Chris Dillow writes,
Pointer from Mark Thoma.
The heuristic that Dillow followed was this: he saw many Brexit supporters as racists, therefore he would not support Brexit.
On Facebook, one of my friends posted that although she wanted to attend the anti-Trump march, she was troubled by some of the positions espoused by leaders of the march. So, although I assume that she broadly sympathizes with the marchers, she was having doubts because of this particular heuristic.
For any cause, there are some supporters who are deplorable. I am sure that Chris Dillow could find some prominent Remainers for whom he has animosity, although they are not as numerable as those on the Leaver side.
I think that a heuristic that says “Do not associate with a political cause if you find a fair number of its supporters deplorable” would leave you unwilling to support any political cause.
And that might not be a bad thing.
It seems to me that the civil rights movement represented one of the major failures of this heuristic on both sides. Many on the right did not support it because it had a lot of Commies in it. Many on the left concluded that since said Commies supported civil rights they must not be so bad.
In other words, “I would have been on the other side if my side were the other side.”
Of course if the remain person had gone into the poor backwards minority neighborhoods in London were they are practicing Islamic law and the cops don’t go, he would find lots of deplorable people there. They are out of sight out of mind though. It’s only non-upper middle class white people he doesn’t like.
A friend sent me a documentary by this liberal guy in the Netherlands who had his phone stolen by a poor Muslim. He gets data updates on where the phone is and what its being used for. He starts to have sympathy for the guy that stole the phone. Even adds money to the credit account. Then one day he tries to go meet the guy and…disaster. Realizes that the actual human being is just third world trash that would mug him the second he had opportunity. People say its easy to hate the other, its also easy to irrationally love the other. The other is just a blank slate upon which we can project what we want.
Despising people is a very interesting way to celebrate diversity and mutual respect.
Government is just the name for the things we do together.
10 days ago Tyler Cowen was, well, mood affiliating with Black Lives Matter. As many people pointed out with prominent examples, if he followed your heuristic, he wouldn’t have done so. Instead, he offered a nearly opposite heuristic.
Well, maybe. But the danger is picking a respectable ‘smart version’ that doesn’t reflect social reality.
And it’s an opposite heuristic because it allows one to mood affiliate with practically any or even all groups – according to ones preferences and interests – while posturing to maintain a distance between oneself and those deplorable qualities and elements. If one takes this position – “By affiliating with this group, I am of course only agreeing with the best possible version of its theme” – then one can always lawyer one’s way out of any criticism. That’s annoying.
In Cowen’s case, people pointed out that, as with any movement, the core question about whether one should be allowed to mood affiliate and get away with ‘supporting the smart message’ without being associated with the deplorables, revolved around whether the key complaints and claims – and the consensus narrative in which they these claims are embedded – were actually what was widely believed by most other members of the group, and also, you know, ‘true’.
In the case of BLM, possible claims about the amount of law-enforcement-related tragedy happening to American blacks include, “A lot, like to any group,” “A disproportionate, but still fair, just, and equitable amount,” or “A disproportionate and unfair, unjust, and inequitable amount.” As a commenter pointed out, it’s a key question of conditional probabilities.
But, ahem, that kind of claim is susceptible to empirical verification or falsification, and so, if 90% of a ‘movement’ is making an empirically false but morally compelling claim, then one can still affiliate with it by siding with the ‘smart version’ which says that the morally neutral, but empirically true, claim is still ‘valid’, and claiming that supporting that claim is still the same thing as “BLM”, even if few other BLM’ers would agree.
So the question really becomes when will you apply this, or not, and when will your target social milieu let you get away with this, and when won’t they. Since smart people are keenly aware of their group’s hypersensitivities on the one hand and tolerant indulgences on the other, it’s hardly some neutral principle in practice. More along the lines of socially acceptable excuses for semi-plausibly-deniable tribal signalling. “I need an excuse to affiliate with some otherwise unsavory types with ugly notions,” on the one hand, and “I need an excuse to disaffiliate with some reasonable people and legitimate ideas,” on the other.
I doubt they were really racists. He believed what some guy said.
Btw, since when is racist more harmful than global communist?
It’s why they lie about Deplorables. To stack the deck. Funny that smart people fall for it.
And also, what racism? Like people here believe that being anti 10s of millions of more Mexicans is “racism?” We should say that only wanting the race that can traipse across the border us racism.
It is like saying someone who has a bad neighbor is into anti-neighborism.
In a 2-party system, a lot of the energy is expended marketing the opposition as deplorable. This is what all the “science denier” and thw like us all about. Clinton made the shark jumping move of being caught telling the truth. But you have 2 parties. If course all the nationalists are going to be on the nationalist side if an issue.
Another reason the Trump phenomena is so fascinating is that he might be the first president where his high unfavorables became a feature rather than a bug. Let’s hope it is not a trend.
I’m familiar with the distinction between thinking fast and slow, but now I see there’s this third option, which is actively not thinking at all. The book could be titled Thinking Dillow. It’s the 2017 alternative to thinking.
Obviously it’s always been a popular option, to not think for yourself about the benefits and costs of specific tax policies or specific regulatory policies.
People just don’t usually say openly that they’re going to outsource their brains to their Facebook feeds. They don’t proclaim openly that they’re letting CNN do their thinking for them. Points for honesty to Chris Dillow.
There’s a big obvious drawback to racial profiling, and it’s the same big obvious drawback here. Officer Dillow ends up arresting a lot of innocent men who are guilty only of being young, black and male, or young, Muslim and male. That’s what happens when a cop doesn’t pay any attention to the question of whether the kid he’s arrested actually had anything to do with the crime.
Is this really what Burke meant about a private stock of reason? If other people aren’t using their reason in the first place, and you rely on them to reason things out on your behalf, reason never comes into it. It’s tribalism all the way down.
A social networking platform isn’t weighing up the arguments about comparative savings rates in Germany versus Greece. It’s not thinking about whether a single currency makes sense for the Portuguese and the Swedes.