Continetti, Lu, and me on the New Right; Alice Evans on religiosity; Brink Lindsey on temperance; Rob Henderson on statistical personality differences; Coleman Hughes on how he was treated by TED
Coleman Hughes description of what went on at TED is devastating, and I urge everyone to read it at the link. That there is within the TED organization a group called “Black@TED”, which TED’s website describes as an “Employee Resource Group that exists to provide a safe space for TED staff who identify as Black" tells us that TED is a "woke" organization that likes to affect commitment to the values of open discussion but whose real mission is the propagation of Left ideology.
Note further the absurd language: "provide a safe space for TED staff who identify as Black." The ritual capitalization of the word black. The effort to imply that blacks who work among all the Progressives at TED are somehow in danger of attack. The notion that this danger would extend even to those who though not black, "identify" as black. Do they have any Rachel Dolezals there? "Providing a safe space" is a euphemism for establishing an institutional platform for complaint about ideas or words that might threaten empirical disconfirmation of racist anti-white ideological belief.
I know Steve Sailer has mentioned this elephant before - but anyone who reads even casually from the well of 20th century black writers and essayists, has got to be taken aback by the kindergarten-ization of the current Black "intellectual" elite represented by the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi. You could do just a vocab analysis and find this to be the case. I don't understand what happened there.
Maybe everything didn't used to be better, but the "spokesmen" and writers sure used to be.
Maybe it's better for Coleman Hughes to be on a harder path than mainstream acceptance, but I'm sure it doesn't pay the bills to be the vilified darling of a slender strand of the right.
Opportunity Cost and Diminishing Marginal Returns. (It's an econ blog, after all).
A century or more ago, black intellectuals had limited alternative opportunities for lucrative employment or roads to fame and power. Today, a very smart black person pursuing a typical high status and high-paying career has a 99% chance of landing such a position.
And the point of diminishing marginal returns to intelligence for black public intellectuals writing on race matters has moved dramatically to the left. Getting and staying on the A-list for commentary is extremely competitive, and more intelligence will only be useful when it will help you out-compete your rivals.
Back in the day, the rigor, quality, cleverness, artistry, novelty, style, persuasiveness, and creativity of a public intellectual's output all mattered a great deal to how he would be judged and fare in the arena, and thus, whether he would win that competition. And in that lost world of yesterday when that was the case, since more intelligence tends to make a writer better on all those dimensions, the pool of successful writers all tended to be quite smart.
But today, none of those things matter. There is no penalty whatsoever to performing at the level of a mediocrity on any of those measures.
Indeed, if you stop to think about it, that this -ought- to be the case, for them and all the other mediocrities like them too, is precisely what these mediocrities -are- arguing!
The previous generation of smart people advocating cleverly for the status of mediocrities predictably led to the over-advancement of the next generation's mediocrities, and into the very positions to which that baton of advocacy was passed, but where their mediocre successors now advocate not for others, but themselves, not cleverly, but ineptly, but not that it matters anymore, cause it doesn't.
In fairness, I suppose, this tends to be true across the board. Any old New York Review of Books issue tends to be dense with brainy people showing away, even when smart-stupid. So I am reluctant to totally yield the notion that school is making people dumber than they need be.
It's wokeness, which is almost uniquely pernicious as an inherently anti-meritocratic political ideology.
So, it's not really about the decline in the quality of schooling, though it can't be helping, but which is more caused than cause, that is, downstream of the same headwaters.
The deep philosophical problem is that when there is a critical internal and irreparable contradiction between a perspective's metaphysics and epistemology, and progress towards some important goal hinges on its resolution, then, "something's gotta give".
It's certainly possible for smart people to make strong, rigorous, and valid cases for false or bad ideas, so long as the arguments still follow the ethos, spirit, rules, and procedures of that system's internal "logic". History is full of that kind of thing.
But leftism got itself (and the rest of us) into a jam. On the one hand, leftist elites converged to the conceit of being enlightened adherents to a kind of "modernist" metaphysical consensus of "atheist, eliminative materialism" that necessarily carried with a scientific and empirical epistemological standard where inferential claims about anything must conform to observable evidence and rules of formal logic to be considered valid. "No hell below us, above us only sky." Let's just call all this "The Science".
On the other hand, the logic of democratic state governance inescapably creates the opportunity the exploitation of which is the leftist political formula: Robin Hood Clientalism and the neo-Spoils System by which the left uses state power to grab and redistribute stuff, jobs, and status from their opponents to their supporters. All of that is obviously norm-violating when expressed forthrightly, and so to lubricate social acquiescence it has to be backed up by an ideological Narrative that provides a Socially Acceptable Excuse for the grabbing.
And the trouble is obviously that The Science contradicts The Narrative. Duh! Of course it does. The Narrative is a bunch of lies about the nature of human reality, so of course its claims conflict with the results of any reliable way to learn about the nature of reality, i.e., "The Science."
It's a trilemma / "impossible trinity". "Good, fast, cheap: pick two" Pinker has a social version "Free, Fair, Equal". This one is "Science, Democracy, Narrative."
But the quest and ambition for power isn't just going to throw up its hands, give up, and go home. So something's got to give. And that something is coherent epistemology, which gets sacrificed, compromised, and corrupted.
The last time the left ran into this problem was in the intellectual wake of America's victory in WWII and the elite academics and influential public intellectuals at the center of the action hit their stride about 60 years ago with entire libraries full of relativist, postmodernist, "critical", and deconstructionist flavors of nonsensical gobbledygook that served its political purpose then dumped like a bag of garbage. Deservedly, because it -was- all garbage.
The old progressive theory of technocratic governance was that power and authority should be informed by and exercised consistently with scientific knowledge and principles, either "rule by experts" or at least "rule with experts, consistent with expertise".
And for this to work, The Truth, that is supposed to tell authority what to do and how to do it, is something external that must be discovered, beyond human control, indifferent to our preferences, objective and perpetual. The arrow is supposed to point and influence is supposed to flow just one way: Knowledge -> Power.
But that valve is pretty irritating, and irritants to power are called "targets".
What the leftist intellectuals did was the equivalent of raising the strength of the electric field opposing the direction of that technocratic epistemic diode until they reached its breakdown voltage. The servant has become the Master, and the former master had become a mere agent in the role of shyster, press secretary, spin-meister, and snake-oil salesman.
So, the point of all that intellectual garbage was to go for the throat of the consensus in favor of robust and rigorous intellectual and epistemic gatekeeping that stood in the way of propagating untrue claims useful to the leftist political program. "So, you know, maybe there isn't such a thing as just one shared objective reality that would limit my ability to make up bogus claims. You can't disprove my claims, there's no valid way for you to do so, and the belief that there is a good way is just a false social construction, ha!"
Fortunately the volume from that particular wave of intellectual rubbish quickly peaked then diminished. The status of incredibly rapid technological advancements and the fame and great fortunes made as a result eventually sucked the oxygen out of the room and extinguished the flame. The diode started working again, some times, for some things.
But with wokeness the flame is back and now a catastrophic wildfire, and the breakdown voltage so greatly exceeded that the whole motherboard vanished into a cloud of incandescent vapor.
In math, anything is true if a contradiction is true. "A is not A" Wokeness literally insists on an axiom just as fallacious, "Mediocrities are not Mediocrities."
There is no possibility whatsoever of reconciling that axiom with any epistemic system relying on standards of intellectual rigor that are good at discerning whether a claim is supported by the reasoning of a valid and rational argument consisting of inferences properly drawn from logical analysis of empirical evidence.
No. Possibility. None.
So, something's gotta give.
And so, what the power that relies on the woke narrative did was to insist that -these intellectual standards themselves- are unwoke, "white", politically incorrect, racist, etc. To criticize on the basis of those standards is a cardinal sin, and the critic the worst kind of sinner.
It is in this manner that wokeness has become nothing less than a dagger stabbing into the very heart of what's left of the health of our society's intellectual culture.
This is so true, one of the best of so many great Handle comments. When the true criteria are racist, thus a sin against woke, false criteria are used and contradictions accepted.
Obama’s election in 2008 showed Democrats the way—every critic of any Dem policy was labeled a racist. This worked.
So how exactly is a "social pressure movement" supposed to happen? It sounds to me as wishful-thinking as the kind of "we ought to", "we need to to" bits that many journalists stick on the end of their pieces without offering anything in the way of "but how exactly?". To my mind, the only social pressure successes that could fit the label are those that have arisen from the banding together of once-tiny but obsessively one-track-minded gender dysphorics. I can't see anything by non-obsessive-malcontent types ever getting going in that way. Pessimism...sorry. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
I have been thinking on just this point for a while, and the best I can come up with is the inculcation of specific rules and attitudes towards behavior in our children. So, in the bad example of temperance (that movement had a lot of bad even without legislation) we could teach our children "Anymore than 3 drinks a night is too much; it is just asking for trouble" and "Being visibly drunk in public is embarrassing, only suitable for losers." If we were to look at something more recent, maybe "Those short shorts with 'Juicy' written across the ass are just pathetic. No young girl should be advertising like that unless she is a street walker."
