Re: We are all Slave now.
 

You didn't read the article.

TM

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I think you have to look at these things over a historical timeline. We can disagree on that. I see your point.

The question this exchange highlights is, what's white? And built into that, is white a class construct?

Where do I slot my Indian neighbor? The Pakistanis? The Jews? How about the Asians? I've always assumed the Syrians, Lebanese, and Latino people I knew were white. Is that incorrect?

Is the Syrian Christian family part of the "majority," but the Syrian Muslim family a "minority?"

Does each discrete non-minority have a unique identity with unique forms of oppression?

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

hope T doesn't have any deals closing this week.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I don't care whether he's left or right, he's a fucking bigot.

Dismissed.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I did, but quickly. I'll look again.

Is To! Is Not!
 

Reopened.

Sam Harris is not even close to a bigot.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Thanks for this article. I haven't seen it.

TM

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Don't expect any crazy exchanges in that podcast. The conversation is lucid, thoughtful, and low key.

The one where Klein and Harris go at it is way hotter. Klein makes some really solid points, but in the end, Harris corners him on being pro-censorship and Klein, realizing he's in a tight spot, pretty much concedes that yes, he is.

I have to respect Klein's candor in it.

Re: Fantastic
 

First of all, what difference does it make? The point is that there is a built-in advantage that perpetuates itself.

Second, it's not just because there are more whites. The problem is the positions whites are in based on a hundreds of years of huge advantages. So not only are there more whites. There are way more rich and powerful whites.

Third, no matter how much you try to ignore the fact that white people absolutely do not associate with black and other minority people in a significant way and do not formulate relationships that are deep and meaningful in a way that would create opportunities at the same levels for black people, that fact cannot be avoided.

I don't think you know what "anecdote" means.

If you want to argue that wealthy and powerful (even relatively speaking) white people have tons of black friends, you can have that argument on that island you're sitting on by yourself.

No need to dignify something so obvious. It stands on its own.

TM

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I'm not clicking on that. Hell, it takes everything I have to not skip Sebby's posts altogether.

TM

Re: Fantastic
 

You cited a difference. I offered simple math explaining it.

I didn't say it the math explained it in total. But it explains an awful lot of it. And you overlooked that math.

I'm not ignoring it. I accept most of that.

I do not accept that this applies to all minorities if one lumps Jews, Asians, Middle-Easterners, Indians, and Latinos into the "minorities." But you're correct regarding Blacks. That segregation persists.

You asserted that whites with minority friends tended not to be powerful whites. This could only based on anecdata.

Since we're comparing anecdotes, my observation would be that the more educated and intelligent a person is, the less he focuses on race or ethnic background. I'm more likely to see a diverse crowd at a wealthy person's party than at a middle class white party.

But that's just more "bullshit" from me, of course.

If we've reached the nadir where an article stating that white people are defensive about race issues cannot be criticized without the infantile response, "See, you proved the point!", this place is done. If a person is going to engage in that silliness, he might as well title the thread, "This Post Is Irrefutable: Read It, Accept It in Total, and Don't Dare Reply!"

...Actually, that title pretty much sums up the United States at the moment, right and left.

TM[/QUOTE]

Re: Fantastic
 

Yo, whatever man.

TM

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

They were not white at the time, just as latinx immigrants are not white now, regardless of how white they look.

But they could access whiteness, historically often by placing themselves in contrast with black people, who are obviously not white.

"White" is a construct that's meaning can and has changed over time.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

oh Fuck. It's one thing when ggg or T maps my post.......:confused:

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I would love a little button at the bottom of comments on an article that could be clicked that points this out. Makes for easier scrolling through.

Report from the Patch
 

Michigan is a blue state, that, as we know, went red. Our state legislature is heavily R, but that is Gerrymandering. We've regularly had R governors and the odd Senator- but to win statewide they have to be a business R, who feels close to liberal on abortion/gay rights etc.

So I was curious what the upcoming R primaries look like- are the candidates distancing from Trump? I watch little live TV, not claiming to read constantly so I don't watch anything (Hi Ty!), I constantly watch stuff, but mostly things like Mr. Ed on disc.

So I only recently saw the current TV ads- there is a smear ad for candidate 1 showing candidate 2- film of him saying things like, "Of course I don't agree with what Trump does, I mean, the stuff with women." 3 or 4 things quite similar.

