I suggest some essays and podcasts that pertain to liberal values.
The fantasy intellectual who is emerging as Most Valuable Player by leading in several scoring categories is Robert Wright. Listen to what Wright says to Robert Wiblin, especially minutes 28-38, about the way that tribalism and psychological biases are impediments to solving important problems. The rest of the podcast elaborates on these themes.
“…tribalism and psychological biases are impediments to solving important problems.”
They’re not trying to solve important problems. They’re creating problems. Just like their demand for racism so far exceeds the supply of actual racism it has to be manufactured (http://www.fakehatecrimes.org/). That’s the whole point. They are not in the problem solving business, they’d be ‘out of a job’.
+1
We are in a zero sum status game where certain people that continually under deliver in producing useful outputs in market contexts get to boss the rest of us around because of what happened 60+ years ago.
The low status folks don’t care about the tribalism and the biases that plague their political movements. It’s definitely not about that.
It would be more helpful if EverExtruder specified who “they” are in his comment and Kurt specified who “certain people” are in his comment.
I’m pretty sure they are not FIT leaders. The whole point of this project is that the wrong people are getting the most attention on all media, but especially on social media.
I wish I had time to reply, but I’m busy right now rooting out white supremacy, the “most lethal threat to the homeland today” as our president discussed a few days ago.
I’ve been going door to door in my neighborhood to locate these sleeper cells. No luck yet, but stay tuned. I’ll keep knocking until we get to the bottom of this existential threat.
In the meantime, consider re-reviewing our comments above to which you responded. I won’t speak for the EverExtruder, but pretty sure you haven’t quite gotten the point yet, which has nothing to do with FIT picks who have very little institutions power (if any).
I think Sullivan has missed the mechanism explaining how CRT and its anti-liberalism came about, and why it doesn’t bother a lot of people who otherwise consider themselves liberal, because they are able to compartmentalize the nonsense in the short-term, in a kind of intellectual “containment policy”.
What CRT really is a big framework trying to rationalize a “salvaging apologetics” for empirically false premises.
If you start out with objectively inaccurate and provably false claims about material reality, then people are going to be able to use logic and evidence to make counterarguments and pick your claims apart. If you stay on the same level while making your case, you are sure to lose out.
But if you are putting the cart before the horse, then there is no alternative but to move epistemically upstream and to argue for undermining the basis of those criticisms. This is a form of ‘answer’ to all those “Well, what about this, and what about that?” counterexamples from the critics who are off-narrative.
You are going to have to resort to relying on unfalsifiable or purportedly self-evident claims which hedge and preserve maximum latitude for moving goalposts and playing rhetorically invalid word games later on, and claim that the contrary evidence was produced by an unreliable process, untrustworthy because ‘contaminated’ by biasing factors.
When critics take the bait and try to play the game on this new level, the next move in the chess game is to just continue moving upstream to the basis of epistemology itself to lower the status of ‘rationality’ and ‘legal fairness’ as subordinate to the axiom of the patent injustice of current circumstances. Of course you will also use every tool at your disposal to personalize criticism itself and penalize them for their public disagreement.
The end result of building this intellectually impenetrable fortress against any possible criticism, dissent, heresy, or resistance is necessarily a bunch of low-brow obtuse gobbledygook and nonsensical word salad, which we know because of things like scholarly publishing hoaxes like the Sokal and Grievance Studies affairs.
It’s hopeless to try and tackle any of this with appeals to free speech, liberalism, or enlightenment rationality because it was intentionally fabricated and refined over time for the express purpose of making those appeals hopeless.
Most ‘right-thinking’ people are content to let the CRT crowd get away with all that, without any awareness or feeling of dissonance, or fear of it spreading into the realms of their personal lives or professional interests, where they imagine they will be able to continue to apply liberalism and rationality as normal. But that kind of epistemological containment doesn’t work, and in short-order, the mental patterns of that nonsense and identity-first obsessiveness invade every domain.
>—-“It’s hopeless to try and tackle any of this with appeals to free speech, liberalism, or enlightenment rationality….”
No, it’s not. Those are EXACTLY the grounds you DO need to fight this on. You can always tell which grounds are good or bad for each side by observing what they most want to talk about and what they avoid talking abut as much as possible.
The reason Kendi always declines when McWhorter or Coleman Hughes challenge him to debate is that he knows this is where they will go and he can’t compete on those issues.