The trick it seems to me is to not only express that something is bad or undesirable, but give a good reason why such that the rule takes on the same sort of common sense nature as "you shouldn't put a fork in the electrical outlet." The other trick, and this is the harder one perhaps, is to embody the rule with a limiting principle so it isn't taken to the extreme, an extreme that is easily shown to be silly. The temperance movement did that, going towards "No alcohol ever" which was obviously a bit much. The left often falls afoul of that, for example equal rights for minorities rapidly turning into "more rights and power for minorities!" Without a limiting principle, people either take things way too far and cause more harm than good, or see the way too far argument and just decide "These people are insane, and their rule is stupid."
"people take things way too far" is, I think, the tragedy of Liberal Individualism in a nutshell. It could almost be called Icarus Syndrome.
Like you though, I do try to find reasons to be positive and Yes inculcating attitudes in our children is the way. But we can't expect any help from the school system....not in the UK at least (where I don't think there's any real doubting that a great majority of teachers are at least semi-woke). There's perhaps more chance in the growing home-school movement in the US.
I wouldn't limit people taking things way too far to Liberal individualism; it seems to be the default mode for most human action. In the realm of the physical we tend to get smacked back into line by reality; nearly every college student has a night out what teaches them what way too much alcohol is, and they dial it back a bit. In the realm of the mental we rarely have such negative feedback, and so we tend to just keep pushing things, because more of something virtuous is always more virtuous, right?
I think Aristotle was really on to something, and makes a point of it because it is so easy for humans to miss: virtue lies between two extremes of vice.
Attention is a double edged sword. It's a human instinct to desire it. It's healthy to value your privacy and not to be so self obsessed that it begins to take over your life. You sound healthy to me.
I just now watched the video of that discussion and wow, Continetti and Lu have extremely weak cases which often rely on statements that are either ignorant, confused, or disingenuous.
The test of whether a discussion between critics on the same side of some issue is a waste-of-time echo-chamber of inaccuracy is the adversarial-lawyers-at-trial test: whether they would have said the same things without immediately being made to look like fools, when in the presence of a skilled and knowledgeable opponent. They failed that test badly.
As just one example, there is repeated reliance on the fallacy of ideological equivocation and the elision of the enormous gap between "the conservative movement" and various pretenders to that status.
You know what's funny? If you translate "New" and (political) "Right" into Latin, you get "Neo" and "Conservative". Huh! How about that?
Alas, what Neo-Conservative actually meant was, "Not Conservative". *(see below only if you care)
Which is part of why, despite there still being something resembling a "conservative movement" that believes in radical and extreme ideas like getting murderers off city streets (shout-out to Baltimore!) no one even talks about Neoconservatism or Neoconservatives anymore except in the past tense. If I say, "Wolfowitz" do you even remember him? If so, nostalgically? Fondly? Ha!
Pace Continetti, there is no irony at all in Claremont electing to be something a bit more relevant and wise than a Jaffa-worshiping cult of personality. Indeed, it's obvious there wouldn't still exist a Claremont had they done so. As some history homonymic trivia, it -is- a little ironic that they are now closer on average to the views of the count of Clermont-Tonnere, so maybe they should update the spelling too along with the views.
Most of the Neos were ideologically bipolar with regards to an incoherent and internally inconsistent mix of worldly cynicism and pessimism as regards the human condition, on the one hand (part of their awakening to defect from their origins on the hard left), and boundless confidence and naïve optimism bordering on magical thinking about the universal power and appeal of their favored ideals, on the other.
Strauss was no de Maistre by a long shot, but he was influenced by the European school of thought on the subject, and the above dissonance is what happens when you try to make a cocktail by mixing a shot of that school with a concentrated syrup of American kool-aid. The Straussian stuff was a potent tonic, but the crash after the American sugar rush put the whole scene into a diabetic coma from which it never emerged. And good riddance.
Jaffa, for all his merits, makes for a good example of someone who drank that kool-aid, helped brew new flavors, and then drank those too. And while he enjoyed plenty of success, he didn't deserve to win, because the quality of his thinking suffered the consequences. To say that his victories in his fights with Buchanan, Bork, Kirk, Lasch, Gottfried, and others don't stand the test of time when seen from 2023 in extreme understatement. His role in the conversion of Buckley is on par with the New Deal so far as being in the hall of fame of setbacks to genuine conservativism in American politics. When's the last time anyone has shared a link to anything in National Review?
No one says "neoconservative" anymore because neoconservatism deserves it. The whole scene had a completely miserable quarter century that everybody is keen to forget about and move on from. Are there any actual conservatives in existence who lived through that time and look back at what happened after 9/11 or during any part of the W Bush administration with pride? Ha, quite the contrary, more like anger and shame. Every time the neoconservatives pursued anything that didn't overlap with plain-old-conservatism, it ended in embarrassing disaster. And any actually conservative "neoconservatives" went extinct a long time ago. The others (e.g., Bill Kristol, Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot, etc.) were obvious fakers every time they made a gaffe of letting their actual opinions escape their mouths, and as their later careers in letters, so to speak, repeatedly reveal to daily disgust.
Likewise, "New Right" is "Not New" Right. To clear the road still partially blocked by some remaining festering pieces of the rotting giant corpse of neoconservatism, and to revive the principles and arguments they sidelined for two generations, literary expediency requires that effort be cast as "New" to those who don't either remember or read history, about the time when it was just "Right".
To be fair, it is New in the sense of being a more up-to-date version of what was once just "American Right", but which has now matured ungracefully by the intellectual benefit but spiritual hit of last half century's track record of disillusionment, failure, and degeneration. Sure, when you've had a hard life, sometimes getting smarter about it also turns you into a bit of a curmudgeon, either bitter or bellicose. My sense of things is that there aren't any prominent, non-progressive critics of the New Right who didn't vote for both Hillary Clinton and Biden, but if you find one then you are dealing with someone can't or won't understand those underlying lessons.
*(ok, only if you're interested)
Neoconservatism is not conservatism because in our post-"Triumph of PR Tricks", post-Orwellian, pre-Confucian-rectification-of-names world, various word games actually work on occasion to confuse people enough to win sneaky ideological and political victories.
So the trick is: Step 1: Find a fuzzy label for an ideal, philosophy, or ideological concept, which already has an understood meaning, and for which a large mass of people have strong respect and sense that they should be loyally committed to it. Step 2: Steal that label, but add a little tweak. Say that your completely different concept is the thing which that label really means, when you stop and think about it. Step 3: Having successfully fooled all those chump, your wolf gets to enjoy exploiting the loyalty and respect for the dead sheep whose skin suit it is now wearing. "Now follow me instead, morons!"
So, a good general rule in political linguistics is that when you notice anyone doing this - the placement of a positive valence modifier in front of some respected term for an ideological concept - that modifier is always reasonably interpreted to mean, "Not" or "Not Actual".
E.g., "Social Justice" is "Not Actual Justice". Neoconservatism is "Not Actual Conservatism". Any of a whole variety of "X Libertarianism" is "Not Actual Libertarianism".
This doesn't apply to negative-valence modifiers, invented and applied by opponents, meant to be used as epithets in a derogatory fashion. In that case, the modifier mean, "Actual". So when the Neoconservatives snarked that something was "Paleoconservative", what they meant was, "Actually Conservative".
Libertarians often complain, with great merit, about the word "liberal" being purloined from people who believed mostly in non-coercion by those who believed in a society engineered from the top-down by technocrats.
I mainly shrug at this. That horse left the barn; we lost that match; language has evolved (due to popular usage, not the Anglo equivalent of <i>l'academie francaise</a>.
But I cannot get over the fact that we lost the word "temperance". And I find it dispiriting that Kling's list of social norms he thinks ought to be dissuaded can't distinguish between the original meaning of temperance (moderation in use) and prohibition/blanket condemnation. Kling:
<blockquote>I would like to see social pressure applied also in other areas: against marijuana use; against promiscuous use of four-letter words; in favor of forming relationships that result in grandchildren.</blockquote>
Three pitches; three swinging-misses. Should marijuana use be dissuaded or <i>over-</i>use? Where does the use four-letter words become "promiscuous"? What counts? The word "suck", which is often used in a low and vulgar style, literally has four letters. And serial, non-marital, non-cohabiting sexual relationships beginning at a young age are probably the way to max out grandchildren, yet I doubt that this is what Kling has in mind.
Social norms that evolve from the bottom up are salubrious and even necessary but we're going to need to do a better job than relying on religious diktat or ill-defined vibes.
Just want to thank you for the lesson on the word "temperance" there; I am converted to use that word accurately from now on - it being a highly useful one. You have also greatly changed my understanding of the Temperance Movement, at the same time. I wonder if any of those in that movement lamented the unbending, firebrand Mother Thompson types who perhaps account for the change in understanding the word?
