But... can it really be said that the populists in the Republican party and the elites are effectively working together to advance a shared agenda? The Republicans do have a radical economic agenda, but it's not intended to appease the Trumpist base, with very rare exceptions (like executive orders that save or create additional coal jobs). It's primarily supposed to serve the ultra-wealthy.

The Republican economic agenda is to do basically whatever they feel like doing. It's scarcely an agenda.

https://www.splcenter.org/news/2016/02/17/splcs-intelligence-report-amid-year-lethal-violence-extremist-groups-expanded-ranks-2015

All is normal in America. I wonder how much these groups expanded in 2016.

I like how the article is about extremist groups that expanded in 2015, yet the image shows a man who wasn't elected until late 2016

I found the 2016 article and yes it increased that year too.

The SPLC claims the rise is partly due to Trump. Who knows?

In any case, I came here to post this:

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/05/politics/cia-kim-jong-un-intelligence-profile/index.html

So, we can hopefully admit that North Korea isn't just crazy.

One could also argue the converse.

Yeah, probably that as well. Apparently from ~2011 to ~2014, hate groups were in decline, but the overall trend since 2000 has been expansion. And these people try very hard to get political influence in any way they can.

Where'd you hear that?

SPLC data, their graph shows a YoY increase except from 2011-2014. There's apparently about twice as many hate groups active today than there was 20 years ago.

I'm curious as to what the SPLC defines as a "hate group" and who wrote the definition. To illustrate, I see that "ANTI-LGBT" is a hate group category. There are likely scores of such groups, but what makes one group a "hate" group and another just an activist group? Is every LDS church a hate group? The LDS church was the driving force behind the successful Proposition 8 campaign in California a few years ago, defining marriage as between one man and one woman, until it was overturned at the Supreme Court. Is that hate group activity? How about anti-abortion groups? I don't know how much the data takes into account differing politics and unpopular opinions before categorizing something as a "hate" group. Obviously, groups that condone or support violence are hate groups, but short of advocating bloodshed, I'm not sure what else can qualify a group as a "hate" group. Is any group that is counter to popular politics a hate group?

There's a particular group I was surprised to find on the list. The leader of the group is an acquaintance of my father. He certainly has some unpopular beliefs, but he's about as harmless and unassuming as a person can be. His big bad hate activism is sending emails at election time, warning his subscribers about bills or politicians that are contrary to the beliefs of his group. There are numerous other groups that do the exact same thing, but because he's on the "wrong" side of the issue, it's a hate group?

Further, I wonder how many of these hate groups are little more than some crazy dude and his three cousins drinking together and writing a crazy website about how the chinaman wants to steal our jobs. How many of these groups maintain any sort of membership or conduct any activities? Are the newly added groups actually new movements, or did crazy cousin #3 move to Toledo and start a new chapter with his already-racist neighbor?


It's a difficult and complicated task to track such things. I applaud their efforts, but would be wary to implicitly trust their findings. Even a cursory glance at the SPLC website shows they have their own predilections.

The SPLC defines a hate group as any activist organization with beliefs that malign entire classes of people on the basis of immutable characteristics, or which acts against them, violently or otherwise. Opposing gay marriage or abortion is probably not enough to end up on their list. Opposing gay people or women probably is.

You didn't say what the issue is, so I'm left imagining that it's something bad enough that it would undermine your point to say it.

The SPLC does not have magical ****head detecting powers. They find hate groups when those groups organize and gain publicity. Seeing more hate groups show up - even ramshackle ones - still means that racist activists and nazis and other bad folks are convicted enough and brazen enough to organize, act, and publicly associate under the banner of their cause. That is a bad thing.

The US government considers antifa a terrorist group, for example, but not the KKK, which has an actual history of actually terrorizing black people. There's no accounting for taste, I guess.

It's a religious group that produces "Christian voter guides" that promotes bills and politicians that represent fairly traditional protestant values. And my point was that it's almost exclusively email or snail mail based, there are no protests or marches or demonstrations. Certainly nothing that could be considered violent or extreme, or even promoting such measures. I'm not sure why it qualifies as a hate group given its tepid activities. I assume it's labeled a hate group because traditional protestant values are no longer mainstream.

Activism is activism. That does include things like mail campaigns, not just violence and civil disobedience.

