211–220 of 328 posts
I think I feel a similar way. There’s issues and causes that I wholeheartedly believe in, but find myself pushing back against when I’m coerced to pledge a certain allegiance or wear a specific ‘scause. I dunno if I’m just being oppositionally defiant as some instinctive reaction or what. In a way, the actual exercise of rebellion gives the issue meaning. If you’re forced to issue a statement of some sort, it just be…
I really wish the young people on the left who snark about "late-stage capitalism" every time a Walgreens declines to refund pack of Sour Patches would talk to people from countries like China, India, or Russia. We truly don't understand how good we have it in the US. Do we have corruption? Sure. Regulatory capture? Yeah. A stupid healthcare system? Absolutely. But you can't be thrown in jail for comparing Mitch McCo…
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The same way other nations do?
It's vital that a democratic nation fully understands the method they use to elect representatives. People need to understand how their vote maps to a preference, and how their votes are tallied to determine who wins and who doesn't. If a significant share of the electorate does not understand the vote tallying process and expects an outcome different from the one that actually resulted from counting the votes, you w…
(What I'm getting at is that the problem's not the voting system, it's something else).
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> Targeting class diversity naturally gets you racial diversity anyways. Not only that, the opposite doesn't. There are fewer black kids than white kids who grew up in affluent / middle class families, but not so few that you couldn't fill every diversity slot at an elite university with them. Which defeats the proper purpose of the program. You're supposed to be giving opportunities to people who didn't have them an…
> Targeting class diversity naturally gets you racial diversity anyways. Not always true. Look at the SHSAT. If you looked at the poor kids and took the top scores, it would be mostly Asians. The same thing applies for admissions to the Ivies. If they set aside 25% of their incoming class to be from the bottom 25% of the income distribution they'd fill most of those slots with Asians.
So what? A few generations ago they said the same thing about Jews which was why they added extra admissions criteria in the first place. If one person has proven to be more academically qualified than another, they should be admitted. It doesn’t matter if they’re Jewish, Asian (which is an entire continent so it’s a bit silly to lump them all together, as if someone from China and someone from India have any kind of shared experience) or whatever.
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If the desired outcome is to benefit from the mixing of ideas, is that best served by using mandatory diversity statements to narrowly filter the applicant pool?
My understanding is that diversity statements are typically asking what you plan to do build/maintain diversity. Like, “I’ll start a science club at a local elementary school with a large population of underrepresented students”. It’s not just a description of how you have some uniquely desirable combination of identities.
I hope more people will pick up on the danger of this slippery slope. Part of the problem though is that we seem to have a tendency towards polar vortices of worldviews that suck in various issues that aren't even necessarily strongly connected, just to make them more effective in opposing the other side in an excessively concentrated way. So there is this tendency of social activists towards conformance and centrali…
> So I have to conclude that this is not just a left problem In America, the conservative movement drove fealty to ideals and invented cancel culture. It wasn’t leftists insisting our money trust god or that small children pledge allegiance. The left adopted it because people were committing suicide because of the systematic hate and discrimination. The religious right wing invented it because their feelings were hur…
Look, if you don't want an echo chamber on this topic, maybe consider the point of diversity statements. I can't put it better than Stephen Jay Gould: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." Consider that a diversity statement is a way to evaluate if the applicant has…
The recent case involving Yoel Inbar at UCLA provides evidence that DEI isn't just about measuring a candidate's ability to teach and mentor people from diverse backgrounds. There is also a component of signaling commitment to a specific political ideology. I would suggest listening to the interview he gave below, where it's pretty clear that even though he's critical of DEI statements, a stance which ultimately caused him to lose a job offer at UCLA, he's still in favor of diversity and social justice. (Interview starts at 41:30)
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You can go much further and adopt more direct democratic approaches, for example, referendums, which focus more on actual issues than on which individual gets the power. This can also reduce extremism, as it requires (and causes) a wider debate (and thus mutual understanding) in society. There is a historic reason why US and UK suffer from this problem the most, because they were built primarily on liberalism and not…
counterpoint to referendums: Brexit, which has been a disaster for Britain.
Look, if you don't want an echo chamber on this topic, maybe consider the point of diversity statements. I can't put it better than Stephen Jay Gould: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." Consider that a diversity statement is a way to evaluate if the applicant has…
This is a very thoughtful and sensible reply, but it's going to get lost in the storm and that is a shame. Personally I've always thought that a lot of these issues boil down to intentional misreading or lack of understanding of things unsaid. As an example, a whole bunch of people, for some reason, took "Black Lives Matter" to mean "Only Black Lives Matter", as if that was said or as if that was the point. In your e…
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counterpoint to referendums: Brexit, which has been a disaster for Britain.
