Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)
robkhenderson.com
robkhenderson.com
> When I was growing up in foster homes, or making minimum wage as a
> dishwasher, or serving in the military, I never heard words like “cultural
> appropriation” or “gendered” or “heteronormative.”
>
> Working class people could not tell you what these terms mean. But if you
> visit an elite university, you’ll find plenty of affluent people who will
> eagerly explain them to you.
> But unlike luxury goods, luxury beliefs can have long term detrimental
> effects for the poor and working class. However costly these beliefs are
> for the rich, they often inflict even greater costs on everyone else.
Well.. it's not at all clear that those things he mention has anything to do with anti-racism and feminism. In fact, it seems quite clear they are the opposite of that.
It's ridiculously transparent libertarian/conservative PR.
As others have said - far more directly abusive and entitled privileged beliefs are endemic among the very rich.
If they weren't they wouldn't spend so much time strike-breaking, stealing pay, flouting laws and regulations, buying politicians, and proselytising their messaging through think tanks, PR firms and captured media.
The fact is worrying and getting angry about things like cultural appropriation is something one can only do if they have the time and energy to.
Most laborers are too concerned about being able to pay their bills, provide for their dependents and too tired from difficult labor to get that upset about a Chinese Basketball player wearing dreads.
I don't freak out over homosexuals. I see how "cultural appropriation" is bs. You can have those two ideas in your head at once. In fact, the vast majority do! Because it's the only sane position.
It may turn out that there's some interesting points being made, and you almost walked into one yourself.
What if a lot of these luxury beliefs promulgated by the elite are really just conscience laundering / overt cover for all the bad things you point out they do covertly (strike breaking / bribery / fraud / etc)?
It's a thought worth examining and has non-zero merit.
Some of my trendiest, leftiest friends (hey and I vote all-dem, all the time myself) are actually far richer but come from family money. And many of them are less white/straight/male than me! And many of them have strongly ironic ideas about things..
Greta IG re-posting "climate change is an existential crisis", while owning big ICE SUVs and flying 10x/year. "Soak the rich" (because their dad bought their condo for them in cash and their lifestyle doesn't depend on the high income they believe should be taxed). SATs are racist (but THEIR kid got all the SAT prep / coaching / etc to ensure access to the best school). AOC good & "billionaires shouldn't exist", but happily spend summers crashing in their boarding school friends mansion whose father is a well known but politically quieter CEO.
This post is basically conservative rambling disguised as sociology.
There are sets of liberal and conservative beliefs that are held by the wealthy and powerful that are detrimental to the powerless and poor.
He cites the liberal set, maybe he is a conservative and that’s his bias or maybe because there is an inbuilt hypocrisy in some of them, ultimately it doesn’t matter because the point stands on its own and one shouldn’t discount that.
Then sure there may be some elements of truth sprinkled every now and then, but every piece of propaganda always lies on some truth to be convincing, that doesn't make it legit.
They are equally bad, no matter where they come from, and they do not deserve anyone's attention, especially when it comes from grifters who live from the the confirmation bias of their followers/patrons.
(I don't even fit in the American political segmentation anyway)
Are you suggesting that it is inherently bad faith to argue against a position that one doesn't like?
And there are bunch of conservatives that are even pleasant to read even though I don't have much in common with them.
You can have different opinions and still argue in good faith.
Where's the point of making an argument against liberal ideas you do like?
Unless you are arguing that anything painted "liberal" should never have arguments made against it? That anyone making an argument against a "liberal" position should have their motives questioned?
But it doesn't seems to be something you're familiar with given your response…
You could break people up into political and wealth-based quadrants: 1. Conservative and rich 2. Conservative and poor 3. Liberal and rich 4. Liberal and poor
Consider the typical expressed beliefs of quadrants 1 and 2. Both advocate that individualism and an internal locus of control can help you succeed in life. The difference is whether they have "succeeded in life" (by socioeconomic measures/ whatever).
Consider the same for quadrants 3 and 4. They would typically be more likely to advocate for the idea that success is based on luck. Again, the difference between 3 and 4 is whether they have not "succeeded."
Of all the quadrants, quadrant number 3 (liberal and rich) has a unique cognitive dissonance between their lived reality and their stated moral position. They tend to believe that rich people have achieved their wealth largely through luck, and now have power and autonomy that others lack. They state that the rich should help the poor, and they are rich, so they continually must justify their own wealth. This type of cognitive dissonance does not exist in the same way for the other 3 quadrants. That's why TFA is inevitably critical of the left for its luxury beliefs moreso than the right.
I'm relatively affluent and I know that it's mostly the product of luck, I have no problem admitting that and that my salary is outrageous compared to the amount of work it requires (and required over my lifetime). I am also actively a militant in favor of an increase in taxes for the guys like me. I'd give away 80% of my capital instantly if it made all of my social class to the same because I know it would make life way better for most of us.
How am I suffering from cognitive dissonance?
As a european, I just can't wrap my head around this. How is it racist if I like a food of an other culture so much I cook it? Or I like a hairstyle of different culture so I also want to wear it. Or clothes. Or making music. Or....
I mean, I admire all that stuff so much that I want it to be part of my life. How is this racist?
Everyone drinks the same can of coke and eats the same grocery store sushi. If you look closer at the woke crowd you'll see that grocery store sushi is pretty "white".
One of the big things they're actually complaining about is enshittification of other cultures via capitalism.
So the idea is that cultural appropriation is a way to keep capitalism from eating the world, to keep shitty grocery store sushi from competing with people who actually know what they're doing. To try and keep capitalists from pillaging every developing economy.
1) It has nothing to do with racism but uses the accusation of someone being racist as a tool to push an agenda.
2) Japan still makes good sushi. Supermarket sushi has not destroyed japanese sushi culture
3) I'd argue that capitalism has made the world better in pretty much every aspect. You could argue that capitalism has destroyed the environment, but the fact is that leftist countries have a history of being even more destructive.
4) "white people have no culture" But people all over the world drink coke, watch american movies, drink french wine, eat italian food, drive german cars and they seem to like their smartphones.
It's like goldilocks.. you can't like another cultural too much (cultural appropriation) or too little (racism). Often the statement is made by people who aren't even from the supposedly wronged culture. Please let me know how much and in what manner I am allowed to appreciate and participate in other cultures, Mr Cultural Gatekeeper.
America is great because people come here, participate in and enhance the existing culture.
My grandmother loved Chinese takeout cuz she was a Jew who grew up in NYC. My Southeast Asian in-laws love Italian food and always insist on taking us out to it. Also, hate to break it to people, but Southeast Asia has some really crazy localized Italian dishes involving ketchup & hot dogs.
Yesterday for breakfast I had greek yogurt.. from a company founded by a Greek! Last night I had leftover Thai (made by Thais!) and stopped by a Jewish bakery owned by Muslims for dessert. Had a black&white cookie with some baklava.
My parents who live outside of any big city, who have never been to Asia, now frequently go out for Pho. A couple generations ago Vietnam was synonymous with "bad war". For a GenZ American it's now synonymous with "good food".
What's not to love here?
Because it turns out nothing is perfect, including capitalism.
Japan and other Asian countries expressly push their food and culture as a component of political and economic diplomacy. Like, literally, that's a stated goal. Anime, the Hilux, and sushi have done more to ensure good will to Japan than any lame goodwill gesture.
As I remember it, this really took off in popular culture after native americans got sick of dude-bros/girls wearing war bonnets to music festivals. Around 2012-2014 it was a hugely popular piece. When 'cultural appropriation' came up then I mildly agreed with the sentiment because the look was pretty openly disrespectful.
And then it expanded like kudzu until digital hairstyles became off-limits:
https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2020/11/30/21734131/ani...
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...
I don't doubt there was someone somewhere complaining, but similar to the rename of the washington redkins, most of us didn't give a shit.
The most grumbling I've ever heard around this is complaints that pow-wow's are too commercialized but, if anything, that was criticizing our own tribes.
It's the old adage about a few loud people.
No it's not. It's about as real of a thing as the miasma theory. It's a idea that's been laundered through academia, but that doesn't make it anything but "well researched" fiction.
Of course many terms mutate in meaning.
That's absolutely subjugating the identity of the colonized: it takes these parts of their identity and says "these are not yours; like everything else, they are ours, and we can do with them as we please."
