More Warbyisms; Robert P. George and Yoram Hazony on anti-semitic speech; Alice Evans on non-Western marriage patterns; Rob Kurzban on weaponizing morality
“It was only with sexual liberation and job-creating economic growth in the late 20th century that wives could actually leave.”
Before the Information Age, brute strength was often the key to survival and success. In such a world, women were likely to be treated as second class citizens. Once brains became more important than brawn, women could more easily compete.
Oddly, many feminists want to tear down the free market system that created the world in which they are on an equal - perhaps more than equal - footing with men.
I think your view is just the same as George's (which I also agree with). I don't think it will solve the problem, although it's all that can be done from the top down.
As long as students are willing to socially sanction each other for their beliefs, they will correctly feel controlled and constrained by their peers. What they need is a more tolerant "culture of free speech." But no one can or should force this on them, although admissions could help the situation somewhat if they wanted to.
I’m not sure that you’ve succeeded threading that needle; at least not within your own hypothetical classroom. You say: “I think that free speech is the right value. We should tolerate antisemitic speech. What administrators should emphatically reject is the bullying, the intimidation, the “demands.’”
Imagine teaching a semester-long class and allowing antisemitism within your own class. It’s probably not going to work.
Within your own classroom, you’re probably not going to allow degrees of antisemitic speech leading up to the threshold degree at which you call administrators. You say: “Call the police and bring charges against protesters who engage in vandalism and other forms of lawbreaking. Expel students who try to intimidate and shout down others. Then you will have a climate in which free speech can operate.”
You’re a teacher. Your job is to teach. The students are there to learn. You need to be productive with your time, especially classroom time. You’re also leaving out two important concepts: respect and rights.
There’s a very simple rule for controlling student behavior. It goes something like this.
You post a sign in your classroom that reads.
I am here to learn.
I respect myself and my rights.
I respect others and their rights.
You go over this on the first day of class, making clear the process for violating the rules.
1. When a student is not following the classroom rules, the teacher will address the student’s behavior.
2. If the behavior continues, the student will be given time to be introspective away from the other students. The teacher will welcome the student back to the classroom only after the student shows that he understands the problem and makes a commitment to be respectful.
3. If the behavior continues, then administration will be notified, and the student will be invited to meet with them.
4. If the behavior is still an issue, a conference will be arranged between the student, teacher and administration. An ultimatum may be presented to the student.
This framework addresses all forms of behavior, not just antisemitic speech, and is tied to cultural norms of respect and rights including life, liberty and property - the Founding documents.
With this said, depending on the subject and the maturity level of the class—undergraduates vs graduate students—you might provide examples of acceptable antisemitic speech, but you do this experimentally, with a right to tighten up the speech rules if things don’t work out.
Why aren’t colleges already using behavior management plans like this one?
Honest and open and free inquiry would permit asking: where is it best for that mother-in-law to exercise her dominion, her natural bossiness - at home or in an office? (Or in the civic club or the preservation society or the church, etc.).
Easy female divorce requires a large and coercive welfare state.
Women are a net fiscal sink pretty much their entire lives.
Single women and/or underclass women are particularly deep sinks.
I don't have any particular problem with women escaping abusive relationships, but not all divorces stem from abuse and its unfair to make society bear the fiscal burden of supporting single mothers.
> Easy female divorce requires a large and coercive welfare state.
Outside of the underclass, it's not even welfare so much as child support. Under the current American child support centered family system, women can escape a bad marriage, but men (except for a small and unrepresentative fraction of the very rich) can't - not without leaving behind most of their accumulated assets and their future earnings, not to mention the children. This creates perverse incentives, and the ease with which the concept of abusive relationships can be abused does not help. Dalrock wrote about this at length 10-15 years ago. E.g. this is a good jump off point: https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/bargaining-in-the-shadow-of-the-law/
> Women are a net fiscal sink pretty much their entire lives.
To be fair, women are the only demographic source available, and that has got to be worth something even if it not monetizable.
Paying unproductive people to breed never works. (What would it “working” even look like?)
