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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell

Very interesting longform article about how a professor had a summer seminar for high school students taken over by his radical TA, in a course focusing primarily on anti-blackness - this despite Dr. Vincent Lloyd's confused self description:

I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.

What's striking about this is how miserable it seems to have made everyone involved:

Furthermore, in the 2022 community, afternoons and evenings would no longer be spent having fun and doing homework. Two college-age students called “factotums” (led by one I will call “Keisha”) were assigned to create anti-racism workshops to fill the afternoons. There were workshops on white supremacy, on privilege, on African independence movements, on the thought and activism of Angela Davis, and more, all of which followed an initial, day-long workshop on “transformative justice.” Students described the workshops as emotionally draining, forcing the high schoolers to confront tough issues and to be challenged in ways they had never been challenged before.

From the initial “transformative-justice” workshop, students learned to snap their fingers when they agreed with what a classmate was saying. This practice immediately entered the seminar and was weaponized. One student would try out a controversial (or just unusual) view. Silence. Then another student would repeat a piece of anti-racist dogma, and the room would be filled with the click-clack of snapping fingers.

hilariously, two of the asian students ended up being 'expelled' from the program, for reasons that were not shared with the professor.

During our discussion of incarceration, an Asian-American student cited federal inmate demographics: About 60 percent of those incarcerated are white. The black students said they were harmed. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy. Outside of the seminar, I was told, the black students had to devote a great deal of time to making right the harm that was inflicted on them by hearing prison statistics that were not about blacks. A few days later, the Asian-American student was expelled from the program.

Finally, about halfway through the seminar, the TA led a struggle session where all the students accused the professor of doing a lot of anti black harm to them, and then they all did their own thing without his involvement.

I emailed the students and Keisha with this decision, and with an offer to read and respond to any written work the students produced—and I never heard back. No one sent written work. None indicated a desire to attend a meeting where I would be a “guest speaker.” The students had almost two weeks left. With the seminar canceled, did they go home? Did they tell their parents? Did Keisha lecture to them all day? I don’t know. I had extricated myself from the abusive relationship, but nine students remained captive.

They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy.

The woke are more correct than the mainstream!

If you take a look at the objective facts, they tend to delegitimize woke narratives and vibes. I say delegitimize because you can't disprove a feeling. The nature of feelings is that they do not need a factual basis. I could cite links but the article says it itself:

Outside of the seminar, I was told, the black students had to devote a great deal of time to making right the harm that was inflicted on them by hearing prison statistics that were not about blacks.

I also think this is an example of the slippery slope principle in action. We have someone who's in favor of basically all the progressive ideas, in favor of prison abolition and so on. Yet they're still getting suppressed by their subordinates for not being PC enough, or feeling like they're suppressed. If you're looking at a movement, one should observe the trend rather than just positions at any given point.

I am surprised that the author of this article is surprised, since there's a lot of critical theorist writing that dovetails well with what is happening in these anti-racist workshops.

For context, I've been reading a bunch of critical theorist scholarship recently. While it's been aggravating because much of it has been written in intentionally long-winded and obfuscatory language and almost all of it describes an underlying belief system so inherently objectionable that I'm convinced exposure to it is inevitably going to damage people's sanity, I've found it's been useful in understanding what this particular cohort of ideologues believe. It's become abundantly clear that the beliefs espoused in these workshops don't start and end with some radical, offended grievance-obsessed students, this insanity exists at the very core of Critical Social Justice ideology.

For example, this:

During our discussion of incarceration, an Asian-American student cited federal inmate demographics: About 60 percent of those incarcerated are white. The black students said they were harmed. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy.

This is an idea that has cropped up multiple times. I'm sure everyone here already knows about the infamous infographic that labels "objective, rational linear thinking" as a quality of "whiteness" and "white culture". This is, however, not new: the seed of this idea can be traced back very far in critical race scholarship. For example, here's an article by John Calmore called "Critical Race Theory, Archie Shepp, and Fire Music: Securing an Authentic Intellectual Life in a Multicultural World", which came out in the early 1990s. It was so influential it got included in a compilation book called "Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement" by critical race theorist par excellence Kimberlé Crenshaw. I first found it cited in this video and initially struggled to find the text online so I could read it, but eventually managed to download the full text from this admittedly seedy-looking file upload site.