Even if it would have been as you described: it would have nothing to do with me cooking african food because I love the taste. It's admiration, not theft.
I guess I'm sort of old fashioned, when a concept is coined by some person I go with their definition and not what my feelings on it as a Dane might be.
cooking African food because you like the taste would probably not be cultural appropriation as the concept was originally defined, although I guess people may feel that is what it means now.
In most cases, Europeans don't live close to the people their countries colonized (though there are some exceptions, like the Basque and Catalonia regions), so there's less of a likelihood for people to want to appropriate them.
And no; cooking African food, no matter whether you belong to a culture that colonized that particular African culture, is not appropriation (unless, as I mentioned in another post, the food is part of a closed religious/ritual practice).
The appropriator needs to get some profit or acclaim for doing the thing, while the people it came from are denigrated for the it.
Clothing is a much more visible identity marker: if you're dressed in clothing from particular African cultures, that's a strong signal that you belong to that culture—so if you do not, in fact, belong to it, that can cause a number of kinds of problems in the right (or wrong) circumstances.
Furthermore, for many cultures, the clothing that most recognizably signals membership is related to some form of cultural or religious ritual, and wearing it outside of that context can be very disrespectful.
Imagine if, for instance, you were in Nairobi (or Tokyo, or Mumbai) and saw someone wearing the traditional robes and cap of a Catholic cardinal—and you saw them partying, being vulgar, doing drugs, that sort of thing. Obviously, the connotations are not the same, because of the overall dominance of the Catholic Church and Western culture generally, but I hope that it gets across the general idea of why clothing can be more prone to appropriation, and why that's a problem.
> Furthermore, for many cultures, the clothing that most recognizably signals membership is related to some form of cultural or religious ritual, and wearing it outside of that context can be very disrespectful
Fair enough; it would be wrong for me to wear a soldier's uniform if I've never served in the army.
Still, I can't help but feel that complaining about cultural appropriation is just a way to maintain USA's cultural dominance. The message seems to be: It's fine for Americans to spread their culture, but it's wrong for other countries to do the same.
It’s not just whether you’re ‘allowed’ to eat certain foods - it’s more whether your allowance for foods is different than someone else’s, because of your level of cultural status versus theirs. It’s about double standards.
You're stripping the value of African food from African people, the same as colonialism stripped their resources from their land.
Opening restaurants with food from your culture is pretty much the standard way of doing it and certainly not looked down upon.
All of this sounds racist to me. People are now forbidden to do things if they have the wrong skin color.
Food is more of an edge case. I know there have been situations where someone who is white opened up a restaurant that sold food of a particular ethnicity. I'm not familiar with the specifics however. I would imagine that people debated whether or not that was cultural appropriation. Again, I don't know any specifics in that case.
I would say that cultural appropriation is less about individuals and more about the overall taking of something that means something to one culture and removing all that meaning. An example that comes to mind are things like turning Native American clothes into fashion or kids dressing as indians for Halloween.
So eat what you want to eat.
So if you’d be worried about hiring a black man with dreads, but you wouldn’t have the same hangups about a white woman with dreads, that’s an example. Or if when you make Foul Madras it’s very cultured and experimental and basically laudable of you - but if someone from Egypt brings it in, it’s more like a “oh isn’t your culture quaint” kind of situation, if not flat out “why did you make food that smells so bad.”
Like the enduring nonsensical racist gripe that people from indo/pak background smell like curry… while the UK had simultaneously made tika masala into a national dish. It’s brave and adventurous when white people do it, it’s separatist and foreign when brown people do it, even though it’s what brown people grew up with. That’s the angle.
If I, a white man living in upstate NY, were to don Haudenosaunee ritual gear and record myself performing a traditional dance of theirs, that would be cultural appropriation. It refers to a dominant culture taking the trappings of a colonized or otherwise marginalized culture and using them for entertainment, for clout, or otherwise for our own purposes.
On the other hand, if I were to travel to Japan, stay at a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn), and wear the simple kimono they provide for guests, or go to a kimono rental shop and rent a kimono from them for the day, that would be cultural appreciation, because that is something that the Japanese offer openly as a way for foreigners to connect with and understand their culture.
In general, cooking and eating food of another culture in your own home cannot be cultural appropriation. (The only exception I can think of offhand is if the food is part of a closed religious practice of some sort.) Similarly with music—it's very unlikely to be cultural appropriation unless the music is part of a religious practice or being used disrespectfully. Hairstyles and clothing require a bit more nuance and can depend on the situation.
and then bougie middle-class white people getting upset about stuff they don't really understand
Making fun of marginalized religions, which are already frequently ridiculed because they're different from what the dominant culture does, and which are under threat, either overall or within a given area, is a very different matter.
The problem with cultural appropriation is specifically that it exacerbates marginalization and discrimination against already-marginalized groups.
Making fun of any religion is fine. No religion is above reproach, no religion is beyond mockery. None of them.
>Making fun of marginalized religions
Here's a newspeak term. There is no such thing as a "marginalized religion". This is a fictitious concept.
>which are already frequently ridiculed because they're different from what the dominant culture does, and which are under threat, either overall or within a given area, is a very different matter.
Good, every religion should be ridiculed. There's no culture that's beyond ridicule.
You're trying to create an illogical concept where hatred of White people is a reasonable thing. You can't come straight out and say it, so you launder the idea through a luxury belief and magically the hatred is tolerable.
>The problem with cultural appropriation is specifically that it exacerbates marginalization and discrimination against already-marginalized groups.
No it doesn't, because "cultural appropriation" doesn't exist. Upholding cultures even if they're backwards because it's politically fruitful breeds resentment. This is "baizou" behavior.
This is insufficient to be cultural appropriation. The context in which you wear the ritual gear and do the dances matter, the same as with the Japanese example.
Yes, I can see how that could be perceived as demeaning.
See also: Häagen-Dazs. Foreign people speak funny and can't write. Very funny.
No it wouldn't. It wouldn't be because cultural appropriation doesn't exist. Culture is not a zero sum game. You doing that takes away nothing from the originating culture.
>It refers to a dominant culture taking the trappings of a colonized or otherwise marginalized culture and using them for entertainment, for clout, or otherwise for our own purposes.
Ah yes, White original sin and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion-tier rhetoric about the international White conspiracy. Conspiracy theories about some "dominance" and hierarchy of cultures on some fabricated scale is what the Nazis used to justify cleansing Europe of the Jews.
>On the other hand, if I were to travel to Japan, stay at a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn), and wear the simple kimono they provide for guests, or go to a kimono rental shop and rent a kimono from them for the day, that would be cultural appreciation, because that is something that the Japanese offer openly as a way for foreigners to connect with and understand their culture.
Japanese offer openly people to wear kimonos anywhere. It's often a gift given so others can wear them outside of Japan. You can appreciate culture anywhere.
>In general, cooking and eating food of another culture in your own home cannot be cultural appropriation. (The only exception I can think of offhand is if the food is part of a closed religious practice of some sort.) Similarly with music—it's very unlikely to be cultural appropriation unless the music is part of a religious practice or being used disrespectfully. Hairstyles and clothing require a bit more nuance and can depend on the situation.
Not in general, in totality: none of the aforementioned things are "cultural appropriation". The concept is an illusion.
Cultural appropriation is widely understood to be when someone in a position of power (most commonly a white person) utilizes something that is heavily related or socially seen as "part of" a minority community. For example, a white person wearing a Native American headdress. The issue that the minority community has with that is that they are routinely belittled or put down for participating in that part of their own community. For example, a white person wearing a Native American war bonnet to Coachella is appropriation, as war bonnets are culturally significant to Native Americans and you have to earn the ability to wear one. Meanwhile, many white Americans still put down Native American customs as "witchcraft".
When it comes to food, music, or clothing, you're pretty good there. It's primarily just avoiding things that are culturally or spiritually significant to a culture. I.E., don't wear a headdress if you're not Native American, don't act like you're the best rapper ever if you grew up on a farm in Kansas, or say you make the best gumbo in the world if you've never even been to New Orleans.
Laying claim to culture is dumb, but everyone wants to feel special. One’s culture is less at risk from appropriation than from extinction as the world continues to trend towards an internet transmitted monoculture.
