I have a friend who has pretty much embraced the BlueAnon mentality on Twitter. He delivers standard-order yelling defenses of Critical Race Theory even though he's said nothing about it before until this year. Why? To make himself look good, stick it to the "bad guys," and gain followers I guess. It's sad.
This is a great post. The Yglesias tweet that discusses Richard Delgado's succinct definition of CRT reminds me that Richard Posner (aka Judge Posner of 7th Circuit fame) had a hilarious takedown of Delgado as part of some law review symposium in the early 90s. I will have to dig up the citation.
The selfish fallacy strikes me as a modified True Scotsman fallacy, or appeal to purity: argument by motivated, ad-hoc redefinition of a category or term. If I understand the example here properly, it boils down to "No true CRT practitioner is radically illiberal" when evidence asserts otherwise.
I like that framework a lot to think of whats going on here (and how you write about it). As well as the mental cirque du soleil we do, I still think a great deal boils down to the "what do my 'enemies think? I will think the opposite' as a crude and overused epistemic heuristic we all fall back on to varying degrees. I would really like to see how many people would respond to the question, "Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump say the sun rises in the East. Do you agree with Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump ?" (Or sub in whoever you despise - "crooked hillary etc)... It reminds me of the dynamic Paul Graham wrote about regarding identity and keeping it small http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html ...
Finally... the fact that while in law school I avoided substantive law courses as much as possible in favor of theory & philosophy and tacked on a history master’s degree for good measure will finally be “useful”. 🤪😂
Tbh I find it hilarious that CRT has become ‘a thing’.
I ran into this same issue with “Socialism .” I eventually learned that quoting dictionaries gets you nowhere. I just try to figure out someone’s position without clinging too hard to the actual meaning. And in most cases the discovered difference in positions turns out to be small.
I’ve mostly avoided this debate because like everything else in our stupid culture war it’s a moral panic that will be over in six months and you’re right that nothing will have changed.
I have no doubt that Jeet is a soggy liberal, but completely devoid of context his tweet seems to be saying that the floating signifier will be used to shape curriculums in ways that really have nothing to do with CRT, which seems like a reasonable expectation. That’s always been a part of conservative culture war since Mccarthyism or even earlier.
The difference today seems to be that now we’re supposed to care about it in order to be “good” and fight back rather than just ignoring Bari and the rest of her clownish cohort and dictating the conversation ourselves. Defending CRT reminds me a bit of the embarrassing woman that wrote the “rioting is good” book this summer. It’s completely adopting the antagonistic framing of the right wing culture warriors and just saying “this is good actually”.
The cousin to Convenient Ignorance is Denialism. The left pretended cancel culture didn't exist for an entire year. You don't have to look far on blue check twitter to find tons of tweets professing hilarity about something that Doesn't Even Exist! I've noticed there are a lot fewer tweets about Cancel Culture Doesn't Exist because it's so obvious that cancel culture does in fact exist.
CRT became a Thing as fast as Judith Butler became The Correct Interpretation of Gender. Super fast, without anyone really reading the underlying body of work (but of course they have snippets they post to Tumblr!). Accepting without thinking means liberals started agreeing with things such as "yeah gender doesn't exist at all, so".... while conveniently ignoring all of the ideas that might flow from that - I recall Bill Nye got in trouble for insisting that biological sex is a scientific fact.
While I do enjoy people snarking about CRT, I wonder if the fallacy (& commentary) is entirely correct. Firstly, are we demanding too much of people who are in general support of an idea? Must one find all interpretations of a theory/philosophy and develop rebuttals to them? Is it possible that different things (concepts, organizations, philosophies) mean different things to different people?
Here I note that common definitions are essential to clear communication, but it's possible to support democracy while abhorring mob rule, even if it took men of the Founding Fathers' metal to thread that needle. And I note that many of the common defenses of CRT are indeed claiming that CRT doesn't mean things that it's most vocal & prominent supporters say that, yes, actually, it *does* mean.
Secondly - FdB says "this will all be gone in 6 months." Oh, you sweet summer child. Critical Theory has been a viable thing in academia (started in literature departments, if I am correct, not law, although law is where intersectionality as a discriminations concept was first formalized) since at least the 1970's, growing all along, and has been spreading toxicity in niche online groups since 2004 or so, before exploding into common HR departments in 2014.
It's not going away in 6 months. It may be something that, like socialism and the automobile, is with us for forever. (Making note of the date.)
