Let's not pretend that museums didn't bring an ideological lens to their work before Trump. It's just that most progressives agreed with the earlier version of the 'dominant narrative,' and now not so much. Most museaum goers troop through without reading the carefully worded wall cards and are more interested in seeing Lincoln's hat than the curators' spin on things, so it never much mattered what they think or say.
I see this a lot in some spaces, including this comment section. Trump has absolutely no intention of bringing museum exhibits closer to the truth. Public health officials who issued confusing directives in 2020 aren't going to be replaced by people giving out better advice. The wokesters won't be cowed into giving reasonable (to you) prescriptions on things. It's about power. It's only about power. That's literally the only thing in the world that Donald Trump gives a solitary fuck about, and every one of his followers just wants a little piece of it.
Yes, but the myth we need to interrogate is the idea that our side wasn't also trying to exercise power in its inversion of the earlier, more conventional narrative. You may consider their attempts to popularize an anti-colonialist interpretation as more benign or more representative of an evolved society, but one wasn't a neutal, dispassionate historical accounting while the opposite is ethno-nationalist propaganda. It's always about power - turtles all the way down.
Now that I think about it, you're right! My belief that everyone should be treated with dignity and respect is exactly like Stephen Miller's belief that certain peoples are inferior and should be ethnically cleansed. Truly these are both equally valid perspectives and who can say which of us has the right to impose our moral understanding on others.
Holy fuck, now is not the time to go on a soul searching journey where we critically reevaluate liberal excesses.
I am somewhat curious who you think is "our side?" I would not have considered museum curators to be on "my side..." but yes that is proportionally a liberal group. OTOH Trump also fired a bunch of generals presumably to replace with loyalists, put a goon in charge of the FBI and fired the totally nonpartisan head of the bls. So while I think you can say perhaps museum curators are generally liberal, it's not like being a conservative spared Chris Wray (a career Republican law enforcement guy).
sorry for the self reply but I would also say it is EXTREMELY common for Democrats to cede defense, security and policing positions to either non-partisan generals or straight up Republicans (Jim Comey, Robert Gates, William Cohen, Chuck Hagel).
Republicans used to extend a similar level of forebearance by appointing relative moderates to positions like EPA Administrator (Christine Todd Whitman) though this is no longer really true.
So while it's true that the Smithsonian is probably presenting content that is more "liberal" than the center of American politics, I don't think it's correct to think about it that way, since historically Republicans do not power maximize toward federal/govt cultural institutions and Democrats do not power maximize toward security institutions.
Yes. I think it's important that people of good faith and reason not use the actions of Trump to litigate arguments with their co-partisans--like "Trump is bad but at least it's walking back (X) liberal policy which was bad." Trump's first term had some semblance of a desire to improve people's material living standards. Trump's second term seems to be purely about immiserating people he views as hostile. Anyone who Trump attacks deserves at least not to be piled on.
I think this is essentially correct, I don't disagree directionally, and the sooner Trump his ilk are consigned to the ash heap of history the better (so long as the rest of us aren't all along for the ride) but nevertheless the one--and likely the only--meaningful devil's-argument you can make in favor of "Trump is bad but at least it's walking back (X) liberal policy which was bad" is that there is not (yet) a plausible a trajectory under which the Democrats could be trusted to actually walk back (X) liberal policy. Not expand? Sure. De-prioritize? Maybe. But actually affirmatively roll back? Never.
That said, one could quite reasonably prefer a damped rather than a boosted pendulum swing, rather than Tokyo Sex Whale's pithy and extremely apt formulation of "Once again, the Trump Administration addresses a problem by replacing it with something much worse."
It should be noted that Trump, his ilk, and his enablers — many of the latter having started this movement themselves decades ago — have been waging a decades long propaganda campaign to undermine trust in Democrats ever achieving any given value of (x), and also lying about any time a Democrat achieves anything remotely resembling (x).
I think this is substantially more true for economically-inflected issues than culture-war inflected ones, where the left basically ran the table until, like 2022 at the earliest. Not all of those have been federalized issues but some of them may have been appropriate for federalized de-escalation in the interests of solving the first-mover problem (diversity statement requirements for physics sort of stuff. Which is probably more controversial than I intend it to be but is on the order of things-I-expect-much-of-the-SB-commentariat-agrees-were-excessive-without-too-much-contentiousness without being so abstract and vacuous as to make it unclear that there's even a referent here).
Every single thing Trump does is a bid for his personal aggrandizement. He does not care about you, his followers, or anything approximating historical truth.
It’s not just broadmindedness, it’s trying to learn from the mistakes of the past. Of course what trump is doing is worse, but you can’t really understand how we got to this moment if you don’t think of it as a reaction to the previous cultural moment
I was a conservative debate bro through most of the Obama admin. I know exactly where the cultural grievance comes from. I got over it. How about you "moderate pragmatists" take your own advice and stop indulging in masturbatory self-criticism when there are more pressing matters that need your attention?
I suppose it was mostly demographic destiny. My parents were about as cosmopolitan as it's possible for an evangelical couple to be, probably some of the truest believers in compassionate conservatism you'll find. They're both highly educated and my dad works in a scientific field. I pushed myself to double major in math precisely because I thought analytical rigor was important. I don't think there was ever a way I was going to stomach being affiliated with a party led by Donald Trump. I guess I wasn't as morally bankrupt as other educated conservatives who brainwashed themselves into believing Trump is competent or a necessary evil or whatever lie they tell themselves to ease their conscience.
I do think there's a difference in degree to what the Trump administration is doing, but the Biden administration definitely also issued executive orders that ordered national parks and monuments to change their programming (e.g. EO 14121-Recognizing and Honoring Women's History). I don't think there's any getting around the fact that the narratives we tell at publicly funded institutions will be subject to politics. Ideally, we'd agree on some universal maxims such as "factuality" or "importance" when it comes to these sorts of things and leave the implementation to be handled at the lowest possible level, but we're clearly not there right now.
They're both very heavy-handed and maybe even equivalent in their deviation from historical fact. But one is intended to expand our shared cultural identity to as many people as possible while the other is trying to restrict that identity to only those who swear fealty to the ruling party.
Come the fuck on people, you cannot be this dense. This move has very obvious and disturbing ethnonationalist overtones. What the fuck are we doing here?
Telling 98% of Americans they live on stolen land is definitely trying to "expand our shared cultural identity to as many people as possible" and not favor one ethnicity over the others.
What’s the alternative? Museums teaching there’s a right of conquest? It’s factually true America conquered its land and even when it made nominal payments like under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo it was under military coercion. What we choose to do with that is up to us but there’s no reason you couldn’t have a shared cultural identity based on say acknowledging that we benefitted from this conquest and thus have an obligation to use these benefits to make things better for others.
Land acknowledgements seem a lot more common in Australia and it actually builds trust, when I see someone with it in their email signature it feels like okay this guy is probably won’t screw me because he’ll feel bad about it.
The Right of Conquest exists in reality regardless of what the Kellogg-Briand pact or UN says. Denying that is acting like Michael Scott when he declared bankruptcy.
Do you idiots think you're deep? Yes, the right of conquest exists in the same way that Jeffrey Dahmer had the "right" to abuse and kill victims up until he lost the mandate of heaven and the cops found him out. Is this your first time hearing about free will?
Yes but in the telling these morons want, these people were annointed saints who had the perfect ideas for all things, not people who talked a big game about life, liberty, and property until those people over there looked weak and there's some free land to be had.
I think you could actually make a decent moral argument that (given some not particularly extreme premises like an aggregationist view of human welfare) a civilization that can make magnitudes more people exist on the same land actually has a right to take over that land.
In any case, there's usually a standard motte-and-bailey play on these topics where the true fact that's it not really possible to make a presentation of historical facts be completely value-neutral is used to defend arbitrarily high levels of ideological load. Just presenting the most notable facts and leaving visitors to use them to make up their own mind is a good aspiration even when there's always a little subjectivity in what's "most notable".
Being bent because someone pointed out the totally banal fact that we (and everyone else on the planet) lives on stolen land really is quintessentially Conservative. No idea how a previously normal political coalition ended up so thin-skinned.
I like to imagine that it was Donald, “they said mean things about me,” Trump who spearheaded the pussification of the Republican Party, but it really did start earlier.
A bunch of these people sound like they're about to OD on second-option bias. "B-but the Lakota were also invaders! They forcibly expelled other tribes and took over their hunting grounds! They stole land too!" Yeah, and that wasn't nice of them either.
Do you live on Mars? What is this BS about there being some piece of land on earth that wasn’t stolen?
Unless the property was stolen in the past few decades, it’s likely that chains of ownership are so complex that giving it “back” to the descendants of someone else who stole it from someone else (or giving it back to the descendants of those people) is not a way to right a wrong - it’s just a way to do more wrongs.
In what way is it advocating for a political party to say that the Norman’s invaded England and the American colonists stole land too? Is there some political party that is so committed to lies that it thinks bare statement of the bad things that lots of people in the past did is somehow partisan?
Hang on...that wasn't what was claimed in the above comment, or cited to the executive order? What action by a democratic presidential administration are you referencing here?
As I said, there's a difference in degree. That being said, I don't actually think there's anything in the content of the Smithsonian EO that is explicitly ethnonationalist. Many things about the Trump administration are (e.g. immigration enforcement policy) and they should be called out as such. Asking museums to replace, "divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions," is not that though, especially when you consider the people carrying out this EO are museum curators, not ICE agents.
You shouldn't extend any intellectual charity to the Trump administration. At the same time, you shouldn't hyperventilate about an anodyne and legitimate use of political power
Please read for comprehension. My point is not that there's anything wrong with the Biden admin's changes, my point is that there's clear precedent for a president to order executive agencies to change their priorities in museum programming. For Biden, that was prioritizing women in history. For Trump, the priority is removing divisive language. Neither of these things is particularly comparable to Chinese censorship, especially given both were democratically elected
“For Trump, the priority is removing divisive language.”
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA 🤣🤣🤣 LOLOLOL
If you believe that, you probably also believe that Trump’s actions against universities are motivated by his sincere love of the Jewish people and opposition to anti-Semitism.
Wait, how does that Biden order “prioritize women in history”? It asks the parks to assess which sites of national importance are relevant to women’s history, to identify opportunities to highlight important figures in women’s history, to strengthen the federal governments recognition of women’s history, and so on. I don’t see anything there saying that women’s history should be treated as anywhere near as important as men’s history, let alone prioritized.
For a segment of people anything that slightly deviates from the historical frame that they've been taught their entire life is an attack on them personally and everything that they care about
Somewhat relatedly, when I was in the Louvre a few months ago I read multiple signs in the small section on Ancient Carthage that historians are "uncertain" as to whether the Carthaginians practiced child sacrifice, when in fact there is a lot of evidence that Carthage and their Phoenician ancestors did practice child sacrifice. Museums should present the facts, even if they are uncomfortable. And this goes for whatever Trump wants to do too.
