There definitely is a line to be careful with, but I do think this is the vast majority of what is happening with most social justice movements today.
Black Lives Matter is not fighting for cops to shoot more white people to equalize the numbers, they are trying to show how it is possible in lots of similar situations to deescalate situations without killing anyone, even with violent offenders if training is good, and officers don't have a bias (explicit or subconscious) against the type of person. It is also very obvious to show that minorities are being over-policed and often harassed for just living their lives.
I think similarly with this issue of the leg up that attractive people have in the world, the only way we can fight it is by acknowledging it exists and trying to actively re-evaluate every decision we make about who we choose to interact with, and how much it is informed by these types of bias. This is not the same as giving the attractive people a -10 on whatever evaluation they are a part of. It is always going to be true that correcting for these types of bias will be inexact, welcome to life, but saying we just shouldn't give a shit about less attractive people is a worse outcome for all of society, and its not like author is asking for infinite effort from everyone to correct this. Talented people exist everywhere, if we don't push those of disadvantaged groups up, only some of them will "pull their bootstraps" hard enough to overcome things on their own. People need to be introspective to correct for their biases, there really isn't a way around that, we are imperfect beings quick to pass judgement.
I have a distinct memory of a part of the confirmation hearing of Sonia Sotomayor, she had written about her need to actively review her background when starting a case, to see if she might have prior experiences that would color her judgement. Republicans tried to spin this as, she acknowledged she is biased, obviously she can't be an objective judge. But she defended herself well and asserted it is effectively impossible, to just be objective without this kind of evaluation. Effectively the same argument that people correctly make about the virtual impossibility of just being "race-blind", we all have things we have experienced that color our perceptions of different people, ideas and places, we cannot ignore that fact and just go on asserting we are good objective decision makers with no special effort to account for these things.
In the specific example of police brutality you are right, however BLM organizations are also generally anti magnet school/charter school, which in many poor primarily black neighborhoods is the only good school option for children. Since these schools get to choose (for the most part) who they enroll they tend to take all the more gifted kids/kids with good family environment out of the normal public school. This obviously leads to greater inequality of outcome, which activists try to "correct" by forcing everybody to be in the low quality public schools.
Remember this when people go on and on about "equity". In the grave, all men are equal.
The reason we have low-quality public schools is because education is criminally underfunded and poorly handled, especially in poor areas because of property tax funding.
I don't fully support removing magnet schools, but you can bet that if rich families had to send their kids to the same schools as the poor kids, they'd be lobbying all day for better funding. Apportioning funding per-head from state taxes rather than property taxes would be a good first step.
I think the leftys, who I generally hang around and aggree with get a lot wrong about schools. We spend a lot on schools, other countries that spend a lot less get better outcomes. I mean FFS the richest country in the world with a 85% graduation rate, it's completely insane. Fixing the schools isn't a one-dimensional problem, and I think there are some charters that have good ideas. While they do generally under-serve students with differing abilities, I think that is talked about too much and is used to try to discredit everything they do. There are problems in the schools, absolutely, everyone agrees, and unfortunately aversion to change comes from every level, but unfortunately it's often on different issues/changes. Teachers, parents, students, admins and politicians all have things they balk at that prevents fixing the schools, we need to change a lot of minds or have a huge top down reworking of schools, but unfortunately that runs right into one of the issues people get all worked up about, local control.
> forcing everybody to be in the low quality public schools.
Seems obvious to me that the issue isn't that private or magnet schools are high quality, but rather that public schools are low quality. Basically, the goal is still, bring people up. The "bringing down" in this case is not only temporary, it's only actually "bringing to baseline."
A bunch of rich people and state congresspeople's kids being forced to go to "shitty public schools" sounds like a great way to force the issue.
And the alternative sounds suspiciously like "extract resources from poor communities to feed my rich kid new lacrosse sticks."
Again, if going to a public school is so bad as to be considered "holding a child hostage," the issue isn't the making-rich-kids-go-to-public-schools, it's the public schools.
