> I think the author, like many today who try to disparage democracy...
Democracy as has been used over the past decade or so (as in, such-and-such is a threat to our democracy) does a fine enough job disparaging itself.
> ... gets too caught up in the founders as scripture and old word usages.
And yet you also write—
> Democracy is superior... because of its moral and rational foundation, that all are created equal, all have universal, inalienable rights...
—which is based on scripture straight out of the founders.
Thing is, many of the founders (and the most important among them) were familiar not just with (then) present-day monarchy, taxation and war, but with ancient Athens, ancient Rome and enlightenment thinkers like John Locke. They had examples of both good and bad democracies to draw lessons from, and they realized early-on that without some binding agreement to rein in the worst tendencies of democracy, the nation wouldn't regularly self-evaluate, correct itself and prevent an implosion by majority rule.
We needn't look back as far as Jim Crow or American Prohibition or McCarthyism to see where 'majorities' can lead us. If you want, think California and its democratic super-majorities over the past decade. Or, if progressive, think of Florida and its anti-lgbt laws. You sure you want majority rule?
> The solution is human rights, as implemented in the Bill of Rights.
Which, again, is scripture out of the founders.
But let's say this solution didn't come out of the founders: who decides what human rights are? The majority? University professors? The self-selected intelligentsia? The current governors of California and Florida?
> which is based on scripture straight out of the founders.
No, it's based on the arguments that I presented today - the arguments are good today. That the founders also said it doesn't make it less true.
> If you want, think California and its democratic super-majorities over the past decade.
What is wrong with California? You may not agree with policies, but it's not undemocratic oppression and cruelty like the right-wing examples you list.
Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I was under the impression this is what most of the world wanted? And if not the world, then most elites in the US?
I speak both from public and personal history: when American leadership signed its various trade treaties with China back in the 90s and earlier, opening itself up to the swift transfer of manufacturing to its one-time enemy, was American leadership not signaling its strong desire to diminish American power for the sake of peace?
And on a personal level: my hippie parents had often railed against American imperialism and voted for candidates they thought could stop it. What did they (and other similarly-minded folks) think would happen once America withdrew from the world stage? Do people who think the same way today believe America will grow stronger by pulling back?
Having been around since the late 60s, I can only say this attitude has been in the making for a long time. I can't point to college sit-ins or Nixon going to China or Carter turning over the Panama Canal or the US-China Relations Act (2000) or anything specific stating 'this is the definitive moment', but this desire for a weaker, more isolationist America is neither surprising nor accidental for those of us who've been watching it grow. It's ultimately what my parents and their contemporaries wanted. It's... dream fulfillment.
My thoughts on this is it appears the 2nd Trump administration is obviously better for everyone _outside_ of the US (with the exception of Ukraine, Syria, Palestinians), and is lowering outcomes for groups _inside_ the US.
I think the current administration's actions are backed by the desire to kick out all immigrants, build a fortress wall around the US, and I guess wait out the end times.
Us lefties often say the best way to lower immigration rates is make other countries a more desirable place to live. I'm not sure if this has ever been put into practice though.
Regarding China, the European and American financial relationship is the largest in the world. Chinese trade with Europe is tiny. Sounds like that is all about to change.
I'm assuming you're on platforms dominated by Americans and Westerners so you're not seeing it much, but I can assure large portions of the world are quite happy to see America's downfall in real-time.
Personally, I hope to see China fill the void America will leave behind; the world will be better for it.
I think a more likely outcome is nobody filling the hole America leaves behind, and the incentives of a multipolar world are much more brutal then that of a unipolar world, as a result I expect a rise of new nuclear armed states.
No not at all. The vast majority of Americans are uninterested in being world policemen when it means it's mainly American boys (and girls, but mostly boys, let's be real) dying in foreign wars.
The Chinese are not stupid enough to send their kids to die in war, and even if they were, they at least have an excess of young males.
Usually, but not always. Here you go—'cinch'. Could replace the first 'c' with s, but the second instance would be a little more difficult, as 'sh' has a softer pronunciation than 'ch' here, which itself is not as hard as 'j' (emoji) or 'ge' (rage).
While I agree with you regarding Toni Morrison, I'm not sure where you're going with the 'almost seem racist in this context' remark.
When I read the article, I read the article, immediately jumping past the headline and lead graphic, not bothering to check who wrote the article before coming back here to read the comments. I only learned of Ms. Morrison's authorship from your top comment.
Outside the story's impression of poverty versus wealth in the 1940's, and without knowing who the author is, what gave you the idea this article had anything to do with race? Or that the person's notions you commented on 'almost seem racist'?
