> I think that it’s possible to meaningfully resist what the Trump administration is trying to do while at the same time taking steps to promote intellectual diversity on campus.
I would go further, and say that this is a crucial part of the resistance against Trump.
Never forget that Trump won a democratic election twice. Never with a majority, but certainly with a very large base of support, a base that only got stronger the second (third) time. It isn't just that many are bamboozled by his lies and the huge media ecosystem propping them up. It's also that they are actively repulsed by progressives' behavior. As long as there is democracy, it is necessary to win elections back from the authoritarians, and to do that it is necessary to stop repulsing swing voters, and in order to do that you have to listen when voters talk about the things they dislike, and take action to help them push back against those things (to the extent we can agree with them).
Whenever you have a choice between siding with swing voters or progressives, ask yourself: do you want to defeat the authoritarians or not? Right now everything Democrats say should be calibrated to winning elections.
Trump is "easy mode authoritarianism". His competence is low, he's a convicted felon, his personality is annoying even to many people who voted for him, he lies constantly just because he's incapable of keeping track of very many facts, etc. For Democrats to lose twice against that is astonishing. Every serious person has to be looking in the mirror, trying to figure out what they and their community did wrong to provoke people to vote for *that*.
"I think there is a very unhealthy left that makes resistance to the toxic right harder." I agree with this. Sadly, the truth is, the left could go to great lengths to soften its arch-progressive rhetoric and ideology, and it still wouldn't placate the right. Dogmatic undergrads waving copies of Edward Said didn’t cause the MAGA-led attack on academia — they merely provided an easy pretext for MAGA to justify, cynically, the fascist repression of speech and inquiry that they were going to pursue anyway. (I believe this point comes up later in the post.)
As always, accountability in this world is asymmetric. The left are expected to reform their worst elements, avoid even the slightest of overreaches, and be the adults in the room. The right, by contrast, is held to the lowest possible standard, where it's considered a "win" if they merely don't set all our institutions and democratic norms ablaze every few years.
Another thing: educated people are naturally handicapped in politics because they don't have the "man on the street perspective". When your head is full of facts, you are unable to see the simple appeal of advertisements and editorials that are full of misrepresentations and logical fallacies.
Good people who want to win an election have to work harder because they have to see from multiple perspectives at once: from the perspective of fact, reason and kindness, but also from the perspective of an uneducated, apathetic person who has previously nodded along to a lot of bad propaganda in their environment. I think Trump won twice, almost effortlessly, because he *IS* that second person. Better candidates never have that luxury.
I agree that’s a big reason Trump won. But historically, virtually every modern president has been an educated elite. The good candidates can find ways to connect with voters across the political and class spectrum, even the candidates with prestigious degrees and elite professional backgrounds. Perhaps social media is changing that, but not sure we can say definitively.
> The right, by contrast, is held to the lowest possible standard, where it's considered a "win" if they merely don't set all our institutions and democratic norms ablaze every few years.
Held by whom? It's wise to use active voice so that you keep track of who you are talking about. The right holds themselves to low standards, and it works for them. Empirically speaking, when the left also holds itself to low standards, they lose elections. Therefore, the left must have higher standards. It's not fair, but it's true. The correct response is to roll up your sleeves and get to work.
I think the basic problem is that the average man on the street doesn't even have enough competence to design an institution or an electoral system or a city development plan, let alone all three, and yet as voters they're asked to figure out who should do such tasks. And then we tell them "get out and vote" but not "get on the internet, study the candidates intently, sharpen your BS detectors, and sign up to vote for the best candidate in the primary who can plausibly win under the awful constraints of our first-past-the-post systems".
Authoritarians have learned to thrive in this environment, supercharged by social media; liberals aren't figuring it out, and need to learn.
I understand and share Rushdie’s revulsion towards religion and Islam. I do think the ideology of jihadism shapes Hamas's attacks on Israel, even as the realities of occupation, blockade, and serial bombardment make some form of violent resistance likely - just as the ideology of Jabotinskyism informs how Israeli state violence manifests. The role of religion is important and bidirectional but also overrated. Vietcong bombed cafes, schools, etc to resist U.S. occupation, were called a death cult. Zionist militias like the Irgun pre-Israel bombed marketplaces, the King David Hotel, etc — were called terrorists. The issue wasn’t religion —the tactics ended once statehood was realized. There is definitely a weird Islamo-leftism where leftists r too sensitive to Islam but Rushdie is injecting it to describe leftist sympathy for a cause that is easily explained by other factors. I don’t understand why Rushdie can’t be criticized for reading too much of his own experience into a conflict, just the way Ta Na Heisi Coates was?
