Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) now stands for Division, Exclusion, and Inequity.
Affirmative action, and there is nothing even remotely affirming about it, is divisive, pitting one race against another in their fight to compete for a finite number of places at college,, inclusion has become exclusion with white and asian males deliberately kept out, and the college mismatch, dropouts, and changing majors (the usual results of bad AA policies) have led to more inequity than before.
(2) Beginnings of doubt, and the first faint stirring of misgiving
(3) Growing disenchantment, yet a loyalty to the cause coupled with ego prevents any public articulation, but the person starts to self-question
(4 Increasing anger, usually triggered by a personal circumstance, with the person feeling more emboldened to speak out (Many students and increasing numbers of faculty are in stages 3 and 4).
(5) ) Utter Disillusionment with all scales dropping in freefall, and the Truth emerges. The person then goes and votes for the other party. Quietly.
This substack is, unfortunately, another demonstration of intellectually lazy socio-political commentary. To wit, Ms. Barr has a long history of racist comments and diatribes. If there were just one, or two, or three perhaps your line of argument would hold water. However, her tweet about Jarret was just one of the latest. Please open your eyes, gents. Need to look at patterns of activity over time. Same applies to so many demonstrably nefarious folks being promoted as 'paragons of free speech' . Frankly, it's tiring. And it invites more irrational ponderings and speculations (like the drivel Steve P tapped out in this comment thread). And this reminds of Mr. Loury's pointing to sentiments that are, allegedly, widespread caters to the problematic criterion of social proof - a criterion more problematic now then ever, in this age of social media. Ideas, simply by dint of their being publicized, does not make them good ideas. To the contrary, we have more nonsense running hand in hand with sensible ideas then ever before. And this should remind us that, while one of the best things about the Web is that ANYBODY can contribute, one of the worse things about the web is, indeed, that ANYBODY can contribute.
I like the Duke and Dauphin from Huck Finn as opposed to Emperor’s New Clothes because it accounts for the possibility that some people will buy the con. Huck knows the Duke and Dauphin are liars cut from the same cloth as Tom Sawyer, but Jim is just hearing more of the same kind of lies he heard throughout his life as a slave, at least Huck assumes this, and they don’t have the conversation until long after the Duke and Dauphin are gone. Duke and Dauphin is a variation on New Clothes by way of the Royal Nonesuch. In this case, someone who claims to be a king, tells everyone there’s a high tragedy, and it’s really just him naked and painted. Everyone falls for it, no one wants to admit they fall for it, so the next night everyone who didn’t see the show falls for it all over again. You don’t know it’s a con, until you know it’s a con, and the mixture of rage and shame keeps the quiet. That is until it’s time to lead the Duke and Dauphin out on a rail. The Elect will be lead out on a rail someday, you can count on that like you can count on rain, a con can’t sell forever.
I think everything would work out alot better and everyone would be alot happier if we did not have a multicultural society and we had a raciallly and ethnically homogeneous society. This has been the case throughout all of history and we should end this multicultural experiment the sooner the better as it has been an abject failure.
The weird thing is that there are lots of these ideas on the left as well as the right. The communism issue like they say here is still something that people will remain silent about even if they agree on any Marxist point of view. But, there is the whole women rights issue. Women who have been raped continue to remain silent on the issue. The poor will always feel embarrassed to ask for help. Exploited workers continue to remain silent out of fear of losing employment even when they are not being paid a fair wage.
Just remember, if someone at work says that a black woman invented the airplane, then don't argue about it, no matter how much valid evidence you have to the contrary. It's just not worth losing your job over and being placed on a no-hire list.
Where's Loopy's regular partner McWhore? Probably off fellating a white gentleman. Fridman should have stuck to AI. Now he's just another clown who propping up people like Loopy who are paid to peddle anti-Blackness. You'll never see on this podcast someone white who makes a career out of being anti-white. Same for an anti-russian russian. He's a joke.
Word on the street is you're requiring your students to read 'Persecution and the Art of Writing' (a good book no doubt but not his best), so you know the deal. The big ideas people, not the Kendis or the Hannah-Joneses, or even the McWhorters, but the Strausses, Barfields, and, perhaps on his best days, even the Lourys of this world are not going to come out and tell you what they really think about the Emperor, or his nakedness, but will conceal their actual views in ways that only intelligent readers will discern. No politician who has studied political philosophy, and who understands the essential difference between Aristotle and Machiavelli, can be foolish enough to grant to the masses that one needful but sorely lacking trait, civic virtue. And so the sheep will always need a shepherd...let's hope they pick the good one, the one that laid down his life for the sheep.
