Why is Peterson so attractive to the right? — deusidex

Wrote on this here and here. I think the reasons he's popular and attractive to the right+centrists are detached from whatever his scholarly merits are.

I'd like you to fill this out. — Banno

I shall try to contrast what I've been thinking to what you've been thinking, but I'd like you to answer a couple of questions first. I need you to spell out how you think this works before I try and make the contrast.

So the object language is the world. — Banno

The missing piece may be that the world is, in Davidson's words, always and already interpreted. The illocution of making statements involves representing the world in words - that's what the game is. — Banno

When you say "the object language is the world", what does that mean? Does it entail that the world is a language because it is an object language, or are you making a different claim? If you are making a different claim, what metaphysics justifies treating the world as a language?

Moreover, I'll grant that the world is "always already interpreted", but I don't see why that should make the content of that tacit interpretation propositional or even just language-like. Can you spell that out for me? Heidegger's emphatically against the claim that tacit interpretation works primarily by how it comes to be embedded in declarative sentences. Even though he sides with the claim that language ("discourse") plays a central role in giving the world its interactive texture (of institutions, intentions, rituals, signposts, jokes etc) and that texture is "always already there".

For Heidegger, propositionality; called the predicative "as structure" - conceived of as the adequation of thought and being through sententially expressed judgements - is retrojected onto pragmatic activity. It arises during conceptual/intellectual judgements regarding activities. It's like Witty's seeing-as applied to statable judgements - a seeing that (such and such) is the case. This is contrasted to the pre-predicative "as structure"; the pragmatic, procedural and existential components of interpretation - more of a seeing-how and the how of seeing-as. He has language "discourse" interweaving+coordinating both of those "as-structures" without exhausting all of their aspects, notably only the first has statements (judgements) playing a central role.

(substantial edits)

Now you're doing it. The statement is a disquotation (of its quotation). — bongo fury

I was summarising what I understood as Banno's account.

While confusion of use and mention is endemic, can we please focus on ordinary declarative statements? — bongo fury

If you like. I think they're being emphasised in an oscillatory manner.

To my tastes @Banno is trying to have his cake and eat it too - language is pragmatic, generically speech acts aren't assertions, truth plays a central role in a theory of meaning (of assertions).

Allegedly: belief's a two place relation with an agent on the left and a statement on the right, but that works out the same as the agent having a belief about the statement's disquotation because the statement and its disquotation are truth functionally equivalent (despite that one is a statement, and one is a worldly event - the world as a metalanguage).

When you push on the alleged connection between the statement and its truth condition, we end up with "use", pragmatics, norms being used to justify the belief claim.

When you push on the pragmatics, you end up with something like a formal semantics of statements alone to justify the belief claim.

Repeat ad nauseum, never talk about anything substantive. It feels like a holism that will use anything it deems connected to avoid articulating a point.

What is on the RHS is a state of affairs, a fact, what is the case, the relevant correlation, the extension of the sentence... — Banno

What's the extension of an apology?

It was read. We decided no. Sorry for the delay.

Forgot to say, if you're trying to find your way around philosophy, check out the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - they're free, extensive, peer reviewed and up to date. Introductory sections in them tend not to be mercilessly technical either (except formal logic articles).

he books you've cited all lead to a very left wing, — counterpunch

>Includes Heidegger (Nazi) and Schopenhauer (Pessimist conservative).

:roll:

If you're reading it in terms of who reacts to who:

Schopenhauer reacts to Kant.
Heidegger reacts to Kierkegaard and Kant and Schopenhauer (though I can't remember if his Schop or Kierkegaard reaction is in being and time).

So probably: Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger.

Those perceived differences are what our talk is grounded in, i.e., they provide the context for our talk. — Andrew M

If you'll permit me to be a bit socratic, when you say that they "provide the context for our talk", and that this context "grounds" the use of language, I was wondering if you could comment on:

(1) How speech acts are assigned to contexts; how do you tell which context a speech act is in?
(2) Whether the context of a given speech act doesn't just "ground" but also determines some component of its meaning - or in a more pragmatic vocabulary, if the context the speech act arises in influences the norms of use of the speech act?

