‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
"Vox pops" have formed part of filling air-time or column inches for a long while, but this is largely replaced now by journalists looking at Twitter and either a) using that as a stand-in for 'this is what the public think' or b) making it the story itself. Social media is no longer just "second screen" below-the-line commenting on events, it's helping to shape what becomes a story.
I think a lot of it is probably a symptom of trimmed budgets and the 24hr news cycle — social media is in easy reach and available at whatever point you're writing your article.
Unfortunately, I don't think we can roll back on the constant need for more 'breaking news', but would be interesting if a newspaper were to take an editorial stance that it won't quote/embed any tweets or social posts in their articles.
The entire internet should take this advice, firstly for the reason you stated, and also because the Twitter website UX is appalling.
Alice wants to read the news, Bob wants to write it. Mallet wants to foster discussion of an idea of dubious worthiness to further nefarious but unstated aims.
Alice is attracted to lurid, weird and scary, even though she mostly knows better, because we all are.
Bob is attracted to easy stories, because it is hard to run a paper today.
Mallet doesn't care too much about how his poison gets out there, only that it does.
Among other things, this suggests that any one thing, like not embedding Twitter quotes, is unlikely to make much difference - Mallet will shift to something else.
That's the problem here. Kill the advertising dependency, and Mallet will find it much harder to spread their poison.
It's not like we weren't warned.
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism."
"Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with [indulgences]."
"As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists, who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny, “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”
"In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.”
-- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
It doesn't account for this specific example, the use of outrage as an instrument of social control.
"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
Although said by one of the Nazi leaders - I don't think it is any less true.
I've been rereading McLuhan, Postman, Huxley, etc.
Manufacturing Consent is the most directly applicable to understanding social media. With at least two updates to the thesis.
#1
The outrage machine is fueled by advertising, right? What's new is the motivating control (choice) moved from the advertiser's intent to the algorithmic recommenders.
#2
Third parties learned to effectively manipulate the algorithmic recommenders. So whereas before the gatekeepers acted as a great filter, third parties are now able to command attention and drive narratives.
--
Forgive me for stumbling over my descriptions. I'm just now trying to write out my notions. And I don't think any of this is "new". Just that with the new medium upsetting the old constraints and balances, different parts of the ecosystem are more impactful.
The purpose of purchaing advertising is to increase sales of the advertised product or service. How does the "outrage machine" lead to increased sales of the products or services being advertised? Do you think many people are actually buying products through advertisements posted in, say, Trump vs. AOC flamewars?
Who has the (most) power in the social media ecosystem? Certainly not the advertisers. Today, the power balance has shifted to the aggregators (h/t Stratechery) and the trolls.
Here's a loaded question that might help explain the new power dynamic: Who are the current targets of dissastified customers? During broadcast era (the time of Manufacturing Consent), people boycotted advertisers and brands. Today, people boycott the aggregators (FAANG) and influencers (aka cancel culture).
Take it one step further. Let's call manipulating the algorithm "trolling" (for lack of a better term). What leverage does anyone have over the trolls? I find it very weird, a la roshambo, that there are no effective checks on their power. As in, how does one protest or boycott a troll farm? Even the aggregators struggle to check the trolls.
Great video. I’d never heard Postman speak before. Thanks.
There are more videos of him there, including an hour and a half lecture. I suppose that’s ironic, but not very, because NP was open to the idea that computer technology could lead to useful media. He just didn’t get to experience much of it in his lifetime.
Now, we can experience him through it, which is a blessing in this time.
:-)
This was not about a totalitarian government burning books.
This was about a population numbing themselves with bright colours, bland affirmation and meaningless feeds of facts. With vacuous, superficial interaction with friends and family through screens. They burned the books themselves, so they didn't have to encounter anything challenging.
"I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible. ... Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side."
- block Twitter content in news articles
- block links to articles with Twitter content from ever being shown to me in the first place
Most news articles provide little value to my life anyway, but I don't think I've ever read an article referencing Twitter quotes that was worthwhile.
While I'm dreaming, if I had any way to filter all the news about what public figures say, and keep only the news about what they actually do...
It takes work to filter out the noise, (& there's plenty of noise to avoid!), but one can select the actual scientists diong the research, who will link to their key findings & papers, answer questions, etc., or direct to current & former officials, key industry/govt players, the journalists themselves and get their comments directly, without the scaled editorial slant. (private lists, to avoid the algorithmic feed is the key; I don't think it is possible on FB)
It's definitely less work that investigative journalism, but to the extent that twitter is influential, it's a topic that should be covered.
IMHO, the media has (at least) two important jobs: 1) conduct novel investigations and 2) summarize the firehose of events and ideas into a form concise enough for someone to read on a daily/weekly basis. "What people are saying on social media" falls squarely into the second category.
I can list many reasons, the top few would be:
1. It is too easy to game "what people are saying" on social media
2. Loudest voices / most extreme positions get picked up, amplified, and passed off as "what people are saying"
3. It is too easy / predictable to game what kind of messages the media chooses to summarize
4. None of it matters (see my original post about what people say vs. what people do)
If an idea is worth discussing, it is worth discussing regardless of its source (social media or otherwise). Conversely, and I know this is open for debate, but Twitter is not a great medium for discussing ideas.
Social media regularly reminds me of the Douglas Adams quote:
“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
That is, on average, what people are saying on social media. It is not worth summarizing and covering.
I disagree that would be "the valuable version." That's just "the more quantified" version. A music critic's list of the 100 best songs of 2020 is not inferior to Billboard's list of the 100 most popular songs of 2020 as determined by quantified data.
Twitter is a cultural phenomenon, and its milieu(s) and output aren't completely unworthy of journalistic attention. That's not to say it's a top shelf subject, but the "news" properly covers all kinds of similar things, and some, like sports for instance, have even less value.
It's the difference between a music critic choosing the 100 best songs (fine, because it's a person's own opinion presented honestly) versus a music critic saying they're just going with the popular consensus while cherry picking tweets that happen to pick the 100 they would have chosen (bad, because the tweets aren't put into context). Or like a traditional paper looking for a scientist who will say something exciting/sensational in a particular direction, then presenting it as scientific consensus.
You can find a group saying anything on twitter. That means that the fact that some particular thing exists on it is useless.
This is circular reasoning. It's only influential because journalists cover it. And they only cover it because "it's influential".
Journalists don't cover Social Media. They cover Twitter. They ignore Reddit, Imgur, Tumblr, etc. Those are all social media with approximately the same user base as Twitter (Reddit probably has more). But totally ignored by print journos.
So I guess I somehow do block twitter?
And that journalists have knowledge that is a mile wide and an inch deep. Their job is to file copy to strict deadlines.
I understand your argument but I also in no way want to distract from the culpability owned by social media companies, their product designers and managers, and the people who wrote the code to implement their desires.
They are ultimately guilty for the damage they have wrought on our societies. Traditional media companies may have exacerbated the issue with their participation, but they didn't create it.
>Unfortunately, I don't think we can roll back on the constant need for more 'breaking news'
We can't, but just like smoking cigarettes or shooting up opioids we can recognize it as a source of damage and addiction and start changing things to combat it.
Cue the 1960s and 70s long before any social media and the amazing amount of not just protests but bombings, assassinations and so on that make the current culture war seem like a mere shouting match.
Before the media started using social media as “facts” for their reporting, these arguments would just be another online “flame war.” Remember when we used those terms? Remember when online arguments remained as just that?
Now, when 1000 people on Twitter try to cancel someone the media reports it as if it’s an actual popular opinion, thus amplifying the problem for better or worse.
I find it tough to blame the news for this — the social media companies were making deliberate design choices and the news companies were reacting in an attempt to stay in business in a rapidly changing market.
On top of that there's also two other groups that further complicate the picture: end users and advertisers.
It's not clear to me that we need to go through the motions of trying to persecute one of these groups in particular, since the situation is already evolving. End users are starting to become wise to the ways in which they are manipulated by all three of the other groups, and not necessarily always in a conscious way -- I personally had a turning point where I was just tired of the cycle, it got boring, and I didn't even have to try to consciously cut out these things, they just kind of fell away while I spent my time elsewhere.
It's hardly persecution to insist that American businesses stop doing gross harm to the American people. Your personal anecdote is largely irrelevant compared to Facebook's earnings report - lots of people still use these platforms and they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It's unlikely that these companies will pivot their business model in the absence of oversight. I've stopped using it too, but we absolutely should create market rules to deal with the obvious abuses that have occurred so they don't crop up again.
I think this is hugely presumptuous. Is there an alternative model they could have used? Are there companies using such alternative models?
It's hardly persecution to insist that American businesses stop doing gross harm to the American people.
Agreed, but it's very much not clear what the harm is. To say that it's algorithm-based advertising is not at all convincing to me, but maybe there's a good argument for that being the case that I haven't seen? What convinced you?
lots of people still use these platforms and they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future
Yes, but I think you underestimate end users. The shift away from supernormal stimuli of all kinds will be slow and arduous, but for whatever reason I have faith that we will do it. We're successfully doing it with smoking, and making good progress on the sugar + sedentary lifestyle front as well with all sorts of niche diets and fitness regimines popping up.
Although it's still super early, I see the beginnings of a move away from this particular brand of virality based social media as well. Examples would be: the popularity of long form lecture series on youtube + online classes (masterclass is fluffy, but also points in this direction), the evolution of shared blocklists on twitter and other similar methods of "bubbling" (including the rise and rise of reddit, as well as discord), the trend of non-toxic, long-lived anonymous accounts on twitter, etc. etc.
Also, and maybe I'm just being unimaginative, but what kinds of market rules would make sense here?
It probably is the most efficient model for a social media company (as you said, that's why they all do it). I don't think that type of monopoly is healthy in a market economy, and by regulating it, you allow other, more benign models a chance to grow.
> We're successfully doing it with smoking, and making good progress on the sugar + sedentary lifestyle front as well with all sorts of niche diets and fitness regimines popping up.
Are you just shitposting or are you not aware of the substantial history of prosecuting and regulating those industries, which have been instrumental in driving those changes? I don't underestimate end users - I think if you provide proper leadership and make the right thing the easy thing, then end users will do the right thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax
https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/new-food-warning-labels-beg...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Move!
If you spend most of your time around people who have a certain type of education and economic means, who do their own research, and have the liberty to control their lives to some extent then a libertarian outlook seems obvious. Outside that bubble, it becomes real clear that a lot of these problems are systemic and too big for most individuals to comprehend, let alone solve. It sounds dramatic to apply that to Facebook, but given the impact it seems to have on society, a little flair is appropriate.
> Also, and maybe I'm just being unimaginative, but what kinds of market rules would make sense here?
Apply the CCPA nationally and give users full control of their data and how it is used for starters. If you make it easy for customers to opt their data out of targeted advertising most will - if not immediately, then eventually (as you described, fatigue). If Facebook doesn't have the data, then their ad engine isn't really much better than anyone else and other business models become more attractive.
There are a bunch of different ideas about how to go about it, but taking away the data monopolies would seem to be the easiest, most self-executing solution.
Plus, the experience of eating a cookie has an inherent, positive psychological value, even if the intention is still to separate your from your money. Art vs. Science, God vs. the Devil, etc.
For an analogy imagine a town that with an arsonist setting lots of homes on fire. It is obviously true that "storing gas in your hose contributes to houses burning down", but "getting rid of gasoline in house will not fix the fires".
For clarity I consider "the algorithm" the sophisticated ordering of your follower's posts, and the recommendation of new followers. This means getting rid of "the algorithm" mostly means going back to the 00's when post where sorted by date, likes, or simple formula that combined the two. Content still went viral, and people still sorted themselves into information silos. This meant people spend more time searching for content, but I don't see any real fundamental difference that is going to result in less polarization.
The underlying problem is people communicating with other people. I argue if we got rid of the internet it would not get rid of this polarization and spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories. In fact you saw many similar problems prior to the Civl War, when the fastest method of communication was a telegram. People still distributed pamphlets, formed clubs with like minded individuals, gossiped, and spread rumors and falsehoods.
I think people grab on to idea "the algorithm is causes polarization", because it puts single thing, presents a specific solution (change/get rid of the algorithm), and has an specific, abstract group of people to blame the owners and employees of the big tech companies. People don't like it what the problems affecting their lives are caused by dozens of interacting forces and there is no clear simple solution, but rather a lot of work in a lot of areas.
As an aside drop in disappearing manufacturing jobs and illegal immigrants. See what you get.
It's obviously much more complicated than than that though.
But with modern social networks, a single mouse click can send it into dozens of feeds; hundreds, for some people. And then you get this effect magnified manyfold:
Certainly they aren't part of the legacy media, but they all seem to carry water for the same narratives and ideologies.
The non-mainstream media is publications that people in polite urban mostly-coastal American culture sneer at: Breitbart, The Post Millenial, Reason, Parler, Gab, specific independent journalists on some of the mainstream platforms, etc.
But certainly Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit are media and they are mainstream. And they have demonstrated their willingness to censor stories with more or less the same bias (in the same ideological direction) as the mainstream legacy media. They're just the mainstream new media.
I'm not generally one to speak out against capitalism, but having come from a country that has 'strong, communitarian and cultural ideals' - I believe that hyper-individualism and capitalism have created an ugly, 'perfect storm of self flagellation' here with MSM, Social Media, Politics, Entertainment.
'Communitarian ideals' mean that there are unspoken rules of legitimacy, fraternity, civility, professionalism etc. that exist in many fields like the media, even in politics where all the 'grey areas' of civility count for so much, a lot of US Senate functions like this historically.
These soft ideals however leave the door way open for radicals and money-seekers to 'disrupt' and take over, justifying their cause through either 'moral legitimacy of social justice' or 'responsibility towards shareholders' - or, like in the case of Nike for example - both.
Any institution that can be instrumentalist and submitted will be.
Though I don't blame FB PM's specifically - it's right there in the ethos: 'disrupt' and 'move fast / break things / do it ask for permission later'. Without any regard at all for social and cultural ideals, they just get completely uprooted in the search for whatever it is the objective is, in the case of FB, money.
They both built a virality engine, and then acted dumbfounded (at first) when news sites used this to tune their content to go viral. It's an intentionally incredibly addictive, and borderline malicious, product that capitalizes on the worst human instincts. The entire thing exists as a feedback loop that grants you legitimacy by counting the number of eyeballs (real or not) that see it.
Many, many people in my area regard social media as a credible source of truth. I know that people don't think much of the people where I live, and that comes from the lack of good educational opportunities afforded them out here in flyover country. But these people get to vote too. They get to participate in society as well. I guess I mean that they count. You can't say there is no one who claims social media is credible, when it is obvious there are millions who are swayed by social media precisely because it is credible in their view.
In fact, if a story is only on social media, it's proof of the story's validity in their eyes. If the mainstream media won't run a story they found on social media, then it must be part of a conspiracy to keep the "truth" from getting out. I hear this narrative everyday in my area of the midwest.
Contrary to popular thought, the "liberal" media utterly failed minorities. The abuse of minorities in the US spans generations and has consistently been relegated to the margins of mainstream news. It has been typical in the US -- for decades -- for the NY Times to grant a single death in Israel front page coverage while a death of an African American at the hands of police in NYC would barely get coverage. My point is not that either is acceptable -- but rather that both are bad. Perhaps non-coverage of an incident in NY is worse because a NY paper might want to consider the atrocities happening right down the street.
The BLM movement finally came to the forefront not because of the "liberal" media but in spite of it. The BLM movement was enabled by Social Media. If Twitter did not exist, there is no reason to assume we would have made any progress.
The media overall and the liberal media have lost part of their control over the narrative (and the power that selective coverage conveys) and trying to blame things on social media. But believe this -- what we have seen in 2020 is progress. As messy and as ugly as it is, we've actually moved forward with minority rights.
Consider also how hypocritical the coverage has been. Liberal media tells us that "Silicon Valley lacks diversity". TBH it does, but you know the real problem is not SV, it is a national media controlled by four families with zero minorities on their boards and executive staff -- telling an industry with huge numbers of minorities (including many brown people in senior/CxO ranks) they lack diversity.
SV does need to get better, but saying SV is the start and end of all problems is absolutely false.
One can hope. Let's tally up by 2025.
NYT has a "brown" person and an African-American on the current board of directors:
https://www.nytco.com/board-of-directors/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Rogers_Jr.
Editorial Board has an African-American (Brent Staples: Education, Criminal Justice, Economics) with 30year tenure .
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/opinion/editorialbo...
What damage? The stuff people wrote on it? That's the people.
That's what I love about people who think everyone should vote. But just look at Twitter. Most people are poorly informed idiots who are hyper-emotional and inclined to mob-think.
I'm all for more direct democracy but that doesn't mean I want anyone and everyone to vote. We need informed voters.
Which is why I despise the drives to get random people out to vote for whoever they heard spoken the loudest about in relation to their issues.
That’s like putting an alligator pit in a mall and blaming people for getting eaten.
There is no incentive for people to become more informed. Public choice theory explains this, voters are rationally ignorant.
It's driven by any participant who is making money from the political process. This includes MSM, Social Media, Political Consultants, and on and on.
Agree with your statement of this being a symptom of trimmed budgets and the 24hr news cycle. The push for free news on the internet may have also contributed.
Thoses enquetes were done on somewhate crowded yet non busy places for convenience, and tended to sample a specific part of the population: e.g. people going to shopping districts at off hours, or people coming out of church for the most biased samplings.
Telephone checks were similar in that you had a very high percentage of at home caregivers responding to them.
Do you the past journalistic methods as that much more sophisticated than nowadays ?
As for the issue itself, the wikipedia article has a pretty good overview of the whole thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathroom_bill
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-12/shares...
A frank discussion about industrial policy would not inure to the benefit of any established political actor. It's a story of breathtaking incompetence, callousness, greed, and self-deception.
Yes, they are, and in 2016, both political parties faced outsider candidates running surprisingly strong campaigns in their Presidential primaries on explicitly repudiating different aspects of neoliberalism, including deindustrialization.
But one of those candidates was Donald Trump, and it was much more important to point out what a rude, crude bastard he was, 24/7, than to discuss the issues of political economy raised by the outsider populists. The point was to crush them, to avoid anyone in the political sphere questioning deindustrialization and financialization.
Four years later, we know that trying to silence populism while also giving Trump, a populist, 24/7 earned-media coverage did not work. At the time, though, people expected it to work.
That's correlation, not causation. Even if there's a connection to election years, the causality could very well be reversed (e.g. activists increase their efforts to get attention when it matters most). However, I'm inclined to think your observation is just coincidence or misses a critical factor.
