The Great SSP Canada Cancel Culture & Wokeism Thread

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Acajack

As I think you probably recognize, it would be impossible to arrive at such a consensus as the Robin DiAngelo types (just using one example) actually believe that their thing is an unassailable truth. As true as the fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.

Of course, but she is not the audience. It's the 90% of people who are not hard-liners.

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by lio45

Um... no. Elementary school math fail (I'm going to assume you were just very tired.)

1963: whites holding ~20x the wealth of nonwhites;

2016: whites holding ~10x the wealth of blacks and ~8x the wealth of Latinos.

Maybe that wasn't a very clear chart. According to this article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...ck-households/

"In 1968, a typical middle-class black household had $6,674 in wealth compared with $70,786 for the typical middle-class white household, according to data from the historical Survey of Consumer Finances that has been adjusted for inflation. In 2016, the typical middle-class black household had $13,024 in wealth versus $149,703 for the median white household, an even larger gap in percentage terms."

The wealth gap has ebbed and flowed a bit, but the general trajectory is that it's stagnated or increased:

Originally Posted by someone123

I wonder how many well-intentioned public initiatives have fed into this disparity instead of fixing it. I'd guess that housing is a big part of this for example but if you're in traditional public housing or a rent-controlled apartment you're not building wealth from the money you spend on housing.

As you say the glass ceiling has been removed at least for a few elites but that doesn't do much good for average people.

I don't have the statistics but some periods in the 20th century were very good for black earnings, educational attainment, etc. They were not periods that were marked by exquisitely tuned anti-racism detectors. And there have been a lot of minorities who moved to North America and climbed the ladder despite lots of discrimination (Jews, Asians). This doesn't mean that discrimination is good but there just isn't a lot of evidence that it's the one thing holding particular groups back in any semi-modern era in North America.

To be clear, I'm not blaming racism as the direct cause for why black wealth has not kept pace with white wealth. The bigger problem has been the sort of neoliberal economics that have hallowed the middle class and grown wealth inequality in general.

Being that black Americans were generally starting from a lower point than white Americans, they haven't been able to reap the rewards to the same extent. A more equitable economic system would equally benefit working and middle class people of all races though (which would subsequently start to close the wealth gaps).

[milomilo]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

To be clear, I'm not blaming racism as the cause for why black wealth has not kept pace with white wealth. The problem is neoliberal economics that have hallowed the middle class and expanded wealth inequality in general.

It's not really neoliberal economics, it's just economics. Just math really. Inequality has been around long before "neoliberal economics". I don't think the economic ideology prior to neoliberalism was more redistributive than today either.

Otherwise I agree though. The poor got richer slower than the rich got richer, and blacks were more poor back then so they are even poorer (relatively) now. It's just math and economics. But trying to explain to a pink haired SJW that the solution to systemic racism is a better structured tax system conjured up by evil economists is anathema. It'll take generations to fix as well, well beyond the attention spans of an emotional voter.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by milomilo

Uh, it looks like it's per family, so the fact it gets split into black and hispanic later doesn't matter - you can't add the black + hispanic to make the math work.

Of course not! You're insulting me

From his data, plain as day:

Median family wealth:

1963: whites $47,655, nonwhites $2,467.

2016: whites $171,000, blacks $17,409.

(or alternatively, 2016: whites $171,000, hispanics $20,920.)

[lio45]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

Maybe that wasn't a very clear chart.

It was extremely clear. Unless it's fake data, your chart very clearly says that in 1963 the median white family had 20x the wealth of the median nonwhite family (most of those back then black, I'd guess), and half a century later in 2016 that gap has now shrunk to the median white family only having 10x the wealth of the median black family.

(And then, after posting that clear chart, you said in your post that you thought it showed the opposite, for some reason.)

[lio45]

Originally Posted by milomilo

I'm not surprised, it shouldn't be surprising and it's not because of racism, which I think is the point. White families were richer back then, and the gains of economic growth have gone disproportionally to the wealthy, so the families that were rich then are even more rich now.

Well then you should be surprised, because the gap has shrunk to half of what it was.

The median white family only went in wealth from ~$50k to ~$170k (so, less than 4x) while the median black family increased their wealth by a factor of ~7x and the median hispanic family multiplied it by ~8.

(I'm not surprised the gap has shrunk; blacks have a lot more opportunities relative to whites now.)