The norms of use consist of patterns of speech acts in interaction with the world.
Which are used to ground and contextualise speech acts interacting with the world.
One point of the analysis treats speech acts as a given - a base/guarantor of meaning, one point of the analysis treats them as fungible - the superstructure/vehicle of meaning. Both contextualiser and context element - condition of possibility and actual instance.

I agree that speech acts both contextualise norms of language use and arise in contexts, what I think this does is stop them from being appealed to as a ground at one moment and as an expression in that ground the next.

Some of the trouble traces back to Alfred Tarski's unfortunate suggestion that the formula " 'Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white" commits us to a correspondence theory of truth. Actually it leaves us free to adopt any theory (correspondence, coherence, or other) that gives " 'Snow is white' is true" and "snow is white" the same truth-value. — bongo fury

Seems amenable!

Though @Banno here uses it (at least, last time we talked about it) in a deflationary manner. IE the sense of a declarative sentence is spelled out in the conditions that would make it true and only those conditions, and there's no better candidate for spelling out those conditions than disquoting the declarative sentence itself. The major contrast between deflation and correspondence (as I see it) is that a correspondence theory takes a sentence and matches it to some sort of worldly fact - like an event, a thought, an object's properties - and says the sentence is true when it matches the fact.. Banno's deflationary view doesn't match the sentence with some worldly fact, it matches it with other sentences that would be true in all and only the same conditions.

Banno's particular quirk (probably following Davidson) is that he then treats truth (IIRC) as an unanalysable primitive in norms of language; so the meanings of sentences are spelled out by how they are true, but what it means to say a sentence is true is something that must be assumed of any use of language and can't be spelled out in terms of any other idea or language practice. You already know what it means for a declarative sentence to be true, if you didn't the whole apparatus of language around it would fall apart. For Banno, as for Davidson, it seems the T-sentence isn't a theory of truth; it takes truth as a given and uses the T sentence to provide a theory of meaning.

That seems to me what is incongruous in fdrake and @Constance, that in seeing reference as ready-to-hand they are mystified by its being conventional. — Banno

It is conventional, but it isn't merely conventional. I doubt you believe that "this is a red rose" simply because we call it one. Norms play a part, they don't determine it all; otherwise there'd be no ability to coordinate between systems of evaluating sentences - how can we tell "snow is white" is true if and only if schnee ist weiß? Have to look at the snow and the norms of use.

When we make the assertion that the rose is red we somehow invoke a "condensation of the rose's constitutive patterns"...? — Banno

You know as well as I do that it's unfashionable to make names work like predicates that pick out a unique object. When someone says "This rose is red", and I am talking about "a condensation of the rose's constitutive patterns", I did not intend to set up a correspondence between the noun "rose" and the rose properties, I intended to set up a productive relationship between the rose and the speech act of asserting "This rose is red".

You might want to call it a causal relationship, what was it about the rose that caused me to describe it as red? No doubt you will say that it was a red rose. Then we've got to return to the question; what caused it to count as a red rose? That it was a red rose explains why the assertion was true, but not the cause of the assertion.

Part of the cause of that "counts as" is the rose, part of that counts as is in the norms of language use.

I must need more coffee, because I can't make sense of this. What are the things language is concerned with? It is concerned with the stuff around us every day. I don't see how it could be said to function in their absence. — Banno

Maybe you've read "absence" as "it doesn't exist at all", I'm intending "absence" as whatever is allowing us to speak of a hypothetical red rose over the forum. It's in neither of our heads is, it's in neither of our memories, it's in neither of our imaginations, so where is it? Absent, in that sense. But it works all the same.

Those experiences are what ground the use of that language — Andrew M

Yes, what do you mean by "ground", how does it work?

