The Color Purple

Identifying the Problem

I was in the car, listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I do this rarely, mainly because I'm not enough of a Lefty to find the show all that interesting. David Remnick may have been an excellent staff writer and he might now be a standout editor, but he seems to have the understanding that Liberal politics is self-evidently correct, and thus have difficulty with the idea that a worldview may be both rational and at odds with liberal orthodoxy. An interview that they recently re-aired with Mark Lilla drove this point home for me. Mr. Lilla made what I think is a very good point:

There’s a difference between speaking truth to power and seizing power to defend the truth. And those require very different things, right?

Mr. Remnick seemed very reluctant to say, "Right," and then proceed from there. Instead, he seemed to be surprised that anyone felt that dialing back the focus on specific group identity was even helpful, let alone necessary.

In my own understanding, the issue that often comes up with identity politics is that it demands that people who do not share a given identity understand their obligations to the people who do. And when those perceived obligations are not fulfilled, they are simply repeated, louder and more stridently. As I took his points, Mr. Lilla was saying that if you're going to ask (let alone demand) that someone do something for you that they're disinclined to do, you're better off approaching them with "Here is what's in it for you, as well as us," rather than "You owe this to us." This strikes me as perfectly logical; after all, had people been inclined to act on such an obligation, they'd have done so once it had been pointed out to them. If they are instead recalcitrant, shouting louder will not change that.

To be sure, Mr. Lilla missed some opportunities to really make his case. At one point, Mr. Remnick asked:

But [the legalization of same-sex marriage] also happened because you had people in the streets shouting, “We’re here. We’re queer.” Which is something that, in the book, you say will only get you a pat on the head. Didn’t that help get power, too? Didn’t Stonewall help get power, the civil-rights movement help get power?

Mr. Lilla pointed out how these things were focused on a particular group. Fair enough. But I think that I would have liked to seen him really engage with the question and ask: "Whose mind was changed by "people in the streets shouting, 'We're here. We're queer'?" That is to say: Who saw people marching in the streets, and because they'd seen those people marching, changed their voting patterns? A related question could be: Is it then true, that without, specifically, the public protests and marches of the Civil-Rights era and the LGBT movement, that power could not have been attained? Personally, I felt that Mr. Remnick missed some of what Mr. Lilla was attempting to convey. There is footage from the Civil-Rights movement that, as near as I can tell, moved people to say: This should not be happening to Americans; rather than: This should not be happening to Black people.

And I believe that Mr. Lilla's point was that this broader focus is what drives success. Now, to be sure, that's a debatable point. But it can't be debated until it's understood.

Whispers

Back when I was in junior high school, there was a class assignment to create a news program, modeled after the local network news. The class was divided into small groups and each group determined what would be in their program. This being the early 1980s, editorials at the end of the program were still a thing, and so our program ended with one. I was manning the editorial desk, and I spent a few minutes pontificating on how insulting it was that adults worried about the effects that cartoon violence would have on us. While there were some cartoons that had more or less realistic portrayals of people in them, Bugs Bunny and The Flintstones were still regular fare at this time. And it really did seem to be dismissive of our faculties for reasoning to think that we couldn't be trusted to understand that real people wouldn't just get up an walk away from the sorts of things that happened to Tom and Jerry or Rocky and Bullwinkle.

But, in the nearly four decades between then and now, I've come to understand that there's a form of virtue signalling that operates by casting others as foolish or unintelligent and then proclaiming that the world needs to be altered to protect them from themselves. The graphic below being one such:

In fairness, it's true that one can say that "School shooting victim rejected shooter and embarrassed him in class" implies that if Shana Fisher had "played nice" and given Dimitrios Pagourtzis what he wanted, he wouldn't have shot her. But it's just as true that one can say that the same headline makes Pagourtzis out to be a complete, and blameworthy, loser - especially in the absence of any headlines that point to him having deliberately spared any of his female classmates who had responded to his advances.

Where I find this to be suspect is in the idea that changes in the wording of headlines is what buoys sexism in this country, rather than much more open apologism of violent acting out. "School shooter shot victim 'because she rejected him'," would be a much more direct statement. And a headline like that would typically be followed by someone (likely a relative or close friend of the shooter) directly making the point that the shooter had acted out of hurt or shame, in an attempt to make the shooter seem less evil, or to otherwise excuse their behavior.

And if we take "School shooting victim rejected shooter and embarrassed him in class" to have sexist implications, it's more likely that it's a symptom of a sexist society, rather than a driver, and the people who seek to victim blame subtly through their headlines are likely being much more open about it in other contexts - and that is where young people would learn it from. And it would be young people; the middle-aged, like myself, are far too set in our ways, and world-views, to have the needle moved by weak insinuations in online headlines.

