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On July 20 2017 11:36 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On July 20 2017 11:29 TheLordofAwesome wrote:On July 20 2017 11:21 Falling wrote:"Society's expectations and socialization of women into the workforce including what jobs they are expected and pushed towards in their youth." What if that isn't true. What if those women have agency and actually want to work in jobs that tend to be more people oriented rather than thing oriented (for instance). For number 2, there is also a biological factor- that is women are literally giving birth to babies, which cannot be done by men. That means there will naturally be more maternity leave around that time period regardless of societal expectations and socialization... unless you propose they give birth at the workplace and keep going. But what if it is the case that young professional women are hotshots in their careers and then suddenly, when they hit their early thirties, they decide what is really valuable to them is to start a family and drop out of the labourforce for a time, does that really count as gender pay gap or societal expectation and socialization? What about that individual woman's wants, desires, agency and choice? I think it really matter why people are doing what they are doing and it goes beyond socialization. People can also want what they want. I like this post. The follow up question is why don't men leave the work forces as often as women? It could be pure biology, but my bet is on culture and centuries of male dominated society. I would like to see a world where men and women leave the works force to care for children close in close to equal measure.
US culture is more understanding of a woman wanting to take maternity leave as opposed to a man taking paternity leave - and this is taking into account how truly atrocious the country is at maternity leave. From a reproductive standpoint, there is a high pressure on the woman to have kids and care for them, so the man is depended upon to continue working during this time to support the mother and child. Not being able to do so is viewed as a negative attribute when women are looking for somebody to start a family with. Men are often characterized as being bumbling oafs that can't be trusted to be left alone with their young kids without burning the house down.
On July 20 2017 11:52 ticklishmusic wrote:
iirc after adjusting for a whole bevy of factors like experience, etc. there's still a wage gap though it's something like ninety cents on the dollar.
If that's true, and I say this with a foul taste in my proverbial mouth, that's probably a far more reasonable accounting of the situation. However when the situation comes up when it comes to gender or political issues on a large stage, it never starts there. It goes to 77-79% and stays there.
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Canada11328 Posts
On July 20 2017 11:40 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 20 2017 11:30 Falling wrote:Why are you using high paid actors as an example? The movie industry is pretty mercurial as far as who gets paid what based on star power and behind the scenes negotiations. It would be far more helpful to look at far more standard jobs. On July 20 2017 11:30 Nyxisto wrote:On July 20 2017 11:21 Falling wrote:"Society's expectations and socialization of women into the workforce including what jobs they are expected and pushed towards in their youth." What if that isn't true. What if those women have agency and actually want to work in jobs that tend to be more people oriented rather than thing oriented (for instance). For number 2, there is also a biological factor- that is women are literally giving birth to babies, which cannot be done by men. That means there will naturally be more maternity leave around that time period regardless of societal expectations and socialization... unless you propose they give birth at the workplace and keep going. But what if it is the case that young professional women are hotshots in their careers and then suddenly, when they hit their early thirties, they decide what is really valuable to them is to start a family and drop out of the labourforce for a time, does that really count as gender pay gap or societal expectation and socialization? What about that individual woman's wants, desires, agency and choice? I think it really matter why people are doing what they are doing and it goes beyond socialization. People can also want what they want. It sure does count as socialization, there's no such thing as being outside of your social expectations. In very wealthy countries it's usually just the result of being able to not have to work full time. In much of Asia, Russia and even countries like Iran nowadays female participation in the labour market is really high. And female participation in the workforce in North America is also very high. Canada 15-24 64%, which is higher than males at 63%. Then 25-44 82% which is lower than men at 91%, but not by much. 45+ 47% compared to 58% males. Do you believe people have agency or choice? Do you believe people have desires and that desires can change and be prioritized to the point where something family can be a higher prioritization than paid work? Because they way you are framing this, doesn't seem to leave much room for agency outside of 'there's no such thing as being outside of your social expectations'. Programmed to desire? In the need to respond quickly, I picked the first example that came to mind. I'll dig a bit for a better example. One moment. Architecture (my profession): www.acsa-arch.orgJournalists: www.washingtonpost.comI could do a lot of different professions, but for sake of brevity, I'll go with these two.
Okay, thank you. I'll take a look at the journalism later, but powering through the architect one, it describes the very thing I've talked about before. Hotshot career women (in this case architects) are equal with men. But then something happens: Years of Experience by Age and Gender. Women suddenly start wanting to have a family in their early 30's and then drop out of the workforce for periods of time to do so. The question is this: could you pay them enough to stay? And if you couldn't, does that mean they have prioritized something more: having a family and is that such a bad thing? I mean, we are in a day and age, if you don't want to have a family that can be resolved, permanently. If you want to do the career thing with no family that's a thing that is very easily available. It would be interesting to see if the ones that stay, the ones that choose to not have a family, do they also see a decline in wages or do they stay on par?
I would like to see a world where men and women leave the works force to care for children close in close to equal measure.
That's great, but what if it turns out that on average women would prefer to work part time and have more time for their family than men? This is something we really don't know, so it make it difficult to make declarative statements about the ills of modern society that men don't equally drop out of the workforce, without determining if each couple has freely decided which partner is going to be the primary caregiver and if the woman, on average desired, freely to be that person... is that a bad thing?
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On July 20 2017 11:55 Falling wrote:Show nested quote +On July 20 2017 11:40 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:On July 20 2017 11:30 Falling wrote:Why are you using high paid actors as an example? The movie industry is pretty mercurial as far as who gets paid what based on star power and behind the scenes negotiations. It would be far more helpful to look at far more standard jobs. On July 20 2017 11:30 Nyxisto wrote:On July 20 2017 11:21 Falling wrote:"Society's expectations and socialization of women into the workforce including what jobs they are expected and pushed towards in their youth." What if that isn't true. What if those women have agency and actually want to work in jobs that tend to be more people oriented rather than thing oriented (for instance). For number 2, there is also a biological factor- that is women are literally giving birth to babies, which cannot be done by men. That means there will naturally be more maternity leave around that time period regardless of societal expectations and socialization... unless you propose they give birth at the workplace and keep going. But what if it is the case that young professional women are hotshots in their careers and then suddenly, when they hit their early thirties, they decide what is really valuable to them is to start a family and drop out of the labourforce for a time, does that really count as gender pay gap or societal expectation and socialization? What about that individual woman's wants, desires, agency and choice? I think it really matter why people are doing what they are doing and it goes beyond socialization. People can also want what they want. It sure does count as socialization, there's no such thing as being outside of your social expectations. In very wealthy countries it's usually just the result of being able to not have to work full time. In much of Asia, Russia and even countries like Iran nowadays female participation in the labour market is really high. And female participation in the workforce in North America is also very high. Canada 15-24 64%, which is higher than males at 63%. Then 25-44 82% which is lower than men at 91%, but not by much. 45+ 47% compared to 58% males. Do you believe people have agency or choice? Do you believe people have desires and that desires can change and be prioritized to the point where something family can be a higher prioritization than paid work? Because they way you are framing this, doesn't seem to leave much room for agency outside of 'there's no such thing as being outside of your social expectations'. Programmed to desire? In the need to respond quickly, I picked the first example that came to mind. I'll dig a bit for a better example. One moment. Architecture (my profession): www.acsa-arch.orgJournalists: www.washingtonpost.comI could do a lot of different professions, but for sake of brevity, I'll go with these two. Okay, thank you. I'll take a look at the journalism later, but powering through the architect one, it describes the very thing I've talked about before. Hotshot career women (in this case architects) are equal with men. But then something happens: Years of Experience by Age and Gender. Women suddenly start wanting to have a family in their early 30's and then drop out of the workforce for periods of time to do so. The question is this: could you pay them enough to stay? And if you couldn't, does that mean they have prioritized something more: having a family and is that such a bad thing? I mean, we are in a day and age, if you don't want to have a family that can be resolved, permanently. If you want to do the career thing with no family that's a thing that is very easily available. It would be interesting to see if the ones that stay, the ones that choose to not have a family, do they also see a decline in wages or do they stay on par?
I've talked to some practicing architects at school and on the website Archinect. The women take breaks but ultimately come back. The thing with architecture is that it is heavily based on how you design and can complete drawings and how accurate they are. As you get up in age, you are perceived to be able to do everything required and your pay is adjusted accordingly.
For the women that I've talked to, they had children and came back. But the pay wasn't the same. They either switched to teaching since it provided an easier lifestyle, or they opened their own practice. You kind of have to do an indepth study in architecture to get to the root, as you've stated previously. But women leaving lowers their wages, while men who leave and come back, stay relatively the same. For comparison, look at Studio Gang or Zaha Hadid Architects and compare them to Bjarke Ingels Group or OMA by Rem Koolhaas.