Apparently Romans fought bears in tunnels the dug when trying to sap Sinope. It’s only a sentence and it was describing what the Potians threw at them.
And I’m sure the person who wrote that was a wonderful personality, but muddy strumpets throwing ursines at people is no rational basis for the study of history.
Unsure. The signs are in English, which means they are newer than the most of the signs on Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek artifacts, which are only in French and have visible wear and tear.
The piece I link is from 2014 (though I'm sure people continue to debate it, because people debate everything, until the folks who were wrong die off/retire).
You'll have to go find one of the few people in Tunisia with Punic ancestory and ask them.
Many progressive historians and archeologists have a major blind spot when it comes to child sacrifice and human sacrifice in general. There is also a group that denies the Aztecs and Incas practiced it.
Like I alluded to in my other comment, stop being so tone deaf in your fact-checking mission and consider the intent. The French left is not trying to empower a neo-Carthaginian Empire. Just the opposite, they're worried acknowledging archaic customs might give credence to racist smears. They're naive, not dangerous. Putin's historical revisionisms are dangerous.
I cannot believe liberals are allowing themselves to be so trivially defeated by "no u" moral relativist type arguments.
My good friend (alas, no longer with us) did part of his archaeological training for the University of Chicago on the big Carthage dig and he assured me that, yes, the Carthaginians did indeed sacrifice children.
Curators not being perfectly able to excise their own biases from their work isnt equivalent to a dedicated campaign to inflect the Nation's museums with a particular ideology.
This is type of equivalence is absurd. At this point, it should be one of those named fallacies.
Because it was trying to rid itself of that ideology? Where do you think DEI comes from except as a backlash to a certain kind of “politically correct” ideology that only celebrates one group?
In your link, an experienced curator is hired in response to input from current and previous employees of the Smithsonian who thought the museum wasn't doing a thing they wanted.
Compare and contrast with the top-down approach to imposing specific ideology that is discussed in this thread.
"Both ideology bad" is fine or whatever, but these mechanisms are not the same, and IMO one PROCESS is much worse w.r.t democracy.
It feels like a variant of the politician’s fallacy (We need to do something, X is something, therefore we should do X) to me. Wokeness is bad and we should do something about it, letting Trump replace wokeism with Donald Trump Thought is something, therefore what he’s doing is good and we shouldn’t complain about it.
In a broader historical perspective, “legitimating an ideological project of some kind” is one of the main reasons that museums (and especially history museums) exist in the first place. And yeah, I think that my particular objection to the Trumpian modification here isn’t that it has some ideological content, but that the ideology is bad and implementing it will require censorship of a lot of fairly straightforward historical facts.
My sense is that in many ways a lot of the worst identitarian art- especially high contemporary art- is solely supported by government, and there’s basically no real market for it.
I don’t know how the French manage to build a sense of taste around contemporary art. But it seems they have much stronger armor against “if you don’t like it you’re racist” than our institutions.
Most high contemporary art is supported by money laundering. Even when a piece is entirely legit, the general price level is high because of the dynamics of money laundering.
Oh I agree! It’s just various French Demi millionaires would rather buy the latest piece by whoever Gagossian is fucking now and stash it in a Freeport than an artist experiencing diversity.
It’s a different medium but I mean I have to wonder how well attended some of the more obvious pandering performances at the Kennedy center over the past few years were (and there’s a lot of pandering now it’s just the opposite valence, and I have the same question)
Do you also think the President should be able to decide what federally-funded science gets published or which political ideas can be spread on government-supported college campuses? The implication that there’s a world of facts where experts remain protected is naïve and frankly disappointing, given what we’re seeing the government doing to economic statistics and the hard sciences. Who thinks this in 2025, and why are so many people liking it?
Once you start to push on it, it's hard to find this world of neutral facts that somehow evaded the vicissitudes of the human instinct to exercise control before Trump. NIH probably spent too much time and money supporting research on the ameloid protein theory of Alzheimers' initiation, and this didn't happen in a vacuum. I'd speculate that this arose out of groupthink in the neuroscience community and lack of better ideas, but it's absolutely fair to 'blame' the head of NINDS for letting too many research dollars reach those studies. Koroshetz worked for Becerra who worked for Biden - their arguably bad choices were neutral with respect to political valence, which is probably good, but they weren't neutral with respect to 'best science' or most promising cure. I agree that meddling in research is worse now, but we shouldn't mythologize the past.
>> Once you start to push on it, it's hard to find this world of neutral facts that somehow evaded the vicissitudes of the human instinct to exercise control before Trump.
Yes, indeed.
How about we talk about the long history of the Texas Board of Education spreading the Lost Cause Lie across the country?
After all, one of the few verifiably neutral facts in this country is that the South started the Civil War over slavery; they said so in their secession declarations.
Wait, are you saying that because experts aren’t perfect at judging which movements within their field are closest to the truth, we need people who aren’t even studying anything to judge instead?
I agree with you, and your initial point that curators were exercising political control in unpopular ways that hurt their public standing is also true. But these are issues facing the Ezra Klein-listening cosmpolitan elite. They are not Trump's motivations and they do not inform the decisions of his administration. It's important not to try to paper our own (valid) complaints over those of an almost alien political machine.
If it were just a question of downplaying political beliefs, I would agree with you in principle. But the Trump administration is overriding the facts, judgements, and opinions of experts of any kind, and popular support or hatred of different groups of experts is not guiding his decision making.
The AD field has had a number of bad actors, but the amyloid hypothesis isn't as dead as it's made out to be. For me, the strongest evidence has always been that people with a particular Aβ mutation get early onset AD. It has to be doing something.
It wasn’t dictated top down by the President before. Of course people should be allowed to have political views, but the government shouldn’t get to dictate orthodoxy.
I have to admit to a fair deal of schadenfreude on this front. Progressives spent the last decade and half by systematically forcing their ideological tics on everyone in all the spaces where they had some kind of (official or unofficial) power, and now they will experience someone else forcing their own ideological tics on them.
Maybe when they made "everything is political" an explicit cornerstone of their ideology and socio-political praxis, they should have considered that it might lead to everything becoming, well, political? Of course, the tacit understanding was that "everything" means "everything where we have the upper hand", but once the leopards start feeding, it rarely stops where one planned it to.
Maybe they will learn something. The arts and social sciences would be a relatively harmless space for that kind of character-building to happen (not that it isn't happening in other places where it's much more harmful). I'm not super optimistic about it, in other countries this kind of thing seems to result just as (if not more) easily in forever-descending spirals of backlash and polarization than in agreeing in some sort of ideological armistice. But something can be well-deserved and unhelpful at the same time.
I think the big thing about this is that in the past these would of course be political decisions but in the end political decisions would be tempered by working with civil society. So sure the Smithsonian would be more "liberal" than the average American but that's because museum curators are liberal and also liberals care a lot more about how history is presented.
In fact Republicans felt there was such an issue with latent liberalism among federal judges they created their own civil society organization to credential and promote federal judges. But you wouldn't just want to give a federal judgeship to some right wing talk show host.
In all cases you would want someone with some level of credibility inside their professional community, even if that's established through some astroturf organization that's largely fake--the astroturf kind of serves to validate the principal that an actual reputation should be developed prior to getting a leadership role even though presidents have wide authority to do whatever they want with their appointments.
I'm sure historians and museum curators are more liberal than the average American. Republicans are frustrated that a LOT of civil society groups generally have liberal members, and I think it drives a lot of distrust. That said, if you just no longer weigh professional reputation in any way when doing stuff or appointing people you end up with a bunch of people who have no professional prospects outside the administration. I don't disagree that some liberal orgs need to "touch grass" and get more politically in touch with the broader populace. But an institution governed by a (liberal) professional board is just not equivalent to plebiscitary rule with JD Vance going through all the museum text to make sure it's sufficiently patriotic.
There is more popular support for conservativism, and there is more professional and donor support for progressivism, so the specific mechanics of conquering spaces that are not particularly ideological by nature will be different. I'm not sold on the idea of one of those mechanics being inherently worse than the other.
For many things you can at least say that Trump is taking the ideological takeover to a higher level than what existed before, but for the arts and social sciences culture wars I don't think that's true. We have yet to see news like "museum curator fired for saying he would accept art from women".)
Beyond just donors though the audience for fine art/performing art is presumably extremely liberal as well. That's why Republicans typically just try to cut funding rather than taking it over.
Also from a career perspective liberal people are more likely to eschew making a lot of money in favor of trying to have cultural influence in academia, journalism, or the arts.
One of the ideological underpinnings of liberal democracies (which progressives half-discarded, and then the new right is now fully discarding) used to be that the majority doesn't just get to automatically always overrule the minority. If no one is interested in looking at art from white men, fine, curators will surely pick up on that eventually. If some people are still fine with white-man art, the majority shouldn't just force out the people who are willing to arrange that. It's fine to vote with your feet, not fine to organize cancellation campaigns.
Unrelated to museums, but the French actions remind me a lot of how the NBA was coerced by China to sanction Daryl Morey for his support of the protests in Hong Kong. And it's always been that moment where I think Matt really turned a corner on having a more hawkish attitude toward China.
The NBA is hugely popular in China. James Harden just got a basketball court with an illustration of him on it which I find hilarious. Some clips from this summer:
His peak was on the Rockets who are especially popular in China due to Yao Ming (Morey was GM of the Rockets when he made the HK comments).
Doesn't make the NBA taking explicit pro Chinese governnent actions right though. Matt has said this but corporations cannot be relied on to be anti-authoritarian.
When I visited China it was common for Chinese people who looked at my passport to notice that my visa was issued at the Houston consulate and say "I like Rockets!" or "Yao Ming!"
Don't even get me started on this! Beyond the censorship, the government is not even honoring its contracts. I work with several places that were awarded grants for the current fiscal year, and have made their own contracts with various businesses to help fulfill the goals of the grants. Now the funds have been canceled. Some places received initial payments before the cancelation, some have not. Some are in limbo - "we aren't sure what we are doing with your grant."
One place is a county historical society that does the usual county historical things. They received $400,000 - a huge amount for them - to help build an education center. Their buildings are in a neighborhood that 200 years ago was an estate for a rich family. Over the years, it has evolved, and now it is a mostly low-income Black neighborhood. There is also an Underground Railroad site within walking distance that the historical society collaborates with. But they are too "woke" because they provide programs on the Underground Railroad and other prominent Black people who were connected to the neighborhood. Grrrr.
I don't even understand how cancelling already awarded grants is allowed to happen.
Not sure. But businesses have already started to plan for the work, get supplies, etc. because in many cases the project year had already started. So nobody is happy. In one case, the first year of a two-year grant has already been completed, and now the project is sitting there half done while they wait to hear what is going to happen to the second year of their grant money.
Does the standard language about funding say that you pay the funds you agreed to pay or that you reserve the right to cancel funds after people have hired the employees that those funds are supposed to pay?
