Objectively intelligent.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Adder

Except way more than you are willing to accept actually is.

That's an argument of degree reasonable people can entertain. Perhaps wokeism is best considered by lumping its adherents/would-be adherents into two groups:

1. People who assess race's importance in terms of degree;
2. People who insist it is primary in all things

The former would be people like Michael Eric Dyson. The latter would be indefensible binary thinkers like Kendri.

A convenient test to assess valid and invalid thinkers would be to ask whether one insists that there are only racists and anti-racists, and no other categories. If you hold that view, I don't think you can be taken seriously.

The invention of new duties on the part of others is fascinating. That seems to come up a lot in moral panics.

Related: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/w...versities.html

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

That's an argument of degree reasonable people can entertain. Perhaps wokeism is best considered by lumping its adherents/would-be adherents into two groups:

1. People who assess race's importance in terms of degree;
2. People who insist it is primary in all things

The former would be people like Michael Eric Dyson. The latter would be indefensible binary thinkers like Kendri.

A convenient test to assess valid and invalid thinkers would be to ask whether one insists that there are only racists and anti-racists, and no other categories. If you hold that view, I don't think you can be taken seriously.

The invention of new duties on the part of others is fascinating. That seems to come up a lot in moral panics.

Related: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/w...versities.html

The distinction you are making exists only in your head.

Oh, and just to mess with your head, I don't think there are any non-racists.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Adder

The distinction you are making exists only in your head.

Oh, and just to mess with your head, I don't think there are any non-racists.

Bollocks. That's exactly Kendi's point. You're anti-racist or you're racist.

Regarding what you think, I think I know why you think it. Or at least Paul Graham does:

In the last few years, many of us have noticed that the customs protecting free inquiry have been weakened. Some say we're overreacting — that they haven't been weakened very much, or that they've been weakened in the service of a greater good. The latter I'll dispose of immediately. When the conventional-minded get the upper hand, they always say it's in the service of a greater good. It just happens to be a different, incompatible greater good each time.

As for the former worry, that the independent-minded are being oversensitive, and that free inquiry hasn't been shut down that much, you can't judge that unless you are yourself independent-minded. You can't know how much of the space of ideas is being lopped off unless you have them, and only the independent-minded have the ones at the edges. Precisely because of this, they tend to be very sensitive to changes in how freely one can explore ideas. They're the canaries in this coalmine.

The conventional-minded say, as they always do, that they don't want to shut down the discussion of all ideas, just the bad ones.

http://www.paulgraham.com/conformism.html

Graham is trying to explain how herds of passive, easily led people get behind fashionable ideas that they think are "for the greater good" and seek to squelch dissent or critique of those ideas.

I think a point subsumed within that it is that a lot of people get behind these ideas and don't seek to squelch dissent, but instead seek to, as Steve Bannon would say, "flood the space." To poke holes in wokeism is to find ones self at odds with a huge number of people Who Are Really Invested In Insisting Its A Strong And Intellectually Defensible Movement.

They'll fight to the death on these points, creating an amusing paradox -- conventional herd thinking channeled into rhetoric of revolution and aggressive social change.

Pick your quadrant.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Pick your quadrant.

What if bias and racism are the bigger threat to free inquiry?

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

What if bias and racism are the bigger threat to free inquiry?

Then you’re dreaming, or really high.

Wake up, or sober up, and ask a relevant question.

[Pretty Little Flower]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Then you’re dreaming, or really high.

Wake up, or sober up, and ask a relevant question.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Then you’re dreaming, or really high.

Wake up, or sober up, and ask a relevant question.

I don't understand what Graham means when he says the customs protecting free inquiry have been weakened.

To me, the more salient change lately is the proliferation of ways for individuals to be published and heard, particularly in social media. The most recent example is Substack. This totally cuts against what Graham is saying. Niche voices can find their own audience without needing to worry about gatekeepers.

If you ask me, the bigger threat to the marketplace of ideas is the proliferation of people arguing in bad faith, and the channels dedicated to telling people whatever they want to hear. A huge proportion of Republicans think Biden stole the election.