A name is not a description. Nor does a name refer only in virtue of its somehow being the same as a description. — Banno

Wasn't talking about names as definite descriptions. "Standing in" is a reference to the quote: "Words don't stand for things, they stand in for them". Meaning roughly language functions in the absence of the things it is concerned with, and it must be this way. Even when you say "I do" at a marriage, marriage isn't there in the words is it? It's not like you "conjure" marriage by saying "I do", the act's significance is deferred to the historical+institutional+interpersonal contexts, and it's only in relation to those contexts that "I do" stands in for marriage in any way at all. That's the sense of "standing in" I was going for.

T-sentences do not claim that the thing on the left is the very same as the thing on the right. The equivalence is one of truth-function, not of identity. Any interpretation that applies to the proposition on the left also applies to the state of affairs on the right. Hence, they cancel out, like paired variables in any equation. — Banno

I never said they were identical, I said they "counted as" each other - not every way for two things to be held equivalent is an identity between them. Indeed, the first part of the post contains "words aren't identical to the things they stand in for".

The Frankfurt School messed up with the idea of the proletarian revolution and passed the leadership of the revolutionary process to big capital. Those who do not realize this are blind or functionally illiterate. — Rafaella Leon

Do you have any examples of people or businesses which exemplify this leadership role "big capital" plays? Who is big capital?

Is there also another form of capital? What's the relationship between these two forms, if so?

This is about metavalue, which I wont' go into unless you want to, but I say it moves the discussion to value because the content is, of course, not discussable. Presence qua presence cannot be spoken, and if the understanding is all about pragmatics, what we call reality, truth and the rest is really ready-to-hand instrumentality of Being in the world. — Constance

@Banno, @Andrew M

If we're using terms in the same way, I don't think it's surprising that "presence qua presence cannot be spoken", words aren't identical to the things they stand in for after all. When we make an assertion, a whole process of interaction has lead to the uttered statement. "This rose is red", what are the boundaries of the rose? How many thorns does it have? How many petals? What is its hue? How reflective is it? How tall? A condensation of the rose's constitutive patterns occurs when using words to stand in for them; what counts as a rose, what counts as red, and what is irrelevant for both instances of counting as.

To say that "x" and x pick out the same thing is quite different than saying "x" is true iff x, the equivalence between the x on the left and the x on the right occurs only after the rose has been counted as red and counted as a rose; that is to say after it has been picked out. A whole regime of phenomena; of representation, of perceptual exploration of the environment, of how word is tailored to world; is hidden if the x on the right is treated as an uninterpreted event in the world. The perspective, norms, use of language, go into x, that is why it can be matched redundantly with "x" being true. In other words, that x on the right is theory ladened, and the theory it is ladened with is set up by how the statement counts as the state of affairs.

Which provides a problem, if how "x" counts as x is internal to norms of discourse - it is indeed part of their execution -, those discursive norms must be taken as a given in order for disquotation to spell out the sense of a declarative sentences. ""x" and x pick out the same thing" works as an account of the sense of "x" only insofar as the means by which they do pick out the same thing is taken for granted. For declarative sentences, this is all buried in truth; truth as direct but interpreted contact between what the sentence is and what it picks out. That burial is also an inversion; what counts as an event becomes the substrate of the declarative sentence, rather than the speech act of its assertion containing within it a generation of what counts as what in interaction with an event. Displacing the generative component of the speech act's content with the norms by which the speech is judged by that generative content. This is an intellectual magic trick; a conjuring of the given by which the relationship between "x" and x is judged as a redundancy. In reality, that relationship is a generative process of interaction, and the conformability between "x" and x can be seen, retrospectively, as its output.

How terrible insurrectionists would be those violently protesting the events then? — ssu

It seems quite consistent to be in support of some violent insurrections and not in support of others. Neither the violence nor the insurrection parts of it are inherently wrong, it's a matter of how it's done, why it's done, and what're the consequences.

