22 thoughts on “An adult in the room”

1. I’ve skimmed the essay. It sounds like she is unhappy about reality. I can actually empathize with some of her points. I, however, can’t see what it has to do with “white supremacy” whatsoever. I

   Ironically, my comment probably just reinforces CRT agenda.

2. I’ve unfortunately read it because the principal of my child’s public school linked to it favorably. It’s astonishingly racist, but a large majority of the school’s teachers and staff seem to love it. Very disturbing.

3. When Matt Yglesias is considered the adult in the room, we are already lost.

4. Arnold writes “Both major parties are intimidated by the worst of their constituencies.” Again, he puts forth a spurious moral equivalence in an effort to seem disinterested. Cancel culture is a thousand times worse on the Left than the Right.

   • Liz Cheney says “hi!”

     • I don’t agree that Liz Cheney’s experience is a good example of cancel culture. Cancel culture is being fired/demoted/deplatformed for expressing something that is more or less orthogonal to one’s role/position, in some cases even only as a confused faux pas.

       I haven’t been following the Cheney situation too closely, but as I see it, Cheney is a politician in a position of leadership who was not in line with the majority faction of her own party. Therefore, she was demoted from that position of leadership. That’s not cancel culture: that’s more or less just politics. It’s on all fours with the Human Rights Campaign firing one of its leaders for publicly opposing gay marriage.

       Cancel culture is when a professor is removed after saying the Chinese filler word 那个, because the word sounds similar to a slur against blacks, or when a literary agent is fired from her job because she retweeted something deemed ‘transphobic’ on social media.

       • The 4-year-olds driving the right would be those who have equated party ID with loyalty to a single individual who happens to declare nearly every day that an election was stolen from him. Loyalty to Trump trumps principle and policy. Even the military swears allegiance not to a person, but to the Constitution. To the 4-year-olds, there is no Constitution, there is only Trump. Liz Cheney’s ouster is evidence not of a Republican version of cancel culture, but that the 4-year-olds are running the show.

       • The difference is between just and unjust discrimination. In general, it is valid to complain about ‘cancel culture’ when someone is injecting a political or ideological litmus test in an inappropriate or irrelevant place. I am trying to get you fired for what you think, but your job has nothing to do with what you think.

         But an institution that explicitly bases membership on loyal adherence to a particular religion, ideology, or political platform is different.

         It is appropriate for, say, the Catholic Church, to excommunicate and eject a heretic priest who publicly disobeys the Pope and denies the divinity of Jesus Christ. That is not ‘canceling’ the priest, because these are appropriate actions having a direct bearing on the explicit requirements of his position and the conditions to remain a member in good standing of an explicitly ideological organization.

         The point of the word ‘cancel’, on the other hand, is specifically to complain about efforts to punish people for heresy (not criminal, because an exercise of civil liberty) by getting them fired from jobs the performance of which, officially and explicitly, has nothing to do with taking a particular position.

5. “I have not read the essay, but my fear would be that it is about average for a diversity, equity, and inclusion training seminar.”

   But it isn’t. It’s a jumbled mismash of organizational pet peeves that have nothing to do with race with and then ‘white supremacy’ is added to the title. If this is where ‘white supremacy’ is going, it’s headed toward becoming generic, content-free term for ‘things lefties don’t like for some reason or another’ (sort of like ‘fascism’).

   • Agreed. It isn’t even CRT—

     “Organizations that are people of color-led or a majority people of color can also demonstrate many damaging characteristics of white supremacy culture.”

   • It’s obviously CRT.

     White people are more effective than black people (due to things like conscientiousness, showing up on time, evidence based thinking, etc). Therefore, effectiveness is racist.

     It matters not that there are effective black people and ineffective white people. What matters, as in all things, is statistical group average traits. If white people have more of something, even effectiveness, than its bad and should no longer be a metric by which status and rewards are doled out.

     Its very obvious that the goal of this stuff is that more status/rewards/sinecures should be given out to black people even if they aren’t producing measurable results to justify such rewards or even maintaining basic norms of professionalism. This has always been a racket about increasing the amount of affirmative action beyond even what we have today.

     Sure, some white people like Okun will get a cut of what they carve out for black people. A commission if you will. The SLPC has been running that racket a long time and they built the Poverty Palace.

     You people aren’t cynical enough.

6. Yeah well Greg Patons bio is still on USCs website so I guess he wasnt that cancelled.

   Marshall Dean Geoffrey Garrett informed the Marshall community via a Sept. 25 email that USC’s Office of Equity, Equal Opportunity and Title IX found professor Gregory Patton, who used a Chinese word that sparked controversy, “did not violate the university’s policy.”

   According to the email, EEO-TIX “has concluded that the concerns expressed by students were sincere, but that Professor Patton’s actions did not violate the university’s policy.”

   Idk who the other person is.

