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Why would you write a long-winded op about how your opponents are all idiots when you could have just gone to a website like the American Conservative or National Review or even Breitbart and found a summary of your opponents positions written in their own words? You don't even have any quotations from them. Is there any actual research behind your summary or did you just write it from the gut based on a few half-remembered arguments you've gotten into?rudatron posted:It is if you're arguing it's a material sacrifice. Police brutality and lovely services don't benefit white people, if anything have more successful black people would raise overall productivity = more stuff. Guy Goodbody posted:Like factsareuseless and rudatron said, getting people out of prisons would have other positive effects. A society that keeps people imprisoned for no reason is not a society already operating at maximum efficiency. The result wouldn't just be higher unemployment. I think that people's perceptions of where their interests lie are a bit more complicated than you're allowing here.
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Jan 10, 2017 18:34
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Also I'm gonna go ahead and say that any thread where every second post is by Brainiac Five is destined for great things. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 10, 2017 18:36
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rudatron posted:No, not at all Helsing, I'm sure their perceptions of their interests are more complex, but I'm talking about the reality. I'm just not sure how much we can separate someone's perceived interest from their actual interests. Let's say I undergo elective surgery to donate a kidney to a friend in need. I perceive this to be in my "interest" but am I actually mistaken about this? It doesn't seem like there's a coherent way to a find a correct answer here one way or the other, it just comes down to my personal preference and judgement. We can talk about racist societies operating below efficiency and thus producing lower standards of living (as measured in economic terms) but I think it's a fairly shallow interpretation of human psychology to think that their "real" interest always lies in whatever path will lead to the largest expansion of their material comforts. People desire to live for things larger than themselves and for people raised in certain cultural milieu that something can be a cultural or racial or otherwise sectarian identity that is necessarily defined in opposition to some kind of other.
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Jan 10, 2017 19:06
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rudatron posted:Human beings have certain easily observable and quantifiable desires - the desire for security, prosperity, purpose, community, etc. If you believe that 'sectarian identities' are part of those desires (and that such identities can only ever exist in opposition to some other identity), then you're arguing that racism is eternal. I do not agree with that. I think racism exists because it provides a feeling of an imagined community and security, as well as the (false) impression that there are people out there who 'get' you. There's nothing about those desires that necessitates the existence of something that they can only exist in opposition to, and that kind of thinking is a case of too much philosophical idealism. Does Man existing mean Woman must exist? Technically, but there's no special reasons humans must be men or women, perhaps in the future that distinction will no longer exist - that 'necessity' will have simply disappeared. I don't agree that "purpose" or "community" are "easily quantifiable" and I challenge you to actually quantify them in a way that isn't completely vague and tautological. As far as racism, it's a historical phenomenon and obviously the specific racial and sectarian prejudices plauging the world today are not eternal categories, they're constantly evolving and sensitive to context. But in a larger sense I would say that yes, my own belief is that prejudices and identity-formation based on othering appear to be fairly basic psychological traits and a political philosophy that assumes these tendencies can be permanently overcome is getting dangerously close to utopian. Even if we build a more just society in which these othering tendencies are sublimated into harmless conflicts, there will still always be a lurking danger of these sentiments reappearing in a more harmful form in the future, because humans seem to have an innate capacity for group-based prejudice and I don't think that capacity can be permanently eliminated. I don't want to come off as saying that racism can never be eliminated because I think any specific instance or racism or sexism or any other prejudice is the result of a specific historical context, which is changeable. But reducing our opponents to irrational caricatures isn't necessarily the best way to develop good strategies to fight them. Racism isn't just an irrational attempt to accumulate material goods, it's a very important way that many people construct their identities and we need to recognize that if we're going to develop effective anti-racist strategies. Just dismissing it as some kind of false consciousness seems dangerous to me as it could lead us to develop the wrong intuitions about the best way to counter racist trends in society.
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Jan 10, 2017 19:39
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rudatron posted:We don't have any statistics! We've got to deal with the information we have, and the information we have is that America, as a whole, is strongly reacting against what they see as people who are out of touch with them. We are losing, not winning, losing. Strategy must be reassessed. Here's a hypothesis: activists practices are backfiring. Is it 100% true, beyond any reasonable doubt? No. Should it be dismissed totally? No. While activist call out culture does seem to drive away potential allies in some cases I think its real liability isn't that it hurts people's feelings but rather the attitudes and worldviews it tends to cultivate. I think Frosted Flake was onto something when he suggested there's a lot of social climbing happening here. I might go a step further and say in many cases the activist left slips into a pseudo-religious moral tone where discussions of concrete strategic or organizational goals become secondary to establishing and policing political purity. Quite often political organizing seems to play second fiddle to cultural criticism. The result is that a bunch of people with middle class educations and a strong command of esoteric social justice vocabularies are able to advance their own positions without actually building up organizations that would be politically strong enough to challenge the status quo. I mean, any successful anti-establishment movement is going to upset people and step on toes. Saying mean words to your enemies on twitter or in a university department meeting isn't necessarily the end of the world, it's not even necessarily a tactical mistake. But interacting with a lot of leftist activists these days you start to get the sense that they have cultivated a worldview so far removed from achieving material political victories, and so focused on winning basically pointless arguments within their own limited (and typically very academic) sphere of personal daily life, that the result is a movement of priestly scolds rather than real political activists.