The voice over then explains that #2 cannot be trusted to help move Trump's good works forward.

2's answer? I expected, "No shit. I'm not that kind of R." He'll need that to win in November.

But instead, the answer was film continuing after the earlier quotes- in each case he went on to say- "but, I can live with that behavior because he's the best President ever!" Or something like that.

There is no attempt to distance, to the contrary.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I think your hostility to Google and their cafeterias, or the notion of them that you have, has not so much to do with the way they make food available to their employees. The Google cafeteria I went to wasn't "pimped out," whatever that means. The eBay cafeteria I went to wasn't subsidized, as far as I can tell, and I don't think you really object to subsidies there -- or do you think law-firm cafeterias need to calculate the market cost of the rent they don't pay and increase their prices by that amount? Surely no.

Aaron Peskin's proposal is a stupid idea. If, like some of us, you work at a company that brings in a decent lunch and you much prefer that to having to go out and get food, it's hard to understand why taking away the former option makes anyone better off. But if you have a bee in your bonnet about something else, maybe it sounds awesome.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

What bias? Roberts is reporting about a poll. Seriously?

I was amazed that anyone could think that Harris came off well in that exchange. Maybe you can quote where Klein "argues for censorship in academia," because that's not what I recall. (Or maybe you can't.)

Re: Report from the Patch
 

Same in Florida - the current Ag Commissioner Adam Putnam was expected to cruise to the GOP nomination and then to the governor’s mansion. Now he’s down by double-digits in the polls to a relatively junior congressman endorsed by President Trump. And the New York Times is ON IT.

Re: Report from the Patch
 

"It's always the economy, stupid."

The way to beat Trump in a state like that is to cite wages lagging, and how little of the tax cuts went to lower to middle class voters. Also blame the gas price increases on Trump's middle eastern policy (that's untrue, but whatever) and highlight the damage he's done to Obamacare.

Emphasizing Russia, pee tapes, and #metoo is the dangerous and unnecessary route. Use those only as icing where necessary.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Here's the transcript:

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/1721024...script-podcast

Where does Harris corner Klein on being pro-censorship?

You didn't mention that much of what they're discussing is whether Charles Murray's work should be taken seriously. Do you think Charles Murray should be taken seriously? Do you think that declining to invite Charles Murray to speak at a college is the same thing as censorship? Do you think that Charles Murray has been censored?

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Harris says Murray's work should be considered. Klein argues we must consider the science within the social context before just throwing it out there. It's an artful dodge, but amounts to, "Murray says terribly uncomfortable things. We should weight their impact before debating them on purely scientific bases."

Klein has a point. (I also think Murray's work is scientifically lacking because he's a gross generalist who loves dividing complex groups into black and white.) Murray's stuff is incendiary and we should be careful about those discussions. Where Klein goes too far is suggesting the potential social damage from debating Murray augurs in favor of pre-emptively marginalizing Murray, effectively censoring him. Harris's point - let the science do the talking and debunk Murray as it may - is far more compelling and intellectually honest.

Re: Report from the Patch
 

I was talking about the senate. If the R candidate that emerges runs on a Trump-ie agenda he will lose big. The Dems have winning michigan statewide sorted.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Klein is incredibly slippery:
__________

Ezra Klein

I think there is what you would call confusion here. I do think it’s just important to say this. I have not criticized you, and I continue to not, for having the conversation. I’ve criticized you for having the conversation without dealing with and separating it out and thinking through the context and the weight of American history on it.

Sam Harris

The weight of American history is completely irrelevant to—

Ezra Klein

It can’t possibly be irrelevant on something that even you admit is environmental!

Sam Harris

No, the only thing that is relevant. Yes, but that part of the conversation has been had. You don’t have to talk about slavery. You don’t have to talk about the specific injustices in the past to have a conversation about the environmental factors that very likely keep people back. I completely agree with you that it is right to worry that the environment for blacks, or for any other group that seems not to be thriving by one metric or another, that the environment almost certainly plays a role. And the environment, we just know that the environment plays a role across the board in behavioral genetics. There’s no one who’s arguing that any of these traits — forget about intelligence, anything we care about — is 100 percent heritable. It’s just that nothing that complex is 100 percent heritable.

And again, I have zero interest in establishing differences among races, and my reading of Murray and, again, he said this on my podcast several times, his focus is not on groups, his focus is on individuals. It’s just a fact that individuals find themselves with whatever cognitive toolkit they have, however they got it, based on genes and environment, and we have a society that is massively rewarding specific tools.

