In 2009 a very useful and enlightening research study was done polling the opinions on key subjects of thousands of philosophers, called the PhilPapers Survey (something I wish someone would fund for Biblical Studies). Well, that study was repeated, with substantial revisions and updates, in 2020. See The 2020 Philpapers Survey. I already wrote up where I stood on the questions asked in the original survey, and discussed the nature and design of the survey a bit as well, in How I’d Answer the PhilPapers Survey. Here I will discuss some interesting new things in the 2020 Survey—just a few things that caught my attention; this is by no means a comprehensive discussion of their results. In a separate article to follow I will cover what my own responses would be to the new questions asked in 2020, or if I’d change any of my earlier responses in light of the 2020 study.
It’s important to read the accompanying survey paper, as it explains why one cannot simply directly compare the 2009 and 2020 surveys, owing to important differences in the way responses were measured, and it provides a compensating longitudinal analysis that does that comparison for you, using the requisite statistical techniques for compensating for those differences. I will also be discussing only the results reproduced in that paper here. It may be possible to dig into their settings and get answers to questions about the counts and frequencies that I here state are not given. So what I mean by that is only, “not given” in the survey summary paper, not necessarily by whatever survey tools are available at the site (though again, remember, direct comparisons aren’t possible).
The primary difference between 2020 and 2009 is that they expanded the thirty main questions to forty, and then added sixty more questions that hit on specific subjects (like abortion or race) rather than broad philosophical positions like the mains. And they did some interesting things this time. One that really caught my eye was with their new question, “Gender: Biological, Psychological, Social, Unreal, Other.” As I noted for the 2009 survey, their questions are often not well formed, and here we see another example of that: these are overlapping categories, and how one answers depends on semantic assumptions all respondents might not share, or might not have known how to navigate for this survey. For example, what really is the difference between “Unreal” and “Social”? I can certainly come up with a way to define both terms that makes them refer to different things, but I’m not here being asked to do that. So what did the respondents do? This makes the answers harder to evaluate. Some who answered “Unreal” might have meant “Socio-Psychological,” while others may have meant gender isn’t even a psychological phenomenon or a social construct (which would be a bizarre position, but logically allowed by the phrasing of the question). Likewise, there is no such thing as a social construct that isn’t also psychological in some sense. Nor can anything psychological not also be biological (since it’s all in the brain regardless). So how can one answer any of these things exclusively? And so on.
I’ll use this then as my first example, especially as I’ve endeavored to know a lot about it.
Transgender and Race Issues
One way the survey tried to work around this problem is to allow more ways to answer and more ways to count up the answers. As in this case: the percentage of philosophers who answered “Biological” to that gender question superficially clocked in at 29%, compared to about 22% who put it as psychological and 63% as social, or both. By contrast, only 4% answered “Unreal” (and about 15% “Other”), and that number dropped to under 2% when you discount those who answered that and something else at the same time (probably all those people I expected would answer both “Unreal” and “Social” and the like, which amounts really to just saying gender is a social construct, or whatever they additionally answered).
But wait, you might say, those numbers add to over 100%. This is because they counted inclusively multiple responses this time. For example, if you answered both biological and social/psychological you were counted in both percentages. When counting exclusively resulted in a different count by three or more percentiles, they show that as well, and that happened here. When we ask how many philosophers answered that gender is only biological, the count drops to only 15% (compared to 4% who answered “only psychological” and 43% who answered “only social,” for nearly 50% when you include those who answered only as “Unreal,” and these sums don’t include those who answered more than one way).
It would be entirely congruent with scientific fact to answer both biological and either or both psychological or social, or to have answered yes to both psychological and social but not biological (which count is not shown in their comparison). This is because it is impossible to have a social fact that isn’t also a psychological fact (no minds, no society; much less any effect of one), although respondents might forget that, given the way the question is worded, and think what is being sought is the primary and not incidental engine of an effect. Likewise, it is impossible to have a psychological fact that isn’t also a biological fact (no brain, no mind), but again one might forget that, given the way the question is worded, and think what is being sought is the primary and not incidental engine of an effect, or worse, if someone thought adding “Biological” was affirming chromosomal essentialism or something, which is a much more specific assertion than just “Biological.”
This is a problem with over-simplified questions like this, because “Biological” is ambiguous as to whether what is meant actually is “Inherited” (or even what is being inherited—chromosomal destiny is a different inheritance position than thinking about cross-inheriting different body-maps or other “gendered” brain components). Likewise whether “Biological” is meant to include environmental and deliberative biological outcomes. Everything one learns, passively or actively, is represented in a biological structure in the brain; hormone replacement therapy has gendered effects that are obviously thereby being caused biologically; and cross-gender brain structures we know can be biologically inherited, so even the inheritance aspect of gender does not entail denying transgender identities, but can even be used to support them, the same way “born gay” thinking has done.
So if one wants to get at the unscientific transphobic nutters who don’t know the difference between sex and gender and thus who still think gender must match someone’s genitals or chromosome type or something, this survey might not help as much as you’d like, owing to all those confusions. But by giving also the exclusive counts when they differed enough to pay attention to, they did give us at least an upper bound. Since we know 15% answered “only” biological, it is reasonable to infer most of those respondents were discounting any role for psychological choice or social category-making (they must imagine no one can take HRT or experience a different biochemical environment or be raised in a different cultural context or have different experiences and develop a different gender identity than they “inherited”). Maybe a few of these respondents are “cis-trans” essentialists who believe even transgender identity is inherited by birth (like the body-mapping theory and other “inherited brain structure” models; the survey provided no tool to discern that). But odds are, I think, most of those respondents are transphobic gender essentialists. More importantly, it’s certain no more than that are. It’s thus encouraging to see that that number is low enough to be in line with the usual percentages of reactionary idiots in educated society generally. This survey shows most philosophers (by a nearly 6 to 1 margin) correctly comprehend at least some of the science on sex and gender. That’s reassuring. And these numbers were comparable for race, indicating philosophers have a better read on the sociology and biology of these things, and that the bigots are less than 15% of us.
What I also found interesting is that they added a question as well on what to do about the concept of gender: “Preserve, Revise, Eliminate, Other.” Fascinating. Half are for revising. In other words, we need to change the social construct of “gender categories” in some way. By contrast, only one in six want to eliminate gender as a category altogether, and only one in five want to preserve gender categories just the way they are—which are comparable numbers, of each side hanging out at the extremes. Although again, poor question design leaves it unclear what “Preserve” as an answer was thought to mean. Preserve as in preserve even transgender identities, and thus stick with the way we demarcate feminine and masculine but just let people choose between them? Or preserve as in, disallow transgender identities, and stick with “men are men and women are women”? Can’t tell. Bad study design.
There were similar results for racial categories, although again one can’t tell if respondents thought they were answering for “now” or an ideal future. There can be reasons to maintain racial categories while racism continues to target them precisely because you have to to fight back against that, and that requires acknowledging who is being discriminated against and why; which is a different consideration than what you might say would be the ideal end state of society to work toward. “Eventually we want to get rid of racial categories; but we can’t do that until racism declines enough to be insignificant” is not the same position as “Race doesn’t exist; therefore neither does racism.” In any event, 40% were for “Eliminate,” only 8% for “Preserve,” and a third or so for “Revise.” Racial categories are therefore much less popular among philosophers than gendering people. (And yes, though they added no question about the race of respondents, I suspect a disproportionate number are white, so we probably aren’t getting an accurate picture of what actual targets of racism think about all this.)
Philosophical Methods?
By contrast, their new question about philosophical methods was just garbage, a total mess of utter useless construction. They asked the question, ”Philosophical methods (which methods are the most useful/important)?” and had a slate of possible answers to the unintelligible tune of, “Conceptual analysis, Conceptual engineering, Empirical philosophy, Experimental philosophy, Formal philosophy, Intuition-based philosophy, Linguistic philosophy, Other.” I don’t even know what some of these things mean. How does “Formal philosophy” differ from any of the others listed? What does that phrase even mean as a methodology? Or “Conceptual engineering.” What is that? And how is it a method? And insofar as I can contrive some meaning it could possibly have as a method, how does that differ from literally anything else on the list? Almost every single thing listed is barely comprehensible as a distinct option. Only “Conceptual analysis” and “Empirical philosophy” come close to having any anchor to a recognizable distinction being made, and even that is fuzzy, particularly since the question wasn’t about which methods were useful or legitimate or important, but only “most” so, which is a hopelessly subjective and vague query to pose. By what metric? Time spent? Words written? A numerical count of the problems a method is applied to? By the significance or importance of the problems it can be applied to? By feels?
I literally have no idea what this question is even asking, and even less how to answer it, and I doubt anyone else was in a better position. They certainly weren’t likely in any commonly shared position, as I’m sure each came up with their own framework for answering the WTFs of this question in order to answer it at all. All of which renders the answer stats here pretty much useless. The most I can take from their results that is at all informative (?) is that only a third or so of philosophers are “against” experimental philosophy, and less than 15% against any empirical philosophy at all, which puts an end the claptrap about philosophy being “only” about the analysis of concepts and having no empirical component—of it being only about ideas and not facts. To the contrary, 60% of all philosophers declared empirical philosophy “most useful” or “most important” and a third even put experimental philosophy on that level. We can’t tell from this readout how many of those respondents overlapped, but one might expect no one would answer “experimental philosophy” and not also “empirical philosophy,” so presumably these are independently usable numbers—which would mean half of all empirical philosophers (hence a third of all philosophers) endorse experimental philosophy as also “most useful/important,” and if roughly a third of “all” philosophers are against it, that leaves roughly a third who are cool with it but don’t prioritize it, which would mean two thirds accept experimental philosophy as a thing, even if they disagree on how important it is (by whatever metric for “important” each was using, which we have no idea of).
If you asked me my answer here, I’d have to say “all of the above,” with perhaps leaving out “Intuition-based philosophy.” Maybe. I can conceptualize a role for that to explore or discover ideas, but it has no use as a method for determining which ideas are true or useful. Ultimately knowledge has to come from something empirical or analytical (or both). But notice, their question did not even make clear that distinction. So we can’t even tell what someone who answered “Intuition” even meant; that reliable knowledge can be gained that way (wrong), or that only adduced information can (right)? Beyond that, I see no way to argue any of the listed methods is “more important” or “more useful” than the others. They all have a range of importance and uses across a whole range of problems and objectives. So I’d be counted in nearly every statistic shown. Except, I guess, I’d be in the “against” categories for intuition as a methodology—alongside apparently 29% of philosophers. Which concerns me. What do the other 71% of philosophers think they were accepting as a methodology here? How? I can come up with maybe what possibly they think; but the issue for me is this survey gives me no tools to find out. Indeed, roughly 50% even classify “Intuition” as “important/useful.” Maybe they are thinking of the same position I hold (that intuition is useful as an information source but not as a method of resolving what’s true), or something else. So the statistic is more or less useless. Since I don’t know what the respondents thought it meant, I don’t know what these percentages tell me about them, or about philosophy.
Miscellaneous Observations
On the one hand, it’s useful to see that only 13% of philosophers deem elective first trimester abortion to be “impermissible.” That’s probably the same percentage or so who are Evangelical Christians (or otherwise in the conservative idiot bigot brigade). Good to see it’s so small. But why no question about third trimester abortion; or distinguishing “elective” from “medically necessary”? Their question again becomes terribly uninformative. On the other hand, the new question about which argument for theism “is the strongest” (which, as I explored recently, doesn’t entail agreeing it’s effective) ended up with disappointing results. Evidently there is no agreement as to the answer. The “Other” category shows the highest probability (at 25%), but that’s also counting respondents who ticked that and other boxes as well. But since we know the exclusive percentage (those who only selected “Other”) varies from that by less than three percentiles (since it isn’t listed; so, it must be above 22% and under 28%), it is still more than every other answer.
The next highest was “cosmological argument” at 21% or so, beating out even even the “design argument” at 18% or so. Although I wondered at first if the question as framed has confused the cosmological and the fine-tuning arguments, since technically the latter is a design argument yet a lot of people conflate it as a cosmological argument and assume “design argument” means biological creationism. So, one might worry not all respondents were answering the same question here. But the survey included a separate question about “Cosmological fine-tuning (what explains it?)” and the percentage who credited that to design was essentially identical (about 17%), so these concerns were addressed. It apparently is true: the fine-tuning argument isn’t at the top in philosophers’ minds. Though it’s close. Amusingly, though, even counting inclusively, the losers are equally the Ontological and Moral augments, neither winning respect from even 10% of respondents. So in a sense you can say more philosophers think abortion is evil than think the moral argument for god is particularly convincing. Which is to say, almost no philosophers at all.
Looking back at the question about cosmological fine-tuning, it was interesting to see, as a side point, only 15% of philosophers believing in a multiverse; this suggests a much poorer attention to the state of current cosmological science than the gender and race questions showed regarding the sociobiological sciences. I am astonished that nearly a third of philosophers actually think fine-tuning is a “brute fact” (no indicated difference for exclusive counts means this is roughly indeed the case among philosophers), while 22% or so don’t believe there is any fine-tuning at all (though an understandable position, given my point earlier this month that it’s actually not yet possible to really know if there is). And I have no idea what the 18% of philosophers who answered “Other” are thinking. That’s a lot (nearly a fifth). What other options are there? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Similarly, I was surprised to see that about 30% of philosophers deny there is a hard problem of consciousness. It is unclear if respondents thought they were answering whether there is a problem but it has been solved (like Dennett might say) or whether there isn’t even a problem to solve (like I have encountered some maintaining of late: see The Bogus Idea of the Bogus Mysteries of Consciousness). I was likewise fascinated to see nearly an even split between philosophers over whether they would even want to live forever (45% Yes to 41% No)—an interesting problem for Christians trying to sell them that. Although, IMO the “Nos” are not thinking logically here; because any problem of dissatisfaction, like boredom, that can be solved in a short span of time, can be solved in a long one, which is just a bunch of short spans of time. So any problem there could be with living forever, must necessarily be solvable. More pertinent is, rather, the diminishing, rather than negative, value of eternal life. And there is a crucial difference between saying “I don’t want to live forever” and “I don’t need to live forever.” And we can’t discern that here. Bad study design again.
But part of the issue in this case may be skepticism about even the possibility of immortality. Because a different question about mind-uploading, whether it counts as living forever or really means your death (and some non-you doppelgänger gets to live forever in your place instead…or something), an astonishing half of all philosophers classified this as “Death.” There is no actual ontological basis for such a judgment (since you do not consist of anything more than patterns of information; it matters not one whit what instrument is storing and running it, nor would you ever even notice if we secretly swapped that out), so I always took that to be more of a layperson’s mistake. But evidently half of all philosophers aren’t well grounded in the ontology of personal existence. And this does look the same as the half who don’t want to live forever, though the survey paper didn’t show the correlation factor. They did show the correlation, though, between “immortality: yes” and theism and Evangelical positions like “against abortion,” and those were weirdly low—only around 0.36 and the like—which means most theists, even Evangelicals, don’t want to live forever, which is a strange result. I can’t explain it.
Still, almost 28% are on board with mind-uploaded immortality, and another 18% answered “Other,” thus (combined) accounting for the other half of philosophers. I expect the “Others” would merely assert a more nuanced view as to what degree or kind of survival that would indicate. For example, one can consistently admit mind-uploading equals the death of the body and rebirth to a new life, and thus see the question as warranting qualification. As no exclusive counts are given, we know they were close to the inclusive counts, so it would be safe to say that half of all philosophers don’t see mind-uploading as dying and being replaced. For comparison, the 2020 answers to the old Teletransporter problem (does it really transport you, or just kill you and make a copy that isn’t you?) are also roughly evenly split (35% “Survival,” 40% “Death,” 25% “Other”), which comes out nearly the same (more than half don’t see it as “death” but as at least qualified survival, while still quite a lot see it as “Death”).
