Yeah these people desperately need to STFU. "Oh no, this subscription I pay $5 for is giving me too much stuff I could easily choose to ignore."
I like to think Freddie is still just in vacation mode and this is the real reason, but half a month of almost no real content is killing me. I'm going to be forced to do my job at some point.
Agreed, I don't know who the hell was clamoring for shorter posts but some complaints just deserve to be ignored. I feel for Freddie here because if he gives anyone what they ask for, it inevitably produces more complaints, but I love to wake up and see a nice long Freddie post to dive into.
It's funny to contrast Stancil's attitude to popularism ("terrible, because it's white men telling everyone else what is good for them!") with the progressive left's attitude to the use of the word Latinx. In honor of Short Week, I'll leave my comment at that.
Think about the Russian revolution. The real one was in Feb. 1917 followed by October when Lenin stepped up. They really could not let the peasants run things. And first off the Cheka.
I think these movements are kind of like the dog that caught the car. It's easy to say all kinds of things when you never have to follow through on any kinds of reforms or create an alternative. You can literally be wrong about everything 100% of the time and suffer no consequences because your ideas aren't implemented and the worst of it will be just talk. Give them even a tiny taste of actual power and everything changes. Suddenly all the flaws start to matter a lot.
Much darker than that is, I think, that while they would never, ever admit it many or even most people on the left prefer it that way. They'd rather just shout radical critique all day and night and never have pesky reality get in the way an appealing idea. They prefer being powerless because it's easier than dealing with the consequences of actual change. Their ideas are either too incompetent to ever work on a practical level or they can't deal with or defend the amount of suffering it'd take to implement them. So we get what we have now.
They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to call the shots with a very long and very specific set of rules about how society should a d should not be run, but the also don't want either admit too or actually have this same power. It leads to a fundamentally incoherent politics.
And sadly, those of us who would relish the amount of suffering it would take to implement, and in fact would take visceral joy in dealing it out, are far too few in number.
If "really existing socialism" in the 20th century proved anything it's that no amount of violence, repression, and suffering will square a circle/make a wrong answer right. There's something to be said for having the courage to stand by your convictions, but I meant this more in the spirit of never being too sure you have all the answers or that is easy to be right all the time when the sole criteria for being "right" is how well it aggres with whatever revolutionary theory you're pushing at the moment.
I will say that, while I don't necessarily agree with the, the tankie crowd at least tends to have more coherent ideas about what should be done.
There are radical Black academics who feel the way Stancil does, right? I've encountered a fair number of them online on Twitter and various social justice Facebook pages.
I think what happened here is that Stancil and people of his ilk latched on to that radical academic viewpoint as The Truth About How Black People Everywhere Feel and just ran with it. But that viewpoint is held by a very tiny percentage of the population. It's just that social media bubbles made it appear larger.
I made that mistake myself back in 2013-2016. Took me a long time to realize Twitter is not real life.
Too, so many people's actual civic engagement begins and ends on twitter. If you tell them that they're not even effectively advocating for change, they will get mad.
After the MP murder this month I saw a lot of people on Twitter who thought US politicians have security details. These are people whose entire Twitter existence is about politics and yet have so little real world experience in it they don't know something that anyone who has been to a county fair would know.
They get upset because they consider it a right-wing talking point. Conservatives like Ben Shapiro and diehard IDW types like Dave Rubin say it all the time (even though they're on Twitter just as much as anybody, lol).
So when Twitter libs hear "Twitter is not real life" it activates the ol' tribal lizard brain.
Something I just can't forget is Samaria Rice's criticisms of BLM and Shaun King's exceptionally patronizing dismissal of her. It's hard not to notice the difference in their ways of communicating: hers is what a real person sounds like, his is what an academic activist sounds like. I'm not even saying either is wrong or right. I'm just pointing out the stark difference between someone who is pretty much an average person and someone who has made elite activism their career, and who wins the verbal sparring match.
Thomas Sowell calls this “verbal virtuosity” and says it is the left's most powerful weapon. IOW, they have mastered the art of glib. And, yes, I have opened myself up to reading conservative thought. I decided it was time to expand my universe beyond the hash-slinging of the MSM and develop a broader POV.
