I'm really happy to see how the #RMS situation played out. Not only did he get to stay on the board, but to see such an overwhelmingly stronger support for him then dissenters gives me hope.

Its not that I like or dislike RMS, but the argument against him was so beyond absurd that it is concerning that it got momentum at all. But of course to listen to the detractors you'd think he supported sexual assault or something. Lets just hope these sort of people who will lie and exaggerate a situation in some false sense of "social justice" never become the majority, there are too many people like that already and it is getting in the way of achieving any real lasting social justice when these people are crying wolf louder and louder every day.

#FSF

@freemo There is a deeper reason why the woke tend to believe absurdity and lie about people:The postmodern philosophy underlying their ideology is anti-realist
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For most of us, the concept of “truth” doesn’t seem terribly complicated until we try to define it. Truth is… what’s true—this is actually the first definition for “truth,” paraphrasing a bit, in some dictionaries. Truth is that which is in accordance with reality is another. Philosophers understand that “truth” is a more complicated topic, and people in different schools of thought have different understandings of what truth is. Some, for example, hold that truths must be in some way transcendent of all human contingencies—that which absolutely holds for all people in all times (sometimes in all possible universes). Scientists tend to use a more pragmatic understanding (sometimes called “provisional truths”) that could be rendered as statements about reality upon which we can bet and reliably win. Most people, including nearly all scientists and many philosophers, generally agree that for something to be a “truth” means its having something to do with accurately describing reality.
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The postmodern school of thought, which profoundly informs the Theory of Critical Social Justice, however, does not see truth this way. In fact, it is openly hostile and radically skeptical of these understandings of truth, which might generally be described as being “realist” in orientation because they see some correspondence between truth and reality. Postmodernism is generally anti-realist in orientation, meaning that it does not necessarily see a connection between “truths” and reality. Truths might happen to describe reality, say as the Earth and the Sun describing a dynamic system in which both travel along eliptical orbits around their common center of mass (which is inside the Sun), or not, say as the Sun going around the Earth. Under postmodern thought, both of these understandings are “true” in the cultures that consider them true. That is, postmodern thought sees truth as entirely a matter of human (social) contingencies. This is what the American postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty meant when he wrote, “We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there.”
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Truths, in postmodern Theory, are socially validated statements about reality, which means that they are, ultimately, products of not just the cultures that produce them but of power within those cultures. The French postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault described this as power-knowledge, insisting that knowledge claims (truths) are ultimately only expressions of power. This sound strange, but the logic is accessible. What is considered true is decided by people by some social process of validation, the thinking goes, so “truth” is a social and political status conferred to certain ideas, which is then reinforced by their acceptance as true. Simultaneously, “truths” confer (political) power, as “knowledge is power” implies, because if it is accepted that a proposition is true, then people who accept it as such will behave accordingly. Thus, Foucault Theorized that “truths” are socially constructed by the systems of power (and the powerful within them) in society and then used to dominate, particularly in the attempt to maintain their power and exclusive status (see also, hegemony, episteme, and biopower).
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Most of this anti-realist, political understanding of truth (and knowledge) has been imported more or less intact into Critical Social Justice.
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In Critical Social Justice, “truth” is still considered culturally contingent, but because of the strong influence of identity politics at the core of the Critical Social Justice project (which could be said to use critical and postmodern Theories to do identity politics – see also intersectionality and positionality), the relevant cultures are ones rooted in various identities Theorized to be “minoritized.” Thus, “knowledge” and “truth” as we generally conceive of them are considered shorthand for “cis, straight, white, Western, male knowledge” or “cis, straight, white, Western, male truth” (see also, white science, white mathematics, and white empiricism, and also feminist empiricism), which are just one way of knowing. In fact, they’re a particularly bad one because these dominant groups not at all aware of their self-serving biases or limitations of their own knowing system (see also, internalized dominance and meritocracy).
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Thus, on the other hand, Critical Social Justice generally believes in cultural knowledges (e.g., racial knowledge) that have been marginalized by “dominant discourses,” which are deemed to be straight, white, male, able-bodied, thin, Western, Eurocentric, etc. These are believed to arise because different identity-based cultures have different ways of knowing (epistemologies) thus recognize different knowledges, and dominant ways of knowing (e.g., science, reason, logic, dialectic – see also, master’s tools) are believed to have utilized their greater power to unjustly exclude them from the range of “acceptable” ways of knowing and knowledges (see also, epistemic injustice, epistemic oppression, and epistemic violence).
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-truth/

@Vectorfield A lot of what you have written here is true [sic], but I feel it's also missing the point. One does not have to be anti-realist to see that culture massively influences what is considered true, and that its power over people comes in a big part of it being able to do so. You give the example of the Earth and the Sun, but you had to _very carefully_ word it to actually be correct. If you wrote "the Earth goes around the Sun, not the other way around", which would be considered true by a majority of members of our culture, it would have been disputable.

The insight that you seem to be dismissing (or maybe missing entirely) is that a vast majority of statements made by people are not technical enough to be strictly true. In the wiggle-room that creates cultures can express their power in various ways. SJWism claims that in political contexts the power that is expressed often leads to hurting minorities, a claim for which I would say they make quite a good case. And there is nothing anti-realist in that.

Of course there are idiots who misinterpret the above as "there is no truth" and become anti-realist, but the intellectual core of SJWism does not seem to be making that mistake.

