It's full of citations of Bonilla-Silva, is about prioritizing anti-racist commitments in math education in teacher (perhaps over math qualifications, which I get 'to the student' is part of the education scholarship but...), and indulges the usual essentialism-via-socialization of African-American ways of knowing.
Not far off from the video posted, it's the same ideas, and they're fair to call CRT ideas. I doubt the broad value of including this in an education plan.
Money quote: "The proposed framework would, in effect, de-mathematize math. For all the rhetoric in this framework about equity, social justice, environmental care and culturally appropriate pedagogy, there is no realistic hope for a more fair, just, equal and well-stewarded society if our schools uproot long-proven, reliable and highly effective math methods and instead try to build a mathless Brave New World on a foundation of unsound ideology. A real champion of equity and justice would want all California’s children to learn actual math—as in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus—not an endless river of new pedagogical fads that effectively distort and displace actual math."
I actually do think lying about something like this should be enough to nullify his contract. I actually have no strong feelings about his vaccination stance but I do think it’s outrageous that he was dishonest about it and flouted the rules in place. As you said, take a stand one way or another.
I do think, though, that wokeness is not at all unrelated to the covid stuff. People genuinely do treat vaccination as a social justice issue, and that refusing to vaccinate disproportionately risks the lives vulnerable groups including people of color and people with disabilities. This argument is a valid one, but it veers into “wokeness” when the people making it want to shut down any arguments at all because having a differing opinion is so beyond the pale.
Again, I think that Rodgers’s huge misstep was being a dishonest coward about the whole thing, and I myself am extremely pro vaccination, and got myself and every member of my family vaccinated as soon as I could. But I do understand the argument that woke politics have infected the issue.
Maybe, but Aaron Rodgers isn’t really a straightforwardly conservative guy. Up until now, he’s really been sort of a liberal’s quarterback. He was vocally against the Dakota Pipeline and spoke out against it, urging Biden to shit it down as recently as this spring; he supported Colon Kaepernick and spoke out against the NFL for (in his opinion) cutting him solely because of the protests; he’s somewhat estranged from his family because of his rejection of conservative Christianity (although I think he’s still a Christian). I think it’s unfair to assume that he wouldn’t think about things like racial equity.
I think he seriously screwed up his handling of this issue, lied, and got away with it because he’s a star QB, and it’s possible that this whole incident will have a radicalizing effect on him. I have more respect for Kylie Irving, whose general opinions seem WAY more out there but who at least had the integrity to just be open about not getting the vax. But I do think Rodgers is more nuanced or at least less predictable in his politics than you are assuming.
Short and to the point. Love it! Hopefully the rest of the pundit class will pick this point up and spread it like the "There are no Refs" essay is starting to make the rounds.... And you did it without having to use the increasingly tired "motte and bailey" phrase.
I am more and more convinced that the politics ostensibly practiced by the people who are noisiest about being part of the left in America literally don't actually even exist. There are no coherent positions, no policy agendas, no ideas that go beyond trying to torture the English language around the clock with one another.
It's simply just a tedious, linguistic parlor game played for one-upsmanship points in the Professional Managerial Class.
"If you ask these people, are you part of a social revolution?, they’ll loudly tell you yes!"
I saw a LinkedIn post advertising a talk called something like "Corporate Diversity in the Post-George Floyd Era." Ok. A poor guy getting shot over convenience store food was actually about 6-figure corporate executive positions!
I think these people want to sound revolutionary, I don't think they want any meaningful change. I used to call myself an "anarchist" before realizing the "radicalism" amounted to little more than putting stickers on street signs.
If they got the "meaningful change" they so brazenly lie about wanting, half of those frauds would be out of a job, and have to find another hustle. Actually getting change is the last thing they want. It's precisely why they don't have any actual politics.
When I was a kid I was taught to distrust any preacher who drove a Cadillac.
The modern equivalent is high status whites claiming their field needs more diversification, or corporations doing land acknowledgement. If you really believed what you were selling....
The bizarre corporate attempted tie ins reminds me of that cringe Pepsi commercial where Kendal Jenner hands a can of pepsi across the barricade to bring peace.... Its partially marketing trying to tie into the aspirational memes out there. "Hey, you like Social Justice? I like Social Justice too. My product goes great with Social Justice! In fact, I have a Social Justice discount this week!"
I tend to get a little conspiratorial on this, but it seems like there was almost a concerted effort after the failed Occupy movement to redirect blame for society’s problems away from corporations and wealth inequality to racism and racial inequality.
This now allows corporations to be the “good guys” while having to do nothing more than implement some diversity trainings, and toss up a #BLM on their Twitter account.
Meanwhile, many liberals and progressives who were once critics of multi-national corporations and neoliberalism are now cheerleaders for Big Pharma and Big Tech.
Quite an inversion of belief in a relatively short amount of time.
Possibly, but can anyone really "invert" principles that weren't important enough for them to articulate, let alone really hold on to, in the first place?
I agree 100% with your take and I don't think it requires a conspiracy to explain it, rather just a confluence of incentives that people just tacitly glom onto because they're easy, rewarding, and at least ostensibly just. I'm sure these corporations are quite sincere about "doing something", but the "something" they're doing just so happens not to affect their bottom line nor have them face any particularly tough questions. A wholesale critique of capitalism - or even just of high finance - asks a bit more of them than a diversity officer does. So no wonder why, at a time when Something Must Be Done, they chose what they chose. No conspiracy required. Just good old economics and good old politics.
'I think these people want to sound revolutionary, I don't think they want any meaningful change.'
I'm not saying anything new but it's a deeply conservative ideology.
Specifically it creates a moral rationale for hierarchies (and in particular the moral superiority of the center versus the depravity of the periphery, per Gurri's The Revolt of the Public) that obviates criticism of inequalities in wealth, status, and power.
I think a fair read is that the public is able to see how incompetent and self-serving many institutions are. Elites whose status was dependent on their ability to provide meaningful expertise, procedural fairness, and sense making are being undermined on a number of fronts and pseudo-radical ideology represents a rationale for continuation of the hierarchy.
It's not a coincidence that the sickest industries (media) and academic disciplines (what is the point of Ed schools) are affected first and worst.
Most conservative place I ever lived was San Francisco about 20 years ago. It seemed like everyone thought it was still 1974 and were opposed to any proposal that would move the needle closer to 2000.
The answer is much simpler. Big corporations generally want to keep costs low, so they create competitive ladder climbing environments. They need young labor straight from school, and they want them to force out their higher paid middle managers. Corporations will appease whatever politics these young people have to keep the scheme working.
This exemplifies what compels me to give you 5 dollars every month. It's the incorrigible sincerity and forthrightness. Throws a lifeline to my despairing, irony-poisoned brain.
My problem with that is that I think "social justice", in the abstract, is a good thing. I don't want the woke to claim that label, as IMO they working AGAINST true social justice.
As a prospective new-minted Republican, how might you convince fellow Republicans that there's a definition of "social justice" that needn't be bad?
The closest I've come to seeing someone accomplish this is to argue from a Christian, perhaps most successfully Catholic, perspective. Even then, it's not particularly convincing, especially to the unchurched — though some of the hardest to convince seem to be the "church militant" churched. What is your favorite argument that "social justice" needn't mean "woke"? I would like a new argument to try, since the ones I've tried so far seem unconvincing to my nearest and dearest on the right.
In terms of race the most successful formulation is the one from the 1970's and 1980's: race should simply be ignored. It isn't a question of what conservatives like, it's a question of what the general public likes and the vast majority of Americans are comfortable with the concept of "judging people based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin". In fact what has enraged so many otherwise politically indifferent individuals is the social justice formulation that race is essential. How many times have you heard the man on the street quote about how the new focus on intersectional classifications is "turning people against each other"?
Of course Republicans have a definition of social justice, to which they are quite committed. It's essentially the Classical Liberal point of view. Each person has intrinsic value, but must also contribute to society to the extent they can. Judgment as to who legitimately needs charity is up to individuals, and should not be coerced. Some people are evil, or commit too many evil acts to be forgiven, and should be ousted from society. Crimes of the dead (eg slavery) are not prosecutable on the living. People should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Etc etc.
I know many Republicans sincerely committed to the idea of a just society that you describe, but I also know a lot of Republicans, and know that many would insist up and down that that vision of a just society is not "social justice" — that "social justice" must necessarily mean what they consider the unwarranted social engineering which would interfere with their conception of a just society.
Justice, real justice, they say, is just justice. Not social. It's a common talking point on the right, and even exceptionally reasonable Republicans can be quite insistent that a vision for a truly just society cannot be called "social justice".
I'm not saying this to discourage you. From what little I know of you, having you on Team R would improve it. Just, the perhaps-quite-understandable aversion to using "the other side's" lingo seems to be a feature of the team.
Gonna have to disagree a bit. Republicans who lean in a libertarian direction are pretty committed to classical liberalism, sure. But Republicans leaning in ...another... direction are not particularly enamored of some core concepts of classical liberalism. I'm thinking of how classical liberalism would relate to topics like: gay marriage, immigration policy, drug legalization, free trade, etc.