Well it's funny because the far-left is now making center-leftists "conservative." Although I believe Sowell considers himself one. People like McWhorter or Coleman Hughes or Chloe Valdary, who aren't captured by the far-left propaganda, are branded conservative, but if you actually listen to them, not so much.
Exactly. I love both Hughes and McWhorter because they are thoughtful and well-reasoned. The labeling and demonizing—so crazy. Sowell does get a bit polemical at times and he does let conservatives off the hook in a lot of ways that I would not but I very much enjoy reading him. I strongly disagree with him on the minimum wage (having fought my way out of poverty). I think one of the ways we fix many of the ills in this country is by paying a living wage to people and get rid of backdoor corporate subsidies to employees of Walmart and the like. Particularly in industries where the profits run in the billions. We need to change corporate charters to include more stakeholders.
Yeah, I think a lot of people confuse What They See Online with what normal people think about anything.
To use Minneapolis as an example (since I live here), some people I know think the activists are too powerful at this moment and they fear that their calls for a radical restructuring of society will send Minneapolis into chaos.
The truth of the matter is that the activist class couldn't even get the public safety question on the ballot last year, when emotions were highest and defunding/restructuring the police had the highest support. A year later, the question is now on the ballot and most people have lost their enthusiasm or have become disillusioned or simply tuned out again.
If your only connection to Minneapolis or even public opinion is social media, then it probably does seem like the activists are running the world.
But the truth about power is that those who have it don't need to tweet about it.
Social media (and the general nicheification of media) amplifies a classic issue where people vastly overgeneralize their life. It's the person who uses technical jargon to people not in their field. Or the sports fan who is in disbelief you don't know who the backup quarterback for their favorite team is, because they obsess over it and so do their friends and they extrapolate that to society.
Freddie does this from time to time (though I think he's FAR better than most) and it's extremely common in people in the media spaces. They fixate on these things like the Bad Art Friend story and think "everyone is talking about this!!" when, no, actually almost no one was talking about this. No one reads the New Yorker, and no one knows who Celeste Ng is. Okay, not no one, but far less people than care about, say, pro wrestling.
Liz Bruenig tweeted something over the weekend where she was basically saying "look, I'm not famous." And she's right. I doubt many people know who she is. I never heard of her until Freddie mentioned her. And I never knew who Freddie was until Glenn Greenwald (actually famous) mentioned him. But people in media think they're famous so the (few) people who follow them think they're famous and suddenly the Bruenigs and FdB are destroying America with their left wing politics when none of them are actually influential (much to the world's detriment). There's people on Twitter who legitimately think Jesse Singal is causing a trans Holocaust and if I mentioned Jesse to anyone I know in real life they'd be baffled who I was talking about.
My hypothesis is that this is because humans are unable - evolutionarily - to grasp with the size of society. My favorite example of this is the Kardashians. People who have never watched that show always assume it's hugely popular. I can't count the amount of times I've heard something like "Americans are too busy watching the Kardashians to...(Whatever bullshit the author cares about)." In reality, as famous as they are, very few people have ever watched that show. It never eclipsed 5 million people (which is piddling) and generally had about 1-2 million. Far, far fewer people have ever watched that show than watched noted ratings flops Homicide: Life on the Streets or Newsradio. But people can't grasp that the people they see on social media talking about this - which is a massive number on a personal level - are actually a minuscule number on a society level. Because our chimp brains never needed to make that distinction because it's only been relevant for a century or so.
To draw back to your original point, this is to me, the mechanism behind why that behavior exists. People like this idiot Freddie skewers repeatedly (I forget his name and he's too inconsequential to scroll up for) probably aren't bad faith actors. They legitimately think "BIPOCs want (insert thing actual Black people don't want or like)" because NHJ and Kendi and the Black MFA from Colombia they get drinks with want that. And that's their world, and that was a good enough thought process for almost all human history. And they're, frankly, not smart enough to process the competing information (like polling) and change their world view.
Sorry if this was long, but I think this is a massively underexplored area that's pretty important and, as we saw last year with BLM and Stop the Steal, has real world impact. But, tl;dr people need to touch grass.
As a geriatric millenial I remember the pre-internet world and yet feel completely at home in the internet world. I love the internet. I am as much of a technooptimist as a non-STEM person can be. And I agree with you completely.