No one on Murray’s side of this debate is saying that all social self-worth is indexed by IQ scores. No one is saying that, and this is the point I was trying to make when I said, “Look I am inferior to John von Neumann?” I don’t think so and I don’t think you think so.

What’s at stake here is not a person’s intrinsic worth, right? And using words like inferior completely loads the dice here. It’s a highly charged, moralistic assertion, which just does not map onto any sane person’s thinking about this. Yes it mapped on to Thomas Jefferson’s thinking about this, but to summarize what I’m doing with the slaveholders of our distant past and talk about these things as though it’s a single set of ideas, it’s completely unfair journalistically, and it has the consequence that I’ve described.

. . .

Ezra Klein

Look, you talked about the stakes of this conversation, and there are stakes to it. Some of them are policy stakes. Those are the ones Charles Murray is fundamentally interested in, ones that when you asked him why you should have this conversation he kept bringing up. There are stakes in how we treat each other and what kind of groups we see in each other. I think using these conversations to become more precise, as opposed to less precise — using these conversations to begin to question social categories that we build for political purposes in this country, as opposed to validate them in strange ways that don’t have consistency across them — I think we could be doing a better job on that.

In all this, what I would say, and I’ll let this be my final point, and I appreciate the time you’ve given to this conversation today, is I think that to have this conversation well, to be ready for what may or may not come down the pike, to be able to talk about this, as you say, like adults, I think that you would be doing your audience a service to let go of some of the feelings you have about what you call identity politics and what you see in others with identity politics and have more conversations about race in America and the way it is built and they way it is seen and the way it acts on people’s life chances.

I think that there is room to have conversations about genetic findings, but because we are mapping those conversations onto social-political realities, having more conversations where you deliver more nuance and more understanding, where you yourself get more understanding of the social-political realities — I feel uncomfortable being the person on the other side of the chair here. I don’t think — I’m not an expert on race and IQ — but I’m also not someone who I think is the right spokesperson for the experience of other races in this country. And I don’t think that is me falling into a trap of identity politics. I think that is me being honest about what are the limits of my own perception. There’s a lot I can learn, but, you know, I’m a political journalist and I’ve only learned so much.

_______

Klein can't come right out and say he believes Murray should be shunned. Instead, he takes a roundabout, arguing over and over about how Murray is interested in policy. In doing this, he's trying to remove Murray from the scientific realm and put him in the policy realm. This affords him a stronger argument that Murray's policy prescriptions are odious. It entirely avoids the debate over whether Murray's science is lacking, which I think it very much is, as his generalized groupings are cultural, and cultural studies is a soft-headed and hardly rigorous field. (Harris is dead wrong is asserting that Murray focuses on individuals. I see none of that in Murray, and all of the contrary.)

Harris, OTOH, says let Murray's "science" be put to the test as science.

I favor letting a person like Murray have his day on the proofs and fail on those proofs. What on earth could be the objection to that?

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

That bears only the faintest resemblance to what Klein said. Actually, that's too kind. Among other things, Klein repeatedly points out to Harris that academics say that Murray's work is shite, and that Harris is bending over backwards to avoiding acknowledging that. For example:

The question you have to ask yourself is, why is Harris working so hard to rehabilitate Murray's work? Why all the preening about his courage in being able to consider the science, and the courage only to consider pro-Murray science? Why is that so compelling to Harris, and why is it so compelling to you?

Murray is a political hack. He has been a political hack for ever. He clearly has an agenda. Why does Harris so easily impute bad motives to people on one side of the spectrum, like Klein, but simply ignore that Murray's work is in the name of trying to get the government to do less for people who are less well off? Doesn't that seem relevant to you?

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I asked you where Klein was -- as you called him -- pro-censorship. You respond by calling him slippery, and quoting a huge chunk of text that says, well, it's not clear to me why your point is. Someone is being slippery here, and it's not Klein or Harris.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Klein is absolutely being pro-censorship. He's accusing Harris of failing to view a scientific argument in necessary social context - to work to soften a debate in advance. He's saying Harris is acting dangerously.

Klein is attempting to prevent Harris from a discourse, not unlike what you are attempting here.

You know I see exactly what you're doing, as does anyone else viewing this back and forth honestly.

