If Mort Divine ruled the world

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/voter-suppression-wisconsin-election-2016/

Requiring a current ID is "voter suppression". Well, yes, yes it is indeed. That's the fucking point. To suppress votes that shouldn't count, like dead persons, non-citizens, etc. Amazing how there's an epidemic of "lost drivers licenses" right around election time. Can't be bothered to get and/or maintain ID but they are obviously a valuable part of an intelligent and informed democracy.
 
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@Dak your boy deBoer published a really good piece on In These Times.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/17729/critique_drift

This all largely descends from a related condition: many in the broad online left have adopted a norm where being an ally means that you never critique people who are presumed to be speaking from your side, and especially if they are seen as speaking from a position of greater oppression. I understand the need for solidarity, I understand the problem of undermining and derailing, and I recognize why people feel strongly that those who have traditionally been silenced should be given a position of privilege in our conversations. But critique drift demonstrates why a healthy, functioning political movement can’t forbid tactical criticism of those with whom you largely agree. Because critical vocabulary and political arguments are common intellectual property which gain or lose power based on their communal use, never criticizing those who misuse them ultimately disarms the Left. Refusing to say “this is a real thing, but you are not being fair or helpful in making that accusation right now” alienates potential allies, contributes to the burgeoning backlash against social justice politics, and prevents us from making the most accurate, cogent critique possible.

I find myself, more and more often, in the useless position of defending particular critiques in the general while having to admit that a particular instance of it is cheap or unfair or just wrong. I also find myself constantly having to tell people that I do in fact believe in a given critique, because denying that a particular application of that critique is correct does not in any way mean that I deny its salience in general. Both of these things amount to wasted time and energy, precisely the kind of wasted time and energy that the online left appears to be drowning in right now. Like so many others, I am exhausted by the need to constantly assert the sincerity of my views because I refuse to engage in the useless signaling that is so much a part of current social justice culture.
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I thought the paragraph after your quote cutoff as the entire problem in a nutshell:

And you can imagine the immediate rejoinder to this post: just more of the same of what I’m criticizing. “You’re mansplaining politics, you’re tone policing, you’re gaslighting.” That’s exactly the problem: Every critique of this type of engagement can simply be ground up in more of the same.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/what-facebook-did/542502/

The obvious narrative in this piece is that FB was an unwitting dupe of Russia. It looks to me like sour grapes that Breitbart managed to understand the power of FB better than aaaaalllllllll of the "center left" media weighted against it. The amount of RHEEEEE about Breitbart, or the Koch brothers, from the left, underscores the degree to which the right/alt right have only one point of focus for the left, while the left is something far beyond Hydra status. Of course, FB is appropriately contrite in their failure as a Cardinal member of the Cathedral:

After publication, Adam Mosseri, head of News Feed, sent an email
describing some of the work that Facebook is doing in response to the
problems during the election. They include new software and processes
"to stop the spread of misinformation, click-bait and other
problematic content on Facebook."

"The truth is we’ve learned things since the election, and we take our
responsibility to protect the community of people who use Facebook
seriously. As a result, we’ve launched a company-wide effort to
improve the integrity of information on our service," he wrote. "It’s
already translated into new products, new protections, and the
commitment of thousands of new people to enforce our policies and
standards... We know there is a lot more work to do, but I’ve never
seen this company more engaged on a single challenge since I joined
almost 10 years ago."
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Can't allow heresy to go uncensored! I can imagine the emboldened portion being spoken in 16th century Latin by the Pope post-95 Theses about protecting the Church flock.
 
Dak said:
www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-frankfurt-school-knew-trump-was-coming?mbid=social_facebook_aud_dev_kw_paid-the-frankfurt-school-knew-trump-was-coming

:lol:

The Frankfurt school cared about moral authority.

:lol::lol::lol::lol:

This is what happens when a music critic writes philo-political commentary.
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:erk:

Alex Ross is actually a really smart guy. He was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.

That said, I think it's pretty obvious that Adorno et al saw Trump coming. This shouldn't really be surprising to anyone living in today's world; but for an expat German from the 1940s, it's a perceptive prediction.