Sure, counterpoint to freedom is that you can make a mistake. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have that freedom. The Brexit referendum was organized (and supported) by the conservative government, which wanted more neoliberalism. It was more of a populist stunt than the expression of the will of the people. That's not true to the spirit of referendums or direct democracy - these should exist to allow people to di…
I particularly rebut any suggestion that the Tories organised the referendum. That's only true at the most superficial reading. The whole farrago (pun intended) was founded by fringe nutters in the party, offered as a sop by the party leadership, and co-opted and orchestrated by interests inimical to the nation. (There is a case to answer for treason.)
Ever since the first referendum to join the EU in 1975, the anti-Europe faction of the Tory party was muttering in dark corners.
They gathered political strength at the fringe, slowly bolstered by drips of propaganda such as Boris Johnson's baseless claim, as a journalist, that the EU regulated the bendiness of bananas. In 2013, a nameless senior Tory in the orthodoxy coined the phrase "swivel-eyed loons".
Boris Johnson, may he swing, is every bit as much a fabricator as Donald Trump. If truth enters his speech, it's because it got lost.
_Aside: English politics has always been a straight left-right axis, with the left split between Labour and Lib Dems but the right united in the Tories. Labour had always had a strong socially-conservative constituency, but social conservatism has never been a campaign theme, AFAICR, beyond "tough on crime", which is a cheap vote-winner for anyone anywhere. The Labour Party is relatively new, but the Tories and Lib Dems trace their ancestry back to the same Tory-Whig axis that America inherited. Brexit turned that axis into a quadrant, with the LDs united but with the Tories and Labour split._
After they dicked over the plebs with austerity in a recession, the nation was angry with neoliberals, and the anti-EU gang fed on that. Not without reason, given how Greece got the shaft to protect German investors.
Campaigning for an outright majority in 2013, Cameron (a widely-used nickname for Pigfucker) offered the loons a referendum to keep them inside the tent; if the right split, it would have been a huge embarrassment for him. At that point, an anti-EU platform would not have taken many votes, but they would mostly have been Tory votes.
The Tories were already a neoliberal govenment, and they were blithely confident that they would win the referendum - it was a free hit for the loons, which was supposed to shut them up for another decade. Cameron had nothing to gain except silencing an annoying sideshow. He was already five years into an aggressive neoliberal strategy.
He shrugged off the power of bullshit stories such as "bendy bananas" and "Romanian squatters", despite the fact that they were in the Sun (proles), the Mail (proles with pretensions of intelligence), the Spectator (unintelligent toffs), and the Telegraph (obedient middle class). My apologies if you take the Spectator for the cartoons.
Despite their swivelly eyes, the Leave campaign acquired a huge war chest - namely, money from forex speculators and from Russia, which tells you exactly who benefits.
_Aside: London has been a haven for Russian money since glasnost. Russian oligarchs had been funding the Tories for years. Russia had total access to English politics up until the 2022 sanctions. The report from the inquiry into Leave campaign irregularities was suppressed._
The Leave backers brought in Steve Bannon, fresh from Trump's campaign. Bannon is not a great talent, but, in the milieu of English political campaigns, he was ahead of the curve. England was unprepared for bare-faced lies being astroturfed on Facebook.
Meanwhile, Cameron burned his war chest on fucking leaflet drops.
Cameron failed to generate any positive talking points, and expected to win by default. He argued that we'd become poor if we left Europe, which did little to sway working-class voters whom he had spent 6 years impoverishing. This arrogance was reflected by Gove's soundbite "people in this country have had enough of experts".
A new constituency emerged: "gammon", named for their ruddy complexions; choleric boomers, typically educated and middle-class but who long ago waved goodbye to curious intelligence, susceptible to and active on Facebook. These people are not as bad as your American fox news zombies, but of the same ilk - spittle-flecked rants at the breakfast table, "simple common sense", highly emotional yet sublimely certain of their own rationality. These chumps did not have a legitimate grievance against the government or the EU; their apoplexy was inchoate; they were merely channeled by the grifters.
Combine the gammon with the uninformed working class plebs, who bought into the threats of waves of gypsies arriving from Romania and mixed it with baseline sentiment against immigrants from all countries, and also the huge constituency that just wanted to give the arrogant neoliberals a black eye, and you have a win against the odds for Leave.
Excuse my rambling. It's hard to be concise when you're incandescent with fury.