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> When I was growing up in foster homes, or making minimum wage as a > dishwasher, or serving in the military, I never heard words like “cultural > ap

> When I was growing up in foster homes, or making minimum wage as a > dishwasher, or serving in the military, I never heard words like “cultural > appropriation” or “gendered” or “heteronormative.” > > Working class people could not tell you what these terms mean. But if you > visit an elite university, you’ll find plenty of affluent people who will > eagerly explain them to you. I figured out as soon as I saw the link title that the author's examples for "luxury beliefs" would just so happen to be associated with a feminist and anti-racist outlook. > But unlike luxury goods, luxury beliefs can have long term detrimental > effects for the poor and working class. However costly these beliefs are > for the rich, they often inflict even greater costs on everyone else. This is certainly true for a high number of luxury beliefs, such as "trickle down economics", "small government" advocacy and "catallaxy", none of which come up often among dishwashers; and all of which freshman students at Yale, who just read their first essay on Friedrich Hayek, will gladly explain to you.

bryanrasmussen 3y ago
[flagged]
- stewx 3y ago
  Intelligence and knowledge are two different things. An uneducated person may be highly intelligent but have little knowledge.
  - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
    ok - in that case: when I switched to a white collar job suddenly all the world's knowledge was unlocked in my brain, and I knew the meaning of all these terms that had heretofore been opaque to me.
    - jocaal 3y ago
      The author addresses this in the text. He claims the wealthy have the time (And I will add access to resources like the internet and books) to spend on learning esoteric knowledge. From my N=1 experience, that seems to be true. I don't really get why that offends you. Is it really hard to believe that people in different social classes prioritize learning different things?
      - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
        >I don't really get why that offends you. well probably because I have learned more esoteric knowledge than almost anyone I know despite having come from poorer circumstances than anyone I know, and I learned it while being poor.
    - Mezzie 3y ago
      Those with the capacity and inclination to learn such things (meaning academic theory and systems) who are born into working class communities or families are heavily encouraged to leave the working class behind and cut ties. The working class communities are intellectually strip mined, and the kids quickly learn their only chance at success relies very much on learning to hide where they came from unless they're trotting it out for sympathy points/scholarships, in which case you need to talk about your background but make clear that you've ~ transcended it. As a result the only people left in the working class as adults are those who couldn't learn academic theory. Some exceptions I've seen are people like my mother who grew up higher-class but 'defected'. Another exception is occasional disabled members of the working class. It has nothing to do with the intelligence or ability of the working class as a population and everything to do with the fact that people in that class who have certain abilities and types of intelligence are offered a way out that others aren't. (e.g. A mechanical genius is less likely to get this treatment than a kid reading several grades ahead ).
- philwelch 3y ago
  I can assure you that understanding woke buzzwords does not actually make you more intelligent. Usually the opposite.
boxed 3y ago
> be associated with a feminist and anti-racist outlook. Well.. it's not at all clear that those things he mention has anything to do with anti-racism and feminism. In fact, it seems quite clear they are the opposite of that.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  The implication is clearly that "woke" is an effete privileged liberal attack on the poor and oppressed. It's ridiculously transparent libertarian/conservative PR. As others have said - far more directly abusive and entitled privileged beliefs are endemic among the very rich. If they weren't they wouldn't spend so much time strike-breaking, stealing pay, flouting laws and regulations, buying politicians, and proselytising their messaging through think tanks, PR firms and captured media.
  - fieldcny 3y ago
    The two are not mutually exclusive. The fact is worrying and getting angry about things like cultural appropriation is something one can only do if they have the time and energy to. Most laborers are too concerned about being able to pay their bills, provide for their dependents and too tired from difficult labor to get that upset about a Chinese Basketball player wearing dreads.
    - lupire 3y ago
      And yet they have energy to freak out about homosexuality.
      - jasonladuke0311 3y ago
        Who is “they?” Are you suggesting that all laborers are homophobic?
      - boxed 3y ago
        You are a part of the problem. You see the entire world as two camps: crazy woke and racist/imperialist. This is wrong. I don't freak out over homosexuals. I see how "cultural appropriation" is bs. You can have those two ideas in your head at once. In fact, the vast majority do! Because it's the only sane position.
littlestymaar 3y ago
Yeah, it's also really funny because the data that the author uses about police reform also show the conservative luxury beliefs that is “police department don't need to be reformed”. (And the same data also shows that for every income class, the police is largely seen as dysfunctional needing either serious reform or complete defunding). This post is basically conservative rambling disguised as sociology.
- fieldcny 3y ago
  I am in no way conservative, but I think you are missing the point. There are sets of liberal and conservative beliefs that are held by the wealthy and powerful that are detrimental to the powerless and poor. He cites the liberal set, maybe he is a conservative and that’s his bias or maybe because there is an inbuilt hypocrisy in some of them, ultimately it doesn’t matter because the point stands on its own and one shouldn’t discount that.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    I think you are the one missing the point: it's not that this post has a conservative bias (every text necessarily has these kinds of bias, and that's fine). The problem with this post is that it is only here as an argument against liberal ideas that he doesn't like, and as such it's entirely driven by bad faith. Then sure there may be some elements of truth sprinkled every now and then, but every piece of propaganda always lies on some truth to be convincing, that doesn't make it legit.
    - woooooo 3y ago
      Maybe you could evaluate the truth of something on its own merit, rather than sorting into "liberal vs conservative" first and letting truth be secondary to allegiance.
      - ModernMech 3y ago
        Part of evaluating truth these days is figuring out what information is being left out by the author. It’s hard to figure out the merits of an argument when only one side is presented or info is being hidden.
JanSt 3y ago