(I think believing there is such a thing as "true social justice" is the first mistake made by those I would call social justice maximalists.)
I hear what you're saying but I don't think I'm conceding that they have a monopoly on caring about social justice by employing that term.
When I google the definition "maximalist" it returns: (especially in politics) a person who holds extreme views and is not prepared to compromise.
To me, that neatly divides *my* ideas about the most productive way to pursue further improvements in social justice from theirs but without using a term that I think is pejorative. And I think they wouldn't mind the term. To me that is a feature not a bug.
This had a lot of amazing and hilarious lines in it, so thoroughly enjoyed.
As I often say, they took a core part of the politics I spent my life advocating for, divorced it from the part that makes a difference, ripped out any intellectual rigor and put in things designed to make them feel better, and packaged it in language designed to make them look cool to people exactly like them.
In a century we went from John Reed to threatening on Twitter to beat people up for using the W word.
"they took a core part of the politics I spent my life advocating for, divorced it from the part that makes a difference, ripped out any intellectual rigor and put in things designed to make them feel better, and packaged it in language designed to make them look cool to people exactly like them."
Very much true for me also, but I think it's much worse than that. They are now advocating against free speech, are in favor of highly illiberal policing of thought and language (backed up with hugely consequential social and economic sanctions against transgressors), and are installing their Political Officers in every corporation, every college. They police acceptable art, acceptable discourse, and they have gone all-in with the anti-science trans cult, which rivals QAnon in its craziness (but is far more successful).
That's what I'm thinking. Said I'd NEVER vote Dem again. (But WAS cagey when I added, "if at all POSSIBLE." Not comfortable with Trump, tho, so there is that.
"He was a strange figure—like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child’s proportions." - Charles Dickens .. A Christmas Carol
Yep. Biden is absolutely not viable for 2024, and neither IMO is Harris. And I have no idea if there is anyone else out there who could challenge. Of course, Obama was a huge surprise in 2008, so it's not hopeless.
Yeah, I would still vote for wokest Democrat over Trump (any Trump), but hopefully nature will take its course before 2024. Or, to quote an option suggested by the Orange Man himself: "If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”
the whole purpose of democracy is to resolve otherwise intractable disagreements without violence. the premise is you will live in a country with people you really disagree with and we want to move past that to solve the things which impact us all (read: material concerns).
They will keep on using names they think are good, and if the names get co-opted and used to make them look silly, they'll say that using those names is bigoted. (This happened with fake news; I recall when the term was used by the left to describe right-wing misinformation sites. Then Trump managed to make it describe mainstream media sites, after which it became a term that, if you unironically used it, meant you were right-wing.)
The thing is, it's precisely their lack of centralized coordination that's a strength. On the one hand, there is no central authority anyone can point to as the source of terms or ideas. And yet on the other hand, highly educated people download phrasing and ideas at the same time and try them out en masse, and if it doesn't work, they can use the lack of centralized authority as a shield and say that no one ever said that. (Yes, you can numerous people who said that, but they'll just respond by saying that all of those people are nobodies, and no one listens to them.) As Vox Day once put it, they act like a school of fish. (Note: from what I know about him, I have a pretty low opinion of Vox Day, but I don't know that much about him.)
I love that someone else remembers that happening with Fake News. Sometimes it seems that no one remembers what the discourse actually was last decade/year/week.
I remember seeing a video ad for Facebook where they had that a simpering NPR-voice narrator say probably the most Facebook claim I've ever heard: "we also had to deal with false news." 'Had to deal with', like it rained from the sky. 'False news', like we weren't all calling it fake news until Trump claimed it.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the change from Dems going "I'm not going to trust any vaccine that Trump rushes through authorization!" to "Anyone who doesn't get the vaccine immediately is an idiot Trumper who deserves to die".
I can't possibly believe no one else noticed that. And yet nobody else really seems to remember.
I think the term "woke" is starting to piss them off now because people are starting to realize just how empty and self-righteous social justice politics, aka woke politics really is. More than anything, the language games, non-sensical politics, and shoddy intellectual thought is starting to lose its power. Maybe some of them are becoming more self-aware of how it's almost exclusively tribal signaling, but a majority don't understand that what they're doing is alienating a remarkably large share of the country. CNN just ran a segment about how Virginia elected Youngkin because non-college educated white women voted overwhelmingly in his favor. They have the position that non-college educated people are the problem...
It's an effective insult because it's a concise summation of why people hate liberals: liberals believe they're possessed of an incontrovertible, undebatable moral truth and if you're not on board with them it's because you're a benighted fool.
It *used to be* that you're a poor benighted fool. Now it's "because you're an immoral and probably irredeemable racist / transphobe / misogynist who should not be allowed to participate in the shared project that is our country."
I had a conversation with someone over on Slowboring who stated the commonly held belief that there is nothing wrong with a manager picking a newly married 27 year old guy over a similar newly married 27 year old woman on the grounds that the guy is less likely to go out on maternity leave. He also felt that it was totally appropriate for the police to treat people differently based on the statistical likelihood of them being a threat. A 19 year old Black male is more of a threat than a 19 year old Asian male and a 70 year old Asian female is vastly less of a threat than either 19 year old. And the cops should act accordingly.
For the woke twitter folks I'm curious to know how they would convivence someone like that of their error of their ways? Certainly 10s of millions of Americans hold those views.
Because the guys is less likely to go out on maternity leave? I hate to tell you this, but the number of guys that get pregnant is vanishingly small.
The point is that the woke Twitter crowd is so vanishingly small that convincing them of anything is not the point. All that's required is to broadcast their views to mainstream America. The idea, for example, that in the real world men becoming pregnant is an issue is going to rouse widespread derision and mockery.
Don't you see that talking about "human beings who can lactate" is driving people to Dave Chappelle and Team TERF? It's the GOP's wet dream.
How many people had even heard of a "terf" before? How many do you think only learned it because Dave Chappelle or JK Rowling talked about it--in a positive connotation?
Is that wrong? How many guys do you know that have gotten pregnant?
There's also the ancillary question of whether or not two physical standards for a job like firefighting makes sense. Presumably the requirement to lift X amount of pounds exists because a firefighter may have to lift and carry somebody from a burning building. Given that consideration how can anybody justify a second, less rigorous standard based solely on gender?
Since guys can’t get pregnant is it ok for a hiring manager to prefer a newly married 27 year old guy over a newly married 27 year old female? You say that’s fine.
My question was, what would your Steele man argument be that it was wrong.
The manager is being rational given the situation (assuming both candidates are otherwise equally good candidates), but it doesn't mean the situation is just.
We should design society such that parents of any gender are just as likely and/or able to take fully-paid parental leave, make childcare easy and free at the point of access, and overall value people's lives over a slavish devotion to work and "productivity".
In my younger days I was in a cult called "an internet startup". My co-workers and I would roll into work early in the morning, then we would go out to lunch together. Then we would long hours into the night, more likely than not going out to dinner and drinks with the same group of people. Sometimes we would sleep at the office underneath our desks. Then we would come back in on Saturdays, followed by a night of debauchery with the same people. Once your social circle of friends has a perfect overlap with your co-workers how is that not a cult?
And it is one that we entered into willingly. The gamble we took is that the compensation might have been a little lower but there was a chance for riches down the road.
That pattern is repeated everywhere: in the tech world, in finance and banking, in medicine and research. What needs to be recognized is that what's driving this is individual choices. And when somebody decides to sleep over at the office of their own volition how do you compete with that? Would it be fair if the person that doesn't sleep under their desk gets the raise despite working fewer hours and demonstrating less commitment?
Megan McArdle made a related point a while back. She described working in tech, and having "what did you do on the weekend" conversations with her male co-workers, and hearing about how they spent all their free time doing techie stuff (work related and not), and feeling that she could never compete with that, because she valued doing stuff outside of tech.
And if that's testoserone related (which seems very plausible to me), then what?
Yeah, one of my standard interview questions is "What do you code during your spare time?". Good programmers are programmers because they love to program, on the clock and off.
I dispute this. I'd say most great programmers love to do it, and do it in their off hours. However....
1) I've known some not great programmers who code plenty in their off time.
2) I've known enough good programmers who were 9-to-5ers to make me doubt this overall.
Not saying it's a bad question; merely that it's a generalization I've heard about programmers for many years that does not seem to match reality. But I'm not on the Silicon Valley side of software development; maybe things are different there.
You're contradicting yourself here when you write that "...most great programmers..." do it while you later write that it's a generalization that doesn't seem to match reality.
I would also assert that a lot of good coding is natural instinct but there is still plenty of room for practice and experience. Years ago I saw Dave Thomas speak at a conference and what he said then spoke to me: is programming your job or is it your profession? Because if it's the latter then it is natural to desire to practice to expand your knowledge and to hone your skills. That is a process that never stops. I think of it as the instrument maker who never stops trying to improve as he makes violin after violin. The goal is always to try to get better.
Now, in recent times finding anybody is just about impossible so the question is less valuable simply because we are willing to compromise just to get a warm body into the chair. And sometimes not all that warm.
