False that anyone feels that way? That is false. I am a liberal elitist type with liberal elitist tastes. Therefore I read articles and subscribe to podcasts dedicated to stuff like indie/foreign films, “premium” TV (The Leftovers, Fargo, etc.), local/organic cuisine, and so on. I also follow such tastemakers on Twitter. And I promise you, 100%, they throw around “white guy” as a standard epithet. If a show or movie stars an angst-ridden straight white man, much shade is thrown. (See some of the silly histrionics going around about Baby Driver for a perfect recent example.) Heaven forfend the U.S. military ever be portrayed positively. And I mean even with Obama as Commander in Chief. Slate’s Culture Gabfest, for instance, had a very hard time with the fact that a movie about a crisis early in Obama’s presidency did not treat the Somali pirates, rather than the Navy SEALs who shot them, as the good guys!
It’s so galling. I stick with that crowd because I have no interest in watching NCIS or American Sniper, or trying to take away people’s healthcare for that matter. But the reflexive anti-Americanism (again: predating Trump, who deserves every possible “anti” there is) drives me nuts sometimes.
Sure, if you are content to hang out in mainstream or right wing spaces. If like me you feel most comfortable in educated liberal spaces, you’re expected to wear a hairshirt and constantly denounce everything about your identity, or you will be castigated and shunned from that community. But then I don’t want to go hang with the rednecks, the libertarians, the MRAs, the dudebros, or the boring mainstream guys. So it does feel like being under attack, from the “cool kids” whose opinion counts.
What incredible nonsense. This sounds like the fantasies inside the minds of right-wing radio hosts. Real world liberals don’t act like this. No liberal has ever pressured me to “denounce everything about my identity”.
Fine, not everything. One is probably enough. Occasionally lament either your white, male, or straight privilege and you should be fine. Denouncing U.S. foreign policy (even under Democratic administrations) can’t hurt either. Unless you commit an unforgivable sin, like arguing with a progressive POC about race, with a female feminist about women’s issues, or with a GLBTQ person about, well, GLBTQ issues. In such a case, there is no saving you. Same if you criticize BLM, college suppression of free speech, or Muslim oppression of women, gays, or freethinkers. Abandon all hope, ye who enter there. The crowd I’m talking about has nothing but contempt and outrage for traditional straight white male liberals like Jonathan Chait (a favorite of mine).
(And I can prove the examples I gave upthread, like the Slate deal.)
The crowd you’re talking about sound like maybe a tiny fraction of one percent of all liberals. Why worry about such a tiny group? I’ve committed all the supposed sins you’ve listed here, and I’m doing just fine with the liberals I interact with. So is Chait, by the way.
I don’t know what percentage they are IRL, but in the most visible and influential online spaces, they are legion. From a Gawker piece with the headline “Punch-Drunk Jonathan Chait Takes On the Entire Internet”:
As do I.
Sure, Jon Chait still has a job, and likely always will. But I’m not sure another generation of writers like him are in the journalism pipeline, or would get prominent platforms if they were. So the prescriptive/proscriptive voices I’m talking about serve to undercut people like Chait now, and–more ominously–to phase them out as a significant part of the conversation in the future. Not good.
Sounds like sky is falling crap. So Chait got criticized. So what? Why is that so awful? It’s good that there’s lots of diversity of opinion on the left. It’s good that liberals are comfortable criticizing other liberals. I see absolutely no reason to believe that center left writers are in any danger of losing their voices.
I think Harris made a huge mistake in publishing that exchange. It confirms to me something I’d already suspected – Harris’s ego has grown to the point that he can’t reasonably evaluate criticism. He took personally criticisms that were about various points Murray had made, and refused to engage on the facts. He repeated bad science like trying to rebut Klein’s point about the Flynn effect with a point about black income and IQ, which is totally irrelevant – if society still doesn’t treat black people, including wealthy black people, equally, then test scores don’t tell us anything about genetics.
I think Klein makes a very strong argument – Murray’s arguments are largely based on poor science, and Harris failed to challenge him on his bad arguments. And Harris is unwilling or unable to consider either of these possibilities.
I’m hardly surprised that you are still with Klein. I still side with Harris (which is not, BTW, the same as endorsing Murray’s policy prescriptions).