I don't know what "traditional Protestant values" means. That is very subjective. It wasn't long ago that Protestant groups opposed mixed race marriages and adoptions, for example, although I hope few of them would profess that sort of view today, and I would definitely consider groups advocating that kind of traditional value a hate group.

I would also personally judge groups based on a singularity of purpose. For example, Protestants traditionally believe against gay marriage, but they believe in a lot of other things too. Protestants are not defined solely by opposition to gay marriage. Even if an organization is founded and remains consistent with some traditional Protestant views, if they are fixated on the portions of their beliefs that involves persecuting another person, and therefore neglect the parts of their faith that tell them to behave differently, I wouldn't consider that group Protestant. I would consider it a hate group.

Does the SPLC site explain why they are listed?

There are a lot of quotes by the founder espousing his opposition to gay marriage, funding of abortion, and removal of prayer in schools.

I'm less concerned about this particular organization, and mostly interested in just what criteria this group (or the US government, as you brought up earlier) uses to define a hate group or terrorist organization. As you know, once a label is applied (even if it has no basis) it can cause irreparable damage.

Edit: in today's easily offended society, we can be quick to label what we don't like or agree with as "hate" or "fascism" or "commies," etc. Last week a football player expressed his surprise that a female reporter knew the technical aspects of the sport and faced significant backlash for being sexist, despite the fact this his surprised was statically warranted. I would be surprised to encounter a female bricklayer. I know women /can/ be bricklayers, but very few actually are.

Surprise *and amusement*. Amusement first and surprise second, really, since he literally grinned and said it was 'funny' several times. Just to clarify...

TBH I feel like that warrants a gentle rebuke more than a vociferous condemnation, but eh.

My god, what a pig!

Well, actually, he's a panther.

The fact that such a small, unplanned, accidentally-verbalized thought caused headlines (at least two people here immediately knew what I was talking about), loss of sponsorships, and necessitated a formal, public apology is farcical.

I agree. But just in case this was a pointed remark, you should note that sometimes the people making the comparison have good evidence.

Not pointed at all, just a general observation.

Sometimes they have good evidence and it's perfectly warranted. Obviously, there are worrisome trends with growing extremism. At the same time, there's another worrisome trend where rhetoric on the left is becoming increasing emotional, lacking in composure, and insufficiently subtle (it's happening on the right, too, although it's not completely analogous). Is it a coincidence that people who identify as white racial supremacists came into cultural prominence at the precise moment when the left adopted a definition of "white supremacy" that was far too inclusive, and thus one that in its tone doesn't make a moral distinction between people who are legitimately hateful ideological racists, and unfortunate social disparities? (For example, I frequently hear "white supremacy" used to refer to the mere fact that white people continue to be disproportionately represented in professional occupations. Not to people who think that whites should be disproportionately represented. Just to the fact that it is the case.) I'd submit that it's probably not a coincidence. It seems perfectly fair to point out that extremism is growing alongside polarized political rhetoric on both the left and the right, and that they're both issues of consequence.

I would agree that it's not a coincidence, but not because fringe rhetoric on the left is driving conservatives to greater extremism. It's because the same forces are acting upon both groups, and they are both reacting to those forces in the manner to which they are best suited

This is all a symptom of our countries not acting in the interests of the people who live there. Which is to say, the problem is capitalism.

Yeah I agree. Both problems are manifestations of increasing polarization, and the root causes of polarization are likely economic (although not exclusively).

At this point I don't think it would surprise anybody if I revealed my belief that all social problems are ultimately economic ones.

Sometimes I think there are some problems that are actually social-psychological. Like our seemingly intrinsic urge to reduce the world to binaries. Out of a nearly infinite and high dimensional continuum of political stances, we almost universally reduce them to left and right: liberal and conservative. But then we do that for everything else, too. Male and female. Light and dark. Red and blue. Windows and Unix. Academics and sports. The strangest one of all is dogs and cats, to the extent that we've all decided somehow that dogs and cats are opposite animals, and we can conveniently partition people into whether they prefer dogs or prefer cats, and furthermore that dogs are the masculine preference, and cats are the feminine one.

But then I remember the Pareto principle, and, yep, it's actually all economics too.

Jonk, have you read Freakonomics?

I find the response to using words like that to be more of a flaw of the people on the right than the left, who can't realize a term is being used differently, and blow up so emotionally because to them words can never be used differently if they don't like it.

