So what is your opinion on reparations? (I don't listen to podcasts.)
Mine is that while fine in principle, it's absolutely impossible to craft the details. Who, exactly, qualifies? Do we use the one-drop rule? For people with inadequate records (eg almost everybody), how are decisions made? Who makes them? By what standard of evidence? Is there an appeals process? How does that work?
No matter what decisions are made on these very difficult issues, they are guaranteed to be poorly received by some subset of people, setting off a new round of recriminations.
I like the piece, and I'm on your side against your English teacher friend, but (you knew there was a but coming!)...I'm rather wary of the "exhaustion" lingo that's been circulating for the last two years, if not longer. It's interesting to me which groups are described by the NYTimes as exhausted and which are not. The Times frequently tells us that teachers are exhausted, parents who work from home (=many Times readers) are exhausted, health care workers are exhausted, Black people are exhausted (from having to listen to white people's questions). This has become a huge MSM trope. They haven't to my knowledge said that police are exhausted, or that Jews are exhausted, or that rural voters are exhausted by being continually asked why they voted for Trump. Perhaps some people are exhausted, and perhaps more of them belong to certain groups rather than others. Or perhaps this is a mainstream media notion rather than a lived reality, based on progressives' wanting to differentiate some groups from others. The point about exhaustion is that there's no necessary objective correlative, and therefore it's the perfect concept for a current progressive strand for whom subjective experience on the part of favored groups is more significant than empirical evidence (and more significant than policy debates about how to solve problems).
So what is your opinion on reparations? (I don't listen to podcasts.)
Mine is that while fine in principle, it's absolutely impossible to craft the details. Who, exactly, qualifies? Do we use the one-drop rule? For people with inadequate records (eg almost everybody), how are decisions made? Who makes them? By what standard of evidence? Is there an appeals process? How does that work?
No matter what decisions are made on these very difficult issues, they are guaranteed to be poorly received by some subset of people, setting off a new round of recriminations.
I like the piece, and I'm on your side against your English teacher friend, but (you knew there was a but coming!)...I'm rather wary of the "exhaustion" lingo that's been circulating for the last two years, if not longer. It's interesting to me which groups are described by the NYTimes as exhausted and which are not. The Times frequently tells us that teachers are exhausted, parents who work from home (=many Times readers) are exhausted, health care workers are exhausted, Black people are exhausted (from having to listen to white people's questions). This has become a huge MSM trope. They haven't to my knowledge said that police are exhausted, or that Jews are exhausted, or that rural voters are exhausted by being continually asked why they voted for Trump. Perhaps some people are exhausted, and perhaps more of them belong to certain groups rather than others. Or perhaps this is a mainstream media notion rather than a lived reality, based on progressives' wanting to differentiate some groups from others. The point about exhaustion is that there's no necessary objective correlative, and therefore it's the perfect concept for a current progressive strand for whom subjective experience on the part of favored groups is more significant than empirical evidence (and more significant than policy debates about how to solve problems).