To be clear; if the context was something like a group of extremely pissed off people impoverished during COVID nonlethally disrupting the process that kept blocking their stimulus checks, that's at the very least defensible and understandable. A violent attempt to overturn an election result whose fairness held up to extreme bipartisan scrutiny in that court system is definitely not defensible. What is justified to believe about the situation matters.

Redistribution does not work. People have to do it (succeed) themselves in order for it to be sustainable. — synthesis

Certainly not by Fox full stop. His privilege goes so far beyond his whiteness that his touted authority on ground level Britain ("the most tolerant lovely country in Europe") is quite ridiculous. I'm quite sure Fox's upbringing was lovely and tolerant. And white as snow. But that says nothing about Britain. — Kenosha Kid

Yes. It is quite ridiculous that a scholar of ethnicity and culture in the UK's opinion on whether racism is implicated in an event is dismissed as deplatforming and racism, whereas Fox interrupting her, accusing her of racism and the show itself changing segment was not.

Regardless, the idea that a dialogue between two people on a major news platform is taken as an instance of deplatforming is just nuts. No one was denied access to a venue, and the only person who was interrupted (repeatedly) was Boyle.

The infamous example is that of Lawrence Fox on Question Time - told by a woman in the audience that he couldn't have an opinion on the British Royal family because he's white. — counterpunch

The worst part about engaging in good faith with people like yourself is that I actually have to fucking check your sources just in case what you're saying is right. All that to avoid filterbubbling myself.

Here's the dialogue, and yes I transcribed it:

Rachel Boyle: "The problem we've got with this is that Megan has agreed to be Harry's wife and then the press have torn her to pieces. And let's be really clear about what this is, let's call it by its name, it's racism. She's a black woman and she has been torn to pieces"

Lawrence Fox interrupts: "No it's not, we're the most tolerant lovely country in Europe, you can't just throw the charge of racism at everybody, it's really starting to get boring now..."

Rachel Boyle: "The worst thing about your comment is that you are a white privileged male"

Lawrence Fox interrupts, groaning, the audience joins in, some applaud: "Ohhh god, I can't help what I am. I was born like this it's an immutable characteristic, so to call me a white privileged male is to be racist"

Rachel Boyle: "You cannot dismiss..."

The Question time hosts then interrupt her again and move segment.

If you look at it in context, the reason Boyle invoked the concept of "white privilege" was because Fox was hostilely dismissive of the claim that the reason the press tore Megan to shreds for marrying Harry had anything to do with her skin colour. If you look at it, privilege is invoked quite precisely as being informative of Fox's perspective which he expressed in the statement, and his hostile, groaning dismissal of the very idea that the British tabloids went apeshit on Harry and Megan in a racially loaded manner. It was actually Fox who interpreted the claim as "shut up because you're white" and acted thusly. Boyle's comments were regarding press coverage.

Considering that the role racism played in how tabloids treated Megan had some evidence for it, it shouldn't've been dismissed outright, and certainly not in Fox's hyperbolic and posturing tone. He head-desked at the very idea that being white in the UK doesn't get you exposed to racism much and thus your perspective may not have a good barometer for racism's presence and extent.

I think you've been living in a filterbubble.

And even if Boyle did want Fox to respond to an accusation of white privilege on a news platform, that already disqualifies it from being a deplatforming event. Unless, of course, you think a charged discussion on a national news platform is deplatforming...

The question is how we bring that about. Do you really believe that de-platforming straight white males is a way to bring about greater tolerance and understanding? — counterpunch

No one's going into Burns Nights and shutting them down for being white supremacist events promoting a pasty poet are they? Do me a favour will you, give me a list of events in which white men were deplatformed for being white men, You don't just get to list events there with your interpretation, you have to establish that white men are being deplatformed for being white men.

