
A Profile of Claire Lehmann of Quillette - daegloe
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/11/11/intellectual-dark-web-quillette-claire-lehmann-221917
======
mancerayder
A lot of people are going to compare this publication to "bog Conservative"
\-- or worse, 'alt-right' \-- online publications. A friend sent me an article
for the first time today and it took the words out of my head - and it's not
at all what I would consider right-wing.

Does the word 'white' in the headline of this piece make you nervous:
[https://quillette.com/2018/08/17/a-closer-look-at-anti-
white...](https://quillette.com/2018/08/17/a-closer-look-at-anti-white-
rhetoric/) ? Will you skim the headline, downvote this and fail to read the
part that talks heavily about the new NYT editor and hundreds of her tweets,
combines other examples and advances a thesis that there's a new type of
religious ideology that's taken hold in the U.S., while traditional religion
waned? If so, then you're precisely what the conversation is about: people who
sit idly by as a new dogmatism takes hold under the guise of righteousness.

As a traditionally Left person myself, I'm deeply troubled by the discourse in
the U.S., where the Left and the extreme Right use the same phraseology and
attitude, while the former feels vindicated and justified (because they are on
the correct side). And throwing away due process in the interest of the
Greater Good? If you're not reminded of the Salem Witch Trials, you should be
reminded of Stalin's purges just the same.

 _Stepping out of right-versus-left politics, the idea is to remain skeptical
of all group-think, regardless of where it comes from._

edit: grammar

~~~
roenxi
> And throwing away due process in the interest of the Greater Good? If you're
> not reminded of the Salem Witch Trials, you should be reminded of Stalin's
> purges just the same.

Indeed. Most of the rhetoric seems to have a tit-for-tat feel to it. I don't
know how the rest of the right wing feel, but things like the Russia
conspiracy theories are a lot more palatable in light of older, even more
insane conspiracy theories like Obama instituting Sharia law or being born in
Kenya.

The concerning parts of the dialog are the innocuous elements where due
process starts to break down. Slogans like "Resist" and "Not My President" are
more scary than most of the rest to me - the health of the system are more
important than political ideology. Hopefully they don't mean what they are
literally saying, but it'll be scary if that language breaks out of America
and starts to spread across the rest of the Anglosphere.

~~~
stcredzero
_Most of the rhetoric seems to have a tit-for-tat feel to it._

Forget about tit for tat. Let's talk about principles. Innocent until proven
guilty. Rule of law. The right of free speech. As per usual, the side holding
power wishes to dispense with those principles, so they can proceed to get
their way, "for the greater good." The other side, knocked onto its back foot,
is the one talking about principles. In the 60's, it was the other way around,
at least at first.

(Then, as now, there are opportunists on the far extremes, hoping to gain
power by fanning the flames of outrage.)

Now, power is not only embodied in television and print media, it's also
mediated by the viral potential of social media. There is one side which seeks
to reserve the power of virality to itself, all the while holding onto the
declining power of traditional media. It's precisely for situations like this,
that the principles were created. It's precisely this kind of imbalance that
the principles are supposed to help bring back towards the center.

 _the health of the system are more important than political ideology_

Hear hear.

(Center-left person here.)

------
alanh
If you’ve ever read PG’s classic essay "What You Can’t Say," Quillette may be
recognizable as a publication unafraid to ask all of today’s unaskable
questions.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html)

[https://quillette.com/](https://quillette.com/)

~~~
pron
Quillette doesn't strike me as containing anything "unsayable", just very,
very old things. After reading one Quillette article I found myself coming
back because it was so striking how the articles appear to have been lifted,
almost verbatim, from Victorian publications on eugenics that we studied in
grad school. Same obsession with natural selection, same topics, and same
pseudoscience. Most of us here have scientific/mathematical education and see
in an instant how implausible and comical Quillette's pseudo-scientific
aspirations are, but I assume that many of their readerships have as much of
an understanding of science as the laymen of the Victorian era, and find it
all very enticing. We may enjoy reading it like we enjoy reading the
publications of the flat Earth people, but I guess that to some these things
may ring true. Quillette's editorial staff must know history as well as they
know science, or they would have made use of an endless supply of
uncopyrighted material from Victorian publications.

~~~
MarkMc
Let's look at an example: below is an excerpt from "Black American Culture and
the Racial Wealth Gap" [1] which claims that 20% of the racial wealth gap is
due to Black preference for expensive cars, jewelry and clothes. Is this
pseudoscience?