I appreciate the internet's power.. We're remaking society. That's power. We can use it for good or we can use it for bad (or a bit of both) but we need to take it seriously. And unfortunately, we don't. We don't understand network effects. We don't understand path dependence. We don't understand monopoly power. We're playing with fire. And unlike real fire - where you learn immediately what not to do with it - by the time we learn what we can and can't do with this it may be too late.
Though I think you don't even need to go all the way back to evolutionary reasons. I think it's much simpler.
If people have a lot of emotional or intellectual investment in something, it is inconceivable that other people aren't at least aware of whatever they're concerned with.
I've been involved with independent publishing for about as long as I've been an adult. I could probably list a dozen authors who I think are doing very well and I would be shocked if anyone reading this had even heard of their *publisher* let alone the individual authors.
I think people tend to believe that's true, but only because we often talk of more famous authors.
I think more people would be familiar with Tor as a publisher than they would be with, like, Neon Yang. On the other hand, more people recognize George RR Martin but way fewer would recognize his publisher Bantam.
This is an astute synopsis. Steven Pinker referenced something called the "Availability Heuristic" (Enlightenment Now) in which the importance of something is measured by how often it shows up in our space. Social media prioritizes certain information and literally distorts our perception.
That's interesting and I should read what Pinker says about that.
This absolutely happened to me during covid because my normal way of checking this stuff (interacting in the real world) was so limited. I really did begin to perceive things more in line with the algorithm. As soon as the pandemic ended and I got back into the real world it was very much "oh yeah, that's ridiculous, why did I think that?"
Haha, I picked those two because they were my favorite shows of my high school years. And, outrageously, about the only two shows in the world that aren't streaming!
A precursor goal to getting black people money so they don’t care what white people think is honest debate. Condescension and overreach, that is tje hallmark of the liberals
Sentences that shine: "The only political respect I know of lies in respecting people’s political goals so much that you demand ruthless discipline in their efforts to achieve them, even when that hurts their feelings. " Bingo.
So true. This couplet was also excellent. “To change the latter you have to get real about the former. If your first instinct is to say that this isn’t fair then you’re not tough enough to change the world.”
Sometime in my teens, Mom and I were about to cross the street. The crosswalk light was a go, and I stepped into the street with all the confidence of invincible, unencumbered youth.
Mom grabbed my arm before I took a second step. “Hang on.” She double-checked that no cars were coming, then let go of me and started to cross.
“Why’d you stop me? We had the right of way!”
She just smiled (with a little too much syrup) and said, “Well then, you’d get to have ‘I had the right of way’ on your tombstone.”
Most interpersonal interactions in life (and especially in politics) are a choice between feeling righteous (but leaving empty-handed) and swallowing your pride (while actually moving the ball down the field). Objectively, the choice is clear. But that dopamine hit from righteous fury sure is addictive.
This is unbelievably close to what I’ve been thinking for a long time now, but I have never come close to articulating it as deftly and precisely as you do here. Thank you.
All credit to mom. She never finished college, so was convinced that she "wasn't smart." But I find myself sharing her wisdom with others at least weekly <3
My mom always said something similar when I was learning to drive: never assume that because you have the right of way, you'll get it. She was also big on being skeptical of people's turn signals until they actually slowed :)
Welcome back Freddie and commenters. I missed you guys.
Great points in this post. It’s so clear that many of these activists don’t want to win. They want to feel morally superior forever because it allows them to rationalize all sorts of antisocial behaviors. If they woke up tomorrow and government met their demands, they would feel loss rather than joy.
Aside from the extreme policy demands (abolish the police) the social demands are also designed to never end. White people must feel guilty forever; you never graduate from DEI training. Even the white diversity trainers explain that they’re still racist.
There’s just no interest in making change that can be observed in reality (and celebrated as a step in the right direction).
Why is it heartless? Dollars are just a measure (imperfect of course) of cost in other terms: human labor needed, natural resources needed. If a problem can be solved at lower cost, of course that's better.
And a round of very loud applause for you. You are DOING SOMETHING. Thank you!!! "I’d much rather play politics, speak Republican, and get real outcomes" Yes!
As a lawyer, and thus a member of the class of the greatest scam artists ever, I respect the DEI industry so much for exactly that reason. They manufactured a situation where it's so pressing and vital they're necessary but also impossible to ever end. It's organized religionesque in its brilliance, but better, in that it replaces a lot of B2C ickiness with B2B ease. Ya can't knock the hustle.
