> When I was growing up in foster homes, or making minimum wage as a
> dishwasher, or serving in the military, I never heard words like “cultural
> appropriation” or “gendered” or “heteronormative.”
>
> Working class people could not tell you what these terms mean. But if you
> visit an elite university, you’ll find plenty of affluent people who will
> eagerly explain them to you.
I figured out as soon as I saw the link title that the author's examples for "luxury beliefs" would just so happen to be associated with a feminist and anti-racist outlook.
> But unlike luxury goods, luxury beliefs can have long term detrimental
> effects for the poor and working class. However costly these beliefs are
> for the rich, they often inflict even greater costs on everyone else.
This is certainly true for a high number of luxury beliefs, such as "trickle down economics", "small government" advocacy and "catallaxy", none of which come up often among dishwashers; and all of which freshman students at Yale, who just read their first essay on Friedrich Hayek, will gladly explain to you.
> I figured out as soon as I saw the link title that the author's examples for "luxury beliefs" would just so happen to be associated with a feminist and anti-racist outlook.
Isn't the author's point that the examples correlate very highly with affluence? The fact that it may/may not be correlated to something else might be relevant, but I'm not seeing the relevance.
Yes, the examples correlate with affluence, which is a necessary condition for them to be included in this article; but it is obviously not a sufficient condition, as all "luxury beliefs" from elsewhere on the political spectrum are excluded.
My point is that this is a bad faith argument. The author pretends to care about "luxury" beliefs, but in truth, all he cares about is finding a cheap shot against feminist positions. He intends to delegitimize these positions by painting them as an upper-class fringe ("luxury") concern. Once this angle of attack is found, the author never stops to see that the same attack could be levied against any number of political positions that he himself might agree with, because he was never interested in a real debate to begin with: he only wants to smear and ridicule.
The point is not that the examples are also "correlated" with something else, it's that they're carefully cherry-picked and made a target for an attack that would work against conservative positions, carefully excluded by the author, just as nicely as it does against liberal positions here.
I dunno, I read it apolitically. Normal working-class people don’t give a shit about any of this stuff, and as soon as they do, it’ll become unfashionable, and we’ll move on to the next thing.
> dunno, I read it apolitically. Normal working-class people don’t give a shit about any of this stuff
The fiercest culture warriors I know are working-class folk. They do in fact, give a shit about this stuff, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum. I blame the increased polarization.
The irony is that people who claim to be against culture wars - like the author - are they themselves actively engaging in a culture war while feigning neutrality. The truth is that they are simply against one perspective, which betrays either a lack of self-awareness, or bad faith.
I think once the idea of heteronormativity had percolated through all of society as a well understood concept, it would no longer be as pressing a concern. These concepts tend to be in vogue specifically because they are salient.
It is intellectually dangerous to read a piece like this "apolitically", precisely because a biased political agenda is wearing the garb of a much more universal observation. If the writer had mixed "luxury beliefs" from all over the political spectrum, then there would be a clear focus on what the title purports to concern. Instead, there is a second agenda that is being silently conflated without being acknowledged.
White working class people don’t, others definitely do. You can’t just generalize like that.
Working class people aren’t even inherently apolitical, they just don’t vote and aren’t taught that voting changes things like middle and upper class folks are
It's true that white working class people are the most likely to non engage politically for a variety of reasons, but it's also generalizing to say that working class PoC inherently care or adopt the same political ideas as the professional classes. Even among Black Southerners (who are very politically organized), whether someone agrees with modern social justice/intersectional frameworks is going to depend highly on other factors such as age and level of religiosity.
It’s wild that this whole piece is based on one response on one question in a poll.
The income bracket breakdown on that question is 22%/23%/32%. Which is significant but isn’t “they’re all top hat wearing elites just trying to impress each other”. “Defund the police” isn’t even the majority opinion of that income bracket.
This whole article is just an attempt to smear liberals. Even if you care about making the case that defund the police is a “luxury” to advance their social standing, then simply pointing to a slightly higher level of support in a higher income bracket is quite frankly stupid.
(As an aside, I don’t think they get the history of dueling right, either.)
The response proves his point too in a way, and something I've observed in my NYC left rich cohort.
Deflecting all criticism by knee jerk reaction of calling the questioner a racist. Disagreement over the magnitude of a problem, its relation to other problems, or the terms used for a problem makes you racist and therefore bad. Now we don't need to consider your opinion and can move on.
I did not call the author a racist, and to be quite honest, I fail to understand how one can reach that conclusion outside of a willful attempt to misrepresent my criticism.
> Is this so different? It's saying the thing without saying it.
This is reductive and only true in a binary world. If I question some anti-terrorism approaches, does that make me pro-terrorism? Of course not, but one could dishonestly accuse another of that to silence them or derail the conversation (see The Dixie Chicks). The world is hardly ever black and white.
My point was that their original comment about the article made was basically "I knew this person would be critical of blue coded luxury beliefs without being critical of red coded luxury beliefs!" without really arguing about the concept of luxury beliefs, or the examples being criticized.
It was shoot the messenger type stuff.
I recall when the Dixie Chicks criticized Dubya's invasion of Iraq.
The analogy here, to me, would be instead of arguing about whether Iraq invasion was a good idea, you said "aha! I knew the Dixie Chicks wouldn't have anything to say about Whitewater!" (or some similarly team blue scandal of similar vintage).
I hate tribalism, and I actually hate to see it even more on the side I vote with because it puts me in the position of being asked to defend things that I don't think make sense.
The latest topic of political discussion - Israel vs Palestine - is proving this. Not to derail the conversion about that topic itself, as it's highly contentious, but to point out that is a topic that is far from black and white, and both sides in our oversimplified two party system are finding out that there is nuance to be had on that topic, as they can't agree what the "right" stance is, though they can collectively agree that some ideas are stupid. To look at the other big topics of the past few, someone could be anti-mask and pro-vaccine, or anti-looting and vandalism but anti-police violence, neither of which wholly aligns with either party, but exists in the broader spectrum of what an individual believes in.
Yeah I think maybe we are making the same point in a way?
I felt the poster was discounting the article because the author had the opposite political preference on 2 topics. They lead with - "I figured out as soon as I saw the link title that the author's examples for "luxury beliefs" would just so happen to be associated with a feminist and anti-racist outlook."
To me reading the criticism of "my side" by reasonable writers from "the other side" is only additive. Also, logically that's exactly where I would expect the criticism to come from. You may even gain some perspective and re-evaluate your position or adjust your argument. This is how we grow.
As you point out, one can have a complex set of preferences/beliefs/things they support that do not fit directly into blue|red binary as a whole.
My problem with the argument is not that it's anti-feminist, it is that it's a broad-swath argument that could be levied against any number of beliefs, and the author deliberately chose to wield it only and exclusively against feminist and anti-racist positions.
I made that quite clear in my original comment by suggesting several conservative "luxury beliefs" that I believe the author would have to criticize on the same grounds, but failed to do so. This is not "deflection", it's showing that the article employs double standards and is thus intellectually dishonest.
The "predictable" part, in my estimation, is that this kind of argument would be used by a right-wing author. To be saying the thing by saying it, conservative cultural critics, when measuring liberal discourse, are incapable of coming up with a bar that they themselves don't trip over.
I think they do. It's just, it's so blatantly obvious that "single-payer healthcare is too expensive" and "there's no problem with police violence toward black people in particular" are "luxury beliefs" (in the sense that you can only afford to hold them if you're not directly affected by them) that there's no need to spell it out. (This point is sometimes spelled out when it comes to discussions on race and gender -- that's what "privilege" means. That "privilege" isn't brought up as much when it comes to economic/class issues speaks to the state of class warfare in the US.)
>Now we don't need to consider your opinion and can move on.
You can ignore anyone arguing from opinion, that's a given. "NYC left rich cohort" sounds like an absolute nightmare to try to figure out the truth with, given that they seem to think the character of a speaker has any bearing on the validity of their spoken words. Best not to engage with people like that, it's a waste of time.
Exactly, the deflections of 'racism' and 'sexism' are thought-terminating cliches bandied about in an act of pure class war. No need to listen to Trumpies talk about immigration and how it effects their community if they're all racists; that makes them the other and we can just pretend they don't exist.
I have genuinely never heard or read a Trump supporter discuss any practical effect of immigration, illegal or otherwise, on their actual communities. It's all very theoretical, based on hyperbolic and often false "news" items, and involves a heavy dose of borderline glee in being emotionally callous and selfish.
At beast, I have seen people misread statistics to support their position, but, again, that's not really "how it effects their community".
Okay, here's something written by Trump supporter and Cal State Fresno prof. Victor Davis Hanson discussing the effect of immigration on a community where he has lived since 1970:
That is a valuable perspective and all, and I don't discredit it (or concern for curbing illegal immigration as a top policy priority in general), but I'm not sure it's that persuasive for the point you are trying to make.
Let me put it this way: pointing to one cogent article by a non-representative Trump supporter (you won't find many of them in academia, and the college-educated skew liberal/Dem) doesn't really make me change my mind about writing most of them off as racists based on my personal experience and what most of them say (which is not as cogent and reasonable as this guy's article).
Couldn't your personal experience be a function of what Trump supporters make it through your filter bubble? We tend to see mostly the stupidest exemplars of our political opponents.
This article might be the single most vapid thing I've read all day, and I just read a Bari Weiss article for context.
Author leans in quite heavily to his own bonafides... somehow able to rise from foster homes to the military to graduate from Yale.
Neato.
And then he gets REALLY basic shit wrong.
"Working class" does not mean "lower middle class white folks." Go ask 10 "working class" black folks whether this country is racist. Then ask them whether it occurs at all levels of the country. They don't even need to know what the term "systemic racism" is to be able to describe it to you.
"Defund the police" had a pretty fucking specific meaning. It meant removing all the military surplus gear from police organizations in an attempt to reduce the amount of machismo and brutality from LEOs. Nobody should ever feel safe around a person who barely graduated from high school and yet has the authority to brutalize you and legally steal your shit. Go ask people if they think body cams on cops are important.
Is it now a "luxury belief" for women to be afraid that they live in a state that might attempt to jail them for the crime of having a failed pregnancy, or is that an actual valid concern? Don't want to do that? Okay, then let's look at the number of OBGYNs who are choosing to leave states with oppressive anti-female laws because THEY don't want to be prosecuted for the crime of providing healthcare, and follow that up by examining the cities in places like Texas that want to prosecute women for using state highways to LEAVE the state in order to receive proper reproductive healthcare.
Luxury beliefs my ass. It's only a luxury in his mind because these things don't impact him.
Painting your ideological opponents as "elite" and "out of touch" is a political trick as old as time, it encourages the listener not to engage the subject purportedly supported by the elite, but instead dismiss it out of hand as something no regular man should even bother themselves with.
Bonus points for making them elites in academia who apparently do not know how the "real word" works.
It is actually a means of pivoting to a different subject, and the next step is to make the subject the person doing the pivoting, and from there to change the entire scope of the discussion to the interpersonal dynamics of the parties involved in the discussion.
On the left (whom I would count myself among, even if I would hardly pass a purity test) there are many ways to do this, the key to all of them being that there's not a serious attempt to engage with the substance of the matter but simply to use an intersecting contextual facet as a means to collect the focus away from the topic and toward the discussant. Racism is probably the most straightforward path, or at least the most well-traveled (of the two mentioned in this thread, it would outrank abortion by being more generally applicable across age groups sexes religions etc) it goes "this isn't about x, x is really about racism. Your position on x implies you might be a racist. That position is personally offensive to me, who is directly or indirectly affected by racism." Done. conversation is now about people, and specifically two individual people, and specifically about the unfalsifiable statements about the feelings of one or both, and this is where it ends.
The right wing version of this trick, at least in the US, is much clumsier and ham-fisted but follows from the same motivation to replace the confrontation with an idea with a personal confrontation, though unlike the progressives they have only managed to devise one or two lasting variations of this same discussion-jamming measure: the pedophilia track and the socialist / communist sympathizer track.
I'm at a loss as to how to even attempt to have conversations in public about anything that matters due to the ever-present danger of one of these tactics surfacing and rendering the entire effort pointless. Perhaps we need to revive IRL coffee shop culture of small close circle debate from the 1800s, or import something like it from wherever a form of it still exists, maybe morocco or turkey.
Exactly. They certainly are not luxuries, and to some extent they’re not even beliefs - they’re acknowledgments about the way the world works, about modern systemic factors that impact the lives of historically oppressed populations.
Just because someone doesn’t recognize a word, doesn’t mean it’s some rarified hoity toity elitist folly - it’s ignorance; a lack of education or opportunity, nothing more.
There is not a state that will jail women for a failed pregnancy. Thank you for contributing to the ever-fucked up and misinformed conversation about abortion.
none of your links give any cases where a woman was prosecuted or jailed for a failed pregnancy.
The links did cite cases where medical practitioners did not do their job because they were worried about the government.
Texas law specifically states that abortions in the case of risk to the mother are ok and the medical practitioners felt the language wasnt clear enough.
As a european, I just can't wrap my head around this. How is it racist if I like a food of an other culture so much I cook it? Or I like a hairstyle of different culture so I also want to wear it. Or clothes. Or making music. Or....
I mean, I admire all that stuff so much that I want it to be part of my life. How is this racist?
As I remember it, this really took off in popular culture after native americans got sick of dude-bros/girls wearing war bonnets to music festivals. Around 2012-2014 it was a hugely popular piece. When 'cultural appropriation' came up then I mildly agreed with the sentiment because the look was pretty openly disrespectful.
And then it expanded like kudzu until digital hairstyles became off-limits:
as a native american myself, I have no recollection of anyone I know ever taking issue with this.
I don't doubt there was someone somewhere complaining, but similar to the rename of the washington redkins, most of us didn't give a shit.
The most grumbling I've ever heard around this is complaints that pow-wow's are too commercialized but, if anything, that was criticizing our own tribes.
The popular phrase was “my culture is not a costume” at the time. I also remember a bit of encouragement to distinguish between native and native-inspired fashion on the one hand and mimicry and stereotyping on the other.
I don't doubt there were people making noise, but I live in a state that's known for Native Americans (I'm sure you can guess) and it just wasn't a concern for anyone I know.