I’m all for DEI for conservatives. I think one uncomfortable thing is, that dare I say, libs just have higher IQ and/or more interest in academic pursuits. Based merely on merit, we would have more leftists/libs in academia. But for health of nation/society, sure let’s do DEI for conservatives. But let’s be honest that’s what we are doing.
Second, the hate towards Yglesias is because he’s a troll and he picks fights with leftists. He isn’t extreme ideologically he just likes to fight with leftists for fun. It’s mutual.
Your making it way more complex and confusing than necessary. Liberal? Centrist? Conservative? Red herrings. Simply ask "is this person here debating in good faith? Yes? Excellent. Your seat at the table is reserved. Is this person here debating in bad faith? Your seat at this grand debate is forfeit, bye bye. Regardless of political leanings or party affiliation.
Mayhaps a refresher for spotting bad faith arguments is in order here. Or how to detect you've been/are being/are about to be hoodwinked. Protip, the individual who proclaims themselves unbiased or states they could never be unknowingly manipulated by someone else, is the easiest to manipulate person in the room.
Now there also exists an in between category. I call it variable, or quasi good faith arguments. This is a byproduct of mid 2010s Twitter algorithm falling in love with feigned superficial conflict and rewarding posters who could constantly stir up low levels of background shit. A number of centrists discovered financial success via soft offending various subcommunities as long as they rotated targets frequently. The algorithm orgasmed with all the engagement and rewarded them in turn. People don't hate matty y. People know Matty does occasionally engage in good faith. But its the exception. He quasi engages on levels that wildly vary article to article. The AI that trained him to do this collapsed, but he hasn't adjusted.
People would just rather not bother engaging with someone who only legitimately shows up 20% of time. He isn't hated. A growing number of people discovered the benefits of simply ignoring him. Will we get legit debate from matty this week? Its been so long but we know hes capable so we must maintain hope! Will he drop a hint at conflict via an accidental omission of an important party to said debate? Or do we get the full blown 72 hours no sleep/loose association/symbolic logic troll take this time. Its like that coworker who can't function if not surrounded by orbiting clouds of interpersonal chaos. Not worth the effort. If they can be avoided, we all avoid them.
Like Nate Silver is a smart dude. He could communicate effectively in a number of ways. But he chooses to intentionally craft internally inconsistent sentences and his prose vibrates on a quantum field one level above and below standard logic, unable to commit to anything. Perpetually teasing the collapse of the wave function. Maybe. Depends. It creates a subtle sense of misunderstanding in the reader. Let me reread that, I must have completely missed his point. Nope. It got you to further "engage" which was its purpose. Effectively communicating a point was never the goal. Not an overt bad faith argument, but not a good faith attempt either. That persons seat at the debate table should be on a timer. Show up again in less than good faith....seat revoked. No hate. We just have a line of applicants who can do better than you half assing this mission of ours. Bye bye.
Its a gimmick. He too has failed to overcome his old algorithm behavior patterns. He will never join bluesky. Not because he knows he will be hated. He knows that he will simply be ignored. People are typically pretty good at spotting consistent behavioral artifice, and will quickly simply disengage if allowed. A fate much worse than hate.
Hardcore MAGA, Marxist, Absolute divine right advocates. Anarcho-syndicalists. Those dudes in Evangelion who want to cast off all individuality and merge our collective unconscious into a divine singularity while our physical bodies burst into tang.....if they all show up with and engage in good faith, they are welcome here and I look forward to listening to what they have to say.
You show up in and engage in bad faith....your done. Quality of your opinions aren't the issue. The quality of you is the issue. We recommend you solve you first and upon proof of good faith engagement you may be reinvited. Proof via your actions. Not words.
While I don't like how Matt Y engages with Twitter, I think his Slow Boring posts are 100% good faith. Can you give an example of an article that you think isn't?