After complaining about people using technical jargon I then use technical jargon in another comment. Ironic (at least in an Alanis way).
B2C means business to consumer, which is how most businesses we know market. Like retail. B2B means business to business, or a business that markets its product/services directly to other business. The difference between selling copy machines door to door and selling copy machines to a law firm.
In regards the DEI consultants, you see both, e.g., how Robin DeAngelo sells a book directly to the public, but also sells trainings directly to corporations that their employees are forced to attend.
The latter is often a superior business model. To continue the religion metaphor, think about how much work 1st Century Christians had to put in to get a few converts here and there. Now think about the flood of converts you get by converting the King of the Ostrogoths, who then forces his people to become Christian. It's just a much better hustle that way.
"The goal is not to get white people to treat Black people like they’re made of glass. The goal is to get Black people money and power and then they don’t need to care how white people treat them."
I love this phrase, but in practice it may end up not being a huge change. We see that in the kind of training now in vogue for businesses that are trying to cater to a more diverse customer/employee base -- a lot of which could be marketed as 'how to treat people as if they're made of glass'. When your money and power are exerted as customers, the kind of equality they buy is to be treated as customers, which usually means with exaggerated and insincere respect.
There's a lot of people involved in these debates who either have no cogent theory of how a majority ethnic group should interact with minority ethnic groups in a polyethnic democratic state or have no understanding of American demographics.
This post reminded me of how diffuse and ineffective the Occupy movement seemed to me at the time -- they seemed to revel in not having any kind of agenda other than being really angry at the one percent. It struck me as a little sad at the time -- I found the one percent framing a little convenient for a movement that had plenty of kids from the top five or ten percent of American income, but I want a world where young people are trying to move forward a concrete plan for change to make it better for them and those who come after them. But when it just seems like inchoate rage I don't see what the benefit is.
I think what Occupy was experimenting with is that you can actually change the world without using traditional hierarchical leadership structures - a sort of pseudo-communistic solution, if you will. The problem with this approach is that humans just don't naturally organize themselves when left to their own devices. We still need leadership and structure to accomplish goals; to keep things focused and on-track. This is one of the reasons why tribalism is still so potent and corporatism is so successful. Corporations have mastered goal manifestation.
The same thing happened with CHAZ in Seattle. It was a resistance effort that devolved very quickly into chaos due to lack of structure. It never works. Structure cultivates consensus and focus - many people agreeing to focus on the same goal. That is how you create actual reality. For whatever reason, this appears to be how humans work. And until we evolve to some higher level of consciousness and/or political organization, we have to work with what we have to achieve change.
I'm reading Nonzero by Robert Wright at the moment, and it hypothesizes about this. Americans especially seem to hold up, say, indigenous cultures as superior ways of being (hey, that might be so in some respects! that's not my argument) but Wright references archeological and historic research that shows many indigenous cultures in the Americas were very socially complex, even with rudimentary forms of capitalism, all before European interaction.
No, your stuff is not too long. This one was over much too fast! (Full disclosure: I'm retired so have lots of time to read)
Now I have to read the local newspaper. :(
Yeah, I don’t know who keeps complaining that we get too much for our money, but please 🤐 don’t ruin it for the rest of us
Yeah these people desperately need to STFU. "Oh no, this subscription I pay $5 for is giving me too much stuff I could easily choose to ignore."
I like to think Freddie is still just in vacation mode and this is the real reason, but half a month of almost no real content is killing me. I'm going to be forced to do my job at some point.
LOL! (I would say "me too", but that phrase has been #trademarked.)
Probably Twitter users, I reckon. Truly they are one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
If you have time to read blogs, I recommend Astral Codex Ten.
That's if you have time to waste. In terms of value per word, Freddie wins hands down.
Agreed, I don't know who the hell was clamoring for shorter posts but some complaints just deserve to be ignored. I feel for Freddie here because if he gives anyone what they ask for, it inevitably produces more complaints, but I love to wake up and see a nice long Freddie post to dive into.
😂
It's funny to contrast Stancil's attitude to popularism ("terrible, because it's white men telling everyone else what is good for them!") with the progressive left's attitude to the use of the word Latinx. In honor of Short Week, I'll leave my comment at that.
