intensity of their desires, and the shame of their compulsions and their weaknesses, they are entirely unequipped to navigate it successfully because the social tools they have been given are non-functional and not even addressing the correct basic facts.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
4mo ago
Here's a theory for you - blame cultural marxism....
... Okay, I'm intentionally being a bit obnoxious, obviously, but let me try to make a case here.
Here's one view: women have a lot of power, and women have always had a lot of power. In many cases, that power has looked somewhat different than the power that men have wielded. That's fine and normal. And in a healthy, functional society, gender roles and ideals and responsibilities evolve that take the natural human tendencies of both men and women into account and help temper reliably occurring problems in both men and women to keep their worst impulses in check and help them wield their various kinds of power responsibly, stably and pro-socially. All of this is the ideal, anyway.
But then, enter enlightenment ideals about legibility, equality, and combine them with post-enlightenment ideals about oppressor-oppressed dynamics. Now, the fact that lots of ways women wield power is illegible means it is invisible in political discussions. And an insistence on a sort of a priori equality between men and women means that even accepting that men and women might wield power in different ways is seen a suspect, like it's just a justification for women not having more legible power. And finally, an insistence on seeing things through an oppressor-oppressed binary means that even the basic idea that women might routinely and predictably behave in ways that hurt people, and those ways of being might need to be tempered, is no longer basic wisdom, but rather just one more way to keep women down.
That combination of world views arguably has a tendency of infantilizing women and stripping them of any real agency and responsibility, which over in reality ends up being a giant problem if they actually DO have a bunch of agency and power that actually needs to be kept in check sometimes for the good of broader society.
Anyway, that's one theory, anyway... something like that.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
5mo ago
There's something at the core of this all, from progressives, that I fundamentally have a hard time wrapping my head around.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s in the South in a conservative religious family in a conservative community. The view of the Supreme Court was overwhelmingly that it had behaved as an unelected, anti-democratic, civilization wrecking dictatorship for half a century. If you valued freedom of religion and freedom of association in a more traditional, de Tocqueville-ian sense (with a strong emphasis on the ability of people to form and police their own communities with their own values and their own norms and their own boundaries), the Supreme Court had behaved as a wrecking ball. And particularly if you were sensitive, as most smarter conservatives I knew were, to the ubiquity of second order effects in society, the Supreme Court came across constantly as a body that was totally indifferent to, and totally insulated from, the disastrous second order effects of its dictates and airy social engineering.
BUT... well, Reagan won in a landslide, and the country had turned back to the right, and with that level of political domination, at some point the Supreme Court was going to have to reflect that political reality... or so we thought. And besides, conservatives value authority and institutions and fear chaos. There's a very deep awareness of Chesterton's Fence on a gut level. So despite those wide spread, deeply held beliefs about the Supreme Court, we just marched ahead, accepted their rulings, and tried to steer our lives around the damage they inflicted. (Also, the federal government had made it clear earlier that they would send in Federal troops from time to time to enforce Supreme Court rulings at gun point, and most people were ready just to move on with their lives)
But of course, over time, all the pipeline issues about the judiciary did become more apparent - the political domination of Reagan conservatives really SHOULD have resulted in a much more conservative judiciary than actually resulted, with much, MUCH more radically conservative rulings on all sorts of things like abortion and affirmative action and disparate impact back in the 80s and early 90s, if you were going by the feelings of voters at the time. But it took too long for conservatives to recognize the problems about where you get those judges from, and by that point, the country had moved on... or so it seemed until Mitch McConnell played the hardest of hard ball, fate intervened, and former Democrat Donald Trump got 3 supreme court picks after not winning the popular vote.
Anyway, that's my baseline for how people I grew up around viewed the Supreme Court.