My guess about Nate Silver is that he's devoted to not offending the right wing, so that they don't view him as an enemy, thus keeping them in his audience. (Matt OTOH is a devoted Moderate Democrat, so speaks more freely.) And then there's Scott Alexander, who also avoids offending the right (mainly by limiting direct political advocacy) but went out on a limb to endorse Not Trump.
Belvedere: “…scholarly pursuits shouldn’t be inhibited by the government.” Young: “Right”…government shouldn’t…”come in and put its thumb on the scale.” Clearly, the Biden administration did just that with EO 13985 and Equity Action Plans across many federal agencies, including the Department of Education. The Biden DOE OCR sent their own Dear Colleague letters with explicit policy guidance and investigated complaints & worked with institutions to resolve complaints. Don’t like what the Trump administration is doing but the previous administration, as well as the Obama administration, had their thumb on the scale as well.
This is obvious false equivalency. What Biden did may not have been justified. What Trump is doing is on another plane: spontaneously threatening to cancel billions in funding, restricting a university's ability to enroll foreign students, demanding direct control over entire academic departments, programmatically undermining scientific research, arresting a student for penning an op-ed critical of Israel, etc. In 2021, JD Vance, the guy now first in line to the presidency, literally called universities "the enemy." The Biden White House never came close to expressing or acting on such rhetoric, which is more reminiscent of Stalin or Hitler than American democracy.
Somewhere between inequality and iniquity, we get the tendentious (and pejorative) notion of "inequity" -- as if it's self-evident (and indisputable) that all outcomes (among arbitrarily-defined groups) must be the same. Furthermore, the ILLIBERAL leftist will periodically interject, "Right?," while steamrollering along with such rhetoric -- excluding (or relegating to disruption) any attempt to say, "No, that's NOT right!"
As "No black America, no white America" (which many voters took at face value) morphed into a focus on "Black lives" (rather than merely on police brutality), those voters began to detect the more-than-faint whiff of a bait-and-switch.
There was no statewide "bathroom bill" in North Carolina until the City of Charlotte took it upon itself to declare "gender identity" a sacrosanct (legally protected) human attribute, explicitly elevating it above biological sex. Soon enough, those aforementioned voters were being branded with un-chosen and unwanted identities like "Latinx" and (even among gay people) as "cis" -- in a world of "female" penises and pregnant "men."
Time after time, we've seen a shift from a liberal recognition of "self-determination" as an individual right (of personal freedom and "live and let live") -- to a "progressive" politics bent on redressing the purported grievances of "historically marginalized" groups.
This is a recurring pattern -- and it needs to stop! Recognizing the need for (and the importance of) such a "reckoning" in no way excuses -- and is ultimately crucial to undermining and disabling -- the truly anti-democratic predations and bald-faced lies of a Donald Trump.
For me, this was a worthwhile intro to a push for expanding ideas we can consider in universities and beyond. I am not Jewish, but Google AI tells me that "Jewish individuals constitute approximately 0.2% of the world's population. However, they account for roughly 22% of all Nobel laureates between 1901 and 2023, according to Wikipedia. " I imagine this is controversial. I know we must say "environment", not "genetics".
I'm sorry, but I do not understand your point. (My initial feeling is that there are many things that would seem to be beyond the control of the individual.)
That depends on what one means by "the control of the individual." I grew up in a (Jewish) household that placed a high value on learning. Is that "environment" or "heredity" (or a composite of both)? In the end, it was still up to me (i.e., a matter of defining myself as an individual) to determine whether or not I loved to read, or to do math (or for that matter, whether I did my homework).
FWIW, I basically agree with your initial comment :-)
I see it as both environment and heredity. Yes. The agency part- We do like to feel like we have agency- choices. I'm going to say that is above my pay grade. Thanks for the discussion. :)
> I think that it’s possible to meaningfully resist what the Trump administration is trying to do while at the same time taking steps to promote intellectual diversity on campus.
I would go further, and say that this is a crucial part of the resistance against Trump.
Never forget that Trump won a democratic election twice. Never with a majority, but certainly with a very large base of support, a base that only got stronger the second (third) time. It isn't just that many are bamboozled by his lies and the huge media ecosystem propping them up. It's also that they are actively repulsed by progressives' behavior. As long as there is democracy, it is necessary to win elections back from the authoritarians, and to do that it is necessary to stop repulsing swing voters, and in order to do that you have to listen when voters talk about the things they dislike, and take action to help them push back against those things (to the extent we can agree with them).