Think about the Russian revolution. The real one was in Feb. 1917 followed by October when Lenin stepped up. They really could not let the peasants run things. And first off the Cheka.
I think these movements are kind of like the dog that caught the car. It's easy to say all kinds of things when you never have to follow through on any kinds of reforms or create an alternative. You can literally be wrong about everything 100% of the time and suffer no consequences because your ideas aren't implemented and the worst of it will be just talk. Give them even a tiny taste of actual power and everything changes. Suddenly all the flaws start to matter a lot.
Much darker than that is, I think, that while they would never, ever admit it many or even most people on the left prefer it that way. They'd rather just shout radical critique all day and night and never have pesky reality get in the way an appealing idea. They prefer being powerless because it's easier than dealing with the consequences of actual change. Their ideas are either too incompetent to ever work on a practical level or they can't deal with or defend the amount of suffering it'd take to implement them. So we get what we have now.
When power is "problematized," why would they want to admit they have it?
They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to call the shots with a very long and very specific set of rules about how society should a d should not be run, but the also don't want either admit too or actually have this same power. It leads to a fundamentally incoherent politics.
And sadly, those of us who would relish the amount of suffering it would take to implement, and in fact would take visceral joy in dealing it out, are far too few in number.
If "really existing socialism" in the 20th century proved anything it's that no amount of violence, repression, and suffering will square a circle/make a wrong answer right. There's something to be said for having the courage to stand by your convictions, but I meant this more in the spirit of never being too sure you have all the answers or that is easy to be right all the time when the sole criteria for being "right" is how well it aggres with whatever revolutionary theory you're pushing at the moment.
I will say that, while I don't necessarily agree with the, the tankie crowd at least tends to have more coherent ideas about what should be done.
Yes. It's called humility. And it is what tempers our tendency toward righteousness and keeps our vision clear.
Outrage has become the new moral high ground. Or, has it always been this way? ;-)
There are radical Black academics who feel the way Stancil does, right? I've encountered a fair number of them online on Twitter and various social justice Facebook pages.
I think what happened here is that Stancil and people of his ilk latched on to that radical academic viewpoint as The Truth About How Black People Everywhere Feel and just ran with it. But that viewpoint is held by a very tiny percentage of the population. It's just that social media bubbles made it appear larger.
I made that mistake myself back in 2013-2016. Took me a long time to realize Twitter is not real life.
"Took me a long time to realize Twitter is not real life."
Some people get really upset when you point that out. Not sure what's behind that. I think it has to do with politics as sport/hobby.
Too, so many people's actual civic engagement begins and ends on twitter. If you tell them that they're not even effectively advocating for change, they will get mad.
It's easier to tweet than to organize.
After the MP murder this month I saw a lot of people on Twitter who thought US politicians have security details. These are people whose entire Twitter existence is about politics and yet have so little real world experience in it they don't know something that anyone who has been to a county fair would know.
They get upset because they consider it a right-wing talking point. Conservatives like Ben Shapiro and diehard IDW types like Dave Rubin say it all the time (even though they're on Twitter just as much as anybody, lol).
So when Twitter libs hear "Twitter is not real life" it activates the ol' tribal lizard brain.
Something I just can't forget is Samaria Rice's criticisms of BLM and Shaun King's exceptionally patronizing dismissal of her. It's hard not to notice the difference in their ways of communicating: hers is what a real person sounds like, his is what an academic activist sounds like. I'm not even saying either is wrong or right. I'm just pointing out the stark difference between someone who is pretty much an average person and someone who has made elite activism their career, and who wins the verbal sparring match.
Thomas Sowell calls this “verbal virtuosity” and says it is the left's most powerful weapon. IOW, they have mastered the art of glib. And, yes, I have opened myself up to reading conservative thought. I decided it was time to expand my universe beyond the hash-slinging of the MSM and develop a broader POV.
Well it's funny because the far-left is now making center-leftists "conservative." Although I believe Sowell considers himself one. People like McWhorter or Coleman Hughes or Chloe Valdary, who aren't captured by the far-left propaganda, are branded conservative, but if you actually listen to them, not so much.
