Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Wednesday, November 17, 2021

Good Matt, Bad Matt

 I was prepared to disagree with Yglesias' take on the AMA adopting more inclusive language. He has a tendency to be pointless and aggressively contrarian. However, I think he strikes an important point that I've made in the past as well. Too often, groups engage in eyewashing issues like racist policies by changing language and symbols rather than actual policy. It's so much easier to produce a PowerPoint about how to talk about race than to inconvenience yourself with changing how things are actually done. For instance, our school does a lot of the right things surrounding language, but we still could increase the number of students of color, if we shifted more resources towards financial aid.

The specific take about the medical community is just a real stark example of how "doing something" really doesn't do anything, if the real problems lie unaddressed.

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