But the Washington Post has statistics that clearly show there's no four year cycle to police shootings: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
Just wait until 2024 and they'll pick another case to hype up. Despite the fact that police brutality happens every year and nothing gets done about it. It's all bread and circuses.
One factor in that is America is a pretty unequal society, and problems the relatively wealthy [1] face receive disproportionate attention than those primarily confined to the less wealthy. Not saying that's the only factor, but it's definitely a major one.
Ditto with de-industrialization, which a sibling comment mentioned. The relatively wealthy gain disproportionately from it in the short term, and those who are disproportionately hurt by it are less wealthy and typically live in unfashionable areas. Predictably, their problems get relatively less attention than they probably should (esp. since the relatively wealthy have the option of hand-waving those problems away with stuff like "Pareto efficiency," etc.).
[1] I'd count software engineers and similar professionals as "relatively wealthy."
Because I sure don't see opiate abuse or ODs as a problem disproportionately affecting the poor. Sure, it affects a lot of poor people, but it also affects a fair number of the wealthy, quite possibly in numbers greater than their proportion in the population. (It's hard to judge because every celebrity overdose will be widely reported, so availability bias might be affecting my perception.)
Your rephrase lost an important nuance. I said "problems the relatively wealthy face." Bathroom choice is a problem wealth can't really solve or mitigate, so it's one they still face (either directly or through their children or peers).
> but it also affects a fair number of the wealthy, quite possibly in numbers greater than their proportion in the population. (It's hard to judge because every celebrity overdose will be widely reported, so availability bias might be affecting my perception.)
IMO, celebrity drug abuse is kinda a different thing, because celebrities are a special, tiny class that's easy to hold yourself apart from.
Why? That has nothing to do with my point. Even if the US was in fact the most equal society to ever exist, it's indisputable that it still has significant inequality, which was the starting point of my comment.
> it's indisputable that it still has significant inequality
I was trying to understand where you were coming from and giving you the opportunity to change my mind.
For one thing, guesstimating the number of affected people is pretty subjective. A policy can be important to me even though it does not nominally affect me directly. Secondly, this method doesn't even attempt to weigh policies by anything else, like the magnitude of benefits/downsides, budgetary concerns, civil rights implications, etc. For instance, in my view, it's fine for a political issue involving state-sanctioned persecution or bigotry of a very small minority to share political attention with a large public health crisis.
The first example that comes to mind is US armed service veterans. Apparently, the medical care they received from the Veteran's Administration was really terrible, with apocryphal stories of veterans dying while waiting for appointments to see Drs. There were many bad actors in the VA medical service who would have been fired in any other organization but due to VA policy, kept their jobs. Through programs such as VA Choice and VA Accountability[0], the approval rating of the VA jumped to 91%, a record.
In the US, there are 17.4 million veterans, and as you indicated, they all have family and friends who are going to see these improvements in a positive light.
It makes me wonder how many other situations there are like this that we don't hear about.
On the other end, the president can pardon one person at a time. Perhaps that's the least number of people who can be positively affected by one act.
[0] https://www.va.gov/opa/choiceact/documents/choice-act-summar...
Some news about tweets is justified - for example the president of the US has at times announced policies on Twitter first. It's a modern equivalent of making an brief announcement to the press or sending out a very sparse press release.
And the tweets that you (and I) hate to see reported, those of random people and especially headlines like "Twitter goes mad about (whatever)" somehow making an entire article out of quoting 6 random Twitter users... it's a digital form of voxpops on TV or reader's letters in newspapers. All of them can be a nice addition at times, but in my opinion the vast majority shouldn't be part of a "news" medium.
Much as this is reassuring, its not the whole story.
Yes, the "MSM", well parts of them report chaff because its cheap.
But why bother? because it sells.
In some cases there are editors that push a certain stance or opinion. even more rare are the cases where they manage to actually shift a section of society's world view permanently.
The problem is perfectly illustraited by the german newspaper "DER SPIEGEL" it literally means "the mirror"
Both social, print and to a lesser extent tv news(the uk is highly regulated) are a mirror on society.
They push what sells, and if its comfortable lies, then it so be it.
So no, the main problem is not "the media" its us for consuming shit.
If we stop reading gossip, junk and "punditry" then they'll stop making it. Its as simple as that.
I'm surprised that you say that the main culprit is the main stream media. I see this kind of reporting in all news outlets, especially non-MSM. It's cheap and trivial to write an article that highlights some comments from four people with 15 twitter followers a piece, and claim that "People are saying".
You even hear the POTUS frequently use "people are saying" and then quoting whackadoos from Twitter. Can we really hold MSM to a higher standard than the president of the free world?
I think you're 100% correct, social media stories are the equivalent of the cute fluffy stories 20 years ago, but there's a huge moral hazard associated with that.
Let’s challenge that assumption with historical precedent.
A technological and social revolution of sorts in the 1800s. In the first world of the time, the masses became literate and had more leisure time. Combined with advances in the technology of printing and paper production, and in distribution of the physical book, it led to an explosion of interest in something called “the novel”. It was almost a madness at the time, cf. the popularity of Charles Dickens works.
But eventually the violent boiling cooled to a simmer. A continuous simmer, but just a simmer culturally. I don’t know how or why the dynamic changed, but it did settle down.
I’d guess a similar analogy could be made with “the theater”, which is even below a simmer at this point in modern culture.
What will change the dynamic? Your guess is as good as mine...
They also voted to abandon entrance exams at my magnet high school: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4979
It’s not comforting to know that only a tiny minority of people are standing up and declaring themselves “gatekeepers of white supremacy” when that person is the Dean of a school or a School Board Superintendent. Just because folks fighting the culture wars might be few in number doesn’t mean they don’t have their hands on a lot of levers.
I don't think someone who really was a "gatekeeper of white supremacy" would describe themselves that way.
In racism training, you simply acknowledge that by being human, you are racist. You can’t cure it anymore than you can cure alcoholism. It’s always with you and if you care to not be racist, you have to be aware of that.
Why is that claim uncomfortable?
I agree! There’s no reason in-groups should be defined by race...but, at least in the United States, it was quite literally legislated in law for centuries and formed the basis of a slave state and then segregation. So it seems like race has historically been one way we define in-groups and out-groups. Based on current events, I’d argue race is still pretty important to a lot of people. Otherwise our politics wouldn’t be...whatever you want to call them.
> Indeed the whole notion of 'race' itself is largely artificial, historically- and locally-contingent, and thus so is racism.
Race is socially constructed but it’s definitely real. Racism is also real.
It's not completely true though. We usually reserve the term for active, conscious acts. Not just unconscious bias. So maybe we need a new word for that?
Admitting said claim for those people does not feel like acknowledging the system we live in against their will or that they have unconscious biases. It feels like acknowledging a serious character defect, worthy of ostracism, being fired, and possibly having a mob show up at your house.
Now, I'm not a prescriptivist. I acknowledge that language evolves, but it does not evolve the same way in every place at the same time. It tends to evolve in a particular place and spread out from there. The particular definition you're using has not spread to the entirety of society yet. Your pitch could really benefit from some localization to the various sub-dialects of the english language if you'd like less push back in the future.
The second is the destruction of an institution. A school for the gifted and talented with no mechanism to keep out those who are neither rapidly becomes just another school. Once the City University of New York was one of the major public research universities of the USA. Then it moved to open admissions. Now it’s nothing special. In contrast Berkeley instituted affirmative action which allows for different standards for different ethnic groups. It’s probably the top public university.
The second is obviously an opinion piece as well: Being more inclusive isn't "ruining an institution" nor is changing things. It isn't like entrance exams are perfect.
The first is not religious in any sense. It appears to be an acknowledgment of the bias's we all have as humans. We all have bias's, unconscious and conscious - its part of being human. In that sense we're all 'racist' to some degree and its important to acknowledge that so as to overcome it.
As far as the second example cited I think more information is missing before jumping to a conclusion.
If you're endeavouring to acknowledge, understand and overcome biases, that isn't racism, it's anti-racism.
Seriously? What else do you need? Proclamation of the believe in unseen powers?
Thats a big stretch.
No. I reject this. No matter how many times you or others tell me that I’m racist and can’t help it, and if I just pray... I mean take enough sanctioned training courses it’ll go away I will not partake. Period. Nobody is racist until proven otherwise, or racist until they’ve taken enough unconscious bias training courses. That’s something you and others are making up to deal with your own insecurities and racism. Being uncomfortable walking down the street at night because you see a black man is your racism. Not mine. No thanks.
This entire “movement” looks exactly like a witch hunt or the Soviet gulags. When someone is inconvenient, you just call them a racist since everybody is magically, automatically guilty of being racist and off they go.
I’m really sick and tired of seeing this crap. It’s ruining western civilization and creating conflict. It’s not even about race anymore. It’s just white people telling everyone they are racist so they can feel good about themselves and create positions of power and authority. Some genuinely believe this, but some also genuinely believe they are saving your soul when they pray for you.
I reject racism. I’m not a racist and you’re not going to tell me or others that we are racist just because you are or you think others are.
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, neat—and wrong. -- H.L. Mencken
and from a different social issue but highlighting how easy it is to go from "good guy" to "bad guy";
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist. -- Hélder Câmara
I am no domain expert but an ammendment to require mens rea for far more felonies as opposed to the farcical nonsense where picking up an unidentified feather could be a crime if the feather turns out to be from a bald eagle.
Racism comes in many forms, it's not just about being scared of black men on the street. That's a wildly exaggerated strawman.
Everyone has biases and prejudices. Everyone. Yes, that includes you.
But people don't have the same biases and prejudices. People differ in what they're prejudiced against (or for!) and they differ in the magnitude of their prejudice.
And let's be clear: this is not just about skin colour. Gender, sexual orientation, class, accent, formal education... people have prejudices against all of these things and more.
Unconscious bias not a type of prayer or cleansing ritual. You don't stop being biased or prejudiced because you do UB training.
It is supposed to help you identify when and how that prejudice manifests itself so that you can take a step back and try and consciously try and remove your prejudices from your decision-making.
And if you reject racism, why not arm yourself with this tool? If you're not racist (or sexist or classist etc...) Why not take a couple of seconds to think "has some stereotype about this person lead me to this conclusion? No? Okay, let's carry on..."
Everyone is a sinner (not the Pope, tho). Yes, that includes you! Go confess and do your penance
It's _not_ a value judgement. People aren't evil for having biases. They're not sinners because they do, and they don't have to do penance.
Also, for having biases, people are actually getting called evil (racist, nazi, bigot, etc) every day, and are expected to apologize/be fired/read more sacred texts/participate in group exorcisms/etc
And for the record, unconscious bias training has not been shown to have any correlation with actual discriminatory behavior, and the the researchers who developed the test reject how it is being used in these training sessions.
It’s ruining western civilization and creating conflict for whom? Western civilization has always been marked by conflict for some.
You can tell people about factory farms without screaming "cow rapist". You can tell people about privilege without spiraling into some racist cult. But that would probably be class privilege, which is much better at predicting success than the color of your skin.
However, I have also routinely seen cult-like, and racist behavior in diversity training, and frankly in anti-racist activism.
I’m glad you didn’t experience these. I also think that the work can be done in a nuanced way that avoids the pitfalls.
Unfortunately I think this is becoming less and less common as a drive to scale delivery of these kinds of trainings causes the quality to drop.
Why would being racist make someone an unworthy sinner? Racism is just treating others differently based on their race. It’s not weird or evil. In fact, it’s perfectly normal and even understandable. Humans have probably always separated themselves into groups. Even chimpanzees do it. I think that’s what the trainings try to get at.
> The second is the destruction of an institution. A school for the gifted and talented with no mechanism to keep out those who are neither rapidly becomes just another school. Once the City University of New York was one of the major public research universities of the USA. Then it moved to open admissions. Now it’s nothing special. In contrast Berkeley instituted affirmative action which allows for different standards for different ethnic groups. It’s probably the top public university.
Meanwhile, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Stanford, and UVA all have affirmative action and are doing fine. Decades of supposedly different standards haven’t hurt their standing. They continue to graduate a diverse class of high achievers that are well-represented in just about every field imaginable. How does that square with your claims?
Are you sure you’re not the extremist? You seem to have an axe to grind.
That’s the entire point of comparing CUNY and Berkeley. You can maintain prestige while having different standards for different ethnic groups. You can’t while having no standards. Eliminating entrance exams is how CUNY did it. Different standards is how Berkeley and Harvard etc. do it. That’s not what is being proposed for the gifted school in question. It’s the elimination of standards.
Standardized tests are one measure of academic merit and not even the best one. There are plenty of 1500s reporting to 1250s.
As for affirmative action being an effort to keep out Asians...have you been to Harvard’s campus? There are many, many Asian students there. In fact, nearly one in five students at Harvard are of Asian descent. The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face. The people pushing the idea have an axe to grind and it usually isn’t actually in the interest of Asian-Americans.
If you're Asian and you're reading this, never forget that the above is what progressives believe about how society treats Asians: transgressions against you get simply waved away. Think twice about supporting them.
For the record, I am Asian and a liberal but definitely not progressive.
I was wrong to minimize the struggles of Asians in this country. There is real discrimination against Asians. Your comment and others have changed my view. Thanks for helping me work through my own blind spots on this issue. I didn’t mean to wave away your pain.
https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...
Looks like the courts found that Harvard's admissions system did not qualify as legally discriminatory, but did nonetheless somewhat disadvantage Asian-American applicants. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/harvard-admissions-law...
Are there any elite school (so sourcing students from the same pool of applicants) that don't include race in their admission process? Would be interesting to compare the demographics.
There is the in-state vs out of state tuition distinction, so it's not exactly the same pool as east coast universities.
Sources: https://registrar.caltech.edu/records/enrollment-statistics https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/massachusetts-instit....
These are interesting stats but they don't actually mean anything unless you can prove that the applicant pools for Caltech and Berkeley are similar to that of MIT. It's entirely possible, that Caltech and Berkeley have a higher proportion of Asian applications. It's also possible that underrepresented minorities that could be admitted to Caltech or Berkeley pick Harvard or Princeton because they're more well-regarded and more diverse. I wouldn't be surprised. Elite schools compete for the same kids.
Considering their ranking I would be willing to bet their applicant pool might significantly overlap (seeing as they attract world wide talent).
So, as long as you see some people of a given race and it meets some arbitrary % in your mind, that's enough, is that the argument you're making? No discrimination going on then?
This level of lack of critical thinking here is astounding, and it's sad (actually scary) that opinions like this might guide admissions policies.
I'm likely not going to change your mind, and I'm not going to revisit this thread again after I click away, so take this just as one person to another giving some advice as if we were strangers talking to each other honestly with no consequences.
Check yourself once in a while that you don't go falling the hole of deceiving yourself that you're right, using any cobbled together argument you can find. Because you sound like you're ready to trade off people's lives using whatever traits you think are equivalent, in the name of diversity or some symbolic goal you wish to achieve.
When someone lives in a certain state and applies to university, they have the opportunity to show their worth and skills by their achievements. When Harvard seeks to broaden their search for those people to new geographies, all to the better.
When Harvard says that no matter how good you are, because you're Asian, your achievements will be weighed a little less because we have enough of them, I cannot believe that you are unable to see how that's different.
And your principles of how you judge whether there are "enough" Asians, well, sir, they could equally be used by someone to say there are "enough" black students or Hispanic students, or any minority, by someone less well-intentioned.
I would rather have the approach where no one is deciding that there's "enough" of some group based on their favored characteristic of the day.
When is applies to university, they have the opportunity to show their worth and skills by their achievements. When Harvard seeks to broaden their search for those people to underrepresented minorities, all to the better.
I understand why the parallels make you uncomfortable. You’d need to ask yourself why you’re fine giving the kid from Montana a leg up. Better not to think about it.
"According to enrollment data from the Office of Admissions provided by Faculty of Arts and Sciences spokesperson Anna Cowenhoven, 51.5 percent of the non-international students who enrolled in Harvard’s Class of 2018 hail from just four states: New York, New Jersey, California, and Massachusetts." https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/3/26/regional-divers...
The following has numbers by state that seem consistent with the article from the Crimson: https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/harvard-university/s...
It suggests that (New York and New Jersey) have over an order of magnitude more students admitted to Harvard per capita than (Montana and Nebraska).
My high school was 70% Asian. Projections are that getting rid of the entrance exam will drop it to about 30% Asian. (Ironically, the group that will benefit the most from the lottery is white people.) The elite schools are capping the percentage of Asians--you can see this by comparing against schools that don't practice holistic admissions.
Affirmative action and lottery-based admissions in particular is, in at least a narrow and direct sense, contrary to "the interest of Asian-Americans" just as its contrary to the interests of white Americans. Standardized testing offers a direct path to the middle and upper middle class for Asian immigrants (as well as other immigrant groups such as Nigerians who come to the U.S. with lots of education but not necessarily money). Asians have extremely high levels of income mobility in the U.S.--an kid growing up in the bottom 20% has a 27% chance of ending up in the top 20%; double the odds for a white kid born in the bottom 20%. My dad was born in a village in Bangladesh. Thanks to the SAT, my brother and I are comfortably in the top 1%. The U.S. system of "meritocracy" (such as it is) is extremely effective at helping us distinguish ourselves from upper middle class white people who have more cultural competency, social connections, etc.
In "How to be an Anti-Racist," Ibram X. Kendi defines "equity" as the representation of a group in an organization reflecting the representation of the group in the general population. Any other distribution, he declares, is the product of systemic racism. I don't think Kendi was thinking about the implications of that statement for non-white, non-Black people, but they are alarming for Asians, Jews, Nigerians, etc. Imagine cutting Harvard down from 20% Asian to 5-6% Asian. Or Google or Facebook! What do you think that would do to Asian income mobility?
Now, I happen to support measures to reduce disparities for ADOS people, because all Americans have a common obligation to remediate the nation's history of slavery and segregation. To that end, I support things like traditional affirmative action.
At the same time, Asians are a minority and have to be realistic about the fact that they are not similarly-situated to either white people or Black people and do not have identical interests to either group. Holistic measures that limit the Asians at elite educational institutions and businesses to 20-25% may be tolerable. Measures like lotteries that would reduce Asian representation down to 5-6% would be a dramatic negative change.
I would argue that understanding the importance of the SAT is a form of cultural competency.
> Holistic measures that limit the Asians at elite educational institutions and businesses to 20-25% may be tolerable. Measures like lotteries that would reduce Asian representation down to 5-6% would be a dramatic negative change.