Exactly. I love both Hughes and McWhorter because they are thoughtful and well-reasoned. The labeling and demonizing—so crazy. Sowell does get a bit polemical at times and he does let conservatives off the hook in a lot of ways that I would not but I very much enjoy reading him. I strongly disagree with him on the minimum wage (having fought my way out of poverty). I think one of the ways we fix many of the ills in this country is by paying a living wage to people and get rid of backdoor corporate subsidies to employees of Walmart and the like. Particularly in industries where the profits run in the billions. We need to change corporate charters to include more stakeholders.
Yeah, I think a lot of people confuse What They See Online with what normal people think about anything.
To use Minneapolis as an example (since I live here), some people I know think the activists are too powerful at this moment and they fear that their calls for a radical restructuring of society will send Minneapolis into chaos.
The truth of the matter is that the activist class couldn't even get the public safety question on the ballot last year, when emotions were highest and defunding/restructuring the police had the highest support. A year later, the question is now on the ballot and most people have lost their enthusiasm or have become disillusioned or simply tuned out again.
If your only connection to Minneapolis or even public opinion is social media, then it probably does seem like the activists are running the world.
But the truth about power is that those who have it don't need to tweet about it.
That last line is a good one. Also, you can obfuscate your own level of power by tweeting about how terribly other people wield power.
Conservatives have made tweeting about victimhood almost its own industry.
Yup, victimology is a non-partisan hobby. We like to make fun of woke version, but Fox News is 24/7 victimology.
Social media (and the general nicheification of media) amplifies a classic issue where people vastly overgeneralize their life. It's the person who uses technical jargon to people not in their field. Or the sports fan who is in disbelief you don't know who the backup quarterback for their favorite team is, because they obsess over it and so do their friends and they extrapolate that to society.
Freddie does this from time to time (though I think he's FAR better than most) and it's extremely common in people in the media spaces. They fixate on these things like the Bad Art Friend story and think "everyone is talking about this!!" when, no, actually almost no one was talking about this. No one reads the New Yorker, and no one knows who Celeste Ng is. Okay, not no one, but far less people than care about, say, pro wrestling.
Liz Bruenig tweeted something over the weekend where she was basically saying "look, I'm not famous." And she's right. I doubt many people know who she is. I never heard of her until Freddie mentioned her. And I never knew who Freddie was until Glenn Greenwald (actually famous) mentioned him. But people in media think they're famous so the (few) people who follow them think they're famous and suddenly the Bruenigs and FdB are destroying America with their left wing politics when none of them are actually influential (much to the world's detriment). There's people on Twitter who legitimately think Jesse Singal is causing a trans Holocaust and if I mentioned Jesse to anyone I know in real life they'd be baffled who I was talking about.
My hypothesis is that this is because humans are unable - evolutionarily - to grasp with the size of society. My favorite example of this is the Kardashians. People who have never watched that show always assume it's hugely popular. I can't count the amount of times I've heard something like "Americans are too busy watching the Kardashians to...(Whatever bullshit the author cares about)." In reality, as famous as they are, very few people have ever watched that show. It never eclipsed 5 million people (which is piddling) and generally had about 1-2 million. Far, far fewer people have ever watched that show than watched noted ratings flops Homicide: Life on the Streets or Newsradio. But people can't grasp that the people they see on social media talking about this - which is a massive number on a personal level - are actually a minuscule number on a society level. Because our chimp brains never needed to make that distinction because it's only been relevant for a century or so.
To draw back to your original point, this is to me, the mechanism behind why that behavior exists. People like this idiot Freddie skewers repeatedly (I forget his name and he's too inconsequential to scroll up for) probably aren't bad faith actors. They legitimately think "BIPOCs want (insert thing actual Black people don't want or like)" because NHJ and Kendi and the Black MFA from Colombia they get drinks with want that. And that's their world, and that was a good enough thought process for almost all human history. And they're, frankly, not smart enough to process the competing information (like polling) and change their world view.
Sorry if this was long, but I think this is a massively underexplored area that's pretty important and, as we saw last year with BLM and Stop the Steal, has real world impact. But, tl;dr people need to touch grass.
As a geriatric millenial I remember the pre-internet world and yet feel completely at home in the internet world. I love the internet. I am as much of a technooptimist as a non-STEM person can be. And I agree with you completely.
