In conversations with friends in even the liberal mainstream (where I belonged fairly comfortably, too, as late as the beginning of Obama’s second term), I find such a stubborn and sometimes even angry resistance to seriously considering the impact of incentives in influencing human behavior. I’m hardly an economist or even proponent of a traditional, reductive rational actor model of human behavior. We’re animals and individual psychology and group dynamics count for a lot, too. But the best I come up with is these friends, who are all financially comfortable people with advanced degrees living in large cities, is that they consider a concern re: incentivizing bad behavior to be a species of victim-blaming. They seem to consider all people in victim categories (by identity or poverty) as lacking agency. They don’t seem to appreciate that the structures and incentives and personal examples they create and model for their own kids, almost without thinking, might actually be important to other kids, other adults, even when they lack some of their and their own kids’ advantages. I keep seeing an inability or unwillingness to consider incentives as one element in so many disastrous policies being promulgated from the left. Certainly, this isn’t a new story, but the variety and reach of such programs keeps expanding unchecked. To check such irresponsible excesses seems to require such bad outcomes a coalition of unwoke but implicitly approved of minorities and disaffected liberals revolts. Anyone else already has been or will be labeled “alt-right” or “far-right”, smeared and silenced.
I'm in the same boat as you, living in the Blue Bubble of modern liberalism but having given up even trying to discuss politics w/ my friends anymore.
I think the confusion starts w/ exactly what is Politics and what are its purposes. Traditionally (or at least till our first Twitter president descended his escalator) Politics was ideally about deciding what was best for the public good, as in defense, education, welfare, dividing and allocating assets and resources etc.
But in our age of permanent culture war inside the never-sleeping digital panopticon, Politics for upscale urban liberals has become completely divorced from and only vaguely connected to its former more practical meaning. Politics for them is about first and foremost tribal bonding, tribal/virtue signaling, or letting others know which team you're on and if you're Good or Bad.
What's most important for liberals and their social and psychological needs is that they remain seen as an upstanding and obedient member of Team Blue, and that they never utter a blasphemous word or opinion that could in any way be construed as conservative/Republican. (This is why they can't mention things like personal agency or initiative bc in our discourse these code as Red/conservative "pull up your bootstraps" ideas and thus are verboten to liberals.)
They know it's much more likely that they get cancelled and receive the social death penalty for apostasy than that their kid gets shot or is too dumb to get into college. So they respond to incentives, and thus only repeat approved dogma (and get really angry when asked to even discuss it), because absolute tribal loyalty is the safest bet despite the occasional headache from cognitive dissonance.
"Politics for them is about first and foremost tribal bonding, tribal/virtue signaling, or letting others know which team you're on and if you're Good or Bad. "
In other words, if a society de-emphasizes religion to the point that people rarely go to church, people will still act religiously.
I suspect most people who act as you describe don't consider themselves to be acting religiously, even though they clearly are.
Formal religion is dying (in western nations), and wokism is born from it's absence.
it has been fascinating watching the Social Justice religion coalesce, grow up and start to rampage through the countryside. it's not every day you get to see a new god born!
Yes, virtually all such people I know would consider themselves either completely areligious (not only without religion; religion is irrelevant to their lives) or actively hostile to religion and committed to achieving what they see as one and the same: a more humane, post-religious society.
Yes, but I would take it one step further and say that far too many liberals are unwilling to consider the secondary effects of anything. Their only concern seems to be, "am I on the right side of this?" If so, nothing else matters. So, if "climate change action" causes mass unemployment, raises the cost of energy for those who can least afford it, enriches billionaires, all while failing to alter the weather or even materially reduce global carbon emissions at all, that's OK. If "defund the police" is based on a lie, but also causes a homocide epidemic and breakdown of law and order in the inner-cities, that's OK. It goes on and on, liberals just want the feeling of moral superiority, but are utterly irresponsible when it comes to the actual impacts of those positions. That's why liberalism has increasingly become the ideology of the educated elites, they are the very group least likely to suffer material harms when things go awry.
