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I'm not sure I have a whole lot to say here beyond, "TracingWoodgrains is just right."
He's just right! There's no way to justify a norm like "never criticise bad things if my side is responsible". That's unironically the sort of logic that gets you the Great Leap Forward, where lower-ranking officials are afraid to report anything that goes against the narrative preferred by the higher-ups, and the result is always disastrous.
Set aside what you think about him as a person. On the specific issue here, he is just unambiguously correct.
The fact that people whose brains have been eaten by partisanship and culture war are unable to see that, whether that be lefties who have to deny and distract and minimise the scandal because it's going to be a win for the right, or whether it be righties who cannot possibly grant that a hated outsider did a better job of identifying and advocating for an issue that should have been an easy win for them, is really their own problem.
TracingWoodgrains is right.
Everything else is distraction.
Exactly. I wouldn't hire him to babysit but he's literally correct about his expose. He doesn't have to be an exemplary person(and as far as I know he's not). He has to be right about this specific issue.
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He's more correct than the /r/atc people, sure, but he spun the original FAA article to be quite kind towards the perpetrators.
Since then he's backed off, I like to think in part due to the points I made, and has even directly criticized the leadership involved in that scandal, so at this point I have no complaints with his treatment of the issue. But it still took too long to get there.
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No.
The point is that he lies, and will make up information, and physical artefacts, to drive the story he wants to tell.
He has done this once. Has he done it again? I don't know. But I have to take everything he says through that lens, wether the story benefits 'my side' or not. There is no trust, no faith there - he can put on the Centrist or Conservative mask as much as he wants, but I know it's a mask, I know that he's lied before, and there is no way I can celebrate or advocate for the stories he writes because there is now a non-zero chance he's lying about something explicitly to look good for whatever side he's wearing as a skin suit.
Personally, I'd prefer that he'd give up the 'both sides' grift and just write whatever benefits his side and philosophy, whatever that may be.
Like I said, I'm not interested in making this a referendum on his character. You don't have to accept anything he says on any other subject. That's your own lookout. What I'm saying is that in a context where so many responses to TW's FAA reporting and advocacy are attempts to deflect, to either minimise the issue or to ad hominem the man himself, it is worth the firm reminder that what he has said about the FAA's hiring procedures is true.
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Hoaxes are fine, in my opinion, making up evidence to set them up can also be fine. To the extent he was dishonest, it was in the presentation, not the making things depertament. He said LOTT accepted a claim without due diligence, and then proceeded to describe how much work he had to put to get past the due diligence, but since this was about a hated outgroup figure, a decent chunk of his audience bought the framing.
I'd say the lesson is you can't trust his conclusions, not that he'll hide or make up evidence.
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I don't know who had their brain eaten by culture war if you think that people who don't want to sing praises of your friend must be distracting from the issue.
How did he do a better job identifying and advocating for the issue? He did a better job reporting on that particular story, but when it comes to the issue itself, how has he done a better job identifying it than anyone from James Lindsay through Lomez to the seven zillion witches posting here? How has he done a better job advocating for it, than Chris Rufo? Last I checked he was advocating that people vote for the candidate that would ensure more of this would keep happening.
It was Steve Sailer who brought it to the attention of the online right with his piece predating Trace's by a month, with basically the same information content.
Trace even confirmed that he was clued into it by Sailer.
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Oh, that's hilarious.
Did we just confirm Sailer is actually a furry?
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As I said, it doesn't matter whether you like him or not. Nor do I care whether or not you praise him. The merits of TW as an individual are beside the point. The point is the issue itself.
I submit that TW is right about the issue, and that he has done a better job of bringing this particular issue to the public attention than anybody on the Motte, much less James Lindsay or Chris Rufo. Rufo has probably been more effective as an anti-woke activist in general, but on the FAA hirings scandal specifically - movement there is because of TW. He notes this himself.
And yes, he voted for Harris. He voted for Harris while publicly and passionately expressing his dissatisfaction with her, and after the election, he went on to continue to explain his problems with her, and what he thinks the Democrats ought to do, which means that I think this portrayal of him as some kind of bootlicking Democrat partisan is absurd. He made a judgement that, as much as he disliked Harris, he found her on balance the less-bad candidate that Donald Trump. If you want to blame him for literally everying that Harris or her political faction ever advocated for, then by the same logic we must blame every Trump voter for literally everything that Trump or his political faction ever advocated for. That is a lunatic standard to hold any voter to.
And even so, it is irrelevant, because whatever you think of TW's choice in the 2024 election, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the FAA hiring scandal or his activism thereabouts.
On the issue - he is right. You don't have to praise him. You don't have to like him. But he is right about the FAA.
