Current Affairs The New Middle
- Thread starter dholliday
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I see some posts about Jordan Peterson. Here's a fun video, which goes some way to showing how much of a fraud he is. Apparently the only way to quit smoking is to have a religious experience. lol
Also, Matt Dillahunty <3
Also, Matt Dillahunty <3
Also, a couple of very recent tweets of meaningless word salad. lol
You have to give him credit. He writes in a word circle that he could make it mean anything he wants it to mean.
Replace the second tweet with any noun as the first word and it pretty much the same sense. I chose cheese. I will sleep soundly tonight.
Last link from me for now... I love the 'unnecessarily complicated' bit. Really sums him up. lol
https://pressprogress.ca/jordan-pet...the-court-called-his-expert-opinions-dubious/
https://pressprogress.ca/jordan-pet...the-court-called-his-expert-opinions-dubious/
Who knows! lol Maybe they got swept up in the hype surrounding that guy. Maybe they do it to own the libs. Whatever it is, he's making incredible sums of money off it - $66k a month, last time his Patreon was publicly visible.
abelard
Player Valuation: £35m
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/
The Labour right seem to think the financial crisis is irrelevant. This is the inference we might draw from Chris Leslie’s pamphlet, Centre Ground (pdf).
Pretty much the only reference he makes to the crisis is the claim that it “fuelled cynicism about government and politicians”. Nowhere does he even acknowledge the possibility that the crisis might undermine New Labour’s thinking about the relationship between the state and capitalism. The crisis – and the subsequent decade-long stagnation in real wages and productivity – shows for me that a stable policy framework is not sufficient for economic stability or growth; that economic growth might need greater state intervention than New Labour offered; that severe recessions can originate not merely from bad economic policy or macroeconomic shocks but from the failure (pdf) of key firms; and that the vast incomes and power of a tiny minority are not benign. In other words, social democrats need to rethink. The great virtue of Corbyn and McDonnell is that they see this.
Leslie, however, does not. Instead, he seems stuck in a 1990s mindset. This, for example, could have been said by Tony Blair in 1997:
But this doesn’t seem to be true. Job-to-job flows are lower than they were before the crisis, suggesting that there’s less churn than there used to be. And of course stagnant productivity suggests the rate of technological development is much less than precipitous. The challenge for policy-makers is not to deal with the fall-out from economic dynamism, but to restart that dynamism.
This blindspot to the changed nature of capitalism is not an idiosyncrasy of Leslie’s. Only a few weeks ago Ian Austin complained that Corbyn has taken Labour out of the mainstream without even mentioning the crisis, and without even considering the possibility that a changed capitalism requires a changed Labour party.
Herein, though, lies a delightful irony. Although he’s oblivious to the nature of post-crisis capitalism, Leslie claims that the centre ground “is grounded in the real world as it is today” and is “focusing on 21st century challenges – not 20th century nostalgia.” One of the “core values” of centrism, he says, is “evidence not ideology.”
The cognitive dissonance here is astounding.
What does this tell us? It might be corroboration of Karl Pahlman’s point, that politicians who claim to be evidence-based in fact have a “hierarchy of knowledge” and evidence that capitalism is dysfunctional comes well down this hierarchy. He writes (pdf):
I suspect, though, that there’s something else. Leslie is playing a common self-serving trick among centrists – of pretending that they are moderate, rational and evidence-based whilst their opponents (on both sides) are unreasonable ideologues. As Leslie says, centrists are “choosing an evidence-based rather than ideologically-driven approach to the world.”
This, of course, is a fiction. What you believe and how you believe it are two different things. As I’ve said, extremism and fanaticism are distinct: you can be a fanatical centrist and (albeit less commonly I fear) a reasonable, sceptical extremist. Centrism is an ideology just like any other. Perhaps if centrists were to realize this they might acquire the self-awareness that is a necessary starting point for engaging intelligently with both Corbynism and capitalism.
The Labour right seem to think the financial crisis is irrelevant. This is the inference we might draw from Chris Leslie’s pamphlet, Centre Ground (pdf).
Pretty much the only reference he makes to the crisis is the claim that it “fuelled cynicism about government and politicians”. Nowhere does he even acknowledge the possibility that the crisis might undermine New Labour’s thinking about the relationship between the state and capitalism. The crisis – and the subsequent decade-long stagnation in real wages and productivity – shows for me that a stable policy framework is not sufficient for economic stability or growth; that economic growth might need greater state intervention than New Labour offered; that severe recessions can originate not merely from bad economic policy or macroeconomic shocks but from the failure (pdf) of key firms; and that the vast incomes and power of a tiny minority are not benign. In other words, social democrats need to rethink. The great virtue of Corbyn and McDonnell is that they see this.