Some of the best programmers I know avoid programming in their spare time. Some of the worst spend all their free time working (badly) on side projects. And, sure, I've run across the opposite example too, but I'm deeply sceptical that a choice of hobbies is a strong signal of much.
> Good programmers are programmers because they love to program
And one way for some people to *stop* loving to program is to do nothing but programming, burn out, and get sick of it. Which has happened to more than one engineer I know.
Conversely, I *do* know managers who select for employees who program as a hobby because they think it means they'll be open to unpaid overtime, or because they think it means they won't have to budget for professional development or training "on the clock"...
I am in tech and this was my condundrum for a while. I decided that I would settle for never being a superstar so I could do other things outside tech and live a richer life. Even if you are brilliant, the learning curve is brutal. So, you just have to choose your balance.
I'm not 100% sure how your comment is responding to mine -- I presume it's that potential parents are less likely to be able to participate in the "slavish devotion to work" culture.
Maybe it's the case that anyone who wants to have work-life balance should simply accept they can't compete with that "commitment," and choose a different company to work for that actually hires enough people to do the amount of work that needs to be done. Or maybe it's the case that this is increasingly becoming the norm in entire fields, and it's the sign of a sick culture that should get its priorities in order.
My point is that increasing access to child care doesn't address the underlying issue. If somebody is a professional artist and they spend 16 hours a day sculpting/painting/etc. is that a problem with societal expectations? If a writer puts in 12 hours a day on his novel or screenplay is that due to lack of access to easy childcare?
Devotion to work and devotion to profession/craft are real phenomenon. I majored in physics in college and the expectation there is that if you go on to a position at a university or research institute that physics will be your life. Some of that I am sure is career pressure but a large part of it is also that the people who tend to go into physics view it as beautiful and profound and therefore naturally spend huge amounts of their waking time involved with it. If you are only a dabbler how can you compete with that?
1) BronxZooCobra's original point was: How does someone who is "woke" convince the average person that it's wrong to hire a young man over a young woman, if both of whom are equally as likely to become a parent, but the woman is more likely to take maternity leave and take on a greater share of domestic labour?
And my belief is that it's less effective to argue "you're a terrible sexist hiring manager, #DoBetter" and more that we should create the conditions for a less sexist society, wherein a 27 y/o recently married male candidate is equally as likely to devote the time to being a parent as the female candidate. There's lots of things that could contribute to balancing that out, from universal paid leave programs to peer pressure gender norms to free childcare.
2) Separately, there is the issue of "prospective parent" vs "prospective not parent" candidates. And if your prospective workplace's culture is SO demanding that a parent basically has to choose between the job or seeing their kids, then yeah, perhaps it's not a good fit for either party. That's why my cousin, a talented lawyer who worked at a big firm, decided to move into a 9-5 law job shortly before having children.
3) And, irrespective of the parenting issue, then there's the question of whether "devotion to work" to the exclusion of having a healthy work/life balance is a) necessary to be good at certain professions and b) is a result of societal expectations.
For a), maybe at the beginning where there's a big learning curve and you have to devote a lot of hours, but I think with almost any skill, there's a plateau where you just have to maintain and keep up.
In terms of societal expectations and a culture of work -- ultimately, I come back to my friend Sarah, who works for a corporation that has offices in Denmark and NYC. She complains a lot about how people at the Denmark office take too much vacation and don't respond to her midnight emails immediately and generally have a more relaxed approach to work. The Denmark folks are competent and get shit done, but maybe a little more slowly, but generally sound a lot happier. Meanwhile, Sarah is super fucking miserable and talks about wanting to quit all the time.
1. Even if you had the child care and parental leave there is no guarantee that it would be utilized equally by both men and women. Given the position of most men as the primary bread winner of the family plus the natural incentive to compete for better pay, promotions, etc. it may well be that the hiring manager in this case would be better off taking the guy, depending on what kind of work we're talking about of course.
2. This just seems like a tacit recognition of the fact that the hiring manager might be justified in choosing the 27 year old man in this hypothetical.
3. I would counter that people are variable and diverse creatures and a healthy work/life balance is going to be largely subjective. The issue is that there is always going to be one extreme end of the curve, those workaholics who love their job and/or work in general and consequently devote a far higher share of their waking hours to working compared to the general population. There is another portion of the population who are perhaps less enthusiastic but feel compelled to work harder to try to keep up. And of course I think most people are a mix of the two.
I feel for your friend Sarah but for me personally those years working at the start up were a blast. Diversity in the workplace should obviously imply the need to recognize there are all sorts of different jobs and different companies.
I've come up with a term for them: Carthage. As the Romans destroyed Carthage thousands of years ago, surely there is nobody to object to use of that name. And it conveniently starts with CRT.
When people talk about CRT, they are talking about “the latest stupid thing a diversity consultant who read Robin DiAngelo’s book said”. And here you find the agents of Carthage. Carthage is the Revolution. From this angle, it looks like it is mostly a Cultural Revolution.
Carthage is “Defund the Police”, Carthage is the Twitter personality who calls you a racist and insists “my job isn’t to educate you” when you ask why. The people that came up with Latinx as a word live in Carthage. Many of the people who use that term have visited Carthage, though they may have done so as wanderers lost at sea.
I'm not a fan of the rhetorical implication that this movement should be ruthlessly destroyed. If we're choosing a name that can be used in debate, there's no point in being antagonistic right off the bat.
Something that worked in academia with real, actual-CRT CRT and adjoining critical theories (post-colonial, queer) was that the language was complex and encoded, even if the ideas weren't that hard to make sense of when translated from the academic jargon. This jargon was useful in part to communicate with devotees while at the same time saying, 'Nothing to see hear folks,' and, 'We are being totally reasonable.'
I think it also worked for a short time in actual, real world politics. That is, until it hit a threshold and normal people were wondering WTF was going on. The simultaneous radicalism and, 'Nothing to see hear folks,' have imploded and made it easy for Chris Rufos to do what Chris Rufos do. Basically, for wokeness to spread it had to be translated into accessible language and that lowered the bar in terms of time investment (decreasing value of 'rational ignorance') for normal people as its costs were increasing.
Because wokeness was so ensconced in a corner of weird, elite discourse, it hasn't adapted to be able to stand broader scrutiny. Maybe there's a lesson in that for the Left.
I’m curious about what you’re saying here because I went to art school in the 1990s when “lit crit” was evolving into post structuralism but critical race theory wasn’t really part of the conversation there. Lots of talk about deconstruction and the decentered subject, and on and on.. you could just watch people get comically tangled up in their own rhetoric to the degree they would forget whatever it was they thought they were trying to say in the first place. While i personally found this entertaining I never in a million years imagined it could evolve into an ideology that anyone would try to operationalize in the real world it just seemed too ridiculous. More to the point the whole project was so clearly nihilistic and the jargon itself seemed to signal opposition to action of any kind, positive or negative. Any thoughts on where and how philosophies this tortured worked their way into the mainstream?
Yeah it’s a great question and I don’t have a simple answer. In broad outlines, I think you have a lot of advanced degree surplus elites experiencing precarity economically, culturally, and in terms of social status, decaying institutions and industries, and at the same time this ideology is being refracted through the internet and getting dumber and stickier (gain of function). And so it ends up giving purpose to failing institutions and failing industries and failing careers. I hate to use the n-word, but maybe the efficiencies of neoliberalism have left a lot of people and institutions purposeless. But obviously that doesn’t really explain it, right? I feel like everything is so fucking weird. Like if you told me 25 years ago we’d all be about critical theory and Oprah, Trump, and Clintons in 2021 I wouldn’t be able to imagine it.
All of those contributors sound legit and yes everything is very very weird right now. If you had told me back then that someday Lit Crit would rule the world and that its hegemony would be demonstrated by massive numbers of suburban wine moms calling each other white supremacists on Facebook I would not have known what to say.
IMHO, I am not surprised that women have used a new set or moral ideas in the pursuit of petty social games with other women. I suspect that DiAngelo is popular, not because she is making the world a better place, but because she showed women how to use social justice to advance their own social games.
On “dog whistles”: Last week, Tom Cotton was on Fox news complaining about the teachers’ union president and he said: “Randi Weingarten is a joke. Randi Weingarten does not even have children of her own. What in the hell does she know about raising and teaching kids? In fact that’s probably why she was perfectly fine to shut down schools for two years and force kids to wear masks, because she didn’t have to deal with it at home.”
They called this a “homophobic dog whistle” and also an affront to every teacher who doesn’t have children. Tom Cotton does seem to be homophobic in general, but it’s ridiculous to read this as an effort to stoke anti-lesbian prejudice. Why would he even need to do that, when parents are extremely pissed about the school closures? But they call it a “dog whistle” because they know that Cotton’s actual message resonates with voters.
This tactic might work on some people, but when it stops working it really stops working. Parents are fed up with being told they’re prejudiced when they know they’re not.
I've been around plenty of woke people, and the idea that something is X-phobic or X-ist is very effective in those circles. That's the best way to win an argument amongst those people. Unfortunately, for them, it's not working on the outside world.
It would be like if a basketball player had a move that worked well against his teammates at practice but didn't work in the actual games, but he kept on using it anyway.
