I was bored enough to flick through this week’s Culture War thread looking for something to sneer at and I hit absolute gold - a post linking to a web archive of a deleted post on Scott’s Tumblr from 2016 in which…. Well, go read it for yourself.
TL;DR: Scott has noticed that like 90% of scientists, journalists, educators, etc tend to support the Democrat party over the Republican party. Rather than reaching the conclusion a normal person would from this data (“gee, the vast majority of educated smart people are going with option A here, maybe that’s because it’s better than option B?”) Scott galaxy-brains himself into deciding that this is proof that there’s a vast Left-wing conspiracy to bias everything you hear against the poor Right-wingers (actual quote: “imagine an institution that’s 90% Klansmen, with all its findings interpreted by and transmitted through a second institution that’s 90% Klansmen, and consider how useful (or not) the information about black people that eventually reaches you through the conjunction of those two institutions will be”). Then there’s this segue into how nerds are oppressed by leftists because they’re so gosh-darn nice and fair and meritocratic and the Left hates that. Then he has the fucking chutzpah to end it with a paragraph about how you know he’s unbiased because he’s a Left-winger too, pinkie-swear!
It’s pretty much everything you’ve always suspected he secretly believes but would never say out loud.
Generally when a group is over-represented in a area of work, the right-wing thesis is that it’s just because that group is naturally better at/more inclined to that kind of work.
Unless it’s not enough Trump supporters in academia, in which case it is time to scream bloody murder and endorse affirmative action for conservatives.
What irritates me is the notion that any accusations of racism or sexism are somehow performative or empty, about which, bullshit. It’s painfully obvious that the “red tribe” are manifestly racist, homophobic, transphobic, and sexist. Furthermore, they clearly delight in being open about these traits, which they feel emboldened to do under Trumpism.
Too many who play in “rationalism” space themselves delight in this new openness to hate. It’s sad that Scott has become a kind of fellow traveler to these monsters.
In case it isn’t quite clear why this post is bad and Scott should feel bad; he never considers for even an instant the idea that, eg; journalists might have noticed that Republicans are worse than Democrats and that’s why they aren’t split exactly 50:50 between supporting them and not supporting them. Which is freakin’ insane, because it was the 2016 election season when he wrote that and he literally says in the last paragraph:
So despite the fact that it’s obvious even to him that Republicans are worse than Democrats, we still have to treat journalists who notice that the same way we would treat Klansmen writing articles about black people.
The weirdest thing is when people point to the leftward shift among even hard science people as indisputable proof of SJWism as opposed to the massive rightward shift of the Republican’s.
If you were a physicist in 1970’s America, it made sense to vote for the Republican’s because they were funding science, low taxes, a reasonable welfare state, and especially on the coasts, fairly socially liberal stuff.
Like - if you work at Bell Labs in 1971, it makes perfect sense to vote for whatever moderate Republican is in your Congressional district, as opposed to the Lil’ Ball of Hate that’s likely the nominee in 2018.
Also, there’s the small matter that the youths (as in under 45) are just far more to the left than older people.
this is almost identical to this post satirizing scott:
this is just incredibly self-serving
“i agree with the left on everything for exactly as long as they’re talking about Other People, but the instant I come under fire for anything at all it becomes a vast international conspiracy. climate change may be bad but the real shit is preserving Nerd Culture”
it continues to bewilder me how an entire culture can be this pathologically and unreflexively narcissistic
When I read the Masterpiece To End All Masterpieces “Meditations on Moloch,” I kept thinking, “Moloch is capital, you ass,” while experiencing the sinking feeling of, “you think Moloch is (((The Cathedral))), don’t you?”
Ah, the most rational of conspiracy theories. The liberal elite, which controls everything, is ever creating new social causes to take even more power for itself from itself.
Comparing liberals to the KKK is one of the most on-brand things Scott has ever written.
It must be a vast and terrible Left-wing conspiracy that can force the Republicans to adopt positions (ranging from climate change denial and creationism to Laffer curves and the hordes of terrorist immigrants) that are just objectively wrong.
This is questionably low decoupling skills from such a statue of rationality as scott alexander
There are lots of places Scott goes overboard, but this seems like a particularly bad example. For a half ounce of context, I’ll just quote a bit of the intro;
“I’ll try to present it in as deliberately conspiratorial and tinfoil-hattish a way as possible. I make no guarantees I will stand by any of this when I’m sober / when it’s not 3:30 AM.”
And if you’re not sure if he stands by it… he did delete it.
[deleted]
Sounds like he’s just describing class politics