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Specifically regarding virtue signalling, im not sure you’re arguing anything beyond meaningless rhetoric. The claim simply amounts to “you say you believe in something, but your actions say otherwise, because you don’t actually treat it as a ‘cause’, but as social political stance”.

See the term “champagne socialists”. It’s really easy to utilize something like “changing the psychology of racists” for virtue signalling. Or any other stance for that matter.

Taking the stance isn’t at issue, but rather stopping there (having the opinion publicly, but not following through in any meaningful manner).

I agree with the terms, I just don't see how the author has determined that progressives have universally decided to stop there, and not follow through in a meaningful manner. Deplatforming, for example, is meaningful praxis for a lot of lefties. I happen to think it's counter-productive, but just because I disagree with them, that doesn't now mean that the actions don't count and they are simply just champaigne socialist.

The problem is that the champagne socialist does things too, to support his stated goal... just nothing useful. It just further entrenches his social position, but never actually the peoples he claims to help.

That they do work does not ensure its meaningful; at a minimum it needs to somewhat justified...by something. Personally, I’ve yet to find a decent argument for deplatforming (it seems to go against every acceptable idealistic political stance; I mean, its fundamentally against freedom of speech, which is an absurd stance to be taking — and afaik, not a stance otherwise taken), which for me implies that not much thinking actually went into the operation as to whether it was something that should be done.

Which is the behavior you’d expect... of a champagne socialist. Calling for big political events, possibly even organizing them, without considering whether this would actually support their cause in any real fashion.. because it doesn’t matter whether or not it does. It just needs to be interpreted as helping.

Its just positioning.

Ofc, this is also the behavior we associate with politicians, but thats another can of worms ;)

> Our author seems to be quite drastically mischaracterizing the intentions of what he calls the "contemporary left"

The author is a professor at a major university, in a humanities field. As such, he is quite likely to be at least somewhat familiar with the intentions and attitudes of this political group - and while I have not specifically looked at "3rd-wave anti-racism", thought patterns are absolutely a commonly-recurring concern. The burden is on those who take the opposite view to provide evidence to the contrary. In addition, you are using terms like "SJWs" and, most strikingly, "cucks" (a crude and offensive sexual slur that has regrettably entered the present-day political lexicon, roughly comparable to the use of "teabaggers" back in the 2000s), which in fact are not generally found in the article, as if they represented the author's stance. This does not seem to be a case of arguing in good faith.

The author does in fact use the term Social Justice Warrior, which I agree, is an unproductive disparaging term used to dismiss people, which is why I used the term cuck. Perhaps it's an escalation of rhetorical force, but I don't think it's unfair given the tone of the article, specifically where the author characterizes progressive ideology as "cry. Then cry louder"

I think you're cherry picking a bit there. I noticed that phrase because it was out of sync with the rest of the article, which is quite sober. And even then the phrase you quote is a long way from "cuck".

> when a white person starts arguing about IQ scores, which is an explicitly white supremacist argument

No it isn't. IQ scores are a perfectly legitimate thing to debate, and whites don't top that scale, Jews do, followed by Asians. Calling this a white supremacist argument is itself racist. And no it is not uncontroversially accepted; that you think it is shows you're in an ideological bubble and have closed your mind to the fact that other intelligent people disagree with you and it's not because they're uninformed. In fact IQ tests still stand as the single strongest predictor in all of psychology, it is the gold standard of indicators. It is those who doubt IQ who are in the minority and who are apparently uninformed.

> The author complains heavily about how "SJWs" call people White Supremacist too often

They do, as you've just proven, the term is thrown around constantly for completely invalid reasons exactly as you have just done. You've just proven the authors point.

I remember when Jacob Appelbaum was called "rapist, sociopath, plagiarist" and how pages of pages of comments on HN defended that with the most shoddy intellectual contortions, always complete with an air of moral superiority -- and I remember how the few sane voices were treated.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844625

But you could surely just describe it differently, like saying there's just "a few instances of college liberals losing their temper on camera", so where are the examples, right?