We shouldn't limit the number of Asians at top universities or companies. But we shouldn't be content with a system that perpetuates a status quo built on our country's original sin. We have to do something proactively. Maybe it's reparations. Maybe it's universal pre-kindergarten or means-tested baby bonds. But it's something instead of nothing.
Chimpanzees murder. Just because primates have been doing something for millions of years doesn't make it acceptable. We have the capability to rise above our instincts and make rational decisions about who we want to be.
Treating others differently based on their race is fundamentally unethical. You're not an irredeemably broken person just because you've done something unethical in the past, but saying "well everyone does it" or "it's just natural" is just refusing personal responsibility.
Maybe some people honestly can't accept the idea that they have done something wrong, and would cling to a belief that deep down they knew was wrong if they didn't have such an "out" to preserve their view of themselves. They'ed rather double down on racism than admit they've knowingly treated people incorrectly.
For most people though, acknowledging a problem is the first step to solving it. Everyone alive today has spent the vast majority if not the entirety of their lives in a world where the idea of racial superiority has been thoroughly discredited. The emphasis on certain features like skin color over others like hair color in segregating people is an entirely learned behavior. For racism to endure to the degree it does today, enormous numbers of people must have actively chosen to learn this behavior and refused to change. It hardly seems unreasonable to conclude that for many, telling them that something is normal and natural robs them of their imperative to change.
Because those who were enlightened before you now hold the power. They removed the scales from your eyes, so now the power structure has been set. All you need to do is obey.
I'm sure once you're downvoted to invisibility, you're takeaway will be that "HN is a bunch of extremists", instead of the more reasonable "why are a bunch of mild-mannered software developers whose culture has always been open to different types of people strongly disagreeing with what I say?".
Could it be that we see a danger in this that you do not? It's seems fairly obvious to me that our country is starting to crumble around us. Perhaps you're living in a situation where that's not apparant.
The issue is these institutions cast a way wider net for their admission pool compared to a high school.
Really, MIT gets applicants from everywhere in the world and kids will gladly relocate to Boston to attend. A high school, especially a public one, can only expect applicants from its county.
Whether one agrees with Catholics on any number of things (and many reasonable people do not), there is a certain logic to the idea that before you can be better, you have to actually say what's wrong. Forcing a group of people to self label as racist in the way described above is unmoored from reality: even if one had done things that were racist in the past, there is no looking squarely at one's short comings, and there is no taking responsibility for anything. And for someone who hadn't done anything racist, or for someone who claims to have never done anything racist, it's just a show, and things won't actually get better in a meaningful way.
[1] https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/sacraments-and-sacr...
[2] https://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p2s...
So even if that Dean said he is a racist, he's probably not unless you warp the definition of racism.
But I've also seen some people do some pretty oblivious things in my time - like ordering company tee-shirts for their mixed-gender team, but only getting male sizes. Or evaluating every interview candidate's communication skills and cultural fit based on a conversation about rock climbing and craft beer.
And other stuff managers might need to get good at aren't taught at home or in college. If you get performance complaints about an otherwise-good employee who is fasting during Ramadan, what's the right way to address that while respecting privacy and being fair to the complainant, complainee and the company?
I can understand why an employer might want their employees to have a bit of extra training, above and beyond what college and life experience have already taught them. At least for the employees destined for promotion to senior positions.
> Or evaluating every interview candidate's communication skills and cultural fit based on a conversation about rock climbing and craft beer.
I feel like any cultural fit test is going to be inherently sexist/racist/classist. Better to just throw them out. Also why waste time talking about anything not relevant to the job to judge communication skills when you could be having job related discussions.
> If you get performance complaints about an otherwise-good employee who is fasting during Ramadan, what's the right way to address that while respecting privacy and being fair to the complainant, complainee and the company?
Is the complaint this person isn't doing their job? Then it should be treated like every other complaint. Is the complaint is "They aren't eating lunch" then it should be treated very differently.
Sure, but how is that? Different performance problems call for different solutions.
Do you treat it like the newly hired dyslexic person? Like the person who's going through a difficult divorce? Like the person who likes to party and sometimes comes in tired or hung over? Like the person with gaps in their education and training? Like the parent who sometimes gets called for child-related emergencies? Like the person who disagrees with the policies, but can be convinced with better explanation? Like the person who finds the work too boring to be able to concentrate on? Like the person who doesn't like the job, but hasn't found another yet?
A competent manager will have half a dozen different tools in their toolbox - and it takes some forethought to be able to reach for the correct one first time on receipt of a complaint.
* An affirmation that we stand with the black community.
* A list of political organizations we should donate to in support of the black community.
* TED talks on how news, policing, etc. are sometimes implicitly racist. (We as a company aren't involved in news or policing.)
* A reimbursement offer for up to $1,000 per person on anti-racism materials.
* Recommended articles, books, etc.
There's a lot of other stuff in tabs and menus and such. But if I didn't know how to handle an employee with poor performance during the Ramadan fast, none of the information I see would help me figure it out, and it's my understanding that this is typical.
You miss the biggest goal: for departments of diversity, inclusion, etc to gain more power and hires.
I'd say no for the most part.
It's mostly hypocrisy and everyone knows is theater, which creates boredom at best, and bad blood at worst.
Diversity is built organically, not through sessions.
It's like those bogus "we're a big family" pep sessions -- and then the company screws you over.
I read a study a while back, which I can't find right now, that concluded that these sessions do more harm than good in the workplace.
One study I could find, which might be of relevant interest, is that diverse workplaces are far less likely to come together and organize in terms of unions or worker rights[0], which might go some way to back up the suspicion this whole shitshow we've been submerged into is merely a big-money attempt to turn normal people against one another by provoking racial tensions to prevent them from becoming class conscious and instigating a movement like Occupy Wall Street again.
>How exactly does this help?
It doesn't. The entire purpose of it is ritual humiliation.
[0]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793915602253
There is research that shows that companies with diverse leadership and staff financially outperform the average. See for example:
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc...
The problem is, no one knows for sure how to take an existing corporate culture with low diversity, and transform it to one with higher diversity and higher performance. Cultures can be extremely resistant to change.
DEI trainings are just the latest attempt to find something that works. It will take a few years to see if they do.
Ah, that looks like a nice bit of marketing from McKinsey. Huge companies that work on global markets with clearly recognizable brands are naturally more diverse (sourcing people from all over the world) and also care about their public image enough to increase their diversity in management positions.
Of course this doesn't mean at all that by increasing diversity your performance will improve, the causal arrow goes in the opposite direction.
One it would it be impossible to publish research that came to the opposite conclusion. Imagine seeing a headline that said "replacing female and black executive leadership with old white dudes increases profit" by McKinsey.
Second the magnitude of the impact seems insane. This seems larger than the difference most studies find between good leadership and average leadership. And while I wouldn't be surprised if diverse leadership is marginally better than non-diverse leadership I would be surprised if it's larger than the difference between average and good.
Three they're pulling from many different countries which could potentially create huge confounds.
In general "research" that comes out of a place like McKinsey and Bane is pretty suspect but something like this is even more.
Even if none of the other problems are real they still don't establish causation. It could easily be the case that diverse candidates are harder to find, so more competitive/better firms are able to better attract them.
I think diversity is great and there are lots of great reasons to increase it but I doubt the impact on profitability would be anything beyond marginal.
Both an average and a good leader will drown the same army if they lead them into a swamp because they've never seen a swamp before.
A black woman, a white man, and Asian woman who all graduated from Harvard and worked for McKinsey try to reduce car part inventory through logistical innovation.
I wouldn't be surprised if the more diverse group came up with a better solution.
To take your contrived example regional diversity will have a much larger impact on making sure someone has encountered a swamp than racial diversity.
I think it's easy to overestimate the effect of racial diversity and underestimate the effect of other types of diversities on problem solving style because one is so easy to see.
I think it's fair to assume that had there been at least one black individual in the development pipeline, the company that made that camera would have avoided an embarrassing mistake.
On a related note successful Empires become more diverse over time - one of the few virtues of Imperialism and they need the edge to expand further while the most xenophobic ones tend to be shorter lived or more limited in their success. One insulting but true observation about national flags flown by white supremacists is that they are all flags of losers (Nazi Germany, Confederacy, Rhodesia).
White men are like 35% of the U.S. population in total. So on the back of the envelope, a corporate culture that inclines toward hiring white men, also inclines against hiring from 65% of the population. That's a lot of talent available for your competitors to hire.
And the numbers get even more dramatic the younger you look. Non-hispanic white U.S. residents under 16 made up less than 50% of the population at that age as of last year. And the trend direction is obvious. Source:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-census-data-shows-the...
The left-hand side of this chart is what the future of the American workforce will look like. The right-hand side is what it used to look like:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/30/most-common...
If a company does not figure out how to hire, retain, and promote people who are not white men, they are going to see a shrinking talent pool for decades to come. The data is obvious to corporate leaders, which is why so many companies are treating diversity as an issue for management of the business.
Agreed. Not hiring the best talent is always bad for a company. If you are biased against your best talent, you've selected worse talent.
However, diversity goals keep moving - they are well past bias issues. Note that tech companies aren't hiring mostly white men at this point - they are in fact outnumbered by Asian men (Google was at 30% and 39% in tech hiring respectively last year.). And yet, we are still talking about the lack of diversity in tech (women remain underepresented, but in terms of ethnicity it's a very diverse place)
You implicitly assume that the performance of a leadership team is the sum of the talent of its members.
I'm sure that's important, but the more direct variable to study (somehow) would be how similar people's backgrounds are. If they are all precisely alike, then they'll miss perspectives and be blindsided. But if they are totally different, then they will struggle to communicate their assumptions, and also won't perform well.
So I'd expect honest research to show a U-shaped loss curve. Or more realistically, to have gathered cautionary tales of companies that fell apart for both of these reasons.
But to focus on the U.S. most really competitive institutions in the U.S. like medical institutions are not running into the problem of having too many white people. Medical institutions have too many Asians, and not enough Black and Hispanic people to have a representative graduating class.
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/allopathic-distrib...
So, benefit there. ;)
Please elaborate on what you mean by "warp the definition of racism".
changing the definition of racism so a specific targetgroup is included. For example instead of "discriminate minority groups" they say "disadvantage minority groups" and then include things like those entrence exams as a disadvantage. In the end everything is somehow racist.
But to intentionally disadvantage a minority group is to discriminate against that minority group.
Are you suggesting that intentionally disadvantaging a group is not discriminating against that group?
Or are you suggesting that unintentionally disadvantaging a group is not only not discriminating against that group, but that also it is is also excusable and needs no correction? i.e. that the consistent, albeit unintentional, disadvantaging shall continue?
---
With respect to entrance examinations specifically - while I have zero experience of context with the situation today, I fully appreciate how entrance examinations can be intentionally and unintentionally exclusionary - and yet still be seen as innocuous. A good example is in the (historical) [entrance exams for the UK's Grammar School systems which are sat at age 11[(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven-plus#Controversy); while the grammar-school system was ostensibly universal and open to all, the entrance exams with questions predicated on a familiarity with middle-class culture naturally disadvantaged working-class students.
I would argue that depends on the intent. Do i put them in a disadvantage because they are part of that group or because a large part of that group wouldn't fit the requirements i have.
Lets say i'm looking for someone doing voiceover. Someone without an accent. That would probably put a lot of non-native english speaker in a disadvantage. Would you argue, that i'm discriminating against them or have racist intentions?
In this diversity session they would then argue my knowledge that non-native english speaker are put in a disadvantage by this requirement was the reason to put it in and therefor i'm racist.
What if I'm not racist, but the rest of my employees are, and I want my team to be cohesive and productive?
Everyone has an accent. When you say "without an accent," what you mean is that you are looking for someone with a particular accent that is meant to be free of features that identify someone as coming from a particular region.
In a way, it's discriminatory, because you're saying that people who do not speak your preferred dialect are not speaking "proper" English. Even if they grew up speaking English their entire life.
Thats what an accent is, yes. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/accent
> In a way, it's discriminatory, because you're saying that people who do not speak your preferred dialect are not speaking "proper" English. Even if they grew up speaking English their entire life.
thats not what i said/wrote. Thats how you interpret it.
It depends on the policy. Is the height of a basketball hoop a policy that is unintentionally discriminating against me because I can't jump that high? Is the Nobel Prize racist because Jews are massively overrepresented among winners?
The debate here is over whether any policy that results in racial disparity is racist. To me, that argument is obviously wrong.
> A good example is in the (historical) [entrance exams for the UK's Grammar School systems which are sat at age 11[(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven-plus#Controversy); while the grammar-school system was ostensibly universal and open to all, the entrance exams with questions predicated on a familiarity with middle-class culture naturally disadvantaged working-class students.
To you, tests like the one you mention are racist (or classist) because you assume that certain races or classes will be more likely to know certain things and others less likely. But, ironically, to me, your assumption is racist (and classist) because we have different definitions of racism.
Finally, I think there's a serious flaw in your thinking. If "studies show" that rich kids test better in math, does that mean math tests are classist? Is it even possible to create a test so that every group you consider (ethnic or socio-economic) will achieve the same average score? And which groups shall we consider? Isn't it common knowledge these days that there is no canonical way to divvy people up into "races"? Why is it that, for the purpose of college admission, "Asian" is an ethnicity but "Jew" isn't? Furthermore, imagine I am born to rich parents and my parents hire a math tutor from the age of 3 until I graduate high school. By the time I take the SAT, I will probably be much better at math than the average high school student. Is there anything wrong with that? Why is it correct for tests to attempt to discern innate ability rather than current ability?
The issue was that they were testing for neither; rather, they were testing knowledge irrelevant to the thing ostensibly being tested (but specific to a class group).
From Wikipedia: "For example, questions about the role of household servants or classical composers were far easier for middle-class children to answer than for those from less wealthy or less educated backgrounds".
That's a good argument but it's not the argument that I was responding to:
> the grammar-school system was ostensibly universal and open to all, the entrance exams with questions predicated on a familiarity with middle-class culture naturally disadvantaged working-class students.
The problem arises when the only opportunity is to replace measurable discrimination with non-measurable discrimination. For example, SAT results are easy to measure, and because of this we take correlations with X, Y, and Z, and find that SAT slightly discriminates against people in subpopulation Z.
So we replace the SAT with a holistic interview-and-quiz format that is only used at our institution. The data is kept internal (for student privacy) and there aren't enough datapoints to derive meaningful correlations with X, Y, or Z.
Is there less discrimination? We don't know! What you accomplish is to replace a standard within which you can detect discrimination with one where you can't.
So yes, using metrics that have small but measurable inequities may be preferable to using metrics where inequities cannot be measured. In the metrizable case the "disadvantage" is at least bounded.
Now, in the alternative case where you actually have options, i.e. you have one measure with some inequities and another measure that you know has fewer inequities, then of course it would be racist to choose the first measure over the second. But this is not an analogous situation to university entrance exams at all.
Such scenarios may be susceptible to preference cascades though, when people realize that they're actually in good company and suddenly feel free to act and say as they truly wish. When that happens, change is rapid. The personal guards of a hated dictator may switch sides overnight and execute the leader they would have killed others for the day before.
It's almost like making generalisations about people's actions only by their skin colour or ethnic background is somehow wrong. Weird to think that basically anyone studying social science or humanities is being taught this stuff and that it is at this point basically accepted as fact.
So, basically inquisitor wannabees and pseudoscience cultists. Your colleague dodged a bullet.
The idea that claiming that you are racist makes you not racist is totally gaga, random, and based in magical thinking, not in science. It only helps to hide in plain sight the real racists making much easier to admit it for everybody.
The fact my colleague took it so personally says more about them, I think, than the training.
Religious rituals seem totally normal to the initiated and strange and cult-ish to others.
I don't believe the similarity to Maoist struggle sessions is an accident, it's born from the same general school of thought.
1) Mao had been frozen out after the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, and this was his way of discrediting his enemies and getting back on top.
2) Young people full of fervor are fucking vicious.
None of it really had much to do with marxist philosophy in general or with the things Mao in particular had said before he'd been frozen out. But it says a lot about power.
Nonsense. The Cultural Revolution had much to do with Marxist philosophy. For goodness’ sake, read the May 16 Notification and Sixteen Points.
The entire point of the courses I've seen is to bring people awareness of unconscious bias and thereby help them transition from ignorant commission of error to awareness of the potential for such error. And unconscious bias doesn't make one "worthless," it's (as far as we can tell) pretty ordinary human behavior.
The entire point of the [bible camp] I've seen is to bring people awareness of [unconscious sinning] and thereby help them transition from ignorant commission of [sin] to awareness of the potential for [sin]. And [unconscious sinning] doesn't make one "worthless," it's (as far as we can tell) pretty ordinary human behavior [since we're all born in sin]. (https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/what-is-the-biblical-ev...)
Original sin is a concept couched in Christian mythology. Unconscious bias is a concept derived from statistical study and observation. The similarity is that unconscious bias, like original sin, appears to be innate to the human existence---a byproduct of the way we think about the world, the thousands of quick decisions we make subconsciously to go about our days. The parallel doesn't make it untrue.
The entire point of some exhibits in science museums I've seen is to bring people awareness of optical illusions and help them transition from not knowing that the human eye has some fascinating corner case failure modes to awareness of the existence of those failure modes. And the eye being imperfect doesn't make it "worthless," it's a pretty ordinary side effect of evolution in the context where those failure modes are rare to observe.
You’re defending diversity training, which nobody is attacking. We’re talking about a particular kind of rhetoric where people take personal responsibility in behalf of their race and label themselves with words that, in ordinary usage, have extremely inflammatory meanings.
I’m from a “diverse background.” I think diversity training and making organizations more diverse is great. But this rhetoric is an explosively bad approach to race relations, and as a non-white person I am very worried about what the result will be.
So not much more to say on this topic without specific examples.
By contrast, your motte: "training on how to work with people from diverse backgrounds.
You trusted your alma mater when you were taught there; not trusting the direction it's taking now? Is it possible you're not seeing the picture the way they are?
I think the same principle applies here. Malicious racism and passive racism have the same effect.
Studies have shown that people who don't think themselves to be actually racist still act in race-discriminatory ways. For example, people with non-ethic-names get more callbacks for their resume controlled for qualifications on the resume (https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...).
For instance, Buddhism is a suite of beliefs about enlightenment and transcendence. We don't refer to people as "structural Buddhists" simply because they have equanimity.
1) Having people declare personal complicity for a general social ill; and
2) Using words that have widely-understood connotations to mean something different in order to achieve shocking rhetorical effect.
It's not just inconsistent with social norms, it's alienating to many non-white people. I don't think the well-meaning white people doing this (and almost everyone involved in this is white) really understand that we have to actually go on and try to interact normally our professors and administrators after this.
