Excellent analysis of the intersection of bullshit and branding at work in the current moral panics over CRT and "wokeness" from @donmoyn. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/bullshit-bra…
What's striking about the analysis is how the bullshit flows freely among the various levels, from an anti-semitic grifter, to a right wing activist huckster, and even a NYTimes columnist. Honestly can't see a way out of this. Depressing.
Like in an example @donmoyn discusses in the post, when Marc Lamont Hill demolishes the anti-semitic grifter in a televised segment, the response from the grifter is, "See he DOES know so much about this, just like I said." B.S. on top of B.S.
I don't know how to get past the problem of motivated reasoning the drives these responses. With a lot of time and patience I think those things can be undone, but we have no existing mechanism for that. There's no business model supporting careful analyses like the above.
Not to make this about me, but I feel the same kind of frustration reading this as I do when I try to produce some careful, nuanced analysis on a subject and it gets obliterated by the bullshit.
Ex. I wrote a long blog post about the FIRE database on campus speech where I am critical of how the data is collected and framed, but then also discuss how and when it is useful to better understanding what's going on on campuses. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…
But it's impossible to have a discussion about FIRE and their database because lots of people are motivated to trumpet their (obviously limited) data because they want to argue that there's a censorious trend towards conservatives on campus.
It's just much more complicated than that. It always is. And settling for that simplified frame means that we will never make progress on any of it because we can't even get to the core of the discussion and debate.
That's the point though, right. It's not a matter of collaborating to solve a problem. It's just a tug-of-war over power. I get it. But fuck...it's depressing.
Incredibly handy for a commenter to show up to demonstrate the very point that @donmoyn is making.
https://twitter.com/granitesentry/status/1444340545086763013
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