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Falling: if that is the case, great. They have the desire to work part time and can. But we have a long way to go before our women in the US no longer feel pressured to leave their jobs and care for children. When it comes to the pay gap, these discussions trend toward the claim the problem is unknowable and therefore can't be addressed. It all has this vague implication that the 80 cents on the dollar is "natural" and the problem might already be solved.
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Canada13388 Posts
On July 20 2017 11:30 Nyxisto wrote:Show nested quote +On July 20 2017 11:21 Falling wrote:"Society's expectations and socialization of women into the workforce including what jobs they are expected and pushed towards in their youth." What if that isn't true. What if those women have agency and actually want to work in jobs that tend to be more people oriented rather than thing oriented (for instance). For number 2, there is also a biological factor- that is women are literally giving birth to babies, which cannot be done by men. That means there will naturally be more maternity leave around that time period regardless of societal expectations and socialization... unless you propose they give birth at the workplace and keep going. But what if it is the case that young professional women are hotshots in their careers and then suddenly, when they hit their early thirties, they decide what is really valuable to them is to start a family and drop out of the labourforce for a time, does that really count as gender pay gap or societal expectation and socialization? What about that individual woman's wants, desires, agency and choice? I think it really matter why people are doing what they are doing and it goes beyond socialization. People can also want what they want. It sure does count as socialization, there's no such thing as being outside of your social expectations. In very wealthy countries it's usually just the result of being able to not have to work full time. In much of Asia, Russia and even countries like Iran nowadays female participation in the labour market is really high.
Yeah as nyx points out, their decision and agency are guided by social expectations and how they've been brought up.
And yes, of course women need time off for the physical act of giving labour as a biological necessity, but they don't need to be away from work for a year - biologically. They could be back at work in a few weeks. I know women who have only taken off a month or 3 weeks after giving birth because they were very career driven.
But thats an exception, not a rule. Many women are labelled as cold, or callous if they go back to work within a few weeks of giving birth. Men who take only the day their child is born off work are not treated nearly the same way.
Or is that biological too Falling?
The the fact of the matter is that there is a pay gap, no it isn't based on sex alone on the face value, but yes it is related to the way that society works in the west and the changing role of women in the workforce.
Something a lot of people tend to forget is that its only been about a hundred years since women were able to vote, just over 70 years since they truly entered the workforce alongside men. Thats one lifetime.
Women before WW2 were not allowed to do many many jobs because those jobs were just for men. Even when the men came back from war, many women were forced to give up their jobs.
Lets not act like we're 300 years past the struggles of women trying to have equal opportunity. Nowadays, yes, I argue that many women do have equal opportunities on paper. The problem comes in the fact that on paper things are always different than how they are in reality.
Yes, some women can navigate professional work to be able to do what they want at an equal pay of men and they buck all social trends to do it. Many women don't have the social capital to make that work. And many women accept the fact that no matter what they do, to get ahead in their work they will be the "bitch" or the "closeted lesbian" or the "cold indifferent mother" or the "slept with the boss for a promotion whore" because to be anything else than those labels, they wouldn't be where they are professionally.
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Trump warning Mueller in an NYT interview not to go too far afield of the actual Russia issue - i.e. dont look at the trump family business. I'm sure Mueller is just shaking in fear now lol. Trump is a national joke.
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On July 20 2017 12:16 Doodsmack wrote:
Trump warning Mueller in an NYT interview not to go too far afield of the actual Russia issue - i.e. dont look at the trump family business. I'm sure Mueller is just shaking in fear now lol. Trump is a national joke.
Good luck with that one. That's like telling a beagle to not go rummaging around for food.
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On July 20 2017 11:30 TheTenthDoc wrote:Quite a few analyses do look within specific professions and still find wage gaps. The 70 cent figure usually doesn't pop up once that's accounted for, but it's not rare to see 0.8-0.9 numbers, and as far as I know I've never seen a study where the gap disappeared. Nursing is one of the big studied areas, I think. Here's a summary article. You'd be hard pressed to find any fields where women make more than men (and if there was truly no wage gap, you would find equally as many studies showing women make more than men as men making more than women).
I don't doubt that you're correct (that there's a pay gap favoring males), but the bold part is actually not true.
Academic journals don't publish negative results, and it's a point of serious criticism among researchers/scientists. If an academic does a study and find a result that doesn't find a significant effect (i.e. no significant pay gap), or an effect that confirms the status quo knowledge ("men make more than women"), then journals simply won't publish it.
There's pretty big problems with the cycle this creates when it happens on a large scale:
1) Public gets interested in whether Assertion A on Topic X is true
2) Academics rush to study whether Assertion A on Topic X is true (due to how incentives are set up in academia). Let's say 1000 people study it.
3) Even if you assume researchers are playing it straight so you take p-values at their nominal level (a very bad assumption, btw), and you assume zero effect, you expect 50 of those 1000 studies (at the standard p < 0.05 p-value threshold that journals use) to produce positive results of Assertion A.
4) Journals only publish positive results (i.e. the 50 instead of the 950) of Assertion A.
5) The media reports that Assertion A is confirmed by academic research.
If you look at the input and output of the system, what's happening is that public interest in a controversial claim literally produces research to support the controversial claim because of how the current academic process works.
Of course, publications produced this way don't hold up during replication attempts. Hence why we have a replication crisis going on.
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On July 20 2017 05:20 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On July 20 2017 02:06 IgnE wrote:On July 20 2017 01:40 xDaunt wrote:On July 19 2017 14:33 IgnE wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 18 2017 09:36 xDaunt wrote:I meant to post this editorial a few days ago, but have been badly tied up with work: Show nested quote +It’s anyone’s guess whether the latest round of Russia revelations will flame out or bring the administration toppling to the ground. But either way, the drama is only one act in an ongoing cycle of outrages involving Trump and Russia that will, one way or another, come to an end. That is not true of the controversy over the President’s remarks in Warsaw last week, which exposed a crucial contest over ideas that will continue to influence our politics until long after this administration has left office. And the responses from Trump’s liberal critics were revealing — and dangerous.
The speech — a call to arms for a Western civilization ostensibly menaced by decadence and bloat from within and hostile powers from without — was received across the center-left as a thinly veiled apologia for white nationalism. “Trump did everything but cite Pepe the Frog,” tweeted the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart. “Trump’s speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto,” read a Vox headline. According the New Republic’s Jeet Heer, Trump’s “alt-right speech” “redefined the West in nativist terms.”
Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term “alt-right” that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate them as distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized.
There is no shortage of fair criticism of Trump’s speech: For example, that he shouldn’t have delivered it in Poland because of Warsaw’s recent authoritarian tilt; that his criticism of Russia should have been more pointed; or that he would have better served America’s interests by sounding a more Wilsonian tone when it came to promoting democracy around the world. And, yes, Trump has proven himself a clever manipulator of white identity politics during his short political career, so it is understandable that critics would scrutinize his remarks for any hint of bigotry. But by identifying Western civilization itself with white nationalism, the center-left is unwittingly empowering its enemies and imperiling its values.
How did progressive intellectuals get themselves into this mess? The confusion comes in part from loose language: in particular, a conflation of “liberalism” and “the West.” Liberalism is an ideology — defined by, among other things, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property, popular sovereignty and equal dignity of all people. The West is the geographically delimited area where those values were first realized on a large scale during and after the European Enlightenment.
So to appeal to “the West” in highlighting the importance of liberal values, as Trump did, is not to suggest that those values are the exclusive property of whites or Christians. Rather, it is to accurately recognize that the seeds of these values were forged in the context of the West’s wars, religions and classical inheritances hundreds of years ago. Since then, they have spread far beyond their geographic place of birth and have won tremendous prestige across the world.
What is at stake now is whether Americans will surrender the idea of “the West” to liberalism’s enemies on the alt-right — that is, whether we will allow people who deny the equal citizenship of women and minorities and Jews to lay claim to the legacy of Western civilization. This would amount to a major and potentially suicidal concession, because the alt-right — not in the opportunistically watered-down sense of “immigration skeptic,” or “social conservative,” but in the sense of genuine white male political supremacism — is anti-Western. It is hostile to the once-radical ideals of pluralism and self-governance and individual rights that were developed during the Western Enlightenment and its offshoots. It represents an attack on, not a defense of, of the West’s greatest achievements.