I'm not sure about moral authority, but then I'm not sure what in the piece explicitly suggests that the Frankfurt School were moralists...? If anything, Adorno harbored personal morals, but his work is disturbingly amoral. Perhaps the moral aspect is something you see in Ross's description/projection...?
 
The moral authority angle is oozing from nearly every piece flowing in the daily anti-Trump river of writing. At this point, you could write endless similar articles by simply copy/pasting chunks from other random articles without anyone noticing. Ross adds nothing new other than flexing his nightstand library, which was worth a laugh.

Edit: In looking at the sorts of people the MacArthur Fellowship funds, I'm not surprised. 3 scientists and then a bunch of people with liberal boilerplate.
 
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The insinuation of that statement is that political perspective is related to the capacity for intellectual thought, which I know can't be the case...

As a liberal, I realize that my sensitivity to the article's sense of moral authority is probably diluted. But I have to admit, I find your reaction to articles like this somewhat surprising. I know you don't agree with them politically, and I know this creates problems for you with regard to their moral authority; but while the election of Trump may be a signal from those who feel politically and socially neglected (a serious issue), this isn't the full explanation.

It's also true that he came to power because of post-WWII America's naive disengagement from "reality" by media, something which I know you've criticized before. Although I'm sympathetic to the value-less functioning of systems (this is Deleuze 101), I think that an informed perspective on contemporary media complexity demands a wider lens than what the average FOX News or HuffPost audience is prepared to give. I'd venture that it was this very same folk simplicity (or solipsism, if we want to be more philosophical) that was the Frankfurt School's primary target when it came to American cultural ideology. The Dialectic of Enlightenment describes the permeation of reality by a media system that reinforces solipsism and isolation, and presents a barrier to any kind of political action (be it left or right).

I realize that Trump's election can be seen as a reaction to this, but it's also symptomatic of it; and that's primarily what Ross is arguing (and arguing against, for better or worse). So it's not some substance-less left-wing rant, but a comment on what writers like Adorno got right (even if Adorno was still a high culture snob who despised the masses).
 
im barely into this and this is top tier mort-ism

https://www.theatlantic.com/enterta...einstein-and-the-economics-of-consent/543618/

It was around this time that I remember sitting in a casual gathering where a straight, white male activist said, “Our gender and race has all the power. So when you want to have sex with a woman you have to ask and get her verbal consent.” He continued, “If that woman is a person of color, she is oppressed by both her gender and her race and then you should really ask twice.” The literalism of his ratio was ridiculously reductive, and his declarative tone off-putting, but I appreciated that he was trying to articulate how complicated it is to negotiate the invisible forces of privilege and power inside sexual encounters
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Why Charles Murray is Odious

A really nice rejoinder to Murray's thesis.

This is the aspect of the book that makes me the angriest, and that I sense is responsible for a lot of people being unwilling to take Murray seriously: he pretends not to even realize that his thesis allows white America to feel exonerated for the condition of black America. He says that it would make no difference whether the IQ test differences (and therefore economic differences) were genetic. But it would make a massive difference: it would relieve white people who think intelligence means merit from having to feel guilty about reaping the benefits of living in a society built on racial discrimination. His thesis is not just an academic question about nature and nurture: it would also provide grist for the argument that slavery didn’t matter very much in the creation of present social outcomes; the reason black families have, on average, 1/10 of the wealth of white families, has little to do with the fact that they were prevented from accruing assets for over half the history of the United States, during which time they were kept in chains, beaten, raped, and murdered. Rather, it’s because of them and the fact that they just inherently lack the “cognitive ability” to catch up. And that lack of cognitive ability has little to do with the fact that for hundreds of years, if a black child was caught with a book, white people would whip them. (As they say, since “the African black population has not been subjected to the historical legacy of American black slavery,” and Africans are even less intelligent, “the hypothesis about the special circumstances of American blacks depressing their test scores is not substantiated by the African data.”) The question may be empirical, but there are potential social ramifications here, and anyone discussing the issue could at least try to demonstrate a marginal awareness of them.