My Top Observations
I was most impressed to see almost a third of philosophers embrace naturalist realism about moral facts. This means the general position (and I mean the general position, not any specific position) shared by Sam Harris and myself has won over 1 in 3 philosophers. That puts us in good company then. Also interesting in this direction is that only 1 in 4 philosophers are exclusively Capitalists, outnumbered by nearly half of all philosophers (twice as many) who are exclusively Socialists! It is true the 2020 study included all major English-speaking nations, including Australia and the U.K., and English-speaking philosophers all across Europe and beyond (whereas the 2009 study was mostly North America). But the respondents from the US still swamp them all. So I don’t think this can account for the result here. It’s clear from the numbers that some philosophers (two or three percent maybe) ticked both boxes—as I would have: I believe the ideal system is an equilibrium state of both systems as checks and balances against each other’s excesses, akin to a well-functioning ecosystem. It’s possible many who checked “Other” (19%) share a similar outlook. So, I’m with maybe a quarter of philosophers in all. But wow, there sure is a lot of anti-capitalism among academic philosophers even in the U.S.!
Another result that caught my eye was that nearly half of all philosophers think the Principle of Sufficient Reason is bullshit. Sorry, theists. And probably related, nearly 1 in 5 philosophers believes in the Many-Worlds hypothesis of Quantum Mechanics! (Which means, if you compare stats, that too many of these philosophers don’t know that entails a multiverse with respect to Fine-Tuning.) Also, only 28% think spacetime is real. Instead most, at 45%, think it is only a relational concept, which is a leading view in physics today, so understandable; but, IMO, wrong (such a stance cannot explain why there are only three spatial and one temporal dimension instead of infinitely many—spacetime has to be real, in order to be constrained to only that domain). By contrast, 41% of philosophers agree time travel is “metaphysically impossible.” IMO, they’re right…if we mean by that what most people want time travel to mean; as opposed to what it really is, which would never make for an interesting movie, despite implausibly trying: e.g. in Tenet, their thoughts would also go backwards, and thus “undo” their memories rather than build them, producing no net change in anything. In fact, you couldn’t tell the difference between your going forward or backwards in time (see Sense and Goodness without God, “Time and the Multiverse,” III.3.6, esp. pp. 92-93).
There were some other odd questions, like whether the “Units of selection” in evolution are “genes” or “organisms.” Philosophers are evenly split (one third say genes, one third say organisms, and only one third say neither or both). This is again indicative of poor science education in the field. The answer is of course both. Genes are always attached to an organism. You can’t individually isolate a gene and select it without killing or saving the organism as a whole. If organisms could survive while their genes continued a selection process (something more akin to what Lamarck imagined, or the X-Men comics), then you could answer only “genes.” Honestly, philosophers should know this (see the corresponding article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Finally, it was super weird to see countable numbers of philosophers think plants and even subatomic particles are conscious (7% and 2%, respectively; and only 80% and 89% respectively even so much as “leaning against” that conclusion!). It’s hard to fathom what those philosophers are imagining or thought they were answering. Perhaps these are panpsychists, or imagining a completely different definition of “conscious” than the other respondents were—or (as I suspect for most panpsychists) both.
What’s Changed?
Overall, the new questions tend to be even more poorly formulated than the original thirty, with answers and distinctions among them often hopelessly unclear; and questions as well. So it will be harder to do my next article covering what my responses would be. But another question one might ask about the 2020 survey is, what’s changed? Very little, IMO; but some things of note. 1 in 5 of the philosophers in this survey are women, same as last time. And Aristotle, Hume, Kant, or Wittgenstein are still whom most philosophers identify with. But when it comes to positions, their survey paper singles out the biggest changes, and can even show changes for the same individuals (though the survey is anonymous, the computer analytics can track the same respondent in the blind). It’s been only ten years of course, which isn’t much time to expect much to have changed. But still. What happened?
I have a lot of problems with the lack of clarity and consistency in the way philosophers use or ascribe to any of the positions polled. But if I settled on an “on balance, all things considered” assessment, most but not all of the change has been in the right direction, IMO. The largest swing (13 points) was toward “non-classical” interpretations of logic, a distinction I think is more vacuous than useful, but on balance I would say this is moving in the right direction. Nearly as large (11 points) is a swing against “Invariantism” about knowledge claims, mostly heading back toward “Contextualism” (nearly 8 points), which I agree is also the right direction.
Swings get smaller after that. “Externalism” about moral motivation has gotten more popular (almost 9 points), which I think is the wrong direction. Likewise another such swing toward Humeanism about laws of nature (wrong). But a comparable swing toward the existence of a priori knowledge I can say is correct only because I think philosophers today are misusing the term. Then smaller swings (almost 7 points) have gone toward “Subjectivism” in aesthetics (correct); but against “pull the switch” on Trolley Problems (wrong). And yet at the same time we see swings (over 5 points) toward moral realism (correct) and compatibilism (also correct).
So, in all, the entire field has mostly moved in my direction. I think the only wrong directions being taken so far are in the popularity of moral externalism, Humean physics, and how to answer the trolley problem. The question then is, how do my philosophical conclusions stack up against the field in all the new topics this survey explored? My next entry on this subject will answer that question.
Or, “Philosophy…Too Mushy to Even Analyze”? 🙂
I mean… philosophy is supposed to teach things like logic, so it shouldn’t be that hard to at least not ask mutually exclusive questions or ask specific questions…
Like, “What moral theories do you think are worth exploring? (You may answer more than one”) and have deontological, virtue, utilitarian, social contract and Other.
As Fred noted, the problem you reference isn’t really with philosophy as a subject of study, but with the failure of philosophers to do it well. Which is a correctable condition.
“I suspect a disproportionate number are white, so we probably aren’t getting an accurate picture of what actual targets of racism think about all this”
Whites are also victims of racism, both at the interpersonal and systemic levels: Nick Sandman and Kyle Rittenhouse being examples of the latter, while the white victims of the BLM riots in 2020 are victims of the former. It should have been foreseen that whites would be targeted during those riots much like we were in the 90s during the LA riots. One can also mention the Asian victims of affirmative action at UCLA and U Michigan. The fact that there can be a national media war against random white kids like Sandman and Rittenhouse proves that white supremacy is a thing of the past in America, even if there is still lingering racism against non-whites at the interpersonal (that is, not systemic) level. It was an insistence on not being color blind that led to racial discrimination against blacks and Native Americans in the first place, so those who insist on maintaining those racial categories in response to past injustices have nobody to blame but themselves for the implications of their views. J.Krishmamurty along with all the Buddhist teachers said that arbitrary categories like race must be eliminated, that is, we must act as if they don’t exist, in order to create peace.
An excellent book I read a while back by Walter E. Williams is “Race and Economics”. Highly recommended in this day and age.
Those people aren’t being targeted any differently than black people in the same circumstances would be; in fact, decidedly less viciously and unjustly. So your examples actually disprove your point, and demonstrate the reverse.
White people are not the victims of systemic injustice. As every example you adduce will only illustrate they are always treated better than people of color in the same circumstances.
There can be racism against white people, but it looks nothing like what you describe, and is quite rare. For example, I was once physically attacked in a black neighborhood solely for being white (complete with racial slurs). That does not systemically happen. And this is not the sort of thing happening to either Sandman or Rittenhouse, who both did actual things that had a black person done the same they’d be far worse off.
This is why there remains a problem we need to solve. And denying the problem exists won’t solve it.
The moment your claim of “systemic racism” isn’t supported by unequal access to institutions of power, or differences in treatment at the bank, or being followed by security guards, but literally mentions individuals and then tries to use riots and extraordinary events as proof of routine systemic outcomes. You wrote a check your mouth couldn’t cash, and did so about something as important (even by your own admission), as racism. Why did you do this? What delusion about yourself is so important to you that you’d put your integrity on the line in this way?
Just look at the black-white wealth gap. It increased, not decreased, after 2008. We made backwards progress thanks to systemic racism (and, yes, 2008 was in part caused by and amplified systemic racism: people of color were disproportionately targeted by banks). Has anything, anything, comparable happened to whites in the recent past? Obviously not. People try to point to the opioid crisis, but not only is that harming black and brown communities too so what we’re really seeing is a rare case where a health crisis is hitting a community as hard or worse than other communities and because they are better off in the first place the impact is more apparently severe because you have further to fall when you go higher, but that’s not a crisis of systemic racism. That’s a crisis of corrupt capitalism. Yet the same people who deny that color-blind institutional racism is a thing or matters when it happens to POCs harp on how bad it is when it happens to white communities. Which itself shows a lot about priorities.
I am hoping you are misquoting those Buddhist teachers, because if not they’re wrong and logically obviously so. “[R]ace must be eliminated” is true. “[T]hat is, we must act as if they don’t exist, in order to create peace” does not in fact follow. As Tim Wise has pointed out, “Hunger must be eliminated” does not necessitate “That is, we must act as if hunger doesn’t exist”. The opposite, actually. You can’t solve a problem you don’t think exists.
The reason why people think race is different from hunger is that they think that race is purely fictive. But the problem is that race is a perversion of something that is not fictive: Ethnicity. This has in turn led some people to think we should eliminate ethnic distinctions. Not only is that tossing out baby with bathwater (ethnic identity is a real and healthy part of identity and can be totally fine in a just society where it confers no advantage or disadvantage, only systemically-incidental difference), but in any case good luck in getting humans to abandon ethnicity.
More centrally, the solution to a delusion is not to pretend you don’t have it. It’s to face the reason for it. That requires confronting biases, and admitting they exist, not denying it. The actual science, not armchair philosophers, has confirmed this repeatedly.
And the danger of color-blind ideology is that it guarantees racism emerges. Really. As I’ve pointed out before (https://thefredbc.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/racial-color-blindness-just-as-dysfunctional-as-regular-blindness/), it’s deeply dysfunctional. To prove it, do this thought experiment. Imagine that we all took a pill tomorrow that made us incapable of engaging in interpersonal racism while also preventing us from recognizing past racial categories, even subconsciously. Would racism go away? Well, no. It’d get a lot better, but people of color wouldn’t magically wake up with more money, or less exposure to pollution, or less stress and the legacy of stress-exacerbated conditions, or better housing, or better education. Eventually, as conditions didn’t properly equalize, and we no longer could remember things like racial history, we would wonder what was wrong with “those people” who just kept having every opportunity and not succeeding. Eventually there would be theories, in the absence of an alternative, that was something was just wrong with them. That’s the inevitable outcome of color-blind ideology and why conservatives love it so much: It reproduces racism. Julian Bond has pointed this out.
And this fear, this totemic fear that even the thought of racism is so harmful, is so deeply a very white fear, because it imagines racism as this thing that just lurks around rather than being, you know, extremely, viscerally real, burnt into your experiences and interactions and your neighborhoods. In reality, racism is just a delusion. And we should be no more afraid of it perpetuating itself when properly acknowledged, confronted and dealt with than the delusion that someone is Abraham Lincoln.
Which tells me your actual motive here. You just don’t want to do that work.
In response to Fred: Fred, you are, from what I can tell at least, a white man. I have to wonder out loud: what is your actual motive here? Why would you go out of your way to make your own race look so bad? That white people collectively have done terrible things to black people and others is a fact no opponent of your view would deny. That whites are collectively continuing the oppression of black people and others, today, is what I deny and for which I have seen no evidence outside of anecdotes about black people being pulled over by the police. Case in point, former police officer Jeff Hodge shot a white woman twenty-one times after handcuffing her behind her back and leaving her for dead. That is far worse objectively, than what happened to Breonna Taylor or the other cases that are mentioned in the debate. If anything, the scientific literature has debunked the claim that implicit biases are real. I’ve taken those “implicit bias” tests that top tier schools administer: they’re bunk. The methodology is heavily flawed (it depends on how fast you can hit your keyboard) and so is unreliable. Hunger and race are two different things. How many race-obsessed folks have you met who were happier before they went to college? I can think of quite a few. That is not to say that is the defacto result of going to college, but it is a side-effect of it in some cases. If you don’t think of seeing things in terms of race, you get along better with people. A white supremacist is somebody who is obsessed with race. “Anti-Racists” are also obsessed with race and also do damage to race relations. I’ve heard “anti-racists” preach against interracial adoption, interracial marriage etc. sounding exactly like a Klansman! I will say you’re the first person to mention Tim Wise in a while, he seems to have been sidelined by the likes of Robin Diangelo, et.al.
Briefly, even if, as you claim, implicit biases did exist, what makes them bad? What’s wrong with having “implicit biases” against convicted felons, drug dealers, the band Phish (I kid!), etc.? Is having an “implicit bias” against Olive Garden or Italian food a bad thing? If someone has an implicit bias against dating a guy with four children from three different mothers, is that a bad thing? If I have an implicit bias against dating a Irish woman rather than an Asian woman at Stanford, who is to say that is bad? This is something to think about.
Finally, no black person would have been “worse off” than Nick Sandman because Sandman didn’t do anything. So the comparison simply cannot exist because even other whites are never in his position. As far as Kyle Rittenhouse goes, there was a black kid who shot somebody at his school and he got bail, so he was not in fact treated worse than Rittenhouse (assuming for the sake of argument that he was, like Rittenhouse, acting in dire self-defense).
Finally, let’s stop using the term “people of color”: it’s puerile and afactual since whites are also “people of color” just as all people, big and small, are “people of size”.
Bill, it is evident you have done no research on this whatever and have no idea what you are talking about.
Please get up to speed. It is only worthwhile having informed opinions, don’t you agree?
Start with my article and everything it links to: Actually, Fryer Proved Systemic Racism in American Policing
Bill, I can see that your woobies are making you say things that to you seem perfectly reasonable but to everyone else look not only callous but wildly irrational. Taking apart the series of bad assumptions and bad faith assumptions is a monumental task, and not one of your arguments actually rest on anything that should survive an ounce of critical inquiry, meaning you haven’t done any.
You say, “In response to Fred: Fred, you are, from what I can tell at least, a white man. I have to wonder out loud: what is your actual motive here? Why would you go out of your way to make your own race look so bad?”
First of all, this statement assumes that races are actual things. I don’t care about races. “Whites” don’t exist. People identified as whites do. If I say a lot of whites have done shitty things, I have said nothing that applies to me or anyone I think hasn’t done those shitty things. The only way you can think this is a remotely sensible place to begin is if you have some deeply racist assumptions. The fact that I don’t share those, by the way, falsifies your view.
Second of all, what exactly did I say about whites, at all? Really! Like, you could go to some of my other Quora posts or commentary and get at that impression if you were paying no attention, but here I barely mentioned whites. I talked about structural factors. In contrast to your screed which ended with seriously suggesting we read a book written by a frequent replacement host for Rush Limbaugh, I used the word “white” four times. My analysis actually could have applied to any situation where there is ethnic or racial tension. So… you’re not talking to me. Or Richard. You’re talking to phantoms you made up. Please, pay actual attention.
So, what is my motive? Well, truth, justice and the American way. Really. I think that we should be honest about social problems. I think we should try to figure out where we have systemic issues and correct them. My goal isn’t to make anyone feel bad, or to castigate anyone. But it also isn’t to sweep things under the rug. Mandela was right: Reconciliation should start with Truth.
And it is transparent that to you even talking about these issues is so terrifying, evokes such a fear of a zero-sum game of racial position, that something as balanced as what I wrote and what Richard wrote makes you see collective castigation.
You say, “That white people collectively have done terrible things to black people and others is a fact no opponent of your view would deny”.
But that’s flat horseshit, Bill. There are people who try to systematically downplay the impacts of racism and colonialism. There are people who say blacks are better off here than they would be in Africa. Even beyond overt bigots, there are also covet bigots, colonialist apologists, etc. So, no, actually, there are people who disagree with my view (and with many of yours).
But more importantly, the fact that you think this concession is just a footnote is deeply telling.