Yes, we very obviously are literal animals, no scare quotes needed. Unless you’re just beaming in from a couple hundred years ago, you should be embarrassed at trying to employ shallowly circular sophistry to make such an utterly ignorant claim. Seriously, on what basis do you purport to claim that humans aren’t a species of primates - a selective interpretation of an assertion from some religious book? Humans and chimpanzees share 99% of DNA and we share very large proportions with many other species. We developed virtually the same morphology which performs essentially the same functions as many many dozens of other mammals. You’re apparently trying to claim that because humans are not exactly like other species in every way, we are somehow not animals, but some other entirely special and separate category whose experiences and perceptions cannot be closely compared to many other species. Many other species use language and use tools. Several other species have already been proven under experimental conditions to have theory of mind. There are many other forms of sense making in which other species are superior. You’re just assuming because you don’t know that other species don’t know or can’t learn and reason in certain ways of their own. You seem to take “animals” as some sort of affront, a term which debases one member of the animal kingdom, rather than a factual label for all that kingdom’s members. I don’t understand why it’s seemingly so important, other than based on very fundamentalist religious beliefs, for some people to denigrate and dismiss all other sentient species as if they are automatons rather than the obviously thinking, feeling, emotionally sensitive and complex fellow animals they are, unless one wants a license to abuse and exploit them. I’d guess you’d never claim that humans who are young children or are elderly and perhaps suffering from dementia or have some other severe cognitive handicap - and therefore aren’t able to discuss accountability and human behavior - somehow aren’t human. Of course they are and we have come along way to better ensure humans who are cognitively handicapped in various ways are not condemned as subhuman and abused or excluded from basic rights and benefits on that basis. Likewise, we do not demand equal responsibility from all humans in order protect their rights and regard them as human. You should do some reading about the latest research in animal cognition. We are not the same in every way, no, but we have far, far more in common in terms of both cognitively ability and the capacity to feel complex emotions than used to be assumed. As was done with othering different groups of humans, much of this willful ignorance is wielded as an excuse and justification to self-servingly abuse and exploit other species. The evidence is overwhelmingly clear other species can think and feel. It’s been very well demonstrated that rats (as smart as three year old human children) have a strong sense of empathy and even of regret for a decision. The cognitive ability of crows is on par with seven year old human children. Elephants, cetaceans, and our fellow primates are even smarter and more socially complex. We don’t denigrate our own species by acknowledging the obvious: we are animals that developed from common evolutionary roots with many other species. We denigrate our own species by constructing specious excuses to construct a baselessly totalizing exceptionalism designed to massage our own egos and justify abusing other species. This is both moral idiocy and idiocy idiocy. Do you think the sun orbits the earth, too, because we live on it?
“A substantial number of men who had [no] history of dysphoria or gender-nonconformity, but who did have a history of serious sexual violence, were suddenly deciding that they were women and should be cohabiting with female prisoners.”
In the American judicial system, defendants who qualify for dual diagnosis (substance and mental health disorder) can obtain more favorable and lenient punishments. For anyone that has worked in criminal justice, this has been an obvious opportunity for fraud, since the mental health claims are nearly always self-reported but the substance abuse claims are easy to verify since many felons like to party.
I've personally witnessed defendants laughing and high-fiving after sentencing when a crank of a shrink opined to the judge that the defendant qualified for a dual diagnosis that was likely a decent bit of acting. There are shrinks who've made careers out of this, and like any other credentialed and lucrative professions the temptation to fudge a few things to justify a result or diagnosis is simply too good to pass up when the Public Defender is eager for your services.
Hired guns in the trans activist world are similarly incentivized. Grifters ensue.
I've had any number of acquaintances in 12 Step programs say the dual diagnosis maneuver has another benefit. It significantly improves the chance of getting the medical insurance company to foot the bill for a five figure 30 day stay at rehab.
If, heaven forbid, I ever had to go to prison, and they were willing to send me to women's prison instead of the men's, just on my say-so, it would be a no brainer. You'd be crazy not to opt for that.
