Isegoria

Joe Rogan interviews Scott Adams:

(I would say it’s self-recommending, but our Slovenian guest recommended it to me.)

You are still crying wolf, Scott Alexander laments:

Trump made gains among blacks. He made gains among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.

Nor was there some surge in white turnout. I don’t think we have official numbers yet, but by eyeballing what data we have it looks very much like whites turned out in equal or lesser numbers this year than in 2012, 2008, and so on.

[EDIT: though see here for an alternate perspective]

The media responded to all of this freely available data with articles like White Flight From Reality: Inside The Racist Panic That Fueled Donald Trump’s Victory and Make No Mistake: Donald Trump’s Win Represents A Racist “Whitelash”.

I stick to my thesis from October 2015. There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he’s “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up. It’s a catastrophic distraction from the dozens of other undeniable problems with Trump that could have convinced voters to abandon him. That it came to dominate the election cycle should be considered a horrifying indictment of our political discourse, in the same way that it would be a horrifying indictment of our political discourse if the entire Republican campaign had been based around the theory that Hillary Clinton was a secret Satanist. Yes, calling Romney a racist was crying wolf. But you are still crying wolf.

Read the whole thing.

A large, preregistered study of stereotype accuracy in Denmark looked at stereotypes about country of origin and use of social benefits:

A nationally representative Danish sample was asked to estimate the percentage of persons aged 30-39 living in Denmark receiving social benefits for 70 countries of origin (N = 766). After extensive quality control procedures, a sample of 484 persons were available for analysis. Stereotypes were scored by accuracy by comparing the estimated values to values obtained from an official source. Individual stereotypes were found to be fairly accurate (median/mean correlation with criterion values = .48/.43), while the aggregate stereotype was found to be very accurate (r = .70). Both individual and aggregate-level stereotypes tended to underestimate the percentages of persons receiving social benefits and underestimate real group differences.

In bivariate analysis, stereotype correlational accuracy was found to be predicted by a variety of predictors at above chance levels, including conservatism (r = .13), nationalism (r = .11), some immigration critical beliefs/preferences, agreement with a few political parties, educational attainment (r = .20), being male (d = .19) and cognitive ability (r = .22). Agreement with most political parties, experience with ghettos, age, and policy positions on immigrant questions had little or no predictive validity.

In multivariate predictive analysis using LASSO regression, correlational accuracy was found to be predicted only by cognitive ability and educational attainment with even moderate level of reliability. In general, stereotype accuracy was not easy to predict, even using 24 predictors (k-fold cross-validated R2 = 4%).

We examined whether stereotype accuracy was related to the proportion of Muslims in the groups. Stereotypes were found to be less accurate for the groups with higher proportions of Muslims in that participants underestimated the percentages of persons receiving social benefits (mean estimation error for Muslim groups relative to overall elevation error = -8.09 %points).

The study was preregistered with most analyses being specified before data collection began.

There are many types of diversity, Tyler Cowen notes:

Diversity of occupation, diversity of musical taste, diversity of outlook, diversity of residence, and of course varying kinds of racial and ethnic diversity. You could list thousands of kinds of diversity.

The original thinking behind the Electoral College was that geographic diversity was important. The Founding Fathers were not majoritarian, but rather they believed in placing special weight on diversity of this kind. The prevailing view was “if too many (geographically) diverse voices veto you, you can’t get elected, not even with a majority of the votes.” That view was a strange and perhaps unlikely precursor of today’s veto rights/PC approach on campus, but there you go.

Democrats now control at least one legislative house in only 17 states, and the reach of the party is shrinking dramatically. So by the 18th century standards of diversity, emphasizing geography, the Democratic coalition is remarkably non-diverse. You can see how much of Hillary Clinton’s majority came from the two states of New York and California. That also means the Republicans are not just a “Southern rump party,” as some commentators used to suggest.

If you think of education as serving a smoothing function, the less educated are in some ways considerably more diverse than the educated.

The Democratic Party today is more likely to stress the relevance of ethnic and racial diversity, if the talk is about diversity. (Gender diversity too, but that requires its own post, maybe later to come.) Non-Democrats are more likely to count other forms of diversity for more than the Democrats do. I see Democrats as somewhat concentrated in particular cities and also in particular occupations, more than Republicans are. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is another way in which Democrats are less diverse.

When it comes to views about the relevant forms of diversity, the views of non-Democrats are more diverse than the views of Democrats, I would hazard to guess. A non-Democrat is more likely to focus on something other than racial and ethnic diversity, compared to a Democrat.

Correctly or not, many Americans do not think racial and ethnic diversity is the diversity that should command so much attention. That is one place to start for understanding why so many 2012 Obama voters switched to Trump this time around, or maybe just stayed home.

I could not make up the notion of gender-equal snow-clearing:

Stockholm’s municipal government, a coalition of the Social Democrats and the Green Party, brought in gender equal snow cleaning last year, pledging to make moving around the city on icy winter days just as safe for women as it is for men.

Men are statistically more likely to be drivers, while women are more likely to use pavements, cycle paths, and public transport.

