To which I'd only add the following: what if "blowing everything up" is the point, and logic is merely the final obstacle standing in the way? What kind of being would possess such a motive, and what illusions might it craft to ensure success?
What kind indeed? The MO seems to be to implant false premises in people's minds, which by way of their inner logic, often unknown to those who hold the premises, lead to said blowing-up. Logic finally leading to disolving logic - or at least the attempt, because it cannot be done. You will only disolve yourself...
💬 c2 has less utility than c1 for our society, and sacrifice the difference in utility [...] accepting the degradation of said society so that it can give way to a new society built on the principles of c2
c1 = fossil fuels; c2 = renewables 😁
💬 “creative destruction” of our culture and its systems, with at the very least negative short-term consequences
Jun 25, 2023·edited Jun 25, 2023Liked by L.P. Koch
The underlying assumption of the inclusion/diversity ideology is that morality (right vs wrong) is all about social status or power attached to belonging to a handful of identity groups, and that these qualities must be shared equally just across these groups. The choice of power and social status as the basis of moral right is an entirely arbitrary, unsubstantiated assumption. The division into identity groups according to race, gender, sexual orientation is also entirely arbitrary. One could equally argue that people with very low IQ were always ‘oppressed’ by people with average IQ, or people with low integrity were always incarcerated and punished at higher rates than others, or that aristocracy/royalty of every race universally oppressed and exploited ALL other people of their own race, or anyone else as far as they could. Strangely, this last, most historically entrenched and common form of oppression is entirely absent from the inclusion/diversity/affirmation discourse, as if African tyrants were just as oppressed as the African cobalt miners. If all of recorded history were taken into account instead of some arbitrarily carved out experiences by a particular group in a particular place and time, while ignoring other oppressed groups in all other places who may share the racial characteristics with what the current group deems to be the oppressors (which is racial supremacism of itself) then the amount of past suffering and injustices would be equal for all possible racial categories. In short, all races were abused and exploited to the limits of survival, regarded as entirely dispensable by the select few members of their own race who claimed a god given right to threat other humans as property. Racial supremacists of the diversity and inclusion ilk insist that Congolese suffered more than, say the Irish or the Slavs, which is of course an absurd proposition, but it also implies that the suffering of racial ancestors (an arbitrary category selection) is a kind of universal currency, a claim on the property and rights of others in the present, irrespective of their individual actions, which is as absurd as all their other assumptions. https://substack.com/@michaelkowalik/note/c-17470681
Well said. The arbitrariness of category selection (or really the selection based on a very low form of self-interest) is even prior to any logical implications that play themselves out downstream.
It could also be noted that without slavery, there would be a much smaller African American population.
Also noted that slavery was and still is, part of a market economy. Such that white slave traders didn't just go in and round up whatever Africans they came across, but bought them off a pre-existing system, in which those loosing wars, or too poor and powerless, were sold off by the powers that be. Consequently seeding their genes across the New World, rather than simply being erased, as would have been the more likely situation, had they remained in Africa.
To culture, good and bad are some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, while to nature, it's the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience.
What's good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.
So often things that can be bad in one sense, are good in another. Aka, no pain, no gain. Alternatively what can be good in moderation, can be bad in excess.
One of the problems with our culture, no matter its technological advances, is the foundational premises are still fairly simplistic and primitive.
Given we have reached the edge of the global petri dish, it's time to go beyond our fairly linear, tribal/herd beliefs, where any deviation from the direction the crowd is running, must be wrong.
Slavery is a fundamental wrong, contrary to human dignity and to the conditions of rational consciousness. Regarding it as beneficial in any way is a category mistake, conflating fundamental principles with utility, which amounts to a rejection of fundamental principles (of right vs wrong). The reference to 'seeding their genes' also ascribes value to race, which is a commitment to racial supremacism and self-defeating: it amounts to devaluing your rational consciousness by the proxy of other races, and reduces the value of humanity to biology, which has no value apart of rational consciousness, therefore contradiction.
I have to say, reading the rest of your post gives me a chuckle.
Rational consciousness is separate from biology?
Either your appreciation of biology is extremely limited, or your value judgements assigned to "rational consciousness" have little bearing on anything other than cultural assumptions, presumably academic.
A few questions;
Would a spiritual absolute be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, or an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell?