I think the reason it doesn't show what you said is that the wealthy you're speaking of who are disproportionally hugging the gains are such a small share of the general population that they're not affecting the median family that much. The median family almost certainly lost a lot of ground (relatively speaking) compared to the 1%. The gap between the 1963 1% and the 1963 median family (whether white or black) was almost certainly smaller than the gap between the 2016 1% and the 2016 median family (whether white or black).

That's the effect you were expecting, it's just that it's reserved to the really wealthy.

[milomilo]

Originally Posted by lio45

Of course not! You're insulting me

From his data, plain as day:

Median family wealth:

1963: whites $47,655, nonwhites $2,467.

2016: whites $171,000, blacks $17,409.

(or alternatively, 2016: whites $171,000, hispanics $20,920.)

Ah, I see, the headline numbers are based on the 1983 values, not 1963 which is indeed worse than today. So it looks like the wealth gap narrowed 63-83, but has widened since 83.

Which coincides well with economic data on inequality, it got better after the war, then started getting worse again will continue to go in the wrong direction near indefinitely without policy to arrest it.

[milomilo]

Originally Posted by lio45

Well then you should be surprised, because the gap has shrunk to half of what it was.

The gap is increasing since the middle of the time period, using the numbers given.

[someone123]

I think relative terms make sense here.

Consider:

Median member of group A has $0 in 2000
Median member of group B has $100,000 in 2000

Median member of group A has $1,000,000 in 2020 (+$1,000,000)
Median member of group B has $1,100,001 in 2020 (+$1,000,001)

Progress or backward slide?

(I'd still say it's depressingly slow progress in wealth generation for the comparatively poor minorities given their low starting wealth.)

[lio45]

MonkeyRonin's first article has the median white family wealth at $171,000 in 2016 and the median black family wealth at $17,409 in 2016, and MonkeyRonin's second article has the median white family wealth at $149,703 in 2016 and the median black family wealth at $13,024 in 2016.

Whether or not the wealth gap has increased or shrunk in the last few decades is contained within the error bars on those numbers......

[lio45]

Originally Posted by milomilo

Ah, I see, the headline numbers are based on the 1983 values, not 1963 which is indeed worse than today. So it looks like the wealth gap narrowed 63-83, but has widened since 83.

I didn't notice the headline numbers, just what MonkeyRonin said (that the gap had widened since 1960).

1960-today, I'd guess the gap has greatly shrunk. Blacks in 1960 had extremely limited opportunities. They may still have less opportunities today but the relative opportunity gap is much smaller, and I expect wealth to reflect that fact.

From points after the Civil Rights movement, to today, I would guess the gap has remained roughly the same. Some factors favor the already wealthy, other factors favor the less wealthy (easier to make relative gains when you have very little), I'd approximate the overall effect would be a wash.

(I'm genuinely trying to determine what my opinion would have been, without cheating. )

[p_xavier]

There's a reason why I'm all for succession taxes (I know they don't work well if only one country implements them).

[kool maudit]

In a functioning system, values exist in tension with other values. For instance, we all value the safety of children, but we also recognize that children need to have experiences and live in the world. So while people may argue about unsupervised swimming or road hockey, nobody can gain much ground by saying that all children must be kept in cribs until puberty, because it is understood to violate the second value that holds safety in tension.

Decaying systems, or maybe just systems in rapid flux, create situations where values are not held in tension, and so they permit absurdities and reward claims that would be very difficult to actually live out.

If the value of child safety was suddenly deemed completely under-observed, or if the claim that children need to live life and have experiences was characterised as a bad-faith claim by people who really want children to be injured and die, all sorts of weird books and pedagogical ideas would come out; you'd have people claiming that children should be packed in styrofoam peanuts or restrained in safe rooms until the age of majority. If you could profit or advance in your field by such claims, you'd start to see people finding new ways to pack away children, people advocating induced medical comas and other things that would alienate people, but would advance nonetheless because the alienated peoples' secret value of lived experience would have been deprecated to near-worthlessness.

Social justice stripped of its natural socialist context looks a bit like this, because the tension isn't where we might think it is. The tension doesn't exist between policies to benefit minorities and our need to all live in the multicultural society we share. It exists between late-capitalist austerity and the rhetoric used to morally launder its various regimes, and explain away their shortcomings. So it's inverted in the sense that, the more untenable the inequalities and hierarchies of the system become, the more extreme the rhetoric used to counterbalance this must be. It structurally favours high-tension conditions.

I think a lot of things become distorted and stretched and alienating in regimes that need to change but will not.

