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TracingWoodgrains Profile picture
@tracewoodgrains
Jun 10, 2023 • 7 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
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"Berkeley doesn't have affirmative action" is a good example of a technically defensible but straightforwardly false argument that obscures rather than elucidates. As soon as California banned affirmative action, Berkeley openly and urgently looked to circumvent it. ImageImage
This is what "no affirmative action" looks like at Berkeley: "comprehensive review" that happens to weight admissions in much the same way explicit affirmative action did.
city-journal.org/article/elites… Image
The data is unambiguous, such that there can be no substantive dispute. The affirmative action ban never stopped Berkeley from weighing race heavily within admissions. It just required them to get creative. eml.berkeley.edu/~webfac/morett… Image
In absolute terms, you saw a small shift in enrollment by race, followed by a return to baseline as the UC system grew more comfortable working around the ban. Image
UC Berkeley administrators were open about the moral urgency they felt in aiming to circumvent the ban. Their straightforward goal was to re-establish affirmative action while dodging legal action, however they could. Image
There is an argument to be had over the merits of affirmative action. There is none whatsoever over whether Berkeley has been practicing it since the ban, and the only reasons to claim is hasn't are ignorance or deliberate intent to mislead. Image
One who had direct experience crafting Berkeley's policy on this has weighed in—don't miss his (excellent) response. As he indicates, part of this comes down to whether implicit, as opposed to explicit, racial preferences constitute affirmative action.

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More from @tracewoodgrains

TracingWoodgrains Profile picture
Apr 20
one reason I react so strongly to calls for violence is that I get the sense that for a lot of people, violence is how you show true seriousness—and they want to skip all the steps of living humbly for a cause and jump straight to dying nobly for it, no matter the cost to others
you feel strongly enough about this to call for violence? cool! do you feel strongly enough to do a thousand more useful and less glamorous substantive things, things that don’t threaten to throw everyone else into chaos?

no? then sit down.
I don’t want to kill or die for the causes I value.

I want to build a piratical state organized for benevolence and save millions of lives while others are killing and dying around me.

& if, more likely, I can’t be that or am not called to it, I want to support those who can. Image
Read 4 tweets
TracingWoodgrains Profile picture
Mar 26
This podcast is a great listen, and it demonstrates the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of Abundance.

At every step, Newsom nods along and says how much he loves it. And at every step, Newsom nods along and explains why he's already "done" it or why he won't do it.
What does Abundance need? More specific demands and a more pugilistic attitude.

It's simply too agreeable right now. It doesn't need endless hypothetical allies, it needs to provide specifics about who's blocking what and why, then to get them out of the way.
Abundance has friends for days.

It needs to make a few more enemies.
Read 4 tweets
TracingWoodgrains Profile picture
Mar 18
Good book so far! Image
My banner art is set in (alt-history) 1905. Why? I couldn't have given a better reason than this. Image
Image
Why focus on the left? Good answer. Image
Read 25 tweets
TracingWoodgrains Profile picture
Mar 16
This is the paradox of the dissident right: For all the time they spend calling others degenerates, much of their behavior is almost uniquely repulsive to those whose traditions they make idols of.

People like Captive Dreamer bring shame to their families and their traditions.
More on this:

the hit dogs are beginning to holler

every departure I have made from tradition has been careful and deliberate, and the whole way my family and I have continued to build meaningfully alongside each other and support each other

these neotrads revel in vulgarity and ugliness Image
Read 6 tweets
TracingWoodgrains Profile picture
Mar 13
Just watched a 4-hour argument between an archaeologist and a pseud (Flint Dibble and Graham Hancock) so I'd know what a random tweet was talking about. Now I can't find the tweet so instead I'll blast my thoughts to the public, bc it Says A Lot About Society.

The argument was on the Joe Rogan podcast, and probably everyone else has already heard of it, but I sure hadn't.

First: the pseud has a much, much larger platform than the archaeologist. He's had Netflix shows, been on Joe Rogan, and plays a large role in shaping the public conversation around the topic. The archaeologist has the heft of institutional credibility, but has much less personal influence than the pseud.

Second: the pseud sucks. He sucks. His m.o. is to play at god-of-the-gaps, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively at anything he can assert is underexplained while dismissing sound evidence as inconsequential and demanding to be taken seriously the whole time. He frames a narrative of himself vs Orthodox Academics, and rather than treating academia as a perpetual argument, treats every Orthodox Academic as an attorney defending the Client of Orthodoxy. This, in his eyes, justifies any tactic necessary to make his case: selective evidence, innuendo, anything and everything to persuade people towards his pre-determined conclusion, like the worst and most dishonest sort of online arguers. He openly states this.

Third: the intersection with politics and culture is fascinating and predictable. The archeologist accepts the progressive culture that dominates academia as the air he breathes, which is why eg he is now primarily active on Bluesky. In the entire conversation, the one strong point the pseud has is when he points out how he's been framed as Perpetuating White Supremacy. And there's actually a really interesting conversation that could be had there: academia has drifted towards a moral consensus alongside its focus on truth claims, and when criticizing opponents, academics often mix moral and truth claims while asserting the same authority from both.

Inevitably, this means that people wary of their moral uniformity will trust them less; this gave the pseud an opening to claim he was a victim of Cancel Culture and of vicious smears. One of the core challenge for people who take truth seriously today is that most of the people with actual legitimate expertise in hard fields pair that expertise with confidence in a moral consensus not at all shared by many of the people they need trust from, and interpretations in line with that moral consensus. Many, unimpressed by the moral claims, will turn instead to those who align more with their moral frames even if what those people say on factual matters is nonsense.

Fourth: it's been a while since I saw this sort of good, old-fashioned beatdown of a pseud. The highlight was probably the numerology section, where - in response to claims about how extraordinary numerical coincidences connected the Great Pyramid to the radius of the earth - the archeologist showed how the same coincidences could be applied to the weed number. Good, clean fun.

The coda of this is that the pseud went back to Joe Rogan and together they found the one time in a four-hour conversation the archeologist misstated the evidence and mocked him behind his back. They lamented how the archeologist "played fast and loose with the truth", how he was arrogant, just wanted to win, didn't want to get to the truth, and how this proved there was an arrogant establishment in archeology that would use dirty tricks to cling to a narrative while the pseud was just curiously exploring questions. No matter that the pseud had been embarrassed on topic after topic. No matter that all he had was furtive gesturing and innuendo in the face of serious research. All he had to do was note one error after-the-fact (something the archeologist agreed was in error), then come back and trumpet it to "show" that the archeologist was a mendacious liar trying to keep him down the whole time.

Quite the microcosm.Image
Image
Image
anyway, here's the argument

and here's the pseud cravenly returning to crow about Big Archeology keeping him down

Read 5 tweets
TracingWoodgrains Profile picture
Mar 10
The way Darryl Cooper broke into mass consciousness is rather awkward for everyone whose introduction to him was “God’s Socialist” or “Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem”

He is a much more complex and sympathetic figure than the standard range of grifters and ne’er-do-wells
The trouble is that in a certain light, he is exactly who everyone thinks he is

and in another equally important light, he is very much not who everyone thinks he is

his podcast contains some of the most humanizing examinations of thorny history anywhere. and yet
like, Jesse's perfectly correct about all of this

and it's not a case where I can argue to separate art from artist; his worldview emphatically and deeply informs every part of his podcast

but if you know his longform, you know why it's complicated

Read 5 tweets

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