Can we conflate ideals with absolutes and if we do, whose ideals are the most absolute?
Is time the point of the present moving past to future, or is that simply an effect of this sentient interface our bodies have with their situation functioning as as sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate?
Or is it activity and the resulting change turning future to past? As in tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
How much does actual rationality, beyond narrow self interest, play in most people's lives? Basically how do you determine the line between rational and irrational, if the only criteria is what your particular groupthink states it is?
What are your "fundamental principles of right and wrong?" Ever hear of the "trolley problem?"
So basically what you are saying is that it would be better that some 30 percent of the New World gene pool was not of African heritage, if it meant no one was enslaved in the process?
Wonder if you put that to a vote among actual African Americans, what the results would be.
I am saying that you are a racial supremacist who denies universal moral principles, thereby negating your own moral status. Those who fail to learn by consistent reasoning will have to learn through suffering.
There are a lot of fun ways to go with this framing. But I should say for the record that I question premise A in terms of extent of depth and breadth. In otherwords, on a spectrum of oppression and a distribution of affected systems, my argument limits the applicability of Affirmative Action overall. Most people don't like to go there of course because it limits the scope and effect of their politics for or against.
But the fun part is bringing to the front the question of whether those possessed of C2 skills are
1. Competent enough to instruct more C2 skills, regardless of its utility to society.
2. Numerically sufficient to have a 'systemic' effect.
Notice how the acceptance of the premises of 'diversity is our strength' dilutes the entire substance of Affirmative Action. If you presume that C2 competence is easily acquired and broadly distributed within the C2 group, even as that group is unfairly excluded from the C1 group, whom then is the beneficiary of integration of C2 competents into C1 institutions? Well that depends on whether or not C2 skills are indeed transferrable. (Wouldnt that be 'appropriation'?)
If C2 skills are not transferrable then integration is a zero-sum power game. This is the inevitable conclusion of C1 vs C2 essentialism. This essentialism is at the heart of all such debates.
Excellent point about "C2 distribution" and appropriation. Another instance of where confusion muddies the water and the whole idea seems less radical because people just assume that C2 skills are transferable and beneficial to all even though essentialism pretty much excludes this, while the whole argument ALSO hinges on accepting essentialism. Underneath this logic lurks, as you say, a zero-sum power game, something that the vast majority of people would never accept.
I think B is a lot weaker than one would like, and doesn’t follow from A necessarily. It presupposes out the existence of parallel systems, such as local schools that do not oppress in the same manner as the general schools. Likewise it assumes away the possibility of non-oppressive employers.
Of course I don’t think the left wants to argue that either, but I think that is the obvious problem.
Yes indeed, the logic here is very crude. That is also the danger of such analysis, and why arguments against logic have have some truth in them that make them compelling. But that is usually how ideologies operate: crude, almost violent logic. As you say, if you allow such nuances to enter the picture, the whole "systemic oppression" thing loses its sting, and back to basic humanity we are, as we should.
I'll go the nuclear option. None of this is about Logic. It's about Power: gimmes and the power to take them. Proponents of AA would argue that this is morally correct because systemic oppression is wholly an exercise of Power by the White Man (and they are correct, if only because all successful empires are founded on the exercise of power).
It's great to see the logic laid out in mathematical detail (and very well done on that account). But, as a man whose youthful love of math and logic was crushed by the realities of the world, I am sad to say that it doesn't matter much in the long game. The masses are not moved by Logic.
I get the skepticism, and believe me I don't put logic on a pedestral. I see this more as an exercise in thinking through some of the inner logic of these arguments. Just because it's about power doesn't mean that there isn't something to uncover and to learn here. Implications have a habit of playing themselves out, and sometimes laying it down helps sharpen one's vision of something that before then was more of a vague sense.
My biggest problem with the argument is that it understates the role of innate ability in competence. If we accept your argument but add that some work experience will allow someone with equal ability to catch up after three of four years, then it is easy to justify affirmative action. Just allow some reduced competence for a few years to undo the injustice of inferior education that resulted from oppression. That would seem to most to be a good trade-off. But, alas, it's not so. Most affirmative action hires do not have equal innate ability and will never catch up. For this reason, I think it's a bad tactic to use this argument.
There are much deeper problems, in which this tension between in-groups and out-groups plays out.