"Indians" were renamed "native americans" by white people against their will. Another act of imperialism by the "woke". Cultural appropriation is exactly the same.
Americans tied up so much of their image of a "good person" with not being racist, that when in environments with no way to demonstrate that they are not racist, they had to invent new racist things to oppose.
As a millennial, racism was taught to me in k-12 as being perhaps one of the fundamental forces of evil in the world; kind of an analog to what Christian students learn about Satan. As a result, people in my generation have moral codes that revolve around it, sometimes in twisted ways. Someone gets hit by a car but hey were racist? Had it coming.
This really hit it on the head. Racism was presented as the worst transgression anyone could make. Is it a surprise that when the generation raised in that environment reached adulthood - and realised that racism wasn't quite as dead as they thought, some of them would take their internalised morality to the extreme.
As a European, the closest you can usually get to this is when an American company decides to take your local custom or tradition and commercialize it without any understanding of its context. As a German the closest approximation is "Oktoberfest" which usually condenses all of Germany into an extremely tourist-y idea of Bavaria, but of course this is hard to even notice anymore because "we" are doing it to "ourselves": a lot of money is made by German companies selling "Oktoberfest" as a tourist-y fabrication.
Now compare that with Hawai'i: instead of locals profitting of the local culture, Hawai'i was a kingdom colonized by the US and most of the tourism is done by mainland US companies rather than locals. The locals stand by as not only their land is sold off to rich Americans piece by piece but so is their culture and heritage. Religious traditions become scenary, sacred symbols become decoration and so on.
It's not immoral to take inspiration from foreign food, music, architecture, dress or traditions and weave them into your own (or even lift them wholesale). But this isn't about an individual act, it's about something happening in a very one-sided power relation where the more powerful side not simply copies the original but replicates it out of context and then (intentionally or non) uses their power to popularize their hollow replica to the point that it replaces the authentic original and that original context is lost.
Much like "racist" it's really more about the predisposition of a system towards emergent outcomes than individual belief or intent.
Cultural appropriation is a very real thing, but the line between disrespectful/mocking and genuinely participating in a different culture can get gray. Unfortunately sometimes people take this understanding to the extreme.
No it's not. It's about as real of a thing as the miasma theory. It's a idea that's been laundered through academia, but that doesn't make it anything but "well researched" fiction.
Some of the comments I see kinda get to the point, but not all the way. I've grown up in a fairly liberal part of the southern US, with a high African American population so these are the kind of conversations I encounter fairly often.
Cultural appropriation is widely understood to be when someone in a position of power (most commonly a white person) utilizes something that is heavily related or socially seen as "part of" a minority community. For example, a white person wearing a Native American headdress. The issue that the minority community has with that is that they are routinely belittled or put down for participating in that part of their own community. For example, a white person wearing a Native American war bonnet to Coachella is appropriation, as war bonnets are culturally significant to Native Americans and you have to earn the ability to wear one. Meanwhile, many white Americans still put down Native American customs as "witchcraft".
When it comes to food, music, or clothing, you're pretty good there. It's primarily just avoiding things that are culturally or spiritually significant to a culture. I.E., don't wear a headdress if you're not Native American, don't act like you're the best rapper ever if you grew up on a farm in Kansas, or say you make the best gumbo in the world if you've never even been to New Orleans.
Seems like a fancy way to argue that it’s ethical to discriminate against white people because there is a historical debt to settle.
Laying claim to culture is dumb, but everyone wants to feel special. One’s culture is less at risk from appropriation than from extinction as the world continues to trend towards an internet transmitted monoculture.
Also, not sure what discrimination against white people over a historical debt you're referring to. The appropriation statement is specifically about how a significant aspects of certain cultures are repressed in modern American society, but when they are utilized by the majority (in America, white Americans), they're celebrated as fashionable or acceptable.
Laying claim to culture is dumb? That's kinda how things have been for the past thousands of years. A lot of these cultures have existed longer than many modern countries have. Yes, they do have risks from a cultural extinction, but watering a culture down or disconnecting it from it's roots doesn't save it from extinction. If anything, it advances that. Having people of that culture continue their cultural practices and protecting those practices, helps ensure that culture continues on.
Yes, there can be an internet monoculture, but everyone is part of some subculture. And the subculture is what is being protected. These cultures have existed for hundreds or thousands of years, and they carry historical importance in understanding history and the evolution of society.
Oh you are right I definitely over projected here and did not recognize the nuance in your argument. I do find in my experience, that most people do not restrict their definition as much as you have.
No worries, it's definitely something that can be very nuanced and it definitely has different meanings and interpretations depending on who you're asking. It's one of those societal things where no two people will say the same thing or have the same relationship with it. This is just the best way I've been able to explain it in a way that, in a way, brings it down to the meat and potatoes of the concept.
The term "cultural appropriation" has been widely misused and diluted by people who don't really understand it.
If I, a white man living in upstate NY, were to don Haudenosaunee ritual gear and record myself performing a traditional dance of theirs, that would be cultural appropriation. It refers to a dominant culture taking the trappings of a colonized or otherwise marginalized culture and using them for entertainment, for clout, or otherwise for our own purposes.
On the other hand, if I were to travel to Japan, stay at a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn), and wear the simple kimono they provide for guests, or go to a kimono rental shop and rent a kimono from them for the day, that would be cultural appreciation, because that is something that the Japanese offer openly as a way for foreigners to connect with and understand their culture.
In general, cooking and eating food of another culture in your own home cannot be cultural appropriation. (The only exception I can think of offhand is if the food is part of a closed religious practice of some sort.) Similarly with music—it's very unlikely to be cultural appropriation unless the music is part of a religious practice or being used disrespectfully. Hairstyles and clothing require a bit more nuance and can depend on the situation.
Among the people that care about cultural appropriation, there are so many different interpretations of which acts are offensive that it is a minefield of uncertainty. A lot of it feels to me like a vocal minority trying to railroad the discussion.
Maybe a better example would be if you donned that ritual gear and started a tourism company that taught traditional ceremonies to rich tourists. And having no idea what the actual ceremonies are you just copied it off a Hollywood movie.
Yes, I can see how that could be perceived as demeaning.
See also: Häagen-Dazs. Foreign people speak funny and can't write. Very funny.
> If I, a white man living in upstate NY, were to don Haudenosaunee ritual gear and record myself performing a traditional dance of theirs, that would be cultural appropriation.
This is insufficient to be cultural appropriation. The context in which you wear the ritual gear and do the dances matter, the same as with the Japanese example.
>If I, a white man living in upstate NY, were to don Haudenosaunee ritual gear and record myself performing a traditional dance of theirs, that would be cultural appropriation.
No it wouldn't. It wouldn't be because cultural appropriation doesn't exist. Culture is not a zero sum game. You doing that takes away nothing from the originating culture.
>It refers to a dominant culture taking the trappings of a colonized or otherwise marginalized culture and using them for entertainment, for clout, or otherwise for our own purposes.
Ah yes, White original sin and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion-tier rhetoric about the international White conspiracy. Conspiracy theories about some "dominance" and hierarchy of cultures on some fabricated scale is what the Nazis used to justify cleansing Europe of the Jews.
>On the other hand, if I were to travel to Japan, stay at a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn), and wear the simple kimono they provide for guests, or go to a kimono rental shop and rent a kimono from them for the day, that would be cultural appreciation, because that is something that the Japanese offer openly as a way for foreigners to connect with and understand their culture.
Japanese offer openly people to wear kimonos anywhere. It's often a gift given so others can wear them outside of Japan. You can appreciate culture anywhere.
>In general, cooking and eating food of another culture in your own home cannot be cultural appropriation. (The only exception I can think of offhand is if the food is part of a closed religious practice of some sort.) Similarly with music—it's very unlikely to be cultural appropriation unless the music is part of a religious practice or being used disrespectfully. Hairstyles and clothing require a bit more nuance and can depend on the situation.
Not in general, in totality: none of the aforementioned things are "cultural appropriation". The concept is an illusion.
Making fun of dominant religions, that are in no danger of being wiped out because people find them ridiculous, is fine.
Making fun of marginalized religions, which are already frequently ridiculed because they're different from what the dominant culture does, and which are under threat, either overall or within a given area, is a very different matter.
The problem with cultural appropriation is specifically that it exacerbates marginalization and discrimination against already-marginalized groups.
>Making fun of dominant religions, that are in no danger of being wiped out because people find them ridiculous, is fine.
Making fun of any religion is fine. No religion is above reproach, no religion is beyond mockery. None of them.
>Making fun of marginalized religions
Here's a newspeak term. There is no such thing as a "marginalized religion". This is a fictitious concept.
>which are already frequently ridiculed because they're different from what the dominant culture does, and which are under threat, either overall or within a given area, is a very different matter.
Good, every religion should be ridiculed. There's no culture that's beyond ridicule.
You're trying to create an illogical concept where hatred of White people is a reasonable thing. You can't come straight out and say it, so you launder the idea through a luxury belief and magically the hatred is tolerable.
>The problem with cultural appropriation is specifically that it exacerbates marginalization and discrimination against already-marginalized groups.
No it doesn't, because "cultural appropriation" doesn't exist. Upholding cultures even if they're backwards because it's politically fruitful breeds resentment. This is "baizou" behavior.
Thanks for making HN more entertaining. I do feel sorry for those cultures that didn't come up with computers, they can't read your comments, because that would be cultural appropriation.
That's not the point of cultural appropriation. The point is people in the dominant culture using symbols of other cultures in a way that is socially acceptable for them to use, but non-socially acceptable for them to use. It's kinda fucked up if I can't wear my natural hair style or I'll get fired from my minimum wage job, but that isn't the case for someone of the dominant cultural class wearing the same hairstyle.
If it's acceptable for everyone, then it isn't cultural appropriation, it's just culture sharing. It's when society takes it away from those who grew up with it but allow others to use it that it's cultural appropriation.
It's a problematic/flawed concept, but that's the core idea and it makes some sense.
The strongest form of that argument I know about is really about how capitalism is eating the world. It's a common refrain that "white people have no culture", but if you replace "white people" with "globalized capitalism" it starts making more sense.
Everyone drinks the same can of coke and eats the same grocery store sushi. If you look closer at the woke crowd you'll see that grocery store sushi is pretty "white".
One of the big things they're actually complaining about is enshittification of other cultures via capitalism.
So the idea is that cultural appropriation is a way to keep capitalism from eating the world, to keep shitty grocery store sushi from competing with people who actually know what they're doing. To try and keep capitalists from pillaging every developing economy.
1) It has nothing to do with racism but uses the accusation of someone being racist as a tool to push an agenda.
2) Japan still makes good sushi. Supermarket sushi has not destroyed japanese sushi culture
3) I'd argue that capitalism has made the world better in pretty much every aspect. You could argue that capitalism has destroyed the environment, but the fact is that leftist countries have a history of being even more destructive.
4) "white people have no culture"
But people all over the world drink coke, watch american movies, drink french wine, eat italian food, drive german cars and they seem to like their smartphones.
It's like goldilocks.. you can't like another cultural too much (cultural appropriation) or too little (racism). Often the statement is made by people who aren't even from the supposedly wronged culture. Please let me know how much and in what manner I am allowed to appreciate and participate in other cultures, Mr Cultural Gatekeeper.
America is great because people come here, participate in and enhance the existing culture.
My grandmother loved Chinese takeout cuz she was a Jew who grew up in NYC. My Southeast Asian in-laws love Italian food and always insist on taking us out to it. Also, hate to break it to people, but Southeast Asia has some really crazy localized Italian dishes involving ketchup & hot dogs.
Yesterday for breakfast I had greek yogurt.. from a company founded by a Greek! Last night I had leftover Thai (made by Thais!) and stopped by a Jewish bakery owned by Muslims for dessert. Had a black&white cookie with some baklava.
My parents who live outside of any big city, who have never been to Asia, now frequently go out for Pho. A couple generations ago Vietnam was synonymous with "bad war". For a GenZ American it's now synonymous with "good food".
> Japan still makes good sushi. Supermarket sushi has not destroyed japanese sushi culture
Japan and other Asian countries expressly push their food and culture as a component of political and economic diplomacy. Like, literally, that's a stated goal. Anime, the Hilux, and sushi have done more to ensure good will to Japan than any lame goodwill gesture.
cultural appropriation is related to colonialism and post-colonialism, its relation to racism as a concept is really a function of how racism relates to the other two fields.
I have a university degree and I know all the words but I don't understand what you are trying to say. I'd say colonialism - at least from a european perspective - has a lot more to do with subjugating the identity of the colonized. That's the opposite of "cultural appropriation".
I think Colonialism is more of a neologism for 'imperialism' since the US empire has a pretty different form from the old European empires. In US Parlance it seems to refer to a wealth pump moving resources from the undernourished colonies to a corpulent administrative center. Cultural artefacts could be an example, though of course this doesn't refer to physical artefacts that the original owners lose. It's a bit weird to me as well, though I can see how stealing a cultural artefact to put in a museum and copying a hairstyle could feel similar to someone living with inherited trauma.
Oh, no; it's absolutely part of it. Cultural appropriation involves the dominant culture taking practices (including things like clothing, music, dance, etc, especially if it's part of a religious practice) of a colonized or marginalized culture, removing them from their cultural context, and using them for their own purposes.
That's absolutely subjugating the identity of the colonized: it takes these parts of their identity and says "these are not yours; like everything else, they are ours, and we can do with them as we please."
As I said, the european/my german perspective does not see this - at least what I have learned. An essential motive of colonialism was the missionization and education of the "primitive, uncivilized race". The Germans saw it as their task to civilize the colonial population by introducing them to German culture and the Christian religion. Other colonial powers, such as Great Britain or France, also followed this ideological motive and tried to educate the "inferior race" in their sense.
Even if it would have been as you described: it would have nothing to do with me cooking african food because I love the taste. It's admiration, not theft.
For the food context, it'd be you opening an African food restaurant, that all the white people go to instead of an African food restaurant run by somebody from Africa. Meanwhile, Africans would be looked down on for making and eating said African food when they're supposed to be "integrating" to the local German food.
