On ‘Mock-Eliminationist’ Rhetoric as a Strategy of Persuasion, &

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-05-20

May 20, 2022

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FIRST: On ‘Mock-Eliminationist’ Rhetoric as a Strategy of Persuasion:

The extremely sharp and wise Liam Bright is annoyed this week. (But what else is new?):

Liam Bright: ’This: Morgan J. Freeman @mjfree: “Being ‘anti-racist’ starts by admitting ‘whiteness’ is a disease…” from a well-followed [260K] blue-tick account, himself white.
To put the point mildly it’s not ideal messaging. But it also seems so hubristic to claim anti-racism requires knowing this sorta humanities talk. People have been anti-racist a long time without needing EdTheory degrees.
Re: the messaging—on its surface it so much sounds like “build up to mass murder talk”. Of course people balk. And we all even know that was the point! That was how it sounded edgy and attention-grabbing at academic conferences. No action is intended, but it’s cool to insinuate.
Really I basically think the academic humanities have vastly too much and the wrong sort of influence on contemporary activism. We’re bad and we’ve made what we’ve touched worse…
LINK:

Liam Bright @lastpositivist

This from a well followed blue tick account, himself white. To put the point mildly it's not ideal messaging. But it also seems so hubristic to claim anti racism requires knowing this sorta humanities talk. People have been anti racist a long time without needing EdTheory degrees

What can one say about this, other than: “Of course Liam is correct here!”?

The guy—Freeman—tries to provoke, gets a backlash, and then feels validated in his stance as a defender of Woke-ness by all the abuse he gets. And so he profoundly mistakes the situation.

The right thing for him to do is to take lessons from Daniel Davies:

Daniel Davies: Rules for Contrarians: 1. Don’t Whine. That Is All: ‘I like to think that I know a little bit about contrarianism. So I’m disturbed to see that people who are making roughly infinity more money than me out of the practice aren’t sticking to the unwritten rules of the game…. If you start a fight, you can hardly be surprised that you’re in a fight. It’s the definition of passive-aggression and really quite unseemly, to set out to provoke people, and then when they react passionately and defensively, to criticise them for not holding to your standards of a calm and rational debate…. If you’re writing a contrarian piece properly, you ought to be well aware of what point it looks like you’re making, because the entire point is to make a defensible argument which strongly resembles a controversial one. So having done this intentionally, you don’t get to complain that people have “misinterpreted” your piece by taking you to be saying exactly what you carefully constructed the argument to look like you were saying…. Contrarians ought to have thick skins, because their entire raison d’etre is the giving of intellectual offence to others. So don’t whine, for heaven’s sake. Own your bullshit…
LINK: <https://crookedtimber.org/2009/10/22/rules-for-contrarians-1-dont-whine-that-is-all/>

And this is a very nice follow-up:

Charlie Stross @cstross

@lastpositivist @delong It also reflects the specifically Christian doctrine of original sin, which is extremely unhelpful—if the writer interprets everything through a religious lens they'll likely only be receptive to religious solutions, and blind to non-religious ones.

James Palmer @BeijingPalmer

@cstross @lastpositivist @delong was thinking exactly this, along with the follow-up that you can't, in this way of thinking, be saved by deeds alone but by the grace of theory. You have to truly accept theory into your heart.

One Video:

Raumpatrouille Orion (1966) <https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=3TMimV9reNs>:

Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

Very Briefly Noted:

Alex Millson: Five Things You Need to Know to Start Your Day: ‘Apple… previewed the… mixed-reality headset to the board… ramped up development of rOS… the software that will run on the headset…. Advanced processors… ultra-high-resolution screens… debut could potentially come within the next several months… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-05-19/five-things-you-need-to-know-to-start-your-day-l3dn6ks9?cmpid=BBD051922_MKT>
John Cassidy: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding: ‘As an inevitable crash occurs, many of the swindles and alleged swindles are coming to light… <https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-great-crypto-grift-may-be-unwinding>
Michael Weber & al.: The Subjective Inflation Expectations of Households and Firms: Measurement, Determinants, and Implications <https://www.nber.org/papers/w30046>
Wendy Edelberg & al.: Recession Remedies: Lessons Learned from the U.S. Economic Policy Response to COVID–19<https://mailchi.mp/hamiltonproject/wage-growth-book-release-event-recap-blog-series-on-budget-1585209?e=775065d7ae>
Max Reyes: Tracking a Racist Conspiracy Theory From the Web to the Mainstream: ‘Fox News host Tucker Carlson promoted the idea that Democratic politicians wanted to “force demographic change through immigration” in more than 400 episodes of his nightly program…. The theory is showing up in more and more mass killings… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-05-19/tracking-a-racist-conspiracy-theory-from-the-web-to-the-mainstream?cmpid=BBD051922_EQ>
Barry Ritholtz: Facebook Has a Superuser-Supremacy Problem: ‘Most public activity on the platform comes from a tiny, hyperactive group of abusive users… [who] decide what everyone sees…. Certain sites are paying a network of large Facebook pages, including several controlled by prominent conservative political personalities, to post its content… in direct violation of Facebook’s rules… <https://ritholtz.com/2022/05/10-tuesday-am-reads-381/>
Martin Sandbu: Inflation & the Economics of Belonging <https://www.ft.com/content/4df218c4-329e-427e-9db7-2f1a37aa43c8>
Jon Gruber: Facebook on 30 Percent Platform Fees: ‘Hold Our Beer’ <https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/04/18/facebook-platform-fees>
Neveen Shaaban Abdalla & al.: Intelligence & the War in Ukraine: Part 2 <https://warontherocks.com/2022/05/intelligence-and-the-war-in-ukraine-part-2/?__s=vyym9al708ox0czut6oj>
Nathan Nunn & Nancy Qian: The Potato’s Contribution to Population & Urbanization: Evidence from a Historical Experiment <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yi8p5zCpTsgDw2hTco4wVgLDMDLBYoNd/view>

Twitter & ‘Stack:

Armand Domalewski: ’Getting called a colonizer by the white wife of a private equity executive because I supported replacing parking with a bike lane was an incredible moment…