I really wish people would stop using "the racial reckoning" to refer to the hysteria around race from 2020 (or 2014 depending on where you want to track it).
There was no reckoning, there was actually the opposite of any introspection or actual conversation about race, more a lot of dictated new norms which thankfully are starting to be shed.
I hope (and doubt) that in a few years we can look back on this and the lies + misrepresentations that worked the country into a state where apologies and encouragements for riots and removing the police were coming out of the mouths of prominent politicians and nearly every major news outlet, while businesses and schools are advancing racial discrimination as best HR practices.
I wonder if all the people who badgered their friends to donate to causes they had spent literal seconds researching feel foolish for shouting down people to give their money away during a financially difficult period (pandemic), especially knowing what we know now about even the most vaunted of these “charities.”
A HUGE question I don't have time at the moment to express more fully: HOW do "we" "welcome back" all the fools who spent all this time / energy / $$ on the mass stupidity??? (I was one of those fools. Not anymore.)
Well. I never really "kicked them out" so there's nothing to welcome them back to.
There are some I don't socialize with as much anymore, but it wasn't because I ejected them. . . it was just all the absurd proselytizing and judginess. And also the almost comical parodies of clueless upper class, white casual white racism masking as being an "ally".
So, you know, just cut that shit out and we can hang again.
What are the odds Henry Rogers would have been given the time of day hadn't he changed his name to "Ibram X. Kendi"? It's so pretentious, so ClusterB, it's nauseating. You've got to be a major sucker to buy into this.
In other news, the darlings of the international left just murdered over twelve hundred innocent men women and children in southern Israel. One woman’s naked body was paraded through Gaza cheered on by crowds.
I’ve seen this described as a terrorist attack. It’s not. Hamas is the de facto ruling party of Gaza - this was a war crime. If you want a two state solution, these guys will be one of the states. These guys who just kidnapped, murdered, and did who knows what else to a 30 year old peace protester, stripped her, and paraded her through the street shouting “God is great”.
Yes that’s true. It’s much harder to claim “Palestinians just want peace and human rights” when they overwhelmingly support a group that engages in open warfare against Israel and fundamentally believes in eliminating it as a nation.
To play devil's advocate on behalf of the idiots who believe it, it's almost been more than a decade since Hamas won that election, so it's *possible* that Hamas would not be elected today.
I mean, they would, because the party running the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, Fatah, is so corrupt and so reliant on Israeli security cooperation to stay in power, that they (Fatah) would almost certainly be wiped out in new elections, mostly to Hamas' benefit.
Polling does seem to indicate that Gazans are kinda fed up with Hamas too, but more because of their own corruption, lack of elections, etc than due to a fundamental disagreement with their goals.
I saw a set of polls from mid 2022 that indicated that a strong majority of Gazans believe that long term Palestine should be the entire “river to the sea” area (i.e. no more Israel) but short term there views were at least somewhat more pragmatic.
I lost some respect for Dave Smith who normally has pretty good anti war takes but now seems to be justifying the attack by Hamas. I get Israel has been shitty too. There's no real good guy is this never ending war, but I don't know. It still sucks.
You know I actually haven’t seen a lot of this, less than is typical I think due to the videos, kidnappings etc. I think it’s about as fringe as the pro Russia in Ukraine left (which horseshoes together with the pro Russia right).
If people are saying that they feel bad for what’s about to happen to palistinian citizens I don’t think that’s the same as justifying what hamas did.
There's a WaPo article that says that her family first found out about her death and identified her by that video because they recognized her hair and tattoos.
I heard something today where her family said it was true. They want the video to be seen, too. It's horrific.
I'm still reeling from reading about young parents of 10 month old twins who realized the terrorists were at their door so proceeded to hide their babies in the house before the parents were killed. IDF found the babies alive, thankfully, after their parents had been dead for 12-14 hours. As a twin mom, this wrecked me.
Or the grandmother who was filmed on her phone being murdered, and they guys who killed her uploaded it to her Facebook wall and that's how her granddaughter found out... but seeing grandma get murdered in a video on Facebook...
I’m torn. I’m avoiding these videos etc because I don’t want that stuff in my brain but then I wonder if they would want me to witness? Or is it just horror porn now? I felt the same way about the 911 footage. I don’t really know what to do.
Spare us the platitudes and both sideisms. This isn’t a tragedy for the Palestinian people, they’ve been dancing in the streets for hours and their supporters online can barely contain their glee.
The time to choose non-violence was BEFORE the rape and massacre. Now Palestine will reap what it has sown and it couldn’t be more deserved.
I’m sure it will come as great comfort to the ten year olds with their throat slits, the young women who were raped to death, the senior citizens gunned down at a bus stop and the families shot execution style inside their homes, not to mention the hostages currently being tortured inside Gaza, that somewhere, somehow, there might be a Palestinian who doesn’t agree with what is happening to them.
This is how authoritarian regimes work: Hamas was democratically elected by the Palestinian people to represent them, they rule with the consent of their government. The Palestinian people marched out to help them commit this crime against humanity and cheered them on as they paraded the naked corpses of their victims through the street. If there are some Palestinians who don’t like it, they are irrelevant. The same way the existence of Germans who didn’t agree with the Nazis were also irrelevant. The Nazis still started a world war, the Nazis still committed a genocide, and the Nazis faced the consequences of their actions. This isn’t going to be any different.
I’m not dehumanizing anyone by saying this. If you’re looking for dehumanization, look at what Hamas is doing to their innocent victims. Look carefully, and don’t look away. When people tell you who they are, believe them. Palestine, not merely Hamas, but Palestine is telling us that they are not only the enemy of Israel, but the enemy of decent people everywhere. If Palestine wants to be recognized as a country, they have to be prepared to be criticized like a country, and that’s what I’m doing. Cope.
I get that it’s an emotionally charged topic for a lot of people and that’s why I generally never engage when it comes to the whole Israel-Palestine mess. I’m sorry for your pain. I’m from a country that had its fair share of conflict and being the oppressor as well as suffering immense casualties. I have seen and continue to see the same types of language used over and over to help further violence and it’s just very disheartening that nothing ever seems to change. That really is all.
Well said. All of it. If Palestinians are so worthy of compassion from the world, then maybe participating in mass rapes and executions of women, children, and the elderly aren't the way to win sympathy.
People everywhere are worthy of compassion. If an individual has committed a crime then hold them accountable. It’s not that hard - Do not vilify every person based on their nationality or race.
`Hamas was democratically elected by the Palestinian people to represent them'
Hamas won an election something like 17 years ago; there hasn't been an election since.
`The Palestinian people marched out to help them commit this crime... If there are some Palestinians who don’t like it, they are irrelevant.'
