If Mort Divine ruled the world

[Einherjar86]

Well I can distinguish between an intellectual curiosity in some component of a thing, and endorsing a political/social/psychological/philosophical position. But at the same time Coates is typically not read or recommended in that way, and his opinion is not alone and it is damaging real lives in its pathological paranoid externalizing (even while Coates does quite well for himself). While Coates is gladhanded and lives life on easy street, I deal with black demented (clinically) schizophrenics (who were IVCd by their own family) who refuse to take their medicines because somehow they are in an inpatient psych ward because racism (one particular current patient is in mind). That's one extreme individual anecdote, but the worse ones are the neighborhoods upon neighborhoods in places like Baltimore. How are the adherents of Coatsian rhetoric doing:

https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1141670149424123910

Also Baltimore: 57 years. Also NYC is not technically accurate - Bloomberg wasn't listed as a Democrat even though he should be.

What the fuck is the metric for "worst run cities"? Such a loaded tweet.

Anyway, on to other matters: thank you Donna Haraway.

Our view was never that truth is just a question of which perspective you see it from.

Bruno [Latour] and I were at a conference together in Brazil once. (Which reminds me: if people want to criticize us, it ought to be for the amount of jet fuel involved in making and spreading these ideas! Not for leading the way to post-truth.)

Anyhow. We were at this conference. It was a bunch of primate field biologists, plus me and Bruno. And Stephen Glickman, a really cool biologist, took us apart privately. He said: “Now, I don’t want to embarrass you. But do you believe in reality?”

We were both kind of shocked by the question. First, we were shocked that it was a question of belief, which is a Protestant question. A confessional question. The idea that reality is a question of belief is a barely secularized legacy of the religious wars. In fact, reality is a matter of worlding and inhabiting. It is a matter of testing the holdingness of things. Do things hold or not?

Take evolution. The notion that you would or would not “believe” in evolution already gives away the game. If you say, “Of course I believe in evolution,” you have lost, because you have entered the semiotics of representationalism – and post-truth, frankly. You have entered an arena where these are all just matters of internal conviction and have nothing to do with the world. You have left the domain of worlding.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-LcUz2DuAo2cC-I9a7JuXZrjgyAVsCrdHmoPujHSb7F4Q

I'm reminded of a comment by a biologist I know who once said that when non-scientists hear the word "theory," they think to themselves "Oh, I can choose to not believe this, it's just a theory"; but when scientists hear the word "theory," there's no question of personal belief.

https://twitter.com/Nicole61836638/status/1141174495576653824

But my car is why the earth is polluted......

Your car is why the earth is polluted. Why do you always insist on false choices?

 

[Dak]

What the fuck is the metric for "worst run cities"? Such a loaded tweet.

Anyway, onto other matters: thank you Donna Haraway.



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-LcUz2DuAo2cC-I9a7JuXZrjgyAVsCrdHmoPujHSb7F4Q

I'm reminded of a comment by a biologist I know who once said that when non-scientists hear the word "theory," they think to themselves "Oh, I can choose to not believe this, it's just a theory"; but when scientists hear the word "theory," there's no question of personal belief.

Poorly run: Crumbling infrastructure, high crime, high corruption. It's not complicated.

I'm not sure what the point was with the Guardian article.

Your car is why the earth is polluted. Why do you always insist on false choices?

This is like the "one drop" rule. Lots of things "pollute".....and? I will refer back to the eminent Thomas Sowell and his "Three Questions":

I’ve often said there are three questions that would destroy most of the arguments on the left.

The first is: ‘Compared to what?’

The second is: ‘At what cost?’

And the third is: ‘What hard evidence do you have?’

Now there are very few ideas on the left that can pass all of those…”

The first question usually takes care of most objections.

Back of the Napkin math says via my vehicle I produce the equivalent CO2 in one year of one commercial airplane in around a week of flying, and CO2 isn't even pollution; I can't find solid numbers of actual pollution (toxic compounds). Compare this to dumping straight trash in the water, which SE Asia does by the tonnage, and apparently the situation isn't all that much better in many other places.

 

[Einherjar86]

Poorly run: Crumbling infrastructure, high crime, high corruption. It's not complicated.

You don't think small towns with republican mayors across the country suffer from all three of those same issues?

Back of the Napkin math says via my vehicle I produce the equivalent CO2 in one year of one commercial airplane in around a week of flying, and CO2 isn't even pollution; I can't find solid numbers of actual pollution (toxic compounds). Compare this to dumping straight trash in the water, which SE Asia does by the tonnage, and apparently the situation isn't all that much better in many other places.

Your car is part of a massive industry. Its exhaust alone doesn't make sense without factoring in all the exhaust from all the other cars being driven across the planet.