When you discussed the “spiral of silence” I could not help but think of Professor Timur Kuran’s work on Preference Falsification in this book Private Truths, Public Lies.
You may have come across this already, but if not I would highly encourage you, and any other listeners/readers that are interested in the topic, to read his work for an in-depth / analytical underpinning of the theory and for case studies and implications of such a phenomenon.
There is a kind of silent equilibrium that the left is exploiting.
Societies have to find a balance between truth and politeness. Thats a big part of what makes us civilized. We all internally profile strangers based on a hundred different (mainly) visual cues. Race is one of those cues along with age, sex, attractiveness, hygiene, class, and on and on. For example, Attractiveness and intelligence are negatively correlated in the uncontrolled inner workings of my brain. I didn’t choose this, it just is, and I am often proven wrong. I am white and grew up playing sports in a racially diverse area. My gut reaction to black skin is to assume they are more athletic than a similarly built white person. This is of course not always true, but I can’t deny I have the thought. If I was a cop would this gut assumption make me more fearful in a physical altercation? Maybe. I am ashamed to say I have a distrust of the very poor in an encounter on the street, but I also have a strong distrust of the wealthy when it comes to business dealings. These reactions can veer even further into the irrational. I might have a negative gut reaction to someone because they remind me of an old girlfriend that I can’t stand. Every single human does this. It is not a rational, well thought out profile, it is a snap-judgement and is entirely out of our immediate control.
So what we do for social cohesion is agree on an unspoken and unwritten contract of politeness and effort. We all pretend like we don’t know that we are all internally profiling each other. We can’t know the exact nature of others thoughts so we agree to judge each other by how well we moderate them, which is to say, we agree to judge each other by our words and actions. Then we make an effort to dilute these unwanted gut reactions by meeting more people. But there is a flaw to be exploited with this agreement. Everyone knows that everyone else is racist, but we don’t know how racist. Maybe race has become far less important over the last 60 years or maybe white people have just become better at hiding it. What the left does is shine a light on this fact, but only in regards to white people. So white people who are not openly racist are surely quietly racist, which is true to some extent. As evidence they point to the open racism of past white people. So instead of “wow, look how much less racist white people have become” its “wow, look at how much better at hiding their racism white people have become.”
The left has voided half of the politeness contract. So now, if you’re white, you must still be polite and give effort, but while you’re being polite you must also apologize for the inner racist thoughts we all know you’re having. Or if you are gong to speak on race at all you must first rattle off a list of qualifiers and admissions of guilt. The scary part is that once you tear up the politeness contract, millions of white people start to wonder why they continue trying, when they are getting none of the benefits of politeness and effort. It’s a no win situation.
I’ve mentioned a mentor somewhere, Michael Carriger. Professor at Johnson County Community College. He has a story much more interesting than any womens talk. It’s all about not being allowed to teach a certain book, and an AP department walking out of a job. He’d be good to have on the show.
Glenn’s concern for the “Spiral of Silence” that functions like a social panopticon cause conservative self censorship and how the disingenuous use of bigotry is feeding the radicalization of the right. I actually agree with that. BUT I also feel that those black inner city Americans who were rioting where also victims of the “Spiral of Silence” as their grievances went unheard and seeing a police officer acquitted for killing unarmed black people set a terrible precedent. Instead this was seen as a failure of their culture and a lack of personal responsibility. Glenn’s bottom up concept of if everyone just fall in line a just act right all will be fine. I feel this conversation lacked an analysis of the systems and institutions that in my opinion have major impacts on societal outcomes. I feel economics often mistakes the map for the territory and often delivers unfavorable outcomes when implemented in the real world. The personal responsibility approach to addressing social issues is putting the cart in front of the horse if we do not address the system/institutional aspects first.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) now stands for Division, Exclusion, and Inequity.
Affirmative action, and there is nothing even remotely affirming about it, is divisive, pitting one race against another in their fight to compete for a finite number of places at college,, inclusion has become exclusion with white and asian males deliberately kept out, and the college mismatch, dropouts, and changing majors (the usual results of bad AA policies) have led to more inequity than before.