It’s Murray’s flippant treatment of this history that makes some scholars so angry at his work. He doesn’t even take the widespread existence of racism seriously as a hypothesis. After all, a black-white IQ score difference, combined with evidence that IQ is in some degree heritable, is actually consistent with the idea that black people are genetically superior to white people in intelligence, and that their scores are depressed by early exposure to a society that devalues them from the earliest years of their lives (recall Malcolm X’s teacher responding to his aspiration toward being a lawyer by telling him carpentry was more realistic). To put it differently: Black people could inherit average IQs of 110, while white people inherit average IQs of 100, but the disadvantages of living in a racist society from birth could mean that by a young age, black people end up with average IQs of 95 and white people stay at 100. As Ned Block explains, there is a hidden premise that a role for genetics must necessarily disadvantage blacks, but that’s not necessarily the case.
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Einherjar86 said:
The insinuation of that statement is that political perspective is related to the capacity for intellectual thought, which I know can't be the case...

As a liberal, I realize that my sensitivity to the article's sense of moral authority is probably diluted. But I have to admit, I find your reaction to articles like this somewhat surprising. I know you don't agree with them politically, and I know this creates problems for you with regard to their moral authority; but while the election of Trump may be a signal from those who feel politically and socially neglected (a serious issue), this isn't the full explanation.

It's also true that he came to power because of post-WWII America's naive disengagement from "reality" by media, something which I know you've criticized before. Although I'm sympathetic to the value-less functioning of systems (this is Deleuze 101), I think that an informed perspective on contemporary media complexity demands a wider lens than what the average FOX News or HuffPost audience is prepared to give. I'd venture that it was this very same folk simplicity (or solipsism, if we want to be more philosophical) that was the Frankfurt School's primary target when it came to American cultural ideology. The Dialectic of Enlightenment describes the permeation of reality by a media system that reinforces solipsism and isolation, and presents a barrier to any kind of political action (be it left or right).

I realize that Trump's election can be seen as a reaction to this, but it's also symptomatic of it; and that's primarily what Ross is arguing (and arguing against, for better or worse). So it's not some substance-less left-wing rant, but a comment on what writers like Adorno got right (even if Adorno was still a high culture snob who despised the masses).
Click to expand...

I'm not saying it's an intelligence issue. But it is a science vs "art" issue, and I do find most artists intellectually lacking, even if they may score fine on IQ tests. Hell, my wife scores fine on IQ tests and is an art major, and she isn't remotely intellectual. But she doesn't pretend to be either like many do (and as such she doesn't fit in well with the peers in her major, who all vapidly regurgitate the Lacanian et al garbage they are fed).

Adorno may or may not have substance, but I see nothing in the Ross article that is anything different from the 1,000,000 other articles on CNN, Salon, etc other than, essentially, Adorno quotes.

Einherjar86 said:
Why Charles Murray is Odious

A really nice rejoinder to Murray's thesis.
Click to expand...

I disagree on the quality of this rejoinder. This person demonstrates typical offense taking and an apparent unfamiliarity with psychometrics. However, to his credit, the link to the Ned Block piece is worthy. I'm still reading and digesting. I think there are some potential problems here but off the cuff I would say the problems are related to analogy and special pleading than motivated misunderstanding or subject matter ignorance.
 
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Dak said:
I'm not saying it's an intelligence issue. But it is a science vs "art" issue, and I do find most artists intellectually lacking, even if they may score fine on IQ tests. Hell, my wife scores fine on IQ tests and is an art major, and she isn't remotely intellectual. But she doesn't pretend to be either like many do (and as such she doesn't fit in well with the peers in her major, who all vapidly regurgitate the Lacanian et al garbage they are fed).
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I don't think it's that artists are un-intellectual, but that they express their intellectualism in typically uncritical ways.

Dak said:
I disagree on the quality of this rejoinder. This person demonstrates typical offense taking and an apparent unfamiliarity with psychometrics.
Click to expand...

What's wrong with expressing distaste toward a particular view? That appears to be central to the piece, i.e. that Murray has no moral regard or appreciation for the wider implications of his argument. I think it's perfectly acceptable to express impatience when dealing with what looks like empathetic incompetence. It would be a different story if Murray never suggested that the genetic factor of IQ makes no difference, but he actually goes out of his way to say that it makes no difference. Morality aside, that's an empirically falsifiable claim.
 
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