   • This was in response to Justin sorry.

7. Dudes, it is over. The University of California will no longer use SAT scores to evaluate help applicants. The SAT is “racist.”

   Yes, even the math portion of the SAT is racist, although the test and the results are color blind.

   I think emigration is the option….

   • To where?

     Remember when the entire western world staged simultaneous mass protests in the middle of a pandemic lockdown because a multiple violent offender happened to OD in police custody in Minnesota. They literally “take a knee” in English football games over that.

     I guess you don’t have to deal with this kind of shit in China, but that has its own issues.

     You either beat these people or they take over everything.

   • Or ACT scores either. But it’s not over. I am sure that the elite UC campuses will figure out how to stay elite. They’ll consider high-school GPA and courses along with high-school reputations to admit white and asian high-achievers (but not too many of the latter) and then also select whatever number of affirmative-action admits they desire using ‘holistic’ criteria which will enable them to ignore the rejection of Prop 16 by California voters.

     • Maybe so. But then many young men are socially awkward, even perhaps backwards (me, in my youth) but great at math, geometry, sciences.

       They are the kind of people “discovered” by blind testing.

       And GPA’s—who can measure bloat, vs. good intentions (“nice kid, deserves a break”) vs. true performance?

       Maybe Austria, Hungary, Thailand, Japan are the places to ponder.

     • Standardized tests got me into both my high school and college, as well as my scholarship.

       In addition to a few more diversity slots, I think primarily what will happen is that smart but lower class whites/asians will lose out on the margin. You will have less new men and more mediocre daughters of the well off.

8. Matt Yglesias: “So for the record, I wholeheartedly agree — I do not think a bunch of folks running around telling the world that asking for written memos and focusing on measurable results is racist are going to take over the United States and extinguish human liberty. Frankly, I don’t think they’re going to do anything at all other than run a bunch of basically useless trainings and disrupt the internal functioning of progressive organizations.”

   And if we wanted to shift a little higher than the very lowest level of fruit?

   Jason Riley: “Last month, officials in the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced that they were convening a discussion of ‘strategies for addressing racial and other disparities in the administration of school discipline.’ The goal is to assess ‘the impact of exclusionary school discipline policies and practices, such as suspensions and school-based arrests, on our nation’s students, particularly students of color’ and ‘also share diverse strategies for addressing harmful and discriminatory school discipline practices and creating positive school climates.'”

   Riley spells out the entirely foreseeable consequences by recounting what happened the last time:

   In 2012, the Education Department released a study showing that black students were more likely than their white peers to be suspended and expelled from school. This disparity was taken as evidence of racial bias, and two years later the department issued threatening ‘guidance’ letters to school districts across the country. The letters essentially warned that schools would face federal civil-rights investigations if black suspension rates didn’t come down. Schools were pressured to discipline students, or not, based on race rather than behavior, and many administrators and teachers obliged.

   In New York, Los Angeles and Chicago–the nation’s three largest school systems–reductions in suspensions and expulsions were followed by an uptick in bullying and other disruptive behavior. Students and teachers alike have reported feeling less safe. Fighting, gang activity and drug use have increased. A 2018 study of schools in Wisconsin found that ‘softer discipline policies, pushed by the Obama administration, are having a negative impact on student test scores.’

   The sad irony is that black students, in whose name this was done, were the ones most hurt by racial quotas in school discipline. A 2017 federal survey of school safety by the National Center for Education Statistics found that 25% of black students nationwide reported being bullied, the highest percentage of any racial or ethnic group.

   • Age traditionally makes one cynical and pragmatic.

     The cynical and pragmatic thing to do at the personal level is to acknowledge the steam roller of this culture movement and try to run faster and/or get out of the way. Maybe the very ambitious even think they can take over the drivers seat.

     Arnold uses the phrase “be an adult” in terms of courage and honesty. But those aren’t necessarily “adult” attributes, and the young famously exude these virtues to an often naive degree.

     I think the primary problem faced is that defeating this cultural movement would require immense personal risk, doing things and making trade offs one otherwise wouldn’t, and an immense leap of faith that others would coordinate and do the same at the same time so that your sacrifices weren’t in vain. It doesn’t surprise me that lots of “adults” calculate those odds and start wondering if perhaps they should just worry about paying their mortgage and putting food on their kids table.

     The problem isn’t people knowing this is all BS, the problem is that putting up with BS is specifically what gets beat into you by the time you are an adult.

   • “… disrupt the internal functioning of progressive organizations.”

     This is where Matt tells his real concerns. Okun’s work is simply anti-effectiveness propaganda in the language of antiracism.

     Matt want to make sure this propaganda does not get used against his friends, only his enemies.

   • Result: the Parkland school shooting and 17 dead people. Nick Cruz couldn’t be disciplined because he was black. (well, half, anyway.

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