Fair enough. but then you need to admit that all Israelis are responsible for there being 10x as many Palestinian civilian deaths as there were Israeli civilian deaths before this attack. Given its status as the occupying authority, Israelis are also responsible for settlement expansion in the West Bank and the siege of Gaza that has immiserated those people.
Yes, like I said, Hamas are like the Nazis: democratically elected by the population, seized power, and have ruled with the consent of the governed ever since.
I never said ALL Palestinians are responsible for this. That is a position you made up.
If there are more Palestinian civilian deaths, then you can blame the Palestinian government for that as well. They choose to make war, they refuse to make peace, and they choose to use human shields.
Why do you believe that building houses is morally equivalent to raping and murdering children?
The polling in how actual Palestinians feel doesn’t really support your touchy feely happy portrayal of their policy positions. Kill all the Jews and drive them into the sea is a fairly mainstream view there.
You can try to paint me as being a softy all you want but the widespread existence of antisemitic assholes doesn’t make it okay for people there to be bombed who didn’t ask to be born into this mess. Islamic extremists want me to be dead as much as anyone else so I definitely don’t have sympathy for them
Whether it is okay is beside the point. At this point it is clear it is a war to a decent percentage of people in the area, and in a war there is a lot of collateral damage.
If the Palestians don't want to be hurt by Hamas' behavior perhaps they should get away from areas controlled by Hamas? You seem to want some world where Israelis care just as much about Palestinians as their friends/family.
That is always a nice liberal fantasy, but when you come down to brass tacks, not how human psychology actually works.
Sure in some abstract sense my child's life is worth no more or less than some other child in Thailand and I should be willing to help that child just as much as my own. No one actually lives in that abstract place except wackadoos like Peter Singer. And then once people like him retreat to the motte of "well of course not everyone is equal from a particular perspective, of course you care more about your friends/family and devote more resources to them", well then the whole project dissolves because you are back to the same old normal world we live in.
If someone lives in an authoritarian regime where the de facto government advocates genocide against another people does that mean that they “reap what they have sown?” And deserve to die in return? I hope we haven’t stopped that far.
some palistinian civilians who themselves have done nothing wrong (like the Israeli citizens who have done nothing wrong) will die when Israel counterattacks. It is OK and in fact the right thing to feel bad about that even while supporting Israel. Don’t dehumanize. It’s not necessary to dehumanize Palestine in order to support Israel’s actions.
The harsh reality of war is that what individuals “deserve” stops being of primary concern. The Gazan pseudo-state has chosen to go to war with the state of Israel. The people of Gaza appear to be largely in support of this war. They, collectively, will experience the consequences of that war. It’s a cosmic injustice that those within Gaza who would counsel against war will die right along side the most rabid war-mongers, but this injustice is hardly unique to Gaza.
You accuse others of dehumanizing, but you are doing the same to some degree by projecting upon the “average civilian in Gaza” not humanity but your own preferred flavor of human, a peace loving soul who just wants to get along with their neighbor and survive.
Such people may exist in Gaza, but probably not as many as I suspect you’d like. Many others are right there chanting God is Great at the desecrated naked corpse of a raped young woman. Those people are humans too - just not the kind that is convenient for your beliefs.
Your point is well taken, but too many goddam Palestinians are dancing in the streets. (Those aren't false flag paid actors we see.) Can't really make excuses for that.
You can say “those people suck” without outright advocating like this poster that they deserve to be die and we shouldn’t feel bad about it.
I stand in the apparently controversial position that it’s OK to feel bad anytime civilians die.
Amazingly it’s possible to support Israel counterattacking and possibly even occupying Palestine permanently while still feeling bad for Palestinian civilians instead of monstering them. Imagine that.
Actually, I think you'll find several examples throughout history that sometimes, beating the barbarians until they beg for mercy does, in fact, stop the killing. Ask the Germans.
I honestly don't know which is worse: a grifter who cynically accepts and squanders funds donated in good faith, or a true believer who is hopelessly incompetent to run a multimillion-dollar enterprise entrusted to him. I suspect that Kendi is a little of both.
He argued that Kendi is not a grifter, but I don't think the essay addressed the question of whether he's a grossly incompetent manager of money and people. McWhorter did talk about this a bit with Glenn Loury, putting all the blame for the failure of the BU center on those who had mistakenly thought Kendi a scholar and an academic. It wasn't Kendi's fault, McWhorter says, that he got "swept up" into a position for which he wasn't qualified, for which "all of us" would have taken the money and the fame.
I think he's cutting Kendi way too much slack. Maybe he's going out of his way to defend him because otherwise people will assume, based on their fundamental disagreements, that he's part of the schadenfreude brigade.
I agree; as much as I have always liked John McWhorter, I think he tends to be a bit of a contrarian; even his linguistics takes I sometimes think can get a little out there. I admit I only read/saw the freeloaders' part of the initial Glenn Loury conversation with John about this, but Glenn brought up Kendi not entertaining a Q&A at a BU talk for which he got paid $40K and wasn't even an hour long, and John's response ended with "it's not his fault." I agree Kendi's probably more a true believer than grifter, but avoiding questions strikes me as cognizance that his POV isn't defensible or fit for academic discourse.
I am usually much more wary of true believers than of cynics. Cynics are just looking to get paid in some fashion, so you can buy them off, but the true believers will never relent. They cannot be persuaded, bribed or intimidated--they think they are doing the Lord's work, and thereby justify all manner of harm.
I've always loved the C.S. Lewis quote: "The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
There's a quote I forget but I keep meaning to find that basically says something to the effect of the capitalist can be satiated by his drives, but those driven by their own righteousness can never be satisfied.
It's not really a "saying" that women have to do what men do, only backwards and in heels.
It's a quotation often ascribed to Ginger Rogers, though it was actually a cartoonist Bob Thavez who wrote a comic with the line about Ginger having to do everything Fred Astaire did, backwards and in high heels.
My issue with all this race stuff, and trans stuff for that matter, is that it gets exported. I'm Australian, so I'm better than you Americans. That said, a lot of progressives here attempt to import all these ridiculous identity politics matters to Australia as though they're relevant. During the George Floyd aftermath there were protests over here, which made absolutely no sense whatsoever. America sneezes, and the world gets a cold.
Kennedy's garbage got postered over a lot of issues locally. Currently there's a referendum for the Indigenous Voice to parliament, and both the yes and no camps have built their whole campaigns around identity garbage.
Most of us don't want this, and don't care for it. Kennedy getting outed as an incompetent cunt (I'm Australian, I can say that) is deeply satisfying as a result, but the damage is done. His legacy is that he's already fucked everything.
You say that we export our cultural bullshit to you, but as an American parent who has seen every episode of Bluey MULTIPLE times, I’m going to have to remind you that it’s a 2-way street.
I love all of the "variants" that spun up across the anglosphere (and likely elsewhere) Canadians still managed to focus on anti black racism until (like Aus) they shifted gears to the plight of the natives. In the UK it became about the BAMEs and somehow still about police violence (including guns in some cases).