As any alt-rightist will be quick to point out, many Enlightenment philosophers were racist by current standards. (Have you even read what Voltaire said about the Jews?) But this is a non-sequitur: The Enlightenment is today remembered and celebrated not for the flaws of its principals but for laying the intellectual foundations that have allowed today’s conception of liberalism to develop and prosper.
As Dimitri Halikias pointed out on Twitter, there is a strange convergence between the extreme left and the extreme right when it comes to understanding the Western political tradition. The campus left (hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go) rejects Western Civilization because it is racist. The alt-right, meanwhile, accepts Western civilization only insofar as it is racist — they fashion themselves defenders of “the West,” but reject the ideas of equality and human dignity that are the West’s principal achievements. But both, crucially, deny the connection between the West and the liberal tradition.
To critics, one of the most offending lines in Trump’s speech was his remark that “the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Trump clearly intended this to refer to the threat from Islamic extremism — and, presumably, the politically correct liberals who he believes are enabling it. But there is another threat to the West’s survival in the form of a far-right politics that would replace liberalism and the rule of law with tribalism and white ethnic patronage.
The best defense we have against this threat is the Western liberal tradition. But by trying to turn the “West” into a slur, Trump’s critics are disarming. Perhaps the president’s dire warning wasn’t so exaggerated, after all. Source. The author's main point is interesting and functionally indistinguishable from the arguments that I have previously made regarding the radical Left's overbearing use of identity and racial politics. What say y'all on the left? This article is interesting because it at least draws distinctions between the "extreme" left and right despite its tepid equivocation ("there is a strange convergence …") and despite rehashing Horseshoe Theory pablum. The problem is that its vision is far too limited (and I am not just talking about the unalloyed celebration of "liberalism"). The "racism" or, perhaps more properly, "Eurocentrism" of the Enlightenment is far too narrow a hook on which to hang the divide between left and right. If anything, this kind of analysis seems to have missed the epochal shift from the modern to the postmodern that Negri and Hardt point out in their book, Empire. Negri and Hardt identify a struggle between two modes within the emergence of modernity that the Enlightenment ushered in. On the one hand is the revolutionary transition from "a dualistic consciousness, a hierarchical vision of society, and a metaphysical idea of science" inherited from medieval Europe to "an experimental idea of science, a constituent conception of history and cities, and [the posing] of being as an immanent terrain of knowledge and action." The Enlightenment brought about "an affirmation of the power of this world, the discovery of the plane of the immanence." This new found creativity ushers in a revolutionary subjectivity within modern people, that fundamentally changed the modes of life of the population. On the other hand, uprooting and destroying traditional forms of life and connections to the past provokes conflict and war, or counter-revolution. The second "mode" of modernity "poses a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire." You get modern capitalism emerging in Genoa and the Italian city states, as well as the Reformation, civil wars, and the reestablishment of ideologies of command and authority: absolutism, parliament, and the rise of the modern nation state which sought to control, mediate, and harness the productive energies unleashed by Enlightenment thought. Insofar as the contemporary left and right appeal to "modern" Enlightenment ideals, or in the context of this article, we could talk about "the West," I think they are talking about two separates modes of Enlightenment. On the one hand you have the opening up of the potentiality of the multitude in the plane of immanence, and on the other hand you have a modern appeal to a "people." The "people" being the reduction of the heterogeneities and singularities of the multitude to a single subjectivity: "the national people," which is capable of univocal communication and knowable, controllable, desires. The "people" legitimates sovereign authority in the presence of the prince, the parliament, the dictator, etc. The crisis of modernity is the "contradictory co-presence of the multitude and a power that wants to reduce it to the rule of one" or at least the imagined community of the nation-state. It's hard to know how seriously to take the idiots who talk about "neo-Marxism," "feminism," and "post-modernism" as the premiere monolithic evils ailing us in the present. Mostly because even when they can convince the totally ignorant that they have a working knowledge of those concepts, they actually have no clue what they are talking about. But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions. You don't have to look any further for evidence of the waning legitimacy of the imperial world order than the ineffectiveness of police action by the United States within the last two decades. It is effectiveness, itself, that legitimates those actions by restoring peace and upholding humanitarian principles, and every failure greatly undermines that legitimacy. And so there's a conflation here, in this article you have linked, xDaunt, between "Western Enlightenment modernity" as the bevy of imperialist, war-prone, nation states that carved up territories and maintained strict lines between the capitalist market inside, and the colonial outside, and the " imperial global market led by the United States" which is based on a truly global sovereign imperative, breaks down borders, opens flows of capital, culture, and people, and incorporates the entire world into a single united market. The fundamentalist Islamists of ISIS are no more pre-modern than they are post-modern. Jihadist mentality of "being-against" is an active response to globalizing post-modern imperial sovereignty. They resist in the only way open to them. To put up strict borders and cut yourself off from that policing, organizing influence today is to turn your territory into a ghetto. On the question of Enlightenment I am partial to Kant's answer in Was ist Aufklärung: "Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason by in lack of resolution and courage to use it without distinction from another." Insofar as "identity politics" attempts to overturn hierarchies by circumscribing individuals and groups within eidetic boundary lines, saying " I am essentially this [or these] kind(s) of entity," I think it is silly and short-sighted. One might say childish. Insofar as the wiser members displace hierarchies, recognize fractured subjectivities, and refrain from putting me or themselves in the very boxes that [we] want to dismantle/deconstruct, I don't even see what the big deal is. ![[image loading]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/Klee%2C_paul%2C_angelus_novus%2C_1920.jpg) I want you to know that I needed two cups of coffee before I tackled this. And at times, I felt like scotch may have been more effective. In short, I think that you're missing the forest for the trees. At issue here isn't really a particular definition of the Enlightenment or how Western thought evolved following the Enlightenment. What's at issue is whether we should embrace the culture that gave birth to the Enlightenment: "Western culture." For decades, the intellectual left has been making arguments that undermine the status and prestige of Western culture. And these arguments have only grown more radical in recent years (hence the author sounding the alarm at the attacks on Trump's speech that necessarily incorporate various levels of demonizing Western culture). Thus while I agree with you that the average proponent on the right really doesn't understand what they're talking about when they loosely throw around terms like "Marxist" or "Neo-Marxist," there is more than just some truth to the fact that the Marxist schools of thought have been the primary launching pads for the current outbreak of Western self-hatred. Lastly, I need to address the following: But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions. You identified the problem (cultural clashes => conflict/war/bad things). You even tacitly admit that this problem is well-grounded in historical fact. But then you dismiss this problem with a wave of a hand by declaring that we're in a new epoch where none of this cultural difference shit matters anymore, and by implication, it won't matter in the future, either. I simply find that to be an incredible declaration. I have no idea where your confidence in this newfound state of world order permanence comes from. In fact, your repeated use of the term "imperial" or "imperialist" when referring to this order shows that you understand that this order is maintained through Western (re: American) unipolar force and power. What happens when we inevitably revert to a multipolar world? What happens when another unipolar power emerges that may have a very different idea of culture (not to mention cultural tolerance) than the West presently does? The answers to these questions are precisely why Western culture should be defended and why it is foolish for the Left to antagonize Trump for doing so. As we know from the examples of Rome and every other great empire that rise and fell, cultural integrity matters. And when it's lost, it's usually not regained, to the peril of the people. i'm not going to respond at length now but in short my point might be distilled to something like the following: western nostaglia for 50s leave it to beaver pastiche from the likes of Publius has failed to adequately reckon with and accept modernity's passing. there is no way to return to the (fantasy of) the past. this problem is exacerbated by conservatives' general belief in markets and the creative potential of capital without properly understanding that the need for expansion, and the concomitant incorporation and articulation of the outside (i.e. those scary elements that threaten order itself) is what has propelled us into our contemporary imperial order. corruption, in the sense of "degeneration" and/or recrudescence (or if you prefer "creative destruction") is the necessary condition and modality of this imperial order. you cannot maintain empire, with its legitimacy bolstered by effective police action and a universalizing set of human rights, without that corruption. the only way to get rid of discomfort with the disintegration of the boundary line between us and them, between first and third world (if that is what you feel and what you mean by "integrity," or identical self-sameness) is to end the project of empire. that's all fine and good, as long as you understand that empire is the only substrate upon which capital accumulation can continue unabated. at least until other avenues of expansion open up. mars colonization anyone? Maybe some conservatives are preoccupied with the past and a return to the "glory days," but that's certainly not the point that I am making, which is strictly forward looking. And again, you're missing the forest for the trees with the point that you're making. Let's just presume for a moment that you're correct in asserting that the dynamics of capitalism make cultural contact, mixing, and conflict inevitable, thereby creating the forces that threaten cultural integrity. All that you have done is define the need for some type of cultural defense. You're not saying that the Romans should have bent over sooner for the barbarians, are you? Such defeatism is absurd. And this absurdity becomes very apparent once you step outside of Western culture and see what other peoples think. The Chinese created the perfect slur for the people who adhere to this kind of defeatism: "baizuo" -- the white left.