Still, there are plenty of consequences of these policies. Often quite tragic. Now decades of evidence of the failure of the Great Society. People bear those consequences, they are not shielded from them because of policy … sometimes the anecdotal details even make their way into a news story, though as a sidelight. All of this is in plain view.
None of that seems to matter, or to change people’s behavior. The cause makes its dreary effect and people are okay with it.
It's hard not to feel that liberal democracy must fail when it is not coupled with paternalism.
A note .. when Ms Evan's says "Western Europe escaped patrilocality thanks to a draconian Catholic Church." what she is referencing is the wide-ranging Catholic prohibition on cousin marriage which also included relationships created by earlier marriages, not just direct lineage.
Thanks Arnold, yet more good links with your own fine tweet (-like) response. Yes on free speech, including Nazis in Skokie, or in college, but 0 tolerance for illegal violence or vandalism.
The Dems accept illegal violence, like in BLM “mostly peaceful” riots, when it’s Dem voters being violent. Most Jewish Dem voters accepted that violence, too, while most Trump voters reject the violence in all cases.
The colleges won’t be fixed until there are more Republican professors. In % terms, so a big reduction in the number of professors is a reduction in the problem.
My two married kids & I were arguing at 2 am about women and casual sex, which Alice Evans doesn’t explicitly cover much. Since I had brought up slut shaming, and they both think it’s mean to the individual woman, but likely does reduce promiscuity in society so fewer other women make that mistake. My son has female friends who enjoy it, my daughter’s female friends all regret it-tho they consent to it and do it again. A bit like fat people and fat shaming and drinkers with drinking and drunk shamming, or drug addict shaming.
Shaming, and what is shameful or not, is too little discussed as part of cultural. Like f*ck and n-word, which are both legal to say, but the latter can get you fired (legally supported by lawsuits against work places which don’t fire those using the n-words). Shame-honor cultures are different from US guilt cultures.
“It was only with sexual liberation and job-creating economic growth in the late 20th century that wives could actually leave.”
Before the Information Age, brute strength was often the key to survival and success. In such a world, women were likely to be treated as second class citizens. Once brains became more important than brawn, women could more easily compete.
Oddly, many feminists want to tear down the free market system that created the world in which they are on an equal - perhaps more than equal - footing with men.
I think your view is just the same as George's (which I also agree with). I don't think it will solve the problem, although it's all that can be done from the top down.
As long as students are willing to socially sanction each other for their beliefs, they will correctly feel controlled and constrained by their peers. What they need is a more tolerant "culture of free speech." But no one can or should force this on them, although admissions could help the situation somewhat if they wanted to.
I’m not sure that you’ve succeeded threading that needle; at least not within your own hypothetical classroom. You say: “I think that free speech is the right value. We should tolerate antisemitic speech. What administrators should emphatically reject is the bullying, the intimidation, the “demands.’”
Imagine teaching a semester-long class and allowing antisemitism within your own class. It’s probably not going to work.
Within your own classroom, you’re probably not going to allow degrees of antisemitic speech leading up to the threshold degree at which you call administrators. You say: “Call the police and bring charges against protesters who engage in vandalism and other forms of lawbreaking. Expel students who try to intimidate and shout down others. Then you will have a climate in which free speech can operate.”
You’re a teacher. Your job is to teach. The students are there to learn. You need to be productive with your time, especially classroom time. You’re also leaving out two important concepts: respect and rights.
There’s a very simple rule for controlling student behavior. It goes something like this.
You post a sign in your classroom that reads.
I am here to learn.
I respect myself and my rights.
I respect others and their rights.
You go over this on the first day of class, making clear the process for violating the rules.
1. When a student is not following the classroom rules, the teacher will address the student’s behavior.
2. If the behavior continues, the student will be given time to be introspective away from the other students. The teacher will welcome the student back to the classroom only after the student shows that he understands the problem and makes a commitment to be respectful.