Oh they definitely spun the anti-police, anti-black-racism thing over here, but it was through the prism of Aboriginal deaths in custody. The problem with this is twofold:
1) Police don't operate the prisons, so they're a weird target for this criticism.
2) Per capita, Aboriginals are less likely to die in custody than any other group.
So the issue is that Aboriginals are in prison at a disproportionately high level, but that's because as a group they commit way more crime. Police don't actually have anything to do with that. They just arrest the people that commit the crimes after the fact.
Yep I've seen the "Aboriginal" concerns have skyrocketed. I'd of course wager to guess that it completely out of bounds to actually make the argument that the higher crime rate explains the stats just as it does over here.
Of course there is the ever existent bastion of "well why do they commit more crimes" that gets retreated to. Implying it is because of systemic racism in the form of both over and under policing, a country which meddlesome too much in their affairs and simultaneously doesn't give them enough support?
If I sound bitter it is because I can't stand a world that tacitly agrees to believe these absurd arguments.
For the Aboriginals the problem is multi faceted, and there's no easy cure. I don't think anyone is arguing that they don't get enough support over here, as they get way more support. Plenty of services are available to Aboriginals that aren't available to anyone else, but historically they've been directed by a bunch of non-Aboriginals that had no idea what was good for the Aboriginals in the first place.
Add to that the hundreds of different tribes across the nation, so there's never been a central body of them to chat to, all of who have differing cultural practices, and it gets more complicated still.
Very few would argue that they don't commit more crime. Almost everyone would admit that, albeit quietly in some cases. The question of what to do about it is complicated.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's not so much the case that America is imposing its culture on the world as the world is adopting/appropriating/imitating it. Whether for better or worse. Given how rapidly American media has rotted over the past few years, this may have a disproportionately large impact on people who only knew America through media.
This was a point I often made to Australians when I lived there, and I got a lot of pushback. But in my experience, many of them watched more American TV and followed American news more closely than I ever have. Conversely, the Aussies would always say that they did have their own culture and politics but they didn't seem very interested in talking about either. Maybe the Voice is an exception.
I was always of the mind that the Aussies should spread their wings and be a little more independent minded.
Australians had local content laws that were ripped away in a free trade deal with the US under the Howard government. From that point on we were saturated with American media and lost most of our own.
We've plenty of our own culture, it's just that we have to focus on what the bigger players or there do because that's what we'll get sucked into. The US goes to war, and we get dragged in each time. It's idiotic local policy that creates that cause and effect, but it's the reality of the situation.
I think we should be a Switzerland between the US and China, as both countries need us more than we need or want them, but that would require political bravery and politicians haven't been brave since Keating.
Australia's position within Asia, and in terms of global coverage, is a massive boon to the US. This is most evident in the realm of signals intelligence, but also in terms of their ability to project force. China wants Australia for very similar reasons.
Like what? Trade? China eclipses the US on that front. Politically? The US leans on Australia heavily at the UN whenever they go to war. Militarily an alliance is helpful, but Australia is hardly in the business of invading anywhere, and the threats to Australia are Indonesia, one of our major trading partners, and China, our largest trading partner. The only thing I can think of is intelligence sharing, in which we're a vital player anyway.
So yeah, the US gets a lot from us. We could get more from them.
It seemed to me that many of the Australians I talked to felt like they were already there. Like they were more advanced in some cultural way than Americans, but they would never disavow anything about America that they actually liked, which was an awful lot.
So we're probably not that far apart in our assessment here.
There's a lot of American things we like, but culturally we're very different. Taking yourself seriously over here is a no no, and we don't need to explain or telegraph when we joking. We're way more fatalistic than Americans, too.
So we're not superior, but many American behaviours are the antithesis of us. As a result, we'll play with Americans, socially, like a cat plays with a mouse. They often don't know this is happening, and when they find out they get deeply annoyed.
`we'll play with Americans, socially, like a cat plays with a mouse...they get deeply annoyed'
As one does around annoying people.
In any case, congratulations on living in a continent-sized Nevada where you have to dodge wave-upon-wave of emu and kangaroos ten minutes outside any city!
Two Spirit was a Canuck creation, derived from (but not in current usage authentic to) a belief system in some indigenous groups. I think land acknowledgements and "welcome to country" started in Australia.
Welcome to country is likely to have started over here in Australia, as it was an Aboriginal tradition to ask for permission to enter other tribal territory in many areas. It's a nice tradition to to your hat to, that's now an empty diatribe that gets droned out at the start of most formal events.
If an elder comes along to welcome everyone to the land, totally fine. I think that's a decent thing to do. When a whole bunch of people without Aboriginal heritage mention Aboriginal tribes they have no link to, to a bunch of people that have no link to them, I find that utterly confusing.
Yeah my issue with the "welcome" is the fact it's only one way. There's no real "ask" and no framework for the elder to say "no you're not welcome, get your stupid conference off my land". It's a pantomime to salve the guilt of liberal whites and it's nauseating. ("see? The natives are so friendly they WANTED us here!", said every smug colonizer of the last millennium).
Well, the elders choose which events to attend. If they're not there then it'll be an empty land acknowledgement from a non-Indigenous person.
So they can say no, just they're unlikely to do so at most events that they've agreed to open. Their absence at a large event should speak volumes... but it doesn't because the empty land acknowledgement seems to do the trick.
Interesting. I've never really unpacked that before. Perhaps they are objecting to many things by refusing them.
Right. I picture these corps doing land acknowledgments while fully prepared to arrest or maim anybody from the acknowledged groups stepping onto the property unauthorized. Fucking joke.
I work in an historically stuffy white field (ok it's academic publishing). We need to seek out "diverse" people to contribute to the product. It was recently brought up that Canada and Australia are good for this in part because people will not only put pronouns in their signatures, but will also indicate whether they identify as *settlers* or not. Sounds like they got the US beat.
I haven't seen that here in Australia, as of yet. I've no doubt some people are doing this, but it hasn't captured the public conscienceness to the same degree that pronouns have.
I listened to Josh Szeps on Sam Harris about this Voice thing the other day. I admit to being American and never having heard of Szeps or the issue before. He dispassionately laid out for and against arguments. Frankly the against arguments made more sense to me--how can you undo this once its done and who's to know in whose hands and under what regime such a thing would play out. Which is to say I hear you friend, but it sounds like Oz has it's own cray-cray idiosyncratic identity politics thing going on...
Szeps is doing a very good job of iron-manning the arguments for both sides, but the campaign over here and online turmoil have been directly out of the American playbook. The points Szeps is making are good... and are very rarely made by either of the official campaigns. Instead it's boiling down to, "If you don't vote yes, you're a racist," and, "Vote no BECAUSE you're a racist (wink)."