It’s not just that “whites” (read: American political and economic power structures, disproportionately but not entirely staffed by white straight Christian men often with cooptation of and collaboration with the poor, people of color, LGBTQ folks, etc.) did some mean things. Slavery wasn’t just cruel. It had intergenerational outcomes. Even the infamous Moynihan Report, which helped start a culture of poverty framing for racial issues in the US, made clear that a huge amount of the culture of poverty they identified went back to slavery. And then Jim Crow kept screwing things up, and then ongoing racism did.
So even if overt and subconscious racism disappeared in 1968, in the point I made that you apparently took as an opportunity for pearl clutching rather than actual thought (which tells me that you are emotionally invested in not performing the simple thought experiment I suggested), that would still have left blacks with trillions in differential wealth, which would then expose them to disadvantages everywhere wealth matters… which is everywhere. This is what Oliver and Shapiro document extensively in Black Wealth, White Wealth, a free PDF of older versions of which you can find online.
Right now blacks have 1% of the nation’s wealth or so compared to 12-13% of the population. Even if we want to say that no one today is doing anything to exacerbate that (no racist drug war, no racialized attack on welfare, etc.), that still would hardly be black people’s fault today. Which suggests a potential answer: reparations! Direct resources for wealth building to black communities for their autonomous use. Again, plenty of literature on this if you want to actually do the 12th-grade level research. Downplaying hundreds of years of slavery and Jim Crow into one sentence like this to implicitly argue that the ongoing significance of it must be nil is just childish.
Oh, and not to put too fine a point on it, Bill, but actually, you did deny this. By arguing quite clearly that you think we need to stop talking about white and black as different categories because of the supposed wisdom of unnamed Buddhist teachers, you have actually indicated that you think we can’t talk even in past terms about what whites did to blacks.
You say, “That whites are collectively continuing the oppression of black people and others, today, is what I deny and for which I have seen no evidence outside of anecdotes about black people being pulled over by the police”.
Which means you have done no research. Despite this being an issue you want to pontificate on as if your opinion matters. Which means you don’t really care about the fates of people of color.
Because showing you the literally thousands of studies that show systemic discrimination against people of color and disadvantages for people of color in essentially every American institution, from criminal justice (not just rates of being pulled over but also differential rates of enforcement and prosecution everywhere – whites and blacks use drugs at essentially the same rate and see massively different rates of incarceration for it) but also banking and finance, home ownership and treatment by realtors, stereotype threat and other disadvantages in education, etc. etc. is pointless because you could have done this work yourself and didn’t, I’ll just point you here: http://www.timwise.org/2000/05/exchange-with-david-horowitz-on-racism/ . Horowitz makes many of your awful arguments and Wise dispatches them. This is from 20 years ago so the research has changed a lot, but it’ll at least get you up to speed with where you can start looking
Of course, we again have to correct your awful framing. “Collectively continuing” is way too vague and lets you make emotionally potent speeches instead of assessing facts. The picture is more complicated.
First of all, it doesn’t need to be most whites to cause great harm. If merely a substantial minority, let alone a majority, of people in power act in racist fashions, that is enough. If enough police officers, politicians, judges, district attorneys, etc. don’t prevent subconscious biases from guiding their behavior, are beholden to overtly racist individuals (e.g. Steve Kings and Donald Trumps who have a substantial racist and white nationalist base), don’t push back against the differential power and prestige white can bring to bear to protect and advocate for their interests, etc. that alone will advance inequality.
Take the 2008 recession. It wasn’t that whites are mean. It was that banks are predatory. But because not everyone in America has the same social, economic, individual and collective resources, predatory banks were able to do much more damage to black and Hispanic communities than white ones. It’s not as if poor and middle class white communities weren’t fucked over by the subprimse mortagage crisis; it was just worse for blacks.
Explaining this fully takes whole books. Entire college courses are taught to indicate the array of systemic factors at hand. Just as an example: In college, we had a Hispanic real estate agent come in, who explained that even when he sold a house to black couples, they (only semi-jokingly) asked him to not sell to anyone else in the same neighborhood, because they knew that white flight would happen if he sold too many more homes.
Second, those anecdotes should have been enough, Bill. If you were really listening, you should have realized that the stories you were hearing (the interminable, endless stories) didn’t match anything like the experiences you’ve had. And even if that just made you think that maybe cops suck, that should still have mattered to you. But instead you choose to make that a footnote.
You say, “Case in point, former police officer Jeff Hodge shot a white woman twenty-one times after handcuffing her behind her back and leaving her for dead. That is far worse objectively, than what happened to Breonna Taylor or the other cases that are mentioned in the debate”.
So… you are really going to try to use anecdotal evidence to settle this. Okay. Amadou Diallo was shot by multiple officers, 41 shots fired, 19 connected. https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/officers-shot-black-man-59-convicting-federal-agent-wont-easy-rcna4429 describes another case with even more shots fired. https://www.denverpost.com/2019/08/30/elijah-mcclain-aurora-police-death/ describes a man who got beaten into brain death. And what happened to Freddie Gray, part of routine mistreatment of black suspects, was a slow-motion horror story.
Oh, and not to put too fine a point on it, but human rights authorities note that our prisons are messed up in the extreme. Want to look at the incarceration rates for blacks and whites? So blacks get subjected to solitary confinement, routine inmate abuse, torture, deprivation, and prison rape as a result of the criminal justice system.
But hey, as long as we’re talking about anecdotes, here’s mine. I’ve never been killed by cops. Always been treated well by them, even when I was doing stupid-ass (if ultimately harmless) shit. Man, must be no systemic racism against whites, right?!
And, while we’re at it: The reason I talk like this isn’t self-loathing. It’s because my community, people I love, have been infected by this disease called racism, this poison, and it’s killing them. Just like it’s choking your mind right now.
Because you are not this stupid, Bill. You know full well that just comparing one white to one black suspect piecemeal is no way to argue. But you’re doing it because thinking about this properly is transparently deeply scary to you. Why, Bill? Why is your humanity worth so little to you?
You say, “If anything, the scientific literature has debunked the claim that implicit biases are real. I’ve taken those “implicit bias” tests that top tier schools administer: they’re bunk. The methodology is heavily flawed (it depends on how fast you can hit your keyboard) and so is unreliable”.
Which is utter horseshit, Bill. Just go to Google Scholar right now and see if that adds up. “I personally think it’s bunk”, your bald assertion, goes against people who actually do the work.
So, yes, how fast you can hit the keyboard matters. Think that racists hit the keyboard slower, Bill? No? Is that utterly stupid? Why, then that’s not an explanation, is it? Okay, you can have different variations when you’re hungry! Put aside that that’s true of lots of tests (IQ, blood sugar, etc.), which we still take seriously even if we take some care. Again, Bill, are non-racists always just hungrier than racists? These aren’t serious controls.
Look up the efficacy of bias training programs, Bill. If implicit biases aren’t real, which makes no sense psychologically whatsoever and I suspect you don’t even believe based on your apparent desire to talk about systemic problems against whites (what, Bill, is implicit bias only against whites?), how is that happening?
This isn’t a serious argument. You’re just trying to apologize to yourself. But hey, Hoss, if you have evidence, cite it.
I have a sociology degree, dude. I am telling you, right now, this is not a winning debate for you. The consensus is that implicit bias is real.
You say, “ How many race-obsessed folks have you met who were happier before they went to college? I can think of quite a few”.
Which could just mean that learning the truth about stuff sometimes sucks. Doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. So this is a blatant fallacy, an appeal to convenience.
Of course, I know people for whom learning about race issues actually really helped them. Putting aside that you implicitly deperson people of color here by just ignoring that they are pretty loudly telling you that they want to have this conversation and they will feel better doing so, I know whites for whom realizing that whiteness has a cost too was deeply liberatory.
And I had a pretty standard white liberal view of race, as being largely rooted in economics, until I read Wise’s work. I’m not any less happy after learning about that. It actually was deeply liberating to me, to realize and have a greater understanding of my neighbors of color.
So you fucked up a fallacy, Bill. Not only would it matter to the truth of a proposition if it made you feel bad to learn it, but you’re reasoning from unfalsifiable anecdotal evidence anyways.
You then go in this fallacious vein, eventually saying, “A white supremacist is somebody who is obsessed with race. “Anti-Racists” are also obsessed with race and also do damage to race relations. I’ve heard “anti-racists” preach against interracial adoption, interracial marriage etc. sounding exactly like a Klansman! I will say you’re the first person to mention Tim Wise in a while, he seems to have been sidelined by the likes of Robin Diangelo, et.al.”
So… why not respond to Wise’s work, then?
You don’t even mention anyone or their arguments in context so we can’t even fisk you, but even if you’re right, so what? Bill, people like you end up saying clownshoes shit like “It’s good to ignore a problem we all know exists”. There, I just made an argument that is infinitely better than yours because we all see an example of the clownshoes shit. Sure, it was kind of a strawman, and sure, your viewpoint is more nuanced than that, but who cares?
I have an idea, Bill. Talk to me. Talk to Richard. Don’t talk to phantom people. You clearly have no response to my arguments.
You say, “Briefly, even if, as you claim, implicit biases did exist, what makes them bad? What’s wrong with having “implicit biases” against convicted felons, drug dealers, the band Phish (I kid!), etc.? Is having an “implicit bias” against Olive Garden or Italian food a bad thing? If someone has an implicit bias against dating a guy with four children from three different mothers, is that a bad thing? If I have an implicit bias against dating a Irish woman rather than an Asian woman at Stanford, who is to say that is bad? This is something to think about.”
Bill… I’m going to give you one chance here to assume that you are just being a jackass and not being an actual racist.
Because, Bill, I shouldn’t have to explain why the specific implicit bias that people have against people of color is not like a bias against felons. Because people of color are people. They are not inherently as a group any worse or better than whites. Thinking otherwise is literally definitional racism. Right after warning us to not think in racist ways, you then basically ask “What’s wrong with racism?” Hey, Bill? Maybe try not defending racism and then you won’t have to worry about being a racist!
Now, of course, even the biases against convicted felons and drug dealers is a bad thing, dude. Lots of felons are people who made mistakes. Drug dealers are just selling a product. Yes, there are shitty convicted felons and shitty drug dealers, just like there are American war criminals!
I could ask you, Bill, what would be so bad about the implicit biases against whites you seem to care about? What about biases against Republicans? Against men? Surely I can make a case why those groups have done shitty things! Even you agree on whites!
Stereotypes are irrational. Stop trying to defend them.
You say, “Finally, no black person would have been “worse off” than Nick Sandman because Sandman didn’t do anything. So the comparison simply cannot exist because even other whites are never in his position. As far as Kyle Rittenhouse goes, there was a black kid who shot somebody at his school and he got bail, so he was not in fact treated worse than Rittenhouse (assuming for the sake of argument that he was, like Rittenhouse, acting in dire self-defense)”
Please, name the case, Bill. And then explain how it was anything like Rittenhouse going with a gun to a place he knew he was likely to shoot it.
And Sandmann was a public bigot and pest. This is the guy you’re defending? For fuck’s sake. Man, what a wonderful example of white privilege. Has Obama gotten anyone to have to pay him for loonie conspiracy theories? Sandmann SLAPPed his way to silencing people reporting on him being a piece of crap. The fact that you want to cite him as an example and hold him up in the same post that you talked about Breonna Taylor… for fucking shame, dude. Be better than this.
You then say, “Finally, let’s stop using the term “people of color”: it’s puerile and afactual since whites are also “people of color” just as all people, big and small, are “people of size”.”
Which is as stupid as saying “Let’s stop using the terrm ‘green’ to refer to environmental movements, the environment isn’t all green!” Words have context-specific uses. You know what it means, stop whining. (And of course unlike “people of size” the term “colored” has an actual legal history, of the kind that you sweep under the rug when it suits you).
So… not a single argument against the sources I cited, the arguments I made, the thought experiment I provided. Just psychological projection and outright asking why being subconsciously racist is bad. This is why I say the kind of things I do, Bill. I am hoping to save you and people like you from a cloud of stupidity that is making you a worse person.
Anybody who thinks that about an underage kid who was sent death threats by celebrities merely for smiling uncomfortably at the Crypt Keeper’s long-lost cousin needs to take a break from CNN for a while. Seriously “dude”, “standing while white” isn’t a hate crime, nor does it make one a “pest”. He was there to protest on behalf of the millions of black lives lost to abortion every year. Ironically, the real racists aka the Black Hebrew Israelites, didn’t get any mention by the MSM. You keep citing Tim Wise as if that hypocrite was an authority. Did you know he lives in a wealthy white area? Here’s an interview I found of Wise from around the time Sandman was in the news, I have quoted a portion of it to show you how much of an illogical hack Wise is:
Source: https://www.salon.com/2019/01/28/anti-racist-activist-tim-wise-heres-what-id-tell-the-covington-catholic-boys/
Unless Wise is either God or Santa, he would have no idea what those kids would or would not do in their spare time. Already he’s showing his anti-Catholic bigotry and self-loathingness, pandering to a certain mindset that whites collectively must somehow be “guilty” of racism merely for existing. He says that the kids were “staring down” that old man. Anybody with eyes to see and ears to hear would know that’s not what happened. Of course, Wise was too busy selling books and basking in anti-white rhetoric to bother looking at the footage of the aforesaid Crypt Keeper walking directly up to those kids while they were waiting for their bus. Smiling was a rather calm response to having some creep bang a drum in your face. Crypt Keeper Phillips is also a convicted felon who tried disrupting a church service. Says a lot about that attention seeker, doesn’t it? He then went on national television demanding all of the kids be expelled. Anyone who continues to think Sandman did anything wrong needs to go back and rewatch the video, preferably the entire thing, which the worthless hacks at CNN were too lazy to do. Just goes to show you that you can’t believe everything you hear.
I suppose anybody who voted for Bill Clinton in the 90s must be a white supremacist since he bombed that hospital in Africa. If Wise is where you get your information from, then you’re being misled by a self-loathing millionaire hypocrite. Wise is being very selective in how he applies his standards. Does Wise live in a poor black area? Does he shop at Whole Foods or Aldis? Does he shop at Goodwill, get food from a fire station, or does he spend premium amounts on coffee at the local hipster coffee shop? Judging by everything I am seeing about Wise, my guess is that he is just like any other “woke” yuppie cashing in on the white guilt publishing business. Makes it easier to complain about capitalism when you live in a capitalist society. This is not the only piece by Wise I have read. I have listened to his lectures back in 2015 along with additional criticism by CRT authors such as Tommy Curry. I can assure you and Richard that I am, indeed “up to date”. Unless somebody reinvented the wheel, I’m pretty sure James Lindsay, Shelby Steele, and even Randall Kennedy have rebutted some of the assumptions presented on this thread. In his book “Race, Crime, and The Law”, Harvard law professor Kennedy notes that it is a mistake to just assume that the war on drugs is racist and that it is far more complicated than people have assumed.
Especially for Tim Wise and the others who continue to treat Sandman as “a bigot and a pest”. Maybe Sandman will move in next to Tim Wise in his (probably) gated community and can play his Metallica CDs at 3am while Wise is trying to type up his next book? That’s being a “pest” alright!
No one said Sandmann was committing a crime. What people said was that he showed up in a MAGA hat and acted like a racist choad. And he did. He and his MAGA-ite friends, brought in for a political event, first got hassled by some Black Israelites and then were jerks to other protesters. That’s what was recorded on video, that’s what was reported. So nice straw man there, Bill.
And the idea that Tim Wise has to be psychic to see that there’s a very clear correlation between the kind of people who show up at anti-abortion rallies and those who tend to be on the other side of the political spectrum from BLM activists, peace activists, etc. is childish in the fucking extreme. We all know you know better, Bill, so why are you lying?