I don't think that looking at the epistemology of the movement does a good job of explaining cancel mobs. If you want to do that taking a closer look at tribalism and outrage culture does a much better job, and also generalizes much better to non-SJWish cancellations. @freemo

@timorl @freemo I would like to inform you that ideas have consequences, the consequences of radical skepticism and subjectivism are many, to name just a few:
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In the Academy:
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So in the academy- the supposed engine of knowledge production, you have professors and researchers who no longer care about objective reality and dismiss the scientific methodology as tools for white-male-domination, who are only interested in pushing and indoctrinating a certain ideology, then scholarship is transformed into activism. Note that while social sciences and liberal arts are among the most infected departments, the STEM field are not immune. For example( quoting from Cynical Theories):
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「Since 2010, there have been an increasing number of proposals from within engineering, arguing for the use of Social Justice concepts in that profession. One 2015 paper proposes that an engineer should “demonstrate competence in the provision of sociotechnological services that are sensitive to dynamics of difference, power, and privilege among people and cultural groups.” In the book Engineering and Social Justice, published by Purdue University Press, we read many variations on the same theme and a worrisome recommendation: “getting beyond views of truth as objective and absolute is the most fundamental change we need in engineering education.” Meanwhile, arguments have been made that mathematics is intrinsically sexist and racist because of its focus on objectivity and proof and because of disparate outcomes in mathematics education across racial groups. One 2018 paper asserts,
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_Drawing upon Indigenous worldviews to reconceptualize what mathematics is and how it is practiced, I argue for a movement against objects, truths, and knowledge towards a way of being in the world that is guided by first principles—mathematx. This shift from thinking of mathematics as a noun to mathematx as a verb holds potential for honouring our connections with each other as human and other-than-human persons, for balancing problem solving with joy, and for maintaining critical bifocality at the local and global level.」_
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The result of that? The engine of knowledge production becomes broken
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In the Media:
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If the responsibility of a journalist is no longer to speak truth about the powerful and to inform the public faithfully of what is going on(since objective reality is unattainable and truth is whatever the powerful decide is true), but instead, to promote agendas that they deem are moral and righteous, then the media organizations will not spend time on actual news reporting, but instead, create narratives in the service of their agenda. Media organizations becomes propaganda organizations.
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The result of that? Distrust of the media, Alternative realities.
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In the broader society:
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A liberal society is able to exist because it has functional conflict-solving mechanisms that can peacefully mediate the frictions and disputes among different interest groups, which requires the willingness and ability to participate in civil conversations and reasoned debates. Underlying these interactions is the belief that through health and repectul conversations people are able to reach a common ground. But what happens if people think is impossible to have civil discussions because there is no objective standard upon which common ground is built and that people of different indentiy background are unable to communicate with each other due to their different lived experiences (e.g. Standard Point Theory, the belief that knowledge comes from the lived experience of different identity groups, who are differently positioned in society and thus see different aspects of it. ). If subjective feelings (determined by different lived experiences as members from different identity backgrounds) is all that matters, what if your feeling disagrees with mine? If peaceful conversation and negotiation is gone, hobbesian style zero-sum power play becomes the only option.
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I don't think the intellectual core of wokeism can be divided from how wokeism is put into practice, we can not solve the problem if we don't know its root causes, only when we understand what happened and why it happened, can we figure out what is going on and why it's going on, these knowledge then will guide us in dealing with the problem.

@Vectorfield @freemo I think you are still dismissing the main point – a lot of what is considered true in a society _is_ based on the values of the society rather than actual base reality, even in civilisations following the traditions of the Enlightenment.

I also don't think characterizing all the problems you mentioned as stemming from wokism is accurate. Academia doesn't seem to be doing much worse in the wake of SJWs, there are still good publications and shit ones, both in the directly wokish social sciences, as well as much less related fields. Even among the quotes you provided I can see some which might be parts of valid criticism, although it's hard to tell without context. (Others are obviously bullshit, but as I said there are always shit papers.) Most of the problems I have seen in academia are the result of the whole publish-or-perish culture, for which I like to blame Elsevier, 'cause I hate them, but I'm aware this is a systemic problem, with no trivial solution. I sincerely doubt removing wokishness would improve the workings of science in any measurable way.

I also think the main drivers of the change in the media are not related to wokishness, although in this case removing it might improve the situation slightly. It still wouldn't be a long term solution. I strongly suspect the changes for the worse were mostly resulting from the pressure to capture audiences, and thus lower the quality of what they produce, followed by various second-order effects driving reasonable people out of the profession. I am pretty sure this proccess started way before SJWs even existed, although it might have sped up around the same time they came into being, due to the internet becoming more popular (common cause for both).

Finally the broader society thing is closest to the truth, but this is also where you ignore the main message of SJWism. If the interactions in society were really based on a common ground being reached through reasoned conversation, then there would be no problem. The main point of SJWism is that these interactions claimed to be based on civil discussions, but are inherently biased in ways dictated by the culture. From this point of view, a very radical position would be that the breakdown of these discussions is a good thing. Most SJWism I saw does _not_, however, take that position (although the pop radical version certainly sometimes does). They mostly want to help people identify these biases as problems, and offer some partial solutions. I do agree that even this approach damages some institutions, some of which are not even that broken in the first place, but I think without other factors this would be healthy for the system as a whole. This post is getting long and it's late here, so I'm not gonna go into these other factors, sorry, ask me again if you want to know what I think.