And so when I see enraged public progressives and fellow travelers like David French railing against the current Supreme Court and its legitimacy, the thing I keep thinking is, the progressives I'm thinking of have built their ENTIRE moral universe around other citizens respecting all sorts of previous (as their opponents see it) destructive Supreme Court rulings from roughly the 1940s to the 2010s. Much of their moral progress stories require other citizens to simply bow down and accept and actively prop up those other rulings. They gain from the legitimacy of the Supreme Court in a way that the traditionalists I grew up around absolutely don't. Given that, it's very difficult for me to imagine a future where people upset by the current Supreme Court manage to publicly delegitimize it and mess with it AND also their opponents still accept the legitimacy of previous generations rulings. And if I'm right about that, it seems like progressives have vastly more to lose by having a much more weakened Supreme Court.
I've noted before that I often get a "born on third, thought they hit a triple" vibe from progressives when it comes to the institutions they've inherited, and their overwhelming sense that it's just natural for different institutions to lean their way - and the Supreme Court is absolutely a place where I think that is true.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
6mo ago
As a data point, there's a giant astrology / witchy section of books very close to the register at my local Barnes and Noble (I live in a 65% Biden voting area in a purple metro in a purple state, for what that's worth... very Karen territory). So at the very least, there are marketers who believe that there is an audience there, and it's the trendy kind of audience that you try to extract money from to keep your ailing business afloat.
That entire store at this point gives off serious anti-straight-male vibes, because of the books they stock and foreground, really. Which I suspect is more a reflection on the current publishing industry and the audience that still goes into book stores like that to buy books than anything particular about B&N. But as someone who reads a huge amount and loves books and bookstores (but, well, libgen, so hey, I concede my role as part of the problem), it is seriously depressing to be there.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
6mo ago
What we see isn’t what is, and how we’re seen isn’t who we are.
"we" "we" "we"....
We?
I think there's a very, very strong case to be made that the birth of the entire New Deal state and its subsequent massive growth (along with all its cousin forms of government in the mid 20th century, be it social democracy or communism or fascism or what have you) relied intensely on real time, overwhelming broadcast media. No radio+national periodicals+Hollywood movies+(later)broadcast tv -> no New Deal state. And more particularly, no polity that could even make sense to the New Deal state in the first place. And then throw in ever more centralized public schooling and the role of ever more dominant national university systems in finishing off the process of population... "massaging", let's say. Add in the draft and military service, too.
There's your "we". It has always been a technologically created Frankenstein monster... which, to be honest, is kind of the Western Enlightenment thing anyway. Can't have the Protestant reformation and the 30 years war without the printing press.
One deep problem "we" face right now, I think, is that current year American liberals in positions of social authority often very much have, I think, a "born on third, thought they hit a triple" sense of recent history, the 20th century, and the actual contours of sense making institutions in America in the 20th century. The stories of, say, the Red Scare in the 50s are still a memory they keep alive, but the similar role of the New Deal state in snuffing out conservative / traditionalist / reactionary broadcast media in the United States from the 30s until the 80's is largely unknown to them, and thus it seems like just a natural state of affairs, of them "being on the right side of history". So things like J Edgar Hoover's and FDRs actions against American "isolationists" - like here - or JFK's relationship to right wing radio - like here - are stories that are unfamiliar. Thus you end up with oblivious claims like, "Fox News and Rush Limbaugh were the aberration after normalcy, brought into being by the dastardly end of the Fairness Doctrine".
I think there's a similar undercurrent to the frustration with social media from people who desperately want to go back to the broadcast news environment I remember from the early 1980s as a kid. I recognize where it's coming from. And I know exactly why my conservative family abandoned its catechizing, scolding, and noxious (to them) values the moment they had the opportunity to have any other options for news, too.
I don't even disagree, at some object level, with all sorts of critiques about social media, their business models, and pervasive phones more broadly.
But we are living through a broad collapse of shared authority. Because they have been the unquestioned and unquestioning inheritors of a lot of that shared authority, this experience is apparently especially shocking to a lot of American liberals. Social media and new communication technologies certainly play a role in that process. But, at least to me, it seems like that collapse is a much bigger story, with a lot more moving parts, than just social media, and it's not so clear which direction casual arrows point.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
6mo ago
Everybody gets what they want here: liberals get the fact-based learning about sex and contraception and conservatives get the abstinence-only perspective.