But it IS working. My employer wants my pronouns. My medical-care provider wants my sex-assigned-at-birth, my current gender indentity, and I think yet one more thing that I can't remember.
Increasingly my colleagues have been adding pronouns and I am dreading the day my institute will officially ask us to add them. It’s just something I am so fundamentally against because I did not “prefer” to be a woman and was something I really struggled with throughout my life. Anyway, my current top excuse to not add them is that I’m an atheist. Maybe that will fly.
My workplace has them as an option. I don't really have an argument against them, but I basically don't care. I look like a man, I think people can guess the pronouns
My workplace is extremely woke. I've been asked to add pronouns to email signatures, to add them to my Zoom screen (next to my name), and to announce them in meetings. I've also been asked to distribute pronoun stickers to people in my department. So far my response has been a passive failure to comply with any of it, or in one instance a bland "I don't do pronouns" when pressed (although of course I "do" pronouns; everyone does -- I just don't want to announce or dictate pronouns for other people to use. To me, pronouns are completely utilitarian. Take your best guess, and if I understand that I'm being spoken to or about, we're good.)
I'm not satisfied with my responses and passive resistance, because I feel I should "say something" but don't know what. If I "say something" I want it not to come across as the rantings of an unhinged contrarian a-hole (whether I am one or not, I don't want to seem like one); I'd rather anything I say be something -- I don't know: "uplifting"? "encouraging"? -- that other people feel emboldened to join in with.
His prelude to something legit was nasty because Tom Cotton is mean as a snake, but "she thought it was perfectly fine to shut down schools for two years" is a perfectly legit issue. People are riled up about masks not because of masks per se, but because masks have become a symbol of all of the in retrospect mistakes that were made "out of an abundance of caution" before there was any data on COVID transmission. I bet that if schools had re-opened after the initial shutdown with masks and being outside as much as possible nobody would be so angry about masks today. There'd be some grumbling, but it wouldn't be a condensed symbol for all of the over-reaction that occurred early in the pandemic. People are angry now not because the early restrictions were made, it is because public health and school authorities didn't back off once there was data from other countries and other states that showed how schools could re-open with mitigations. Parents could have chosen to remain at home if their risk calculus was different, but the approach used in a lot of districts was that any risk was too much risk.
I am all in with his Empower Parents to Protect Their Kids Act, which would make it unlawful for schools to participate in reassigning a minor child’s gender identity without first obtaining parental permission.
That's how it actually is when the votes in real elections are being counted in real elections and the results examined via exit poll results, instead of huffy partisan tankie quips.
Arguing if most recent off-year elections were aberrant or a trend? Try that instead. The Democratic party is already sufficiently concerned that this is going to look like a kiss on the cheek compared to the mid-terms in 2022, so maybe, just saying "TEXAS SUX THEREFORE THE GOP ISN'T GETTING FEMALE VOTES" doesn't really capture the reality of the politics on the ground right now.
It is not very strange that there are a whole lot of women care more about other issues (the economy, education, and crime) than they do about abortion.
David French did an analysis of the impact of abortion on the Virginia election https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/what-the-virginia-election-taught, and no matter what you think of him, he's a good analyst. I would have expected a bigger backlash, but when I thought about it, the women who had only lousy birth control and no access to safe, legal abortion are now quite elderly. People my age grew up knowing from the time we became able to get pregnant, we had access to effective birth control and to abortion. As harsh as it is to say this, I think that when Roe is overturned early next year there won't be a huge backlash in the 2022 elections. The way Dems message on abortion is repellent to even pro-choice voters, and almost nobody is in public life anymore who remembers what things were like before Roe. The consequences won't sink in for a few years and then maybe the pro-choice side will be able to secure abortion rights on a state by state basis.
I saw this, and I agree with your take. The times, circumstances, and politics are all so different from when RvW was originally decided as to be almost from another planet.
There is, can, and will be, a balance between the obvious need for abortion, and the right of people to determine what, if any, restrictions on it there can or should be. The TX, MS, etc. laws were deliberately passed with the intention of being challenged to get them to SCOTUS to decide.
This was just strategy, that a lot of the people on the tankie left didn't get because they write off every state legislator in red states as a knuckly dragging moron.
The problem with Roe is that it is really quite extreme--no restrictions until viability? That makes a lot of pro-choicers like me really queasy. I actually like the Mississipi 15 week ban except it is probably a stalking horse to move the line further and further to conception.
I agree. I think abortion is going to be a much less potent issue going forward than the left expects. Especially because plenty of blue states will keep abortion available, so now women in red states will have to travel. Of course this is a huge burden to the poor, but just another one on top of all their other burdens, and so won't have any particular valence for voters (I predict).
This is where philanthropists can make a huge difference---MacKenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates can set up a foundation that will fund travel, abortion fees and other expenses for the poor. It could be a pool of money available to Planned Parenthood.
Pretty much everything Cotton says in this piece is absolutely correct. You hardly have to like Tom Cotton to acknowledge that everything he's pointing out here is more or less completely obvious right now.
Thanks for the link. I don't agree with everything Cotton says in the interview, but I do acknowledge that his positions on these culture issues reflect majority public opinion in the United States. (The one exception is his opinion on parental leave, that fathers should get less. Most Americans favor paid leave for both parents.)
I have no idea if Cotton is homophobic or not, whatever that really means these days, but my experience with the woke is any conversation where you challenge their views or disagree with them devolves into an ad hominem pretty quick. The better the argument, the quicker the attack. Score one for Cotton.
Casual White racists segregate their children's schools by pulling them out of urban school districts to either private schools or lily White suburbs and really really hate it when you call them out on it. This is particularly egregious in liberal San Francisco where the public schools are good by any measure.
Just because you can't hear it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I still think economic class is the more salient point. There is of course large overlap with race.
Our public school district has one or two largely white schools and one or two mostly minority schools. The white schools are in rich neighborhoods and the minority schools in poor ones.
I don’t doubt there is real, underlying racism in some of these cases. Snobbery, though, is a wider umbrella that covers it all.
Okay, but I've seen "woke" used for everything from the most extreme radical politics to not using racial slurs, so the word brings only a limited amount of clarity itself.
There are terms that I expect could be used without too many complaints, but mainly unsatisfactory. "Antiracist activist" is too narrow, and ceding the word "antiracist" to them galls; "progressive" is far too broad. Something based on "social justice" might work (but not "social justice warrior," obviously), even though I don't think "social justice" is bandied about as much as it used to be.
You shouldn't target somebody in public with a racial slur. Discussing racial slurs in public should be okay. Are we not supposed to talk about the frequency with which the term "nigger" shows up in literary works like Huckleberry Finn or Breakfast at Tiffany's?
And in the private realm all bets are off. Clearly the greater evil would be an attempt to police private speech.
"...and whether to incorporate some kind of "woke" messaging into the curriculum..."
What?
The paper citing Martin is here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236790021_Danny_Bernard_Martin_-_Beyond_Missionaries_or_Cannibals_Who_Should_Teach_Mathematics_to_African_American_Children_-_The_High_School_Journal_911
It's full of citations of Bonilla-Silva, is about prioritizing anti-racist commitments in math education in teacher (perhaps over math qualifications, which I get 'to the student' is part of the education scholarship but...), and indulges the usual essentialism-via-socialization of African-American ways of knowing.
Not far off from the video posted, it's the same ideas, and they're fair to call CRT ideas. I doubt the broad value of including this in an education plan.
You can read what several hundred California STEM professors think of the idea here: https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13658
Money quote: "The proposed framework would, in effect, de-mathematize math. For all the rhetoric in this framework about equity, social justice, environmental care and culturally appropriate pedagogy, there is no realistic hope for a more fair, just, equal and well-stewarded society if our schools uproot long-proven, reliable and highly effective math methods and instead try to build a mathless Brave New World on a foundation of unsound ideology. A real champion of equity and justice would want all California’s children to learn actual math—as in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus—not an endless river of new pedagogical fads that effectively distort and displace actual math."
I actually do think lying about something like this should be enough to nullify his contract. I actually have no strong feelings about his vaccination stance but I do think it’s outrageous that he was dishonest about it and flouted the rules in place. As you said, take a stand one way or another.
I do think, though, that wokeness is not at all unrelated to the covid stuff. People genuinely do treat vaccination as a social justice issue, and that refusing to vaccinate disproportionately risks the lives vulnerable groups including people of color and people with disabilities. This argument is a valid one, but it veers into “wokeness” when the people making it want to shut down any arguments at all because having a differing opinion is so beyond the pale.
Again, I think that Rodgers’s huge misstep was being a dishonest coward about the whole thing, and I myself am extremely pro vaccination, and got myself and every member of my family vaccinated as soon as I could. But I do understand the argument that woke politics have infected the issue.
Maybe, but Aaron Rodgers isn’t really a straightforwardly conservative guy. Up until now, he’s really been sort of a liberal’s quarterback. He was vocally against the Dakota Pipeline and spoke out against it, urging Biden to shit it down as recently as this spring; he supported Colon Kaepernick and spoke out against the NFL for (in his opinion) cutting him solely because of the protests; he’s somewhat estranged from his family because of his rejection of conservative Christianity (although I think he’s still a Christian). I think it’s unfair to assume that he wouldn’t think about things like racial equity.