Leslie, however, does not. Instead, he seems stuck in a 1990s mindset. This, for example, could have been said by Tony Blair in 1997:
It is the precipitous rate of technological development and globalisation that have churned the nature of employment and production, from what were rates of transformation that once occurred inter-generationally to now intra-generational change.
But this doesn’t seem to be true. Job-to-job flows are lower than they were before the crisis, suggesting that there’s less churn than there used to be. And of course stagnant productivity suggests the rate of technological development is much less than precipitous. The challenge for policy-makers is not to deal with the fall-out from economic dynamism, but to restart that dynamism.
This blindspot to the changed nature of capitalism is not an idiosyncrasy of Leslie’s. Only a few weeks ago Ian Austin complained that Corbyn has taken Labour out of the mainstream without even mentioning the crisis, and without even considering the possibility that a changed capitalism requires a changed Labour party.
Herein, though, lies a delightful irony. Although he’s oblivious to the nature of post-crisis capitalism, Leslie claims that the centre ground “is grounded in the real world as it is today” and is “focusing on 21st century challenges – not 20th century nostalgia.” One of the “core values” of centrism, he says, is “evidence not ideology.”
The cognitive dissonance here is astounding.
What does this tell us? It might be corroboration of Karl Pahlman’s point, that politicians who claim to be evidence-based in fact have a “hierarchy of knowledge” and evidence that capitalism is dysfunctional comes well down this hierarchy. He writes (pdf):
Not all evidence in the policy process is equal…The types of evidence that are used and valued in the process represent important power dynamics in policymaking…Often, they support the dominant and prevailing ways of thinking about the world, rarely challenging the distribution of power.
I suspect, though, that there’s something else. Leslie is playing a common self-serving trick among centrists – of pretending that they are moderate, rational and evidence-based whilst their opponents (on both sides) are unreasonable ideologues. As Leslie says, centrists are “choosing an evidence-based rather than ideologically-driven approach to the world.”
This, of course, is a fiction. What you believe and how you believe it are two different things. As I’ve said, extremism and fanaticism are distinct: you can be a fanatical centrist and (albeit less commonly I fear) a reasonable, sceptical extremist. Centrism is an ideology just like any other. Perhaps if centrists were to realize this they might acquire the self-awareness that is a necessary starting point for engaging intelligently with both Corbynism and capitalism.
dholliday
deconstructed rep
Good article which I suppose belongs best in the middle thread:
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Why identity politics benefits the right more than the left
Over a year into Donald Trump’s presidency, commentators are still trying to understand the election and the explosion of intolerance following it. One common view is that Trump’s victory was a consequence of pervasive racism in American society.
Studies make clear, however, that racism has been decreasing over time, among Republicans and Democrats. (Views of immigration have also grown more favorable.) Moreover, since racism is deep-seated and longstanding, reference to it alone makes it difficult to understand the election of Barack Obama and Trump, the differences between Trump and the two previous Republican nominees on race and immigration, and the dramatic breakdown of social norms and civility following the elections. (Social scientists call this the “constant can’t explain a variable” problem.)
This does not mean racism is irrelevant; it matters, but social science suggests it does in more complicated ways than much commentary suggests.
Perhaps because straightforward bigotry has declined precipitously while more subtle, complex resentments remain, understanding how intolerance shapes politics requires examining not just beliefs, but also the relationship between beliefs and the environments people find themselves in. This distinction has important implications for how we interpret and address contemporary social and political problems.
Rather than being directly translated into behavior, psychologists tell us beliefs can remain latent until “triggered”. In a fascinating study, Karen Stenner shows in The Authoritarian Dynamic that while some individuals have “predispositions” towards intolerance, these predispositions require an external stimulus to be transformed into actions. Or, as another scholar puts it: “It’s as though some people have a button on their foreheads, and when the button is pushed, they suddenly become intensely focused on defending their in-group … But when they perceive no such threat, their behavior is not unusually intolerant. So the key is to understand what pushes that button.”
What pushes that button, Stenner and others find, is group-based threats. In experiments researchers easily shift individuals from indifference, even modest tolerance, to aggressive defenses of their own group by exposing them to such threats. Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson, for example, found that simply making white Americans aware that they would soon be a minority increased their propensity to favor their own group and become wary of those outside it. (Similar effects were found among Canadians. Indeed, although this tendency is most dangerous among whites since they are the most powerful group in western societies, researchers have consistently found such propensities in all groups.)