In the article, Calmore declares: "As a form of oppositional scholarship, critical race theory challenges the universality of white experience/judgment as the authoritative standard that binds people of color and normatively measures, directs, controls, and regulates the terms of proper thought, expression, presentment, and behavior." So you can see here the expression of the idea that the standards that white people create in their societies are the standards that people of colour are bound to follow, and CRT stands in opposition to this because adapting to these standards supposedly renders people of colour inauthentic. "Hence, a major theme of critical race theory reflects the colored intellectual's persistent battle to avoid being rendered inauthentic by the pressures of adapting to the white world and to take instead an oppositional stance by relying on one's true existential life, which is rooted in a world of color even though not stuck there."

With that covered, Calmore begins attacking the expectation of objectivity and neutrality in scholarship as one of these dictates and pressures that supposedly prevent Black folx and other people of colour from being authentic, and what he instead endorses is an approach characterised by the production of intentionally biased scholarship personal expression: "As a reflection of authenticity, critical race scholarship also rejects the traditional dictates that implore one to write and study as a detached observer whose work is purportedly objective, neutral, and balanced. In the classic sense of “professing,” critical race scholars advocate and defend positions. Fran Olsen points out that traditional scholarship's appearance of balance presupposes a status quo baseline that hinders both understanding and social change. Critical race theory tends, in response, toward very personal expression that allows our experiences and lessons, learned as people of color, to convey the knowledge that we possess in a way that is empowering to us and, it is hoped, ultimately empowering to those on whose behalf we act. Those of us who profess critical race theory are, in simplest terms, trying to be true to ourselves."

And here's the author disparaging neutrality in legal discourse. "When people of color deemphasize an individuality that tries to transcend color—when we attempt, in other words, to express valid generalizations generated out of race consciousness—we challenge the underlying inadequacy of dominant legal discourse, that which Kimberlé Crenshaw has labeled “perspectivelessness.” This position of perspectivelessness holds that legal analysis is possible without taking into account various conflicts of individual values, experiences, and world views. According to Crenshaw, by stripping away the analysis of any particular cultural, political, or class characteristic, this perspectivelessness is presented as the objective, neutral legal discourse, with a corollary of “color blindness,” used to reduce conflict and devalue the relevance of our particular perspectives."

The text then launches into an incessant, repetitive lament about how black intellectuals supposedly often uncritically bend to the pressures of dominant white academia and white culture, and eventually at the end advocates that "As African Americans in dominant white society, we must guard against institutional co-optation that socializes us away from our own identities and value systems."

In other words, the critical theorist view is that these academic and scholarly virtues we're familiar with have no value in and of themselves, they are only considered to have value by white academia (this is also true for other aspects of "dominant white American culture"). Critical race theorists think this is racist, they think that "Black thought" or the deprioritisation of objectivity and other such values in favour of Black experience and Black racial consciousness is equally good (or in fact better), but that it is denigrated and devalued simply because of White society. And when coloured scholars and intellectuals endorse and practice "white virtues", they consider them to be people who have lost their racial identity and who are just inauthentically capitulating to the pressures that White society places on them. So being a person of colour doesn't save you from criticism.

The Telluride professor seems bewildered by Keisha, but really all she was doing in her workshops was teaching them ideological tenets that have long existed in critical race theory. As James Lindsay notes in his criticism of critical theory, objectivity is thought of in critical theorist circles as a "myth that’s used to marginalize other ways of knowing and uphold dominant systems of power." The reason why these students reacted to the citation of incarceration statistics in that way is because they think this is an invocation of (white!) objectivity to silence and devalue Black voices and Black subjective experience, and is thus problematic. It's entirely consistent with the worldview and is a fantastic example of the mind-rot that critical theory cultivates in the minds of its believers.

I believe this article falls under the "I never thought the leopards would eat my face, said the person who voted for the Face-Eating Leopards Party" umbrella. This man is reaping the harvest of all the "I am no stranger to anti-racism workshops: I have participated in many of them, and I have facilitated them myself" seeds he and others have sown. He allowed this 'Keisha' to set the tone from the start, instead of imposing his authority as the teacher in charge. He stood back to let it all be student-led and then he was surprised when this happened?

What is going on here is the older generation being smacked in the face with their own irrelevance. The twenty-year old Keishas, the graduates of courses he and his ilk have taught for years, are the ones now shoving their way forward to be leaders and influences. Did he step in to do anything when the white and Asian students were being bullied into silence? Not that I can discern from the article. And then, having sown the dragon's teeth, he is astonished and amazed when the crop springs out of the ground to attack him.

Seems more like “I never thought leopards would eat my face, says a face-eating leopard.”

I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.