I also agree that practice cannot be disconnected from theory in this case, but I also appreciate some of the practical results of wokism, so I guess we differ here.

@timorl @freemo I think you're getting me wrong, what I am not saying is that wokeism is the cause of all our problem today(I think it's the symptom of our problem, just like trump). What I am saying is that one of the intellectual roots of wokiesm, that is, radical skepticism and subjectivism, hostility towards reason and facts, is a very important contributing factor to the problems we have, including wokeism. Yes, I don't think by simply removing wokeism we are going to fix the problem in the academy, because the academy have lost their commitment to truth first, then they are captured by these wokeish idea second. Yes, I don't think getting rid of wokeism in the media would be the long term solution, for as long as the reporters and columnists have no interest of telling the truth as it is, it's just a matter of time before they take on an another narrative, probably more wild and abusrd. And while the environment for public discussion can be improved for a while if wokeism is gone, It's still impossible to build the common ground if people continues to believe that there is no object reality that preceds our emotions, feelings, cultural influences, that you have your reality, and I have mine. If people fail to build their consensus on the very basics of the physical and social world, there is no way they can move forward, and they can't deal with the problems facing their civilization.

@Vectorfield @freemo Then I think our main disagreement is how much wokism is hostile towards facts. I think there is a clear intellectual subcurrent within the movement that is, but it's also unfair to describe the whole thing as hostile to reason. At its core, wokism is pointing out a widespread bias in patterns of thinking and its political implications. From this perspective it's even part of the greater project to correct our biases, although it's more of a political endeavour, rather than an intellectual one. It clearly could be a much better movement, mostly if the anti-realist subcurrent was weaker, but I believe that in the end it is making the world a better place in more ways than it is damaging it.

@timorl @freemo It's one thing is to make a claim based on statistics and facts about widespread bias that may have affected our judgement. It's quite another to assume that just because one belong to a specific identity category, he is inherently biased, or racist, misogynistic, etc, which is exactly what the woke ideology thinks.
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Quoting from Delgado and Stefancic,
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_What do critical race theorists believe? Probably not every member would subscribe to every tenet set out in this book, but many would agree on the following propositions. First, that racism is ordinary, not aberrational—“normal science,” the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country. Second, most would agree that our system of white-over-color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material. The first feature, ordinariness, means that racism is difficult to cure or address. … The second feature, sometimes called “interest convergence” or material determinism, adds a further dimension. Because racism advances the interests of both white elites (materially) and working-class people (psychically), large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it._
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(Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (third edition) by Critical Race Theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. )
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Quoting from Robin J. DiAngelo,
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_**Being good or bad is not relevant.** Racism is a multilayered system embedded in our culture. All of us are socialized into the system of racism. Racism cannot be avoided. **Whites have blind spots on racism**, and I have blind spots on racism. Racism is complex, and I don’t have to understand every nuance of the feedback to validate that feedback. **Whites are / I am unconsciously invested in racism. Bias is implicit and unconscious.**_
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(Robin J. DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism)
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And
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_One of the key contributions of critical theorists concerns the production of knowledge. Given that the transmission of knowledge is an integral activity in schools, critical scholars in the field of education have been especially concerned with how knowledge is produced. These scholars argue that a key element of social injustice involves the claim that particular knowledge is objective, neutral, and universal. **An approach based on critical theory calls into question the idea that objectivity is desirable or even possible.** The term used to describe this way of thinking about knowledge is that knowledge is socially constructed. When we refer to knowledge as socially constructed we mean that knowledge is reflective of the values and interests of those who produce it._
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(Sensoy, Ozlem, and Robin DiAngelo. Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, second edition. Teacher’s College Press: New York, 2017, p. 53.)
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And
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_“we do not intend to inspire guilt or assign blame… But each of us does have a choice about whether we are going to work to interrupt and dismantle these systems [of injustice] or support their existence by ignoring them. **There is no neutral ground**; to choose not to act against injustice is to choose to allow it.”_ (Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education)(p. xxiv)
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_“Critical theory **challenges the claim that any knowledge is neutral or objective**, and outside of humanly constructed meanings and interests.”_ (Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education)(p. 187)
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_“Critical social justice perspectives:_
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_**There is no neutral text**; all texts represent a particular perspective_
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_**All texts are embedded with ideology**; the ideology embedded in most mainstream texts functions to reproduce historical relations of unequal power._
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_Texts that appeal to a wide audience usually do so because they **reinforce dominant narratives and serve dominant interests**”_ (Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education) (p .210)
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_“Our analysis of social justice is based on a school of thought know as Critical Theory. Critical Theory refers to a body of scholarship that examines how society works, and is a tradition that emerged in the early part of the 20th century from a group of scholars at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany”_ (Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education)(p. 25)
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_“Efforts among scholars to understand how society works weren’t limited to the Frankfurt School; French philosophers (notably Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Lacan) were also grappling with similar questions… This work merges in the North American context of the 1960s with antiwar, feminist, gay rights, Black power, Indigenous peoples, The Chicano Movement, disability rights, and other movements for social justice”_
(Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education)(p. 26)

@Vectorfield @freemo I don't think the introduction you give to the quotes gives them justice, because I clearly don't think the things it would imply, while in general either agreeing with the quotes or sometimes needing more context. Specifics follow:

Delgado and Stefancic: I see two factual statements made here, one which I think is relatively obvious and another which has a good chance of being true (I think it is, but I'm not certain). The first can be rephrased/generalized as: people from different backgrounds will have systematically different beliefs, due to having systematically different experiences. This statement would be true even if humans were perfect Bayesian reasoners, never mind the actual mess our brain is. The second is that there are incentives within society to keep various structures of power in place, in particular in the US these are in a big part race-based. The general part of this statement seems very plausible to me, that's what I would expect of any society. The concrete US example I am less sure about, but mostly due to my limited knowledge about the US (I've never been there, for once). Based on what I know it doesn't seem implausible, and many people who live in the US apparently think this is the case. The text of the quote follows directly from these two statements, so I am inclined to agree with it.

DiAngelo: This one is phrased in the performative, self-flagellating style I really don't enjoy, but if you strip that away the statements themselves are not that objectionable to me. Much of it is just the first statement from the previous paragraph -- people experiencing events sampled from a significantly different distribution (i.e. white people very rarely being targets of racist behaviours) will have vastly different beliefs ("blind spots" in the quote). The "invested" part just repeats the second statement from the paragraph above, although it strenghtens it in a way that makes me slightly less inclined to agree with it. The first sentence perhaps requires more comment -- I am reading it as "one can be a good person and still have these biases", which is a very good point to make. It can help people who consider themselves good come to terms with the fact that they might also need to consider themselves racist (in the sense the word is used here) and try to improve that.

Sensoy, Ozlem, & DiAngelo: Oh I _love_ this one. The fact that school curriculums are often created without acknowledging all the subjectivity that goes into them is an atrocity. And I don't just mean the obvious cases like history or reading lists or things like that. I am personally annoyed that the school of mathematics taught in schools is treated as given and unchallengable, with no mention of the alternatives at any point. Even at university I had to go massively off track to actually encounter them, and that happened _after_ I got my degree. I would gladly talk about this more, but this is not the thread for that, as it's only marginally relevant.

S, O, & DA 2: Well, this just seems like the claim that morality is important. If you believe murder or theft is bad you will not accept that people can stay neutral in these matters, same for the beliefs about systemic inequality.

S, O, & DA 3: It is worth noting that here, and in the first paragraph you quote from this book, the authors are talking about "knowledge", rather than "truth". The distinction is very important, because it shows the ideology does not have to be anti-realist (even if some subcurrents, as we established, are). I am not sure what exact meaning of "knowledge" they are using here, since this is a contentious term in philosophy, but for most I don't agree with the statement that "no knowledge is neutral or objective" -- I believe sufficiently small pieces of information can be neutral & objective. It is worth noting that they don't really even _make_ the above claim -- they say critical theory challenges the opposite claim, not asserts it is wrong, that distinction is also somewhat important. And their definition of knowledge might exclude the small pieces of information that I would consider neutral, I know some relatively popular definitions do.

The following quotes repeat/rephrase various of the above claims and show these are related to the historic and contemporary SJW movement, which I don't disagree with, so I don't think I have to comment on them.