Safe to say, nepotism has been a far more historically corrosive factor in competency, than diversity hiring.
The reality is that as these linear, goal oriented creatures, we apply idealized objectives to a cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality. Then wonder why the blowback keeps smacking us in the back of the head.
To culture, good and bad are some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, while in nature, it's the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental, the 1/0 of sentience.
So when we try applying our black white models to a complex and nuanced reality, we end up swirling down the usual rabbit holes.
The fact is that life exists in the very middle of the spectrum, where complex patterns and feedback is most intense. This thin biosphere on the surface of this little orb is a small, fluctuating state somewhere between the absolute and the infinite. Black holes and black body radiation.
Currently we are riding a wave of a couple hundred million years of stored sunlight and adapting to that will set the parameters of all our other social expressions. We need to understand the sublime and the nuanced is far more interesting than simply pushing the boundaries. We are not going to seriously explore outer space, given its magnitude, but we are seriously ignoring inner space. Right now, we exist as these emotional pods in a system primarily designed to manufacture the notional chits our society uses as economic medium. As these linear, goal oriented creatures, we see money as signal to save and store, while the economy needs them to circulate. Consequently our economic experts refer to it as both medium of exchange and store of value.
Yet a medium is dynamic, while a store is static. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. Would doctors, highway engineers, or the average five year old confuse the two? Doing so amounts to an economic Ebola virus, as all value is broken into its monetary scrap value, to be siphoned off into our savings accounts, for a future we are destroying.
All actual work has already been outsourced to third world countries, because it is more monetarily effective. So we are left to worry whether the remaining office staff is competent and whether AI will make their bullshit jobs redundant.
A flawless formulation, Sir Koch.
To which I'd only add the following: what if "blowing everything up" is the point, and logic is merely the final obstacle standing in the way? What kind of being would possess such a motive, and what illusions might it craft to ensure success?
What kind indeed? The MO seems to be to implant false premises in people's minds, which by way of their inner logic, often unknown to those who hold the premises, lead to said blowing-up. Logic finally leading to disolving logic - or at least the attempt, because it cannot be done. You will only disolve yourself...
💬 c2 has less utility than c1 for our society, and sacrifice the difference in utility [...] accepting the degradation of said society so that it can give way to a new society built on the principles of c2
c1 = fossil fuels; c2 = renewables 😁
💬 “creative destruction” of our culture and its systems, with at the very least negative short-term consequences
This was brilliant.
Thanks, John.
The underlying assumption of the inclusion/diversity ideology is that morality (right vs wrong) is all about social status or power attached to belonging to a handful of identity groups, and that these qualities must be shared equally just across these groups. The choice of power and social status as the basis of moral right is an entirely arbitrary, unsubstantiated assumption. The division into identity groups according to race, gender, sexual orientation is also entirely arbitrary. One could equally argue that people with very low IQ were always ‘oppressed’ by people with average IQ, or people with low integrity were always incarcerated and punished at higher rates than others, or that aristocracy/royalty of every race universally oppressed and exploited ALL other people of their own race, or anyone else as far as they could. Strangely, this last, most historically entrenched and common form of oppression is entirely absent from the inclusion/diversity/affirmation discourse, as if African tyrants were just as oppressed as the African cobalt miners. If all of recorded history were taken into account instead of some arbitrarily carved out experiences by a particular group in a particular place and time, while ignoring other oppressed groups in all other places who may share the racial characteristics with what the current group deems to be the oppressors (which is racial supremacism of itself) then the amount of past suffering and injustices would be equal for all possible racial categories. In short, all races were abused and exploited to the limits of survival, regarded as entirely dispensable by the select few members of their own race who claimed a god given right to threat other humans as property. Racial supremacists of the diversity and inclusion ilk insist that Congolese suffered more than, say the Irish or the Slavs, which is of course an absurd proposition, but it also implies that the suffering of racial ancestors (an arbitrary category selection) is a kind of universal currency, a claim on the property and rights of others in the present, irrespective of their individual actions, which is as absurd as all their other assumptions. https://substack.com/@michaelkowalik/note/c-17470681
Well said. The arbitrariness of category selection (or really the selection based on a very low form of self-interest) is even prior to any logical implications that play themselves out downstream.