On the sunny first day of seminar, I sat at the end of a pair of picnic tables with nervous, excited 17-year-olds. Twelve high-school students had been chosen by the Telluride Association through a rigorous application process—the acceptance rate is reportedly around 3 percent—to spend six weeks together taking a college-level course, all expenses paid.

These people live in such a bubble even by 'blue tribe' standards. He preaches inclusion yet the program has a a 3% acceptance rate. There is so much material abundance and prosperity that elites have to invent scarcity. Being a professional victim confers more status than inclusive equality and is easier than having to actually accomplish something useful.

He preaches inclusion yet the program has a a 3% acceptance rate.

I don't think that's a bad thing at all. What percent of highschool students do you really think would get a lot of value from a summer sociology seminar series? And larger class sizes make teaching harder to, it's a lot easier to try to bring 3 shy students in a class of 12 out of their shells than 20 shy students in a class of 80.

And it's not like the actual knowledge is particularly restricted. Tons of lectures are available on YouTube. It's just the time of experienced of teachers that's limited, which is still a scarce resource even today.

It's just another form of invented scarcity.

And it's not like the actual knowledge is particularly restricted.

That is the whole point of inventing scarcity. Because knowledge is so abundant that status is one of the few things that resists the trend of commodification seen everywhere else in life, whether it's knowledge or luxury goods.

So do you think the non-profit Telluride Society should just accept every student that applies for a summer class, and end up with class sizes in the hundreds? Or pay for 30x as many teachers to keep class sizes the same?

one possibility could be to make it an online seminar

I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.

It is kind of hilarious how badly this statement would come off if you substituted prettymuch any other ethnicity or word for Black.

Really? I'm pretty sure you can do swap in "Jewish" or "Muslim" and the only thing that might be dicey would be "Afrocentric". Possibly true for Latino as well. Definitely acceptable for "Native American" or "First Nations" or "indigenous people". Possibly feasible for various Asian ethnicities.

Come to think of it, I think you'd only get in trouble for saying that you're from a white neighborhood, focus on eliminating anti-white racism, sent your kids to a Eurocentric school, and participate in organizations that further the goals of white Americans.

"Muslim" is a religious group, not an ethnicity. People often use "Jewish" and "Ashkenazi" interchangably, but strictly speaking the former is a religion strongly associated with a collection of distinct ethnic groups (Ashkenazi, Sephardic etc.) rather than an ethnicity in its own right.

What he fails to recognise is that 'Keisha' is a smart cookie who knows how the grift is operated and is grabbing all the attention and importance that she can. She's only a graduate herself, so if she wants to climb the slippery pole of academic promotion, she has to do exactly this kind of thing: shove the old guard out of the way and position herself as the face of anti-Blackness on campus. If it's a choice between our professor and the Keishas, the college administration will side with the Keishas because they can't afford the bad publicity that the Keishas know how to engender, exactly what kind of online mobs to whip up:

A recent graduate of an Ivy League university, mentored by a television-celebrity black intellectual, Keisha introduced herself as a black woman who grew up poor and “housing vulnerable,” whose grandmother’s limbs had been broken by white supremacists, and who had just spent four years of college teaching in prisons and advocating for prison abolition.

She's clearly ambitious, knows how to position herself, is making the right kind of networking connections (the TV celebrity) and our professor here has no clue what is going on.

Keisha's not a smart cookie, at least long term, because she'll get the same treatment only worse and faster. She'll have ten years of running the show, possibly less, and then lose control when she is ousted by a more nominally oppressed group, probably queer black transgenders, or a more radical counter-oppressive group who accept her premise that "the harm is urgent" and "can't be fixed" with civil discussion and so turn towards fedposting IRL.

She sees the grift but ignores the consequences of its iterations: a Cornell Autonomous Zone. And if by some miracle such a zone succeeded in establishing its sovereignty they would be faced with the perennial problems that face all territories of how to a) govern and b) relate to neighbouring territories. Of course there's more than two thousand years of existing scholarship on those matters, and institutions that exist to both study and apply their lessons, but that baby washes in the bathwater of inequity.

Keisha's not a smart cookie, at least long term, because she'll get the same treatment only worse and faster.

Oh I'm sure she knows that, which is why she's putting in the groundwork now to take over running these kind of white liberal guilt workshops, eventually build up enough of a 'name' for herself that she can pivot into the world of TV intellectual (like her mentor in the story, that the professor is hilariously sniffy about), and be gone from academia by the time the leopards come for her face.