I think he seriously screwed up his handling of this issue, lied, and got away with it because he’s a star QB, and it’s possible that this whole incident will have a radicalizing effect on him. I have more respect for Kylie Irving, whose general opinions seem WAY more out there but who at least had the integrity to just be open about not getting the vax. But I do think Rodgers is more nuanced or at least less predictable in his politics than you are assuming.
Ugh Shut not shit and Kyrie not Kylie.
Short and to the point. Love it! Hopefully the rest of the pundit class will pick this point up and spread it like the "There are no Refs" essay is starting to make the rounds.... And you did it without having to use the increasingly tired "motte and bailey" phrase.
It might be tired to Substack readers, but I think it's a useful idea to the general population.
hehe, fair enough :)
I can never remember what "motte and bailey" means. IMO, it's a phrase that should stay in the SSC/ACT/LW backwater from whence it came.
I am more and more convinced that the politics ostensibly practiced by the people who are noisiest about being part of the left in America literally don't actually even exist. There are no coherent positions, no policy agendas, no ideas that go beyond trying to torture the English language around the clock with one another.
It's simply just a tedious, linguistic parlor game played for one-upsmanship points in the Professional Managerial Class.
You say that and...
I clicked on the Greenwald tweet and one of the trending topics on twitter was "Best Protest Costumes from COP26"
A) "Here is my new idea called X"
B) "We think idea X is bad"
A) "WE NEVER SAID IDEA X - IDEA X Is a [SEMI-ACADEMIC SLUR] term for actual idea Y"
B) "We think idea Y is bad"
A) "WE NEV....
Easy mode is right. It's such nonsense, but seems to be facilitated by collective goldfish level memory (intentional or otherwise).
That's just a dogwhistle for hating kittens. Why do you hate kittens? What's wrong with you?
"If you ask these people, are you part of a social revolution?, they’ll loudly tell you yes!"
I saw a LinkedIn post advertising a talk called something like "Corporate Diversity in the Post-George Floyd Era." Ok. A poor guy getting shot over convenience store food was actually about 6-figure corporate executive positions!
I think these people want to sound revolutionary, I don't think they want any meaningful change. I used to call myself an "anarchist" before realizing the "radicalism" amounted to little more than putting stickers on street signs.
If they got the "meaningful change" they so brazenly lie about wanting, half of those frauds would be out of a job, and have to find another hustle. Actually getting change is the last thing they want. It's precisely why they don't have any actual politics.
When I was a kid I was taught to distrust any preacher who drove a Cadillac.
The modern equivalent is high status whites claiming their field needs more diversification, or corporations doing land acknowledgement. If you really believed what you were selling....
Also distrust social movements that call for more administrators.
There was some college protest a few years back that demanded a chief diversity offer or something like that.
Yeah, and now every college has one.
It's the successes of the movement that worry me, not it's failures.
Here's a fun google search: chief diversity officer site:.edu
As someone who has bullshitted their way into higher paying white collar jobs, I have complete solidarity with chief diversity officers
The bizarre corporate attempted tie ins reminds me of that cringe Pepsi commercial where Kendal Jenner hands a can of pepsi across the barricade to bring peace.... Its partially marketing trying to tie into the aspirational memes out there. "Hey, you like Social Justice? I like Social Justice too. My product goes great with Social Justice! In fact, I have a Social Justice discount this week!"
I tend to get a little conspiratorial on this, but it seems like there was almost a concerted effort after the failed Occupy movement to redirect blame for society’s problems away from corporations and wealth inequality to racism and racial inequality.
This now allows corporations to be the “good guys” while having to do nothing more than implement some diversity trainings, and toss up a #BLM on their Twitter account.
Meanwhile, many liberals and progressives who were once critics of multi-national corporations and neoliberalism are now cheerleaders for Big Pharma and Big Tech.
Quite an inversion of belief in a relatively short amount of time.
Possibly, but can anyone really "invert" principles that weren't important enough for them to articulate, let alone really hold on to, in the first place?
I agree 100% with your take and I don't think it requires a conspiracy to explain it, rather just a confluence of incentives that people just tacitly glom onto because they're easy, rewarding, and at least ostensibly just. I'm sure these corporations are quite sincere about "doing something", but the "something" they're doing just so happens not to affect their bottom line nor have them face any particularly tough questions. A wholesale critique of capitalism - or even just of high finance - asks a bit more of them than a diversity officer does. So no wonder why, at a time when Something Must Be Done, they chose what they chose. No conspiracy required. Just good old economics and good old politics.
'I think these people want to sound revolutionary, I don't think they want any meaningful change.'
I'm not saying anything new but it's a deeply conservative ideology.
Specifically it creates a moral rationale for hierarchies (and in particular the moral superiority of the center versus the depravity of the periphery, per Gurri's The Revolt of the Public) that obviates criticism of inequalities in wealth, status, and power.
I think a fair read is that the public is able to see how incompetent and self-serving many institutions are. Elites whose status was dependent on their ability to provide meaningful expertise, procedural fairness, and sense making are being undermined on a number of fronts and pseudo-radical ideology represents a rationale for continuation of the hierarchy.
It's not a coincidence that the sickest industries (media) and academic disciplines (what is the point of Ed schools) are affected first and worst.
Most conservative place I ever lived was San Francisco about 20 years ago. It seemed like everyone thought it was still 1974 and were opposed to any proposal that would move the needle closer to 2000.
That, to me, is a definition of "conservatism."
The answer is much simpler. Big corporations generally want to keep costs low, so they create competitive ladder climbing environments. They need young labor straight from school, and they want them to force out their higher paid middle managers. Corporations will appease whatever politics these young people have to keep the scheme working.
This exemplifies what compels me to give you 5 dollars every month. It's the incorrigible sincerity and forthrightness. Throws a lifeline to my despairing, irony-poisoned brain.
Until the movement you are referring to has named itself, I propose "social justice maximalist".
My problem with that is that I think "social justice", in the abstract, is a good thing. I don't want the woke to claim that label, as IMO they working AGAINST true social justice.
As a prospective new-minted Republican, how might you convince fellow Republicans that there's a definition of "social justice" that needn't be bad?
The closest I've come to seeing someone accomplish this is to argue from a Christian, perhaps most successfully Catholic, perspective. Even then, it's not particularly convincing, especially to the unchurched — though some of the hardest to convince seem to be the "church militant" churched. What is your favorite argument that "social justice" needn't mean "woke"? I would like a new argument to try, since the ones I've tried so far seem unconvincing to my nearest and dearest on the right.
In terms of race the most successful formulation is the one from the 1970's and 1980's: race should simply be ignored. It isn't a question of what conservatives like, it's a question of what the general public likes and the vast majority of Americans are comfortable with the concept of "judging people based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin". In fact what has enraged so many otherwise politically indifferent individuals is the social justice formulation that race is essential. How many times have you heard the man on the street quote about how the new focus on intersectional classifications is "turning people against each other"?
^^^^This!
Of course Republicans have a definition of social justice, to which they are quite committed. It's essentially the Classical Liberal point of view. Each person has intrinsic value, but must also contribute to society to the extent they can. Judgment as to who legitimately needs charity is up to individuals, and should not be coerced. Some people are evil, or commit too many evil acts to be forgiven, and should be ousted from society. Crimes of the dead (eg slavery) are not prosecutable on the living. People should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Etc etc.
I see Slaw mentioned "content of" already.
I know many Republicans sincerely committed to the idea of a just society that you describe, but I also know a lot of Republicans, and know that many would insist up and down that that vision of a just society is not "social justice" — that "social justice" must necessarily mean what they consider the unwarranted social engineering which would interfere with their conception of a just society.
Justice, real justice, they say, is just justice. Not social. It's a common talking point on the right, and even exceptionally reasonable Republicans can be quite insistent that a vision for a truly just society cannot be called "social justice".
I'm not saying this to discourage you. From what little I know of you, having you on Team R would improve it. Just, the perhaps-quite-understandable aversion to using "the other side's" lingo seems to be a feature of the team.
Gonna have to disagree a bit. Republicans who lean in a libertarian direction are pretty committed to classical liberalism, sure. But Republicans leaning in ...another... direction are not particularly enamored of some core concepts of classical liberalism. I'm thinking of how classical liberalism would relate to topics like: gay marriage, immigration policy, drug legalization, free trade, etc.
(I think believing there is such a thing as "true social justice" is the first mistake made by those I would call social justice maximalists.)
I hear what you're saying but I don't think I'm conceding that they have a monopoly on caring about social justice by employing that term.
When I google the definition "maximalist" it returns: (especially in politics) a person who holds extreme views and is not prepared to compromise.
To me, that neatly divides *my* ideas about the most productive way to pursue further improvements in social justice from theirs but without using a term that I think is pejorative. And I think they wouldn't mind the term. To me that is a feature not a bug.
This had a lot of amazing and hilarious lines in it, so thoroughly enjoyed.
