The actual problem is that we have a new bunch of “speech regulators” (not in the legal sense, not usually at least) who are especially humorless and obnoxious and I would say neurotic — in the personality psychology sense of that word. I say let’s complain about the real problem, namely the moral fiber, emotional temperaments, and factual worldviews of the individuals who have arrogated the new speech censorship functions to themselves.
I think that this is one of Tyler’s best posts of the year, and I have not excerpted my favorite part. The context is a letter to Harper’s signed by some prominent intellectuals, including many on the left, mildly rebuking cancel culture. I interpret Tyler as saying that the letter indicates how weak our side is relative to what one would hope. Imagine if the same group of signatories published a letter taking a stance with which you disagreed. Would you care? If not, then perhaps one should not be optimistic that this letter will turn the tide.
I wish we had a more scientific profile of social justice activists. My unscientific observations:
1. They tend to be young. Most of the people on my side of the free speech issue are also on my side of 50.
I’ve said before that I suspect that heavy usage of social media makes it more difficult to cope with beliefs you dislike. It makes controversy feel immediate and necessitating a response rather than remote and something one can allow to pass.
2. They tend to be not in the highest status brackets. How many leading scientists want to support #ShutDownSTEM?
If you’re successful in a prestige hierarchy, you don’t resort to dominance moves. Dominance behavior seems to me to be the essence of he social justice activist approach. It feels anti-liberal because it is.
3. They are not in the highest intellectual brackets. For a variety of reasons, institutions of higher education have had to accommodate students, professors, and especially administrators who are not top caliber in analytical ability. Part of the accommodation is to try to disguise the intellectual inferiority of those who are what George Will called lumpen intelligentsia.
They see liberal values and intellectual merit as elements of a dominance hierarchy, and they are wrong about that. They make their own dominance moves in the name of justice, and they are wrong about that, too.
I think Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer characterizes them pretty well (which is disturbing, because it was written to explain fascism). His central insight is that, for those who lack talent and opportunity, freedom is unpleasant. The freedom to do whatever you’re capable of is only valuable to the capable; for the incapable it’s an unending insult. Mass movements offer such people a chance to ignore their personal irrelevance by wrapping themselves up in a mythic struggle against … whatever’s handy.
That book is still worth reading. It goes in and out of fashion. Many educated (or at least credentialed) people under 30 or 40 have never heard of it, alas.
Probably in that book is the notion that “true believers” enjoy joining a movement but they may not care which one. Thus, in 1920s Germany, some people were Communists for a time and then at some point simply switched sides and became Nazis.
There is a great anecdote from the essayist Patrick Leigh Fermor about meeting some such people in workingman’s bar in Hamburg and staying in their attic that night. The year was 1933. His hosts had switched to National Socialism but still had the Communist propaganda posters in the attic.
Methinks this is true, but I still have not read Fermor. Thus I’m repeating the anecdote second or third hand.
= – = – = – =
I think there’s a bigger issue. I’ll state as a hypothesis.
HYPOTHESIS: “In the USA today, many individuals have an impulse toward idealism and they wish to improve the world. Simultaneously, they are unsure how to express and harness the impulse.”
Sorry, it’s not idealism. Some of my close California relatives that meet Arnold’s profile 150% may look and sound like idealists, but once you spend time with them you realize that their mendacity and hypocrisy are inconsistent with any good intention. They are useful idiots ready to service the few willing to sacrifice everyone else to get power.
For a non-exhaustive list of types of useful idiocy and their services, see https://unherd.com/2018/06/six-types-useful-idiot/
That’s pretty good. Thanks for sharing.
You know we were recently discussing Old Trek vs New Trek as an example pf the difference between 1990s progressivism and 2020s progressivism. There are more examples to count.
One is struck how the purpose of life in Old Trek was for talented, driven, hard working people to expand and improve themselves through the freedoms (and responsibilities) offered by “automated luxury communism”. The first episode itself is putting humanity on trial and humanity overcoming the charge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vu5TsBwG9w
But of course, today we have New Trek.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnlxugk3Qb0
Yikes, you make feel old. I have a completely different view of what is “Old Trek” and “New Trek”.
