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In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

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Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#201

Post by parrellel »

gertef wrote: post #93
briantakita wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"White Culture" only exists in the domain of Identity Politics. Remove Identity Politics & you remove the notion of "White Culture", among other socially divisive memes.

"White Culture" was invented as a defense of Slavery and Colonialism. Remove racially-based oppression as well as its legacy, and you remove the notion of "White Culture"

"White Culture" also acts as an easy straw man for those discriminated against and other minorities. Remember there aren't any cultural Eastern Europeans or Appalachians or what have you in the face of the monolith.

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#202

Post by narrator »

anigbrowl wrote: post #132
narrator wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been almost 90 years since Antonio Gramsci designed the culture war in his prison notebooks[1], so things have morphed a bit and the centrally planned communism he advocated is out of favor as an end goal, but the blueprint is still pretty much the same. To quote Wikipedia a little: "Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologi…

It really didn't matter if they were morally justified or not by any philosophy. The point was is that they were opposed to the hegemony and that's all that mattered. Wait...you're saying that they pursue their own interests?! How dare they!

The problem is that non-hegemonic factions may have contradictory interests. For example the Islamists and homosexuals do not agree on important issues. This isn't really important to the political opportunists because they are primarily interested in creating as large a power base aa possible for their ambitions so these contradictions are ignored as much as is possible by them.

The fight a few years ago within the Sierra Club environmental organization between pro and anti-immigration factions was a similar display of the political contradiction's that plague the coalitions of non-hegemonic cultures.

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#203

Post by padseeker »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #161
padseeker wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me hard proof of "anti-assimilation" ideas, not one obscure student group in California. I want real evidence. This whole passage reeks of a manufactured justification for racism.

Prop 58 was an anti-assimilation idea: http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-elec...

How does Prop 58 amount to an anti-assimilation ideas?

It allows for bilingual education. If it were advocating for something other than English it would have merit. But that is not the case;

"it preserves a portion of the statute mandating that all students become proficient in English, no matter what program they choose."

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#204

Post by sologoub »

zhemao wrote: post #129
djrogers wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is clearly an aside from TFA, but what are you talking about? Europe has had mass immigration recently, not emigration.

Pretty sure GP means the mass emigration of Europeans to North America in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

What does this have to do with the article? People (all people) fled violence, hunger and death that came from a series of conflicts so dire that some populations haven't fully recovered still.

Add to that incredible amounts of political violence at the dawn of the 20th century, and you have the immigration flows. Similar thing happened when the Soviet block collapsed and economic/political strife spilled out.

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#205

Post by icebraining »

weberc2 wrote: post #143
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but that doesn't help. Whether or not due to influence by C(now), there are very few people currently alive who would not say that C(now) > C(slavery). Those people cannot (validly) also argue that all cultures are equal. Worse, I'd guess that there is a liberal/conservative element here. Liberals are more likely to believe that C(now) > C(slavery); they are also more likely to believe that all cultures are equ…

I think my post agrees with your first paragraph, but your post reads like a rebuke. I disagree that conservatives are more likely to believe that C(slavery) was better than C(now), but I agree that conservatives are more likely to process an absolute morality position (with liberals it seems more complicated--most would say they support moral relativism, but they seem to view other moral systems as fundamentally rac…

evil, which can't be far from moral absolutism

Why? I can consider something subjectively evil, that is, I can feel a strong moral repulsion without considering that judgment to be universal.

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#206

Post by gabemart »

hprotagonist wrote: post #131
lambdaphagy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relative to all people living today, let alone whom have ever lived, you probably share rather a high percentage of the variation in cultural values with white people, however construed. Check out this map, for example: http://www.iffs.se/media/1906/culturemap_may2015.jpeg and notice how Anglos, even when separated by oceans for hundreds of years, tend to cluster in one corner of values-space.

what in the world is a "traditional vs. secular-rational values" axis? Why is it in linear units between -2.5 and 2.5? I have no idea how to interpret this graph.

http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp might shed some light

(I have no prior knowledge, I just searched)

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#207

Post by kelnos »

stinkytaco wrote: post #184
kelnos wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be technically correct (as we know, the best kind of correct), but it's not a useful argument to make, outside of pedantry. You may not be defending slavery, but you are suggesting that we cannot make a definitive statement about whether slavery is good or bad. If we can't do that, then what's the point of practical discussion about the direction of our civilization?

Perhaps with the best of intentions, the left seems to be silencing the discussion, or at least attempting to. It's a paradoxical defense of cultural relativism with a morally absolute position (saying x is bad and should be institutionally censored). I don't have an easy way to resolve that dilemma, but sometimes it seems the left is more concerned with appearance than with discussion.

Yeah, I definitely see that, and it worries me as well.

I do believe that the concept of tolerance can go too far, and that simply tolerating intolerant people can actually give you a worse outcome than censoring them. But I'm afraid that the left (of which I consider myself a part) goes too far sometimes. It's taboo to even try to discuss some topics, and people who don't understand and are just trying to learn get slapped down. That's not helping.

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#208

Post by AstralStorm »

lambdaphagy wrote: post #71
colanderman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. For example, there is no one "white culture". I'm white, and there are plenty of white people in my home town with whom I share little to no cultural values. Any conversation about relative values of "cultures" is probably better cast as a discussion about cultural memes (in the original Dawkins sense [1]), with the understanding that the flow of memes tend to follow social contours as clusters, and interact w…

Relative to all people living today, let alone whom have ever lived, you probably share rather a high percentage of the variation in cultural values with white people, however construed. Check out this map, for example: http://www.iffs.se/media/1906/culturemap_may2015.jpeg and notice how Anglos, even when separated by oceans for hundreds of years, tend to cluster in one corner of values-space.

This is not white culture but Anglo-Saxon. (Ask someone who's Slavic.)

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#209

Post by WillPostForFood »

padseeker wrote: post #203
WillPostForFood wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prop 58 was an anti-assimilation idea: http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-elec...

How does Prop 58 amount to an anti-assimilation ideas? It allows for bilingual education. If it were advocating for something other than English it would have merit. But that is not the case; "it preserves a portion of the statute mandating that all students become proficient in English, no matter what program they choose."

Teaching in Spanish inherently is advocating for something other than English, and is definitionally anti-assimilation.

You can see the meta message in this article. Fewer Latinos are speaking Spanish, so teach them more Spanish in schools to preserve the language and culture. Whether you think that's a good idea or not, it is anti-assimilation.

http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article120912998.html

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#210

Post by taylodl »

angersock wrote: post #97
leepowers wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> .... inner city blacks are incompatible with an advanced free market economy. We must have read different articles because that's not what I saw - I think you're so focused on detecting a dog whistle that you're missing the key point being raised. Values are race, gender, and class neutral. A value or system of values can be adopted by a person regardless of their race, gender, class, sexual orientation, etc. Value…

Building on this point, values for a single person/group can be ranked in terms of importance: I value easily drinkable water much more than I value easy access to cat pictures, and I value easy access to cat pictures more than I value Irish independence (for example). This being the case, two groups that might differ on some values can oftentimes work together if they have similar regard for highly-prioritized share…

In my argumentation and debate class I took at the University many years ago the professor made the somewhat provocative statement that there is a set of universal values which everyone holds dear. The problem is they rank them differently in terms of importance and that's where all the arguments stem from. The key to effective debate is to identify those values you share and show you have the same mutual concerns.
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