> I don't actually think anybody really thinks this. I've never heard this ideology espoused by anybody

It is acted on, not espoused, it's probably incompatible with consciously being aware of it. What is said is usually some variation of "look what you made me do". (no, not in those literal words, but in meaning)

Not that I would ever apply that all to "the left", or "progressives". But there's a lot of people calling themselves that, while being anything but. They just smell the power that a cult of victimhood can convey, and they are cruel and have double standards. The proof is in the pudding -- in what they do, how they reason, not in what is written on the flag. And it hurts those who are actually true to the causes which others just espouse, to use as tools to get to peck on others.

> Additionally, the phrase "virtue signalling" is extremely sloppy.

I agree very much with that. But so is "a few instances of college liberals losing their temper on camera". Might as well reply to your comment with "oh, it just seems like you entered a bunch of characters in a textarea and pressed the reply button". Technically true, totally useless for communication.

situation: cop is super friendly and gives a normal traffic ticket, wishes a nice day

description: I was just threatened by a cop to get pulled out of my car in the middle of nowhere, I could have been the next victim, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAJvNpFVAz0

Mind blowing. She doesn't call him white supremacist, but I'd say this a very fine example anyway. Not depictured in the video is the reactions to her claim, before the bodycam video showed it to be a lie, I can only imagine.

That's using actual victims and actual fear to be a reckless driver and a pseudo-victim at worst, the most charitable interpretation I can come up with, is that this women was so addicted to Facebook and saw so much stuff about cops killing black people, that she didn't even see or hear the actual cop, and honestly believed in her completely deformed version of the situation.

I honestly don't know what would be worse, but it points to one of two wider issues either way.

edit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbqqefsfC14&t=4m41s

> "Oh, you're from South Carolina! You are a little whitey, you supremacist"

as I said: too many cruel, heartless people with double standards, smelling pathetically small amounts of power and using it for pathetically petty things.

Same video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbqqefsfC14&t=6m23s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbqqefsfC14&t=8m32s

Incredible. And this goes hand in hand with "deplatforming"? The US is breeding itself a whole lot of brownshirts in spe, how can you not see that? The weaker an individual is, the more cruel they will be in a mob, this explains what we see more than anything. I for one won't give the noobs trying to import that into Germany even one inch, no pasaran, and God help the US.

Not only that, but the author has displayed a poverty of knowledge on the topic they're writing about, in particular the theory which drives the movements the author is arguing against. For instance,

>Contrast this approach with that of people lionized today who worked within a racism none could disagree was more implacably overt and hostile than today.

This is exactly the issue being raised by the people the author decries. The fact that these issues have become less overt and hostile is part of the problem - we compare current racisms to the more "overt" ones and therefore conclude they have disappeared rather than change form, just as Zizek notes the new forms of dominance in the workplace are no longer to command you to work, but for your boss to befriend you such that you feel bad for not working. I think the superego is at work in racism and in the workplace.

>fostering social justice requires fashioning oneself as vulnerable, injured, and/or broken by things

Does this apply to the large body of academics in the social and philosophical sciences who have usually maintained a large degree of professionalism, or is the author only criticising young people who are, like any other generation, interested in drawing attention to themselves, in addition to whatever legitimate grievances they might have?

>She believed that the speech rights blacks had fought for so hard must be extended to people she found noxious, including on issues as personal to her as race.

This is one example where the author cites a black person to maintain the notion that if a civil rights leader has done something correctly, then it must have been right. Could it not, on the contrary, be argued that modern times have called for a change in tactics and a renewed set of problems, even if the author had previously suggested that they are less overt, could it not also be that they are different in kind not merely degree? Is the author aware of the work of Herbert Marcuse in his criticism of J.S. Mill's idea of speech and tolerance, or indeed the left criticism of human rights? I'd actually suppose that if the people he decries are putting forward strong anti-racist arguments then he should also be willing to consider the critique of ideology which drives them.

He is thus either not willing to look deeply into what he criticises (i.e he will focus on the appearance of "woke" college students rather than the essence of why they do what they do psyhcoanalytically or philosophically) or he is unable to look that deep for one reason or another.

