Moderating:
Hijacking this thread to a debate about HRC is not going to continue.
Thread will reopen in an hour.
This topic was automatically opened after 60 minutes.
hid as was continuing hijack, What Exit?
It’s what you would call a dog whistle if you thought the other side did it, and I’m quite sure you’re aware of it. The meaning is clear both to the intended audience and the target of the denegration. Playing gotcha with me on the exact quote doesn’t make the statement’s intent any different.
Again, everything in this debate rests in proportion. From the perspective of political persuasion, how much sneering is acceptable? Zero, obviously. How much is realistic? Humans are humans, they will do dumb things. Some sneering exists.
From that point I do think it’s an important question - are liberals doing this excessively, or at a frequency that needs correcting? Is this a talking point we need to give oxygen to? I would suggest ‘no’. The right wing is busy mining, scraping, and editing every soundbite to craft the “sneering” narrative because it plays so incredibly well. They will do it with or without your help.
So - yes, avoid “sneering” as a matter of routine. Avoid dismissing people based on class. It’s not ideal, be reasonably sensitive. But also, don’t help feed the right-wing narrative around this, don’t pour water on the grease fire. Many in the right-wing faction are determined to be aggrieved right out of the gate; they will find something in your words to interpret as a “sneer” despite your best efforts.
As you say, they will do it with or without my help. But if this is an actual problem among Democrats–and I think it is–then raising the issue isn’t helping Republicans if it helps Democrats be aware of what they’re doing.
I’m not in favor of adjusting my behavior based on how liars will lie about it. If they’re gonna lie, I need to do the right thing and let them lie.
Another place that this sneering shows up is in Democrats from other regions talking about the Southern US. Very often their talk is condescending and full of sneers. Even I, a lifelong Southerner, have caught myself putting on an exaggerated Southern accent when I’m imitating a stupid bigot. It’s never the genteel Virginia aristocratic accent that people put on, either: it’s the accent of poor White southerners.
My suggestion is that folks pay attention to how their behavior might be smearing their working-class neighbors as stupid or bigoted, conflating economic class with undesirable characteristics, and avoid doing so just as they avoid conflating race with undesirable characteristics.
I am one of the less educated white people myself. I agree with what you but would also add a lot of the less educated are in poverty and/or working poor.
I don’t think anyone who is NOT lived in poverty understands just how mental exhausting it is. Many of us would like to care but a lot of the people I know go right to sleep once they get home from work and the waking hours are consumed with dealing with day to day grind of being poor:
Trying to pay our bills and having enough money for groceries. Keeping the crappy housing clean and livable. Dealing with others in poverty who don’t budget good and are constantly looking to “borrow” money, food. etc.
It is just so exhausting to deal with and having to “think” deeply about politics is at the back of our minds.
The foundation of science is a willingness to be proven wrong. An experts job isn’t to be 100% sure that they are correct in everything they pronounce. It’s that they make there recommendations based on the body of knowledge in their field as it currently stands. What makes them an expert isn’t a lab coat, a clipboard, or any such thing like that. It’s the years of study, including ongoing study, into their field of expertise. The fact that things change isn’t a bug that “proves” the experts don’t know anything, it’s a feature that means we’re willing to update our view on the world as new data becomes available.
Take what Dr. Fauci said about COVID-19 back in March of 2020 vs. his most recent statements. Of course they’re different. That doesn’t mean he was lying then, or that he’s lying now. It just means science has made progress, so the scientists change what they say as we gain more knowledge.
What would you like to know?
In South Africa, we have very sharp class divides, and education definitely plays into that.
I was always taught to value education as a worthy pursuit, but not at the expense of denigrating the uneducated manual labourer. That comes from having a worker-centred liberation movement. Even today, many of the politically powerful here are not highly educated. We’ve had one president without any formal schooling. He just happened to be absolutely shit, but it wasn’t because he wasn’t educated. And his equally-shitty predecessor had a Masters in Economics from Sussex, so there’s that…
But then here, being uneducated is often from very bad historical circumstances and ongoing inequalities resulting from that, not lack of desire to be educated. So sneering at the uneducated would be very unwise.
I think that’s also very true here, but the prevailing American myth is that everyone has any opportunity they want. While the racist history and its effects on educational opportunities are indisputable, there is a related (and much less discussed) history of classism and its effects on educational opportunities. The dude quoted in the OP, and I, suggest that American progressives pay attention to that.
This is a huge difference, I think. The US has a labor movement, but it’s been decimated, and any discussion of class has been Orwellianly labeled “class warfare”. It may be that classism is much more acceptable here than in South Africa, at least on the left.
This aspect is pretty valid. Bashing white southerners is a fairly cheap shot, and it’s something that people feel far too comfortable doing.
I do feel like there is a certain stripe of leftist who sits at the lower rungs of academic elite (perhaps a humanities masters degree, unused), and also the lower rung of economic achievement (perhaps living off rich parents, or not gainfully employed). This insecurity drives them to judge others, whether it’s the opposite faction (hicks, rednecks), or even their own faction (declaring things to be “basic” or “bougie” or “cheugy” or otherwise gauche. They have no self-reflection and will take no correction on the topic. I do wish these people would shut up and crawl under a rock, but this is more about my own annoyance with certain types of non-self-aware people.
Speaking for myself, I have incredible respect for people that work hard at low skill low wage jobs, and I would never laugh at them or sneer at them or look down on them simply because they weren’t born with the advantages that I was born with.