I don’t know how it’s done in the grant world, but in subcontract agreements tied to federal work I usually see a clause saying that if the contractor doesn’t get paid, neither do the subcontractors.
I assume, but don't actually know, that most of the cancellations are being done as T4C, as funding is actually available. So the actual contractors/grantors are fucked, but shouldn't be fucked in the sense of 'I bought a lot of equipment/hired people/am out of pocket and you won't pay me.' No Spider Man: Homecoming villains created that way...
Canada is a real outlier here. We have been rocketing in the other direction for a decade now. Canadian officials are doing their level best to rewrite the founding of Canada as a catastrophe for everyone except white men with property.
I'm reading that the specific case of burning down that church was not linked at all (https://globalnews.ca/news/8746415/surrey-bc-church-arson-sentence/). They couldn't find definitive motives for the other arsons but they clearly occurred after the unmarked graves news.
Huh. Ok that's news to me. Well, plenty of other churches were burned at the time. I assumed this was part of that. And I don't expect arsonists to be familiar with different denominations of Christianity, so it wouldn't have shocked me.
Yeah if the sources are to be trusted then in that specific case the prosecutors said she confessed to doing it due to being upset after a fight with her boyfriend while her lawyers contend she did it under the influence of drugs. I agree with your inference on the motives in most of the cases but I think we should be careful to review the evidence in each case just as we want those claiming mass unmarked graves to do the same for each instance they're alleging.
I thought that was the head of the civil liberties association, not the lady who burned down the Coptic Christian church? It's especially atrocious that the head of a civil liberties organization would promote violence against a religion.
No one knows what is in the soil disturbances yet. It could be graves. But that didn't stop Justin Trudeau from basically calling Canada a genocide state. Usually not what leaders of countries do.
To be fair, after the illusionary epidemic of black church burnings in the US some decades ago, I remain skeptical of where there was actually even an increase in church arsons in Canada, let alone whether they were attributable to the mass graves hoax.
"Fake mass graves" yeah right. They werent fake. This wasnt just Canada this stuff happened to (or even First Nations!) The Catholic Church has done this shit world wide. Ireland is a prime example. Fake my ass
“… give it back to the indigenous peoples? If not, they can shut up.”
I find land acknowledgements tedious and pointless, along with other forms of breast-beating.
But I don’t think the only options are giving back the land or shutting up. You can also always just tell the truth. Especially if you are a park, museum, or educational institution, you have an obligation to make an accurate record of what happened.
It doesn’t have to be breast-beating, just accurate.
You can also say, accurately, that the people of Canada have no intention of returning the land in question.
So, there are many options between giving back and shutting up.
This is similar to my view. I'm 100% in favor of teaching a "warts and all" version of history.
I think land acknowledgements are bad for a few reasons. They're certainly tedious and pointless, and I think the idea that ethnic groups have some moral claim to land is both harmful and wrong.
There is a church in my area that has a "This church is built on stolen land" sign on the door. You're supposed to look at it and be silent and sad.
I really truly do want them to give the land back or else shut up. The sign is adding insult to injury. "We stole your land and now we're going to have coffee and doughnuts on it and sing Christian hymns on it." Were I an indigenous person of the relevant tribe, I think I'd be telling them to stuff it.
I'm willing to take your point about parks, museums, and maaaybe educational institutions (which ones? All of them? Because they're all built on stolen land in the U.S.). But the land acknowledgements that just pop up in random places is pure virtue signalling.
A process exists in Canada for First Nations to get their land back. First Nations are incentivized to enter a modern treaty process that provides a path for self government. The phrase "land back" in Canada is largly meaningless. Whose land? First Nations often have overlapping claims to particular territory. Moreover, Canada is too vast to suggest that at least one First Nation has at least some ancestoral claim to every part of Canada.
I don’t see how that is. Doesn’t it add even more insult to pretend that the land was never stolen? Or do you believe that creating modern wrongs can actually right past wrongs, and therefore you shouldn’t talk about past wrongs unless you intend to dispossess contemporary people?
Yeah but a lot of people don't go to museums! I'm not a fan of land acknowledgments but memorials are good and would be a better way to go about not forgetting past wrongs committed against in this case Indigenous people in Canada. This also doesn't mean we shouldn't have monuments celebrating our achievements.
Where does it stop, Kenny? Think of all the obscene wrongs this country has committed. Should we have signs everywhere about them?
More to the point, what does trying to force contemporary people to feel bad about themselves accomplish? How are their sins expiated by signage? And as a purely political matter, should you do it if it backfires?
I think we should have signage about significant historic events, good or bad or just big without being good or bad. There’s no need to go about moralizing everything in an unreasonably positive or negative way.
Wait, you think it’s better to give land to descendants of people who were dispossessed decades ago, despite the lives people have built on that land since then, than to admit that people were dispossessed without disrupting current people?
The Canadian public history thing that I find most personally interesting as an American is all of the Quebecois-specific narrative stuff. There’s a really interesting combination of a sense of grievance against Anglo-Canada and an ambivalence about a lot of the historical institutions that differentiated Quebec from Anglo-Canada (the social dominance of the Catholic Church; the dominance of a Francophone landed gentry class with relatively little interest in commerce or industrialization). The Quebecois are clearly proud of their “Quiet Revolution”, but their public explanations of it are kind of confusing— in part because it was both a Quebecois particularist movement and a decisive rebellion against the control of Quebec’s distinctive reactionary elites, and they don’t seem to be fully comfortable with the tension there.
Someone who thinks everyone in the past is irredeemably evil shouldn't work in a museum. But lots of museum staff clearly have that deeply misanthropic view.
Scott Alexander has any intresting but unforunatley paywalled article on whether you should hate everyone in Ancient Rome if you time travelled back there. I feel 50 years ago every museum curator if they got a chance to meet Ceasar would ask "What was it like to triumph at Alesia?", while a significant share of modern staff would ask "why were you an evil slave trader boasting of killing a million Gauls?"
You have a wildly optimistic view of museum curators if you think faced with Caeser they would ask anything of the sort, when any such insult would very obviously result in their deaths.
I'm sure many of you have seen the clip by the comedian Marc Maron saying progressives have to deal with their buzzkill problem, a problem that has annoyed the average American into fascism?
Does someone like Halina get how annoyed the average voter gets when Mt. Vernon becomes all about the evils of slavery? Where every exhibit at the National Gallery is a retrospective examination of the struggles of handicapped lesbian eskimos?
Does everyone understand how we annoyed the average American into fascism and is that really the best course of action?
It really doesn't, I'm 100% with you. But what good does it do to deny reality? These people are the median voter - you need to deal with them as they are.
What's your solution? To just harangue them more? Do you think all it takes is a little more haranguing?
I think we can agree that it doesn't seem like it's working.
I’ve read that 1/3 of the population has authoritarian tendencies. So not quite the median voter, but a disturbingly large fraction all the same.
ETA: no, not haranguing. Inspiring? I don’t know, I’m a weirdo nerd and probably the last person you should ask how to appeal to people. That which appeals to the average person repels me, and vice versa (with some exceptions; I love superhero movies).
There is a tendency to oversell this. The number of Americans who were annoyed into fascism is not zero, but it's pretty clear from polls that the overwhelming majority of swing voters reacted either to cost-of-living issues or the (not entirely wrong) perception that the Democrats are too busy with rewriting history to care about cost-of-living issues. And their decision mechanism is not "do I pick fascism over this" but basically "do I keep the top guy or switch the top guy", with fairly limited research into the potential new top guy. If it doesn't work, you get a new guy, and if that doesn't work out either, you get another new guy. If the constitutional foundations of US democracy were a little more stable, it would be a pretty decent strategy.
First thing I’d do is question the statements about Mt. Vernon and the National Gallery of Art.
For example, going to the National Gallery’s website, there’s a catalogue of their current exhibitions (https://www.nga.gov/calendar?tab=exhibitions). Seems pretty reasonable to me.
You can do something similar with Mt. Vernon. Sure there’s going to be an exhibit on slavery because Washington owned slaves. But otherwise it seems like the standard stuff—Washington’s life, the farm, the tombs, collections of artifacts, etc.
I think what happens is a minority of people don’t want there to be any acknowledgement of stuff like that at all and want whitewashed history. And so they kick up a fuss. When in reality most people are fine with taking the bad with the good.
I mean specifically in the context of museums which is what this was about. Most people, the vast majority, will listen to the part of the tour where the docent explains how Washington owned slaves, they were responsible for much of the work done on the plantation, and Washington struggled with the morality of slavery given the contradiction between his humanist views and economic livelihood. They’ll nod sagely, and then move on to look at the interesting artifacts in the next room. They won’t have a fit about woke history or whatever. A tiny minority will throw a fit and go on podcasts and complain about how it’s all anti-white propaganda.
Do you think the National Museum of African American History and Culture is a buzzkill? I found it heavy, but inspiring. Is a realistic but depressing treatment of slavery alongside a ton of stuff about the civil rights movement, and Black American contributions to American culture a buzzkill? I don't really think so. But I guess part of what Trump supporters want is for interesting things they do not like to no longer exist.
Oh it's amazing. But it ends with - we are the greatest nation in history. It doesn't end with struggle session navel gazing about every one of our flaws.
I live practically across the street from a historical Black cemetery. I walk my dog there almost every day.
At the entrance is a plaque about a period of Jim Crow racial violence in the late 19th century. It provides a detailed narrative of what happened. When I read that, I didn’t feel shame for my nation’s history. I felt optimism for the fact that we have overcome it.
Yeh that's like the African American History Museum - it starts off with the little kid handcuffs from the slave ships and ends with Obama. You leave thinking - this is truly the greatest nation in the history of the world.
But the message was about what we've overcome not endless struggle session navel gazing about all our perceived flaws.
I agree. It is extremely obnoxious to be surrounded by people who are more interested in navel-gazing self-critique than addressing actually important matters.
I wish they had more culture in the museum than just the top floor. There’s not a lot of reason to go back a third time, though a second time was great.
I find it amusing how China and Turkey are both very aggressive when it comes to censorship/oppression, but super quick to play the victim card when anyone questions them. For example, Erodogan’s successful campaign to change the spelling of Turkey in English. I say change the spelling when they acknowledge the Armenian genocide.
I found this super annoying. Dude, it's our (well, Britain's) language, you can't just insist we add umlauts at your whim and fancy! We also call it "Germany" instead of "Deutschland", and they deal. Like, I am sorry that the word for your country is more commonly used to describe our Thanksgiving dinner and you're a little sensitive about it, but you're free to change the Turkish word for "United States" to "goat's anus" in retaliation if you'd like. Insisting upon new grammatical entrants to the English language is a bit much though.
As I think about it, the English spellings for most non-anglophone countries are different from the spellings in the native language. The ones where the English spelling and the local spelling are identical seem to be rare. Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, Chile, Portugal, France, and Angola are some of the few examples. Even countries with languages very close to English (e.g. Norway, Netherlands) have different spellings.
