On one level, the reason is obvious: accountability. There’s a lot at stake...

except somehow for Donald J. Trump and some in identity politics...

How do they get around it? system 1 vs system 2

1:10:00 identity politics: the only stable "identity" is personality type, which is inborn and constant for life.<br /> my heresy: i found a hypothesis for the question: how must we connect different personality types to create stable groups?<br /> "the system" likes my work so much, they are threatening to bust my door, steal my stuff, and throw me in jail for five years, as a punishment for publishing my radical answer to the question: who are my friends?<br /> my book: pallas. who are my friends. group composition by personality type

Yong, Ed. “The Tipping Point When Minority Views Take Over.” The Atlantic (blog), June 7, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/the-tipping-point-when-minority-views-take-over/562307/.

Centola's Experiments Suggest 25% Activists Will Tip a Population

Relationship with @Schelling1971 work?

Schelling, Thomas C. “Dynamic Models of Segregation.” The Journal of Mathematical Sociology 1, no. 2 (July 1, 1971): 143–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022250X.1971.9989794.

It's somewhat interesting and potentially non-coincidental that the entirety of this list aside from Sam Harris and Camille Paglia are highlighted as anti-trans (red) by the browser extension Shinigami Eyes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_dark_web

In a society consumed with information overload, it is easier for our brains to allow our well evolved cognitive biases to decide not only what to pay attention to, but what to believe.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/pronouns?s=r

Here's a link to the penultimate draft (not for citation): https://www.academia.edu/46814693/The_Signaling_Function_of_Sharing_Fake_Stories

This broad thesis sounds to me like something I've read before, perhaps in George Lakoff about people signaling group membership or perhaps people with respect to their voting tendencies. The question isn't who should I vote for specifically, but who would someone like me (ie. who would my group, my tribe) vote for?

This sort of phenomena is likely easier to see/show in sports fans who will tell blatant untruths or delude themselves about the teams of which they are fans.The team winning at all costs will cause them to put on blinders.

A particular recent example of something like this with relation to what might otherwise be a logical business decision is seen in incoming Amazon CEO Andy Jassy nixing the idea of building in Philadelphia due to his own NFL fandom https://www.phillyvoice.com/amazon-hq2-philly-eagles-giants-rivalry-andy-jassy-jeff-bezos-amazon-unbound/

Why would someone make a potential multi-million dollar decision over their sports preference?

change these institutions how?

The struggle for justice can be found within the self (rather than the group).

Reason is another form of power.

How does the idea of justice and self in the first connect (or not) to the Woodard's idea of self with respect to God in the Protestant evangelical America?

If we mutually exclusively split America into these four classifications, what would be the proportion of people within each?

What do the overlaps of these four groups look like with respect to Colin Woodard's eleven American Nations?

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/lifting-the-mask

Jesus is a "hood ornament."

searing...

Interesting.

I've found myself looking at statements from Republicans over the past several years and tagging them as "hypocrisy".

I wonder what the actual overlap of the two groups is?

I feel like this is the general case...

How?

Why?

Examples of this sort of non-logical behaviour used to represent identity can be found in fiction in:

• Dr. Seuss' The Butter Battle Book (Random House,1984) which is based on
• the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu in Jonathan Swift's 1726 satire Gulliver's Travels, which was based on an argument over the correct end to crack an egg once soft-boiled.

It almost seems related to creating identity politics as bike-shedding because the real issues are so complex that most people can't grasp all the nuances, so it's easier to choose sides based on some completely other heuristic. Changing sides later on causes too much cognitive dissonance, so once on a path, one must stick to it.

A lot of inflammatory dog whistle rhetoric here (not to mention the poor use of en dashes posing as em dashes).

He calls out destructive repercussions of identity politics, but fails to notice that everyone wants to feel safe in their identity, not just cis-gendered white male Republicans.

He calls out censorship of dissenting opinion while writing on his own website. When did the government censor his opinions or any other opinions? Republicans are so pro-corporation and pro-enterprise, but then get upset when those same great companies enforce basic social norms?