Laying claim to culture is dumb? That's kinda how things have been for the past thousands of years. A lot of these cultures have existed longer than many modern countries have. Yes, they do have risks from a cultural extinction, but watering a culture down or disconnecting it from it's roots doesn't save it from extinction. If anything, it advances that. Having people of that culture continue their cultural practices and protecting those practices, helps ensure that culture continues on.
Yes, there can be an internet monoculture, but everyone is part of some subculture. And the subculture is what is being protected. These cultures have existed for hundreds or thousands of years, and they carry historical importance in understanding history and the evolution of society.
Isn't part of being a rapper acting like you're the best rapper ever?
Now compare that with Hawai'i: instead of locals profitting of the local culture, Hawai'i was a kingdom colonized by the US and most of the tourism is done by mainland US companies rather than locals. The locals stand by as not only their land is sold off to rich Americans piece by piece but so is their culture and heritage. Religious traditions become scenary, sacred symbols become decoration and so on.
It's not immoral to take inspiration from foreign food, music, architecture, dress or traditions and weave them into your own (or even lift them wholesale). But this isn't about an individual act, it's about something happening in a very one-sided power relation where the more powerful side not simply copies the original but replicates it out of context and then (intentionally or non) uses their power to popularize their hollow replica to the point that it replaces the authentic original and that original context is lost.
Much like "racist" it's really more about the predisposition of a system towards emergent outcomes than individual belief or intent.
If it's acceptable for everyone, then it isn't cultural appropriation, it's just culture sharing. It's when society takes it away from those who grew up with it but allow others to use it that it's cultural appropriation.
It's a problematic/flawed concept, but that's the core idea and it makes some sense.
We also know the government taxing carbon or giving employment advantages to (often wealthy or connected) minorities rather than people who need it.
Luxury beliefs are common amongst the educated and twist demands for Justice for all into demands for privileges for themselves!
Isn't the author's point that the examples correlate very highly with affluence? The fact that it may/may not be correlated to something else might be relevant, but I'm not seeing the relevance.
Deflecting all criticism by knee jerk reaction of calling the questioner a racist. Disagreement over the magnitude of a problem, its relation to other problems, or the terms used for a problem makes you racist and therefore bad. Now we don't need to consider your opinion and can move on.
You can ignore anyone arguing from opinion, that's a given. "NYC left rich cohort" sounds like an absolute nightmare to try to figure out the truth with, given that they seem to think the character of a speaker has any bearing on the validity of their spoken words. Best not to engage with people like that, it's a waste of time.
At beast, I have seen people misread statistics to support their position, but, again, that's not really "how it effects their community".
https://www.hoover.org/research/diversity-illegal-immigratio...
Let me put it this way: pointing to one cogent article by a non-representative Trump supporter (you won't find many of them in academia, and the college-educated skew liberal/Dem) doesn't really make me change my mind about writing most of them off as racists based on my personal experience and what most of them say (which is not as cogent and reasonable as this guy's article).
Is this so different? It's saying the thing without saying it.
I made that quite clear in my original comment by suggesting several conservative "luxury beliefs" that I believe the author would have to criticize on the same grounds, but failed to do so. This is not "deflection", it's showing that the article employs double standards and is thus intellectually dishonest.
The "predictable" part, in my estimation, is that this kind of argument would be used by a right-wing author. To be saying the thing by saying it, conservative cultural critics, when measuring liberal discourse, are incapable of coming up with a bar that they themselves don't trip over.
This is reductive and only true in a binary world. If I question some anti-terrorism approaches, does that make me pro-terrorism? Of course not, but one could dishonestly accuse another of that to silence them or derail the conversation (see The Dixie Chicks). The world is hardly ever black and white.
It was shoot the messenger type stuff.
I recall when the Dixie Chicks criticized Dubya's invasion of Iraq.
The analogy here, to me, would be instead of arguing about whether Iraq invasion was a good idea, you said "aha! I knew the Dixie Chicks wouldn't have anything to say about Whitewater!" (or some similarly team blue scandal of similar vintage).
I hate tribalism, and I actually hate to see it even more on the side I vote with because it puts me in the position of being asked to defend things that I don't think make sense.
I felt the poster was discounting the article because the author had the opposite political preference on 2 topics. They lead with - "I figured out as soon as I saw the link title that the author's examples for "luxury beliefs" would just so happen to be associated with a feminist and anti-racist outlook."
To me reading the criticism of "my side" by reasonable writers from "the other side" is only additive. Also, logically that's exactly where I would expect the criticism to come from. You may even gain some perspective and re-evaluate your position or adjust your argument. This is how we grow.
As you point out, one can have a complex set of preferences/beliefs/things they support that do not fit directly into blue|red binary as a whole.
My point is that this is a bad faith argument. The author pretends to care about "luxury" beliefs, but in truth, all he cares about is finding a cheap shot against feminist positions. He intends to delegitimize these positions by painting them as an upper-class fringe ("luxury") concern. Once this angle of attack is found, the author never stops to see that the same attack could be levied against any number of political positions that he himself might agree with, because he was never interested in a real debate to begin with: he only wants to smear and ridicule.
The point is not that the examples are also "correlated" with something else, it's that they're carefully cherry-picked and made a target for an attack that would work against conservative positions, carefully excluded by the author, just as nicely as it does against liberal positions here.
It is intellectually dangerous to read a piece like this "apolitically", precisely because a biased political agenda is wearing the garb of a much more universal observation. If the writer had mixed "luxury beliefs" from all over the political spectrum, then there would be a clear focus on what the title purports to concern. Instead, there is a second agenda that is being silently conflated without being acknowledged.
The fiercest culture warriors I know are working-class folk. They do in fact, give a shit about this stuff, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum. I blame the increased polarization.
The irony is that people who claim to be against culture wars - like the author - are they themselves actively engaging in a culture war while feigning neutrality. The truth is that they are simply against one perspective, which betrays either a lack of self-awareness, or bad faith.
It’s wild that this whole piece is based on one response on one question in a poll.
The income bracket breakdown on that question is 22%/23%/32%. Which is significant but isn’t “they’re all top hat wearing elites just trying to impress each other”. “Defund the police” isn’t even the majority opinion of that income bracket.
This whole article is just an attempt to smear liberals. Even if you care about making the case that defund the police is a “luxury” to advance their social standing, then simply pointing to a slightly higher level of support in a higher income bracket is quite frankly stupid.
(As an aside, I don’t think they get the history of dueling right, either.)
While the income breakdown is 22%/23%/32%, the urban breakdown is 30%/25%/28%/12%. With the largest difference between City and Rural.
This is not commented on by the author, as it would undercut their implicit point.
Working class people aren’t even inherently apolitical, they just don’t vote and aren’t taught that voting changes things like middle and upper class folks are
Then you've been duped by the author faking a neutral tone. This post is definitely not apolitical.
Author leans in quite heavily to his own bonafides... somehow able to rise from foster homes to the military to graduate from Yale.
Neato.
And then he gets REALLY basic shit wrong.
"Working class" does not mean "lower middle class white folks." Go ask 10 "working class" black folks whether this country is racist. Then ask them whether it occurs at all levels of the country. They don't even need to know what the term "systemic racism" is to be able to describe it to you.
"Defund the police" had a pretty fucking specific meaning. It meant removing all the military surplus gear from police organizations in an attempt to reduce the amount of machismo and brutality from LEOs. Nobody should ever feel safe around a person who barely graduated from high school and yet has the authority to brutalize you and legally steal your shit. Go ask people if they think body cams on cops are important.
Is it now a "luxury belief" for women to be afraid that they live in a state that might attempt to jail them for the crime of having a failed pregnancy, or is that an actual valid concern? Don't want to do that? Okay, then let's look at the number of OBGYNs who are choosing to leave states with oppressive anti-female laws because THEY don't want to be prosecuted for the crime of providing healthcare, and follow that up by examining the cities in places like Texas that want to prosecute women for using state highways to LEAVE the state in order to receive proper reproductive healthcare.
Luxury beliefs my ass. It's only a luxury in his mind because these things don't impact him.
Bonus points for making them elites in academia who apparently do not know how the "real word" works.
It is actually a means of pivoting to a different subject, and the next step is to make the subject the person doing the pivoting, and from there to change the entire scope of the discussion to the interpersonal dynamics of the parties involved in the discussion.