Even on college campuses now CRT doesn’t win debates on this. It relies on shutting them down. Well you can’t get away with that in the political arena and that’s why CRT’s ability to achieve its political ends is very self limiting.
Here is a video in which Kendi – who is willing to talk with H.L. Gates and Cornell West, addresses his unwillingness to engage with McWhorter, Loury, and Hughes in particular, who he accuses of unfairly misrepresenting his work and failing to adequately explain their contention of the non-binary nature of culpability regarding structural racism. He says people who oppose his work are coming from a racist place.
To my ears he is clearly just dodging – those three commentators have all fairly represented his work before criticizing it – but I’m sure the kind of people favorably inclined to his message will let him get away with these bogus excuses. Even his metaphorical example of a light bulb either being on or off with nothing in-between is kind of dumb. “Ever heard of a dimmer switch?”
At any rate, Kendi is extremely successful in part because he is indeed able to get away with dodging and shutting down debate. I simply don’t agree that people “can’t get away with that in the political arena”, it looks like lots of public debates see one side get “shut down” these days. Hanania’s latest, “Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law” shows just how much it has achieved its political ends via the law and government bureaucracies.
Related: Kendi got stuck in neutral while trying to define racism. The video is very much worth a viewing.
Hint: there is a reason he won’t engage with those that disagree with him.
https://twitter.com/johnhmcwhorter/status/1399670923221946372?s=21
I am hardly inclined to defend Kendi, but within the framework of his model of how the world works, his definition makes perfect sense to me.
It’s consistent and coherent with his fundamental premises, and comes right out of his terrible book, which I read, albeit for free (thanks, internet) because no way am I sending an extra penny to that guy, especially since the market for woke is booming.
Indeed, it is precisely what conservative critics of ‘disparate impact’ analysis have been saying – for decades now – would be the direct inference and inevitable logical implication of defaulting to a presumption of actionable discrimination whenever there were statistical disparities, while also making rebuttal practically infeasible. It’s a good example of how one can never rely on the preservation of any unprincipled exception.
The woke tenet is Neurological Statistical Equality (NSE): the statistical character of all psychological and cognitive qualities of all human population groups are the same by nature. Thus, when there are clearly measurable disparities between these groups in desirable life outcomes, that is necessarily due to oppression and unjust discrimination, either as a legacy of past injustice and to extent we as a society haven’t fixed things to be level yet, the ongoing perpetuation of injustice.
To paraphrase Kendi – well, to translate from CRT-ese – ‘racism’ is shorthand for the sum of all the factors that contribute to these disparities, which includes anyone who has not been convinced of these truths (i.e., they are not ‘woke’ to them) and is not doing their part to fix them and keep throttling up the intensity of interventions until those outcomes are equal, and definitely includes anyone who is undermining the marketing of the narrative.
If you substitute ‘racism’ for ‘fascism’, and ‘colorblindness’ for ‘pacifism’, Kendi is just saying exactly what Orwell said:
As a modifier, it describes any system or institution which produces those outcomes, not just the sentiments and ideas motivating individual actions and decisions.
To really distill it to its pure essence, Kendi’s ‘racism’ is just the generic answer to the question, “Why are blacks worse off than whites in this area?” If one accepts NSE – as all right-thinking persons do – racism *has* to be the answer, and defining it in a way consistent with that conclusion would sound just like the definition Kendi gave.
@Handle
Your verbose reply isn’t really helping Kendi’s cause very much.
Here is what Kendi said in the video above:
“Racism is a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas.”
Sorry, but I would have flunked out of college using roundabout circular references like these.
>—“I’m sure the kind of people favorably inclined to his message will let him get away with these bogus excuses.”
Yes, but everyone else, including the majority NOT already favorably inclined to his message, or merely undecided or unaware of it, and curious, will be turned off by his crippling inability to defend his position in any kind of open debate. Especially because his most effective critics like Hughes and McWhorter are gaining increasing fame in challenging these ideas and increasingly focussing on challenging them.
Kendi himself admits his agenda would require a Constitutional Amendment. There is zero support for such an amendment. It is not a threat to be approved in even a single state. And it could not possibly be approved without a lot of public debate.
This is not “an intellectually impenetrable fortress.” It is a house of cards entirely dependent on people not pushing back against it.