Next year it won't be Professor Lloyd invited to host a seminar for Telluride; Keisha has won that round. And why was it important to win? He explains it himself in the piece:

The Telluride Association maintains a low profile, even in higher-education circles, but it has played an important role in shaping the US elite. Its alumni are ideologically diverse: queer theorist Eve Sedgewick and postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak (its first female member), Georgia politician Stacey Abrams and journalist Walter Isaacson, neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz and Francis Fukuyama (who served on Telluride’s board). Launched by mining entrepreneur L.L. Nunn in 1911, a few years before he founded Deep Springs College, Telluride aims to cultivate democratic communities among high-school and college students. It runs houses near Cornell and the University of Michigan, where students receive scholarships, govern themselves, and incorporate intellectual life and service work into their residential communities. In 1954, Telluride started its high-school summer program.

And the deep pockets are not immune to giving in on the grounds of white liberal guilt:

In the wake of the George Floyd protests, a group of black Telluride alumni pressured the association to examine the racism that, they claimed, was baked into the organizational culture. “We have all experienced anti-blackness within the association and through its programs,” their open letter said. The result was a redesign of the summer seminars: Telluride would now offer only “Critical Black Studies” and “Anti-Oppressive Studies” seminars. The former would “seek to focus more specifically on the needs and interests of black students.”

So now that Keisha has got her foot in the door and claimed her first trophy with Professor Lloyd's head mounted on her wall of anti-black violence, she can settle down to that prime opportunity of networking and getting prestigious names on her CV to build her career in the professional grievance studies grift. Lloyd can write all he likes about his past credits, but Keisha is the new generation elbowing him out of the way.

I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition.

That just made him a good target for Keisha to displace and take over from him.

Keisha speaks for me: She says everything I think better than I ever could

This sounds suspiciously like ‘Everything chairman Mao says is true. One of his words will overcome 10,000 of ours.’ And realistically she appears to be brainwashing teenagers(this step is not difficult) into making a power grab for her. It is a notable feature of wokeness that there is functionally no way to push back against this: Keisha might be an observable bad actor, but she is also a well credentialed black woman with appropriate ideological views, and telluride is so open minded it’s brain fell out and got replaced by woke.

That's exactly what is going on: bully and harass the non-black students about their privilege and their guilt for being complicit in systemic racism, where the only way to be spared is to agree with everything Keisha says and to support her no matter what. That way, she'll pick a different victim to bring down (like the two students she got kicked out of the seminar). Terrorise them into fear of saying even a single wrong word so that a slip-up means being hounded as a villain, and they'll soon learn to shut up and not dare say anything but "Keisha is right, what Keisha says goes".

Do you want Voldemorts? Because that’s how you get Voldemorts.

Radicalization is dangerous, and it’s less worrying than it should be because America has little history of radical militias publicly swelling their ranks and taking over areas like Boko Haram or ISIS. There is a chance we’re about to see the collapse of civil peace. If California actually puts reparations in a bill and brings it to a vote, either way things will go badly. If voted down, I predict Beverly Hills will burn.

I doubt it. The 2020 riots happened because of 1) a very prominent set of videos with extremely poor optics relating to a specific issue(police use of force) 2) a large set of relatively violent people with obvious reasons to care about this issue and 3) outside support from organized left wing interests who turned it into a self reinforcing cycle by offering things like looting as a reward for showing up and fighting.

I would not expect that the median member of the underclass(who did the actual rioting) particularly thinks of reparations as a hill to die on, and I wouldn't expect voting down reparations to have the same terrible optics as George Floyd or Jacob Blake. Writers for Vox are not the same thing as violent underclass teens and poor youth don't particularly listen to Vox writers.

I mean, I understand why a certain breed of out of touch leftist thinks of underclass youth as being at the beck and call of antifa, but these people also think that the median accused murderer was peacefully composing slam poetry about the inner power of black women. I don't understand why right wingers seem to think the same thing; the crips and bloods are happy to coordinate with antifa to stage protests that demand changes to police use of force rules, but that doesn't make them reliable allies to lefty direct action. They're not showing up to defend homeless encampments from being cleared out or to protect drag shows from protestors or to protest in favor of abortion, all things that antifa generally favors and regularly protests about.

Your #3 should be #1, and your #1 should be #3, because that is the order in which the causality flows.

It’s not intended to be in any particular order.

If voted down, I predict Beverly Hills will burn.

No, Beverly Hills will be protected. But the little streets will burn, and the ordinary guy - black, white or brown - trying to run a business or work a normal job will be the one to suffer.

Do you want Voldemorts? Because that’s how you get Voldemorts.

Sure, why not? Gives you an enemy to rally against an an excuse to implement even harsher measures.