As I often say, they took a core part of the politics I spent my life advocating for, divorced it from the part that makes a difference, ripped out any intellectual rigor and put in things designed to make them feel better, and packaged it in language designed to make them look cool to people exactly like them.
In a century we went from John Reed to threatening on Twitter to beat people up for using the W word.
"they took a core part of the politics I spent my life advocating for, divorced it from the part that makes a difference, ripped out any intellectual rigor and put in things designed to make them feel better, and packaged it in language designed to make them look cool to people exactly like them."
Very much true for me also, but I think it's much worse than that. They are now advocating against free speech, are in favor of highly illiberal policing of thought and language (backed up with hugely consequential social and economic sanctions against transgressors), and are installing their Political Officers in every corporation, every college. They police acceptable art, acceptable discourse, and they have gone all-in with the anti-science trans cult, which rivals QAnon in its craziness (but is far more successful).
I think it's time to go resister as a Republican.
That's what I'm thinking. Said I'd NEVER vote Dem again. (But WAS cagey when I added, "if at all POSSIBLE." Not comfortable with Trump, tho, so there is that.
Donald Trump as the Ghost of Elections Past
"He was a strange figure—like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child’s proportions." - Charles Dickens .. A Christmas Carol
I'm sorry, but I think this is just burying your head in the sand. If he is around in 2024 and he wants the nomination he will get it.
And in terms of him being around he is three years younger than Biden.
Yep. Biden is absolutely not viable for 2024, and neither IMO is Harris. And I have no idea if there is anyone else out there who could challenge. Of course, Obama was a huge surprise in 2008, so it's not hopeless.
If Biden isn't around Harris will be the heir apparent. Whether or not she chooses to step aside is a potentially explosive question.
Yeah, I would still vote for wokest Democrat over Trump (any Trump), but hopefully nature will take its course before 2024. Or, to quote an option suggested by the Orange Man himself: "If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”
I couldn't vote for the wokest Dem, even over Trump. I expressed opinion long ago that should step aside in '24, but I'm not sure he will.
Harris? Pffft.
arrgh... "opinion long ago that BIDEN should..."
the whole purpose of democracy is to resolve otherwise intractable disagreements without violence. the premise is you will live in a country with people you really disagree with and we want to move past that to solve the things which impact us all (read: material concerns).
It's a fishing expedition, right?
They will keep on using names they think are good, and if the names get co-opted and used to make them look silly, they'll say that using those names is bigoted. (This happened with fake news; I recall when the term was used by the left to describe right-wing misinformation sites. Then Trump managed to make it describe mainstream media sites, after which it became a term that, if you unironically used it, meant you were right-wing.)
The thing is, it's precisely their lack of centralized coordination that's a strength. On the one hand, there is no central authority anyone can point to as the source of terms or ideas. And yet on the other hand, highly educated people download phrasing and ideas at the same time and try them out en masse, and if it doesn't work, they can use the lack of centralized authority as a shield and say that no one ever said that. (Yes, you can numerous people who said that, but they'll just respond by saying that all of those people are nobodies, and no one listens to them.) As Vox Day once put it, they act like a school of fish. (Note: from what I know about him, I have a pretty low opinion of Vox Day, but I don't know that much about him.)
I love that someone else remembers that happening with Fake News. Sometimes it seems that no one remembers what the discourse actually was last decade/year/week.
I remember seeing a video ad for Facebook where they had that a simpering NPR-voice narrator say probably the most Facebook claim I've ever heard: "we also had to deal with false news." 'Had to deal with', like it rained from the sky. 'False news', like we weren't all calling it fake news until Trump claimed it.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the change from Dems going "I'm not going to trust any vaccine that Trump rushes through authorization!" to "Anyone who doesn't get the vaccine immediately is an idiot Trumper who deserves to die".
I can't possibly believe no one else noticed that. And yet nobody else really seems to remember.
I’ve always found it hard to remember things that aren’t true.
There’s a whole account on Twitter dedicated to exposing exactly what you’re talking about here. Not that it will make any difference.
I'm annoyed that you took my point and said it better than I was going to. But glad I read the comments first.
I really want to apologize to you for annoying you, but that's an instinct I should probably get over. I'll just take the compliment!
I think the term "woke" is starting to piss them off now because people are starting to realize just how empty and self-righteous social justice politics, aka woke politics really is. More than anything, the language games, non-sensical politics, and shoddy intellectual thought is starting to lose its power. Maybe some of them are becoming more self-aware of how it's almost exclusively tribal signaling, but a majority don't understand that what they're doing is alienating a remarkably large share of the country. CNN just ran a segment about how Virginia elected Youngkin because non-college educated white women voted overwhelmingly in his favor. They have the position that non-college educated people are the problem...
It's an effective insult because it's a concise summation of why people hate liberals: liberals believe they're possessed of an incontrovertible, undebatable moral truth and if you're not on board with them it's because you're a benighted fool.
It *used to be* that you're a poor benighted fool. Now it's "because you're an immoral and probably irredeemable racist / transphobe / misogynist who should not be allowed to participate in the shared project that is our country."
I had a conversation with someone over on Slowboring who stated the commonly held belief that there is nothing wrong with a manager picking a newly married 27 year old guy over a similar newly married 27 year old woman on the grounds that the guy is less likely to go out on maternity leave. He also felt that it was totally appropriate for the police to treat people differently based on the statistical likelihood of them being a threat. A 19 year old Black male is more of a threat than a 19 year old Asian male and a 70 year old Asian female is vastly less of a threat than either 19 year old. And the cops should act accordingly.
For the woke twitter folks I'm curious to know how they would convivence someone like that of their error of their ways? Certainly 10s of millions of Americans hold those views.
We need more context here. Does "being a threat" mean waving a gun around, or does it mean driving slightly over the speed limit?
Because the guys is less likely to go out on maternity leave? I hate to tell you this, but the number of guys that get pregnant is vanishingly small.
The point is that the woke Twitter crowd is so vanishingly small that convincing them of anything is not the point. All that's required is to broadcast their views to mainstream America. The idea, for example, that in the real world men becoming pregnant is an issue is going to rouse widespread derision and mockery.
Since you think discriminating against newly married 20 something women is fine. What’s your steel man argument against your position?
Don't you see that talking about "human beings who can lactate" is driving people to Dave Chappelle and Team TERF? It's the GOP's wet dream.
How many people had even heard of a "terf" before? How many do you think only learned it because Dave Chappelle or JK Rowling talked about it--in a positive connotation?
We’re talking about two different things. Stick to the question of the job going to a guy because he won’t get pregnant.
Is that wrong? How many guys do you know that have gotten pregnant?
There's also the ancillary question of whether or not two physical standards for a job like firefighting makes sense. Presumably the requirement to lift X amount of pounds exists because a firefighter may have to lift and carry somebody from a burning building. Given that consideration how can anybody justify a second, less rigorous standard based solely on gender?
Since guys can’t get pregnant is it ok for a hiring manager to prefer a newly married 27 year old guy over a newly married 27 year old female? You say that’s fine.
My question was, what would your Steele man argument be that it was wrong.
The manager is being rational given the situation (assuming both candidates are otherwise equally good candidates), but it doesn't mean the situation is just.
We should design society such that parents of any gender are just as likely and/or able to take fully-paid parental leave, make childcare easy and free at the point of access, and overall value people's lives over a slavish devotion to work and "productivity".
In my younger days I was in a cult called "an internet startup". My co-workers and I would roll into work early in the morning, then we would go out to lunch together. Then we would long hours into the night, more likely than not going out to dinner and drinks with the same group of people. Sometimes we would sleep at the office underneath our desks. Then we would come back in on Saturdays, followed by a night of debauchery with the same people. Once your social circle of friends has a perfect overlap with your co-workers how is that not a cult?
And it is one that we entered into willingly. The gamble we took is that the compensation might have been a little lower but there was a chance for riches down the road.
That pattern is repeated everywhere: in the tech world, in finance and banking, in medicine and research. What needs to be recognized is that what's driving this is individual choices. And when somebody decides to sleep over at the office of their own volition how do you compete with that? Would it be fair if the person that doesn't sleep under their desk gets the raise despite working fewer hours and demonstrating less commitment?
Megan McArdle made a related point a while back. She described working in tech, and having "what did you do on the weekend" conversations with her male co-workers, and hearing about how they spent all their free time doing techie stuff (work related and not), and feeling that she could never compete with that, because she valued doing stuff outside of tech.
And if that's testoserone related (which seems very plausible to me), then what?
Yeah, one of my standard interview questions is "What do you code during your spare time?". Good programmers are programmers because they love to program, on the clock and off.
I dispute this. I'd say most great programmers love to do it, and do it in their off hours. However....
1) I've known some not great programmers who code plenty in their off time.
2) I've known enough good programmers who were 9-to-5ers to make me doubt this overall.
Not saying it's a bad question; merely that it's a generalization I've heard about programmers for many years that does not seem to match reality. But I'm not on the Silicon Valley side of software development; maybe things are different there.
You're contradicting yourself here when you write that "...most great programmers..." do it while you later write that it's a generalization that doesn't seem to match reality.
