https://newrepublic.com/article/1583...ary-liberalism

CHAZ/CHOP....and the removal of the rule of law, and the subsequent introduction of those who attempted to install their own control/authority through mob rule. Lefties were largely defending it as "peaceful protest".

I don't think misguided is the correct word for the behavior, as it's becoming quite common. Tweet mining is just the latest iteration of the online virtue signaling craze. Calling people out on social media enhances your standing with your tribe, raises your self-esteem, and costs you nothing. You also don't actually have to be a virtuous person. It is super toxic behavior: attacking others to make yourself feel/look good.

https://publications.aston.ac.uk/id/...Manuscript.pdf

I see no reason for the behavior to decrease over time? It just seems like a natural evolution of how people put forward a fake glamorous life online.

It may or may not decrease over time but it will almost certainly become less significant over time as social media matures and people adjust their response.

Note that this is not the same as the good political use of social media where people adjust their behavior.

I believe that John McWhorter is talking about Stephen Pinker toward the end of this video. About 41:30 in.

The whole video is great.

The video reminds me of another point which is that equality is an important part of the answer. The push back against the fringe purity wing becomes far more effective as the people at the top of their professions/institutions becomes less of just a load of white men.

Sure the purity wing will hurl their abuse at non-white men as well but it becomes dramatically more obvious how ridiculous it is.

I was going to post that video today. It really is great.

This is the next evolution of postmodernism/progressive/sjw toxicity. From the first five minutes you can tell this person is working with a blank slate when it comes to logic and reason, as in, there is no rationality to it. It's just conjecture after conjecture based on anecdotal evidence. She implicitly makes herself out to the be the prophet.

It goes beyond the somewhat meaningless and harmless attribution of "white privilege". It's a NYT's bestseller, and has received much positive media attention. Somewhat ironically, and comically, she does say in her book, the white progressive is the worst for black people. That humor is short lived, though, as this book and this person's ideas are outright destructive and terribly counter-productive.

Maybe they were angry because she insulted their intelligence and was being outright accusatory?

By the way, she is not a sociologist, or a psychologist.

Here is her dissertation:

It's nonsense.

People commonly behave defensively when they feel attacked.

<insert gobsmacked icon>

It's almost like the pap psychology claim that they would respond with humility and self-reflection was bollocks.

That's not the case, though. It's pure gaslighting. People rejected her ideas, and instead of contending with why they were rejected, she created and attributed the reason for the rejection to emotional turmoil when presented with her ideas. I don't get defensive when someone says I've benefited from racism, yet what does the #toxiccult do when someone rejects the idea? Attack their sanity. I know it's not true, I'm secure in that belief, there is no reason to be defensive, I do reject it on an intellectual level, though, and so do most of the people she is describing.

I know one thing, I know what and how gaslighting is perpetrated, and this it.

Oh, and someone needs to teach that lady about Josh Gibson.

It's hard to credit that no-one felt attacked. Especially if she is as toxic as you suggest. It is common, as we see in these forums, for the fringe group to greatly exaggerate how upset people are and they do try to pretend objections are some sort of crying so she may be guilty of that tactic. Even so people do commonly feel attacked even when they reject it on an intellectual level as well. Some do get upset sometimes, particularly before they realise what is going on.

I agree.

I think there's some sort of auto ban for too much agreement in this forum so I'll point that you almost certainly have benefited from racism. I'm sure I have.

Maybe some white people have....I have not really achieved much in life, or at least what society would conventionally call achievements (mostly becasue I don't care about conventional success, so the ways where racism would benefit me are extremely small, if at all). When you guys talk about benefit, it's nonsensical. I can see where upper middle class people would think that, but the idea that some random poor or lower middle class white person benefits when racism occurs is not really something I'm inclined to believe. None of what anyone has posted has been compelling on that front.

The Iraq war may have brought lower oil prices that benefited me. That doesn't mean I supported the war or thought it was right.

It's amazing how much outrage there is over a few people being unjustly killed by individual police officers across the country, while there is barely a peep about massive atrocities like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc., perpetrated by our government. We're talking about actions that cost trillions of $, killed hundreds of thousands of people, devastated whole nations and put them into poverty, slavery, chaos, etc.

No one is suggesting that because of racism every white person is a lock to achieve X.

If all other things are equal and working class white person and working class black person try to become middle class, it will be to some degree easier for the white person. That does not mean the white person will succeed every time. The white person will still encounter plenty of challenges and difficulties and no one is suggesting that benefits of racism will abracadabra make those challenges moot. Arguing against that is simply a strawman.