[kool maudit]

Let's look at a recent example of a "woke" culture-fragment whose absurdity shows its structural roots.

On January 30, the San Francisco Chronicle published an op-ed alleging that Bernie Sanders' now-famous inauguration mittens represented "a lesson for S.F. high school students in subtle white privilege".

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/...e-15909700.php

It is not nothing to have an op-ed published in the Chronicle, which is a 155-year old paper serving as the only major daily in the world's richest city.

Whatever the actual beliefs of the writer, it is a stretch to characterize the homespun mittens worn by a 79-year old Jewish socialist as somehow implicated in the unjust system that "white privilege" brings to mind.

It's not important whether this can rhetorically be done; writers can do all sorts of things. But why was it "platformed" by the Chronicle?

it's fairly obvious: the victory of the liberal Biden over the socialist Sanders created a degree of static on the economic left, particularly in the context of still-undelivered stimulus cheques etc.

Scribes are any regime's first line of defence, so if you can find one that will join a still-beloved political rival whose base lies inside the party to a stigmatized and counter-regime ideology, you do it. It really doesn't matter how many people laugh, because a few won't. The thought is now out there.

So again, it doesn't matter if the writer of this op-ed is a "snowflake", or whether she is misguided or fanatical or whatever. The piece did not become visible to us because a lot of people are talking about Bernie's racist mittens. It became visible to us because it is tiny little piece of a broad effort to morally launder liberalism at the expense of socialism.

The piece is absurd because its goal was improbable. It had to be overstretched to cover the ground it needed to cover. Whether the writer is actually a fanatic doesn't matter, because that's not why we saw her words.

A lot of things are like this.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by lio45

I didn't notice the headline numbers, just what MonkeyRonin said (that the gap had widened since 1960).

1960-today, I'd guess the gap has greatly shrunk. Blacks in 1960 had extremely limited opportunities. They may still have less opportunities today but the relative opportunity gap is much smaller, and I expect wealth to reflect that fact.

From points after the Civil Rights movement, to today, I would guess the gap has remained roughly the same. Some factors favor the already wealthy, other factors favor the less wealthy (easier to make relative gains when you have very little), I'd approximate the overall effect would be a wash.

(I'm genuinely trying to determine what my opinion would have been, without cheating. )

It seems like a variation on the old line "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer".

I'd say the rich get a lot richer, faster. And the poor get a bit richer (or at least a less poor), more slowly.

The US has never been and is still not very good at helping its poorest elements rise out of poverty. Across all races in fact.

Instead of broad stats that are skewed by how already rich people like the Kennedys grew their wealth from the 1960s to today, it would be interesting to see stats on where the descendants of dirt poor families from the 1960s (whether white, black or hispanic) are today in terms of wealth.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by someone123

Of course, but she is not the audience. It's the 90% of people who are not hard-liners.

I don't want to over-dramatize, but the share of the audience that would agree with her is growing extremely rapidly at the moment.

At best or worst (depending on your point of view) the masses tend to be sitting idly by while all of this unfurls.

That means they either passively agree or don't care.

Either way, it doesn't make for very good odds for your "proposal".

It doesn't take millions of people to spark a revolution.

It just takes a surprisingly small but determined group coupled with the indifference or passive support of the masses.

In western societies today, the determined "woke" side arguably has a greater share of mobilized critical mass than most of the major revolutions that have marked human history in the past few centuries.

(I'd argue that at least in the U.S., the far right also has a comparable critical mass.)

[wave46]

Originally Posted by Acajack

I don't want to over-dramatize, but the share of the audience that would agree with her is growing extremely rapidly at the moment.

At best or worst (depending on your point of view) the masses tend to be sitting idly by while all of this unfurls.

That means they either passively agree or don't care.

Either way, it doesn't make for very good odds for your "proposal".

It doesn't take millions of people to spark a revolution.

It just takes a surprisingly small but determined group coupled with the indifference or passive support of the masses.

In western societies today, the determined "woke" side arguably has a greater share of mobilized critical mass than most of the major revolutions that have marked human history in the past few centuries.

(I'd argue that at least in the U.S., the far right also has a comparable critical mass.)

Is it true though? Are there really that many "woke" people ready to actually storm the Bastille? Or is it mostly noise and fury (er, Tweets and angst) signifying nothing?

The alt-right arguably came closer with its Stupid Coup. Even then, it folded like a sheet under minimal pressure.