Whenever you have a choice between siding with swing voters or progressives, ask yourself: do you want to defeat the authoritarians or not? Right now everything Democrats say should be calibrated to winning elections.
Trump is "easy mode authoritarianism". His competence is low, he's a convicted felon, his personality is annoying even to many people who voted for him, he lies constantly just because he's incapable of keeping track of very many facts, etc. For Democrats to lose twice against that is astonishing. Every serious person has to be looking in the mirror, trying to figure out what they and their community did wrong to provoke people to vote for *that*.
"I think there is a very unhealthy left that makes resistance to the toxic right harder." I agree with this. Sadly, the truth is, the left could go to great lengths to soften its arch-progressive rhetoric and ideology, and it still wouldn't placate the right. Dogmatic undergrads waving copies of Edward Said didn’t cause the MAGA-led attack on academia — they merely provided an easy pretext for MAGA to justify, cynically, the fascist repression of speech and inquiry that they were going to pursue anyway. (I believe this point comes up later in the post.)
As always, accountability in this world is asymmetric. The left are expected to reform their worst elements, avoid even the slightest of overreaches, and be the adults in the room. The right, by contrast, is held to the lowest possible standard, where it's considered a "win" if they merely don't set all our institutions and democratic norms ablaze every few years.
Another thing: educated people are naturally handicapped in politics because they don't have the "man on the street perspective". When your head is full of facts, you are unable to see the simple appeal of advertisements and editorials that are full of misrepresentations and logical fallacies.
Good people who want to win an election have to work harder because they have to see from multiple perspectives at once: from the perspective of fact, reason and kindness, but also from the perspective of an uneducated, apathetic person who has previously nodded along to a lot of bad propaganda in their environment. I think Trump won twice, almost effortlessly, because he *IS* that second person. Better candidates never have that luxury.
I agree that’s a big reason Trump won. But historically, virtually every modern president has been an educated elite. The good candidates can find ways to connect with voters across the political and class spectrum, even the candidates with prestigious degrees and elite professional backgrounds. Perhaps social media is changing that, but not sure we can say definitively.
> The right, by contrast, is held to the lowest possible standard, where it's considered a "win" if they merely don't set all our institutions and democratic norms ablaze every few years.
Held by whom? It's wise to use active voice so that you keep track of who you are talking about. The right holds themselves to low standards, and it works for them. Empirically speaking, when the left also holds itself to low standards, they lose elections. Therefore, the left must have higher standards. It's not fair, but it's true. The correct response is to roll up your sleeves and get to work.
I think the basic problem is that the average man on the street doesn't even have enough competence to design an institution or an electoral system or a city development plan, let alone all three, and yet as voters they're asked to figure out who should do such tasks. And then we tell them "get out and vote" but not "get on the internet, study the candidates intently, sharpen your BS detectors, and sign up to vote for the best candidate in the primary who can plausibly win under the awful constraints of our first-past-the-post systems".
Authoritarians have learned to thrive in this environment, supercharged by social media; liberals aren't figuring it out, and need to learn.
Who holds the right to low standards? As you say, themselves. The media. And many voters.
I understand and share Rushdie’s revulsion towards religion and Islam. I do think the ideology of jihadism shapes Hamas's attacks on Israel, even as the realities of occupation, blockade, and serial bombardment make some form of violent resistance likely - just as the ideology of Jabotinskyism informs how Israeli state violence manifests. The role of religion is important and bidirectional but also overrated. Vietcong bombed cafes, schools, etc to resist U.S. occupation, were called a death cult. Zionist militias like the Irgun pre-Israel bombed marketplaces, the King David Hotel, etc — were called terrorists. The issue wasn’t religion —the tactics ended once statehood was realized. There is definitely a weird Islamo-leftism where leftists r too sensitive to Islam but Rushdie is injecting it to describe leftist sympathy for a cause that is easily explained by other factors. I don’t understand why Rushdie can’t be criticized for reading too much of his own experience into a conflict, just the way Ta Na Heisi Coates was?