Leaders of "justice" movements want power. The best way to get power is to make an outside group the enemy and tell your followers their problems are only because of the enemy. Next, you position yourself as having the answer and if your followers will only continue doing what you say then they will be lifted, their problems will subside, and the enemy vanquished. As long as you can keep an enemy front and center and your followers problems never subside your power will continue to grow.
You write this in a way that implicitly dismisses the Cause of various social justice movements as indistinguishable from any group with leaders. Are you claiming that there's no difference between Black Lives Matters and Jim Jones' church?
It's a little hard to act like they're being disingenuous when the supposed enemy acts in ways that are completely consistent with being an actual enemy, though. Only when the supposed enemy is not.
> There’s a lot of vitriol aimed at rich people right now, regardless of how they attained their wealth.
Part of the problem is that our current property regime does not distinguish between property acquired through accession [1] and property acquired through extraction.
There is this weird philosophy that all "market transactions" are equally legitimate and that market price is the correct (and only reliable) indicator of economic value. This view ignores the fact that market prices are as much a product of market structure as they are a reflection of people's preferences.
Our current property regime evolved that way for precisely that reason. Distinguishing the two and highlighting it would be a subversive, rather revolutionary act, which would attract a lot of hate.
I don't care how you made your money, hoarding it should be looked down on. Greed is bad, we don't need to make things illegal, but I sure as hell am going to think anyone with a privately owned Yacht is a little bit worse of a person than someone reinvesting their money in their community and trying to explore new ideas, or if you are tired and don't want to personally invent stuff or run another business, go find some enthusiastic entrepreneur to support. I am not against rich people having power, I think we should get them to pay their damn taxes and fair share, but beyond part of their money that ought to be allocated by a democratically elected government they can do what they want with their wealth to control the world. But anyone using their money to just show how wealthy they are is going to get serious judgement from me, and I think that is a healthy way to think about rich people.
I think it should be likely obvious from my statement above, I want there to be talented people, and I really don't see a substantial movement to pull down successful people.
What are examples of things people are doing that make you think we are going in this direction?
but seriously everything you are saying is seething with value judgements.
> should get them to pay their damn taxes and fair share
what constitutes a 'fair share'? Who gets to decide?
it's easy to criticize yachts. Let's say a billionaire did something "you might like" like throw a ton of money into a basic physics project. But what if that basic physics project is looking for superluminal neutrinos? Or maybe you'd criticize that the billionaire just wanted to get their name out, which is, essentially vanity, an obviously negative character trait.
Or we could get into sketchier territory. What if the billionaire spent tons of money in "development" in an "underdeveloped country". Is that bad or good? Who gets to decide?
I mean the ironic thing is that on many metrics, buying a yacht could be the least bad thing of the three things that I have mentioned, at least the likelihood of buying a yacht actively hurting someone else is relatively low.
Absolutely, there are certainly ways to put on a show like you're helping people and not really care.
Finding those people is harder than the Yacht idiots, but that's why we have watchdogs for public charities and can make laws regulating what people can do with a charity.
If people are making investments not as part of a public charity, we have journalists to hopefully keep some high level accountability, but yeah youn can do bad stuff with money in a lot of ways, go figure.
Even people doing lots of good can still be seen on a spectrum, I love a lot of the work Bill Gates is doing around the world, but I think he worked really hard to fight FOSS, and I think the world is worse off in some ways for it.
I'm saying buying crazy expensive luxury goods is never a good thing, it's just a waste of resources to prop up someone's shallow ego.
On taxes this will forever be an evolving discussion. Hopefully with good policies over the next few decades we can even out some of the income and wealth disparities and need a smaller welfare state. When that happens I'm all for tax cuts.
But at this point the capital gains rate is absolutely in need of change. Taxing the rich is really politically popular, across the political spectrum. If someone has to pay %39 on a million dollars of earned income, the "job creators" making billions can pay something closer to that on their income too.
