Most people are scared of losing their jobs for saying / thinking / doing / being accused of doing the wrong thing by the vocal minority of social justice warriors. This is totally obvious if you’re not part part of the minority, but a bitter pill for the woke crowd to swallow.
‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
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Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#92> It states that 12% of voters accounted for 50% of all social-media and Twitter users – and are six times as active on social media as are other sections of the population. That's not a tiny minority: it's a pretty reasonable dispersal of social media use. 12% of the population accounting for 50% of anything is a more egalitarian distribution than we see with, say: wealth, healthcare use, or educational attainment.…
12% of voters is not 12% of the population. People who didn't vote, People who are too young to vote, People who cannot vote. Etc Voters as a group is meant to reflect that proportion of the population that is involved with the political process at the basic level.
Good point. Only about 50% of Britons voted in the Brexit referendum, for a turnout of 72% [0].
So the inequality is twice what I made it out to be there. I don't think it changes my comparisons all that much: we don't usually consider infants when measuring inequality in wealth or educational attainments either, or we use their caregivers as a proxy.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_Kingdom_European...
Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#93Somewhat ironic to have the leading liberal culture warrior publication in the UK dismiss the ugliness as some sort of sideline crank affair.
The Guardian is as bad as The Daily Mail from the other side, but seems to genuinely believe it's somehow above it all.
Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know those diversity sessions... They claim everyone who is white or passing as white is racist. I had to "confess" that i'm racist and promise to do better or it would have consequences for my career. Sidenote: I volunteer at a refugee center and took in a syrian family. Literally hitler, i know. A colleague got fired because he wouldn't confess and left the session. So even if that Dean said he is a racist, he's…
Is there any real proof that these diversity sessions actually help people work in diverse environments? The way you describe this, it reads like a really, really weird cargo cult where just confessing to one's supposed racism will somehow make you more open to people of differing backgrounds. How exactly does this help?
Demanding people declare they are racists sounds very strange to me - I'm not sure that would help things much.
But I've also seen some people do some pretty oblivious things in my time - like ordering company tee-shirts for their mixed-gender team, but only getting male sizes. Or evaluating every interview candidate's communication skills and cultural fit based on a conversation about rock climbing and craft beer.
And other stuff managers might need to get good at aren't taught at home or in college. If you get performance complaints about an otherwise-good employee who is fasting during Ramadan, what's the right way to address that while respecting privacy and being fair to the complainant, complainee and the company?
I can understand why an employer might want their employees to have a bit of extra training, above and beyond what college and life experience have already taught them. At least for the employees destined for promotion to senior positions.
Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first describes a quasi-religious ritual in which all participants ritually affirm that they are unworthy sinners, racists. Those who believe get the satisfaction of publicly proclaiming their sin, signaling their superiority over the outsiders. Those who don’t believe have their faces rubbed in the fact that other people have the power to make them lie in public about who they are and what they believe. It shows…
Thats an over-reaction. The first is not religious in any sense. It appears to be an acknowledgment of the bias's we all have as humans. We all have bias's, unconscious and conscious - its part of being human. In that sense we're all 'racist' to some degree and its important to acknowledge that so as to overcome it. As far as the second example cited I think more information is missing before jumping to a conclusion.
> In that sense we're all 'racist' to some degree and its important to acknowledge that so as to overcome it.
No. I reject this. No matter how many times you or others tell me that I’m racist and can’t help it, and if I just pray... I mean take enough sanctioned training courses it’ll go away I will not partake. Period. Nobody is racist until proven otherwise, or racist until they’ve taken enough unconscious bias training courses. That’s something you and others are making up to deal with your own insecurities and racism. Being uncomfortable walking down the street at night because you see a black man is your racism. Not mine. No thanks.
This entire “movement” looks exactly like a witch hunt or the Soviet gulags. When someone is inconvenient, you just call them a racist since everybody is magically, automatically guilty of being racist and off they go.
I’m really sick and tired of seeing this crap. It’s ruining western civilization and creating conflict. It’s not even about race anymore. It’s just white people telling everyone they are racist so they can feel good about themselves and create positions of power and authority. Some genuinely believe this, but some also genuinely believe they are saving your soul when they pray for you.