Because of that, it's very hard for me to have normal interactions with people who explicitly identify as racist, even if they say they're a special kind of racist who intends to treat me well.
In other words, there's no magically non-racist person out there. Everyone's a little bit racist.
Making people confess to being 'racist', at institutions where being Racist gets you fired, is a power-move.
Those of us who can see that aren't objecting to the idea of unconscious bias, we're objecting to the power move.
There's a world of difference between confronting one's unconscious bias and unapologetic, willful racism.
If there's such a world of difference, why conflate the two using the same word?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/us/merriam-webster-racism...
Not "suggesting" - demanding, and specifically labelling themselves "racist" - not just admitting that they benefit from it.
We talk about an institution that will only hire people as long as they came out as racists first. Wow!.
Looks like the type of workplace to avoid at any cost.
Firstly, if everyone is a racist then the word racist loses meaning. So when you have an actual racist and say this person is racist, it's meaningless. Everyone is racist.
Secondly, the amount of false positives will just be crazy high. How can this possibly ever work?
I don't know what they think they are achieving?
They don't think they're actually hunting down people who hate others based on race. They're self-consciously building class power that serves themselves as individuals and the material interests of their class.
I wonder how scientific this understanding is
https://diversity.ucsf.edu/resources/state-science-unconscio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit-association_test#Crit...
Also pretty obvious biased cherry picking on that page. Counterexample:
Women preferred 2:1 over men for STEM faculty positions
But I see it is the same as forcing people to stay in an unpleasant class until they understand type theory. We teach people things they need to know so that they know them, because knowledge is useful. We're certainly not calling the question of "having education seminars" into question, are we?
Suppose we were discussing a risk management seminar which you had reason to believe was teaching a flawed methodology, one likely to cause serious harm if widely adopted. Would you be similarly sanguine in that case?
With respect, I'll defer to the career sociologists and psychologists on the topic, much as I'd defer to the risk management PhD on the topic of risk management.
I've known too many tech-savvy folk who think humans can be reduced and deconstructed like a computer, declare humanities research bunk because it doesn't fit their mental model, and get profoundly surprised when their mental model doesn't fit actual human behavior. The psychologists and sociologists have a better track record on modeling and predicting human behavior.
This isn't a good heuristic, without some way of judging the entire field. Would you defer to expert career scientologists about E-meters? Would it help if they published papers on the topic and held conferences and you picked only the best-cited ones from that process? Why not?
I think the relevant question is: If they were completely wrong about how the world actually works, would this have had any negative consequences for them?
This would lead you to some degree of skepticism of risk management professionals, too. If the risks are small and frequent (like estimating how many car crashes per month) then you can trust that people & methods that are badly wrong will have been weeded out. But when the risks are of rare events (like, say, housing market crashes, or nuclear war) then professionals can pass an entire career without being tested against reality. So you should be wary that the most prominent voices are chosen for reasons other than actually predicting the risk.
And career sociologists, of course, aren't heavily rewarded for accurate predictions.
Morgan Freeman (black) has said it years ago: "Stop talking about it".
what's humiliating about having the same problem that basically everyone does?
It also suggests it's up to session-organisers to decide what justifiably humiliates a person.
Perhaps it's just not humiliating.
How do you know? It doesn't sound like the kind of session where honest (dissenting) exchange is encouraged.
People in America really don’t understand what the alternative is like. Academic theater seems workable, or at least harmless at best so long as we’re standing on solid bedrock. But that’s a framework that exists so long as you maintain it. What society really looks like absent this framework is what happened in Iraq after in 2005. The first time people voted, they did so strictly along ethnic lines and then tried to annihilate each other. Or in my home country where we went to war to separate ourselves from people who had the same skin color and same religion, but spoke a different language.
The United States is the most successful multi-ethnic democracy in the world. For example, while Muslim immigrants to the US achieved economic parity within a generation or two, in countries like France they’re facing multi-generational poverty. We are not perfect. While we have successfully integrated (socially and economically) wave after wave of immigrants. We are doing it again right now—income mobility among Hispanic people is similar to white such that within a few generations incomes for these groups converge. Our persistent failure has been our inability to fix the legacy of our shameful history of slavery, segregation, and Indian removal. But nobody else has figured out how to do that either. In countries like the UK, the Black-white income gap is just as large as in the US. The gap in maternal mortality rates is even larger. And in most of the rest of Europe, it’s not even legal to keep statistics about these disparities.
Maybe some professors have figured out a better replacement for our universal values that will work better—one that replaced a broad, shared commitment to equality with individual white people admitting complicity in perpetuating systemic racism. But they probably didn’t.
The United States is currently undergoing a massive upheaval in multiple major cities about its willingness to sweep racial discrimination under the rug and call it "success." It's an unstable equilibrium; it works until it doesn't.
"there is no good evidence that people are unaware of their biases. While people do often express surprise at the score they get on the Implicit Association Test, that often reflects the labels that are used to express the degree of bias rather than the presence of some difference in attitudes toward different groups"
-- https://www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/ulterior-motives/201...
I have no problem with teaching accurate information wrt bias; but on the other hand, that metric doesn't impel people to label themselves racist, which seems to be a goal.
The Implicit Association Test at Age 21: No Evidence for Construct Validity [0]
> The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is 21 years old. Greenwald et al. (1998) proposed that the IAT measures individual differences in implicit social cognition. This claim requires evidence of construct validity. I review the evidence and show that there is insufficient evidence for this claim. Most important, I show that few studies were able to test discriminant validity of the IAT as a measure of implicit personality characteristics and that a single-construct model fits multi-method data as well or better than a dual-construct models. Thus, the IAT appears to be a measure of the same personality characteristics that are measured with explicit measures. I also show that the validity of the IAT varies across personality characteristics. It has low validity as a measure of self-esteem, moderate validity as a measure of racial bias, and high validity as a measure of political orientation. The existing evidence also suggests that the IAT measures stable characteristics rather than states and has low predictive validity of single behaviors. Based on these findings, it is important that users of the IAT clearly distinguish between implicit measures and implicit constructs. The IAT is an implicit measure, but there is no evidence that it measures implicit constructs.
The Creators of the Implicit Association Test Should Get Their Story Straight [1]
> The problem, as I showed in a lengthy rundown of the many, many problems with the test published this past January, is that there’s very little evidence to support that claim that the IAT meaningfully predicts anything. In fact, the test is riddled with statistical problems — problems severe enough that it’s fair to ask whether it is effectively “misdiagnosing” the millions of people who have taken it, the vast majority of whom are likely unaware of its very serious shortcomings. There’s now solid research published in a top journal strongly suggesting the test cannot even meaningfully predict individual behavior. And if the test can’t predict individual behavior, it’s unclear exactly what it does do or why it should be the center of so many conversations and programs geared at fighting racism.
Psychology’s Favorite Tool for Measuring Racism Isn’t Up to the Job [2]
[0] https://replicationindex.com/2019/02/15/iat21/
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem...
[2] https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-...
The person who ties you to a stake and burns you alive to cleanse the devil from you can sincerely intend to save your soul, but what they are doing is still horrible. Intent is vastly overrated.
The fact that this is what "fighting racism" looks like when forced hysterectomies are performed on undocumented immigrants in concentration camps show that it's not really about racism for the people that are doing this.
True progressives are out there fighting current battles. Corruption, bribery, current-day slavery etc. Conformists are out there marching about battles already won like gay rights, slavery in the United States etc.
https://news.yahoo.com/richard-grenell-addresses-rnc-gop-220...
LGBT rights in Poland and Russia are in dire straits. In Chechnya, I think they still deport gay people. In far too many countries, homosexuality is still illegal. Even in the Western world, growing up gay or trans often is associated with a measurably higher level of stress.
Of course, it got better, but it's still not over.
It's about power and is using something people are very unlikely to disagree with to grab at power.
"We're anti-racists, therefore if you oppose us or our actions you must be racists".
"We're anti-fascist, therefore if you oppose us or our actions you must be fascists".
And it's very effective. Just look at the choke-hold it has corporate America in, in particular, at the moment.
Yes, the CRT/Woke crowd learned well from the success of Frank Lunz and similar conservatives in the 80s and 90s.
Their ideology may well break apart the country, but their linguistic propaganda is very effective, indeed.
Racists in positions of power may tilt the playing field in your favor whether you've asked for it or not. And it may not even be you personally, but people in your neighborhood, your social groups in general.
Unsafe generalization is at the root of prejudice. Racists / sexists / bigots generalize from the worst instances of individual behaviour to a group, or aggregate statistics about a group, and then apply the generalization in specific individual scenarios. A crude example, taking the generalization "Jews run global finance" - and it's true that they have been historically over-represented - and then applying the generalization to specifics: "you're a Jew, I don't like Jews because they run the world".
A good rule to bear in mind before leaping to prejudice is that the variance within groups is larger than the variance between groups.
White privilege is a prejudice concept built along the same architecture as racism and sexism. It takes aggregate group attributes and tries to enforce it in the particular against individuals. You've just rehearsed the line yourself - "you benefit from racism" - you've given an example of instantiation of a group attribute upon an individual without evidence. It is literally prejudice, and it's unjust, even if it's more likely to be true than false.
I have zero doubt that many people are treated differently based on skin and other overt characteristics. But that's not my argument.
The core of the issue is that this is a stereotype being applied on a person because of their race. At no point is someone going through that person's own individual history and determining specific points where they have benefited. Instead, there is just the stereotype (which might even be true on average) that is being applied to each individual person because of their (perceived) race.
What was the word for stereotyping someone based on their race?
I will say, I think it's strange they are asking them to admit to being racist, and "be better". It's a systemic thing, so it requires systemic change. Asking them to say they are racist and that they need to be better seems unneededly divisive.
Edit: As others have pointed out, the last sentence is kind of wrong. The paraphrase should probably say, "I recognize I'm a part of a system or systems that uphold racism". Look at the ADL's definition for racism to see what I mean:
By their definition, you are racist if you help uphold any of the "systems, institutions, or factors that advantage white people and for people of color, cause widespread harm and disadvantages in access and opportunity."
This stuff barely flies with hyper-progressive elites, and many of them are deeply uncomfortable with it. This is possibly the dumbest thing ever pushed by those who think they are doing good.
They use that too, interchangegly and confusingly...
Because that word lacks any form of punch. Being "privileged" does not imply any personal responsibility; it's essentially saying you got lucky.
My understanding is that this tactic of taking very strong words like "racist" or "nazi" and superextending their definitions is just an attempt to harness the strong emotional response people have to these words and direct it at a very large group of people.
The unfortunate side effect is, that it slowly weakens the terminology, to the point where some day being a "racist" might just not be a big deal anymore.
The more direct danger of this strategy is that, in the short term, while most of the population still associates a term with a different definition, it allows quickly invoking very strong emotions with an accusation that is not technically wrong by the newer definition.
This becomes even more obvious when you look at how people often dance around these definitions to deliberately keep the newer definition as esoteric as possible, so the word retains its connotations for as long as possible.
Here's a definition from the ADL for systemic racism.
"A combination of systems, institutions and factors that advantage white people and for people of color, cause widespread harm and disadvantages in access and opportunity. One person or even one group of people did not create systemic racism, rather it: (1) is grounded in the history of our laws and institutions which were created on a foundation of white supremacy;* (2) exists in the institutions and policies that advantage white people and disadvantage people of color; and (3) takes places in interpersonal communication and behavior (e.g., slurs, bullying, offensive language) that maintains and supports systemic inequities and systemic racism." [1]
So if you support one of the "systems, institutions and factors", you are by this definition, racist. I just said most white people probably are, by this definition.
I personally don't think individual racists are that big of a deal anymore. Systemic racism is much more harmful.
I even think that a little bit of the prejudice-type racism can help people overcome racism. More on that: https://qz.com/398723/slavoj-zizek-thinks-political-correctn...
[1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/raceinc.html
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/racial-wealth-gap-costs-economy...
[3] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-...
How do you explain then, that asian-americans (on average) outearn whites, have a higher SAT score and are less likly to be in prison? They have been impacted by racist policies too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
> This of course will lead more black people to turn to crime, because they have less good options, because they are on average, poorer and less educated. All the old laws and our history going back to slavery still has effects today that are compounding and allow the problem to continue to exist.
poverty and education dont explain those numbers, but there is (at least partly) the growing number of fatherless homes that correlate with many factors influence positive outcome. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/06/18/533062607/poverty... https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/line/107-children-in-s... You want black people to get out of this cycle? Dont be a criminal, comply with police, educate yourself, help others do the same. But somehow this is called "acting white".
It's ridiculous to say that Asian Americans have experienced anything near the racism that black people have in the United States. I don't think they should even be included in the conversion when talking about racism. The racism they experience is mostly prejudice-type racism, not systemic.
> the growing number of fatherless homes that correlate with many factors influence positive outcome.
Well yeah, that's another systemic problem, that's partially caused by fathers being in prison and such.
> You want black people to get out of this cycle? Dont be a criminal, comply with police, educate yourself, help others do the same. But somehow this is called "acting white".
I don't follow your logic. If it's so easy for black people to get out of the cycle, why don't they? Why is it that so many black people are in the cycle vs. white people? Are you saying that black people are inherently worse?
You should pick a different word, to describe this, since you are mostly just confusing people with the new definition that you are using.
You do realize that one of the main reasons for redefining words is to cause confusion?
As in, we'll take this word with narrow meaning and then massively expand the meaning in order to fight our cause?
As in, nobody wants to be accused of being racist so if we reuse the word "racist" for something else we'll be able to manipulate the discourse?
If they actually used the words as they mean, people would realize that they're complaining about nothing.
The other unfair argument is to refute a minor point and claim there's nothing left to discuss. Like you did right there.
But then everyone is racist. Including black people. Everyone is part of this society that has systemic features tht benefit whites.
So if everyone is racist, what’s the point of labeling?
For example I wasn’t even “white” until I moved to USA a few years ago. Took me 6+ years to even grok how “white” works and what it means but I’m told I was racist all along.
And yeah sure I want the system to change, but honestly I have enough work with being an immigrant without inherent rights. Hell I’m technically a visitor so I don’t even have immigration rights yet. This is not my fight to fight ... but folks say that makes me racist and privileged and how dare I.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If I do yes to BLM does that mean I’m not racist? What if I speak in support of BLM? Is that a blanket dispensation against being racist?
> 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'
Sure, but this only reinforces u/rayiner's point. Nobody amended or replaced the Civil Rights Act. No vote was held to enshrine a broader definition of racism as legally and ethically binding on all citizens. Instead, a small clique of well-connected professional-class people are imposing this stuff top-down through their control of ostensibly private (but in fact, pseudo-private, often dependent on donations, subsidies, tax breaks, or public funding) institutions.
To my mind, the solution is simple: bring major public institutions back under full public governance and control. No more "we're on private property" rubbish from people taking tax dollars.
And, preferably, a fresh labor law enshrining protection for political opinions in the workplace that do not violate extent civil-rights laws.
This definition doesn't even bother me on face. Obviously, systems can be designed to advantage one group and disadvantage another group. And, obviously, Jim Crow effects the distribution of family wealth to this day.
What bothers me about BigCorp diversity training is something a quite different. Choose a random public company. Its stocks are almost certainly disproportionately owned by white people. Many of the older companies even did business with apartheid states in the USA (and elsewhere) pre-1960. The ones that have been around for a century might've even done business with Nazis or were even run by anti-Semites (eg Ford). But even if not, just due to the fact that wealth is disproportionately owned by white people, so too are most stocks in large companies.
Racially skewed allocation of large company's stock due to a combination of historical discrimination lumping capital into white folk's pockets until ~60 years ago and the compounded nature of wealth is EXACTLY the sort of thing actual social theorists mean when they say "structural racism".
The problem with diversity training at BigCorps is not that they talk about structural racism per se. The problem is that they use the training as a way to distract from the actual structural inequalities in our financial system and instead put the onus of change on low-level employees who have almost no access to actual power and agency within the org (or larger society). I'm half convinced that this sort of diversity training is intentional miseducation.
When I listen to these training seminars, I can't help by hear them as the board/CEO saying "please don't pay attention to our mostly white and ivy-educated executive's stock-based compensation plan or our disproportionaltely white stockholder's dividends, which are actually excellent examples of structural racism in action; look over there instead".
Only fanatics seriously consider large scale forced redistribution for good reason - the damage to property rights causes the market to come tumbling down as it undermines trustworthiness. Would you work for someone who just decides one day "You know what? You worked for us for a decade - we're going to need all of your remaining salary back."?
That's kind of my whole point, right?
It wouldn't be "systemic" or "structural" if a single CEO or a few CEOs could unilaterally fix the problem, because one man isn't a "system" or "structure". The thing that makes systemic/structural racism systemic/structural is that you'd have to radically change of the normal order of things to address the underlying problem. It's not personal, and it therefore can't be fixed by a few personal actions. It has to be fixed at the systems level.
BigCorps can't change anything about systemic racism because they are the system.
> Focusing on things they can reasonably change is a legitimate approach.
"Mandatory HR training made me rethink my views on systemic racism" -- no one ever.
In fact, I'm 100% convinced that these diversity trainings are actively counter-productive to actually changing any minds.
If you take structural racism seriously, then the idea of BigCorp "doing something" about structural racism via HR lectures to low level employees is prime facie absurd. Cindy in accounting can't do shit about structural/systemic racism... that's kind of the whole point of distinguishing it from more personal forms of discrimination/prejudice.
Training on systemic racism might make sense for powerful people with the ability to effect the functioning of systems over years/decades. Politicians, boards, CEOs, execs, VCs, maybe some managers, etc. And it's the sort of thing that activists should try to explain in public forums.
But at the individual contributor level, a much simpler regimen of "what is explicit discrimination" + "we will fire you for overt explicit discrimination because it is illegal and not aligned with our corporate values" + "dear god don't do stupid shit like wearing blackface to the company party" + maybe a short module on implicit bias is much more effective. Because that's the sort of material is actionable at the IC level, and it's the sort of thing people are open to being told by HR drones.
Half day trainings on systemic racism for Cindy in Accounting or Bob the Admin Assistant makes no god damn sense, and probably does more harm than good.
Like, seriously, HR is not the right place for this conversation. You'll lose more people than you gain by shoe-horning such a complex topic into a BigCorp training module. Stick to shop ethics.
Well, maybe they shouldn't be declaring themselves society's chosen vanguard against structural racism, then. After all, it wouldn't be forced redistribution if they volunteered to just mail every black person in the country $16,000 worth (to take an example from a film about reparations) in company stock.