+1
Every person at a good school (eg Harvard) was tops in their class in high school. But coming to a good school, 20% of those kids will now be in the bottom quintile (in skill, intelligence, etc.) on campus. I wonder to what extent that correlates with being in this movement. Going from thinking you’re the smartest your whole life to suddenly finding out you’re not that special is probably a big shock. Like you said – it’s an unending insult.
And this would be exacerbated by diversity goals that bring in students who are even lower than usual for a given school, simply because of their gender and/or skin color.
This would predict that social justice types would be more likely to go to better schools and be in the bottom quintile (in terms of say SAT scores or some similar proxy for student quality) at their school. They’d also be more likely to be diversity admits and therefore less likely to be white men or Asians. I don’t know if any of that tracks but that’s what I would predict.
Realistically speaking, do you expect America to deliver the American dream to most of its citizens over the next generation.
1) Affordable ownership of house with “good schools” and low crime
2) Relatively safe employment with benefits
3) Relatively comfortable retirement
4) A husband/wife and 2.5 kids, affordably and with low divorce risk
5) Means to acquire education and training appropriate to children’s skills
I severely doubt a majority of the next generation will accomplish these things. Isn’t it fair to say that if the American Dream is dead, it can no longer be a driving principal for the next generation to organize around.
And if is dead, why shouldn’t they find new gods.
I would think that if you solve numbers 2 and 4, the rest would follow.
#2 isn’t necessarily enough to afford #1
#4 there’s the rub
Woke America runs on ignorance. Theirs is a simple black-and-white world of good and evil, oppressors and oppressed. But everything is simple until you know something about it. Binary morality rarely can stand in the face of knowledge and understanding.
Unfortunately, we’ve built quite a bit of value on top of a sand dune. Consumer marketing never focuses on utility. For some time, companies have instead pursued any number of soft reputational assets, and try to appeal to the feelings and emotions of consumers. Universities stake quite a bit on the feelings of their students and potential students. Politicians focus on emotional affiliations, not policies. All this is much easier than grinding out rigorous improvements to function.
The last two generations have focused on the manipulation of emotions to gain advantages without worrying much about the underlying substance, and now we are all terrified to learn that it can all snap back on us.
Culture commentator Tyler Cowen now has more skin in the game than serious economist Tyler Cowen has, and all that can go away with a few bad stories. There is a way to get back to where we were, but it means giving up the BS and going back to work.
You’re all way overthinking here. This is weaponized female competition in a zero sum status and dominance game.
And this IS the future of the post Christian, Post Scarcity west unless you find a way to break or divert that.
The process of the eventual stopping of this stupid insanity is going to be truly horrific. We should all be grappling seriously with the implications of that fact, but it’s such an unpleasant subject that everyone wants to pretend they can dismiss that predictable destination and refuses to even think about it. Big mistake.
With any kind of trouble that tends to get worse over time, the severity of the treatment needed to fix the problem – or at least stop it from getting even worse – rises in proportion to its progression.
If you find a single termite and step on it, you are fine. If a whole colony is chomping on the end of a big beam, you can drill and inject poison if the beam is salvageable, or go so far as the major project to simply replace the beam if things have gone too far. If every piece of wood in the frame of the house is turning into chewed-up mush and the infestation is everywhere, you have no choice but to burn the whole thing down to ashes and rebuild.
Every single day that goes by closes yet another window of opportunity to fix things in a certain way, and the if you start the next day, it will be slightly costlier, harder, more destructive, and more desperate as less likely to succeed at all.
Think what it would have taken to stop this fanatical lunacy in its tracks back in, say, 1980. Then how much more in 1990 then 2000 then 2010 then today.
At the earliest stages, perhaps some slight stiffening of the spine of high prestige individuals in the ruling elite? Calling the rabid and ogrish vanguardists nasty, mean people with psychological problems in the hope that the threat of being considered low status, mentally ill losers will make them reconsider?
Later on, perhaps just a few court cases and laws going the right way? Later on, mass arrests and purgings and loyalty oaths? Later on, Spanish Civil War and terrorist paramilitary death squads and a Franco? If you think the sequence stops there, no, there is still plenty of room at the bottom.
