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[silverspawn]

this is too much I can't I'm too soft

[silverspawn]

if nothing else this definitively proves that less is more. I actually don't know if I can finish this movie.

[faust]

Chapter 5: Social Justice, High and Low (Part 1)

I'm splitting this into 2 parts because it is very long.

Let's start with my most fundamental critique: Urban does not understand what critical theory is. To hear him tell it, it is an unfalsifiable theory of everything for sociology. This is, at best, a severe misunderstanding. Critical theory offers an analytical framework, a lens through which society may be viewed. It is not claiming that this is the only lens, that nothing else is ever worthwhile, just that it is a useful tool for analyzing stuff so that you can form hypotheses off of it, and these hypotheses may subsequently be tested.

So in the first part, he lays out the framework. Apart from what I pointed out above, it's actually a fairly decent summary of the framework. Towards the end though, he seems to get confused, first explaining intersectionality decently well and then going on to complain that what he derogatorily calls "Social Justice Fundamentalism" (SJF in the future, I will grudgingly use his slur for clarity) doesn't consider factors like class, age, wealth etc. I mean, yes it does, you just explained intersectionality and that what that is all about. What are you even talking about? He also repeats his claim that high-rung far-left people are most often wrong. Citation needed.

He claims that SJF thinks in binaries, to which no evidence is given. In much of what follows, he seems to zero in very hard on the racial aspect, the other dimensions are largely ignored as far as I can tell. I find it particularly interesting that he is so bothered by the racist-antiracist distinction. He complains that the SJF position is that "you're either a racist of an antiracist". Which is of course, a doubtful framing, but the SJF position would be racist is the default and you have to put in active effort to be antiracist. Which maps surprisingly well onto Urban's model of low-rung versus high-rung thinking. But somehow his model is good and the SJF model is bad.

The assertion that SJF stifles dissent is just hilarious to me. Walk into any leftist space and ask two people their opinion on a given topic, and you'll get conflicting opinions. Leftist infighting is so commonplace it's become a meme.

Urban spends some time explaining how, while he can't know the experience of a black person, he can make his own educated guess based on adjacent experiences he himself made. That is all fairly reasonable, and probably nothing most SJFs would disagree with. Then he goes on to complain about how the following is considered a microaggression by one person: "As a woman, I know what your experience as a black person is like." Even though minutes before he disagreed with that statement himself!

A lot of the time he says the SJF states certain things as axiomatic and that's not scientific because like physicists don't just take for granted that a force like gravity exists. But of course if you look in a physics paper, it won't start out by proving that gravity exists. You have to take some basic things for granted if you wish to investigate the finer points.

He complains about how the word racism is used by SJF, but his way of using racism is never questioned and assumed as default.  Indeed Urban himself has a lot of assumptions that are never questioned, like the value of his "liberal games", or that being in the center is good. It find graphic 27 in the audiobook graphic files quite funny in the light of that because on the Liberalism side, just nothing happens, the theory isn't refined in any way, and somehow that is apparently a good thing.

There are a lot of references to articles or tweets where some potentially bad point is made that I don't feel it's really worth responding to. Maybe some of those points are bad! But are they representative?

A final annoyance I have is how he, like many liberals, quotes Martin Luther King in support of his positions, as if MLK would be on his side in this. For reference, this is what MLK said about people like Urban:

First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season".

[faust]

One thing I forgot to mention: Urban makes fun of how most people in SJF are white and points to this as a contradiction because whites can't speak (according to him according to SJF) of topics of race. This is part wrong and part a result of his own narrow focus on the racial aspect. Wrong insofar as critical race theory was definitely developed by people of color, and result of a narrow focus because while there are a lot of white people in that area, they are (in my experience at least) also in large part queer and thus may not focus on racial issues but issues of gender and sexual orientation.

[Awaclus]

[silverspawn]

Let's start with my most fundamental critique: Urban does not understand what critical theory is. To hear him tell it, it is an unfalsifiable theory of everything for sociology. This is, at best, a severe misunderstanding. Critical theory offers an analytical framework, a lens through which society may be viewed. It is not claiming that this is the only lens, that nothing else is ever worthwhile, just that it is a useful tool for analyzing stuff so that you can form hypotheses off of it, and these hypotheses may subsequently be tested.

My suggestion is to view the claim not as a theoretical point of what the theory was meant to say or does say based on the literal interpretation, but purely as a descriptive claim of how it is often applied.

When I listened to this, I didn't go "woah Tim's theoretical understanding of critical theory is so awesome, if faust only hears this, he will change his position on a fundamental logical level". I rather went "damn it sure looks like there are a lot of examples of stuff that actually happened and keep happening that fit the description of this SJE thing quite closely".