I'm the first generation in my family to attend university. I studied sociology and politics. My major concerns upon graduating were not political or sociological - but philosophical and environmental. — counterpunch

Same, but I went into STEM for statistics in the hope of becoming more employable. Not as a mature student though. When you grow up in a place where people leave a state school expecting to be "on the dole" because there's no jobs anywhere nearby, you wanna get the fuck out if you at all can. The choices looked like "join the army and go to Afghanistan or Iraq" or be a student.

It's strange how you can be so astute in some respects, and so purblind in others. — counterpunch

Thanks!

Your left wing, anti-capitalist, pay more-have less, carbon tax this, stop that, windmills and solar panels idea of sustainability won't work. It's based on Malthusian pessimism - disproven by 200 years of improved living standards despite a growing population, and the lie of limits to growth. Resources, in fact, are a function of the energy available to create them - not some fixed quantity being used up, that might run out. — counterpunch

I think you're right to say that there are better technologies to use to provide green increases in living standards, interpreting it literally you're very wrong though; oil and its derivatives are finite. That's a major problem.

We need improved living standards - not impoverishment imposed by left wing authoritarian government, not least because poor people tend to breed more.

I really wish you'd voted for Corbyn. From their 2019 Manifesto:

That’s why Labour will kick-start a Green Industrial Revolution that will create one million jobs in the UK to transform our industry, energy, transport, agriculture and our buildings, while restoring nature. Our Green New Deal aims to achieve the substantial majority of our emissions reductions by 2030 in a way that is evidence-based, just and that delivers an economy that serves the interests of the many, not the few.

Just as the original Industrial Revolution brought industry, jobs and pride to our towns, Labour’s world-leading Green Industrial Revolution will rebuild them, with more rewarding, well-paid jobs, lower energy bills and whole new industries to revive parts of our country that have been neglected for too long. For some, industrial transition has become a byword for devastation, because successive Conservative governments were content to sit back and leave the fate of whole industries and communities at the mercy of market forces. A Labour government will never let that happen.

We will work in partnership with the workforce and their trade unions in every sector of our economy, so that they lead the transition in their industries, creating new, good-quality jobs and making sure that their extensive skills are passed on to the next generation of workers.

We will show the world how prioritising sustainability will not only deliver immediate improvements to everyone’s lives but also offer humanity a pathway to a more equitable and enlightened economy: one that protects our environment, reins in corporate power, revitalises democracy, unites our communities, builds international solidarity and promises a better quality of life for all. The scale of the challenge requires nothing less.

Tackling the destruction of our planet is a question of justice – for the communities at home and abroad who are most affected by it and for our children who will bear the consequences if we don’t. Social justice will define Labour’s approach. We will make sure that the costs of the green transition fall fairly and are mostly borne by the wealthy and those most responsible for the problem

And Bernie Sanders; another figurehead of the trend you're criticising; promised a similar but more restricted program.

The facts of the matter are green energy transitions are huge coordination problems and costly, government involvement is required to address both those things. Why are you so filled with vitriol against a trend which wants the same things as you - green democratising reform?

@frank

I couldn't find the original video with voter demographic breakdown, but I found one with Mark Blyth making largely the same point. (Edit: if you want a longer piece putting the UK's political disintegration and rise of the right alongside the US's, he's got lectures on that too).

(It could make a nice reading group too, especially in the way it might attract both analytics and continentals) — jamalrob

That sounds like a good idea. The bugger is organising it and then sticking to it.

:up:

Cool article. Do you have any similar references for why Gabriel describes these domains as "fields of sense" - what is it that aligns the characaterisation of these domains with the sensory/the meaningful if:

New Realism consists in the claim that there are objects and fields of sense, which have a full-blown realist shape and others, for which this does not hold without either of those enjoying any kind of metaphysical or overall explanatory primacy.

no domains are given metaphysical or explanatory primacy? Aligning this general ontological construct with the category of sense seems to be a move which gives the concept of sense an explanatory and metaphysical primacy.

If you have time, yes! — frank

I tried to find it again, couldn't. Sorry! I'll have another look another day.