Re: "that hard-coding temperance into law does not seem to work. [... .] Granting that temperance in this realm is desirable, what can we learn from the early temperance movement (a) about *how* to get it in motion and (b) how to keep it from going overboard?"
A difficulty is that many people naturally interpret freedom to do X as an endorsement of X, rather than merely permission to do X.
Charles Murray's Belmont seems a place where freedom to do X doesn't translate into substantial prevalence of X, because peers frown on X.
Do we know how to strengthen healthy social norms via policy, while preserving liberty?
In answer to your question, I think that counter intuitively we need to make less a matter of policy. It seems to me that in realms where many things that are bad to do are proscribed by legislation people tend to assume that all bad things are illegal, and anything that remains is good. Possibly that is an over correction when seeing some things that seem alright be deemed illegal, so people assume that since some ok things are illegal, anything legal must be better, I don't know.
On the other hand, in realms where almost everything is allowed, people seem to assume that many things they are allowed do are bad, and so start to pay more attention to the actual results instead of relying on someone else to do it for them via legislation.
That isn't a fully fleshed out theory, just something I have noticed.
If this must take a libertarian direction, which I doubt has the "ideological" heft to stand up to - well, ideology - it's more of a mood or a personality tendency among some, possibly few - then let us go full libertarian and insist on nobody reaching into your pocket in order to pay for the lifestyle choices, and indeed reproductive choices (!), of others.
That this is not obvious to even our most prominent "libertarians" is a sign that they have been captured by the left.
And I guess this sort of judge-y, let-me-keep-my-money talk is uncool. Because libertarians are not immune to wanting to have things both ways, to be seen as compassionate? Or as infinitely deep-pocketed overseers of "state capacity" a la Tyler Cowen? (Complaining about money is such a loser, yesteryear thing to do?) Or because drugs were always their signature issue, and they just happen to overlap with the preferences of the very weakest among us, whose procreation we should not be enabling? Or because they can't resist entering into pointless circular debates about the best, most "efficient" ways to mitigate harm? (Which discussions are only something that could happen if the battle for personal autonomy was entirely lost or abandoned.)
Or because they too want to get jobs for their kids in the non-profit social-pathology industrial complex?
My point wasn't really a libertarian (small l or big L) one, but rather more of a human nature point. I don't disagree that going full on "stop taking my money to spend on other people's choices" would be a good policy move over all, or that modern political discourse on the right, even among libertarians, has gotten kind of oddly accepting of the notion that personal autonomy is always subordinate to the state. I am just making a point about how humans seem to interact with explicit rules, particularly regarding how many rules over what scopes of behaviors etc. My observations suggest that as formal rules (legislation) gets more and more comprehensive, people start to off load most of their moral reasoning to the rule makers and take a "if it is legal it is good and must be done more; if it is illegal it is bad and must never be done" sort of approach, possibly with a little "somethings that are illegal are also good to do" mixed in.
Necroposting, but it is somewhat comical for a conservative like Lindsay to bring up the temperance movement as an example for a strategy conservatives might use, as the temperance movement was (at that point) the absolute epitome of militant radical progressive Christianity (i.e. progressivism). Its closest modern relatives are the various purity movements - anti-racist, environmental, and so on - and they are spearheaded by the same kind of people who spearheaded the temperance movement in XIX c.
"Granting that temperance in this realm is desirable, what can we learn from the early temperance movement (a) about *how* to get it in motion and (b) how to keep it from going overboard?
It seems to me that the temperance movement had strong institutional support from organized religion, which no longer has much oomph,"
The downfall of organized religion needs to be tackled first. My impression is that organized religion did not simply die of neglect; rather, it has been actively infiltrated and deliberately run into the ground by wokists, who consider religion actively harmful and want its institutions destroyed. Since these haters are not going to give up their anti-crusade, any new or retaken religious institution needs to be designed to prevent wokists from ever controlling it again. It is probably too late to save most of the large Christian denominations under their present organizations.
I have an interview with Lindsey coming up soon. I guess I'll play-act like a popular podcaster and say that if you'd like me to ask him anything in particular, lemme know.
Grant seems to be correct that Hughes misrepresents the meta-study that Grant used to motivate his argument. Entirely possible that the study is shit, but it does conclude that multiculturalism is better at reducing intergroup prejudice, discrimination and negative stereotypes than race-neutral approaches overall.
Even if correct, I don't think Grant's argument is a good reason for TED not to post the Hughes talk, of course.
I mean, this is TED after all. Granted I only ever watched one TED talk, because I do have a little intellectual snobbery (it was by a woman who used flashing lights - red, I think? - to lure giant squid to undersea cameras, thus catching footage of them for the first time; it was very interesting and cool) - but isn't TED chiefly known for things like, that thing about how women are seen as powerful if they lean back in their chair and adopt an open, dude-like sitting posture?
Hughes says "the only anti–color blindness finding in the paper is that color blindness & meritocracy are associated with opposing DEI policies. Well, I do oppose race-based DEI policies in most (but not all) cases. Unapologetically. But that is a philosophical disagreement, not an example of me delivering incorrect social science." If that is the case, the paper would offer no credible support for the claim that "multiculturalism is better at reducing intergroup prejudice, discrimination and negative stereotypes than race-neutral approaches overall." Mere opposition to DEI does not in itself evidence prejudice, discrimination, or negative stereotypes for there are many sound objections to such policies.
Yes, that's the place where Hughes misrepresents the paper (at least judging from the abstract; the full paper is not available through my university's library, which may be a sign that it is indeed a shit paper). It seems among other things like they're using the "treat the difference between statistically significant and insignificant as significant" approach, which is ususally not great methodology.
But from the abstract, it is clear that their results (if you buy the method) show that multiculturalism is better by the standards of reducing prejudice and stereotyping:
To this end, we use random effects meta-analysis (k = 296) to investigate the effects of 3 identity-blind ideologies—colorblindness, meritocracy, and assimilation—and 1 identity-conscious ideology—multiculturalism—on 4 indicators of high quality intergroup relations—reduced prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping and increased diversity policy support. Multiculturalism is generally associated with high quality intergroup relations (prejudice: ρ = −.32; discrimination: ρ = −.22; stereotyping: ρ = −.17; policy support: ρ = .57). In contrast, the effects of identity-blind ideologies vary considerably. Different identity-blind ideologies have divergent effects on the same outcome; for example, colorblindness is negatively related (ρ = −.19), meritocracy is unrelated (ρ = .00), and assimilation is positively related (ρ = .17) to stereotyping. Likewise, the same ideology has divergent effects on different outcomes; for example, meritocracy is negatively related to discrimination (ρ = −.48), but also negatively related to policy support (ρ = −.45) and unrelated to prejudice (ρ = −.15) and stereotyping (ρ = .00). We discuss the implications of our findings for theory, practice, and future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
Do you not understand the abstract? It supports Hughes, not Grant, Dave. If I had to give a broad summery of that abstract it would be this- DEI groups think well of themselves and other DEI groups and think poorly of colorblind chosen groups. However, read the entire paper if you don't believe Hughes rather than rely on the abstract. Your only finding the abstract suggests to me that you never even bothered to read Hughes essay where he links you to the entire paper.
It is a low quality paper, that much we can agree on, but Hughes is correct in asserting that it doesn't argue against colorblind selection methods- it only argues that those selected by DEI methods like it that way, which is a blindingly obvious result- literally a begging the question result.
To be clear, I don't at all like what Grant is doing here. He's obviously the sort of social scientist who is comfortable saying "I can link to one metastudy that concludes this Bad Idea is false, therefore nobody should make arguments for it in public except under carefully controlled conditions." That is stupid, and it's stupid of him to say it.
When they say that "meritocracy is unrelated to prejudice and stereotyping" that means that it doesn't help out with those problems (nor does it make them worse). When they say "multiculturalism is associated with [a reduction in prejudice, discrimination and stereotyping]" then, that is them concluding that multiculturalism does better than meritocracy on two of the three factors other than the stupid "do people support DEI" one.
Hughes isn't arguing for meritocracy, at least not directly- he is arguing for colorblindness, Dave, and the paper does distinguish between those two ideologies within the results section. Again, you clearly didn't read Hughes essay or the entire paper.
As for the rest of your comment here- my summary is accurate- a quota system will produce the quota desired, or something close to it and, within the group and between groups selected similarly, the dimensions measured will be "improved". It isn't like people are generally going to be disappointed or critical of a system that positively selects them- to find the real effects, though, you have to analyze what the people who weren't selected thought about it.
If the NBA instituted a racial quota system mirroring US society, the players inside the system would be quite happy about it on average, and the people who would not be happy about it would be on the outside and their opinions would have been uncaptured by pretty much all the papers described in the meta-analysis. This is what makes the paper worthless, in my opinion- it really is only studying the opinions of those on the inside of any system of selection, including those under meritocratic and color-blind systems.