Overreach is the liberal problem, their hubris and arrogance and we see it. Overreach that defies common sense is an endless topic for the other half of America - the uneducated people. They see liberals as lying hypocrites and their overly complex plans as idiocy. They see the fancy plans come and go like fashion. They see the elite with their finger on the scale in their own favour. They feel the sting of being spoken down to, of being managed through absurd explanations meant to deceive but hobbled by lack of education they can’t win the argument through argument. And the long came Trump the bloviating ignoramus who mocked and snitched on the fancy pants dummies. Pure joy, schadenfreude for the unwashed.
Raise the minimum wage to 20 bucks you assholes and then leave us alone.
"the kind of soggy liberals who teach at law schools have decided that they need to look busy when it comes to race or risk losing their cush gigs"
This made me chuckle. Twelve years ago, I found myself drunk for the first time on pineapple margaritas at a fairly tame bachelorette party held in an after-hours art store. As I stumbled out, a magnet caught my eye that's still on my fridge today. It's a very Catholic-looking portrait of Christ, and the caption reads: "Jesus is Coming. Look Busy." I didn't know it then, but that was the first real step I took toward a critical examination of my religious thought, which had dominated much of my life. It took drunken inhibition to get beneath the veneer of unshakable certainty.
Since then, any time I've internally felt the impulse "so-and-so is coming/watching. Look busy" I've stopped and really taken a good hard look at what I'm so invested in covering up with disingenuous supportiveness. You, among a few others, have provided handholds for me to navigate my way out of lazy thinking. Cheers.
The left's best strategy is to force the conservatives to talk about the unpopular parts of their platform, and the reverse is true too. If the end result of all of this is 'the left further embraces a very unpopular radical worldview and spends time explaining it in detail to America' then it's hard to believe that conservatives are making poor strategic decisions here, regardless of how nonsensical the bills themselves might be. I don't think we should give them too much credit as strategic decision makers, but laughing this off completely as "man these guys didn't even go to grad school!" is also a mistake.
I have a friend who has pretty much embraced the BlueAnon mentality on Twitter. He delivers standard-order yelling defenses of Critical Race Theory even though he's said nothing about it before until this year. Why? To make himself look good, stick it to the "bad guys," and gain followers I guess. It's sad.
I know you read Slate Star Codex, and this reminded me a great deal of the "motte-and-bailey" fallacy.
This is a great post. The Yglesias tweet that discusses Richard Delgado's succinct definition of CRT reminds me that Richard Posner (aka Judge Posner of 7th Circuit fame) had a hilarious takedown of Delgado as part of some law review symposium in the early 90s. I will have to dig up the citation.
The selfish fallacy strikes me as a modified True Scotsman fallacy, or appeal to purity: argument by motivated, ad-hoc redefinition of a category or term. If I understand the example here properly, it boils down to "No true CRT practitioner is radically illiberal" when evidence asserts otherwise.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
I like that framework a lot to think of whats going on here (and how you write about it). As well as the mental cirque du soleil we do, I still think a great deal boils down to the "what do my 'enemies think? I will think the opposite' as a crude and overused epistemic heuristic we all fall back on to varying degrees. I would really like to see how many people would respond to the question, "Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump say the sun rises in the East. Do you agree with Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump ?" (Or sub in whoever you despise - "crooked hillary etc)... It reminds me of the dynamic Paul Graham wrote about regarding identity and keeping it small http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html ...
“obscure set of theories from legal education”
Finally... the fact that while in law school I avoided substantive law courses as much as possible in favor of theory & philosophy and tacked on a history master’s degree for good measure will finally be “useful”. 🤪😂
Tbh I find it hilarious that CRT has become ‘a thing’.
Hmm. We shrinks mostly call this denial motivated by cognitive dissonance.
I ran into this same issue with “Socialism .” I eventually learned that quoting dictionaries gets you nowhere. I just try to figure out someone’s position without clinging too hard to the actual meaning. And in most cases the discovered difference in positions turns out to be small.
I’ve mostly avoided this debate because like everything else in our stupid culture war it’s a moral panic that will be over in six months and you’re right that nothing will have changed.
I have no doubt that Jeet is a soggy liberal, but completely devoid of context his tweet seems to be saying that the floating signifier will be used to shape curriculums in ways that really have nothing to do with CRT, which seems like a reasonable expectation. That’s always been a part of conservative culture war since Mccarthyism or even earlier.