@timorl @freemo Do you really believe these stuff? You seems to be very good at rationalizing absurd claims that otherwise would be obviously wrong. That reminds me of this guy spending thousands of words trying to prove 2+2=4 is a cultural construction.(https://www.mathvalues.org/masterblog/of-course-2-2-4-is-cultural-that-doesnt-mean-the-sum-could-be-anything-else) I don't know the reason why you are trying to rationalize the woke ideology, probably you think they have got the right politics(on the right side), probably your moral impulse has overridden your common sense, probably you are trying to enhance your rationalizing skills by putting yourself into such a strange position, or you're sincerely buying into these stuff. Anyway, by putting yourself in this position, you have really chosen a place that is very hard to defend.
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So let's get to the first argument "The first can be rephrased/generalized as: people from different backgrounds will have systematically different beliefs, due to having systematically different experiences." Well, I think your rephrasing is no wrong, but incomplete. What you are missing here is that 1.Racism has been redefined, meaning not one's personal attitudes towards race and racism but one's position in the "system" so what you think or do as as individual doesn't matter, so long as you are not actively dismantling the system through which your privilege is preserved, you are racist. 2.The system we have today in countries such as the US is entirely racist, by racist it means it's the “normal science,” the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country, and it's in the interest of the privileged, both psychically and materially, to maintain that system. I think the change of definition is a dishonest and dangerous move because it manipulates on people's assumptions of the meaning of the words, if the critical theorists could do it this way, other people could do it as well, it's an awful precedent. And the words racism, with its meaning redefined, doesn't make clearer of things, instead it obfuscates, racism in this sense could mean literally anything, and if it could mean anything, it means nothing. So that's my disagreement with point one, my disagreement with point two is that we shouldn't assume the conclusion first and use it's as an uncontestable fact. If you are going to assume something, you need to prove it, by proving I mean not providing subjective feelings and lived experiences that are useless and unfalsifiable, but by offering statistics, facts, logical conclusions. I don't think the critical theorists, the woke, and people like you have proven it, so it's silly to treat systematic racism as unquestionable and generally accepted knowledge. Now coming back to your point: "people from different backgrounds will have systematically different beliefs, due to having systematically different experiences." My question is, what do you mean by systematic? Is it systematic racism? Or capitalism? Or liberal democracy? I don't think your point would be valid if what you are talking is systematic racism, as it's not true. It's a narrative, not a fact. So are people's beliefs affected by the political system and economical system(and culture) in which they live? Definitely. The question is to which degree are they affected, and would it mean that they are affected in the same way? I should say that I don't know the exact amount of influence that these systems weild on our thinking, and so far as I can see, no one has quantified them, and I don't think they will ever be able to, which means when we are using such concepts we are only using them in an abstract sense. We could use examples, give analogies, but we can't test their effect in a rigorous and empirical way. That means, if we want to talk abstractly, build concepts around them, it's okay, but if we want to count them as objective standards, no, and it's not really much helpful for us to understand how people think if we are taking a factual and evidence based approach. And I don't really think that the social "systems" are the only factors affecting how we think, for example, wheather certainly has an impact on people's thinking, so is colour, and our health condition, if we are thinking systematically, why don't we take these into account? Oh, of course we can not neglect the effects of social media, and the different impacts of different types of social media, Twitter users have different behavior patterns compared with users of YouTube, and users of centralized platforms don't behave the same with users of decentralized platforms. I can add many factors that affects our thinking from all walks of life, the list is almost infinite, depending only on how "systematic" you wish it would be. Do you see the problem here? I hope you do. Even if we take all the factors into account, we still don't know the actual process of how they affect people. But there's one thing for certain that even when people are under the same influence of the same factors, experiences, or "systems", people still don't react in the same way, this is because we are different individuals and we don't think the same, we don't feel the same, and we would naturally behave differently. To thinks that people belonging to the same identity category all have the same ideas is another way to say" If you don't think this way, you ain't black!" We should always stress the importance of the diversity of ideas over the superficial diversity of identities. Critical theory, along with its "systematic" thinking is dimnishing individuality and promoting group mentality, which is not only factually false, but also anti-human-nature, it's also a direct assault on human agency and individual freedom. Whatever ideas you find interesting or useful from this theory doesn't change this fact.
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Your second point: There are incentives within society to keep various structures of power in place. Again, few people would deny it, the question is to which degree these incentives are effective? are they quantifiable? I don't think we can answer these questions and we can only talk about them in an abstract way, except for that you can read everyone's mind, and measure them, which is impossible. And by stressing on the significance of these particular bad incentives, you are neglecting people's other incentives of good will, for example, the incentive to care, to help, to heal, and the incentive to build a fair and just society. It's the good intentions of people, despite their identity categories, that have made the astounding progress in the history possible (it's simply false to claim that no progress or very few progress has been made). The danger lies here if you have such a deeply cynical view of human intention that everything people do is for the purpose of preserving power and privilege: If people are constantly being blamed or demonized despite doing nothing wrong have have no malicious intentions, they will actually stop engaging the other camp of people of good will, and start the Hobbesian zero sum power play, where the most unscrupulous wins. The result of this may range from the complete discard of historical progress to the establishment of an autocratic state. This is why It's very dangerous and irresponsible to demonize the other side and not respecting your opponent. Besides, the same logic can also to applied to your own camp as well. For example, your said the dominant identity group who enjoy more power and privilege have the ill-intentioned will to preserve their power(for the sake of argument let's assume it's true), but what about the subordinate identity group? Don't they also have the desire for power and privilege? The desire for power and privilege is ugly, why do you think this particular group's desire for power and privilege is noble? It seem to me really absurd to think this way. A argument can easily be made that the true intentions of the so called anti-racists to to build a caste system where the one with the most victim status enjoys the most privilege power. And It's largely true, Some people in the United States argued that gay white men and nonblack people of color—generally assessed as marginalized groups—need to recognize their privilege and antiblackness(news.trust.org/item/20190502130719-tpcky/), somebody insisted that lighter-skinned black people recognize their privilege over darker-skinned black people.( mediadiversified.org/2018/04/26/we-need-to-talk-about-light-skinned-privilege/),Straight black men have been described as the “white people of black people.”(verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/straight-black-men-are-the-white-people-of-black-people-1814157214). The white liberal's commitment to anti-racism and anti-fascism can also be read as ill-intentioned too. Why? Because the white establishment is playing identity politics in order to hide people from the fact that these corrupted DC politicians, especially these within the Democrats, are detached from the lives of average American citizens, that they have led people down, cheated on the people, what they did during the Iraq war and financial crisis was a brazen betrayal, and they have implemented mass surveillance without people's consent. By playing identify politics, they have diverted people's attention from their corrupt deeds onto something superficial. The Media class is corrupted as well, that's why they don't report the news and use identity politics as the justification for propaganda.
Do you see the double-edge effect of Cynicism? I hope you do.
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The part of DiAngelo
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It's more than obvious that Robin DiAngelo's claim is entirely based on the claim that the American society is systematically racist—a vague term that carries little substance nor is it based on facts. Extraordinary Claims requires Extraordinary Evidence—something they are not providing. The sentence "Being good or bad is not relevant." is a complete rejection or human agency and historical progress. "Whites have blind spots on racism" is a total denial of human's reasoning capacity and their ability to overcome prejudices.You seems to be extremely versed in extracting "merits" from awful theories, but I'm sure you can extract similar stuff from 「Mein Kampf」 or 「Краткий курс истории ВКП亅, if you only focus on the "merits". The question is not whether or not the woke ideology is entirely bad(the same could apply to literally everything in the world), the question is how would these ideas play out in reality and in which way the society would mainly be affected. Telling people on the other side that they are inherently bad people no matter what their intention are while rejecting individual agency is a bad way to formulate racial progress, in fact this approach is the hindrance to racial progress, it doesn't continue the legacy of civil rights movement and it's running the risk of losing out the progress entirely.
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I noticed that you said you are personally annoyed that the school of mathematics taught in schools is treated as given and unchallengable. I don't know which country you grow from in or which civilization you belong to, but as soon as your country have stopped teaching 2+2=4 or ceased to teach the law of gravity, your country, and your civilization is doomed to fall quickly, a country or a civilization that denies the very basis of objective reality will soon self-collapse, if not be conquered by countries like my own: China. The country that spends least time on the fashionable nonsense and recognizes the importance of science and technology will become the most competitive country, the country that rejects 2+2=4 will lose the ability to self-defense. That's very simple.
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S, O, & DA 2: "Well, this just seems like the claim that morality is important. If you believe murder or theft is bad you will not accept that people can stay neutral in these matters, same for the beliefs about systemic inequality." Morality is important, but if your moral impulses override your reason, the noblest intentions may well end up with the most disastrous outcomes. Morality that is incapable of handling the reality is not morality at all. If being moral means believing hidden oppressive power structure underlies all of the society's interactions, yet are visible only to the ones who are woke, then I am afraid this kind of morality is the pseudo-marality that is only compatible with pseudo-realities. Pseudo-realities are conspiracy theories without conspirators, such conspiracy theories challenges the basics of human reasoning, even the most ardent supporter of Donald Trump still maintain the sensibility that prevents them from believing wild stories like these, I used to believe the rise of alternative realites is an isolated problem that is limited to trump supporters, I've changed my mind after seeing how the left behaves.
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S, O, & DA 3: I'm not sure if it's still meaningful to write about this, to talk about abstract stuff detached from daily experience. But since we've came so long and it's about to finish, let's continue. Before I start I would like to ask you a question: You seem to agree with the idea that racism is bad, immoral, but really, why do you thinks so? How do you know it's immoral? Is is just your subjective personal feeling or something built upon objective standards? If the answer is the former, then how is it that your subjective feeling is superior than other one's? A white supremacist's subjective feeling is no bad than your own, if morality is subjective. If the answer is the later, that is, there are some objective standards upon which our moral decision could be made(for example, less harm, more care, reciprocity). It must means that there are objective moral principles that precede our feelings, and can be known. If these moral standards can't be known, then how did you know it? You might answer "these moral principles happens to correspond my subjective feelings." But the question continues: How do you know your subjective feelings correspond these objective standards? And how did you which moral standards are objective? If there exists knowable moral standards that apply to all, then, by definition, there are objective knowledge about morality, which is also to say, knowledge can be neutral and objective, except you are going to agree that racism is as moral as anti-racism.
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Here is my reply to your questions, hopefully I've made myself clear. I don't think I'm ever going to convince you as you seems to be too emotionally invested in critical-theory-style anti-racism, although you try to distance yourself from Social Justice Activism. I'm writing to people who might be reading our debates on this thread. I think both of us have made our position clear, If you still want to continue this debate, that is, in my view, not very meaningful, it's fine, we can go on.