I want to take this question very seriously, but it would help if you would elaborate on what you mean by "Western culture." I take it you don't mean anything so broad (and narrow) as "that which is opposed to Islam" but I am not sure how much of what might be perceived as "Western" you think is worth defending. In other words, I would prefer to skip over the inevitable apophatic objections and move to a more positive characterization of "Western culture," including that which you think needs defending from the forces of cultural contact, mixing, and conflict.
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I consider myself pretty intelligent, but some of the words you all use are over my head. Apophatic? Isn't there an easier way to say it?
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defining something through a negative, i.e defining western values by what they aren't instead of what they are
This actually reminds me of something Merkel said about xenophobic attitudes towards Islam. She essentially called on citizens not to be mad at Muslims over here because they take their own religion more seriously than we do ours. Which has some truth to it. Lots of resentment today comes from people who lack any kind of identity and can only define others in negative terms.
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Google gave me the answers and I now understand it. But as such, wouldn't an easier word have been better? This is the uppity leftist attitude that the right dislikes (not calling IgnE a leftist or rightist). Dumbing down our language is a travesty in this nation, but in some instances, it may ingratiate you to other who may not be as informed on the subject as you are.
Just my dos centavos.
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On July 20 2017 12:36 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On July 20 2017 05:20 xDaunt wrote:On July 20 2017 02:06 IgnE wrote:On July 20 2017 01:40 xDaunt wrote:On July 19 2017 14:33 IgnE wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 18 2017 09:36 xDaunt wrote:I meant to post this editorial a few days ago, but have been badly tied up with work: Show nested quote +It’s anyone’s guess whether the latest round of Russia revelations will flame out or bring the administration toppling to the ground. But either way, the drama is only one act in an ongoing cycle of outrages involving Trump and Russia that will, one way or another, come to an end. That is not true of the controversy over the President’s remarks in Warsaw last week, which exposed a crucial contest over ideas that will continue to influence our politics until long after this administration has left office. And the responses from Trump’s liberal critics were revealing — and dangerous.
The speech — a call to arms for a Western civilization ostensibly menaced by decadence and bloat from within and hostile powers from without — was received across the center-left as a thinly veiled apologia for white nationalism. “Trump did everything but cite Pepe the Frog,” tweeted the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart. “Trump’s speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto,” read a Vox headline. According the New Republic’s Jeet Heer, Trump’s “alt-right speech” “redefined the West in nativist terms.”
Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term “alt-right” that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate them as distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized.
There is no shortage of fair criticism of Trump’s speech: For example, that he shouldn’t have delivered it in Poland because of Warsaw’s recent authoritarian tilt; that his criticism of Russia should have been more pointed; or that he would have better served America’s interests by sounding a more Wilsonian tone when it came to promoting democracy around the world. And, yes, Trump has proven himself a clever manipulator of white identity politics during his short political career, so it is understandable that critics would scrutinize his remarks for any hint of bigotry. But by identifying Western civilization itself with white nationalism, the center-left is unwittingly empowering its enemies and imperiling its values.
How did progressive intellectuals get themselves into this mess? The confusion comes in part from loose language: in particular, a conflation of “liberalism” and “the West.” Liberalism is an ideology — defined by, among other things, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property, popular sovereignty and equal dignity of all people. The West is the geographically delimited area where those values were first realized on a large scale during and after the European Enlightenment.
So to appeal to “the West” in highlighting the importance of liberal values, as Trump did, is not to suggest that those values are the exclusive property of whites or Christians. Rather, it is to accurately recognize that the seeds of these values were forged in the context of the West’s wars, religions and classical inheritances hundreds of years ago. Since then, they have spread far beyond their geographic place of birth and have won tremendous prestige across the world.
What is at stake now is whether Americans will surrender the idea of “the West” to liberalism’s enemies on the alt-right — that is, whether we will allow people who deny the equal citizenship of women and minorities and Jews to lay claim to the legacy of Western civilization. This would amount to a major and potentially suicidal concession, because the alt-right — not in the opportunistically watered-down sense of “immigration skeptic,” or “social conservative,” but in the sense of genuine white male political supremacism — is anti-Western. It is hostile to the once-radical ideals of pluralism and self-governance and individual rights that were developed during the Western Enlightenment and its offshoots. It represents an attack on, not a defense of, of the West’s greatest achievements.
As any alt-rightist will be quick to point out, many Enlightenment philosophers were racist by current standards. (Have you even read what Voltaire said about the Jews?) But this is a non-sequitur: The Enlightenment is today remembered and celebrated not for the flaws of its principals but for laying the intellectual foundations that have allowed today’s conception of liberalism to develop and prosper.
As Dimitri Halikias pointed out on Twitter, there is a strange convergence between the extreme left and the extreme right when it comes to understanding the Western political tradition. The campus left (hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go) rejects Western Civilization because it is racist. The alt-right, meanwhile, accepts Western civilization only insofar as it is racist — they fashion themselves defenders of “the West,” but reject the ideas of equality and human dignity that are the West’s principal achievements. But both, crucially, deny the connection between the West and the liberal tradition.
To critics, one of the most offending lines in Trump’s speech was his remark that “the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Trump clearly intended this to refer to the threat from Islamic extremism — and, presumably, the politically correct liberals who he believes are enabling it. But there is another threat to the West’s survival in the form of a far-right politics that would replace liberalism and the rule of law with tribalism and white ethnic patronage.
The best defense we have against this threat is the Western liberal tradition. But by trying to turn the “West” into a slur, Trump’s critics are disarming. Perhaps the president’s dire warning wasn’t so exaggerated, after all. Source. The author's main point is interesting and functionally indistinguishable from the arguments that I have previously made regarding the radical Left's overbearing use of identity and racial politics. What say y'all on the left? This article is interesting because it at least draws distinctions between the "extreme" left and right despite its tepid equivocation ("there is a strange convergence …") and despite rehashing Horseshoe Theory pablum. The problem is that its vision is far too limited (and I am not just talking about the unalloyed celebration of "liberalism"). The "racism" or, perhaps more properly, "Eurocentrism" of the Enlightenment is far too narrow a hook on which to hang the divide between left and right. If anything, this kind of analysis seems to have missed the epochal shift from the modern to the postmodern that Negri and Hardt point out in their book, Empire. Negri and Hardt identify a struggle between two modes within the emergence of modernity that the Enlightenment ushered in. On the one hand is the revolutionary transition from "a dualistic consciousness, a hierarchical vision of society, and a metaphysical idea of science" inherited from medieval Europe to "an experimental idea of science, a constituent conception of history and cities, and [the posing] of being as an immanent terrain of knowledge and action." The Enlightenment brought about "an affirmation of the power of this world, the discovery of the plane of the immanence." This new found creativity ushers in a revolutionary subjectivity within modern people, that fundamentally changed the modes of life of the population. On the other hand, uprooting and destroying traditional forms of life and connections to the past provokes conflict and war, or counter-revolution. The second "mode" of modernity "poses a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire." You get modern capitalism emerging in Genoa and the Italian city states, as well as the Reformation, civil wars, and the reestablishment of ideologies of command and authority: absolutism, parliament, and the rise of the modern nation state which sought to control, mediate, and harness the productive energies unleashed by Enlightenment thought. Insofar as the contemporary left and right appeal to "modern" Enlightenment ideals, or in the context of this article, we could talk about "the West," I think they are talking about two separates modes of Enlightenment. On the one hand you have the opening up of the potentiality of the multitude in the plane of immanence, and on the other hand you have a modern appeal to a "people." The "people" being the reduction of the heterogeneities and singularities of the multitude to a single subjectivity: "the national people," which is capable of univocal communication and knowable, controllable, desires. The "people" legitimates sovereign authority in the presence of the prince, the parliament, the dictator, etc. The crisis of modernity is the "contradictory co-presence of the multitude and a power that wants to reduce it to the rule of one" or at least the imagined community of the nation-state. It's hard to know how seriously to take the idiots who talk about "neo-Marxism," "feminism," and "post-modernism" as the premiere monolithic evils ailing us in the present. Mostly because even when they can convince the totally ignorant that they have a working knowledge of those concepts, they actually have no clue what they are talking about. But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions. You don't have to look any further for evidence of the waning legitimacy of the imperial world order than the ineffectiveness of police action by the United States within the last two decades. It is effectiveness, itself, that legitimates those actions by restoring peace and upholding humanitarian principles, and every failure greatly undermines that legitimacy. And so