The entire chapter shouldn't be taken as an attack on Social Justice at all. In fact, Tim clearly understands this as well since he first differentiated two kinds of social justice, where the first kind is an unambiguous good. I think he then makes a mistake by tying critical race theory to the second kind -- I think he should have separated that as well.

Anyway, again, just take the description of SJE as a definition of a thing that may or may not exist and the next 200 pages as evidence that it does exist.

[faust]

Let's start with my most fundamental critique: Urban does not understand what critical theory is. To hear him tell it, it is an unfalsifiable theory of everything for sociology. This is, at best, a severe misunderstanding. Critical theory offers an analytical framework, a lens through which society may be viewed. It is not claiming that this is the only lens, that nothing else is ever worthwhile, just that it is a useful tool for analyzing stuff so that you can form hypotheses off of it, and these hypotheses may subsequently be tested.

My suggestion is to view the claim not as a theoretical point of what the theory was meant to say or does say based on the literal interpretation, but purely as a descriptive claim of how it is often applied.

When I listened to this, I didn't go "woah Tim's theoretical understanding of critical theory is so awesome, if faust only hears this, he will change his position on a fundamental logical level". I rather went "damn it sure looks like there are a lot of examples of stuff that actually happened and keep happening that fit the description of this SJE thing quite closely".

The entire chapter shouldn't be taken as an attack on Social Justice at all. In fact, Tim clearly understands this as well since he first differentiated two kinds of social justice, where the first kind is an unambiguous good. I think he then makes a mistake by tying critical race theory to the second kind -- I think he should have separated that as well.

Anyway, again, just take the description of SJE as a definition of a thing that may or may not exist and the next 200 pages as evidence that it does exist.

Having now gotten a bit further, I think there is something to what you say. The critique he levels indeed seems to be pointed to a specific kind of social justice activism. However, from where I stand, he is mislabeling them. What he criticizes is what I would call liberal social justice, yet for him it is opposed to liberal social justice.

For Urban, SJF is, after all, in a line coming from Marxist theory, and what the strands he lists as leading to SJF have in common is that they seek a systemic critique. Yet that systemic critique is largely ignored, and he focuses a lot on people who see the issue at the individual level - i.e. liberals. One of his main sources for SJF is Robin DiAngelo, a corporate consultant (not a likely occupation for a leftist). It is not hard to find that leftist thinkers reject her (see a leftist critique e.g. here).

If that was all that Urban was criticizing, that would be fine. But there is a conflation going, because it is claimed that SJF is opposed to liberalism, yet the opposing force he sees there is not the same movement as the movement DiAngelo is a part of, because DiAngelo does not reject liberalism. What Urban is attacking is really a low-rung version of his own beliefs (so the same on the left-right spectrum, but lower on the ladder), and yet he seems to believe that he is attacking a different set of beliefs that is to the left of his own.

[faust]

Interlude: The tale of King Moustache

So the first half of this is some pretty basic 1984 stuff. Control speech to control thoughts and all that. Not sure we needed a whole fairy tale for it but hey, maybe some people don't know 1984.

The second part is all about freedom of speech. Yes, freedom of speech is good. Is it the fundamental right and does it alone ensure a "free marketplace of ideas"? Well marketplace maybe, in the sense that the people with the most money control the conversation. Freedom of speech doesn't mean much if noone listens to you. Urban is convinced that the best ideas rise to the top, and the evidence is that two ideas did. This is of course uh biased. It's hard to know about bad ideas that haven't been corrected because largely, we still don't see them as bad. You could take animal welfare, as Urban himself imagines a future where we see eating animals as bad. Vegetarians have been around for centuries and yet the thought pile hasn't shifted, what's that about? I'd also love some discussion of Roe v Wade in this context, but maybe that was too recent to make it into the book.

He's also strawmanning the imagined opposition: He contrasts a free speech environment with a dictatorship, and the dictatorship forbids speech about how interracial marriage is fine so we can't move to the better position. Well, what if the dictatorship instead enforced speech about how interracial marriage is good? That would probably shift public opinion faster than the marketplace of ideas. And of course the dictator would always believe that their position is good, actually, and thus it's justified to censor.

What then follows is an account of a situation involving Bret Weinstein. I had not heard of this before. To hear Urban tell it (who as far as I can tell follows Weinstein's own narrative), students were forcing white students off campus for a day, and Weinstein politely voiced dissent, and then the students rioted and applied force until Weinstein was made to resign. Now that's certainly... a perspective. Being somewhat skeptical of this account, I did some of my own research. You can read quite a different version of the events on RationalWiki. Urban presenting Weinstein's version of events unquestioningly makes me very doubtful that he is going to approach the rest of the chapter in good faith. But we'll see I suppose.