@Vectorfield @freemo I tried mentioning explicitly how much credence I have in each claim made in the previous post. So for many of them, yes, I do believe them, for others I at least find them plausible. None are obviously wrong. And the article you link is actually reasonably good, for pop mathematics, but I'll get deeper into that in the mathematics section.

The first claim is not about racism, at least my rephrasing of it isn't. (Both the rephrasings don't quite correspond to how the original argument was divided into two, I felt the division I chose made the actual statements being made clearer. Sorry for not stating this explicitly.) As I mentioned, I am less certain about the concrete racism claims, due to my limited knowledge of the US. Concerning the different usage of the word racism, referring to systemic racism rather than overt racism, I also don't like the name, but I have yet to see someone propose a better one for the concept. After all the concept refers to different experiences people of different races encounter within the system, ending up in some races worse off. If you have a better name than "systemic racism" for the concept I would gladly hear it. Whether this is actually the case in the US is an empirical question, for which I think SJWs have provided some evidence, but as already mentioned I am not completely sure about this.

Now I see we tripped over a small language barrier: "systematic" is not the same as "systemic". In this context it just means that people will be exposed to experiences drawn from different distributions, and these distributions depend on various properties of their backgrounds. The traits of these backgrounds are also not distributed evenly, so the distributions will be different in systematic ways – to give an uncontrovensial example people in Poland will have different experiences than people in China, and these differences are not purely random. They will be exposed to different languages, religions, teaching styles etc. This is also the case within societies – people born into poor families will have different experiences than people born into rich families, and, I expect, people born black will have different experiences than people born white. All these differences are not purely random, but systematic. I don't think any of the above is controversial. Then there is the fact that learning from different experiences leads to different beliefs, which is a claim for which I could even get citations (ranging from recent ML work, through earlier work on rational agents, and probably also from neuroscience and social sciences if I tried, although I am not an expert in any of the latter), so I don't think you would consider that debatable.

