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Julian Sanchez Profile picture
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28 Nov, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Oof. Apparently they found someone to double down on the Randian misunderstanding of Kant everyone was having a good laugh at when WaPo printed it a couple weeks back.
This at least attacks some stuff Kant actually said, though the supposed intellectual original sin here is (a) not particularly unique to Kant & (b) pretty trivially correct.
Like, if you think defending the Enlightenment project requires rejecting the idea that reality as we perceive it is mediated & structured by our cognitive apparatus, that sounds like pretty bad news for the Enlightenment project, because that’s clearly true.
The piece doesn’t even really try to explain why this is wrong except by suggesting that leads inexorably to Hegel, Marx, and wokeness. Which is like refuting Darwin by noting that eugenicists had some pretty awful ideas.

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More from @normative

Julian Sanchez Profile picture
7 Nov
🧵A few thoughts about the way the branding of the new boogeyman as “Critical Race Theory” has made the discussion around it polarized and unproductive, to the benefit of (and probably as intended by) those who did the branding…
First, it’s of course true that K-12 schools are not "teaching Critical Race Theory” any more than they’re teaching vector calculus. And this is the instinctive response of people who had some sense of what “critical race theory” was before it became a buzzword.
But most people had never heard of CRT before it became a buzzword. To them it means “a fuzzy constellation of stuff happening in schools I’m uncomfortable with.” And that is very explicitly the point of the folks mounting the crusade.
Read 23 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
6 Nov
So, Denis Villeneuve apparently plans to do a film finishing Dune and then a film of Dune Messiah. And I really hope he does both, because Dune is itself really half a story.
Because if you stop at Dune, you do sort of have a White Savior power fantasy story, when the point of Paul Atreides’ arc is why that’s, you know, bad.
Timothée Chalamet is ingeniously cast, because even in his sympathetic emo-Paul, you can see the seeds of the brutal bastard he’ll credibly play when the character’s been emperor a dozen years.
Read 4 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
29 Oct
Well, I work at yet another organization the Kochs give money to, so I expect this will be dismissed as shilling, but the logic of this seems incredibly strained.
The Kochs throw money at a ton of organizations on the right (and several not on the right, for that matter). Any time several of them focus on the same topic, for whatever reason, you can point out they have “Koch ties.” The right loves the same trick with “Soros-funded."
It does not follow that the Kochs have sent out marching orders that all the organizations they donate to must now focus on CRT or whatever the flavor of the week is.
Read 6 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
29 Oct
In virtually every claim like this, you could replace “Facebook” with “connecting people.” Not that FB doesn’t deserve the crap they get, but the intensity of it feels a little like a form of denial—if not for the wicked algorithms, we would’t be doing this.
It is admittedly depressing to think a descent into psychotic and violent conspiracy theories is just a concomitant of widespread, low-friction connectivity, but… it probably is. This stuff spreads on all sorts of platforms, even without algorithmic boosting.
The underlying problem is *this is the type of content that increases engagement*. That means, sort of tautologically, that it’s what people are going to engage with absent aggressive intervention to prevent that from happening.
Read 31 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
21 Oct
Maybe there’s more to this than is in the article, but it sounds totally insane. An MIT lecture on climate science gets cancelled because the speaker had elsewhere written critically of affirmative action policies. nytimes.com/2021/10/20/us/…
This seems especially dumb because most proponents of affirmaritive action view it as a kind of corrective measure that, ideally, is successful enough that it can be phased out at some point. So when does it become permissible to suggest that point has arrived?
I don’t even agree wtih Abbot, for what it’s worth—but at some point the balance of equities is going to tilt back in favor of race-neutral admissions, and I don’t know how you can have confidence a policy is justified if academics are penalized for making the negative case.
Read 7 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
19 Oct
A good & thoughtful piece that reminds me a little of something I wrote ages ago about what I called the “those assholes” problem… And should probably rechristen something more genteel, like “The Identity Feedback Loop Problem” gawker.com/culture/identi…
The idea was that polarization, and the fear of either being mistaken for or lending support to the outgroup, undermines self-correction mechanisms that help protect groups from veering into extremism or being exploited by grifters.
So if you’re a decent person who recognizes that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc are serious problems to be fought, you have very little incentive to speak up about abuses of those values. You don’t want to bolster (or be mistaken for!) “those assholes”...
Read 9 tweets

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