This has to be stopped soon and at all costs. Those committed to stopping it as soon as it becomes possible to organize enough influence and capability to do so are put in an increasingly difficult position the longer it takes, not in terms of tactical disadvantage, but in terms of number of civilized and humans methods of pushing back which will simply have to be abandoned in the increasingly desperate struggle to save what can still be saved, and the fact that many of their potential allies will balk at those abandonments unless terrified by what both sides are doing into going along with the dirty fighting because there are no longer any choices.
All true. The coordination problem is real, though. Someone has to move first, and then you need that critical first follower and then more have to jump on board.
Classical liberals–the right–the established liberals–neoliberals, everybody who is under threat here is letting their principal of organization be reaction to outrages. But that means that any effort to counteract peters out. Either it seems to succeed, in which case everyone else who should join shrugs and goes about their business because the problem must not be that bad yet. Or else it fails and everyone shrugs and hunkers down because its too dangerous to fight.
You point out the costs of victory, to an audience that is not yet conscious that victory is necessary.
P.S. Worse, even the people who are aware think the process is much less advanced than it is. Where would you say we are right now? Its pretty clear that we are just short of the mass arrests stage. But the will isn’t there. No one is even calling for laws at this point.
This isn’t a call for despair. Its a call for people to start being serious.
As for coordination: I have been thinking seriously about this issue for a long while. There are indeed some things which might work, but they are long-shots, personally risky for everyone involved, and would need a lot of patronage to develop. Part of the problem, as in any game, is that one can’t openly discuss future strategies, or they won’t work.
The sad fact is that without such developments, in all likelihood the coordination problem is probably impossible to solve until pens give way to swords (perhaps not even then) and even with fancy new Internetische Magicks. There are a number of big problems that must be solved simultaneously, each of which on its own is sufficient to make it infeasible, and in combination make it profoundly unlikely even in the best circumstances.
It’s one thing to say, “We would need a miracle.” It’s another thing to say, “We would need *ten* miracles.” Even in the Bible which is full of miracles, there are really only one or two times when they just keep coming one after another.
As for the appropriate level of alarm: Cassandra was given the gift of accurate prophecy but cursed to never be believed. (Solomon Solomon’s “Ajax and Cassandra” (1886) is a good example of “Peak Painting” which happened at the end of the 19th century and died with Victoria. Another one is Ciseri’s “Ecce Homo”.)
Throughout history there have always been lots of Cassandras: people who have made rigorous cases for accurate predictions of what would happen if … and unable to summon sufficiently motivating alarm in sufficient time to make any difference. There is the expression, “fighting the last war”, and the American Right lags at least generation or two behind the appropriate level of seriousness and grim and gloom.
But it’s not just a matter of Boolean “believed vs. not believed”, it’s a continuous spectrum and question of how many people and with what amount of time available.
My idea of a “Cassandra Score” is to try and measure how bad the situation is.
It goes from 0 to 100. 100 means “Full Cassandra” – absolutely no one will believe you until it is actually happening to them. 50 is the tipping point for “enough people with enough motivation, will, resources, influence, and time.”
At 49, you just might be able to save Troy. At 51, Troy burns and Lesser Ajax is still going to carry you away, but at least lots of people saw it coming and made preparations and perhaps even some got away to found Rome and get revenge one thousand years later by winning the Macedonian Wars.
Anything below 20 and you nip the problem in the bud. Anything above 90 means that when they come for you, you were eating dinner with the door unlocked and no gun in the house thinking about your pleasant retirement ten years away and were utterly surprised and cannot bring yourself to believe this is all really happening until the bitter end.
In terms of the “return on sending an effective message which nudges people towards being more alarmed”, there is no more consequential context to be in than when your team is at CS51 and you can convince them to get to CS49. That’s “Getting your stuff together in the nick of time and barely squeaking out a win.”
But we are not at CS51. Nowhere close.
My impression is that the entire “non-woke-crowd” is at about a Cassandra Score 70 or 80, and if anything, this has been getting *worse* in the last ten years. Even as some people become more alarmed, they are still not changing as fast as events, which continue to pull farther and farther ahead of their attitudes.
My argument to these people is that they should bite the bullet and support some uncomfortable compromise policies now, not just to avoid disaster, but to make that avoidance as civilized, humane, and consistent with liberal values as possible. War is evil and hell – only fools argue otherwise. But if you have to fight a war because there are even greater evils, then it is better to fight it when you can win it using conventional methods, instead of having to resort to increasingly awful unconventional methods.