there's a conflation here, in this article you have linked, xDaunt, between "Western Enlightenment modernity" as the bevy of imperialist, war-prone, nation states that carved up territories and maintained strict lines between the capitalist market inside, and the colonial outside, and the " imperial global market led by the United States" which is based on a truly global sovereign imperative, breaks down borders, opens flows of capital, culture, and people, and incorporates the entire world into a single united market. The fundamentalist Islamists of ISIS are no more pre-modern than they are post-modern. Jihadist mentality of "being-against" is an active response to globalizing post-modern imperial sovereignty. They resist in the only way open to them. To put up strict borders and cut yourself off from that policing, organizing influence today is to turn your territory into a ghetto. On the question of Enlightenment I am partial to Kant's answer in Was ist Aufklärung: "Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason by in lack of resolution and courage to use it without distinction from another." Insofar as "identity politics" attempts to overturn hierarchies by circumscribing individuals and groups within eidetic boundary lines, saying " I am essentially this [or these] kind(s) of entity," I think it is silly and short-sighted. One might say childish. Insofar as the wiser members displace hierarchies, recognize fractured subjectivities, and refrain from putting me or themselves in the very boxes that [we] want to dismantle/deconstruct, I don't even see what the big deal is. I want you to know that I needed two cups of coffee before I tackled this. And at times, I felt like scotch may have been more effective. In short, I think that you're missing the forest for the trees. At issue here isn't really a particular definition of the Enlightenment or how Western thought evolved following the Enlightenment. What's at issue is whether we should embrace the culture that gave birth to the Enlightenment: "Western culture." For decades, the intellectual left has been making arguments that undermine the status and prestige of Western culture. And these arguments have only grown more radical in recent years (hence the author sounding the alarm at the attacks on Trump's speech that necessarily incorporate various levels of demonizing Western culture). Thus while I agree with you that the average proponent on the right really doesn't understand what they're talking about when they loosely throw around terms like "Marxist" or "Neo-Marxist," there is more than just some truth to the fact that the Marxist schools of thought have been the primary launching pads for the current outbreak of Western self-hatred. Lastly, I need to address the following: But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions. You identified the problem (cultural clashes => conflict/war/bad things). You even tacitly admit that this problem is well-grounded in historical fact. But then you dismiss this problem with a wave of a hand by declaring that we're in a new epoch where none of this cultural difference shit matters anymore, and by implication, it won't matter in the future, either. I simply find that to be an incredible declaration. I have no idea where your confidence in this newfound state of world order permanence comes from. In fact, your repeated use of the term "imperial" or "imperialist" when referring to this order shows that you understand that this order is maintained through Western (re: American) unipolar force and power. What happens when we inevitably revert to a multipolar world? What happens when another unipolar power emerges that may have a very different idea of culture (not to mention cultural tolerance) than the West presently does? The answers to these questions are precisely why Western culture should be defended and why it is foolish for the Left to antagonize Trump for doing so. As we know from the examples of Rome and every other great empire that rise and fell, cultural integrity matters. And when it's lost, it's usually not regained, to the peril of the people. i'm not going to respond at length now but in short my point might be distilled to something like the following: western nostaglia for 50s leave it to beaver pastiche from the likes of Publius has failed to adequately reckon with and accept modernity's passing. there is no way to return to the (fantasy of) the past. this problem is exacerbated by conservatives' general belief in markets and the creative potential of capital without properly understanding that the need for expansion, and the concomitant incorporation and articulation of the outside (i.e. those scary elements that threaten order itself) is what has propelled us into our contemporary imperial order. corruption, in the sense of "degeneration" and/or recrudescence (or if you prefer "creative destruction") is the necessary condition and modality of this imperial order. you cannot maintain empire, with its legitimacy bolstered by effective police action and a universalizing set of human rights, without that corruption. the only way to get rid of discomfort with the disintegration of the boundary line between us and them, between first and third world (if that is what you feel and what you mean by "integrity," or identical self-sameness) is to end the project of empire. that's all fine and good, as long as you understand that empire is the only substrate upon which capital accumulation can continue unabated. at least until other avenues of expansion open up. mars colonization anyone? Maybe some conservatives are preoccupied with the past and a return to the "glory days," but that's certainly not the point that I am making, which is strictly forward looking. And again, you're missing the forest for the trees with the point that you're making. Let's just presume for a moment that you're correct in asserting that the dynamics of capitalism make cultural contact, mixing, and conflict inevitable, thereby creating the forces that threaten cultural integrity. All that you have done is define the need for some type of cultural defense. You're not saying that the Romans should have bent over sooner for the barbarians, are you? Such defeatism is absurd. And this absurdity becomes very apparent once you step outside of Western culture and see what other peoples think. The Chinese created the perfect slur for the people who adhere to this kind of defeatism: "baizuo" -- the white left. I want to take this question very seriously, but it would help if you would elaborate on what you mean by "Western culture." I take it you don't mean anything so narrow as "that which is opposed to Islam" but I am not sure how much of what might be perceived as "Western" you think is worth defending. In other words, I would prefer to skip over the inevitable apophatic objections and move to a more positive characterization of "Western culture," including that which you think needs defending from the forces of cultural contact, mixing, and conflict.
Let's start with a broad definition of Western culture, which would include traditions of individual liberty, inalienable rights, political plurality, rationalism, and the rule of law (I'd throw Christianity in there as well, but I'm not sure that we need to go down that rabbit hole yet).
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On July 20 2017 13:33 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On July 20 2017 12:36 IgnE wrote:On July 20 2017 05:20 xDaunt wrote:On July 20 2017 02:06 IgnE wrote:On July 20 2017 01:40 xDaunt wrote:On July 19 2017 14:33 IgnE wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 18 2017 09:36 xDaunt wrote:I meant to post this editorial a few days ago, but have been badly tied up with work: Show nested quote +It’s anyone’s guess whether the latest round of Russia revelations will flame out or bring the administration toppling to the ground. But either way, the drama is only one act in an ongoing cycle of outrages involving Trump and Russia that will, one way or another, come to an end. That is not true of the controversy over the President’s remarks in Warsaw last week, which exposed a crucial contest over ideas that will continue to influence our politics until long after this administration has left office. And the responses from Trump’s liberal critics were revealing — and dangerous.
The speech — a call to arms for a Western civilization ostensibly menaced by decadence and bloat from within and hostile powers from without — was received across the center-left as a thinly veiled apologia for white nationalism. “Trump did everything but cite Pepe the Frog,” tweeted the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart. “Trump’s speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto,” read a Vox headline. According the New Republic’s Jeet Heer, Trump’s “alt-right speech” “redefined the West in nativist terms.”
Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term “alt-right” that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate them as distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized.
There is no shortage of fair criticism of Trump’s speech: For example, that he shouldn’t have delivered it in Poland because of Warsaw’s recent authoritarian tilt; that his criticism of Russia should have been more pointed; or that he would have better served America’s interests by sounding a more Wilsonian tone when it came to promoting democracy around the world. And, yes, Trump has proven himself a clever manipulator of white identity politics during his short political career, so it is understandable that critics would scrutinize his remarks for any hint of bigotry. But by identifying Western civilization itself with white nationalism, the center-left is unwittingly empowering its enemies and imperiling its values.
How did progressive intellectuals get themselves into this mess? The confusion comes in part from loose language: in particular, a conflation of “liberalism” and “the West.” Liberalism is an ideology — defined by, among other things, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property, popular sovereignty and equal dignity of all people. The West is the geographically delimited area where those values were first realized on a large scale during and after the European Enlightenment.
So to appeal to “the West” in highlighting the importance of liberal values, as Trump did, is not to suggest that those values are the exclusive property of whites or Christians. Rather, it is to accurately recognize that the seeds of these values were forged in the context of the West’s wars, religions and classical inheritances hundreds of years ago. Since then, they have spread far beyond their geographic place of birth and have won tremendous prestige across the world.
What is at stake now is whether Americans will surrender the idea of “the West” to liberalism’s enemies on the alt-right — that is, whether we will allow people who deny the equal citizenship of women and minorities and Jews to lay claim to the legacy of Western civilization. This would amount to a major and potentially suicidal concession, because the alt-right — not in the opportunistically watered-down sense of “immigration skeptic,” or “social conservative,” but in the sense of genuine white male political supremacism — is anti-Western. It is hostile to the once-radical ideals of pluralism and self-governance and individual rights that were developed during the Western Enlightenment and its offshoots. It represents an attack on, not a defense of, of the West’s greatest achievements.
