I remember at the peak of the White Privilege discourse I was out for dinner with a group of us who had become friends through work but now worked at different places, and we were talking about work stuff and something (I can’t remember exactly what came up) and I was halfway through saying ‘well that’s an easy thing for us to say as a bunch of white guys’ before I stopped halfway through when I realised I was the only white guy at table
Then we all burst out laughing
But surely that is the goal isn’t it, a situation where you sit with 6 ppl you’ve known for years and don’t even realise you’re the only white guy there, not a world where we’re all defined by identity
What I don't understand about communism and its derivatives, is that how is it that smart people can be in favor of a system that reduces productivity, and not realize that eventually, they will feel the impact of it? 100% of people who favor it work under the assumption that its implementation won't impact output. That's a quasi-religious belief that has nothing to do with reality.
Central planning has historically been presented as a way to greatly increase productivity. The fact that it has historically always failed to do so has traditionally been countered with the riposte of "but that's not real [ins. central planning philosophy]!" But this is always a post-facto justification, and if you look at the objections, you can usually find them being brought up on record by the very same people who would go on to impliment their own version of what would later be known as "not real [ins. central planning philosophy]" until they ran into the same issues themselves. Stalin, for instance, as Kristian Niemietz points out in his book on this practice, was quite critical of the brutality of Trotsky's implimentation of socialism on the Russian population, before he himself would finally attain supreme power and would then run into all the same issues of trying to impliment socialism as Trotsky. And even outside of socialism and into other anti-capitalist systems, the thought leaders of the Confederate slave system were just as critical of the heartlessness and brutality of Yankee capitalism as any red revolutionary.
You need to strike at the heart of the people who promote this twaddle. The problem is inherient to central planning.
Yes! This identity obession is like a massive Trojan horse that's been rolled into schools and all our institutions since the upheavals of 2020. Shock Doctrine meets 1984. None of this would have surprised novelist Doris Lessing who recounted the shattering of her illusions with Communism in her autobiography. She describes how, as Stalin's crimes became impossible to rationalize, former comrades either sold out and went on to lives of lies as Soviet party members or left the party in despair and in many cases died broken hearted. In 2003 Chicago socialists and unionists were talking admiringly of Hugo Chavez and sending delegations to Venezuela. (How tragically ironic that the leftist mayor of Chicago is now faced with the consequences of Chavismo with desperate migrants.) We don't see enough reckoning on the left today with the failures and dangers of ideologies like so called Anti-Racism (doublespeak example A). It's almost as if some want to destabilize society. Hm. Hoping Mounk's book, which sounds excellent, will help us find our way off the runaway woke train before it's too late.
'The Identity trap' is an old leftist psychological narcissism in a new set of clothes. The leftist Progressive mentality has always needed to find 'victims' so that it can feel better about itself by vicariously (and speciously) 'being on their side'. It's always been a middle class intelligentsia thing and dates all the way from the mid-19th century. First it was 'the poor' then it was anyone who was not white and now it's an ever-expanding - almost desperate - search for new 'victims' to champion. Yes it is immensely harmful to our social fabric. TS Eliot nailed it decades ago: "They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them....... because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
“The evidence from hundreds of studies all over the world is overwhelming,’ writes Mounk; ‘when people who hold prejudices about outsiders come into contact with them under the right circumstances, they develop a much more positive view of them.’”
“Under the right circumstances” is the key phrase. To the extent there are group differences in intelligence and crime, it will cause frictions and often outright hostility. Also, consider this biographical detail on Mounk’s Wiki page:
He has said he felt like a stranger in Germany, and though German is his native language, he never felt accepted as a "true German" by his peers.
I remember at the peak of the White Privilege discourse I was out for dinner with a group of us who had become friends through work but now worked at different places, and we were talking about work stuff and something (I can’t remember exactly what came up) and I was halfway through saying ‘well that’s an easy thing for us to say as a bunch of white guys’ before I stopped halfway through when I realised I was the only white guy at table
Then we all burst out laughing
But surely that is the goal isn’t it, a situation where you sit with 6 ppl you’ve known for years and don’t even realise you’re the only white guy there, not a world where we’re all defined by identity
What I don't understand about communism and its derivatives, is that how is it that smart people can be in favor of a system that reduces productivity, and not realize that eventually, they will feel the impact of it? 100% of people who favor it work under the assumption that its implementation won't impact output. That's a quasi-religious belief that has nothing to do with reality.
Central planning has historically been presented as a way to greatly increase productivity. The fact that it has historically always failed to do so has traditionally been countered with the riposte of "but that's not real [ins. central planning philosophy]!" But this is always a post-facto justification, and if you look at the objections, you can usually find them being brought up on record by the very same people who would go on to impliment their own version of what would later be known as "not real [ins. central planning philosophy]" until they ran into the same issues themselves. Stalin, for instance, as Kristian Niemietz points out in his book on this practice, was quite critical of the brutality of Trotsky's implimentation of socialism on the Russian population, before he himself would finally attain supreme power and would then run into all the same issues of trying to impliment socialism as Trotsky. And even outside of socialism and into other anti-capitalist systems, the thought leaders of the Confederate slave system were just as critical of the heartlessness and brutality of Yankee capitalism as any red revolutionary.
You need to strike at the heart of the people who promote this twaddle. The problem is inherient to central planning.
Yes! This identity obession is like a massive Trojan horse that's been rolled into schools and all our institutions since the upheavals of 2020. Shock Doctrine meets 1984. None of this would have surprised novelist Doris Lessing who recounted the shattering of her illusions with Communism in her autobiography. She describes how, as Stalin's crimes became impossible to rationalize, former comrades either sold out and went on to lives of lies as Soviet party members or left the party in despair and in many cases died broken hearted. In 2003 Chicago socialists and unionists were talking admiringly of Hugo Chavez and sending delegations to Venezuela. (How tragically ironic that the leftist mayor of Chicago is now faced with the consequences of Chavismo with desperate migrants.) We don't see enough reckoning on the left today with the failures and dangers of ideologies like so called Anti-Racism (doublespeak example A). It's almost as if some want to destabilize society. Hm. Hoping Mounk's book, which sounds excellent, will help us find our way off the runaway woke train before it's too late.
'The Identity trap' is an old leftist psychological narcissism in a new set of clothes. The leftist Progressive mentality has always needed to find 'victims' so that it can feel better about itself by vicariously (and speciously) 'being on their side'. It's always been a middle class intelligentsia thing and dates all the way from the mid-19th century. First it was 'the poor' then it was anyone who was not white and now it's an ever-expanding - almost desperate - search for new 'victims' to champion. Yes it is immensely harmful to our social fabric. TS Eliot nailed it decades ago: "They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them....... because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
“The evidence from hundreds of studies all over the world is overwhelming,’ writes Mounk; ‘when people who hold prejudices about outsiders come into contact with them under the right circumstances, they develop a much more positive view of them.’”
“Under the right circumstances” is the key phrase. To the extent there are group differences in intelligence and crime, it will cause frictions and often outright hostility. Also, consider this biographical detail on Mounk’s Wiki page:
He has said he felt like a stranger in Germany, and though German is his native language, he never felt accepted as a "true German" by his peers.