If you were to take the complaints of minority journalists seriously -- I know, but just imagine with me -- then it's a real problem that their voices are underrepresented. Their stories are not being told or heard. That is a problem for free inquiry. I could try to translate that into terms you'd be more sympathetic to by saying that many voices seek to conform to what the (white) majority is saying, and that dissenting voices get squelched, or just not hired.

eta: Also, it's like there needs to be one conversation about the New York Times, and another conversation about the rest of the media. The New York Times is doing fine as a business and hires whoever it wants. It has an outsized importance right now because of the proliferation of other voices and because it has no competitor in setting the national conversation.

[Pretty Little Flower]

Hey RT, hope you guys are doing o.k. down there. My in-laws are in Houston and they have been without power, heat, and essentially without cell service for two days. They had to flee their house this morning because they ran out of things to burn (they had started burning old furniture from the basement, and a neighbor brought them some wood after cutting down a tree across the street but it was too green and frozen to burn). They were going to go to the office, but also no power or heat there, so they went to a coworker of my F-I-L, who has no power but somehow managed to get a generator and space heaters and is trying to get the inside temp of his house above 32 degrees. They would flee the city, but apparently the highways are closed and the other roads are dangerous as hell, with more snow and ice moving in. It sounds really grim.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower

Hey RT, hope you guys are doing o.k. down there. My in-laws are in Houston and they have been without power, heat, and essentially without cell service for two days. They had to flee their house this morning because they ran out of things to burn (they had started burning old furniture from the basement, and a neighbor brought them some wood after cutting down a tree across the street but it was too green and frozen to burn). They were going to go to the office, but also no power or heat there, so they went to a coworker of my F-I-L, who has no power but somehow managed to get a generator and space heaters and is trying to get the inside temp of his house above 32 degrees. They would flee the city, but apparently the highways are closed and the other roads are dangerous as hell, with more snow and ice moving in. It sounds really grim.

Just got off a conference call with two attorneys in Austin. Power is basically out unless you happen to live adjacent the Hospital district. The power isn't just downed lines but also transportation problems due to the icing. One was in the district and fine. The other was a single guy who had not thought of stocking food. He also lived outside the area with power. He told us about last night: he wandered among lots of others from restaurant to restaurant hoping to find one open. Eventually he found one, and spent three hours waiting for a sandwich. Post apocalypse sounding.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

I don't understand what Graham means when he says the customs protecting free inquiry have been weakened.

I think he means that the customary approach to free speech was to protect the rights of any group to speak, however fucked up what they say might be. ACLU defending Nazis in Skokie, etc.

The old rule was bad ideas would be countered by either being ignored or critiqued with other speech showing their flaws.

To me, the more salient change lately is the proliferation of ways for individuals to be published and heard, particularly in social media. The most recent example is Substack. This totally cuts against what Graham is saying. Niche voices can find their own audience without needing to worry about gatekeepers.

I think he's focusing initially on college campus intolerance and corporate toadying to left wing cancel mobs and extrapolating from there.

However, as to your point, I agree that Substack and other forms of direct online publishing have allowed more voices to proliferate. But Substack is a bit unique. It attracts voices who, to use Sam Harris's term, have cancel-proofed themselves. Taibbi, Sullivan, Greenwald, Harris... these people are beyond the reach of cancel hysterias. They actually profit from looking down their noses at those who'd seek to cancel them. Substack is like a finger in the eye of the current youth gestalt: An offending voice should not be countered, but silenced as much as possible, and have economic pain inflicted on it.

If you ask me, the bigger threat to the marketplace of ideas is the proliferation of people arguing in bad faith, and the channels dedicated to telling people whatever they want to hear. A huge proportion of Republicans think Biden stole the election.

That is a huge problem. It forces consumers of media to apply critical thinking and decide what's true and what's not. And worse, it allows intentionally self-deluding types ample falsehoods to pass back and forth to one another to silo themselves even more extremely.