As any alt-rightist will be quick to point out, many Enlightenment philosophers were racist by current standards. (Have you even read what Voltaire said about the Jews?) But this is a non-sequitur: The Enlightenment is today remembered and celebrated not for the flaws of its principals but for laying the intellectual foundations that have allowed today’s conception of liberalism to develop and prosper.
As Dimitri Halikias pointed out on Twitter, there is a strange convergence between the extreme left and the extreme right when it comes to understanding the Western political tradition. The campus left (hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go) rejects Western Civilization because it is racist. The alt-right, meanwhile, accepts Western civilization only insofar as it is racist — they fashion themselves defenders of “the West,” but reject the ideas of equality and human dignity that are the West’s principal achievements. But both, crucially, deny the connection between the West and the liberal tradition.
To critics, one of the most offending lines in Trump’s speech was his remark that “the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Trump clearly intended this to refer to the threat from Islamic extremism — and, presumably, the politically correct liberals who he believes are enabling it. But there is another threat to the West’s survival in the form of a far-right politics that would replace liberalism and the rule of law with tribalism and white ethnic patronage.
The best defense we have against this threat is the Western liberal tradition. But by trying to turn the “West” into a slur, Trump’s critics are disarming. Perhaps the president’s dire warning wasn’t so exaggerated, after all. Source. The author's main point is interesting and functionally indistinguishable from the arguments that I have previously made regarding the radical Left's overbearing use of identity and racial politics. What say y'all on the left? This article is interesting because it at least draws distinctions between the "extreme" left and right despite its tepid equivocation ("there is a strange convergence …") and despite rehashing Horseshoe Theory pablum. The problem is that its vision is far too limited (and I am not just talking about the unalloyed celebration of "liberalism"). The "racism" or, perhaps more properly, "Eurocentrism" of the Enlightenment is far too narrow a hook on which to hang the divide between left and right. If anything, this kind of analysis seems to have missed the epochal shift from the modern to the postmodern that Negri and Hardt point out in their book, Empire. Negri and Hardt identify a struggle between two modes within the emergence of modernity that the Enlightenment ushered in. On the one hand is the revolutionary transition from "a dualistic consciousness, a hierarchical vision of society, and a metaphysical idea of science" inherited from medieval Europe to "an experimental idea of science, a constituent conception of history and cities, and [the posing] of being as an immanent terrain of knowledge and action." The Enlightenment brought about "an affirmation of the power of this world, the discovery of the plane of the immanence." This new found creativity ushers in a revolutionary subjectivity within modern people, that fundamentally changed the modes of life of the population. On the other hand, uprooting and destroying traditional forms of life and connections to the past provokes conflict and war, or counter-revolution. The second "mode" of modernity "poses a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire." You get modern capitalism emerging in Genoa and the Italian city states, as well as the Reformation, civil wars, and the reestablishment of ideologies of command and authority: absolutism, parliament, and the rise of the modern nation state which sought to control, mediate, and harness the productive energies unleashed by Enlightenment thought. Insofar as the contemporary left and right appeal to "modern" Enlightenment ideals, or in the context of this article, we could talk about "the West," I think they are talking about two separates modes of Enlightenment. On the one hand you have the opening up of the potentiality of the multitude in the plane of immanence, and on the other hand you have a modern appeal to a "people." The "people" being the reduction of the heterogeneities and singularities of the multitude to a single subjectivity: "the national people," which is capable of univocal communication and knowable, controllable, desires. The "people" legitimates sovereign authority in the presence of the prince, the parliament, the dictator, etc. The crisis of modernity is the "contradictory co-presence of the multitude and a power that wants to reduce it to the rule of one" or at least the imagined community of the nation-state. It's hard to know how seriously to take the idiots who talk about "neo-Marxism," "feminism," and "post-modernism" as the premiere monolithic evils ailing us in the present. Mostly because even when they can convince the totally ignorant that they have a working knowledge of those concepts, they actually have no clue what they are talking about. But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions. You don't have to look any further for evidence of the waning legitimacy of the imperial world order than the ineffectiveness of police action by the United States within the last two decades. It is effectiveness, itself, that legitimates those actions by restoring peace and upholding humanitarian principles, and every failure greatly undermines that legitimacy. And so there's a conflation here, in this article you have linked, xDaunt, between "Western Enlightenment modernity" as the bevy of imperialist, war-prone, nation states that carved up territories and maintained strict lines between the capitalist market inside, and the colonial outside, and the " imperial global market led by the United States" which is based on a truly global sovereign imperative, breaks down borders, opens flows of capital, culture, and people, and incorporates the entire world into a single united market. The fundamentalist Islamists of ISIS are no more pre-modern than they are post-modern. Jihadist mentality of "being-against" is an active response to globalizing post-modern imperial sovereignty. They resist in the only way open to them. To put up strict borders and cut yourself off from that policing, organizing influence today is to turn your territory into a ghetto. On the question of Enlightenment I am partial to Kant's answer in Was ist Aufklärung: "Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason by in lack of resolution and courage to use it without distinction from another." Insofar as "identity politics" attempts to overturn hierarchies by circumscribing individuals and groups within eidetic boundary lines, saying " I am essentially this [or these] kind(s) of entity," I think it is silly and short-sighted. One might say childish. Insofar as the wiser members displace hierarchies, recognize fractured subjectivities, and refrain from putting me or themselves in the very boxes that [we] want to dismantle/deconstruct, I don't even see what the big deal is. I want you to know that I needed two cups of coffee before I tackled this. And at times, I felt like scotch may have been more effective. In short, I think that you're missing the forest for the trees. At issue here isn't really a particular definition of the Enlightenment or how Western thought evolved following the Enlightenment. What's at issue is whether we should embrace the culture that gave birth to the Enlightenment: "Western culture." For decades, the intellectual left has been making arguments that undermine the status and prestige of Western culture. And these arguments have only grown more radical in recent years (hence the author sounding the alarm at the attacks on Trump's speech that necessarily incorporate various levels of demonizing Western culture). Thus while I agree with you that the average proponent on the right really doesn't understand what they're talking about when they loosely throw around terms like "Marxist" or "Neo-Marxist," there is more than just some truth to the fact that the Marxist schools of thought have been the primary launching pads for the current outbreak of Western self-hatred. Lastly, I need to address the following: But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions. You identified the problem (cultural clashes => conflict/war/bad things). You even tacitly admit that this problem is well-grounded in historical fact. But then you dismiss this problem with a wave of a hand by declaring that we're in a new epoch where none of this cultural difference shit matters anymore, and by implication, it won't matter in the future, either. I simply find that to be an incredible declaration. I have no idea where your confidence in this newfound state of world order permanence comes from. In fact, your repeated use of the term "imperial" or "imperialist" when referring to this order shows that you understand that this order is maintained through Western (re: American) unipolar force and power. What happens when we inevitably revert to a multipolar world? What happens when another unipolar power emerges that may have a very different idea of culture (not to mention cultural tolerance) than the West presently does? The answers to these questions are precisely why Western culture should be defended and why it is foolish for the Left to antagonize Trump for doing so. As we know from the examples of Rome and every other great empire that rise and fell, cultural integrity matters. And when it's lost, it's usually not regained, to the peril of the people. i'm not going to respond at length now but in short my point might be distilled to something like the following: western nostaglia for 50s leave it to beaver pastiche from the likes of Publius has failed to adequately reckon with and accept modernity's passing. there is no way to return to the (fantasy of) the past. this problem is exacerbated by conservatives' general belief in markets and the creative potential of capital without properly understanding that the need for expansion, and the concomitant incorporation and articulation of the outside (i.e. those scary elements that threaten order itself) is what has propelled us into our contemporary imperial order. corruption, in the sense of "degeneration" and/or recrudescence (or if you prefer "creative destruction") is the necessary condition and modality of this imperial order. you cannot maintain empire, with its legitimacy bolstered by effective police action and a universalizing set of human rights, without that corruption. the only way to get rid of discomfort with the disintegration of the boundary line between us and them, between first and third world (if that is what you feel and what you mean by "integrity," or identical self-sameness) is to end the project of empire. that's all fine and good, as long as you understand that empire is the only substrate upon which capital accumulation can continue unabated. at least until other avenues of expansion open up. mars colonization anyone? Maybe some conservatives are preoccupied with the past and a return to the "glory days," but that's certainly not the point that I am making, which is strictly forward looking. And again, you're missing the forest for the trees with the point that you're making. Let's just presume for a moment that you're correct in asserting that the dynamics of capitalism make cultural contact, mixing, and conflict inevitable, thereby creating the forces that threaten cultural integrity. All that you have done is define the need for some type of cultural defense. You're not saying that the Romans should have bent over sooner for the barbarians, are you? Such defeatism is absurd. And this absurdity becomes very apparent once you step outside of Western culture and see what other peoples think. The Chinese created the perfect slur for the people who adhere to this kind of defeatism: "baizuo" -- the white left. I want to take this question very seriously, but it would help if you would elaborate on what you mean by "Western culture." I take it you don't mean anything so narrow as "that which is opposed to Islam" but I am not sure how much of what might be perceived as "Western" you think is worth defending. In other words, I would prefer to skip over the inevitable apophatic objections and move to a more positive characterization of "Western culture," including that which you think needs defending from the forces of cultural contact, mixing, and conflict. Let's start with a broad definition of Western culture, which would include traditions of individual liberty, inalienable rights, political plurality, and the rule of law (I'd throw Christianity in there as well, but I'm not sure that we need to go down that rabbit hole yet).