Whenever I encounter these people, I give them a smile or a compliment or even a little help, I expend a little effort to try to make their day just a little bit brighter. This is in contrast to some of my younger conservative male relatives who seem to spend an inordinate amount of time online looking for new ways to “mess with” fast food and retail workers. I did EXPLODE at one such relative when he was sharing one of those techniques, so if that counts as sneering at the less educated, I was guilty that one time.
I will however, laugh at and sneer at stupid opinions on matters of significance, like “climate change is a hoax” or “vaccines are bad” or “Trump won”, no matter what social strata the petson expressing them hails from. I think this is the only reasonable reaction, to do anything else contributes to “bothsideism”. And it’s an effective technique, especially when the person expressing the opinion is trying to move you towards anger. And the fact that’s it effective is why the people that espouse the stupid opinions consistently play the “you think you’re better than me” card. I’m convinced that the primary reason Trump’s coup attempt didn’t succeed is that the liberals laughed at his efforts instead of getting mad.
Insignificant opinions, not so much. Just the other day I nodded politely and talked about my favorite books when a neighbor was raving about The DaVinci Code instead of calling it Foucault’s Pendulum for Dummies. Which is an incredibly elitist joke he wouldn’t have gotten anyway.
And sometimes this happens in reverse, a few weeks ago some blue collar guy sneered at me for using the word correspondence in conversation, and it wasn’t the first time a relatively uneducated person said shit like “why can’t you just talk like a normal person” when I used big words.
Sure–and that’s not the phenomenon I’m talking about. The distinction you’re drawing–between stupid opinions (regardless of formal education) and people without formal education–is exactly the distinction that I think gets lost too often.
Exactly what you shared. How much higher education was linked to class, and if those with the higher education had a culture (real or imagined) of disdain for those lacking it. And how it played into politics as well.
From what I’ve read, it’s also a substantial issue in Japan, but that’s from an outsiders POV, and I want as many hits on the subject from outside my own cultural assumptions. I do agree with the earlier point that the USA has long had a tendency to push educated political elites to the forefront while simultaneously sneering at “book larnin’”. Or, in words of one of my wife’s instructors (Her Undergrad was a dual major in Physics and Mechanical Engineering) ‘Scientists sit in chairs getting grants, engineers get things done’.
It’s not entirely wrong, but it is does indicate a certain disrespect in the other direction as well. Not that mechies are hardly uneducated themselves (I can’t do a fraction of that math) but that and the general dislike for “ivory tower intellectuals” are equally a sneer.
I’m a WHOLE lot more inclined to accept what a person with a PhD in geoscience would say over what I feel. I’m not nearly so arrogant to think that I know enough to even begin to know how to interpret that data or make a decision about whether global warming is true or not.
Why? Because I’ve got multiple college degrees myself, and I know that I don’t know shit about geoscience or global warming, because I haven’t studied them myself, but those people have.
Now I might have my own firmly held opinions about some business computing topics, but again, that’s because I’ve got a CS degree, a MS degree, and a MBA, along with 20+ years of professional experience.
I wouldn’t presume to tell a butcher OR a geoscientist that I know more than they do; at best, I might say that I prefer a NY strip over a filet mignon in general, but I’m going to defer to their knowledge about which one will be more tender, flavorful, etc…
My FiL was an electrician. High school education. Raised three kids and put them through college. Never in a million years would I belittle him for having less formal education than I did. He was an intelligent guy. People complain about in-laws but not me. He and his wife were really great.
I think the issue is more about willful ignorance. Like with vaccines or climate change denial (or flat earthers…still not sure they really exist because it is so stupid). I will sneer at those people and those people may well hold more advanced degrees than I do. Ben Stein leaps to mind. I am sure I can think of others if someone wants more examples.
Anyone who, after being given well researched information backed up by sources, says “Well, you have your opinion, and I have mine” will be lucky if I I do is sneer.
Sources are very often questionable. They obviously can’t be ignored but I don’t fault anyone for questioning a source.
Question away, but that does not pertain to what I actually said.
This is a fantastic example of what @Spice_Weasel is talking about, and of the dangers of ignorance. It’s not so much about education as it is about a willingness to examine one’s own beliefs; I picked up this skill while getting my degree, as I assume many others do, so maybe there’s a correlation between education level and the ability to learn and change your mind - but on the other hand there are plenty of college grads who lack this skill.
This post also highlights the danger, and the reason why who do think about our beliefs find this attitude so frustrating.
HoneyBadgerDC in this posts insists that racism and homophobia are vanishingly rare. Does he point to evidence to support this claim? Nope, not at all. And his response to evidence being shown to him is to claim that he and other conservatives are being painted as villains; that they’re not protecting the status quo out of homophobia and racism, but because they find the act of asking these questions to be “threatening to [their] society or families”.
As we know, all that it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. I won’t weigh in on whether HoneyBadgerDC or anyone else is a “good” person, but I’ll note that burying your head in the sand because you don’t want to think about uncomfortable questions is exactly what the evil men want the good ones to do while they’re out triumphing.
A lack of intellectual curiosity and honesty is not a neutral character trait. It is a deeply negative one, and exceedingly destructive to our society.
Education level is not a perfect indicator of intellectual curiosity or honesty by any means, and we shouldn’t alienate people by forgetting this. At the same time, higher ed does provide students with valuable life skills, especially when it comes to critical thinking, and that can’t be discounted. There’s a reason why many careers require a college degree.