The next part of this paragraph is you completely dismissing a lot of data and research. The field is not trivially quantifiable, but there is a lot research being done on various groups of people, subcultures, ethnicities etc. And a lot of the differences in the beliefs of these people are actually known. Any social sciencist would be laughed out of the room if they suggested e.g. using only white people for a study that's supposed to be about society in general – such an approach would invite tons of biases in the data, almost irrespectively of what the study would be about. Many of these biases have been quantified in various studies (as much as they are able to; I am well aware of the problems with statistical quality of many publications). If you were trying to imply these influences are completely not quantifiable you are just plain wrong, if you are complaining that there is no comprehensive theory of how the differences arise then, well, afaik there is no field of knowledge that _started_ with a theory, they (almost?) always start with a lot of research and only formulate a theory after lots of work. Finally, these are claims about statistical properties of the distrubutions of beliefs confitional on backgrouds. So, at least at it's core, wokeism does not imply that thinking in a specific way is necessary to belong to a group.

As for individualism vs collectivism this is an enormous separate ideological topic. I tend to lean somewhat on the side of individualism, but I also have the impression that the US is wa~y too slanted that way and more collectivism would do it good. A big part of the SJW movement is too collectivist for my taste, which is definitely to an extent the result of the ideology focusing on the biases that stem from group membership, but not enough to scare me. And I disagree collectivism is anti-human – humans are, after all, _very_ social animals.

I think you are somehow misunderstanding the word "incentives". Maybe you are confusing it with "intentions"? Incentives are pressures extracted by a system on people's decision making, e.g. capitalism provides incentives for providing people with what they want by transferring money to the people that do that, law often tries to provide incentives to avoid doing things agains the public good in the form of punishments or fines, schools provide incentives for learning in the form of getting good grades etc.(not all of the above work well, just giving examples). This framework does not speak about people's intentions at all. It rather explains that, if the system provides wrong incentives, then even people with good intentions will follow these a portion of the time, and make bad actions.If anything, this is a very anti-cynical view (or at least the version of it I subscribe to) – people are generally good, but the systems in which they operate make them do things which end up having bad consequences, despite no one (or almost no one) having any ill will in the process. It's the good intentions and hard work that actually change society and the incentives within for the better – I'm pretty sure a majority of wokism agrees with that, that's why they are actually trying to change things. They also state that there are many bad incentives remaining, and working to fix them is an important goal.

DiAngelo: I think you are misinterpreting him quite a bit. "Being good or bad is not relevant" is not a statement about the futility of morality, but rather of the above – incentives, rather than inner motivations, will make people take actions often enough, that they are much more important than whether these people are moral. If it implied it is _futile_ to try to change that, then SJWism wouldn't be a political movement at all. "Whites have blind spots on racism" highlights the different-experiences aspect stemming from racial backgrounds, and communicating experiences is _hard_. Yes, human reasoning capacity can compensate for that somewhat (again, if it couldn't then the whole SJW project wouldn't be a political movement), but you have to spend an enormous amount of resources to actually do that and there are few incentives for you to do so. Even when you do, it's very hard to be sure you are still not missing something, because you have to work with people who don't even know what knowledge you might be missing.

Yeah, I am quite a fan of trying to learn from whatever I read, and I am very anti-cynical, so by default I expect that things people invest lots of time into contain at least something useful. In this spirit I often recommend people read "SCUM manifesto", which maybe isn't as bad as "Mein Kampf", but still written by a stark raving mad person. I recommend it because it contains some insights about society that I think are relatively correct and not neccessarily explained clearly in less crazy sources. It's also interesting, reading something that looks like cutting satire, only to notice halfway through that the author is actually serious. But I digress. I am quite sure I am _not_ doing this in this case, I not only value insights provided by the perspectives we are discussing, but also more or less agree with the values much of the movement represents. And i honestly think you are misinterpreting the quotes to mean something dofferent than the authors intended. Also note that all this is very much opposed to thinking that "people on the other side are inherently bad".

Oh goodness, mathematics. I don't know how good your background in that is, so I'm not sure how far into details I should go. The article you linked is actually a reasonably good resource on that for laypeople, it mentions some of the crucial concepts at least. Anyway, for the short version to avoid growing this thread even more – I agree that any formalization of mathematics that does not imply some form of the statement "2 + 2 = 4" is mostly useless (note that the article also confirms that, already in the title). There are, however, many choices made in formalizing mathematics that are not obvious, and definitely not universal. For approaches which take different decisions you can look up finitism (although the Wikipedia article is lacking) and hyperrreals/nonstandard analysis. The former can be seen as a better formalization for computer science applications, while the latter for analysis and possibly physics. Crucially, I believe that the most common, ZFC-based, formalization is strictly worse than either of these. Anyway, my main point is not even that these are better, but that people are unaware they exist, and worse, believe they _cannot_ exist, because they are taught that mathematics is universal. This is the exact point the article you linked is making.

S, O, & DA 2: well,, yes, my point is that just believing that morality is important brings nothing to the discussion. The Nazis believed morality was important and that Jews were doing immoral things so they opposed them, slavery abolitionists believed morality is important and that slave owners were doing immoral things so they opposed them. The difference here is that one of the above was right, and that is what the discussion should be about – how much a specific ideology is correct. The fact that the ideology believes morality is important and must be acted upon is a bit of a non-squitur in this context. I don't think we have an actual disagreement here, I just don't think that specific quote was relevant.