I'm positive that other countries pollute horribly. China is the number one carbon emitter. Saying that your car contributes to pollution doesn't somehow absolve other countries of their role in global pollution--so why are you acting like me saying your car contributes to pollution is a personal attack on you? It's not that complicated.

The point of the Guardian article was me sharing something different. Why are you being such a shithead?

 

[CiG]

Are small towns really comparable to cities?

 

[Einherjar86]

I think if we're talking about management, then it's fine to compare cities to towns. Someone more informed than me could probably make a list of small towns with republican mayors that are "poorly run." Hell, that list might be longer than the city list. There are a lot more towns in American than cities.

 

[Dak]

Saying that your car contributes to pollution doesn't somehow absolve other countries of their role in global pollution--so why are you acting like me saying your car contributes to pollution is a personal attack on you? It's not that complicated.

I don't care that someone thinks I'm polluting. I do. So does every other sentient being. My point is relative to what.

The point of the Guardian article was me sharing something different. Why are you being such a shithead?

I'm not being a shithead, I was asking for context. I don't know what the point is. Plus you posted it in the Mort thread, so presumably it had some SJW import.

 

[Einherjar86]

I don't care that someone thinks I'm polluting. I do. So does every other sentient being. My point is relative to what.

It's funny to see you pulling the relativist card.

Carbon emissions aren't relative. We have a fairly accurate picture of how much carbon gets emitted, and how much of it we cause. Petroleum-based transportation accounts for about one third of total anthropogenic emissions. You can't consider your automobile absent this context, because it's this very context that's given rise to your car in the first place. It wouldn't make any practical sense to say "If my car were the only car on the planet, it would have no discernible impact on the climate." That's certainly true; but it's also nonsensical. There's no plausible historical scenario in which we can think of cars' individual emissions. They're the result of mass industrialization, and it only makes sense to talk about them that way.

I'm not being a shithead, I was asking for context. I don't know what the point is. Plus you posted it in the Mort thread, so presumably it had some SJW import.

You've kinda been a shithead for a few posts now.

I've always viewed this thread as being about more than SJW discussion. It's about matters relevant to the immediate political climate. Haraway is commenting explicitly on the post-truth era. It made sense to post it here.

 

[Dak]

I think if we're talking about management, then it's fine to compare cities to towns. Someone more informed than me could probably make a list of small towns with republican mayors that are "poorly run." Hell, that list might be longer than the city list. There are a lot more towns in American than cities.

Sorry I missed responding to this, but the difference is the number of state/fed dollars under disposal. We can also nix the crime issue, because we already know the 13/50 stat.

Edit: This is related to Question Number 1: Compared to what? So what if the list is longer? How many towns equal the rot in the cities? On the crime and infrastructure question, would probably take thousands. We already know you could eliminate several cities like Baltimore and Chicago and cut the national crime rate nearly in half.

 

[Einherjar86]

But how are you not committing a grievous error by insinuating more than the correlation between "poorly run" cities and democratic leadership? How is that tweet not implying that democratic leadership causes or is incapable of fixing the issues, when in fact they could be caused by any number of things and it's unlikely the republican leadership would fix anything either? The tweet uses the word "correlation," but it's saying more than that.

I'm not frustrated by your attacks on democratic leadership, but in the insinuation (in that tweet, at least) that republican leadership is superior.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

The handful of large cities with Republican histories that I can think of (San Diego and Colorado Springs as two examples) are certainly far ahead the national average where low crime and high income are concerned. fwiw I don't think it's a clear-cut Dem vs Rep thing though, it's more a problem of civil rights legacies, all Democratic, squatting on a cache of political capital last earned in the 1960s and 70s. These are leaders that strongly promote black identitarianism and do nothing for their local communities beyond stirring up rage and getting wealthy for it. The neoliberal, relatively-pro-cop younger generation is better on this front, e.g. Cory Booker who (from what I can tell) legitimately improved Newark as mayor after decades of rule by a corrupt black supremacist. But Dems are still at least partially complicit in that they won't ever criticize black corruption from their own party, knowing that they risk offending their most loyal voting bloc.

 

[CiG]

 

[Dak]

But how are you not committing a grievous error by insinuating more than the correlation between "poorly run" cities and democratic leadership? How is that tweet not implying that democratic leadership causes or is incapable of fixing the issues, when in fact they could be caused by any number of things and it's unlikely the republican leadership would fix anything either? The tweet uses the word "correlation," but it's saying more than that.

I'm not frustrated by your attacks on democratic leadership, but in the insinuation (in that tweet, at least) that republican leadership is superior.