A lot of that has local flavour, but it's certainly aping a lot of American trends.
Uh, if you claim that Australian protests over police brutality toward dark-skinned folk are not "relevant" and "make no sense whatsoever," you're either cripplingly ignorant of your own country's affairs or trying to pull a snow job:
It’s unfortunate that the FrigidWind Center to build a perpetual motion machine did not receive the same funding. It would have produced at least as much as Kendi.
It’s an incredibly subtle point and Jesse brushed up against it but there’s a solution that’s superior to “defund the police” that isn’t just “hope for them to not become hyper aggressive and militarized”.
Break the police unions.
I don’t care how you do it. I don’t care how many political careers need to be sacrificed to achieve it. But do that and you’ve solved your problem. They work for us, they serve us, and you know why? Because we pay them. Their jobs exist because of our taxes. In what other employment relationship does the employee call all of the shots? We control the purse strings; it should be up to us how they behave, what equipment they possess, and who gets hired/fired/promoted.
Break the unions, remind the employees who they answer to, fire the low performers, keep the one who prove worthy of the job.
This argument is identical to the argument to break all unions, which strikes me as, uh, not a coincidence?
I think there are good arguments for removing discipline over use of force from the bargaining process-- it should not be up to some arbitrator whether a cop who shoots a homeless guy gets his gun and badge back-- but the idea that they shouldn't have the same rights as any other employee to negotiate over pay and benefits is corporatist claptrap.
No, because “all unions” includes both public sector and private sector unions. The latter are fine(ish), but the former? Nah. You either get a monopoly over supply OR strong labor protections. It’s one or the other, you choose. Don’t like it? Maybe you’re not cut out for being a cop, try art school.
“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.
The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations.”
-Far-right talking points of the highly uncivilized Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Other policies that FDR's administration supported include such greatest hits as (off the top of my head) racial segregation of the military, so no, I do not feel in some way bound to conform to his view of things.
LOL, did you just get out of a coma? Take a look at the history of policing in this country, or in Canada, or <gestures at communist nations both current and historical> and tell me what exactly was “civilized” about the way they treated people.
TIL “far right” means “wanting to limit the state’s ability to leverage its monopoly on violence”. Someone tell the protesters from 2020 that they’re basically Chris Rufo!
The day that I can run this argument through chatGPT and have it say, “pretty weak; have you considered posting this on Reddit in 2006?” is the day I’ll believe that AI has not only arrived but is friendly.
What kind of school did you go to where kindergarten teachers choked unarmed people to death by the way? That must be the reason you’re trying to draw an equivalence between two dramatically different professions that have next to nothing in common other than public funding. It would be incredibly dumb to make such a facile connection otherwise, so I feel bad for your fellow schoolmates that you had to deal with that trauma.
Now, I’m a bit worried Chris Hansen is gonna bust into my den and expose me for trying to take advantage of an intellectual adolescent but let me spell it out for you: “he who pays the piper calls the tune”. There’s a reason that phrase has existed for ages: the person paying for something gets to define the terms of service. What you seem to want is for the piper to be paid and choose what tune to play while beating the shit out of people and violating constitutional rights. And why? Just because of some weird fetishization of labor.
This is a bit of a reductio ad Hitler but I doubt you can handle anything more subtle than a banal swipe at someone who’s the epitome of “far right” so: You know the people standing on guard towers in Dachau? They were working for a paycheck. They all lost their jobs abruptly in April 1945 during a hostile takeover of their office space, but I’m not too disappointed - because performing a task in exchange for money doesn’t make you special, and it doesn’t give you any kind of moral superiority.
I don’t care that cops work. So do washing machines. I don’t get to opt out of paying their salaries, so I should get to be choosy about whose labor I pay for. I wouldn’t pay a kindergarten teacher who choked kids out and planted sugar cookies on them; I don’t want to pay for bad cops either.
Yeah, those uncivilized Germans don’t allow their Beamters to strike. I went to Munich and they didn’t have paved roads or electricity, so it’s definitely a backward place.
The way you do this indirectly is by enabling school choice. Make them compete with every other provider, acknowledging that education is a commodity that private actors need to budget for to a degree that suits them, just like everything else. Public schools will either compete or fold, but at least they’ll have a chance. What they won’t have is a monopoly on supply, or an ability to raise prices without commensurate service improvements.
As someone who is in a public sector job and a union member, if you break the public sector union, then anyone who has a modicum of experience and knowledge will leave in droves. Our pay is already 20% below comparable private sector salaries, but the job stability and benefits make it an appealing trade off for a lot of people. And as someone who is disabled, I feel a lot safer knowing there’s a union that has my back.
The difference with a police union is that they do not care what lengths they have to go to, because those are the personalities that tend to make up police forces themselves. With my union, if I break the law in the course of my job, I’m on my own.
Police unions are a creature unto themselves, and even other union members tend not to like them.
>The difference with a police union is that they do not care what lengths they have to go to
Oh it is? Our school district had strike>pandemic>strike, all while their compensation has grown much faster than the general populations. Additionally a 5 day school week basically never happens now, to the extent the kids and parents are surprised if there is a full week of classes.
School days get chiseled down each year. It is very clear the teachers are out for number 1 above all else, it is no different than the police at all.
Yes, unions do negotiate for the benefit of their members. That’s kind of their purpose. But generally speaking, teachers unions don’t argue that their members are above the law, as police unions often do. If a teacher assaults a student, they almost always go to jail, or at least are stripped of their license and aren’t allowed to teach anymore. Police unions are notorious for shuffling murderous cops around to help them avoid culpability.
Want to crack down on police brutality? End their unions. The far leftists that hijacked the conversation during the 2020 BLM riots are incapable of thinking that a union could do wrong, so they went for defund because Reagan bad.
I was talking to another academic about Kendi's center. He said he has to account for every penny of an operating budget in the low five figures for his department, and he couldn't understand the complete lack of financial oversight. Does anyone understand better than I do what went on here?
My best guess, as someone who hasn't followed this story super closely, is that Kendi was perceived as too important and his donors as too substantial to second-guess, so Kendi was basically given carte blanche. Is that correct?
Peevishly, I want to add that all of the $43 million could have done a lot of good for disproportionately minority students, and been accounted for, if it had gone into existing first-gen scholarship funds and related programs that support first-gen students in completing their degrees.
But I suspect Kendi wouldn't have been interested in dumping money into existing programs that don't bring attention to his take on American life, and he probably wouldn't have gotten multimillion donations from tech luminaries for that project, either.
I’m a department chair at a state university. I need two budget officers to sign off on a $30 coffee/snacks expense for a faculty meeting. I’m trying to give away a $600 gift from a donor to some worthy students, and I need to triangulate between three different offices.