cultural appropriation As a european, I just can't wrap my head around this. How is it racist if I like a food of an other culture so much I cook it? Or I like a hairstyle of different culture so I also want to wear it. Or clothes. Or making music. Or.... I mean, I admire all that stuff so much that I want it to be part of my life. How is this racist?
- doublespanner 3y ago
  Americans tied up so much of their image of a "good person" with not being racist, that when in environments with no way to demonstrate that they are not racist, they had to invent new racist things to oppose.
  - boppo1 3y ago
    As a millennial, racism was taught to me in k-12 as being perhaps one of the fundamental forces of evil in the world; kind of an analog to what Christian students learn about Satan. As a result, people in my generation have moral codes that revolve around it, sometimes in twisted ways. Someone gets hit by a car but hey were racist? Had it coming.
    - leoedin 3y ago
      This really hit it on the head. Racism was presented as the worst transgression anyone could make. Is it a surprise that when the generation raised in that environment reached adulthood - and realised that racism wasn't quite as dead as they thought, some of them would take their internalised morality to the extreme.
      - cutty_wise 3y ago
        [dead]
- traverseda 3y ago
  The strongest form of that argument I know about is really about how capitalism is eating the world. It's a common refrain that "white people have no culture", but if you replace "white people" with "globalized capitalism" it starts making more sense. Everyone drinks the same can of coke and eats the same grocery store sushi. If you look closer at the woke crowd you'll see that grocery store sushi is pretty "white". One of the big things they're actually complaining about is enshittification of other cultures via capitalism. So the idea is that cultural appropriation is a way to keep capitalism from eating the world, to keep shitty grocery store sushi from competing with people who actually know what they're doing. To try and keep capitalists from pillaging every developing economy.
newsclues 3y ago
Having worked minimum wage jobs, we know, understand and talk about trickle down economics. We also know the government taxing carbon or giving employment advantages to (often wealthy or connected) minorities rather than people who need it. Luxury beliefs are common amongst the educated and twist demands for Justice for all into demands for privileges for themselves!
romusha 3y ago
On the other hand, peasants in Russia believe in big government and there's no luxury there for them
torginus 3y ago
Yes, people are great fakers - we talk about things not because we believe them, but because we want others to think we do. That describes the great communication divide, where rich people, who rent out multiple apartments talk about housing is a human right, whereas the line cook at the local burger place couldn't be more excited to tell you about his crypto investment portfolio.
lelanthran 3y ago
> I figured out as soon as I saw the link title that the author's examples for "luxury beliefs" would just so happen to be associated with a feminist and anti-racist outlook. Isn't the author's point that the examples correlate very highly with affluence? The fact that it may/may not be correlated to something else might be relevant, but I'm not seeing the relevance.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  The response proves his point too in a way, and something I've observed in my NYC left rich cohort. Deflecting all criticism by knee jerk reaction of calling the questioner a racist. Disagreement over the magnitude of a problem, its relation to other problems, or the terms used for a problem makes you racist and therefore bad. Now we don't need to consider your opinion and can move on.
  - zarathustreal 3y ago
    >Now we don't need to consider your opinion and can move on. You can ignore anyone arguing from opinion, that's a given. "NYC left rich cohort" sounds like an absolute nightmare to try to figure out the truth with, given that they seem to think the character of a speaker has any bearing on the validity of their spoken words. Best not to engage with people like that, it's a waste of time.
  - lom888 3y ago
    Exactly, the deflections of 'racism' and 'sexism' are thought-terminating cliches bandied about in an act of pure class war. No need to listen to Trumpies talk about immigration and how it effects their community if they're all racists; that makes them the other and we can just pretend they don't exist.
    - catlover76 3y ago
      I have genuinely never heard or read a Trump supporter discuss any practical effect of immigration, illegal or otherwise, on their actual communities. It's all very theoretical, based on hyperbolic and often false "news" items, and involves a heavy dose of borderline glee in being emotionally callous and selfish. At beast, I have seen people misread statistics to support their position, but, again, that's not really "how it effects their community".
ceasefire 3y ago
Pretty sure working class people suppress "fancy words". A fella could get mistaken for a "fairy" or maybe even get a beatin'. It's like how mothers used to chip in to enforce gender inequality their daughters suffered. It is a defeatist mindset, that is culturally enforced and learned from bitter lessons of the reality of power balance and dynamics in society. edit: like many here at my development stage (middleclass, degreed parents, etc) there was significant positive feedback for displaying cognitive abilities. So it is not a luxury, it is a privilege. And that raises the question of whether it is in fact required (as a sort of petite-bourgois-oblige) for those of us who are comfortable with "fancy words" to do the talking for the otherwise encumbered oppressed?
- sneed_chucker 3y ago
  > Pretty sure working class people suppress "fancy words". A fella could get mistaken for a "fairy" or maybe even get a beatin'. > And that raises the question of whether it is in fact required (as a sort of petite-bourgois-oblige) for those of us who are comfortable with "fancy words" to do the talking for the otherwise encumbered oppressed? I honestly cannot tell if this is a serious comment. I hope not.
  - suoduandao3 3y ago
    It looks to me like the best satire I've seen all day.
prvc 3y ago
The phenomenon of the migration of upper-middle or middle class (that is, those on the margin of luxury) holders of the beliefs mentioned in TFA from blue to red states is strong evidence of his thesis.
demondemidi 3y ago
I smelled that too! And the author didn’t fail to deliver. The George Floyd protests in Portland Oregon were massive. I find it hard to square that with a yougov poll that says only upper middle class people were protesting to defund the police because the crowds were young people who aren’t even old enough to have achieved that economic status. The author hilariously tries to paint small liberal movements as cultural capital, which is the same smear conservatives play when using “virtue signaling.” I’m sorry but 30 years ago Silence=Death fell under his category, and here we are today with overwhelming support nationwide for gay rights. This paper is interesting but seems intentionally geared toward wrapping antiprogressive rhetoric as insight.
mock-possum 3y ago
Thanks for calling it out, pretty clear to me too that that’s where this article was headed. It sucks to see stuff like this posted on HN, feels like a let down.