On the left (whom I would count myself among, even if I would hardly pass a purity test) there are many ways to do this, the key to all of them being that there's not a serious attempt to engage with the substance of the matter but simply to use an intersecting contextual facet as a means to collect the focus away from the topic and toward the discussant. Racism is probably the most straightforward path, or at least the most well-traveled (of the two mentioned in this thread, it would outrank abortion by being more generally applicable across age groups sexes religions etc) it goes "this isn't about x, x is really about racism. Your position on x implies you might be a racist. That position is personally offensive to me, who is directly or indirectly affected by racism." Done. conversation is now about people, and specifically two individual people, and specifically about the unfalsifiable statements about the feelings of one or both, and this is where it ends.
The right wing version of this trick, at least in the US, is much clumsier and ham-fisted but follows from the same motivation to replace the confrontation with an idea with a personal confrontation, though unlike the progressives they have only managed to devise one or two lasting variations of this same discussion-jamming measure: the pedophilia track and the socialist / communist sympathizer track.
I'm at a loss as to how to even attempt to have conversations in public about anything that matters due to the ever-present danger of one of these tactics surfacing and rendering the entire effort pointless. Perhaps we need to revive IRL coffee shop culture of small close circle debate from the 1800s, or import something like it from wherever a form of it still exists, maybe morocco or turkey.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/17/health/abortion-miscarria...
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/west-texas-county-ba....
Come again? The only way you could fail to know about these things or read about them is if you willfully choose to ignore them.
The links did cite cases where medical practitioners did not do their job because they were worried about the government.
Texas law specifically states that abortions in the case of risk to the mother are ok and the medical practitioners felt the language wasnt clear enough.
Just because someone doesn’t recognize a word, doesn’t mean it’s some rarified hoity toity elitist folly - it’s ignorance; a lack of education or opportunity, nothing more.
It's like how mothers used to chip in to enforce gender inequality their daughters suffered. It is a defeatist mindset, that is culturally enforced and learned from bitter lessons of the reality of power balance and dynamics in society.
edit:
like many here at my development stage (middleclass, degreed parents, etc) there was significant positive feedback for displaying cognitive abilities.
So it is not a luxury, it is a privilege.
And that raises the question of whether it is in fact required (as a sort of petite-bourgois-oblige) for those of us who are comfortable with "fancy words" to do the talking for the otherwise encumbered oppressed?
> And that raises the question of whether it is in fact required (as a sort of petite-bourgois-oblige) for those of us who are comfortable with "fancy words" to do the talking for the otherwise encumbered oppressed?
I honestly cannot tell if this is a serious comment. I hope not.
And the author didn’t fail to deliver. The George Floyd protests in Portland Oregon were massive. I find it hard to square that with a yougov poll that says only upper middle class people were protesting to defund the police because the crowds were young people who aren’t even old enough to have achieved that economic status.
The author hilariously tries to paint small liberal movements as cultural capital, which is the same smear conservatives play when using “virtue signaling.” I’m sorry but 30 years ago Silence=Death fell under his category, and here we are today with overwhelming support nationwide for gay rights.
This paper is interesting but seems intentionally geared toward wrapping antiprogressive rhetoric as insight.
Religion ticks all these boxes.
In some contexts, so does patriotism, racism, worship of the military, publicly dumping cases of Bud Light, etc etc etc. In some ways, even disdain for education is a sort of expensive status display.
The author is just describing what people of all kinds do. Yes, there are very silly beliefs which sometimes seduce educated elites. But that just makes them like everybody else.
Also, the author is picking on some trendy ideas which are currently held by some of the elites, but so what? It would be truly surprising if a decade-plus of higher education and immersion in data and discourse did not produce a different consensus. The author offers no evidence that “defund the police” is an inherently absurd idea, no more than other formerly radical ideas like universal suffrage or abolishing slavery. In my town, the police absorb over 20% of the city budget, have doubled their spend in the past decade, and are unaccountable to the people. So I think it’s at least a topic worthy of interest!
- Police staffing levels are at critical levels [2]
- Violent crime has shot way up in 2021 (along with the rest of the country) [3]
- Things got so bad so quickly that in just a year millions of dollars were added back to the budget [4]
- Things have continued to get worse relative to the rest of the country (which has seen crime drop back down) [5]
When someone believes that there's semen in a beer, or they go to church, or they reply 'thank you for your service' to someone on the internet, that doesn't have real consequences for people. It might get spoken about in the media sometimes, but it's more just a side-show.
When a stupid slogan ruined the best chance America had for wide police reform in decades, that does have consequences. Even more now, nobody (who should be a cop) in Portland wants to be a cop. Lower class communities that need more patrols don't have them. People don't feel safe in their houses. Who do you think took the brunt of this: those who chanted the slogan, or those in the huge minority ethnic groups in East Portland?
And the most critical part about this: defund the police was treated with some amount of legitimacy by the media because it was their in group saying it. It should have been treated as the fringe belief it really was. Imagine if that airtime was used to campaign for reform. The real frustration of it all is that it was a zeitgeist that could have been an opportunity for real reform, and really making people want to be cops. Instead the moment was pissed away by a dumb slogan, rather than constructive debate.
[1] Besides at best a hand-wavy 'community policing', which conjures up memories of that one Simpsons episode.
[2] https://manhattan.institute/article/portlands-police-staffin...
[3] https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/fi...
[4] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/portland-among-u-s-citie...
[5] https://www.axios.com/local/portland/2023/10/30/oregon-crime...
Redefining words in order to win arguments. Nice. Defunding means exactly that. I know this because that is what happened to the police forces that were defunded. Not entirely defunded, but they ended up with less money in their budget.
> the typical day-to-day work for a police officer doesn't require violence or the threat of violence
Says who? Are you a cop? Do you have cops in the family? Are you a law enforcement expert? Do you have any source or statistic whatsoever to back that up?
> that. I know this because that is what happened to the police forces that
> were defunded. Not entirely defunded, but they ended up with less money
> in their budget.
The poster is not redefining the term.
The "Defund The Police" movement has very specific and very well documented goals: Use police only for law-enforcement, and use specialized responders for non-law enforcement interactions. For example, you send mental health specialists when someone is threatening suicide. This will reduce funding for the police, but it also reduces the police's workload.
Is the movement poorly named? Yes. Is their goal to eliminate police? Absolutely not.
There's a person threatening suicide in public and then pulling out a knife or gun when the authorities show up. Now what?
It's easy to be an armchair law enforcement expert and dream up scenarios where the good guys always wins. But reality doesn't conform to your utopian ideas.
Just take the L. The movement messed up.
I get that you may not want to eliminate police, but I assure you, a large number of the people at the center of these movements do want that.
In the UK for instance most officers don't even carry guns.
https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/trends-in-violent-crime/#....
While the rise in violent crime isn't caused by unarmed police officers the fact that they are unarmed didn't prohibit the rise in violent crime.
> The ONS reported that victimisation rates shown by the CSEW have been decreasing in the long term. They peaked in the year ending December 1995, when 4.7% of adults were a victim of violent crime. Rates have remained below 2% since the year ending March 2014.
> In contrast to the downward trend shown by the CSEW, the ONS highlighted that police recorded violent crime increased between the years ending March 2013 and March 2022. The ONS explained that these increases are thought to be driven by improvements in police recording practices
You are playing the Motte and Bailey[1] tactic perfectly. You say that defunding means only "demilitarizing", which many people would probably agree with. But when put into practise, it's never that.
I mean, you don't need to delve very far into academia or lefty twitter to find extremist people saying exactly this, that defund does actually mean abolish, or is the first step to it. And the extremists are important in this case, because they are the ones put in power, or writing the text books for next generation in power.
So either, you're a fool & a useful idiot mindlessly parroting this Motte, or you're the deviant waiting to implement the Bailey.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
Now I don't think that's realistic, and no matter how fair your society is going to be there would always be the need for some police in the end (the author themselves acknowledge that as well when talking about “less needs” for the police), but claiming that they want to abolish the police in the sense of "directly removing it in today's society" is a strawman. (Yes the provocative title is an invitation to strawmans but you fell for the trap)
No, it went viral three years ago when it came out and I remembered it.
> Because the argument made here isn't the one you think it is: it's about financing social care in order to be able to make crime disappear (making the police “obsolete”).
Yes, and? That’s exactly the argument I think it is.