S, O, DA 3: I have no idea why you suddenly started talking about moral relativism here, it doesn't seem to relate to the quote nor to my response to it. If you ask, I subscribe to preference utilitarianism and my position on moral realism is too long to fit in this paragraph. I also read too much philosophy on that to be too sure about anything in this area – morality is clearly a hard problem. If this is about moral knowledge not being neutral and objective then well, this is such an complicated concept that I am sure my knowledge of it is neither neutral nor objective. This doesn't mean I am not looking for truth in this, as well as in other areas. If anything, the awareness of much of my knowledge being biased by my experience helps me seek the truth, by making it easier to change my mind when I'm wrong. Being wrong is also a scale, so the fact that knowledge is subjective and biased doesn't mean it's completely detached from reality – one can still be more or less wrong while being biased. And to answer the direct question – I am quite sure that being overtly racist is clearly immoral and somewhat suspect that not opposing systemic racism is mildly immoral (I'm not sure which "racism" you have been talking abut here; as I said above I also don't like that the term is overloaded).

I am sad to hear that you think this discussion isn't productive, I think I am learning from it. I also don't think I am that emotionally invested in critical theory, I think it provides a very useful perspective on common biases and the social justice movement it spawned seems to be doing more good than harm, but it's not the core of my being. (With the exception of the mathematics part, I am quite invested in that, bloody tertium non datur and other nonconstructive bullshit. ;P) If you want to see me being actually invested in something we can talk about veganism or Agda or type theory or bayesianism or recursive Harry Potter fanfiction or, well, there probably are someother options, but SJWism is not one of them.

@timorl @freemo Well, since you want to continue this nonsense, let's continue, but this time I"ll keep it short.
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1.You are still not offering any sufficient evidence to support the claim of systematic(or systemic, depending on what kind of language game you want to play) racism.
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2.You are still not taking other factors within the system (e.g.weather, colour, heath, social media, economy) into account.
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3.You still failed to provide empirical data that quantities how one's identity category (or the social and political system one lives in) affects one's thinking. For example, data that quantities how one chinese's mind would transform had he grewn up from Poland, or how a Blackman's thinking would(Systematically or systemically, choose as you wish) change if he were white.
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4.Even you change the word “intentions” into “incentives”, it doesn't change the fact that the anti-racists, or liberals have the incentives to do bad, for example, to accumulate more power and privilege, to justify the lying, to divert people's attention from their own corruption. And it doesn't change the fact that the non-woke have incentives to build a equal and just society, for example, to reduce inner conflict, to solidify the country, to ensure peace and order, to be moral.
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5.You are not disagreeing with the cliam that 「Mein Kampf」 and 「Краткий курс истории ВКП亅are not meritless, you just put out another book and said it's also not meritless, so? Being not completely meritless doesn't make it any better than 「Mein Kampf」 or 「Краткий курс истории ВКП亅because even these books has some "insights" as you might call it. You can find all the useful things from Robin DiAngelo, however “Being good or bad is not relevant.” is a complete rejection or human agency and historical progress even if people truely have the incentives to do bad.(they have incentives to do good as well, you're only focusing on the part to do bad, yet you didn't apply the same standard to the woke) “Whites have blind spots on racism” is a total denial of human’s reasoning capacity and their ability to overcome prejudices even if people belonging to different identity categories experience differently and they have incentives not to overcome prejudices( again, you are only focusing on the incentives to maintain prejudice, and apply this standard only to one side) The fact that you can find "insights" from them doesn't make it a good theory , because you can do it with any theory as long as you think they've got the right politics, although you tried to appear neutral.
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6.It's completely predictable that you would find this 2+2=4 is cultural construction interesting and insightful, Western civilization seems to have produced a lot of intelligent sophists who are extremely capable of building complicated concepts and constructing abstract ideas. I'm not going to elaborate on why a civilization that denies the objective of something as basic as 2+2=4 is doomed to fall, maybe the western civilization indeed has reached the end of development.
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7.You are now saying you subscribe to utilitarianism and moral realism. But really, how do you know you subscribe to utilitarianism and realism? Maybe what you are truely believing is white supremacism(or black superemacism), you just didn't know it, because your knowledge about yourself is biased and not neutral, your brain have deceived you into believing you are an utilitarianist and moral realist while you are not. You said you are sure your knowledge of moral objectivity is neither neutral nor objective. However, if all knowledge is inherently biased you shouldn't be sure of anything, you shouldn't even be sure that you are not sure. The idea that knowing your knowledge being biased by your experience helps your seek the truth may also be nothing more than a delusion, because how do you know your knowledge is bias by your experience? And how do you know knowing this would help you become less biased? It could be a story you tell yourself as well. Being subjective and biased doesn’t mean it’s completely detached from reality? Come on! Seriously? You don't even know when or if you are being subjective and biased, and if you don't know when or if you are being subjective and biased, how would you even be able to know anything about reality, let alone knowing how your perception is related to it? Are you saying racist is bad? Sir. May you are a racist but you just don't know it, maybe you don't think racist is bad, maybe your don't even know what is racist at all. Unless you are going to admit objective knowledge is possible and attainable, we can go and on and on and on. Sadly, you seems to be only interested in defending"the guy on the right side".
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Ok, here is my response, do you want to continue?