Next you complain that pointing out that wearing the hat of a man who is a known and self-admitted sexual criminal (and really a clear rapist), who openly says extremely racist views, a hat that has a slogan that implies that America was “great” when gays couldn’t get married or blacks were routinely hanged or women couldn’t easily enter the workforce (you know, what it means to say to make America great “again”, since “again” by definition means it was in the past when all that was true), is invalid because Bill Clinton did a thing. Well, Bill Clinton didn’t bomb that clinic because he’s a white supremacist. The clinic bombing was vile, but someone who voted for him did not signal that they wanted to do that. Wearing a MAGA hat, on the other hand, signals at minimum that you were okay with some of Trump’s overtly stated, public policies that he said he would enact ahead of time, like, you know, a giant racist wall, or stop-and-frisk. So this whataboutism bullshit doesn’t cut it. It’s not a good analogy, but even if you’re right, that would only mean we should criticize people who have given implicit cover to Bill Clinton’s crimes. Which… we should. Holy crap! When you’re not a partisan hack, it’s possible to have a conscience! Where’s yours?
And then you take my point that the truth sometimes sucks in response to the overt argument that people who studied racism sometimes seem to be bummed as a result as a way of making a snarky point in summation, after having not actually done any of the work to defend Sandmann and make an open strawman of the people criticizing Sandmann, even after you yourself cited an article that didn’t do that. Of course, you openly changed the subject in doing so, ignoring that I had caught you in a flat out fallacy. Instead of taking accountability for that, you decided to duck it and play a rhetorical game instead. Why, Bill? Why is stanning for racists worth this much to you?
Why did you do that, Bill? Why did you imply that people’s only problems with Sandmann was that he was protesting while white and then cite an article that gave lots of reasons that weren’t that? You may have found Tim’s article non-compelling, mainly because you clearly don’t care about the truth on this topic and so came up with lame excuses and whataboutism in order to avoid taking his point, but you didn’t respond to either me or Tim even after quoting us. Why does it matter to you to lie about this?
(Oh, and Tim used to live very near the communities he served, before neo-Nazis threatened his family repeatedly including showing up with Skittles – look it up – near his home so he had to move. Funny how you decided to do no research on where Tim lived and it ended up indicating that you had no fucking idea about his actual activism and its costs. Why did you do that? Why did you not care about the truth?)
Richard gave you resources. Why are you ignoring them? Why are you ignoring all of my arguments? Do you really think that I, someone who is clearly on the left, is eager to defend Bill Clinton? Do you really think anyone who can read the entire thread is going to think that you’re being reasonable here, that you are going to convince anyone? Or is this about protecting your ego? And why are we so far from the idea that there’s some kind of deep structural racism against whites or that it’s bad to even talk about racism? Why do you get to say that everyone else is race-baiting when it comes to Sandmann, right after providing evidence to the contrary, and then get to have the audacity to say we need to stop talking about racism?
This clearly matters to you. You clearly are thinking about it. You’re just doing it badly. Why? I have given you opportunity after opportunity to address an actual evidence-based picture on institutional racism, one that doesn’t excoriate whites, one that would involve reforms that would ultimately benefit everyone and make the society more just. Why is it so important to you not to have that conversation?
Also, regarding Shelby et al.: Yes, and Shelby’s brother Claude pummeled him in the literature with stereotype threat, which is amply supported.
I know you can cite me scholars who deny the consensus. Just like I can cite you sundry scholars of various degrees of intellectual honesty who deny the consensus on evolution, Big Bang cosmology, and any principle you seek to hold. Richard can point you to countless fundamentalist scholars who deny well-established facts of the field of Biblical studies because of their a priori commitment to inerrantism. Every single thing you’ve said in these threads has been contradicted by a scholar. For every Sowell you can cite me, I can raise you a Bertrand and Mullainathan, a Pager, and a Gilens. If we want to interrogate the free market ideology that would defend conservative thought, I can go to Marxist and anarchist scholars, and you couldn’t complain about their bias or them being marginal if you wanted to be serious. If you want to seriously go through the literature, we can, and you will lose the debate badly, but just saying that there are people who disagree with me is a chickenshit stance. Like how you tried to do an amateur, armchair dismissal of a massive field of study (implicit bias) and I had to point out that your problems with the field made no fucking sense and the controls you were suggesting couldn’t possibly explain the extremely consistent data (to say nothing of the fact that you seem to be unaware that implicit bias isn’t always tested by randos online; they just post a version of it for the good of the public, but that’s not the only basis for the literature).
The difference is that conservative scholarship on this topic sucks. Like conservative scholarship generally does. And it’s transparent that you’ve only read the conservative scholarship, because it’s exceedingly clear that you can’t help yourself to not strawman views you literally just read.
That’s why the consensus goes away from the conservatives. You know, like this very thread, where you saw that philosophers overwhelmingly do not agree with them. It’s why they had to make their own special little safe space foundation in Heritage (and in other think tanks) because they routinely don’t hack it in peer review (and then have the gall to complain that their non-peer reviewed books aren’t being taught in class).
Read Steinberg’s Ethnic Myth and get to the parts where he examines Sowell’s arguments. Then look for Sowell’s rejoinders. You’ll see why Steinberg is taken seriously and Sowell is not. The same applies to Shelby and everyone else you cite. It’s why you had to open up with citing someone who literally co-hosted for Rush fucking Limbaugh, while never bothering to admit the very clear ideological bias on display.
And before you try to argue that it’s left-wing bias against you, look at what happened with Pager’s study. She was examining felons’ difficulty in reentry into the job market. She was a responsible scholar and so she controlled for race. She did not go into the research to find racism. It just emerged from the data. As Richard pointed out to you, conservatives cite Fryer’s study when it suits them but ignores that Fryer overwhelmingly indicates the massive preponderance of racism and his few conclusions that contradict the mainstream can easily be explained (as he himself discussed) by the fact that he was dependent on police reports and cops lie to cover their asses. It takes a priori ideological commitment to not see the immense evidence for structural racism. Conservative scholars end up just gainsaying all of it, insisting against all evidence that all those barriers really can’t matter but rates of wedlock must.
“laypeople like you”
There it is. Anyway, I want you to build a time machine, somehow, and go back to the mid 90s and tell your past self that there will be a SCOTUS case in the future where the definition of a “woman” will be up for grabs. I then want you to come back to the present and relay what your past self’s reaction was to that.
My 90s self would be totally on board with that. Because I had just read the entirety of Roe v Wade and knew even then that’s exactly the sort of thing the judiciary is for.
That gender didn’t mean the same thing as sex was already well established by then (a formal scientific discovery of it goes at least as far back as the 1950s; it became mainstream in academic discourse by the 1970s).
Though I would later discover this wasn’t new. Ancient authors exhibit awareness of the distinction even as far back as the Roman Empire, which should be less surprising as they employed fully gendered languages and thus were well aware gender had nothing to do with sex, as if ships and abstractions like “virtue” had genitals. I also discovered in the late 90s, from taking courses in anthropology at the time, that many cultures have long made the distinction explicit, even identifying more than two genders, such as in certain Native American and West Asian cultures.
Jackson is well aware the science on this is now immense and complex and she isn’t an expert in it. As a judge, she must adhere to what actual experts testify to in proceedings within the boundaries of the Federal Rules of Evidence. And she has taken no cases like that yet, so couldn’t comment. Just as she explained to the disingenuous ignoramuses questioning her in Congress. And we should want judges to act exactly like this. It’s precisely what they are for: to maintain neutrality in disputes until formal proceedings are presented to them properly weighing the pertinent facts and law.
Hey, Bill. If you’re constantly hearing from people that you are demonstrably a lay person and don’t understand what you’re talking about, you should take some personal responsibility and listen to that, and start either doing some research and consulting experts or not running your mouth about things you don’t know about.
If I heard in the 90s, when I was 13, that a judge would want to hear from a biologist to know what a woman was, I would accept that there’s probably some nuances that are important or at least that there could be. Apparently even as a teenager I was more honest than you ever have been.
Implicit bias literature is when you want ESP without wanting ESP: it’s mindreading but without the cool occult stuff. If one has an implicit bias, there are only two ways that is possible: innate ideas (impossible according to hardcore atheist physicalist i,e. reductionists) or they are learned (ala Locke’s blank slate). Stephen Pinker wrote a whole book “How the Mind Works” which is against the blank slate theory but nonetheless, most philosophers more or less reject belief in innate ideas. Which means that if implicit biases are in fact learned, but one is unaware of their existence. Where did they learn these biases? In police training courses? Absurd given how much money is invested in diversity training. In Chicago, for instance, police have to take multiple cultural competency courses, including on religion, so if there is systemic racism in policing against black people, then 1. those courses don’t work and it is all pervasive or 2. they do work on only some police officers are racist and therefore there is no systemic racism in policing against blacks. Which is it? I know people on anti-racism task forces who are openly against WASPS marrying non-WASPS, what to speak of legit interracial marriage. Every “anti-racist” I’ve ever met was far more racist than they average Joe Sixpack on the street. It’s “anti-racists” who want separate student unions, graduation ceremonies, hell, even racially segregated yoga studios. Even a great mind like the great late Thích Nhất Hạnh supported this bullshit towards the end of his life, proving that even Buddhist masters can become morally corrupted by woke ideology.
Even if we did have innate ideas, there is no scientific reason to think racism is one of those. Back to Cornel West, West opposed Thomas due to party lines because that is what is expected of him. This is the same guy who shared a stage with a suspected murderer named Radhanath Swami. So West has an issue with a so called “Uncle Tom” like Justice Thomas but can’t be bothered to read the countless articles and several books that outright accuse his Swami friend of being a murderous cult member and yet I am accused of not doing my research on these people?
https://iskconnews.org/radhanath-swami-and-dr-cornel-west-bond-in-conversation-on-faith/
http://www.harekrsna.org/gbc/black/radanath.htm
Holy shit, Bill, now you are just screwing up super basic philosophy, and exposing yourself to be utterly inept, while going back to previous conversations, all so you can avoid talking about systemic racism. At least for once you’re talking about an issue, before you then decide to pull your dirtiest pool yet.
So! Implicit bias! Finally!
You say, “Implicit bias literature is when you want ESP without wanting ESP: it’s mindreading but without the cool occult stuff”.
And you offer precisely zero evidence for this. You cite Pinker on an unrelated broader topic.
You say, “If one has an implicit bias, there are only two ways that is possible: innate ideas (impossible according to hardcore atheist physicalist i,e. reductionists) or they are learned (ala Locke’s blank slate). Stephen Pinker wrote a whole book “How the Mind Works” which is against the blank slate theory but nonetheless, most philosophers more or less reject belief in innate ideas”.
The fallacy of a false dilemma. Ideas can be both innate and learned, with complex influences from both biology and environment, and “biology” and “environment” are themselves intertwined inextricably and cyclically. And you are now trying to take a position that both are false, even when you’re trying to
argue for this false binary. Are you even trying to pay attention? Of course, you end up clearly siding with learned behavior, so… implicit bias is learned so I win!
In fact, Bill, the modern scientific and philosophical consensus (and this is so fucking basic I shouldn’t need to cite this for you, but I will: https://canvas.highline.edu/courses/1240222/pages/false-dichotomy-nature-vs-nurture?module_item_id=16078526#:~:text=The%20very%20nature%20of%20the,options%2C%20whereas%20others%20are%20available ) is that it’s both. We have some built-in ideas (and how the fuck is this against physicalism? our ideas are a physical consequence of brain configuration under physicalism), or more accurately some built-in ways that we approach the world and engage with it. The entire field of cognitive psychology demonstrates a host of biases. We also learn stuff. You need to stop reading mass market books like Pinker’s that support your delusions and start actually talking to experts in the fields in question. If you talk to almost anyone working anywhere in sociology, they will all tell you that it’s always both biological and social.
And so implicit biases (and, again, you clearly believe in implicit biases, you keep alleging people are biased and don’t have the audacity to claim it’s all overt consciously-held hatred) are a combination of these. We live in a racist society, but people have natural tendencies toward in-group and out-group identification. Those tendencies are complex and can lead to homophilic in-group valorizing or heterophilic out-group valorizing effects, etc. but they do always lead to stereotypes and biases. Like, are you going to try to argue that people don’t have stereotypical thoughts?
So let’s actually cite some research!
https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12910-017-0179-8 , for example, is a systematic analysis that confirms that IAT tests have impacts on real behavior. All of the hash that some make about test-retest stability (you know, that thing we should accept would change given that the test itself can expose the underlying biases in the person to that person) and other complaints miss that the overwhelming bulk of the literature can link implicit bias results to demonstrable impacts in the world. It’s measuring something, but there is reasonable debate about what and what impact it’s having. I bet you think IQ is a valid measure even though it’s nowhere near as useful and is infinitely more ideologically and scientifically fraught!
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797619844270 actually supports you a little, Bill, but it also supports me. They find that biases seem to emerge from being immersed in a culture but that individual biases can evaporate in different cultures. Which explains why bias training can work.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364661321002047 this also indicates that it comes from structural inequality. Some, like https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2372732217746190 , argue that conventional bias training puts too much focus on the individual, and I agree, but the very existence of the bias training raises consciousness of these biases.
And this one, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31192631/ , finds that you can use a ton of measures to try to change the results and you still get implicit measures that can vary slightly but still have the same level of correlation with observed behavior and explicit bias.
Oh, and when it comes to his ideas about the blank slate and evo psych, Pinker is a hack. https://freethoughtblogs.com/reprobate/2018/02/25/three-feminist-myths/ demonstrates how Pinker is both internally inconsistent and ideologically biased in how he surveys evidence. And Richard’s own analysis of evopsych, on which Pinker heavily depends, is also useful: https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/9141 . Pinker just straight up lies both about activist and movement feminism and about all his ideological opponents, implying that everyone who rejects his radical biotruths and his extreme beliefs in modularity (and the ascension of free markets and everything else) are all just people who believe in a blank slate, when no one does. It’s a massive strawman, and you apparently don’t know that. Which means you have done no research on the sources you cite. Super telling.
There are valid criticisms of IAT measures and approaches. You’re not making them.
You say, :” Which means that if implicit biases are in fact learned, but one is unaware of their existence. Where did they learn these biases? In police training courses? Absurd given how much money is invested in diversity training. In Chicago, for instance, police have to take multiple cultural competency courses, including on religion, so if there is systemic racism in policing against black people, then 1. those courses don’t work and it is all pervasive or 2. they do work on only some police officers are racist and therefore there is no systemic racism in policing against blacks”.
Because people wake up and turn on as complete blank slates the day they walk into police training. And all cops live in Chicago.
Dude, we live in a society where people have biases and stereotypes. You know this. You’ve acknowledged it yourself in these threads. You were previously so terrified of this fact that you wanted us to not talk about racism so it would go away. Now you seem to be baffled, BAFFLED!, at the idea that racism exists everywhere.
Why is it so bizarre to imagine that people who have been exposed to even explicit racist messaging (you know, like the neo-Nazis spewing trash on the Internet or everyone’s proverbial racist uncles), let alone broader cultural ideas about race that came from a racist society, might absorb that implicitly at a level before they have even considered it? You just make a baseless argument from incredulity against this.
You don’t cite any evidence about the efficacy of the Chicago police program, which would be a pretty important thing to suggest. I haven’t found any, but I did find that HR professionals note how important it is ( https://www.builtinchicago.org/2020/11/09/chicago-unconscious-bias-in-the-workplace ) and that bias training can work ( https://hbr.org/2021/09/unconscious-bias-training-that-works#:~:text=UB%20training%20seeks%20to%20raise,interactions%20with%20customers%20and%20colleagues. ). The problem has been programs that have just assumed that mere consciousness alone, rather than broader institutional support and changing actual behavior and habits, is sufficient. This is why the bias training programs that demonstrably work are ones where people actually train to see their bias in action and change their behavior and habits. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2021/03/24/is-unconscious-bias-training-still-worthwhile/ is a very good article that argues that IAT training needs to continue, just with a broader, more thoroughgoing support.