Let me try to make the case that this isn't really getting to the heart of the matter and why these issues are difficult.
One, imagine that schools had a strictly materialist class about the proper ways to season and cook your dead pets and dead relatives to eat them, in times of war or famine or plane crashes in the Andes or even just economic depression. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the proper ways to use sex workers or to even perform as one yourself in a healthy way, if you happen to come from a moral culture that sees that as being reasonable. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the proper care and upkeep of your slaves to ensure they had good diet and exercise to perform their slaving duties effectively. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the most efficient way to operate a factory farm. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the healthiest ways to engage in sexual gratification with minors. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the current state of human biodiversity in different populations, and the appropriate ways to take advantage of those biological facts in constructing a functional society.
In each case, these classes would be controversial, regardless of whether the material was actually accurate and useful, because the move to a strictly materialist frame is already putting the activity in question into a category that some people would intensely disagree about in a metaphysical way. And just so with sex ed. Traditionalists disagreeing with progressives about abortion is downstream from traditionalists disagreeing with progressives about what sex IS, in some profound existential / spiritual sense, and, for that matter, what humans and families and mortality all are... just as in my hypothetical, the other classes would be offensive because they make assumptions about what a dead relative is, what so called "sex work" is (which is the entire point of the rebranding), what slavery is, and so on.
And two, the actual history of the 20th century and progressives championing of Sex Ed and abortion and planned parenthood and contraception and all the rest has had a significant undercurrent of them trying (from what they see as a civically responsible perspective) to get a bunch of other demographics to get their fertility rates under control... which has, of course, totally worked. It absolutely hasn't been just been some disinterested attempt to share some really interesting facts that they learned. You really don't have to read around much in history to see that this is true. I'm not even going to argue the morality or wisdom of this here; I'm just saying there is a history here. I'm also not saying that many people haven't also become convinced of the moral neutrality of a great deal of sexual stuff, or a bunch of the individual rights aspects of sexual liberation or whatever, either. But wealthy, civically-minded people from specific backgrounds and specific worldviews have absolutely used giant amounts of money to push this stuff to try to shape demographics. And because of that history, there's no way to talk about "Hey, so, what about Sex Ed?" without it raising a bunch of controversy, especially with groups that have been on the receiving end of this all. It already absolutely hasn't been used in a neutral way.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
6mo ago
It seems to me that some people, basically, see obvious "used car salesman" lies as insults, personal ones. "You think I'm gonna believe that??? You think that's earning my vote??? The nerve..." So they get incensed. But lawyer lies, on the other hand, they get a nod when they get noticed. "Ok, good one, you even managed to technically say the truth."
Well, part of my argument (or, well, my suspicion, anyway) was that there was something like a class or place-in-the-hierarchy aspect to how different groups of people respond to the used-car-salesman-style lie vs the lawyer-style lie... and further, that that place-in-the-hierarchy aspect was potentially dangerous or destabilizing for the broader system, long term, and even further, elite groups have a lot of short-term incentives not to see the fact that it was potentially dangerous and destabilizing, because the social validity of their forms of lying (and only their forms) props up their place in the hierarchy.
Lawyers don't get offended if they see other lawyers absolutely shading and abusing the truth well, because they have internalized a value system that sees that as at least plausibly virtuous behavior. Like, we live in an adversarial system where everyone deserves representation, and therefore every lawyer, MORALLY, should be doing everything possible inside the bounds of the law to advocate for their clients - and this is fine, because other parties ought to have their own lawyers advocating similarly for them. And further, they see those moves as just the inevitable, legitimate moves given our set of incentives and institutions. It's like expert game fans watching a good speed runner - yes, reprogramming Mario 64 in real time on the controller via a buffer overflow glitch arguably violates the spirit of the game design of Mario 64 and makes for a lousy show, but wow is that being good at the actual, existing Mario 64! That's what being a good speed runner looks like! And so it is with being a good lawyer - this is certainly my experience with knowing a few lawyers, anyway. Don't hate the player, adjust the game (eventually).