The full story of the transition from sex to gender in English prisons from the 1980s onwards, and the crucial role of queer theory in this transformation, was published in this article (free access): https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/2/1/183
In conversations with friends in even the liberal mainstream (where I belonged fairly comfortably, too, as late as the beginning of Obama’s second term), I find such a stubborn and sometimes even angry resistance to seriously considering the impact of incentives in influencing human behavior. I’m hardly an economist or even proponent of a traditional, reductive rational actor model of human behavior. We’re animals and individual psychology and group dynamics count for a lot, too. But the best I come up with is these friends, who are all financially comfortable people with advanced degrees living in large cities, is that they consider a concern re: incentivizing bad behavior to be a species of victim-blaming. They seem to consider all people in victim categories (by identity or poverty) as lacking agency. They don’t seem to appreciate that the structures and incentives and personal examples they create and model for their own kids, almost without thinking, might actually be important to other kids, other adults, even when they lack some of their and their own kids’ advantages. I keep seeing an inability or unwillingness to consider incentives as one element in so many disastrous policies being promulgated from the left. Certainly, this isn’t a new story, but the variety and reach of such programs keeps expanding unchecked. To check such irresponsible excesses seems to require such bad outcomes a coalition of unwoke but implicitly approved of minorities and disaffected liberals revolts. Anyone else already has been or will be labeled “alt-right” or “far-right”, smeared and silenced.
I'm in the same boat as you, living in the Blue Bubble of modern liberalism but having given up even trying to discuss politics w/ my friends anymore.
I think the confusion starts w/ exactly what is Politics and what are its purposes. Traditionally (or at least till our first Twitter president descended his escalator) Politics was ideally about deciding what was best for the public good, as in defense, education, welfare, dividing and allocating assets and resources etc.
But in our age of permanent culture war inside the never-sleeping digital panopticon, Politics for upscale urban liberals has become completely divorced from and only vaguely connected to its former more practical meaning. Politics for them is about first and foremost tribal bonding, tribal/virtue signaling, or letting others know which team you're on and if you're Good or Bad.
What's most important for liberals and their social and psychological needs is that they remain seen as an upstanding and obedient member of Team Blue, and that they never utter a blasphemous word or opinion that could in any way be construed as conservative/Republican. (This is why they can't mention things like personal agency or initiative bc in our discourse these code as Red/conservative "pull up your bootstraps" ideas and thus are verboten to liberals.)
They know it's much more likely that they get cancelled and receive the social death penalty for apostasy than that their kid gets shot or is too dumb to get into college. So they respond to incentives, and thus only repeat approved dogma (and get really angry when asked to even discuss it), because absolute tribal loyalty is the safest bet despite the occasional headache from cognitive dissonance.
"Politics for them is about first and foremost tribal bonding, tribal/virtue signaling, or letting others know which team you're on and if you're Good or Bad. "
In other words, if a society de-emphasizes religion to the point that people rarely go to church, people will still act religiously.
I suspect most people who act as you describe don't consider themselves to be acting religiously, even though they clearly are.
Formal religion is dying (in western nations), and wokism is born from it's absence.
it has been fascinating watching the Social Justice religion coalesce, grow up and start to rampage through the countryside. it's not every day you get to see a new god born!
Yes, virtually all such people I know would consider themselves either completely areligious (not only without religion; religion is irrelevant to their lives) or actively hostile to religion and committed to achieving what they see as one and the same: a more humane, post-religious society.
I love your comment, CP, and find I directly relate to it living in New England. Everything you say is totally true and I see it every single day.
Yes, but I would take it one step further and say that far too many liberals are unwilling to consider the secondary effects of anything. Their only concern seems to be, "am I on the right side of this?" If so, nothing else matters. So, if "climate change action" causes mass unemployment, raises the cost of energy for those who can least afford it, enriches billionaires, all while failing to alter the weather or even materially reduce global carbon emissions at all, that's OK. If "defund the police" is based on a lie, but also causes a homocide epidemic and breakdown of law and order in the inner-cities, that's OK. It goes on and on, liberals just want the feeling of moral superiority, but are utterly irresponsible when it comes to the actual impacts of those positions. That's why liberalism has increasingly become the ideology of the educated elites, they are the very group least likely to suffer material harms when things go awry.