Do I think it's productive to make those terms more inclusive? No, but I also realize that most would make a distinction between hard white supremacy and subtler systemic issues. Of course you can find counter-examples, and of course people don't have a terribly hard time picking apart the more stupid stuff on the left. But I also think the irrational outrage is a tool to shut down discourse and make it about offense instead of the ideas.

But then again, you have a similar problem when discussing the economics, and the problems really are truly related to economics than to issues of radical white supremacy (bold or mild flavor). Radical in the sense here meaning, unfettered from other causes, like economic issues.

Like, in many ways I think the episode with Jordan B. Peterson is a microcosm of the whole debate. It can look, from a distance, like Jordan B. Peterson is just offering a mild criticism of using different pronouns. And this is how many people choose to interpret it. After digging, I realized he was actually just going on an emotional tantrum and was all but outright harassing his colleagues for asking him to stop. There was more to it than just the criticism, and it never would have been newsworthy if he just calmly wrote a book about it instead of doing the **** he did. Unfortunately, though, the media in America is really ****ty at reporting and feed into the prejudices everybody has of the left, the Tucker Carlson "special snowflake" **** that everybody and their mother thinks is funny and has been criticized to death.

What I'm getting at is literally nobody reads the rational discourse.

OTOH though, I do agree that there are plenty on the left to justly mock, and there is a trend of university students giving overly emotional rhetoric and other over the top characterizations that isn't helpful.

I'm not sure how the Pareto principle fits in. Actually, my mother read that book and it seemed to me that trying to see the world as 80/20 splits was just a cognitive bias, like numerology or something. Is there something I'm not getting?

The mental flaw you're describing though is a pretty good single way to see how much of our understanding is limited to simplifications, and how getting these simplifications entirely right is, well, for one not entirely possible, but it's hard to refine them. Especially when the simplifications of your society cause harm.

For reference, see:



The title being the binary of good and evil is a big mistake of humankind's.

Symptom of social media dogpile culture. Ted Kaczynski was right.

Rota was right.

Jon`C is talking about wilting myth #3 (see indented text)

[quote=Gian-Caro Rota]
The truth offends. In all languages of the world one finds proverbs that stress this truism in many colorful versions ("veritas odium parit" in Latin). More precisely: certain truths offend. Which truths offend? When and why do we "take offense?" All cultures have offered variants of one and the same answer to these questions. We take offense at those truths that threaten any of the myths we profess to believe in. Taking offense is an effective way we have of shutting off some unpleasant truth. It works. It enables us to restore a hold on our dearest myths, to last until the next offending truth comes along.

Myths come in two kinds: working myths and wilting myths. Working myths are the bedrock of civilization, they are what college students in the sixties used to call "ultimate reality." We could not function without the solid support that we get from our working myths. We are not aware of our working myths.

Sooner or later, every working myth begins to wilt. We can tell that a myth is wilting as soon as we are able to express it in words. It then turns into a belief, to be preserved and defended.

A wilting myth is an albatross hanging from our necks. Only on rare occasions do we summon the courage to discard a wilting myth; more often, we hang on to a wilting myth to the very end. If anyone dares question any of our wilting myths, we will lash out and label him elitist," "subversive," "reactionary," "irrational," "cynical...... nihilistic," obscurantist." We will seize on some incorrect but irrelevant detail as an excuse to dismiss an entire argument. Most discussions, whether in science, in philosophy, in politics or in everyday conversation, are thinly veiled attacks or defenses of some wilting myth.

Eventually, a wilting myth gets dropped by all but the hard-liners.

These are the bigots, the fanatics, the mass murderers. Hitler staged a last-ditch defense of the cloying romantic myths of the past century. Stalin battled for the dying myth of socialism. The kooks of Montana are taking the last stand in defense of the myth of the West.

The wilting myths of the millennium are the theme of this book. Never before in history have so many myths begun to wilt at the same time, and a hard choice had to be made, to wit:
[INDENT]
1. The myth of monolithic personality. "Every scientist must also be a good guy." "If you are good at math, then you will be good at anything." "Great men are great in everything they do." "Heidegger cannot be a good philosopher because he was a Nazi."
[/INDENT]