You're going to try to corner me as someone with ill intent. This is quite cheap, but you've trended cheap as of late, so it's hardly unexpected.

I am a free speech absolutist. I do not like any form of censorship, particularly those attempted on the sly.

And you still have not answered my inquiry: What on earth is lost in letting Murray, or any other "intellectual," fail on the merits?

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I think Klein and Murray are birds of a feather. Bullshitters with agendas.

Re: Report from the Patch
 

Same in Minnesota, where the two main Rs in the governor's race are competing to sound the most anti-immigrant and pro-45. Hard to imagine that's really a winning strategy, but maybe they back off post primary? Especially as a recent poll (small sample, hilariously large margin of error) showed them both losing by double digits to the top Dems.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Okay, this is going to be the last response because I just don't care anymore. I thought it was a simple fix that would actually help local businesses without doing any real harm to companies like Google. You don't or don't care because...progress. Fine.

But I can't let you get away with this bullshit. Google's cafeteria in New York (and the ones cited in the article I posted awhile ago--and I'm sure lots of others) are absolutely insane. I have a friend who works there. I met him for lunch. The cafeteria is huge, the food is everything from serious gourmet to whatever type of fast food you want. It is absolutely overwhelming, delicious, amazing. And it's free (or complimentary). And then there are snack rooms and coffee spots everywhere. It's crazy. Hell, if I worked there, I wouldn't go out either. So, like I said, there isn't a business that can compete with a behemoth who can spend truckloads of cash on something like this.

If you put Google on a block in Chelsea, rent goes up for everyone. That's great news for the suburbs and Brooklyn where those employees will live. But if Google is like a cruise ship sitting on land and none of the employees spend any money at any of the businesses that are in that neighborhood, those businesses, who used to service the people who didn't bring their lunch (and that example below is so fucking stupid, I'm really surprised you included it in your argument), fail. That means that there are many empty spots (or tons of turnover because in NYC people take those spots and then realize two months in the expenses are unsustainable) and the people who live in those neighborhoods suffer even more. No one at Google even notices, because they don't give a fuck about the neighborhood. They are their own neighborhood.

The big negative for Google is that their employees lose a perk. They're not going to lose employees because of that. The big negative for everyone else in the neighborhood is that expenses have gone way up, restaurants leave, and you have a bunch of rich tech assholes treating your neighborhood like a parking lot.

Your example of law firms is not on point. Sure a few of them have cafeterias. Some are even subsidized. But they're simple, small cafeterias. When I used to work at White & Case, I went here and there, but not that much. If I wanted a slice or a burger or a specific type of salad, I had to go outside. Google now owns two adjacent city blocks in Chelsea. That's insane. Not terrible. Just crazy. It would be amazing for the businesses in the area if they didn't have a cafeteria.

I can't speak on a personal level to how San Fran and Silicon Valley residents feel about tech people, but I've heard that almost everyone hates them because they buy up everything in residential neighborhoods and do shit like this where they work so businesses and the people who live there don't like them much either. Maybe I'm wrong.

Ah. Well, I guess that settles it.

These last two sentences are completely ridiculous and a waste of the time it took your sweaty little fingers to type out.

TM

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Murray's agenda is, explicitly, white supremacy and male supremacy. He writes books arguing that whites are better than blacks and men are better than women.

What do you view Klein's agenda as?

As to Harris' discourse, its been dismissed. Blather all he wants, the right approach is to not feed the troll. No one should bother listening to him, engaging with him, showing up on a show to debate him.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

By the way, I once went down this rabbit hole, read Murray's original trash book and a couple of the rebuttals, discovered I'd not get that time back, and that I should have dismissed him as a nutjob long before.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I neglected to respond to this.

I can't speak for Harris, but I find Klein particularly offensive because Vox is a stridently biased website that works assiduously to hide its bias and present itself as a neutral arbiter. And arbiter isn't chosen there for lack of a better pronoun. Vox, and Klein particularly, offer themselves as authorities. The writing always holds the undercurrent, "We're the enlightened. We've the last word."

Except the site sucks. It's as predictable as Fox and only differs in extent of effort to cover up its slip. It'll almost always offer some lengthy, seemingly thoughtful assessment of an issue ending with the accepted liberal doctrinaire view.

