From a commenter on this post.
The main goal of the ascendant educated left-wing white people is to differentiate themselves socially from middle-class white people.
I thought that was too accurate and too succinct to leave buried in the comments.
From a commenter on this post.
The main goal of the ascendant educated left-wing white people is to differentiate themselves socially from middle-class white people.
I thought that was too accurate and too succinct to leave buried in the comments.
Politics isn’t about policy, its about signaling and personal narrative making.
A lot of Silicon Valley politics can be explained by the psychology of nerds. If you start actually thinking about the logic of policies your getting off into the weeds and missing the core.
But part of the psychology of nerds is to be rational, which helps hedge against SV totally descending into progressive territory. Thankfully.
There isn’t much rational about “pop rationality” that nerds tend to settle into. It’s generally about people with poor understanding of human psychology and sociology making some really shallow statements that confirm their biases.
Your average nerd has a very stunted view of the human condition, and as such most of his “rational” beliefs about society are going to be full of holes because they’ve got bad assumptions.
They also often do really bad at things like statistics too if the issue it to emotional and politicized.
Are you betting on the outcomes or trying to figure out the best policy?
I don’t think I’ll ever understand psychology but I have a shot at economics.
I was just thinking about this issue today, after getting derisively laughed out of the discussion on the matter of recycling. I said “I think there’s space” [to store all the garbage], and a 6-7 person group just burst out laughing that anyone could think such a dumb thing.
A truly smart person nowadays is not going to find a home in defending the official positions of either Republics nor Democrats. These are movements that fundamentally try to align a hundred-odd million people each toward voting in a particular way. A truly smart person should be embarrassed to be aligned with these things. Certainly I am pretty dismissive of faux intellectuals who open up by gushing that “President ____ is just soooo inspiring”.
I am surrounded by exactly the sort of hipster knowledge workers described above, who want to sound erudite and who want to raise themselves above the hoi polai that work 9-5 jobs and shop at Walmart instead of Target. These people aren’t rational at all about GMOs, recycling, CO2 policy, trains, the minimum wage, or privatized education. They all hew so strongly to the Democrat party line on these issues that it’s hard to even politely disagree with any sub-point on these topics.
No, it’s not charitable. I think the line has to be drawn when people start believing in an American political party. There’s just no hope for a rational conversation if someone is fawning over their favorite party.
SWPLs
“Taking the most charitable view of those who disagree”
Don’t be confused about this. If the alternative view is “they are just stupid,” then most other explanations are more charitable.