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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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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".

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