bryanrasmussen 3y ago

[flagged]

stewx 3y ago
Intelligence and knowledge are two different things. An uneducated person may be highly intelligent but have little knowledge.
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  ok - in that case: when I switched to a white collar job suddenly all the world's knowledge was unlocked in my brain, and I knew the meaning of all these terms that had heretofore been opaque to me.
  - jocaal 3y ago
    The author addresses this in the text. He claims the wealthy have the time (And I will add access to resources like the internet and books) to spend on learning esoteric knowledge. From my N=1 experience, that seems to be true. I don't really get why that offends you. Is it really hard to believe that people in different social classes prioritize learning different things?
    - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
      >I don't really get why that offends you. well probably because I have learned more esoteric knowledge than almost anyone I know despite having come from poorer circumstances than anyone I know, and I learned it while being poor.
  - Mezzie 3y ago
    Those with the capacity and inclination to learn such things (meaning academic theory and systems) who are born into working class communities or families are heavily encouraged to leave the working class behind and cut ties. The working class communities are intellectually strip mined, and the kids quickly learn their only chance at success relies very much on learning to hide where they came from unless they're trotting it out for sympathy points/scholarships, in which case you need to talk about your background but make clear that you've ~ transcended it. As a result the only people left in the working class as adults are those who couldn't learn academic theory. Some exceptions I've seen are people like my mother who grew up higher-class but 'defected'. Another exception is occasional disabled members of the working class. It has nothing to do with the intelligence or ability of the working class as a population and everything to do with the fact that people in that class who have certain abilities and types of intelligence are offered a way out that others aren't. (e.g. A mechanical genius is less likely to get this treatment than a kid reading several grades ahead ).
philwelch 3y ago
I can assure you that understanding woke buzzwords does not actually make you more intelligent. Usually the opposite.