Tyler was pointing to a paradox: People are often willing to speak out only as part of a group, but group messages are often watered down and thus less impactful. The paradox naturally limits the effectiveness of those speaking out in favor of free speech.
This seems relevant here. Sorry, I don’t have the link to hand, but it should be easy enough to find.
“Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities”, by Eric Ok, Yi Qian, Brendan Strejcek, & Karl Aquino (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2 Jul 2020).
Abstract: We investigate the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue. In our first three studies, we show that the virtuous victim signal can facilitate nonreciprocal resource transfer from others to the signaler. Next, we develop and validate a victim signaling scale that we combine with an established measure of virtue signaling to operationalize the virtuous victim construct. We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits—Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy—more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies. In Study 5, we show that a specific dimension of Machiavellianism—amoral manipulation—and a form of narcissism that reflects a person’s belief in their superior prosociality predict more frequent virtuous victim signaling. Studies 3, 4, and 6 test our hypothesis that the frequency of emitting virtuous victim signal predicts a person’s willingness to engage in and endorse ethically questionable behaviors, such as lying to earn a bonus, intention to purchase counterfeit products and moral judgments of counterfeiters, and making exaggerated claims about being harmed in an organizational context.
If you venerate the crucifixion, everyone wants to pretend they are being crucified.
I have to be honest but the words I see in “White Fragility” and “Anti-Racism” feel an awful lot like when I say every week
“I confess to almighty God
and to you, my brothers and sisters,
that I have greatly sinned,
in my thoughts and in my words,
in what I have done and in what I have failed to do,
through my fault, through my fault,
through my most grievous fault;
therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin,
all the Angels and Saints,
and you, my brothers and sisters,
to pray for me to the Lord our God.[7]”
Just replace Mary with George Floyd.
Woke America runs on ignorance and Malice.
My unscientific and therefore suspect observation is that the social justice types are overwhelmingly underemployed liberal arts majors looking for an alternative to the traditional status structure. Therefore they claim that everything is “rigged” or even “racist”, absolving themselves of responsibility for not having studied a major that leads to employment.
I think that this complements well with Arnold’s point. The less ambitious or less capable students congregate in the liberal arts majors. Liberal arts teachers can basically teach whatever they want, there are no professional tests that students will need to take, and enjoy spending their time indoctorinating the young.
This also points to the best method of addressing the complications of the social justice warriors, professionalize higher education (or even all education). Go the route of the Australians and drop government funding for liberal arts majors. This would save the taxpayer money, save the real students time, and help direct some students into real professions instead of wasting their time.
Defund the Liberal Arts!!
One suspects that the New York Times firing of opinion page editor James Bennet hit close to home for many of the Harpers letter signatories.
“The left eats its own” is the old saw for the veracity for which there appears ample evidence, so it’s not particularly surprising to see a group of mostly center leftists circle the wagons when they sense that they are next on the menu.
Nevertheless, one wonders how much of cancel culture is merely office politics by other means, at newspapers but in academia as well. Everyone lower on the ladder gets a chance at moving a rung up when someone higher up gets tossed off.
I have not read the books mentioned above but will find time. Russian literature on the Stalin era is what I am most reminded of. Darkness at Noon in particular. It’s hard to have sympathy for people being destroyed by the monsters they helped create.
And as always the best defense is a good offense. There is no penalty to run around accusing others of whatever thought crime is strategically advantageous, and, much to be gained. People who made livings off tawdry “investigative journalism “ can make as much or more now playing the cancel culture game.
Not participating in social media removes me from much direct contact with the online outrage mobs, as well as affording room for indifference, but one wonders to what market the scary boogeyman of the day phenomenon plays ? Are incels! homophobes! jugalos! white supremacists! filling a social need created by the death of dime store novels? A certain segment of the population has gotten utility out of reading scary stories about creepy monster-types, perhaps fueling evolutionarily derived pleasure responses that reward use of imagination. Films and movies don’t trigger the response because no imagination is involved.