Klein has Harris at an inherent disadvantage, for the precise reason the latter said: he does not want to be seen as being obsessed with trumpeting IQ/race disparities, while Klein has no problem being seen as the “white knight” disputing them. Harris said years ago (like, over a decade now), in the “Four Horseman” video with Dennett, Hitchens, and Dawkins, that he saw racial differences in IQ as an example of a kind of truth that it would be better not to investigate or talk about.
And I agree with that—so long as this ceasefire holds on all sides. But as long as “school reformers” are going to threaten the livelihoods of educators by labelling their schools “failing” because of low test scores, that is sadly not the case.
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Do you mean you’re entirely unaware of the “school reform” movement, that accuses educators at inner city schools of “failing” their students, even if the students and parents are happy with their schools, solely based on the students scoring lower on standardized tests than their counterparts at whiter schools?
This philosophy was the impetus behind Dubya’s “No Child Left Behind” legislation, and his oft-cited bromide about the “soft bigotry of low expectations”. And there are many on the right who support it because it tends to take on teacher unions, and right wingers love to bust ‘em some unions. But it also has a purchase on the left, due to the axiomatic belief among left-leaning social scientists that intelligence/aptitude is all about environmental factors rather than genes (“nurture” rather than “nature”), evidence be damned.
I would prefer we go back to that so-called “soft bigotry” and stop calling attention to the low scores of black students. But if these “reformers” are going to try to take down schools and teachers unions this way, I’m going to sigh and stick up for my belief that these educators are doing the best they can with students whose potential is limited.
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I guess what was asking was: are you suggesting that students at inner city schools score lower on standardized tests is because they are black and thus naturally have a lower IQ? To which it seems the answer is “yes”.
And I think we can all agree that the degree to which students/parents/teachers are “happy” with their school is not a meaningful data point when evaluating whether or not the school is effective or successful.
I dunno. Maybe because the mission of a school is to provide an excellent education, and parental satisfaction is not, in itself, a particularly helpful marker for assessing whether that’s happening. You would need to establish that the parents’ understanding of the school’s mission is primarily that of delivering an excellent education.
And even then, it would be an assessment based on second order criteria.
No, because they are called schools, not “guarantors of parity on standardized tests”.
The idea that if a community, including parents and students, are happy with a school, and the administration and teachers are happy with it, that is irrelevant? That strikes me as a pretty radical proposition. And while it’s my view that is generally painted as racist, let’s keep in mind that the above-described people at inner city schools are generally predominantly nonwhite (including the teachers and administration). So for some white “reformers” from outside the community to come in and tell them they’re all wrong? Wow, that takes chutzpah.
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This probably makes sense to you, and Harris, and other folks who bear no malice towards black people but still believe they are, in general, inherently inferior in intelligence, on average, to other groups. But it’s still just absed on your own biases and not science. Science tells us that it’s ridiculous to make any conclusions about race and intelligence with data from such a profoundly unequal society. Further, the only actual studies that tried to compare DNA ancestry and intelligence within groups (the Scarr study I’ve mentioned many times) showed no correlation at all between African ancestry and lower test scores.
Murray is shit on by most scientists because his conclusions are based on poor science. Do you really think Murray’s conclusion in dismissing any achievement of any kind by black people except for Duke Ellington was based on good science? And Harris is rightly shit on for failing to challenge Murray’s poor conclusions at all, and ignoring or glossing over the quality criticism (like the Flynn effect).
Certainly there’s an argument to be made about local vs. federal guidelines for what makes a successful school (and perhaps you and I would be mostly in agreement there). But even at a local level, “we’re happy” is a poor metric for the success of any policy or social program, particularly if that policy or program has a goal or objective beyond making people happy. For example, “We’re happy with our roads full of potholes” does not mean the same thing as “we have good roads.”
But no one’s happy with roads full of potholes. The “failing” school scenario is commonplace.
Andy, I don’t agree with you on the science, but that’s already been churned over plenty upthread. I stand by what I said there.
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So if the graduates of a given high school read on a fourth grade level and do math at a third grade level, it is a radical proposition to say that this is at least as important as parent satisfaction? And it’s “chutzpah” to tell them that people who don’t have basic high-school level skills are at a disadvantage when they go to find jobs and/or otherwise function in adult society?
Not sure I agree 100% with your detective work there, Lou.
Do you think we need to do anything about the black-white gap in education? Or, as long as the parents are happy with their schools, nothing need be done?