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.
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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.
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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...
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...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?
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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.
(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.
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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.
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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…
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"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.
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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.
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:
"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."
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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.
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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."
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."
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:
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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."
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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."
Spoke with a male, "mixed" race (black and white) high school student and learned about teen views on race, DEI, and the gender divide over Trump. 🧵
1. Race: He said race at his very diverse HS wasn't an important category. They're all friends and don't divide up by race.
2. DEI: The campus DEI officer, in contrast, and other administrators are obsessed with and very sensitive about race.
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2a. DEI, cont'd: He and his peers tease each other amiably about race. This is a bonding mechanism. He said if the DEI officer and other admin found out, they'd be in trouble, so they keep it secret from them.
2b. The DEI officer is seen as "a bit much" and no one likes the class she teaches. All she does is tell them what they can't do or say. She talks incessantly about how to behave in order to be "sensitive." They don't take her at all seriously.
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3. Trump: The boys largely didn't favor Trump but they aren't worried about the next 4 years. We'll be ok. The girls think it's the end of the world, because abortion will be banned.
He said it wasn't possible for the boys to console the girls by pointing out that Trump has repeatedly said he's not in favor of a total ban, so they shouldn't catastrophize. If the boys tried to offer this perspective, the girls would freak out, and it would damage their relationship, so they keep it to themselves.
I am 53 years old. The last 4 years amount to the most repressive, totalitarian era I've ever lived through.
"If the general atmosphere of fear we live in as people who want to speak and live freely—if all that change in American society had the fingerprints of a particular leader on it, that leader would be a fascist."
—@noam_dworman
But it was not a particular leader—it was the left. 🧵
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It was not a fascist leader but a society-wide culture of totalitarian intolerance that made me watch my words like a hawk for half a decade.
It was fear of retaliation from the left that made me lay awake at night, terrified that a student might have misinterpreted something I said in class and initiated a cancellation campaign against me.
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It was not a fascist leader but a leftwing culture of retribution—in the face of which tenured faculty and college administrators cowered—wielded by 18-year-olds that ended the career of a colleague of mine because she read out loud a word in an antiracist comic book. Yes, students, with the complicity of an entire college staffed with cowards whose fear was nonetheless rational, actually ended her career for reading an ANTIRACIST comic book.
"West Coast [progressivism] is the cowboy version: more rebellious, less civilised, and also completely incoherent. On the one hand, it’s the same schoolmarmish, nanny-state liberalism you can find in any blue state: bans on plastic straws, quotas for women on corporate boards, mandated gender neutral toy aisles. On the other, it’s the exact inverse: permissiveness verging on criminal negligence. 🧵
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"In SF, for instance, it’s illegal not to compost your food scraps. But you can smoke meth outside a playground and suffer little more than glares from passersby. In California, college students are required by law to obtain repeated, vocal permission from their partners for a sexual encounter to be deemed not rape. But pimps can openly sex traffic minors on city streets in broad daylight, and the police can do little about it. All of these disparate approaches to perceived social problems are regarded as 'progressive.'
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"In the past two decades or so, the West Coast’s version of progressivism has become ascendant in Left-wing American politics from coast to coast. New York City, for instance, has embraced not only San Francisco’s compost law, but its laissez-faire approach to public drug use too. How, then, can we explain this weird blend of big-state progressivism and Left-wing American libertarianism?
Colleges "decolonize" curricula even as they ax foreign languages. Why? I think (1) colleges want to appear to value "diversity" without scaring off students by requiring hard work; and profs urge decolonization/diversity only to advance (2a) their own parochial interests, or (2b) nakedly political agendas (see 2a). No one actually cares about "decolonization" or "diversity." If they did, they'd be advocating for much more rather than less language study. 🧵
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"Serious efforts to decolonize the American college curriculum cannot take place amid waning support for the study of world languages. Yet that is precisely what we are witnessing today: American colleges and universities eliminate language programs while continuing to trumpet their commitment to curricular diversity and 'inclusive excellence.'
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"It seems a stereotypically American, and perhaps more broadly imperialist, conceit to believe that we can create cosmopolitan monoglots. When we undervalue the study of world languages, we shut the door to true cosmopolitanism and all the awe and wonder it inculcates. We deny students the opportunity to participate in and engage deeply with other cultures, to fathom how our language shapes our view of the world, and to do the hard work that fosters meaningful cross-cultural interactions and mutual respect.
My college's Board of Trustees rejected a request by SJP/JVP to divest from Boeing, Elbit Systems, Caterpillar, and Lockheed Martin.
Student paper reached out for comment. Here's what I said.
"I endorse the decision of the Board of Trustees regarding the divestment proposal.🧵
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"The Board gave several reasons for their decision, the most important of which is, in my view, the consideration that 'taking a position on a complex geopolitical situation would potentially chill the expression of diverse opinions, undermine the expression of pluralism, ...
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"...and alienate members of our community.' The Board’s decision is very much in line with the stance of 'institutional neutrality' recommended in the well-known 1967 Kalven Committee 'Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action.'