More great news from The Atlantic, ever a beacon of positivity in today’s identity politics world.
Woo!
It’s mostly the right’s fault – of course – but this being The Atlantic, they also take a moment to criticize the left’s oblivious rush into the same self-destructive behavior.
It’s almost as if a country full of people with different, non-intersecting identities, that blame each other for their problems, and are experiencing decreasing commonalities, and showing an increase in tensions, is surprising to some. Whatever you think of religion shared Christianity amoung all the various branch and denominations is a point of commonality. Take that away and replace it with… nothing… and not surprisingly you end up with people even more dissimilar to each other.
We all really like cat gifs.
Other than my appropriation of SJ buzzwords in defending my fellow minorities (under Islam) against the so called progressive left I haven’t put much time in updating the ID politics side of things. A simple risk assessment shows where my energies should lie, and that’s fighting the Quitlers, Trumpalos and other ethno-nationalists.
This showed up in my TL recently though, is quite interesting.
Interesting article, but here is where it and like-minded critiques go wrong:
“We … cannot engage fully with Charles Murray, while he is known for readily quoting himself. Because of that, we see this talk as hate speech.” They know this before a single word of the speech has been spoken.
I bolded the part that people keep wrongly criticizing. Of course the audience knows what Murray is going to say. Why is this such a surprise? Murray has written several books that explain his views. Is it realistic to suppose that Murray’s lecture will have a drastically different conclusion from what he has written elsewhere?
Academic talks are fairly predictable. They present the speaker’s work, with an emphasis on the most recent publications, and maybe a little humor or other human touch to make it more digestible. Your interest in what a speaker has to say should naturally be based on prior publications. If you’ve decided that a particular speaker’s publications are completely wrongheaded, then it’s reasonable to presume that the talk will be wrongheaded as well, and it’s rather unrealistic to think that the speaker will say something worthwhile.
Well, it’s not like they read the books either. Which is fine! Everyone wants to save time. But even if they were merely using a summary of his work, I think Sharp is arguing that the problem is when you say they “decided his publications are wrongheaded.”
Let’s leave aside that the term “wrongheaded” brings to mind more of a senile old man shaking his head at all the queers he meets than a thorough investigation of truth. What happened is that Murray made a controversial assertion in a book from two decades ago based on scientific evidence. We have a normal scientific process to challenge that conclusion. Researchers have used that process, and it’s probably why his ideas have not been widely adopted.
His real sin is that his research was co-opted by racists. It’s declared hate speech not because it’s hate speech, but because hate speakers refer to it. Whatever the case, once someone is branded with this label, which happens to encompass everyone from Hitler to a quirky libertarian researcher like Murray, they are shunned forever in a way that would make a religious zealot blush (at least the ones that don’t still stone people to death). We’ve read other articles in this thread about how researchers are afraid to touch taboo subjects for this very reason. This seems less than ideal in the search for truth, though I guess if you reject science as oppressive, you couldn’t care less.
Regardless, there are still other fascinating facts and conclusions in Murray’s work that may interest someone. In fact, he wasn’t even there to talk about that book! He was there to talk about a newer book. One of Murray’s quirks is that he tends to jump around with a new universal explanation for social challenges in each book he writes, so his “ideas” change over time. This book is about how poor whites are now taking on some of the same social problems as poor minorities. Everyone outside of Trump voters can see this happening. It’s why liberals are so flabbergasted about his demographics. Perhaps if they had listened to the speech, they would’ve found some common ground. That seems to be in short supply.
To be fair, shunning libertarians is a correct move.
It would be easier to identify them if they were forced to wear the letter L.
Or just deport them all to Somalia, where they can enjoy the many fruits of a neutered and powerless central authority.
Just curious pwk but what do you make of Pierre Manent?
Republicans don’t see color. They just see that white Christians are the real victims of discrimination in America today.
This is what stood out to me:
But the early indications are clear. Trump campaigned on a kind of white identity politics, highlighting black crime, Latino immigration and Islamic terrorism as defining issues for the nation. This was not just a break from Obama’s approach, but also a shift from the last Republican president. George W. Bush visited a mosque, said “Islam is peace” in a speech, pushed immigration reform that would grant citizenship to certain undocumented immigrants, signed a renewal of the Voting Rights Act, and put two African-Americans (Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice) in powerful roles in his administration from its earliest days.
We’ve reached the point where we look back at a guy who attempted a massive purge of the Justice Department to get rid of Attorneys General who would defend voting rights and say, “Those were the good old days, when the President defended civil rights.”
Discrimination against all groups is real, even against straight male Caucasian Christians. It’s human nature to be biased towards those that are like you, and therefore biased against those which are different. This normally isn’t borne by some evil facist outlook but rather because it’s easier to understand and sympathize with those who have shared experiences. I don’t expect that will ever go away, just lower over time as the less rational influences echoed in society (hopefully) diminish.
That said, not all discrimination is equal. Furthermore, the impact of a dominant group’s discrimination as opposed to that from a minority is considerably different.
That’s why I’d like more pointed questions in these surveys, like “In your opinion, is being a member of [group] more likely to hurt or help your chances of getting hired at a job with a salary range of X-Y?”
There is a pretty big difference between being offended or being denied your rights and killed by the police.
Which is basically the difference between white/Christian discrimination and gay/black discrimination.
According to Republicans, Blacks are the group which is least discriminated against in this country…
…
…
Edit: better gif! :)
I’d think it’s the (partially) manufactured hatred for Affirmative Action which drives it.
I’m very amused by that chart. It’s discrimination power rankings!
So the SJW brand of identity politics and paternal racism has now have been translated into Chinese.
The question has received more than 400 answers from Zhihu users, which include some of the most representative perceptions of the ‘white left’. Although the emphasis varies, baizuo is used generally to describe those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.
The mark of a rich and successful nation is having time to waste on stuff like this. China has arrived!
At least the ones that made it in the cities I guess.
Good luck with that!
[quote]
This Left is more likely to participate in a public shaming than to lobby for a new law; it is more likely to mobilize to occupy a park or shut down a freeway than to register voters.[/quote]
There’s some truth here.