I can’t believe Kendi had absolutely no oversight over how he could use $42 million (or however many millions his center had after the University took their cut–he did not have a $42 mil budget.) I *can* believe that the people overseeing it were not asking too many questions about how the money was being spent.
Was there something about the way Kendi’s centre was set up & funded that meant there wasn’t the same kind of oversight there would be for a normal department?
I don’t doubt there are political reasons why people didn’t ask to many questions, but I also wonder if structurally it was in a position to go longer without anyone noticing?
Typically private money has fewer strings attached than public money. When I was in my PhD program we sometimes had food delivered to our meetings but we had to be very careful it was using our industry donations (which were very small in comparison) because NSF money strictly forbids this use case.
Thank makes sense and I wonder if both the emperor’s lack of clothes and financial improprieties would have been spotted a lot quicker if he’d been more heavily reliant on public money.
There’s no way he’d get that kind of a leash with public funding, it’s not so much that funding agencies aren’t super-woke (they all require impact statements full of social justice talk these days) but that they’re small-c conservative and wouldn’t give a huge research grant to someone without a proven research track record.
Yes, it’s an interesting phenomenon as whilst there’s probably plenty of blame to place on BU for allowing themselves to be associated with something so vacuous, it’s the private money of credulous fools that ultimately allowed him to set the whole thing up. That in term is driven by credulous medical a culture that’s allowed Kendi’s absurd ideas to permeate the culture largely unchallenged.
So much stupidity could be avoided if more people actually thought about this stuff critically.
Yes, it’s very much like the concept of original sin except they don’t have any redeeming grace on offer in the anti-racist religion. White people are irredeemably racist in this ideology.
Protestants believe in original sin as well. Catholics believe it is redeemed through baptism, although people retain a tendency to sinfulness. Some Protestants are actually closer to the “whiteness” doctrine, believing that human sinfulness is innate and not avoidable through free will.
The conservative position is now that coercing students into Christian prayer with ostentatious public displays is not an establishment clause violation, erecting giant Latin crosses on public land is not an establishment clause violation, but being ideologically anti-racist is an establishment clause violation.
I don't think that being a true believer is a defense to fraud.
Consider Billy McFarland. He truly thought he was going to deliver an amazing music festival experience for his customers. However, he was flying by the seat of his pants, selling tickets to something that no rational observer would believe was actually going to happen as advertised. In the end, Fyre Festival became a byword for fraud.
Kendi, no matter his true believer status, sold something that he had no good reason to believe that he could deliver on.
Not to mention that true believers of all stripes commit all manner of atrocities around the world. Being a "true believer" is generally not a good thing.
It can be. Fraud requires a lot of very specific elements, among which is making a representation that the defendant knows to be false at the time of the representation ("scienter," in the old Law French).
If I take donations thinking that I'm going to do x, but later change my mind and end up using them to do y, that may be a breach of contract, or even the tort of conversion, but it's probably not fraud.
On the email exchange Jesse was having, I disagree with the idea that you can be certain that the money wouldn’t have gone anywhere better.
Of course their are idiots who only give these sorts of sums to fashionable things and it’s really nothing more than virtue signalling. However, I think there’s also people who really think ‘I have a lot of money I’d like to do some good with it’ who if the intellectual climate wasn’t so bankrupt and people who should know better hadn’t elevated someone so intellectually vacuous, there’s a chance a actual serious ideas would have got more prominence and at least a chunk of the money may have gone in that direction rather than idiocy Kendi was pushing.
Yeah I actually suspect that the inverse is likely to be more true. We are one of the most charitable nations in the world, but even our resources have limits, and our charitable giving does not keep up with the demand. Kendi added demand to the list, and helped to make it a priority within multiple societies. I wouldn't be surprised if at least one of the more useful charities got less funding then previous years due to the redirection of the public interest.
I think even if you ring fenced it to just academic research, in a healthy intellectual climate someone like Roland Fryer would be a household name & having vast sums chucked at him, not a fraud like Kendi.
I tend to agree with John McWhorter that the real villains are the enablers who must have been able to read Kendi & see there was nothing there, yet for non intellectual reasons pretended the emperor was wearing a tailored suit.
If this leads to The Atlantic ditching him I will miss Kemele Foster reading sections out loud, as it always brought a laugh.
During the Kendi section - Katie and Jesse pointed out that even though Kendi tries to claim otherwise, currently it is clearly beneficial to be a member of an "under-represented" or "marginalized" group for selling books/ideas getting these positions.
They missed out on one of Kendi's accidental admissions that this is true - a couple years ago he actually deleted a tweet that basically showed he knows this is currently beneficial.
"Kendi, a humanities professor at Boston University, tweeted an article Friday by The Hill citing a study that found 34% of White students who applied to colleges and universities falsely claimed they were a racial minority on their application and that 77% of them were accepted."
I really wish people would stop using "the racial reckoning" to refer to the hysteria around race from 2020 (or 2014 depending on where you want to track it).
There was no reckoning, there was actually the opposite of any introspection or actual conversation about race, more a lot of dictated new norms which thankfully are starting to be shed.
I hope (and doubt) that in a few years we can look back on this and the lies + misrepresentations that worked the country into a state where apologies and encouragements for riots and removing the police were coming out of the mouths of prominent politicians and nearly every major news outlet, while businesses and schools are advancing racial discrimination as best HR practices.
...sigh
I wonder if all the people who badgered their friends to donate to causes they had spent literal seconds researching feel foolish for shouting down people to give their money away during a financially difficult period (pandemic), especially knowing what we know now about even the most vaunted of these “charities.”
(They do not.)
I always thought the term “reckoning” was used facetiously in this context
lol
I like how Jesse referred to “wreck” as in “wreckening” toward the end of the episode. More apt.
Not just politicians and news outlets but normally-sane people in our everyday lives.
Ok but have you considered that it's a catchy term
A HUGE question I don't have time at the moment to express more fully: HOW do "we" "welcome back" all the fools who spent all this time / energy / $$ on the mass stupidity??? (I was one of those fools. Not anymore.)
I think we just acknowledge that it’s very easy to be fooled and swept up in a mass movement. See: tulip fever.
Well. I never really "kicked them out" so there's nothing to welcome them back to.
There are some I don't socialize with as much anymore, but it wasn't because I ejected them. . . it was just all the absurd proselytizing and judginess. And also the almost comical parodies of clueless upper class, white casual white racism masking as being an "ally".
So, you know, just cut that shit out and we can hang again.
What are the odds Henry Rogers would have been given the time of day hadn't he changed his name to "Ibram X. Kendi"? It's so pretentious, so ClusterB, it's nauseating. You've got to be a major sucker to buy into this.
The name is all part of the performance.
I didn't realise he'd made a name change!
The Fifth Column guys were talking about his name change in a recent episode. I hadn't realized it either!
Cultural appropriation
It is so Cluster B! I wonder why these are proliferating. Is it the cultural moment that encourages them or something else?