[silverspawn]

man RationalWiki is absolutely horrendous. That's about the last place I'd look for anything useful ever

[silverspawn]

I mean I think Bret Weinstein is a clown and probably not super reliable and I had a bit of the same reaction, but the fact that RationalWiki contradicts his position doesn't influence my belief at all

[silverspawn]

I'm downloading my first torrent!

[Awaclus]

I'm downloading my first torrent!

[faust]

I mean I think Bret Weinstein is a clown and probably not super reliable and I had a bit of the same reaction, but the fact that RationalWiki contradicts his position doesn't influence my belief at all

Well I'm not sure what sources would please you. There are at least references on RationalWiki, which is more than you can say about a random news article.

[silverspawn]

There is no media outlet I trust enough to just take their word, but if it were like a NYT article, I'd at least take something from it. With RationalWiki, I expect them to maliciously make him sound as bad as humanly possible because he's in their outgroup.

It lists sources, but did you look at the sources? (I mean obviously not, this isn't a gotcha, it would take an unreasonable amount of time to do that.) But I expect both the sources to biased and the way the article uses them to be misleading

[silverspawn]

I mean come on, if I just take ten seconds to look at the page, we have chapter headings

Reactionary gaslighting

Tinfoil hat quackery

That's not even trying to be impartial. And the first sentence of the article on Ivermectin reads

Weinstein and Heying tell all of their fans who are worried about the pandemic to take ivermectin, which they take weekly.

Yeah sounds like legit reporting. You kind of don't even have to check the references because I don't know what kind of source could possibly valdidate such a blanket claim, but I did check anyway (CTRL+F for "week") and nope they don't say that his fans all take ivermectin weekly.

Bret is probably responsible for several deaths by recommending Ivermectin to people who consequently chose not to get vaccinated -- but this doesn't help. I give RationalWiki about the same credibility as Breitbart

[silverspawn]

Oh actually I think "they" in the quoted sentence refers to W and H themselves, in which case it's horrendous writing but not made-up bc one of the sources did claim this.

[faust]

Fair enough, it was the first thing I found. It's actually a bit tricky to find coverage that isn't like Breitbart-level right right bias, but here's an example:

https://psmag.com/education/the-real-free-speech-story-at-evergreen-college

[silverspawn]

So I looked into this a bit, mainly the article you linked, and it seems to me like Tim Urban's summary is mostly correct (or if it's not, the article doesn't show why).

Most of it really doesn't contradict Tim at all, or Weinstein's version of events, or even tell you much of anything. E.g.,

Weinstein also tweeted a picture of college students who he claimed were involved in violence. For example, he claimed that students with bats were roaming campus, and used as evidence a clearly staged photo, unlinked to the protests, with no evidence that the students pictured were involved in any violence. The fallout for these students was intense. One student, who asked to remain anonymous to protect their safety, said that they started receiving death threats from people who knew their address. "I had to move three times for my safety and eventually left the state," the student says. Later, the student was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder because of the constant threats. "I feel incredibly isolated, like no one could understand or even wants to take the time to understand what really happened," the student says. "The narrative surrounding our goals and actions has been so horribly skewed, I don't know how to begin addressing it."*

If true, this shows that Weinstein is an asshole (which I agree with), but doesn't seem to have any bearing on the original sequence of events. The article doesn't say when this happened but the paragraph before talks about June and the settlement was reached in June, so it doesn't seem like this influenced his firing.

The Weinstein controversy has also had permanent effects on the college itself. In 2018, Evergreen decided to cancel the Day of Absence. The official school statement says that the event was canceled because "Gross and deliberate mischaracterizations of the event in 2017 provoked violent threats against students, staff and faculty." In short, encouraged by Weinstein, right-wing hate-mongers were successful in their effort to shutter an anti-racist event, all under the banner of defending "free speech."

This is quite a leap, but say we accept the framing -- so what? The story blew up, lots of right winters heard it, they sent threats; that seems like the kind of thing that would happen whether the original sequence of events was like Weinstein reported or not

Students at Evergreen, however, were not ready to let the tradition die, so, without school support, Littleton and others organized a three-day event. They returned to the original structure of the Day of Absence, whereby people of color left campus for a day.

"The student of color population at Evergreen is pretty small," Littleton tells me, "so it can feel really isolating here sometimes, and this way we get to meet other people of color and maybe talk about our shared experiences at Evergreen. And a lot of white people who have taken part in the Day of Absence have also really liked it. We had a lot of white people involved in the planning of this year's Day of Absence, and they did a lot of the work in helping make this happen."

