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Jake 🇺🇸 Profile picture
@omni_american
Feb 13, 2023 • 18 tweets • 8 min read • Read on X
New theory: "The virtuous lie"

A virtuous lie is a falsehood that's promulgated & not corrected despite known falsity b/c it serves an "emancipatory" end.

#1619Project, New History of Capitalism, Hawaiian indigeneity: lies that're "good" b/c they free us of an oppressive past.
2/
We quite literally live by these lies. At my college, you see signs that say "This is Tongva land." No one cares that before the Tongva got here, the Hokan were here. The Tongva, an Uto-Aztecan people, replaced the Hokan, as Uto-Aztecan peoples did across western N. America.
3/
We live by these lies b/c to do so makes us good people. To question them is to align oneself w/ evil. Famous author addressed a local HS with a talk straight out of New History of Capitalism. He painted American slavery in the most gruesome colors. So far so good. However...
4/
...he lied that cotton made up 50% of the US economy and that cotton's increasing productivity resulted from increasing torture.

Logic of the virtuous lie: nobody wants to be the one who points out that this is contradicted by the best research. What, you support slavery?
5/
The author's lies were virtuous. Slavery is a moral abyss: one can never overdo one's condemnation of it...even if one lies. Such lies are virtuous, serving noble goals like reparations, as was explicit in the author's talk. To correct the lies is to oppose the noble goals.
6/
Virtuous lies (VL) differ from Plato's Noble Lie (NL) & @robkhenderson's Luxury Belief.

(1) NL promotes positive self-conception; VL, self-criticism. (2) NL reconciles us to social inequality; VL aims to dismantle inequality. (3) NL is metaphysical; VL is historiographical.
7/
Like Luxury Beliefs (LB), virtuous lies (VL) are both emancipatory & signal moral goodness. However, LB are prescriptive, e.g., "defund the police." VL, in contrast, are descriptive, e.g., "cops are more likely to kill black people." Thus, VLs provide "factual" basis for LBs.
8/
I'll update this 🧵 with examples of "virtuous lies."

From Isabel Wilkerson's book "Caste." The lie is subtle: You're invited to believe that 1/1000 black men & boys are currently being killed by the cops while unarmed. That'd be genocide! Truth here: freeblackthought.substack.com/p/what-the-dat… Image
9/
"Virtuous lies" underlie many communications at elite institutions. This talk announcement simply *presupposes* that "unkindness" is a distinctive characteristic of "our post-1492 era."

Almost every utterance on campus invites us to see the US as implicated in unique evils. Image
10/
Virtuous lie: inflating mass shooting stats.

Fact: "mass shooting" is defined by federal gov't: 3+ killed in public rampage.

There've been 141 since 1982. 3.53/yr: Far too many, but not what's claimed.

Accurate stats here (& see next Tweet):
motherjones.com/politics/2012/… Image
11/
Inflating mass shootings is a virtuous lie. It's morally "good" to inflate. It signals that you take the problem seriously. Insisting on the true number is to "minimize" & thus "bad."

Yet getting it wrong matters, b/c it impedes effective responses:

motherjones.com/politics/2015/…
12/
"Implicit bias, attitudes or internalized stereotypes that affect our perceptions, actions, & decisions in an unconscious manner, exists, & often contributes to unequal treatment of people based on race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, etc." Image
13/
CA's Assembly Bill 241 (quoted prev Twt), mandating "implicit bias" education for MDs and nurses, is wholly based on the "virtuous lie" that we understand what we mean when we say "implicit bias" and that whatever it is, it influences behavior. This is an outright falsehood.
14/
The truth about implicit bias is:

"it's not clear precisely what is being measured on implicit attitude tests; implicit attitudes do not effectively predict actual discriminatory behavior; most interventions [such as CA's new law] are ineffective."

musaalgharbi.com/2020/09/16/div…
15/
CA's Assembly Bill 241, mandating "implicit bias" education for MDs: leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billText…

Support for implicit bias being a "virtuous lie" that we believe because it makes us "good":

1. dailynous.com/2017/01/12/rec…

2. freedomcast.us/iopod/episode1

3. psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble…
16/
"Implicit bias" is a "virtuous lie" we live by.

It even informs law now, like CA's Bill 241, which says "Implicit bias...exists, and often contributes to unequal treatment..."

Two more sources on implicit bias, both by @jessesingal:

1. thecut.com/2017/01/psycho…

2. Ch. 6: Image
17/
It's a "virtuous lie" that for gender dysphoria, science is settled on (1) "puberty blockers for adolescents going through early stages of natural puberty," followed by, for "older teens," (2) "cross sex hormones, essentially avoiding natal puberty."

18/
Virtuous lies about puberty blockers, hormones & suicidality for kids w/ gender dysphoria are repeated w/ uncritical certainty by media elites.