What a surprise. An ideologically motivated conservative denies the evidence, doesn’t have any on offer, cherry-picks anecdotes, and then makes his worldview from that, all to justify not improving flawed but well-meaning policies so they are even more effective. Nothing at all emblematic about that (/s)!
You say, “Every “anti-racist” I’ve ever met was far more racist than they average Joe Sixpack on the street. It’s “anti-racists” who want separate student unions, graduation ceremonies, hell, even racially segregated yoga studios. Even a great mind like the great late Thích Nhất Hạnh supported this bullshit towards the end of his life, proving that even Buddhist masters can become morally corrupted by woke ideology”.
So you have anecdotal data. And anecdotal data based on a bad comparison: Anti-racists, since they are dedicated activists, should be compared to neo-Nazis and alt-righters who are their ideologically motivated opposition, rather than random members of the population. I wonder why you did that. Maybe because an actually fair comparison would prove how much of a fucking partisan hack you are being?
You cite no polls, of course, and you know damn well I can cite you poll after poll that shows that the average American will say some incredibly racist, offensive, vile horseshit. They will be biased against Muslims, against Arabs, against atheists. So your anecdotal data doesn’t fucking cut it, Bill.
Of course, your immense bias on this topic has already been exposed. I have not shown a single indication that I’m more racist than everyone who voted for Donald Trump, Bill. You just stopped trying to have that argument. I bet you’ve pigeonholed me into the racist anti-racist category: you already accused me of being effectively a self-hating white, no matter the original tenor of my response to you, and of having incredible anti-conservative hatred, no matter how much I am clearly capable of returning to calm policy analysis. Your judgment fucking sucks, Bill. I don’t trust you to identify a racist because you demonstrably do it poorly.
I’m a Buddhist. It scares me that you think Buddhism supports your thoughts. Buddhism should tell you that your mental illusions can mislead you and active thought and mindfulness are necessary to improve compassion, because compassionate, enlightened behavior is not default. Why didn’t you assume this from Buddhism, Bill? Why did you ignore your apparent beliefs? Is it because your biases are stronger than your practice?
You say, “Even if we did have innate ideas, there is no scientific reason to think racism is one of those”.
What a wonderful bit of assuming your beliefs to be true in your premises. IAT studies, the thing we were discussing, say that racism is implicit, though not innate.
And, yeah, actually, Bill, there’s some pretty good research that indicates that humans are predisposed to use some visual signifiers to identify tribe. That’s not an overwhelming signal, it can be overcome, and it’s based off of the society’s existing racial and ethnic understanding. We don’t talk about Scythians anymore. We’re not worried about the Peril of the Hun. But the fact that societies do tend to keep developing racist ideologies does point to something about us. Chomsky has argued that it’s more parsimonious to argue that people use ex post facto rationalizations to justify the shitty things they’re already doing, and that’s fair as an explanation for systemic racism and colonialist ideology.
You say, “Back to Cornel West, West opposed Thomas due to party lines because that is what is expected of him.”
[citation needed]
You don’t cite a single piece of West’s actual arguments against Thomas. You just assert, baldly, that he’s as biased as you are. Why? Why can’t you ever bother making actual facts? These two links you cite here, in order to engage in some dirty fucking pool on an incredibly tangential point so that you can make a fallacious argument that doesn’t prove West was right about Thomas.
Maybe Cornel West is an asshole, dude. That doesn’t make him wrong about Thomas. Your argument from hypocrisy and genetic fallacy doesn’t fucking cut it. Why did you do this? I keep on pointing out how you keep making arguments about people rather than ideas, and you keep being unable to help yourself.
You say, “This is the same guy who shared a stage with a suspected murderer named Radhanath Swami. So West has an issue with a so called “Uncle Tom” like Justice Thomas but can’t be bothered to read the countless articles and several books that outright accuse his Swami friend of being a murderous cult member and yet I am accused of not doing my research on these people?”
Oh, cool, so guilt by association is totally valid! Every Republican who ever bitches about child pornography, like they did with Jackson, are all massive hypocrites because of Dennis Hastert! They’re all rapists because they love Trump, the self-admitted rapist, and Kavanaugh, the accused rapist and known liar! You seem to know your spiritual communities: is everyone who has ever even considered new spirituality after the 60s all guilty of terrorism because of fucking Rajneesh? You hated that we were treating the Covington kids by virtue of looking at them being ant-abortion right-wing extremists, so apparently that’s actually valid and we can just assume Sandmann is an asshole just because of his asshole friends and his asshole school! I can go on and on. It is trivial to find people on every issue you’ve talked about on this thread who hang out with jerks, who platform jerks, etc. People are flawed. But that never bothers you when it’s your pet issues.
It couldn’t be that West disagrees with you and finds the accusations implausible, or thinks that the arguments from the guy are interesting and he actually believes in platforming controversial figures. It couldn’t be that he had thought maybe he should debate him because Swami might be dangerous and a possible murderer, and found the right place to do that, the way that Dillahunty did huge damage to Peterson is a “conversation” just by basic logic. Nope. He’s a hypocrite. Even though you don’t cite any of his reasoning for why he did it. Even though you didn’t ask him. You bitch about intellectual charity and then only once cite your opposition, when you did it with Tim, and you cited a different article than the one that was shown to you then lied about what it said.
Hey, Bill, remember when you said that common law was the way you described harm? Swami is suspected of murder. Not convicted. You fucking mendacious clown. I’m sorry, but you deserve to be upbraided for that bullshit you just pulled. You have contradicted, just now, countless things you have said earlier.
When it came to the harm from racism, that has to be done in law. But when it comes to a guy you don’t like and think may be a murderer, fuck that it’s all allegations, not only should we not listen to him, but West is a bad person for platforming him!
When it came to Kavanaugh, it was totally acceptable for him to shriek about a persecution complex because he was being accused. But Swami can’t do the same because accusations against him are clearly matters of indisputable public record, despite the lack of any actual prosecution and the fact that everyone has to say “alleged” about all these murders because no one ever fucking made a case despite it supposedly being so ironclad!
Intellectual charity? Not for West! He’s a hypocrite because he likes an alleged murderer but not an alleged grabass and proven bad judge, even though those aren’t even the same thing!
What an incredibly fucking asshole move you just pulled, Bill. When it comes to people you don’t like, allegations on blogs and Quora fucking cut it. Rumors cut it. What incredible mendacity.
Looking up the accusations against Swami, there’s Quora articles that insist that he ordered the hit on Prabhu, some blog posts, etc. Nothing like evidence, or a police report, or anything. It sounds like the standard bullshit accusations that happen in cults. Might Swami be a murderer? Hell yeah! Rajneesh sure did that anthrax stuff! It astonishes me how much you act like a partisan. Like, I think Bill Clinton is a likely rapist, dude. You can criticize Cornel West all you like. No gods, no masters, no idols. Maybe you need to start doing the same.
And this borderline libelous accusation was, let’s remember, to: 1) Discredit Swami so that 2) You can discredit West by guilt by association so that 3) You can argue that West had no valid reason to dislike Thomas and was being ideologically motivated so that 4) What again, exactly? That liberal blacks can disagree with conservative blacks, thus disproving your entire bullshit about identity politics and how liberals behave? What’s your fucking point? How badly have you lost the plot? If I were to make an argument like this, Bill, relying on sheer fucking hearsay and rumor, I would have done it for something central to the argument. Not some tangential nonsense. You really don’t give a fuck about racism.
Inside baseball about Hare Krishnas and other new spirituality movements? THAT you know about and have citations for! How fucking telling!
Be more mindful, Bill. You of all people have no excuse for this bullshit. You are applying such a grotesquely obvious double standard that it is clearly coming from not having thought about your beliefs for five seconds. Think about why you are so charged on this topic. Take some accountability for yourself.
So I ended up doing what I doubt you ever actually did, and simply read what West has said about Thomas. And, quelle surprise, you’re full of shit. You simply cannot honestly represent the tenor and nature of your opponent’s arguments.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Race_Matters/p89c2eTJgJgC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=clarence%20thomas . In Race Matters, West criticizes Thomas for mediocrity and failure: Allowing discrimination cases to “die on the vine”, being underqualified in educational terms and actual bench achievement, etc. He also upbraids him for having criticized his sister, Emma Mae, in ways that are racist mythology and deeply unfair to his sister. (You know, that racial solidarity you criticized West for not showing but never criticized Thomas for not showing, given your inability to avoid partisan bias!)
He centers all of this in the light of the cruelty shown Anita Hill and what he argues to have been a failure of black intellectual character and leadership. His criticism of Thomas was a springboard to discuss other things, broader concerns. He even notes that Souter’s mediocrity shouldn’t be used to excuse Thomas’. His point is that the black community having defended Thomas implicitly indicates that racial solidarity has to defend the mediocre, which is an internalized acquiescence to racist ideology. None of this is really about Thomas. There isn’t a vendetta here. There are measured criticisms.
And here, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/interviews/west.html , West says the following after Gates points out that Thomas had been depicted as a jockey and in other deeply cruel ways: “Clarence Thomas must never be demonized. He ought to be deeply criticized, ought not to be disrespected in terms of having his humanity called into question even though a person like myself may have very deep disagreements with him. It’s so easy to begin to demonize someone you think is so far removed and as the demonization begins to expand, it ends up being everybody but your friends. After a while everybody else but you. That is a slippery slope that is so easy to slide down, and that’s what is dangerous. So there ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives”. That’s not ignoring racial solidarity. That’s caring about it while also caring about truth and caring about the totality of your community beyond mere token members of it. And while I have some concerns about the identity politics framing that West and Gates take for granted here, I can have those concerns while also having empathy for why they are thinking that way and recognizing that perhaps they have some concerns I am not properly understanding. You know, actual empathy, actual wisdom, actual compassion.
In other words, West is very measured about his criticism. I am sure you think West is being unreasonable because you disagree with him. But this is simply not the hit piece you thought it was.
You lied to me. And I bet you didn’t even check this. I bet you inherited from conservative commentary that West was just a hater and a mediocre scholar, and didn’t read West in his own words.
Why do you not care what your word means? When you say something, why do you not care that it’s routinely not correct, not well thought-out, not reliable? Shouldn’t your word and deed matter to you?
Sorry to reply again, Bill, but something caught my eye. I am not intending to bury you with verbiage here, but this is so emblematic of just awful reasoning, reasoning that you are clearly smarter than, that it deserves to be unpacked. Because if you can get why this was a terrible and thoughtless argument, maybe you can stop holding your irrational ideas about the sociology of race.
So you said, “Absurd given how much money is invested in diversity training. In Chicago, for instance, police have to take multiple cultural competency courses, including on religion, so if there is systemic racism in policing against black people, then 1. those courses don’t work and it is all pervasive or 2. they do work on only some police officers are racist and therefore there is no systemic racism in policing against blacks”.
The number of ways that this line of reasoning is so mangled and so full of fractal non sequiturs, I want to break it down.
Broadly, the argument is:
1) If a problem is real, a solution is present for it.
2) Diversity training is a solution to systemic racism in policing.
3) Diversity training has been implemented.
4) Diversity training has not completely eliminated systemic racism.
5) Therefore, systemic racism doesn’t exist.
As you yourself correctly note, #1 and #2 are false. A problem can be real and the proposed solutions for it fail to deal with it. One cannot reason from the failure of solutions to the non-existence of problems.
But #3 is only supported by referring to Chicago. You say “for instance”, but don’t prove that Chicago is actually representative.
You don’t support #4 with any evidence whatsoever.
So #5 doesn’t follow.
But the entire argument hinges on two utterly fallacious lines of reasoning.
First, you implicitly assume that a solution must be perfect for it to be worth implementing.
In fact, if we see that a bias training program reduces racial gaps in policing, we are perfectly justified in making the inference that there was bias. But it’s affirming the consequent to go the other way: the failure of a policy doesn’t disprove the existence of a problem, especially when that problem is documented. The fact that you had to try to reason this way to get to your argument shows that even you know that you can’t make a valid argument to the conclusion, so you need an invalid one.
Bias training could be being effective by reducing the amount of bias in action among officers, and still not perfectly solve the problem because it doesn’t totally eliminate the bias. You simply assume this problem away.
In fact, part of the reason for a broad-reaching, relatively radical route to criminal justice reform in line with “Defund the Police” rhetoric is precisely because no one solution on its own is likely to be effective and we’ve seen that piecemeal reforms get coopted or ignored. We need broad-reaching change that actually makes the institutions shift in their values and behaviors.
But the second problem is that you fractally fail to understand racism in the criminal justice system.
It’s not just implicit bias in police officers. It’s not just the same kind of implicit biases in police leadership, or prosecutors, or policymakers, or corrections officers and officials. It’s not just the presence of explicit bias among some individuals, even if it may be a minority. It’s not just the pressures toward police militarization. It’s not just a militaristic society that tends to use criminalization approaches instead of rationally-rooted ones. It’s not just the overt racism, classism and anti-leftism that birthed the drug war. It’s not just the protection of American banks that engage in money laundering for drug dealers. It’s not just the failure to properly fund social work and other alternatives to the police, motivated by a culture that values sadism and cruelty (often rooted in Christian fundamentalism). It’s not just failing to clean up lead.
It’s all of those things. So implicit bias training was never meant to single-handedly solve the problem. So this entire line of reasoning is as irrational as someone telling their auto mechanic that they clearly don’t need to change their oil because their tires blew. The entire car has issues, and if we don’t intend to just replace it, then we need to do some serious maintenance.
But by being reductive, you can point your opponents as simple-minded, stubborn, irrational bigots. You can ignore that the problem is multifaceted, including elements that aren’t even directly about race but become institutionally racist when they aggravate existing racial differences. It’s irrational, and actually demonstrates a total contempt for the needs of all Americans, but it does at least have the benefit of making one feel better, I guess.
And you even tried to slip in a genetic fallacy along with your anecdotal arguments with the claim that you know people who are on anti-racist taskforces who have racist views. As if their individual hypocrisy proves that there is widespread hypocrisy among anti-racist workers in general. Let alone as if their individual hypocrisy proves that the broad approach isn’t justified. Their imperfections has nothing to do with the argument… but it does let you decide to not talk about the racism of officers, or the failure of the criminal justice system, or the needs of communities of color, or anything of the sort. You used whataboutism as a woobie.
You may not realize this about yourself. But it’s transparent to everyone else.
“No one said Sandmann was committing a crime. What people said was that he showed up in a MAGA hat and acted like a racist choad. And he did. He and his MAGA-ite friends, brought in for a political event, first got hassled by some Black Israelites and then were jerks to other protesters. That’s what was recorded on video, that’s what was reported. So nice straw man there, Bill.”
Where specifically did Sandmann act like a “racist choad” in that video? I saw a 17yr old smiling uncomfortably at a creepy old felon with a history of targeting Christians, meanwhile countless white liberals including the ones working for MSM ignored the BHIs who were the real racists. We saw a similar mob attack Rittenhouse the following year. Face it, MSM hates white people. They just do. Even during the OJ Simpson case (for those old enough to remember) they treated Simpson as a victim of systemic racism despite the clear evidence he killed two people. A white store employee at a mall in Flint, Michigan was brutally assaulted by a black man for allegedly saying the n-word (the guy he was with later denied that ever happened) and got zero jail time! If the races were reversed, the whole city would have been on fire.
BLM activists have openly declared their support for Cuba, a country that is less of a country and more of a hellhole. A communist dictatorship where dissenters are imprisoned or killed. THAT is the organization that leads the riots in the name of “justice” several times a year. In my opinion, you need to swap the blue pill for the red one. The founders of that organization live in palaces while their “black brothers” live in houses that don’t even have stoves. LBJ’s policies helped contribute to the state of poverty in the black community. Why are so many black conservatives spending decades writing books against Johnson’s “war on poverty”? If one says that they “have internalized racism” then that would be an ad hominem and not an argument. Just some things to think about.