Building on such research, Diana Mutz recently argued that Trump’s stress on themes like growing immigration, the power of minorities and the rise of China highlighted status threats and fears particularly among whites without a college education, prompting a “defensive reaction” that was the most important factor in his election. This “defensive reaction” also explains why Trump’s post-election racist, xenophobic and sexist statements and reversal of traditional Republican positions on trade and other issues have helped him – they keep threats to whites front and center, provoking anger, fear and a strong desire to protect their own group.
Understanding why Trump found it easy to trigger these reactions requires examining broader changes in American society. In an excellent new book, Uncivil Agreement, Lilliana Mason analyzes perhaps the most important of these: a decades-long process of “social sorting”. Mason notes that although racial and religious animosity has been present throughout American history, only recently has it lined up neatly along partisan lines. In the past, the Republican and Democratic parties attracted supporters with different racial, religious, ideological and regional identities, but gradually Republicans became the party of white, evangelical, conservative and rural voters, while the Democrats became associated with non-whites, non-evangelical, liberal and metropolitan voters.
This lining up of identities dramatically changes electoral stakes: previously if your party lost, other parts of your identity were not threatened, but today losing is also a blow to your racial, religious, regional and ideological identity. (Mason cites a study showing that in the week following Obama’s 2012 election, Republicans felt sadder than American parents after the Newtown school shooting or Bostonians after the Boston Marathon bombing.) This social sorting has led partisans of both parties to engage in negative stereotyping and even demonization. (One study found less support for “out-group” marriage among partisan Republicans and Democrats than for interracial marriage among Americans overall.)
Once the other party becomes an enemy rather than an opponent, winning becomes more important than the common good and compromise becomes an anathema. Such situations also promote emotional rather than rational evaluations of policies and evidence. Making matters worse, social scientists consistently find that the most committed partisans, those who are the angriest and have the most negative feelings towards out-groups, are the most politically engaged.
What does all this mean for those who oppose Trump and want to fight the dangerous trends his presidency has unleashed?
The short-term goal must be winning elections, and this means not helping Trump rile up his base by activating their sense of “threat” and inflaming the grievances and anger that lead them to rally around him. This will require avoiding the type of “identity politics” that stresses differences and creates a sense of “zero-sum” competition between groups and instead emphasizing common values and interests.
Stenner, for example, notes that “all the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference … are the surest ways to aggravate [the] intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness … Nothing inspires greater tolerance from the intolerant than an abundance of common and unifying beliefs, practices, rituals, institutions and processes.”
Relatedly, research suggests that calling people racist when they do not see themselves that way is counterproductive. As noted above, while there surely are true bigots, studies show that not all those who exhibit intolerant behavior harbor extreme racial animus. Moreover, as Stanford psychologist Alana Conner notes, if the goal is to diminish intolerance “telling people they’re racist, sexist and xenophobic is going to get you exactly nowhere. It’s such a threatening message. One of the things we know from social psychology is when people feel threatened, they can’t change, they can’t listen.”
This has obvious implications for recent debates about civility. Incivility is central to Trump’s strategy – it helps him galvanize his supporters by reminding them how “bad” and “threatening” the other side is. Since this has become such a hot-button topic on the left, it is worth being clear what incivility is. There is no definition of democracy that does not accept peaceful protest and other forms of vociferous political engagement. Incivility is about form – not substance; it is consistently defined by scholars as including invective, ridicule, emotionality, histrionics and other forms of personal attacks or norm-defying behavior. By engaging in even superficially similar tactics, Democrats abet Trump’s ability to do this – as one Trump supporter put it, every time Democrats attack him “it makes me angry, which causes me to want to defend him more” – potentially alienate wavering Republican-leaning independents, and help divert debate from policies, corruption and other substantive issues.
Of course, there is a double standard here and this, along with the psychic release that comes with venting the anger and grievances that have been building over the past year, are the rationales given by the left for incivility. But against these must be weighed incivility’s impact on upcoming elections as well as the overall health of democracy. (Scholars consistently find that incivility spreads rapidly, generates anger and defensive reactions, demobilizes moderates and activates the strongest partisans, corrodes faith in government, trust in institutions and respect for our fellow citizens.)
Over the long term of course the goal is repairing democracy and diminishing intolerance and for this promoting cross-cutting cleavages within civil society and political organizations is absolutely necessary. (Here, recent debates about ideological diversity and the new grassroots activism within the Democratic party is relevant.) Scholars have long recognized the necessity of cross-cutting cleavages to healthy democracy. In his classic study, the Social Requisites of Democracy, Seymour Martin Lipset, for example, noted that “the available evidence suggests that the chances for stable democracy are enhanced to the extent that groups and individuals have a number of cross-cutting, politically relevant affiliations”.
