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.
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.
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.
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.