It's also worth understanding that there can be something else at work here, too. And that is the common understanding that in the end, the world is fair. In other words, it doesn't take sexism to come to the conclusion that Shana Fisher had done something to contribute to her own demise. The idea that "bad things don't happen to good people" will do perfectly.

Sexism is like any other "ism." Once one is convinced that it's pervasive and seductive, it will appear to be everywhere and have a way of worming into anyone's mind. It is perhaps worth thinking of people as being smarter than that. If for no other reason than one's own comfort with the world, and the other people they share it with. There are enough people obviously spreading discord that there's no need to look under rocks for it.

Brother, Can You Spare A Thought?

There is a genre of story in The Atlantic (and in other publications, I would guess) that strikes me as: "Won't somebody think of the impoverished?" The general pattern of the stories is as follows: Some beneficial activity, X, is easier to successfully pursue under set of circumstances Y. Because set of circumstances Y is more accessible to people with money, poor people are locked out of activity X, and isn't that terrible?

Caroline Kitchener's piece on women having children (especially their first) after the age of 40 is an example of the type. The advantages of having children after the age of 40 are established: "For both affluent and low-income women, it seems to help to circumvent the gender-wage gap." The idea that it's easier for people of means is put out there: "'It is a privilege to be able to wait—to have more economic advantages when you have kids,' Feinberg said. But for the vast majority of mothers, that’s not an option." And finally, we're told why this is terrible: "If only the most affluent mothers are able to reap the rewards that come with older motherhood, Shreffler told me, 'that might perpetuate the inequality that we already see in children born to women with and without a college degree:' lifting up the fruits of the fortysomethings, leaving behind the kids of the moms who couldn’t afford to wait."

By the end of the article, I could almost feel Ms. Kitchener leaning over me, looking to see if I was wringing my hands properly. But it seems to me that these articles, focused as they are on reminding us yet again of the unfairness of the fact that people without money aren't as well-off as people with money, don't then take the discussion to the next level - fixing things.

This article is an advocacy piece, and it strikes me that the goal is for readers to go out and press policymakers for fertility and maternity care that's more readily available and of lower cost. Which is fair enough. There is nothing wrong with either of those goals. But it strikes me that it may be easier, not to mention far less expensive, to see what can be done to make the advantages of becoming a parent at 40+ available to people who become parents in their twenties, when they don't have as much need for expensive medical interventions to become pregnant, deliver a healthy child and come out of the experience in good health themselves. Likewise, encouraging more people to take time away from work, for whatever reason, when they are young would go a ways towards remedying the wage gap that maternity leave tends to open without asking the currently childless to subsidize their coworkers' childbearing choices and timing.

And, to be sure, the options put forth are not necessarily bad choices. They may, in fact, be the best available options, in which case, go for it. But the formulaic nature of stories lamenting the inability of the less well off to behave in the same way as their wealthier peers seems to blind people to the idea that there is more than one road that leads to Rome.

Join Today

Join the Illuminate cult online today and get instant sum of 5 million
dollars with a free home any where you choose to live in the world and also
get 200,000 dollars monthly as a salary… If you are interested please
kindly fill the following information to this email below {
greatbrotherhoodilluminati666@gmail.com}

Sounds legit.

This started popping up in comments that were made to social media posts by news organizations, under a few different names, and so I dropped in on their profiles to see what their deal was. And it was the same thing, over and over. Post after post, going back months, all with the same text. Many of them contained random links to other content on the Web; anything from food blogs to racist screeds by open White supremacists. And a number of articles about the Illuminati; either purporting to explain some aspect of their ritualism, lists of their members in specific nations, supposed exposés of their worldwide leadership and, strangely, articles debunking the whole thing.

Every time I see a scam like this, I wonder who the intended mark is. Who sees an offer of membership from what is supposed to be the most secretive group in the world (how it maintains this status given that everyone seems to know about it is beyond me), promising instant wealth, and says to themselves: "Yeah, my ship has finally come in. I'll just send an e-mail to this random gmail account and the all-powerful rulers of the world will set me up for life. As soon as I give them my financial information.

I understand the whole point behind making these 419 scams so outlandish that anyone who genuinely pursues one will stick with it to the bitter end (and the complete draining of their finances), but it's difficult for me to fathom that anyone could be both that gullible and able to retain enough money to be worth fleecing. There can't be that many completely unintelligent lottery winners in the world.

But if this is coming from some benighted 3rd world backwater somewhere, perhaps $20 here or $50 is enough to keep them afloat (and pay for internet time) long enough that they can desperately fish for their next mark. Maybe they should just advertise the low, low cost of living, instead.