Closer to home, the Bernie-bro offspring who spent months in a Catholic Workers home and protested at military bases, no longer identifies as socialist. Having moved to smaller town and found socially useful employment providing real services to people in a community has done a lot to realign a world view deformed by years in a school system that rewarded oppressor-oppressed thinking. With schooling in the USA now so unspeakably vile and corrupt, real education will only come from immersion in the real world.
“There is no penalty to run around accusing others of whatever thought crime is strategically advantageous, and, much to be gained.”
Spinning yesterday’s “woke” statement into today’s thought crime takes only a bit of creativity.
Sure. For now.
But the trouble is, they are not really thinking ahead.
Handle’s First Law is that all the best quotes are apocryphal, and Voltaire actually never said, “If you want to know who rules over you, ask who you are not allowed to criticize.” (It was actually a nasty guy from Pittsburgh, 27 years ago instead of 270 years ago).
But it’s definitely true, and provides us a test for whether someone is blowing smoke with regards to a designated boogeyman. If they are allowed to criticize the boogeyman, instead trash him openly, crudely, and relentlessly, then they are either lying or suffering from some kind of cognitive deficiency when they simultaneously say the boogeyman is all-powerful and terrifying. If you were really scared, you wouldn’t say such things.
Remember when after 9/11 there were those comics and artists who would pretend they were making fun of “religion” in general and not just Christianity, and poke fun at Jesus while posing as somehow being “courageous” by doing so? So, so brave. And then someone would say, “Ok, now do Mohammad”, and they would stutter and stammer and sweat and pull on their collar while looking askance, “Ah, ha, um, whew, is it getting hot in here?”
Yeah, not so brave now are we buddy? Those who tried turned out to be more naive than actually brave and didn’t think terrible things would happen to them until they had to go into hiding. Turns out there is someone who is actually scary, not just make-believe slander-scary, and who you are actually scared of. No jokes about them.
So all this talk about how terrible white people and white supremacy is and how absolutely crushingly powerful and pervasive and dominant and frightening it is, well, it’s all the same kind of inconsistency and incoherency, isn’t it? No one is actually afraid of the white supremacists or whites in general, no one feels “ruled” by them, because everyone feels completely free in expressing every kind of moronic “criticism”, with really no limit to how stupid and vicious and falsifiable these claims can get.
All the people who are being threatened with cancellation or running afoul of the woke reign of terror and committee of public safe spaces are, likewise, objectively not scary at all.
But here’s the problem.
Eventually, after God knows how much terrible devastation, some of those people are going to survive and be in the new ruling class. And they are going to remember. They are going to hold grudges like you can’t believe. And they are *not* going to forgive and forget. They are going to get busy with the settling of scores as their first order of business.
This is what I mean by these wokesters not thinking ahead. They are doing all this gleeful participation in the orgy of human extirpation completely out in public, where everyone can see them do it. In a way that makes those people scared and angered by it.
And those people are copying and pasting. They are screen grabbing.
They are making the lists. They are checking them twice. They know who’s been naughty. They won’t treat them nice.
Not nice at all. I can guarantee you that.
But the wokesters, 100% of them I’d bet, aren’t thinking about that at all. They are so cavalier and unworried because they think anything like this is completely impossible. They are wrong. They aren’t thinking that there are any lists, that their names would on them, that one day this is all going to catch up with them, and when it does, there will be no mercy for them, for no mercy was given by them. They are going to get counter-cancelled, bigly.
While we are still able to keep this at the level of words, it is not milquetoast pleading in Harper’s to please not be in such a hurry, but *these* kind of words that the wokesters need to be hearing and thinking about seriously the next think they are contemplating calling for someone’s cancellation.
They probably wouldn’t listen or believe those words either, but at least they’d get a vision of the grim future ahead.
Having moved to smaller town and found socially useful employment providing real services to people in a community has done a lot to realign a world view formed by years in a school system that rewarded oppressor-oppressed thinking.
Indeed, a regular job with ordinary people clears away the clouds of political illusion for many a college Marxist. Sure did in my case.
Anecdotally, in my work in scientific programming I find that many very smart, very high achieving people have the woke worldview. I think the age is a strong predictor. I think Jonathan Haidt wrote a paper about that.
Yeah, it’s not like programmers at Google aren’t smart capable people with real jobs. And while they *might* be a step up from underemployed liberal arts majors, the bottom line is they believe basically the same things and don’t feel any need to stop the mob.