Ironically Ibram X. Kendi uses this exact example in "How to Be an Antiracist."
That's a complete crock. East Asians top the charts in income by ethnicity, college admissions, and have the lowest rates of criminality. For a supposed system created to benefit white people it sure is doing an awful job of it.
"A belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race"
By broadly redefining racism in a way that removes individual agency you can declare anyone you want as racist. Then you can conveniently and selectively conflate it with the common definition to produce individual responsibility. It's a huckster tactic it's how you get things like
"I will say, I think it's strange they are asking them to admit to being racist, and "be better". It's a systemic thing, so it requires systemic change. Asking them to say they are racist and that they need to be better seems unneededly divisive."
By ensuring that the target they want is inherently racist and also individually responsible but with no possible power to change this, you can ensure an endless need for racism seminars and donations to assuage inherited guilt.
> White and Hispanic children have fairly similar rates of intergenerational mobility.... Because of these modest intergenerational gaps, the income gap between Hispanic and white Americans is shrinking across generations.... Asians appear likely to converge to income levels comparable to white Americans in the long run.
> In contrast to Hispanics and Asians, there are large intergenerational gaps between black and American Indian children relative to white children.... If mobility rates do not change, our estimates imply a steady-state gap in family income ranks between whites and American Indians of 18 percentiles, and a white-black gap of 19 percentiles. These values are very similar to the empirically observed gaps for children in our sample, suggesting that blacks and American Indians are currently close to the steady-state income distributions that would prevail if differences in mobility rates remained constant across generations.
In terms of rhetoric, moreover, it's deliberately inflammatory. Critical theorist academics appropriated existing terms with weight connotations, like "racist" and "white supremacy," to mean more abstract, systemic things that don't necessarily imply prejudicial intent.
People should be wary of adopting this rhetoric even if well-intentioned. Just because some academics thought this rhetoric was clever doesn't mean that people of color generally want race-relations to be defined by such inflammatory rhetoric. As a purely practical matter, there is a ceiling on the fraction of white people who will actually respond in a productive way to being called a "racist" and a "white supremacist" (even if you explain to them the academic twist on the words). There is a reason we do things the way we do them. There is a reason civil rights movements have been built on appeals to universal values and the goal of color-blind equality as the ultimate ideal.
In terms of specific actions that can mean a lot of different things! The diversity session can probably suggest a few concrete steps towards this end (I am not a DEI professional etc)
The point here is precisely to equivocate between two terms to manipulate others. You get your target to accept one claim using a relatively acceptable defintion, and the force them to concede rather more extreme claims by implicitly switching to a more self-serving definition.
> Struggle sessions were a form of public humiliation and torture used by the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) at various times in the Mao era, particularly during the years immediately before and after the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and during the Cultural Revolution. The aim of struggle sessions was to shape public opinion, as well as to humiliate, persecute, or execute political rivals and those deemed class enemies.
> In general, the victim of a struggle session was forced to admit various crimes before a crowd of people who would verbally and physically abuse the victim until they confessed. Struggle sessions were often held at the workplace of the accused, but they were sometimes conducted in sports stadiums where large crowds would gather if the target was well-known.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session Sorry for the Wikipedia reference.
Good old Struggle sessions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
There's also push back at the federal level against this, and public awareness is growing.
It is true that we probably have somewhat different values. I don't personally value TJ having some high rating as decided by magazines and would happily sacrifice scores if I believed it was possible to better provide education to gifted students across Fairfax County. And I do believe that the test makes it harder for FCPS to do this well, though it certainly allows TJ to select for specific kinds of students that make it score well in magazine ratings.
I also believe that it is not good to separate students into many strata earlier in life and believe that the lottery limits the effect of wealth and other inequities on young kids. You may believe that we should reward students who studied their brains out in school, did test prep on weekends, and joined clubs so they could round out a resume. Those are different values and that's okay.
It is also very likely that we have different opinions about the expected outcome of ending the test. I believe that it will make it easier, not harder for students to access high quality education and recognizing that there are so many students that could succeed at TJ will encourage FCPS to allocate more resources to magnet programs so there can be more slots for these students. I also hope that this will demonstrate the need for a humanities-focused alternative, which currently does not exist (the humanities education offered at TJ is atrocious, IMO). I also believe that moving away from strict testing as the primary mechanism for excellence will help TJ recover some of its creative side that is so valuable for young learners. The creativity available during 8th period has been slowly crushed under the weight of standardized learning processes over the last several decades. A lot of the skills I learned during 8th period are no longer made available to students in order to serve the almighty test score. I hope that admitting smart students who aren't bound to testing will help this.
It is also very likely that we have different opinions about the ability of the test to separate students into strata.
I do not support destroying TJ. I believe that this makes FCPS education better and encourages more TJs.
We disagree. That's fine. But you list my peers among extremists and you claim that I intend to sabotage quality education. Why is your position not extreme?
I missed that you were a different poster than the one I responded to.
> I didn’t say you you intend to sabotage quality education. I said you were against excellence. Turning a gifted school into a normal one will in practice be the end of academic acceleration.
But it isn't turning a gifted school into a normal one. The proposal still requires accelerated math background, high test scores, and recommendations from administrators. The teachers will remain strong. The proposal isn't a raw lottery among all FCPS students. The proposal isn't cutting funding for the astronomy lab. The option for the gifted won't vanish. The same population of people will be able to apply to TJ.
I am not "against excellence". I do value other things in different ratios, perhaps. If somebody told me that the average AP scores at TJ would go down by 0.2 points and the school would have a population of free-and-reduced-lunch kids that matched the general population of FCPS, I'd say that was a good trade. I may value "excellence" less than you (for some definition of excellence) but I don't oppose it.
I also believe that TJ's test focus (and AP focus) leads to a suboptimal pedagogy. Look at how 8th period has changed over the last several decades. Gone are the opportunities for wild experimentation and creativity outside of the norm. I believe that students are being forced into boxes at TJ and that eliminating the test will make it more clear that TJ can better serve its students with a wider set of opportunities for its kids.
I know a fair number of alumni who wouldn't encourage their kids to attend TJ because the "excellence" it provides is so limited in scope. Students can feasibly be exposed to better curricula in IB and to wider ranges of human experiences at accelerated programs within base schools. I don't know if I fully agree, but the fact that very smart, successful, and educate people can look at TJ and say "I do not agree that this is a pinnacle of excellence" should make us all step back and understand that we don't agree on what excellence means.
You did also use the phrase "support destroying..." when describing me and my beliefs. I think that "sabotage" is a reasonable match to that.
IB is at best very little better than AP. If you’re not teaching actual college level material like Bard College at Simon’s Rock[1] a limited amount will be lost by allowing administrators more leeway to discriminate against Asians.
I apologize for my overwrought language. I pattern matched your opposition to the current regime to the Ed school orthodoxy or the San Franciscan attempt to actually end Lowell.
The school is stunningly AP centric. When I attended, total number of AP courses taken was the primary measure distinguishing students. There were entire core classes that were not offered as non-AP courses. It is a major metric in what makes the school so highly rated in magazines.
The school does teach advanced classes, but the best stuff isn't in the test-driven structure. I'm married to a college professor and friends with many of them. The idea that APs are equivalent to college courses is largely bunk.
> a limited amount will be lost by allowing administrators more leeway to discriminate against Asians.
How precisely is a random lottery that requires certain education history and grades to enter discriminating against asians? Asian students still disproportionately make up lottery-eligible students.
Don’t forget the administrator letters. Or that the random lottery’s purpose is to move from admissions by moving from highest score down until the classes are filled to fulfills minimum requirements. That latter is to reduce the proportion and number of Asians. It’s phrased as a student body more reflective of the district’s student population but the effect, which is both foreseen and desired is to reduce the number of Asians.
Super majorities of people believe race should play no factor at all in college admissions. And grades and standardized test scores are the two things people list first as criteria that should govern admissions decisions. I do not believe that folks who would advocate abandoning standardized testing entirely based on the premise that they're irredeemably flawed are not expressing a widely-held opinion.
And a full 12% of surveyed people in the article you cite think that testing should play no role in college admissions. It 12% is below the bar for "extreme" then a tremendous number of beliefs that are common among the tech crowd should be labeled as "extreme".
I think you are using a rhetorical trick to retreat. I'm not coming for your children.
I know very little about HR departments and bias training. I do know a lot of academics who study race in fields like history and sociology and I do know that people scream at some of them and call them anti-white even though their scholarship is very rigorous. So I would expect there to be a range of quality among bias training and that both high and low quality bias training causes certain groups of people to lash out. But I also have basically no information here.
Separating the two helps the audience determine if you’re speaking in good faith, or if you’re trying to rationalize and cover up an injustice.
Screeds generally indicate the latter.
Even if the balance is tilted the other way for this particular magnet school, it's quite inflammatory to claim this initiative is in any way similar the destruction of 1,500 year old religious icons by an extremely violent group of religious extremists.
The people who "rearranged their lives" to try to get their children into the school are also in no way entitled a spot. If this school is doing an excellent job teaching students, and that absolutely appears to be the case, then more energy should be spent on expanding those same opportunities to a greater number of people, not worrying about the speculative incremental decline in quality that might be incurred when switching from one set of entrance criteria to another.
The data I've seen says the reverse, that SAT is a better predictor than GPA, but both together contain more information.
https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview...
> then more energy should be spent on expanding those same opportunities to a greater number of people, not worrying about the speculative incremental decline in quality that might be incurred when switching from one set of entrance criteria to another.
Making all schools better is a noble goal. But I thought the point of selective magnet schools was largely to gather selected students in one place. It's not so much that you give superior teachers to some, it's that a whole class of kids who are all into math (or whatever) can be taught more, faster, than an average class.
For instance, I attended a HS where GPA was graded on a 4.0 scale, even for advanced placement and college credit classes. The consequence is that you had a bunch of "Valedictorians" with perfect GPAs that attended spitwad classes.
Other schools I've seen grade on a 5.0 (or even a 6.0 I believe) system, to differentiate.
I would also suspect that GPA is more easily influenced by parental involvement than SAT (or just a plain IQ test).
Give it a few years to see if the drop-out rate changes.
Statements of that sort are meant to be acknowledgement that systemic racism is universal and perpetuates through us at the individual level, and usually in ways far more subtle than police brutality or the use of racial slurs.
One of the most anti-racist things that one can do is acknowledge the racism in themselves, and keep that in mind and in check when making decisions that affect others. Never trust when someone says they are absolutely not racist - it's something we all struggle with because of our shared conditioning.
A Dean saying they are racist and a "gatekeeper of white supremacy" is just acknowledging that through the power of their position, thet exercise a system that furthers white privilege.
If anything, that Dean should be applauded for confronting and acknowledging their own role in racist systems.
All the same, I can acknowledge that part of me becomes somewhat racist when walking through a less white part of town at night (and I'm not white).
Hostile to whom? People who deny the existence of systemic and institutional racism?
> As a non-white person I would have been extremely uncomfortable sitting through that.
Why? I ask because I'm also a non-white person who has sat through just those kind of discussions. They weren't "comfortable" - no introspective discussion of racism is - but they certainly were not hostile because the participants came with charity and a desire to understand themselves and the context better.
The tone of any conversation, defined by the attitudes of those who participate, has a great deal to do with the way people experience it.
I'm not even American but I've found the more pompous a thing is named, the more likely it is to be Republican backed. I guess it's their penchant for drama :-)
>In July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments. But those comments came from just 19,400 commenters, Montgomery said. That's 0.06 percent of users who are commenting, a number that has stayed steady through 2016.
https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2016/08/17/4895169...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22622983
> The number of accounts that have posted to HN this year, divided by the number of IP addresses that have accessed HN, is 0.008. How close that is to the '1% rule' ratio depends on which is the bigger factor: users with more than one IP or IPs with more than one user. We don't know. If the former is bigger, then 0.008 is a lower bound.
> Here's another way. The number of accounts that have posted this year, divided by the number of accounts that have viewed HN while logged in, is 0.36. That doesn't tell us much, but we can estimate the ratio of logged-in users to total users this way: logged-in page views divided by total page views. That ratio is 0.23. We can multiply those two to estimate the ratio of posters to total:
> So the two ways of estimating produce 0.8% and 8% respectively. Both ways are bogus in that they assume things we don't know and mix units that aren't the same, but they're the two I came up with and I don't remember how I did it before. It's interesting that they're almost exactly an order of magnitude apart. That makes it tempting to say the number is probably in between, but that's another cognitive bias talking.
Hopefully someone will be able to find an example because my Googlefoo is failing me.
hackernews comments to visitor rateI always assumed it meant 90% only read, 9% interact/comment and 1% create.
On the flip side, I wonder if everyone on social media were to comment on most items they had interest in, if it wouldn't completely drown out all of the extreme viewpoints. It may actually make social media extremely boring, as compared to the current standard. One can dream...
I'd expect the same for politics. Of course politics affects everyone personally in all kinds of ways, but most of the population just isn't that interested.
The issue of gay marriage in the US was fought mostly by progressive and social conservative activists, but the people they were trying to convince were those in the middle. The reason the progressives won is that the middle became increasingly convinced that banning gay marriage was immoral for the government to do.
In the case of a gay marriage, a small minority was directly affected by a tangible and quantifiable problem: not being able to have the same legal status as straight families. It wasn't about taking something from the majority, or guilt-tripping others. So adopting what they asked for had a net-positive effect: straight people were unaffected, while the gays got perks previously unavailable to them.
The current trends are different. Climate change and social justice issues don't personally affect most the people who are vocal about it. Interestingly, most of them do have one thing in common: lack of highly marketable skills or professional weight. Most of them are priced out of property ownership or retirement. Many are depressed to a point where they cannot find anyone to make family with (in my experience, strong marriages boil down to having common constructive interests, working on the same goal together and relying on each other). Except, they are not addressing the quantifiable problems. Instead, their fury got redirected to much broader problems that are almost impossible to quantify or address in a measurable way. So now it's a fight with no winning, it keeps people busy blowing their steam off at random strangers who dare to disagree with them, but all it does in the long term is increases the divisiveness of the society and makes fear and anger the new normal.
Okay, I'm stopping reading here to start replying, because there are already numerous problems with your reasoning:
* In the case of gay marriage, many of the people fighting for it were not, in fact, gay, and were not personally affected. Why does that matter? There were white people fighting in the civil rights movement for black rights, is that somehow lesser? Why is fighting for others a problem?
* Climate change already has, in fact, displayed some impact on most people by now.
* The fight over climate change is focused on the future, it's focused on prevention of larger harms, we're talking about a timeline that includes decades. Waiting until things are already a total, unmitigated disaster and then doing something about it would obviously be deeply stupid.
* Social justice issues actually do affect tons of people -- my wife, being a woman, is affected by various problems of sexism. Women and girls comprise half the population, add in basically any ethnicity or sexual minority and you're already at a majority of people.
* Again, even if you're personally the whitest, straightest, cis-est, male-st person possible, what's wrong with standing up for the rights of others? How is that disturbing in the least? I think you may be confusing "disturbing" with "encouraging" or "inspiring".
> Interestingly, most of them do have one thing in common: lack of highly marketable skills or professional weight.
Imagine someone making an identical argument for MLK's march on Washington DC, or for the broader civil rights movement at large. This is basically a character attack designed to deflect from the actual problems they're protesting. "These people only protest because they're losers!" is basically the message you're sending here.
If you look at social conservatism as a whole, this is basically always the argument, the way that history is rationalized. As soon as they lose one fight -- women being able to vote, civil rights movement, gay marriage, etc. -- the mantra suddenly goes from "okay okay, fine, [last change] was totally a good thing after all, but [new change] is completely crazy! For real this time!"
Generally, it is not, but there is a risk that "people who are not X, but are fighting for X" will misrepresent the opinions of "people who are X".
Also, "people who are X" usually have diverse opinions, while the "people who are not X, but are fighting for X" crowd often develops a monolithic opinion, and if you disagree with it, you are called anti-X.
To give an example, I know gay people who want equal rights, but are disgusted by the "prides". If a woke straight person heard me saying that I support equals rights but don't like the "prides", they would call me a homophobe. Because it is known -- among the woke straight people who support gay rights -- that all gays support the "prides".
Similarly, an Indian person probably wouldn't be offended by finding out that I practice yoga (they might actually be happy about it), but a woke white person might sic a Twitter mob on me for the sin of cultural appropriation.
> Again, even if you're personally the whitest, straightest, cis-est, male-st person possible, what's wrong with standing up for the rights of others?
Nothing, unless I appropriate their cause in service of signaling my wokeness and attacking people I don't like.
For example, when racism is used as a weapon in fight between two groups of white people, who already had another reason to fight each other, but used this opportunity to make their attack more socially acceptable.
Who cares. Wasn’t the point of the article you’re commenting on that a tiny minority is responsible for outsized impact in discussions like this?
So who cares what a “Twitter mob” says about you practicing yoga? Does this really have any bearing on current social justice issues like real cultural appropriation, anymore than a right-wing figure posting a video of someone yelling about the patriarchy has any bearing on feminism?
It’s a distraction that boils down the issues to figures you can hate: Cultural appropriation is stupid because someone got angry on Twitter because of yoga. Feminism is stupid because Ben shapiro filmed himself winning a debate against a feminist.
Also I never understood the concept of "cultural appropriation", what the heck does that even mean? As long as human history goes we've been copying cultural perks from other lands, regions and tribes. To tell people this is suddenly not okay for some reason is beyond crazy.
Ask five people, get six answers, as far as I've found.
That's not a tiny minority: it's a pretty reasonable dispersal of social media use. 12% of the population accounting for 50% of anything is a more egalitarian distribution than we see with, say: wealth, healthcare use, or educational attainment.
Public discourse was dominated by a "tiny minority" when the only people with a wide-reaching mouthpiece were a few hundred journalists and a few hundred politicians.
I don't really disagree with the article's main claim - that the more extreme views are overrepresented on social media - but it's not a numbers thing.
People who didn't vote, People who are too young to vote, People who cannot vote. Etc
Voters as a group is meant to reflect that proportion of the population that is involved with the political process at the basic level.
So the inequality is twice what I made it out to be there. I don't think it changes my comparisons all that much: we don't usually consider infants when measuring inequality in wealth or educational attainments either, or we use their caregivers as a proxy.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_Kingdom_European...
There is overwhelming evidence that at the end of the day, people's political and issue views are overwhelmingly bell curve-shaped.
The issue is that the bell curve gets split into categories. American voters are given two options, so people get split into "right" and "left" even when the mode is in the center. Or academics define the "center" extremely narrowly and therefore claim a majority of citizens are polarized.