\-----------------------------------------

To what extent do poor spending habits explain the persistence of the wealth
gap? Economists at the University of Chicago and the University of
Pennsylvania asked this question after analyzing 16 years of nationally
representative data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. Consistent with the
Nielsen data, they found that blacks with comparable incomes to whites spent
17 percent less on education, and 32 percent more (an extra $2300 per year in
2005 dollars) on ‘visible goods’—defined as cars, jewelry, and clothes. What’s
more, “after controlling for visible spending,” they concluded that the
“wealth gap between Blacks and Whites, conditional on permanent income,
declines by 50 percent.” To be clear, that 50 percent figure doesn’t pertain
to the total wealth gap, but to the proportion of the gap that remains after
income is taken into account—which was 40 percent. The upshot: the fact that
blacks spent more on cars, jewelry, and clothes explained fully 20 percent of
the total racial wealth gap.

[1] [https://quillette.com/2018/07/19/black-american-culture-
and-...](https://quillette.com/2018/07/19/black-american-culture-and-the-
racial-wealth-gap/)

~~~
rbehrends
Luckily, somebody already did the work [1].

In short: There is an implication in the Coleman essay that African Americans
have less wealth because they spend more.

Problem with that:

1\. While black people spend more on these items than white people, white
people spend correspondingly more on other luxury goods.

2\. Quote: "[...] once income is controlled, if anything, black families
actually have a slightly higher savings rate than their white counterparts.
[...] If anything, it appears that blacks generally live more frugal lives
than whites; a study conducted by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy
using the 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances found that, at comparable levels of
income, whites spend 1.3 times more than blacks (Traub et al.)"

So, yeah, the entire argument depends on a cherry-picked metric (we're leaving
aside the question to what extent cars and clothing are necessarily Veblen
goods and to what extent differences in types of spending are the result of
different social constraints and incentives [2]) that does not reflect actual
spending and saving habits well.

What Quillette essentially is: a Gish Gallop [3] in webzine form. Debunking
all this takes time and effort and few people have the spare time to keep up
with their output, and even then the debunking is often not seen by the
original readers.

[1]
[https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=21121635...](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=21121635&postcount=1612)

[2] For example, the problem that it can be more important for a black person
to appear well-dressed to compensate for racial bias than for a white person.

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop)

~~~
tomp
Unfortunately, [1] doesn't counter the most interesting claim, that _" blacks
[...] spent 17 percent less on education"_.

------
henron
I support Quillette's fight for free speech and wholeheartedly agree that it's
important that we can debate any idea put forth in "good faith" (subjective,
of course, but a necessary qualifier) on its merits. However, I largely
disagree with their assessment of the severity of the anti free speech
movement in the US. For instance, Larry Summer's dismissal as president of
Harvard is a commonly cited example as this backlash. But after Harvard, he
went on to chair the national economic council and regularly publish columns
in many major publications. So, he wasn't exactly frozen out of society,
unlike many members of truly disadvantaged groups. Perhaps academia is sick
and in need of reform, but we don't need to exaggerate the problem.

------
thundergolfer
The "dangerous" ideas of Quillette are mostly just bog standard conservative
talking points, you realise when you browse it for a few minutes.

~~~
m52go
Which conservative outlets would you say are similar to Quillette? I've been
reading it for a while and consider it a fair bit more thoughtful than other
outlets, even if it skews conservative.

~~~
mancerayder
I think people sometimes (especially on the identitarian Left) equate
questioning the Left as automatically being on the "Other Team." I'm on the
same Team and I think self-criticism is important to avoid turning into
dogmatic robots, and dangerous ones at that.

~~~
stcredzero
_I think people sometimes (especially on the identitarian Left) equate
questioning the Left as automatically being on the "Other Team."_

When people reach the point that merely asking questions marks you as "the
enemy," it's precisely those people who constitute the greatest danger. For
one thing, it indicates that 1) they aren't interested in dissent, nuance, or
their own fallibility and 2) they think they have enough power to behave in
such an authoritarian fashion.

------
lgleason
While I support having a different view that goes beyond mostly postmodernist
mono-culture of today's media, I also know some people who are both members of
the IDW and who have had run-ins with Claire.

With the three academics who were behind the hoax articles in the feminist
publications, Quillette had a three day heads up and played a much smaller
role that she is implying in that article.

I also know someone that Claire contacted to write an article. After agreeing
to write the article this person began to pen the article. Then, shortly they
found out that two other people had been asked to Quillette to write the same
article. Needless to say that didn't go over well, this person confronted
Claire about it and decided to not continue with the article or to write for
her.

It's a shame because while we really do need something that goes outside of
the crazy mono-culture that tries to destroy all dissent, based on what I've
seen Quillette, it runs the real risk of doing more harm than good for the
cause.

~~~
zeroname
> members of the IDW

Oh, it's a membership now? Where do you sign up?

> It's a shame because while we really do need something that goes outside of
> the crazy mono-culture that tries to destroy all dissent, based on what I've
> seen Quillette, it runs the real risk of doing more harm than good for the
> cause.

You draw that conclusion from the perception that Claire exaggerated
something, that she commissioned an article from multiple sources and... the
fact that an unspecified number of people had "run-ins" with her?

That's mono-think, dude.