If California actually puts reparations in a bill and brings it to a vote, either way things will go badly. If voted down, I predict Beverly Hills will burn.

So it burns, and we get a new vote. State capacity today in the First World is far too great for whatever minor civil disturbance comes up to actually change anything; they're basically the equivalent of cattle prods to get the proles to in the correct direction. If the vote goes the other way, either nowhere burns and the white people just suck it up, or they get crushed by the state.

I have some thoughts on these passages (bolding mine):

In their “transformative-justice” workshop, my students learned to name “harms.” This language, and the framework it expresses, come out of the prison-abolition movement. Instead of matching crimes with punishments, abolitionists encourage us to think about harms and how they can be made right, often through inviting a broader community to discern the impact of harms, the reasons they came about, and paths forward. In the language of the anti-racism workshop, a harm becomes anything that makes you feel not quite right. For a 17-year-old at a highly selective, all-expenses-paid summer program, newly empowered with the language of harm, there are relatively few sites at which to use this framework. My seminar became the site at which to try out—and weaponize—this language.

[...]

Keisha is uniquely talented at performing her role, but she isn’t the author of the play. Pushing anti-racism to its limits, what we reach isn’t just hollow doctrine, but abuse: Pathological relationships that cut us off from the world, from the give-and-take of reasons and feelings unfolding over time that makes up life in the world. We see this crystal clear in the paradoxes that I encountered: The experience was supposed to be organized around a “transformative justice,” rather than a punitive model, yet the community managed to expel two of its members. Students continually voiced their desire to find practical actions to help change the world, but after four weeks, they had learned to say that anti-blackness is so foundational, the world could never change. The students wanted freedom, for themselves and for all, but they started to say that the only route to freedom is indoctrination: having me tell them what to think.

This and the ending bit about "believers in democracy, fugitives from democracy" got me thinking: for all the benefits of democracy, it must have safeguards and limits. Imprisonment and policing are bad, but the only remaining alternative to punishing social transgression is mob rule, and I imagine that even a purely-black community that does not police or imprison its members will eventually turn to lynching or exile. Maybe this is how it will be in the world that modern anti-racists want to bring forth--maybe this is how it should be, to put on the Neoreactionary hat for a bit. But this can't possibly make for anywhere nice to live.

I have little sympathy for the professor because he was too complacent; he didn't bother imposing his authority (under the guise of letting it all be student-led learning and democratic and whatnot) because he never imagined a real challenge to it. He has been a male Keisha in his time, running anti-racism workshops and getting used to being deferred to (especially by white liberals) as the authority on what it is all about:

I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition.

...In 2014, I taught “Race and the Limits of Law” for Telluride’s Ithaca location. ...(W)ith excitement at the prospect of revisiting thorny questions about race after the national conversation had changed so much because of Black Lives Matter I reached out to Telluride to explore teaching the seminar again. (Telluride seminars are co-taught; my seminar was taught with my wife, a lawyer and indigenous-studies professor.)

...In this, Telluride continued a pattern of tracking liberal values as they evolved. It offered courses on race since the 1950s, and the Ithaca house was known as “the most liberal living unit on campus” in the 1970s because of its relatively early acceptance of Jewish, black, and female students. In 1993, at the height of US multiculturalism, Telluride began offering a new stream of seminars focusing on race and difference and aimed at underrepresented students.

So he's been happily going along teaching about the evils of whiteness (even if he didn't phrase it or even think of it like that). Then the new generation of sharper, greedier Keishas come along, he's a big fat prime target, and he has no idea that he's being marked to be brought down and replaced. So he lets Keisha play her little games and take over under his nose, rather than stepping in and smacking her down about over-reaching her authority, then he's shocked when the mob turns on him.

the only remaining alternative to punishing social transgression is mob rule, [...] even a purely-black community that does not police or imprison its members will eventually turn to lynching or exile.

Yes, exactly, that's why I find the concept of police abolition/defunding the police so frightening. It doesn't mean that suddenly there are no cops, it means that suddenly everyone is a cop.

As we saw in CHAZ/CHOP in which self-appointed community protectors executed a pair of unarmed black teens.

There is some set of valid complaints against the police, juries and judges. But then there's no having any of those things at all.

*Jack Nicholson Nodding*

The Trad-Right would like to take this moment to say "we told you so". Hobbes, Smith, Burke, Et Al were right all along about how pursuing emancipation for emancipation's sake would only end one way.

Edit to add: I did not see @raggedy_anthem's reply until after I had posted

This is the bit that lost me all sympathy, if I had any, for him:

I had extricated myself from the abusive relationship, but nine students remained captive. Belief in democracy had authorized abuse, and there was no way out.

