After scanning the comments I posted this comment:
Interesting that so many in the CRT apologists in the comments are calling this man an outlier. NOW they want statistics. They want real statistics only when it is convenient to their ideology. You don't hear the CRT apologists clamoring for statistical evidence when Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi are spreading their poison in full stride.
The false story about the motives of the Pulse Nightclub murderer is alive and well, despite indisputable evidence that he was attempting to kill people, not LGBT people. Legacy media and politicians cling to the false narrative and we simply must assume (at this point) that they know that their story is false. However, their false story is powerful. It serves as effective cheap signaling and it moves people to anger, including people who should know better. The Pulse story is merely one example of a common phenomenon today. The story itself serves as the foundation for a "truth," upon which cherry-picked factoids, most of them easily disproved, make everyone in one's tribe feel the righteous anger. Again, Pulse is one example of many. We could substitute dozens of commonly exchanged "truths" for Pulse. That is what much too often serves as "news" in the year 2021. Glenn Greenwald elaborates.
Whatever Mateen's motives were, the horror and tragedy of the extinguishing of forty-nine innocent lives at PULSE on June 12, 2016, remains the same. But this enduring falsehood — which continues to deceive many well-meaning people through this very day, long past the point that it has been definitively debunked — is damaging for so many reasons.
Lying about what happened dishonors Mateen's victims. It harms the cause of LGBT equality, which does not need lies and fabrications to be a just movement. It obscures how often U.S. violence in the Muslim world causes "blowback” — to use the CIA's term — by motivating others to bring violence to the U.S. as retaliation and deterrence for violence against innocent Muslims. And a major reason for the completely unjust prosecution of Noor Salman was to appease understandable demands within the Orlando LGBT community for someone to be punished, but mob justice rarely produces anything benevolent.
No matter how noble the intent, journalism — and activism — becomes corrupted if it knowingly supports falsehoods. That the PULSE massacre was an act of anti-LGBT hatred is a fiction. Unless you are a neocon, there is no such thing as a "noble lie.” It is way past time for politicians and activist groups to stop disseminating this one.
Seeing that this completely false story still has legs (referring to the murderer's motives, not the murders themselves which certainly happened), I am reminded of Daniel Kahneman's discussion of the power of narratives in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman indicates that we crave consistency in our explanations, not completeness, and this craving leads to overconfidence. We are profligate generators of flimsy explanations and we are "rarely stumped." As a result, poor evidence can make a great story (p. 209). Also, we often believe primarily because our friends believe. Our confidence in our beliefs are preposterous but necessary given our limited cognitive horsepower. That said, once we have our story down pat, it becomes easy to repeat and our confidence in telling that story grows, even if untrue. Confidence results from cognitive ease and coherence, but confidence does not equal truth (p. 238).
I recommend this high-energy thoughtful and challenging conversation between Jordan Peterson and Bari Weiss. Do I need to say that I don't agree with everything mentioned during this long conversation? These days, apparently so. There is so much that is honest and good about this open-ended exchange, where these two strong personalities challenge each other and (contrary to the current U.S. zeitgeist) appreciate each other for these challenges.
Here is one of my favorite parts. Those who are steeped in Wokeness so often want to tear everything down, every aspect of the system, all institutions, assuming that there is something good on the other side that will simply organically bloom. This approach is reminding me of fundamentalist libertarianism and fundamentalist conservatives: many of whom believe that great things will simply happen if we just get government out of the way. As though our institutions, which we have crafted over decades and centuries, are not doing Herculaneum work to (imperfectly) set up curbs and guard rails to give us necessary structure to allow human flourishing. I see our (imperfect and always evolving) institutions much like I see traffic laws. Sometimes these institutions seem arbitrary, but they serve to allow people to interact with each other, often in helpful ways that is captured by the definition of "institution" offered by economist Doug North: “humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction." For North, Institutions not bounded by brick and mortar (or by particular people), but by two kinds of constraints: formal and informal. Together, these constraints comprise what John Drobak and North call “the rules of the game.”
We need a set of basic laws in order to move to the next step, to better things, sometimes to almost-magic seeming levels of complexity. Institutions allow this, but destroyed institutions invite (actually, demand) socio-economic collapse. Society's basic rules (promulgated through our institutions) also remind me of the axioms of geometry. Why assume the truth of axioms? Because if you don't, we can't do geometry!