You're stripping the value of African food from African people, the same as colonialism stripped their resources from their land.
While it's certainly not an exclusively American phenomenon, cultural appropriation is vastly more likely to occur here than nearly anywhere else, both because we live on (recently-)colonized land, with the remnants of the people we stole it from still living among us, and because we are such a cultural melting pot, so people can much more easily come into contact with the cultural practices of marginalized cultures.
In most cases, Europeans don't live close to the people their countries colonized (though there are some exceptions, like the Basque and Catalonia regions), so there's less of a likelihood for people to want to appropriate them.
And no; cooking African food, no matter whether you belong to a culture that colonized that particular African culture, is not appropriation (unless, as I mentioned in another post, the food is part of a closed religious/ritual practice).
What's so special about food? Why is it cultural appropriation to wear African clothes, but not appropriation to cook African food? Both are important parts of their culture.
Well, for one thing, food is, for the most part, something you're doing purely for yourself, in the privacy of your own home.
Clothing is a much more visible identity marker: if you're dressed in clothing from particular African cultures, that's a strong signal that you belong to that culture—so if you do not, in fact, belong to it, that can cause a number of kinds of problems in the right (or wrong) circumstances.
Furthermore, for many cultures, the clothing that most recognizably signals membership is related to some form of cultural or religious ritual, and wearing it outside of that context can be very disrespectful.
Imagine if, for instance, you were in Nairobi (or Tokyo, or Mumbai) and saw someone wearing the traditional robes and cap of a Catholic cardinal—and you saw them partying, being vulgar, doing drugs, that sort of thing. Obviously, the connotations are not the same, because of the overall dominance of the Catholic Church and Western culture generally, but I hope that it gets across the general idea of why clothing can be more prone to appropriation, and why that's a problem.
So if I brought African food to work with me, and ate it during lunch with my co-workers, that would be cultural appropriation?
> Furthermore, for many cultures, the clothing that most recognizably signals membership is related to some form of cultural or religious ritual, and wearing it outside of that context can be very disrespectful
Fair enough; it would be wrong for me to wear a soldier's uniform if I've never served in the army.
Still, I can't help but feel that complaining about cultural appropriation is just a way to maintain USA's cultural dominance. The message seems to be: It's fine for Americans to spread their culture, but it's wrong for other countries to do the same.
It’s more cultural appropriation if you bring something in to the office and everyone is like “oh, that’s interesting, what is that, can I try it?” - while your coworker brings the same thing in and everyone’s reaction is different, “um, what is that, what is it, why don’t you just bring normal food” - followed by a passive aggressive note on the microwave not to reheat particular foods. You know?
It’s not just whether you’re ‘allowed’ to eat certain foods - it’s more whether your allowance for foods is different than someone else’s, because of your level of cultural status versus theirs. It’s about double standards.
well I mean that's cool that you have a different opinion of the meaning of the term, but the term was created as a critique of the effects of colonialism / post-colonialism and first use of the term comes here AFAIK https://www.archivesdelacritiquedart.org/wp-content/uploads/...
I guess I'm sort of old fashioned, when a concept is coined by some person I go with their definition and not what my feelings on it as a Dane might be.
cooking African food because you like the taste would probably not be cultural appropriation as the concept was originally defined, although I guess people may feel that is what it means now.
The food thing - and a lot of the other cultural appropriation touchstones - is more about double standards than anything else.
So if you’d be worried about hiring a black man with dreads, but you wouldn’t have the same hangups about a white woman with dreads, that’s an example. Or if when you make Foul Madras it’s very cultured and experimental and basically laudable of you - but if someone from Egypt brings it in, it’s more like a “oh isn’t your culture quaint” kind of situation, if not flat out “why did you make food that smells so bad.”
Like the enduring nonsensical racist gripe that people from indo/pak background smell like curry… while the UK had simultaneously made tika masala into a national dish. It’s brave and adventurous when white people do it, it’s separatist and foreign when brown people do it, even though it’s what brown people grew up with. That’s the angle.
It is exploitation of culture in the same way that natural resources of other countries were exploited: they were seen as something they could take and do what they wanted with it regardless of what the people that were already using it though.
Food is more of an edge case. I know there have been situations where someone who is white opened up a restaurant that sold food of a particular ethnicity. I'm not familiar with the specifics however. I would imagine that people debated whether or not that was cultural appropriation. Again, I don't know any specifics in that case.
I would say that cultural appropriation is less about individuals and more about the overall taking of something that means something to one culture and removing all that meaning. An example that comes to mind are things like turning Native American clothes into fashion or kids dressing as indians for Halloween.
> be associated with a feminist and anti-racist outlook.
Well.. it's not at all clear that those things he mention has anything to do with anti-racism and feminism. In fact, it seems quite clear they are the opposite of that.
The implication is clearly that "woke" is an effete privileged liberal attack on the poor and oppressed.
It's ridiculously transparent libertarian/conservative PR.
As others have said - far more directly abusive and entitled privileged beliefs are endemic among the very rich.
If they weren't they wouldn't spend so much time strike-breaking, stealing pay, flouting laws and regulations, buying politicians, and proselytising their messaging through think tanks, PR firms and captured media.
The fact is worrying and getting angry about things like cultural appropriation is something one can only do if they have the time and energy to.
Most laborers are too concerned about being able to pay their bills, provide for their dependents and too tired from difficult labor to get that upset about a Chinese Basketball player wearing dreads.
You are a part of the problem. You see the entire world as two camps: crazy woke and racist/imperialist. This is wrong.
I don't freak out over homosexuals. I see how "cultural appropriation" is bs. You can have those two ideas in your head at once. In fact, the vast majority do! Because it's the only sane position.
Sometimes one must examine the criticism of the "other side" rather than simply writing them off as "racist" or "heretic" (depending on the century).
It may turn out that there's some interesting points being made, and you almost walked into one yourself.
What if a lot of these luxury beliefs promulgated by the elite are really just conscience laundering / overt cover for all the bad things you point out they do covertly (strike breaking / bribery / fraud / etc)?
It's a thought worth examining and has non-zero merit.
Some of my trendiest, leftiest friends (hey and I vote all-dem, all the time myself) are actually far richer but come from family money. And many of them are less white/straight/male than me! And many of them have strongly ironic ideas about things..
Greta IG re-posting "climate change is an existential crisis", while owning big ICE SUVs and flying 10x/year. "Soak the rich" (because their dad bought their condo for them in cash and their lifestyle doesn't depend on the high income they believe should be taxed). SATs are racist (but THEIR kid got all the SAT prep / coaching / etc to ensure access to the best school). AOC good & "billionaires shouldn't exist", but happily spend summers crashing in their boarding school friends mansion whose father is a well known but politically quieter CEO.
And the author didn’t fail to deliver. The George Floyd protests in Portland Oregon were massive. I find it hard to square that with a yougov poll that says only upper middle class people were protesting to defund the police because the crowds were young people who aren’t even old enough to have achieved that economic status.
The author hilariously tries to paint small liberal movements as cultural capital, which is the same smear conservatives play when using “virtue signaling.” I’m sorry but 30 years ago Silence=Death fell under his category, and here we are today with overwhelming support nationwide for gay rights.
This paper is interesting but seems intentionally geared toward wrapping antiprogressive rhetoric as insight.
Yeah, it's also really funny because the data that the author uses about police reform also show the conservative luxury beliefs that is “police department don't need to be reformed”. (And the same data also shows that for every income class, the police is largely seen as dysfunctional needing either serious reform or complete defunding).
This post is basically conservative rambling disguised as sociology.
I am in no way conservative, but I think you are missing the point.
There are sets of liberal and conservative beliefs that are held by the wealthy and powerful that are detrimental to the powerless and poor.
He cites the liberal set, maybe he is a conservative and that’s his bias or maybe because there is an inbuilt hypocrisy in some of them, ultimately it doesn’t matter because the point stands on its own and one shouldn’t discount that.
I think you are the one missing the point: it's not that this post has a conservative bias (every text necessarily has these kinds of bias, and that's fine). The problem with this post is that it is only here as an argument against liberal ideas that he doesn't like, and as such it's entirely driven by bad faith.
Then sure there may be some elements of truth sprinkled every now and then, but every piece of propaganda always lies on some truth to be convincing, that doesn't make it legit.
You could break people up into political and wealth-based quadrants:
1. Conservative and rich
2. Conservative and poor
3. Liberal and rich
4. Liberal and poor
Consider the typical expressed beliefs of quadrants 1 and 2. Both advocate that individualism and an internal locus of control can help you succeed in life. The difference is whether they have "succeeded in life" (by socioeconomic measures/ whatever).
Consider the same for quadrants 3 and 4. They would typically be more likely to advocate for the idea that success is based on luck. Again, the difference between 3 and 4 is whether they have not "succeeded."
Of all the quadrants, quadrant number 3 (liberal and rich) has a unique cognitive dissonance between their lived reality and their stated moral position. They tend to believe that rich people have achieved their wealth largely through luck, and now have power and autonomy that others lack. They state that the rich should help the poor, and they are rich, so they continually must justify their own wealth. This type of cognitive dissonance does not exist in the same way for the other 3 quadrants. That's why TFA is inevitably critical of the left for its luxury beliefs moreso than the right.
I'm relatively affluent and I know that it's mostly the product of luck, I have no problem admitting that and that my salary is outrageous compared to the amount of work it requires (and required over my lifetime). I am also actively a militant in favor of an increase in taxes for the guys like me. I'd give away 80% of my capital instantly if it made all of my social class to the same because I know it would make life way better for most of us.
No, but if you disguise your criticism as sociological analysis while hiding under the rug the obvious parts of the analysis that wouldn't fit your narrative, then it's fair to say that's bad faith.
No, I actually read more conservatives than I do read from people who share my opinions because bad faith annoys me even more when it's done from my side.
And there are bunch of conservatives that are even pleasant to read even though I don't have much in common with them.
You can have different opinions and still argue in good faith.
David French is a compulsive contrarian and has ended up in a position where virtually all of his writing consists of attacks against conservatives written for liberal audiences. He’s not nearly as bad as Bill Kristol or Max Boot in this regard but he’s not taken seriously by other conservatives anymore.
Maybe you could evaluate the truth of something on its own merit, rather than sorting into "liberal vs conservative" first and letting truth be secondary to allegiance.
Part of evaluating truth these days is figuring out what information is being left out by the author. It’s hard to figure out the merits of an argument when only one side is presented or info is being hidden.
It's not about liberal vs conservative sorting, there are bad faith argument being raised by all political side.
They are equally bad, no matter where they come from, and they do not deserve anyone's attention, especially when it comes from grifters who live from the the confirmation bias of their followers/patrons.
(I don't even fit in the American political segmentation anyway)
> The problem with this post is that it is only here as an argument against liberal ideas that he doesn't like,
Where's the point of making an argument against liberal ideas you do like?
Unless you are arguing that anything painted "liberal" should never have arguments made against it? That anyone making an argument against a "liberal" position should have their motives questioned?
Yes, people are great fakers - we talk about things not because we believe them, but because we want others to think we do. That describes the great communication divide, where rich people, who rent out multiple apartments talk about housing is a human right, whereas the line cook at the local burger place couldn't be more excited to tell you about his crypto investment portfolio.
The phenomenon of the migration of upper-middle or middle class (that is, those on the margin of luxury) holders of the beliefs mentioned in TFA from blue to red states is strong evidence of his thesis.
Thanks for calling it out, pretty clear to me too that that’s where this article was headed. It sucks to see stuff like this posted on HN, feels like a let down.
ok - in that case: when I switched to a white collar job suddenly all the world's knowledge was unlocked in my brain, and I knew the meaning of all these terms that had heretofore been opaque to me.
Those with the capacity and inclination to learn such things (meaning academic theory and systems) who are born into working class communities or families are heavily encouraged to leave the working class behind and cut ties. The working class communities are intellectually strip mined, and the kids quickly learn their only chance at success relies very much on learning to hide where they came from unless they're trotting it out for sympathy points/scholarships, in which case you need to talk about your background but make clear that you've ~ transcended it. As a result the only people left in the working class as adults are those who couldn't learn academic theory.
Some exceptions I've seen are people like my mother who grew up higher-class but 'defected'. Another exception is occasional disabled members of the working class.
It has nothing to do with the intelligence or ability of the working class as a population and everything to do with the fact that people in that class who have certain abilities and types of intelligence are offered a way out that others aren't. (e.g. A mechanical genius is less likely to get this treatment than a kid reading several grades ahead ).
The author addresses this in the text. He claims the wealthy have the time (And I will add access to resources like the internet and books) to spend on learning esoteric knowledge. From my N=1 experience, that seems to be true. I don't really get why that offends you. Is it really hard to believe that people in different social classes prioritize learning different things?
well probably because I have learned more esoteric knowledge than almost anyone I know despite having come from poorer circumstances than anyone I know, and I learned it while being poor.
Pretty sure working class people suppress "fancy words". A fella could get mistaken for a "fairy" or maybe even get a beatin'.
It's like how mothers used to chip in to enforce gender inequality their daughters suffered. It is a defeatist mindset, that is culturally enforced and learned from bitter lessons of the reality of power balance and dynamics in society.
edit:
like many here at my development stage (middleclass, degreed parents, etc) there was significant positive feedback for displaying cognitive abilities.
So it is not a luxury, it is a privilege.
And that raises the question of whether it is in fact required (as a sort of petite-bourgois-oblige) for those of us who are comfortable with "fancy words" to do the talking for the otherwise encumbered oppressed?
> Pretty sure working class people suppress "fancy words". A fella could get mistaken for a "fairy" or maybe even get a beatin'.
> And that raises the question of whether it is in fact required (as a sort of petite-bourgois-oblige) for those of us who are comfortable with "fancy words" to do the talking for the otherwise encumbered oppressed?
I honestly cannot tell if this is a serious comment. I hope not.
Let’s consider the contrary. Do poor people sometimes hold highly questionable beliefs, promulgated by institutions, and does professing these beliefs in expensive and flamboyant ways confer status?
Religion ticks all these boxes.
In some contexts, so does patriotism, racism, worship of the military, publicly dumping cases of Bud Light, etc etc etc. In some ways, even disdain for education is a sort of expensive status display.