I reject racism. I’m not a racist and you’re not going to tell me or others that we are racist just because you are or you think others are.
Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#96This is a surprise only to that tiny minority.
Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand how someone can say this with a straight face. Whitewater was a New York Times created scandal. It was the New York Times that ran cover for the Bush administration in invading Iraq. It was the New York Times that a week before the 2016 election ran dueling stories that played up the Clinton e-mail story and simultaneously absolved Trump of any links to Russia. All of these stories got widespread m…
> simultaneously absolved Trump of any links to Russia The investigation also failed to find sufficient evidence to charge anyone in the Trump administration with collusion. At this point Russiagate is thoroughly debunked.
Collusion is a very specific charge.
I wouldn't call "Russiagate" in any way debunked given this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_charges_brought_in_th...
Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know those diversity sessions... They claim everyone who is white or passing as white is racist. I had to "confess" that i'm racist and promise to do better or it would have consequences for my career. Sidenote: I volunteer at a refugee center and took in a syrian family. Literally hitler, i know. A colleague got fired because he wouldn't confess and left the session. So even if that Dean said he is a racist, he's…
I've been in such trainings, and I've seen lots of people get offended at hearing "you benefit from racism" as if it meant "you're racist". Racists in positions of power may tilt the playing field in your favor whether you've asked for it or not. And it may not even be you personally, but people in your neighborhood, your social groups in general.
Jumping from generalizations about groups to specifics of individuals is inherently unjust - as is the inverse, generalizing about a group from a few individuals. Generalization from systematic group aggregation is useful for exposing systemic biases, but action should be specific to the circumstances of individuals independent of group membership or the risk of injustice is very high.
Unsafe generalization is at the root of prejudice. Racists / sexists / bigots generalize from the worst instances of individual behaviour to a group, or aggregate statistics about a group, and then apply the generalization in specific individual scenarios. A crude example, taking the generalization "Jews run global finance" - and it's true that they have been historically over-represented - and then applying the generalization to specifics: "you're a Jew, I don't like Jews because they run the world".
A good rule to bear in mind before leaping to prejudice is that the variance within groups is larger than the variance between groups.
White privilege is a prejudice concept built along the same architecture as racism and sexism. It takes aggregate group attributes and tries to enforce it in the particular against individuals. You've just rehearsed the line yourself - "you benefit from racism" - you've given an example of instantiation of a group attribute upon an individual without evidence. It is literally prejudice, and it's unjust, even if it's more likely to be true than false.
Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#99Yes. The culture war is to a great extent a US import. The US is extremely polarised, possibly uniquely so for a country with a single national language and mostly-shared ethnic background (compare Belgium, which is highly polarised but along language lines). The UK has its own natural fragmentation lines (north/south, class system, four nations, catholic/protestant) but those are not the lines on which the culture w…
Interestingly the US actually does not actually have an official natrual language.
But it is a topic of discussion. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Language_Unity_Act. Latest attempt, AFAICT, is https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/997/..., which became https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/997/....
That has not been moving recently.
Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being racist isn’t the same as being evil. Just about everyone, to some extent, is racist. I don’t see how that’s an extreme claim. Humans are a social species. We have in-groups and out-groups. Often times the most salient marker for whether someone is in your group is whether they share certain phenotypes or language. There’s nothing weird about that. It’s expected. It’s our default setting. But it does lead to tre…
We may tend to prefer in-groups as humans, but there's no reason why one's "in-group" should be defined by race. Indeed the whole notion of 'race' itself is largely artificial, historically- and locally-contingent, and thus so is racism. If the claim was that as humans, we're all naturally driven to be more broadly biased and perhaps intolerant towards some others, that would be far more defensible.
> We may tend to prefer in-groups as humans, but there's no reason why one's "in-group" should be defined by race.
I agree! There’s no reason in-groups should be defined by race...but, at least in the United States, it was quite literally legislated in law for centuries and formed the basis of a slave state and then segregation. So it seems like race has historically been one way we define in-groups and out-groups. Based on current events, I’d argue race is still pretty important to a lot of people. Otherwise our politics wouldn’t be...whatever you want to call them.
> Indeed the whole notion of 'race' itself is largely artificial, historically- and locally-contingent, and thus so is racism.
Race is socially constructed but it’s definitely real. Racism is also real.