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Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

robkhenderson.com

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Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#261

Post by mech987987 »

littlestymaar wrote: post #165
fieldcny wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in no way conservative, but I think you are missing the point. There are sets of liberal and conservative beliefs that are held by the wealthy and powerful that are detrimental to the powerless and poor. He cites the liberal set, maybe he is a conservative and that’s his bias or maybe because there is an inbuilt hypocrisy in some of them, ultimately it doesn’t matter because the point stands on its own and one s…

I think you are the one missing the point: it's not that this post has a conservative bias (every text necessarily has these kinds of bias, and that's fine). The problem with this post is that it is only here as an argument against liberal ideas that he doesn't like, and as such it's entirely driven by bad faith. Then sure there may be some elements of truth sprinkled every now and then, but every piece of propaganda…

I would suggest the following explanation:

You could break people up into political and wealth-based quadrants: 1. Conservative and rich 2. Conservative and poor 3. Liberal and rich 4. Liberal and poor

Consider the typical expressed beliefs of quadrants 1 and 2. Both advocate that individualism and an internal locus of control can help you succeed in life. The difference is whether they have "succeeded in life" (by socioeconomic measures/ whatever).

Consider the same for quadrants 3 and 4. They would typically be more likely to advocate for the idea that success is based on luck. Again, the difference between 3 and 4 is whether they have not "succeeded."

Of all the quadrants, quadrant number 3 (liberal and rich) has a unique cognitive dissonance between their lived reality and their stated moral position. They tend to believe that rich people have achieved their wealth largely through luck, and now have power and autonomy that others lack. They state that the rich should help the poor, and they are rich, so they continually must justify their own wealth. This type of cognitive dissonance does not exist in the same way for the other 3 quadrants. That's why TFA is inevitably critical of the left for its luxury beliefs moreso than the right.

Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#263

Post by steveBK123 »

indigo945 wrote: post #257
steveBK123 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The response proves his point too in a way, and something I've observed in my NYC left rich cohort. Deflecting all criticism by knee jerk reaction of calling the questioner a racist. Disagreement over the magnitude of a problem, its relation to other problems, or the terms used for a problem makes you racist and therefore bad. Now we don't need to consider your opinion and can move on.

I did not call the author a racist, and to be quite honest, I fail to understand how one can reach that conclusion outside of a willful attempt to misrepresent my criticism.

No, you deflected by immediately discounting the author as being predictably, in your estimation, anti- feminist / anti- anti-racist.

Is this so different? It's saying the thing without saying it.

Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#264

Post by danaris »

JanSt wrote: post #230
danaris wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, no; it's absolutely part of it. Cultural appropriation involves the dominant culture taking practices (including things like clothing, music, dance, etc, especially if it's part of a religious practice) of a colonized or marginalized culture, removing them from their cultural context, and using them for their own purposes. That's absolutely subjugating the identity of the colonized: it takes these parts of their…

As I said, the european/my german perspective does not see this - at least what I have learned. An essential motive of colonialism was the missionization and education of the "primitive, uncivilized race". The Germans saw it as their task to civilize the colonial population by introducing them to German culture and the Christian religion. Other colonial powers, such as Great Britain or France, also followed this ideo…

While it's certainly not an exclusively American phenomenon, cultural appropriation is vastly more likely to occur here than nearly anywhere else, both because we live on (recently-)colonized land, with the remnants of the people we stole it from still living among us, and because we are such a cultural melting pot, so people can much more easily come into contact with the cultural practices of marginalized cultures.

In most cases, Europeans don't live close to the people their countries colonized (though there are some exceptions, like the Basque and Catalonia regions), so there's less of a likelihood for people to want to appropriate them.

And no; cooking African food, no matter whether you belong to a culture that colonized that particular African culture, is not appropriation (unless, as I mentioned in another post, the food is part of a closed religious/ritual practice).

Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#266

Post by neilk »

cmcaleer wrote: post #124
neilk wrote: post #106

Let’s consider the contrary. Do poor people sometimes hold highly questionable beliefs, promulgated by institutions, and does professing these beliefs in expensive and flamboyant ways confer status? Religion ticks all these boxes. In some contexts, so does patriotism, racism, worship of the military, publicly dumping cases of Bud Light, etc etc etc. In some ways, even disdain for education is a sort of expensive stat…

Defund the police was an inherently absurd idea. It especially bothers me that proponents gave no reasonable explanation for what happens next after defunding[1] and many seemed to have no appetite for reform. Portland was kind of a poster child for this. Just look at how things have changed after their budget slash. - Police staffing levels are at critical levels [2] - Violent crime has shot way up in 2021 (along wi…

I don’t have an informed opinion about Portland or its police. But I think that’s not exactly the issue here.

