posted on May 09, 2018 01:41 PM by
u/needs_discipline_bad
52
u/Fuguenocht37 pointsat 1525893810.000000
What the hell in any case is the threat posed to these people by
SJWs, who by all accounts are an enervated shadow of, say, 60s
activism?
When high-ranking people with money, privilege and influence speak in
sober tones of how our country is discriminatory because they can’t make
public comments about how they view blacks as inferior without facing
career repercussions, my brain stops working.
It’s a strange kind of oppression in which silenced dissidents keep
getting book deals, op-eds, sold-out speaking tours, lucrative Patreons,
millions of YouTube views, and sympathetic profiles in the world’s
leading newspapers. How much more attention do they want? How much
freer can speech be?
> I wish I could hire him to write searing takedowns of everyone I hate.
You can donate to Current Affairs and then tweet proposals for articles at their twitter account. That's reasonably close.
For an allegedly repressed minority, the names in Weiss’s article
sure seem to show up on the op-ed pages I read pretty frequently.
And Chapo Trap
House have talked about it at length - a lot of these guys are
making millions of dollars a year, making TV appearances, giving
speeches at universities, being lauded in NY Times articles… but
students sometimes protest the bigoted shit they say, so clearly they’re
being oppressed.
Fuck, Sam Harris spent a year fawning over (literal cross-burner)
Charles Murray, got some very mild pushback over it in the form of a
critical article on Vox.com and spent months shrieking about the SJW
hordes trying to silence him.
That's because Sam Harris is under the delusion that he's left-wing solely for being a secularist, so people piercing that delusion really hurt his precious lil' fee-fees.
>(literal cross-burner) Charles Murray
I *just* had this "literal cross burner" argument on /r/slatestarcodex , and the incident is a little strange. It isn't *exactly* a KKK cross burning racial intimidation incident, though even in 1960 smalltown Iowa it sure appeared that way initially to everyone else in the town besides Murray and his "oblivious" friends:
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/magazine/daring-research-or-social-science-pornography-charles-murray.html
>While there is much to admire about the industry and inquisitiveness of Murray's teen-age years, there is at least one adventure that he understandably deletes from the story -- the night he helped his friends burn a cross. They had formed a kind of good guys' gang, "the Mallows," whose very name, from marshmallows, was a play on their own softness. In the fall of 1960, during their senior year, they nailed some scrap wood into a cross, adorned it with fireworks and set it ablaze on a hill beside the police station, with marshmallows scattered as a calling card.
>Rutledge recalls his astonishment the next day when the talk turned to racial persecution in a town with two black families. "There wouldn't have been a racist thought in our simple-minded minds," he says. "That's how unaware we were."
>A long pause follows when Murray is reminded of the event. "Incredibly, incredibly dumb," he says. "But it never crossed our minds that this had any larger significance. And I look back on that and say, 'How on earth could we be so oblivious?' I guess it says something about that day and age that it didn't cross our minds."
To be clear, I don't buy Murray's protestation of ignorance. He for sure knew what cross burning meant. Maybe he didn't mean his little fireworks prank as an act of racial terrorism, he may have just been an "ironic" 4chan style edgelord in the 1960s mold, but it sure came off as terrorism to people in his town, and his resume since then gave me no reason to doubt the initial framing of the story. "Charles Murray burnt a cross in his youth? Yeah, seems right..."
Yeah, I've had the "actually, he said he didn't know burning crosses was racist, so it's fine!" argument on SSC as well.
One of the things that really irritates me about rationalists in general (and Scott in particular, come to think about it) is that they'll happily talk about the importance of Bayesian reasoning for everything other than answering the question "is this person a racist?". If someone denies they're a racist, suddenly the burden of proof is *absurdly* high - we have to take them at their word no matter what and it doesn't matter how much evidence we have against that. Murray's claim he didn't know what burning a cross meant (in *1960*, for god's sake) is laughable. Everyone knows it's a lie, but for some reason we're supposed to extend him the presumption of innocence.
Scott's You Are Still Crying Wolf post is maybe the ur-example - Trump says he isn't a racist, so Scott thinks it's just utterly indefensible to suggest that he is. You should ignore decades of documented bigotry (including Trump literally losing lawsuits over allegations of racial bias), you should ignore him beginning his presidential campaign with a rant about how Mexico is sending rapists and murderers over the border, you should ignore how all the racists think he's one of them... because "he ate a taco bowl that one time!".