> The fact that these issues have become less overt and hostile is part of the problem - we compare current racisms to the more "overt" ones and therefore conclude they have disappeared rather than change form

The author does not deny that this is a challenge for 3rd-wave anti-racists - indeed, this is a major point of the article itself. However, it seems unhelpful to call it a "problem", with no further qualification, as if the 1st and 2nd "wave" were not contending with far worse problems on the racism front. To think otherwise begs the question of why anyone should even bother to address racism at all, when racism itself can never disappear but merely "change form" into something else, ready for the (n+1)-th wave to address in turn.

The author isn’t doing any of the things you’re claiming.

He agrees that racism has changed form and supports the goals of 3rd wave anti-racists, and understands why they do what they do.

He just argues that the tactics they use are self-defeating.

Except he is doing what I'm claiming; but claiming that racism manifests itself differently (which, if it is his only position, I agree with him) isn't only what he's doing, he's also implying that the racism of today is less pernicious, and leaving no scope for it to be equally as pernicious. If racism has changed form, shouldn't the responses to it also change form? The author also brings up racist viewpoints as merely "challenging the orthodoxy of race".

The issue here is very simple; the author sees the tactics as self defeating because he doesn't agree with them, or because they don't want to accomplish his own aims - because they challenge the liberal orthodoxy, which he defends by mentioning several policies. To him, only policies can be challenged, and anything other than a policy doesn't count for institutional racism at all. The only exceptions he's willing to make are when racism is so bad that liberal approaches don't work so well - in Dr. King's instance. But I would contend that racism (and indeed sexism and classism) manifests itself in a much more overt and discreet way, but this only makes them categorically worse, just as the workplace example I used.

I'm not entirely convinced he does understand what they want to do, having opted to go for a standard "they just want to control what we think" line rather than addressing their issues with the process as it actually stands. It's a bizarre article which hasn't looked into the history of the movement as it exists, and what its strengths and shortcomings are.

I'm struggling to understand how one would attempt to claim that the racism of today is equally or more pernicious than the racism of first and second wave antiracism movements? Is it your genuine belief that racism today exceeds that during 2nd wave antiracism? That people in 2018 suffer racism of equal magnitude as compared to poll taxes, explicit refusal to hire certain races, de-facto legal lynching, etc. ? Or first wave antiracism (abolitionism)? It seems incredibly difficult to make either of these claims.

No doubt, any amount of racism is more than what is ideal. But to criticize the article for, "implying that the racism of today is less pernicious, and leaving no scope for it to be equally as pernicious" strikes me as non-sensical, since the overwhelming majority of people would agree that it is less pernicious.

Liberals have a tendency to focus on legal frameworks and equality before the law while ignoring the material conditions and the lived experiences of black people.

In some sense, it's trivially true that legal equality means things are "better", but there's plenty of empirical evidence that suggests that material gains won by the civil rights movement have regressed significantly.

For example, in many places, schools are more segregated than they've been since the 60s [1]. Further, the housing crisis erased gains in black wealth back to levels of the 80s and 90s [2].

This is too large a subject to get into in an HN comment, but if you're curious, I'd highly suggest reading Michelle Alexander's excellent book The New Jim Crow[3], which focuses particularly on incarceration.

[1]: https://www.vox.com/2018/3/5/17080218/school-segregation-get... [2]: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017... [3]: https://www.vanderbilt.edu/ctp/The_New_Jim_Crow.pdf

No doubt that the lived experiences of black people aren't entirely captured by legal changes. But the point remains: how can one reasonably make the claim that the lived experiences of black people between reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement, or before abolition of slavery are the same or better than today?

The author spends a huge amount of space validating the new form racism takes and saying that it makes sense.

He says nothing about the tactics not accomplishing his own aims, or that only policies can be challenged.

He simply criticizes the way the attempt to change people’s psychology is being done as resembling a religious structure.

Attempting to change people’s attitudes and psychology is fine.

It’s also obvious that there is more than one approach to doing it, and that it’s likely that many approaches to a problem like this will be self defeating.