It's not simply that it's Democratic leadership, but that we are talking about unbroken decades of it all while these places trend worse and worse, while there is no questioning of the leadership or the citizenry but rather any problems are blamed on "racism". It's Coatsian.

https://www.takimag.com/article/the_first_rule_of_white_club_steve_sailer/

The central event in Between the World and Me is the fatal shooting in 2000 of an acquaintance from Howard U. by an undercover deputy from Prince George County, the country’s most affluent black-majority county. Coates refers to this tragedy repeatedly as proof of America’s demonic drive to destroy black bodies. (The dead man’s family, I found, was eventually awarded $3.7 million in their wrongful-death suit, much like the $3 million awarded to the parents of a teen gunned down by an undercover Obama Administration agent in a shooting that I investigated in 2010. You have never heard of my local police blotter item, though, because the victim was white.)

Since I”m a horrible person, my immediate response to Coates” tale was…okay…black-run county, affirmative-action hiring, and poor police decision-making…you know, I bet the shooter cop was black.

And sure enough, the Carlton Jones who shot Prince Jones turned out to be black. Coates eventually gets around to briefly admitting that awkward fact, but only after seven pages of purple prose about people who believe they are whites destroying black bodies.

https://www.takimag.com/article/occams_rubber_room_steve_sailer/

Today’s standard story as peddled by Coates rejects Occam’s Razor. For example, in 2011 the Obama administration reported that blacks commit homicide at a rate almost eight times that of whites. Is that proof of “the enduring myth of black criminality”? Or is it just evidence of black criminality?

But the simpler interpretation would be a stereotype! And stereotypes, as you learn at college, are mass delusions. Or something. The professors didn't explain precisely, but you got the message: Knowing that the average person is wrong about everything is what makes you better than people who didn't learn that at college.

What distinguishes Ta-Nehisi from his white competitors in the Hate Whitey business is his guileless faith in what he was taught. He really believes that if he amasses a mound of evidence that everybody for the past 150 years whose opinion is worth considering has been concerned about the black tendency toward criminality, well, that just proves how hallucinatorily racist America is. Since we all know from first principles that blacks couldn't possibly be more inclined toward disorganized crime than, say, Chinese, the fact that every expert has, at one point or another, broken down and admitted that they are just demonstrates how mind-warping white racism must be.

 

[Einherjar86]

It's not simply that it's Democratic leadership, but that we are talking about unbroken decades of it all while these places trend worse and worse, while there is no questioning of the leadership or the citizenry but rather any problems are blamed on "racism". It's Coatsian.

For me, it's not simply that democratic leadership is at issue (or is the sole issue). There's no reason to assume that republican leadership would do anything to fix these problems. It's true that faith in democratic leadership is misplaced in many cases, but so is faith in republican leadership.

Regarding the takimag excerpts, I think the journalist is suffering from a delusion about what his professors told him about stereotypes.

 

[Dak]

For me, it's not simply that democratic leadership is at issue (or is the sole issue). There's no reason to assume that republican leadership would do anything to fix these problems. It's true that faith in democratic leadership is misplaced in many cases, but so is faith in republican leadership.

Regarding the takimag excerpts, I think the journalist is suffering from a delusion about what his professors told him about stereotypes.

Republican leadership is like democracy, the worst form of leadership except for all the others. Plenty of room for improvement, but it is unlikely to be found across the aisle. Can't fix real problems in communities when there are SJW issues to address.

Having watched a graduate Social Psychology professor hem and haw around the accuracy of stereotypes and discuss how they could be "problematic" even if accurate, I don't find anything delusional about it. At least the graduate psych professor couldn't avoid the research; outside of psychology (and probably even down at the introductory undergraduate psych level), stereotypes are dismissed as illinformed if not also outright bad. Sailer's writing is everything Coates' is not: Sharp, witty, and accurate. He's a noticer extraordinaire.

 

[Einherjar86]

Republican leadership is like democracy, the worst form of leadership except for all the others.

mmmmm not true, but can we just say we disagree and call it a day?

I'm also not prepared to defend Coates against your charges since, as I mentioned earlier, I haven't even read any of his books. I've only read the occasional Atlantic piece.

Having watched a graduate Social Psychology professor hem and haw around the accuracy of stereotypes and discuss how they could be "problematic" even if accurate, I don't find anything delusional about it.

You're not using "delusion" the same way he did:

But the simpler interpretation would be a stereotype! And stereotypes, as you learn at college, are mass delusions.

You just said that your professor acknowledged stereotypes can be accurate; hence they're not "mass delusions." Your boy is suggesting that college teaches us that stereotypes are inaccurate; but that's not at all what most professors versed in the discourse would say. They'd say that stereotypes misidentify the trait, behavior, characteristic, what-have-you as inherent or essential to the type, e.g. Jews are good with money and it's their Jewishness that makes them good with money. That's the fallacy, which is what we "learn at college" (or most of us, anyway).