The author is just describing what people of all kinds do. Yes, there are very silly beliefs which sometimes seduce educated elites. But that just makes them like everybody else.
Also, the author is picking on some trendy ideas which are currently held by some of the elites, but so what? It would be truly surprising if a decade-plus of higher education and immersion in data and discourse did not produce a different consensus. The author offers no evidence that “defund the police” is an inherently absurd idea, no more than other formerly radical ideas like universal suffrage or abolishing slavery. In my town, the police absorb over 20% of the city budget, have doubled their spend in the past decade, and are unaccountable to the people. So I think it’s at least a topic worthy of interest!
Regular participation in religious services is of the most beneficial activities a person can do for their mental health. I'm not saying this as a platitude, but as a well documented observed phenomenom [0][1]. To the point, I regularly see studies on benefits to those who regularly attend religious services and have never seen a study showing any adverse affects from it.
That is not to say religion is an unalloyed good, far from it. But human communities are built around shared values and beliefs - and religions provide community, cohesion, and existential value that is not replicable in any other way.
This kinda knee-jerk anti-religious sentiment is something I'd personally label a luxury belief that is largely damaging to the population as a whole. If you are sufficiently wealthy, you can probably fill some of the voids left by a lack of religion. But irreligiosity does not scale
It does scale, only ~13% of the population of the Czech Republic are religious (affiliated) [1], and additional ~10% are not affiliated but consider themselves as believers [2].
I broadly agree with your statements that in general religion brings better mental health to a population and that there's a void of community in populations that aren't centered around religion. That's something I've personally felt, growing up in the Christian church and existing outside of it as an adult. I feel like saying there's never adverse effects or that "irreligiosity does not scale" misses the point in a few ways.
First, there's pretty obvious harmful effects of religion: on the minor end, feeling ostracized if you happen to be different than what the stated beliefs say are correct, i.e. being queer in the Christian church and ostracized or driven to suicide for it. (Or even more fundamental issues, like taking issue with men being the head of households.) On the extreme end, you have crusades, pogroms, wars that engulf nations. Obviously relatively harmful. Or even on the individual scale, ritual killings of those who defy the religious order.
I'd also posit that, again from the Christian faith, believing there's an all-powerful god who will sort out justice in the afterlife leads to negative outcomes here on Earth: believing you'll have everlasting life in heaven is of course going to limit your investment in systems here on Earth. I've had religious people cite (paraphrased) that "god will sort it all out" when I ask why they don't push to directly address more of the problems in the world. There's an abdication of responsibility I've found relatively common amongst my religious family on such issues. (Not universally, notably, but still.)
Regardless, for those who have "lost faith" on epistemological grounds, what is the alternative to irreligiosity? I don't "choose" not to believe in the Christian (or any other) god, I'm unconvinced by the evidence put forward by their evangelists. I have no philosophically sound alternative to atheism unless and until I encounter convincing evidence to the contrary.
I also worry about people "giving up" some of their philosophical beliefs just to belong to that kind of community. I've talked before [0] about how other more extreme communities (e.g. flat earth) aren't so much comprised of people who believe the premise of the group so much as people who _want to belong somewhere_.
> But irreligiosity does not scale
What's the alternative? The atheist segment of the population giving up portions of their ethical and philosophical autonomy to churches in exchange for a sense of community? Continuing to enable the hold of said autonomy over those who believe largely because they aren't exposed to other epistemologies because their community center discourages it?
> I feel like saying there's never adverse effects or that "irreligiosity does not scale" misses the point in a few ways.
I just mean irreligiosity doesn't scale as a way to provide existential value and social cohesion. This is what Henderson is getting at with Luxury Beliefs. They are beliefs that you can hold in the top, lets say, 10% of the wealth distribution. But those luxury beliefs actually damage people lower down the socio-economic ladder.
> feel like saying there's never adverse effects
There's definitely adverse effects! But its opposite side of the coin of having meaningful, cohesive communities. Your own examples are perfect. Belonging to a community does a lot, but at the same time it means you have to conform to the community or lose its benefits.
Also, the examples of crusades, etc are just human nature expressed through religion. If the 20th century taught us nothing else, is that you don't need religion to have murderous ideologies. In fact, I'd take the Spanish Inquisition to the horrors of 20th century dictators any day!
> What's the alternative
I mean, that's problem we're facing isn't it? Maybe there is some way to replace the social and existential value provided by religion, but I don't see it.
> The author is just describing what people of all kinds do. Yes, there are very silly beliefs which sometimes seduce educated elites. But that just makes them like everybody else.
The idea that some of these beliefs are popular specifically because you have to be rich to afford them was a new insight to me when I first heard it. Maybe I should've come up with it myself from first principles, but I didn't.
Defund the police was an inherently absurd idea. It especially bothers me that proponents gave no reasonable explanation for what happens next after defunding[1] and many seemed to have no appetite for reform. Portland was kind of a poster child for this. Just look at how things have changed after their budget slash.
- Police staffing levels are at critical levels [2]
- Violent crime has shot way up in 2021 (along with the rest of the country) [3]
- Things got so bad so quickly that in just a year millions of dollars were added back to the budget [4]
- Things have continued to get worse relative to the rest of the country (which has seen crime drop back down) [5]
When someone believes that there's semen in a beer, or they go to church, or they reply 'thank you for your service' to someone on the internet, that doesn't have real consequences for people. It might get spoken about in the media sometimes, but it's more just a side-show.
When a stupid slogan ruined the best chance America had for wide police reform in decades, that does have consequences. Even more now, nobody (who should be a cop) in Portland wants to be a cop. Lower class communities that need more patrols don't have them. People don't feel safe in their houses. Who do you think took the brunt of this: those who chanted the slogan, or those in the huge minority ethnic groups in East Portland?
And the most critical part about this: defund the police was treated with some amount of legitimacy by the media because it was their in group saying it. It should have been treated as the fringe belief it really was. Imagine if that airtime was used to campaign for reform. The real frustration of it all is that it was a zeitgeist that could have been an opportunity for real reform, and really making people want to be cops. Instead the moment was pissed away by a dumb slogan, rather than constructive debate.
[1] Besides at best a hand-wavy 'community policing', which conjures up memories of that one Simpsons episode.
Your comment is pretty incendiary so I won't go through it point by point, but I'd like to emphasize the distinction between defunding (i.e. demilitarizing) and abolishing the police. Abolishing the police altogether is more of a utopian goal and very few people think society can function today without some kind of police. That said, the typical day-to-day work for a police officer doesn't require violence or the threat of violence, and the police force shouldn't behave like some kind of paramilitary unit.
> I'd like to emphasize the distinction between defunding (i.e. demilitarizing) and abolishing the police
You are playing the Motte and Bailey[1] tactic perfectly. You say that defunding means only "demilitarizing", which many people would probably agree with. But when put into practise, it's never that.
I mean, you don't need to delve very far into academia or lefty twitter to find extremist people saying exactly this, that defund does actually mean abolish, or is the first step to it. And the extremists are important in this case, because they are the ones put in power, or writing the text books for next generation in power.
So either, you're a fool & a useful idiot mindlessly parroting this Motte, or you're the deviant waiting to implement the Bailey.
What do you mean? Where has police abolition been ever "put into practice"?
> I mean, you don't need to delve very far into academia or lefty twitter to find extremist people saying exactly this, that defund does actually mean abolish
If you're trying to find the point of view of stupidest leftist in existence to say “the left is stupid” then sure. Of course there are idiots/teenagers/trolls on Twitter that think that abolishing the police is the way, but that doesn't mean it's some shared position from everyone on the left or that the others are clueless.
Also, by doing this your message is violating HN's guideline.
> demilitarize - remove all military forces from (an area)
Militarization of police refers to this trend where police has started to buy hardware that was previously of military use only[1], so it's not completely absurd to talk about the opposite motion as “demilitarization”.
> defund - prevent (a group or organization) from continuing to receive funds
Or just (significantly) reduce how much funds they get.
I would argue you find that kind of left wing extremist exclusively on twitter and at the fringes of academia. They have no power and are not taken very seriously.
You just found this on Google and because this is behind a paywall you haven't read it, right? Because the argument made here isn't the one you think it is: it's about financing social care in order to be able to make crime disappear (making the police “obsolete”).
Now I don't think that's realistic, and no matter how fair your society is going to be there would always be the need for some police in the end (the author themselves acknowledge that as well when talking about “less needs” for the police), but claiming that they want to abolish the police in the sense of "directly removing it in today's society" is a strawman. (Yes the provocative title is an invitation to strawmans but you fell for the trap)
No, it went viral three years ago when it came out and I remembered it.
> Because the argument made here isn't the one you think it is: it's about financing social care in order to be able to make crime disappear (making the police “obsolete”).
Yes, and? That’s exactly the argument I think it is.
> Yes the provocative title is an invitation to strawmans but you fell for the trap
A strawman is when you misrepresent a position as being absurd. When the position is already absurd, it is neither possible nor necessary to strawman it.
> Yes, and? That’s exactly the argument I think it is.
Then why are you responding in a thread along with someone who takes the argument as in “literally remove the police directly and let the chaos begin”? And why are you using this article as a support for their argument?
> A strawman is when you misrepresent a position as being absurd
No, a strawman is when you misrepresent someone's argument as being another absurd argument. The argument in the article isn't the one that automatic6131 is arguing against, and since you quoted the article as if it was, you're effectively making a strawman against it.
If you think the argument in the article is absurd, that's fine that you criticize it, but it's not what you're doing here.
“Defund the police” means to reduce funding to law enforcement and reallocate that funding to social programs. In the limit case, you eliminate law enforcement directly. Some people in this thread were denying this or claiming that this idea was only advocated on “Twitter and at the fringes of academia”. This claim was false because the idea was actually published by the New York Times.
Whatever particular hair you’re splitting doesn’t change that, and the fact that you’re focused on splitting that hair in particular only demonstrates the degree of bad faith and intellectual dishonesty required to make this extreme proposal sound like anything more than the gibbering nonsense it is.
The one building strawman is then accusing others of intellectual dishonesty, the poor man's argument playbook has been followed till the end and we can now stop this conversation. Thanks for making everyone lose their time.
The strawman was constructed by yourself. Your strawman is:
> someone who takes the argument as in “literally remove the police directly and let the chaos begin”
I clicked the “parent” links to read every comment in this chain about defunding the police and none of the people in this discussion match the strawman you describe. My characterization of “defund/abolish the police”, in which funding for law enforcement is reallocated to social programs, is completely consistent with how automatic6131 and cmcaleer were characterizing the slogan, contra yourself and gizmo. The first reference to abolition was automatic’s here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38083132):
> I mean, you don't need to delve very far into academia or lefty twitter to find extremist people saying exactly this, that defund does actually mean abolish, or is the first step to it.
Indeed you do not. This is exactly what the NYT piece I linked to says, in so many words. And you’ve admitted as much yourself.
Redefining words in order to win arguments. Nice.
Defunding means exactly that. I know this because that is what happened to the police forces that were defunded. Not entirely defunded, but they ended up with less money in their budget.
> the typical day-to-day work for a police officer doesn't require violence or the threat of violence
Says who? Are you a cop? Do you have cops in the family? Are you a law enforcement expert?
Do you have any source or statistic whatsoever to back that up?
> Redefining words in order to win arguments. Nice. Defunding means exactly
> that. I know this because that is what happened to the police forces that
> were defunded. Not entirely defunded, but they ended up with less money
> in their budget.
The poster is not redefining the term.
The "Defund The Police" movement has very specific and very well documented goals: Use police only for law-enforcement, and use specialized responders for non-law enforcement interactions. For example, you send mental health specialists when someone is threatening suicide. This will reduce funding for the police, but it also reduces the police's workload.
Is the movement poorly named? Yes. Is their goal to eliminate police?
Absolutely not.
The movement existed for five seconds, had a really bad idea as their name, and now you're saying it was all a misunderstanding and they are really moderates?
There's a person waving a knife or gun around in public threatening to commit suicide.
Now what?
There's a person threatening suicide in public and then pulling out a knife or gun when the authorities show up.
Now what?
It's easy to be an armchair law enforcement expert and dream up scenarios where the good guys always wins.
But reality doesn't conform to your utopian ideas.
The "defund the police" movement was not that well organized but I agree, they do have very specific and very well documented goals: the end of policing. They went hand-in-hand with the prison abolitionist movement.
I get that you may not want to eliminate police, but I assure you, a large number of the people at the center of these movements do want that.
UK police didn't have guns in the early 2000s either. The rise in recorded violent crime can't be explained by something that hasn't changed. You're just trolling now.
Did you even look at the link I included that disputes that violent crime is trending up at all? Your chart shows that digital cameras have gotten cheap. Not that violent crime has actually gone up.
> The ONS reported that victimisation rates shown by the CSEW have been decreasing in the long term. They peaked in the year ending December 1995, when 4.7% of adults were a victim of violent crime. Rates have remained below 2% since the year ending March 2014.
> In contrast to the downward trend shown by the CSEW, the ONS highlighted that police recorded violent crime increased between the years ending March 2013 and March 2022. The ONS explained that these increases are thought to be driven by improvements in police recording practices
I really don't think I'm being too incendiary. I didn't want to just spew bile, I'm frustrated at the wasted opportunity and the fact that those who have suffered most from it are those who those with the luxury beliefs were purporting to represent, and tried to show how these beliefs have harmed those who they're purportedly protecting. People shouldn't kid themselves about the consequences if they campaigned for this; it should be a useful lesson in politics for everyone.
> defunding (i.e. demilitarizing)
I agree with this! But this is reformation, not defunding. In fact, trying to create a police force more in line with Peelian principles will cost a lot more. "Reform the police" is very broad and has a lot of room for interpretation. "Defund the police" is a very straightforward request. Words have meanings, and defund does not mean demilitarize. I would bet a large amount of money on "Defund the police" polling worse with all political groups than "Reform the police" by a huge margin.
> the police force shouldn't behave like some kind of paramilitary unit
I agree with this too! Perhaps this could be done through some kind of reform ;)
Reform requires political will. And political will typically materializes when reform (a) benefits the politicians directly, (b) is made beneficial by lobbyists, (c) the public loudly demands it.