Even this Harper’s letter basically says “everything you are saying is right and just and correct…just please don’t cancel me.”
I work at a fairly prestigious institution and the scientists all very much woke to my knowledge, with plenty of people promoting “ShutDownSTEM’ in emails to everyone at the institution.
Successful STEM people tend to be more passively woke, in that they usually don’t talk about politics unless someone else brings it up, and some tend to avoid the topic (though some are as obnoxiously woke as a sociology major; I’ve known a few faculty members who can’t sit through a thirty minute meeting about research without going on a political rant, or make awkward anti-white or anti-male remarks out of nowhere). But once politics comes up, most assent to all the tenets of the faith. Remarkably, most scientists seem to uncritically accept that social scientists are the experts on politics, and parrot their talking points without questioning the methodology (e.g., they’ll accept a low quality analysis that blatantly ignores confounding variables which, if it were done by a scientist, would be harshly rejected).
The tension between science and social science is pretty nonexistent on the ground, and only a big deal among people who blog about reproducibility issues and what not. Social scientists won the ‘science wars‘ at the cultural level even if they lost it intellectually. Most scientists will silently let sociologists pontificate on their (scientists’) own fields despite knowing nothing about them nowadays.
So having waded into this debate over the past week with a fair number of leftist critics, there are a couple of arguments on their side we can learn something from.
1. Critics correctly point out that several of the signers do not practice what they preach in the letter. Weiss and Stephens have sought to get academics fired for anti-Israeli views, Rowling has threatened lawsuits against critics for insulting but pretty clearly protected speech. Moreover, the signers do not tend to be among those standing up for left-wing speakers harassed by far-right online hate mobs, a type of harassment that happens fairly frequently. Thus the common refrain that “they don’t care about free speech, they only care about free speech for themselves.”
Now this is an ad hominem, and not a substantive response to the content of the letter. Nonetheless it points to a real lesson: if you want to speak persuasively in support of universal, even-handed liberal principles, it’s best to pick speakers who follow those principles even when it costs them or their “side”. Unfortunately such speakers are all too rare.
2. Critics also correctly point out that there are lots of arguably much worse illiberal abuses going on in the world: here in the US we have police brutality against peaceful protesters and immigrant kids in cages; elsewhere there are atrocities like China’s crackdown on Hong Kong. Why then focus so much on cancel culture?
Again the implication is that this prioritization must come from ulterior motives. I think there are several more charitable explanations:
(a) sociological closeness, or “outgroup vs fargroup” if you like Hansonian terminology. Liberal intellectuals feel more emotionally invested in academic and intellectual portions of society because those are more a part of their own lives; this is a natural human tendency. Then too academia claims to serve a higher intellectual purpose, and so academic illiberalism is a visible and shocking betrayal of that purpose in a way that US police or Chinese regime illiberalism is not.
(b) Persuadability. One can reasonably focus argument not on those whose abuses are worst but who you can best hope to change by arguing about it. Nobody seriously thinks that Xi Jinping is going to listen to a bunch of Western intellectuals telling him to stop oppressing the people of Hong Kong; but fellow-intellectuals really seem like they should be the sort of people who *would* listen seriously to a critique of their illiberal culture.
(c) Directionality. What’s worth opposing is not just what’s really bad now but what might be on track to be really bad in the future. It would have been a mistake to write off the Jacobins in 1788 France, the Bolsheviks in 1916 Russia, the Islamists in 1977 Iran, etc. So when a growing group, even a fringe group without much political power, starts showing the habits of mind of those sorts of totalitarian revolutionaries, we should take it seriously.
(b) and (c) seem to me especially worth stressing in expressing concern about intellectual illiberalism. Just to maximize the number of people I’m likely to offend, I’ll note that the same sort of “what about those even worse people, why aren’t you yelling at them” argument is also often used against critics of Israeli government policy: and in my view those critics, especially liberal Jewish critics, tend to be motivated to focus on criticizing Israel by the same (a)-(c) factors above.
“left-wing speakers harassed by far-right online hate mobs, a type of harassment that happens fairly frequently”
Do far right online hate mobs get you fired from your job?
I thought that Cambridge lady that said “White Lives Don’t Matter” got promoted.
