Facewon wrote:

Now, I haven't read the article yet, but holy cow does sommers screw the pooch here. You can encounter ideas without ideology, doncha know.

Lolololol.

https://twitter.com/CHSommers/status/1027685871057694720

Interesting piece and incredibly shortsighted yes. Imho, Peterson et al are in fact the 'new right' indulging in a form of IP but sadly they are blissfully unaware of it. Oh lol, irony....

It's a new re-packaging (sugarcoating?) of the same old pills, making them pallatible to the millenial youth. Remember Harris endorsing Murray?

All this propaganda bs is quite profitable too no doubt and must be quite an incentive. I can assure you both Peterson and Murray earn much more than a regular uni scientist, professor or lecturer due to these 'extra curricular' activities.

Thanks to Tin for the thoughtful reply.

No expectation for a reply on any of this then. I’m also struggling for time at the moment.

tin_robot wrote:

Never underestimate my capacity for denial.  I don't think I at any point assign him to a tribe, "rival" or otherwise.   My "opening move" was to flag what I felt was the slightly odd use of the word "just" to describe a 65% difference in income between white households and their "black counterparts".  I thought it was a revealing piece of framing, not politically, but simply because I thought it extraordinary to find a 65% pay difference so insignificant as to prefix it with "just".  (Though that may, I suppose, be more of a statement on me, than the author. Equally, as Jon pointed out, it could simply be sloppy writing.) I then went on to ask you to consider the way in which he chose to describe "the left" and "the right".  For instance, I thought his description of "the right" as impotent to be bizarre. (The exact context to which he was referring was the assertion that "the right" was "too far from the media channels through which blacks communicate" - a statement that is both as bizarre as it is bold, but also utterly rife with the very identity politics which you dislike.  It is highly problematic at the very least.)

Look I mean that’s fine, it’s hardly a deal breaker either way.

But then I do owe Dante an explanation.

I guess I’m still not sure which “biases” or “blind spots” you might be referring to if they’re not of a political nature. You say just here that it’s “utterly rife” with IP but of what flavour if not that?

And what is the infamous “just” in that first sentence so revealing of to you that I'm still missing completely?

For what it’s worth, my reading is that he’s simply drawing attention to the enormous disparity between income and wealth. That there’s just a 65% pa difference in income while at the same time an enormous 10 -1 wealth disparity overall within the same group.

That’s a problem without an immediately obvious solution.

But like I said, parsing is a dead end.

Let’s move on.

tin_robot wrote:

Which brings us to the pedestrian parable.  A quick recap. The Pedestrian Parable goes like this: A pedestrian (P) gets hit by a driver (D) and sustains serious injuries.  The incident itself in entirely the fault of D. D pays all the medical fees for P, who is patched up in hospital. However P refuses to engage in physiotherapy, holding D entirely responsible for his physical condition. P doesn't recover, despite D doing everything he can to facilitate it, because P won't take the necessary steps required to ensure his recovery.

The parable is invoked here (and elsewhere) to suggest that black Americans are now essentially P.  They could get out of their predicament if only they would stop blaming D and help themselves…

That’s a reasonable summary, but you're wrong about the last bit. 

Nothing actually hinges here on P blaming D or refusing to help themselves. The point of the analogy is to highlight the idea that there are some kinds of injuries that only the injured can heal, irrespective of who is responsible for them.

tin_robot wrote:

There are a bunch of assumptions in this that renders the analogy unhelpful, if not actively offensive.  The primary one is the idea that the D (in this case, "white america") has done all it can to help P ("black america"). This seems to me to be pretty much a nonsense.  To get even close to being able to make that argument you would need to begin with the sort of financial reparations that Coates et al have called for. Though even then, I think you're a way short.  P is probably not engaging with his physio, partly because physio sucks, but also because of the psychological impact of the accident. The psychological effect of a road traffic accident is nothing next to generations of oppression, so again, I think this particular driver has quite a way to go before they can be said to have "done everything".   I think there's a wider point to be made about our metaphorical pedestrian too. I've seen plenty of people who act in exactly the manner described in the parable. People to whom terrible things happened because someone else fucked them over. It's true that some are held back in their recovery because they're so busy blaming the person who caused their suffering, that they never take ownership of the bit they can control.  I understand that argument. But... For the most part I find people are really good at letting go of that resentment once, and only once, they feel that the person that caused their injury has atoned. The phrase "if they had only apologised" is used a lot. the argument the Coates et al have employed in what little I have read of their work tends to be about precisely that. Achieving a sense of reparation, not really financially, but socially, and psychologically, so that everyone (white americans included) can move on.  Moving on involves acknowledging and accepting the past, not making convoluted arguments about why we should just forget about it and pull ourselves together.

So to make the pedestrian parable work here, you need the driver to have run him down, but then refuse to make any initial attempts to help, and refuse to pay for any physiotherapy or pain relief, just grudgingly stumping up enough for essential life saving treatments.  D should insist he's done nothing wrong, and should then regularly tell P it's time he stopped whining because he could probably get better if he really tried. Then the "parable" just about fits. Fuck D.