So once the heat gets turned up, forget all the stuff about his students unique talents and gently guiding discussion and building community, when the heat was turned up he bailed and left a bunch of 17 year olds to fend for themselves under someone who was a little tin god in her mid to late 20s, who had proven that she could take the scalp of an established professor. Do we think those kids finished up the remainder of the seminar as anything but terrified and brainwashed into compliance? And the one adult who should have been looking out for them and standing up for them with the administration against Keisha just went home for the remainder of the summer so he wouldn't be inconvenienced any more. And to write a piece about he was the victim here.

He deserves whatever happens next, for his cowardice. Of course there was a way out, but it would have cost him to fight for it - so he capitulated. He's all right, to hell with the rest of you, Jack.

Remember that it's not about what we deserve. I can sympathize with a coward even while finding cowardice contemptable. Judgment is a hell of a drug.

I had extricated myself from the abusive relationship, but [others] remained captive.

This is exactly how I feel about my pet victim group. But when one is up against the reigning ideology of your society, you mostly have to keep your mouth shut. Very few people have the courage to be heroes, and most people who do have that kind of courage just get destroyed when they make a move.

it means that suddenly everyone is a cop.

no , it's worse than that. Deputizing law-abiding gun owners would help lower crime. It means a complete inversion: the criminals have power

Depends on if we're talking anarcho-tyranny where the laws are only applied on the pro-social, or genuine commitment to police abolition. If it's the latter, I made a post on TheSchism about that a while back:

There is no progressive utopia where the man who rapes my tween daughter gets rehabilitated with kind, gentle counseling, because I would have hunted him down and Blood Eagled him on livestream. Oh no, I've been sentenced to kind, gentle counseling. I decline to acknowledge my wrongdoing by attending. Are you going to send the social workers to not arrest me?

In the real world, I would not do so because I fear and respect the government's monopoly on retribution. Even if I were enraged by the outcome of the trial, I would have to weigh vengeance against the consequences for violating that monopoly.

A world with no police and no prisons is not one free of brutality. It's not even free of brutality against criminals! It would instead be a world where thieves are savagely beaten by enthusiastically vicious mall cops, rapists are castrated, and there is a vigorous subculture focused on videos of pedophiles being tortured to death.

I've argued elsewhere that no serious proponent of police abolition actually wants anything like 'no lawkeepers period, love-ins only'. At the risk of weakmanning: they just percieve (not inaccurately) that the current monopoly on force is held by a hostile/indifferent tribe, and they would like it to be held by their own tribe.

Normally the short route to this goal is some form of independence movement, but for various reasons that's a nonstarter at the moment, and liberal-white outgroup bias opens up the nontraditional route of minority coup. But, as we saw, said outgroup bias didn't extend quite so far as some hoped.

Realistically, this gets expressed as police abolitionism because the blue tribe doesn't have anyone who actually wants to be a cop. Well, probably like three. In the whole country. Given the choice between "no enforcement of the law" and "enforcement of the law by people who resent us and aren't motivated to do it the way we want", they choose "no enforcement" because they honestly haven't considered that if a strongly worded letter isn't backed by force, people can just fucking call your bluff and will.

And, of course, that doesn't account for the vast majority of blue tribers who don't actually want to abolish the police.

Agreed and I think that this is actually one of the major gaps in inference between the tribes. Is the law there to protect the public, or is it there to protect the criminal from the public? Notions like "burden of proof" and "innocent until proven guilty" are valuable pro-social norms to have, but they are also entirely unworkable in a world without police. As I used to argue back on SSC "democracy in it's purest form is a lynch mob, and that is why I will never consider myself a democrat".

there is a vigorous subculture focused on videos of pedophiles

Suspected pedophiles at that. Rationalists rightly complain about bad reasoning by juries, but vigilante gangs are probably even worse, and much better armed.

I once spoke to a guy who was a cleaner in the West, but who came from a Taliban-heavy part of Pakistan. As well as being very smart and friendly, they were a repository of horrific stories about coming from a place that (we agreed) was very similar to Medieval Europe. Once, he came back from the West and he was going to see his family. He was travelling on a train at night, when several men with handguns sat down with him and started questioning him: "Why are you wearing Western clothes?" "Why do you look so rich?" "Are you an unbeliever?"

Eventually, they started questioning him about specific parts of the Qur'an. Only his madrassa education, which had involved otherwise useless mechanical memorization of particular passages (without attention to the meaning) saved him from being taken to a dark spot by these men and killed, with no hope that they would ever be even punished for their actions by the local "police".