"In support of Hypothesis 1a, color blindness is negatively related to stereotyping ( .19,95%CI [ .29, .10];Table2). Color blindness is also negatively related to prejudice( .07,95%CI[ .15, .003]), but not discrimination ( .08,95%CI[ .24,.08])."
So Hughes was misrepresenting it a bit, everything he says in his piece is strictly speaking true but he doesn't mention that color blindness fared worse than multiculturalism by one of the non-bullshit metrics.
But the confidence intervals are wide enough that colorblindness could in fact be just as good at reducing discrimination as the multicultural approach by their metrics. This is why it's a mistake to treat the difference between significant and insignificant as significant.
TBH I suspect that these are all effects of not controlling for "what sort of people tend to run or join institutions that profess color-blindness vs multiculturalism, and how prejudiced (or willing to express stereotypes) do those people start out," but again, I'm surprised that Hughes didn't accurately represent the findings. Probably his back was up a bit.
I had assumed the subscriber count for each person was paid subscribers. Are you saying that paid subscribers is likely vastly lower than the headline number? I will have to revise down sharply what income I thought people were making on sub stack.
When you click on the checkmark next to Kling's name or any other substack writer, it tells you the magnitude of the paid subscribers. For Kling, it is "hundreds of paid subscribers" and, last time I checked, Matt Taibbi had "tens of thousands". And I think the checkmarks have a color code, too.
As a test I clicked on a writer with almost 20k subscribers, and he also has "hundreds of paid subscribers" like Arnold. Perhaps his is close to 1,000 than 200, who knows, but I understand a lot better now.
200 * $10/month * 12 month = $24,000 a year
1,000 * $10/month * 12 months = $120,000 a year
The upper end of that isn't a bad income, but I thought people on sub stack with reasonable numbers were making bank. Enough for it to be their career.
Not that I planned to write a sub stack nor become as popular as people way more successful then I would be, but its still a lot less then a good career.
I guess the number of people paying per subscription is maybe 5% or so?
I expect it varies a lot depending on the particular substack. Some, like Kling, allow non-payers to see everything or almost everything. Others, like Taibbi, only allow a short preview for non-payers, so if you want to see the content you have to pay.
Probably, but the other sub stack I checked out was probably around the same 5% ballpark. Even Taibbi has 332,000 subscriptions, so he doesn't need a high % conversion to reach "10s of thousands" paid.
"I would like to see social pressure applied also in other areas: against marijuana use; against promiscuous use of four-letter words; in favor of forming relationships that result in grandchildren."
I don't disagree with this yet to me it sounds a lot like the kind of pressure being applied via wokeism.
Also worth pointing out that alcohol has lots of calories and spoils very slowly, unlike most food and drink products during the time period. The "trail food" that they ate in the 17th-19th centuries was also pretty nasty. Pemmican, for example, is bad, hard tack is also famously bad. Un-spiced porridge is no bueno. Booze has tons of calories, travels well, is not filling, and goes well with tobacco. Alcohol is and was an excellent mobile intoxicant (not unlike smartphones today acting as portable hallucination machines).
Those folks ate that trail food despite also making and consuming large amounts of alcohol because you can't make it on alcohol alone by a long shot. Look up some historical charts on how much they drank - it's astounding. But still, they didn't take much on the trail.
Yes, some monks survived winters on beers brewed in traditional ways to have a good amount of residual carbs which provides a 50% boost. The calories in a good lager or stout are about 2/3 from alcohol content and 1/3 from carbs.
But there was also protein and fat from unfiltered yeast and grain leftovers, and lots of vitamins too - hence the story of stout once being prescribed for pregnancy nutrition. And also, the monks needed something like gallon per day, every single day. Monks getting high on their own supply is literally its own hilarious artistic genre. And they wonder why monk recruitment has gone down. There's an old "Not on Sundays vs Twice on Sundays" joke about it and either the Reformation or Schism of 1054, but I can't remember it.
A fifth of 80 proof liquor will get you - maybe not your liver - through a day. And that's only calories-wise, as all the other essential nutrients have been distilled out. But even the worst alcoholics rarely get more than half their calories from ethanol. But the equivalent 750 grams of carbs has 50% more calories, and won't kill you quickly in the process of eating it.
Hard tack was designed to be (1) ready to eat and (2) able to get a little damp without going too bad too quickly. If you can keep your provisions dry and boil water where you camp, carbs and dried meats win easily.
Peter Wilson puts the daily ration of Wallenstein's troops during the 30 Years' War at ~1k bread, .5kg-1kg of meat, and 1.5 liters of wine OR 3 liters of beer. When I punch that into a modern calculator, it comes out at around 2500 calories for bread, ~850 calories booze, ~1250 calories pork (for 500 grams) and twice that much for a kilogram. I do not think that their bread was anywhere near as energy dense as modern bread, particularly because Wilson puts this at 3,000 calories. Their wine/beer might have also been waterier.
With 2 bottles of wine or 6 pints of beer a day during deployments, the US Army would have had no trouble with recruitment or retention even in wartime. Trouble with good order and discipline? Sure. With the steady operation of complex heavy machinery? Certainly. Sexual misconduct? Undoubtedly. But not recruitment.
I live in San Antonio, a city that is basically Mexico, with a little Central America, a necessarily diminishing Anglo population, and a surprisingly large black minority (compared to Austin) thrown in. I'm not going to pretend I like living in Mexico and wish to die here. I do not. But since it is the future of America I will try to suggest plainly what may be the best aspect of it. WIth the exception of the 2nd gen kids who've been through the school system and so turned out in the victim mode, Mexicans are not an ideological people. They are not an "aspiringly" intellectual people for the most part. Mercifully it means that the shaming of bourgeois norms by going to the opposite extreme of embracing vice - is no concern of theirs - they aren't even aware of it. This may best be illustrated in two ways: unlike in Austin, where they are paramount and will ultimately bankrupt the place, the druggy, mentally ill homeless scarcely enter the civic consciousness; the police here in SA feel no particular compunction about moving the homeless along, or preventing them from occupying all street corners as in Austin; the idea that nice things are better than nasty ones, is not seriously disputed here in the public realm. Now, aesthetically, the city is not very pleasing - but no Texas city is. The other way is that if you are behind somebody holding up traffic to hand a dollar to the panhandler, 9 times out of ten it will be a Hispanic woman. Oh, pobrecito. That is what compassion, and being nice means, nothing more, nothing less.
As for many things, there is an enormous and persistent cultural split remarked upon by centuries of insightful observers between the countries of Northwest and Southern Europe as regards matters of vice and moral regulation of behavior, and which tends to overlap with who went which way in the Reformation (but not -because- of the Reformation).
Those tendencies followed as an inheritance to the regions colonized by those countries in the 16th century, and the contrast between them is most evident not just in Europe but anywhere that regions colonized under the different traditions happen to border each other, as with Mexico and the US.
Now this is painting with a broad brush, history is complicated, and there are of course interesting outliers and counterexamples. Also, nothing was the same after America won WWII.
But, in general, the "Latin" countries (France acts as if only half-Latin) were most likely to settle into equilibria of open secrets and lip service to laws and ideals and preservation of the family-safe wholesomeness of spaces in public, but combined with what in practice, so long as kept more discrete and private, are more permissive and lenient hypocrisies, tolerance of deviations and eccentricities, opportunities to take a break from the acknowledge strain of suppressing normal human urges to comply with social rules and expectations, and so forth.
The "Northern" countries, by contrast, and for various reasons including some kind of defect in their capacity to successfully achieve the intergenerational transmission of such mass "inside jokes" or maybe it's a side-effect of their strong capacity for mass coordination around the focal point of some ideas. But they tend to end up in a historical cycle of reaction and counter-reaction, of pendulum swings from one extreme to the other. Sybaritic Libertinism in one generation and Puritanical Asceticism in another. Elites flip from those who treat "the rules" with messianic holy war seriousness, to those who think it's cool to throw them all out the window because rules are for square chumps. You can see this in the historical periods in English history, the cultural swings contrasting Elizabethan era from Georgian, Regency, Victorian, etc.
You can see this in the way people from these countries go on vacation. The English infamously take their breaks abroad as an opportunity for bacchanalian excess. Meanwhile, as a quirk of fate, I get perks at a Southern European hotel/resort chain the locations of which tend to cater to tourists from the home country, and when they vacation I've never seen any of them go into Full Anarchy Indulgence mode as I've witnessed even rich and supposedly 'upper class' British tourists do repeatedly, but act ... pretty much like their normal selves.
Coleman Hughes description of what went on at TED is devastating, and I urge everyone to read it at the link. That there is within the TED organization a group called “Black@TED”, which TED’s website describes as an “Employee Resource Group that exists to provide a safe space for TED staff who identify as Black" tells us that TED is a "woke" organization that likes to affect commitment to the values of open discussion but whose real mission is the propagation of Left ideology.