But on Thursday and Friday, the policy came under renewed criticism after the city was thrown into chaos by the unusually heavy snow dump, with buses and trains cancelled, and major motorways blocked.

Scholar of religion Kathryn Lofton explains how understanding is dangerous, starting with a story about a dinner party:

It is a double-barreled dinner party — not only a party organized by a dinner, but also a dinner organized as a tribute to one of those at the table. We are supposed to be fawning and on message. We are supposed to admire the food and agree to more wine. We are not supposed to slip out early. And, given the epoch in which we find ourselves, we are supposed to be aghast about Donald Trump.

You have been in so many of these conversations that I don’t need to tell you the content for you to hum along. The conversation never starts straight. It never begins with someone saying, “Well, what about this election and this remarkably unusual Republican nominee Donald Trump?” It begins sidelong. Nobody intends to go there but they are so glad the opening is made so the phrases they’ve been practicing in their cars and in front of debates can get public hearing. But they don’t want to show eagerness, so everyone speaks in knowing punchline.

I don’t want to speak about Trump. I am concerned that our focus on him adds to the thing he needs to stay alive, namely our attention. I do not want to feed his reality — a reality defined by punchline, by non sequitur, by compulsive distraction from the subject at hand. If I get past that and assume attention is necessary, I worry that the way we talk reiterates, in every phrase and posture, why those who follow him do. He has got our goat. And when our goat is got, we talk in ways that show how he came to be by showing why he is someone who others — those not sitting at this dinner table — want.

This time Trump came up because someone mentioned Brexit. Brexit! Can you believe it? someone says. Eyes are rolled. Why are people voting against their interests? How has ignorance taken over the Anglophone world? What is happening? In reply, I do a thing that nobody likes at a party: I give an account of the punchline that isn’t a joke. I begin well enough, nodding at the outrage, and then referring to a story I heard on NPR about a British baker who claimed that after Brexit he could export more cheaply to Europe. If I’d just leave it at that, fine, but I keep going, as if I’d become a scholar of this NPR story and this Brexit-voting baker: he also said that the potential relaxation of employment laws would bring greater flexibility to adjust his labor force; he also said that the increase in customs procedures didn’t bother him; he also said that the diminishment of skilled immigrant labor could be a problem in some sectors but not his; he also said that he knew the tech companies and other newer industries would be hurt the most but that in general expected that any of these losses were nothing before the gains to be had by the decline in the exchange rate between the pound and the Euro.

In this minute, I am being the worst. The worst because I can’t stop talking, and the worst because everyone at the table is clearly getting nervous that I am a little too committed to the Brexit baker. Whose side am I on, anyway? The guest of honor speaks up: Well, he’ll be shown wrong. And the woman on my left, the one who’d spent three years in England, the one with the gumdrop pearls and moss-green cashmere layers, observes that racism drives it all. All of it. See how the baker doesn’t care about immigrant labor? Racism. And everyone at the table nods, knowingly. We know what is wrong in the world, and it is Donald Trump and his offensive forms of speech, his offending acts of racism, his offensive certitude relative to our own.

Understanding is dangerous, here. You are worried maybe now that I don’t agree. That I don’t know that Donald Trump is a world-class bigot who has insulted Mexicans and Muslims, who doesn’t do his homework or honor his debts, who thinks immigrants are leeches and women are walking pussies. You are nervous, I assume, for the same reason that room was nervous: because they comprise that portion of the electorate decidedly disgusted by Donald Trump, and to be a member of that collective you have to understand things that I seem unwilling to see. I don’t get how Brexit is about race and I don’t get, therefore, why we so easily segued at that terrible dinner party from my babbling monologue about the baker into a zippy exchange of pre-auditioned quips about Trump’s racism.

So I fell silent. I didn’t have it in me to keep going with the shallow talk of elite people avoiding comprehension in favor of the pulse of commiseration. At that table, the cohering principle of togetherness was a commitment to the senselessness, the irrationality, the uncomprehending ignorance of it all. Staying shocked at the Donald keeps us all in it, eroticized by our own disgust. What a drag it would be to cease being shocked by his ascendancy, and pursue instead an explanation of how we contributed to it, contributed to it by our very knowing: mine, theirs, ours.

To be a scholar of religion is to participate in a hermeneutics of the incomprehensible. That isn’t exactly right: what scholars of religion do is account for why groups of people consistently agree to things that other people think are incomprehensible, irrational, even senseless. Images illegible relative to contemporary notions of geometry or perspective; abstractions so abstract they twist the brain; doctrines so specific they seem impracticable; myths so fantastic they seem extraterrestrial. Through documentary engagement, linguistic specificity, historical and sociological and economic analysis — scholars of religion make those things legible as human products of human need.

It is therefore unsurprising that I, a scholar of religion, am invested in an account of Trump that renders his absurdity less so. It is, perhaps, my sole specific obligation: to figure out the reason in his seeming madness. To ask, too: Why does he seem mad to some, and not at all to others? The history of religions has long suggested the one does not exist without the other, that to be inside something requires someone else being outside. And, too, that making the strange familiar inevitably ought to make the familiar strange. But here I get ahead of myself.