This is like the argument that Microsoft is good because it brought computers to the people. Microsoft was the one who did that because Microsoft's own actions made there be no room for anyone else to do so.
It's very difficult for anyone not on the left to bring an issue to public attention, because of the actions of the left. So yes, it's true that he did, but this doesn't mean much.
Except he isn't "the left", he's one guy, and he's not responsible for it being "very difficult for anyone not on the left to bring an issue to public attention".
It's still his allies. And even if that doesn't count for anything, it's still that he did it because of external forces that made it easier for people like him.
I last heard this argument deployed to explain why white men didn't earn their accomplishments. I really didn't expect to see it deployed to explain why it doesn't count that TW spoke out against a bad thing.
If only Hlynka were here to see this.
It depends on how directly the second group is affected by the first group's actions, and how directly the members of the first group who accomplished things are associated with the members who did the oppression. If a group of whites suddenly oppressed all the nonwhites and their white friends all made great accomplishments within the next five year period, then yes, that may be a good point. But the lasting effect of oppression that happened a long time ago doesn't count.
I'd also question whether it's true anyway. The US and Europe are predominantly white, especially in historic time periods, so even if there was no oppression at all, most accomplishments would be by whites just by size of population. And when those countries oppressed outsiders, the outsiders generally were in primitive cultures that couldn't accomplish much regardless of whether they were oppressed.
Also, since Jews were oppressed for much of history, you can't use this to say that Jews didn't earn their accomplishments. Even over time periods where Jews weren't oppressed, you'd have to find out how many extra accomplishments the Jews had compared to non-Jews per capita, and exempt those too, since any such excess was unrelated to oppression.
This also raises the question of exactly what you mean by "doesn't count". It counts as TW doing a good thing. But it doesn't count if what you're praising him for explicitly depends on the size of his audience, such as "successfully promoted it when the right-wingers who first noticed it couldn't". (Which is another difference between this and the white people case.)
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Oh, ok. I thought when you said "the issue", you meant anti-wokeness (or anti-DEI-in-particular), not just the FAA thing. Yeah good for him, he noticed it when others didn't. Why is that supposed to be such a big deal?
EDIT: according to @ahobata, he wasn't even the first to report on this, and one the Internet's infamous noticers beat him to it by a month. So can you explain to me, why is this case supposed to be so embarrassing to the anti-woke?
That's nice, but tell, if more people listened to him during the elections, would there be anything being done against the DEI issue?
I disagree, he very clearly is a partisan in the sense that he'll argue to vote for the Democrats over a Republican that's actually active on the culture war front, regardless of how much he will chastise the Democrats for not doing what he wants. I'm pretty sure I remember an old post of his where he was chastising Biden in much the same way he did with Harris, threatening that if things don't improve he just might defect to the Republicans. Would you say things improved over the course of the Biden administration? Would you say Harris was a better candidate than Biden? What exactly would have to happen for me to be able to conclude that he is, in fact, a Dem partisan?
Again, I disagree. You can't beat me over the head with "TW was right" if he effectively wanted to convince people to have the issue continue.
If it's not about praising him, can you explain to me why the sentence "TracingWoodgrains was right" is so important to you? To me, the FAA is just one of infinity cases where an institution engages in blatant racism, it's the least surprising thing in the world, and Trace did indeed come out on the side of the issue that is correct. I don't recall anyone here doubting his claims on the FAA.
I don't believe I said anything about the anti-woke as a general category? Honestly, I think that if you're Chris Rufo or James Lindsay, the best response to TW's FAA story is to just applaud. Just say, "Yes, this is what we're talking about."
I am sure that if Kamala Harris were president right now, there would still be lots of people doing anti-DEI advocacy, and TW would no doubt be among them. I do not believe that he would have changed his mind about or refused to engage in the FAA reporting if Harris were president.
That just sounds to me like you think it's partisan to cast a vote at all. Yes, he voted for a candidate that he hated but considered on balance less bad than the other one. But that's what most people do. I would say that a 'partisan' for a particular party or candidate is someone who spends significant time or effort boosting that party or candidate - and since TW has spent much more criticising the Democrats or Harris than boosting them, I don't consider him a partisan for them. I think he just made the decision that, in a presidential election, which is ultimately a binary choice, he found them less bad than the alternative.
I think the fact that he was actively and effectively working to expose and address the issue undermines your point here. You don't need to vote for Donald Trump to oppose DEI. It is possible to take the position, "DEI is bad, Harris' support for DEI is bad, but on balance Harris is less bad than Trump, so I will vote for Harris while continuing to advocate against DEI".