For (c) the question is: how to get the public worked up enough about an issue that they take to the streets and demand change? Nuance and careful analysis don't motivate people like catchy slogans and impossible demands.
Young people who chant impossible slogans sometimes really change society for the better. People who think in shades of gray and dream of carefully considered incremental change tend not to be involved with political action at all.
I don’t have an informed opinion about Portland or its police. But I think that’s not exactly the issue here.
Others have already noted that the author overstates the support for true police abolishment. Let’s set that aside.
The police are much more unpopular these days than before and the author offers their theory that it’s some deranged attempt to flex on others. There is a much simpler explanation, like the fact that you can watch a supercut of police killings on YouTube now. This prompts reflection and reassessment, and some people end up in more extreme places.
I just don’t buy this idea of costly dogma in the educated elites. You support police reform. Maybe you know people who support some form of defunding the police. Are you losing friends over this?
The author may be on more secure ground when they assert that strong political beliefs are now more untethered from lived experience. But that seems like a predictable outcome of social media. And not always a bad one - if it’s motivated by evidence and empathy.
Sometimes it’s motivated by group processes that inch that group towards radical beliefs, where one derives status from going further down the rabbit hole. That’s bad but it’s not limited to one group.
My colleague works remotely from a more rural area, the land of “Fuck Trudeau” flags. One of his neighbors recently asked him if he was worried about COVID vaccines sterilizing him. Vaccine denial is one of the most “expensive” beliefs of all time. Some sociologists have proposed that such beliefs are strongly professed - despite lived experience of it being deadly to do so - because the person will suffer a “social death” otherwise.
So even if some educated elites are being memed into weird beliefs, this phenomenon is hardly isolated to them.
The Social Justice movement has two kinds of people. The thought leaders in the universities are functionally revolutionaires: "Justice" doesn't mean fairness in their thinking, it means "privileging" the oppressed group and de-privileging the oppressor group. (See the book "Cynical Theories" for a thorough--and left-leaning--analysis of the development of the academic ideas from disillusioned Marxists Foucault/Derrier to the current state.) This isn't really "justice" in the sense of fairness, it is retribution: attempting to right a wrong by wronging.
Then there are the masses, who think "Justice" means "justice" and more or less buy the narrative. (At least, as far as I can tell.) These days, activism is how a lot of people seem to derive their meaning in life. So, "defund the police" advances the revolutionary cause, while being a pithy cause activists can rally around if they are not of the critical thinking persuasion.
The lack of thought about the after-effects is from the academic thinking. The goal is simply to tear down the oppressive system; there is no thought given to a replacement system or how that system would avoid simply being a different oppressing system. Or whether a replacement system would actually be less oppressive than the current system, which by historical standards is one of the least oppressive.
When have zeitgeist moments like that ever led to thoughtful, sober, laser-focused and effective reforms? In my experience, reform takes years and decades to build a consensus. You can’t “catch lightning in a bottle” and call it a day.
The civil rights movement, #MeToo, the Berlin Wall, the world post-2008 crisis, there are probably more that I'm not thinking of, but each of these directly contributed to a better world for those the zeitgeist focussed on in a tangible way. I think the voice of reason did pretty well in these, though unreasonable voices from within movements that made movements look bad to reasonable people existed.
The Civil Rights movement lasted from 1954 to 1968. The Berlin Wall lasted from 1961 to 1989. The #MeToo movement is ongoing and still a long way from achieving its goals.
Not sure what reforms you're referring to with the 2008 crisis. Housing is as unaffordable as ever.
I think your list reinforces my point. You can't achieve meaningful reforms instantaneously. It takes years and decades. The zeitgeist moment might be a catalyst, but focusing on it exclusively ignores all of the work on the ground.
In any case where major reforms are needed, there will always be many people on the other side who need to be convinced (or move on). This takes a long time.
>> Let’s consider the contrary. Do poor people sometimes hold highly questionable beliefs, promulgated by institutions, and does professing these beliefs in expensive and flamboyant ways confer status?
I would consider those beliefs pretty harmless compared to what intelligentsia believes in, even after 100 millions of people died because of their social experiment in the 20th century.
> I would consider those beliefs pretty harmless compared to what intelligentsia believes in
Is it that the beliefs are inherently less harmful or that poverty inherently involves less capacity to affect the material conditions of others?
That is, are poor people's dangerous beliefs less dangerous than those of richer people because of their content, or simply because the people holding them are less powerful?
I guess both, one hand they don't have the time to come up elaborate ideological concepts/fantasies and on the other hand they don't really have the power to change anything. If the most egregious thing you can be accused of is "publicly dumping cases of Bud Light", I don't think you are at the same level as the inventors and executioners of the cultural revolution for example.
> If the most egregious thing you can be accused of is "publicly dumping cases of Bud Light", I don't think you are at the same level as the inventors and executioners of the cultural revolution for example.
The people doing that (and moreso, spreading the idea of it) largely are the intelligentsia (and largely not the proletarian intelligentsia), and while that’s one particular demonstrative act, its not by far the worst the faction doing it can be accused of.
So I’m not so sure that works as an example on multiple levels.
If they can't be even accused of dumping Bud Light cases (you say even this was devised by the intelligentsia), what is then the most egregious thing the poor did?
This piece does not really touch on the many confounding variables that are found when examining the correlation between esoteric beliefs and social status. Level of education, for instance, is a biggie, even when accounting for the perceived prestige of where one goes to school.
The author dismisses some concepts, like cultural appropriation, by saying that the working-class people he grew up with not only didn't trouble themselves with it but didn't even realize that it was a concept.
But just because someone with low education and/or low status doesn't know about or understand a topic doesn't make that topic merely a status symbol, any more than it makes calculus a status symbol.
I agree, in part, with the author that certain pockets of higher education can veer into navel gazing and ivory-tower perspectives, and it can lead students to adopt distorted views of the world. But I don't think it can be said that just because a point of view is more prevalent among higher-educated people (who may indeed have higher status) that means the idea is bunk.
Did he say that a topic was bunk because it was held by the upper class? I took his point that the prevalence of these luxury beliefs is higher among the upper-class in gross disproportion to the impact those beliefs have on people. E.g. cultural appropriation is sometimes used by people in power to pretend they have a connection to cultures where none really exists. It's a form of manipulation. The impact that has on the average person's life is minuscule. The impact of someone from the middle-class taking cultural clues from other cultures in non-existent, yet it's easy to find discussions about the alleged harm this causes among some social groups.
The luxury is in the time spent on relatively unimportant matters, much like spending millions of dollars on a bejeweled egg. That doesn't mean the egg doesn't exist.
Starts off with an interesting premise and makes me think, hey, maybe I should re-examine my priors, let's see the evidence. And then the evidence turns out to be something about people who "make more than $100K," and goes on to assert that they "live in gated communities" and "can afford private security." In 2023, "making over 100K" just means that you're usually on-time with your monthly housing payment.
Author may indeed be going somewhere with this, but I'd like to see stronger support for the thesis.
If we're talking a security firm paying minimum wage hired by the HOA to do rounds at a gated townhouse complex, that's not some unattainable luxury for someone making "just" $100K.
Reminds me of one of my favourite quotes by Huxley:
"If you’re to do anything reasonable in this world, you must have a class of people who are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members can think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must have a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in which eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That’s the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric itself—often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages eccentricity in others"
Benjamin Franklin made a similar argument about civilization being dependent on a strong middle class of financially secure business owners who could afford time to engage in politics.
The key difference is that Franklin's middle class wasn't interheted status.
It sounds like you're talking about an aristocracy, and the quote even uses that word, so I wonder: do you think the aristocracy is responsible for most of the progress in the world?
I'd argue rather that, historically, progress has generally involved removing or disempowering the aristocracy.
In Huxley's day, that was more true[1] than it is today. Look at someone like Lord Kelvin, for instance. State-sponsored science wasn't really a thing yet; most of it was done by people who had the time and money to pursue it.
[1] That is, it was true of scientific progress. As you say, social progress often involved finding a way to destroy the aristocracy's stranglehold on money and power.
Baron Kelvin of Largs became that because of his work, not the other way round.
His father was a University Professor.
Having said that, in the history of science there's a surprising number of people who got to focus on their hobby due to family wealth, and access to all the best toys allowed them to claim a lot of firsts.
Weird, my view of history is that most progress in philosophy, arts, science, engineering, etc has come from aristocracy members who had the means to pursue something other than working for their next meal. That the aristocracy also spent their time exploiting the poor masses doesn't change that.
A casual check says the quoted text is from Huxley's Crome Yellow (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1999/1999-h/1999-h.htm) and that the speaker is a character known only as Mr. Scogan, which some suggest is an analogue of Bertrand Russell.
The terrible argument, built over several pages, is that "defund the police" as a political conviction is a status symbol, because rich people live in gated communities and don't need police.
It ignores the evidence is a 10% increase in a single poll, in which the majority was not of the inverse opinion that police is without fault, they just had a slightly different outlook on necessary police reform being possible in the current structures. It's yet another deliberate misunderstanding of "defund the police" (not a maybe understandable accidental misunderstanding).
Would be interesting to have this poll broken down by race, putting those most affected by broken windows policing and police violence first. And also those who coined the term.
"Among Democrats, Black (38%) and Hispanic (39%) adults are more likely than White adults (32%) to say spending on police in their area should be increased. There is no significant difference across these racial and ethnic groups in the share of adults who say spending should be decreased" (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/10/26/growing-s...)
On the point of success and the rich believing it is just luck whilst the working-class beliefs it's hard work: Maybe both is true. Becoming successful in working class jobs often *does* require hard work, whilst becoming successful in upper-class jobs depends more on other factors such as luck. For example, to become a great construction worker, you need physical strength, stamina, and a strong work ethic, as the job involves long hours of manual labour. On the other hand, landing a high-paying job in finance or tech might depend more on being in the right place at the right time, networking, having access to resources and opportunities etc.
My experience is usually the opposite to be honest. When I look on any forum or social network dedicated to an art form/creative form, it's usually the rich and successful saying how it's all about skill and how their hard work got them there, while it's the poorer, unsuccessful folks talking about luck.
This fits very well with the idea of a self serving bias, where people take credit for their successes and pass off their failures as the fault of external influences:
Which makes sense to me. If you're successful, it must feel horrible to think about how you might not deserve your current status, and how so many equally talented/hard working folks failed miserably in similar circumstances. While if you're unsuccessful, thinking that maybe you just suck and deserve your situation must feel equally miserable.
A high-paying job in finance or tech is not what rich means.
Rich means ownership and rent-seeking. It means dominating some part of your culture to the extent that you can force your will and desires on significant numbers of people - often against their personal interests.
One of the best examples is the health insurance industry, which bankrupts half a million Americans every year - usually people who have been paying insurance premiums for decades, but their money is somehow channelled to shareholders instead of providing care when they need it.
If you're not profiting from an operation like this on a mass scale, you're not truly rich.
The belief that success is mostly luck, while sometimes true, is useless when it comes to making decisions. There is little that I can do to increase my luck, while there is plenty that can be done to work toward a goal. One who has benefited from luck or can afford to buy their own luck, can state this and mean it. Anyone else who holds that position assures their own failure.
Luck is definitely something you can increase to a point.
Luck is basically seemingly random events going your way in a positive way. If you do more things, you’ll have more interactions and more chances those go well.
Luck is just probability. You have to keep playing the board for it to work. Too many people think luck is just sitting and doing nothing and hoping it turns out well.
I think this is the right view of success. Great success requires both talent and hard work.
It’s most obvious in domains like sports and music. I noticed that in my teens by watching Michael Jordan. He was great because he had a body seemingly made for basketball and spent the most time practicing.
How is it any different in medicine, tech, investing, engineering, business, etc.?
The talents are mental, so they are harder to see. The required combination of luck and hard work are the same.
A better world would be one where the successful recognize this and are grateful to be the recipients of life’s lottery winnings. They would try to help the unlucky rather than lord their success over them.
The way I like to think about it is: success requires 1) being in a position to be presented with windows of opportunity and 2) being willing to commit to working towards taking full advantage of those windows when they are presented.
It’s luck, and then it’s work to take advantage of the luck. Except in extreme instances on either end of the spectrum, it’s always both.
Orwell's line from Notes on Nationalism (1945): "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."
Given that working class rubes like myself who finished college in a place my man can't even find in a map are somehow able to know what “cultural appropriation” or “gendered” or “heteronormative” mean, and do that by the same means as everyone else (reading about it) I'm going to presume that the good man has a very peculiar understanding of what "elite" means.
Indeed, I studied in the engineering and not the gender department (we barely had liberal arts IMO), and I too learned how to read. Maybe the cultural elite, like starbucks baristas and people who work in HR.
Nah, you see this belief that baristas and grad students are the real elite. It goes back to thinking class is a cultural thing. So your rural landed gentry is working class because they own a truck.
"Class", by Paul Fussell, is a fun read. It's from 1981 and reads like a period piece today, but it's still a good read.
Somehow, "Black Lives Matter" morphed into "Defund the Police", which turned into a joke. It derailed any serious effort to fix the real problem of cops shooting too many black people. Not quite sure how that happened.
The hard work thing seems to be the reverse of the criticism usually leveled in that direction. The more common criticism is that rich people claimed their riches came from hard work, while most of the time they actually got a big boost from their parents.
I got to this point in my life (working for a living as an engineer/manager) in large part by help from my parents (public school teachers) and they from their parents (coal mining and steelworking).
My kids will get the same type of help such as we’re able to provide it.
My parents’ hard work has a payoff for me and my wife’s/my hard work will very likely have a payoff for our kids.
The amount that movements get adopted by, amplified by, and sometimes co-opted by people who have no idea what they are talking about is substantial. Thats before you even get into the grifters (Shaun King).
Just to bring in another contentious topic, but this simple interview personifies what I saw in summer 2020.
https://x.com/israel_advocacy/status/1718742999591456921
Whatever your view on the relative merits, you have 2 protestors talking about how 1) they don't really support the chant 2) of course they chanted it 3) no we don't actually know the context of half the words in the chant
I'm not from the UK but I generally interpret the specifics of those accents to be a bit more upper class than lower for sure. Not to mention the phrasing, words used, and general indirection of the response.