However, the more the intolerant left seeks to purge the slightest offending voices from mainstream media, the more mainstream media becomes garbage. Garbage like what CNN has turned into -- ignoring riots in the streets in the summer, and treating the Capitol riot like the most important story of our lifetime. (It's not.) Or garbage like the argument, offered by numerous mainstream left-leaning sources, that rioting in the streets this summer did not spread Covid. (It did.) That kind of Fox-like "finger on the scale" reporting drives consumers away from mainstream media (no one trusts it anymore) and into the arms of the bad faith outlets of alternative media.

If you were to take the complaints of minority journalists seriously -- I know, but just imagine with me -- then it's a real problem that their voices are underrepresented. Their stories are not being told or heard. That is a problem for free inquiry. I could try to translate that into terms you'd be more sympathetic to by saying that many voices seek to conform to what the (white) majority is saying, and that dissenting voices get squelched, or just not hired.

You're speaking of the McNeil debacle, I assume. The voices of the co-workers who demanded his firing were not all minority. The most lurid and embarrassing reaches of these moral panics are made by white people who are caught up in purity tests. They treat "social justice" (which they define differently to suit whatever their current aim is) as a religion. Meanwhile, minority voices remain underrepresented. But the white clerisy of this new social justice religion gets its blood lust satisfied by economically harming McNeil.

eta: Also, it's like there needs to be one conversation about the New York Times, and another conversation about the rest of the media. The New York Times is doing fine as a business and hires whoever it wants. It has an outsized importance right now because of the proliferation of other voices and because it has no competitor in setting the national conversation.

You think so? I think WaPo is a very close second right now. But as they both have roughly the same exact slants, they might as well be Diet Coke and Coke Zero. Might as well consider them a single product.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I think he means that the customary approach to free speech was to protect the rights of any group to speak, however fucked up what they say might be. ACLU defending Nazis in Skokie, etc.

The old rule was bad ideas would be countered by either being ignored or critiqued with other speech showing their flaws.

If that's what he meant, he would have talked about the law and legal rights, not "customs," which are different.

And there have always been topics which "custom" has decided that do not warrant free inquiry. NAMBLA did not get invited to run op-eds when we were young, and they still don't.

I think he's focusing initially on college campus intolerance and corporate toadying to left wing cancel mobs and extrapolating from there.

Ah, yes, the left-wing cancel mobs. I thought about meeting up with one on Friday -- we were going to go to a golf-course and try to chant about the overuse of pesticides until all the golfers gave up and resigned their memberships. But it was raining, so I stayed in and listened to Terri Gross archives.

When you say college-campus intolerance, are you talking about Liberty University, yes?

However, as to your point, I agree that Substack and other forms of direct online publishing have allowed more voices to proliferate. But Substack is a bit unique. It attracts voices who, to use Sam Harris's term, have cancel-proofed themselves. Taibbi, Sullivan, Greenwald, Harris... these people are beyond the reach of cancel hysterias. They actually profit from looking down their noses at those who'd seek to cancel them. Substack is like a finger in the eye of the current youth gestalt: An offending voice should not be countered, but silenced as much as possible, and have economic pain inflicted on it.

My point is a broader one, which is that for decades now the technology to publish your views has gotten cheaper, and the opportunities have gotten broader. Substack is only the most recent example.

That is a huge problem. It forces consumers of media to apply critical thinking and decide what's true and what's not.

Lots of people decide wrong, so empirically it does seem to be a problem.

And worse, it allows intentionally self-deluding types ample falsehoods to pass back and forth to one another to silo themselves even more extremely.

Free inquiry doesn't seem to do society as much good if so many people just stay in their silos.

However, the more the intolerant left seeks to purge the slightest offending voices from mainstream media, the more mainstream media becomes garbage. Garbage like what CNN has turned into -- ignoring riots in the streets in the summer, and treating the Capitol riot like the most important story of our lifetime. (It's not.) Or garbage like the argument, offered by numerous mainstream left-leaning sources, that rioting in the streets this summer did not spread Covid. (It did.) That kind of Fox-like "finger on the scale" reporting drives consumers away from mainstream media (no one trusts it anymore) and into the arms of the bad faith outlets of alternative media.