As far as I can tell they're using a definition of racist that revolves around intent. If someone isn't acting out of conscious racial animus then their actions aren't racist, full stop.
That's not the definition the rest of us have used for well over half a century now, but they are at least consistent in their complete disregard for everything interesting that's ever come out of the discipline of sociology.
When I read these articles from Bari Weiss (New York Times), her boss
, James Bennet, and Jeffrey Goldberg (The Atlantic), I am reminded of
Lincoln’s Cooper
Union Speech: >The question recurs, what will satisfy them?
Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow,
convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is
no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very
beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms
and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone;
but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to
convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in
any attempt to disturb them.
These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will
convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and
join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly - done
in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated - we must
place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law
must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery
is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in
private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy
pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole
atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery,
before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from
us.
I am quite aware they do not state their case precisely in this way.
Most of them would probably say to us, “Let us alone, do nothing to us,
and say what you please about slavery.” But we do let them alone - have
never disturbed them - so that, after all, it is what we say, which
dissatisfies them. They will continue to accuse us of doing, until we
cease saying.
>This is an aristocrat wondering, "if my enemies are so silenced, why do all the peasants flock to them?"
what the hell is that even supposed to mean in human
is this some assemblage of basso profundo neoreactionary dogwhistles
that's a rhetorical question i'm not asking for the answer ok
More of a writing prompt for the one that follows it
Honestly you can make a point without bringing in Day of the Dead, Catholicism, Bishops, the Trinity and pagan England for fucks sake.
It blows my mind how many terrible posts are being upvoted in that thread.
To pick a particularly bad one - Dickferret responded to Nathan Robinson's [excellent article](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/07/why-is-charles-murray-odious) on Charles Murray with:
>He spent 7,000 words explaining that the book could threaten white guilt.
Low-effort, incredibly uncharitable, clearly waging the culture war and total nonsense. Even a year ago, an equivalent shitpost would be downvoted and possibly result in a temp ban. But it's 2018 and racism is cool now, so it's at +40 and rising.
And I can't help but note; the only comment disagreeing with him is yours.
Yes, that is one of the many and varied arguments he makes in that article. Odd that such a group of high-decouplers would struggle so to look past one overwrought argument from consequences in an article that doesn't happen to flatter their political biases.
The part where exactly none of the comments rebut, or even acknowledge, all the evidence Robinson presents was intensely frustrating. Like, he has links to fawning NYT articles, stats about podcast numbers and youtube views, and no one seems to find any of this compelling. Apparently "They were physically assaulted/threatened that one time" is a rebuttal to all of this.
> Apparently "They were physically assaulted/threatened that one time" is a rebuttal to all of this.
can't wait to hear the defenses of Tommy J. Curry, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Sarah Bond et al. from the brave defenders of banished thought.
any minute now.
aaaaaaaany minute now.
Especially liking the "we need a more thorough analysis to arrive at the conclusion that these people are *not* being silenced" ([link](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8hnmnb/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_may_7_2018/dypxjyu)).
I'm sure they just slipped up and meant to say that we'd need a thorough review to conclude that they *are* being silenced.
Surely.
What the hell in any case is the threat posed to these people by SJWs, who by all accounts are an enervated shadow of, say, 60s activism?
When high-ranking people with money, privilege and influence speak in sober tones of how our country is discriminatory because they can’t make public comments about how they view blacks as inferior without facing career repercussions, my brain stops working.
I will gladly let you silence me for half that.
Nathan Robinson is my spirit animal.
Kevin Drum makes a similar point in a Mother Jones article:
And Chapo Trap House have talked about it at length - a lot of these guys are making millions of dollars a year, making TV appearances, giving speeches at universities, being lauded in NY Times articles… but students sometimes protest the bigoted shit they say, so clearly they’re being oppressed.
Fuck, Sam Harris spent a year fawning over (literal cross-burner) Charles Murray, got some very mild pushback over it in the form of a critical article on Vox.com and spent months shrieking about the SJW hordes trying to silence him.
When I read these articles from Bari Weiss (New York Times), her boss , James Bennet, and Jeffrey Goldberg (The Atlantic), I am reminded of Lincoln’s Cooper Union Speech: >The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.
Pretty stoked Contra Points gets a mention and a link, her video on JBP is so great.
[deleted]
Duh Interleckshual Dank Web