I love your Icelandic honesty! His behavior is so cluster B, you are right on.
lol
In other news, the darlings of the international left just murdered over twelve hundred innocent men women and children in southern Israel. One woman’s naked body was paraded through Gaza cheered on by crowds.
Enjoy your weekend.
But but but they lost a war 70 years ago! No one has ever lost a war before, and they surely would have been gracious humane winners had they won.
I’ve seen this described as a terrorist attack. It’s not. Hamas is the de facto ruling party of Gaza - this was a war crime. If you want a two state solution, these guys will be one of the states. These guys who just kidnapped, murdered, and did who knows what else to a 30 year old peace protester, stripped her, and paraded her through the street shouting “God is great”.
Hamas is also de jure the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority. They won the last elections, however long ago those were.
Yes that’s true. It’s much harder to claim “Palestinians just want peace and human rights” when they overwhelmingly support a group that engages in open warfare against Israel and fundamentally believes in eliminating it as a nation.
To play devil's advocate on behalf of the idiots who believe it, it's almost been more than a decade since Hamas won that election, so it's *possible* that Hamas would not be elected today.
I mean, they would, because the party running the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, Fatah, is so corrupt and so reliant on Israeli security cooperation to stay in power, that they (Fatah) would almost certainly be wiped out in new elections, mostly to Hamas' benefit.
Polling does seem to indicate that Gazans are kinda fed up with Hamas too, but more because of their own corruption, lack of elections, etc than due to a fundamental disagreement with their goals.
I saw a set of polls from mid 2022 that indicated that a strong majority of Gazans believe that long term Palestine should be the entire “river to the sea” area (i.e. no more Israel) but short term there views were at least somewhat more pragmatic.
They did win the election in Gaza. I believe Mahmoud Abbas actually dissolved the parliament and elections haven't been held since.
Hamas' official governing role of Gaza has about the same half-life right now as Paulie the chauffer did in _The Godfather_
Oh man I am so excited to go on social media and see people I normally like and respect give some awful take about how this is somehow justified🤩
I lost some respect for Dave Smith who normally has pretty good anti war takes but now seems to be justifying the attack by Hamas. I get Israel has been shitty too. There's no real good guy is this never ending war, but I don't know. It still sucks.
I suspect there will be a segment on this in a future BarPod...
You know I actually haven’t seen a lot of this, less than is typical I think due to the videos, kidnappings etc. I think it’s about as fringe as the pro Russia in Ukraine left (which horseshoes together with the pro Russia right).
If people are saying that they feel bad for what’s about to happen to palistinian citizens I don’t think that’s the same as justifying what hamas did.
That woman wasn't even Israeli. She was a German tourist in Israel for a music festival that wanted to promote peace.
Wow, in that case, maybe the world will actually give a shit.
There's a WaPo article that says that her family first found out about her death and identified her by that video because they recognized her hair and tattoos.
I hope that’s not true. That’s so horrible I can’t even wrap my mind around it.
I heard something today where her family said it was true. They want the video to be seen, too. It's horrific.
I'm still reeling from reading about young parents of 10 month old twins who realized the terrorists were at their door so proceeded to hide their babies in the house before the parents were killed. IDF found the babies alive, thankfully, after their parents had been dead for 12-14 hours. As a twin mom, this wrecked me.
Or the grandmother who was filmed on her phone being murdered, and they guys who killed her uploaded it to her Facebook wall and that's how her granddaughter found out... but seeing grandma get murdered in a video on Facebook...
I’m torn. I’m avoiding these videos etc because I don’t want that stuff in my brain but then I wonder if they would want me to witness? Or is it just horror porn now? I felt the same way about the 911 footage. I don’t really know what to do.
No mention in German media.
Edit: it's now slowly filtering through
Fucking disappointed as hell that some NYC lefty groups decided NOW was a good time to have a counter-demo in support of the Palestinians. WTF?????
Spare us the platitudes and both sideisms. This isn’t a tragedy for the Palestinian people, they’ve been dancing in the streets for hours and their supporters online can barely contain their glee.
The time to choose non-violence was BEFORE the rape and massacre. Now Palestine will reap what it has sown and it couldn’t be more deserved.
It’s horrifying and terrible what happened, but this is still a scary as fuck comment.
Not all Palestinians are Hamas. Not all Israelis support violence against Palestinians either. Stop dehumanizing “the enemy”.
I’m sure it will come as great comfort to the ten year olds with their throat slits, the young women who were raped to death, the senior citizens gunned down at a bus stop and the families shot execution style inside their homes, not to mention the hostages currently being tortured inside Gaza, that somewhere, somehow, there might be a Palestinian who doesn’t agree with what is happening to them.
This is how authoritarian regimes work: Hamas was democratically elected by the Palestinian people to represent them, they rule with the consent of their government. The Palestinian people marched out to help them commit this crime against humanity and cheered them on as they paraded the naked corpses of their victims through the street. If there are some Palestinians who don’t like it, they are irrelevant. The same way the existence of Germans who didn’t agree with the Nazis were also irrelevant. The Nazis still started a world war, the Nazis still committed a genocide, and the Nazis faced the consequences of their actions. This isn’t going to be any different.
I’m not dehumanizing anyone by saying this. If you’re looking for dehumanization, look at what Hamas is doing to their innocent victims. Look carefully, and don’t look away. When people tell you who they are, believe them. Palestine, not merely Hamas, but Palestine is telling us that they are not only the enemy of Israel, but the enemy of decent people everywhere. If Palestine wants to be recognized as a country, they have to be prepared to be criticized like a country, and that’s what I’m doing. Cope.
I get that it’s an emotionally charged topic for a lot of people and that’s why I generally never engage when it comes to the whole Israel-Palestine mess. I’m sorry for your pain. I’m from a country that had its fair share of conflict and being the oppressor as well as suffering immense casualties. I have seen and continue to see the same types of language used over and over to help further violence and it’s just very disheartening that nothing ever seems to change. That really is all.
Things are going to change now. Buckle up.
Well said. All of it. If Palestinians are so worthy of compassion from the world, then maybe participating in mass rapes and executions of women, children, and the elderly aren't the way to win sympathy.
People everywhere are worthy of compassion. If an individual has committed a crime then hold them accountable. It’s not that hard - Do not vilify every person based on their nationality or race.
This type of rhetoric is, like eh said, scary.
`Hamas was democratically elected by the Palestinian people to represent them'
Hamas won an election something like 17 years ago; there hasn't been an election since.
`The Palestinian people marched out to help them commit this crime... If there are some Palestinians who don’t like it, they are irrelevant.'
Fair enough. but then you need to admit that all Israelis are responsible for there being 10x as many Palestinian civilian deaths as there were Israeli civilian deaths before this attack. Given its status as the occupying authority, Israelis are also responsible for settlement expansion in the West Bank and the siege of Gaza that has immiserated those people.