Read the whole thing.

Newly minted poli sci Ph.D. Darren Beattie predicted Trump’s win last year:

I thought Trump would win as early as July of last year. There are various signals that someone really attuned to politics knows to look for. One of the signals for me is when Trump made his provocative remarks on immigration and then refused to apologize in the wake of overwhelming corporate and media opposition. Let me be very clear: This does not mean that I like the way he phrased his remarks. My point is that his willingness to take a position on immigration so antithetical to corporate Republican donors and then not be cowed by the usual shaming tactics reflected early on a certain independence and flexibility that led me to think we’re dealing with a very different type of candidate than we’re used to.

He’s not impressed by pundits:

One thing about pundits and “experts” that readers have to understand is that they are not paid to make accurate predictions or give accurate analysis; they are paid to give predictions and analysis that advance a particular agenda, usually the agenda of some billionaire benefactor or corporate media platform. This is a powerful explanation because it accounts for how most of these people can be utter failures and somehow keep their jobs. Just watch, now a lot of these people who were wrong about everything will be asked their “expert opinion” on how and why they went wrong! Some of the “experts” who criticized Trump’s foreign policy are “experts” solely by virtue of being involved in one of the biggest foreign policy disasters of our nation’s history—the Iraq War. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so pathetic. For the academic pollster types, the situation is still more pitiful because they’re not even getting rich off of their wrong predictions.

He sees the current era as a referendum on globalization.

Beattie draws a strong distinction between “centrist” and “mainstream”:

Centrist in my view is pretty much in the center of what most people in the country actually believe; “mainstream” refers to positions promoted by the corporate media and academic opinion. Trump’s success, I think, points to the difference between centrist and mainstream. I do think we will see a change in Trump’s tone. I think all of his most significant proposals will become law. Keep in mind that for a lot, all he has to do is repeal executive orders.

Nick Land talks about the ‘F’ word:

Fascism is back, apparently. At the very least, it might be getting more interesting to talk about.

In the period immediately following World War II, both of the triumphant blocs moved rapidly to define the word ‘fascism’ expediently. The critical objective, on each side, was to emphasize those features comparatively understated in its own domestic version of the phenomenon, in order to underscore the impression that they had unambiguously sided against it. ‘Fascism’ was, definitively, that thing recently and at an enormous cost defeated. The immense sacrifices — and, in fact, progressive fascist reconstruction of society that had been accelerated during the war years — was justified by the crushing defeat of an absolute evil. Distinction was imperative. Thus, the Soviets drew particular attention to the comparatively muted anti-capitalism of the Axis powers, while the Atlantic allies concentrated upon the exotic trappings of German anti-semitic Aryanism. It is particularly notable that the predominant Western definition of fascism is remarkably maladapted to even the most basic comprehension of the Italian original, and that both Western and Soviet anti-fascist narratives are compelled to downplay the revolutionary socialism of its roots, in both its Italian and its German variants.

This is all understandable enough, but it grotesquely mystifies the reality of fascism, which was epitomized — universally — by the 20^th-century war economy. Every major contestant of WWII — including the great Asian powers Japan and China — developed fascist governance to an advanced state. The essential feature was state seizure of the economy’s ‘commanding heights’ in the delegated (and integrated) ‘popular interest’. During war time such interest is peeled back to sheer survival, and thus publicized with dramatic intensity, which is also to say with an unusual absence of skepticism. Fascism is therefore broadly identical with a normalization of war-powers in a modern state, that is: sustained social mobilization under central direction. Consequently, it involves, beside the centralization of political authority in a permanent war council, a tribal hystericization of social identity, and a considerable measure of economic pragmatism. Fascism is practical socialism, distinguished from its dim cousin by its far more sophisticated grasp of incentives, or of human nature in its motivated individual and tribal particularity. When compared to universalistic communism, fascism’s practical advantages are such that ‘actually existing socialism’ always soon turns into it. National socialism and socialism in one country are not sanely separable things. Everyone knows that the literal meaning of ‘fascism’ is bundling.

Like its Continental European and Soviet competitors, American fascism had been fully consolidated by the beginning of the war. The New Deal cemented its structural pillars into place. Socialization of the economy through central banking, the transformation of the Supreme Court into a facilitator of systematic executive over-reach, and a transformation of mass-politics through broadcast media technologies had composed a new, post-constitutional political order. It is this formation that is so flagrantly entering its phase of terminal dementia today.

Since the fascist state justifies itself through perpetual war, it naturally likes wars that cannot end. The Cold War looked like one, but wasn’t quite. The War on Terror is a better bet. In regards to their interminability, if not their moral intensity, ‘wars’ on poverty, drugs, and other resilient social conditions are more attractive still. Waging modern wars, and their metaphorical side-products, is what the fascist state is for. Winning them on occasion, and by accident, is only ever a misfortune. That lesson seems to have been thoroughly learned.

(Hat tip to Aretae.)