nmrm2

1. It's not

2. It's not what he says. It's what is totally completely obviously entailed by what he says but he refuses to actually come out and say point blank.

At exactly the point where you think this actually fucking matters when evaluating the value of those people. That's the "clear, objective" meaning MM refers to. If The Cathedral invented demonization of racism then I'll happily attend the sunday mass.

Or maybe just before that, where you take some raw statistics and draw wild conclusions from it in order to prove your prior. Like people used to do by measuring skull sizes, just slightly more refined this time 'round.

As a matter of fact, people using the term "Racism" in the 1920's-1950's were often referring to people who genuinely believed they had scientific evidence that jews/blacks were inferior.

Racism accompanied with the epistemology du jour is still objectionable. Just because you earnestly believe something doesn't make that belief impeachable.

This is kind of my point wrt MM. He says a lot of True Things that, in the end, amount to nothing. And then pretends he's substantiated some grand thesis about the evils of the Cathedral. But it's often all just inane bullshit when you stop to figure out how the pile of highly specific factoids actually substantiates the overall claim. This isn't always true; there are always diamonds in the rough, and MM wrote prolifically. But the style of argument and accompanying rhetoric lends itself to these sorts of logical leaps from cherry-picked particular to validation of over-arching thesis.

Edit: Also, pre-colonialism is a shitload of time. Asserting Africans were categorically better off during High Colonialism than during the millions of years of human history that is lumped together as "pre-colonialism" is a pretty bold assertion.

Well damn. Better go back to colonization.

But seriously, what the fuck is supposed to be the take-away from this non-argument? Progressivism is bad?

1. It dismisses an obvious truth. You know, that there actually really were/are actually people who actually thought black/latino/etc. people were actually inferior... actually. For Real. Historical Fact. Period. That the term "racist" clearly and unambiguously identifies those people, regardless of whether people disagree about the edge cases.

2. MM dimisses this totally obvious objection by quoting historical inanity (who the fuck cares if the word wasn't in common usage until the 20's? What does that actually have to do with anything?! "Cathedral" didn't enter common usage (under MM's defintion)... ever. Guess the term means nothing in the context in which he's using it? This observation is pure unadulterated inanity)

3. And also while making some unsubstantiated comment about those icky Progressives for those In The Know.

4. Note that what MM literally said (that in addition to being an epithet, "Racist has a clear objective meaning") actually directly contradicts your interpretation of what he said:

> The word is just an epithet with an ever changing meaning. It's not a descriptive label.

I'll excuse you for the lapse in reading comprehension since you actually perfectly translated MM's true meaning. MM said X. He gave unimpeachable evidence for X. And you interpreted X to mean the slightly different Y. Unsurprisingly, since it's totally clear that Y is what MM actually intends his reader to walk away beliving. The rub is that MM didn't actually provide any cogent argument for Y. But his defense of X sure did sound authoritative and unpeachable!

MM is rarely explicitly racist; it's more like he espouses ideas that obviously entail racial superiority and then stops shy and pretends like you're an idiot if you actually believe those "obvious" entailments The Progressives or whoever have been selling you.

(Preface: It's hard to explain, and the following might sound like a bit of an ad hom, but that's not how I mean it. It's just a really useful lense through which to view MM's writing -- especially if you find yourself thinking "he's just saying kinda true things that aren't very PC!". Understanding the rhetorical ploys an author is using can help you see through the trees to the heart of the author's argument and then -- in MM's case -- be sure you're well-founeded in summarily rejecting it.)

Reading MM is like reading an above-average-but-not-exceptionally-bright high schooler who went on a depth-first search of Google for every topic he writes about. The authority emaninating from a depth-first search is obviously flawed because it ignores the forest for the trees, but can be oddly convincing if you don't notice what's going on. Or at least difficult to refute in a clear-headed and logical way because you get stuck in the quagmire of meaningless specificities.

Concretely, MM's writing generally has a well-developed thesis with logical arguments and reasonable citation, but falls flat on its face for reasons that can only be described as "common sense". MM's hope -- or maybe his own blieve -- is that his authoritative knowledge of particularities supporting his point trumps the forest of "common sense" generalities.

But the dozens of obvious objections that aren't addressed by MM -- or are just hand-waved away with a bit of rhetoric about some evil other (progressives, etc.) -- really are at the heart of the matter. A few historical examples really are no replacement for a global view of historical reality.