Yes, like I said, Hamas are like the Nazis: democratically elected by the population, seized power, and have ruled with the consent of the governed ever since.
I never said ALL Palestinians are responsible for this. That is a position you made up.
If there are more Palestinian civilian deaths, then you can blame the Palestinian government for that as well. They choose to make war, they refuse to make peace, and they choose to use human shields.
Why do you believe that building houses is morally equivalent to raping and murdering children?
The polling in how actual Palestinians feel doesn’t really support your touchy feely happy portrayal of their policy positions. Kill all the Jews and drive them into the sea is a fairly mainstream view there.
You can try to paint me as being a softy all you want but the widespread existence of antisemitic assholes doesn’t make it okay for people there to be bombed who didn’t ask to be born into this mess. Islamic extremists want me to be dead as much as anyone else so I definitely don’t have sympathy for them
Whether it is okay is beside the point. At this point it is clear it is a war to a decent percentage of people in the area, and in a war there is a lot of collateral damage.
If the Palestians don't want to be hurt by Hamas' behavior perhaps they should get away from areas controlled by Hamas? You seem to want some world where Israelis care just as much about Palestinians as their friends/family.
That is always a nice liberal fantasy, but when you come down to brass tacks, not how human psychology actually works.
Sure in some abstract sense my child's life is worth no more or less than some other child in Thailand and I should be willing to help that child just as much as my own. No one actually lives in that abstract place except wackadoos like Peter Singer. And then once people like him retreat to the motte of "well of course not everyone is equal from a particular perspective, of course you care more about your friends/family and devote more resources to them", well then the whole project dissolves because you are back to the same old normal world we live in.
If someone lives in an authoritarian regime where the de facto government advocates genocide against another people does that mean that they “reap what they have sown?” And deserve to die in return? I hope we haven’t stopped that far.
some palistinian civilians who themselves have done nothing wrong (like the Israeli citizens who have done nothing wrong) will die when Israel counterattacks. It is OK and in fact the right thing to feel bad about that even while supporting Israel. Don’t dehumanize. It’s not necessary to dehumanize Palestine in order to support Israel’s actions.
The harsh reality of war is that what individuals “deserve” stops being of primary concern. The Gazan pseudo-state has chosen to go to war with the state of Israel. The people of Gaza appear to be largely in support of this war. They, collectively, will experience the consequences of that war. It’s a cosmic injustice that those within Gaza who would counsel against war will die right along side the most rabid war-mongers, but this injustice is hardly unique to Gaza.
You accuse others of dehumanizing, but you are doing the same to some degree by projecting upon the “average civilian in Gaza” not humanity but your own preferred flavor of human, a peace loving soul who just wants to get along with their neighbor and survive.
Such people may exist in Gaza, but probably not as many as I suspect you’d like. Many others are right there chanting God is Great at the desecrated naked corpse of a raped young woman. Those people are humans too - just not the kind that is convenient for your beliefs.
Your point is well taken, but too many goddam Palestinians are dancing in the streets. (Those aren't false flag paid actors we see.) Can't really make excuses for that.
You can say “those people suck” without outright advocating like this poster that they deserve to be die and we shouldn’t feel bad about it.
I stand in the apparently controversial position that it’s OK to feel bad anytime civilians die.
Amazingly it’s possible to support Israel counterattacking and possibly even occupying Palestine permanently while still feeling bad for Palestinian civilians instead of monstering them. Imagine that.
We are in agreement.
Seriously. Maybe we can not want anyone’s civilians to be murdered/terrorized?
Actually, I think you'll find several examples throughout history that sometimes, beating the barbarians until they beg for mercy does, in fact, stop the killing. Ask the Germans.
Wonder if Hilary Clinton thinks the Hamas cult needs to be deprogrammed?
Surely she doesn't think they're as dangerous as the Ultra MAGA....
Perhaps she is saving her condemnation for the soon-to-be-revealed Hyper Hamas
Ask the Taliban.
Alas for the Palestinians, Gaza is not Afghanistan.
It's not Germany either
I honestly don't know which is worse: a grifter who cynically accepts and squanders funds donated in good faith, or a true believer who is hopelessly incompetent to run a multimillion-dollar enterprise entrusted to him. I suspect that Kendi is a little of both.
I thought McWhorter wrote really well about this. A very good faith essay.
I think McWhorter's piece was prior to the news breaking of the brother in law getting a massive chunk of cash for real estate.
He argued that Kendi is not a grifter, but I don't think the essay addressed the question of whether he's a grossly incompetent manager of money and people. McWhorter did talk about this a bit with Glenn Loury, putting all the blame for the failure of the BU center on those who had mistakenly thought Kendi a scholar and an academic. It wasn't Kendi's fault, McWhorter says, that he got "swept up" into a position for which he wasn't qualified, for which "all of us" would have taken the money and the fame.
I think he's cutting Kendi way too much slack. Maybe he's going out of his way to defend him because otherwise people will assume, based on their fundamental disagreements, that he's part of the schadenfreude brigade.
I agree; as much as I have always liked John McWhorter, I think he tends to be a bit of a contrarian; even his linguistics takes I sometimes think can get a little out there. I admit I only read/saw the freeloaders' part of the initial Glenn Loury conversation with John about this, but Glenn brought up Kendi not entertaining a Q&A at a BU talk for which he got paid $40K and wasn't even an hour long, and John's response ended with "it's not his fault." I agree Kendi's probably more a true believer than grifter, but avoiding questions strikes me as cognizance that his POV isn't defensible or fit for academic discourse.
I am usually much more wary of true believers than of cynics. Cynics are just looking to get paid in some fashion, so you can buy them off, but the true believers will never relent. They cannot be persuaded, bribed or intimidated--they think they are doing the Lord's work, and thereby justify all manner of harm.
I've always loved the C.S. Lewis quote: "The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
Love that quote.
So, God Botherers
You've articulated what's scaring me about this whole culture war moment.
True believers can be terrifying.
Unless they believe in a magic man that tells them that they’re forgiven, no matter what.
There's a quote I forget but I keep meaning to find that basically says something to the effect of the capitalist can be satiated by his drives, but those driven by their own righteousness can never be satisfied.
And when you have a grifter as leader and true believers as followers (e.g. MAGA), you have a truly dangerous "movement."
It's not really a "saying" that women have to do what men do, only backwards and in heels.
It's a quotation often ascribed to Ginger Rogers, though it was actually a cartoonist Bob Thavez who wrote a comic with the line about Ginger having to do everything Fred Astaire did, backwards and in high heels.
https://oupacademic.tumblr.com/post/74326381160/misquotation-ginger-rogers
When they were listing out all the different confusing BLM groups I couldn’t not think of the Judean People’s Front in Life of Brian...
