Leftist Tentatively Dissents From Progressive Prope-Lysenkoist Orthodoxy

Z0MG...the NPCs are...becoming self-aware...

   Noah Smith--I don't really know this guy's stuff, though I know I've run across some of it before--discovers that open politicization of science may not be such a great thing after all.

   Needless to say, there's the usual lefty hand-wringing about it all, denials that objectivity is possible, reduction of the value of truth to mere instrumentality...and plenty of fretting about what happens if/when THE RIGHT!!!111 gets a hold of un-PC science. 

   The specific case at hand is about a study that shows that, if X gets incarcerated, X's close young relatives have a lower chance of being incarcerated--roughly that, anyway. So if you're 12, and your 17-year-old, criminal brother gets put away for drug-dealing, there's some chance that you'll learn a lesson from that. (Which isn't, presumably, just how to be cagier drug-dealer...). Lefties apparently flipped out about this because IT SENDS A MESSAGE THAT MASS INCARCERATION IS GOOD!!!1111 Well...it only send that message because it's true, you see... Or, more precisely: mass incarceration is good in at least that one way. 

   Actually, the real problem--as every sane person knows--is that we have a lot of violent criminals here in the USA... Now we don't want that, obviously...but once you've got it, you only have two options: (a) incarcerate a lot of violent criminals; (b) let those violent criminals keep running around committing violence and other crimes. So, given that we've already got the really bad thing, we've chosen the better of the two other options consequent on that thing. It's just about that simple. Analogies aren't that hard to come by. Is it bad that we spend so much money on health-care for people who are overweight? Well...I mean...the really important bad thing is that so many Americans are overweight. Once that problem is in place, we've only got basically two kinds of options...etc. 

   Smith's post is, well, not very good. But, hey: props to him for doing it--and I mean that. It's yet another measure of how far the left has gone over the edge that (a) people have to write posts like this at all, and (b) that his extremely lukewarm defense of truth and rational inquiry was controversial. It should be controversial, if at all, only because it is so lukewarm. And, well, bad. But! My bestowal of props is sincere. 

   If we learned anything from our battle with the paleo-PCs in the late '80s - early '90s, it was that the turning point--which is not a point, but an extended event--comes when they become so crazy that the more moderate left can no longer be fooled / terrorized / tribalized into supporting them. There came a time, back then, when it seemed that the PPCs were going to win--in fact, it seemed that they had already basically won. But then they didn't. I think the lesson is: all is not lost--or, at least, it may not be. But another lesson--at least as important as the first one, and maybe more so--is: as the tide of political correctness began to recede, we--or, at least, I--eventually came to think we'd won. We now know that we  only won some battles. We didn't win the war. The PCs had taken lots of ground, and we won back only part of it. E.g. they had created a vast array of more-or-less explicitly leftist pseudo-disciplines--grievance studies, as Pluckrose, Boghossian, and Lindsay call them. Political correctness wasn't defeated--it merely retreated into certain parts of universities (grievance studies, the humanities, sociology, the para-faculty, Ed schools), like Sauron retreating into Mordor. There it mutated. And it indoctrinated. And honed its sophistical weapons.  And then it--now Neo-PC...a more virulent form of the old virus--burst forth and f*cking took over all of our elite institutions in what seems like the blink of an eye. 

   Anyway...I've got work to do, believe it or not...but there are some lessons from history here:  First: it looked like we lost for awhile there, but we hadn't. Second: it looked like we'd won for awhile there, but we hadn't. Now it looks like we're losing...and we are...but we haven't. We also shouldn't expect to win anything like a decisive victory. That's a relevant asymmetry: they (at least some of them, to at least some extent, in some way) want final, total victory and might, theoretically, achieve it. Of course we'd actually like that too--if it meant that everybody understood the arguments better and stopped being susceptible to political cults...But that's probably not going to happen. And we don't want to take over the culture and the government and institutionalize prohibitions against PC. We don't want to mobilize e-mobs to shriek down political correctness. This crazy bullshit will always be with (as Rauch calls it) liberal science, because, central to that view--our view--is: protecting and even valuing--even cherishing--dissent from the doctrine. In fact, we don't even see it as dissent, really, but more as disagreement. We don't even like to see ourselves as the orthodoxy, I guess. Even, I guess, when we are. Well, that's something we'll have to think about some day...but today is not that day...