Note further the absurd language: "provide a safe space for TED staff who identify as Black." The ritual capitalization of the word black. The effort to imply that blacks who work among all the Progressives at TED are somehow in danger of attack. The notion that this danger would extend even to those who though not black, "identify" as black. Do they have any Rachel Dolezals there? "Providing a safe space" is a euphemism for establishing an institutional platform for complaint about ideas or words that might threaten empirical disconfirmation of racist anti-white ideological belief.
I know Steve Sailer has mentioned this elephant before - but anyone who reads even casually from the well of 20th century black writers and essayists, has got to be taken aback by the kindergarten-ization of the current Black "intellectual" elite represented by the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi. You could do just a vocab analysis and find this to be the case. I don't understand what happened there.
Maybe everything didn't used to be better, but the "spokesmen" and writers sure used to be.
Maybe it's better for Coleman Hughes to be on a harder path than mainstream acceptance, but I'm sure it doesn't pay the bills to be the vilified darling of a slender strand of the right.
Opportunity Cost and Diminishing Marginal Returns. (It's an econ blog, after all).
A century or more ago, black intellectuals had limited alternative opportunities for lucrative employment or roads to fame and power. Today, a very smart black person pursuing a typical high status and high-paying career has a 99% chance of landing such a position.
And the point of diminishing marginal returns to intelligence for black public intellectuals writing on race matters has moved dramatically to the left. Getting and staying on the A-list for commentary is extremely competitive, and more intelligence will only be useful when it will help you out-compete your rivals.
Back in the day, the rigor, quality, cleverness, artistry, novelty, style, persuasiveness, and creativity of a public intellectual's output all mattered a great deal to how he would be judged and fare in the arena, and thus, whether he would win that competition. And in that lost world of yesterday when that was the case, since more intelligence tends to make a writer better on all those dimensions, the pool of successful writers all tended to be quite smart.
But today, none of those things matter. There is no penalty whatsoever to performing at the level of a mediocrity on any of those measures.
Indeed, if you stop to think about it, that this -ought- to be the case, for them and all the other mediocrities like them too, is precisely what these mediocrities -are- arguing!
The previous generation of smart people advocating cleverly for the status of mediocrities predictably led to the over-advancement of the next generation's mediocrities, and into the very positions to which that baton of advocacy was passed, but where their mediocre successors now advocate not for others, but themselves, not cleverly, but ineptly, but not that it matters anymore, cause it doesn't.
In fairness, I suppose, this tends to be true across the board. Any old New York Review of Books issue tends to be dense with brainy people showing away, even when smart-stupid. So I am reluctant to totally yield the notion that school is making people dumber than they need be.
It's wokeness, which is almost uniquely pernicious as an inherently anti-meritocratic political ideology.
So, it's not really about the decline in the quality of schooling, though it can't be helping, but which is more caused than cause, that is, downstream of the same headwaters.
The deep philosophical problem is that when there is a critical internal and irreparable contradiction between a perspective's metaphysics and epistemology, and progress towards some important goal hinges on its resolution, then, "something's gotta give".
It's certainly possible for smart people to make strong, rigorous, and valid cases for false or bad ideas, so long as the arguments still follow the ethos, spirit, rules, and procedures of that system's internal "logic". History is full of that kind of thing.
But leftism got itself (and the rest of us) into a jam. On the one hand, leftist elites converged to the conceit of being enlightened adherents to a kind of "modernist" metaphysical consensus of "atheist, eliminative materialism" that necessarily carried with a scientific and empirical epistemological standard where inferential claims about anything must conform to observable evidence and rules of formal logic to be considered valid. "No hell below us, above us only sky." Let's just call all this "The Science".
On the other hand, the logic of democratic state governance inescapably creates the opportunity the exploitation of which is the leftist political formula: Robin Hood Clientalism and the neo-Spoils System by which the left uses state power to grab and redistribute stuff, jobs, and status from their opponents to their supporters. All of that is obviously norm-violating when expressed forthrightly, and so to lubricate social acquiescence it has to be backed up by an ideological Narrative that provides a Socially Acceptable Excuse for the grabbing.
And the trouble is obviously that The Science contradicts The Narrative. Duh! Of course it does. The Narrative is a bunch of lies about the nature of human reality, so of course its claims conflict with the results of any reliable way to learn about the nature of reality, i.e., "The Science."
It's a trilemma / "impossible trinity". "Good, fast, cheap: pick two" Pinker has a social version "Free, Fair, Equal". This one is "Science, Democracy, Narrative."
But the quest and ambition for power isn't just going to throw up its hands, give up, and go home. So something's got to give. And that something is coherent epistemology, which gets sacrificed, compromised, and corrupted.
The last time the left ran into this problem was in the intellectual wake of America's victory in WWII and the elite academics and influential public intellectuals at the center of the action hit their stride about 60 years ago with entire libraries full of relativist, postmodernist, "critical", and deconstructionist flavors of nonsensical gobbledygook that served its political purpose then dumped like a bag of garbage. Deservedly, because it -was- all garbage.
The old progressive theory of technocratic governance was that power and authority should be informed by and exercised consistently with scientific knowledge and principles, either "rule by experts" or at least "rule with experts, consistent with expertise".
And for this to work, The Truth, that is supposed to tell authority what to do and how to do it, is something external that must be discovered, beyond human control, indifferent to our preferences, objective and perpetual. The arrow is supposed to point and influence is supposed to flow just one way: Knowledge -> Power.
But that valve is pretty irritating, and irritants to power are called "targets".
What the leftist intellectuals did was the equivalent of raising the strength of the electric field opposing the direction of that technocratic epistemic diode until they reached its breakdown voltage. The servant has become the Master, and the former master had become a mere agent in the role of shyster, press secretary, spin-meister, and snake-oil salesman.
So, the point of all that intellectual garbage was to go for the throat of the consensus in favor of robust and rigorous intellectual and epistemic gatekeeping that stood in the way of propagating untrue claims useful to the leftist political program. "So, you know, maybe there isn't such a thing as just one shared objective reality that would limit my ability to make up bogus claims. You can't disprove my claims, there's no valid way for you to do so, and the belief that there is a good way is just a false social construction, ha!"
Fortunately the volume from that particular wave of intellectual rubbish quickly peaked then diminished. The status of incredibly rapid technological advancements and the fame and great fortunes made as a result eventually sucked the oxygen out of the room and extinguished the flame. The diode started working again, some times, for some things.
But with wokeness the flame is back and now a catastrophic wildfire, and the breakdown voltage so greatly exceeded that the whole motherboard vanished into a cloud of incandescent vapor.
In math, anything is true if a contradiction is true. "A is not A" Wokeness literally insists on an axiom just as fallacious, "Mediocrities are not Mediocrities."
There is no possibility whatsoever of reconciling that axiom with any epistemic system relying on standards of intellectual rigor that are good at discerning whether a claim is supported by the reasoning of a valid and rational argument consisting of inferences properly drawn from logical analysis of empirical evidence.
No. Possibility. None.
So, something's gotta give.
And so, what the power that relies on the woke narrative did was to insist that -these intellectual standards themselves- are unwoke, "white", politically incorrect, racist, etc. To criticize on the basis of those standards is a cardinal sin, and the critic the worst kind of sinner.
It is in this manner that wokeness has become nothing less than a dagger stabbing into the very heart of what's left of the health of our society's intellectual culture.
This is so true, one of the best of so many great Handle comments. When the true criteria are racist, thus a sin against woke, false criteria are used and contradictions accepted.
Obama’s election in 2008 showed Democrats the way—every critic of any Dem policy was labeled a racist. This worked.
Every single company I've worked for or interviewed with has these groups within them since the Summer of Floyd if not before.
FWIW Google has the "Greyglers" (or something approximating that spelling) for people over 50 in tech.
Might that be a haven for the fuddy duddy old white men? Or as close as it gets?
So how exactly is a "social pressure movement" supposed to happen? It sounds to me as wishful-thinking as the kind of "we ought to", "we need to to" bits that many journalists stick on the end of their pieces without offering anything in the way of "but how exactly?". To my mind, the only social pressure successes that could fit the label are those that have arisen from the banding together of once-tiny but obsessively one-track-minded gender dysphorics. I can't see anything by non-obsessive-malcontent types ever getting going in that way. Pessimism...sorry. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
I have been thinking on just this point for a while, and the best I can come up with is the inculcation of specific rules and attitudes towards behavior in our children. So, in the bad example of temperance (that movement had a lot of bad even without legislation) we could teach our children "Anymore than 3 drinks a night is too much; it is just asking for trouble" and "Being visibly drunk in public is embarrassing, only suitable for losers." If we were to look at something more recent, maybe "Those short shorts with 'Juicy' written across the ass are just pathetic. No young girl should be advertising like that unless she is a street walker."
The trick it seems to me is to not only express that something is bad or undesirable, but give a good reason why such that the rule takes on the same sort of common sense nature as "you shouldn't put a fork in the electrical outlet." The other trick, and this is the harder one perhaps, is to embody the rule with a limiting principle so it isn't taken to the extreme, an extreme that is easily shown to be silly. The temperance movement did that, going towards "No alcohol ever" which was obviously a bit much. The left often falls afoul of that, for example equal rights for minorities rapidly turning into "more rights and power for minorities!" Without a limiting principle, people either take things way too far and cause more harm than good, or see the way too far argument and just decide "These people are insane, and their rule is stupid."