One of my neighbors was like this during summer 2020. In retrospect she admitted she was just bored of being locked up during covid, and ended up to the right of me on policing lol.
On average, between 10 and 20 unarmed black people are killed by police each year since 2020. This accounts for less than 1% of all police shootings of black people.
I think you should take a look at this [0]. It goes deep into the academic literature on police shootings, so it's not exactly a short read. The author writes in good faith, and exerted considerable effort to substantiate his points. In short, there appears to be a trend of police shootings tending towards white offenders, while non-lethal confrontations are more prevalent during encounters with black offenders.
The defund the police point here is really weak. The author is taking a pretty small difference across very coarsely divided economic categories, and then ascribing the difference to their pet theory, without any effort to address the myriad other candidate hypotheses for why this difference would exist.
And to look at a “100k and up” bracket and say “oh, well they can afford to live in gated communities and hire private security” is just absurd. No, the vast majority of that bracket cannot.
The general concept of luxury beliefs is very interesting, but it feels the author gives it an ideological spin:
1. The author claims that when luxury beliefs 'trickle down' to the working class, they are damaging, which is supposedly not the case for luxury goods. Still, in some not-so-privileged parts of society, signaling status with luxury goods consumes the larger parts of people's budget. Think of someone living in a cheap apartment while driving a (leased) luxury car. This is certainly more damaging than believing the police should be de-funded (which does not have any consequence whatsoever on the micro-level, stupid as it may be).
2. The author claims that advocating a disciplined work ethic while attributing one's own success to luck is inconsistent (and hence bigoted). Still, it _is_ true that success is mostly luck, due to opportunities we cannot control. This does not mean that one should not work hard. It's not that affluent people say: "I am rich because of luck, so you should not even try." The realistic take is that success is mostly due to luck but hard work is one of the few ways to control success _to at least some extent_. Also, in many societies hard work is seen as a virtue in itself, not matter whether it pays off or not. So I would claim that "hard work pays off" is a luxury belief for people who are already super privileged, have strong networks, et cetera. When you are born into the elite, you can afford claiming that marrying into the elite is inferior to working your way up...
“A survey from YouGov found that Americans in the highest income category were by far the most supportive of defunding the police.”
“By far” means “10% more” in the actual graph the author cites, which comes from an online poll that had 1500 respondents. I’m no statistician but that seems like a small difference and small sample size to be the key piece of “data” here.
This article follows most tropes of behavioral science blog articles: broad moral statements taking a vaguely contrarian stance, analogies comparing humans to random animals (gazelles?), and “gotcha” survey data with questionable sample sizes. I find it difficult to take it seriously.
It's a pretty typical result from social science. 1500 respondents is a fairly large sample size--I've seen papers where you're talking closer to ~50.
Going from 22% to 32% is a 10 percentage point difference, but a 46% increase. I agree that the conclusion at the end is flimsy, and there are undoubtedly confounding factors--but the statistics are pretty well in line with what you'd expect in social sciences.
Yeah, but think about the error bars there. You’re looking at an MoE of around 3% for the entire sample, and more for these subgroups. The real difference could be just a couple percentage points and still be within the confidence interval.
I completely agree--many times, papers from the social sciences appear as exercises in "wringing signal from a sea of noise." They're not always successful or convincing! But often there is wide latitude because of the inherent noise...don't ask me why! I got out of economics for a reason!
Also notably the rural/urban divide is even wider, so even taking the data at face value it appears that it also be justified that high earners are more likely to be in urban areas, and that high-earner rural residents are more likely to spend time in urban areas, and that people more exposed to multiculturalism are more likely to espouse concern with policing.
If they they have a good confidence, there error could be around 3% up or down. So that's not bad.
And, yes, I think Defund the Police was primarily espoused and driven by people who would be little affected by the outcome of such performative stances.
The people who live in the places where the police got defunded suffer greater crime rates and disorder --which is why we see people at the grass roots asking for more police.
It's known that lawless places will suffer from lawlessness and then engender vigilantism --this is evident is most war-torn places where 'warlords'/gansters control neighborhoods.
Few cities reduced police budgets at all certainly nobody in any meaningful way defunded the police and even cities short of officers have funding for additional officers they lack people far more than money.
Also in case you didn't notice police don't do much to protect normal folks from crime. They'll be there 15 minutes after whatever happened happened to file a report if they aren't too busy screwing with law abiding citizens.
Personally Ive seen little help when needed and plenty of harassment.
> Yes, the police harass, sometimes I get harassed but that presence is what puts a lid on crime.
> I’ll put up with some harassment in exchange for fewer criminals running free.
Maybe you have a specific harassment:imprisonment ratio in mind, but to me this just says "bring on the police state".
> We can seek redress from the police, we cannot seek redress from criminals.
You can seek it, unless of course they kill you. But will you actually find it? Police departments are famous for investigating themselves and finding that they did nothing wrong.
I was harassed repeatedly made to stand with my hands on a patrol car for 15 minutes in case I had developed a record since last week when I was just walking home from my job at night. I was ultimately falsely arrested for using bad language whilst walking away, prepared a reasonable defense then a excellent appeal both of which were ignored. They showed it as dropped then re-raised it when I had left town.
If I was willing to spend 30 days in jail lose thousands of dollars income and spend thousands more I might be able to win it when appeals took it out of that fucked up state.
Realistically I can't do anything about it.
On the other hand they didnt really investigate the 2 attempts to burn down my apartment building attempted homicide x 50 x 2 nor arrest the ex co-worker who tried to murder one of his fellows in a walmart parking lot.
I was left to organize a neighborhood patrol of the premises in the one case and get a psycho to chase me to get him off a guy who can only run by pressing x.
We live in the worst of all possible worlds where police are available to shoot teens but aren't available to do their jobs. If you wonder why you can't hire enough cops wonder no more. It's not liberals pissing in their cornflakes a lot of good folks don't choose to be a part of an obvious shit show.
In closing it's been said those who would give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither but more importantly they get neither. A police state isn't a particularly safe place.
Also, it's not quite clear how much of a material difference exists between the middle answer and the defund the police answer. The slogan has some optics issues, but diverting funds from overfunded surplus military gear filled police departments to social support networks is not likely to be controversial with the middle group either.
With a cynical viewpoint like this, how would you know the difference between "luxury beliefs expressed just to keep others down and make me look fancy" vs "earnestly held beliefs based on learning, and perhaps I could learn something by considering these beliefs"? Perhaps evaluate the beliefs based on their merit, rather than whose beliefs they are?
My luxury belief is that AI Safety is a joke, but it's a dangerous belief as the benefits of AI will not be equally distributed and biasing towards caution could reduce future suffering. So...
Be cautious reading comments here as many of us are in the socioeconomic class
that luxury beliefs appeal to.
Like those described in the article above, this is very much a middle-class movement whose proponents have seized the opportunity to sneer at working-class people as bigoted, stupid and reactionary.
Tell that to the trans people I've met who were physically beaten and mentally abused by authoritarian parents, unable to move out or find secure housing due to burnout, mental health disabilities, and a lack of aid or sustainable jobs, in both Western and third-world countries.
According to the article, I rightly choose not to believe they exist because they are inconvenient and I am too busy working to accept such an inconvenience.
At least it was easy to see you had no interest to present factual arguments and just regurgitated what you read online. For somebody asking empathy about your childhood, you seem to give very little to others.
My empathy is with women who are being forced to give up their female-only spaces, where they are the most vulnerable, to include men who demand to be there too. It's unacceptable regardless of if these men had difficult childhoods or not. I wouldn't do it, most other men wouldn't either, so neither should they.
> seized the opportunity to sneer at working-class people as bigoted, stupid and reactionary
This is incredibly ignorant view which does not understand the trauma someone can endure when not being allowed or experience not only discrimination, but physical abuse and threats for being who he or she feels is.
I wonder if people said the same thing when screaming for equal rights or other things related to racism and homophobia. That it is only opportunity to sneer at working-class people as bigoted, stupid and reactionary.
The approach might not always be the best, but at the end people want others to be what they really are, no one is screaming to shot or lynch anyone.
The working class jobs are the most unionized ones. The unions also started with actual battles (wikipedia has examples since US history class often does not), from people with traditional values. I think the division is much more harmful that than you think.
Sorry, I am not entirely sure what you are trying to say...
Unions are type of collective fight in form of strikes and bargaining, against exploitation and are the main tool within the class war. Actual battles happened because the ruling class tries to prevent or forbid them. At the end it is a question of profit splitting not a question of pure existence for whom you are. I would go as far as to say one is the example of class war and the other is an example of fight against fascism.
What are you trying to say? I can also cherry-pick one of numerous alt right people storming cities with guns and assault rifles, calling for violence.
The man in that video spent 30 years in prison for kidnap, torture, rape and attempted murder, and is threatening violence to women now he's been released.
He's says he's a woman. Would you find it acceptable for him to use a women's refuge, be incarcerated in a women's prison, undress himself in a women's changing room, and so on, based on his self-declaration of womanhood? If yes, then you'd be indulging in a luxury belief.
> Yes, class domination has had a makeover. It wears bad wigs and stilettos now
Jesus Christ that’s bad, and it’s right up front in this article. Really makes it obvious the kind of audience this is written for.
There’s really only a particular kind of person that thinks it’s funny to tease trans people who don’t pass.
> Civil servants who surely have better things to do are being given LGBTQ+ education and shown training videos about how sinful it is to stop a ‘transwoman’ – ie, a fella – from using the women’s loo.
Wow it just keeps going, it rolls straight into proudly misgendering trans people, wow wow wow.
And you actually want other people to associate this kind of bullshit with you? You recommend it, you link directly to it? For shame.
I am not clear why this is flagged but it seems pretty on point academic-blog for a US university (hey look, there are class issues in society ! who knew!)
I think the idea of luxury beliefs is a fairly good descriptor for what the .5% will need. Once you start looking there are many examples - how many high flyers do you know that have taken up ultra-marathons (very time consuming) or charity work as an all but obligatory percentage of time.
It's a marker for "I have family life so locked down that I can attend to these other expensive options and not be overwhelmed.
This is an interesting read but at the same time I'm puzzled at the length this is going to in order to avoid engaging with ideas the author disagrees with.
This seems similar to the "virtue signaling" attack. But instead of opponents being charged with hypocrisy, they are accused of being (1) privileged, (2) vain, and (3) either senseless or indifferent towards the well-being of others. It seems to me this is suggesting these people don't ever deserve to take part in democracy, which is worrying.
Given HN's user base, if the author is correct, his hypothesis would predict that the users of HackerNews are disproportionately likely to hold these luxury beliefs.
The responses here range from denial to outright hostility at the author, which to me proves his point. This is Ground Zero for the people he's describing!
There's a book called "The Tragedy of the Virtuous Justine" that really exemplifies how luxury beliefs are luxury because they have nothing to lose by adopting them.
In contrast, the less well off stand to lose so much more.
Take plant based meats to save the world belief. They cost double or quadruple the price of normal meat. Given how people live pay check to pay check, living out that ideal will cause them to suffer.
> Conspicuous consumption - in economics, the consumer practice of buying goods in greater quantity/price/quality than practical [1]
Luxury beliefs sound like conspicuous consumption for beliefs. The analogy also works in that some people "boast" of having certain beliefs in the same way some people might think very highly of themselves by, say, wearing loud brand name clothing. In both cases, others (perhaps with more taste) may not be as impressed.
I think the explanation for "defund the police" is simpler... they just see the bad stuff cops do on the news, but haven't ever actually needed the cops personally (and few of their friends have too), primarily due to their affluence. There are exceptions, obviously.
Of the people who have obtained a restraining order, I wonder what percentage want to defund the police.
"so, translated beliefs could be just expensive status symbols coming from dishonesty and having too much of free time. So here are examples of leftist beliefs, see?"
This guy's Twitter account is full of the worst replicating psychology stuff. He's an outrage merchant surfing the present wave. When I pointed out one such failure to replicate he blocked me.
On language, in Britain there was (and still is to an extent) a whole host of words that would mark you as 'non-U' (aspirant middle class) rather than 'U' (upper class).
It is still evident today if you know or interact with any truly upper-class people. There are still variations in the names for some things which persist even now.
Her point is that this effect is way bigger in 3rd world countries, where these kinds of beliefs signal alignment with "The West" and the status that comes with that.
I find the luck vs. hard-work a weird dichotomy - both are true and both are false.
If you don't work hard, you probably won't be successful. But if hard-work were sufficient for success then the richest person in the world, or the President, or however we measure success would also the hardest working, which I don't think most people who agree with.
Similarly, although I think most sports-people would be acknowledged to be very hard-working, there is a matter of luck in their success - you need to find the right sport for you, you need to avoid injury, you need to perform at your best on the day of the big competition / when the talent-scout is visiting.
Perhaps it's just a problem of perspective - if you are relatively successful to begin with you can see that there are a lot of people less successful than you who worked harder by some metric and so would attribute success more to luck and connections than hard-work; if you are relatively unsuccessful, perhaps the correlation between success and hard-work is more immediate - you see that the people who work hard are more successful than you, and that those who slack-off are not.
The author did not do a good job delving into what exactly do these phrases mean. They mean different things to different people. If you are in a working class neighborhood, you value hard work as you see the consequences of unemployment, drug abuse, alcoholism, and poverty. You value hard work to escape poverty. If you are an incredibly successful and wealthy, you will readily admit that luck played a large part in your success. You see many people who worked just as hard or even harder, but fortune smiled on you and not them.
> Private jets, yachts, personal cooks and butlers are truer symbols of the upper class.
Those are all signs of wealth; most classy people would actively avoid them, even if they're wealthy.
I'm from the UK; I suspect that in the USA, it's easier to raise your social class by simply spending money. Here, social class by default is inherited. It's reinforced by where you went to school. Most people of high social class are slightly embarrassed about it; showing it off is seen as tacky.
Are you saying the upper class in UK eg the royal family actively avoids flying private and making their own breakfast and doing their own laundry? Or is the royal family not classy?