> Yes the provocative title is an invitation to strawmans but you fell for the trap
A strawman is when you misrepresent a position as being absurd. When the position is already absurd, it is neither possible nor necessary to strawman it.
Then why are you responding in a thread along with someone who takes the argument as in “literally remove the police directly and let the chaos begin”? And why are you using this article as a support for their argument?
> A strawman is when you misrepresent a position as being absurd
No, a strawman is when you misrepresent someone's argument as being another absurd argument. The argument in the article isn't the one that automatic6131 is arguing against, and since you quoted the article as if it was, you're effectively making a strawman against it.
If you think the argument in the article is absurd, that's fine that you criticize it, but it's not what you're doing here.
Whatever particular hair you’re splitting doesn’t change that, and the fact that you’re focused on splitting that hair in particular only demonstrates the degree of bad faith and intellectual dishonesty required to make this extreme proposal sound like anything more than the gibbering nonsense it is.
> someone who takes the argument as in “literally remove the police directly and let the chaos begin”
I clicked the “parent” links to read every comment in this chain about defunding the police and none of the people in this discussion match the strawman you describe. My characterization of “defund/abolish the police”, in which funding for law enforcement is reallocated to social programs, is completely consistent with how automatic6131 and cmcaleer were characterizing the slogan, contra yourself and gizmo. The first reference to abolition was automatic’s here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38083132):
> I mean, you don't need to delve very far into academia or lefty twitter to find extremist people saying exactly this, that defund does actually mean abolish, or is the first step to it.
Indeed you do not. This is exactly what the NYT piece I linked to says, in so many words. And you’ve admitted as much yourself.
I'd like to emphasize the distinction between your definitions of these words and the actual definitions of these words...
abolish - formally put an end to
defund - prevent (a group or organization) from continuing to receive funds
demilitarize - remove all military forces from (an area)
Militarization of police refers to this trend where police has started to buy hardware that was previously of military use only[1], so it's not completely absurd to talk about the opposite motion as “demilitarization”.
> defund - prevent (a group or organization) from continuing to receive funds
Or just (significantly) reduce how much funds they get.
What do you mean? Where has police abolition been ever "put into practice"?
> I mean, you don't need to delve very far into academia or lefty twitter to find extremist people saying exactly this, that defund does actually mean abolish
If you're trying to find the point of view of stupidest leftist in existence to say “the left is stupid” then sure. Of course there are idiots/teenagers/trolls on Twitter that think that abolishing the police is the way, but that doesn't mean it's some shared position from everyone on the left or that the others are clueless.
Also, by doing this your message is violating HN's guideline.
That wasn't the popular message being broadcast into the public space.
> defunding (i.e. demilitarizing)
I agree with this! But this is reformation, not defunding. In fact, trying to create a police force more in line with Peelian principles will cost a lot more. "Reform the police" is very broad and has a lot of room for interpretation. "Defund the police" is a very straightforward request. Words have meanings, and defund does not mean demilitarize. I would bet a large amount of money on "Defund the police" polling worse with all political groups than "Reform the police" by a huge margin.
> the police force shouldn't behave like some kind of paramilitary unit
I agree with this too! Perhaps this could be done through some kind of reform ;)
For (c) the question is: how to get the public worked up enough about an issue that they take to the streets and demand change? Nuance and careful analysis don't motivate people like catchy slogans and impossible demands.
Young people who chant impossible slogans sometimes really change society for the better. People who think in shades of gray and dream of carefully considered incremental change tend not to be involved with political action at all.
Not sure what reforms you're referring to with the 2008 crisis. Housing is as unaffordable as ever.
I think your list reinforces my point. You can't achieve meaningful reforms instantaneously. It takes years and decades. The zeitgeist moment might be a catalyst, but focusing on it exclusively ignores all of the work on the ground.
In any case where major reforms are needed, there will always be many people on the other side who need to be convinced (or move on). This takes a long time.
Others have already noted that the author overstates the support for true police abolishment. Let’s set that aside.
The police are much more unpopular these days than before and the author offers their theory that it’s some deranged attempt to flex on others. There is a much simpler explanation, like the fact that you can watch a supercut of police killings on YouTube now. This prompts reflection and reassessment, and some people end up in more extreme places.
I just don’t buy this idea of costly dogma in the educated elites. You support police reform. Maybe you know people who support some form of defunding the police. Are you losing friends over this?
The author may be on more secure ground when they assert that strong political beliefs are now more untethered from lived experience. But that seems like a predictable outcome of social media. And not always a bad one - if it’s motivated by evidence and empathy.
Sometimes it’s motivated by group processes that inch that group towards radical beliefs, where one derives status from going further down the rabbit hole. That’s bad but it’s not limited to one group.
My colleague works remotely from a more rural area, the land of “Fuck Trudeau” flags. One of his neighbors recently asked him if he was worried about COVID vaccines sterilizing him. Vaccine denial is one of the most “expensive” beliefs of all time. Some sociologists have proposed that such beliefs are strongly professed - despite lived experience of it being deadly to do so - because the person will suffer a “social death” otherwise.
So even if some educated elites are being memed into weird beliefs, this phenomenon is hardly isolated to them.
Then there are the masses, who think "Justice" means "justice" and more or less buy the narrative. (At least, as far as I can tell.) These days, activism is how a lot of people seem to derive their meaning in life. So, "defund the police" advances the revolutionary cause, while being a pithy cause activists can rally around if they are not of the critical thinking persuasion.
The lack of thought about the after-effects is from the academic thinking. The goal is simply to tear down the oppressive system; there is no thought given to a replacement system or how that system would avoid simply being a different oppressing system. Or whether a replacement system would actually be less oppressive than the current system, which by historical standards is one of the least oppressive.
Environmentalism, anti racism are both good things taken over by a religious cult
The idea that some of these beliefs are popular specifically because you have to be rich to afford them was a new insight to me when I first heard it. Maybe I should've come up with it myself from first principles, but I didn't.
Regular participation in religious services is of the most beneficial activities a person can do for their mental health. I'm not saying this as a platitude, but as a well documented observed phenomenom [0][1]. To the point, I regularly see studies on benefits to those who regularly attend religious services and have never seen a study showing any adverse affects from it.
That is not to say religion is an unalloyed good, far from it. But human communities are built around shared values and beliefs - and religions provide community, cohesion, and existential value that is not replicable in any other way.
This kinda knee-jerk anti-religious sentiment is something I'd personally label a luxury belief that is largely damaging to the population as a whole. If you are sufficiently wealthy, you can probably fill some of the voids left by a lack of religion. But irreligiosity does not scale
[0] https://psyche.co/ideas/why-religious-belief-provides-a-real... [1] https://www.nber.org/digest/oct05/religion-good-you
It does scale, only ~13% of the population of the Czech Republic are religious (affiliated) [1], and additional ~10% are not affiliated but consider themselves as believers [2].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220121163456/https://www.czso....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Czech_Republic...
First, there's pretty obvious harmful effects of religion: on the minor end, feeling ostracized if you happen to be different than what the stated beliefs say are correct, i.e. being queer in the Christian church and ostracized or driven to suicide for it. (Or even more fundamental issues, like taking issue with men being the head of households.) On the extreme end, you have crusades, pogroms, wars that engulf nations. Obviously relatively harmful. Or even on the individual scale, ritual killings of those who defy the religious order.
I'd also posit that, again from the Christian faith, believing there's an all-powerful god who will sort out justice in the afterlife leads to negative outcomes here on Earth: believing you'll have everlasting life in heaven is of course going to limit your investment in systems here on Earth. I've had religious people cite (paraphrased) that "god will sort it all out" when I ask why they don't push to directly address more of the problems in the world. There's an abdication of responsibility I've found relatively common amongst my religious family on such issues. (Not universally, notably, but still.)
Regardless, for those who have "lost faith" on epistemological grounds, what is the alternative to irreligiosity? I don't "choose" not to believe in the Christian (or any other) god, I'm unconvinced by the evidence put forward by their evangelists. I have no philosophically sound alternative to atheism unless and until I encounter convincing evidence to the contrary.
I also worry about people "giving up" some of their philosophical beliefs just to belong to that kind of community. I've talked before [0] about how other more extreme communities (e.g. flat earth) aren't so much comprised of people who believe the premise of the group so much as people who _want to belong somewhere_.