boxed 3y ago

> be associated with a feminist and anti-racist outlook. Well.. it's not at all clear that those things he mention has anything to do with anti-racism and feminism. In fact, it seems quite clear they are the opposite of that.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
The implication is clearly that "woke" is an effete privileged liberal attack on the poor and oppressed. It's ridiculously transparent libertarian/conservative PR. As others have said - far more directly abusive and entitled privileged beliefs are endemic among the very rich. If they weren't they wouldn't spend so much time strike-breaking, stealing pay, flouting laws and regulations, buying politicians, and proselytising their messaging through think tanks, PR firms and captured media.
- fieldcny 3y ago
  The two are not mutually exclusive. The fact is worrying and getting angry about things like cultural appropriation is something one can only do if they have the time and energy to. Most laborers are too concerned about being able to pay their bills, provide for their dependents and too tired from difficult labor to get that upset about a Chinese Basketball player wearing dreads.
  - lupire 3y ago
    And yet they have energy to freak out about homosexuality.
    - jasonladuke0311 3y ago
      Who is “they?” Are you suggesting that all laborers are homophobic?
    - boxed 3y ago
      You are a part of the problem. You see the entire world as two camps: crazy woke and racist/imperialist. This is wrong. I don't freak out over homosexuals. I see how "cultural appropriation" is bs. You can have those two ideas in your head at once. In fact, the vast majority do! Because it's the only sane position.

littlestymaar 3y ago

Yeah, it's also really funny because the data that the author uses about police reform also show the conservative luxury beliefs that is “police department don't need to be reformed”. (And the same data also shows that for every income class, the police is largely seen as dysfunctional needing either serious reform or complete defunding). This post is basically conservative rambling disguised as sociology.

fieldcny 3y ago
I am in no way conservative, but I think you are missing the point. There are sets of liberal and conservative beliefs that are held by the wealthy and powerful that are detrimental to the powerless and poor. He cites the liberal set, maybe he is a conservative and that’s his bias or maybe because there is an inbuilt hypocrisy in some of them, ultimately it doesn’t matter because the point stands on its own and one shouldn’t discount that.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  I think you are the one missing the point: it's not that this post has a conservative bias (every text necessarily has these kinds of bias, and that's fine). The problem with this post is that it is only here as an argument against liberal ideas that he doesn't like, and as such it's entirely driven by bad faith. Then sure there may be some elements of truth sprinkled every now and then, but every piece of propaganda always lies on some truth to be convincing, that doesn't make it legit.
  - woooooo 3y ago
    Maybe you could evaluate the truth of something on its own merit, rather than sorting into "liberal vs conservative" first and letting truth be secondary to allegiance.
    - ModernMech 3y ago
      Part of evaluating truth these days is figuring out what information is being left out by the author. It’s hard to figure out the merits of an argument when only one side is presented or info is being hidden.

JanSt 3y ago

cultural appropriation As a european, I just can't wrap my head around this. How is it racist if I like a food of an other culture so much I cook it? Or I like a hairstyle of different culture so I also want to wear it. Or clothes. Or making music. Or.... I mean, I admire all that stuff so much that I want it to be part of my life. How is this racist?

doublespanner 3y ago
Americans tied up so much of their image of a "good person" with not being racist, that when in environments with no way to demonstrate that they are not racist, they had to invent new racist things to oppose.
- boppo1 3y ago
  As a millennial, racism was taught to me in k-12 as being perhaps one of the fundamental forces of evil in the world; kind of an analog to what Christian students learn about Satan. As a result, people in my generation have moral codes that revolve around it, sometimes in twisted ways. Someone gets hit by a car but hey were racist? Had it coming.
  - leoedin 3y ago
    This really hit it on the head. Racism was presented as the worst transgression anyone could make. Is it a surprise that when the generation raised in that environment reached adulthood - and realised that racism wasn't quite as dead as they thought, some of them would take their internalised morality to the extreme.
    - cutty_wise 3y ago
      [dead]
traverseda 3y ago
The strongest form of that argument I know about is really about how capitalism is eating the world. It's a common refrain that "white people have no culture", but if you replace "white people" with "globalized capitalism" it starts making more sense. Everyone drinks the same can of coke and eats the same grocery store sushi. If you look closer at the woke crowd you'll see that grocery store sushi is pretty "white". One of the big things they're actually complaining about is enshittification of other cultures via capitalism. So the idea is that cultural appropriation is a way to keep capitalism from eating the world, to keep shitty grocery store sushi from competing with people who actually know what they're doing. To try and keep capitalists from pillaging every developing economy.