The tear-it down Woke mentality does not offer any meaningful vision of what is on the other side of tearing it down. There is no real-work path being offered to get from the chaos they preach to anything worth having. These youngsters, many of them from a coddled generation, offer no specifics, only cheap-signaling promises that things will somehow be better. For background on this rather sharp accusation of "coddling," see here, here, here, here and here. Today's young adults have not suffered like many people from prior generations who have seen social-economic collapse. They haven't suffered like many first generation immigrants to the U.S., most of whom are not buying Woke ideology, not for one second. The empty of promises of Woke ideologists remind me of the promises of religious fundamentalists who promise "heaven. The realist in me fills in these empty promises of Woke advocates with things like CHAZ/CHOP (see here, for example) and Evergreen State College. Until I see specifics that convince me otherwise, these two things exemplify the Woke end game.
That is the context for the following excerpt. I have edited only for false starts and to tidy up. The content has not been changed:
Jordan Peterson
There is a concern for the dispossessed, and that's what gives the radicals the moral high ground so often. "We're concerned for the dispossessed, aren't you?" It's like, "Well, yes, as a matter of fact, we are." The wielders of these ideas start out with a moral advantage, but the evidence seems to suggest that the very systems they're attempting to tear down are, in fact, the best antidote to the problems that they're laying out. So then the question pops up again: So if that's the case, why the hell is there so much force behind these ideas? What's driving them? And it's associated with that laughter at the thought of violent bloody revolution,
Bari Weiss
Because we're so removed from violent bloody revolution. That's why. It's a luxury to flirt with these ideas. Let's just take an example, I'm not wearing long sleeves. You could see my collarbone, I could walk down the street here with my wife and go get a falafel at the end of the street and not be stoned to death. Okay, that's the reality. That's a miracle.
Jordan Peterson
That is that's what divides people is whether or not they know that's a miracle.
Bari Weiss
Yes. And if you are so removed from the truth of that miracle, and from gratitude for everyone and every idea, every piece of scaffolding that allows for that to be that my reality, then you will have the foolishness. But it's really the luxury in the decadence to flirt with ideas about doing away with it. I am so curious about why certain people feel in their bones, how thin the veneer of civilization is and why other people are so nonchalant about it. I feel like it's a logical question, but I don't know it.
v
Jordan Peterson
I don't know either. When I was in graduate school, I was obsessed with the finitude of life and with mortality and death. I mean, I wake up every morning and think there's no time. Get to it now! I had friends who I would say were more well-adjusted than me. That's certainly part of it. Like they were more emotionally stable, technically speaking, less prone to depression and anxiety. So that's part of that. It was that those ideas never entered the theater of their imagination. Right? They just weren't a set of existential problems for them. For me, it's always been Paramount.
Steven Pinker coined the term Progressophobia as "hostility to the idea of progress and a fondness for narratives of decline, decadence, degeneration, and doom. As I say in the chapter, “Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves progressive really hate progress." Bill Maher delivers the evidence.
This will put me in a sour mood tonight, as I work on my taxes. The 25 richest people in the U.S. paid an effective tax rate of only 3.4% from 2014-2018. Krystal and Saager discuss this "phenomenal" reporting by Propublica (based on a "immense" secret trove of never-before-seen IRS records). They mention that the highest U.S. tax rate is officially 37%, for those making more than 628,000. My next stop will be Propublica to better understand how the super rich avoid paying taxes. Meanwhile, the median income U.S. household, often living paycheck to paycheck, pays an effective income tax rate of 14%. I assumed something like this, but these numbers are outrageous. This is stealing in broad daylight. This shouts: "Let them eat cake."
Here is a quote from Propublica that will be deflating for those who think that the Biden plan will be transformative regarding the tax burden on the wealthy:
The revelations provided by the IRS data come at a crucial moment. Wealth inequality has become one of the defining issues of our age. The president and Congress are considering the most ambitious tax increases in decades on those with high incomes. But the American tax conversation has been dominated by debate over incremental changes, such as whether the top tax rate should be 39.6% rather than 37%.
ProPublica’s data shows that while some wealthy Americans, such as hedge fund managers, would pay more taxes under the current Biden administration proposals, the vast majority of the top 25 would see little change.
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