Kendi vs McHorter is a debate one could easily go back to 1990 and find the same arguments for the same kind of people. Why did the Kendi’s side gain so much ground over the last few decades if none of these arguments are new?
“Kendi himself admits his agenda would require a Constitutional Amendment. ”
No it doesn’t. What Kendi wants is already illegal under the constitution, but the Supreme Court, which interprets the constitution, and clearly and explicitly allowed something basically the same in multiple rulings. What Harvard does is “constitutional” even if it’s obviously a quota to everyone who isn’t Sandra Day O’Conner.
Over and over again the Kendi’s of the world win where is matters most. Amongst elite decision makers who can make the law whatever they want it to be. Just like the Bolsheviks won despite what the rest of Russia might have felt.
How would a debate with Kendi and McHorter play out?
Kendi would claims “THE GAP” is due to systematic racism.
McHorter would say that is is “complex” with possible non-racist causes.
Neither would be able to prove their case because the actual answer is genetics, so they would just talk past each other.
Elites would choose Kendi because his message has a call to action they can act on, and its consistent with their worldview and current law. McHorter would be left with the same conservative arguments made in the 1990s that failed to CLOSE THE GAP (No Child Left Behind failed, FYI).
Your tactics and arguments are not new. People tried them when I was a teenager and we are literally having the exact same battles today as back then. In the 1990s they wanted to shut down my magnet school for being too Asian. In 2020 they actually did it to the magnet school in my county. Nothing is new. It’s all the same regurgitate garbage, but with a browner electorate that has been steeped in this bullshit and extra generation.
>—“How would a debate with Kendi and McHorter (sic) play out?”
Too funny. You are so unfamiliar with what McWhorter is actually saying on this you literally don’t know how to spell or even pronounce his last name. And that wasn’t a typo. It was a mistake you repeated over and over in your comment.
As with Murray and Clark, you somehow always mange to claim a deeper and opposite understanding of the work of the scholars you purport to cite. McWhorter goes right to the illiberal nature of Kendi’s ideas and how it is a threat to Enlightenment values.
If you didn’t assume without investigation that black people are “worthless,” to use your word, you would have taken the trouble to learn what McWhorter is actually saying.
I think it is both “an intellectually impenetrable fortress” and an intellectual “house of cards entirely dependent on people not pushing back against it.”
There are only three sets of explanations of “the gap”. One, it’s white people’s fault, either now or in the past. Two, it’s black people’s fault. Too many fatherless kids, too little deferred gratification, etc. Three, it’s nobody’s fault; it’s genetics.
One can make arguments for all of them. But the third is totally unacceptable in respectable company. The second, favored by McWhorter, Thomas Sowell, and (partly) Charles Murray, no matter how well it is phrased, is open to the charge of “blaming the victim” And that is JUST NOT DONE. Anyone with social sense knows that like they know you don’t tell a person they’re fat.
So that leaves only one possibility. And, since, as the old boxing saying goes, “you can’t beat somebody with nobody”, you are forced to accept that possibility–or to at least not contradict it. And if you can’t contradict it, you have a hard time arguing against the policies that flow from it.
Sure, the house of cards falls if enough people are willing to say, “The gap exists because black people have done a lousy job of taking advantages of the opportunities they have in America.” But no politician is going to say that, nor anyone who wishes to be taken seriously by the media bookers and shakers.
>—“There are only three sets of explanations of “the gap”….
No, your framing is not the only way to explain this and it is most definitely NOT the way that Sowell and McWhorter go about explaining it. Are you even familiar with their work or are you just assuming it most conform to your beliefs Roger?
Sowell and McWhorter start by pointing out that there has never in history been a multi-racial society where racially sorted outcomes are even approximately equal. They point out that such “equity” is not just abnormal. We NEVER see it. We don’t even see it among the various “white” ethnicities in America. And it’s not always the same groups at the bottom over time or in different societies.
Sowell and McWhorter cite a number of causes. They agree that racism is part of the story but a much overrated part at this point in our history. They think that various cultural pathologies in the black community play a big role including attitudes toward the value of family formation, education, and long term investment. They are agnostic on genetic differences in intelligence between groups and do not agree that such a connection is anywhere near being proven. Both respect Charles Murray and feel he has been mistreated but disagree with his conclusions.
In short, no one is obligated to pick just one of the “explanations” in your false trichotomy. There are an infinite number of possible combinations of the factors shoehorned into your three explanations.