More specifically, research has linked cross-cutting cleavages with toleration, moderation and conflict prevention. This too has implications for contemporary debates about “identity politics”. Perhaps ironically, identity politics is a both more powerful and efficacious for Republicans (and rightwing populists more generally) than it is for Democrats, since the former are more homogeneous.
As long, therefore, as politics is a fight between clearly bounded identity groups, appeals and threats to group identity will benefit Republicans more than Democrats, which is presumably why Steve Bannon infamously remarked that he couldn’t “get enough” of the left’s “race-identity politics”. “The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em ... I want them to talk about race and identity … every day.”
In addition, Americans are more divided socially than they are on the issues; there is significant agreement even on controversial topics like abortion, gun control, immigration and economic policy. Promoting cross-cutting cleavages and diminishing social divisions might therefore help productive policymaking actually occur.
Is our ultimate goal ensuring the compatibility of diversity and democracy? Then promoting the overlapping interests and identifications that enable citizens to become more comfortable with difference and thus more tolerant and trusting, is absolutely necessary.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why identity politics benefits the right more than the left
Over a year into Donald Trump’s presidency, commentators are still trying to understand the election and the explosion of intolerance following it. One common view is that Trump’s victory was a consequence of pervasive racism in American society.
Studies make clear, however, that racism has been decreasing over time, among Republicans and Democrats. (Views of immigration have also grown more favorable.) Moreover, since racism is deep-seated and longstanding, reference to it alone makes it difficult to understand the election of Barack Obama and Trump, the differences between Trump and the two previous Republican nominees on race and immigration, and the dramatic breakdown of social norms and civility following the elections. (Social scientists call this the “constant can’t explain a variable” problem.)
This does not mean racism is irrelevant; it matters, but social science suggests it does in more complicated ways than much commentary suggests.
Perhaps because straightforward bigotry has declined precipitously while more subtle, complex resentments remain, understanding how intolerance shapes politics requires examining not just beliefs, but also the relationship between beliefs and the environments people find themselves in. This distinction has important implications for how we interpret and address contemporary social and political problems.
Rather than being directly translated into behavior, psychologists tell us beliefs can remain latent until “triggered”. In a fascinating study, Karen Stenner shows in The Authoritarian Dynamic that while some individuals have “predispositions” towards intolerance, these predispositions require an external stimulus to be transformed into actions. Or, as another scholar puts it: “It’s as though some people have a button on their foreheads, and when the button is pushed, they suddenly become intensely focused on defending their in-group … But when they perceive no such threat, their behavior is not unusually intolerant. So the key is to understand what pushes that button.”
What pushes that button, Stenner and others find, is group-based threats. In experiments researchers easily shift individuals from indifference, even modest tolerance, to aggressive defenses of their own group by exposing them to such threats. Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson, for example, found that simply making white Americans aware that they would soon be a minority increased their propensity to favor their own group and become wary of those outside it. (Similar effects were found among Canadians. Indeed, although this tendency is most dangerous among whites since they are the most powerful group in western societies, researchers have consistently found such propensities in all groups.)
Building on such research, Diana Mutz recently argued that Trump’s stress on themes like growing immigration, the power of minorities and the rise of China highlighted status threats and fears particularly among whites without a college education, prompting a “defensive reaction” that was the most important factor in his election. This “defensive reaction” also explains why Trump’s post-election racist, xenophobic and sexist statements and reversal of traditional Republican positions on trade and other issues have helped him – they keep threats to whites front and center, provoking anger, fear and a strong desire to protect their own group.
Understanding why Trump found it easy to trigger these reactions requires examining broader changes in American society. In an excellent new book, Uncivil Agreement, Lilliana Mason analyzes perhaps the most important of these: a decades-long process of “social sorting”. Mason notes that although racial and religious animosity has been present throughout American history, only recently has it lined up neatly along partisan lines. In the past, the Republican and Democratic parties attracted supporters with different racial, religious, ideological and regional identities, but gradually Republicans became the party of white, evangelical, conservative and rural voters, while the Democrats became associated with non-whites, non-evangelical, liberal and metropolitan voters.