No human beings aren't "animals" the very fact that people are having conversations about accountability and human behavior is evident of that fact
Yes, we very obviously are literal animals, no scare quotes needed. Unless you’re just beaming in from a couple hundred years ago, you should be embarrassed at trying to employ shallowly circular sophistry to make such an utterly ignorant claim. Seriously, on what basis do you purport to claim that humans aren’t a species of primates - a selective interpretation of an assertion from some religious book? Humans and chimpanzees share 99% of DNA and we share very large proportions with many other species. We developed virtually the same morphology which performs essentially the same functions as many many dozens of other mammals. You’re apparently trying to claim that because humans are not exactly like other species in every way, we are somehow not animals, but some other entirely special and separate category whose experiences and perceptions cannot be closely compared to many other species. Many other species use language and use tools. Several other species have already been proven under experimental conditions to have theory of mind. There are many other forms of sense making in which other species are superior. You’re just assuming because you don’t know that other species don’t know or can’t learn and reason in certain ways of their own. You seem to take “animals” as some sort of affront, a term which debases one member of the animal kingdom, rather than a factual label for all that kingdom’s members. I don’t understand why it’s seemingly so important, other than based on very fundamentalist religious beliefs, for some people to denigrate and dismiss all other sentient species as if they are automatons rather than the obviously thinking, feeling, emotionally sensitive and complex fellow animals they are, unless one wants a license to abuse and exploit them. I’d guess you’d never claim that humans who are young children or are elderly and perhaps suffering from dementia or have some other severe cognitive handicap - and therefore aren’t able to discuss accountability and human behavior - somehow aren’t human. Of course they are and we have come along way to better ensure humans who are cognitively handicapped in various ways are not condemned as subhuman and abused or excluded from basic rights and benefits on that basis. Likewise, we do not demand equal responsibility from all humans in order protect their rights and regard them as human. You should do some reading about the latest research in animal cognition. We are not the same in every way, no, but we have far, far more in common in terms of both cognitively ability and the capacity to feel complex emotions than used to be assumed. As was done with othering different groups of humans, much of this willful ignorance is wielded as an excuse and justification to self-servingly abuse and exploit other species. The evidence is overwhelmingly clear other species can think and feel. It’s been very well demonstrated that rats (as smart as three year old human children) have a strong sense of empathy and even of regret for a decision. The cognitive ability of crows is on par with seven year old human children. Elephants, cetaceans, and our fellow primates are even smarter and more socially complex. We don’t denigrate our own species by acknowledging the obvious: we are animals that developed from common evolutionary roots with many other species. We denigrate our own species by constructing specious excuses to construct a baselessly totalizing exceptionalism designed to massage our own egos and justify abusing other species. This is both moral idiocy and idiocy idiocy. Do you think the sun orbits the earth, too, because we live on it?
Is there a ‘no’ missing from this sentence?
“A substantial number of men who had [no] history of dysphoria or gender-nonconformity, but who did have a history of serious sexual violence, were suddenly deciding that they were women and should be cohabiting with female prisoners.”
I wondered the same thing. Completely changes the impact of the sentence.
Important typo.
In the American judicial system, defendants who qualify for dual diagnosis (substance and mental health disorder) can obtain more favorable and lenient punishments. For anyone that has worked in criminal justice, this has been an obvious opportunity for fraud, since the mental health claims are nearly always self-reported but the substance abuse claims are easy to verify since many felons like to party.
I've personally witnessed defendants laughing and high-fiving after sentencing when a crank of a shrink opined to the judge that the defendant qualified for a dual diagnosis that was likely a decent bit of acting. There are shrinks who've made careers out of this, and like any other credentialed and lucrative professions the temptation to fudge a few things to justify a result or diagnosis is simply too good to pass up when the Public Defender is eager for your services.
Hired guns in the trans activist world are similarly incentivized. Grifters ensue.
I've had any number of acquaintances in 12 Step programs say the dual diagnosis maneuver has another benefit. It significantly improves the chance of getting the medical insurance company to foot the bill for a five figure 30 day stay at rehab.
The UK is an Orwellian farce. State instituions covered up grooming gang abuse of thousands of girls because they were scared of being called racist.
If, heaven forbid, I ever had to go to prison, and they were willing to send me to women's prison instead of the men's, just on my say-so, it would be a no brainer. You'd be crazy not to opt for that.
The full story of the transition from sex to gender in English prisons from the 1980s onwards, and the crucial role of queer theory in this transformation, was published in this article (free access): https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/2/1/183
Thank You. Only abstract so far.
"Her" penis was erect and sticking out of the top of "her" trousers. ~ [Edit: "this is about] rapist so-called "Karen" White
Great article. Thank you
Boys will be boys.
I almost accidentally commented that this is one of your best-written and -reasoned articles and then remembered it's a guest post. ;)
Either way kudos all around.
TYTY for article. Great all-around. (Comments, too. :-)