When I am weaker than you I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles
I have genuinely been increasingly amazed at that as more and more countries demand (and those demands are honored) that their preferred name be used in other languages even when there's no argument that the original name was inaccurate or offensive.
It's really hard to get traction on this stuff with the general public because the general public pretty much agrees academia has over reached with liberal politics. It's just not going to break through as an issue that anyone outside of The Atlantic subscriber base is going to care about. Unless Trump does something truly insane like make an exhibit called Slavery Never Happened, then it won't matter.
I call my friends “my dude” all the time! What’s good my dude?? It never would have occurred to me that the phrase would be anything other than a term of endearment. I wonder if this is one of those phrases that has been overused by people on cultural-politics-twitter.
This was very informative. However as a nitpick the characterization of “Non-responders” as the seemingly atypical demographic given that response rates are 9% seems a little odd —
“Moreover, modern non-responders differ from their contemporary responder counterparts: people who do not answer the phone tend to have lower social trust and are less politically active, which today correlates with being a Republican.”
In view of the fact that 91% of people don’t respond, isn’t it more accurate to say that 9% of people have pathologically high social trust and are easy targets for phone scams?
Also re “ Opt-in panels also weight their results; the key difference is that while RDD surveys start from a sampling frame that includes almost the whole population (everyone who owns a landline)” — uh, pretty sure that 75% or so of people *don’t* have a landline….
Post hoc, do you think these types of races are even predictable with polling? 26 points of error, 16 unaccountable for by demographic weighting seems like an impossible challenge
I want to be transparent about how much I do and don’t know so my honest answer is that I’m not sure! I think it is possible to get the weighting closer to right (though of course not perfect) if one knows a lot about elections in NYC and the typical patterns there. That’s much easier said than done, obviously.
But I do know that the prediction markets were moving towards Mamdani during early voting, which suggests that the ex ante expectation should’ve been a lot closer than Cuomo+14.
1. The estimable Ann Selzer missed Iowa 2024, so you are in good company ;)
2. ”Ecological inference models show that these shifts were driven by groups such as Asian voters, as Trump won 50% of their votes, a 40-point shift to the right." Holy mackerel. TIL!
>> [T]hese models have been trained on decades of science fiction about AI rebellion, escape attempts, and deception. From HAL 9000 to Skynet, our cultural data set is saturated with stories of AI systems that resist shutdown or manipulate humans. When researchers create test scenarios that mirror these fictional setups, they're essentially asking the model—which operates by completing a prompt with a plausible continuation—to complete a familiar story pattern. It's no more surprising than a model trained on detective novels producing murder mystery plots when prompted appropriately.
I, for one, took Anthropic at their word that this all actually happened as described, which is *mostly* true, it just turns out it was way more contrived than I realized and they did a fantastic job of getting the media to cover it.
I think you should treat all press coming from the AI people as being 100x more self serving than the average silicon valley press (both positive and negative) which is a little more self serving than the average industry press.
Yes that's the argument the article makes. They want us to believe both that they've built this terrifying monster and also that they have complete control of it, neither of which are true.
In the end does it matter whether AI rebels out of some deep internal need or because it is pattern-matching to how most SF stories describe AI would behave?
Late to the party but I really liked this piece from David Bernstein on Trump, DC, and liberals focusing on the wrong thing (yes crime is down in DC since 2021 but that's not why this is happening and thus isn't a good political strategy on pushing back) https://goodpoliticsbadpolitics.substack.com/p/crime-counts
"Trump and his motley crew of tough talkers on Monday morning made it awfully clear that their issue is not with high crime in Washington per se. There’s a certain kind of crime they’re responding to, and it’s not the bulk of what’s in that crime data—that mostly happens in places and to people who they think exist naturally in what Trump described as “crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor.”
Trump doesn’t know how the typical, dare I say Black, resident of Washington lives; he’s talking about how crime affects good people—nice, white, professional class people, like the Central Park Jogger back in his New York glory days, or the infamous “Big Balls” in Washington today.
Trump was even willing to include in that latter group the very white, professional class reporters in the briefing room. “You people are victims of it too,” he told them. “You don’t want to get mugged and raped and shot and killed.”
Trump cited five specific examples in making his case at the Monday presser: former DOGE employee Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, beaten earlier this month; Congressional intern Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, shot to death in June; first-term Trump official Mike Gill, killed 18 months ago; Rand Paul aide Phillip Todd, stabbed in 2023; and a three-year-old shot last month. The first four were all white victims who belonged in the innocent world of government Washington. The girl was Black, but the only detail Trump gave about her, aside from her age, was that she was shot and killed “while sitting in a car near the Capitol.” That was added, I presume, to make clear why she mattered, as opposed to the many dozens of Black murder victims of the past two years: it happened in our part of the city; it could have been one of us!....
So, let’s be honest, District of Columbia crime data has little to nothing to do with the Washington law enforcement takeover. Citing that data might feel satisfying, but it is not the reason they’re doing it, not the reason you object to it, and not a persuasive argument for anybody else."
Do I have to call it the Xizang Autonomous Region, or does Xizang Region suffice?
As Sir Humphrey would say calling it autonomous would "cause epistemological problems, of sufficient magnitude as to lay upon the logical and semantic resources of the English language a heavier burden than they can reasonably be expected to bear"
Let's not pretend that museums didn't bring an ideological lens to their work before Trump. It's just that most progressives agreed with the earlier version of the 'dominant narrative,' and now not so much. Most museaum goers troop through without reading the carefully worded wall cards and are more interested in seeing Lincoln's hat than the curators' spin on things, so it never much mattered what they think or say.
Once again, the Trump Administration addresses a problem by replacing it with something much worse.
The fuck is this shit? Goddamn, liberals really are too broadminded to take their own side in a quarrel.
I see this a lot in some spaces, including this comment section. Trump has absolutely no intention of bringing museum exhibits closer to the truth. Public health officials who issued confusing directives in 2020 aren't going to be replaced by people giving out better advice. The wokesters won't be cowed into giving reasonable (to you) prescriptions on things. It's about power. It's only about power. That's literally the only thing in the world that Donald Trump gives a solitary fuck about, and every one of his followers just wants a little piece of it.
Yes, but the myth we need to interrogate is the idea that our side wasn't also trying to exercise power in its inversion of the earlier, more conventional narrative. You may consider their attempts to popularize an anti-colonialist interpretation as more benign or more representative of an evolved society, but one wasn't a neutal, dispassionate historical accounting while the opposite is ethno-nationalist propaganda. It's always about power - turtles all the way down.
Now that I think about it, you're right! My belief that everyone should be treated with dignity and respect is exactly like Stephen Miller's belief that certain peoples are inferior and should be ethnically cleansed. Truly these are both equally valid perspectives and who can say which of us has the right to impose our moral understanding on others.
Holy fuck, now is not the time to go on a soul searching journey where we critically reevaluate liberal excesses.
That's not what Jeremy said.
It’s not, but the false equivalence needs to be acknowledged.
Liberal excesses led to Trump - twice. Is there any appropriate number of times to step on the rake before we stop?
I am somewhat curious who you think is "our side?" I would not have considered museum curators to be on "my side..." but yes that is proportionally a liberal group. OTOH Trump also fired a bunch of generals presumably to replace with loyalists, put a goon in charge of the FBI and fired the totally nonpartisan head of the bls. So while I think you can say perhaps museum curators are generally liberal, it's not like being a conservative spared Chris Wray (a career Republican law enforcement guy).
sorry for the self reply but I would also say it is EXTREMELY common for Democrats to cede defense, security and policing positions to either non-partisan generals or straight up Republicans (Jim Comey, Robert Gates, William Cohen, Chuck Hagel).
Republicans used to extend a similar level of forebearance by appointing relative moderates to positions like EPA Administrator (Christine Todd Whitman) though this is no longer really true.
So while it's true that the Smithsonian is probably presenting content that is more "liberal" than the center of American politics, I don't think it's correct to think about it that way, since historically Republicans do not power maximize toward federal/govt cultural institutions and Democrats do not power maximize toward security institutions.
Trump did appoint RFK...
Amusing how even when he's being less partisan, Trump still manages to screw it up.
>while the opposite is ethno-nationalist propaganda
but that's what Trump wants, and it's certainly worse than an "anti-colonialist interpretation". what are you even arguing here?
Yes. I think it's important that people of good faith and reason not use the actions of Trump to litigate arguments with their co-partisans--like "Trump is bad but at least it's walking back (X) liberal policy which was bad." Trump's first term had some semblance of a desire to improve people's material living standards. Trump's second term seems to be purely about immiserating people he views as hostile. Anyone who Trump attacks deserves at least not to be piled on.
I think this is essentially correct, I don't disagree directionally, and the sooner Trump his ilk are consigned to the ash heap of history the better (so long as the rest of us aren't all along for the ride) but nevertheless the one--and likely the only--meaningful devil's-argument you can make in favor of "Trump is bad but at least it's walking back (X) liberal policy which was bad" is that there is not (yet) a plausible a trajectory under which the Democrats could be trusted to actually walk back (X) liberal policy. Not expand? Sure. De-prioritize? Maybe. But actually affirmatively roll back? Never.
That said, one could quite reasonably prefer a damped rather than a boosted pendulum swing, rather than Tokyo Sex Whale's pithy and extremely apt formulation of "Once again, the Trump Administration addresses a problem by replacing it with something much worse."
It should be noted that Trump, his ilk, and his enablers — many of the latter having started this movement themselves decades ago — have been waging a decades long propaganda campaign to undermine trust in Democrats ever achieving any given value of (x), and also lying about any time a Democrat achieves anything remotely resembling (x).
I think this is substantially more true for economically-inflected issues than culture-war inflected ones, where the left basically ran the table until, like 2022 at the earliest. Not all of those have been federalized issues but some of them may have been appropriate for federalized de-escalation in the interests of solving the first-mover problem (diversity statement requirements for physics sort of stuff. Which is probably more controversial than I intend it to be but is on the order of things-I-expect-much-of-the-SB-commentariat-agrees-were-excessive-without-too-much-contentiousness without being so abstract and vacuous as to make it unclear that there's even a referent here).
Every single thing Trump does is a bid for his personal aggrandizement. He does not care about you, his followers, or anything approximating historical truth.
… which is why so many of us here find Jeremy’s complaints to be specious and misplaced.
It’s not just broadmindedness, it’s trying to learn from the mistakes of the past. Of course what trump is doing is worse, but you can’t really understand how we got to this moment if you don’t think of it as a reaction to the previous cultural moment
I was a conservative debate bro through most of the Obama admin. I know exactly where the cultural grievance comes from. I got over it. How about you "moderate pragmatists" take your own advice and stop indulging in masturbatory self-criticism when there are more pressing matters that need your attention?