Meanwhile, what do you call a hundred lawyers on the bottom of the ocean? A good start! Har har! The reality is, lawyer jokes don't come from nowhere.
Similarly, good politicians who actually know things about political rhetoric (and diplomacy for that matter) have a moral story about how, to knit together a giant, disparate coalition of low information voters and special interest activists who all have tons of unspoken assumptions and values that clash, you have to rely on certain kinds of misleading and ambiguous abstractions and narratives to pull people together for the greater good, even if it leaves individuals with highly incorrect impressions of what you say and mean and will do. It's not lying in some profane sense; rather, it's all strictly utilitarian, with those technically-just-inside-the-bounds-of-law statements being primarily viewed entirely by what effect they have in the broader social world. Plato named the Noble Lie more than 2000 years ago, and despite technological changes since, that core idea remains true and unavoidable.
Meanwhile, how do you know that a politician is lying? Their lips are moving! Har Har! Once again, the reality is, politician stereotypes don't come from nowhere.
Part of why I, personally, have found the replication crisis so jarring of my own worldview (after following it pretty closely) is that I had, previously, assumed that anybody doing something with "science" in its name had, as an ultimate value, pursuit of "disinterested, objective, universal truth" in exactly the way that politicians and lawyers didn't. That faith and trust in "science" was a huge motivator in pulling me out of the more conservative religious background I grew up in. So it's been extremely disruptive to me (on a personal, emotional level) to realize that many of the people in those fields are much closer to the politicians and lawyers than I had been led to believe and, frankly, had wanted to believe. And, similarly, I think such people themselves overwhelmingly have their own moral stories about why what they're doing is, ultimately, virtuous - power poses could help women gain equality, and microaggression research is on the right side of history, so finnicky details about study design and p-hacking and the garden of forking paths (or whatever the details were) are secondary to the greater moral purpose, and it's more important that we not undermine social solidarity in addressing those vital moral issues than that we get every single detail right about how things actually work....
And by the way, have you seen the absolutely cratering of trust in the academy that happened over the last decade? It didn't come from nowhere, either.
I think this is the nub of it. A used car salesman lying, in its ugliest form, is very low status, because its so nakedly venal. "I want money, and I don't mind hurting strangers to get it, because if I lie to you and you believe it, you are a sucker and that's proof you deserve to be taken advantage of." But because it's so venal, and often so crass, I think it's easy for normal people to understand. They can mostly trust their instincts and have their guards up. NOBODY will justify the lying of a used car salesman. And by the way, have you heard about Trump university and Trump steaks?
But the moral cases I just made for what lawyers and politicians and academics do (and I say this as someone who has a few lawyers and many academics in my social circles) are not just much easier to make, they're actually kind of foundational to our entire system. It's what justifies people's behavior and recognition of social power. And status differences play a huge role in it all of this. And a lot of normal people, I think, understand this power difference on a gut level, even if they are unclear on the details and know that they can't actually understand or refute (or even always recognize) the styles of truth abusing being used on them.
In a way, it reminds me a lot of Scott Alexander's essay on getting Eulered, or Paul Graham's old essay that includes the idea of the Blub Paradox. Both essays emphasize the problems of a person encountering arguments or techniques that they can't evaluate because the arguments rely on knowledge or concepts that they can't understand, and yet they are forced to make weighty choices in the face of those arguments... and they recognize the larger, contested social context those arguments or techniques are in, too, and that there are certain zero sum aspects underlying everything.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
7mo ago
I find this all so fascinating and frustrating.
Back in the 2016 election, I remember being struck by the fact that Trump lies like a used car salesman, and most other politicians lie the way that lawyers lie (which is to say, they know exactly how to shade and color and selectively edit and omit what they say so they can't be held legally accountable for it while still absolutely misleading different audiences rhetorically) And at the time, I remember noting that that distinction mattered a great deal to the existing ruling class, because it accounts for much of their skillset, but I was pretty sure that it was not a distinction that lots of normies were so concerned with - or that they might even find lawyer-style lying much more objectionable than used car salesman lying, which they intuitively understand much better.
