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wanye Profile picture
@wanyeburkett
May 10, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
People rightly ask why I focus my ire on progressives and rarely conservatives and, while there is an idiosyncratic personal history there (I almost solely criticized conservatives for my first 25 years), the real answer is just that conservatives are currently irrelevant.
Conservatives don’t make policy in my area, they don’t set the agenda, they don’t control the message, and there are almost none at any of the companies I would like to work for. Conservatives here can barely even say what they think at a dinner party.
It is basically inconceivable that I would ever face personal consequences for saying something “too progressive.” Conservatives are irrelevant. There is no point to criticizing people who are irrelevant.
I grew up in a rural conservative county in a state with Republican leadership and, wouldn’t you know it, I criticized conservatives basically the entire time I lived there. In that milieu progressives were irrelevant.
I took the “Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins criticizing religion” thing to its limit. I know every single one of those arguments and I’ve made them 1000 times. It’s just not interesting to me anymore, nor is it relevant to anything currently happening in my life.
Because progressives are almost definitionally on the vanguard, they self identify as weak and oppressed, but just as a plain accounting, they are in power everywhere in my life that it matters.

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More from @wanyeburkett

wanye Profile picture
Feb 8
When I point out, as I sometimes do, that large shares of the public don't actually understand how modernity works, it's tempting, I'm sure, to dismiss this as elitist snark. But I think it's actually sad, in its way. People don't know how things work, but worse, they have no intuition for why things work the way they do, even once it's explained to them.

This is obvious when you see the arguments they bring to bear.

Courts and laws must seem totally insane to them, never addressing their needs, always coldly rejecting what must seem to them to be persuasive arguments about personal hardship that might have carried the day in more intimate societies.

The whole thing, the whole project of society must seem capricious and random and unfair. When they are asked to make arguments for themselves, they can produce only non sequiturs and appeals to emotion that might as well be in an alien language for how likely they are to have anything to do with the issue at hand.

It might be obvious to you in what ways the cable company is different from the police is different from a local hardware store is different from Lowe's is different from the Social Security Administration, both in their obligations to you and in the limits of thinking about them in terms of obligations at all.

I assure you, this is not true of all people equally.

And if you think, you know, well these people just need to be *educated* better, then you haven't heard what I'm saying. They don't think in contracts, in abstract moral systems, in legal structures. Their intuition is a tide pulling them out into a sea, no matter how many times you row them back in.
Modernity is great. We're not going back to small tribes. And this all just is what it is. But clearly we've moved into territory that some non-trivial share of the population is always going to find themselves out of sync with.

And that's not their fault. And it's genuinely sad.
I will add, despite the pessimism I expressed above, that we have definitely not maxed out the number of people who can be brought to overcome bad intuitions about how the world works. We should be doing a *lot* more propaganda in elementary and secondary schools -- about the rule of law, about markets, about capitalism, about contracts.

Even some people who won't ever fully understand those things could be made to feel less resentment about that fact, if they at least could be made to accept that they are concepts good societies aspire to.
Read 4 tweets
wanye Profile picture
Jan 29
I don’t know, I’m not that vindictive and I don’t really want ordinary liberals to suffer for their views, but we do need some social norms around these things. The thing that drives me most crazy is how many people on the left have absolutely no self-awareness or self-consciousness about the fact that they might be talking to someone who is just a little bit more conservative than they are. It’s a kind of narcissism, a solipsism.

I’m not saying their lives should be ruined for this, but maybe they should be forced to sit through a yearly DEI-esque training that reminds them that other human beings exist, that they sometimes have different political views, that it’s inappropriate to make strident political claims at work, that you’re not actually better or more empathetic or kinder than your coworkers, and that it is extremely obnoxious to behave as though you are.
As has been pointed out to me before, this is probably just an ordinary human foible. If conservatives controlled all the institutions, then this is probably how they would behave in the office, too.
Also, you know, most people actually aren’t like this. I assume most of the coworkers I’ve had over the last 10 years are quite a bit more liberal than I am, but most of them haven’t actually been all that strident about it. Of course you just notice when people are.
Read 4 tweets
wanye Profile picture
Jan 22
Saying that people should wait to get married because they’ll be wiser is sort of like saying that people should wait until they’re 30 to play in the NFL, so that they don’t get involved in any stupid scandals when they’re young and stupid.

It’s of course true, in some sense, so long as you’re aware of the opportunities on which you are foreclosing.
I have no trouble believing that younger marriages are higher variance. But if you wait, you will foreclose on the potential for a specific kind of marriage that many people find quite rewarding.
There’s no free lunch! Sorry to have to tell you that there’s no way to guarantee a good outcome. You can’t actually live your one and only life by delaying every decision until you are 1000% sure it’s time.
Read 5 tweets
wanye Profile picture
Jan 11
I really don’t think you can underestimate the impact of the mass incarceration narrative on political polarization. Imagine how different a country that busts people’s doors down and throws them in prison for decades because they’re smoking a joint is from one that doesn’t. Those are two completely different societies.
There are lots of normal, otherwise well adjusted, successful people walking around you who think there are people in prison who have been there for years and years and years for smoking a joint. That’s what they think. They think that’s a thing that happens in this country. They think the nature of the criminal justice system is that you get caught with a joint, then it goes all the way to a criminal trial, after which you will be sentenced to prison for many years.

Anybody who believes this is completely fucking insane and out of touch with the actual reality of criminal justice in the United States. This isn’t a small difference. That’s an insane belief.

And it might be the modal belief.
We have a large prison population in the United States because we have a lot of violent crime. And there are racial disparities in the criminal justice system because there are also racial disparities in offending.

That’s the truth. Everything else you’ve been told about criminal justice, about mass incarceration, is a lie. It’s not complicated or close — the average American has been sold a complete fabrication.
Read 5 tweets
wanye Profile picture
Jan 8
I think there’s a way in which the phrase, “what do people even DO in suburbs and small towns” is kind of telling on yourself, as though the whole point of life is to consume restaurant food and attend street fairs (at which you consume restaurant food from a cart).
“What do people even do in the suburbs” is it a question with a shelf life. It’s supposed to be uttered by teenagers who are in their peak socializing years during which they are supposed to be finding a mate to have children with.

You aren’t meant to still be asking that question in your 30s.
Socializing is fine. We have friends. We attend events. We do things. It’s just that those things are not central features of my life, anymore, having been replaced by the day-to-day maintenance of a family with children. We don’t need to optimize our life for proximity to socializing opportunities.

If there’s a social event, we can drive 20 or 30 minutes to get to it.
Read 6 tweets
wanye Profile picture
Dec 26, 2024
To the extent that allowing millions and millions of Ellis Islanders to come here guaranteed for at least the next century that the average American would now think of the country as defined by that immigration — that the immigration wasn’t just something that happened, but rather core to what it means to be an American — I think that’s a perfectly good argument against doing new rounds of mass immigration. Certainly you have to acknowledge and admit that this totally changed the average person’s conception of America. People literally think of the country as something else, now.

Obviously, you can prefer what came before or you can prefer what came after, but I don’t see how it’s possible to deny that there’s a difference.
Again, I would just insist that you don’t get to talk about this like it’s no big deal. A thing happened that completely changed the ordinary American’s understanding of what it means to be an American. That’s a really big deal! That’s always going to be a big deal. There’s always going to be a fight about it. It’s always going to be contentious. No, it isn’t just the most obvious thing in the world that you should do it again.
I understand that a lot of you find that kind of thing exciting and see very few downsides, but unfortunately you share the country with people who don’t think of it the same way. So it’s just always going to be a fight.
Read 4 tweets

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