Uhh… Bill, did you not catch the part where they were openly singing a mocking version of Phillips’ song and therefore mocking his culture? That’s on video, and yet astonishingly poorly reported from all of the cluck-clucking about the supposed rush to judgment. The initial commentary focused on that and Sandmann’s expression. Sandmann says that he wasn’t intending to be mocking, but, well, then his class goes ahead and does just that, while also trying to deny that they did it. There’s also eyewitnesses reporting Tomahawk chops and slurs. Oh, and they’re all wearing MAGA hats. You know, a hate symbol.
The Black Israelites being jackasses doesn’t change that fact. If Sandmann and his crew had been cool to the Native American protesters, this wouldn’t have happened. But someone’s fee-fees were hurt, so they had to go sue.
We’re supposed to take Sandmann’s word that a Catholic high school wouldn’t tolerate racism (cough cough bullshit cough cough), that he wasn’t intending to be mocking, that he was trying to defuse the situation, that there was no further poor behavior (no “Build that wall” chants from people wearing MAGA hats – fucking please). And we’re also supposed to do as you do and pretend that a “Make America Great Again” hat, associated with the man who openly called Mexicans rapists and still won an election (man, what anti-white bias!), isn’t an open symbol of hate. Something you stopped bothering to address because it’s rhetorically really inconvenient for you.
Now, contrast that to Barack Obama’s treatment. (Yes, Obama was an adult and a public figure so it’s not exactly analogous, but, hey, using bad analogies has apparently never stopped you!) Obama was the victim of racist conspiracy theories against him that were openly, demonstrably false. And the guy who pushed that narrative won the Presidency right afterwards, in no small part thanks to his lies.
So… when someone is white, and there’s footage that shows them and their friends being jackasses, well, that can be sued because someone didn’t properly parse the details of a third group who were being jerks. But when a black man is openly, transparently libeled? Not only can everyone get away with doing it, but the chief ringleader can be President.
And you think Sandmann proves that white privilege doesn’t exist. Staggering.
Then there’s an “attack” on Rittenhouse. You know, the guy showing up with a gun, who went there explicitly to start shit, and then explicitly started shit.
Now, if you were sincere, Bill, you’d go ahead and look to see if, you know, there are provocateurs against BLM. Or fascists. Or other white-coded movements engaging in extreme violence. You know, like…
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/08/25/proud-boys-are-still-violent-despite-legal-woes
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56004916
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2019/aug/28/in-the-name-of-trump-supporters-attacks-database
https://www.adl.org/blog/following-demonstration-three-neo-nazis-charged-in-florida-assault
You’re winging about Sandmann and Rittenhouse after a fucking treason fest is being poorly investigated for partisan reasons ( https://www.npr.org/2021/05/28/1000524897/senate-republicans-block-plan-for-independent-commission-on-jan-6-capitol-riot ) . You keep talking about these two guys after Heather Heyer was murdered by a fucking car, and Donald Trump both-siderized that happening, and still almost won his next election. You keep talking about these people even when antifa is routinely demonized in media even after Heyer’s death proves, not that it needed proof – watch Shaun’s video on Charlottesville to start – that Nazis start shit openly at rallies.
“MSM” is, of course, not a thing. There’s a wide variety of outlets. Do you seriously want to argue that FOX hates white people? Or do you just mean “Well, not some of the largest and most-listened networks, but the ones I don’t like” when you say “mainstream”?
So… are there examples of the “MSM”, whatever that is, routinely siding with whites, and inded siding with conservatives?
Why, yes. There’s the Daily Show, which prominently platformed Tea Party activists and never centered Tea Party criticism on the fact that it was an overt Astroturfing movement while going and mocking Occupy repeatedly and not giving Occupy intellectuals and intellectuals in their league a chance to speak. They could have gotten Noam Chomsky or Barbara Ehrenreich or Michael Albert or countless left-wing intellectuals on to defend and describe Occupy. They didn’t.
There’s the disproportionate reporting of blacks looting and whites surviving ( https://www.aclu.org/blog/smart-justice/mass-incarceration/black-people-loot-white-people-find ).
There’s the constant willingness of the media to frame Trump supporters as poor benighted people suffering from “economic anxiety”, no matter the evidence to the contrary. While dismissing the entire left.
There’s the constant willingness of the media to frame riots that have a disproportionate number of people of color as being somehow deeply relevant while brushing over white-led riots ( https://youngscholarsinwriting.org/index.php/ysiw/article/download/271/295/ )
There’s media bias against Palestine and toward Israel. And media bias against developing countries everywhere, from Nicaragua to Venezuela. How many op-eds shrieked about Chavez and Maduro while America overtly backs monsters like Islam Karimov?
There’s, ummm, the Rittenhouse case itself. Where we were supposed to take his self-defense claim seriously. Even in liberal outlets.
And, of course, we can actually check to see if you’re right. With science.
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=r6QgAwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR10&dq=media+bias+against+blacks&ots=7nh-Nn3RvR&sig=niRnZqwI5fuzoNOITHup94Ighsc
https://heinonline.org/hol-cgi-bin/get_pdf.cgi?handle=hein.journals/ucdajujlp25§ion=8
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA76157561&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=07388144&p=AONE&sw=w
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2005.tb02184.x
So, actually, the media is so staunchly anti-black that they have had social scientists tell them how they could stop biasing their audience and they just don’t.
“BLM activists openly support Cuba?” [citation needed] Which ones? Might they support Cuba despite its problems for complex reasons? But, of course, Republicans loved sucking up to Russia until just a little bit, and still will host pro-Russian propagandists. Republicans also have loved defending Israeli violence and all their pet dictators. So, again, if we want to play this game, we can go all day. And, of course, any pro-Cuba bias on the left is reported immediately, while the media memory holes things as relevant as the fact that the US backed Saddam Hussein. (You know, one of the most relevant facts before the Republicans lied their way to a racist war!) I can cite Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and Necessary Illusions, detailed scholarly works proving you wrong, and you can ignore me and bring up whatever right-wing cause du jour is.
But, of course, what the hell does this have to do anything, Bill? You can criticize people on the left for all sorts of things if you want, but it doesn’t prove anything when it comes to structural racism. You gave up even trying to defend that topic. I gave you the chance to look at Wise discussing things like the SAGE report, like educational barriers, like stereotype threat. Instead of doing that, you quoted Tim disagreeing with you on Sandmann at length and then lied about what the left argued even when you showed evidence to the contrary. You deliberately avoided looking at actual scholarly evidence, at statistics and facts, in order to try to make the conversation about your shibboleths, your emotionally-charged topics. I might as well shriek about the Dixie Chicks and the Chicago Seven back to you. It’d be trivial for me to find endless individual examples to “disprove” your arguments.
I keep asking you questions, Bill, and you keep ducking them.
Why does this topic make you so irrational?
Why are you unable to talk about statistics and facts in evidence, and instead want to present one-sided accounts of isolated incidents?
If you were right, Bill, it would be easy to prove it. There’s actually sources you could try to cite that try to document left-wing bias in the media. These sources are comically disingenuous, in fact, but they’re out there. You could try to make an evidence-based argument. You’re not even trying to, even when it has been pointed out repeatedly that you are trying to generalize from anecdotes.
Sandmann got a court settlement. Rittenhouse got to be free. Blacks murdered by cops routinely don’t get even a modicum of justice. Almost none of the disproportionately white bankers who ruined the economy after 2008 got a single day in jail. Your own examples, when compared to anything, prove the opposite of what you were trying to argue. So you just keep arguing about them in isolation, never using a control group. You’re obviously smart enough to know why that is irrational. Why do you keep doing it?
I’ve repeatedly tried to talk to you about racialized barriers, Bill. Things that make your neighbors have struggles and problems. I’ve tried to discuss a nuanced, evidence-based picture with you about things like redlining, lead poisoning, police militarization, the dangerous downside of gun culture, the drug war and its racist targeting, crack versus cocaine sentencing, stereotype threat, microaggressions and their demonstrable health impacts, etc. You keep refusing.
Do you not give a shit about black people?
Because that’s the only conclusion that I can draw every time you deliberately refuse to talk about their issues to instead bring up one of your pet crusades.
“Uhh… Bill, did you not catch the part where they were openly singing a mocking version of Phillips’ song and therefore mocking his culture? That’s on video, and yet astonishingly poorly reported from all of the cluck-clucking about the supposed rush to judgment. The initial commentary focused on that and Sandmann’s expression. Sandmann says that he wasn’t intending to be mocking, but, well, then his class goes ahead and does just that, while also trying to deny that they did it. There’s also eyewitnesses reporting Tomahawk chops and slurs. Oh, and they’re all wearing MAGA hats. You know, a hate symbol.”
MAGA hats are not a “hate symbol” but calling a bunch of white high school kids “school shooters” while getting lap dances by MSM is the new normal I guess. Also, you didn’t read (or didn’t register it) the part about that creepy old gimp trying to disrupt Catholic church services in the past, thereby making him not only a convicted felon (the most trustworthy people according to what you’re portraying him as) but also as stupid enough to try and commit another felony. The fact that this made international headlines proves my point that there’s a bias against white men, especially Catholic white men, in the MSM. Also, mocking an old creep for banging a drum in your face is, as I’ve said more times than I can remember on this forum, a rather peaceful response to the situation. Why do you continue to defend that old felon? Remember the song “this old man”? Well, Phillips’ song is “this old felon”. Only someone who has drank the Kool Aid of anti-white self-loathing propaganda could believe that it’s worse to mock an old felon while banging a drum in their faces, than to call a bunch of kids “school shooters” for merely being white. You know your state is experiencing an exodus for a reason, right? Everyone is getting out of California. Your state has the highest homelessness rate in the country, some of the highest violent crime, etc. but no, a bunch of white Catholics from Kentucky are the most dangerous people in America. Honestly, do you think Sandmann would have won all those lawsuits if there wasn’t bias against him? Sandmann exposed the frauds in MSM for what they are: anti-white bigots.
What’s funny, Bill, is that you think that you get to be the one to say that it’s not a hate symbol. (Missing, of course, the actual point of Tim’s article that you quoted, while making no substantive responses to). As Louis CK pointed out (with great irony given how much of a monster we now know he was), we don’t get to decide if we’re an asshole. If we did harm to someone else with our actions, that harm was done no matter our intent.
Make America Great Again says, by definition, that America was great at some point in the past, that it no longer is, and that it could be made great again (by endorsing the MAGA candidate). Unless you think that people wearing that hat were just pining for the good ol’ days of Bush II, one has to admit that anyone who wears that hat either thinks that a society that wages racist drug wars, backs death squads, allows men like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein to ruin lives with near-impunity, didn’t allow LGB people to get married to the people they loved, terrorized trans people, and otherwise perpetuated massive injustices was “great”. (And even if these were people who weren’t pining for their version of the 1950s and 1960s, the Bush era itself was one where people defended torture and illegal wars against brown people). That means thinking that a society can be great when it is expressly, institutionally, racist, sexist, colonialist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-immigrant, pro-Christian dominionist, Islamophobic and militaristic. That’s what words mean.
It doesn’t matter if these people are deluding themselves into some kind of revisionist version of history where that’s not true. Because even to do that, and to refuse to use these smartphone thingies that most of them have to actually go and check if they’re right, is to tell people of color and everyone else they are insulting by the mere wearing of that hat, “I don’t care what you have to say. I don’t care how you view history. My feelings are more important than your safety”.
And that’s just an analysis of the statement of MAGA in and of itself, and what it actually means. Thus far we haven’t attended to what it means to support the man who started his campaign with racist claims about Mexicans then moved on to endorse stop-and-frisk, call other countries “shithole countries”, employ racist lunatics like Stephen Miller and gain the love of the alt-right. The fact that millions wore that hat while not caring about any of that, “not deciding that something that Cheetolini said or that his board did” was finally too vile, too far over the line, not worth their public support. No matter what most of the country was now telling them, to their face. No matter that they were increasingly willing to defend treason.
People like you seem to think that the only way someone can be a racist is if they’re overtly, maliciously, cruelly racist. (Unless it’s racism against whites. Then the slightest error of analysis or focus is sufficient to defend a charge of racism). But racism can thrive when politicians put the needs of their affluent (and therefore disproportionately white) donors and voters first, when police officers default to protecting the rights of those with property and not to protecting the community writ large, when government expenditures refuse to clean up lead paint but insist on murdering brown people.
And so we now live in a world where we can have shrieking about critical race theory, and banning of the mere depiction of LGBTQ folks, by the same people who wore that hat, and you still somehow think that there’s no hate behind it. That it’s not a hate symbol.
But the mainstream media is anti-white. Because… they didn’t cover the Black Hebrew Israelites? Only, they did, Bill. After the initial video went viral, which the MSM didn’t control (funny how personal responsibility goes out the window when you want to be hyperbolic), later commentary covered these jackasses. And the Black Hebrew Israelites are a tiny, fringe group. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of alt-right wacko groups who are far more threatening who the media also don’t cover. How long did it take Gavin McInnes to get shitcanned? How many times did Milo get platformed before he got too toxic? Ann Coulter can openly talk about how we should nuke countries essentially for funsies and still get treated like she’s not a shrieking bigot who deserves no platform.
Your double standard is showing, Bill.
You say “that creepy old gimp” did naughty things in the past, Bill. Therefore, it’s okay to mock his religion and culture, and the people around him! Of course, I could point out, using this kind of bullshit reasoning, that Sandmann and his ilk are a bunch of Catholic kids trying to fight for Christian dominionism and against the rights of women, and so then argue that they deserve whatever commentary they get! Sandmann doesn’t think women deserve to have rights, Bill. Who fucking cares if some Israelites were assholes to him?
And “creepy old gimp?” Fascinating how the mainstream media is racist if they don’t agree with your biases, but reacting that way to someone you haven’t met is acceptable. Of course, if we’re going to dislike proven criminals, Bill, then you better think that Republicans are all eager to host child molesters, given Dennis Hastert! You should look at Trump’s long history of criminality and admitted rape and agree with me that that hat is a symbol of rape! But, no, you won’t do that. It’s transparent, Bill, that you think holding white men accountable is being racist to them. You don’t believe in personal responsibility for the powerful. And you thrash and squirm to deny this to yourself. It’s not working, Bill. Your whataboutism is childish.
You try to argue that Sandmann wouldn’t have won lawsuits if there was nothing to them. Well, in reality, Bill, people settle out of court and win lawsuits all the time on spurious grounds.
But let’s say for a second that you may have a point. Fine. The lawsuits didn’t disprove that he was a racist choad. But, more importantly, then…
*OJ Simpson was indeed innocent, and racist cops like Fuhrman are a major structural problem, because he won that case (ignoring the civil case, of course!)
*Rodney King, who won his lawsuit, proves there is structural racism, contrary to your claims
*Every time that Jesse Jackson or anyone else gets companies to settle out of court regarding discrimination claims or anything else, they are correct about it and those companies were discriminatory
*Obama and Biden won, so any claims that you don’t like that they made about race or gender (say, about the gender pay gap) or anything else are all true
Hell, while we’re at it: The existence of the 1619 Project proves that structural racism is real; every documentary that covered the 1960s in hagiographic tones proves that people like the Chicago Seven were correct; and the fact that most Americans think Trump is a racist means that I’m right about the hat!
So… I’ll grant you that Sandmann is a nice, great kid, as long as you grant, by your own bullshit maxim, that deeply entrenched racism is omnipresent.
But you won’t do that, Bill. And you shouldn’t. Because truth isn’t decided by a court of law or a popularity contest.
Or else you have to think that everyone the Nazis ever killed, perfectly legally, deserved it.
Why are you incapable of talking about this issue honestly, Bill? Why can’t you answer direct questions?
Last chance, Bill. Why can’t you talk about racism using evidence and reason with an eye toward productive reform? I gave you a chance to talk about things like stereotype threat in the last post, and the one before that, and so on and so forth. Why are you so committed to defending Sandmann instead of people of color and marginalized people you actually know?
You’re not getting better at this, chief:
“If we did harm to someone else with our actions, that harm was done no matter our intent.”