So what? They're quoting an activist, the activist gives noble reasons for wanting to do activism. This doesn't tell us anything. I mean in general, if the negation of a piece of information completely unthinkable -- and it is here -- then the information doesn't tell you anything.

In his initial email, Weinstein praised the traditional Day of Absence, in which black people left campus. Yet, when he found out about the student-organized event, he apparently became displeased, retweeting a commenter who claimed that Evergreen students were "self-segregating," and later made a snarky remark about their poster design. (Weinstein did not respond to requests for comment.)

Lol, of course he did. I mean this is just another instance of him being an asshole, and this one is also much milder, I feel like most people would fail this moral consistency test.

Weinstein's tweet went out to around 110,000 Twitter followers; Breitbart News also picked up his comments. As a result, Evergreen organizers were once again deluged with hate mail. The RSVP link for the 2018 Day of Absence received over 200 messages from troll accounts with names like "Bad Idea," "AK 47," and "Adolf Hitler." The response overwhelmed the website, making it difficult for organizers to notify participants about a change of venue.*

Again all plausible regardless of the original sequence of events. If "the right site gets very nasty after a story blows up" means the left people are good guys, then the left people are always good guys.

not gonna go through the rest but it's really all the same; none of it is inconsistent with Weinstein's portrayal of the original sequence of events. It's all just quoting guys on your side and listing bad actions by guys on the other side, which you can do for every story.

Basically the only part of the article that's really relevant is this ... but actually before I quote this, here's what Tim Urban says in the book

- There was this day of absence thingy
- Bret wrote the email saying it's bad
- Some time later, people gathered in front of his classroom, shouting over him and demanding his resignation
- Later that day, students met with the faculty (and he lists some slogans that were used)
- Next day, students took ... a bunch of administrators  into an office and kept them there until their demands were accepted, blocking the entrance
- Subsequently the university asked Weinstein and his wife(?) to resign

Here's the article:

Many students were irritated and angered by Weinstein's email. But it did not trigger protests, nor calls for Weinstein to be fired. In fact, the protests on campus supposedly responding to the email did not take place until May of 2017, and were focused on an entirely different incident, Littleton says. That month, police took two black students out of their dorms just before midnight, following an altercation in the cafeteria the day before, according to Littleton. (The non-black student involved in the altercation was not detained.) In response, activists organized protests, which included demonstrations and marches through classroom buildings in order to raise awareness.*

During this march, Weinstein decided to come out of his classroom and confront the protesters. The protesters were well aware of Weinstein's email, and the conversation grew contentious. Students were especially angered when police arrived; they initially believed that Weinstein had called them himself. Since the students were protesting police bias, this was seen as an especially inflammatory move.

The student protesters' lists of demands after the cafeteria incident included zero tolerance for hate crimes, free health care for students, and a freeze on expansion of police facilities. Though the list initially included a request that Weinstein be fired, the student protesters removed it after a day, because, according to Littleton, "we were really trying to get away from the narrative that it was all about him or even mostly about him."

Yet Weinstein continued to insist that the protesters were mainly concerned with his email.

(And then the article goes on about how he went onto Tucker Carlson. These articles always present "and then he went onto a right wing platform" as if that's a gotcha; of course he went onto a right wing platform, what is that supposed to show?)

So even if all of this is true, it only contradicts with the idea that the protests were about his email (which Tim technically doesn't assert, but it's heavily implied).  That would be like a "mostly true" in a fact check. And it doesn't seem all that relevant, I mean the article doesn't list anything terrible Weinstein has done in this other incident, so is it any better if he was fired over that?

And if I read the article right, all of the right wing reactions happened after he was fired.

[silverspawn]

If all these factual claims are true, I wouldn't give Tim's portrayed great grades; he should have mentioned that there was a right wing backlash (it doesn't really detract from the point, but still, mention it), and he should have said that the email may not have been the reason for protests. But he wouldn't get terrible grades either.

And idk if the claims are all true; the only evidence provided in the article is the word of a protester.

[silverspawn]

Nooo the movie is the german dub {}_{} whyyyyy it didn't say so in the torrent

[Awaclus]

Nooo the movie is the german dub {}_{} whyyyyy it didn't say so in the torrent

Where are you getting your torrents? On RuTracker, people generally put the languages in the title and include the full MediaInfo in the thread (at the very least they do one if not both), which is incredibly useful given how many of them are dubbed in Russian, and I don't think I have ever had to download something blindly just to discover it's the Russian dub. I don't usually use any other sites for western media because almost always RuTracker has it too, but including the language info in at least the description seems to be a convention on 1337x.to as well and really should be on every reasonable site.