So counterpunch really has no one in the government representing his interests? — frank

I don't think so? I'm assuming @counterpunch is one of those hereditary working class people who got educated (possibly when tuition was free!), then aged only to have the Labour party; traditionally worker-populist; betray 'em. But considering he's advocated here for a neoliberal (public-private partnership expanding) figurehead for Labour by my reckoning he's advocating for exactly the kind of Labour politics that destroyed their reputation in 2008 anyway - elites making unaccountable decisions.

And his sense of having been betrayed by the supposed left has left him more angry at leftists than the tories?

Seems that way? Why are you so angry with "the left" @counterpunch? Does the current activist+Corbynite left zeitgeist of anti-racist, pro-trans, anti-sexist class struggle rhetoric make you feel excluded? Like the left's no longer "for you" since you're white?

Oh. He's looking to "own" a leftist. They don't have many forums open to them these days — frank

Indeed. This is one of the few places on the internet someone will be remain able to have that kind of conversation in good faith. And a willing sucker like me is willing to put in the time as a left symbol for a stranger to work out his emotional issues on. @counterpunch here seems to be a species of Brit whose heart is for worker populism and class politics but whose media diet has lead him to forget what those actually looked like in Britain.

Labour needs another Blair - not another Corbyn, because the working man wants capitalism with a social conscience; not to seize the means of production. He has no such aspiration. He never has done. All that Marxian bullshit is another middle class idea of the working class interest - like political correctness. If Labour ever want power again, they need a centrist pitch - like Blair's Third Way. Not political correctness, nothing to the left of Clause IV, but a practical pitch for government that recognises the value of business, so that he can go out and earn a decent living. — counterpunch

You demand I answer for the actions of my ancestors? My working class ancestors built the Labour Party from nothing to represent their interests relative to the owners of the means of production. And you've abandoned us, to weep bitterly and constantly on behalf of everyone but us - while the owners of the means of production have privatised everything, sold off council housing, destroyed the unions, cut pensions, ended job security, imposed zero hours contracts...etc, etc, and I'd still vote for them before a Labour Party overrun by people like you! — counterpunch

This confusion isn't really his fault. In the UK, @counterpunch's brand of populism is articulated along class lines. It's a rather effective bridge builder; the UK's older left leaners (like over 30) have lived through a time of worsening conditions for the lowest earners and the erosion of state institutions by replacing them with public-private partnerships; it started (I think) in the 70's with coal, it ripped through public transport, public housing, libraries, education, care work... and the NHS is teetering on the brink of becoming an insurance style system. Both parties agreed on this programme of fostering public-private partnerships, just differed on implementation issues. As Thatcher put it when asked what her greatest legacy was, she replied "New Labour" - that was the Blairites.

The working class regardless of race suffers from all that, and Labour's (rightly in my view) perceived as a lighter shade of corporate corruption than the Tories after 2008 with their banker bailouts. They've been tearing themselves apart for years trying to reconcile their internal contradictions; their base demands that they have to be the party of workerist populism, they have to be the party of cosmopolitan pro-EU middle class and business interest, and they now have to appeal to this nostalgia fuelled nationalist reaction of the UK's working class against the international public-private partnerships Labour helped foster. It's a borderline intractable divide. (If you'd like I can dig up a Youtube video from a political scientist in support of this analysis of the split). And it winds up having people who're talking worker-populist points rallying to support people whose policies go against those points.

It's anthropology through a telescope. White people do tend to be blind to the racism around them, but that doesn't mean my Danish person is blind. — frank

Aye. I think the approach should depend on the context, since @counterpunch here has been swearing at me for a while I figured I'd pick up the gauntlet. He's expressedly more interested in trying to dunk on me than engaging in good faith:

My friend, I had no such illusions going in. But please don't discount the possibility that someone other than you and I, reading this, might benefit from seeing a lefty twit get handed his arse over and over again. — counterpunch

"You reap what you sow" pays off in the long run.