Would be happy to hear examples of upper class UK people who still do their own laundry and flies coach.
The royal family is rather an extreme example; they are classy as well as being powerful and wealthy. They royals are the epitome of aristocracy; people descended from kings and peers of the realm are a small minority of the upper class.
Sometimes classy people fall on hard times; so yes, they make their own breakfast. But they don't lose their class.
Flying coach is also an extreme example; anyone who can afford business class avoids flying sardine-grade. And it's mostly business people that zoom around in private jets; those denote wealth and power, not class.
You can "upgrade" your class, sometimes; a commission in a "good" army regiment can get you upgraded. They train their officers in how to behave in classy company. Public schools serve the same purpose, but are less effective.
I'm not familiar with the domestic arrangements of any upper-class people, so I can't give you examples you asked for. But for the most part, they're not famous, so you wouldn't have heard of them anyway; after all, famous people can trade their fame for wealth. I've known quite a few people of class who had to work for a living, e.g. as teachers.
[Edit] OK, well-known example: Princess Diana (Diana Spencer). Until she hitched up with the Prince of Wales, she was a nursery teacher, and lived in shared accomodation (i.e. no servants). Of course, she was never stuck for a penny or two; the Spencers are a wealthy, aristocratic family.
Yeah, I know; but I don't know a better word. In this context, it's not about education you have to pay for privately; it's about a group of institutions designed to train the ruling class, particularly the colonial civil service. You do have to pay, though...
Class and wealth are entirely separate in the UK. There are lot of of upper class class people without a lot of wealth. Most of them don't have butlers and private jets and many of them no doubt do their own laundry and fly coach.
OK, I accept that distinction. But IME it's the behaviour that confers the status. Sure, wealthy people can have status despite behaving like oiks; but that kind of status isn't "upper class". Class is recognized from how you speak, how you treat others, your taste, and things like knowing which fork to use.
Yes, but these people don't really interact with lower classes. I think what author wanted to describe is signaling in situations where people just a few social ladder steps apart meet each other. Like gathering in local church or family reunion. Everyone dress basically the same, everyone eat the same grandmas cake but one cousin is MIT-educated engineer, one owns a car dealership and one stack shelves in Walmart.
This is one potential explanation for why successful people quite often drift towards conspiracy theories and paradoxical bitterness as they get older.
I'm thinking of Rudy Giuliani and Elon Musk, but examples abound.
Seems like the rich are spending lots on fancy cars and big houses. I’m not sure saying you support x or y belief is quite the same signal as a sports car.
TBH to me it feels like all the money in this world is spent on fancy cars, houses, and yachts. Anything funded from taxes, insurances, or contributions is basically "the limits are exhausted, the waiting times are in months, your case is not covered". Meantime all the cars and houses I see while driving and walking around? Wow.
"a vulnerable poor person in a crime-ridden neighborhood can’t afford to support defunding the police" [citation needed because the vulnerable poor person is police's first target]
Agreed; the article completely skirts the obvious point that the Black Lives Matter movement was not founded by upper-class white students at an urban college, but by working-class black people who are directly affected by the issue at hand.
In NYC for example theres 400 murders per year, and maybe 1 "bad shoot" by cops where someone ends up dead and the cop should be in jail.
Other jurisdictions the proportion can be far worse, and justifiably reform is being sought. LAPD has about 10x the cop on civilian shootings of NYPD.
In some areas it's like being worried about getting powder burns from the airbag in your car if you crash it and the airbag goes off. I'll keep the airbag, as will most people when you actually poll them.
Meanwhile some of the white liberals who were marching in summer 2020 are the first people to call the cops for trivialities like a noise complaint or car parked in their bike lane..
Sure, skepticism is a useful tool. Understanding someone’s motivations and how their wealth influences their worldview is a natural approach for assessing their position.
However, the conclusion presented here–taken at face value–is reductive and ironically spells out what appears to be the author’s own bias.
I’m not one to go out on a limb to defend affluence, but is it not enough to draw conclusions (whatever they may be) based on veracity and sound logic? Or shall we all just categorically dismiss the opinions of the person further up from you on the economic ladder?
Is someone earning $100k/year really reflective of the elite? I don't really think that cuts it anymore and I would be surprised if the real elite are actually calling to defund the police.
There's a grain of truth here, but only a grain. Who hasn't seen an obviously affluent TikTok Tot (fancy home studio, high end video gear, expensive clothes and makeup) trying to gain clout by talking about the very same injustice of which they are the beneficiary? Pretty annoying, yes. But at the same time, the fact that an idea is expressed for clout doesn't make the idea wrong. We could debate "defund the police" all day, but whether TikTok Tot supports it is irrelevant. That's called well poisoning, close relative of ad hominem, and it's a fallacy. It's the fallacy that pervades OP.
In some quarters, superfluous weaponry is a status symbol. In related quarters, it might be ostentatious displays of crosses and other religious symbols. Does that mean guns or religion are bad? Maybe they are and maybe they aren't, but their use as status symbols doesn't determine the answer. What's more interesting is that OP omits such examples. All of their examples feed into a very particular political narrative, and cherry-picking is another thing that should make readers suspicious.
In the end, the article starts with a small and somewhat interesting observation, which is great, but then ascribes to it greater (and more particular) significance than it deserves.
Wikipedia lists nine possible explanations for stotting. The author, however, simply picks the one that fits his story.
There are also multiple explanations for sexual evolution.
I can hold the belief "Defund the Police" as a poor or as a rich. So it's easy to fake this signal. Also, I don't see any evidence that this belief is held mainly by rich people.
The poster's entire article is based on a strawman.
The "Defund The Police" movement has very specific and very well documented goals: Use police only for law-enforcement, and use specialized responders for non-law enforcement interactions. For example, you send mental health specialists when someone is threatening suicide. This reallocates funding from the police to more capable responders, but allows the remaining police to actually focus on law
enforcement.
The author ignores this completely to make his argument.
> The "Defund The Police" movement has very specific and very well documented goals: Use police only for law-enforcement, and use specialized responders for non-law enforcement interactions.
It's not well-defined at all. There are many people who do literally want to "defund" and abolish the police entirely:
You posted this elsewhere but to be clear, you are wrong.
The defund the police movement, at least the one in the US that gained popularity between 2017 and 2021, was explicitly aimed at eliminating the concept of policing. The belief is that because policing began with South Carolina slave patrols (it did not, but that doesn't matter) that the whole concept is corrupt and changes in execution won't fix the heart of the problem.
In order to fix it, policing needs to be entirely destroyed and rethought, from first principles. The funding would be allocated towards community building and outreach a la the Cure Violence programs in NYC. Since crime is of course solely an economic and mental health issue, with proper education, stipends and mental health resources crime can be eliminated without needing a police force at all.
Some of the elements aren't bad, but taken together it was not a good idea.
It's like the orange man and whether you take him seriously or literally argument that many of his defenders used.
When the defund movement had people marching with ACAB & abolish posters regularly, it's hard to argue it meant anything else.
A thought exercise for the word re-definers defending the term:
If your CEO walked on stage and said "we are defunding __" where __ is the division you work in.. would you be like "oh good it means I'm going to work on better stuff now" or "oh shit let me get my resume up to date".
We can make lots of arguments like "they chose the wrong word" but I don't think we should argue that the word means something else just because it helps the slogan make more sense.
>> The belief is that because policing began with South Carolina slave patrols
Yes! This one always cracked me up and is so American centric. As if history began in 1776 or 1492 or 1619 or whatever date people want to use. No other civilization in the history of humanity ever had law enforcement? We had to invent it, and of course the bad people invented it.
“Defund the Police” reminds me of “High Speed Rail 2”, the biggest benefit of which would have been extra capacity for passenger and freight, new stations etc, not reduced journey times.
Defund The Police is obviously such a terrible name if their true goals are as they say
The whole point is that the defund the police movement is a signal taken up by people not directly effected by the issue; not a comment on the details or potential effectiveness of the concept...
So "the whole point" is that people are only allowed to support policies they would be directly aided by, or disagree with policies they are directly injured by?
Huh, super mysterious why this line of reasoning is popular amongst people who want the world to remain the same.
Big question is does police currently have enough funding for those main tasks? If not defunding them by taking money from them only makes situation even worse.
Or do you actually need more funding to spend on the other stuff? Which could in best case over some years decrease overall costs for society.
> [Gaselles] repeatedly jump as high as they can, springing vertically into the air with all four feet raised.
> The signal this sends to predators is essentially: “I’m so fit that I can afford to expend valuable energy to show you how strong and robust I am compared with the other gazelles.”
I always thought that high jumps of savannah herbivores is meant to give them better view of predators, especially in tall vegetation.
> In other words, high-status people desire wealth and status more than anyone else.
Isn't that a bit like observing that powerful people tend to be politicians, or that being wealthy is correlated with wanting to make a lot of money? Wealth, power and status are scarce goods, so it stands to reason that the people who possess them are the people who are most-motivated to seek them.
Kind of falls apart at the end with the defund the police thing. If you ask poor people "do you want to defund the police" they'll mostly say no. If you ask them "would you rather see fewer police in your neighborhood, and more medical and social response teams instead?" they'll mostly say yes. So in a sense sure "defund the police" is a luxury belief but also... no.
Of course there is some truth in here. But the sheer majority is missing the forest for the trees.
Luxury beliefs are certainly products of wealth - it requires a level of wealth to declare something is wrong rather than pragmatically keeping your head down and going with the flow. As our society becomes more wealthy, these beliefs gain mindshare and become widely accepted - democracy, natural rights, freedom from religion, worker protections, etc.
These things are products of wealth, a type of wealth in their own right, and we should be greatful that our society has become wealthy enough to declare that they should be universal. The author kind of references this at the very end, but then steers right back into the regressive fundamentalism as his closing conclusion.
Looking forward, many visions of progress are somewhat wrong, misguided, or at the very least overstated. Remember when we were all going to be living in Buckyballs? Which is why you have to kind of hold your nose to wade through much of the blue tribe groupthink. But the answer isn't to conclude the entire idea of progress is fallacious and dopamine-pine for the glory days of hard work that are comfortably in the past. Rather, it's to discuss and critique the forward-looking ideas on their own merits, despite the neo-clergy and other politickers that will attack you for it.
> They found that individuals with higher income or a higher social status were the most likely to say that success results from luck and connections rather than hard work, while low-income individuals were more likely to say success comes from hard work and individual effort.
This is basically the old paradigm saying that "people don't make money, money makes money." No one became a billionaire without being in the right place and knowing the right people. Access to that environment can be only gained if one already has significant capital. I guess this is what they mean by luck.
The basic idea is sound. But the majority of the examples are strangely politically biased and in my experience they are things I've never heard from the 1%.
The article only touches two unorthodox beliefs: that we should defund the police (really a preference, not a belief) and that success is largely attributable to luck.
But the elites are more likely to believe conventional wisdom on climate change, on whether vaccines work, on whether the Holocaust happened, on whether digesting genetically modified organisms changes the consumer's DNA, any number of things. Heterodox beliefs in these areas do seem consistent with the hypothesis of in-group signaling, but not with signaling status.
Wanting to defund the police is likely correlated with not needing the police -- but that's likely simple ignorance, not status signaling.
Why the elites would be more likely to say luck is important is not obvious to me, but a single example does not justify the sweeping generalization that this article makes.
> Wanting to defund the police is likely correlated with not needing the police -- but that's likely simple ignorance, not signaling.
Or with police being a net-negative to your life. Like living in a disproportionately policed area.
Or having a disproportionately policed skin color.
The poll is pretty clear, defund the police doesn't mean anarchy, it means replacing it. The how's a bit up in the air, but it's more about how irredeemable the current system seems to someone.
The police are there for when limited violence needs to be meted out to prevent greater harm. They are not counsellors, social workers, or doctors. More funding needs to go to those professionals instead of giving the police military-grade weapons.
> A survey from YouGov found that Americans in the highest income category were by far the most supportive of defunding the police.
> They can afford to hold this position, because they already live in safe, often gated communities. And they can afford to hire private security.
This isn't what defund the police was about at all and is just a strawman to stop inquisitions into the actual point of the defund the police movement.
> In the United States, "defund the police" is a slogan that supports removing funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community resources.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police
Defund the police was never a anarcho communist feel good movement despite what articles like this will guide you believe.
That said, the slogan was slightly ambiguous so it was absolutely destroyed in the "marketplace of ideas". Apparently defunding the police actually means get rid of the police entirely. I guess the slogan had to be "decrease the budget, not entirely remove it just less money, for the police and move that money into other prevention and treatment methods for community support".
Do you think the majority of the people who say defund the police believe that?
Just because a minority of people have a terrible opinion doesn't mean the entire movement does.
Also even the author doesn't believe they can actually abolish the police.
> I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power — whether you want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent — here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities.
> Do you think the majority of the people who say defund the police believe that?
You made the following claim:
>> This isn't what defund the police was about at all and is just a strawman to stop inquisitions into the actual point of the defund the police movement.
I was merely providing an example, published in a paper of record in the U.S., that claims to speak for a "we", to show that indeed the spokespeople for the movement are unambiguous in what "defund" means. The article says "we mean" not "I mean".
> Just because a minority of people have a terrible opinion doesn't mean the entire movement does.
Meanwhile the "larpers" attend protests and change profile pictures and "stand with" and chant slogans. That's the luxury belief part.
WW2 Germany was probably similar in the sense that the majority were silent while the radicals were outspoken?
Nonetheless, be careful when you defend a radical movement
by asserting that, well actually, they meant a more moderate position:
"[T]he motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you retreat to an obvious, uncontroversial statement, and say that was what you meant all along, so you’re clearly right and they’re silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement." https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bri...
The author is arguing extreme ideas like defund the police is self serving without anyone’s real interests in mind. Instead of calling it luxury beliefs, this the next phase of identity politics. A new litmus test.