[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Culture_War/s5YZQQAACAA...
i.e. If you're an extremely conservative government, your moderate citizens views will seem extremely liberal.
Hook-theory, etc.
AFAIK that's simply a fantasy promoted in certain corners of the internet (like the ironically-named r/EnlightenedCentrism). It's not supported by any actual quantitative evidence at all, nor am I aware of any credence given to it in academia. It's essentially made-up. There is no political scientist I'm aware of who takes it seriously.
To my knowledge, it's nothing more than a talking point invented by progressives to try to convince other progressives not to be pulled to the center.
The center is pro police, which is known to the other way for right terrorism.
If you define a centrist as someone who finds the status quo a reasonable compromise,
and you recognise that the history of the United States (among others) and its status quo is infused with white supremacy,
then it's unsurprising that a self-declared "centrist" would often hold views that more closely align with the right-wing than the left.
Centrist public opinion is very different from the status quo, and this is a hugely important distinction to make.
The status quo is set mainly by elites who have a vested interest in their own wealth and power.
The "center" of public opinion, when you actually survey people in detail on the preferences they hold, does not match particularly well with government policy in the US.
(If democracy worked perfectly, then the two might coincide, but they don't because it doesn't.)
From surveys I've seen, the American "center" maps best to a moderately liberal position in current politics, though it really depends on the issue. The American center is extremely liberal when it comes to gay marriage, very liberal with a public option for health care and race issues, moderately liberal when it comes to abortion and gun ownership, and moderately conserative when it comes to economic policy.
The centre of public opinion might be different from the status quo, I don't want to argue about that here.
I was doubting that people who identify as 'centrist' usually hold the 'centre of public opinion'; I think they are more likely to hold a significantly right-wing opinion on most issues.
I don't believe I've come across that hypothesis before in any of the literature or surveys. Do you have something you can cite? I'd love to see it.
A (small) group of Conservative Party MPs in the UK have presented it as such and indicated that it's useful to their cause that there is a perceived enemy to unite behind, whether or not they agree with any particular policies.
e.g. https://inews.co.uk/opinion/tories-culture-war-win-back-popu...
similarly referenced from an international perspective on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war#Artificiality_or_a...
They would act as though they were intellectuals and people who had common sense. I listened to hours and hours of them talking, and an observant person saw through their act pretty quickly.
These people could rarely offer any depth in any other subjects other than ”guess what I saw on Twitter yesterday”.
They get money by believing people online (especually Twitter) represent a majority opinion, and after building that strawman they go on speaking tours to scare people to be afraid of college kids with blue hair.
Outrage porn sells. It’s easy to sell outrage and this symbiotic relationship is very lucrative. Unfortunately they flooded many of my favorite places online and I’ve had to learn to tune them out.
For example, if you think about support gay marriage and LGBT nondiscrimination protections, these are things that would have been framed as fringe progressive ideas a few decades ago, and in the US it's still framed as a "culture war" issue. However, if you are in the LGBT community, these things DO have an impact and will affect your life. It doesn't really matter whether 30% of the population supports these things or 60%.
In two-party democracies, 30% and 60% are exactly the percentages that do matter.
At 30% support you can expect no change - even human rights violations will scarcely be considered a relevant political issue with such a level of support.
Once you hit 60% support, you can expect reform that won't be rolled back.
Exactly as we have seen with gay marriage in the USA. Support for gay marriage reached 40% around 2005 - I can't establish when it hit 30%, as it was rarely polled in the decade before this. Support reached 60% for the first time in 2015 - the year when the Supreme Court ruled it a constitutional right.
In your example, 60% of people didn’t support gay marriage in 2005. I would argue that gay marriage didn’t become a “better” idea between 2005 and 2015. It was always a good idea that provided tangible benefits to gay people, public opinion didn’t just reflect this.
This is sort of aimed at other comments in this discussion, which seemed to be lamenting that the “polarizing” ideas were being pushed in people. I don’t really care if something like, say, a “bathroom bill” is considered a polarizing culture war issue or how many people support it. It has an effect on me and the other trans people in my life, and I don’t feel any inclination to compromise on my position
It's evident from these examples that the public can change their mind even over a relatively short period of time.
It's more correct to think that when 60% of the elites support something change occurs.
b) Immigration levels were constrained by being a member of the EU; which the UK has now consequently left.
“Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead
Is this really true though or does change occur in ways that are a lot smaller, more incremental and undetectable than we realize?
The US 'Founding Fathers' were a relatively small group of merchants, land owners, an publishers that were, if you will, "thought leaders" of an American "englightenment" movement that saw significant opportunities if they could toss the foreign rule of Great Britain. But "Let's break loose from the monarchy" was hardly a common public opinion before a combination of a series of writings made by an absolute handful of individuals in the group and a series of publicized bad tactical / strategic calls made by the representatives of the British government in the Colonies.
(It may be difficult to tease apart cause and effect on this topic, however; consider the possibility that there are fringe thinkers pulling in all directions, but as circumstances change, an accident of incidents may bring some of the fringe thinkers to a position of being less fringe. People were saying police in the US were too brutal to minorities for decades before combination of ubiquitous smartphone cameras and multiple disconnected high-profile incidents that common folk considered brutality started to bring public perception around to that way of thinking. We're in the middle of a cultural fight right now, but if policing as it's done in the US does fundamentally change, history will probably record a story of Black Lives Matter leaders bringing about that change. And if it doesn't change, this era of US history will probably hold a place in history books similar to the one the LA riots hold).
I feel sure most Americans have the same experience, but perhaps I'm an outlier?
Basically, it is with us or against us mentality. Even not having an opinion on some abstract idea, means that you are therefore a perpetrator of this moral wrong.
Not caring about politics is often the worst sin that you can commit to those people, no matter what other actions you have taken in your personal life regarding them or the community.
This is less common in person, and more common with individuals who have arguments with their "friends" on Facebook and the like.
Anyone who makes a post like "If you don't agree with me on X, then unfriend me, as I don't want any people like you in my life!"
To quote Howard Zinn (even if you disagree with his politics - it applies to both sides of the aisle): "You can't be neutral on a moving train. Events are already moving in certain deadly directions, and to be neutral means to accept that."
Being "above" politics is not a virtue when the politics in question are harmful - thus, the "moral crusade".
I do agree America is more politicized now, but that doesn't mean the answer is to retreat into a shell and pretend the issues don't exist.
OK, then please don't play this "what culture war?", as if you have no idea what we're talking about. That's debating in bad faith. I'd not do that to you.
Can you succinctly define what makes a "culture war", and how that is different from political debate?
Specifically, stuff like QAnon, facemask protests, BLM, trans rights, "white privilege", anthem protests, etc etc etc. There's pretty widespread recognition in the US of culture war flashpoints.
But before I engage anymore: are you American? Because we're discussing these political topics in the US context in this thread, explicitly.
I get that you don't like the term, but its use in this context is 100% accurate.
And it clearly is not just your side, it's the other side as well. Both of you are engaging in non-stop culture wars. And it's tiring, and dangerous for our country. You've probably not watched a country descend into civil war. I have. It happens much quicker than you'd think.
Cool. You agree with me.
I questioned whether this was really "invading" family life - that implies that across large swathes of the American population, family/home life has been meaningfully changed.
I did not question whether political discussions had increased in the public sphere, and as you mentioned, I agreed with that point of view.
I'm happy to discuss, but I don't appreciate the smug twisting of words.
Ok, and I gave them descriptions for how life has changed in my response to that.
I gave examples of frequent political discourse that I've been seeing lately, especially online.
> I did not question whether political discussions had increased in the public sphere, and as you mentioned, I agreed with that point of view.
So then you agree with the factual descriptions that I laid out in my response.
Most of those comments I have seen are specifically related to racism. For example, an individual will state that "if you don't support Black lives, unfriend me". I fail to find fault with that. Can you explain why it is problematic for someone to want to distance themselves socially from people that are opting-in to oppose a modern civil rights movement? I would certainly do the same with anyone who opposed the right of Women to vote, or gay people to marry.
I'm not saying they didn't do so for a good reason. I'm saying it's not black-or-white, yet people who make such posts make it black-or-white.
And I'm not sharing with HN the details of my family and workplace discussions, sorry. But maybe someone else here will be willing to. If you don't believe me, then that's OK, that's up to you.
Edit: I mean, the media even covers the near constant revolts of activist employees at Facebook, Twitter, Coinbase, and many other tech companies. Do you want me to find you some articles? Is this new to you?
I didn't say, suggest or imply that I didn't believe you. I stated my alternative experience and asked for more information about yours.
"the media even covers the near constant revolts of activist employees"
From what I see, those are arguments between people who believe in Thing A very strongly and want to act on it and people who also believe in Thing A but would rather not make a huge fuss about it. But the number of people who don't believe Thing A, in the extremely diverse and heavily populated areas I have lived in, are very tiny. For example, I almost never encounter people who think we should censor sex more, or ban abortion, or not fight racism or oppose police oppression, or that we should in any way oppose LGBTQ rights, or enforce religious ideology on the public sphere, etc.
Step 2: "I almost never encounter people who think we should [...] not fight racism"
You're free to exclude anyone you don't like from your friends – it's your life. But if you do this, maybe don't use the fact that your bubble doesn't have anyone who thinks differently from you as evidence of there being very few people out there who disagree with you on such things?
As far as the current movement that aims to of change policy and perspectives to better protect and respect Black lives, I would point out that the supporting any given civil right movement, at any time in any culture, when viewed from a few decades distance, has a nearly flawless track record. Can you name a couple historic movements that had the goal of expanding rights or ending oppression that you, today, would oppose?
I have rarely met people more in a bubble than most folks in large US cities. You may have ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity and (very limited) racial diversity, but the diversity of thought is near zero.
I know you all desperately want to participate in another 1960s civil rights movement, but that battle was won in the...1960s. The vast majority of the remaining issues are socioeconomic. Sorry.
This can also describe the entirety of hard-left twitter, which yes, definitely is a filter bubble and an echo chamber, which has nothing to do with geographic distribution, but everything to do with groupthink, high internal conformity, and not being receptive to foreign ideas.
> Can you name a couple historic movements that had the goal of expanding rights or ending oppression that you, today, would oppose?
Are you implying there would be a shortage of those? In the US:
- Gun rights as they are
- Antivax
- Pro-life movement
- Unrestricted freedom of speech
- Certain special religious rights (regarding exemptions from various taxes / rules / etc.)
- "Free markets" in specific fields like healthcare
- Largely unrestricted rights to political donations
- etc.
Each of those has many, many millions of passionate defenders. These are legitimate civil rights issues / movements, even if you disagree with them.
Something being a "civil rights movement" does not automatically make it right, even if historically that was more often the case than not.
Even communism could be described as a civil rights movement, if it won and discredited capitalism. It is described that way in countries where it won.
Both pro-life and pro-choice can be correctly described as civil rights movements – rights of the mother vs rights of the fetus. I'm not pro-life, but I am able to engage with other people's opinions without labeling them racists / bigots / etc. and excluding them from my life, because I can be wrong, and I wouldn't see it otherwise.
The younger members have grown up taught by many university professors who have pushed postmodernist, power-structure analyses in any different subject areas, to the extent that they find it more important to think of science from the sort of postmodernist cultural theory point of view, than to actually think about the science itself.
Which part of that do you not find particularly significant? You don't think "talking about science" is an important thing for family members to be able do do? You think "science" sounds like a narrow, nerdy sort of conversation that one wouldn't need to have often? You don't think that arguing every time the topic comes up could damage relations with people that I want to get on with? You don't think that us mutually disrespecting each others positions could damage relations? I'm really at a loss for what goes on in your family; do enlighten us.
But the cultural questions involved like who is doing science? for what reasons? under what constraints? what practical applications are there and who will they be applied to? Those potentially matter quite a bit to me.
Sounds like your family are attempting to be active and well-informed and have chosen to become informed in a part of the domain where they can have useful opinions, rather than a part where they can't.
It's not just the "technical details". It's the entire scientific outlook and scientific method! We all agree that building the fair and healthy societies that we want is a very hard task. So when we have hard tasks to do, we don't want to turn away from a scientific/engineering mentality, quite the opposite!
For example, we see that we have a lot of unfairness in society that we want to fix. Perhaps studying game theory and mathematical economics would allow you to contribute to human efforts to create incentive structures and legislation that will promote fairness. Presumably studying statistics and decision theory will help understand the challenges we face as a society needing to make decisions in the face of uncertainty and complex costs.
But studying these things is HARD; it requires effort over a long time span to climb the mountain. It does NOT help at all if young people are encouraged to mill around at the base of the mountain wittering about power structures and unfairness in academia.
Out of curiosity, do you have a STEM PhD? How many millions of dollars in grant money have you raised? How many 100+ citation papers have you published? Are you TT @ an R1 or are you a group lead industry research lab?
I ask because I find that the people who are most excited to defend "academic science" from these sorts of structural criticisms often don't actually have much experience working within the system they are defending. People who actually work in the system know there's plenty to critique.
We should be proud of what academic science has accomplished in the last ~70 years, but not blind to how the extremely poor treatment and high pressure put on grad students and early-career professors warps incentives, creates the conditions for abusive behavior, attracts the wrong sorts of people into management positions, etc.
1. (pre-covid) asking us to cancel a family trip to her home country because her youtube channel says the police are just randomly shooting americans for being american
2. Refusing to go outside at all for months post-covid. In the first few weeks she tried to convince us not to even open the windows!
3. Having family members send us HCQ as a "just in case" even though we literally are more cautious about covid than probably 99% of households
4. Trying to convince us that she should take the HCQ as a preventative even though she goes outside the house for maybe an hour a week and takes no significant risk of exposure
Anyways, I think the easy part is avoiding discussions about politics and world events. Ultimately it matters very little to me why she thinks democrats are evil and which boogeyman she thinks secretly controls the world's finances. It becomes problematic when it leads to irrational behavior. I'm concerned what her youtube channel is going to convince her to believe or to do should Joe Biden win the election.
And the media has covered the many revolts/disagreements of activist employees at Facebook, Twitter, Coinbase and elsewhere. I'm sure people have seen the coverage?
While there has been incursion of talk radio (LBC/Farage), there is no counterpart to the hyper-polarised TV of Fox News yet. Sky News is comparatively normal. The right-wing disinformation comes in via the press and various "client journalists" who repeat things they've heard from "Downing street sources" who they refuse to hold accountable.
> It found that most voters balanced competing political concerns and ideas. Its polling found that 73% believe hate speech is a problem, while 72% believe political correctness is an issue. Some 60% believe many are too sensitive about race, but 60% also recognise issues around “white privilege”.
This is just the combination of leading questions and people responding to words without actually thinking about the underlying concepts.
See, always, Yes Minister: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
The Daily Mail?
Subject to the caveat that I haven't lived in the UK for over 15 years, overall the popular press in the UK is a bit shocking. I don't know of any liberal western country where you see the kind of racism routinely displayed on the front page of mainstream/popular UK newspapers. Perhaps xenophobia rather than direct racism would be a better description but it's not easy to tell the difference in many cases. It's all a bit weird as the UK is generally a tolerant society but somebody must be buying all those newspapers.
About the only UK newspaper I can read these days without getting upset is the Financial Times - there's pockets of good journalism in the Guardian also but it's almost too much of a struggle to find them in the swamp of opinion pieces. I guess the Times isn't too bad or at least tries to represent some sort of centrist view but it feels fairly shallow.
For me the Brexit issue is the UK's version of the culture war in the US. I've talked to people who say they can barely talk to members of their family any more because of Brexit stance differences. And I don't see this division healing very soon - I fear it's going to fester for years.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8671837/RICHARD-L...
> Meanwhile, they’re climbing over each other to fill their faces with state-subsidised chicken and chips at Nando’s, while at the same time pretending to be too frightened to turn up for work.
I walked around town at the weekend. Town seemed as busy as I'd expect during a holiday, which is to say people everywhere in crowds. I noticed Nando's was jam-packed with people inside and outside, as densely as I've ever seen it, no social distancing and little mask use was apparent including among the people crowded on the pavement outside. Same as I walked past other places, and some pubs were heaving, inside and outside.
To be honest, I didn't feel safe walking around the streets with the way people were outside; it became difficult to avoid densely packed groups at some points. The "rule of six" was a joke, I saw groups of 20 people who were obviously together with no masks. Every so often, I'd find myself in the middle of a group who would just surround me on their way past, 0.5m away if that, no masks, and no way for me to avoid them. I'd make the effort to keep out of people's way, and I'd be occasionally thanked for it. But most people seemed to make no effort or have any awareness. About half of all people outside had masks, but of those with masks, about half were not wearing them.
So is that WFH people in the restaurants? I don't know, but I suspect the folks who have lost their jobs, or getting by doing manual labour like food deliveries, or working in hospitals and care homes, aren't the ones spending much at the pubs and restaurants at the moment.
Among my friends who are programmers, about half talk about their social meetups (face to face) at the pub, houses, in the parks etc and seem to have some disdain for CV restrictions. The other half are like me, have high respect for CV restrictions and generally avoiding town and avoiding non-virtual social meetups, and don't think highly of those people who don't wear masks or keep a distance.
I think the Daily Mail anti-WFH rant is typical Tory "get back to work" top-grade bullshit because WFH isn't about people individually saying they are "scared", it's about protecting people at work, which is a company and institution responsibility. The fact some people will densely pack themselves at Nando's etc adds more reason to keep them away from offices for the protection of other people, not less reason. But I thought it did highlight some interesting contradictions going on in society at the moment.
I miss the days when all the facts was reported, instead it is opinions that are slanted one side or another to market to the social media rabbles of the moment. In effect social media like twitter has becomes the REUTER/news wire source of news and opinions are treated as news today.
But in a world in which problems are ignored until some celeb parrots them, one can only cry at the loss of real investigative journalists who are drowned out by a sea of bandwagon opinion pile-ons.
There is an effort to start a Fox News equivalent in the pipeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB_News
That said, we shall have to wait and see whether Neil continues to be vigorous in his questioning of those on the right when he's on a channel that doesn't have the BBC's theoretical commitment to non-partisan neutrality.
If Biden wins, then by spring, the leading story in the "left-leaning" media will be that we need to cut social spending to combat the deficit. The deficit miraculously stops being a story whenever a Republican is in the White House, and becomes a major priority whenever a Democrat is in the White House. Just because people in the media think that racism is bad doesn't make the media left-leaning.
The investigation also failed to find sufficient evidence to charge anyone in the Trump administration with collusion. At this point Russiagate is thoroughly debunked.