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Jan 10, 2017 19:54
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rudatron posted:'easily observable', not easily quantifiable. In principle they must be quantifiable, emotions are just chemicals after all. In this context what's the operational difference between 'extremely likely in any scenario we'll encounter in our lifetimes' and 'innate / eternal'? I'll concede the terminology if you can point out some concrete way in which this distinction actually makes a difference. Beyond that I'm not entirely sure how much we really disagree on and how much we're just applying different descriptions to the same underlying phenomena. If we agree that there's more than just economic interest at play and that racism can't be entirely reduced to irrationality then I have no problem agreeing that material considerations such as security and prosperity play a significant role in how we construct and propagate identities. However, what I've found is that when you adhere to strongly to the "racism is just false consciousness" argument you can end up with a dangerously simplified perspective. Have you ever read David Harvey's "Short History of Neoliberalism"? It has some useful information in it but its coverage of how political consent for neoliberal policies was established in the United States spend almost zero time describing race relations. I think Harvey actually goes so far as to literally refer to racism as a button that the ruling class can press whenever it wants to in order to win concessions from the white working class. That kind of analysis is reductive to the point of stupidity and it seriously damages the rest of Harvey's analysis and presently a falsely simplified picture of social relations in the United States.
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Jan 10, 2017 20:15
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rudatron posted:But ideally social climbing shouldn't be the problem. Any organization worth its salt is going to try and channel ambitious individuals into serving the goals of the group as a whole. Such people are going to exist, so why not use them? The problem is that the 'method' for actualizing that ambition, right now, consists entirely of saying the right words and guilt-tripping as many people as possible. The more you can display how much of a victim you are, or conversely, how the person you dislike is secretly victimizing others, the greater your own voice. That's exactly my point though. The tactics and broader mindset being cultivated here are inimical to the movement's success. I'm not sure that's entirely a philosophical flaw though, I also think it reflects the middle class and pedagogical orientation of much of the activist movement. People get their activist training in academic institutions or narrowly focused internet communities and I think their attitudes and behaviours often reflect that, whereas past generations of leftists often emerged from a very different context.
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Jan 10, 2017 20:19
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61,900,651 people voted for Trump.
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Jan 10, 2017 23:12
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Not many Trump voters out there. Hell, they're only about as numerous as the population of France or Italy or the UK or Thailand. No big deal, I'm sure they're gonna fade away on their own, no big deal.
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Jan 10, 2017 23:16
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cosmicprank posted:My question is, is labeling each other racists and further contributing to a cultural division that will make it harder to come together on this ACTUALLY CRITICAL ISSUE, what you really want to be doing? I don't know, this is just one person's take, I get that some of you have lives colored by discrimination and poo poo, but the unfortunate fact is there is nothing more important. I really wish Gore never made the documentary because it just turned it into another political issue instead of the only issue that actually MATTERS other than not engaging in nuclear war. Why do you think nobody did anything about global warming during the Bush or Clinton years when all these academic debates about white privilege were much less mainstream and prior to An Inconvenient Truth coming out? Singling out those two issues as somehow being uniquely disruptive to taking action on climate change doesn't make any sense. There have been decades of ignored warnings and decades of American political culture become less and less capable of taking on serious challenges. This comes off as you taking a very serious issue -- climate change -- and using it as an excuse to rag on one of your pet peeves. Can you actually demonstrate some kind of strong link between academic debates on racism and inaction on climate change?
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Jan 11, 2017 02:55
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cosmicprank posted:What is the pet peeve you're telling me that I have again? The fact that millions of people on the internet argue about asinine social issues instead of do ANYTHING to make the world more habitable for future generations while considering themselves virtuous for securing intellectual internet victories over the "other side"? Then yep, that's my pet peeve. What I'm asking you is why you picked this particular issue or this particular thread when your criticism would equally apply to the vast majority of political discourse? Our inability to deal with climate change is by far the greatest failure of our society in probably our entire history. It just kind of comes off as though you're being rather selective in who you blame here. Yeah arguments on the internet about microaggressions come off as petty and self-indulgent in the face of climate change, but so do people arguing about gun control or abortion or taxes or most other issues.
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Jan 11, 2017 03:06
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