"people take things way too far" is, I think, the tragedy of Liberal Individualism in a nutshell. It could almost be called Icarus Syndrome.
Like you though, I do try to find reasons to be positive and Yes inculcating attitudes in our children is the way. But we can't expect any help from the school system....not in the UK at least (where I don't think there's any real doubting that a great majority of teachers are at least semi-woke). There's perhaps more chance in the growing home-school movement in the US.
I wouldn't limit people taking things way too far to Liberal individualism; it seems to be the default mode for most human action. In the realm of the physical we tend to get smacked back into line by reality; nearly every college student has a night out what teaches them what way too much alcohol is, and they dial it back a bit. In the realm of the mental we rarely have such negative feedback, and so we tend to just keep pushing things, because more of something virtuous is always more virtuous, right?
I think Aristotle was really on to something, and makes a point of it because it is so easy for humans to miss: virtue lies between two extremes of vice.
And yea, the US school system is a Woke mess. You have to be constantly on guard about what nonsense the teachers might be preaching.
How exactly is easy: Read up on China's Cultural Revolution. That's the same way they're doing it again.
Attention is a double edged sword. It's a human instinct to desire it. It's healthy to value your privacy and not to be so self obsessed that it begins to take over your life. You sound healthy to me.
“One wonders: and then what?” In my church we call this the Pride Cycle. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media/image/the-pride-cycle-76fd0d1?lang=eng
I just now watched the video of that discussion and wow, Continetti and Lu have extremely weak cases which often rely on statements that are either ignorant, confused, or disingenuous.
The test of whether a discussion between critics on the same side of some issue is a waste-of-time echo-chamber of inaccuracy is the adversarial-lawyers-at-trial test: whether they would have said the same things without immediately being made to look like fools, when in the presence of a skilled and knowledgeable opponent. They failed that test badly.
As just one example, there is repeated reliance on the fallacy of ideological equivocation and the elision of the enormous gap between "the conservative movement" and various pretenders to that status.
You know what's funny? If you translate "New" and (political) "Right" into Latin, you get "Neo" and "Conservative". Huh! How about that?
Alas, what Neo-Conservative actually meant was, "Not Conservative". *(see below only if you care)
Which is part of why, despite there still being something resembling a "conservative movement" that believes in radical and extreme ideas like getting murderers off city streets (shout-out to Baltimore!) no one even talks about Neoconservatism or Neoconservatives anymore except in the past tense. If I say, "Wolfowitz" do you even remember him? If so, nostalgically? Fondly? Ha!
Pace Continetti, there is no irony at all in Claremont electing to be something a bit more relevant and wise than a Jaffa-worshiping cult of personality. Indeed, it's obvious there wouldn't still exist a Claremont had they done so. As some history homonymic trivia, it -is- a little ironic that they are now closer on average to the views of the count of Clermont-Tonnere, so maybe they should update the spelling too along with the views.
Most of the Neos were ideologically bipolar with regards to an incoherent and internally inconsistent mix of worldly cynicism and pessimism as regards the human condition, on the one hand (part of their awakening to defect from their origins on the hard left), and boundless confidence and naïve optimism bordering on magical thinking about the universal power and appeal of their favored ideals, on the other.
Strauss was no de Maistre by a long shot, but he was influenced by the European school of thought on the subject, and the above dissonance is what happens when you try to make a cocktail by mixing a shot of that school with a concentrated syrup of American kool-aid. The Straussian stuff was a potent tonic, but the crash after the American sugar rush put the whole scene into a diabetic coma from which it never emerged. And good riddance.
Jaffa, for all his merits, makes for a good example of someone who drank that kool-aid, helped brew new flavors, and then drank those too. And while he enjoyed plenty of success, he didn't deserve to win, because the quality of his thinking suffered the consequences. To say that his victories in his fights with Buchanan, Bork, Kirk, Lasch, Gottfried, and others don't stand the test of time when seen from 2023 in extreme understatement. His role in the conversion of Buckley is on par with the New Deal so far as being in the hall of fame of setbacks to genuine conservativism in American politics. When's the last time anyone has shared a link to anything in National Review?
No one says "neoconservative" anymore because neoconservatism deserves it. The whole scene had a completely miserable quarter century that everybody is keen to forget about and move on from. Are there any actual conservatives in existence who lived through that time and look back at what happened after 9/11 or during any part of the W Bush administration with pride? Ha, quite the contrary, more like anger and shame. Every time the neoconservatives pursued anything that didn't overlap with plain-old-conservatism, it ended in embarrassing disaster. And any actually conservative "neoconservatives" went extinct a long time ago. The others (e.g., Bill Kristol, Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot, etc.) were obvious fakers every time they made a gaffe of letting their actual opinions escape their mouths, and as their later careers in letters, so to speak, repeatedly reveal to daily disgust.
Likewise, "New Right" is "Not New" Right. To clear the road still partially blocked by some remaining festering pieces of the rotting giant corpse of neoconservatism, and to revive the principles and arguments they sidelined for two generations, literary expediency requires that effort be cast as "New" to those who don't either remember or read history, about the time when it was just "Right".
To be fair, it is New in the sense of being a more up-to-date version of what was once just "American Right", but which has now matured ungracefully by the intellectual benefit but spiritual hit of last half century's track record of disillusionment, failure, and degeneration. Sure, when you've had a hard life, sometimes getting smarter about it also turns you into a bit of a curmudgeon, either bitter or bellicose. My sense of things is that there aren't any prominent, non-progressive critics of the New Right who didn't vote for both Hillary Clinton and Biden, but if you find one then you are dealing with someone can't or won't understand those underlying lessons.
*(ok, only if you're interested)
Neoconservatism is not conservatism because in our post-"Triumph of PR Tricks", post-Orwellian, pre-Confucian-rectification-of-names world, various word games actually work on occasion to confuse people enough to win sneaky ideological and political victories.
So the trick is: Step 1: Find a fuzzy label for an ideal, philosophy, or ideological concept, which already has an understood meaning, and for which a large mass of people have strong respect and sense that they should be loyally committed to it. Step 2: Steal that label, but add a little tweak. Say that your completely different concept is the thing which that label really means, when you stop and think about it. Step 3: Having successfully fooled all those chump, your wolf gets to enjoy exploiting the loyalty and respect for the dead sheep whose skin suit it is now wearing. "Now follow me instead, morons!"
So, a good general rule in political linguistics is that when you notice anyone doing this - the placement of a positive valence modifier in front of some respected term for an ideological concept - that modifier is always reasonably interpreted to mean, "Not" or "Not Actual".
E.g., "Social Justice" is "Not Actual Justice". Neoconservatism is "Not Actual Conservatism". Any of a whole variety of "X Libertarianism" is "Not Actual Libertarianism".
This doesn't apply to negative-valence modifiers, invented and applied by opponents, meant to be used as epithets in a derogatory fashion. In that case, the modifier mean, "Actual". So when the Neoconservatives snarked that something was "Paleoconservative", what they meant was, "Actually Conservative".
Libertarians often complain, with great merit, about the word "liberal" being purloined from people who believed mostly in non-coercion by those who believed in a society engineered from the top-down by technocrats.
I mainly shrug at this. That horse left the barn; we lost that match; language has evolved (due to popular usage, not the Anglo equivalent of <i>l'academie francaise</a>.
But I cannot get over the fact that we lost the word "temperance". And I find it dispiriting that Kling's list of social norms he thinks ought to be dissuaded can't distinguish between the original meaning of temperance (moderation in use) and prohibition/blanket condemnation. Kling:
<blockquote>I would like to see social pressure applied also in other areas: against marijuana use; against promiscuous use of four-letter words; in favor of forming relationships that result in grandchildren.</blockquote>
Three pitches; three swinging-misses. Should marijuana use be dissuaded or <i>over-</i>use? Where does the use four-letter words become "promiscuous"? What counts? The word "suck", which is often used in a low and vulgar style, literally has four letters. And serial, non-marital, non-cohabiting sexual relationships beginning at a young age are probably the way to max out grandchildren, yet I doubt that this is what Kling has in mind.
Social norms that evolve from the bottom up are salubrious and even necessary but we're going to need to do a better job than relying on religious diktat or ill-defined vibes.
Just want to thank you for the lesson on the word "temperance" there; I am converted to use that word accurately from now on - it being a highly useful one. You have also greatly changed my understanding of the Temperance Movement, at the same time. I wonder if any of those in that movement lamented the unbending, firebrand Mother Thompson types who perhaps account for the change in understanding the word?
Re: "that hard-coding temperance into law does not seem to work. [... .] Granting that temperance in this realm is desirable, what can we learn from the early temperance movement (a) about *how* to get it in motion and (b) how to keep it from going overboard?"