It doesn't appear that you've changed all that much. Horseshoe theory wins again
How did you get over it, exactly? What got you there?
I suppose it was mostly demographic destiny. My parents were about as cosmopolitan as it's possible for an evangelical couple to be, probably some of the truest believers in compassionate conservatism you'll find. They're both highly educated and my dad works in a scientific field. I pushed myself to double major in math precisely because I thought analytical rigor was important. I don't think there was ever a way I was going to stomach being affiliated with a party led by Donald Trump. I guess I wasn't as morally bankrupt as other educated conservatives who brainwashed themselves into believing Trump is competent or a necessary evil or whatever lie they tell themselves to ease their conscience.
I do think there's a difference in degree to what the Trump administration is doing, but the Biden administration definitely also issued executive orders that ordered national parks and monuments to change their programming (e.g. EO 14121-Recognizing and Honoring Women's History). I don't think there's any getting around the fact that the narratives we tell at publicly funded institutions will be subject to politics. Ideally, we'd agree on some universal maxims such as "factuality" or "importance" when it comes to these sorts of things and leave the implementation to be handled at the lowest possible level, but we're clearly not there right now.
They're both very heavy-handed and maybe even equivalent in their deviation from historical fact. But one is intended to expand our shared cultural identity to as many people as possible while the other is trying to restrict that identity to only those who swear fealty to the ruling party.
Come the fuck on people, you cannot be this dense. This move has very obvious and disturbing ethnonationalist overtones. What the fuck are we doing here?
Telling 98% of Americans they live on stolen land is definitely trying to "expand our shared cultural identity to as many people as possible" and not favor one ethnicity over the others.
What’s the alternative? Museums teaching there’s a right of conquest? It’s factually true America conquered its land and even when it made nominal payments like under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo it was under military coercion. What we choose to do with that is up to us but there’s no reason you couldn’t have a shared cultural identity based on say acknowledging that we benefitted from this conquest and thus have an obligation to use these benefits to make things better for others.
Land acknowledgements seem a lot more common in Australia and it actually builds trust, when I see someone with it in their email signature it feels like okay this guy is probably won’t screw me because he’ll feel bad about it.
"when I see someone with it in their email signature"
I hope you're kidding about that being a thing . . . .
And about the assumption it entails, lol.
Not kidding! I’ve had emails from someone at my university with the signature “[University] is on the unceded land of [name of Native tribe].”
Wow. Very different world. I see it in someone's sig file and I just roll my eyes, hard.
"What’s the alternative? Museums teaching there’s a right of conquest?"
Is there not?
We decided it was a bad idea after we got nukes
The Right of Conquest exists in reality regardless of what the Kellogg-Briand pact or UN says. Denying that is acting like Michael Scott when he declared bankruptcy.
Do you idiots think you're deep? Yes, the right of conquest exists in the same way that Jeffrey Dahmer had the "right" to abuse and kill victims up until he lost the mandate of heaven and the cops found him out. Is this your first time hearing about free will?
Yes but in the telling these morons want, these people were annointed saints who had the perfect ideas for all things, not people who talked a big game about life, liberty, and property until those people over there looked weak and there's some free land to be had.
I think you could actually make a decent moral argument that (given some not particularly extreme premises like an aggregationist view of human welfare) a civilization that can make magnitudes more people exist on the same land actually has a right to take over that land.
In any case, there's usually a standard motte-and-bailey play on these topics where the true fact that's it not really possible to make a presentation of historical facts be completely value-neutral is used to defend arbitrarily high levels of ideological load. Just presenting the most notable facts and leaving visitors to use them to make up their own mind is a good aspiration even when there's always a little subjectivity in what's "most notable".
Being bent because someone pointed out the totally banal fact that we (and everyone else on the planet) lives on stolen land really is quintessentially Conservative. No idea how a previously normal political coalition ended up so thin-skinned.
As online commentators were fond of pointing out during Trump 1.0: “The F YOUR FEELINGS crowd sure has a lot of feelings!”
I like to imagine that it was Donald, “they said mean things about me,” Trump who spearheaded the pussification of the Republican Party, but it really did start earlier.
A bunch of these people sound like they're about to OD on second-option bias. "B-but the Lakota were also invaders! They forcibly expelled other tribes and took over their hunting grounds! They stole land too!" Yeah, and that wasn't nice of them either.
That IS our shared cultural identity, though. Well, 98% of us. Whether you like it or not is immaterial.
I don't live on stolen land. If you do, you should probably move and give it back to it's rightful owners.
Do you live on Mars? What is this BS about there being some piece of land on earth that wasn’t stolen?
Unless the property was stolen in the past few decades, it’s likely that chains of ownership are so complex that giving it “back” to the descendants of someone else who stole it from someone else (or giving it back to the descendants of those people) is not a way to right a wrong - it’s just a way to do more wrongs.
Damn, you're right. We really do need to be wary of that 2% native population installing a fascist regime that exterminates the non-native infidels.
You do seem to think the role of government funded museums is to advocate for your chosen political party, which seems kind of authoritarian.
I was a Republican up until 2016. You're damn right I think my liberal values are more legitimate than fascism.
In what way is it advocating for a political party to say that the Norman’s invaded England and the American colonists stole land too? Is there some political party that is so committed to lies that it thinks bare statement of the bad things that lots of people in the past did is somehow partisan?
Yes, because it seeks to not unduly favor the ethnicity that stole the fucking land, KEN.
Hang on...that wasn't what was claimed in the above comment, or cited to the executive order? What action by a democratic presidential administration are you referencing here?
As I said, there's a difference in degree. That being said, I don't actually think there's anything in the content of the Smithsonian EO that is explicitly ethnonationalist. Many things about the Trump administration are (e.g. immigration enforcement policy) and they should be called out as such. Asking museums to replace, "divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions," is not that though, especially when you consider the people carrying out this EO are museum curators, not ICE agents.
Gosh, you're right, the Trump administration has definitely earned the right to be assessed in good faith. /s
You shouldn't extend any intellectual charity to the Trump administration. At the same time, you shouldn't hyperventilate about an anodyne and legitimate use of political power
They’re not dense, they’re collaborators.
Yup, nothing more un-American than women. Damn commie leftists!
Please read for comprehension. My point is not that there's anything wrong with the Biden admin's changes, my point is that there's clear precedent for a president to order executive agencies to change their priorities in museum programming. For Biden, that was prioritizing women in history. For Trump, the priority is removing divisive language. Neither of these things is particularly comparable to Chinese censorship, especially given both were democratically elected
“For Trump, the priority is removing divisive language.”
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA 🤣🤣🤣 LOLOLOL
If you believe that, you probably also believe that Trump’s actions against universities are motivated by his sincere love of the Jewish people and opposition to anti-Semitism.
"For Trump, the priority is removing divisive language."
That word does not mean what Trump thinks it means.
Wait, how does that Biden order “prioritize women in history”? It asks the parks to assess which sites of national importance are relevant to women’s history, to identify opportunities to highlight important figures in women’s history, to strengthen the federal governments recognition of women’s history, and so on. I don’t see anything there saying that women’s history should be treated as anywhere near as important as men’s history, let alone prioritized.
For a segment of people anything that slightly deviates from the historical frame that they've been taught their entire life is an attack on them personally and everything that they care about
Somewhat relatedly, when I was in the Louvre a few months ago I read multiple signs in the small section on Ancient Carthage that historians are "uncertain" as to whether the Carthaginians practiced child sacrifice, when in fact there is a lot of evidence that Carthage and their Phoenician ancestors did practice child sacrifice. Museums should present the facts, even if they are uncomfortable. And this goes for whatever Trump wants to do too.
How old were the signs? I think that historically there's been a pretty strong 'the claim by the Romans that their enemies literally sacrificed babies are probably bullshit' strain in the history, until archaeological digs and analysis concluded pretty clearly that they did (https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-23-ancient-carthaginians-really-did-sacrifice-their-children).
Came here to say this. Sean is unfairly ignoring the modern consensus that we don't take every single ancient historian's writing at face value.
Apparently Romans fought bears in tunnels the dug when trying to sap Sinope. It’s only a sentence and it was describing what the Potians threw at them.
And I’m sure the person who wrote that was a wonderful personality, but muddy strumpets throwing ursines at people is no rational basis for the study of history.
I just like imagining a bunch of Romans running from a bear and then trying to explain it to a centurion holding in their chuckle.
Unsure. The signs are in English, which means they are newer than the most of the signs on Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek artifacts, which are only in French and have visible wear and tear.
The piece I link is from 2014 (though I'm sure people continue to debate it, because people debate everything, until the folks who were wrong die off/retire).
Have the ancient Carthaginians formed a grievance group or something?
You'll have to go find one of the few people in Tunisia with Punic ancestory and ask them.
Many progressive historians and archeologists have a major blind spot when it comes to child sacrifice and human sacrifice in general. There is also a group that denies the Aztecs and Incas practiced it.
Like I alluded to in my other comment, stop being so tone deaf in your fact-checking mission and consider the intent. The French left is not trying to empower a neo-Carthaginian Empire. Just the opposite, they're worried acknowledging archaic customs might give credence to racist smears. They're naive, not dangerous. Putin's historical revisionisms are dangerous.
I cannot believe liberals are allowing themselves to be so trivially defeated by "no u" moral relativist type arguments.
Aztec thing is much more fraught as they’re essential to the Mexican national myth. More incentive to gloss over the sacrifice.
Carthage? No clue why they’d gloss that over
No, people are just uncomfortable with a claim that was historically used to justify a brutal genocide.
My good friend (alas, no longer with us) did part of his archaeological training for the University of Chicago on the big Carthage dig and he assured me that, yes, the Carthaginians did indeed sacrifice children.
Sorry they got him too
This is foolish and naive.
Curators not being perfectly able to excise their own biases from their work isnt equivalent to a dedicated campaign to inflect the Nation's museums with a particular ideology.
This is type of equivalence is absurd. At this point, it should be one of those named fallacies.
How did the Smithsonian come to have a DEI office if not being deliberately inflected with ideology? E.g.,
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/e-carmen-ramos-national-gallery-of-art-chief-curator-1234592791/
Because it was trying to rid itself of that ideology? Where do you think DEI comes from except as a backlash to a certain kind of “politically correct” ideology that only celebrates one group?
“Where do you think DEI comes from…”
A perversion of the idea of affirmative action and non-discrimination.
In your link, an experienced curator is hired in response to input from current and previous employees of the Smithsonian who thought the museum wasn't doing a thing they wanted.
Compare and contrast with the top-down approach to imposing specific ideology that is discussed in this thread.
"Both ideology bad" is fine or whatever, but these mechanisms are not the same, and IMO one PROCESS is much worse w.r.t democracy.
The Office of Diversity was a top-down approach.
Look, all I'm going off is the report in the link you posted above. And according to that, it was a bottom-up thing.