I wouldn't call "Russiagate" in any way debunked given this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_charges_brought_in_th...
The "unrelated" is completely false, which invalidates your entire argument.
Name an American indicted for unrelated crimes and maybe I can fill in the connection. It's mostly covered in the wiki under each of their paragraphs though.
You're hoping that people won't bother to read said Wiki, or get confused by the legalese.
Papadopoulos: Indicted for making a false statement to FBI.
Manafort and Gates: Indicted for not registering as foreign agents of Ukraine (which, you might have noticed, is sort of an enemy of Russia right now)
Flynn: Indicted for making a false statement to FBI. (Forced by lack of legal fees into pleading guilty, which later caused problems when the government tried to drop charges.)
Pinedo (Who? Exactly): Indicted for identity fraud.
van der Zwaan: Indicted for making false statements (and not an American, anyway).
Cohen: Indicted for making false statements.
Stone: Indicted for making false statements and witness tampering.
Then we have people like Carter Page, whose name was raked over the coals for years because a FBI lawyer intentionally altered evidence (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/us/politics/fbi-ig-report...) showing that far from being a Russian asset, Page had for years briefed the CIA every time he met with suspicious Russians. (Got to love how the Times describes said altering evidence as a "serious error".) You want an actual Russiagate-related indictment and guilty plea? Kevin Clinesmith, said FBI lawyer, is your man.
Manafort and Gates: If your defense is that since Ukraine is an enemy of Russia, and therefore there can't be any pro-Russian agents there, I have bridges to sell you.
Flynn: Yes, he lied about meeting Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak about setting up encrypted channels to Russia.
Cohen: Lying about business developments in Russia (money is always a nice motivator in crime).
Stone: Had contact with Russian state hackers about the DNC hacks.
Donald Jr wasn't indicted for anything, but he managed to incriminate himself all on his own volition on twitter: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/11/us/politics/d...
The most charitable interpretation of this whole thing is that the Trump campaign were too stupid to qualify as collusion (but I think they were fully aware), but were instead pawns: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-senate/s...
Yes. And Russiagate was the belief that the Trump org colluded with the Russians. Which was debunked.
Not that citing Wikipedia means anything, but from the main article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...:
> there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges against Trump or his associates.
Without 100% rock-solid evidence, the legal complexity of trying to indict him (and him potentially pardoning himself) would have likely caused a constitutional crisis, and who knows what might have happened then. It wasn't worth the risk.
Citizen Trump would have been vulnerable to federal charges three different ways in 2018 if he hadn't been elected President.
The references in this thread so far say the opposite. If you have others that prove "We know 100% they colluded with Russian agents", add them.
Two sides of the same coin.
The methodology is thorough and non-partisan (that's the point). Note that the triangle's apex is literally left of center.
Not that it counters your point, but the left alignment at the top is very minor.
This chart is part of the equation, but it says nothing about which of the publications in it have more influence.
If you want a chart, look at this chart of the most common words associated with each candidate in 2016: https://www.businessinsider.com/gallup-candidate-word-clouds...
That's as clear an example of media bias in favor of the Republicans as you can wish for.
Similarly, a Welsh speaker in Wales can insist on using Welsh in court proceedings even if they are also fluent in English. A Gaelic speaker in Scotland can't- an interpreter will be provided in the very rare case where a witness or party to a case speaks Gaelic but not English, just as if they only spoke Polish, Punjabi or Cantonese, but someone who is bilingual like the vast majority of Gaelic speakers is expected to use English.
In general, while Gaelic has some official status, it's not an official language of Scotland in the same way as Welsh is an official language of Wales.
That has not been moving recently.
America at this point has little shared ethnic background. It’s largest states are minority-majority for example and that will be the case everywhere soon as minority babies are already the majority.
California and Texas are utterly dominated by Non-Hispanic and Hispanic white people, the two ethnic groups with by far the highest rates of intermarriage in the United States of America.
England 1798 -> Europe 1898 -> Western 1998
I think the rest of your analysis is just wrong. First there was no "English" America. America from the start had European immigrants. New York was a Dutch colony. The early censuses used "white" and it always meant the same it means today.
This idea of a "progressing" whiteness is way way overblown to make people feel like the demographic changes we are facing are not unusual. But they are. Even if a huge percentage of hispanics start to self-identify as white - White people will still likely become a minority when they were around 90% of the population at the turn of the last century. Asians and Blacks are around ~20% of the population and Asians are the fastest growing ethnic group.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
That ~20% figure is repeated in California and Texas, while the Hispanic and Non-Hispanic white populations are almost perfectly equal in size. These populations intermix at very high rates powered on one side at least by very strong social forces—societal and familial—that have existed for centuries, see: the demographic history of any Latin American country with substantial European immigration + the wildly different European:non European ratios in the US vs them.
From your own article, keeping in mind Hispanic immigrant populations are of European and Native descent:
We know that light-skinned Cubans were considered white at least as of 1950 because (despite the trepidations of the studio) the public accepted Lucy and Ricky, in a way they would never have accepted a black-white or Chinese-white couple. American Indians were considered non-white, but if they assimilated and married whites their children were generally accepted as part of white society. Did you know that Will Rogers was 9/32 ~~Cherokee~~ Maya?
A huge percentage of white babies of 2098 won’t have to self identify as white, they’ll just be white.
How on earth can you possibly say that in 2098 that "a huge percentage of white babies ... will be white"? Are there any demographic studies that say this? Where are you getting this info from? Rarely do projections even go that far.
Even US Census predictions have been off by huge margins within a few years because of unexpected declines in longevity, birth rates, ect.
It isn’t white vs minorities, it’s white “vs” a roughly equally sized Hispanic population in a few states that are already being consolidated because immigration flows have tapered, and, party evidenced by the article you posted, easily integrated into “whiteness”. No progress needed!
Haven’t even gotten into how California and Texas are the definitions of special cases in the USA being literally the most attractive states in the Union and also on the border. What are the proportions like in Utah, Kentucky, Pennsylvania etc?
Simple flows + demographic history mate, regional history is one of the big keys here and points the way.
I dunno, 20 percentage points higher makes a pretty loose definition of "not far away".
Texas meanwhile with a 13 point difference but 22.5 between white and black, the next closest.
According to 2014-2016 March of Dimes data anyways
No, its much higher, probably 70-75%.
Its just that most sources, despite using source data that gathers race and ethnicity separately, combines them into a single dimension which reports non-Hispanic whites as "white" and Hispanics of any race as Hispanic.
Hispanics in the US mostly are white. Hispanics are significantly White to start with, and there is a definite racial socioeconomic stratification with Whites at the top, and that is not without reflection in resources, skills, and networks which help with immigration to the US.
The race-based division in the U.S. also heavily reinforces differences in culture that would be seen as purely class-based elsewhere, and thus mitigated in many ways - we see this when broadly pro-social cultural values end up associated with so-called "Whiteness" in the U.S., it's hard not to see that as a problem.
To be clear, this isn't a difference of culture we're talking about. We're talking about people who routinely get murdered and harassed by police, disenfranchised, paid less ins salary, and excluded from many professional roles by default.
You're of course right that the criminal justice system treats minorities very badly, and that many people are unfairly disenfranchised and excluded from many professional roles due to their past interactions with this problematic system. But that has nothing to do with a claim that our society itself is irredeemably racist, or that everyone is irredeemably racist.
The UK makes teaching religion mandatory in public schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_education_in_primary...
> Additionally, all schools are required by law to provide a daily act of collective worship, of which at least 51% must be Christian in basis over the course of the academic year.
This would be unconstitutional in the United States. We are far more religious than the U.K. But our Supreme Court has imposed a public secularism similar to that of France. (Based on an extremely strained reading of the Establishment Clause.) To this day, 2/3 of Americans oppose this 70-year old precedent.
In the UK, you legalized same-sex marriage by law. In the U.S. the Supreme Court found it to be a constitutional right (in a decision that is in my opinion correct as a legal matter, but many disagree). A year later, the European Court of Human Rights reached the opposite result (finding that denying same-sex couples the right to marry does not violate the European Convention on Human Rights) in a case arising out of France. It’s still not legal in Switzerland.
The UK legalized abortion by law. It’s 24-week limit on abortion for economic reasons is the longest in the EU. In the US, abortion was legalized by the Supreme Court. 24 weeks is a fairly typical limit in the US—a country that’s more religious than Poland (where abortion is illegal). The 12-week limit in Denmark or Germany or France, or the waiting periods that were place in France until 2015, would be unconstitutional. Germany’s abortion laws (where the constitutional court found it unconstitutional to legalize abortion so it’s still just decriminalized under 12 weeks, and where there is a counseling requirement) would be unimaginable. Indeed, at the same time as the Supreme Court found a constitutional right to abortion, the courts of Canada, Austria, and France found that it was a matter for the legislature to decide.
You passed a law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation. Since it was legislation, you were able to consider and impose a large set of exemptions for specific occupations. (You can’t sue a Catholic Church for not hiring gay clergy.) The Supreme Court just recently held (in a decision I think was correct) that our existing 1960s-era law already banned sexual orientation discrimination.
Our Supreme Court is dominated by our country’s cultural elites. Even the conservatives tend to be steeped in the cultural norms of the coastal urban areas. (The one Justice who is not, and has social views typical of Black men like himself of his age, is demonized mercilessly.) No other developed country puts a highly-educated elite in charge of dictating to the rest of the country how to handle these social issues. This is a huge source of resentment and polarization.
The UK does no such thing - education is handled completely separately by the different parts of the UK.
There certainly weren't "daily acts of collective worship" when I was at school in Scotland 40+ years ago and there aren't now when my kids went to school.
Just to add some nuance to this...
RE is the lesson in which pupils are taught about religion. It does not instruct that any particular religious claim is true or false.
And the “daily act of collective worship” is one of those laws that is widely disregarded, to the point where OFSTED inspections will note that schools are not compliant but not mark them down for it. It’s rapidly becoming one of those archaic laws like “the queen owns all the swans” which has very little practical effect on everyday life.
> The Education Reform Act (1988) requires that: -
> 2. Religious Education should be taught in accordance with an agreed syllabus.
> 4. The agreed syllabus reflects "the fact that the religious traditions in Great Britain are in the main Christian while taking into account the teachings and practices of other principal religions represented within Great Britain". (Education Reform Act 1988, Section 8)
Even if the concepts aren't taught as "truth" it makes things vastly easier for Christian parents to socialize their children in their religion. (Which the U.N. recognizes as a human right.) And it would likely be illegal in the U.S. (Teaching about religion generically would not be, but the provision about the Christian tradition of the UK would likely push it over the line.)
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_worship_in_schools
> Schools with a formal faith designation are required to arrange worship in accordance with their trust deed or, if they have no trust deed, in line with the practices of their designated faith. For schools without a formal faith designation, the majority of the acts of worship should be "of a broadly Christian character". In practical terms, this has been interpreted to mean that 51% of school days each school term must have an act of worship of a broadly Christian character.
Social conservatives in the United States would be thrilled to have laws like the one in the U.K. Obviously a country like the U.K. that's becoming irreligious might not take the legal requirement too seriously. Folks in San Francisco probably wouldn't either. But folks in Iowa would probably take these requirements seriously. Under current U.S. law, schools in Iowa in communities where 80% of people go to Church every week are required to operate like schools in France. (My wife and I once calculated that her little town in northwest Iowa had a church for every 150 people.)
Forcing Iowans to act like the French drives a lot of polarization and resentment. When you hear people complain about the "war on Christmas" that's what they're talking about--stripping away the fact that "the religious traditions in [the United States] are in the main Christian."
Indeed. To provide background for others, by the early 1970s various US states had legalized abortion. In Roe v. Wade, however, the Supreme Court ruled that abortion was a constitutional right, abruptly legalizing it nationwide with more or less no restrictions whatsoever; even many abortion-rights supporters believe that the legal theory behind the decision was faulty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade#Legal). The result was so across-the-board that, among other things, the US still allows abortions to occur later than anywhere else.
Preventing the full political debate process from occurring is why abortion remains so controversial in the country almost 50 years and counting. Because such issues are polarizing and partisan, they need full discussion in a legislature, as opposed to unelected judges unilaterally short-circuiting the debate.
The US's leaning on the Supreme Court to make social progress is really a result of its inability to make social progress in sane ways through legislatures. The fact that it took a Supreme Court decision to legalize interracial marriage only two years before the Moon landings should be a source of profound shame on its legislatures.
The situation with slavery and segregation in the United States is unique (and unique legal mechanisms were created to combat the issues). But it's not clear to me that you can generalize from that to other social issues. On homosexuality, for example, the U.S. is between Western Europe and Eastern Europe, and similar to Italy in terms of acceptance. Absent the Supreme Court, many U.S. states would have same-sex marriage in similar time-frames to EU countries. As to abortion, public opinion mirrors the actual laws in countries like France and Germany: support for making it legal up to 12 weeks, subject to things like waiting periods, with strong support for making it legal after that with only limited exceptions.
Sure, some U.S. states would be stragglers, but the same is true in the EU. Ireland didn't legalize abortion until just a couple of years ago. Switzerland and Poland still don't have same-sex marriage. How would the EU react to the European Court of Human Rights taking these decisions away from the state legislatures? Maybe that's what should happen, but this thread is about polarization. It would be polarizing as hell.
Yet. The planned GB News fronted by Andrew Neil looks a lot like a Fox News clone with 24/7 opinion: https://www.ft.com/content/470cf7f4-59e6-47c1-9efa-ce634b798...
I think this is because minority populations are so much smaller in the UK. Minorities have less of a collective voice and influence on culture, and hence most brits "collision cross-section" with racism is smaller. Hence they think of it as less of a problem, but it isn't. I've had Indonesian colleagues yelled at on a bus, Chinese friend shrieked at for using their phone, and my black friend who just feels like he wont ever "be british". My Indian colleague can talk my head off about the racist hiring techniques he's had to deal with. It's not "not a problem" it's just that most brits don't even know someone who is a minority, let alone one that's experienced racism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal
I'm in the middle of a reading a book about it at the moment and to say I am appalled by how these people were treated is an understatement.
And the "hostile environment" that is legally mandated homelessness (people aren't allowed to rent privately, landlords have to check with .gov for "eligibility" to rent).
All those "we lost the paperwork" people are subject to that. They would have lost their jobs, gradually had their banks close the accounts (with no alternative), had their landlords gradually unable to continue the tenancies (each renewal would check), and if they were sick, found themselves rejected at hospital. Someone died due to cancer treatment being stopped.
Some other people who were resident did the decent thing and supplied the tax office with minor tax corrections after their accountants made small errors. This was encouraged by the tax office, we're all supposed to do that and it's quite straightforward. For that good behaviour they got labelled as having bad character and kicked out, because... any excuse to. That's a doubly-harsh label as it limits their rights in other countries in addition to being kicked out of the UK.
> You should have seen the despicable "Go Home" vans that were circulating for a while.
How is losing the paperwork for legal migrants comparable or even closely related to telling illegal migrants to leave?
A coworker of mine had to spend six months living in someone else's flat and legally barred from working while he sued the Home Office; he'd entered legally, they found a paperwork error (making him "illegal"), and he won (making him "legal") once more.
Brexit provides lots of examples of how people who entered and lived in the UK legally but never got (and indeed weren't eligible for!) ILR suddenly can become "illegal" if they don't get "settled status".
Be very clear about this: if you immigrate to the UK by what you think is a legal route, and the Home Office makes a mistake, you can become an illegal immigrant very quickly.
FYI, they didn't lose the paperwork.
UK gov destroyed the paperwork, then deemed people to be illegal migrants.
Then those people were told: quit your job (or we'll force it), leave your spouse, move out of your home, and leave the country. Have 2 weeks notice because we're nice. Obviously with nowhere to go to. And because married people do not have the right to residency, if they were married to a UK citizen that didn't protect them either.
And then consequences started to happen for real. They couldn't just ignore these notices. Jobs were lost. Money was stopped.
As I said, one person even died due to life-critical hospital treatment withheld, and I'm sure many others were pretty worried because all of them would have been denied medical care until the case was settled, and lost their incomes. A number of them were illegally deported.
UK gov has done similar things to other people, not just the Windrush crowd. But Windrush got the press because it was more people at once and older people. There are others who have done everything correctly, paperwork, fees and all, and have kept their own copies of paperwork to confirm their status is fine. Who have then been told, surprise!, quit your job, ditch the tenancy, leave with 2 weeks notice etc.
As it happens, the UK has plenty of people in it who believe they are legally resident and one day find out they are not on some unknowable technicality. And others who are in fact legally resident but the Home Office decided to kick them out anyway.
For a example a number of EU citizen students found out they were not eligible to remain in the UK because they didn't purchase some kind of private health insurance - a condition nobody knew about, nobody was told about, and the Home Office was unable to explain, other than to say they should have purchased it when they arrived as students so that's the reason for telling them to leave.
That kind of technicality. Note that nobody else had to buy this mythical insurance, only students, who weren't told. Essentially the Home Office looks for loopholes to catch people in, that nobody reasonable knows about or would try to enforce. Unlike other areas of law, where "what is reasonable" is taken into account in a principled way, and a process of restoring balance takes place if something is a bit off, the Home Office seems to lack this aspect, perhaps in its pursuit of quotas for kicking out X people a year without regard for whether it's the right people, or even the people intended by policy.
As you can imagine some of these cases end up in court because it's the government breaking the law. But the court system is not well suited to protecting the individuals in these cases, and people can't afford the legal fees.
You often need a judicial review (which is very expensive), because the ordinary policy is "deport first appeal later" or "no appeal possible" depending on the case. Under "deport first appeal later", people usually fail to appeal even when they would win, because it's highly impractical when you can't access your own documents from abroad any more; yet if they do appeal, most appeals are won because the government is found to be not following the law.
You're right. I quoted the parent but it's an important distinction.
> Because both sets of people were treated exactly the same by the system. I.e. inhumanely.
The destroying of paperwork was incompetence rather than inhumanity. The removal of illegal migrants is also not inhuman: it is lawful and reasonable - if you enter a country illegally, you may be kicked out.
Most enter legally, and then something happens which changes that.
For some it's government maladministration. Outside their control. This happens a lot. I think that's inhumane because it's outside their control and they don't have the money or legal backing to fight it, and because the system does not apply ordinary principles of justice to resolve these issues.
For some, it's abuse by government. That is, something just plain illegal by the government, not a mistake but an intentional administrative action which is against the law. Again, I think that's inhumane because most people don't have the money or legal backing to fight.