Of course MM is smart enough to be well-aware of the elephants in the room. However, he's maybe more interested in trolling than in debate. Or maybe really does blieve they're unsubstantiated progressive lies. IDK. In any case, instead of addressing these elephants head on, he kind of summarily dismisses the most obvious rebuttals with a bit of a literary eye roll.

For example, in one comment he rambles on about colonialism being not-so-impeachable because those Africans were brutes prior to and after colonization. The problems with a statement like this really are quite obvious, but his comment goes on at length about particularities of specific European leaders and African dynasties instead of addressing head-on the litany of common-sense high-level objections to his poisition.

It's like when a high schooler puts forth a totally untenable position that is just wrong, and considers himself unimpeached because no one in the room has a response to the particular arcane knowledge he used to backup his point. Even though that knowledge was totally tangential or at best provided one supportive data point in an infinite sea of data suggesting he's dead wrong.

I think people who disagree that MM's writing is racist are mostly just hoodwinked by the above rhetorical ploy -- getting so specific about a few trees that the reader forgets about the forest, and therefore conclusing that the author doesn't need to be held responsible for the obvious historical entailments that follow from his advocacy.

The threats to free speech on college campuses come from a lot of directions, but angry undergrads aren't one of them. In fact, politicizing higher education by insisting that campuses are too liberal is far more likely to lead to socially meaningful self-censorship.

Even supposing you're not being paranoid -- which I think you are -- white men not painting racially charged messages on bathroom doors isn't exactly a big loss to society. However, public intellectuals shying away from studying politically charged topics (gun control policy, abortions and contraceptives, stem cells, fundamentalist religions, climate change, etc.) because of political meddling in university hiring and firing decisions is definitely a big loss.

People who complain about free speech on college campuses should carefully consider the actual agendas of the politicians that are manufacturing and harnessing their outrage...

Anyways, this bit of real politic is completely immaterial to my original point, which is that it's stupid and inconsistent to complain about other people's complaining. In particular because your observation about perception works the other way as well.

And then re-inserted again when the author and his/her intent is identified...

> I have no doubt in my mind the art defense would not pass if the person was a white male.

That would almost certainly depend on the underlying intent and message.

I think you're completely wrong about how improtant identity is in this case, especially if we're trying to determine whether most people would view something as hate speech. The only thing special about a black female is that her underlying intent and message is obivous in context... which, yeah, context matters. Fact Of Human Communication.

If the message were the same as the black female's, it would maybe be identified as "problematic" by some people, but I doubt anyone would call it hate speech. NOTE: This was EXACTLY the response when the black female posted the signs! There was plenty of criticism about tactics even though she was a black female. See https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/18/suny-buffalo-...

If the message were something like "free speech is important", I doubt most people would be sympathetic. Especially mature and thoughtful free-speech activists (even as they defended his right to express those opinions in non-graffiti settings). There are just much better ways of communicating that message. But in any case this almost certainly would not -- de jure -- be considered hate speech.

If it were a professed white nationalist -- as it is in this case -- then it might be considered hate speech and maybe even a hate crime b/c it was graffiti (or, in the case of the article, possibly unauthorized access)

(edit: holy shit a -2 mod on a comment pointing out that context is important to interpreting a message... LOL)

Clearly, people get offended at all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons all the time. Students aren't a special exception and this is hardly a new phenomenon (even if the Internet makes it more observable). If you don't believe me go read the 1 star reviews on Yelp and co. or the comments on your local newspaper's website. Or read your own comment.

The only difference between the inanity of every-day outrage/argument and students at universities complaining about something like cultural appropriate is that it's young liberals at universities complaining. People love complaining about each of those things individually, so their confluence is click-bait heaven.

To flip the table: what makes people who complain about young liberals at universities being too sensitive so sensitive? It's incredible.

It's not so much that I disagree with the concrete free-speech-promoting policies associated with your position on this issue. But complaining about over-sensitivity is just so silly; it's as if the irony of complaining about complaining is completely lost on everyone who talks about this topic.

It was called art because that was its intention.

Context matters. Pretending that all words should always mean the same thing regardless of context is a woefully inadequate approach toward understanding human speech. And yes, the person speaking and their intention is part of context.

Surely you don't take people literally when they speak to you in an ironic or satirical tone?!

Of course this is always an awkward line to walk, and the definition of stupid is entirely subjective. Most things that make people happy aren't totally "rational".

2. Don't compare to letting the money sit under a matress. Insteaad, compare with other investments.

Buying a lottery ticket doesn't make sense when measured purely in terms of profit, even when the expected profit is non-negative.