I’m all for DEI for conservatives. I think one uncomfortable thing is, that dare I say, libs just have higher IQ and/or more interest in academic pursuits. Based merely on merit, we would have more leftists/libs in academia. But for health of nation/society, sure let’s do DEI for conservatives. But let’s be honest that’s what we are doing.
Second, the hate towards Yglesias is because he’s a troll and he picks fights with leftists. He isn’t extreme ideologically he just likes to fight with leftists for fun. It’s mutual.
Your making it way more complex and confusing than necessary. Liberal? Centrist? Conservative? Red herrings. Simply ask "is this person here debating in good faith? Yes? Excellent. Your seat at the table is reserved. Is this person here debating in bad faith? Your seat at this grand debate is forfeit, bye bye. Regardless of political leanings or party affiliation.
Mayhaps a refresher for spotting bad faith arguments is in order here. Or how to detect you've been/are being/are about to be hoodwinked. Protip, the individual who proclaims themselves unbiased or states they could never be unknowingly manipulated by someone else, is the easiest to manipulate person in the room.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/rhetorical-devices/bad-faith-good-faith/
Now there also exists an in between category. I call it variable, or quasi good faith arguments. This is a byproduct of mid 2010s Twitter algorithm falling in love with feigned superficial conflict and rewarding posters who could constantly stir up low levels of background shit. A number of centrists discovered financial success via soft offending various subcommunities as long as they rotated targets frequently. The algorithm orgasmed with all the engagement and rewarded them in turn. People don't hate matty y. People know Matty does occasionally engage in good faith. But its the exception. He quasi engages on levels that wildly vary article to article. The AI that trained him to do this collapsed, but he hasn't adjusted.
People would just rather not bother engaging with someone who only legitimately shows up 20% of time. He isn't hated. A growing number of people discovered the benefits of simply ignoring him. Will we get legit debate from matty this week? Its been so long but we know hes capable so we must maintain hope! Will he drop a hint at conflict via an accidental omission of an important party to said debate? Or do we get the full blown 72 hours no sleep/loose association/symbolic logic troll take this time. Its like that coworker who can't function if not surrounded by orbiting clouds of interpersonal chaos. Not worth the effort. If they can be avoided, we all avoid them.
Like Nate Silver is a smart dude. He could communicate effectively in a number of ways. But he chooses to intentionally craft internally inconsistent sentences and his prose vibrates on a quantum field one level above and below standard logic, unable to commit to anything. Perpetually teasing the collapse of the wave function. Maybe. Depends. It creates a subtle sense of misunderstanding in the reader. Let me reread that, I must have completely missed his point. Nope. It got you to further "engage" which was its purpose. Effectively communicating a point was never the goal. Not an overt bad faith argument, but not a good faith attempt either. That persons seat at the debate table should be on a timer. Show up again in less than good faith....seat revoked. No hate. We just have a line of applicants who can do better than you half assing this mission of ours. Bye bye.
Its a gimmick. He too has failed to overcome his old algorithm behavior patterns. He will never join bluesky. Not because he knows he will be hated. He knows that he will simply be ignored. People are typically pretty good at spotting consistent behavioral artifice, and will quickly simply disengage if allowed. A fate much worse than hate.
Hardcore MAGA, Marxist, Absolute divine right advocates. Anarcho-syndicalists. Those dudes in Evangelion who want to cast off all individuality and merge our collective unconscious into a divine singularity while our physical bodies burst into tang.....if they all show up with and engage in good faith, they are welcome here and I look forward to listening to what they have to say.
You show up in and engage in bad faith....your done. Quality of your opinions aren't the issue. The quality of you is the issue. We recommend you solve you first and upon proof of good faith engagement you may be reinvited. Proof via your actions. Not words.
Its only as difficult as you want it to be.
While I don't like how Matt Y engages with Twitter, I think his Slow Boring posts are 100% good faith. Can you give an example of an article that you think isn't?
My guess about Nate Silver is that he's devoted to not offending the right wing, so that they don't view him as an enemy, thus keeping them in his audience. (Matt OTOH is a devoted Moderate Democrat, so speaks more freely.) And then there's Scott Alexander, who also avoids offending the right (mainly by limiting direct political advocacy) but went out on a limb to endorse Not Trump.
Sure. https://www.slowboring.com/p/moderation-is-not-overrated
So? What's wrong? Explain.
