contiguous draft of "See Color" Decision Child PSA linkpost

(I should be ashamed of how proud I am of the dissonance between the
text and target of the "totally biologically the same" link.)

diff --git a/content/drafts/link-see-color.md b/content/drafts/link-see-color.md
index 2abf00e..85bcf91 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/link-see-color.md
+++ b/content/drafts/link-see-color.md
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 Title: Link: "See Color"
-Date: 2021-02-28
-Category: other
-Tags: linkpost, video, ideology, Steven Universe, race
+Date: 2021-03-08
+Category: commentary
+Tags: linkpost, video, ideology, Steven Universe, race, categorization
 Status: draft
 
 > _Here we are in the future  
@@ -9,7 +9,9 @@ Status: draft
 >
 > —["Who We Are"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN9QWefQ7XE), _Steven Universe: The Movie_
 
-Whether or not you _support_ the ideological transition from late-20th-century individualist "content of their character" liberalism to the [successor ideology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successor_ideology), as a student of the arts, you've got to admit that [the new _Steven Universe_ anti-racism public service announcement](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJkVgGYm4xo) is a _masterfully well-executed_ piece of propaganda. It's _actually persuasive_. I've _never seen anything like it_.
+Whether or not you _support_ the ongoing ideological transition from late-20th-century individualist "content of their character" liberalism to the [successor ideology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successor_ideology), it is imperative that students of literature and the arts know how to judge propaganda on its merits: not everything that tries to teach good morals is good _art_, and not everything your ideological enemies put out is badly done, either.
+
+It is in this spirit that I say that [the new _Steven Universe_ anti-racism public service announcement](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJkVgGYm4xo) is a _masterfully well-executed_ piece of propaganda. It's _actually persuasive_. I've _never seen anything like it_.
 
 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zJkVgGYm4xo" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 
@@ -17,7 +19,7 @@ There's some sense in which I think the creators "got lucky" with this short—I
 
 In contrast, "See Color"'s attacks on old-school liberalism _land_. We open to a '90s-alike PSA invoking the "doesn't matter if you're black, white, or purple" trope (which has been cringe for as long as I (born 1987) can remember, but which I imagine sounded progressive the _first_ time someone said it), until Amethyst breaks character to object to the script—
 
-> AMETHYST: Woah, woah, woah. Hold up a minute here. Ugh, who wrote this? I think it kind of does matter that I'm purple? I mean, I'm purple because I'm literally an alien.
+> AMETHYST: Woah, woah, woah. Hold up a minute here. Ugh, who wrote this? I think it kind of _does_ matter that I'm purple? I mean, I'm purple because I'm literally an alien.
 >
 > BLACK KID: Well I'm not an alien, but it definitely matters to me that I'm black.
 >
@@ -33,6 +35,8 @@ In contrast, "See Color"'s attacks on old-school liberalism _land_. We open to a
 >
 > AMETHYST: Dude, so this entire public service announcement could be a ploy to avoid talking about racism altogether! Hey, ah, could we get a rewrite where we appreciate each other without erasing what makes each of us different?
 
-[TODO: the function of saying "or purple" is to appeal to a principle of equality: if there were purple people, they would get covered by the universal rule. But, Amethyst really is an alien, which would be a different cluster]
+How is the old-school liberal to reply to this? The function of saying "or purple" is to appeal to a _principle_ of equal treatment. Adding a fantasy race in there highlights the universality of our commitment to equality: purple magical alien gem superheroines might not exist, but if they _did_, they would be entitled to the same rights and dignity as everyone.
+
+But how should our principle of majestic equality be applied? [Categories summarize information](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries)—[cluster-structure in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace). As a matter of AI design, there would be no _functional_ reason to assign entities to different categories, if they didn't differ in _some_ decision-relevant ways. The reason it's pretty weird to reference Amethyst's skin color in a lesson about human racism, is because the challenges Amethyst might face as a gem in a world of humans—perhaps the perceptual skew of living thousands of years when most humans don't see a hundred—is going to depend on the ways in which gems and humans are actually different.
 
-[TODO: notice the subtle asymmetry where, for the black kid, being black is important _to her_, whereas the white kid acknowledges that being black "makes a difference"—the white kid saying that being white is _matters_ to her would not be OK; "other people of color" suggest that racism against white people isn't possible—and from usage, this actually "feels right" to me; people complaining about wokeness being racist don't feel very persuasive]
+In this way, we see that old-school liberalism is effectively the position that race _shouldn't exist_ as a cognitively meaningful category. But is it that easy? If there's some sense in which race _does_ exist—even just as a social "type tag" based on superficial anatomy markers in humans who are [otherwise totally biologically the same](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)—then verbally claiming to pretend that it doesn't, isn't a realistic or _honest_ strategy for remediating the harm done by [unfair conventions that culturally evolved around the presence of the category](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/).