2. Suppose you don't care about providing steady scientific employment for individual scientists but do value scientific progress (I find this position contradictory to the point of absurdity, but let's roll with it). Even in this case, cyclical funding cuts are still a source of waste:

a) society essentially wasted money subsidizing the education of people who are now not using their training (some might be, but probably many aren't).

b) funding freezes are often temporary, but by the time spending rebounds all those scientists you spent billions of dollars training have moved on to indsutry (research or no). So now you have to double down and train a new generation in order to make progress.

Theere's plenty of waste in the government, but you'd be hard-pressed to find the typical types of government waste or incompetence in for example the NSF. Unless you believe basic science is wasteful I guess.

My point was just that seeing this is a lot more subtle -- it's not a purely technical observation, but also contains a social/economic component.

It's not so much that you can take informal descriptions and turn them into software, but more that the software can be built by anyone with a few months of training, thus driving down salaries to a point where mere coding is no longer a white collar job.

That doesn't seem impossible, but the reason for its unliklihood is far more subtle.

More-over, pathologizing homosexuality continues to happen in many parts of the world and even, de facto, in some parts of the US (e.g., "gay camps", which often have some component of psuedo-psychology on top of their religiosity).

2. Popular presidential candidates and members of the party that controls congress openly and proudly express anti-homosexual views. The idea that society is on the verge of pathologizing people who disagree with homosexuality is absolutely absurd.

In many cities, poverty is highly concentrated not only in urban areas but also in some of the surrounding suburbs. So the suburban schools -- or at least some of them -- end up as bad or worse than the worst of the urban schools.

So the old surburb/urban school quality divide is slowly breaking down. As a result, affluent urban areas often have high quality schools while impoverished suburbs often have terrible schools.

That said, it's generally true that living in the "good" suburbs is cheaper than living in the "good" parts of urban areas.

Most urban areas have a mix of terrible and excellent schools. The excellent ones rival or exceed the best of the surrounding suburban schools (except with more in-school variance in terms of quality of instruction and background of students), while the terrible ones are truly toxic. Conversely, rural schools are more uniformly "meh" -- generally not toxic, but also pretty underwhelming in terms of instructional quality and available learning opportunities/resources.

Also, IMO, test scores are not great indicators of school quality. Even if you could perfectly control for all confounding factors, test scores probably still wouldn't be great indicators. They're simply, de facto, measuring the wrong things.

That's why so many arguments technical people make in favor of Apple miss the point entirely -- they think that it's a technical problem, but it's actually not. In fact, I'm much more interested to hear the opinion of an ethicist or political historian or public policy expert than the opinion of a technical person.

> It's just in their best interests to expand the power of the legislative body.

That's also true of politicians who do have technial expertise. E.g. Herman Cain has a masters in CS.

Yes. Which there are a lot of, because poverty is so extremely concentrated.

Appeals to fairness as an argument for or against various wealth redistribution schemes always strike me as odd for this reason. Neither side gets an exclusive claim to fairness. Both situations can end up equally unfair for equally reasonable definitions of fairness. No society-level policy -- especially doing nothing -- can possibly hope to be remotely fair in at least an infinitely of possible senses of the word.

Many media companies spend money moderating internet forums because their users and/or advertisers have expectations. Automatically detecting or predicting bad behavior decreases the cost of running these forums, whose purpose is profit rather than dialog.

It's not a change in the nature of trolling that makes moderation more necessary than it was in the past; rather, it's the monetization of forum-posting audiences.

You should fix a lot of other things first (in particular, prefered methodology and advisor) and then, after fixing those things, choose applications toward the left-hand side. A few reasons:

1. If you're doing it for hype alone you will be miserable. Ph.D. students tend to be out ahead of pretty much everyone in terms of the nitty gritty details, so they often hit the trough of disillusionment right around the time everyone else is at the top of the hype curve.

2. A Ph.D. is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be paid (sometimes comfortably) to work on (mostly) whatever you want. If it's not at least a little self-indulgent, you're wasting a great opportunity.

3. You'll have the rest of your life to chase the next sexy thing.

Being born during the middle or late-middle of the 20th century was extremely lucky if you managed to stay out of manufacturing and could put your retirement into funds that came close to matching public markets. A lot of people doubt we'll ever see that kind of economic growth in the first half of the 21st century.

Don't under-estimate the impact of three-four decades of financially comfortable retirement on "living standards".