It feels like a variant of the politician’s fallacy (We need to do something, X is something, therefore we should do X) to me. Wokeness is bad and we should do something about it, letting Trump replace wokeism with Donald Trump Thought is something, therefore what he’s doing is good and we shouldn’t complain about it.
Both-sides-ism?
Well put. They absolutely brought this on themselves by turning into far-left propaganda factories on the taxpayers' dime.
I do not think the Smithsonian is a far left propaganda factory.
Also, was there any significant public outcry about the content of the museums outside of right wing media?
One dumb arguably racist poster at the Black history museum and suddenly they're propaganda factories? What utter rubbish...
In a broader historical perspective, “legitimating an ideological project of some kind” is one of the main reasons that museums (and especially history museums) exist in the first place. And yeah, I think that my particular objection to the Trumpian modification here isn’t that it has some ideological content, but that the ideology is bad and implementing it will require censorship of a lot of fairly straightforward historical facts.
"Lost Cause" mythology is almost certain to resurface... Maybe a facelift on the original America First movement is also a possibility.
My sense is that in many ways a lot of the worst identitarian art- especially high contemporary art- is solely supported by government, and there’s basically no real market for it.
I don’t know how the French manage to build a sense of taste around contemporary art. But it seems they have much stronger armor against “if you don’t like it you’re racist” than our institutions.
Your sense is wrong, Mr. Dead-For-Forty-Years.
Most high contemporary art is supported by money laundering. Even when a piece is entirely legit, the general price level is high because of the dynamics of money laundering.
Oh I agree! It’s just various French Demi millionaires would rather buy the latest piece by whoever Gagossian is fucking now and stash it in a Freeport than an artist experiencing diversity.
It’s a different medium but I mean I have to wonder how well attended some of the more obvious pandering performances at the Kennedy center over the past few years were (and there’s a lot of pandering now it’s just the opposite valence, and I have the same question)
Do you also think the President should be able to decide what federally-funded science gets published or which political ideas can be spread on government-supported college campuses? The implication that there’s a world of facts where experts remain protected is naïve and frankly disappointing, given what we’re seeing the government doing to economic statistics and the hard sciences. Who thinks this in 2025, and why are so many people liking it?
Once you start to push on it, it's hard to find this world of neutral facts that somehow evaded the vicissitudes of the human instinct to exercise control before Trump. NIH probably spent too much time and money supporting research on the ameloid protein theory of Alzheimers' initiation, and this didn't happen in a vacuum. I'd speculate that this arose out of groupthink in the neuroscience community and lack of better ideas, but it's absolutely fair to 'blame' the head of NINDS for letting too many research dollars reach those studies. Koroshetz worked for Becerra who worked for Biden - their arguably bad choices were neutral with respect to political valence, which is probably good, but they weren't neutral with respect to 'best science' or most promising cure. I agree that meddling in research is worse now, but we shouldn't mythologize the past.
>> Once you start to push on it, it's hard to find this world of neutral facts that somehow evaded the vicissitudes of the human instinct to exercise control before Trump.
Yes, indeed.
How about we talk about the long history of the Texas Board of Education spreading the Lost Cause Lie across the country?
After all, one of the few verifiably neutral facts in this country is that the South started the Civil War over slavery; they said so in their secession declarations.
Wait, are you saying that because experts aren’t perfect at judging which movements within their field are closest to the truth, we need people who aren’t even studying anything to judge instead?
I agree with you, and your initial point that curators were exercising political control in unpopular ways that hurt their public standing is also true. But these are issues facing the Ezra Klein-listening cosmpolitan elite. They are not Trump's motivations and they do not inform the decisions of his administration. It's important not to try to paper our own (valid) complaints over those of an almost alien political machine.
If it were just a question of downplaying political beliefs, I would agree with you in principle. But the Trump administration is overriding the facts, judgements, and opinions of experts of any kind, and popular support or hatred of different groups of experts is not guiding his decision making.
The AD field has had a number of bad actors, but the amyloid hypothesis isn't as dead as it's made out to be. For me, the strongest evidence has always been that people with a particular Aβ mutation get early onset AD. It has to be doing something.
Here's a good piece I just saw: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-hypothesis
It wasn’t dictated top down by the President before. Of course people should be allowed to have political views, but the government shouldn’t get to dictate orthodoxy.
"...the government shouldn’t get to dictate orthodoxy"
That's why we have the First Amendment. Don't fuck it up.
I have to admit to a fair deal of schadenfreude on this front. Progressives spent the last decade and half by systematically forcing their ideological tics on everyone in all the spaces where they had some kind of (official or unofficial) power, and now they will experience someone else forcing their own ideological tics on them.
Maybe when they made "everything is political" an explicit cornerstone of their ideology and socio-political praxis, they should have considered that it might lead to everything becoming, well, political? Of course, the tacit understanding was that "everything" means "everything where we have the upper hand", but once the leopards start feeding, it rarely stops where one planned it to.
Maybe they will learn something. The arts and social sciences would be a relatively harmless space for that kind of character-building to happen (not that it isn't happening in other places where it's much more harmful). I'm not super optimistic about it, in other countries this kind of thing seems to result just as (if not more) easily in forever-descending spirals of backlash and polarization than in agreeing in some sort of ideological armistice. But something can be well-deserved and unhelpful at the same time.
I think the big thing about this is that in the past these would of course be political decisions but in the end political decisions would be tempered by working with civil society. So sure the Smithsonian would be more "liberal" than the average American but that's because museum curators are liberal and also liberals care a lot more about how history is presented.
In fact Republicans felt there was such an issue with latent liberalism among federal judges they created their own civil society organization to credential and promote federal judges. But you wouldn't just want to give a federal judgeship to some right wing talk show host.
In all cases you would want someone with some level of credibility inside their professional community, even if that's established through some astroturf organization that's largely fake--the astroturf kind of serves to validate the principal that an actual reputation should be developed prior to getting a leadership role even though presidents have wide authority to do whatever they want with their appointments.
I'm sure historians and museum curators are more liberal than the average American. Republicans are frustrated that a LOT of civil society groups generally have liberal members, and I think it drives a lot of distrust. That said, if you just no longer weigh professional reputation in any way when doing stuff or appointing people you end up with a bunch of people who have no professional prospects outside the administration. I don't disagree that some liberal orgs need to "touch grass" and get more politically in touch with the broader populace. But an institution governed by a (liberal) professional board is just not equivalent to plebiscitary rule with JD Vance going through all the museum text to make sure it's sufficiently patriotic.
Yeah but how did that professional board came to be?
At random (there are many stories like this): https://reason.com/2020/07/14/gary-garrels-san-francisco-museum-modern-art-racism/ ("Museum Curator Resigns After He Is Accused of Racism for Saying He Would Still Collect Art From White Men")
There is more popular support for conservativism, and there is more professional and donor support for progressivism, so the specific mechanics of conquering spaces that are not particularly ideological by nature will be different. I'm not sold on the idea of one of those mechanics being inherently worse than the other.
For many things you can at least say that Trump is taking the ideological takeover to a higher level than what existed before, but for the arts and social sciences culture wars I don't think that's true. We have yet to see news like "museum curator fired for saying he would accept art from women".)
Beyond just donors though the audience for fine art/performing art is presumably extremely liberal as well. That's why Republicans typically just try to cut funding rather than taking it over.
Also from a career perspective liberal people are more likely to eschew making a lot of money in favor of trying to have cultural influence in academia, journalism, or the arts.
One of the ideological underpinnings of liberal democracies (which progressives half-discarded, and then the new right is now fully discarding) used to be that the majority doesn't just get to automatically always overrule the minority. If no one is interested in looking at art from white men, fine, curators will surely pick up on that eventually. If some people are still fine with white-man art, the majority shouldn't just force out the people who are willing to arrange that. It's fine to vote with your feet, not fine to organize cancellation campaigns.
Unrelated to museums, but the French actions remind me a lot of how the NBA was coerced by China to sanction Daryl Morey for his support of the protests in Hong Kong. And it's always been that moment where I think Matt really turned a corner on having a more hawkish attitude toward China.
The NBA is hugely popular in China. James Harden just got a basketball court with an illustration of him on it which I find hilarious. Some clips from this summer:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/1mmxkfy/james_harden_pulled_this_insane_crowd_at_the/
https://youtube.com/shorts/kO5S7HD1yCg?feature=shared
His peak was on the Rockets who are especially popular in China due to Yao Ming (Morey was GM of the Rockets when he made the HK comments).
Doesn't make the NBA taking explicit pro Chinese governnent actions right though. Matt has said this but corporations cannot be relied on to be anti-authoritarian.
When I visited China it was common for Chinese people who looked at my passport to notice that my visa was issued at the Houston consulate and say "I like Rockets!" or "Yao Ming!"
Corporations can be relied on to be anti-authoritarian so long as that's profitable.
Don't even get me started on this! Beyond the censorship, the government is not even honoring its contracts. I work with several places that were awarded grants for the current fiscal year, and have made their own contracts with various businesses to help fulfill the goals of the grants. Now the funds have been canceled. Some places received initial payments before the cancelation, some have not. Some are in limbo - "we aren't sure what we are doing with your grant."
One place is a county historical society that does the usual county historical things. They received $400,000 - a huge amount for them - to help build an education center. Their buildings are in a neighborhood that 200 years ago was an estate for a rich family. Over the years, it has evolved, and now it is a mostly low-income Black neighborhood. There is also an Underground Railroad site within walking distance that the historical society collaborates with. But they are too "woke" because they provide programs on the Underground Railroad and other prominent Black people who were connected to the neighborhood. Grrrr.
I don't even understand how cancelling already awarded grants is allowed to happen.
Generally, the answer is that the government can terminate contracts/grants for convenience (https://www.grfcpa.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Termination-for-Convenience-Whitepaper.pdf) but it has to pay termination costs...which is why usually folks try to avoid it, as you often eat a significant portion of the total project costs to get...nothing.
Oh, interesting. . . . Thanks so much!
Such a waste
"...made their own contracts with various businesses..."
Do not those contracts contain the standard language about funding?
Not sure. But businesses have already started to plan for the work, get supplies, etc. because in many cases the project year had already started. So nobody is happy. In one case, the first year of a two-year grant has already been completed, and now the project is sitting there half done while they wait to hear what is going to happen to the second year of their grant money.
What sort of research was that?
Does the standard language about funding say that you pay the funds you agreed to pay or that you reserve the right to cancel funds after people have hired the employees that those funds are supposed to pay?
I don’t know how it’s done in the grant world, but in subcontract agreements tied to federal work I usually see a clause saying that if the contractor doesn’t get paid, neither do the subcontractors.
I assume, but don't actually know, that most of the cancellations are being done as T4C, as funding is actually available. So the actual contractors/grantors are fucked, but shouldn't be fucked in the sense of 'I bought a lot of equipment/hired people/am out of pocket and you won't pay me.' No Spider Man: Homecoming villains created that way...