I completely agree that there are “an infinite number of possible combinations of factors” to explain “the gap”. That’s why I said there are “only three *sets* of explanations”. Of course, the true explanation could be a combination of parts of each set, and I am fairly sure it is.
What I was trying to say is that most people are not willing to entertain any explanations that come from the second or third set, and that leaves the first by default. Indeed, that it is, at best, a breach of good manners and at worst proof that you are an awful person to entertain any explanations from the second or third set.
Sowell and McWhorter can “get away” with saying “that various cultural pathologies in the black community play a big role including attitudes toward the value of family formation, education, and long term investment” (second set). But no white person can. And Sowell and McWhorter can simply be ignored by respectable opinion.
Describing the second set as “it’s black people’s fault” is putting it in a very stark way. I think that is how most respectable people see it and why they reject second set explanations. ANY explanation that gives black people agency gives them a share in their own misfortune and is thus psychologically troublesome. If it is pointed out that you are “blaming the victim”, there is a good chance you will decide that you don’t want to go there after all.
FWIW, I am familiar with Sowell and McWhorter and have been following this issue since Moynihan’ and Glazer’s Beyond the Melting Pot, which opened people’s eyes to the fact that “We don’t even see it [equal outcomes] among the various “white” ethnicities in America.”
OK thanks for clarifying Roger. That makes a little more sense but you are still vastly overstating how “unacceptable” it is to cite cultural factors as leading to unequal outcomes.
I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard someone make the common sense point that the best way to stay out of poverty is to put a high value on education, save and invest regularly, and get married and stay married.
Are there ANY other cultural variables cited more often as deciding who gets ahead and who sinks into poverty? And does anyone claim these values are reflected equally in all ethic groups?
Sure, people say it all the time to their kids or to people close to them. But it is considered a significant breach of decorum to say it to someone you don’t know, especially to someone who is not doing as well as you. When Coming Apart came out, Charles Murray complained that successful people didn’t “preach what they practice”.
That’s as a personal thing. But as a social thing, as a reason blacks don’t do as well as whites, one is not supposed to even think about it. How often has anyone respectable said it in the last year, during all the tv shows and newspaper and magazine writing about social justice?
People have a great ability to compartmentalize and to act like that river in Egypt. I can’t help thinking about something asdf has talked about. Parents want to live where there are “good schools”. It turns out that “good schools”–defined as schools with high test scores, graduates who go on to get college degrees, etc.–are almost always schools with relatively few black students. Parents may even unconsciously use “few blacks” as a rough measure of “good school”. But they can believe that all they care about is the quality of school, that it has nothing to do with the race of the students. A part of their brain knows there is something racial going on here but the conscious brain refuses to consider it.
Similarly, people’s brains refuse to link how they want their kids to act to be successful with why there is a success gap between different ethnic groups.
Let’s take those three categories.
1) White people fault
2) Black people fault
3) Genetics fault
In current discourse, you will get no reward and stern punishment for #2 and #3. As Steve Sailer put it, the exorcism of #3 proponents has only increased the penalties applied to #2 proponents.
But if you take #1 to its logical extreme you receive rewards and no punishments. That woman who proposed white genocide got hired by the NYTimes. Kendi is getting rich. The incentives are obvious.
I always loved Spandrell’s examination of Mao’s Mango. When you have a game theory where “more X always good” you end up with out of control insane levels of X.
Even if you believe “some combination of #1-#3”, if you incentives all promote #1 you are going to end up 110% allocation to #1.
Reading about Mao’s mangos, I had the following thought: The Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing. To a large extent, it was carried out by students. Human BioDiversity people say that East Asians are, if anything, a tad smarter than Europeans, and these would be on the smarter end of that. Smart does not automatically make someone better. Some times …
“I think that what the Fantasy Intellectual Teams project needs right now is some financial, technical, and marketing support to build the idea to the point where a major media institution takes it on.” – Arnold on substack.
No offense, but: BARF!
Sorry if I am projecting more on to your comment than you meant but why in the world would you want this glorious thing you’ve invented bought by a media institution – the fundamental driver of why we need FITs to begin with? They would have the Kardashians up against Rachel Maddow by week 2!
This is the perfect lean start-up opportunity. Bonus points if somebody can figure out how to incorporate it into a prediction-market style mechanism. Double bonus points if it’s decentralized somehow.