Well I’d say that’s is a pretty cynical view of the state of modern US politics and your reading of Coates is a little iffy, but let’s just park that.

As a thought experiment though, the parable can incorporate all of this as additional dials to turn. You can run it with D taking full responsibility and paying for every conceivable treatment, or you can run your version above or worse where D is maybe even glad he ran over P and won’t lift a finger to help.

Wherever you set those dials and regardless of how P feels about the situation, the fact remains that the nature of Ps injuries means that at a certain point the only remaining gains to be made will be through a grueling 1000 hours of physiotherapy.

I think for the analogy to really not fit here, there would need to be either a denial that there are cultural factors at play at all, or that they do exist but the state can in fact fix all of them.

Does anyone here actually think either of these things?

Yossarian wrote:

Okay, perhaps I misread something, but that was the impression I got. So, if the responsibility for fixing these things neither falls on the individual nor the state, where does it fall?

Again, I’d quibble with the use of ‘responsibility’ here as perhaps an unhelpful word to use. What I’m interested in is practically how to make progress from where we are right now, not where the blame lies.

A useful comparison might be to the “2nd wave” feminist movement in the US in the 60’s.

Things didn’t change because the state suddenly woke up and decided to take responsibility for generations of female oppression. It came about through progressive thinkers reshaping culture from within through well-argued public debate.

Women shaped government policy, not the other way around.

Yossarian wrote:

Actually, another question: You decry identity politics but talk about cultural differences in US black communities. Is this not a contradiction?

Not the way I'm using and thinking about those terms, no.

JRPC wrote:

What I’m interested in is practically how to make progress from where we are right now, not where the blame lies. A useful comparison might be to the “2nd wave” feminist movement in the US in the 60’s. Things didn’t change because the state suddenly woke up and decided to take responsibility for generations of female oppression. It came about through progressive thinkers reshaping culture from within through well-argued public debate. Women shaped government policy, not the other way around.

So by turning to a form of identity politics.

djchump wrote:

JRPC wrote:

Again, I’d quibble with the use of ‘responsibility’ here as perhaps an unhelpful word to use. What I’m interested in is practically how to make progress from where we are right now, not where the blame lies.

So, you're not saying it's black peoples' "responsibility" to sort out the problems facing them, but they're the only ones that can so they should do it so they can "make practical progress"? You're really weaseling hard there with the word "responsibility", because you see it as "unhelpful".

JRPC wrote:

... Things didn’t change because the state suddenly woke up and decided to take responsibility for generations of female oppression. It came about through progressive thinkers reshaping culture from within through well-argued public debate. ...

How do you think that change was brought about without "identity politics"?  You're derping hard if you thought it was down to "well-argued public debate" and some kind of high-browed rationalism winning out.

You don't think there's a rational argument for gender equality?

Or are you saying there is one but it wasn't made by feminists?

I mean, they were only women after all, right?

You're about a century and several thousand miles off target there.

Oh my.

All those words.

Fellows, let me spend a lot of energy itemising a marginal and elusive factor in a major structural issue, badly. It will fucking slap.

Here's an analogy to help....

https://i.imgur.com/rmcRGTq.png

Easy to solve, just like racism.

One day, Triangle decided he was going to play a sneaky trick on Square.

I've stayed out of this because I've barely done any reading on it and am fairly ignorant, but I can't let JRPC do his internet language bullying at the top of the page. "I'm not expecting a response to this" "X but let's park that". This is pre-emptively shutting down the capacity for any response, or more importantly, the "need" for you to respond to any rebuttal. It's, at best, ignorant, and at worst, cowardly. It's not a discussion of you choose to close off any avenues for response in your phrasing.

Sorry. Just really dislike that sort of passive-aggressiveness in writing.

You read through this thread and THAT'S what jumps out to you as an objectionable use of language!?

JRPC wrote:

You read through this thread and THAT'S what jumps out to you as an objectionable use of language!?

I'm reading the concept of you trying to seem open to discussions, yet manipulating or justifying each point by closing them down once you've made your point, under the pretence of an open discussion.

Whether the points are valid or not, I don't know, I'm not really well read on the topic, and wouldn't dare to jump in to the concepts without doing fairly decent background research. I do know the subtleties of language fairly well, however, and those are striking.

regmcfly wrote:

You read through this thread and THAT'S what jumps out to you as an objectionable use of language!?

I'm reading the concept of you trying to seem open to discussions, yet manipulating or justifying each point by closing them down once you've made your point, under the pretence of an open discussion. Whether the points are valid or not, I don't know, I'm not really well read on the topic, and wouldn't dare to jump in to the concepts without doing fairly decent background research. I do know the subtleties of language fairly well, however, and those are striking.

Clearly. 

It's the really blindingly obvious stuff you seem to struggle with.

It's called cherrypicking Reg and Jrpc is well versed in it. Not the first time he's been called out on it.