This lining up of identities dramatically changes electoral stakes: previously if your party lost, other parts of your identity were not threatened, but today losing is also a blow to your racial, religious, regional and ideological identity. (Mason cites a study showing that in the week following Obama’s 2012 election, Republicans felt sadder than American parents after the Newtown school shooting or Bostonians after the Boston Marathon bombing.) This social sorting has led partisans of both parties to engage in negative stereotyping and even demonization. (One study found less support for “out-group” marriage among partisan Republicans and Democrats than for interracial marriage among Americans overall.)
Once the other party becomes an enemy rather than an opponent, winning becomes more important than the common good and compromise becomes an anathema. Such situations also promote emotional rather than rational evaluations of policies and evidence. Making matters worse, social scientists consistently find that the most committed partisans, those who are the angriest and have the most negative feelings towards out-groups, are the most politically engaged.
What does all this mean for those who oppose Trump and want to fight the dangerous trends his presidency has unleashed?
The short-term goal must be winning elections, and this means not helping Trump rile up his base by activating their sense of “threat” and inflaming the grievances and anger that lead them to rally around him. This will require avoiding the type of “identity politics” that stresses differences and creates a sense of “zero-sum” competition between groups and instead emphasizing common values and interests.
Stenner, for example, notes that “all the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference … are the surest ways to aggravate [the] intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness … Nothing inspires greater tolerance from the intolerant than an abundance of common and unifying beliefs, practices, rituals, institutions and processes.”
Relatedly, research suggests that calling people racist when they do not see themselves that way is counterproductive. As noted above, while there surely are true bigots, studies show that not all those who exhibit intolerant behavior harbor extreme racial animus. Moreover, as Stanford psychologist Alana Conner notes, if the goal is to diminish intolerance “telling people they’re racist, sexist and xenophobic is going to get you exactly nowhere. It’s such a threatening message. One of the things we know from social psychology is when people feel threatened, they can’t change, they can’t listen.”
This has obvious implications for recent debates about civility. Incivility is central to Trump’s strategy – it helps him galvanize his supporters by reminding them how “bad” and “threatening” the other side is. Since this has become such a hot-button topic on the left, it is worth being clear what incivility is. There is no definition of democracy that does not accept peaceful protest and other forms of vociferous political engagement. Incivility is about form – not substance; it is consistently defined by scholars as including invective, ridicule, emotionality, histrionics and other forms of personal attacks or norm-defying behavior. By engaging in even superficially similar tactics, Democrats abet Trump’s ability to do this – as one Trump supporter put it, every time Democrats attack him “it makes me angry, which causes me to want to defend him more” – potentially alienate wavering Republican-leaning independents, and help divert debate from policies, corruption and other substantive issues.
Of course, there is a double standard here and this, along with the psychic release that comes with venting the anger and grievances that have been building over the past year, are the rationales given by the left for incivility. But against these must be weighed incivility’s impact on upcoming elections as well as the overall health of democracy. (Scholars consistently find that incivility spreads rapidly, generates anger and defensive reactions, demobilizes moderates and activates the strongest partisans, corrodes faith in government, trust in institutions and respect for our fellow citizens.)
Over the long term of course the goal is repairing democracy and diminishing intolerance and for this promoting cross-cutting cleavages within civil society and political organizations is absolutely necessary. (Here, recent debates about ideological diversity and the new grassroots activism within the Democratic party is relevant.) Scholars have long recognized the necessity of cross-cutting cleavages to healthy democracy. In his classic study, the Social Requisites of Democracy, Seymour Martin Lipset, for example, noted that “the available evidence suggests that the chances for stable democracy are enhanced to the extent that groups and individuals have a number of cross-cutting, politically relevant affiliations”.
More specifically, research has linked cross-cutting cleavages with toleration, moderation and conflict prevention. This too has implications for contemporary debates about “identity politics”. Perhaps ironically, identity politics is a both more powerful and efficacious for Republicans (and rightwing populists more generally) than it is for Democrats, since the former are more homogeneous.
As long, therefore, as politics is a fight between clearly bounded identity groups, appeals and threats to group identity will benefit Republicans more than Democrats, which is presumably why Steve Bannon infamously remarked that he couldn’t “get enough” of the left’s “race-identity politics”. “The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em ... I want them to talk about race and identity … every day.”
In addition, Americans are more divided socially than they are on the issues; there is significant agreement even on controversial topics like abortion, gun control, immigration and economic policy. Promoting cross-cutting cleavages and diminishing social divisions might therefore help productive policymaking actually occur.
Is our ultimate goal ensuring the compatibility of diversity and democracy? Then promoting the overlapping interests and identifications that enable citizens to become more comfortable with difference and thus more tolerant and trusting, is absolutely necessary.
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