US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8447

On August 17 2017 06:54 xDaunt wrote:

Good luck reaching the far left on this. You simply cannot expect a rational response, and the first rational responses from the left on this stuff won't be made to people on the right. Professor Lilla from Columbia (he's very liberal) has been criticizing the left regarding its overuse of identity politics ever since Trump won. He just released a book in which he elaborates on his thoughts, and is now making the rounds giving interviews to support the book. One of the most interesting and poignant things that I've seen him say is this:



Source.

This kinda puts the incoherent SJW nonsense that we see from the likes of Kwark, Plansix, and others in proper perspective, doesn't it?

On August 17 2017 06:32 zlefin wrote:

PS, elections have consequences, and the republican refusal to have a vote on garland as a resul tof the election was wrong. I presume you're still unable to admit that it was wrong and a blight upon the constitution and our democracy that the republicans did so.

you don't get to complain about other people doing something YOU started.

On August 17 2017 06:59 mozoku wrote:

But the concept of statistical populations and the differences between them aren't at all limited to Mahjong and cultural skillsets.

For reasons that are likely at least partially due to historical injustices, crime rates among African Americans from the South Side of Chicago are x times higher than they are among the general US population.

If I'm sitting on a train car with 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, I can observe that I'm x times more likely to be the victim of a crime than if I were sitting among five random members of the general US population. Therefore, I feel more threatened on this train car.

It's literally the same example as Mahjong, but now it's politically sensitive. No, it's not fair to the African Americans on the train. And I would be irrational to assume I'll likely be the victim of a crime on that train, since base crime rates are very low. But I'm still logically and mathematically justified in feeling more threatened on that train car than I would with 5 other random US citizens.

Now does that mean we should treat African Americans differently? Again, that's a judgment between utility and fairness. Mathematically, I would be maximizing utility for myself in terms of safety by choosing the random train car passengers. It's irrational in terms of utility to choose the African American train car.

On the other hand, I'm aware that the base probability of being a victim of a crime is still low, even on that train car, so I as a human being I don't mind being on the train car because I'm willing to sacrifice infinitesimal utility in the interest of avoiding a lot of unfairness.

Where people fall on the scale of utility vs fairness is an individual issue that doesn't really jive with black and white morality.
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I'd like to highlight that I'm making a very technical argument out here. A lot of people who are accused of racism are just racists and are "deplorable." I don't think this argument applies to a lot of people that are accused of being racists.

But, when you call someone racist for e.g. making the analysis that I just did, you begin to dilute the term racist imo.

On August 17 2017 07:10 Wulfey_LA wrote:
Nazis in the street with a President spinning for them but the real problem is that progs talk too much about race.

On August 17 2017 06:01 Danglars wrote:

Honestly, we've been through this before. I claim your various assertions (that conservative posters here are racist, Trump supporters are mostly racists, people who didn't vote Obama are mostly racist) are puerile. You defend that calling everybody racists is justified because everybody's actually racist, and the solution is for people to be less goddamn racist. Kind of like your tumblr example, I can get along just fine if political partisans like yourself think I hate black people or feminist protestors think I'm anti-woman. Both opinions are laughably insane and will hurt your coalitions and political causes the longer you hold them.

I'm working through my shock when people try to double-dip back into reasonable opinions ("we're not calling all Republicans barely removed from the KKK/neonazis/white supremacists"), after they've seen fit to label myself xDaunt and broad swaths of voting Americans racist bigots. It's not consistent, but I'm finding the rules get changed with every switch of political party in control.

One of your most important insights is that liberal politics, by becoming driven by identity, have largely ceased to be truly political, and have instead become effectively religious (“evangelical” is the word you use). Can you explain?