The 5 stages of enlightenment:
(1) Implicitly believing the garbage
(2) Beginnings of doubt, and the first faint stirring of misgiving
(3) Growing disenchantment, yet a loyalty to the cause coupled with ego prevents any public articulation, but the person starts to self-question
(4 Increasing anger, usually triggered by a personal circumstance, with the person feeling more emboldened to speak out (Many students and increasing numbers of faculty are in stages 3 and 4).
(5) ) Utter Disillusionment with all scales dropping in freefall, and the Truth emerges. The person then goes and votes for the other party. Quietly.
This substack is, unfortunately, another demonstration of intellectually lazy socio-political commentary. To wit, Ms. Barr has a long history of racist comments and diatribes. If there were just one, or two, or three perhaps your line of argument would hold water. However, her tweet about Jarret was just one of the latest. Please open your eyes, gents. Need to look at patterns of activity over time. Same applies to so many demonstrably nefarious folks being promoted as 'paragons of free speech' . Frankly, it's tiring. And it invites more irrational ponderings and speculations (like the drivel Steve P tapped out in this comment thread). And this reminds of Mr. Loury's pointing to sentiments that are, allegedly, widespread caters to the problematic criterion of social proof - a criterion more problematic now then ever, in this age of social media. Ideas, simply by dint of their being publicized, does not make them good ideas. To the contrary, we have more nonsense running hand in hand with sensible ideas then ever before. And this should remind us that, while one of the best things about the Web is that ANYBODY can contribute, one of the worse things about the web is, indeed, that ANYBODY can contribute.
I like the Duke and Dauphin from Huck Finn as opposed to Emperor’s New Clothes because it accounts for the possibility that some people will buy the con. Huck knows the Duke and Dauphin are liars cut from the same cloth as Tom Sawyer, but Jim is just hearing more of the same kind of lies he heard throughout his life as a slave, at least Huck assumes this, and they don’t have the conversation until long after the Duke and Dauphin are gone. Duke and Dauphin is a variation on New Clothes by way of the Royal Nonesuch. In this case, someone who claims to be a king, tells everyone there’s a high tragedy, and it’s really just him naked and painted. Everyone falls for it, no one wants to admit they fall for it, so the next night everyone who didn’t see the show falls for it all over again. You don’t know it’s a con, until you know it’s a con, and the mixture of rage and shame keeps the quiet. That is until it’s time to lead the Duke and Dauphin out on a rail. The Elect will be lead out on a rail someday, you can count on that like you can count on rain, a con can’t sell forever.
I think everything would work out alot better and everyone would be alot happier if we did not have a multicultural society and we had a raciallly and ethnically homogeneous society. This has been the case throughout all of history and we should end this multicultural experiment the sooner the better as it has been an abject failure.
The weird thing is that there are lots of these ideas on the left as well as the right. The communism issue like they say here is still something that people will remain silent about even if they agree on any Marxist point of view. But, there is the whole women rights issue. Women who have been raped continue to remain silent on the issue. The poor will always feel embarrassed to ask for help. Exploited workers continue to remain silent out of fear of losing employment even when they are not being paid a fair wage.
Democrats are simply morally depraved animals. Help stamp out the sick, perverted, America hating cult:
VOTE OUT ALL DEMOCRATS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Just remember, if someone at work says that a black woman invented the airplane, then don't argue about it, no matter how much valid evidence you have to the contrary. It's just not worth losing your job over and being placed on a no-hire list.
Where's Loopy's regular partner McWhore? Probably off fellating a white gentleman. Fridman should have stuck to AI. Now he's just another clown who propping up people like Loopy who are paid to peddle anti-Blackness. You'll never see on this podcast someone white who makes a career out of being anti-white. Same for an anti-russian russian. He's a joke.
Word on the street is you're requiring your students to read 'Persecution and the Art of Writing' (a good book no doubt but not his best), so you know the deal. The big ideas people, not the Kendis or the Hannah-Joneses, or even the McWhorters, but the Strausses, Barfields, and, perhaps on his best days, even the Lourys of this world are not going to come out and tell you what they really think about the Emperor, or his nakedness, but will conceal their actual views in ways that only intelligent readers will discern. No politician who has studied political philosophy, and who understands the essential difference between Aristotle and Machiavelli, can be foolish enough to grant to the masses that one needful but sorely lacking trait, civic virtue. And so the sheep will always need a shepherd...let's hope they pick the good one, the one that laid down his life for the sheep.
