Tyrannophobia

08-13-2017

Tyrannophobia

The disgusting events in Charlottesville this weekend have the makings of an inflection point. The "Unite the Right" torch parade on Friday night and the planned but canceled rally in front of the Robert E. Lee statue on Saturday were some of the largest and most public actions of the fascist white power movement in the modern United States. Screaming "white power," and chanting "You will not replace us" and the Nazi slogan "Blood and Soil," the many-hundreds strong torch-brandishing marchers on Friday night were at once angry and organized. The next day the rally was canceled before it began, but in the lead up, some of the scheduled speakers spoke on Twitter. David Duke said:

“This represents a turning point for the people of this country, We are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he’s going to take our country back. That’s what we gotta do.”

The Unite the Right March showed the white power movement in all its fascist and hate-filled disgrace. But it hardly united the right. Senator Orrin Hatch tweeted, "Their tiki torches may be fueled by citronella but their ideas are fueled by hate, & have no place in civil society." And Hatch added, "We should call evil by its name. My brother didn't give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home." Other Republican Senators including Cory Gardner, John McCain, Rob Portman, Chuck Grassley, and Marco Rubio all called the marchers out as hate-filled white supremacists and domestic terrorists. Even Attorney General Jeff Sessions stated

“The violence and deaths in Charlottesville strike at the heart of American law and justice. When such actions arise from racial bigotry and hatred, they betray our core values and cannot be tolerated.”

If the marchers united the right, it was thankfully only true in the sense that at least some Republican politicians finally showed the courage to step up and condemn white nationalism, fascism, and terrorism that are growing and publicly mobilizing in the United States. There was one glaring exception, of course, to the willingness of Republican politicians to unite against the rising tide of race-fueled fascism. President Donald Trump, who calls himself the mouthpiece of the movement, was pointedly silent on the question. He condemned violence on all sides in anodyne words. “We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!” Later, he added, “The hate and the division must stop and must stop right now. We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides.” Unlike other Republicans, Trump would not mention the white nationalists, their fascist tactics, or their racist views. According to an article in the Washington Post, when asked "whether he wanted the support of white nationalists, dozens of whom wore red Make America Great Again hats during the Charlottesville riots, Trump did not respond." Even after 20-year old James Alex Fields drove his car into a group of anti-protesters killing one and injuring 19, President Trump refused to call the action what it was, an act of homegrown, fascist, and racial terrorism. There are optimistic and pessimistic reads on the events in Charlottesville. Optimistically, the Unite the Right rally has united the opposition. The number of prominent Republicans who have publicly distanced themselves from the President is noteworthy and important. In spite the President's silent support for the marchers, there is a small albeit influential core of Republican leaders willing to stand up and confront the dangerous rise of bigotry-fed fascism. Once again, we see that as weak as our civic culture and civil institutions are, they still have some hold in times of crisis. Pessimistically, President Trump has once again shown himself to be a willing enabler of an undeniably racist, anti-Semitic, and fascist movement, one that provides a meaningful part of his voter base. The leaders of the Unite the Right march specifically tied themselves to President Trump. They shouted 'Heil Hitler" and "Heil Trump." I have written before of the danger in the President's refusal to condemn hateful acts:

While the president has not offered anything like a racial, antisemitic, or islamophobic justification for slavery, expulsion, or genocide, his flirtation with those on the alt-right who do make such justifications is supremely dangerous. The distance between an ideology of superiority and inferiority on the one side and mass expulsions and genocide on the other is morally vast but practically narrow. At one point during the campaign, Trump floated and then rejected the idea of a Muslim registry in the United States on national security grounds. What happens after the next terrorist attack? That President Trump has thus far refused to explicitly condemn ideological and physical attacks against Muslims is perhaps the greatest cause for alarm concerning the totalitarian potential of his movement.

