> Forget the wording 'centrist', parent is trying to describe the need for a party that seeks allies from all angles rather than trying to produce outrage towards specific groups of people in a lazy effort to foment in-party support and credit.
Well politics is about making choices where consensus is unattainable. By nature of not being consensual, there will be some angles from which these choices are undesirable. So attracting allies "from all angles" is essentially the same as saying "whoever is not my ally comes from no (reasonable) angle", which is precisely what the democrats are being described as doing in the article. They are the utmost "centrist" party in a way.
The answer to the demonization issue is not to pretend everybody must be your ally, it is to acknowledge that one can reasonably disagree with you, and be willing to engage with your political opponents rather than treat them as enemies, to reach an agreement acceptable to most (though not all).
> Women in trades have reported encounters with customers who doubted their competence and who refused to deal with them, seeking a man instead.
There is plenty of low key sexism (and racism) like that among white collars too so it is not restricted to trades (as acknowledged by the article's author), but this goes beyond banter like just teasing someone because they have red hair.
Real sexism is way more present among middle-class/white-collar workers (whatever their gender is) than between blue collar workers. You will have poorly worded jokes from your coworkers, but the ass-grab or demeaning remarks will always be from managers (the kind of manager who don't know the trade or inherited the job) or customers.
That’s an optimistic take, for instance there’s a lot of physical sexual harassment and even rape reported as occurring between members of the military, and infantry at least seems to code as blue collar.
See, I kind of agree that there are certain types of sexism like assumptions that women won't get their hands dirty or patronising artificial politeness that are purely middle class constructs.
But the idea that only white collar workers are capable of ass-grabs or genuinely derogatory remarks is wild...
It is only when someone think they have power over someone else that they allow themselves to be inappropriate on the workplace. My mom was a nurse before forming nurses, and lived through that (from doctors especially). Her best friend was a security guard at diverse places, but she started at a mall (where she has "wild" stories as you put it. Confirmed 100% always her manager or customers, once the day manager was put on ice for harassment, his replacement ended the night by touching her butt the day he arrived. Crazy that people do that).
But even closer to me, and more recently: i know a woman who work in a call center, and she explained to me the reason why it's always managers on the workplace: the other don't have the time to play powergames with each other, they have too much work (for her it was a female manager who learned of her homosexuality who started to get touchy).
I stand by that. Obviously it is different in non-work settings, but at work?
My guess would be that it's less about "position of power" and more about "less likely to face consequences". You see the same type of behavior in a variety of cases
- Construction workers hooting and whistling at women
What is power, if not the ability to do what you want without facing consequences? If other people already support you or are indifferent, no power is needed to do what you want.
I guess it's a matter of how you look at it. To me, power is one way to avoid consequences, and anonymity is another. From the way you're phrasing things, anonymity is a kind of power, because it lets you avoid consequences. Both views are reasonable.
> It is only when someone think they have power over someone
Isn’t that kind of the point though? That the racist and the sexist and the queerbasher think they have power over the group they’re bigoted against - and that’s what lends them the confidence to act mean?
Yeah that's normal, like we short fat guys are never popular with girls. Learnt that from teenages and firmly believe that biologically people look down on each other.
societally. what amounts to attractiveness can vary a lot more than you think throughout cultures and times.
But yes, people have always been in competition biologically to flaunt success and pick the best mating partner. You can do that through putting others down or otherwise controlling a mate. And the dimorphic needs between sexes only intensifies this. I'm no sociologist but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a universal experience.
I am probably not part of the "we" you are talking about, but I had no idea "normie" means that, and I couldn't infer it from the comment. In fact I inferred a completely wrong meaning from that comment (something like "unenlightened").
Isn't "normie" a pejorative word (genuine question)?
This was the basis of my response too. It's almost never said by people in contexts where it's not pejorative, to my understanding. It's a staple of incels and the elite Mensa types. It dismisses the average lived experience because iamveryspecial.
It generally refers to a group of “normal” people. E.g in some context they are an “out” group that does not have some specialized knowledge or understanding that the “in” group would have. So it can be negative, but it generally just means someone inexperienced with the given topic area. There is an implication of otherness to using the term “normie” for the group using it but it is generally a pretty common term now. For example, imagine a bunch of policy wonks debating something in highly specific language and then someone asks “how would the normies react?” They mean, “how would people unfamiliar with the inner workings of political policy react?” Stuff like that.
It does have a negative connotation for that group in some contexts, but the usage is pretty common and softened now.
> I’ve done this but then you end up with students who are not used to “thinking”.