I guess this gets kind of philosophical or something about the nature of truth and lying, but I find most of Trump's lying so transparent and bullshitty and unimportant that it's hard to even read them as lies, exactly. I remember all the breathless gasping by the press about Trump inflating his inauguration crowd sizes, and... seriously? Who could possibly care? That kind of thing is baked into the cake when listening to someone like Trump. It's like being shocked that Steve Jobs would say the new iphone was the most amazing phone ever, even though he didn't run double blind studies. Trump exaggerates like crazy and plays very fast and loose with details in way that generally strikes me as pretty lazy and bigmouthed, but it's all so brazen and in your face. Everyone knows people like him. It's not hard to calibrate your reaction as an audience and still know how to get the gist of what he's saying (even if I find that all pretty exhausting).
Meanwhile, if I think about my own experience as a voter, I personally experienced Obama as a VASTLY bigger liar than Trump could ever hope to be. And that's because Obama, and his campaign, and the press, were able to shape a public narrative about himself and his administration, leading into the 2008 election, that ended up being massively at odds with how radical and divisive his administration ended up being behind the scenes. But he lied like a cross between a lawyer and an author (which is what he is, so, you know, this shouldn't have been news). Now, legally, it may well be that if you pored over everything Obama said in public in 2008, none of it would be technically a lie in a court of law. And that would be the point, right? Maybe it was my own fault for treating him like a blank slate and projecting what I wanted to believe onto what he said (which he and his campaign aggressively aided and abetted). And again, that would be the point, right? Those can be useful skills to win an election. But I know how I feel about it all now, for whatever that's worth.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
11mo ago
It is different from Tennessee as there isn’t a large black population
The Knoxville Metro Area is (from a bit of googling) only 5% black, Nashville and Chattanooga are about 15% black, whereas Memphis is 47% black. There is a distinct west-to-east gradient across Tennessee where as you go east, the state gets a lot more Appalachian and a lot less black, especially in Knoxville butting up against the Smoky Mountains.
I've lived in both Knoxville and then other deep South parts of America, and at least in my experience, Knoxville was way less invested in typical Southern cultural topics (antebellum South + Civil War), and much more culturally invested in Bluegrass, Davy Crocket, Daniel Boone, and the early settling of the frontier. And if memory serves, eastern Tennessee almost went the way of West Virginia during the Civil War, and for similar reasons.
Pittsburgh and eastern TN have significant differences, of course, but I think there are distinct similarities.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
11mo ago
One of the things I find really interesting about Pittsburgh, relative to its Rust Belt neighbor cities, is just how much less black it is.
If you compare it to Cleveland or Detroit or Milwaukee or Chicago, it's just a much less black city. I had read before that that's because its population boom happened relatively early compared to neighboring cities, and so that boom overlapped less with the Great Migration from the South, but I'm not sure about that.
And because it's barely had any in-migration for the last half a century, it also has a tiny Hispanic population, too. So you end up with a city that is, by national standards, really quite old, and really quite white (although the boundaries of older white ethnics from previous immigration waves are still somewhat visible if you look for them).
In a way, it's kind of a natural experiments of sorts, about the long term effects of different immigration histories. My impression of Pittsburgh is that, as the Rust Belt declined and deindustrialization continued, instead of partially decaying into a giant ghetto like a lot of other Rust Belt cities, it more just kind of aged in place (with a ton of younger workers leaving) and went into a partial hibernation state... which proved to be a giant boon with the rise of New Urbanism, because it meant there were lots of stable, originally working class, walkable, mostly functional neighborhoods with business districts that could slowly transition to appealing to a younger demographic. All this is helped by being a 4 hour drive to D.C. and a 6 1/2 hours drive to New York - I've particularly met a ton of D.C. expats in Pittsburgh who moved because they wanted to have kids and couldn't make the economic math work in D.C.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
11mo ago
One of the most disheartening things about reading more deeply about the public politics of the past is you come to realize that, as often as not, people don't really win arguments (which are often just rhetoric anyway) so much as manage to marginalize their opposition to where no one can hear their arguments anymore. Facts might well play a role in that, but they're certainly far from determinative.