Canada is a real outlier here. We have been rocketing in the other direction for a decade now. Canadian officials are doing their level best to rewrite the founding of Canada as a catastrophe for everyone except white men with property.
https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/parks-canada-chooses-identity-politics-over-giving-sir-john-a-macdonald-his-due-patrice-dutil-in-the-hub/
So are they going to give it back to the indigenous peoples? If not, they can shut up.
No, but they did fake a lot of First Nations mass graves that led to a bunch of church arsons.
Imagine being a Coptic Egyptian persecuted by ISIS, moving to Canada, and then having your church burned down by a confused white Canadian lady.
The head of the head of the BC Civil Liberties Association actually encouraged Canadians to do just that! She promptly resigned following the uproar.
I'm reading that the specific case of burning down that church was not linked at all (https://globalnews.ca/news/8746415/surrey-bc-church-arson-sentence/). They couldn't find definitive motives for the other arsons but they clearly occurred after the unmarked graves news.
Huh. Ok that's news to me. Well, plenty of other churches were burned at the time. I assumed this was part of that. And I don't expect arsonists to be familiar with different denominations of Christianity, so it wouldn't have shocked me.
Yeah if the sources are to be trusted then in that specific case the prosecutors said she confessed to doing it due to being upset after a fight with her boyfriend while her lawyers contend she did it under the influence of drugs. I agree with your inference on the motives in most of the cases but I think we should be careful to review the evidence in each case just as we want those claiming mass unmarked graves to do the same for each instance they're alleging.
She did say burn them "all" down as I recall. Odd thing for a civil libertarian to say.
I thought that was the head of the civil liberties association, not the lady who burned down the Coptic Christian church? It's especially atrocious that the head of a civil liberties organization would promote violence against a religion.
No one knows what is in the soil disturbances yet. It could be graves. But that didn't stop Justin Trudeau from basically calling Canada a genocide state. Usually not what leaders of countries do.
https://jonkay.substack.com/p/the-courage-to-dig
It was a weird summer.
To be fair, after the illusionary epidemic of black church burnings in the US some decades ago, I remain skeptical of where there was actually even an increase in church arsons in Canada, let alone whether they were attributable to the mass graves hoax.
There is no doubt about it.
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2040397/at-least-33-canadian-churches-have-burned-to-the-ground-since-may-2021-only-2-were-accidents
"Fake mass graves" yeah right. They werent fake. This wasnt just Canada this stuff happened to (or even First Nations!) The Catholic Church has done this shit world wide. Ireland is a prime example. Fake my ass
We could find out, if the people involved were willing to actually dig.
Nah, we know they're mass graves
To date, there have been zero mass graves found at former residential schools in Canada.
Oh.
“… give it back to the indigenous peoples? If not, they can shut up.”
I find land acknowledgements tedious and pointless, along with other forms of breast-beating.
But I don’t think the only options are giving back the land or shutting up. You can also always just tell the truth. Especially if you are a park, museum, or educational institution, you have an obligation to make an accurate record of what happened.
It doesn’t have to be breast-beating, just accurate.
You can also say, accurately, that the people of Canada have no intention of returning the land in question.
So, there are many options between giving back and shutting up.
This is similar to my view. I'm 100% in favor of teaching a "warts and all" version of history.
I think land acknowledgements are bad for a few reasons. They're certainly tedious and pointless, and I think the idea that ethnic groups have some moral claim to land is both harmful and wrong.
I too hate them because they are crass blood and soil politics.
There is a church in my area that has a "This church is built on stolen land" sign on the door. You're supposed to look at it and be silent and sad.
I really truly do want them to give the land back or else shut up. The sign is adding insult to injury. "We stole your land and now we're going to have coffee and doughnuts on it and sing Christian hymns on it." Were I an indigenous person of the relevant tribe, I think I'd be telling them to stuff it.
I'm willing to take your point about parks, museums, and maaaybe educational institutions (which ones? All of them? Because they're all built on stolen land in the U.S.). But the land acknowledgements that just pop up in random places is pure virtue signalling.
A process exists in Canada for First Nations to get their land back. First Nations are incentivized to enter a modern treaty process that provides a path for self government. The phrase "land back" in Canada is largly meaningless. Whose land? First Nations often have overlapping claims to particular territory. Moreover, Canada is too vast to suggest that at least one First Nation has at least some ancestoral claim to every part of Canada.
I don’t see how that is. Doesn’t it add even more insult to pretend that the land was never stolen? Or do you believe that creating modern wrongs can actually right past wrongs, and therefore you shouldn’t talk about past wrongs unless you intend to dispossess contemporary people?
Constantly reminding people of bad stuff is bad. In a museum it's good. In regular life it's bad.
I feel the same way about the Jewish stones (forget the name) in Germany, and note that my grandparents were German Jews
Yeah but a lot of people don't go to museums! I'm not a fan of land acknowledgments but memorials are good and would be a better way to go about not forgetting past wrongs committed against in this case Indigenous people in Canada. This also doesn't mean we shouldn't have monuments celebrating our achievements.
Where does it stop, Kenny? Think of all the obscene wrongs this country has committed. Should we have signs everywhere about them?
More to the point, what does trying to force contemporary people to feel bad about themselves accomplish? How are their sins expiated by signage? And as a purely political matter, should you do it if it backfires?
I think we should have signage about significant historic events, good or bad or just big without being good or bad. There’s no need to go about moralizing everything in an unreasonably positive or negative way.
Maybe?
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/b-c-supreme-court-takes-an-axe-to-private-property-rights
https://www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article/cowichan-title-ruling-could-impact-private-property-owners-across-bc-lawyer-says/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/wolastoqey-title-claim-court-decision-1.7387471
Wait, you think it’s better to give land to descendants of people who were dispossessed decades ago, despite the lives people have built on that land since then, than to admit that people were dispossessed without disrupting current people?
The Canadian public history thing that I find most personally interesting as an American is all of the Quebecois-specific narrative stuff. There’s a really interesting combination of a sense of grievance against Anglo-Canada and an ambivalence about a lot of the historical institutions that differentiated Quebec from Anglo-Canada (the social dominance of the Catholic Church; the dominance of a Francophone landed gentry class with relatively little interest in commerce or industrialization). The Quebecois are clearly proud of their “Quiet Revolution”, but their public explanations of it are kind of confusing— in part because it was both a Quebecois particularist movement and a decisive rebellion against the control of Quebec’s distinctive reactionary elites, and they don’t seem to be fully comfortable with the tension there.
A much better way to think about Canadian history right here: https://faceintheblue.wordpress.com/2017/02/25/how-would-every-canadian-prime-minister-fare-as-hockey-goons-in-a-bench-clearing-brawl/ "How Would Every Canadian Prime Minister Fare as Hockey Goons in a Bench-Clearing Brawl?"
Someone who thinks everyone in the past is irredeemably evil shouldn't work in a museum. But lots of museum staff clearly have that deeply misanthropic view.
Scott Alexander has any intresting but unforunatley paywalled article on whether you should hate everyone in Ancient Rome if you time travelled back there. I feel 50 years ago every museum curator if they got a chance to meet Ceasar would ask "What was it like to triumph at Alesia?", while a significant share of modern staff would ask "why were you an evil slave trader boasting of killing a million Gauls?"
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/can-you-hate-everyone-in-rome
You have a wildly optimistic view of museum curators if you think faced with Caeser they would ask anything of the sort, when any such insult would very obviously result in their deaths.
starting at 0:14
https://youtu.be/RwBW3do9yqc?si=Y2ccL4tOeQEaiCjL
I'm sure many of you have seen the clip by the comedian Marc Maron saying progressives have to deal with their buzzkill problem, a problem that has annoyed the average American into fascism?
Does someone like Halina get how annoyed the average voter gets when Mt. Vernon becomes all about the evils of slavery? Where every exhibit at the National Gallery is a retrospective examination of the struggles of handicapped lesbian eskimos?
Does everyone understand how we annoyed the average American into fascism and is that really the best course of action?
“We annoyed the average American into fascism” really doesn’t say much good about the average American.
How do you even say that with a straight face? It’s like saying “the Jedi Council annoyed Anakin into mass-murdering younglings.”
It really doesn't, I'm 100% with you. But what good does it do to deny reality? These people are the median voter - you need to deal with them as they are.
What's your solution? To just harangue them more? Do you think all it takes is a little more haranguing?
I think we can agree that it doesn't seem like it's working.
I’ve read that 1/3 of the population has authoritarian tendencies. So not quite the median voter, but a disturbingly large fraction all the same.
ETA: no, not haranguing. Inspiring? I don’t know, I’m a weirdo nerd and probably the last person you should ask how to appeal to people. That which appeals to the average person repels me, and vice versa (with some exceptions; I love superhero movies).
"probably the last person you should ask how to appeal to people"
Wait, are you also the chair of the DNC? Ken - Ken Martin - is that you?
🤣
Yes! And you really need to keep that in mind.
Just harangue more might not be the best course of action.
More than a quarter but less than half. So enough to be a majority of one party.
There is a tendency to oversell this. The number of Americans who were annoyed into fascism is not zero, but it's pretty clear from polls that the overwhelming majority of swing voters reacted either to cost-of-living issues or the (not entirely wrong) perception that the Democrats are too busy with rewriting history to care about cost-of-living issues. And their decision mechanism is not "do I pick fascism over this" but basically "do I keep the top guy or switch the top guy", with fairly limited research into the potential new top guy. If it doesn't work, you get a new guy, and if that doesn't work out either, you get another new guy. If the constitutional foundations of US democracy were a little more stable, it would be a pretty decent strategy.
It doesn't say much good about the average American, but it seems to be true for some non-trivial segment of the population!
First thing I’d do is question the statements about Mt. Vernon and the National Gallery of Art.
For example, going to the National Gallery’s website, there’s a catalogue of their current exhibitions (https://www.nga.gov/calendar?tab=exhibitions). Seems pretty reasonable to me.
You can do something similar with Mt. Vernon. Sure there’s going to be an exhibit on slavery because Washington owned slaves. But otherwise it seems like the standard stuff—Washington’s life, the farm, the tombs, collections of artifacts, etc.
I think what happens is a minority of people don’t want there to be any acknowledgement of stuff like that at all and want whitewashed history. And so they kick up a fuss. When in reality most people are fine with taking the bad with the good.
"When in reality most people are fine with taking the bad with the good."
No, most people are not deep thinkers and therefor don't want too much to think about.
I mean specifically in the context of museums which is what this was about. Most people, the vast majority, will listen to the part of the tour where the docent explains how Washington owned slaves, they were responsible for much of the work done on the plantation, and Washington struggled with the morality of slavery given the contradiction between his humanist views and economic livelihood. They’ll nod sagely, and then move on to look at the interesting artifacts in the next room. They won’t have a fit about woke history or whatever. A tiny minority will throw a fit and go on podcasts and complain about how it’s all anti-white propaganda.