> But irreligiosity does not scale
What's the alternative? The atheist segment of the population giving up portions of their ethical and philosophical autonomy to churches in exchange for a sense of community? Continuing to enable the hold of said autonomy over those who believe largely because they aren't exposed to other epistemologies because their community center discourages it?
I just mean irreligiosity doesn't scale as a way to provide existential value and social cohesion. This is what Henderson is getting at with Luxury Beliefs. They are beliefs that you can hold in the top, lets say, 10% of the wealth distribution. But those luxury beliefs actually damage people lower down the socio-economic ladder.
> feel like saying there's never adverse effects There's definitely adverse effects! But its opposite side of the coin of having meaningful, cohesive communities. Your own examples are perfect. Belonging to a community does a lot, but at the same time it means you have to conform to the community or lose its benefits.
Also, the examples of crusades, etc are just human nature expressed through religion. If the 20th century taught us nothing else, is that you don't need religion to have murderous ideologies. In fact, I'd take the Spanish Inquisition to the horrors of 20th century dictators any day!
> What's the alternative I mean, that's problem we're facing isn't it? Maybe there is some way to replace the social and existential value provided by religion, but I don't see it.
I would consider those beliefs pretty harmless compared to what intelligentsia believes in, even after 100 millions of people died because of their social experiment in the 20th century.
Is it that the beliefs are inherently less harmful or that poverty inherently involves less capacity to affect the material conditions of others?
That is, are poor people's dangerous beliefs less dangerous than those of richer people because of their content, or simply because the people holding them are less powerful?
The people doing that (and moreso, spreading the idea of it) largely are the intelligentsia (and largely not the proletarian intelligentsia), and while that’s one particular demonstrative act, its not by far the worst the faction doing it can be accused of.
So I’m not so sure that works as an example on multiple levels.
The author dismisses some concepts, like cultural appropriation, by saying that the working-class people he grew up with not only didn't trouble themselves with it but didn't even realize that it was a concept.
But just because someone with low education and/or low status doesn't know about or understand a topic doesn't make that topic merely a status symbol, any more than it makes calculus a status symbol.
I agree, in part, with the author that certain pockets of higher education can veer into navel gazing and ivory-tower perspectives, and it can lead students to adopt distorted views of the world. But I don't think it can be said that just because a point of view is more prevalent among higher-educated people (who may indeed have higher status) that means the idea is bunk.
The luxury is in the time spent on relatively unimportant matters, much like spending millions of dollars on a bejeweled egg. That doesn't mean the egg doesn't exist.
Author may indeed be going somewhere with this, but I'd like to see stronger support for the thesis.
This hugely depends on where you live. To 90% (conservatively low) of the world's population making over 100k a year is insane levels of luxury.
This is super dependent on where you live. You may need to step away from city centers for a little bit to see it.
"If you’re to do anything reasonable in this world, you must have a class of people who are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members can think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must have a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in which eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That’s the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric itself—often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages eccentricity in others"
I'd argue rather that, historically, progress has generally involved removing or disempowering the aristocracy.
[1] That is, it was true of scientific progress. As you say, social progress often involved finding a way to destroy the aristocracy's stranglehold on money and power.
His father was a University Professor.
Having said that, in the history of science there's a surprising number of people who got to focus on their hobby due to family wealth, and access to all the best toys allowed them to claim a lot of firsts.
The key difference is that Franklin's middle class wasn't interheted status.
It ignores the evidence is a 10% increase in a single poll, in which the majority was not of the inverse opinion that police is without fault, they just had a slightly different outlook on necessary police reform being possible in the current structures. It's yet another deliberate misunderstanding of "defund the police" (not a maybe understandable accidental misunderstanding).
Would be interesting to have this poll broken down by race, putting those most affected by broken windows policing and police violence first. And also those who coined the term.
Rich means ownership and rent-seeking. It means dominating some part of your culture to the extent that you can force your will and desires on significant numbers of people - often against their personal interests.
One of the best examples is the health insurance industry, which bankrupts half a million Americans every year - usually people who have been paying insurance premiums for decades, but their money is somehow channelled to shareholders instead of providing care when they need it.
If you're not profiting from an operation like this on a mass scale, you're not truly rich.
> Rich means ownership and rent-seeking.
Huh? No it doesn't.
It’s most obvious in domains like sports and music. I noticed that in my teens by watching Michael Jordan. He was great because he had a body seemingly made for basketball and spent the most time practicing.
How is it any different in medicine, tech, investing, engineering, business, etc.?
The talents are mental, so they are harder to see. The required combination of luck and hard work are the same.
A better world would be one where the successful recognize this and are grateful to be the recipients of life’s lottery winnings. They would try to help the unlucky rather than lord their success over them.
This fits very well with the idea of a self serving bias, where people take credit for their successes and pass off their failures as the fault of external influences:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias
Which makes sense to me. If you're successful, it must feel horrible to think about how you might not deserve your current status, and how so many equally talented/hard working folks failed miserably in similar circumstances. While if you're unsuccessful, thinking that maybe you just suck and deserve your situation must feel equally miserable.
Luck is basically seemingly random events going your way in a positive way. If you do more things, you’ll have more interactions and more chances those go well.
Luck is just probability. You have to keep playing the board for it to work. Too many people think luck is just sitting and doing nothing and hoping it turns out well.
It’s luck, and then it’s work to take advantage of the luck. Except in extreme instances on either end of the spectrum, it’s always both.
Source: https://quotepark.com/quotes/1035696-george-orwell-there-are...
Somehow, "Black Lives Matter" morphed into "Defund the Police", which turned into a joke. It derailed any serious effort to fix the real problem of cops shooting too many black people. Not quite sure how that happened.
The hard work thing seems to be the reverse of the criticism usually leveled in that direction. The more common criticism is that rich people claimed their riches came from hard work, while most of the time they actually got a big boost from their parents.
My kids will get the same type of help such as we’re able to provide it.
My parents’ hard work has a payoff for me and my wife’s/my hard work will very likely have a payoff for our kids.
This is a feature, not a bug, IMO.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
Just to bring in another contentious topic, but this simple interview personifies what I saw in summer 2020. https://x.com/israel_advocacy/status/1718742999591456921 Whatever your view on the relative merits, you have 2 protestors talking about how 1) they don't really support the chant 2) of course they chanted it 3) no we don't actually know the context of half the words in the chant
I'm not from the UK but I generally interpret the specifics of those accents to be a bit more upper class than lower for sure. Not to mention the phrasing, words used, and general indirection of the response.
One of my neighbors was like this during summer 2020. In retrospect she admitted she was just bored of being locked up during covid, and ended up to the right of me on policing lol.
[0] https://kriegman.substack.com/p/post-leading-to-termination-...
And to look at a “100k and up” bracket and say “oh, well they can afford to live in gated communities and hire private security” is just absurd. No, the vast majority of that bracket cannot.
1. The author claims that when luxury beliefs 'trickle down' to the working class, they are damaging, which is supposedly not the case for luxury goods. Still, in some not-so-privileged parts of society, signaling status with luxury goods consumes the larger parts of people's budget. Think of someone living in a cheap apartment while driving a (leased) luxury car. This is certainly more damaging than believing the police should be de-funded (which does not have any consequence whatsoever on the micro-level, stupid as it may be).
2. The author claims that advocating a disciplined work ethic while attributing one's own success to luck is inconsistent (and hence bigoted). Still, it _is_ true that success is mostly luck, due to opportunities we cannot control. This does not mean that one should not work hard. It's not that affluent people say: "I am rich because of luck, so you should not even try." The realistic take is that success is mostly due to luck but hard work is one of the few ways to control success _to at least some extent_. Also, in many societies hard work is seen as a virtue in itself, not matter whether it pays off or not. So I would claim that "hard work pays off" is a luxury belief for people who are already super privileged, have strong networks, et cetera. When you are born into the elite, you can afford claiming that marrying into the elite is inferior to working your way up...
“By far” means “10% more” in the actual graph the author cites, which comes from an online poll that had 1500 respondents. I’m no statistician but that seems like a small difference and small sample size to be the key piece of “data” here.
This article follows most tropes of behavioral science blog articles: broad moral statements taking a vaguely contrarian stance, analogies comparing humans to random animals (gazelles?), and “gotcha” survey data with questionable sample sizes. I find it difficult to take it seriously.