3. If the behavior continues, then administration will be notified, and the student will be invited to meet with them.
4. If the behavior is still an issue, a conference will be arranged between the student, teacher and administration. An ultimatum may be presented to the student.
This framework addresses all forms of behavior, not just antisemitic speech, and is tied to cultural norms of respect and rights including life, liberty and property - the Founding documents.
With this said, depending on the subject and the maturity level of the class—undergraduates vs graduate students—you might provide examples of acceptable antisemitic speech, but you do this experimentally, with a right to tighten up the speech rules if things don’t work out.
Why aren’t colleges already using behavior management plans like this one?
Daughter-in-laws become mother-in-laws eventually.
Honest and open and free inquiry would permit asking: where is it best for that mother-in-law to exercise her dominion, her natural bossiness - at home or in an office? (Or in the civic club or the preservation society or the church, etc.).
Easy female divorce requires a large and coercive welfare state.
Women are a net fiscal sink pretty much their entire lives.
Single women and/or underclass women are particularly deep sinks.
I don't have any particular problem with women escaping abusive relationships, but not all divorces stem from abuse and its unfair to make society bear the fiscal burden of supporting single mothers.
https://deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=514112092086124112005004114088007026105010042041037058069126102123093101109104110102054126001035046017049092099082086090086066062087048093049113023114122005117027037026086125092075096080121079025106105065071023121004013021119066104065019097093120085&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE
> Easy female divorce requires a large and coercive welfare state.
Outside of the underclass, it's not even welfare so much as child support. Under the current American child support centered family system, women can escape a bad marriage, but men (except for a small and unrepresentative fraction of the very rich) can't - not without leaving behind most of their accumulated assets and their future earnings, not to mention the children. This creates perverse incentives, and the ease with which the concept of abusive relationships can be abused does not help. Dalrock wrote about this at length 10-15 years ago. E.g. this is a good jump off point: https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/bargaining-in-the-shadow-of-the-law/
> Women are a net fiscal sink pretty much their entire lives.
To be fair, women are the only demographic source available, and that has got to be worth something even if it not monetizable.
Paying unproductive people to breed never works. (What would it “working” even look like?)
Still, there are plenty of consequences of these policies. Often quite tragic. Now decades of evidence of the failure of the Great Society. People bear those consequences, they are not shielded from them because of policy … sometimes the anecdotal details even make their way into a news story, though as a sidelight. All of this is in plain view.
None of that seems to matter, or to change people’s behavior. The cause makes its dreary effect and people are okay with it.
It's hard not to feel that liberal democracy must fail when it is not coupled with paternalism.
A note .. when Ms Evan's says "Western Europe escaped patrilocality thanks to a draconian Catholic Church." what she is referencing is the wide-ranging Catholic prohibition on cousin marriage which also included relationships created by earlier marriages, not just direct lineage.
Thanks Arnold, yet more good links with your own fine tweet (-like) response. Yes on free speech, including Nazis in Skokie, or in college, but 0 tolerance for illegal violence or vandalism.
The Dems accept illegal violence, like in BLM “mostly peaceful” riots, when it’s Dem voters being violent. Most Jewish Dem voters accepted that violence, too, while most Trump voters reject the violence in all cases.
The colleges won’t be fixed until there are more Republican professors. In % terms, so a big reduction in the number of professors is a reduction in the problem.
My two married kids & I were arguing at 2 am about women and casual sex, which Alice Evans doesn’t explicitly cover much. Since I had brought up slut shaming, and they both think it’s mean to the individual woman, but likely does reduce promiscuity in society so fewer other women make that mistake. My son has female friends who enjoy it, my daughter’s female friends all regret it-tho they consent to it and do it again. A bit like fat people and fat shaming and drinkers with drinking and drunk shamming, or drug addict shaming.
Shaming, and what is shameful or not, is too little discussed as part of cultural. Like f*ck and n-word, which are both legal to say, but the latter can get you fired (legally supported by lawsuits against work places which don’t fire those using the n-words). Shame-honor cultures are different from US guilt cultures.
Because now, students are customers and the customer is always right. No customers.......no schools.