Trump voters can make the exact same move - such-and-such policy is bad, Trump supports the bad policy, but I think that on balance Trump is less bad than Harris, so I will vote for Trump and continue to advocate against the bad policy. You do not have to agree with a candidate on every single issue to judge that candidate preferable at the ballot box.
This was actually an example in Scott's 'Varieties of Argumentative Experience', under the 'Single Facts' heading.
As here:
The top-level post that I was responding to was about liberals who try to minimise the story or attack TW for giving cover to the (ex hypothesi bad and fascist) Trump administration; and I was reading lots of comments here criticising TW for being a centrist Democrat who continues to believe that Trump is bad. I was saying that in the context of all these "who? whom?" arguments, it is worth allowing all of ourselves the sober reminder that what he said was both true and normatively right. That's the ball that we should keep our eyes on.
When he posted his original article, I don't anyone here said anything else.
That's nice, but what would that accomplish? Trace is barely one voice in a massive choir impotently complaining about DEI, and whether he stopped impotently complaining the moment Harris got elected, or complained twice as hard, the result would be the same. By contrast Trump, even if he ultimately falters, is at least making a dent. If you're going to tell me to vote for a politician that would double down on DEI and against one of the few that are likely to dampen it, I feel free to dismiss your claim to be one of the greatest DEI-fighters out there.
No, this is completely unfair. I specifically said he's perfectly entitled to vote for Harris, it's his endorsement that's the issue.
Yeah, but that's not what I'm accusing him of. I'm saying he would never endorse any Republican that would be likely to do anything to put a stop to DEI, or to any other issue he supposedly cares about. He would not endorse DeSantis, he would not endorse Vance, he might endorse someone completely ineffectual (/deliberately sabotaging the side he represents) like Romney, but not someone actually likely to do something to rollback the past 10 years.
Citation needed. There are issues where you can contribute to meaningful change without electing a populist, or taking drastic steps. Take something like the trans issue, there's enough academic pushback to the idea, that I think it's possible to eventually put a stop to it by following all the procedures so beloved by liberals, and without electing politicians that will take drastic action. By contrast 10 years of "exposing and addressing" DEI accomplished absolutely nothing, what worked is banning it from the federal government, and cutting off the money-spigot.
I still don't understand what is the point of this reminder, no one here doubted it. People here are criticizing him, because just like he has his grievances with us, with have ours with him. To me it feels like you're trying to shut off that criticism for no other reason than you personally liking him.
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I can't speak for OliveTapanade, but for myself: it's important because it means that Trace remains a trusted source. I have read his stuff and interacted with him online for years now, and he remains a nuanced thinker and a careful reporter who holds himself to a higher standard of journalism than many professionals. I therefore continue to place high trust in Trace's reports, and I continue to value his analyses for their thoughtfulness even when I reach a different conclusion.
Don't you think it's tad dramatic then to say that anything outside of "TracingWoodgrains was right" is a distraction from the issue? I thought the issue was the FAA.
I also don't understand why it's so important. Personally I do distrust TW, but it's not the kind of distrust that would imply he'd make shit up for a story, or not do due diligence on a source.
I find the whole tree of threads after OP's post somewhat disorienting, like being in a room full of people talking at once past each other. When a poster says "the issue", is it the FAA scandal? Or, per SteveAgain's original top-level post, the reception on Reddit and Hacker News of Trace's post of FAA scandal? Or, per OliveTapanade's first response, is "the issue" the arguments-as-soldiers tactic:
Or is the issue the pervasive and corrosive effects of DEI and the philosophy that spawned it, which appears to be your point, since you differentiate the FAA story specifically from "the issue itself":
And that's just the confusion in our branch of the conversation. OliveTapanade's reply happened in the context of the previous replies. Crushedoranges advocated for Trace to pick a side (and, presumably, do the arguments-as-soldiers):
TequilaMockingbird recalls that Trace was indeed more partisan before:
In this context, OliveTapanade's main point therefore:
Where "the issue" is, specifically, the hiring practices of the FAA that began in 2013.
Yep, that's what I was going for. It's possible I've expressed myself poorly, but the point I wanted to make was to separate out the FAA issue itself from one's judgement of its author.
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Not unless it was to his outgroup, at least.
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Man, you can't blame someone from noticing something after the noticer in chief did.
I general have mixed to negative feelings about trace, but this is actually a very fair point.
“This car isn’t as fast as a Bugatti super bike.” Yeah… basically nothing is.
The thing is people (and I think this included Trace himself originally) were acting like he somehow beat the right / anti-wokes to the punch.
I thought he credited hearing about it from the fight between sailer and mr stencil in the first essay, let me check
Edit, yes:
Funny how stencil gets to be a "twitter personality" while sailer is just a "right wing blogger"...
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Ah, I missed that part. Never bet against sailer on that count.
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