A while ago, probably in some dissident right space, I saw someone sharing the old, original conservative arguments against social security and other government provided pension programs, the arguments that were being offered against them before those programs were implemented. And the main argument I saw was something like "There are natural, organic ties between and across generations in families (illegible ties, you might say) that are crucial to nurture for the health of broader society, and having the government intervene in PROMISING to support the elderly is likely to do grave damage to the longer term building of those ties". I remember being struck at the time that I'd never seen the argument, nor had I seen anyone refute the concern. Those holding those concerns just lost and were marginalized because giving destitute elderly people in the 30s free money was, in the immediate term, a huge relief of visible suffering and was thus understandably hugely popular, politically. Those old discussions keep coming to mind, for me, every time I read these stories about cratering birth rates.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
11mo ago
My googling just now suggests that mental health services in America cost something like 200 to 300 billion dollars a year. You can decide if that sounds like a lot or not, I suppose.
Anyway, I imagine it's a combination of things. I'm going to be totally anecdotal here and make some guesses based on women in my life who seem heavily steeped in this culture, so take it with a massive grain of salt.
On the one hand, you have celebrities like Dr. Phil (net worth $460 million) who genuinely do seem to make a lot of money off of their national brands. Same thing, I suspect, with high profile therapy-oriented book authors who cycle through media targeting women. More than just the money they make, though, they soak up a huge amount of attention while cementing the public frame that everyone could and should use therapy, no different from going to a doctor, and that therapy works and can help anyone. Any time I find myself at a doctors office waiting room in the middle of the day with women's day time tv on, I'm constantly caught off guard by how utterly pervasive the therapy language is in the normal conversations of the (if I'm being mean) clucking hens on those shows. It's the water the fish are swimming in, to mix animal metaphors. This space seems to have a lot of really high profile shysters, to my eyes - it reminds me a lot of tele-evangelists for a slightly different subculture.
And on the other hand, there is the properly credentialed world of normal, local therapists out there who, I suspect, mostly believe in what they're doing but are also aware of how hard and fuzzy working with people is, aren't making huge bank, and are trying to do their best... not that different from, say, teachers. I actually had plenty of experience with such counseling in my teen years, as a matter of fact. And my impression is not that such people are bad people particularly - but like anyone, I think they kind of have to believe that what they do is generally helpful and a helpful part of a solution to other people's problems, even though often times people don't seem to get any better (but then, people really are enormously complicated, and change is hard, and people need to want to change, and you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink, and very often it is the social context of someone that is holding them back, and...) In all of this, they are just like the people I know in high frequency trading who kind of have to believe that by increasing liquidity in the system, they really making finance more efficient for everyone, and just like the higher up I know at Raytheon who kind of has to believe that national defense is obviously important and a net good and Raytheon is itself a net good in that space, and just like the literal DEI trainer I know (mom of my son's friend) who is a nice person who kind of has to believe that she's making the world a better place by running DEI workshops at our local bank. And all of them have mortgages that kind of depend on them believing that what they do is worth doing, even though it can be hard to tell when the world is so complicated, so they can keep their own lives afloat. But all of that eventually adds up to real money, in aggregate.
And yet, as I say, the women I know who seem most drawn to therapy culture and counseling seem... not great. Maybe they would be even worse if that was not a part of their life; there's literally no way I could know that. But I really, really do wonder.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
11mo ago
I've been wondering for a while now if this (generally - I'm not talking about your wife specifically) isn't an underappreciated disaster of the transition from a broad-based traditional Christian culture to a Oprah / Doctor Phil Therapy culture.