@TheBARPod's @jessesingal & @kittypurrzog take @jonstewart & @LastWeekTonight to task for their untruths:
blockedandreported.org/p/episode-138-…

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More from @omni_american

Jake 🇺🇸 Profile picture
Apr 6
New paper out with some colleagues:

"Natural human cognitive tendencies—like myside bias—make it tempting for people to seek out and agree with low-quality information that affirms their prior beliefs and values while avoiding information that does not. Myside bias fuels the development of ideological silos, epistemic secession, and tribal epistemology. While many view this as largely a right-wing problem, we see this occurring across the political spectrum." 🧵Image
2/
"The problem runs even deeper than the misuse of information by incompetent, partisan, and/or bad faith actors. People consuming news and information often do not even respond to evidence or arguments. Instead, we rely on our preformed ideas to make sense of what we see. We interpret information to conform to our expectations.Image
3/
"We are able to excel in the modern world not because of our incredibly complex understanding of it, but because of the community’s collective understanding of it and our trust in and reliance on the expertise of others within that community to sustain it. So it is vital that we rely on information produced by the trustworthy members of the larger epistemic system as we make countless decisions in life. And when we begin to avoid these trustworthy members in favor of untrustworthy ones, our society can begin to falter. Unfortunately, we believe that this is where we are in the U.S. today.Image
Read 9 tweets
Jake 🇺🇸 Profile picture
Apr 2
We knew the Critical-Theory left was engaged in a self-defeating enterprise 20 years ago:

"Entire PhD programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. 🧵Image
2/
"Should I reassure myself by simply saying that bad guys can use any weapon at hand, naturalized facts when it suits them and social construction when it suits them? Should we apologize for having been wrong all along? Or should we rather bring the sword of criticism to criticism itself and do a bit of soul-searching here: what were we really after when we were so intent on showing the social construction of scientific facts?Image
3/
"Isn’t this what criticism intended to say: that there is no sure ground anywhere? But what does it mean when this lack of sure ground is taken away from us by the worst possible fellows as an argument against the things we cherish? Image
Read 11 tweets
Jake 🇺🇸 Profile picture
Dec 24, 2024
"The entire historical legacy of Western civilization has been turned into a battlefield. [The book argues] that the stakes in this conflict could not be higher. For when the past is contaminated, it becomes near impossible to endow people's life with meaning in the present.🧵 Image
2/
"There was no formal declaration of war. But, sure enough, at some point at the turn of the century, a war against the past was launched. The partisans supporting the assault on the legacy of European civilization are not members of a party. They have not issued any war aims and have never formulated an explicit strategic vision. They are also a heterogeneous bunch, a coalition of disparate interests and movements.Image
3/
"Hostility towards the past evolved slowly, then all at once, its intensification occurring haphazardly without any serious long-term thought. The use of the term 'war' to account for the systematic pursuit of historical disinheritance is not simply metaphorical. In effect, this war leads to the diminishing of the authority of the past, to the discrediting of its legacy, and to the killing of the soul of communities whose way of life remains underpinned by European culture.Image
Read 8 tweets
Jake 🇺🇸 Profile picture
Dec 21, 2024
"The hardest thing in 23 years for me to watch was the city council yesterday making their statement that in essence said every single one of us are racist by the very uniform and badge we wear. And then the news pans out, and it shows the outside of City Hall, where the city council is making their statement. And what do I seen outside? It's a mobile field force around City Hall protecting the very people that called us racist." 🧵Image
2/
2020's assault on police was, as the quote above shows, pure hypocrisy on the part of elites. But it was also evil and we knew it, bc Roland Fryer proved in 2016 that its premises were false and, in 2020, that it would cause a huge increase in the deaths of black Americans. Image
3/
The BLM-led assault on policing in 2020 led, according to @wil_da_beast630, to the homicides of 2,874 more black Americans in 2020 alone than would have died otherwise. Almost 3,000 black lives were therefore "unmattered" in a single year as a result of this movement.Image
Read 11 tweets
Jake 🇺🇸 Profile picture
Nov 26, 2024
"Over the last 10 years, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics."

Academia's attempt to radically reform society has been crushed: 🧵Image
2/
After trying to remake society in conformity with its (frankly, rather warped and justly unpopular) criteria:

"The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions—as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate—have been rejected.Image
3/
The attempted revolution carried out by academics and other knowledge-economy elites had an agenda that:

"includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; 'affirmative' care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity—of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups—as the goal of social policy.Image
Read 12 tweets
Jake 🇺🇸 Profile picture
Nov 13, 2024
Many of my Dem/left friends feel rage at Trump voters and masochistic hatred for America, which they see as having succumbed to its own latent transhistorical forces of racism and sexism.

This belief is not only false, as @Musa_alGharbi shows in this 🧵, but it also destroys mental health and, I think, makes it nigh impossible to rebuild the party to regain broad appeal.

Harris didn't lose because of racism or sexism, nor because of wealthy elites, third parties, or turnout.

Check it out:Image
2/
Did Trump win because of racism? No:

"The GOP has been doing worse with white voters for every single cycle that Trump has been on the ballot, from 2016 through 2024. And there’s tons of evidence that Trump’s racialized language has been a major driver of this trend – it’s been a drag on his support among whites rather than serving as the key to his success.

Meanwhile, Harris did quite well with whites in this cycle. She outperformed Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden with white voters. The only Democrat who put up comparable numbers with whites over the last couple decades was, incidentally, another black person: Barack Obama in 2008.

Across the board, Harris and Walz improved their numbers with whites – men and women alike. Democrats lost because everyone except for whites moved in the direction of Donald Trump this cycle."Image
3/
Did Trump win because of sexism? No:

"Kamala’s performance with men was solid. It was her performance with women that destroyed her prospects.

Put simply, it was young and non-white women – the very people who were supposed to ensure Kamala’s victory – who instead helped usher Trump back into the White House.

In fact, even as Kamala’s candidacy went down in flames, women did pretty well at the ballot box this year. For example, as a result of this election cycle, there will be a record number of female governors in the U.S. in 2025. So far, 17 non-incumbent women won House seats; 105 female House incumbents won reelection. 3 non-incumbent women won Senate seats. There were many firsts this cycle as well, including the first transgender woman elected to U.S. Congress.

Voters didn’t seem to have any problem electing women this cycle. They just didn’t respond well to the specific woman that Democrats put at the top of their presidential ticket."Image
Read 9 tweets

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