He also once came across a (probably) dead body in the street at night. Rather than report the killing or see if the man was still alive, he ran away as fast as he could. Why? If he was the person who found the body, then the man's family would consider him as a suspect, and possibly come after him/his family. So the body presumably rotted in the summer heat until a policeman or a member of the man's family saw it.

Indeed, the taliban’s willingness to put rigid adherence to sharia above tribal blood feuds is, in Afghanistan, a key selling point.

The Ghaznavids built interesting and impressive structures at around the same time.

Afghanistan's problem today is that it's state is probably poorer now than it was then. Trade routes that made Medieval Afghanistan potentially wealthy have dried up. Also, monumental architecture has kind of gone out of fashion everywhere.

Yes, but it was also a very violent time with a lot of family feuding and vigilante "justice".

His entire career, indeed his entire life is built around the anti-racist grift. I cannot even articulate how little sympathy I have for it finally inconveniencing him. If you push for your struggle sessions, everyone should dearly hope that you are one day forced to stand as the enemy. In my preferred world, his ridiculous jobs wouldn't exist at all, but I'll settle for the grievance-based institutions he's helped build turning against him.

I think this is a bit extreme of a reaction. Yes, he certainly would fall within the academic left, but reading this, it seems like he definitely cared about the traditional pursuit of academic understanding and dialectic:

The seminar assumes that each student has innate intelligence, even as we come from different backgrounds, have different amounts and sorts of knowledge, and different skills. We can each be formed best if we take advantage of our differing insights to push each other, over time, again and again. When this practice is occasioned by carefully curated texts—not exclusively “great books,” but texts that challenge each other and us as they probe issues of essential importance—a seminar succeeds.

A seminar takes time. The first day, you will be frustrated. The second and the third day, you will be frustrated. Even on the last day, you will be frustrated, though ideally now in a different way. Each intervention in a seminar is incomplete, and gets things wrong. Each subsequent intervention is also incomplete, and also gets things wrong. But there are plenty of insights and surprises, for each participant looks at a text with different eyes.

It is tempting to add: Such is life. Such is democratic life. We each have different, partial knowledge. We each get things wrong, over and over. At our best, we enter the fray by listening to each other and complementing and challenging the insights of our fellows. In the process, over years, decades, we are oriented toward justice and truth.

If the seminar is slow food, the anti-racist workshop put on by college-age students is a sugar rush. All the hashtags are there, condensed, packaged, and delivered from a place of authority. The worst sort of anti-racist workshop simply offers a new language for participants to echo—to retweet out loud.

But then, perhaps there is something unspoken, unrealized here; that the "slow food" of academic discourse will inevitably be pushed aside for the "junk food" of dogma, some how, some way. Maybe if Lloyd had shut down those who were attempting to shut down others, maybe if he'd put his foot down more, then just maybe he could have salvaged his own course from epistemic closure.

So perhaps the ideas he followed would inevitably lead him to this, because there aren't enough principles to restrain them from the logical conclusion, but it does at least seem like things could have been better.

Maybe if Lloyd had shut down those who were attempting to shut down others, maybe if he'd put his foot down more, then just maybe he could have salvaged his own course from epistemic closure.

But he didn't do that, because he didn't think of himself as The Man. He's built a career on lecturing about The Man but doesn't think of himself as an authority figure; he drops hints all through about really wanting the seminar to be a fun place because he had a good time at the last seminar a few years back. He's like the parent who wants to be a best friend instead of a parent, no wonder Keisha filled the power vacuum:

Occasionally, in one-on-one meetings, I could still kid around with them, or hear them chat among themselves about the mundane details of teenage life.

He let Keisha get away with murder because he didn't want to be the bad guy imposing his authority like a grown-up. And so she cut the ground out from under him, while he was hoping for a nice chatty lunch and fun time with the kids:

As I was beginning the seminar, sitting on the grass in my backyard, Keisha interrupted: “I think you should start with a lecture offering context for this reading and telling us the main points.” ...She then announced that she would take the students back to their house without eating the lunch I had waiting for them.

I can't feel sorry for the guy, either he has the backbone of a jellyfish to let his 'teaching assistant' dictate to him what the content of his lectures should be, or he was there for a lazy, well-paid summer break where he wouldn't have to do any real work except sit around chatting with the kids and if the organisation gave him a 'teaching assistant' who wanted to do all the work, sure, let her.