I know I've seen stats suggesting that it has long been the case that women are much more reliable church goers than men. I've likewise seen the claim that normie women seem more drawn to recourse to external "shared" social authority than most normie (non-alpha) men, broadly speaking, too, which goes hand-in-hand with that. Trotting out some folk evo psych, maybe it's all a consequence of their greater general social awareness, verbal communication skills, agreeableness, and neuroticism, as well as physical smallness and the general ambient threat of unchecked male risk taking and male libido and male strength? It's not hard to concoct just so stories about why you might expect exactly these dynamics to emerge, just based on biology.
I have to say, too, as a parent of elementary age kids of both sexes, watching their small social groups emerge and evolve, all the stereotypes are largely true. My oldest daughter, who is in 5th grade, is already having to navigate mean girl social power emerging, with a keen sense of "what is normal" and "what is weird" seemingly drawn from the ether and lots of social policing and exclusion. There's no shortage of girls in my other daughter's kindergarten class (including her, I am not happy to say) who have their "tattle to authority at the slightest imagined infraction" knob turned up to 11... and this emerges despite no shortage of unsupportive feedback about the behavior. The tattling urge is just real, overpowering, and pervasive. Meanwhile, my third grade son and his friends are almost literally small apes with almost no social awareness at all... and again, this despite no shortage of exasperated feedback. They wouldn't even think to tattle as a result of any of their messy interactions.
Anyway, if you go along with any of that, it's not hard to see how the Christian concepts of "faith" and a general "Let go, let God" orientation have a very specific role in easing the demons that beset anxious women who are prone to relitigating all the things that inflame their worst inner voices. One general read of the tradition might say, "There is an authority outside yourself, it can and must be infinitely trusted, it is the root of all reality, it is all benevolent and all knowing, you are a child of God and of infinite worth, you are not wise enough to stand in judgement of anyone or even yourself and humility and hope and forgiveness are thus commandments, despair and gossip are sins, trust God and do your best and turn to faith to come to internalize that all this suffering and anxiety and confusion and difficulty has meaning and has a point and will be bearable." The "Gospel" is literally the "Good News", right?
(I'm not well-versed enough in other traditions to make similar comparisons for other religions or cultures. And of course this is just one read of the tradition. I'm just interested in comparing a certain read of Christianity vs Modern American Therapy culture here)
I'm not saying "Christianity is folk CBT!" But it's not hard to see that at least one reading of the tradition seems very well oriented towards dampening those horrible, anxious, destructive inner voices in a great many women.
The women I know who are totally saturated in therapy culture seem to be marinating constantly in hyper-negative re-litigations of all the particular events in their lives, meanwhile, while loudly evangelizing it as a universal solution to everyone else's problems somehow. And it's clear that therapy culture has replaced what would have been a religious faith and practice previously, even for nominally religious people. And to top it all of, it's all straight up scientism - totally empirically unmoored and indifferently so, the worst kind of woo that the replication crisis (or hell, even Karl Popper in his original engagement with the relationship between Freud and Science) should have swept away long ago. It's all "The Music Man" style confidence games. It's treated with a very specific kind of "authority", and a lot of cash is being made, but the grounding of that authority is, it seems to me, entirely on a foundation of sand. Sticking with my biblical references, as Christ said and then William James reiterated, "By Your Fruits Shall Ye Know Them". And my subjective opinion of therapy culture is that the people most vocally invested in it seem like giant flash red warning signs about it.
I don't intend to evangelize Christianity here, by the way - rather, this is just one more comment in the genre of "I did the New Atheist thing and now I have deep reservations about how much baby got thrown out with the bathwater". Chesterton's Fence et cetera.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1yr ago
Here's a thought experiment.
Imagine a world where communities from all over choose to send their best and brightest to global centers of higher learning, where they would get exposure to the most recent and best medical treatments, and physics knowledge, and mathematical discoveries, and engineering techniques. And then they would return back to their local communities, and use that knowledge to improve the lives of the people in their home communities, while also finding ways to integrate that knowledge with their existing values and traditions and all the various particularities that make up a specific, rooted real community with its own memories and allegiances.
