Blue Tribe Totalitarianism

From a comment by Scott Alexander on his own blog, via Xenosystems:

So given the fact that our knowledge of the world is coming from a 90-percent-plus liberal group that’s working hard to enforce orthodoxy, and then being filtered and broadcast to us by another 90-percent-plus liberal group that’s working hard to enforce orthodoxy, our knowledge of the world is…about as skewed as you would expect from this process. To give just one example, every number and line of evidence we have suggests that the police do not disproportionately target or kill black people compared to the encounter rate (see Part D here and this study) but the conventional wisdom is absolutely 100% certain they do and anybody who questions it is likely to sound like some kind of lunatic.

 

Part of a much longer pair of comments that brilliantly exposes the Blue Tribe (meaning- liberal educated elites) tactics for enforcing orthodoxy and suppression of any / all dissent.  The thing I think he misses though is here:

I am pretty darned Blue Tribe myself – I’m pro-choice, pro-fighting-climate-change, pro-gay, pro-transgender, non-religious, pro-higher-taxes-on-rich, pro-single-payer, anti-gun, ready-for-Hillary, etc – and after having watched the Republican debate tonight I can honestly say I’m terrified at anyone other than the Blue Tribe having power. But just as I can be proud of my Jewish heritage but also upset about the occupation of Palestine, so I can be proud of the Blue Tribe and not too happy about their project of crushing everybody else with an iron fist regardless of the collateral damage. Doing anything about this is a dauntingly large project, but my own comparative advantage is in picking apart some of the sillier studies they use to put a fig-leaf over what they’re doing.

He thinks this aspect of progressivism can be separated from the whole; it cannot. The need to control the worldview and suppress dissent is necessary, because their goal is utopia, and when utopia invariably fails, the reaction of the Utopians is never to reexamine their beliefs and reconsider they’re right, it’s to look for scapegoats who caused their righteous dreams to fail and destroy them so that it will work this time.

In fact, even the Red Tribe / Blue Tribe moniker itself is part of this effort. Before about 2000, politically conservative groups were always blue, and politically progressive / leftist groups were always red. But the media just decided to switch that up on us at one point, probably to try to obscure the connection between the left and communism. And we all just went along, because such a huge percentage of the communications apparatus in this country is dominated by these people.

2 thoughts on “Blue Tribe Totalitarianism

  1. […] need to be viewed with extreme caution.  Social science statistics are notoriously unreliable and studies strongly reflect the political biases of the scientist, 90+% of whom are leftist.  Further, even Christian advocacy groups that agitate for a particular cause need to be likewise […]

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