If you don't like CNN, stop watching it, right? You have lots of choices. Choose something else.

You're speaking of the McNeil debacle, I assume.

Nope, not at all. You are so aggressively conventional on this subject!

You think so? I think WaPo is a very close second right now.

Maybe in their national political reporting, but not as an institution more generally.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

If that's what he meant, he would have talked about the law and legal rights, not "customs," which are different.

And there have always been topics which "custom" has decided that do not warrant free inquiry. NAMBLA did not get invited to run op-eds when we were young, and they still don't.



Ah, yes, the left-wing cancel mobs. I thought about meeting up with one on Friday -- we were going to go to a golf-course and try to chant about the overuse of pesticides until all the golfers gave up and resigned their memberships. But it was raining, so I stayed in and listened to Terri Gross archives.

When you say college-campus intolerance, are you talking about Liberty University, yes?



My point is a broader one, which is that for decades now the technology to publish your views has gotten cheaper, and the opportunities have gotten broader. Substack is only the most recent example.



Lots of people decide wrong, so empirically it does seem to be a problem.



Free inquiry doesn't seem to do society as much good if so many people just stay in their silos.



If you don't like CNN, stop watching it, right? You have lots of choices. Choose something else.



Nope, not at all. You are so aggressively conventional on this subject!



Maybe in their national political reporting, but not as an institution more generally.

I’m sure I speak for the entire board when I say it is hard enough to read this drivel, but can you please try to keep a focus on proper grammar?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

I’m sure I speak for the entire board when I say it is hard enough to read this drivel, but can you please try to keep a focus on proper grammar?

You got it, boss.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower

Hey RT, hope you guys are doing o.k. down there. My in-laws are in Houston and they have been without power, heat, and essentially without cell service for two days. They had to flee their house this morning because they ran out of things to burn (they had started burning old furniture from the basement, and a neighbor brought them some wood after cutting down a tree across the street but it was too green and frozen to burn). They were going to go to the office, but also no power or heat there, so they went to a coworker of my F-I-L, who has no power but somehow managed to get a generator and space heaters and is trying to get the inside temp of his house above 32 degrees. They would flee the city, but apparently the highways are closed and the other roads are dangerous as hell, with more snow and ice moving in. It sounds really grim.

I'm following RT's travails on FB, it sounds like they are managing with some difficulty.

I'm very glad my sister is in El Paso, where there is still power.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

The old rule was bad ideas would be countered by either being ignored or critiqued with other speech showing their flaws.

You seem to be a big fan of some guys who really don't like the latter.

I think he's focusing initially on college campus intolerance and corporate toadying to left wing cancel mobs and extrapolating from there.

You seem to be a guy who really doesn't like the latter (see above)

It attracts voices who, to use Sam Harris's term, have cancel-proofed themselves. Taibbi, Sullivan, Greenwald, Harris...

You left off Ygelsias, and you mean attracted people with a following who want to be free to be a bit more racist than their prior editors let them be. Their migration has been more than a little revealing. (Except Sullivan, whose racism has been apparent all along.)

I will also tell you again that Taibbi and Greenwald are transparently compromised by the Russians, but sure, go ahead and fanboy.

Garbage like what CNN has turned into -- ignoring riots in the streets in the summer, and treating the Capitol riot like the most important story of our lifetime. (It's not.)

Tell me more

Or garbage like the argument, offered by numerous mainstream left-leaning sources, that rioting in the streets this summer did not spread Covid. (It did.)

Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.

The most lurid and embarrassing reaches of these moral panics are made by white people who are caught up in purity tests.

Did you really just call racism a moral panic? Dude.

Meanwhile, minority voices remain underrepresented.

Man, you don't just hear from enough racists these days... Oh. Wait.