And then imagine that those centers of higher learning were very careful to balance how many learners from different communities there were, to make sure that all these different communities got access to that knowledge and were then able to integrate it locally in their own particular way.
Would that be a bad, or facial objectionable world?
You might think I'm trying to make something like a pro-affirmative action case here, but at least for the current world we live in, I see this thought experiment as exactly the opposite. IF different groups maintained healthy boundaries around their own communities, and there was no public rhetoric about particular communities having any moral culpability for the outcomes of other groups (because having healthy boundaries means rejecting appeals to some shared, universalist morality can not exist under meaningful pluralism), THEN different groups having representatives who came to centers of higher learning (however their groups chose those representatives) to bring that knowledge and expertise back to their own communities would kind of be their own business, or so it seems to me. And I think (assuming you were not offended by the existence of groups and group cohesion in the first place) most people could see the resulting world being better off for the entire process. I can appreciate, say, some local Nigerian community wanting access to knowledge about medical instrument sterilization without needing to trot out an SAT to see if they deserve that knowledge.
Now, obviously, what I'm describing is a theoretical story about how Universities could function, but it is not at all how they actually function. What I hope this thought experiment suggests is that you really need universities extracting talented people from the provinces, socially re-engineering them to identify with and then merge into the global ruling class and have contempt for the values and traditions of their home cultures, and then segregating them into communities of the winners who have massive powers over the losers back home, to arrive at a point where race (or group) based affirmative action is going to generate massive amounts of totally predictable moral agitation, especially in a democracy. Or at least that's my own instinct.
Which is to say, from this perspective, affirmative action is a red herring and rhetorical distraction. The real problem is the old progressive impulse towards erasing local distinctions, massively centralizing power, flattening all differences and allegiances in the name of "universalism", and going all in on social engineering. The line between "integration" and "cultural genocide" is, it seems to me, a very who/whom distinction.
And if I had to hazard a guess, I suspect there's no shortage of black Americans who would be sympathetic to the argument here... but of course, that has never been the point.
I have a complicated reaction to this line of argument, I think.
The other day, when talking about the future of the Department of Education, I made a general comparison to how Latvians in what is now Latvia would or should have felt in 1984 if an ethnic Russian were defending the efficiency or professionalism of the central Soviet bureaucracy as it pertained to overseeing education throughout the Soviet Union. And my point then was that the fundamental split was who / whom, and no amount of arguing from the ethnic Russian would bridge that. But the devil is... the "What have the Romans ever done for us" bit in the Life of Brian has a lot of wisdom in it. That was the Soviet bureaucracy. And that is the Cathedral as well. And yet, also, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." And here we are.
To me, it seems like the fundamental problem is that American liberals want there to be "shared" central institutions and "shared" central media voices with "shared" trust and "shared" authority that are somehow perceived as "democratically legitimate", but they also think it's the most natural thing in the world for those "shared" institutions to have their particularist values and their particularist worldviews and be populated by their people and for them to do the gatekeeping. It's totally understandable that they should feel that way, given the actual reality of American since the New Deal, of course. And yet, any argument that's not grappling with that central tension here is, fundamentally, just trying to paper over the actual chasm. For all of these things, they're the Soviet party member in 1984 trying to insist that the ethnic Latvian is being misled by misinformation and propaganda from capitalist roaders by not accepting the authority and value of the central Soviet bureaucracy.
I can't remember if it was Moldbug where I first saw this observation, but I once came across the observation that almost every major power in the world covers, in their authoritative institutions, a lot of the same material in the hard sciences and engineering and basic medicine, and they get a lot of legitimacy by mastering and employing that materially-based knowledge and improving the lot of their citizens - and then they smuggle in a bunch of not-science in the same institutions but call it science to piggyback off that authority, and they spread the legitimating ideology of the hierarchy in this state or empire... anyway, once I saw that observation, I can't not see it everywhere. And that move seems fundamental to this specific discussion, especially given the role that trans (and LGBTQ2IA+ more broadly) has played in exactly this kind of context.
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