While the article does not talk overtly about racial topics; the narrative of a young girl "scrubbing floors" in a "beautiful house" etc. were suggestive and on checking the author's name it became clear. Toni Morrison had been quite fearless and outspoken in her writings about race relations and other topics (see https://time.com/6143127/toni-morrison-book-bans/) and hence had courted her fair share of controversy. But for the commentator to suggest that she had a "cocooned" easy life thus invalidating her advice was plainly ludicrous and could only be interpreted as "almost seem racist in this context" since there was no logical reason for this bias.
From the article linked to above;
Her books do not sugarcoat or use euphemisms. And that is actually what people have trouble with.
Morrison books tend to be targeted because she is unrelenting in her belief that the very particular experiences of Black people are incredibly universal. Blackness is the center of the universe for her and for her readers, or for her imagined reader. And that is inappropriate or inadequate or unreasonable or unimaginable for some people.
Checking her wikipedia page I see that she went to university at 18 years of age and by age 34 she was already an editor, about what "scrubbing of the floors" are we talking about here? Doesn't look like she scrubbed any floors for a living in her adult life.
And as for the racist talk, I have people very close to me who also don't have an immaculate white skin, I'm talking about my mother and my mother's mother (my grandmother), does it make any difference? What skin color do your close-ones have?
"'Energy independent' Uruguay runs on 100% renewables for four straight months"
and the article's very first sentence—
"Renewables alone have powered the Uruguayan economy for nearly four straight months."
versus the quote you use (the second sentence of the article)—
"In the three months to end-September 2023, the South American nation generated all of its electricity from renewable sources"
Both the headline and the first sentence are misleading. The writer did this on purpose. My guess is it's because he (Nick Hedley) likely knows that many (most?) people reading the headline won't go past that first sentence and will come away with a false sense of what really happened. Couldn't he have instead spread the good news with "Energy independent Uruguay runs its electrical grid on 100% renewables for four straight months"?
How is asking for upfront honesty being an acerbic pedant?
You've heard the phrase "read the room"? The OP added this article to HN, a site known for its detail-oriented minds (programmers, engineers, technicians, etc.) or, if you prefer another insult, "rules lawyers".
And then someone complains that these same detail-oriented folks find that some of the details in the article are lacking? And tries shaming them into giving up their detail-oriented ways?
a site known for a commentariat that is, in aggregate, frequently wrong about details, particularly details that matter.
yes, it's great when people who really know what they are writing about show up here. But the great unwashed masses in the comment threads, for all of their fabled "detail-oriented minds" appear wrong at least as often as they are right.
"On the internet nobody knows you're an HN commenter with 3 years of JS experience".
It's possible that the author treats "energy" and "electricity" as synonymous, either out of laziness or ineptitude. Seems more probable than a deliberate attempt to manipulate readers.
> of having an extremely mainstream Californian outlook
One can have the outlook without the residency.
And what is that outlook? Certainly not what CS imagines it to be, e.g. "uncritical technological boosterism and the desire to get rich quick." If one wants the real California ideology, one only need look at Gavin Newsom and the Democratic Party supermajorities of a past decade-plus. Or at the policies enacted by San Fran, LA, and other major California cities in recent years.
Scottish national policy as of late hasn't been too far off this mark. ;-)
Genuine question--if one isn't willing to debate the question at hand, then why debate at all? Why not, as a point of pride or honor or authentic rejection of the topic, withdraw from debate and take the L? It seems the side bringing up the K either is an activist for a different topic no one else wants to hear or is just someone(s) wanting to get one over (even embarrass) their opponent(s) by blind-siding them.
Because competive debates are dumb and a dumb way to make up your mind about anything. The objective of the competitive debate is not to find some kind of truth or meaning or understanding but to win the debate. No honor or pride or authenticity needed. It's meaningless. And Ks are just the inevitable endpoint of this pointless exercise. They don't even have to pretend to debate the topic now, just win becaue that's what the judges like. It's actually always been like this, even without the Ks. If it was a right leaning jury you could win using what abouts and saying "woke" as many times as possible. The Ks just make the uselessness of debate as a format more obvious.
This kind of argument is starting to really bother me. Do you really think that the only part of the debate that matters is the actual debate itself? Are you ignorant of the massive amounts of shit that we learned when researching a topic?
I'm bringing up some old memories now, but lets go with some random topics that I recall
a) We should increase USAID funding to Africa to fight HIV/AIDS
b) We should increase alternative energy incentives in the US.