I appreciate the internet's power.. We're remaking society. That's power. We can use it for good or we can use it for bad (or a bit of both) but we need to take it seriously. And unfortunately, we don't. We don't understand network effects. We don't understand path dependence. We don't understand monopoly power. We're playing with fire. And unlike real fire - where you learn immediately what not to do with it - by the time we learn what we can and can't do with this it may be too late.
I've never heard us referred to as Oregon Trailers before but I'm 100% stealing that.
Yeah, I largely agree with this.
Though I think you don't even need to go all the way back to evolutionary reasons. I think it's much simpler.
If people have a lot of emotional or intellectual investment in something, it is inconceivable that other people aren't at least aware of whatever they're concerned with.
I've been involved with independent publishing for about as long as I've been an adult. I could probably list a dozen authors who I think are doing very well and I would be shocked if anyone reading this had even heard of their *publisher* let alone the individual authors.
To be fair I’m more likely to know the name of an author than a publisher
I think people tend to believe that's true, but only because we often talk of more famous authors.
I think more people would be familiar with Tor as a publisher than they would be with, like, Neon Yang. On the other hand, more people recognize George RR Martin but way fewer would recognize his publisher Bantam.
This is an astute synopsis. Steven Pinker referenced something called the "Availability Heuristic" (Enlightenment Now) in which the importance of something is measured by how often it shows up in our space. Social media prioritizes certain information and literally distorts our perception.
That's interesting and I should read what Pinker says about that.
This absolutely happened to me during covid because my normal way of checking this stuff (interacting in the real world) was so limited. I really did begin to perceive things more in line with the algorithm. As soon as the pandemic ended and I got back into the real world it was very much "oh yeah, that's ridiculous, why did I think that?"
I don't think it's really a matter of smarts; it's lack of self-awareness.
Homicide went seven seasons, and Newsradio went five. Neither was a flop, and how dare you? :)
Otherwise, good post.
Haha, I picked those two because they were my favorite shows of my high school years. And, outrageously, about the only two shows in the world that aren't streaming!
A precursor goal to getting black people money so they don’t care what white people think is honest debate. Condescension and overreach, that is tje hallmark of the liberals
"decades of polling figures and voting attest to the fact that the average Black American is far to his right"
I think this is a feature rather than a bug. How many of these upper-middle class white guys actually want major political change?
Sentences that shine: "The only political respect I know of lies in respecting people’s political goals so much that you demand ruthless discipline in their efforts to achieve them, even when that hurts their feelings. " Bingo.
So true. This couplet was also excellent. “To change the latter you have to get real about the former. If your first instinct is to say that this isn’t fair then you’re not tough enough to change the world.”
I didn't ask for shorter pieces, but I do like the energy in this post.
I think I prefer the longer pieces, but these might be nice to slip in every now and then. Allows for a punchier little piece.
Sometime in my teens, Mom and I were about to cross the street. The crosswalk light was a go, and I stepped into the street with all the confidence of invincible, unencumbered youth.
Mom grabbed my arm before I took a second step. “Hang on.” She double-checked that no cars were coming, then let go of me and started to cross.
“Why’d you stop me? We had the right of way!”
She just smiled (with a little too much syrup) and said, “Well then, you’d get to have ‘I had the right of way’ on your tombstone.”
Most interpersonal interactions in life (and especially in politics) are a choice between feeling righteous (but leaving empty-handed) and swallowing your pride (while actually moving the ball down the field). Objectively, the choice is clear. But that dopamine hit from righteous fury sure is addictive.
This is unbelievably close to what I’ve been thinking for a long time now, but I have never come close to articulating it as deftly and precisely as you do here. Thank you.
All credit to mom. She never finished college, so was convinced that she "wasn't smart." But I find myself sharing her wisdom with others at least weekly <3
My mom always said something similar when I was learning to drive: never assume that because you have the right of way, you'll get it. She was also big on being skeptical of people's turn signals until they actually slowed :)
Perfectly stated. Thank you!
Never too long, Freddie. Let it rip, sir.
Welcome back Freddie and commenters. I missed you guys.
Great points in this post. It’s so clear that many of these activists don’t want to win. They want to feel morally superior forever because it allows them to rationalize all sorts of antisocial behaviors. If they woke up tomorrow and government met their demands, they would feel loss rather than joy.
