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Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

robkhenderson.com

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Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#251

Post by littlestymaar »

philwelch wrote: post #234
thfuran wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Are you suggesting that it is inherently bad faith to argue against a position that one doesn't like?

No, he’s saying it’s inherently bad faith to be conservative.

No, I actually read more conservatives than I do read from people who share my opinions because bad faith annoys me even more when it's done from my side.

And there are bunch of conservatives that are even pleasant to read even though I don't have much in common with them.

You can have different opinions and still argue in good faith.

Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#252

Post by lom888 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #210
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.

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.

Exactly, the deflections of 'racism' and 'sexism' are thought-terminating cliches bandied about in an act of pure class war. No need to listen to Trumpies talk about immigration and how it effects their community if they're all racists; that makes them the other and we can just pretend they don't exist.

Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#253

Post by indigo945 »

lelanthran wrote: post #201
indigo945 wrote: post #101

> When I was growing up in foster homes, or making minimum wage as a > dishwasher, or serving in the military, I never heard words like “cultural > appropriation” or “gendered” or “heteronormative.” > > Working class people could not tell you what these terms mean. But if you > visit an elite university, you’ll find plenty of affluent people who will > eagerly explain them to you. I figured out as soon as I saw the l…

> 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 positions. He intends to delegitimize these positions by painting them as an upper-class fringe ("luxury") concern. Once this angle of attack is found, the author never stops to see that the same attack could be levied against any number of political positions that he himself might agree with, because he was never interested in a real debate to begin with: he only wants to smear and ridicule.

The point is not that the examples are also "correlated" with something else, it's that they're carefully cherry-picked and made a target for an attack that would work against conservative positions, carefully excluded by the author, just as nicely as it does against liberal positions here.

Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#254

Post by philwelch »

littlestymaar wrote: post #251
philwelch wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he’s saying it’s inherently bad faith to be conservative.

No, I actually read more conservatives than I do read from people who share my opinions because bad faith annoys me even more when it's done from my side. And there are bunch of conservatives that are even pleasant to read even though I don't have much in common with them. You can have different opinions and still argue in good faith.

David French doesn’t count.

Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#255

Post by neilk »

lmm wrote: post #162
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…

> 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

Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#256

Post by thrway63245 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #244
JanSt wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

well I mean that's cool that you have a different opinion of the meaning of the term, but the term was created as a critique of the effects of colonialism / post-colonialism and first use of the term comes here AFAIK https://www.archivesdelacritiquedart.org/wp-content/uploads/... I guess I'm sort of old fashioned, when a concept is coined by some person I go with their definition and not what my feelings on it as a D…

[dead]

Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#257

Post by indigo945 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #210
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.

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.

Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#258

Post by jlos »

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…

> Religion ticks all these boxes

Regular participation in religious services is of the most beneficial activities a person can do for their mental health. I'm not saying this as a platitude, but as a well documented observed phenomenom [0][1]. To the point, I regularly see studies on benefits to those who regularly attend religious services and have never seen a study showing any adverse affects from it.

That is not to say religion is an unalloyed good, far from it. But human communities are built around shared values and beliefs - and religions provide community, cohesion, and existential value that is not replicable in any other way.

This kinda knee-jerk anti-religious sentiment is something I'd personally label a luxury belief that is largely damaging to the population as a whole. If you are sufficiently wealthy, you can probably fill some of the voids left by a lack of religion. But irreligiosity does not scale

[0] https://psyche.co/ideas/why-religious-belief-provides-a-real... [1] https://www.nber.org/digest/oct05/religion-good-you

Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#259

Post by snoochyboochies »

Animats wrote: post #95

"Class", by Paul Fussell, is a fun read. It's from 1981 and reads like a period piece today, but it's still a good read. Somehow, "Black Lives Matter" morphed into "Defund the Police", which turned into a joke. It derailed any serious effort to fix the real problem of cops shooting too many black people. Not quite sure how that happened. The hard work thing seems to be the reverse of the criticism usually leveled in…

On average, between 10 and 20 unarmed black people are killed by police each year since 2020. This accounts for less than 1% of all police shootings of black people.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)

#260

Post by leoedin »

boppo1 wrote: post #182
doublespanner wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans tied up so much of their image of a "good person" with not being racist, that when in environments with no way to demonstrate that they are not racist, they had to invent new racist things to oppose.

As a millennial, racism was taught to me in k-12 as being perhaps one of the fundamental forces of evil in the world; kind of an analog to what Christian students learn about Satan. As a result, people in my generation have moral codes that revolve around it, sometimes in twisted ways. Someone gets hit by a car but hey were racist? Had it coming.

This really hit it on the head. Racism was presented as the worst transgression anyone could make. Is it a surprise that when the generation raised in that environment reached adulthood - and realised that racism wasn't quite as dead as they thought, some of them would take their internalised morality to the extreme.
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