Maybe if Lloyd had shut down those who were attempting to shut down others, maybe if he'd put his foot down more, then just maybe he could have salvaged his own course from epistemic closure.

It's exactly what he should have done, and he didn't. Keisha was only supposed to be a teaching assistant. He sat back and let her dictate more and more of what would be covered, what could be covered, and if the students would even listen to him, without attempting to take back control or get the administration to rein her in. He let her bully and intimidate and silence students, and kick two students out. And then she led the mob that came for him, and he was shocked, shocked!

Right, but in practice, his academic understanding and dialectic amounted to devising ever more sophisticated methods of waging culture war, in ever sharper methods of criticism, and all with a clear ideological outcome in mind - the production of political activists to go and spread the bad news. It's hard to imagine the same thing occurring in a programming course. These kids weren't dumb. They were carefully and rigorously selected - no doubt for their ideological discipline, their ability to internalize antiracist rhetoric, and their willingness to challenge and rebel against traditional authority. They were then armed with the finest rhetorical weapons modern society affords, and taught they were not allowed to defend themselves against them. Of interest is that the professor himself has no defense against them either, beyond a weak appeal to his own anti-racist credentials.

These kids weren't dumb. They were carefully and rigorously selected - no doubt for their ideological discipline, their ability to internalize antiracist rhetoric, and their willingness to challenge and rebel against traditional authority.

They were also a bunch of impressionable 17 year olds feeling flattered that they had been selected for Real Grown-up College seminar. Since the professor seems to have done damn-all, by his own account, to protect them, they were ripe for being bullied into compliance with a loud, aggressive young adult (but still older than them and with the authority of being a teaching assistant) like Keisha while Lloyd just sat around in the background wringing his hands:

Eventually, two of the Asian-American students would be expelled from the program for reasons that, Keisha said, couldn’t be shared with me.

Right then is when he should have slapped her down about "I'm the professor contracted to teach this seminar, not you, and I need to know why my class is being expelled without my knowledge or consent", but he let it all go until too late and the leadership of course would not back him up:

Telluride is governed and largely run by program alumni who volunteer their time to further the goals of the association. The volunteer overseeing the summer programs explained to me that there were internal divisions within the loose, sprawling Telluride world over the direction of the summer programs, with some corners of that world zealously pursuing a singular focus on anti-blackness and other corners hoping to continue seminars as they had been conducted in the past. They realized this summer was bumpy not just in our seminar, but across the program. Because Telluride wanted to respect the democratic self-governance of the student community, the leadership didn’t feel comfortable intervening.

Adults with their own careers and lives were too scared to stand up to this virago, why would a small group of kids who were strangers to the place be able to do so?

He helpfully provided an example of how things are supposed to work:

During the first week of the 2014 iteration of the seminar, focused on slavery, a Chinese-American student pointed to a moment in our text where white slave owners were providing food for the enslaved and suggested this showed there were two sides to the issue of slavery. Before I formulated a way to turn his intervention into a stepping-stone toward more sophisticated discussion, two students spoke up with other evidence from the text suggesting that slavery is a moral abomination unworthy of “both sides” discussion. By the end of the seminar, the initial student, who seemed like he might have a wavering moral compass, expressed a newfound commitment to justice

Now was that a discussion, or was it badgering ? He didn‘t seem to be fond of the ‚both sides‘ method then.

I had extricated myself from the abusive relationship, but nine students remained captive. Belief in democracy had authorized abuse, and there was no way out.

He‘s an abused spouse by the end. There‘s that language of harm that seemingly came out of nowhere from the mouths of his students. Poor guy doesn‘t have the tools to explain what happened to him, let alone articulate why his students might be wrong. He seems pretty light skinned, and he‘s not even a woman or queer. He clearly was less on the side of blacks than Keisha was. Ergo, he is the oppressor in that relationship, and that's all she wrote.

He's a damn coward. He spouts all the nice line about what the seminar is supposed to achieve and how the students are supposed to use their talents and experience and be guided (not led or taught, mind you) to the proper conclusions.

And then the new generation of grifter starts holding his feet to the fire, and he abandons the kids (they're 17 is all) to the thought police while he goes home to cry about how he's the victim here. If he had any spine, he would have fought for them. No, when it looked like his cosy sinecure of being a Telluride lecturer would actually require him to do something, he folded as Keisha wanted.

I'm even beginning to doubt his story; I find myself suspecting that he was quite happy to let Keisha do all the heavy lifting in organising the course while he joked around with the kids, told them stories, and did the Wise Elder bit. Just this time it turned out that this Keisha had an agenda of her own, not the plan he wanted her to follow.

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