Professor Loury,
When you discussed the “spiral of silence” I could not help but think of Professor Timur Kuran’s work on Preference Falsification in this book Private Truths, Public Lies.
You may have come across this already, but if not I would highly encourage you, and any other listeners/readers that are interested in the topic, to read his work for an in-depth / analytical underpinning of the theory and for case studies and implications of such a phenomenon.
There is a kind of silent equilibrium that the left is exploiting.
Societies have to find a balance between truth and politeness. Thats a big part of what makes us civilized. We all internally profile strangers based on a hundred different (mainly) visual cues. Race is one of those cues along with age, sex, attractiveness, hygiene, class, and on and on. For example, Attractiveness and intelligence are negatively correlated in the uncontrolled inner workings of my brain. I didn’t choose this, it just is, and I am often proven wrong. I am white and grew up playing sports in a racially diverse area. My gut reaction to black skin is to assume they are more athletic than a similarly built white person. This is of course not always true, but I can’t deny I have the thought. If I was a cop would this gut assumption make me more fearful in a physical altercation? Maybe. I am ashamed to say I have a distrust of the very poor in an encounter on the street, but I also have a strong distrust of the wealthy when it comes to business dealings. These reactions can veer even further into the irrational. I might have a negative gut reaction to someone because they remind me of an old girlfriend that I can’t stand. Every single human does this. It is not a rational, well thought out profile, it is a snap-judgement and is entirely out of our immediate control.
So what we do for social cohesion is agree on an unspoken and unwritten contract of politeness and effort. We all pretend like we don’t know that we are all internally profiling each other. We can’t know the exact nature of others thoughts so we agree to judge each other by how well we moderate them, which is to say, we agree to judge each other by our words and actions. Then we make an effort to dilute these unwanted gut reactions by meeting more people. But there is a flaw to be exploited with this agreement. Everyone knows that everyone else is racist, but we don’t know how racist. Maybe race has become far less important over the last 60 years or maybe white people have just become better at hiding it. What the left does is shine a light on this fact, but only in regards to white people. So white people who are not openly racist are surely quietly racist, which is true to some extent. As evidence they point to the open racism of past white people. So instead of “wow, look how much less racist white people have become” its “wow, look at how much better at hiding their racism white people have become.”
The left has voided half of the politeness contract. So now, if you’re white, you must still be polite and give effort, but while you’re being polite you must also apologize for the inner racist thoughts we all know you’re having. Or if you are gong to speak on race at all you must first rattle off a list of qualifiers and admissions of guilt. The scary part is that once you tear up the politeness contract, millions of white people start to wonder why they continue trying, when they are getting none of the benefits of politeness and effort. It’s a no win situation.
I’ve mentioned a mentor somewhere, Michael Carriger. Professor at Johnson County Community College. He has a story much more interesting than any womens talk. It’s all about not being allowed to teach a certain book, and an AP department walking out of a job. He’d be good to have on the show.
I have listened to a lot of Lex's interviews, and a LOT of Glenn, and I have to say this may be the best I've heard from both of them.
You two really clicked.
I hope this is not the only time you guys get together!
Mr. Loury’s essay can sensibly be taken as a gift to those who believe in MLK’s dream.
Glenn’s concern for the “Spiral of Silence” that functions like a social panopticon cause conservative self censorship and how the disingenuous use of bigotry is feeding the radicalization of the right. I actually agree with that. BUT I also feel that those black inner city Americans who were rioting where also victims of the “Spiral of Silence” as their grievances went unheard and seeing a police officer acquitted for killing unarmed black people set a terrible precedent. Instead this was seen as a failure of their culture and a lack of personal responsibility. Glenn’s bottom up concept of if everyone just fall in line a just act right all will be fine. I feel this conversation lacked an analysis of the systems and institutions that in my opinion have major impacts on societal outcomes. I feel economics often mistakes the map for the territory and often delivers unfavorable outcomes when implemented in the real world. The personal responsibility approach to addressing social issues is putting the cart in front of the horse if we do not address the system/institutional aspects first.