It could also be noted that without slavery, there would be a much smaller African American population.
Also noted that slavery was and still is, part of a market economy. Such that white slave traders didn't just go in and round up whatever Africans they came across, but bought them off a pre-existing system, in which those loosing wars, or too poor and powerless, were sold off by the powers that be. Consequently seeding their genes across the New World, rather than simply being erased, as would have been the more likely situation, had they remained in Africa.
You imply that slavery was beneficial to Africans, which adds an insult to injury.
I didn't imply it, I stated it as a fact.
To culture, good and bad are some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, while to nature, it's the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience.
What's good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.
So often things that can be bad in one sense, are good in another. Aka, no pain, no gain. Alternatively what can be good in moderation, can be bad in excess.
One of the problems with our culture, no matter its technological advances, is the foundational premises are still fairly simplistic and primitive.
Given we have reached the edge of the global petri dish, it's time to go beyond our fairly linear, tribal/herd beliefs, where any deviation from the direction the crowd is running, must be wrong.
Slavery is a fundamental wrong, contrary to human dignity and to the conditions of rational consciousness. Regarding it as beneficial in any way is a category mistake, conflating fundamental principles with utility, which amounts to a rejection of fundamental principles (of right vs wrong). The reference to 'seeding their genes' also ascribes value to race, which is a commitment to racial supremacism and self-defeating: it amounts to devaluing your rational consciousness by the proxy of other races, and reduces the value of humanity to biology, which has no value apart of rational consciousness, therefore contradiction.
I have to say, reading the rest of your post gives me a chuckle.
Rational consciousness is separate from biology?
Either your appreciation of biology is extremely limited, or your value judgements assigned to "rational consciousness" have little bearing on anything other than cultural assumptions, presumably academic.
A few questions;
Would a spiritual absolute be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, or an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell?
Can we conflate ideals with absolutes and if we do, whose ideals are the most absolute?
Is time the point of the present moving past to future, or is that simply an effect of this sentient interface our bodies have with their situation functioning as as sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate?
Or is it activity and the resulting change turning future to past? As in tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
How much does actual rationality, beyond narrow self interest, play in most people's lives? Basically how do you determine the line between rational and irrational, if the only criteria is what your particular groupthink states it is?
What are your "fundamental principles of right and wrong?" Ever hear of the "trolley problem?"
All these questions are answered across dozens of articles on my substack.
So basically what you are saying is that it would be better that some 30 percent of the New World gene pool was not of African heritage, if it meant no one was enslaved in the process?
Wonder if you put that to a vote among actual African Americans, what the results would be.
I am saying that you are a racial supremacist who denies universal moral principles, thereby negating your own moral status. Those who fail to learn by consistent reasoning will have to learn through suffering.
Very amusing and cogent!
There are a lot of fun ways to go with this framing. But I should say for the record that I question premise A in terms of extent of depth and breadth. In otherwords, on a spectrum of oppression and a distribution of affected systems, my argument limits the applicability of Affirmative Action overall. Most people don't like to go there of course because it limits the scope and effect of their politics for or against.
But the fun part is bringing to the front the question of whether those possessed of C2 skills are
1. Competent enough to instruct more C2 skills, regardless of its utility to society.
2. Numerically sufficient to have a 'systemic' effect.
Notice how the acceptance of the premises of 'diversity is our strength' dilutes the entire substance of Affirmative Action. If you presume that C2 competence is easily acquired and broadly distributed within the C2 group, even as that group is unfairly excluded from the C1 group, whom then is the beneficiary of integration of C2 competents into C1 institutions? Well that depends on whether or not C2 skills are indeed transferrable. (Wouldnt that be 'appropriation'?)
If C2 skills are not transferrable then integration is a zero-sum power game. This is the inevitable conclusion of C1 vs C2 essentialism. This essentialism is at the heart of all such debates.
Excellent point about "C2 distribution" and appropriation. Another instance of where confusion muddies the water and the whole idea seems less radical because people just assume that C2 skills are transferable and beneficial to all even though essentialism pretty much excludes this, while the whole argument ALSO hinges on accepting essentialism. Underneath this logic lurks, as you say, a zero-sum power game, something that the vast majority of people would never accept.