Going from 22% to 32% is a 10 percentage point difference, but a 46% increase. I agree that the conclusion at the end is flimsy, and there are undoubtedly confounding factors--but the statistics are pretty well in line with what you'd expect in social sciences.
And, yes, I think Defund the Police was primarily espoused and driven by people who would be little affected by the outcome of such performative stances.
The people who live in the places where the police got defunded suffer greater crime rates and disorder --which is why we see people at the grass roots asking for more police.
It's known that lawless places will suffer from lawlessness and then engender vigilantism --this is evident is most war-torn places where 'warlords'/gansters control neighborhoods.
Also in case you didn't notice police don't do much to protect normal folks from crime. They'll be there 15 minutes after whatever happened happened to file a report if they aren't too busy screwing with law abiding citizens.
Personally Ive seen little help when needed and plenty of harassment.
Yes, the police harass, sometimes I get harassed but that presence is what puts a lid on crime.
I’ll put up with some harassment in exchange for fewer criminals running free.
We can seek redress from the police, we cannot seek redress from criminals.
The reason we need police is the same reason we can’t have nice things: people can’t self govern in a harmonious way.
> I’ll put up with some harassment in exchange for fewer criminals running free.
Maybe you have a specific harassment:imprisonment ratio in mind, but to me this just says "bring on the police state".
> We can seek redress from the police, we cannot seek redress from criminals.
You can seek it, unless of course they kill you. But will you actually find it? Police departments are famous for investigating themselves and finding that they did nothing wrong.
If I was willing to spend 30 days in jail lose thousands of dollars income and spend thousands more I might be able to win it when appeals took it out of that fucked up state.
Realistically I can't do anything about it.
On the other hand they didnt really investigate the 2 attempts to burn down my apartment building attempted homicide x 50 x 2 nor arrest the ex co-worker who tried to murder one of his fellows in a walmart parking lot.
I was left to organize a neighborhood patrol of the premises in the one case and get a psycho to chase me to get him off a guy who can only run by pressing x.
We live in the worst of all possible worlds where police are available to shoot teens but aren't available to do their jobs. If you wonder why you can't hire enough cops wonder no more. It's not liberals pissing in their cornflakes a lot of good folks don't choose to be a part of an obvious shit show.
In closing it's been said those who would give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither but more importantly they get neither. A police state isn't a particularly safe place.
My luxury belief is that AI Safety is a joke, but it's a dangerous belief as the benefits of AI will not be equally distributed and biasing towards caution could reduce future suffering. So...
Be cautious reading comments here as many of us are in the socioeconomic class that luxury beliefs appeal to.
Like those described in the article above, this is very much a middle-class movement whose proponents have seized the opportunity to sneer at working-class people as bigoted, stupid and reactionary.
The same logic refuted abolitionism.
This is incredibly ignorant view which does not understand the trauma someone can endure when not being allowed or experience not only discrimination, but physical abuse and threats for being who he or she feels is. I wonder if people said the same thing when screaming for equal rights or other things related to racism and homophobia. That it is only opportunity to sneer at working-class people as bigoted, stupid and reactionary.
The approach might not always be the best, but at the end people want others to be what they really are, no one is screaming to shot or lynch anyone.
He's says he's a woman. Would you find it acceptable for him to use a women's refuge, be incarcerated in a women's prison, undress himself in a women's changing room, and so on, based on his self-declaration of womanhood? If yes, then you'd be indulging in a luxury belief.
> no one is screaming to … lynch anyone
> no one
Jesus Christ that’s bad, and it’s right up front in this article. Really makes it obvious the kind of audience this is written for.
There’s really only a particular kind of person that thinks it’s funny to tease trans people who don’t pass.
> Civil servants who surely have better things to do are being given LGBTQ+ education and shown training videos about how sinful it is to stop a ‘transwoman’ – ie, a fella – from using the women’s loo.
Wow it just keeps going, it rolls straight into proudly misgendering trans people, wow wow wow.
And you actually want other people to associate this kind of bullshit with you? You recommend it, you link directly to it? For shame.
I think the idea of luxury beliefs is a fairly good descriptor for what the .5% will need. Once you start looking there are many examples - how many high flyers do you know that have taken up ultra-marathons (very time consuming) or charity work as an all but obligatory percentage of time.
It's a marker for "I have family life so locked down that I can attend to these other expensive options and not be overwhelmed.
This seems similar to the "virtue signaling" attack. But instead of opponents being charged with hypocrisy, they are accused of being (1) privileged, (2) vain, and (3) either senseless or indifferent towards the well-being of others. It seems to me this is suggesting these people don't ever deserve to take part in democracy, which is worrying.
Given HN's user base, if the author is correct, his hypothesis would predict that the users of HackerNews are disproportionately likely to hold these luxury beliefs.
In contrast, the less well off stand to lose so much more.
Take plant based meats to save the world belief. They cost double or quadruple the price of normal meat. Given how people live pay check to pay check, living out that ideal will cause them to suffer.
Luxury beliefs sound like conspicuous consumption for beliefs. The analogy also works in that some people "boast" of having certain beliefs in the same way some people might think very highly of themselves by, say, wearing loud brand name clothing. In both cases, others (perhaps with more taste) may not be as impressed.
Of the people who have obtained a restraining order, I wonder what percentage want to defund the police.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
It is still evident today if you know or interact with any truly upper-class people. There are still variations in the names for some things which persist even now.
Her point is that this effect is way bigger in 3rd world countries, where these kinds of beliefs signal alignment with "The West" and the status that comes with that.
If you don't work hard, you probably won't be successful. But if hard-work were sufficient for success then the richest person in the world, or the President, or however we measure success would also the hardest working, which I don't think most people who agree with.
Similarly, although I think most sports-people would be acknowledged to be very hard-working, there is a matter of luck in their success - you need to find the right sport for you, you need to avoid injury, you need to perform at your best on the day of the big competition / when the talent-scout is visiting.
Perhaps it's just a problem of perspective - if you are relatively successful to begin with you can see that there are a lot of people less successful than you who worked harder by some metric and so would attribute success more to luck and connections than hard-work; if you are relatively unsuccessful, perhaps the correlation between success and hard-work is more immediate - you see that the people who work hard are more successful than you, and that those who slack-off are not.
Private jets, yachts, personal cooks and butlers are truer symbols of the upper class.
Those are all signs of wealth; most classy people would actively avoid them, even if they're wealthy.
I'm from the UK; I suspect that in the USA, it's easier to raise your social class by simply spending money. Here, social class by default is inherited. It's reinforced by where you went to school. Most people of high social class are slightly embarrassed about it; showing it off is seen as tacky.
Would be happy to hear examples of upper class UK people who still do their own laundry and flies coach.
Sometimes classy people fall on hard times; so yes, they make their own breakfast. But they don't lose their class.
Flying coach is also an extreme example; anyone who can afford business class avoids flying sardine-grade. And it's mostly business people that zoom around in private jets; those denote wealth and power, not class.
You can "upgrade" your class, sometimes; a commission in a "good" army regiment can get you upgraded. They train their officers in how to behave in classy company. Public schools serve the same purpose, but are less effective.
I'm not familiar with the domestic arrangements of any upper-class people, so I can't give you examples you asked for. But for the most part, they're not famous, so you wouldn't have heard of them anyway; after all, famous people can trade their fame for wealth. I've known quite a few people of class who had to work for a living, e.g. as teachers.
[Edit] OK, well-known example: Princess Diana (Diana Spencer). Until she hitched up with the Prince of Wales, she was a nursery teacher, and lived in shared accomodation (i.e. no servants). Of course, she was never stuck for a penny or two; the Spencers are a wealthy, aristocratic family.
"class" is a social status. "classy" is a behavioral style.
I can't say I agree with all the author writes, but that statement is spot on.
It said that only when people were safe and secure in their relationship, were they able to speak freely and voice their true opinions.
Maybe this is similar. If people are financially and physically secure can believe things openly, even if they have little to do with reality.
I'm thinking of Rudy Giuliani and Elon Musk, but examples abound.
In NYC for example theres 400 murders per year, and maybe 1 "bad shoot" by cops where someone ends up dead and the cop should be in jail.
Other jurisdictions the proportion can be far worse, and justifiably reform is being sought. LAPD has about 10x the cop on civilian shootings of NYPD.