We are an evangelical people. How we ever got a reputation for practicality and common sense is a mystery historians will one day have to unravel. Facing up to problems, gauging their significance, gathering evidence, consulting with others, and testing out new approaches is not our thing. We much prefer to ignore problems until they become crises, undergo an inner conversion, write a gospel, preach it at the top of our lungs, cultivate disciples, demand repentance, predict the apocalypse, beat our plowshares into swords, and expect paradise as a reward. And we wonder why our system is dysfunctional…

Identity politics on the left was at first about large classes of people – African Americans, women – seeking to redress major historical wrongs by mobilizing and then working through our political institutions to secure their rights. It was about enfranchisement, a practical political goal reached by persuading others of the rightness of your cause. But by the 1980s this approach had given way to a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow self-definition. The new identity politics is expressive rather than persuasive. Even the slogans changed, from We shall overcome – a call to action – to I’m here, I’m queer – a call to nothing in particular. Identitarians became self-righteous, hypersensitive, denunciatory, and obsessed with trivial issues that have made them a national laughing stock (drawing up long lists of gender pronouns, condemning spaghetti and meatballs as cultural appropriation,…). This was politically disastrous and just played into the hands of Fox News.

What the new identitarians demand is more than mere recognition, though. They demand that you see this country exactly as they do, reach the same moral judgments about it, and confess your sins (which is what the word “privilege” is a secular euphemism for). The most recent books by Ta-Nahesi Coates and Michal Eric Dyson are quite explicit about this need for repentance. The subtitle of Dyson’s is A Sermon to White America. And the use of the term woke is a dead giveaway that we are in the mental universe of American evangelicalism not American politics.

On August 17 2017 07:12 GreenHorizons wrote:


I had a feeling my sig would be an evergreen.

On August 17 2017 06:59 mozoku wrote:

But the concept of statistical populations and the differences between them aren't at all limited to Mahjong and cultural skillsets.

For reasons that are likely at least partially due to historical injustices, crime rates among African Americans from the South Side of Chicago are x times higher than they are among the general US population.

If I'm sitting on a train car with 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, I can observe that I'm x times more likely to be the victim of a crime than if I were sitting among five random members of the general US population. Therefore, I feel more threatened on this train car.

It's literally the same example as Mahjong, but now it's politically sensitive. No, it's not fair to the African Americans on the train. And I would be irrational to assume I'll likely be the victim of a crime on that train, since base crime rates are very low. But I'm still logically and mathematically justified in feeling more threatened on that train car than I would with 5 other random US citizens.

Now does that mean we should treat African Americans differently? Again, that's a judgment between utility and fairness. Mathematically, I would be maximizing utility for myself in terms of safety by choosing the random train car passengers. It's irrational in terms of utility to choose the African American train car.

On the other hand, I'm aware that the base probability of being a victim of a crime is still low, even on that train car, so I as a human being I don't mind being on the train car because I'm willing to sacrifice infinitesimal utility in the interest of avoiding a lot of unfairness.

Where people fall on the scale of utility vs fairness is an individual issue that doesn't really jive with black and white morality.
-----------
I'd like to highlight that I'm making a very technical argument out here. A lot of people who are accused of racism are just racists and are "deplorable." I don't think this argument applies to a lot of people that are accused of being racists.

But, when you call someone racist for e.g. making the analysis that I just did, you begin to dilute the term racist imo.

On August 17 2017 06:54 xDaunt wrote:

Good luck reaching the far left on this. You simply cannot expect a rational response, and the first rational responses from the left on this stuff won't be made to people on the right. Professor Lilla from Columbia (he's very liberal) has been criticizing the left regarding its overuse of identity politics ever since Trump won. He just released a book in which he elaborates on his thoughts, and is now making the rounds giving interviews to support the book. One of the most interesting and poignant things that I've seen him say is this:



Source.

This kinda puts the incoherent SJW nonsense that we see from the likes of Kwark, Plansix, and others in proper perspective, doesn't it?

Identitarians became self-righteous, hypersensitive, denunciatory, and obsessed with trivial issues that have made them a national laughing stock (drawing up long lists of gender pronouns, condemning spaghetti and meatballs as cultural appropriation,…). This was politically disastrous and just played into the hands of Fox News.