Good interview and I'm sorry I didn't get to meet Cathy at the conference. For another take on the Heterodox Academy in Brooklyn, check out https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/lines-in-the-sand .
Belvedere: “…scholarly pursuits shouldn’t be inhibited by the government.” Young: “Right”…government shouldn’t…”come in and put its thumb on the scale.” Clearly, the Biden administration did just that with EO 13985 and Equity Action Plans across many federal agencies, including the Department of Education. The Biden DOE OCR sent their own Dear Colleague letters with explicit policy guidance and investigated complaints & worked with institutions to resolve complaints. Don’t like what the Trump administration is doing but the previous administration, as well as the Obama administration, had their thumb on the scale as well.
This is obvious false equivalency. What Biden did may not have been justified. What Trump is doing is on another plane: spontaneously threatening to cancel billions in funding, restricting a university's ability to enroll foreign students, demanding direct control over entire academic departments, programmatically undermining scientific research, arresting a student for penning an op-ed critical of Israel, etc. In 2021, JD Vance, the guy now first in line to the presidency, literally called universities "the enemy." The Biden White House never came close to expressing or acting on such rhetoric, which is more reminiscent of Stalin or Hitler than American democracy.
Yes, and that was bad. But Trump doesn't merely have his thumb on the scale. He has his boot on the neck of universitie.
I'm with Cathy Young on this -- and then some.
Somewhere between inequality and iniquity, we get the tendentious (and pejorative) notion of "inequity" -- as if it's self-evident (and indisputable) that all outcomes (among arbitrarily-defined groups) must be the same. Furthermore, the ILLIBERAL leftist will periodically interject, "Right?," while steamrollering along with such rhetoric -- excluding (or relegating to disruption) any attempt to say, "No, that's NOT right!"
As "No black America, no white America" (which many voters took at face value) morphed into a focus on "Black lives" (rather than merely on police brutality), those voters began to detect the more-than-faint whiff of a bait-and-switch.
There was no statewide "bathroom bill" in North Carolina until the City of Charlotte took it upon itself to declare "gender identity" a sacrosanct (legally protected) human attribute, explicitly elevating it above biological sex. Soon enough, those aforementioned voters were being branded with un-chosen and unwanted identities like "Latinx" and (even among gay people) as "cis" -- in a world of "female" penises and pregnant "men."
Time after time, we've seen a shift from a liberal recognition of "self-determination" as an individual right (of personal freedom and "live and let live") -- to a "progressive" politics bent on redressing the purported grievances of "historically marginalized" groups.
This is a recurring pattern -- and it needs to stop! Recognizing the need for (and the importance of) such a "reckoning" in no way excuses -- and is ultimately crucial to undermining and disabling -- the truly anti-democratic predations and bald-faced lies of a Donald Trump.
Have you read ANYTHING I’ve written over the last 10 years on intellectual diversity & the need for university reform?
Walk & chew gum? Seriously?
Seems it's about equivalence. One is annoying the other is seriously dangerous to democracy
They've both operated symbiotically (each feeding on the other) to undermine democracy.
For me, this was a worthwhile intro to a push for expanding ideas we can consider in universities and beyond. I am not Jewish, but Google AI tells me that "Jewish individuals constitute approximately 0.2% of the world's population. However, they account for roughly 22% of all Nobel laureates between 1901 and 2023, according to Wikipedia. " I imagine this is controversial. I know we must say "environment", not "genetics".
It doesn't really matter whether we say "environment" or "genetics" -- as long as we recognize that on the end, it's a matter of agency.
I'm sorry, but I do not understand your point. (My initial feeling is that there are many things that would seem to be beyond the control of the individual.)
That depends on what one means by "the control of the individual." I grew up in a (Jewish) household that placed a high value on learning. Is that "environment" or "heredity" (or a composite of both)? In the end, it was still up to me (i.e., a matter of defining myself as an individual) to determine whether or not I loved to read, or to do math (or for that matter, whether I did my homework).
FWIW, I basically agree with your initial comment :-)
I see it as both environment and heredity. Yes. The agency part- We do like to feel like we have agency- choices. I'm going to say that is above my pay grade. Thanks for the discussion. :)
Jonathan Haidt is a megalomaniacal authoritarian POS so he could care less.