newsclues 3y ago

Having worked minimum wage jobs, we know, understand and talk about trickle down economics. We also know the government taxing carbon or giving employment advantages to (often wealthy or connected) minorities rather than people who need it. Luxury beliefs are common amongst the educated and twist demands for Justice for all into demands for privileges for themselves!

romusha 3y ago

On the other hand, peasants in Russia believe in big government and there's no luxury there for them

torginus 3y ago

Yes, people are great fakers - we talk about things not because we believe them, but because we want others to think we do. That describes the great communication divide, where rich people, who rent out multiple apartments talk about housing is a human right, whereas the line cook at the local burger place couldn't be more excited to tell you about his crypto investment portfolio.

lelanthran 3y ago

> I figured out as soon as I saw the link title that the author's examples for "luxury beliefs" would just so happen to be associated with a feminist and anti-racist outlook. Isn't the author's point that the examples correlate very highly with affluence? The fact that it may/may not be correlated to something else might be relevant, but I'm not seeing the relevance.

steveBK123 3y ago
The response proves his point too in a way, and something I've observed in my NYC left rich cohort. Deflecting all criticism by knee jerk reaction of calling the questioner a racist. Disagreement over the magnitude of a problem, its relation to other problems, or the terms used for a problem makes you racist and therefore bad. Now we don't need to consider your opinion and can move on.
- zarathustreal 3y ago
  >Now we don't need to consider your opinion and can move on. You can ignore anyone arguing from opinion, that's a given. "NYC left rich cohort" sounds like an absolute nightmare to try to figure out the truth with, given that they seem to think the character of a speaker has any bearing on the validity of their spoken words. Best not to engage with people like that, it's a waste of time.
- lom888 3y ago
  Exactly, the deflections of 'racism' and 'sexism' are thought-terminating cliches bandied about in an act of pure class war. No need to listen to Trumpies talk about immigration and how it effects their community if they're all racists; that makes them the other and we can just pretend they don't exist.
  - catlover76 3y ago
    I have genuinely never heard or read a Trump supporter discuss any practical effect of immigration, illegal or otherwise, on their actual communities. It's all very theoretical, based on hyperbolic and often false "news" items, and involves a heavy dose of borderline glee in being emotionally callous and selfish. At beast, I have seen people misread statistics to support their position, but, again, that's not really "how it effects their community".

ceasefire 3y ago

Pretty sure working class people suppress "fancy words". A fella could get mistaken for a "fairy" or maybe even get a beatin'. It's like how mothers used to chip in to enforce gender inequality their daughters suffered. It is a defeatist mindset, that is culturally enforced and learned from bitter lessons of the reality of power balance and dynamics in society. edit: like many here at my development stage (middleclass, degreed parents, etc) there was significant positive feedback for displaying cognitive abilities. So it is not a luxury, it is a privilege. And that raises the question of whether it is in fact required (as a sort of petite-bourgois-oblige) for those of us who are comfortable with "fancy words" to do the talking for the otherwise encumbered oppressed?

sneed_chucker 3y ago
> Pretty sure working class people suppress "fancy words". A fella could get mistaken for a "fairy" or maybe even get a beatin'. > And that raises the question of whether it is in fact required (as a sort of petite-bourgois-oblige) for those of us who are comfortable with "fancy words" to do the talking for the otherwise encumbered oppressed? I honestly cannot tell if this is a serious comment. I hope not.
- suoduandao3 3y ago
  It looks to me like the best satire I've seen all day.

prvc 3y ago

The phenomenon of the migration of upper-middle or middle class (that is, those on the margin of luxury) holders of the beliefs mentioned in TFA from blue to red states is strong evidence of his thesis.

demondemidi 3y ago

I smelled that too! And the author didn’t fail to deliver. The George Floyd protests in Portland Oregon were massive. I find it hard to square that with a yougov poll that says only upper middle class people were protesting to defund the police because the crowds were young people who aren’t even old enough to have achieved that economic status. The author hilariously tries to paint small liberal movements as cultural capital, which is the same smear conservatives play when using “virtue signaling.” I’m sorry but 30 years ago Silence=Death fell under his category, and here we are today with overwhelming support nationwide for gay rights. This paper is interesting but seems intentionally geared toward wrapping antiprogressive rhetoric as insight.

mock-possum 3y ago

Thanks for calling it out, pretty clear to me too that that’s where this article was headed. It sucks to see stuff like this posted on HN, feels like a let down.