Against this myth, sketches of the lives of some notable mathematicians of this century are given in "Fine Hall in the Golden Age," "Light Shadows," "The Story of a Manage A Trois" and "The Lost Cafe." When first published, each of these chapters caused a stir of sorts. After reading the section "Problem Solvers and Theorizers," a mathematician friend (one of the most distinguished living mathematicians) wrote that he would not speak to the author ever again. Another mathematician threatened a lawsuit after reading the section on Emil Artin in "Fine Hall in the Golden Age." After publication of a heavily edited version of "The Lost Cafe" in the magazine Los Alamos Science, the author was permanently excluded from the older echelons of Los Alamos society.[INDENT]
2. The myth of reductionism. "The workings of the mind can be reduced to the brain." "The universe is nothing but a psi function." "Biology is a branch of physics." "Everything has a mechanical explanation."
[/INDENT]

Critiques of these frequently heard assertions are found in "The Barrier of Meaning," "Fundierung as a Logical Concept," "The Primacy of Identity," "The Barber of Seville, or the Useless Precaution," and "Three Senses of �A is B� in Heidegger." The confusion between scientific thought and reductionist error is rampant in our day, and critiques of reductionism are mistakenly viewed as attacks on the scientific method.

Reductionism would do away with the autonomy of biology and physics, of physics and mathematics, as well as with the autonomy of science and philosophy. "The Pernicious Influence of Mathematics upon Philosophy" is motivated by the loss of autonomy in philosophy. The paper (reprinted five times in four languages) was taken as a personal insult by several living philosophers.[INDENT]
3. The zero-one myth. "If a marble is not white, it must be black." "If you don't believe that everything can be explained in terms of atoms and molecules, you must be an irrationalist." "There is no valid explanation other than causal explanation."
[/INDENT]

The ideal of rationality of the Age of Enlightenment is too narrow, and we need not abandon all reason when we stray from this seventeenth-century straightjacket. Already the life sciences follow a logic that is a long way from the logic of mechanics and causal explanation.

The simplistic cravings for a "nothing but" are dealt with in "The Phenomenology of Mathematical Truth," "The Phenomenology of Mathematical Beauty" and "The Phenomenology of Mathematical Proof." There is no answer to the question "What is mathematics?" because the word "is" is misused in such a question. A distinguished mathematician, who is also one of the last hard-line Stalinists, criticized these essays for their "anarchy." He is right.

The book concludes with a selection of book reviews the author has published in the last twenty-five years. It was hard to resist the temptation to publish samples of the hate mail that was received after these reviews. The truth offends.

Cambridge, MA, September 1, 1996
[/quote]

This is the best quote I've read on this topic, it summarizes my thoughts exactly.

No.

The Pareto principle isn't numerology, it's observing that natural phenomena most frequently seem to fit a power law distribution, rather than a normal distribution as we often assume, stated as an overly specific example. In the case of capitalism, a power law distribution of wealth or market share is an immediate consequence of capital concentration. That is the first reason it applies here.

The second reason is that limiting choice is very convenient for institutions. A good example is dogs and cats. It is very convenient that dog and cat ownership are specifically popular, because it limits the amount of training pet store employees need, and it limits the size of the inventory pet stores need to keep to serve the majority of customers. Pet stores still offer non-dog/cat pets and supplies, but they are usually located at the back of the store, and the animals are too often mistreated because the employees aren't properly trained to care for them. In this case, we have a suspiciously convenient binary choice between dogs and cats, and while there is a long tail of alternatives, we are all subtly guided to consider the dominant pet types foremost, which over time generates a power law distribution of pet ownership. This process leads us to consider the alternatives weird pet choices for weird people.

I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to identify all of the other "binaries" with long tails that are inconvenient for institutions to handle.

Oh hell, I'll be frank.

Sooner or later the trans bathroom debate is going to force employers and businesses to spend billions of dollars renovating the privacy robbing aluminum bull**** out of their public bathrooms. If you think that isn't why people were really talking about it, I have a bridge to sell you.

That's a much better description than the Wikipedia. Following the power law distribution is more coherent than "80/20" principle, which seems to ascribe too much power to the actual numbers 80/20. So yeah, that makes sense.

I think a big thing I'm getting at is, the left will criticize and suppress antifa only if the right will actually work to push out the obviously super racist elements on their side. Right now, it feel like many on the right are softening up to overt racism, and Donald Trump is ringleading this in a new way. As far as I can tell, most Republican representatives are sort of tolerating Trump and the far right, and that's really completely unacceptable, and I see no reason why the left should work to suppress our radical elements if the right has a president in office who's encouraging the opposite.

I'm all for that, to be honest.