In some areas it's like being worried about getting powder burns from the airbag in your car if you crash it and the airbag goes off. I'll keep the airbag, as will most people when you actually poll them.
Meanwhile some of the white liberals who were marching in summer 2020 are the first people to call the cops for trivialities like a noise complaint or car parked in their bike lane..
However, the conclusion presented here–taken at face value–is reductive and ironically spells out what appears to be the author’s own bias.
I’m not one to go out on a limb to defend affluence, but is it not enough to draw conclusions (whatever they may be) based on veracity and sound logic? Or shall we all just categorically dismiss the opinions of the person further up from you on the economic ladder?
In some quarters, superfluous weaponry is a status symbol. In related quarters, it might be ostentatious displays of crosses and other religious symbols. Does that mean guns or religion are bad? Maybe they are and maybe they aren't, but their use as status symbols doesn't determine the answer. What's more interesting is that OP omits such examples. All of their examples feed into a very particular political narrative, and cherry-picking is another thing that should make readers suspicious.
In the end, the article starts with a small and somewhat interesting observation, which is great, but then ascribes to it greater (and more particular) significance than it deserves.
Luxury beliefs are status symbols - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33547954 - Nov 2022 (45 comments)
Luxury Beliefs Are Status Symbols - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31713870 - June 2022 (1 comment)
Wikipedia lists nine possible explanations for stotting. The author, however, simply picks the one that fits his story.
There are also multiple explanations for sexual evolution.
I can hold the belief "Defund the Police" as a poor or as a rich. So it's easy to fake this signal. Also, I don't see any evidence that this belief is held mainly by rich people.
The "Defund The Police" movement has very specific and very well documented goals: Use police only for law-enforcement, and use specialized responders for non-law enforcement interactions. For example, you send mental health specialists when someone is threatening suicide. This reallocates funding from the police to more capable responders, but allows the remaining police to actually focus on law enforcement.
The author ignores this completely to make his argument.
Defund The Police is obviously such a terrible name if their true goals are as they say
Huh, super mysterious why this line of reasoning is popular amongst people who want the world to remain the same.
Or do you actually need more funding to spend on the other stuff? Which could in best case over some years decrease overall costs for society.
It's not well-defined at all. There are many people who do literally want to "defund" and abolish the police entirely:
"Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
The defund the police movement, at least the one in the US that gained popularity between 2017 and 2021, was explicitly aimed at eliminating the concept of policing. The belief is that because policing began with South Carolina slave patrols (it did not, but that doesn't matter) that the whole concept is corrupt and changes in execution won't fix the heart of the problem.
In order to fix it, policing needs to be entirely destroyed and rethought, from first principles. The funding would be allocated towards community building and outreach a la the Cure Violence programs in NYC. Since crime is of course solely an economic and mental health issue, with proper education, stipends and mental health resources crime can be eliminated without needing a police force at all.
Some of the elements aren't bad, but taken together it was not a good idea.
When the defund movement had people marching with ACAB & abolish posters regularly, it's hard to argue it meant anything else.
A thought exercise for the word re-definers defending the term:
If your CEO walked on stage and said "we are defunding __" where __ is the division you work in.. would you be like "oh good it means I'm going to work on better stuff now" or "oh shit let me get my resume up to date".
We can make lots of arguments like "they chose the wrong word" but I don't think we should argue that the word means something else just because it helps the slogan make more sense.
Yes! This one always cracked me up and is so American centric. As if history began in 1776 or 1492 or 1619 or whatever date people want to use. No other civilization in the history of humanity ever had law enforcement? We had to invent it, and of course the bad people invented it.
> The signal this sends to predators is essentially: “I’m so fit that I can afford to expend valuable energy to show you how strong and robust I am compared with the other gazelles.”
I always thought that high jumps of savannah herbivores is meant to give them better view of predators, especially in tall vegetation.
Isn't that a bit like observing that powerful people tend to be politicians, or that being wealthy is correlated with wanting to make a lot of money? Wealth, power and status are scarce goods, so it stands to reason that the people who possess them are the people who are most-motivated to seek them.
Luxury beliefs are certainly products of wealth - it requires a level of wealth to declare something is wrong rather than pragmatically keeping your head down and going with the flow. As our society becomes more wealthy, these beliefs gain mindshare and become widely accepted - democracy, natural rights, freedom from religion, worker protections, etc.
These things are products of wealth, a type of wealth in their own right, and we should be greatful that our society has become wealthy enough to declare that they should be universal. The author kind of references this at the very end, but then steers right back into the regressive fundamentalism as his closing conclusion.
Looking forward, many visions of progress are somewhat wrong, misguided, or at the very least overstated. Remember when we were all going to be living in Buckyballs? Which is why you have to kind of hold your nose to wade through much of the blue tribe groupthink. But the answer isn't to conclude the entire idea of progress is fallacious and dopamine-pine for the glory days of hard work that are comfortably in the past. Rather, it's to discuss and critique the forward-looking ideas on their own merits, despite the neo-clergy and other politickers that will attack you for it.
This is basically the old paradigm saying that "people don't make money, money makes money." No one became a billionaire without being in the right place and knowing the right people. Access to that environment can be only gained if one already has significant capital. I guess this is what they mean by luck.
Seems more wholesome than these zero sum games played by the rich.
The article only touches two unorthodox beliefs: that we should defund the police (really a preference, not a belief) and that success is largely attributable to luck.
But the elites are more likely to believe conventional wisdom on climate change, on whether vaccines work, on whether the Holocaust happened, on whether digesting genetically modified organisms changes the consumer's DNA, any number of things. Heterodox beliefs in these areas do seem consistent with the hypothesis of in-group signaling, but not with signaling status.
Wanting to defund the police is likely correlated with not needing the police -- but that's likely simple ignorance, not status signaling.
Why the elites would be more likely to say luck is important is not obvious to me, but a single example does not justify the sweeping generalization that this article makes.
Or with police being a net-negative to your life. Like living in a disproportionately policed area.
Or having a disproportionately policed skin color.
The poll is pretty clear, defund the police doesn't mean anarchy, it means replacing it. The how's a bit up in the air, but it's more about how irredeemable the current system seems to someone.
Is this why humans dance?
> They can afford to hold this position, because they already live in safe, often gated communities. And they can afford to hire private security.
This isn't what defund the police was about at all and is just a strawman to stop inquisitions into the actual point of the defund the police movement.
> In the United States, "defund the police" is a slogan that supports removing funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community resources. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police
Defund the police was never a anarcho communist feel good movement despite what articles like this will guide you believe.
That said, the slogan was slightly ambiguous so it was absolutely destroyed in the "marketplace of ideas". Apparently defunding the police actually means get rid of the police entirely. I guess the slogan had to be "decrease the budget, not entirely remove it just less money, for the police and move that money into other prevention and treatment methods for community support".
In this article titled, "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police":
"Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol... (https://archive.is/H293i)
Just because a minority of people have a terrible opinion doesn't mean the entire movement does.
Also even the author doesn't believe they can actually abolish the police.
> I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power — whether you want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent — here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities.
You made the following claim:
>> This isn't what defund the police was about at all and is just a strawman to stop inquisitions into the actual point of the defund the police movement.
I was merely providing an example, published in a paper of record in the U.S., that claims to speak for a "we", to show that indeed the spokespeople for the movement are unambiguous in what "defund" means. The article says "we mean" not "I mean".
> Just because a minority of people have a terrible opinion doesn't mean the entire movement does.
Certainly, intransigent minorities tend to drive movements and protests. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Meanwhile the "larpers" attend protests and change profile pictures and "stand with" and chant slogans. That's the luxury belief part.
WW2 Germany was probably similar in the sense that the majority were silent while the radicals were outspoken?
Nonetheless, be careful when you defend a radical movement by asserting that, well actually, they meant a more moderate position:
"[T]he motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you retreat to an obvious, uncontroversial statement, and say that was what you meant all along, so you’re clearly right and they’re silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement." https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bri...
The single most important predictor of economic success in life is the wealth of your parents: luck. Maybe some people find this “discouraging” and would prefer if it were not true, or if people did not believe it. But it is true. Social mobility in the United States in general is fairly low.
Personally I prefer to know the truth and to work to fix things I think are unfair, rather than proposing that we just adopt viewpoints that make people into better workers.