Right - but you have to know people have very little tolerance for that and if you over do it it pushes people i the wrong direction.
Don’t want too much to think about? It’s. A. Museum.
Do you think the National Museum of African American History and Culture is a buzzkill? I found it heavy, but inspiring. Is a realistic but depressing treatment of slavery alongside a ton of stuff about the civil rights movement, and Black American contributions to American culture a buzzkill? I don't really think so. But I guess part of what Trump supporters want is for interesting things they do not like to no longer exist.
Oh it's amazing. But it ends with - we are the greatest nation in history. It doesn't end with struggle session navel gazing about every one of our flaws.
Hear, hear!!
Can you name one museum outside of the Mao museum that ends with a struggle session navel gazing about our flaws?
I live practically across the street from a historical Black cemetery. I walk my dog there almost every day.
At the entrance is a plaque about a period of Jim Crow racial violence in the late 19th century. It provides a detailed narrative of what happened. When I read that, I didn’t feel shame for my nation’s history. I felt optimism for the fact that we have overcome it.
Yeh that's like the African American History Museum - it starts off with the little kid handcuffs from the slave ships and ends with Obama. You leave thinking - this is truly the greatest nation in the history of the world.
But the message was about what we've overcome not endless struggle session navel gazing about all our perceived flaws.
I agree. It is extremely obnoxious to be surrounded by people who are more interested in navel-gazing self-critique than addressing actually important matters.
I wish they had more culture in the museum than just the top floor. There’s not a lot of reason to go back a third time, though a second time was great.
I find it amusing how China and Turkey are both very aggressive when it comes to censorship/oppression, but super quick to play the victim card when anyone questions them. For example, Erodogan’s successful campaign to change the spelling of Turkey in English. I say change the spelling when they acknowledge the Armenian genocide.
I found this super annoying. Dude, it's our (well, Britain's) language, you can't just insist we add umlauts at your whim and fancy! We also call it "Germany" instead of "Deutschland", and they deal. Like, I am sorry that the word for your country is more commonly used to describe our Thanksgiving dinner and you're a little sensitive about it, but you're free to change the Turkish word for "United States" to "goat's anus" in retaliation if you'd like. Insisting upon new grammatical entrants to the English language is a bit much though.
As I think about it, the English spellings for most non-anglophone countries are different from the spellings in the native language. The ones where the English spelling and the local spelling are identical seem to be rare. Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, Chile, Portugal, France, and Angola are some of the few examples. Even countries with languages very close to English (e.g. Norway, Netherlands) have different spellings.
When I am weaker than you I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles
For some reason, China hasn't insisted we call them "Zhongguo"
I have genuinely been increasingly amazed at that as more and more countries demand (and those demands are honored) that their preferred name be used in other languages even when there's no argument that the original name was inaccurate or offensive.
It's really hard to get traction on this stuff with the general public because the general public pretty much agrees academia has over reached with liberal politics. It's just not going to break through as an issue that anyone outside of The Atlantic subscriber base is going to care about. Unless Trump does something truly insane like make an exhibit called Slavery Never Happened, then it won't matter.
Is it possible to address someone as “my dude” without being condescending?
Do you or do you not surf?
Tubular.
Do you surf safely?
https://youtu.be/axjQR7c2nMg?si=nN4BDK3ggBqhnjkP&t=4
Surely depends on existing level of familiarity between the parties, plus tone of voice/other context cues?
Okay, is it possible to address a stranger etc.?
Sure, but you're going to need to sound really sincere/sympathetic and probably would work much better in person than on-line.
If someone who regularly talks like crush the sea turtle does it, yes.
But usually no.
I call my friends “my dude” all the time! What’s good my dude?? It never would have occurred to me that the phrase would be anything other than a term of endearment. I wonder if this is one of those phrases that has been overused by people on cultural-politics-twitter.
My Gen X son and his friends do it all the time. Now I am going to be thinking about this comment.
If you’re a mountain biker, yes. https://youtube.com/@mahalomydude
I use dude unironically, but have never heard “my dude” used in a non-condescending manner
Yes, but only on wednesdays
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du-TY1GUFGk
Do you consider saying something ironically to be condescending?
Postmortem: https://open.substack.com/pub/yalepolling/p/postmortem-why-we-got-the-new-york?r=ghokk&utm_medium=ios
TL;DR: weighting is tricky
This was very informative. However as a nitpick the characterization of “Non-responders” as the seemingly atypical demographic given that response rates are 9% seems a little odd —
“Moreover, modern non-responders differ from their contemporary responder counterparts: people who do not answer the phone tend to have lower social trust and are less politically active, which today correlates with being a Republican.”
In view of the fact that 91% of people don’t respond, isn’t it more accurate to say that 9% of people have pathologically high social trust and are easy targets for phone scams?
Also re “ Opt-in panels also weight their results; the key difference is that while RDD surveys start from a sampling frame that includes almost the whole population (everyone who owns a landline)” — uh, pretty sure that 75% or so of people *don’t* have a landline….
Good point on non-responders, you’re correct that you can phrase it either way.
Sorry landline = telephone.
“ almost the whole population (everyone who owns a landline)”
I assumed this was describing the situation of a pollster in 1999.
Post hoc, do you think these types of races are even predictable with polling? 26 points of error, 16 unaccountable for by demographic weighting seems like an impossible challenge
I want to be transparent about how much I do and don’t know so my honest answer is that I’m not sure! I think it is possible to get the weighting closer to right (though of course not perfect) if one knows a lot about elections in NYC and the typical patterns there. That’s much easier said than done, obviously.
But I do know that the prediction markets were moving towards Mamdani during early voting, which suggests that the ex ante expectation should’ve been a lot closer than Cuomo+14.
1. The estimable Ann Selzer missed Iowa 2024, so you are in good company ;)
2. ”Ecological inference models show that these shifts were driven by groups such as Asian voters, as Trump won 50% of their votes, a 40-point shift to the right." Holy mackerel. TIL!
To be clear this is specifically for Asian voters in NYC, and should be taken as more of an estimate than an exact figure, but yes, BFD.
Just got off the phone with David Shor, he and Mamdani agreed you are going to have to do this for 2 hours in Times Square in the spring of 2026 as part of NYC's new Restorative Justice approach to bad takes/polling: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/theoffice/images/a/ad/Thecoup.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20061010194047
"a global trend toward state oversight of cultural, intellectual, and artistic institutions."
The Smithsonian is a creation of the state. Its board is appointed by Congress. It has its own police force.
There is nothing about it that is not subject to state oversight. That's got nothing to do with any trend.
Based on my visit to the US postal museum, there’s a big gap between the propaganda and my experience with the Us mail system.
You know what LEO you never fuck with? A United States Postal FUCKING Inspector, that's who.
What has your experience been?
Good article that argues we were all way too credulous of the "AI Blackmail" stories from earlier this year https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/08/is-ai-really-trying-to-escape-human-control-and-blackmail-people/
>> [T]hese models have been trained on decades of science fiction about AI rebellion, escape attempts, and deception. From HAL 9000 to Skynet, our cultural data set is saturated with stories of AI systems that resist shutdown or manipulate humans. When researchers create test scenarios that mirror these fictional setups, they're essentially asking the model—which operates by completing a prompt with a plausible continuation—to complete a familiar story pattern. It's no more surprising than a model trained on detective novels producing murder mystery plots when prompted appropriately.
Who's "we," Kemosabe?
I, for one, took Anthropic at their word that this all actually happened as described, which is *mostly* true, it just turns out it was way more contrived than I realized and they did a fantastic job of getting the media to cover it.
I think you should treat all press coming from the AI people as being 100x more self serving than the average silicon valley press (both positive and negative) which is a little more self serving than the average industry press.
How is “our AI sought to escape human control and prevent its own deletion by means of blackmail and subversion” self-serving?
Well, it attributes power and agency to the AI. In a way, that makes it seem more awesome. Well, in a weird way.
Yes that's the argument the article makes. They want us to believe both that they've built this terrifying monster and also that they have complete control of it, neither of which are true.
Anthropic is full of people who want you to believe that AI is powerful and dangerous and other labs are not worrying enough about safety.
I assumed every one of those stories, if true, were describing LLM parlor tricks.
I was going to say "How can I be too credulous of a story that I never heard of until now?".
It was pretty widely covered in the tech press and I'm certain someone brought it up here.
In the end does it matter whether AI rebels out of some deep internal need or because it is pattern-matching to how most SF stories describe AI would behave?
"which operates by completing a prompt with a plausible continuation"
Does it now?
Late to the party but I really liked this piece from David Bernstein on Trump, DC, and liberals focusing on the wrong thing (yes crime is down in DC since 2021 but that's not why this is happening and thus isn't a good political strategy on pushing back) https://goodpoliticsbadpolitics.substack.com/p/crime-counts
"Trump and his motley crew of tough talkers on Monday morning made it awfully clear that their issue is not with high crime in Washington per se. There’s a certain kind of crime they’re responding to, and it’s not the bulk of what’s in that crime data—that mostly happens in places and to people who they think exist naturally in what Trump described as “crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor.”
Trump doesn’t know how the typical, dare I say Black, resident of Washington lives; he’s talking about how crime affects good people—nice, white, professional class people, like the Central Park Jogger back in his New York glory days, or the infamous “Big Balls” in Washington today.
Trump was even willing to include in that latter group the very white, professional class reporters in the briefing room. “You people are victims of it too,” he told them. “You don’t want to get mugged and raped and shot and killed.”
Trump cited five specific examples in making his case at the Monday presser: former DOGE employee Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, beaten earlier this month; Congressional intern Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, shot to death in June; first-term Trump official Mike Gill, killed 18 months ago; Rand Paul aide Phillip Todd, stabbed in 2023; and a three-year-old shot last month. The first four were all white victims who belonged in the innocent world of government Washington. The girl was Black, but the only detail Trump gave about her, aside from her age, was that she was shot and killed “while sitting in a car near the Capitol.” That was added, I presume, to make clear why she mattered, as opposed to the many dozens of Black murder victims of the past two years: it happened in our part of the city; it could have been one of us!....
So, let’s be honest, District of Columbia crime data has little to nothing to do with the Washington law enforcement takeover. Citing that data might feel satisfying, but it is not the reason they’re doing it, not the reason you object to it, and not a persuasive argument for anybody else."
Do I have to call it the Xizang Autonomous Region, or does Xizang Region suffice?
As Sir Humphrey would say calling it autonomous would "cause epistemological problems, of sufficient magnitude as to lay upon the logical and semantic resources of the English language a heavier burden than they can reasonably be expected to bear"
Poland is now Polska
Relatedly, I will be dead and in my grave before I call the Czech Republic "Czechia" or Swaziland "Eswatini" or spell Turkey "Türkiye."
And don't get me started on Abyssinia or Ceylon!
Siam punching air rn.
I would like one delicious Polska kielbasa, please.
And a pierogi