The difference today seems to be that now we’re supposed to care about it in order to be “good” and fight back rather than just ignoring Bari and the rest of her clownish cohort and dictating the conversation ourselves. Defending CRT reminds me a bit of the embarrassing woman that wrote the “rioting is good” book this summer. It’s completely adopting the antagonistic framing of the right wing culture warriors and just saying “this is good actually”.
The cousin to Convenient Ignorance is Denialism. The left pretended cancel culture didn't exist for an entire year. You don't have to look far on blue check twitter to find tons of tweets professing hilarity about something that Doesn't Even Exist! I've noticed there are a lot fewer tweets about Cancel Culture Doesn't Exist because it's so obvious that cancel culture does in fact exist.
CRT became a Thing as fast as Judith Butler became The Correct Interpretation of Gender. Super fast, without anyone really reading the underlying body of work (but of course they have snippets they post to Tumblr!). Accepting without thinking means liberals started agreeing with things such as "yeah gender doesn't exist at all, so".... while conveniently ignoring all of the ideas that might flow from that - I recall Bill Nye got in trouble for insisting that biological sex is a scientific fact.
While I do enjoy people snarking about CRT, I wonder if the fallacy (& commentary) is entirely correct. Firstly, are we demanding too much of people who are in general support of an idea? Must one find all interpretations of a theory/philosophy and develop rebuttals to them? Is it possible that different things (concepts, organizations, philosophies) mean different things to different people?
Here I note that common definitions are essential to clear communication, but it's possible to support democracy while abhorring mob rule, even if it took men of the Founding Fathers' metal to thread that needle. And I note that many of the common defenses of CRT are indeed claiming that CRT doesn't mean things that it's most vocal & prominent supporters say that, yes, actually, it *does* mean.
Secondly - FdB says "this will all be gone in 6 months." Oh, you sweet summer child. Critical Theory has been a viable thing in academia (started in literature departments, if I am correct, not law, although law is where intersectionality as a discriminations concept was first formalized) since at least the 1970's, growing all along, and has been spreading toxicity in niche online groups since 2004 or so, before exploding into common HR departments in 2014.
It's not going away in 6 months. It may be something that, like socialism and the automobile, is with us for forever. (Making note of the date.)
Overreach is the liberal problem, their hubris and arrogance and we see it. Overreach that defies common sense is an endless topic for the other half of America - the uneducated people. They see liberals as lying hypocrites and their overly complex plans as idiocy. They see the fancy plans come and go like fashion. They see the elite with their finger on the scale in their own favour. They feel the sting of being spoken down to, of being managed through absurd explanations meant to deceive but hobbled by lack of education they can’t win the argument through argument. And the long came Trump the bloviating ignoramus who mocked and snitched on the fancy pants dummies. Pure joy, schadenfreude for the unwashed.
Raise the minimum wage to 20 bucks you assholes and then leave us alone.
Overreach is your myopia.
Absolutely essential reading on the subject. This is why I subscribe.
"the kind of soggy liberals who teach at law schools have decided that they need to look busy when it comes to race or risk losing their cush gigs"
This made me chuckle. Twelve years ago, I found myself drunk for the first time on pineapple margaritas at a fairly tame bachelorette party held in an after-hours art store. As I stumbled out, a magnet caught my eye that's still on my fridge today. It's a very Catholic-looking portrait of Christ, and the caption reads: "Jesus is Coming. Look Busy." I didn't know it then, but that was the first real step I took toward a critical examination of my religious thought, which had dominated much of my life. It took drunken inhibition to get beneath the veneer of unshakable certainty.
Since then, any time I've internally felt the impulse "so-and-so is coming/watching. Look busy" I've stopped and really taken a good hard look at what I'm so invested in covering up with disingenuous supportiveness. You, among a few others, have provided handholds for me to navigate my way out of lazy thinking. Cheers.
The left's best strategy is to force the conservatives to talk about the unpopular parts of their platform, and the reverse is true too. If the end result of all of this is 'the left further embraces a very unpopular radical worldview and spends time explaining it in detail to America' then it's hard to believe that conservatives are making poor strategic decisions here, regardless of how nonsensical the bills themselves might be. I don't think we should give them too much credit as strategic decision makers, but laughing this off completely as "man these guys didn't even go to grad school!" is also a mistake.