With the USAID topic, we had to learn in high school:
- What is USAID, how does it work
- How does foreign aid to Africa work
- How does the Govt actually allocate funds
- What is HIV/AIDS, how does it spread, and what work is done to prevent/cure it
With the alternative energy topic, we learned:
- How does national alternative energy policy work
- How do states deal with their own energy security vs others
- Does nuclear count as alternative energy
What high schooler is being tought these topics in class. I definitely see debates on HN that are FAR worse than a High School debate since so much research and planning is done by debaters on these topics, and probably know far more than most people.
This is a long battle, "Sophists did, however, have one important thing in common: whatever else they did or did not claim to know, they characteristically had a great understanding of what words would entertain or impress or persuade an audience."
To many an audience, that's all that matters. I have a persuasive essay due tomorrow night. Part of that is transferable rhetorical strategies removed from the actual specifics. On the flip side of your argument, just presenting a list of facts is not persuasive.
Which I want to point out as the root of the problem. Debate is not really about learning, not in the arts and sciences sense.
I remember once an MIT lecture made the point that medicine is not really science. I'll extend that and say, debate is not really about the truth. There's nothing to learn, all it is is learning the rationalizations to serve one side.
So the purpose of debate is to teach high schoolers things? If only there was some other institution they were a part of that could do that. Do HS students no longer take AP history and economics?
You could just as easily have a research club where awards are given for the best research on any given topic. That's essentially what the science fair is.
But it's important to you to have a winner declared between a and b? A fun game, sure, but don't delude yourself into thinking it had more value than entertainment. You could have learned about or been taught energy policy through any number of means. But you are failing to consider why the framing of HIV vs energy funding as a winner take all debate is, as I said above, incredibly dumb.
Except it's not nihilism at all? There are all kinds of ways to increase your and the public's understanding and knowledge. Competitive debate is not it any more than a trial by combat is.
Because its all part of learning how to think critically. Policy Debate is not about actually expecting policy outcomes. It's about learning how to think and argue.
These kinds of questions are not interesting, because EVERYONE ASKS IT. Every single HN question on this topic of "why would you do this" would have reams of evidence/theory to refute it and explain why you're a crazy person for questioning this strategy.
Even back in my day, we definitely had debates where the argument effectively was "This debate is racist, and if we don't win you are all racists" And so you would have to figure out strategies to fight back.
You can see it all the time in the rhetroic online with activists and whatever, people who don't know how to argue, arguing with others that are making either bad faith arguments or trying to figure out how to deal with Kritique style arguments. It waste's their time and everyone elses time.
By being able to argue for/against Kritiques, you gain the ability to quickly call out the fucking bullshit and go straight to the meat.
> By being able to argue for/against Kritiques, you gain the ability to quickly call out the fucking bullshit and go straight to the meat.
I'm not so sure about that. Because, if what Bodnick says is true, the judges never go for the meat but always vote for the sizzle. As she herself wrote, 'For example, many leftist judges will not accept a response to a Marxism kritik that argues that capitalism is good.' Sounds more like the K advocate (with the aid of the judge) is more interested in diffusing aromas than putting ribeye on the table.
> By being able to argue for/against Kritiques, you gain the ability to quickly call out the fucking bullshit and go straight to the meat.
This! I actually laughed out loud at the following line from tfa:
> A Public Forum debater who reached Semifinals at the Tournament of Champions told me: “I had to know critical theory to win... you have to be prepared in case you have to run it or go against it.”
Literally what? That's the entire fucking point. This is like people complaining about squirrels in debate or cheese in an RTS: if it worked, you suck, so maybe try not to suck instead of whining about it? I mean, I, personally, find arguments and worldviews rooted in appeals to authority to be quite gross, but I don't pretend that I can bury my head in the sand and cry unfair if someone deploys an argument like that against me and I can't deal with it due to lack of familiarity. Not really seeing how this scenario is any different.
Even in the extreme case of an outright biased judge, that's still in the game: inverting the K to demonstrate that, actually, the side that raised it are arguing for structural racism or whatever is both a ton of fun and really good experience.
Bias disclaimer: ran/defended against Ks in PF to great success long ago
I didn’t do debate in high school, but I remember a class in the late 80s we had a class “world crisis” which covered the past/current states of Chile, Cuba, Ireland, Israel and South Africa.
We were supposed to debate a South African about apartheid. He couldn’t make it so we debated our teacher (who made his opinions known he was not a fan). He destroyed our arguments one by one. We knew for the rest of the class we would have to up our game.