Charles Murray is a hack. He has an agenda and he dressed it up with science. Much of what he posits can be debunked with science. Klein is a hack. He has an agenda. Much of what he posits can be debunked with economics/political science/basic reasoning.

Except they differ in one regard that makes Klein far more dangerous than Murray. Klein deems himself (particularly in that argument with Harris) a worthy judge of what's within and what's outside the spheres of deviancy. I'm sympathetic to people doing this (I love William Henry's In Defense of Elitism). Sometimes, someone simply has to stand up and say, "Nope. You can't argue flat earth theories. You're wasting our time." Klein, however, is not worthy to shine Henry's shoes. Klein's a predictable and quite dull writer who'll 90% of the time default to an accepted liberal narrative. He has no business judging how or whether the views of Murray or Harris should be considered.

Hearing Klein lecture Harris on how Harris ought to reason (to fit Klein's sensitivities) is mind-bending. Here's a blogger telling a neuroscientist with a staggering resume that he ought to temper his approaches to suit the sensibilities of the blogger's audience. He's completely confused as to who is the elite in the room.

I think this stems from confusion that to hold an empathetic viewpoint somehow makes one more enlightened, "better" than the non-empathetic. Klein and his ilk, who hold views similar to a lot of people here, confuse tolerance and a desire to see fairness as superior, perhaps even smarter, views. That's comforting, of course. But it's also untrue. To desire to help people, as opposed to someone like Charles Murray, does not render one more intelligent or enlightened. It makes one a nicer, kinder person. But it's not proof of some broader intellect that ought to give a blogger gravitas to tell a neuroscientist how he ought to approach scientific matters.

This is why Klein irks me. This is why I'll take the other side of a coin here all the time. Charles Murrays are easy to debunk. Murray's a crank howling into the wind. The Ezra Kleins of the world are officious consensus builders. They have a much more pernicious effect - attempting with some success to craft a narrative of what's acceptable commentary and what's not. These people have no business telling a serious thinker like Harris how or what to think. They are charlatans selling the feel good angle to an often Pavlovian audience, and they should be viewed with intense skepticism at every turn.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Agreed.

To feed his audience what it wants to hear. He's a fabulous brand architect. He gets a 120 IQ set of readers, plays to their sympathies and views, and leaves them thinking they're in the 130-140 range. He pushes well crafted tripe.

Slate's similar. They're both the high end of the HuffPo Continuum.

We're never going to agree on this. Suffice it to say, I hold a 100% opposed view. Let's leave it at that.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I was pretty sure that Mueller would not be trial counsel against Manafort, but hadn't seen anything on point, but I just found this:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...rial-who-s-who

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Is Harris the guy interviewing the Columbia student?

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Even better - live blogging. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...rosecutionopen

Lawyers dwell on small details, since daddy had to lie.
 

Splendid! Thanks, Less.

ETA - I wonder if Mr. Manafort’s daughters will be called to authenticate their text messages re the “blood money” he earned from his work in the Ukraine.*

* Dear Ty: please bite me regarding the “the.” Love, Not Bob

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I'm not as upset at people who make their living confirming the biases of their audience as I am at people who make their living pushing white supremacy.

I will say, I veer away from cable news and toward reading stuff just because of all the confirmation bias that is pedaled. Even if some are better at it than others (the Joy Reids of the world tend to get their facts right, something you don't see with most of the Fox Mafia).

And I especially avoid cable news gatherings of all-white manels like that video you had. Usually a sign what's they are doing is completely masturbatory.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Bull. Shit. Quote where he is "pro-censorship." That is complete bullshit. He is pro-not-taking-Murray-seriously, which is not at all the same thing as saying that Murray should be censored.

That, too, is bullshit. Klein is in an extended conversation with Harris, which is the exact opposite of preventing him from a discourse. I am in an extended conversation with you, which is the exact opposite to attempting to censor you. I have the technological means to censor you, by modifying or deleting your posts. Instead, I am exposing that you are full of shit, which is something quite different.

Fantastic.

Haven't said anything about your intent, have I? You are doing that yourself.

Why are you trying so hard to defend Murray's views? That is, after all, what you are doing. You can explain your own intent -- I am not putting words in your mouth.

Great. When you see censorship, let me know.

Absolutely nothing. Murray has failed on the merits, and Harris is pretending otherwise. Why does Harris just ignore that Murray's work is terrible, that Murray has an agenda, and that reputable experts have said so? Why do you ignore that?