I don’t decide what qualifies as harm. Common Law does. Reality isn’t dwarfed by what the tyrants in BLM want something do be. Some random person on the internet doesn’t get to decide what harm is or is not, that’s what our legal system is for. Don’t like it? Take it up with the powers that be.
Make America Great Again says, by definition, that America was great at some point in the past, that it no longer is, and that it could be made great again (by endorsing the MAGA candidate).
There’s a refusal on some people’s part not to interpret the other side charitably. This is an example. The claim isn’t that America stopped being great. The claim is that it became less great due to people like Bush Jr. who exported all our jobs overseas.
“brown people”
Christ man, you know some of those people are whiter than you are, right? I know Italians who are darker than some Iraqis. I suppose your ignorance of what they look like is partially excusable since most of them are forced to cover their faces due to their barbaric religion. I’ve dated Greek women who are darker than some Indians and Pakistanis. It’s offensive to lump all non-whites together as “brown” as if Iraqis were in fact all dark skinned or that they were ethnically identical to say, blacks or Hispanics.
The “racist” drug war mantram is also easy: coke is harder to make and distribute than crack rocks. No need to bring in the boogeyman of systemic racism, for what it is worth, black politicians were in favor of the war on crack in the 1980s. Ever see a crack baby? If you ever do, you’ll see why the war on drugs was and remains necessary.
“And so we now live in a world where we can have shrieking about critical race theory, and banning of the mere depiction of LGBTQ folks, by the same people who wore that hat, and you still somehow think that there’s no hate behind it. That it’s not a hate symbol.”
CRT is abject trash. Not in favor of banning it per se but not upset that people are against their kids learning that mystical escapism before they even hit the age of reason. Plato was gay, BTW but I don’t see people screaming to have him cancelled, except of course the woke mob who see him as just another dead white male not worth mentioning.
Milo is a gay Jew yet for some reason I still don’t understand, the Left still hated his guts. Even marrying a black man wasn’t good enough for the neo-fascist antifa, et.al. Not sure what to say about this one other than that you apparently got trolled by the gayest man in recent memory. Ironic given the left’s obsession with using gay men as “props”.
You say, “I don’t decide what qualifies as harm. Common Law does.”
So when the Common Law decides that slavery isn’t harm, it isn’t?
Law is not a surefire guide to morality any more than you are. And I am willing to bet that you don’t follow this maxim consistently in any case. (“Common law” doesn’t have free speech rights, for example. Only constitutional law does).
We all actually decide what is harm all of the time.
Even under common law. We make an argument and a judge or another authority decides it. And legislators decide what harms are all the time too. As do executives. So, this is just political naivete.
Worse, it’s totalitarian reasoning. You’re honestly trying to argue that we should have no moral compass besides what the law says. Luckily, that isn’t how anything works, and not the norms this society actually operates on.
You go on to say, “Reality isn’t dwarfed by what the tyrants in BLM want something do be. Some random person on the internet doesn’t get to decide what harm is or is not, that’s what our legal system is for. Don’t like it? Take it up with the powers that be.”
Which is what people are doing. By asking for the
laws to be changed. By protest.
Oops! You just conceded BLM is legitimate and you can have no complaint.
Unless this is a smokescreen, yet another bullshit excuse for views you have for other reasons.
But, again, the law isn’t dispositive. And I don’t think for a second you believe it is. I don’t think you think that the laws written and enforced by Nazis were harmless and just. I very much doubt you think that the court cases that go directions you disagree with, like the OJ Simpson verdict, actually represent an ideal case.
And the law isn’t the only matter in any case. An employer can do something evil that isn’t illegal. I can call you an asshole repeatedly and it’s not illegal, but it would be rude. Richard could ban me for doing so, and that would have nothing to do with the law.
“There’s a refusal on some people’s part not to interpret the other side charitably. This is an example. The claim isn’t that America stopped being great. The claim is that it became less great due to people like Bush Jr. who exported all our jobs overseas”.
And there’s also a refusal on some people’s part to be honest.
“Build That Wall!” and “Lock Her Up!” weren’t claims about the details of jobs. Nor was stop-and-frisk. Or arguing that a judge couldn’t rule in the Trump U case because the judge was Mexican. Or the apologetics for Trump U. Or Trump courting science deniers and creationists. Or Trump and Trumpists lying about the pandemic. Or trying to ban Muslim migration. Or refusing to aid Syrians.
You are straight up lying about how Trump spoke. “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it”. “Uncle Sucker”. “This country is a mess”. “American carnage”. “Laughing stock”. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/18/trumps-been-hating-on-america-is-it-time-for-him-to-leave . His entire appeal was an apocalyptic one: America is either now in the throes of or will be in the throes of something that will effectively destroy it. That’s why it wasn’t “Make America Better” or “Return America to the Height of its Glory”. Pretty much everyone noticed that the 2016 Republic convention was a deeply unpatriotic state of affairs with endless criticism of America, indeed hyperbolic criticism thereof. While the DNC had veterans and their families, and other symbols of patriotism… and Trump mocked veterans as “losers” and “suckers”, and suggested (being a massive racist) that the woman who accompanied her husband to the stage “wasn’t allowed to talk” then didn’t retract his odious bigotry when she did indeed talk, at length.
And you still aren’t dealing with the criticism as stated. So, again, by your own admission, MAGA states that it possible for a society to be great when gay people were legally second class citizens, denied the right to marry, to serve in the military openly, etc. When anti-trans discrimination was legal. With a racist drug war. With racial profiling and stop-and-frisk.
You can only think America was ever “great” if you have deeply white supremacist, homophobic, Christian dominionist, colonialist assumptions. You could think it is a flawed country like all others that is improving, sure. But “great”?
Maybe a bunch of Trumpists didn’t mean the racist things they were implying. Then when everyone pointed this out to them, they would have changed their slogan.
They didn’t. So what the fuck does that tell you?
You say, “Christ man, you know some of those people are whiter than you are, right? I know Italians who are darker than some Iraqis. ”
Apparently treating other people with charity goes out the window when it’s you.
I am fully aware that they’re not all literally brown. That’s not what “brown” means in the parlance. More importantly, when I say “brown people” in this context, I am criticizing how conservatives are thinking of them. They are thinking of “sand [n-words]” and “camel-f[ers]” and all sorts of coding that imagines those people as very dark. The fact that a huge swath of Muslims are Asian? Irrelevant to this mythology. The fact that Sikhs aren’t Muslims despite a Turban? Irrelevant. They are dismissing the humanity of people they see as racially Other, and this is easily demonstrable.
You should be ashamed of trying to pull this mere sentences after trying to upbraid me for a lack of charity. What dirty pool.
You say, “The “racist” drug war mantram is also easy: coke is harder to make and distribute than crack rocks.”
So that’s a reason to have a straight up bias in how users are treated? And if it’s easier to make crack, shouldn’t someone be punished less harshly for its distribution?
Ooops. It’s almost like you didn’t think about this for a fraction of a second.
Moreover, this isn’t even true. Crack is made from powdered cocaine. You start with the product and then refine it further. So, actually, crack is harder to make, in that you need cocaine to make it plus time. This is basic knowledge.
https://www.aclu.org/other/cracks-system-20-years-unjust-federal-crack-cocaine-law . Read up on the actual facts, please.
And if you think that the racist drug war is racist only because of differential treatment of crack and cocaine, you are, again, violating your principle of intellectual charity and attacking a strawman, deliberately trying to find a weak argument instead of the bulk of the evidence.
https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/un-report-on-racial-disparities/ . It’s not just crack and cocaine. Whites and blacks use drugs at essentially the same rate and are not treated the same way. This is just a fact. Why are you so unwilling to discuss this based on facts instead of your armchair arguments about crack?
You say, “CRT is abject trash. Not in favor of banning it per se but not upset that people are against their kids learning that mystical escapism before they even hit the age of reason. ”
Have you ever read Delgado? I bet you haven’t. I bet you have no idea what CRT scholars actually say. Despite your hypocritical calls for charity.
Of course, people are demanding it be banned. So is that wrong?
More importantly, even if you are informed (dubious given your arrogant ignorance thus far), do you really think that this is about the facts? How many critics of CRT have actually read any of it?
If you were being honest, you would be willing to admit that the anti-CRT hysterics is just blatant racebaiting. Even if CRT is wrong, the average newly-minted critic of CRT has never read it and doesn’t know what it is.
But… https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/14590 .
Actually, supposedly informed critics don’t get these ideas. And misrepresent them.
You could have decided to be serious here and admit this was an area where there was a strawman of the left. You didn’t.
That’s telling.
You say, “Milo is a gay Jew yet for some reason I still don’t understand, the Left still hated his guts” Even marrying a black man wasn’t good enough for the neo-fascist antifa, et.al.”
Maybe it has to do with when he said that he supported banning women drivers and liked that Saudi Arabia did it, or his transphobic and sexist bullying, or his denial that cyber-bullying is a thing? Maybe it has to do with his defending both molestation and the idea of self-hating Jews to the point that even fucking Joe Rogan called him out for it? Maybe it’s his role as an alt-right recruiter? Maybe it’s the awful shit we saw him say in leaked emails? Maybe it’s his entire career of vile comments and grotesque misrepresentation of his opposition?
Let’s say he was a troll. Okay, trolling like that is bad for serious topics. But, he wasn’t just a troll. He trolled only marginalized people. He was a dishonest conservative. That should make you mad. And if it’s all okay that he just kekekelol through politics, why the fuck are you mad about Sandmann? It was a work, bro! The media trolled him good! Once again, you care when it’s a white guy and not when it’s their victims. Super cool of you, right?
You have the fucking audacity to act like the left is
defined by identity politics, then get baffled why we don’t like someone who says odious things despite being gay and despite who he’s married to.
Now you know. We’re rational.
You’re not.
And so this is the last time I’m responding to your actual arguments, Bill. From now on, I am going to take something you say and use it as an opportunity to educate you on racial issues. I’m taking away the option for you to keep on making this a conversation about personalities and minutiae rather than policy.
Let’s start with the issue of micro-aggressions!
https://www.pfizer.com/news/articles/understanding_racial_microaggression_and_its_effect_on_mental_health#:~:text=How%20racial%20microaggressions%20impact%20mental,disease%20and%20type%202%20diabetes.
So microaggressions are talked about by the right (you know, those people who violate that intellectual charity norm you pretended to care about and then violated!) as if it’s just some mean things that happen and the idea was made up by activists. These are lies. It is in fact a very real set of peer-reviewed literature.
See, even fairly affluent people of color with good health insurance have these weird differences in health outcomes. Hacks like Dr. Oz resurrected ideas like salt retention or sickle cell anemia, as if that was sufficient to explain the difference.
But good researchers looked and realized that the cumulative stress of having to deal with little, often-ambiguous moments of discrimination and mistreatment (and, yes, sometimes misperceiving a neutral comment as bigoted, precisely because it’s a judgment call and not everyone gets it right) adds up. Moreover, it’s actually the weird, ambiguous ones that are hardest to process. The person who says the slur has proven that they’re an asshole. It may be shocking and traumatizing, but it’s not hard to process. But the person who says “That was a really good report” in a tone that sounds sort of condescending and who has the Trump sticker on their truck so you wonder if they may be closer to the alt-right than they seem and has occasionally talked about “political correctness” and IQ at the office? That weird comment could be passive-aggressive, or it could be total benign. And black and brown people, being on-average reasonable and decent human beings just like everyone else, recognize this, and generally try to extend some degree of charity, and that takes cognitive processing that adds onto the stress of the day.
So all sorts of conditions get amplified by this. And that exacerbates health costs, and costs them time in the workplace.
This is an example of a disparity that isn’t caused by a lot of people being consciously mean. It’s caused by a background radiation of ignorance and subconscious behavior. And so fixing it isn’t easy. Workplaces can do a better job at bias training and encouraging communication… but for that to happen, whites (especially white men), who are disproportionately likely to be defensive on the topic and want it to basically be pushed aside, need to stop whining about political correctness and do some learning. Society as a whole can be better at gently communicating. Health providers can train physicians so that they avoid their own biases. It’s not a problem that’s solved by one mechanism.
Fred, do not let your blind rage against conservatives (good thing I am a liberal) cause you to make ludicrous lumps in logic: saying that common law determines what constitutes as harm is not the same thing as an endorsement of Legal Positivism. Common Law determines what constitutes harm because internet Vikings are generally unreliable, confused, incoherent, and contradict themselves multiple times over and so we give courts, in the US under Common Law, the authority to define harm. We do not give BLM or Antifa activists the ability to define harm because those people are cult members not judges or lawyers. You can be a natural law theorist or a legal positivist and agree with my point on common law. Only someone who has never met a black person outside of a gender studies seminar would assume that it’s a good idea to just give random people, just because they are black, the authority to arbitrate what constitutes “harm”. Someone is not qualified to give an account of what harm is just because they are minorities anymore than whites have a de facto insight into what constitutes harm merely because they are white.
Blind rage against conservatives? Well-poisoning fallacy. I’ve repeatedly pivoted conversations back to evidence and opportunities for reform and asked you to do the same. You insist on making this a left versus right issue. The only person acting as if they have blind rage is you.
The fact that X method of determining harm can be flawed does not prove Y is infallible. You failed to respond to my points that common law co-existed with slavery, monarchy and countless social evils and harms. This, again, makes your argument moot. But since you have made clear that you think that the common law can be changed, and so therefore retroactively harm can be determined, let’s talk about that!
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1341365 . So it’s pretty obvious that if we accept that actors in economies are acting in the public square that common law requires anti-discrimination. It’s also statutory.
And so the widespread failure of anti-discrimination enforcement would be a failure of the law.
https://www.epi.org/unequalpower/publications/strengthening-accountability-for-discrimination-confronting-fundamental-power-imbalances-in-the-employment-relationship/ . And there are mechanisms to do this. Like making it so we hire enough regulators that companies could be investigated faster than once every forty years or so per company.
Notice how this source, like all the other sources I’ve cited (even the Wise article which was actually quite measured and reasoned), is not full of inveterate anti-conservative hatred. Unlike the current treatment of Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is effectively being accused of wanting to put CRT into the law because she’s black. While Republicans could be perfectly civil to, and indeed enabling of, Kavanaugh even as Kavanaugh essentially screeched about partisan bias, lied and threatened Democrats. White privilege indeed. And yet more proof that the only “blind rage” isn’t coming from the people who voted for the Hope guy but instead from the ones who voted for the “shithole countries” guy.
So what objections do you have to dealing with micro-aggressions?
Also, I have never once argued that “Someone is… qualified to give an account of what harm is just because they are minorities”. Indeed, all of my evidence to you has been evidence. Even when we discussed anecdotal data, I pointed out to you how the bulk of the anecdotal data, had you listened, should have given you an initial sense of plausibility. So this is sheer intellectual slander. I might as well just call you a bigot because of your refusal to engage with the evidence which indicates that you don’t give a shit about non-whites. It’d be unfair and yet actually supported by the things you’ve said and haven’t said.
I would point out, as Tim did in the debate with David that you clearly didn’t read, that the fact that whites and conservatives are often so willing to dismiss black testimonies about their own lives and experiences when they have even less information is deeply telling. It’s not dispositive, since people can be wrong, but from a simple Bayesian perspective, people are less likely to be wrong about their own experiences than some random external commentator. It’s trivial to demonstrate that whites are disproportionately likely to simply not believe even extremely well-documented accounts of discrimination and come up with excuses against the evidence. That doesn’t make people of color infallible; it does mean the willingness to totally ignore them, when conservatives will accept the lamest anecdotal evidence as proof of anti-conservative bias (you know, exactly like you’ve done here!), indicates a substantial racial bias. That’s an argument you clearly have no response to, which is why you had to make up a strawman.