Stereotypes by their very nature convey some element of truth. As the old adage goes, stereotypes exist because they're true. Asking whether a stereotype is true misses the entire point. The answer is always "yes." The point is where we locate the source of the truth.

EDIT: speaking of McWhorter...

We can accept that “Don’t retreat, reload” isn’t always a command to shoot people, and that “I’ll pay the legal fees” if someone punches someone else in the face isn’t always a command to punch someone in the face. But then we must also accept that “concentration camp” harks back to the Nazis without exactly implying that Trump is literally pulling a Hitler. If the right can’t take what it dishes out, it might reconsider its comfort with metaphors of violence. In the meantime, the Trump administration’s “tender-age facility” will be, quite justifiably, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “concentration camp.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...sio-cortez-concentration-camp-comment/592180/

Damn republican snowflakes.

 

[Dak]

mmmmm not true, but can we just say we disagree and call it a day?

I'm also not prepared to defend Coates against your charges since, as I mentioned earlier, I haven't even read any of his books. I've only read the occasional Atlantic piece.

I'm interested in what you would consider an example of metropolitan or even state Democratic leadership. There are plenty of examples of bad Republican leadership. Most politicians suck by default. If you don't want to pursue that that's fine though

You're not using "delusion" the same way he did:

You just said that your professor acknowledged stereotypes can be accurate; hence they're not "mass delusions." Your boy is suggesting that college teaches us that stereotypes are inaccurate; but that's not at all what most professors versed in the discourse would say. They'd say that stereotypes misidentify the trait, behavior, characteristic, what-have-you as inherent or essential to the type, e.g. Jews are good with money and it's their Jewishness that makes them good with money. That's the fallacy, which is what we "learn at college" (or most of us, anyway).

Stereotypes by their very nature convey some element of truth. As the old adage goes, stereotypes exist because they're true. Asking whether a stereotype is true misses the entire point. The answer is always "yes." The point is where we locate the source of the truth.

So what makes them good with money? I disagree with your general assertion here about stereotype teaching. A Psychology Today article had to address this back in 2012:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201210/stereotype-inaccuracy

These are statements in peer reviewed papers and APA statements. While some of the comments are quibbles, they are an attempt to suggest we should never actually apply stereotypes because we might be interfacing with the rare exception. So it stands to reason this is a widespread sentiment, beyond anecdata.

Why do so many psychologists emphasize stereotype inaccuracy when the evidence so clearly provides evidence of such high accuracy? Why is there this Extraordinary Scientific Delusion?

There may be many explanations, but one that fits well is the leftward lean of most psychologists.

Stereotypes and IQ tests are the most valid things in all of psychology, an incredibly left-leaning field, which adds extra credence to them, since leftists generally dislike the most likely conclusions from the results. If psychologists, who should know their own literature, want to emphasize in the wrong direction, so much more so for the rest of academia.

EDIT: speaking of McWhorter...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...sio-cortez-concentration-camp-comment/592180/

Damn republican snowflakes.

I frankly don't care what people want to call them. Concentration camps are better than what illegals deserve. Instead of war with Iran, the US Army should be stationed along the borders and at ports of entry with permissive ROE and actually protect the country. Throw in drones and helicopters armed to the teeth for good measure.

Edit: Those people upset about the concentration camp comments are mostly Jewish neocons and the religious right who slavishly follow them. They can fuck off.

 

[CiG]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...sio-cortez-concentration-camp-comment/592180/

Damn republican snowflakes.

If they had any tact they'd refer to them as gulags. Conflating what Republicans do with communism would explode their heads.

 

[Einherjar86]

Concentration camps are better than what illegals deserve.

It's not a matter of intellect or argument; I just can't imagine thinking that. There's no logic you can use to convince me. And I'm okay with that.

 

[Dak]

It's not a matter of intellect or argument; I just can't imagine thinking that. There's no logic you can use to convince me. And I'm okay with that.

It's not really an intellect or logic (slightly differentiated from argument) position per se. It's about skin in the game and related knowledge and ethics. It's somewhat ironic that liberals are only libertarian on borders, while persons like myself are mostly libertarian except on borders. I'm not much of a Milton Friedman fan but he was absolutely right when he said you can't have a welfare state and free immigration. Liberal policies are going to Brazilify the US, which won't hurt them as much because they can afford personal property walls instead of border walls.

Edit: I should also mention the math behind the sentiment: A country owes illegals nothing. A bullet is cheap. Housing and food and guards, no matter how cheap and mean, are expensive.

 

[Dak]

When we get right down to it, the main dividing difference between every strain of "progressive" and "conservative" is that progressives refuse to accept TANSTAAFL, both literally and metaphorically.