Others have already noted that the author overstates the support for true police abolishment. Let’s set that aside.

The police are much more unpopular these days than before and the author offers their theory that it’s some deranged attempt to flex on others. There is a much simpler explanation, like the fact that you can watch a supercut of police killings on YouTube now. This prompts reflection and reassessment, and some people end up in more extreme places.

I just don’t buy this idea of costly dogma in the educated elites. You support police reform. Maybe you know people who support some form of defunding the police. Are you losing friends over this?

The author may be on more secure ground when they assert that strong political beliefs are now more untethered from lived experience. But that seems like a predictable outcome of social media. And not always a bad one - if it’s motivated by evidence and empathy.

Sometimes it’s motivated by group processes that inch that group towards radical beliefs, where one derives status from going further down the rabbit hole. That’s bad but it’s not limited to one group.

My colleague works remotely from a more rural area, the land of “Fuck Trudeau” flags. One of his neighbors recently asked him if he was worried about COVID vaccines sterilizing him. Vaccine denial is one of the most “expensive” beliefs of all time. Some sociologists have proposed that such beliefs are strongly professed - despite lived experience of it being deadly to do so - because the person will suffer a “social death” otherwise.

So even if some educated elites are being memed into weird beliefs, this phenomenon is hardly isolated to them.

Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#267

Post by junofan »

indigo945 wrote: post #253
lelanthran wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I figured out as soon as I saw the link title that the author's examples for "luxury beliefs" would just so happen to be associated with a feminist and anti-racist outlook. Isn't the author's point that the examples correlate very highly with affluence? The fact that it may/may not be correlated to something else might be relevant, but I'm not seeing the relevance.

Yes, the examples correlate with affluence, which is a necessary condition for them to be included in this article; but it is obviously not a sufficient condition, as all "luxury beliefs" from elsewhere on the political spectrum are excluded. My point is that this is a bad faith argument. The author pretends to care about "luxury" beliefs, but in truth, all he cares about is finding a cheap shot against feminist posi…

I dunno, I read it apolitically. Normal working-class people don’t give a shit about any of this stuff, and as soon as they do, it’ll become unfashionable, and we’ll move on to the next thing.

Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#268

Post by joenot443 »

indigo945 wrote: post #257
steveBK123 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The response proves his point too in a way, and something I've observed in my NYC left rich cohort. Deflecting all criticism by knee jerk reaction of calling the questioner a racist. Disagreement over the magnitude of a problem, its relation to other problems, or the terms used for a problem makes you racist and therefore bad. Now we don't need to consider your opinion and can move on.

I did not call the author a racist, and to be quite honest, I fail to understand how one can reach that conclusion outside of a willful attempt to misrepresent my criticism.

Your first comment seemed to imply that the article was written to punch down on an “anti-racist” perspective. Am I misunderstanding your perspective?

Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#269

Post by joenot443 »

neilk wrote: post #255
lmm wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author is just describing what people of all kinds do. Yes, there are very silly beliefs which sometimes seduce educated elites. But that just makes them like everybody else. The idea that some of these beliefs are popular specifically because you have to be rich to afford them was a new insight to me when I first heard it. Maybe I should've come up with it myself from first principles, but I didn't.

You should come up with any belief from first principles

Really? A lot of my beliefs came from books, not from first principle inference.

Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#270

Post by indigo945 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #263
indigo945 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not call the author a racist, and to be quite honest, I fail to understand how one can reach that conclusion outside of a willful attempt to misrepresent my criticism.

No, you deflected by immediately discounting the author as being predictably, in your estimation, anti- feminist / anti- anti-racist. Is this so different? It's saying the thing without saying it.

My problem with the argument is not that it's anti-feminist, it is that it's a broad-swath argument that could be levied against any number of beliefs, and the author deliberately chose to wield it only and exclusively against feminist and anti-racist positions.

I made that quite clear in my original comment by suggesting several conservative "luxury beliefs" that I believe the author would have to criticize on the same grounds, but failed to do so. This is not "deflection", it's showing that the article employs double standards and is thus intellectually dishonest.

The "predictable" part, in my estimation, is that this kind of argument would be used by a right-wing author. To be saying the thing by saying it, conservative cultural critics, when measuring liberal discourse, are incapable of coming up with a bar that they themselves don't trip over.

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