I hate to poker analogy, but if two people want the same opportunity, but one is black one white so this skews a 50/50 (all other things being equal) to a 40/60 but the 40 (black person) wins, its going to be fairly human gonna human perception for the person who had the 60 side of it, to claim there was no benefit.

When we're done tearing down all the statues, it's time to tear down the phallic skyscrapers to stop reminding X-women about the fascist heterosexual intercoursey orthodoxy.

Is it the rule of law though? AFAIK they attempted, unsuccessfully, to impliment their own version of the rule of law, rather than strict mob rule. It's a pretty small group regardless. We started out with students on campuses being the harbinger of illiberalism when, even if you think that are being illiberal, it was largely confined to elite private schools, and now we have some couple of hundred, at most, of same people every time doing the same thing as the harbinger of the new left. They're not.

Mostly through illiberalism very quickly is implied to be any kind of disruption to the status quo that doesn't follow a very narrow form of social activism, that usually being well funded people giving money to lobbyists to influence politicians. But, as the article points out, there is plenty illiberal about the status quo and many times those who are said to be illiberal are anything but, they're simply pushing to emphasis a part of liberalism that's withered under the status quo.

When you were younger did you ever hear the phrase--it's not what you know it's who you know? Thinking back to like even hs years--there were lots of definitely not-rich guys who essentially had their lives laid out for them(and of course it exists as you move further up the chain)--he's got an uncle/whatever at the elec/plumber/whatever union etc. That whole pipeline is at least a part of the stuff that goes thru my mind when thinking about this stuff. It's quite real. Christ look how many white boomers there are that would fall to pieces if you handed them a calculus problem But a huge chunk managed to bounce thru a life of prosperity.

The black community was largely blocked out of establishing those kinds of foundations over the last century and a half. Not 100% but definitely to a pretty huge degree and some progress has been made. Go read the defn for privilege and ask yourself if it fits And this is just one aspect of the whole thing--there are numerous other ways it can be demonstrated(1 quick example--how much potential/equity/generational wealth do you think was denied to black people just by blocking them out of the gi bill benefits after ww2? It's a gigantic number).

When people hear the word reparations they tend to mostly jump right to--but Slavery was eons ago--what did we do? Nothing! lol Except there have been many more transgressions along the way. That there are even people who would take up the other side of even acknowledging it at all is kinda crazy really.

I don't think these two explanations are mutually exclusive. I would agree that there is a signalling (or performative) component in some of this behavior, but I think that is true of basically all human communication. Similarly you can view a lot of human social behavior as "status competition." But those features aren't exclusive of all the other motivations people have, and status-related motivations aren't always entirely conscious either.

I think "virtue signalling" is overused as a pejorative in just this way, to dismiss the sincerity of people expressing a moral viewpoint. It's not much different from the tendency to view everyone as a troll. People are more complicated than that.

(Other research discussed briefly: here, and here)

That you can get a Ph.D. in something based upon a subjective n=4 "Discourse Analysis" is just stupid in general.

That seems to be a fairly optimistic outlook. As far as I can tell since its inception it has only become progressively worse. Social media is a cesspit at this point in the bot misinformation/astroturfing era.

Right, but when you are no longer attacking clearly egregious behavior, but just aping the behavior of others by attacking anything and everything borderline questionable, I'm tossing you right in the 'virtue signaling keyboard warrior' bin. If you pull up and attack a tweet from 2015, you weren't perusing the internet casually and stumbled across something that offended you, you were actively "outrage mining," as you put it. The range of possible motivations for attacking the tweet is pretty narrow at that point.

Nice links by the way. Off topic thought, but it got me wondering how much of the "polarization" we claim as the current state of U.S. politics is just our perception of it as shaped by online discourse and the subsequent media reporting of said discourse. I mean as much as we frame it as the progressives vs the alt right, at the end of the day the Democratic nominee is still Joe Biden.

Sure but it was cute when a newborn baby. I'd like to compare where we are now to the teenage years but given the way people behave round these parts, the Terrible Two's may be more appropriate.

It's not just optimism to think it will get better. The trolling, silly name calling, screaming etc are most effective the first few times but the impacts decays pretty quickly after that. The well of newbies to attack will drop off fast. Also regulation and better company procedures are developing to address the seriously bad and dangerous stuff..