I would also assert that a lot of good coding is natural instinct but there is still plenty of room for practice and experience. Years ago I saw Dave Thomas speak at a conference and what he said then spoke to me: is programming your job or is it your profession? Because if it's the latter then it is natural to desire to practice to expand your knowledge and to hone your skills. That is a process that never stops. I think of it as the instrument maker who never stops trying to improve as he makes violin after violin. The goal is always to try to get better.
Now, in recent times finding anybody is just about impossible so the question is less valuable simply because we are willing to compromise just to get a warm body into the chair. And sometimes not all that warm.
Some of the best programmers I know avoid programming in their spare time. Some of the worst spend all their free time working (badly) on side projects. And, sure, I've run across the opposite example too, but I'm deeply sceptical that a choice of hobbies is a strong signal of much.
> Good programmers are programmers because they love to program
And one way for some people to *stop* loving to program is to do nothing but programming, burn out, and get sick of it. Which has happened to more than one engineer I know.
Conversely, I *do* know managers who select for employees who program as a hobby because they think it means they'll be open to unpaid overtime, or because they think it means they won't have to budget for professional development or training "on the clock"...
I am in tech and this was my condundrum for a while. I decided that I would settle for never being a superstar so I could do other things outside tech and live a richer life. Even if you are brilliant, the learning curve is brutal. So, you just have to choose your balance.
I'm not 100% sure how your comment is responding to mine -- I presume it's that potential parents are less likely to be able to participate in the "slavish devotion to work" culture.
Maybe it's the case that anyone who wants to have work-life balance should simply accept they can't compete with that "commitment," and choose a different company to work for that actually hires enough people to do the amount of work that needs to be done. Or maybe it's the case that this is increasingly becoming the norm in entire fields, and it's the sign of a sick culture that should get its priorities in order.
My point is that increasing access to child care doesn't address the underlying issue. If somebody is a professional artist and they spend 16 hours a day sculpting/painting/etc. is that a problem with societal expectations? If a writer puts in 12 hours a day on his novel or screenplay is that due to lack of access to easy childcare?
Devotion to work and devotion to profession/craft are real phenomenon. I majored in physics in college and the expectation there is that if you go on to a position at a university or research institute that physics will be your life. Some of that I am sure is career pressure but a large part of it is also that the people who tend to go into physics view it as beautiful and profound and therefore naturally spend huge amounts of their waking time involved with it. If you are only a dabbler how can you compete with that?
I think there are a number of issues at play:
1) BronxZooCobra's original point was: How does someone who is "woke" convince the average person that it's wrong to hire a young man over a young woman, if both of whom are equally as likely to become a parent, but the woman is more likely to take maternity leave and take on a greater share of domestic labour?
And my belief is that it's less effective to argue "you're a terrible sexist hiring manager, #DoBetter" and more that we should create the conditions for a less sexist society, wherein a 27 y/o recently married male candidate is equally as likely to devote the time to being a parent as the female candidate. There's lots of things that could contribute to balancing that out, from universal paid leave programs to peer pressure gender norms to free childcare.
2) Separately, there is the issue of "prospective parent" vs "prospective not parent" candidates. And if your prospective workplace's culture is SO demanding that a parent basically has to choose between the job or seeing their kids, then yeah, perhaps it's not a good fit for either party. That's why my cousin, a talented lawyer who worked at a big firm, decided to move into a 9-5 law job shortly before having children.
3) And, irrespective of the parenting issue, then there's the question of whether "devotion to work" to the exclusion of having a healthy work/life balance is a) necessary to be good at certain professions and b) is a result of societal expectations.
For a), maybe at the beginning where there's a big learning curve and you have to devote a lot of hours, but I think with almost any skill, there's a plateau where you just have to maintain and keep up.
In terms of societal expectations and a culture of work -- ultimately, I come back to my friend Sarah, who works for a corporation that has offices in Denmark and NYC. She complains a lot about how people at the Denmark office take too much vacation and don't respond to her midnight emails immediately and generally have a more relaxed approach to work. The Denmark folks are competent and get shit done, but maybe a little more slowly, but generally sound a lot happier. Meanwhile, Sarah is super fucking miserable and talks about wanting to quit all the time.
1. Even if you had the child care and parental leave there is no guarantee that it would be utilized equally by both men and women. Given the position of most men as the primary bread winner of the family plus the natural incentive to compete for better pay, promotions, etc. it may well be that the hiring manager in this case would be better off taking the guy, depending on what kind of work we're talking about of course.
2. This just seems like a tacit recognition of the fact that the hiring manager might be justified in choosing the 27 year old man in this hypothetical.
3. I would counter that people are variable and diverse creatures and a healthy work/life balance is going to be largely subjective. The issue is that there is always going to be one extreme end of the curve, those workaholics who love their job and/or work in general and consequently devote a far higher share of their waking hours to working compared to the general population. There is another portion of the population who are perhaps less enthusiastic but feel compelled to work harder to try to keep up. And of course I think most people are a mix of the two.
I feel for your friend Sarah but for me personally those years working at the start up were a blast. Diversity in the workplace should obviously imply the need to recognize there are all sorts of different jobs and different companies.
I've come up with a term for them: Carthage. As the Romans destroyed Carthage thousands of years ago, surely there is nobody to object to use of that name. And it conveniently starts with CRT.
When people talk about CRT, they are talking about “the latest stupid thing a diversity consultant who read Robin DiAngelo’s book said”. And here you find the agents of Carthage. Carthage is the Revolution. From this angle, it looks like it is mostly a Cultural Revolution.
Carthage is “Defund the Police”, Carthage is the Twitter personality who calls you a racist and insists “my job isn’t to educate you” when you ask why. The people that came up with Latinx as a word live in Carthage. Many of the people who use that term have visited Carthage, though they may have done so as wanderers lost at sea.
Read more: https://yevaud.substack.com/p/what-is-carthage
I'm not a fan of the rhetorical implication that this movement should be ruthlessly destroyed. If we're choosing a name that can be used in debate, there's no point in being antagonistic right off the bat.
If you look at it from the other side, the Carthaginians were an indigenous people destroyed by Roman imperialism.
Something that worked in academia with real, actual-CRT CRT and adjoining critical theories (post-colonial, queer) was that the language was complex and encoded, even if the ideas weren't that hard to make sense of when translated from the academic jargon. This jargon was useful in part to communicate with devotees while at the same time saying, 'Nothing to see hear folks,' and, 'We are being totally reasonable.'
I think it also worked for a short time in actual, real world politics. That is, until it hit a threshold and normal people were wondering WTF was going on. The simultaneous radicalism and, 'Nothing to see hear folks,' have imploded and made it easy for Chris Rufos to do what Chris Rufos do. Basically, for wokeness to spread it had to be translated into accessible language and that lowered the bar in terms of time investment (decreasing value of 'rational ignorance') for normal people as its costs were increasing.
Because wokeness was so ensconced in a corner of weird, elite discourse, it hasn't adapted to be able to stand broader scrutiny. Maybe there's a lesson in that for the Left.
I’m curious about what you’re saying here because I went to art school in the 1990s when “lit crit” was evolving into post structuralism but critical race theory wasn’t really part of the conversation there. Lots of talk about deconstruction and the decentered subject, and on and on.. you could just watch people get comically tangled up in their own rhetoric to the degree they would forget whatever it was they thought they were trying to say in the first place. While i personally found this entertaining I never in a million years imagined it could evolve into an ideology that anyone would try to operationalize in the real world it just seemed too ridiculous. More to the point the whole project was so clearly nihilistic and the jargon itself seemed to signal opposition to action of any kind, positive or negative. Any thoughts on where and how philosophies this tortured worked their way into the mainstream?
Yeah it’s a great question and I don’t have a simple answer. In broad outlines, I think you have a lot of advanced degree surplus elites experiencing precarity economically, culturally, and in terms of social status, decaying institutions and industries, and at the same time this ideology is being refracted through the internet and getting dumber and stickier (gain of function). And so it ends up giving purpose to failing institutions and failing industries and failing careers. I hate to use the n-word, but maybe the efficiencies of neoliberalism have left a lot of people and institutions purposeless. But obviously that doesn’t really explain it, right? I feel like everything is so fucking weird. Like if you told me 25 years ago we’d all be about critical theory and Oprah, Trump, and Clintons in 2021 I wouldn’t be able to imagine it.
All of those contributors sound legit and yes everything is very very weird right now. If you had told me back then that someday Lit Crit would rule the world and that its hegemony would be demonstrated by massive numbers of suburban wine moms calling each other white supremacists on Facebook I would not have known what to say.
IMHO, I am not surprised that women have used a new set or moral ideas in the pursuit of petty social games with other women. I suspect that DiAngelo is popular, not because she is making the world a better place, but because she showed women how to use social justice to advance their own social games.
I think someone else said it better in a comment, but: capitalism gave people happiness (or tried to), but people would rather suffer for meaning.
This was glorious, thank you.