Then we need to teach them. You are doing the right thing for being a "hard" teacher, and it doesn't prevent you from also being known as a caring one.
From experience, acknowledging the students' difficulties with it and emphasising that it is because they were not taught how to think (as opposed to some innate inability to do maths) can go a long way.
It could also be hybrid, with an out-of-class and an in-class components. There could even be multiple steps, with in-class components aimed at both verifying authorship and providing feedback in an iterative process.
AI makes it impossible to rely on out-of-class assignments to evaluate the kids' knowledge. How we respond to that is unclear, but relying on cheating detectors is not going to work.
> just results in you adopting a different narrative, the “I reject narratives” one.
This is like saying that atheism is just another religion because it's the belief in nothing. In a a hairsplitting way it may arguably be true but atheism does not provide a consistent(-ish) narrative about the world like religions do and therefore is fundamentally different.
In the typical Western sense of the word Atheism (that is, not just as a label defining the lack of belief, but the specific instance of ideas/people) is not another "religion," but it's absolutely another "belief system" that often comes with the same set of beliefs about various things.
It's largely an intellectual distinction, because in practice everyone still acts and exists in the world. Identity itself is probably impossible without having some sort of story about who you are.
To be clear, Atheists have different belief systems. They all have in common that they believe in one less god than monotheists, and a handfull less gods than polytheists (that, they share with monotheists), but overall you can have different belief systems that do not involve the existence of one (or multiple) god(s).
I know someone who does not believe in gods because he think aliens are playing with us (fake flags etc. Basically the Stargate mythos, except he never saw the show). Less anecdotal, Chalmers is definitely Atheist, but i sure don't have his belief system, and i'm sure no functionalist does.
Also, in general, philosophy of mind is imho the best way to test you belief systems. Or maybe it's the philosophy field i'm the most comfortable in and thus the one where i pushed my beliefs the furthest :/
I don’t really want to repeat what I already wrote, but just to sum this up again: yes, the mere label of atheist doesn’t imply a specific belief system. But in actual practice, in the real world and not merely in definitions, it tends to indicate certain groupings of beliefs.
In other words, the definitional concept of atheist doesn’t imply a specific belief set (except in the choice of using such a word to define oneself), but the sociological definition definitely does. If we looked at various communities calling themselves atheists, they certainly have beliefs in common.
> Imagine if we recruited professors not just for their academic credentials but for their real-world achievements.
The mistake is to think that someone's world is more "real" than their neighbor's. That may be arguably true if we talk about farmers or fishermen, but it's much less clear that an entrepreneur's world is more "real" than a university professor's.
I do enjoy things like fishing and woodworking because they have an obvious immediate value- when you're done you get something people can immediately use to survive.
But as an academic, I feel like there is more risk of e.g. a project failing and ultimately not being useful, but also a lot more potential. An experiment could uncover the clue leading to curing a major disease, and then you've saved a lot more lives than people you would have fed fishing. There is more risk, but the expected real world value is actually quite high... if it were not grant agencies would not fund it.
I'm pretty sure my elderly dad, who recently had a difficult fight with covid, is only alive because of academic mRNA research.
It can be both. The Bolshevik revolution scared the rulers of many European countries, and its capitalist class. People were very impressed that a regime as stable as that of the tsar could fall like that. This is a regime people invested in at the time because it was considered safe.
It is arguably as a consequence of this, that these rulers and capitalists supported more or less enthusiastically fascism as a way to contain the masses. Without that (implicit) support, it's hard to say whether fascism would have been anything more than a bizarre cult.
"Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! Let the ruling classes tremble..."
They brought it off. In an era when most of Europe was ruled by weak, aging monarchs.[1] In 1917, most of Europe except for France and Portugal still had a monarch, most with real power.
Because Boox won't give you the sources to all the kernel patches that allow Linux to run on these devices. If we didn't need that, there would be no problem, but Linux doesn't have a standard "E-ink" DRM driver so there's no hope to getting this working without a rather intensive reverse-engineering effort.
Well politics is about making choices where consensus is unattainable. By nature of not being consensual, there will be some angles from which these choices are undesirable. So attracting allies "from all angles" is essentially the same as saying "whoever is not my ally comes from no (reasonable) angle", which is precisely what the democrats are being described as doing in the article. They are the utmost "centrist" party in a way.
The answer to the demonization issue is not to pretend everybody must be your ally, it is to acknowledge that one can reasonably disagree with you, and be willing to engage with your political opponents rather than treat them as enemies, to reach an agreement acceptable to most (though not all).
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