I'm not sure we can say the US was founded on those concepts. I suppose if you just erase the humanity of anyone but* white males (a common practice for some) then those would be traditions of western culture though .
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On July 20 2017 13:55 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 20 2017 13:33 xDaunt wrote:On July 20 2017 12:36 IgnE wrote:On July 20 2017 05:20 xDaunt wrote:On July 20 2017 02:06 IgnE wrote:On July 20 2017 01:40 xDaunt wrote:On July 19 2017 14:33 IgnE wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On July 18 2017 09:36 xDaunt wrote:I meant to post this editorial a few days ago, but have been badly tied up with work: Show nested quote +It’s anyone’s guess whether the latest round of Russia revelations will flame out or bring the administration toppling to the ground. But either way, the drama is only one act in an ongoing cycle of outrages involving Trump and Russia that will, one way or another, come to an end. That is not true of the controversy over the President’s remarks in Warsaw last week, which exposed a crucial contest over ideas that will continue to influence our politics until long after this administration has left office. And the responses from Trump’s liberal critics were revealing — and dangerous.
The speech — a call to arms for a Western civilization ostensibly menaced by decadence and bloat from within and hostile powers from without — was received across the center-left as a thinly veiled apologia for white nationalism. “Trump did everything but cite Pepe the Frog,” tweeted the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart. “Trump’s speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto,” read a Vox headline. According the New Republic’s Jeet Heer, Trump’s “alt-right speech” “redefined the West in nativist terms.”
Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term “alt-right” that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate them as distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized.
There is no shortage of fair criticism of Trump’s speech: For example, that he shouldn’t have delivered it in Poland because of Warsaw’s recent authoritarian tilt; that his criticism of Russia should have been more pointed; or that he would have better served America’s interests by sounding a more Wilsonian tone when it came to promoting democracy around the world. And, yes, Trump has proven himself a clever manipulator of white identity politics during his short political career, so it is understandable that critics would scrutinize his remarks for any hint of bigotry. But by identifying Western civilization itself with white nationalism, the center-left is unwittingly empowering its enemies and imperiling its values.
How did progressive intellectuals get themselves into this mess? The confusion comes in part from loose language: in particular, a conflation of “liberalism” and “the West.” Liberalism is an ideology — defined by, among other things, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property, popular sovereignty and equal dignity of all people. The West is the geographically delimited area where those values were first realized on a large scale during and after the European Enlightenment.
So to appeal to “the West” in highlighting the importance of liberal values, as Trump did, is not to suggest that those values are the exclusive property of whites or Christians. Rather, it is to accurately recognize that the seeds of these values were forged in the context of the West’s wars, religions and classical inheritances hundreds of years ago. Since then, they have spread far beyond their geographic place of birth and have won tremendous prestige across the world.
What is at stake now is whether Americans will surrender the idea of “the West” to liberalism’s enemies on the alt-right — that is, whether we will allow people who deny the equal citizenship of women and minorities and Jews to lay claim to the legacy of Western civilization. This would amount to a major and potentially suicidal concession, because the alt-right — not in the opportunistically watered-down sense of “immigration skeptic,” or “social conservative,” but in the sense of genuine white male political supremacism — is anti-Western. It is hostile to the once-radical ideals of pluralism and self-governance and individual rights that were developed during the Western Enlightenment and its offshoots. It represents an attack on, not a defense of, of the West’s greatest achievements.
As any alt-rightist will be quick to point out, many Enlightenment philosophers were racist by current standards. (Have you even read what Voltaire said about the Jews?) But this is a non-sequitur: The Enlightenment is today remembered and celebrated not for the flaws of its principals but for laying the intellectual foundations that have allowed today’s conception of liberalism to develop and prosper.
As Dimitri Halikias pointed out on Twitter, there is a strange convergence between the extreme left and the extreme right when it comes to understanding the Western political tradition. The campus left (hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go) rejects Western Civilization because it is racist. The alt-right, meanwhile, accepts Western civilization only insofar as it is racist — they fashion themselves defenders of “the West,” but reject the ideas of equality and human dignity that are the West’s principal achievements. But both, crucially, deny the connection between the West and the liberal tradition.
To critics, one of the most offending lines in Trump’s speech was his remark that “the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Trump clearly intended this to refer to the threat from Islamic extremism — and, presumably, the politically correct liberals who he believes are enabling it. But there is another threat to the West’s survival in the form of a far-right politics that would replace liberalism and the rule of law with tribalism and white ethnic patronage.
The best defense we have against this threat is the Western liberal tradition. But by trying to turn the “West” into a slur, Trump’s critics are disarming. Perhaps the president’s dire warning wasn’t so exaggerated, after all. Source. The author's main point is interesting and functionally indistinguishable from the arguments that I have previously made regarding the radical Left's overbearing use of identity and racial politics. What say y'all on the left? This article is interesting because it at least draws distinctions between the "extreme" left and right despite its tepid equivocation ("there is a strange convergence …") and despite rehashing Horseshoe Theory pablum. The problem is that its vision is far too limited (and I am not just talking about the unalloyed celebration of "liberalism"). The "racism" or, perhaps more properly, "Eurocentrism" of the Enlightenment is far too narrow a hook on which to hang the divide between left and right. If anything, this kind of analysis seems to have missed the epochal shift from the modern to the postmodern that Negri and Hardt point out in their book, Empire. Negri and Hardt identify a struggle between two modes within the emergence of modernity that the Enlightenment ushered in. On the one hand is the revolutionary transition from "a dualistic consciousness, a hierarchical vision of society, and a metaphysical idea of science" inherited from medieval Europe to "an experimental idea of science, a constituent conception of history and cities, and [the posing] of being as an immanent terrain of knowledge and action." The Enlightenment brought about "an affirmation of the power of this world, the discovery of the plane of the immanence." This new found creativity ushers in a revolutionary subjectivity within modern people, that fundamentally changed the modes of life of the population. On the other hand, uprooting and destroying traditional forms of life and connections to the past provokes conflict and war, or counter-revolution. The second "mode" of modernity "poses a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire." You get modern capitalism emerging in Genoa and the Italian city states, as well as the Reformation, civil wars, and the reestablishment of ideologies of command and authority: absolutism, parliament, and the rise of the modern nation state which sought to control, mediate, and harness the productive energies unleashed by Enlightenment thought. Insofar as the contemporary left and right appeal to "modern" Enlightenment ideals, or in the context of this article, we could talk about "the West," I think they are talking about two separates modes of Enlightenment. On the one hand you have the opening up of the potentiality of the multitude in the plane of immanence, and on the other hand you have a modern appeal to a "people." The "people" being the reduction of the heterogeneities and singularities of the multitude to a single subjectivity: "the national people," which is capable of univocal communication and knowable, controllable, desires. The "people" legitimates sovereign authority in the presence of the prince, the parliament, the dictator, etc. The crisis of modernity is the "contradictory co-presence of the multitude and a power that wants to reduce it to the rule of one" or at least the imagined community of the nation-state. It's hard to know how seriously to take the idiots who talk about "neo-Marxism," "feminism," and "post-modernism" as the premiere monolithic evils ailing us in the present. Mostly because even when they can convince the totally ignorant that they have a working knowledge of those concepts, they actually have no clue what they are talking about. But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions. You don't have to look any further for evidence of the waning legitimacy of the imperial world order than the ineffectiveness of police action by the United States within the last two decades. It is effectiveness, itself, that legitimates those actions by restoring peace and upholding humanitarian principles, and every failure greatly undermines that legitimacy. And so there's a conflation here, in this article you have linked, xDaunt, between "Western Enlightenment modernity" as the bevy of imperialist, war-prone, nation states that carved up territories and maintained strict lines between the capitalist market inside, and the colonial outside, and the " imperial global market led by the United States" which is based on a truly global sovereign imperative, breaks down borders, opens flows of capital, culture, and people, and incorporates the entire world into a single united market. The fundamentalist Islamists of ISIS are no more pre-modern than they are post-modern. Jihadist mentality of "being-against" is an active response to globalizing post-modern imperial sovereignty. They resist in the only way open to