On “dog whistles”: Last week, Tom Cotton was on Fox news complaining about the teachers’ union president and he said: “Randi Weingarten is a joke. Randi Weingarten does not even have children of her own. What in the hell does she know about raising and teaching kids? In fact that’s probably why she was perfectly fine to shut down schools for two years and force kids to wear masks, because she didn’t have to deal with it at home.”
They called this a “homophobic dog whistle” and also an affront to every teacher who doesn’t have children. Tom Cotton does seem to be homophobic in general, but it’s ridiculous to read this as an effort to stoke anti-lesbian prejudice. Why would he even need to do that, when parents are extremely pissed about the school closures? But they call it a “dog whistle” because they know that Cotton’s actual message resonates with voters.
This tactic might work on some people, but when it stops working it really stops working. Parents are fed up with being told they’re prejudiced when they know they’re not.
Randi calling it a dog whistle: https://twitter.com/rweingarten/status/1456085062584311817
I've been around plenty of woke people, and the idea that something is X-phobic or X-ist is very effective in those circles. That's the best way to win an argument amongst those people. Unfortunately, for them, it's not working on the outside world.
It would be like if a basketball player had a move that worked well against his teammates at practice but didn't work in the actual games, but he kept on using it anyway.
But it IS working. My employer wants my pronouns. My medical-care provider wants my sex-assigned-at-birth, my current gender indentity, and I think yet one more thing that I can't remember.
Increasingly my colleagues have been adding pronouns and I am dreading the day my institute will officially ask us to add them. It’s just something I am so fundamentally against because I did not “prefer” to be a woman and was something I really struggled with throughout my life. Anyway, my current top excuse to not add them is that I’m an atheist. Maybe that will fly.
My workplace has them as an option. I don't really have an argument against them, but I basically don't care. I look like a man, I think people can guess the pronouns
My workplace is extremely woke. I've been asked to add pronouns to email signatures, to add them to my Zoom screen (next to my name), and to announce them in meetings. I've also been asked to distribute pronoun stickers to people in my department. So far my response has been a passive failure to comply with any of it, or in one instance a bland "I don't do pronouns" when pressed (although of course I "do" pronouns; everyone does -- I just don't want to announce or dictate pronouns for other people to use. To me, pronouns are completely utilitarian. Take your best guess, and if I understand that I'm being spoken to or about, we're good.)
I'm not satisfied with my responses and passive resistance, because I feel I should "say something" but don't know what. If I "say something" I want it not to come across as the rantings of an unhinged contrarian a-hole (whether I am one or not, I don't want to seem like one); I'd rather anything I say be something -- I don't know: "uplifting"? "encouraging"? -- that other people feel emboldened to join in with.
Haven't figured out what that is yet.
Someone out to let these people know : when you're constantly hearing "dogwhistles", maybe, just maybe, the dog is you.
Or the other voices in their head.
His prelude to something legit was nasty because Tom Cotton is mean as a snake, but "she thought it was perfectly fine to shut down schools for two years" is a perfectly legit issue. People are riled up about masks not because of masks per se, but because masks have become a symbol of all of the in retrospect mistakes that were made "out of an abundance of caution" before there was any data on COVID transmission. I bet that if schools had re-opened after the initial shutdown with masks and being outside as much as possible nobody would be so angry about masks today. There'd be some grumbling, but it wouldn't be a condensed symbol for all of the over-reaction that occurred early in the pandemic. People are angry now not because the early restrictions were made, it is because public health and school authorities didn't back off once there was data from other countries and other states that showed how schools could re-open with mitigations. Parents could have chosen to remain at home if their risk calculus was different, but the approach used in a lot of districts was that any risk was too much risk.
Perhaps your argument would work better if you didn't ignore the refrigerated morgue trucks, and jammed emergency rooms.
Nope, that has nothing to do with schools. There are multiple studies on this issue now, there already were by Autumn 2020 and 2021.
Abigail Shrier has an interesting interview with Cotton: https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/could-the-gop-become-the-party-of
I am all in with his Empower Parents to Protect Their Kids Act, which would make it unlawful for schools to participate in reassigning a minor child’s gender identity without first obtaining parental permission.
That's how it actually is when the votes in real elections are being counted in real elections and the results examined via exit poll results, instead of huffy partisan tankie quips.
Arguing if most recent off-year elections were aberrant or a trend? Try that instead. The Democratic party is already sufficiently concerned that this is going to look like a kiss on the cheek compared to the mid-terms in 2022, so maybe, just saying "TEXAS SUX THEREFORE THE GOP ISN'T GETTING FEMALE VOTES" doesn't really capture the reality of the politics on the ground right now.
It is not very strange that there are a whole lot of women care more about other issues (the economy, education, and crime) than they do about abortion.
And a very significant fraction of women believe that abortion is murder.
David French did an analysis of the impact of abortion on the Virginia election https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/what-the-virginia-election-taught, and no matter what you think of him, he's a good analyst. I would have expected a bigger backlash, but when I thought about it, the women who had only lousy birth control and no access to safe, legal abortion are now quite elderly. People my age grew up knowing from the time we became able to get pregnant, we had access to effective birth control and to abortion. As harsh as it is to say this, I think that when Roe is overturned early next year there won't be a huge backlash in the 2022 elections. The way Dems message on abortion is repellent to even pro-choice voters, and almost nobody is in public life anymore who remembers what things were like before Roe. The consequences won't sink in for a few years and then maybe the pro-choice side will be able to secure abortion rights on a state by state basis.
I saw this, and I agree with your take. The times, circumstances, and politics are all so different from when RvW was originally decided as to be almost from another planet.
There is, can, and will be, a balance between the obvious need for abortion, and the right of people to determine what, if any, restrictions on it there can or should be. The TX, MS, etc. laws were deliberately passed with the intention of being challenged to get them to SCOTUS to decide.
This was just strategy, that a lot of the people on the tankie left didn't get because they write off every state legislator in red states as a knuckly dragging moron.
The problem with Roe is that it is really quite extreme--no restrictions until viability? That makes a lot of pro-choicers like me really queasy. I actually like the Mississipi 15 week ban except it is probably a stalking horse to move the line further and further to conception.
I agree. I think abortion is going to be a much less potent issue going forward than the left expects. Especially because plenty of blue states will keep abortion available, so now women in red states will have to travel. Of course this is a huge burden to the poor, but just another one on top of all their other burdens, and so won't have any particular valence for voters (I predict).
This is where philanthropists can make a huge difference---MacKenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates can set up a foundation that will fund travel, abortion fees and other expenses for the poor. It could be a pool of money available to Planned Parenthood.
This would have been struck down in an instant by SCOTUS if HRC had gotten to appoint 3 Justices instead of Trump.
But hey, those corporate Democrats! So shitty! Can't vote for 'em, no sirree!
Pretty much everything Cotton says in this piece is absolutely correct. You hardly have to like Tom Cotton to acknowledge that everything he's pointing out here is more or less completely obvious right now.
Thanks for the link. I don't agree with everything Cotton says in the interview, but I do acknowledge that his positions on these culture issues reflect majority public opinion in the United States. (The one exception is his opinion on parental leave, that fathers should get less. Most Americans favor paid leave for both parents.)
Agreed on equal leave for fathers.
I agree with any policy that gets people time off work. I'd sign a bill for "alien abduction leave"
Had no idea she is gay, but not at all surprised she is childless.
?? Is this some comment on her appearance? Jesus. Some of these comments are making me regret my subscription…
Meaning she kept the schools closed and seems absolutely indifferent to the needs of parents or children all the while preening morally.
So…. Bro, relax.
Whatever heuristic your using automatically assigns the most uncharitable interpretation but maybe you’re just of *that* generation.
Ok—don’t stress. I apologize if I got you wrong.
I have no idea if Cotton is homophobic or not, whatever that really means these days, but my experience with the woke is any conversation where you challenge their views or disagree with them devolves into an ad hominem pretty quick. The better the argument, the quicker the attack. Score one for Cotton.
Casual White racists segregate their children's schools by pulling them out of urban school districts to either private schools or lily White suburbs and really really hate it when you call them out on it. This is particularly egregious in liberal San Francisco where the public schools are good by any measure.
Just because you can't hear it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I still think economic class is the more salient point. There is of course large overlap with race.
Our public school district has one or two largely white schools and one or two mostly minority schools. The white schools are in rich neighborhoods and the minority schools in poor ones.
I don’t doubt there is real, underlying racism in some of these cases. Snobbery, though, is a wider umbrella that covers it all.
Okay, but I've seen "woke" used for everything from the most extreme radical politics to not using racial slurs, so the word brings only a limited amount of clarity itself.
There are terms that I expect could be used without too many complaints, but mainly unsatisfactory. "Antiracist activist" is too narrow, and ceding the word "antiracist" to them galls; "progressive" is far too broad. Something based on "social justice" might work (but not "social justice warrior," obviously), even though I don't think "social justice" is bandied about as much as it used to be.
You shouldn't target somebody in public with a racial slur. Discussing racial slurs in public should be okay. Are we not supposed to talk about the frequency with which the term "nigger" shows up in literary works like Huckleberry Finn or Breakfast at Tiffany's?
And in the private realm all bets are off. Clearly the greater evil would be an attempt to police private speech.