[faust]

Basically the only part of the article that's really relevant is this ... but actually before I quote this, here's what Tim Urban says in the book

- There was this day of absence thingy
- Bret wrote the email saying it's bad
- Some time later, people gathered in front of his classroom, shouting over him and demanding his resignation
- Later that day, students met with the faculty (and he lists some slogans that were used)
- Next day, students took ... a bunch of administrators  into an office and kept them there until their demands were accepted, blocking the entrance
- Subsequently the university asked Weinstein and his wife(?) to resign

Well, it's true the the article doesn't contradict most of this directly, but the last two points here are pretty heavy allegations (the rest being nothing special). I would need to see some corroboration of that other than what Weinstein himself says. Indeed, Weinstein's resignation doesn't happen until after he sued his employer for $3.85 million dollars. If they were ever asked to resign (which again, not corroborated, though admittedly that would be hard to prove), seems to me the most likely explanation is that the college didn't want someone suing them as their staff. Otherwise the pressure to resign would have happened earlier, and probably also have been part of the suit.

[faust]

Even this right-wing biased source makes no mention of anything supporting these last two claims. The only evidence for it seems to be Weinstein's words.

[faust]

Chapter 6: How to Conquer a College (Part 1)

Earlier chapters have made an effort to portray the other side of things, not always perfectly, but it was there a lot of the time. Unfortunately, this goes completely out the window in the chapter. Urban relies on a very particular narrative and looks only at sources that support it.

There is a bunch of talk about a so-called "victimhood culture". It is claimed that microaggressions are invented to increase the victim's status. This is of course the most uncharitable reading. The charitable reading would go like this: microaggressions are a term coined to help explain to speakers how their implicit biases impact their expression in a negative way, in an effort to make them self-reflect more and thus aid them into high-rung thinking. I feel like in an earlier chapter this viewpoint would have at least been mentioned, but apparently we're past that now.

Urban discusses a case where a racist, homophobic attack was allegedly faked by some celebrity. I haven't looked into it, but I believe that such things happen. This is made out to be some new phenomenon with "literally hundreds of hate crimes hoaxes" happening all over the country (citation fucking needed). And the reason, apparently, is that victimhood increases your status. I have doubts. For probably as long as there were people around who begged for money, they have faked sickness and disability to garner sympathy. Does that imply that being sick or disabled increased your status in society?

We get a passage on how kids these days are too coddled and can't take a slight and millenials and Gen Z are too whiny, and all I can say is... Ok boomer.

We spend a signficant amount of time on how words can't hurt people, and upholding the toxic proverb "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words shall never hurt me." as some sort of gold standard for upbringing. What is violence if not infringing on other people's rights? And Urban himself has previously admitted that there are cases where speech can infringe on someone else's rights (slander and such). So from these it would follow that speech can be violence. Yet Urban dismisses that idea as completely ludicrous. The speech that he defends is always some high-rung idea lab debate even though it is very clear that microaggressions are not concerned with that at all. He never concerns himself with "should racist slurs be acceptable in the classroom" and if not, where does this line end? He pushes the idea of "concept creep", which is of course exactly the response segregationists would have used to defend themselves. "Segregation isn't violence, noone is being physically attacked, this is ridiculous concept creep." How does Urban know where concept creep ought to end?


Then continues a retelling of the story at Evergreen state relying solely on a single source, Bret Weinstein. One would think that were this such a wide-spread phenomenon, we wouldn't have to rely on an incident at some tiny liberal arts college with only a single source available. It is basic journalistic integrity to not report on an incident unless it is corroborated by two independent sources.

[silverspawn]

Well, it's true the the article doesn't contradict most of this directly, but the last two points here are pretty heavy allegations (the rest being nothing special). I would need to see some corroboration of that other than what Weinstein himself says. Indeed, Weinstein's resignation doesn't happen until after he sued his employer for $3.85 million dollars. If they were ever asked to resign (which again, not corroborated, though admittedly that would be hard to prove), seems to me the most likely explanation is that the college didn't want someone suing them as their staff. Otherwise the pressure to resign would have happened earlier, and probably also have been part of the suit.

mhh

Then continues a retelling of the story at Evergreen state relying solely on a single source, Bret Weinstein. One would think that were this such a wide-spread phenomenon, we wouldn't have to rely on an incident at some tiny liberal arts college with only a single source available. It is basic journalistic integrity to not report on an incident unless it is corroborated by two independent sources.

Well we don't; there's about 153 more   anecdotes coming