The way policy debate works (traditionally) is that the affirmative side gets to choose a particular policy to advocate within a broad space. A negative side that sticks to refuting the particular details of that policy is putting themselves at a severe disadvantage - they're always going to be behind in research and debate experience on that topic relative the affirmative (unless maybe they happen to use that same policy proposal themselves when assigned the affirmative). So debaters have used generic negative strategies for many decades, not just meta-critiques of their opponents discursive approach or assumptions ("Ks") but also "disadvantages" based on generalities like "your proposal will use up political capital and prevent Y from happening", and topicality arguments, where e.g. there might be two (or more) facially plausible interpretations of what's in scope for the topic, and they'll argue that whichever the affirmative has used to justify their proposal is incorrect.
Debate is competitive. Yes, each side wants to "get one over" or "blindside" their opponent, but that's not different with the K than with any other creative argument or novel bit of research, and at higher competitive levels everyone is going to be quite comfortable debating the K (at least since the 1990s).
It is. The main advantage that the negative has is that they only need to win 1 of what are called the 5 "stock issues" in order to win a policy debate round. Furthermore, the negative can also run something called a "counter-plan," which I talked about in another comment. That's basically something structured a bit like the affirmative plan, but which (typically) does not affirm the resolution. That's frequently enough to put the affirmative off balance, because the negative has essentially free reign to argue for anything outside of the resolution.
>> Previous generations succumbed badly to gender essentialism... and as ever, left a mess for the next generations.
Perhaps previous generations--thousands of them? millions?--realized there's more to gender than blank-slate social constructionism. And the mess is self-created by a younger generation wanting to rebel for want of anything else to rebel against?
See how easy it is to apply ageism in the other direction? /s
> Isn't iterative improvement what all science is about?
Yes and no. There's more to science, but iterative improvement is a large part of it.
My issue with psychology (and other soft sciences, e.g. sociology, economics) isn't so much its striving to find answers, but its adopting a one-sided worldview before that striving, thereby coloring their findings with that one side.
Look at what you wrote--'I know it [psychology] is typically viewed as a 'liberal' field'. That's because it IS a liberal (well, a politically Progressive) field--its instructors, its researchers, its practitioners largely are self-admittedly liberal (and further Left on the political spectrum.) And when they hire, they hire like-minds.[1] (Which is a thing humans do--no one wants to work with people they... dislike... for some reason.)
And so, because they've no opposing worldview in their ranks to say 'no', well... can their findings be trusted? [2]
>One study found, for example, that a third of social psychologists admitted that they would be unwilling to hire a known conservative to the faculty, and nearly half thought that their colleagues would be unwilling to hire such a person.33 Subsequent work suggests that those findings are not limited to psychology, and that conservative scholars might have a similar willingness to discriminate against liberals.34 On the whole, there does not appear to be a robust pipeline of conservatives desperate to get into academia.
This is substantially different from what you are suggesting, this idea that there is a natural bias when it seems to be a supply problem (and a dismissal of academia entirely, as the article links together the larger conservative push against higher education). Can't hire that which does not exist or believes your field is a farce.
There's a supply problem for women in STEM and our response has been to investigate every potential cause while investing in scholarships and outreach. If we found out that 33% of STEM employers were unwilling to hire women, we'd say, "Aha, that explains the supply problem. Let's fix that." I can't fathom spending tens of thousands of dollars to enter a highly competitve field where a third of employers will rule you out outright (and presumably more will discount you against other candidates).
Even if conservatives aren't interested for other reasons, the presence of a supply problem does not rule out bias. There is evidence of substantial self-reported bias, so there's probably bias.
Democracy as has been used over the past decade or so (as in, such-and-such is a threat to our democracy) does a fine enough job disparaging itself.
> ... gets too caught up in the founders as scripture and old word usages.
And yet you also write—
> Democracy is superior... because of its moral and rational foundation, that all are created equal, all have universal, inalienable rights...
—which is based on scripture straight out of the founders.
Thing is, many of the founders (and the most important among them) were familiar not just with (then) present-day monarchy, taxation and war, but with ancient Athens, ancient Rome and enlightenment thinkers like John Locke. They had examples of both good and bad democracies to draw lessons from, and they realized early-on that without some binding agreement to rein in the worst tendencies of democracy, the nation wouldn't regularly self-evaluate, correct itself and prevent an implosion by majority rule.
We needn't look back as far as Jim Crow or American Prohibition or McCarthyism to see where 'majorities' can lead us. If you want, think California and its democratic super-majorities over the past decade. Or, if progressive, think of Florida and its anti-lgbt laws. You sure you want majority rule?
> The solution is human rights, as implemented in the Bill of Rights.
Which, again, is scripture out of the founders.
But let's say this solution didn't come out of the founders: who decides what human rights are? The majority? University professors? The self-selected intelligentsia? The current governors of California and Florida?
And who decides how these rights are enforced?