I think B is a lot weaker than one would like, and doesn’t follow from A necessarily. It presupposes out the existence of parallel systems, such as local schools that do not oppress in the same manner as the general schools. Likewise it assumes away the possibility of non-oppressive employers.
Of course I don’t think the left wants to argue that either, but I think that is the obvious problem.
Yes indeed, the logic here is very crude. That is also the danger of such analysis, and why arguments against logic have have some truth in them that make them compelling. But that is usually how ideologies operate: crude, almost violent logic. As you say, if you allow such nuances to enter the picture, the whole "systemic oppression" thing loses its sting, and back to basic humanity we are, as we should.
Indeed. A lot of motivated reasoning passes for “sound logic” these days, on all sides. Rationalization is applauded above reason.
Mwah!
Instant like - without knowing what that means! (These are the best likes.)
Hint, it is typically expressed with a typical hand movement involving fingers to the lips.
I'll go the nuclear option. None of this is about Logic. It's about Power: gimmes and the power to take them. Proponents of AA would argue that this is morally correct because systemic oppression is wholly an exercise of Power by the White Man (and they are correct, if only because all successful empires are founded on the exercise of power).
It's great to see the logic laid out in mathematical detail (and very well done on that account). But, as a man whose youthful love of math and logic was crushed by the realities of the world, I am sad to say that it doesn't matter much in the long game. The masses are not moved by Logic.
I get the skepticism, and believe me I don't put logic on a pedestral. I see this more as an exercise in thinking through some of the inner logic of these arguments. Just because it's about power doesn't mean that there isn't something to uncover and to learn here. Implications have a habit of playing themselves out, and sometimes laying it down helps sharpen one's vision of something that before then was more of a vague sense.
My biggest problem with the argument is that it understates the role of innate ability in competence. If we accept your argument but add that some work experience will allow someone with equal ability to catch up after three of four years, then it is easy to justify affirmative action. Just allow some reduced competence for a few years to undo the injustice of inferior education that resulted from oppression. That would seem to most to be a good trade-off. But, alas, it's not so. Most affirmative action hires do not have equal innate ability and will never catch up. For this reason, I think it's a bad tactic to use this argument.
This was not an argument to convince anybody. It was an exercise in thinking through some of the inner logic of the thoughts behind popular stances.
There are much deeper problems, in which this tension between in-groups and out-groups plays out.
Safe to say, nepotism has been a far more historically corrosive factor in competency, than diversity hiring.
The reality is that as these linear, goal oriented creatures, we apply idealized objectives to a cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality. Then wonder why the blowback keeps smacking us in the back of the head.
To culture, good and bad are some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, while in nature, it's the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental, the 1/0 of sentience.
So when we try applying our black white models to a complex and nuanced reality, we end up swirling down the usual rabbit holes.
The fact is that life exists in the very middle of the spectrum, where complex patterns and feedback is most intense. This thin biosphere on the surface of this little orb is a small, fluctuating state somewhere between the absolute and the infinite. Black holes and black body radiation.
Currently we are riding a wave of a couple hundred million years of stored sunlight and adapting to that will set the parameters of all our other social expressions. We need to understand the sublime and the nuanced is far more interesting than simply pushing the boundaries. We are not going to seriously explore outer space, given its magnitude, but we are seriously ignoring inner space. Right now, we exist as these emotional pods in a system primarily designed to manufacture the notional chits our society uses as economic medium. As these linear, goal oriented creatures, we see money as signal to save and store, while the economy needs them to circulate. Consequently our economic experts refer to it as both medium of exchange and store of value.
Yet a medium is dynamic, while a store is static. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. Would doctors, highway engineers, or the average five year old confuse the two? Doing so amounts to an economic Ebola virus, as all value is broken into its monetary scrap value, to be siphoned off into our savings accounts, for a future we are destroying.
All actual work has already been outsourced to third world countries, because it is more monetarily effective. So we are left to worry whether the remaining office staff is competent and whether AI will make their bullshit jobs redundant.
.
As A Country
We Are Still Shitting Obama Out.
The Body Politic Will Recover.
And Our Immunity To His Kind Will Only Strengthen.
His, And Theirs, Is An Emotional World.
You Must Load Your Arrows To Bloody Their Emotions.
It's All They've Got. Understand That. It's All They Have.
'Lest They Have Your Emotions Too.
.