I honestly can't believe you think that calling Bojo and his incompetent toffs "gammon faced clowns" is racist against white people. They absolutely have a choice not to be gammon faced clowns, the same can't be said for skin colour. I'm calling them names because of policy decisions.

Regardless, I see you have a very low bar for branding events instances of racism against white people in the UK, how could you have possibly missed systemic racism against PoCs in the UK if your bar is that low?

I'd guess, as you've highlighted is possible, it's because you don't want to see.

I don't think he meant the racial slur literally, but it had absolutely nothing to do with the convo, — Kenosha Kid

I don't think the intent should matter when calling another poster a racial slur.

just seemed like a "Ban me already". — Kenosha Kid

It did.

Didn't even have time to close this between bannings...

Banned @Brett for using racial slurs against another poster. Considering the rest of the post's content, it looks like another suicide by mod.

I have a theory that counterpunch is @Chester... — The Opposite

They don't read the same to me, Chester was quippy, counterpunch is an essay writer.

Oh, for goodness sake - stop adjusting for this and that, and take some fucking responsibility. There are plenty of poor white people. — counterpunch

I don't think you know what "adjusting" means. In a statistical analysis of data - in this case police killings, there are lots of confounding variables. In this case, crime rates are higher in poor neighbourhoods, and poor neighbourhoods are more likely to contain more nonwhites. You need to "adjust" for the economic causes of police killings since they're causally related to demographic disparities in police killings - systemic racism.

What you've made is an emotional appeal, and I can see it as persuasive if you feel you are under attack. And your civil liberties and equality of opportunity are under attack; just not by working class civil rights activists and their working class allies. If you live in the UK, your civil liberties are being eroded by Bojo and his possy of gammon faced clowns.

It isn't the "politically correct" left who've turned the NHS from the European gold standard of healthcare to the shitshow that it is, it's those clowns you're currently supporting through your rhetoric. Stop trying to shit on the only people who have your back.

BLM used carefully edited cell phone footage to create a social media narrative to suggest that police were murdering black people - and no-one disputed this because of political correctness. — counterpunch

Here's something I really don't understand; how have you managed to convince yourself that political correctness is systemic racism against white people, but you believe systemic racism against nonwhites can be explained entirely by its alleged targets' individual merit? This makes very little sense to me.

I can understand your feelings of persecution. I just don't think you're being persecuted like you seem to believe. To my reckoning, you're actually repeating the talking points and using the same data as right wing rags - and it's to your credit that you've actually looked up data. You should read this, which studies rates of police killings in the US while adjusting for poverty, it concludes:

In addition to confirming previously documented racial/ethnic inequalities in the United States, the analyses above identify strong socioeconomic inequalities in rates of police killings. Rates of police killings increase in tandem with census tract poverty for the overall population, and within the white, black, and Latino populations. For white people, the rate of police killings among the poorest fifth of census tracts (7.9 per million) is similar to the rate among black people in census tracts with the second-lowest poverty (i.e. the second quintile; 7.7 per million). Higher poverty among the black population accounts for a meaningful, but relatively modest, portion of the black-white gap in police killing rates. In contrast, higher census tract poverty fully explained the Latino-white gap, and the police killing rate among Latinos was lower than expected given their relatively high rates of census tract poverty

The broader judicial+law enforcement situation in the UK is similar; which is as expected, marginalised groups with less social opportunities and higher poverty face worse conditions in the street, the job interview, the workplace and the court. Poverty does a lot of the work, but it doesn't explain all the disparity; the remainder is to a large part systemic racism.

The kind of politics that limits police power, empowers social programs, and provides more security for the worst off and the worker, regardless of skin colour, benefits everyone. And it is effective, look at what happened in Glasgow when knife crime ("white on white crime" lol) was addressed as a public health issue!

What would it take you to change your mind on the following issues:
(1) that systemic discrimination exists
(2) that a politics (BLM) wanting social programs for the worst off isn't "racism against white people"
?