Well the whole taxation thing, IMO is insane. There was a year when I made 30k and paid a higher proportion of my income to taxes than Bernie Sanders. Anyways if it's income disparity you're looking to fix, taxing the rich isn't going to help. You need to stop stealing from the poor, which is what the government does via policies like QE. Taxing the rich is linear, the QE is compounding damage.
Totally agree, but I believe anyone who has lots of money, and wants to defend they have money because they are smart and successful should realize that merely being a consumer isn't a very impactful way to contribute to society. Using piles of money to just scale up being a consumer to an absurd level is stupid.
I also think I wouldn't shed a year if Rolls Royce went out of business. There are manufacturing, design, welding jobs out there on markets that actually make sense to scale up. Some things in life you can currently buy don't provide enough value to justify them existing at all. They simply exist as a middle finger to everyone with less, propped up by the idiots that but them.
I'm not saying make anything illegal, I'm saying I judge people who support this and would encourage everyone else to do the same.
Conspicuous consumption is _a_ primary driver of an enormous segment of the economy; it effects housing, electronics, textiles, hygiene, beauty products, liquor, and so on and on. Any luxury that can be experienced as an observer is subject to conspicuous consumption.
It's not absurd and stupid to display wealth, it's a function of being a social mammal. Moreover, it does contribute to society by way of employing legions.
When next you flip open your laptop, or publicly use your phone, or dress nicely, or discuss your vacationing, consider your own words about flaunting your wealth.
Hit-men are people too, people don't magically get defenestrated when they speak out against Putin.
This absurdist remark is just to point out that just because people get paid to do a job, it doesn't mean it's a job we as a society want people to have.
>There’s a lot of vitriol aimed at rich people right now, regardless of how they attained their wealth. I imagine it’ll soon be transferred to talented people as well.
As a rule, few wealthy people extract 100% of their wealth and few earn 100%.
The wealthy that extract 98% sure try to downplay that part and try to pretend that they're among the miniscule number who earned 90+%.
Most manage to self delude themselves that vitriol against the wealthy IS vitriol against talent. Their egos demand it.
Perhaps it's here already? We see a lot of posts here on HN denigrating the value of higher education and saying that highly-educated people are gatekeeping.
The objection is not to highly educated people gatekeeping (though they should know better), but that people with a status that helps unlock further wealth are gatekeeping.
> I imagine it’ll soon be transferred to talented people as well.
It is already, and the logic is something like: talent is largely a function of practice and access to education. Having the means and opportunity to practice and be properly educated is a privilege.
You can find _plenty_ of words written regarding the inherent racism, sexism, ableism et al in various hobbies due to unequal access; from GitHub hobby repos to enjoying nature through hiking and camping.
Zero-sum methods (robbing Peter to pay Paul) work doubly to achieve equality: reducing the 'higher' person and boosting the 'lower' person in a single action. Very quick and efficient if equality of outcome is the first priority.
Sure, identifying these inequalities is a step in making things 'more equal' but how does society correct something that is arguably biological in nature (our preference for beauty)?
Masks? A government backed hotornot.com that issues beauty bonus points to improve ugly hiring outcomes?
People who are good with numbers approach financial situations from a position of privilege, surely that's an equality killer? Do we impose Financial acuity tarrifs in addition to standard taxation?
Obviously these are absurd examples but there is a point of diminishing returns and even negative outcomes in the pursuit of TOTAL equality.
Lifting people up suggests targeted interventions to help individuals. If they face powerful beauty standards, help them find ways to become more beautiful. If there's a hard standardized test, help them find ways to pass it. Justice movements will sometimes engage in these kinds of things, but it's more common in my experience to say that the standards are simply wrong and need to be replaced with more equitable ones.
One example: fit people made fun of because they are fit. The message that everyone is beautiful the way they are and that there's no need for further improvement is detrimental to the society.
I recently discovered it, Akira The Don seems to be the most prolific.
Basically it amounts to taking audio related to self development and layering over electronic beats. I like the format and think it's a really cool way to spread ideas.
I have noticed this trend though, of reacting to justice movements by claiming it'll tear down people. Why do you believe this?