The mobilization of race as an ideological ground for the elevation of one group over another is not simply prejudice. It is a justification for violence and a potential precursor for totalitarian and fascist politics. It is no accident that the march in Charlottesville turned violent. On this point, however, it is important to admit that the beginnings of the violence was two-sided. Who knows who started it, but according to news accounts, anti-protest groups attacked the protesters with pepper spray and projectiles. This of course allows President Trump to get away with the false equation of condemning violence on all sides. But we must also admit, that these attacks on the marchers were wrong. They tactically played into the marcher's desire to show the intolerance of liberal culture. And They reject the fundamental value of plurality that democratic culture must uphold. Most importantly, however, the violence on the left and the right threaten to escalate what has so far been largely a war of ideas into a war for the streets. Street violence was at the very center of the rise of the fascists in Germany. The Nazi's mobilized "Brownshirts"—the SA—and marched them into communist and social democratic strongholds seeking to provoke the communists and social democrats. These groups then mobilized their own street gangs and civil disputes turned into violent struggles. This is part of the fascist game plan, to break down the foundation of liberal and democratic civility, to turn arguments into battles, and to insist that political questions cannot be trusted to persuasion but must be won with weapons. It is likely bad timing that this same weekend that saw the violent mobilization of a fascist mob, Samuel Moyn and David Priestland argued in an op-ed in the New York Times that we should all worry less about the threat that Donald Trump's Presidency poses to our democratic insitutions. For Moyn and Priestland, the United States is wrongly suffering from what they call "tyrannophobia":

"Since Donald Trump’s election, the United States has been gripped by tyrannophobia. Conspiracies against democracy are everywhere; truth is under siege; totalitarianism is making a comeback; “resistance” is the last refuge of citizens. Tyrannophobia, the belief that the overwhelmingly important political issue is the threat to our liberal freedoms and institutions, has always been a powerful force in the United States. As history has shown, however, its tendency to redirect our attention from underlying social and economic problems has often been the real source of danger. It is easier to believe that democracy is under siege than to acknowledge that democracy put Mr. Trump in power — and only more economic fairness and solidarity can keep populists like him out."

Read the rest of Roger's essay on Medium.

Form more information visit: https://medium.com/amor-mundi/tyrannophobia-b05eda5f6d6

Read It

James Damore, an engineer at Google, wrote a memo raising questions about the way Google speaks about and tries to address diversity. The media frenzy and chaos that ensued presented his memo as a "screed," and a "manifesto"; the memo was characterized widely as "anti-diversity" and "unsourced." All of these characterizations are patently wrong. As Conor Friedersdorf wrote in The Atlantic, “I cannot remember the last time so many outlets and observers mischaracterized so many aspects of a text everyone possessed.” Of course, one problem is that few people read Damon's memo. First because it was long (10 pages); and second, because when the memo was published by the website Gizmodo, it was published with the links, charts, and sources removed. Whatever one thinks of the memo, it is well worth reading in its entirety. —RB

"People generally have good intentions, but we all have biases which are invisible to us. Thankfully, open and honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots and help us grow, which is why I wrote this document??. Google has several biases and honest discussion about these biases is being silenced by the dominant ideology. What follows is by no means the complete story, but it’s a perspective that desperately needs to be told at Google. Google’s biases At Google, we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies to race and gender, but we rarely discuss our moral biases. Political orientation is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media?, and Google lean left, we should critically examine these prejudices:

Left Biases	Right Biases
Compassion for the weak	Respect for the strong/autority
Disparities are due to injustices	Disparities are natural and just
Humans are inherently cooperative	Humans are inherently competitive
Change is good (unstable)	Change is dangerous (stable)
Open Idealist	Closed Pragmatic

  Neither side is 100% correct and both viewpoints are necessary for a functioning society or, in this case, company. A company too far to the right may be slow to react, overly hierarchical, and untrusting of others. In contrast, a company too far to the left will constantly be changing (deprecating much loved services), over diversify its interests (ignoring or being ashamed of its core business), and overly trust its employees and competitors. Only facts and reason can shed light on these biases, but when it comes to diversity and inclusion, Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence. ?This silence removes any checks against encroaching extremist and authoritarian policies. For the rest of this document, I’ll concentrate on the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and the authoritarian element that’s required to actually discriminate to create equal representation."

Form more information visit: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf

Let's Do Some Research

In response to the Google Memo, Google's Diversity officer asserted that the memo “advanced incorrect assumptions about gender.” This unargued assertion has led to an incredible outpouring of writing on the psychological field of gender differentiation, something many of us likely knew little about. It turns out that while it is clear that women rival and even exceed men in scientific and technical ability, it is also clear that most women choose different paths. Why that is the case is fully unclear. Four psychologists offered their considered opinions on how men and women differ with regard to technical ability and interest on the website Quillette. The most helpful account I've come across is an extremely well-researched and sourced argument by Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt. Stevens and Haidt review approximately 20 meta-analyses of scientific papers to parse the state of scientific research on the question of biological and social gender differentiations. The core of the essay is a long section in which they analyze the abstracts of 20 meta-analytical studies and color-code the statements supporting Damore's theses in green and those critical of his theses in red. This is extremely revelatory. In the end, Stevens and Haidt conclude that "Damore seems to be correct that there are “population level differences in distributions” of traits that are likely to be relevant for understanding gender gaps at Google and other tech firms." —RB