Of course, you now have given yourself a perfect escape hatch: If it’s not in common law, it’s not harm. But… common law hasn’t proven that whites are discriminated against by the mainstream media, Bill. Yet you said it. So which is it, Bill? Or are you actually saying that you are infallible and can ascertain harm but everyone else is inherently untrustworthy?
“ven as Kavanaugh essentially screeched about partisan bias, lied and threatened Democrats. White privilege indeed. And yet more proof that the only “blind rage” isn’t coming from the people who voted for the Hope guy but instead from the ones who voted for the “shithole countries” guy.”
Yeah man, white privilege helps when almost the entire media empire is falsely accusing you of being a rapist and you have psycho law professors who don’t believe a word you say because you’re a white male. White privilege indeed! Are you saying there are not any “shithole countries”? Pretty sure the non-stop wars in Central Africa have nothing to do with us but then again, that is my white privilege talking. As far as black testimony goes, Justice Thomas was dismissed as an “Uncle Tom” by the same folks who are talking about how white men don’t believe black people. Cornel West devoted a whole section in his book Race Matters as to why Thomas was unqualified for the job. So much for black solidarity……
“Falsely accusing”? So are you accusing Blasey Ford of perjury and lying? You can’t have it both ways, Bill. Either you’re saying one person lied or another did, and you decided to side with the white man. Kavanaugh wasn’t being subjected to the loss of his freedom. Only not getting a job. And we had more than enough evidence based on demonstrable lies (https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/brett-kavanaugh-lied-brazenly-repeatedly-under-oath-any-law-student-ncna916031) to indicate that Kavanaugh is, at least, unhinged, partisan, cruel and dishonest. We all saw it. Even many Republicans were baffled that it had to be this guy. That’s how far white privilege goes, Bill. A white person, especially a white man, can prove themselves incapable of doing the job, they can be accused of a serious crime, and people like you, Bill, will automatically assume that their accusers are lying and that they are being ganged up on by the media who are just pointing out how utterly unconvincing it is that Brett lied about what words meant. A morally and intellectually mediocre white man like Brett can get the job even when he’s the first person considered. The fact that there were numerous other possible candidates, even white male conservatives, doesn’t matter
.
But funny, Bill, that you then decide to not show any empathy to Ketanji. In fact, you cut out the part that mentioned her, so that you could only focus on the white man who you empathize with rather than the black woman you don’t. Thus proving that the only person who has any demonstrable bias here is you. I was perfectly capable of criticizing Bill Clinton for his criminal acts in Sudan and elsewhere. Kamala Harris telling migrants to not come to the United States given the context of what has happened in South America thanks to the US is morally pathetic and ignoble. I can criticize black women, Democrats, whoever. But you can’t even acknowledge the existence of a woman of color.
Brett lies and you side with him. Brown is accused of being associated with pedophilia by outright lies (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/19/sen-hawleys-misleading-attack-judge-jacksons-sentencing-child-porn-offenders/) that even conservatives can call out as being QAnon signaling and you don’t say a damn thing. And then you have the audacity to deny white privilege.
This is an elementary point, Bill. You can’t deny white privilege by looking at whether Brett got negative treatment. You have to evaluate that negative treatment against a comparand, or else you are making an experiment with no control. So we do the experiment. Kavanaugh and Jackson both get criticism. But Brett’s criticism comes from the result of specific things he is alleged to have done and his actual conduct on the stand. Jackson’s criticism is connected to her race (e.g. accusations that she will use CRT in her rulings) and based off of lies (e.g. misrepresenting her public positions). The experiment is clear. White privilege exists. Even if Jackson ends up getting the job, she is getting a scale and intensity of scrutiny Kavanaugh did not despite Kavanaugh deserving more of it.
You could easily have avoided the partisan breaking of the norm of charity you so dishonestly decried. You could have argued that you disagree with Judge Jackson on many issues but she is clearly qualified, the Dems clearly have the majority, and the accusations of being soft on child crime are QAnon-signaling wingnut nonsense that is shameful and prevents real criticism. You didn’t.
As for whether there are “shithole countries”: I think people live in complicated places and try to do their best, and so that rhetoric is gross. But I would also point out that Russia seems to be a pretty nasty shithole, and yet Trump didn’t seem to refer to that. Because they were white. So, again, you are strawmanning the criticism, and you know it.
Then you have the audacity to look at West criticizing Thomas and upbraid him for a supposed lack of racial solidarity. Once again, Bill, you have unequivocal evidence that in fact the left is perfectly capable of looking at individuals as individuals. But West’s arguments did not hinge on Thomas’ race. I am going to guess West looked at the pretty obvious evidence that Thomas is, plausibly, a grabass (with Hill’s statements being supported by two other women), among other failures. Of course, if you were being serious, you would recognize that Thomas and Kavanaugh both faced criticism. So much for anti-white bias: Thomas got it. But you’re Schrodinger’s anti-racist, Bill. When something bad happens to whites or people you care about, that’s racism. When you don’t, it isn’t. There is no greater maxim. You have never once bothered to indicate why you cared so much about Sandmann and not about any others who may have been slandered by the media. You didn’t deal with my evidence that the media is in fact biased against people of color.
So now you have no substantive responses to the issues of microaggressions or how common law frameworks can easily accommodate better anti-discrimination rules yet fail to, which shows the failure of policy-makers to deal with racism. You have no responses to two issues of institutional racism. You claimed you had only ever been given anecdotal and weak evidence. You are now begin given the chance to assess that evidence, and you’re failing.
Let’s consider another category of institutional racism!
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.12.2.23 .
Since the 1990s, paired audit studies have found evidence of discrimination against minorities in banking and in other financial issues.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0891242415620484 . This evidence holds even if you try to control for region. Minority businesses are disproportionately in crap neighborhoods. This, too, would be about racism: Redlining, urban renewal, blockbusting, etc. etc. Decades of predatory behavior and straight-up state led racism. And yet apparently the racism of loan agencies are so extreme that that effect disappears from consideration but race remains important.
This, of course, limits the ability of blacks to close the black-white wealth gap. It makes minorities in general more dependent on white-owned businesses for work, enhancing the impact of employment discrimination. It keeps minority communities in poverty. Given property tax funding of schools, that in turn keeps minority schools underfunded. (And dishonest conservative attempts to point to high per-capita spending in inner-city schools ignore that inner-city children need more resources precisely because they have greater endogenous needs thanks to factors outside the classroom: more likely to have a parent imprisoned thanks to the racist drug war you blithely blew off with no thought, more likely to have learning disabilities and need special education thanks to factors like ongoing lead exposure, etc.)
Any concern about that? Or are you going to keep coming to the defense of accused rapists and known liars instead of your black neighbors, proving yourself to be deeply racist inside?
I don’t have time to respond to everything right now but any SCOTUS nominee who can’t even define what a “woman” is while playing the gender card is not qualified to teach elementary school let alone sit on the highest court in the land.
Bill, I’m leaving the rest between you and Fred. But on this one side-point, please be aware that a justice is required to not take a position on a matter of expert testimony in a potential future court dispute. If you read the transcript, this is what Jackson explained to Blackburn.
A judge cannot just define scientific terms on their own. That would be illegal. A judge has to weigh expert testimony (as defined by the Federal Rules of Evidence) and rule as to the law based on that testimony as to the matter of fact in question. Jackson has yet to do that. So she can’t answer that question here. If a judge pre-stated what they would rule on a matter they are not an expert in, that would indicate judicial corruption, essentially telegraphing they have prejudged a case that hasn’t yet even been brought before them.
That laypeople like you don’t know things like this is why you are the ones not qualified to teach this stuff. You can do better. Try.
See, Bill, my problem is that you never have the time to respond to why the drug war is fractally racist and why that has significant impacts, or why discrimination in banking matters, or what we could possibly do about racism in terms of policy that you would view as appropriate given what seems pretty clearly to be right-wing views that you have.
You do have the time to defend Kavanaugh and Sandmann and Rittenhouse. You do have the time to nitpick at a Tim Wise article about Sandmann but not at the ones that would give you a pretty comprehensive set of information about why conservative arguments on racial topics are so poorly considered.
Despite being given chance after chance, you never have the time, apparently, to admit that black folks face some serious structural barrier. You could have conceded that the media can be shitty to lots of people, for example, when I gave you the evidence on media discrimination against blacks in response to your idea that the “MSM” is biased against whites. You never have the time to address a topic from their perspective.
You have time for your priorities. Not theirs.
That’s telling. And it doesn’t say anything good about you or your belief system.
So let’s look at the Judge Jackson issue.
To add on to what Richard pointed out: https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/ketanji-brown-jackson-woman-marsha-blackburn-20220329.html .
“Can you define a definition for the word ‘woman’?”
In what context, Marsha? Do we mean legally, or biologically, or in terms of gender and identity?
One of the biggest problems with conservatives in the gender debate is that they circularly presuppose the issue at hand. Gender is complex. Conservatives want to make an argument from incredulity and just point to the biology. But the rest of us don’t actually necessarily root our understandings in the biology. We recognize that to think about a woman as being defined by her sexual organs immediately has super problematic implications even for cis women who go through a hysterectomy, or have to have hormonal treatment, or are infertile, or deviate from the norm in some way. And, yes, the same applies to chromosomes, and everything else. In contrast, what a person just intuitively knows what they are has no such problems. “You are a woman with a penis” is not a challenging notion. “You are a man who menstruates” isn’t either. Because just as a cis man does not become not a man, or even any less of a man, if he loses his penis or is born without one, so too does a trans man become any less of a man by not having one.
If you care about the biological definition exclusively, fine. But when conservatives say “There are only two genders”, they are actually wrong by definition.
Jackson can’t predecide these complicated issues of law, biology, and identity. The question is malformed. It was a leading question in practice because Blackburn clearly had an agenda, but even in theory the question was incomplete. Jackson would be a shitty legal scholar if she just gave some off-the-cuff answer. Anyone asking that question in her courtroom, at least of a non-expert, should be forced to clarify the context, and even a non-expert can only be allowed to define the term in the specific context at hand for their testimony. To answer the question, Blackburn would have needed to be clear about the specific context and Jackson would have needed relevant research materials. Instead, Jackson did exactly what she should have, as a legal scholar: Recognize that seemingly simple, obvious topics can actually be complicated and refuse to sound off.
This is really basic law, Bill. Like, watch Legal Eagle, or an episode of Law and Order. You know how lawyers have to pass this big complicated test instead of just trusting Internet commenters like you? It’s because being really precise with your language is complicated.
And notice that this was your reason, Bill. Your reason that you chose as your dismissive bumper sticker slogan was this culture war bullshit.
I pointed to Kavanaugh being a demonstrated liar and a clear partisan. I pointed to unprofessional conduct. It wasn’t one question that discredited him. It was everything, above and beyond the accusation.
And he got the fucking job.
You are having the gall to hold Jackson to account for not running her mouth on a topic she was unqualified for, which actually proves she is a good legal scholar. And you should like this, Bill. She could have defined “woman” in the context of the gender concepts you clearly are not a big fan. She didn’t. She indicated that she was open-minded and would make rulings in context.
So we have a clear case of white privilege, again. Kavanaugh can have a massive group of defenders even as he proves he is grossly unqualified. Conservatives themselves can only find evidence of Brown being competent. At worst you can accuse her of being ignorant. Not of having lied. And so the black woman, because of conservative gender politics, is being held to the stance that she should always have a definition memorized, while Kavanaugh is held to the standard that he’s a white Republican and so he gets on the bench.
And this is after we discover that Clarence Thomas should have recused himself after everything to do with the January 6th riots due to his wife’s wingnuttery and he didn’t.
This is what you want to talk about, Bill. Culture war trivia. You choose to be ignorant about the needs of people of color.
Why?
Not to be picky here but the site needs an upgrade so that I can reply to specific comments without having to scroll up, but anyway :
“And this is after we discover that Clarence Thomas should have recused himself after everything to do with the January 6th riots due to his wife’s wingnuttery and he didn’t.”
You do know that married couples can fundamentally disagree with each other right. If Thomas himself supported Jan.6 then of course he should recuse himself from those cases, however, as far as we know, it was only his wife who did that. So it would be unfair to demand he do that unless and until his wife or other immediate family member or friend is personally charged with crimes connected to that event. I would say the same thing if Kagan’s husband had supported the BLM riots.
Bill, two things:
Technicals:
Because the comments thread by indenting, there is a functional limit on how many subthreads can be presented in a browser frame. Once you hit that limit, you simply have to go back up the thread stages and start over. There is no actual fix for this. Other than using a commenting plugin that doesn’t indent threaded comments, which would eliminate the utility of threading. (I actually do want a better comments plugin, but the difficulty of installing and debugging such things is too extreme to justify spending days trying to set it up, so I haven’t yet.)
Subject of discussion:
On the legal question, that isn’t how the law works. It is precisely because of proximity to power and influence that recusal is required. The mere appearance of undo influence is always sufficient legal grounds. At no point does anyone have to prove any actual influence occurred. All the law requires is that a judge’s “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” Period. It tends to be the case that people are influenced by or biased toward the positions of their spouses. So Thomas’s impartiality can be reasonably questioned. No one needs to prove that it “is” questionable. There is reasonable grounds to suspect it. And the law says that’s that.
Look over the various examples of disqualifying grounds under that law: they are even more vague than “my spouse tried to secretly overthrow the government.” So if they count, that certainly does. And lo, it is explicitly listed in par. 5: “He or his spouse, or a person within the third degree of relationship to either of them, or the spouse of such a person: … Is known by the judge to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.”
As for example, her communications on the matter of insurrection being surrendered to the investigating committee—yet he voted against that, without admitting his section 28 grounds for recusal (we only found out later that he had something to hide by that vote). That’s judicial corruption under the law. Maybe not enough to impeach him for it though (as he was outvoted it’s a consequentially minor offense), but if he continues to violate section 28, he very well can be legally impeached and removed from the bench for corrupt practice (and yes, the law is explicit on this point, too).
The important takeaway here though is methodological: you should have been able to determine this yourself with just five minutes of Googling. That you didn’t discredits everything you say as likely not reliably fact-checked or even knowledgeable. The more we catch you failing at basic epistemic responsibilities, the less trustable anything you say becomes.
You need to engage routinely in reliable fact-checking and self-informing on issues you weigh in on before anyone has any reason to believe you ever do that. And only if they believe you reliably do that can they trust anything you say. You need to start becoming a more epistemically reliable person. This is literally the most important quality in anyone who would ever expect to engage a discussion of any matter of fact, ever. And you should take this seriously.
Yeah, so… Richard’s comment obviously demonstrates the point here. Seriously, this isn’t up for any debate. We’re not just concerned about Thomas’ own opinions, though you saying that spouses can disagree about a topic doesn’t mean that they are and doesn’t deny that they are much more likely to agree on a topic than the average person they don’t like, especially when there’s independent evidence that they are likely to agree (namely, Thomas’ existing partisan bias matching his wife). We are actually perfectly justified in worrying that Thomas has opinions that he cannot overcome, but hopefully as a judge he could.
The problem is that he has a vested interest in the case that has nothing to do with his own convictions or sense of the law. His family could be affected depending on his ruling. And that not only gives him a perverse incentive to rule dishonestly, but very reasonably could cloud his judgment and make him delusionally reason toward his desired conclusion.
You can say that you would think the same about Kagan with BLM, but, well, I don’t believe you, Bill. You have shown yourself to be perfectly willing to allege bias from all sorts of parties. You’ve said it about the mainstream media. You even argued, straight-up illogically, that Sandmann must have had bias against him to win the lawsuits, even though the fact of the lawsuits going his way actually proves that the system worked for him – the proof of systemic bias would have been if he had had justice denied. The way that Blasey-Ford did.
This isn’t just a matter of ignorance, Bill. You’ve proven both that you care about bias and try to detect it when it’s against your tribe. You not seeing a problem here, and continuing to try to debate minutiae instead of systemic racism, just keeps showing the point.
Why can’t you talk about systemic racism, Bill?