A difficulty is that many people naturally interpret freedom to do X as an endorsement of X, rather than merely permission to do X.
Charles Murray's Belmont seems a place where freedom to do X doesn't translate into substantial prevalence of X, because peers frown on X.
Do we know how to strengthen healthy social norms via policy, while preserving liberty?
In answer to your question, I think that counter intuitively we need to make less a matter of policy. It seems to me that in realms where many things that are bad to do are proscribed by legislation people tend to assume that all bad things are illegal, and anything that remains is good. Possibly that is an over correction when seeing some things that seem alright be deemed illegal, so people assume that since some ok things are illegal, anything legal must be better, I don't know.
On the other hand, in realms where almost everything is allowed, people seem to assume that many things they are allowed do are bad, and so start to pay more attention to the actual results instead of relying on someone else to do it for them via legislation.
That isn't a fully fleshed out theory, just something I have noticed.
If this must take a libertarian direction, which I doubt has the "ideological" heft to stand up to - well, ideology - it's more of a mood or a personality tendency among some, possibly few - then let us go full libertarian and insist on nobody reaching into your pocket in order to pay for the lifestyle choices, and indeed reproductive choices (!), of others.
That this is not obvious to even our most prominent "libertarians" is a sign that they have been captured by the left.
And I guess this sort of judge-y, let-me-keep-my-money talk is uncool. Because libertarians are not immune to wanting to have things both ways, to be seen as compassionate? Or as infinitely deep-pocketed overseers of "state capacity" a la Tyler Cowen? (Complaining about money is such a loser, yesteryear thing to do?) Or because drugs were always their signature issue, and they just happen to overlap with the preferences of the very weakest among us, whose procreation we should not be enabling? Or because they can't resist entering into pointless circular debates about the best, most "efficient" ways to mitigate harm? (Which discussions are only something that could happen if the battle for personal autonomy was entirely lost or abandoned.)
Or because they too want to get jobs for their kids in the non-profit social-pathology industrial complex?
My point wasn't really a libertarian (small l or big L) one, but rather more of a human nature point. I don't disagree that going full on "stop taking my money to spend on other people's choices" would be a good policy move over all, or that modern political discourse on the right, even among libertarians, has gotten kind of oddly accepting of the notion that personal autonomy is always subordinate to the state. I am just making a point about how humans seem to interact with explicit rules, particularly regarding how many rules over what scopes of behaviors etc. My observations suggest that as formal rules (legislation) gets more and more comprehensive, people start to off load most of their moral reasoning to the rule makers and take a "if it is legal it is good and must be done more; if it is illegal it is bad and must never be done" sort of approach, possibly with a little "somethings that are illegal are also good to do" mixed in.
Necroposting, but it is somewhat comical for a conservative like Lindsay to bring up the temperance movement as an example for a strategy conservatives might use, as the temperance movement was (at that point) the absolute epitome of militant radical progressive Christianity (i.e. progressivism). Its closest modern relatives are the various purity movements - anti-racist, environmental, and so on - and they are spearheaded by the same kind of people who spearheaded the temperance movement in XIX c.
You may enjoy https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/tv-commercials-produced-by-iyh
"Granting that temperance in this realm is desirable, what can we learn from the early temperance movement (a) about *how* to get it in motion and (b) how to keep it from going overboard?
It seems to me that the temperance movement had strong institutional support from organized religion, which no longer has much oomph,"
The downfall of organized religion needs to be tackled first. My impression is that organized religion did not simply die of neglect; rather, it has been actively infiltrated and deliberately run into the ground by wokists, who consider religion actively harmful and want its institutions destroyed. Since these haters are not going to give up their anti-crusade, any new or retaken religious institution needs to be designed to prevent wokists from ever controlling it again. It is probably too late to save most of the large Christian denominations under their present organizations.
I have an interview with Lindsey coming up soon. I guess I'll play-act like a popular podcaster and say that if you'd like me to ask him anything in particular, lemme know.
Grant seems to be correct that Hughes misrepresents the meta-study that Grant used to motivate his argument. Entirely possible that the study is shit, but it does conclude that multiculturalism is better at reducing intergroup prejudice, discrimination and negative stereotypes than race-neutral approaches overall.
Even if correct, I don't think Grant's argument is a good reason for TED not to post the Hughes talk, of course.
I mean, this is TED after all. Granted I only ever watched one TED talk, because I do have a little intellectual snobbery (it was by a woman who used flashing lights - red, I think? - to lure giant squid to undersea cameras, thus catching footage of them for the first time; it was very interesting and cool) - but isn't TED chiefly known for things like, that thing about how women are seen as powerful if they lean back in their chair and adopt an open, dude-like sitting posture?
Hughes says "the only anti–color blindness finding in the paper is that color blindness & meritocracy are associated with opposing DEI policies. Well, I do oppose race-based DEI policies in most (but not all) cases. Unapologetically. But that is a philosophical disagreement, not an example of me delivering incorrect social science." If that is the case, the paper would offer no credible support for the claim that "multiculturalism is better at reducing intergroup prejudice, discrimination and negative stereotypes than race-neutral approaches overall." Mere opposition to DEI does not in itself evidence prejudice, discrimination, or negative stereotypes for there are many sound objections to such policies.
Yes Hughes says that, it's not fully accurate as a statement about the paper, see my reply to Yancey
No, Dave, Hughes described the conclusions of that paper accurately- Grant is the one obfuscating it.
Yes, that's the place where Hughes misrepresents the paper (at least judging from the abstract; the full paper is not available through my university's library, which may be a sign that it is indeed a shit paper). It seems among other things like they're using the "treat the difference between statistically significant and insignificant as significant" approach, which is ususally not great methodology.
But from the abstract, it is clear that their results (if you buy the method) show that multiculturalism is better by the standards of reducing prejudice and stereotyping:
To this end, we use random effects meta-analysis (k = 296) to investigate the effects of 3 identity-blind ideologies—colorblindness, meritocracy, and assimilation—and 1 identity-conscious ideology—multiculturalism—on 4 indicators of high quality intergroup relations—reduced prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping and increased diversity policy support. Multiculturalism is generally associated with high quality intergroup relations (prejudice: ρ = −.32; discrimination: ρ = −.22; stereotyping: ρ = −.17; policy support: ρ = .57). In contrast, the effects of identity-blind ideologies vary considerably. Different identity-blind ideologies have divergent effects on the same outcome; for example, colorblindness is negatively related (ρ = −.19), meritocracy is unrelated (ρ = .00), and assimilation is positively related (ρ = .17) to stereotyping. Likewise, the same ideology has divergent effects on different outcomes; for example, meritocracy is negatively related to discrimination (ρ = −.48), but also negatively related to policy support (ρ = −.45) and unrelated to prejudice (ρ = −.15) and stereotyping (ρ = .00). We discuss the implications of our findings for theory, practice, and future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
Do you not understand the abstract? It supports Hughes, not Grant, Dave. If I had to give a broad summery of that abstract it would be this- DEI groups think well of themselves and other DEI groups and think poorly of colorblind chosen groups. However, read the entire paper if you don't believe Hughes rather than rely on the abstract. Your only finding the abstract suggests to me that you never even bothered to read Hughes essay where he links you to the entire paper.
It is a low quality paper, that much we can agree on, but Hughes is correct in asserting that it doesn't argue against colorblind selection methods- it only argues that those selected by DEI methods like it that way, which is a blindingly obvious result- literally a begging the question result.
To be clear, I don't at all like what Grant is doing here. He's obviously the sort of social scientist who is comfortable saying "I can link to one metastudy that concludes this Bad Idea is false, therefore nobody should make arguments for it in public except under carefully controlled conditions." That is stupid, and it's stupid of him to say it.
When they say that "meritocracy is unrelated to prejudice and stereotyping" that means that it doesn't help out with those problems (nor does it make them worse). When they say "multiculturalism is associated with [a reduction in prejudice, discrimination and stereotyping]" then, that is them concluding that multiculturalism does better than meritocracy on two of the three factors other than the stupid "do people support DEI" one.
Hughes isn't arguing for meritocracy, at least not directly- he is arguing for colorblindness, Dave, and the paper does distinguish between those two ideologies within the results section. Again, you clearly didn't read Hughes essay or the entire paper.
As for the rest of your comment here- my summary is accurate- a quota system will produce the quota desired, or something close to it and, within the group and between groups selected similarly, the dimensions measured will be "improved". It isn't like people are generally going to be disappointed or critical of a system that positively selects them- to find the real effects, though, you have to analyze what the people who weren't selected thought about it.
If the NBA instituted a racial quota system mirroring US society, the players inside the system would be quite happy about it on average, and the people who would not be happy about it would be on the outside and their opinions would have been uncaptured by pretty much all the papers described in the meta-analysis. This is what makes the paper worthless, in my opinion- it really is only studying the opinions of those on the inside of any system of selection, including those under meritocratic and color-blind systems.