"Damore challenges the way that Google is currently pursuing diversity–with a heavy emphasis on implicit bias training–and its assumption that gender gaps necessarily show the existence of some form of bias. Damore argues that a company that was completely free of bias and discrimination would not end up with a 50/50 gender split in all job functions because there are population differences in some traits that might influence the jobs men and women seek out and succeed at. His memo is structured as an argument against a position he refers to as “the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment.” Is Damore correct that such “population level differences” exist? It’s very hard to evaluate empirical claims about politicized topics because everyone can “cherry pick” the studies that support their side (for longer discussions, see here and here). The best way to establish the truth in such cases is to examine meta-analyses, which are studies that integrate the findings from many other studies. We list all the relevant meta-analyses and large sample studies we have found so far in section 2, below, along with their abstracts. But first, in section 1, we collect all the commentary we can find from experts who are writing about the Google memo specifically. And finally, in section 3, we give our own views about how to make sense of the complicated and conflicting set of research findings. If you think we have left out any major experts or meta-analyses, please let us know in the comments at the end, and if appropriate we will add it to this list.  We intend this post to be a living document that brings together in one place the best empirically grounded arguments on all sides. It will be updated regularly.... 3) OUR CONCLUSIONS The research findings are complicated, as you can see from the many abstracts containing both red and green text, and from the presence on both sides of the debate of some of the top researchers in psychology. Nonetheless, we think that the situation can be greatly clarified by distinguishing abilities from interests. We think the following three statements are supported by the research reviewed above:

1. Gender differences in math/scienceability, achievement, and performance are small or nil. (See especially the studies by Hyde; see also this review paper by Spelke, 2005). There are two exceptions to this statement: A) Men (on average) score higher than women on some tests of spatial abilities, such as the ability to rotate 3-dimensional objects in one’s mind. This ability may be relevant in some areas of engineering, but it’s not clear why it would matter for coding. B) There is some evidence that men are more variable on a variety of traits, meaning that they are over-represented at both tails of the distribution (i.e., more men at the very bottom, and at the very top), even though there is no gender difference on average. There is an ongoing debate about whether or not this is true across nations and decades; We are currently reviewing this literature, and will post our conclusions and links to studies next week.
2. Gender differences in interest and enjoyment of math, coding, and highly “systemizing” activities are large. The difference on traits related to preferences for “people vs. things” is found consistently and is very large, with some effect sizes exceeding 1.0. (See especially the meta-analyses by Su and her colleagues, and also see this review paper by Ceci & Williams, 2015).
3. Culture and context matter, in complicated ways. Some gender differences have decreased over time as women have achieved greater equality, showing that these differences are responsive to changes in culture and environment. But the cross-national findings sometimes show “paradoxical” effects: progress toward gender equality in rights and opportunities sometimes leads to larger gender differences in some traits and career choices. Nonetheless, it seems that actions taken today by parents, teachers, politicians, and designers of tech products may increase the likelihood that girls will grow up to pursue careers in tech, and this is true whether or not biology plays a role in producing any particular population difference. (See this review paper by Eagly and Wood, 2013).

In conclusion, based on the meta-analyses we reviewed above, Damore seems to be correct that there are “population level differences in distributions” of traits that are likely to be relevant for understanding gender gaps at Google and other tech firms. The differences are much larger and more consistent for traits related to interest and enjoyment, rather than ability. This distinction between interest and ability is important because it may address one of the main fears raised by Damore’s critics: that the memo itself will cause Google employees to assume that women are less qualified, or less “suited” for tech jobs, and will therefore lead to more bias against women in tech jobs. But the empirical evidence we have reviewed should have the opposite effect. Population differences in interest may be part of the explanation for why there are fewer women in the applicant pool, but the women who choose to enter the pool are just as capable as the larger number of men in the pool. This conclusion does not deny that various forms of bias, harassment, and discouragement exist and contribute to outcome disparities, nor does it imply that the differences in interest are biologically fixed and cannot be changed in future generations."

Form more information visit: https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/08/10/the-google-memo-what-does-the-research-say-about-gender-differences/