Other examples of "luxury beliefs" not mentioned by the author include the idea that all the poor need to do is work harder, and the idea that unregulated capitalism provides the best outcome for all.
too many words to say something obvious. rich people have always had the luxury of time to think novel things. That's what gave us most of science, philosophy, politics, liberalism, socialism, the democracy of today and the freedoms to make powerpoint presentations about it. history decides which of them go to the garbage bin
I know lots of people who are quite poor and are also very invested in the human rights of Palestinians. I know lots of people who are quite poor and very interested in reining in police violence. Your opinions and experiences aren't universal.
They aren't speaking about protest in the interest of the human rights of Palestinians.
See the fact that protestors aren't suggesting that Hamas give themselves up as a means of protecting the lives of their Palestinian human shields.
Protestors want October 7th and no consequences, or limited consequences on the terms of those who would see the perpetrators keep power. Specifically, to be able to slaughter masses of civilians and then run behind their human shields with impunity and forever.
Human shields that should move as far South as possible. Human shields who widely support Hamas and their actions.
Hamas has the ability to end all of this in this very hour, should they care enough about the Palestinians. They only need to give up.
Protestors have the ability to demand that Hamas end this conflict in this very hour, should they actually first care about Palestinians and not the continuity of War.
All Hamas has to do is give themselves up. Or at least move camp to an area that is away from the civilians.
Hamas won't, and neither will their "pro-Palestinian" supporters demand it.
Which is a primary problem with ostensible "pro-Palestinian protest" in the context of the current conflict.
Terrorists can't slaughter 1300+ civilians, declaring civilians combatants, and then credibly declare the deaths of their specific human shields to be a human rights issue that is the responsibility of their enemies. Unless they are in the process of giving up. The same paradigm applies to the nature of their support.
The deaths of Palestinians are a Human rights issue. But the cause and responsibility is on Hamas and its support. They can give up in this very hour. Or simply move camp. Anything else is an ongoing illustration of their deceit that doesn't care an ounce for Palestinian Life.
Not all protests exist to further concrete political proposals (ex. suggestions to Hamas). Expressions of mass grief, community solidarity, and elevation of an issue which harms your neighbors are all important outcomes for people meeting en masse. You're welcome to impute whatever motives you want onto people you disagree with, but that doesn't mean you actually understand.
// Not all protests exist to further concrete political proposals (ex. suggestions to Hamas). Expressions of mass grief, community solidarity, and elevation of an issue which harms your neighbors are all important outcomes for people meeting en masse
This too smells like a "luxury belief" to me. If you're actually experiencing the problem, you want to solve stuff. You want to be practical and pragmatic because your ass is on the line -- or die as a martyr while prolonging people's suffering, but hopefully the former.
In contrast to that, things like wallowing in "mass grief" and generating a lot of noise and energy in a way that isn't aiming at making anything better is exactly the kind of thing one can easily engage in when shielded from the outcomes and failure on the actual issue.
> This too smells like a "luxury belief" to me. If you're actually experiencing the problem, you want to solve stuff
This is kind of broad and I don't think it's super fair to what I'm trying to say. You might want to solve stuff very badly, but simultaneously want to hold space for communal grief. There are examples of this all over the place (look at any community response to a mass shooting). Waving that away as "noise and energy" is IMO a kind of tech-bro, solutionist impulse that ignores the very real function that it serves in creating bonds between people or like entrenching a shared culture. Solutions come from coherent political movements, coherent political movements come from people who know and trust each other. Being together, in physical space, airing the same grievances and seeing how many people stand with you is incredibly empowering and an important step in producing the kind of mass movements that bring change. You can call that a luxury belief if you want, but I would encourage you to talk with poor people who actually organize political movements (although maybe you do and we just run in different circles) because I think your mind will be changed.
I suppose if I equate “retributive genocide” and “just consequences” then I can see where you’re coming from. The US made similar statements as they poured white phosphorus on Afghani children after 9/11 and I thought it was a thin argument then. I don’t find it much more convincing now.
Overall I try not to lie, but given how different our experiences seem to be I’m not sure if there’s much I can say on the internet to convince you of that. Have a good one!
Will you state that Hamas should give up as a means of ending the conflict?
To test your moral and semantic consistency.
Your "retributive genocide" label doesn't hold if the conflict ends as soon as Hamas is eleminated, which it would. And which they can effect in this instant by giving up.
Not that people are obligated to or widely accepting of the morally and logically inconsistent labels of Hamas supporters. Hamas who began this conflict with a massive war crime.
Your straw man attempt is unskilled and indicative of your weak position.
You lie a lot. To yourself and to your readers. I never said "just consequences". You won't launder Hamas propaganda through this conversation. Every innocent death is an injustice on the head of Hamas and its supporters: many being Palestinian. Hamas can give up in this hour. Or better yet they can invent a time machine, return to October 6th, and cancel their plan for the massive war crime that started this.
The penalty for which, and which would save the most Palestinian lives, is Hamas giving up in the nearest possible moment.
They could have given up immediately in order to save the most possible Palestinian lives. Or moved out from behind their human shields, immediately. They didn't. Every moment that they do not is for the continuity of their war at the calculated expense of Palestinian civilian lives.
Let's see a single pro Palestine protest whose primary message is toward that single most effective goal.
inbfre your not so covert Hamas support and October 7th justifications.
Sure happy to: Oct 7 was a crime and the perpetrators should face justice. Hamas should immediately disarm and leave civilian areas. I don't like reactionary Islamism, I don't believe violent terror creates political progress. Fighting this war is not productive and is harming civilians. Again: you're welcome to impute whatever motives on me or others that you want, but that doesn't make them correct.
With all that said, I will also say: the presence of Hamas members in civilian areas does not give the Israeli military legal right to kill civilians. What is being done to (and has been done to for decades) the citizens of the West Bank and Gaza by the state of Israel is a crime and its perpetrators should face justice. West Bank settlers need to leave immediately and return the stolen property to its owners. The open air prison that is the West Bank should close and the rights of its occupants should be restored. War crimes don't fix war crimes.
The most direct way to stop the mass death of Palestinian civilians is for the people killing them to stop doing that. The idea that the only response to the violence of one political faction (Hamas) is greater amounts of retributive violence until conditions are met is just the “take hostages” paradigm at another scale. The fact that any attempt to move beyond that paradigm gets labeled as like “pro terrorist propaganda” is the same stupid nonsense that embroiled the US in a costly and atrocious war for 2 decades.
// The idea that the only response to the violence of one political faction (Hamas) is greater amounts of retributive violence
This seems to be the crucial flaw in your analysis - I don't see a cycle of "retributive" violence. Israel asserts the goal is to "solve this threat" not "kill as many as possible." If they could remove the threat w/o affecting civilians, they would do that. This is a qualitatively different than the Hamas strategy of intentionally targeting kindergartners as happened in Oct 7.
From where I'm sitting the historical contours are somewhat different. I understand what is asserted by Israel, but I think an examination of their historical treatment of Palestinians makes it pretty clear that they're interested in basically removing them from the area at any cost. In my own opinion, this history makes their claims about not wanting to harm civilians not very credible. I've drawn a lot of parallels with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and I think that this is another place where history is repeating itself. The US claimed over and over again that it was fighting "justly" and would not be committing violence if it wasn't the cleanest way to resolve the threat, but retrospective analysis shows that this isn't really what was happening on the ground.
>I don't believe violent terror creates political progress.
That's an understatement, especially for the situation under discussion. October 7th has forever destroyed any chance at diplomatic progress on the Palestinian cause. There will be zero political currency to make it happen.
One of the more curious phenomenons of this period is to watch Palestinians and their supporters speak of the future as if October 7th didn't happen.
And that there is some chance of diplomacy toward Palestinian statehood or an improvement in their condition going forward. There won't be, at least given their radicalized state that seems to be the status quo for the forseeable future. Life is going to be a misery for Palestinians, at least for generations more to come.
That isn't an emotional comment. It's an objective one that has the best interest of innocent Palestinians at heart, in terms of suggesting that they move away from radicalization and toward relocating to a region where they can actually have a quality of life.
Those whose rhetoric serves to keep Palestinians radicalized, such as yourself, in-part will be responsible for their continued abject misery. Situations permanently change and this is one of them.
>the presence of Hamas members in civilian areas does not give the Israeli military legal right to kill civilians.
You're confused as to how war works, absent proof of large scale targeting of only civilians.
Hamas just engaged in unspeakable evil to the end of beginning a real War. This isn't a joke. And it has chosen to hide in a dense urban area of one of its cities. Which is another act of unspeakable evil. Civilians should move South.
But no Army, especially one objectively guilty of an operation that was intended to be a massive and the most brutal of war crime, has ever been able to start a war and then hide among its civilians toward preventing its eradication. By claiming that the collateral damage incurred by going after them is a war crime. Leaving Hamas to commit future atrocities on target populations.
Yours are the ethics of the utilization of Human Shields toward engaging in War and War Crimes.
Luckily, the wider West has the baseline level of moral clarity enough to see through these "thin" arguments. If Hamas thought it was going to commit 10/7 and then use its civilians as legal shields, then it is finding out that it is mistaken. And it is further criminal for the attempt.
But it can end the War now by giving up now.
>retributive violence
An obvious falsehood given the already repeated constraints. See my prior posts.
> until conditions are met is just taking the “take hostages” paradigm to another scale.
Your logic car was teetering on its wheels and now has flipped into doing a double barrel roll down the highway.
This is a terrible attempt at inverting what is actually happening. Additionally, it mocks the vicitims of Hamas terror.
Hamas can free the Israeli hostages. Hamas can free Gaza immediately by removing itself from it, after starting a war.
The only stupidity here is how fiercely you are defending the continued actions, and their results, of the most potent terrorist threat in decades. On a public message board.
I don't want a single further civilian Palestinian to so much as get a scratch. They should all immeidately move South for the duration of this conflict, and work toward shaking off their Hamas rulers.
> Those whose rhetoric serves to keep Palestinians radicalized, such as yourself, in-part will be responsible for their continued abject misery.
What a fucked up thing to say. As if rhetoric from some far-away Westerners is what keeps these people radicalized and miserable.
You can eliminate Hamas down to the last man, but if conditions in Gaza don't change, you'll just get Hamas 2.0. And Hamas 3.0 after you eliminate those. I'm stating the obvious, but it's not possible to deradicalize a group of people by bombing them and depopulating their largest city.
> Yours are the ethics of the utilization of Human Shields toward engaging in War and War Crimes.
And yours are the ethics of shooting the hostage to kill the hostage taker. Which certainly has precedent in warfare, and may be necessary to ensure national security depending on who you ask — but let's not mince words here. You don't get to wash the blood from your hands by pointing to the hidden terrorists behind the corpses of bombed-out families. (Even if you're legally allowed to label it "collateral damage.")
Hey could you show me an example or two of a pro-hamas rally that has happened on a college campus recently?
I've been going to pro-palestine rallies because they're experiencing a genocide funded and supplied by my tax money, so I kind of consider protesting against it a right and obligation of mine. Haven't seen much mention of hamas at them though but maybe I'm not at the right ones.
You could also stand to interrogate a little more the connection between poverty in "the hood" and the global struggle against colonialism. American black people and palestinians have a long history of mutual solidarity. Aren't you curious about why?
I don't think the OP meant that the rallies were explicitly to support Hamas vs Palestine, but more that there is a general sentiment that the attack on Oct 7th was justified.
In my mind, framing anything as "pro-palestinian" too simplistic. I am a strong supporter of Israel and I am also very pro-palestinian in the sense that I hope for a solution that enables them to live in peace and prosperity.
The "nuance" is to peel back to the root causes of what's happening so things can be fixed. When people equate "responding to terrorism" with "genocide" (a stretch...) you're not talking about the issue in a way that can enable any sort of evolution.
Maybe that's a form of "luxury belief" that's being talked about here - you can throw around righteous terms w/o having to worry about solving the problem or being impacted by a lack of solution...
> You could also stand to interrogate a little more the connection between poverty in "the hood" and the global struggle against colonialism. American black people and palestinians have a long history of mutual solidarity. Aren't you curious about why?
Honestly for me... no. My parents grew up in poverty in a British colony, and they're extremely well off and their children more so. It gave us a lot of advantages. If they grew up here in the United States as a colonized people, they would have had even more advantages, and if I'm being honest, my entire family looks at the black community with confusion as to why they don't take advantage of the fact they're born in America, which puts them lightyears ahead of my parent's upbringing and poverty.
My mom ended her career by a desire to give back and taught in inner city public schools. Honestly, that was enlightening and explained a lot of why kids aren't doing well. Although both my parents and those kids grew up / are growing up poor. My grandparents wouldn't have tolerated what my mom found in the schools. At the end of the day culture matters.
OK. I mean if you're not curious about it I'm not going to try to convince you? Generations of activists and scholars have found a relationship here but if you're certain they're wrong to that's your project. Not sure why you even wrote anything past the first sentence here.
Yours is an under-rated comment. When my belief is sound, I go and advocate for it articulately and logically, engaging with people where they are to bring them along. When my belief is weak, I malign them for not a-priori reaching the same conclusion w/o my effort.
Is this the new codeword for "champagne socialism"? Interesting how "trickle down economics" isn't provided as an example of a luxury belief, seems like it would fit the provided definition extremely well in the context of US politics.
Devil's advocate: maybe because the author perceives "tickle down economics" as a position adopted by many of the working class and may even aide in survival.
Sorry I was being oblique to signal some snark. You're sort of hitting my point directly: "luxury beliefs" are just whatever you personally believe to be (a) wrongly held and (b) limited to only the aristocracy (ie. not the opinion of "real Americans"). But concretely demonstrating both is kind of difficult and largely relies on your own subjective experience. It's a political cudgel, not a proper tool of inquiry.
In a feminized society that systematically elevates victims, status seekers must either LARP as victims (Singapore scions doing undergrad at Yale who march as "people of color") or make an ostentatious show of allyship, publicly subordinating their interest to that of the "oppressed".
He seems unconcerned about the actual truth and falsity of ideas, just how “useful” they are.
The single most important predictor of economic success in life is the wealth of your parents: luck. Maybe some people find this “discouraging” and would prefer if it were not true, or if people did not believe it. But it is true. Social mobility in the United States in general is fairly low.
Personally I prefer to know the truth and to work to fix things I think are unfair, rather than proposing that we just adopt viewpoints that make people into better workers.
