Quote:
Originally Posted by FlyWf
DVaut is wrong, Chua is 100% a moron.
Eh I'm still gonna white knight for her a little here, but only in a specific way. I think she's a complex character who has perhaps descended into a bit of right wing hack territory, but even then, the real point is that her politics are bad.
So, again: I encourage people to read World on Fire. As I said, she's carrying tons of water for leftist arguments there, essentially lambasting a lot of bad Heritage Foundation style right-wingerism that informed lots of destructive early aughts American foreign policy, and probably still does today. And surely back into time, dating back to the Cold War. She's essentially saying the idea that you functionally just up-end regimes, even bad ones, drop in a mix of bombs/capitalism/free markets and leave -- that's a recipe for chaos, for exploitation. It will brew up a right-wing backlash that inevitably crushes the global poor and the already-exploited. Any leftist who has criticized American imperialism, cultural imperialism, free market orthodoxy -- you're functionally making a lot of the same arguments Chua did then.
As I said, the book isn't perfect; she's ultimately trying to salvage markets and she's probably approaching race science type arguments (effectively that dominant local ethnic majorities were dominant for a reason, and that disruptive foreign intervention ran the risk of empowering market dominant minorities who will upset the majority ethnic groups, or simply empower the corrupt and the grifty, and that in those conditions, democracy will fail and produce a right-wing backlash). For better or worse, though, that sort of race science **** IS a bit endemic to conservativism writ large. It's why I said she's really harkening back to an older style of right-wingerism that was more common in the early 20th century, that looked a bit warily at capitalism precisely because it threatened old and traditional social order. She is almost a direct descendant of ideology which is both bad but also discrete and different from the modern day fascist right, imo.
But, if anyone doesn't want to read her books and wants a faster way to judge, you can listen to her on Chris Hayes podcast:
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinio...ipt-ncna882186
I really don't think she's a moron. I do think her politics are largely wretched. In fact, my whole point of entering into this Amy Chua Judgement Day thing is to make sure we on the left don't embrace her. Consider that grizy and someone else above are like "she's really a leftist." Don't let her stain us; I just don't want to flat out call her a moron, she's not. I think she's just pedestrian bad.
HAVING said that:
1. I didn't read The Triple Package, so if she's devolving into race science screeds and/or right-wing hacky stuff, I totally buy it. Trolly posted an article earlier where she has a sympathetic friend in Charles Murray who almost surely fits the same category or at least fills a neighboring typology. I don't want to get into a credentialism debate but Murray went to Harvard and has a phd from MIT; it's pretty unlikely he's a moron. He's just a racist and evil. We can separate the two.
2. I'm not defending Chua the child abuser, or Chua the groomer of Kavanaugh boners.
Can't she be smart but simply have ****ty politics? Those people exist too!
Now, the rant, and why I think we're talking about this:
A lot of this really seems like it's borne out of a bad leftist mentality that all bad people are de facto morons. I think this is degraded, and functionally a long standing gripe of mine.
I wrote a long thing 10 years ago about Chris Langan who is almost surely the smartest human that has ever been measured AND a complete monster, but for whatever reason this sends people into fits trying to claim Langan is either truly dumb, or he cheats on tests, or IQ tests are totally useless.
WHY? I think because the left is still wrapped up in technocratic political schemes and wedded to the notion that leftism is meaningful and good because it's What Smart People Think or it's more empirical than right-wingerism. Well, both might be true, but I honestly couldn't give a **** and neither should the left. I'm a leftist because I think social equality is an unqualified good and guiding moral principle. I get the sense many on the left are so motivated to discredit Chua types as idiots because they themselves lack commitment to genuine leftist principles and so they're working sideways into discrediting the entire right-wing as some sort of anti-intellectual exercise. Letting Chua remain as smart but poorly principled, amoral and ghoulish (all the evidence lines up in that direction) is unsatisfying and produces cognitive dissonance on the left.
I get that in the 2018 that decrying any right-winger or right-wing adjacent fellow traveler as a moron is increasingly true since it's self-selecting for morons and will hit more often than it misses; it is an entirely compelling argument since the right IS now deeply anti-intellectual and anti-empirical. But that's like, only one tangential reason to be skeptical of right-wingerism. The better criticism is that it embraces competitive social hierarchies that incentivizes wretched anti-social behaviors (like Chua demonstrates!) and is inimical to human flourishing.
I mean, to summarize all the points here and bring it full circle, the truly unfortunate thing about the right and their ideas is that it takes someone like Chua who I truly believe is smart and is surely talented and ambitious and turns their efforts and capacities into grooming young women to be leered at by pervy rich old powerful guys like Kavanaugh. Her intellectual capacities are truly wasted trying to game and manipulate these hierarchies or provide a moral justification for them, instead of tearing them down.
Last edited by DVaut1; 09-21-2018 at 02:35 AM.