them. To put up strict borders and cut yourself off from that policing, organizing influence today is to turn your territory into a ghetto. On the question of Enlightenment I am partial to Kant's answer in Was ist Aufklärung: "Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason by in lack of resolution and courage to use it without distinction from another." Insofar as "identity politics" attempts to overturn hierarchies by circumscribing individuals and groups within eidetic boundary lines, saying " I am essentially this [or these] kind(s) of entity," I think it is silly and short-sighted. One might say childish. Insofar as the wiser members displace hierarchies, recognize fractured subjectivities, and refrain from putting me or themselves in the very boxes that [we] want to dismantle/deconstruct, I don't even see what the big deal is. I want you to know that I needed two cups of coffee before I tackled this. And at times, I felt like scotch may have been more effective. In short, I think that you're missing the forest for the trees. At issue here isn't really a particular definition of the Enlightenment or how Western thought evolved following the Enlightenment. What's at issue is whether we should embrace the culture that gave birth to the Enlightenment: "Western culture." For decades, the intellectual left has been making arguments that undermine the status and prestige of Western culture. And these arguments have only grown more radical in recent years (hence the author sounding the alarm at the attacks on Trump's speech that necessarily incorporate various levels of demonizing Western culture). Thus while I agree with you that the average proponent on the right really doesn't understand what they're talking about when they loosely throw around terms like "Marxist" or "Neo-Marxist," there is more than just some truth to the fact that the Marxist schools of thought have been the primary launching pads for the current outbreak of Western self-hatred. Lastly, I need to address the following: But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions. You identified the problem (cultural clashes => conflict/war/bad things). You even tacitly admit that this problem is well-grounded in historical fact. But then you dismiss this problem with a wave of a hand by declaring that we're in a new epoch where none of this cultural difference shit matters anymore, and by implication, it won't matter in the future, either. I simply find that to be an incredible declaration. I have no idea where your confidence in this newfound state of world order permanence comes from. In fact, your repeated use of the term "imperial" or "imperialist" when referring to this order shows that you understand that this order is maintained through Western (re: American) unipolar force and power. What happens when we inevitably revert to a multipolar world? What happens when another unipolar power emerges that may have a very different idea of culture (not to mention cultural tolerance) than the West presently does? The answers to these questions are precisely why Western culture should be defended and why it is foolish for the Left to antagonize Trump for doing so. As we know from the examples of Rome and every other great empire that rise and fell, cultural integrity matters. And when it's lost, it's usually not regained, to the peril of the people. i'm not going to respond at length now but in short my point might be distilled to something like the following: western nostaglia for 50s leave it to beaver pastiche from the likes of Publius has failed to adequately reckon with and accept modernity's passing. there is no way to return to the (fantasy of) the past. this problem is exacerbated by conservatives' general belief in markets and the creative potential of capital without properly understanding that the need for expansion, and the concomitant incorporation and articulation of the outside (i.e. those scary elements that threaten order itself) is what has propelled us into our contemporary imperial order. corruption, in the sense of "degeneration" and/or recrudescence (or if you prefer "creative destruction") is the necessary condition and modality of this imperial order. you cannot maintain empire, with its legitimacy bolstered by effective police action and a universalizing set of human rights, without that corruption. the only way to get rid of discomfort with the disintegration of the boundary line between us and them, between first and third world (if that is what you feel and what you mean by "integrity," or identical self-sameness) is to end the project of empire. that's all fine and good, as long as you understand that empire is the only substrate upon which capital accumulation can continue unabated. at least until other avenues of expansion open up. mars colonization anyone? Maybe some conservatives are preoccupied with the past and a return to the "glory days," but that's certainly not the point that I am making, which is strictly forward looking. And again, you're missing the forest for the trees with the point that you're making. Let's just presume for a moment that you're correct in asserting that the dynamics of capitalism make cultural contact, mixing, and conflict inevitable, thereby creating the forces that threaten cultural integrity. All that you have done is define the need for some type of cultural defense. You're not saying that the Romans should have bent over sooner for the barbarians, are you? Such defeatism is absurd. And this absurdity becomes very apparent once you step outside of Western culture and see what other peoples think. The Chinese created the perfect slur for the people who adhere to this kind of defeatism: "baizuo" -- the white left. I want to take this question very seriously, but it would help if you would elaborate on what you mean by "Western culture." I take it you don't mean anything so narrow as "that which is opposed to Islam" but I am not sure how much of what might be perceived as "Western" you think is worth defending. In other words, I would prefer to skip over the inevitable apophatic objections and move to a more positive characterization of "Western culture," including that which you think needs defending from the forces of cultural contact, mixing, and conflict. Let's start with a broad definition of Western culture, which would include traditions of individual liberty, inalienable rights, political plurality, and the rule of law (I'd throw Christianity in there as well, but I'm not sure that we need to go down that rabbit hole yet). I'm not sure we can say the US was founded on those concepts. I suppose if you just erase the humanity anyone but* white males (a common practice for some) then those would be traditions of western culture though .
Don't worry, I'm sure that I'll be addressing this when I respond to Igne's next post.
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John McCain's mom is probably going to outlive him. Crazy...
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Canada11328 Posts
Or is that biological too Falling?
Well, no it isn't. That's clearly an attitude that will hopefully change over time.
edit
That's a choice a woman can make in the modern era, and a choice she should be able to make. But equally, any woman that decides, voluntarily, because they want to stay at home for extended periods of time to care for her new family, shouldn't be seen as messing up the gender distribution that otherwise- that they are being chased out of the workforce due to socialization and societal expectation. If they want to go back to work right away and the family can find a reasonable way to take care of the children, all power to them. And if one of the parents wants to cut back on work to care for the children, all power to them. The concern and indeed preoccupation for equal distribution across all jobs to some extent makes paid work the pinnacle of fulfillment and necessarily denigrates child rearing to being something rather lesser- that is something is wrong with society if one gender or the other on average must or is forced to cut back on their career. (Notice my emphasized words which betrays a certain view.) Seeing child rearing as an obligation and an obstruction to a career is a fairly low view of family in comparison to career. And I mean this for men and women. ...I don't know. I'm musing as I'm typing as I'm struggling to articulate what I'm seeing in society.
/end edit
But anyways, notice we aren't actually talking about a wage gap anymore. What we are actually talking about is desirable distribution by occupation. That's a very different thing and something that .7 to the dollar doesn't really touch. It's a distractor. (Insofar that it isn't true when comparing like occupation and like experience- if two teachers of equal training and experience are getting paid differently based upon gender, that is illegal and should be stopped immediately.)
I mean, it's certainly worth finding out if women are entering and exiting their occupation by choice or if they are getting blocked by the patriarchy. But it's not quite so simple because couples are making decisions on what makes sense for them as a family. It might not line up with a neat and tidy equal distribution in every occupation from garbage truck drivers to nurses... or maybe it might. But I think too often this discussion thinks too big picture- systems- and precludes the actual individuals, their agency, that are making decisions based on their hopes, dreams, and limitations.
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Regarding the "having babies" is a career hazard, paid maternity & paternity leave with some days mandated for paternity leave goes a long way to equal that bit out.
We have 480 days (combined) and 90 of them are mandated for paternity use. I think around 25% of the days are used by the dads on average now, and several of my friends are doing a straight 50/50 split. I know there has been some rumblings of giving more incentive to people doing the 50/50 split.
Hooray for taxes (but f me as I'm never having kids -.-)
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Canada11328 Posts
I'm all for mat/pat leave. The US lags behind in this regard, but they should really get on board because I think it's a great thing for a day and age that pretty well requires double income for a family. But I think families are great, and so if there are things that can be done to alleviate new families and allow more time for children to bond with their parents, all the better.
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On July 20 2017 14:13 DannyJ wrote:
John McCain's mom is probably going to outlive him. Crazy...
Considering what the guy went through and the amount of abuse his body has taken it isnt THAT surprising. Still very sad. Best of luck to this real american hero.
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EPT