For some it's that their partner's wage drops below a threshold. Outside their control. I think that's inhumane because once you are in and settled and started a family etc. you should not be so precarious that a slight change in your partner's income results in you having to leave.
Think of the number of people during the pandemic whose income has reduced. Now imagine the added stress of facing deportation on a plane because your partner's income dropped.
For some it's losing their job. Outside their control. I think that's inhumane because it's a breeding ground for abuse by their employer: "if you don't do whatever we tell you and suck it up, we will fire you and you will have to leave your family and the country".
For some it's their partner dumping them. Outside their control. I think that's inhumane because it's a breeding ground for abuse by their partner: "if you don't do whatever nasty things I demand you do for me I will dump you and you will have to leave your job and the country".
For some they never entered - they were born in the country. They are legal until age 18, at which point they lose rights.
I think it's inhumane to remove someone who is born and bred in a country, and who doesn't even know something will happen until at the age of 18 or so, they apply to university, and find out not only can they not go, they get a letter telling them to leave the only place they have ever known. Go "home"... where? There isn't another "home".
I think inhumane implies malice. This is incompetance.
> intentional administrative action which is against the law.
Agreed that's malicious.
> For some it's that their partner's wage drops below a threshold. Outside their control. I think that's inhumane because once you are in and settled and started a family etc.
That's sometimes part of the contract for entering a country. Nobody is forced to accept it.
That truly depends on your meaning of "force". For example, if I point a gun at you and tell you to give me your money or else, you are not forced to give me the money. You still have a choice. Yet, we commonly say that someone is forced because they are compelled by the alternative being a worse option created by someone else deliberately.
In that sense, yes people are forced to accept that contract.
Although it is part of the contract, I think it's inhumane that the contract is set up that way, and nation states should be held to higher standards than that.
If the contract for living in a country was that they chopped off a finger each year, would that be humane? No it wouldn't, and we'd protest against it. Some people would still choose it anyway. But something being part of a contract does not make that thing humane.
Why would people choose it anyway? Because being with the person you love matters a lot to some people.
And it matters to me that people who love each other, whoever they are, are allowed by nation states to be together if they wish. I consider it a basic facet of humane society to allow that. A proper example of what ought to be a simple human right. In the ballpark of "we hold these truths to be self-evident".
For two people who love each other to be prevented by law from being together in either of their home countries (because it's certainly possible for both ends to have incompatible restrictions) is, in my opinion, inhumane.
Also, for someone to be with someone else and then if the relationship turns sour to have the state applying enormous pressure to stay in the abusive relationship (whether with a partner or employer), that is also, in my opinion, inhumane and not a state functioning as it should. The state's job is to protect all people in its care, that includes all people it has accepted into its care as well. A state is ideally held to the standards of its noble constitution. It is not good enough to say "well it was part of the contract". We do not allow abusive terms in contracts to be upheld, even if they have been accepted. If someone agrees to be a slave, we declare that agreement void. Some things are struck out by courts if necessary when deciding what is right. Same should apply, in my opinion, to this.
That's been one of the issues I encountered on my case on the time I've spent in the UK, you can spend as much time as you want there, you will never be considered like a local, you will be designated as a part of the community you supposed to belong, that's great if you like recreating the place you are coming from, not so great if you actually want to integrate.
Apart from film, pop music, reality television, the Yankees baseball cap, jeans, and a constant stream of news articles about Trump, what have the Americans ever done for us?
Compare how many cultural products are American in origin or mention America or American news to how many you get about, say, France or Germany. The influence is _huge_. This is why France has laws requiring a fraction of culture (especially TV and film) to be in French.
The UK is certainly polarised, and racist, but in different ways to America. It may be the case that a police murder in Portland starts a riot in Bristol, but it would never be the other way round.
When was the last time there was a protest by Americans outside a British embassy over British politics? The US embassy in London practically has a rota for all the different groups that have protested there.
What's also a US import is the division of people into 'right-wing' or 'left-wing' based on the most frivolous of attributes.
'Downing Street Sources' has been a phrase used by journalists for decades; everyone knows what it means. It's not a 'dog whistle' (another stupid imported phrase).
This is because we have strong broadcast regulation. Broadcasters must have regard for due impartiality and due accuracy.[0]
LBC are managing to push that line to its very limit, by having shows that are presented by opposing polemics so that overall they maintain balance.
[0] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio-and-on-demand/broadcast-co...
It was a very sour taste in my mouth after reading this paragraph near the end and then seeing the exaggerated threats to garner donations.
> America faces an epic choice ... > ... in the coming weeks, and the results will define the country for a generation. These are perilous times. Over the last four years, much of what the Guardian holds dear has been threatened – democracy, civility, truth. > > The country is at a crossroads. The Supreme Court hangs in the balance – and with it, the future of abortion and voting rights, healthcare, climate policy and much more. Science is in a battle with conjecture and instinct to determine policy in the middle of a pandemic. At the same time, the US is reckoning with centuries of racial injustice – as the White House stokes division along racial lines. At a time like this, an independent news organization that fights for truth and holds power to account is not just optional. It is essential. > > Like many news organizations, the Guardian has been significantly impacted by the pandemic. We rely to an ever greater extent on our readers, both for the moral force to continue doing journalism at a time like this and for the financial strength to facilitate that reporting. > > We believe every one of us deserves equal access to fact-based news and analysis. We’ve decided to keep Guardian journalism free for all readers, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay. This is made possible thanks to the support we receive from readers across America in all 50 states. > > As our business model comes under even greater pressure, we’d love your help so that we can carry on our essential work. If you can, support the Guardian from as little as $1 – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.
I know it is de rigueur to bash the minority of liberals at the forefront of these "wars" (as opposed to the conservatives pushing back to "conserve" the cultural status quo, hence the names), but this article kinda shoots itself in the foot when it shows the increase of of awareness around issues that used to be fringe, like Climate Change, that are now regarded as a main-stream threat and not a "culture war", which is what conservatives have tried to paint it as for 30+ years.
Or consider gay marriage. In the 80's this was heretical on both sides of the pond, now it is close to being the law of the land in the US and no longer a "culture war". But thankfully the minority fought for what is now majority.
Second, culture wars are always fought by minorities. It doesn't take a large number of people to change the status quo. This applies as much to revolutionaries (communists, Nazis, etc) as demographics (Taleb once gave the relatively innocuous example of kashrut classifications on food in the grocery store as an example of how a tiny minority can impose its sectarian norms on an agricultural industry that serves a majority that probably doesn't even know what kashrut is; he used this, I believe, to illustrate that the argument that you don't need a majority of devout, Sharia law-following Muslims for Sharia to become a realistic possibility).
Third, the current culture war is real. Even if it is led and actively propelled by a small minority, it nonetheless embroils everyone. It's difficult to give a single date of birth for the current culture war, and in some sense, the world has always been in a state of cultural war. But what people typically have in mind is the deep-cutting revolution that has been escalating since the 1960s. Like newborn fish that don't know what water is and have no memory of things past, many fail to grasp the revolution taking place. Perhaps people expect revolutions to look theatrically dramatic. But there is a culture war taking place. In the last 20 years along, we have seen changes that were unthinkable across human history.
The stakes are high and the multitudes will be led by whoever is the victor. The media are instruments of different factions in the war. Some are looking for a seat at the table when the dust has settled Other look to wage total cultural war against their opponents. Some are fighting to preserve what's left. Others seek to counteract the entire rebellion.
It may be better to call this a culture battle. I claim to know the victor of the war. I just don't know who will win the battle, or how much blood will be spilled.
If "blue state" workers think their red-state brethren are incorrigible racist assholes, and "red state" working people think the blue states are full of virtue-signaling effete hypocrites... then capital wins because, even though 75% of the American public likes socialist economic ideas (when stated plainly and without a "socialist" label) they are all fighting each other over unrelated stuff, like whether J.K. Rowling's latest misinformed comment means we should stop reading her.
What if we levied an information fee -- any entity which dispenses information for profit must then pay into public education tax funds to enhance the discerning capabilities of the populace.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Really telling. These fringe groups are taking over our political discourse and online discussion. They are driving a societal wedge.
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that "In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance."
The Guardian is as bad as The Daily Mail from the other side, but seems to genuinely believe it's somehow above it all.
The vast majority of people who heavily use social media, are much more likely to have much stronger beliefs one way or another than people who don't.
I even have a theory much of this is driven by social isolation, mostly young men with nothing better to do. So these young men go on tirades about how the Last of Us Two is a feminist plot to destroy masculinity or something stupid like that.
Normally if you have stuff going on you won't waste your time being angry about a piece of media. Society is going to need to find a path for these left over men, self worth shouldn't be tied into your income after all.
I'd wager that boredom and, more importantly, lack of purpose fuels most of the hate and insanity we see today on the internet. This impacts all genders equally and our society is going need to think real hard how we go about tackling a growing number of young people struggling with existential angst.
Last week the internet had a compelling video showing a young white person yelling at a black man trying to cross a BLM barricade. The black man wanted to go on his way, the protester was insulting him and telling him what a terrible person he was.
It's completely nuts. But not a new phenomenon.
If your theory is correct much of this kerfuffle will dry up right after the election, along with the funding.
You'll also find that radical centrists (as defined by actual political positions) are an infinitesimal group, and that the vast majority of people will report their beliefs as middle of the road no matter what the actual content. They will also report that they are middle-class, no matter what their income.
And what content-free questions:
> It concludes that unlike in the US, climate change is not a culture-war issue in the UK. In Britain, it found that 85% of voters believe climate change concerns us all. The most sceptical group were voters described as “disengaged traditionalists”, where the figure was still 76%. Meanwhile, 79% of all voters say gender equality is a sign of progress.
Does climate change "concern us all"? Yes, climate change is being used as a weapon to destroy progress and people's livelihoods.
Is gender equality a sign of progress? Yes, when the courts stop favoring women, and give me the right to choose who I want to hire regardless of whether they're a man or woman, society will have progressed.
> The research also suggested that the Covid-19 crisis had prompted an outburst of social solidarity. In February, 70% of voters agreed that “it’s everyone for themselves”, with 30% agreeing that “we look after each other”. By September, the proportion who opted for “we look after each other” had increased to 54%.
I don't even know what this question means, or how it's relevant to the thesis. I think they were searching for people who both had no loved ones, and are not just covid denialists, but not even aware that anything is even going on. Covid denialists have support networks, that's how they keep their businesses open and schedule protests. It's very difficult to phrase a question when the position that you think is the most reasonable is also a very extreme one (that covid is very dangerous and justifies extreme measures.)
> More than half (57%) reported an increased awareness of the living conditions of others, 77% feel that the pandemic has reminded us of our common humanity, and 62% feel they have the ability to change things around them – an increase of 15 points since February.
Unintelligible. And these are the entirety of the examples cited in the article.
edit: also Jo Cox supported BDS, so I guess she was an extremist, too.
edit2: missed this
> Its polling found that 73% believe hate speech is a problem, while 72% believe political correctness is an issue. Some 60% believe many are too sensitive about race, but 60% also recognise issues around “white privilege”.
- looks pretty extreme to me.
Um, no. You already can hire whomever you want and for whatever reason you want. You just can't be blatantly sexist. Perhaps you need to step back and reassess your viewpoint because it reeks of scare mongering.
tl;dr: If you go around with a survey that asks "Are you an unreasonable extremist?" and mark everyone down who says "No" as a Brownite centrist Democrat, you're going to find a silent majority of Brownite centrist Democrats.
While technically true, in a real war the “tiny minority” (the military) don’t choose when or where or why to fight, that is done by the “large majority”, the voters electing a government.
The UK has been in a number of wars since I've been able to vote - I don't recall being asked to vote on any one of them? Or indeed the wars in question being part of the manifesto for any party at any election?
The government picks the wars without any reference to the voters?
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i...
It’s just text. Copy-paste is the first computer user habit anyone learns.
The idea machines are learning is nuts. Sorting the same old human copy-pasta isn’t learning. What is there to learn about vanilla ice cream? It’s all in eating it.
What a shock we’re just more efficiently eating shit
I really don't think The Guardian understands what they're talking about here. The so called "culture war" is about Marxist ideology. The people denying climate change are fringe wackos of this tiny minority who fight culture wars.
EDIT: It's fascinating to see the votes on this change without anyone even trying to make an argument to justify the claim it has to do with Marxism. I'd love to see one of those downvoters explain exactly how it has anything to do with Marxism. I'm not holding my breath.
Corbyn is certainly left wing by US and UK standards, but has never been a Marxist, and is moderate by the standards of most of Europe. McDonnell on the other hand, could reasonably be described as Marxist.
He had some pretty sharp ideas about the problems in his contemporary economic system that are still relevant today, even if he dropped the ball on predicting the best solution.
He really was not. He was great at politics. He was great at taping into things that workers cared about.
But his actual economics that he laid out, in Das Kapital? The actual mathmatical equations in it, and falsifiable predictions in that book? The labor theory of value?
All pretty worthless. Basically no serious academic takes the labor theory of value seriously. It is non-sense.
Heterodox economic theories are heterodox for a reason. That reason being that they are not reflective of reality.
> He really was not. He was great at politics.
Not in the governance sense (he wasn't a statesmen), so you must mean in the other sense ("activities within an organization that are aimed at improving someone's status or position").
But this is sort of a difference without a difference, right? For most of human history, people who were "great at X" were in truth at least as good at politics as the thing they're actually known for.
Even e.g. Euclid was arguably a great geometer but an even greater politician.
Hell, Pythagoras was literally a cult leader.
With rare exceptions, your name isn't remembered by history unless you're good at politics.
> Basically no serious academic takes the labor theory of value seriously.
The labor theory of value is much older than Marx, and components of it are certainly taken seriously in management schools when talking about pricing services for example. Similarly, economists use components of other theories of value where it makes sense. I think it's more accurate to say that economics as a profession has moved on from these sorts of "generalizable theories of value" to give more nuanced analyses, which is quite different from saying that those theories proposed historically by Marx or Frisch or whoever have no influence.
Anyways, can you define "serious academic" in a way that doesn't make this sentence tautological? There's no one who claims Das Kapital is the Bible of Economics, but the same is true for Wealth of Nations and basically any other historical text. That doesn't mean that Smith and Marx are irrelevant, though.
Sure. Basically the entire field of modern day economics does not take the labor theory of value, in the way that Marx means it.
In terms of an actual description of how economies work, almost all real life, professional, economists do not take Marxian "economics" seriously.
> to give more nuanced analyses
It is not a matter of something being "nuanced" or not. It is instead that the vast majority of modern day economists do not take Marxian economics seriously at all.
Yeah but that's true for EVERY theory of value contemporaneous to Marx.
Saying "economics reject the LTV" is in my mind a bit like saying that physicists reject Newtonian mechanics. It's both true but also severely under-estimates the significant influence of Newton on modern physics.
>> to give more nuanced analyses
> It is not a matter of something being "nuanced" or not. It is instead that the vast majority of modern day economists do not take Marxian economics seriously at all.
I gave one specific example: management schools still draw from labor theories of value to explain competitive pressure and price discovery in the service sector. There are hundreds of other examples like this.
No. It is not rejecting it in the way that physicists reject Newtonian mechanics.
Instead it is that most modern day economists reject Marxian economics in the same way that astronomers reject flat earthers.
The labor theory of value is just completely bunk.
Source:
https://voxeu.org/article/marx-and-modern-microeconomics
"Few economists doubt that Marx flunked economics"
"Economists, looking back, have not found much to admire in Karl Marx"
That is what I mean. Economists just don't take seriously much of anything that Marx has to say on the actual field of economics, on the same level as that of flat earthers.
His only insights are maybe into politics. But not the actual field of economics.
When economists are saying that he "flunked" economists, as quoted from the article, it is intended to imply that basically nothing that Marx had to say, on actual economics matters at all, and is so ridiculous that we should compare it to conspiracy theories, or flat earthers, or something else that is equally nonsensical.
the thesis of the article you quote is literally identical to the thesis of my posts -- that Marx is in fact influential on modern economics. Again, I don't want to be confrontational, but... did you read the article you're quoting? The thesis is literally the opposite of what you claim it is.
> "Few economists doubt that Marx flunked economics"
The rest of that paragraph reads as follows:
But this column argues that Marx’s representation of the power relationship between capital and labour in the firm is an essential insight for understanding and improving modern capitalism. Indeed, this insight is incorporated into standard principal–agent models of labour and credit markets.
So the article you are quoting for support states that Marxist ideas are incorporated into standard models. Not directly, of course, but there. Kinda like how Newtonian ideas are in some sense incorporated into standard model...
Let's continue.
> "Economists, looking back, have not found much to admire in Karl Marx"
And then the entire next paragraph makes literally exactly the same argument I'm making here -- that Marx is obsolete and even what he was trying to do in terms of "generalized models" is obsolete -- but that he none-the-less does effect modern economics:
These assessments are based largely on our current – and correct in my view – understanding of Marx’s labour theory of value as a pioneering, but inconsistent and outdated, attempt at a general equilibrium model of pricing and distribution. But there is another aspect of his work that has been strongly vindicated by theoretical advances in recent decades: the idea that the exercise of power is an essential aspect of the working of the capitalist economy, even in its idealised, perfectly competitive, state.
TBH, it looks like the best source you can muster for your claims is making substantively exactly the same argument I'm making.... Marx's theories are flawed but clearly continue to effect work-a-day economics to this day.
So you do not refute this statement?
I using this source to reference the opinions of economists.
This is what economists believe.
The rest of the blog post makes no other references to what economists actually believe.
I am merely using the source to explain to you, what the general opinion of economists is. (even though the author disagrees with the opinion of economists)
The person in the blog post (Samuel Bowles) is literally a Marxian. So yes, I do know that a Marxian believes in Marxian economics.
But I am using this source, because even a Marxian is willing to admit that basically all economists think that Marx was bunk.
Even a supporter of Marxian economics is aware that his opinions are fringe, and that the rest of academia disagrees with him.
Which is why I am using him as a source. Because even though he gives arguments in favor of Marx being relevant, he is willing to admit that all of his fellows in academia, disagree with him.
> it looks like the best source you can muster for your claims is making substantively exactly the same argument I'm making
The source that I am showing, is by a Marxian economist who admits that he is in the extreme minority position, and that everyone disagrees with him.
This absolutely supports my point. Even a strong supporters of Marxian economics is saying that everyone disagrees with him, and that he is fringe.
That's because in many things in science and knowledge, being among the first to predict things wrong in an interesting manner is valuable.
Put another way: If Marxism had any prominent support in the UK, RLB would have been outflanked on the left in the Labour leadership elections, rather than losing to someone on her right.
Care to share which policies those might be?