It is fun to watch the elite play each side like fiddles. They're not dumb - they know how the game is played. Bonus: if you can get the idiots fighting each other, you walk away with their wallets. Why does one think Trump's signature policy was a big tax cut for corporations and the upper class?

One might think that getting all the poor people on the same side might actually accomplish something.

Maybe that's why Canada has that residual socialist side. We exported most of our extreme elites to the rest of the world. The extreme ends of the power structure that naturally opposes these things are weaker here. The divisions in this country aren't conducive to pitting poor against poor.

[jamincan]

It can often be useful to examine things with certain glasses on - a feminist critique of a movie, for example. The author of that piece is looking at the inauguration and looking for white privilege, and, not-entirely shockingly finds it. Bernie is a white man, after all.

The problem, I think, is that it is often too easy to think that the picture that these critiques paint is also the reality. Slapping an infra-red filter on a camera allows you to see things you might have otherwise missed, but it also obscures a lot of information as well. A critical look at privilege is useful, but it has to be understood that it is a necessarily limited picture.

As for Bernie's mittens, I think the author of that article missed the mark. Critically, they strip away all the context of who he is in order to advance their argument that this is white privilege. But 'the medium is the message': Bernie dressing that way does not communicate the same message as if, say, Ted Cruz showed up to inauguration dressed like he was taking his dog out for a walk on a Saturday morning. Enforcing a dress-code like this has actually mostly been a way to enforce class hierarchies and Bernie not-conforming to that is simultaneously a reflection of his privileged position as a senator, but also not reinforcing a standard that is fundamentally about cementing privilege. It is not necessarily a contradiction to accuse Bernie of white privilege for not conforming to a standard that is rooted in class privilege, but it certainly misses the forest for the trees.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by kool maudit

Let's look at a recent example of a "woke" culture-fragment whose absurdity shows its structural roots.

On January 30, the San Francisco Chronicle published an op-ed alleging that Bernie Sanders' now-famous inauguration mittens represented "a lesson for S.F. high school students in subtle white privilege".

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/...e-15909700.php

It is not nothing to have an op-ed published in the Chronicle, which is a 155-year old paper serving as the only major daily in the world's richest city.

Whatever the actual beliefs of the writer, it is a stretch to characterize the homespun mittens worn by a 79-year old Jewish socialist as somehow implicated in the unjust system that "white privilege" brings to mind.

It's not important whether this can rhetorically be done; writers can do all sorts of things. But why was it "platformed" by the Chronicle?

it's fairly obvious: the victory of the liberal Biden over the socialist Sanders created a degree of static on the economic left, particularly in the context of still-undelivered stimulus cheques etc.

Scribes are any regime's first line of defence, so if you can find one that will join a still-beloved political rival whose base lies inside the party to a stigmatized and counter-regime ideology, you do it. It really doesn't matter how many people laugh, because a few won't. The thought is now out there.

So again, it doesn't matter if the writer of this op-ed is a "snowflake", or whether she is misguided or fanatical or whatever. The piece did not become visible to us because a lot of people are talking about Bernie's racist mittens. It became visible to us because it is tiny little piece of a broad effort to morally launder liberalism at the expense of socialism.

The piece is absurd because its goal was improbable. It had to be overstretched to cover the ground it needed to cover. Whether the writer is actually a fanatic doesn't matter, because that's not why we saw her words.

A lot of things are like this.

The overall "push" is extremely obvious to anyone who does a decent scan of the daily news right now.

I don't happen to think it's part of a concerted effort, but the gain in traction is obvious.

Could these simply be ideas whose time has come? (As Victor Hugo said, they're more powerful than all the armies of the world combined.)

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by Acajack

The overall "push" is extremely obvious to anyone who does a decent scan of the daily news right now.

I don't happen to think it's part of a concerted effort, but the gain in traction is obvious.

Could these simply be ideas whose time has come? (As Victor Hugo said, they're more powerful than all the armies of the world combined.)

The article is mostly a disingenuous appropriate of woke rhetoric intended to undermine an opposition figure on the even-futher-left. A sort of attempt to beat them at their own game. Accusations of "Racist Bernie Bros" has become a bit of a trope from establishment Democrats at this point - I don't think it's so much that they genuinely think they're racist though as it is that they think they can "win" by calling them the racists.

Which, in a way speaks to the traction that argument has right now. But in another, speaks to it having reached its logical breaking point. Whenever everyone just accuses everyone else they disagree with of being racist, it ceases to be an effective rhetorical device.