Aside from the extreme policy demands (abolish the police) the social demands are also designed to never end. White people must feel guilty forever; you never graduate from DEI training. Even the white diversity trainers explain that they’re still racist.
There’s just no interest in making change that can be observed in reality (and celebrated as a step in the right direction).
Why is it heartless? Dollars are just a measure (imperfect of course) of cost in other terms: human labor needed, natural resources needed. If a problem can be solved at lower cost, of course that's better.
And a round of very loud applause for you. You are DOING SOMETHING. Thank you!!! "I’d much rather play politics, speak Republican, and get real outcomes" Yes!
As a lawyer, and thus a member of the class of the greatest scam artists ever, I respect the DEI industry so much for exactly that reason. They manufactured a situation where it's so pressing and vital they're necessary but also impossible to ever end. It's organized religionesque in its brilliance, but better, in that it replaces a lot of B2C ickiness with B2B ease. Ya can't knock the hustle.
B2C? B2B?
After complaining about people using technical jargon I then use technical jargon in another comment. Ironic (at least in an Alanis way).
B2C means business to consumer, which is how most businesses we know market. Like retail. B2B means business to business, or a business that markets its product/services directly to other business. The difference between selling copy machines door to door and selling copy machines to a law firm.
In regards the DEI consultants, you see both, e.g., how Robin DeAngelo sells a book directly to the public, but also sells trainings directly to corporations that their employees are forced to attend.
The latter is often a superior business model. To continue the religion metaphor, think about how much work 1st Century Christians had to put in to get a few converts here and there. Now think about the flood of converts you get by converting the King of the Ostrogoths, who then forces his people to become Christian. It's just a much better hustle that way.
Thank you. In these terms, protests are B2C, electing more Democrats is B2B, and the latter is a superior model for getting results (I claim).
"The goal is not to get white people to treat Black people like they’re made of glass. The goal is to get Black people money and power and then they don’t need to care how white people treat them."
I love this phrase, but in practice it may end up not being a huge change. We see that in the kind of training now in vogue for businesses that are trying to cater to a more diverse customer/employee base -- a lot of which could be marketed as 'how to treat people as if they're made of glass'. When your money and power are exerted as customers, the kind of equality they buy is to be treated as customers, which usually means with exaggerated and insincere respect.
I've a feeling that we all want something better.
There's a lot of people involved in these debates who either have no cogent theory of how a majority ethnic group should interact with minority ethnic groups in a polyethnic democratic state or have no understanding of American demographics.
This post reminded me of how diffuse and ineffective the Occupy movement seemed to me at the time -- they seemed to revel in not having any kind of agenda other than being really angry at the one percent. It struck me as a little sad at the time -- I found the one percent framing a little convenient for a movement that had plenty of kids from the top five or ten percent of American income, but I want a world where young people are trying to move forward a concrete plan for change to make it better for them and those who come after them. But when it just seems like inchoate rage I don't see what the benefit is.
I think what Occupy was experimenting with is that you can actually change the world without using traditional hierarchical leadership structures - a sort of pseudo-communistic solution, if you will. The problem with this approach is that humans just don't naturally organize themselves when left to their own devices. We still need leadership and structure to accomplish goals; to keep things focused and on-track. This is one of the reasons why tribalism is still so potent and corporatism is so successful. Corporations have mastered goal manifestation.
The same thing happened with CHAZ in Seattle. It was a resistance effort that devolved very quickly into chaos due to lack of structure. It never works. Structure cultivates consensus and focus - many people agreeing to focus on the same goal. That is how you create actual reality. For whatever reason, this appears to be how humans work. And until we evolve to some higher level of consciousness and/or political organization, we have to work with what we have to achieve change.
I'm reading Nonzero by Robert Wright at the moment, and it hypothesizes about this. Americans especially seem to hold up, say, indigenous cultures as superior ways of being (hey, that might be so in some respects! that's not my argument) but Wright references archeological and historic research that shows many indigenous cultures in the Americas were very socially complex, even with rudimentary forms of capitalism, all before European interaction.
In this post you repeatedly accuse the left activist class of being racist. Which isn't a critique, by the way. You're right.
So i guess this is another comment about feeling deeply confused as to why you still consider these people your (simply misguided) allies.