“here in the US we have police brutality against peaceful protesters”
They are literally burning down out cities and trying to erase our past. They are having mass riots in a pandemic. Most should be shot on site. There is absolutely no defense of these animals.
“immigrant kids in cages”
They shouldn’t be here and those are the consequences. They should be glad they aren’t worse. Mass replacement by dysgenic invaders will go down as the single most destructive and evil act of this century.
“elsewhere there are atrocities like China’s crackdown on Hong Kong.”
Honestly, I hope the CCP wins at this point. They seem far more sane. They have an actual vision for the future that isn’t nihilistic carnage.
“shocking betrayal of that purpose in a way that US police”
Police brutality is largely a myth. The entire BLM narrative has zero factual basis and is nothing short of terrorism. The underclass in this country deserves nothing. Nearly everyone killed by the police pretty much had it coming and it’s a net good that they are dead.
Asdf, if you would tone down the way you express yourself slightly (e.g. police killings being a “net good”) it would be much more persuasive. Isn’t it enough to say that unjustified police killings are statistically insignificant and more or less align racially with frequency of arrests? After all, screw ups are inevitable in any profession, and bad cops do get hired from time to time.
As to China, isn’t it more effective to point out that the Left in this country seems to have an authoritarian vision similar to Xi’s (other than the stadium executions, for now), rather than rooting for China to win? The Democrats seem to spend most of their time rooting for China, anyway.
Just a thought.
Asked the same question over at Marginal Revolution (on this post, I think). What happens when they’re done eating their own and come for Kling, Cowen, Eugene Volokh, and the other public defenders of free speech?
Much of the power of the woke Left stems from their victims’ belief that the woke Left is righteous. Kling and company don’t share that belief.
What happens after they finally lose and the new social credit system scans for any attempt at trying to get someone cancelled or complaining in a way likely to stir racial resentments and assigns them to re-education camps? Will they object, “but muh free speech!” then? Sorry dude, it was nice while it lasted, but that ship has sailed, and indeed, you were the one who set sail in it.
If they are not high status why have most corporations embraced it? Do you think the people who run Apple, Google, Amazon and most of the high tech companies are low status and low intelligence?
SJW is a religion. Plenty of smart people are religious. BLM activists are not the smartest people but plenty of smart, high status people embrace them.
Online I am more familiar with the transgender activists. Some of them are very smart successful people. Thanks to their efforts if you don’t believe that biological sex is a social construct, that women can have penises, male bodied transwomen should be in female sports and that children can have surgery and drugs that make them sterile you are subject to being banned on social media.
Go look at the abuse directed at JK Rowling on twitter for saying sex is real and that trans medical procedures should not be performed on minors. Trans activists are furious with her because she is saying what they routinely get lower status people banned from social media and fired from their jobs.
Yeah, Tim Cook and Jack Dorsey aren’t low status, nor is Paul Krugman, nor are the editorial staff of the New York Times. It’s possible that disgruntled non-elites are the most fanatical, but successful, high status people are among the most loyal worshipers.
The idea that it’s just the ‘second sons’ of the elite driving this movement is a comforting story but unfortunately hard to back up.
Elite overproduction. Too many people going to college and many who graduate from higher level schools who shouldn’t have been there, or even been in college at all, now they are waiting for their big break into the higher status professions.
During the March-May lockdown these people (along with many others) were on social media even more than normal and that create the blow-up in June around the country.
Spotted Toad and crew on twitter go through this idea. I think it’s a major part of the explanation for the last couple months.
“Social justice is an actual impediment to acquiring human capital” – Thomas Sowell
That’s how they fail to gain any improvement via higher education, but the angry woman SJW origin can be seen in this discussion with Abigail Shrier on her recent book about transgenderism in teen girls. Those that don’t go that route find their religion in SJW, because they certainly aren’t getting anything of value from the colleges or professors.
https://youtu.be/OdtxUcvkJWA
I had hoped Kling would respond to Yoram Hazony’s take or the points he made:
https://twitter.com/yhazony/status/1281256839162847233
Specifically, while the letter is rebuking cancel culture, it itself excludes conservatives, it features liberals who have themselves been involved in canceling conservatives, and the letter itself makes three jabs to delegitimatize the conservative point of view.