OK, I got the paper. Here is what they say:
"In support of Hypothesis 1a, color blindness is negatively related to stereotyping ( .19,95%CI [ .29, .10];Table2). Color blindness is also negatively related to prejudice( .07,95%CI[ .15, .003]), but not discrimination ( .08,95%CI[ .24,.08])."
So Hughes was misrepresenting it a bit, everything he says in his piece is strictly speaking true but he doesn't mention that color blindness fared worse than multiculturalism by one of the non-bullshit metrics.
But the confidence intervals are wide enough that colorblindness could in fact be just as good at reducing discrimination as the multicultural approach by their metrics. This is why it's a mistake to treat the difference between significant and insignificant as significant.
TBH I suspect that these are all effects of not controlling for "what sort of people tend to run or join institutions that profess color-blindness vs multiculturalism, and how prejudiced (or willing to express stereotypes) do those people start out," but again, I'm surprised that Hughes didn't accurately represent the findings. Probably his back was up a bit.
I had assumed the subscriber count for each person was paid subscribers. Are you saying that paid subscribers is likely vastly lower than the headline number? I will have to revise down sharply what income I thought people were making on sub stack.
I'm pretty sure that the subscriber counts are for total subscribers, including unpaid.
When you click on the checkmark next to Kling's name or any other substack writer, it tells you the magnitude of the paid subscribers. For Kling, it is "hundreds of paid subscribers" and, last time I checked, Matt Taibbi had "tens of thousands". And I think the checkmarks have a color code, too.
Got it. That is very useful.
As a test I clicked on a writer with almost 20k subscribers, and he also has "hundreds of paid subscribers" like Arnold. Perhaps his is close to 1,000 than 200, who knows, but I understand a lot better now.
200 * $10/month * 12 month = $24,000 a year
1,000 * $10/month * 12 months = $120,000 a year
The upper end of that isn't a bad income, but I thought people on sub stack with reasonable numbers were making bank. Enough for it to be their career.
Not that I planned to write a sub stack nor become as popular as people way more successful then I would be, but its still a lot less then a good career.
I guess the number of people paying per subscription is maybe 5% or so?
I expect it varies a lot depending on the particular substack. Some, like Kling, allow non-payers to see everything or almost everything. Others, like Taibbi, only allow a short preview for non-payers, so if you want to see the content you have to pay.
Probably, but the other sub stack I checked out was probably around the same 5% ballpark. Even Taibbi has 332,000 subscriptions, so he doesn't need a high % conversion to reach "10s of thousands" paid.
"I would like to see social pressure applied also in other areas: against marijuana use; against promiscuous use of four-letter words; in favor of forming relationships that result in grandchildren."
I don't disagree with this yet to me it sounds a lot like the kind of pressure being applied via wokeism.
Also worth pointing out that alcohol has lots of calories and spoils very slowly, unlike most food and drink products during the time period. The "trail food" that they ate in the 17th-19th centuries was also pretty nasty. Pemmican, for example, is bad, hard tack is also famously bad. Un-spiced porridge is no bueno. Booze has tons of calories, travels well, is not filling, and goes well with tobacco. Alcohol is and was an excellent mobile intoxicant (not unlike smartphones today acting as portable hallucination machines).
Those folks ate that trail food despite also making and consuming large amounts of alcohol because you can't make it on alcohol alone by a long shot. Look up some historical charts on how much they drank - it's astounding. But still, they didn't take much on the trail.
Yes, some monks survived winters on beers brewed in traditional ways to have a good amount of residual carbs which provides a 50% boost. The calories in a good lager or stout are about 2/3 from alcohol content and 1/3 from carbs.
But there was also protein and fat from unfiltered yeast and grain leftovers, and lots of vitamins too - hence the story of stout once being prescribed for pregnancy nutrition. And also, the monks needed something like gallon per day, every single day. Monks getting high on their own supply is literally its own hilarious artistic genre. And they wonder why monk recruitment has gone down. There's an old "Not on Sundays vs Twice on Sundays" joke about it and either the Reformation or Schism of 1054, but I can't remember it.
A fifth of 80 proof liquor will get you - maybe not your liver - through a day. And that's only calories-wise, as all the other essential nutrients have been distilled out. But even the worst alcoholics rarely get more than half their calories from ethanol. But the equivalent 750 grams of carbs has 50% more calories, and won't kill you quickly in the process of eating it.
Hard tack was designed to be (1) ready to eat and (2) able to get a little damp without going too bad too quickly. If you can keep your provisions dry and boil water where you camp, carbs and dried meats win easily.
I was thinking of soldiers and sailors in general, but in particular Lewis and Clark, who initially brought 30 gallons of wine plus six kegs of something-or-other: https://www.nps.gov/articles/alcohol-and-the-lewis-and-clark-expedition.htm
Peter Wilson puts the daily ration of Wallenstein's troops during the 30 Years' War at ~1k bread, .5kg-1kg of meat, and 1.5 liters of wine OR 3 liters of beer. When I punch that into a modern calculator, it comes out at around 2500 calories for bread, ~850 calories booze, ~1250 calories pork (for 500 grams) and twice that much for a kilogram. I do not think that their bread was anywhere near as energy dense as modern bread, particularly because Wilson puts this at 3,000 calories. Their wine/beer might have also been waterier.
With 2 bottles of wine or 6 pints of beer a day during deployments, the US Army would have had no trouble with recruitment or retention even in wartime. Trouble with good order and discipline? Sure. With the steady operation of complex heavy machinery? Certainly. Sexual misconduct? Undoubtedly. But not recruitment.
Well, what are you waiting for? You just solved the 2023 recruitment crisis!
I live in San Antonio, a city that is basically Mexico, with a little Central America, a necessarily diminishing Anglo population, and a surprisingly large black minority (compared to Austin) thrown in. I'm not going to pretend I like living in Mexico and wish to die here. I do not. But since it is the future of America I will try to suggest plainly what may be the best aspect of it. WIth the exception of the 2nd gen kids who've been through the school system and so turned out in the victim mode, Mexicans are not an ideological people. They are not an "aspiringly" intellectual people for the most part. Mercifully it means that the shaming of bourgeois norms by going to the opposite extreme of embracing vice - is no concern of theirs - they aren't even aware of it. This may best be illustrated in two ways: unlike in Austin, where they are paramount and will ultimately bankrupt the place, the druggy, mentally ill homeless scarcely enter the civic consciousness; the police here in SA feel no particular compunction about moving the homeless along, or preventing them from occupying all street corners as in Austin; the idea that nice things are better than nasty ones, is not seriously disputed here in the public realm. Now, aesthetically, the city is not very pleasing - but no Texas city is. The other way is that if you are behind somebody holding up traffic to hand a dollar to the panhandler, 9 times out of ten it will be a Hispanic woman. Oh, pobrecito. That is what compassion, and being nice means, nothing more, nothing less.
As for many things, there is an enormous and persistent cultural split remarked upon by centuries of insightful observers between the countries of Northwest and Southern Europe as regards matters of vice and moral regulation of behavior, and which tends to overlap with who went which way in the Reformation (but not -because- of the Reformation).
Those tendencies followed as an inheritance to the regions colonized by those countries in the 16th century, and the contrast between them is most evident not just in Europe but anywhere that regions colonized under the different traditions happen to border each other, as with Mexico and the US.
Now this is painting with a broad brush, history is complicated, and there are of course interesting outliers and counterexamples. Also, nothing was the same after America won WWII.
But, in general, the "Latin" countries (France acts as if only half-Latin) were most likely to settle into equilibria of open secrets and lip service to laws and ideals and preservation of the family-safe wholesomeness of spaces in public, but combined with what in practice, so long as kept more discrete and private, are more permissive and lenient hypocrisies, tolerance of deviations and eccentricities, opportunities to take a break from the acknowledge strain of suppressing normal human urges to comply with social rules and expectations, and so forth.
The "Northern" countries, by contrast, and for various reasons including some kind of defect in their capacity to successfully achieve the intergenerational transmission of such mass "inside jokes" or maybe it's a side-effect of their strong capacity for mass coordination around the focal point of some ideas. But they tend to end up in a historical cycle of reaction and counter-reaction, of pendulum swings from one extreme to the other. Sybaritic Libertinism in one generation and Puritanical Asceticism in another. Elites flip from those who treat "the rules" with messianic holy war seriousness, to those who think it's cool to throw them all out the window because rules are for square chumps. You can see this in the historical periods in English history, the cultural swings contrasting Elizabethan era from Georgian, Regency, Victorian, etc.
You can see this in the way people from these countries go on vacation. The English infamously take their breaks abroad as an opportunity for bacchanalian excess. Meanwhile, as a quirk of fate, I get perks at a Southern European hotel/resort chain the locations of which tend to cater to tourists from the home country, and when they vacation I've never seen any of them go into Full Anarchy Indulgence mode as I've witnessed even rich and supposedly 'upper class' British tourists do repeatedly, but act ... pretty much like their normal selves.