You demand I answer for the actions of my ancestors? My working class ancestors built the Labour Party from nothing to represent their interests relative to the owners of the means of production. And you've abandoned us, to weep bitterly and constantly on behalf of everyone but us - while the owners of the means of production have privatised everything, sold off council housing, destroyed the unions, cut pensions, ended job security, imposed zero hours contracts...etc, etc, and I'd still vote for them before a Labour Party overrun by people like you! — counterpunch

This reads like you frame the struggle against systemic discrimination as a separate struggle from class struggle; overwhelmingly those who get the short end of the stick demographically are economically disenfranchised - working long hours for too little pay and too little security. Programs that benefit those groups tend to benefit the worst off.

A working class politics that emphasises social programs but can't stand in solidarity with those who would benefit most from them loses its base. Get with the times, race+class+gender are aspects of the same struggle.

I will, however, join you in lamenting the death of class politics in the UK's "Labour party", I simply hope that the Corbynite wing wins out soon.

Where's that from? What's it mean? — Banno

Belief as a propositional attitude, with proposition substituted for statement. The substitution being justified by truth functional equivalence/substitution salva-veritae/disquotation. This goes back to the start of our dispute.

You'd enjoy the paper I linked to @Maw. It concludes:

Even without any mediation, labour values capture about 91 per cent of the structure of observed market prices. This alone makes it clear that it is technical change that drives the movements of relative prices over time, as Ricardo so cogently argued (Pasinetti, 1977, pp. 138-43). Moving to the vertically integrated version of Marx’s approximation of prices of production allows us to retain this critical insight, while at the same time accounting for the price-of-production-induced transfers of value that he emphasized. On the whole these results seem to provide powerful support for the classical and Marxian emphasis on the structural determinants of relative prices in the modern world.

Well no, this is putting the cart before the horse. The upper limit cost of what the general consumer is willing to put up is only known in the last instance, i.e. the products have to be produced and in market for sale. This requires that the wage labors have already been hired and have done the work and need to be compensated, the machines have been bought the land rented etc. and everything has been put into use. The capitalist doesn't have otherworldly foresight into what the general population within a market is going to purchase and what they are willing to spend. And, more often than not, this is a crises that occurs for pre-existing markets, e.g. a consumer technology is that suddenly rendered obsolete by new technology so that demand sudden falls for the older product. — Maw

:up:

Anwar Shaikh's work found that Marxian "prices of production" actually track market price extremely closely; less than 0.12% relative deviation between the two in the analysed time series.

I wouldn't presume to discourage the imagined audience from doing so, but would merely point out that it is assumed that any disparity is the consequence of discrimination - conflating effect with cause. It is not assumed that person Y has a personal responsibility to qualify for the loan, or the job, or not commit the crime. It is not allowed that X doesn't have a discriminatory opinion of person Y. If it's not explicit, it's implicit, it's institutional, it's subconscious, but it's definitely discrimination. The one thing disparity cannot be, is the consequence of person Y being judged fairly on merit - even while, disparities are bound to result from people being judged fairly on merit, because any one person is different from any other. — counterpunch

That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Systemic discrimination is absolutely explicit. See this World Health Organisation report charting systemic sexism and its causes; gender stereotypes make glass ceilings and maternity is an employment opportunity "tax"; gender as a societal process apportions men and women differentially into different jobs and gets them treated differently within them regardless of individual merit.

And I have no idea how you've come through COVID and BLM without gaining even a cursory understanding of the empirical realities that systemic racism refers to.

Your position requires sanitising history, something you allegedly dislike; it begs you to answer the question of how we could emerge from an imperial history, a global slave trade, and enter into a post-colonial present without the expropriated, undermined groups of all that suffering under the weight of that history. It beggars belief that all of this can neatly be explained by differences in individual merit.

I guess you need context for this not to make you laugh out loud. :lol: — Outlander

I am a shambles.