I’m a white man, so you should listen to absolutely nothing I say, at least on matters of social justice. I have no standing. No way to relate. My color and gender nullify me, and it gets worse: I grew up in the suburbs. Dad made six figures. We had a backyard pool. From the 10th through 12th grades, I attended private school. So the only proper way for me to check my privilege is to realize that it blinds me to others’ struggles and should gag me during discussions about the right responses to them. [...]

Not long ago I wrote about Evergreen State College, which was roiled by protests after a white biology professor, Bret Weinstein, disparaged the particular tack of a day of racial healing. He raised valid points, only to be branded a bigot and threatened with violence.

That reception was wrong. I said so. And a reader responded: “I don’t need one more white male criticizing young people of color.” Other readers also homed in on my race — or on the professor’s: “Weinstein will be fine. He’s white.” That automatically and axiomatically made him a less compelling actor in the drama, a less deserving object of concern, no matter his actions, no matter his argument. [...]

In a new book coming out this week, “The Once and Future Liberal,” he asserts that “classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. This makes perfect sense if you believe that identity determines everything. It means that there is no impartial space for dialogue. White men have one ‘epistemology,’ black women have another. So what remains to be said?”

And where are the bridges? [...]

That kind of thinking fosters estrangement instead of connection. Lilla noted that what people in a given victim group sometimes seem to be saying is: “You must understand my experience, and you can’t understand my experience.”

“They argue both, so people shrug their shoulders and walk away,” he said.

On August 17 2017 07:04 GreenHorizons wrote:


The analysis is racist though. It completely neglects that arrest and conviction rates are NOT crime commission rates. We know for any crime people admit to that white people commit it at the same or higher rates than black people and yet are arrested and convicted at a far lower rate.

If you're on a train with 100 random Americans, there will be more white criminals on the train than black ones.

On August 17 2017 07:21 Wulfey_LA wrote:




EDIT: the only identity politics that matters is white identity politics. When Republicans do their white cultural dance (horseback riding, fishing, shooting, stupid hats, saying ya'll), that is identity politics. That has such a larger effect on the direction of this country than the sum of every last race club at the universities.

On August 17 2017 07:27 Danglars wrote:


Damn eloquent, I gotta say. Of course, "national laughing stock," is kind of graded on a sliding scale with Trump in the White House, but admittedly these people are climbing high and aspire to higher.

I've always been sympathetic to the religious comparisons because so much fits if you think the State is your savior/supreme being/god. White privilege is something of original sin. Confessing your white privilege and becoming a champion for the oppressed classes is the quasi path to salvation. There's an enforced moral code. There's a priest class along intersectional boundaries. The non-religious or people of different religions (excepting those from priestlike oppressed classes) are viewed as the absolute moral evil. The worst of these are seen as irredeemable. So yeah, you quote good context.

Another one I found particularly illuminating recently was in the New York Times, of all places. Titled "I'm a White Man. Hear me out."
NYT

Thoughts? The 2004 version of me wondered when this kind of nonsense will end, but starting in 2016, I moved towards wondering if it will ever end or become marginalized in discourse.

On August 17 2017 07:31 Kyadytim wrote:
It's a little late to the party because I was unable to post for a while, but Vox Day's explanation of what the Alt-Right is contains the phrase "The Alt Right believes we must secure the existence of white people and a future for white children," which is a transparent paraphrase of the white supremacist slogan "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." Quoting that while arguing that the alt-right is not a movement where white supremacists have a large amount of representation and/or influence should be self-defeating.

On August 17 2017 07:31 Kyadytim wrote:
It's a little late to the party because I was unable to post for a while, but Vox Day's explanation of what the Alt-Right is contains the phrase "The Alt Right believes we must secure the existence of white people and a future for white children," which is a transparent paraphrase of the white supremacist slogan "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." Quoting that while arguing that the alt-right is not a movement where white supremacists have a large amount of representation and/or influence should be self-defeating.