And then, in the same breath: "rewriting American history?!" Perhaps we just taking a more nuanced perspective of the actual truths? Maybe we're hearing the stories and perspectives of those who's dissenting opinions have been not only been censored out of the media, but never allowed in for almost 250 years?

Kromanti is perhaps the most laden term in African Diaspora history in a Jamaican or Anglophone context and, as I've written elsewhere (my Slavery and Abolition article from 2014), I think that parsing Kromanti -- or really any of these terms -- as primarily geographic misses so much of what they connoted.

Before 1688, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, only 7% of the Africans arriving in Jamaica came from the Gold Coast, and most of these between 1676-1680. So there's no real demographic reason for this centrality of Kromanti identity, if we assume Kromanti is a gloss for people of Gold Coast origins.

Even for those who were placed in chains on slave ships from ports in the Gold Coast, there is no reason to believe that most were Akan speakers, and in fact Apter's work would convey how deeply those on the coast associated enslavement with people from the north, who certainly did not speak Akan, even to the extent that Akan was a meaningful linguistic category in the seventeenth century.

More importantly, however, why "Kromanti"? Kromanti is a tiny fishing village. I argue that it gained a particular kind of salience after 1717, when the Asantehene (the king of Asante) was betrayed and murdered there, and his body could not be recovered popularly memorialized. In the wake of this, the people of Asante developed an oath, Memenada Akromanti, and that oath was used by maroons and revolutionaries in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and even nineteenth-century Jamaica of diverse origins, from Madagascar to Kongo to Biafra.

This, of course, is early for that, and so begs the question: why Kromanti?

Was Kromanti important earlier, as Agorsah's archeological work suggests, because of iron working? Could that reputation have resonated with ideologies about blacksmithing and political legitimacy from the Kongo?

The plurality of musical forms here, however, if nothing else, should push us beyond thinking of Kromanti as a simple or straightforward gloss for a region cum ethnicity cum linguistic group, and try to think, again, of what these terms meant for those using them in the seventeenth century.

Nice.

The chat will lead into a backchannel discussion of a “Disrupting DH” presentation at the 2016 Modern Language Association conference in Austin, TX.

It would be worth interrogating what it is about "the nature of Twitter" that makes this so.

I think it has to do with the intersection of a number of things:

• 140 character limit
• Broadcast and re-broadcast that de-couples the Tweet from the authorial context
• Sub-tweeting and shaming as attire and slacktivism

I'm sure that's only the surface.

The only counter-argument that comes to mind for me didn't form itself until I had read this last paragraph a few times.

If your identity marker connotes tolerance then it hopefully has the opposite effect. Insofar as the experience of marginalization promotes empathy such identities might be good evidence for intelligence, and I do think individuals who feel oppressed or marginalized tend to empathize with others who suffer for different, marginalized identities.

These identities will only breed stupidity if the individual feels a competition for scarce resources that overwhelms their empathy, whence the perniciousness of the belief in zero sum attention economics as a greater threat to activism than inaction, ignorance, and exhaustion.

I find myself thinking here about intersectionality, and about a certain critique of identity politics which seems to target those whose identities are marked. White men e.g. can critique and transcend the grid, while those whose positions in it are sites of political organizing are accused of reifying the grid. Not sure if Massumi is even in that neighborhood...

Yes!!! Reminds me of this quote from Graeber's "Democracy Project": https://instagram.com/p/tjcYY9Og32/?taken-by=tilgovi

Of course. That's an important theme. It's as though it's being suggested here that radical feminists chose this view, when I think it's more correct to say that they are reacting to it.

Might one argue that since these feminists feel their fight has been co-opted and, despite the many ways trans individuals are less assured of their safety and rights than cis women, the radical feminist is actually the more oppressed insofar as identity politics has left them behind? In which case, might we celebrate that time is given to this minority rather than criticize the piece for being one-sided?

I count only three instances, none of which are offensively dwelling on appearance in the way that media often is scrutinizing women's bodies. One of these descriptions is particularly well meaning: it is given only to color the story of abandoned transition with the image of hormone-induced stubble. To mention that there are physical descriptions of any of the activists in the piece here is obvious pandering.