Spliter
My issue with all this race stuff, and trans stuff for that matter, is that it gets exported. I'm Australian, so I'm better than you Americans. That said, a lot of progressives here attempt to import all these ridiculous identity politics matters to Australia as though they're relevant. During the George Floyd aftermath there were protests over here, which made absolutely no sense whatsoever. America sneezes, and the world gets a cold.
Kennedy's garbage got postered over a lot of issues locally. Currently there's a referendum for the Indigenous Voice to parliament, and both the yes and no camps have built their whole campaigns around identity garbage.
Most of us don't want this, and don't care for it. Kennedy getting outed as an incompetent cunt (I'm Australian, I can say that) is deeply satisfying as a result, but the damage is done. His legacy is that he's already fucked everything.
You say that we export our cultural bullshit to you, but as an American parent who has seen every episode of Bluey MULTIPLE times, I’m going to have to remind you that it’s a 2-way street.
You got Bluey. We got Kardashians. You're still ahead in this trade.
Yeah, I don’t think we will ever be able to make up for the Kardashians.
That's ONLY because the Australians are holding back their most devastating weapon: ... No, not emus. VEGEMITE!
I love all of the "variants" that spun up across the anglosphere (and likely elsewhere) Canadians still managed to focus on anti black racism until (like Aus) they shifted gears to the plight of the natives. In the UK it became about the BAMEs and somehow still about police violence (including guns in some cases).
Oh they definitely spun the anti-police, anti-black-racism thing over here, but it was through the prism of Aboriginal deaths in custody. The problem with this is twofold:
1) Police don't operate the prisons, so they're a weird target for this criticism.
2) Per capita, Aboriginals are less likely to die in custody than any other group.
So the issue is that Aboriginals are in prison at a disproportionately high level, but that's because as a group they commit way more crime. Police don't actually have anything to do with that. They just arrest the people that commit the crimes after the fact.
Yep I've seen the "Aboriginal" concerns have skyrocketed. I'd of course wager to guess that it completely out of bounds to actually make the argument that the higher crime rate explains the stats just as it does over here.
Of course there is the ever existent bastion of "well why do they commit more crimes" that gets retreated to. Implying it is because of systemic racism in the form of both over and under policing, a country which meddlesome too much in their affairs and simultaneously doesn't give them enough support?
If I sound bitter it is because I can't stand a world that tacitly agrees to believe these absurd arguments.
For the Aboriginals the problem is multi faceted, and there's no easy cure. I don't think anyone is arguing that they don't get enough support over here, as they get way more support. Plenty of services are available to Aboriginals that aren't available to anyone else, but historically they've been directed by a bunch of non-Aboriginals that had no idea what was good for the Aboriginals in the first place.
Add to that the hundreds of different tribes across the nation, so there's never been a central body of them to chat to, all of who have differing cultural practices, and it gets more complicated still.
Very few would argue that they don't commit more crime. Almost everyone would admit that, albeit quietly in some cases. The question of what to do about it is complicated.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's not so much the case that America is imposing its culture on the world as the world is adopting/appropriating/imitating it. Whether for better or worse. Given how rapidly American media has rotted over the past few years, this may have a disproportionately large impact on people who only knew America through media.
This was a point I often made to Australians when I lived there, and I got a lot of pushback. But in my experience, many of them watched more American TV and followed American news more closely than I ever have. Conversely, the Aussies would always say that they did have their own culture and politics but they didn't seem very interested in talking about either. Maybe the Voice is an exception.
I was always of the mind that the Aussies should spread their wings and be a little more independent minded.
Australians had local content laws that were ripped away in a free trade deal with the US under the Howard government. From that point on we were saturated with American media and lost most of our own.
We've plenty of our own culture, it's just that we have to focus on what the bigger players or there do because that's what we'll get sucked into. The US goes to war, and we get dragged in each time. It's idiotic local policy that creates that cause and effect, but it's the reality of the situation.
I think we should be a Switzerland between the US and China, as both countries need us more than we need or want them, but that would require political bravery and politicians haven't been brave since Keating.
Sorry, did you say that the US needs Australia more than Australia needs the US? Did I misread that?
You didn't.
Australia's position within Asia, and in terms of global coverage, is a massive boon to the US. This is most evident in the realm of signals intelligence, but also in terms of their ability to project force. China wants Australia for very similar reasons.
And considering every other aspect of geopolitics besides force projection? I just can't believe anyone would believe that
Like what? Trade? China eclipses the US on that front. Politically? The US leans on Australia heavily at the UN whenever they go to war. Militarily an alliance is helpful, but Australia is hardly in the business of invading anywhere, and the threats to Australia are Indonesia, one of our major trading partners, and China, our largest trading partner. The only thing I can think of is intelligence sharing, in which we're a vital player anyway.
So yeah, the US gets a lot from us. We could get more from them.
It seemed to me that many of the Australians I talked to felt like they were already there. Like they were more advanced in some cultural way than Americans, but they would never disavow anything about America that they actually liked, which was an awful lot.
So we're probably not that far apart in our assessment here.
There's a lot of American things we like, but culturally we're very different. Taking yourself seriously over here is a no no, and we don't need to explain or telegraph when we joking. We're way more fatalistic than Americans, too.
So we're not superior, but many American behaviours are the antithesis of us. As a result, we'll play with Americans, socially, like a cat plays with a mouse. They often don't know this is happening, and when they find out they get deeply annoyed.
`Taking yourself seriously over here is a no no'
Thread backs this up.
`we'll play with Americans, socially, like a cat plays with a mouse...they get deeply annoyed'
As one does around annoying people.
In any case, congratulations on living in a continent-sized Nevada where you have to dodge wave-upon-wave of emu and kangaroos ten minutes outside any city!
`Australians had local content laws that were ripped away in a free trade deal with the US...'
Maybe you shouldn't have done that? Not sure why you're blaming us for you giving up your culture and importing ours?
At least you still have Daniel Johns. He's doing interesting things, culturally.
Didn’t land acknowledgment and the concept of two spirit also originate in Canada before catching on in the US?
Two Spirit was a Canuck creation, derived from (but not in current usage authentic to) a belief system in some indigenous groups. I think land acknowledgements and "welcome to country" started in Australia.
Welcome to country is likely to have started over here in Australia, as it was an Aboriginal tradition to ask for permission to enter other tribal territory in many areas. It's a nice tradition to to your hat to, that's now an empty diatribe that gets droned out at the start of most formal events.
If an elder comes along to welcome everyone to the land, totally fine. I think that's a decent thing to do. When a whole bunch of people without Aboriginal heritage mention Aboriginal tribes they have no link to, to a bunch of people that have no link to them, I find that utterly confusing.
Yeah my issue with the "welcome" is the fact it's only one way. There's no real "ask" and no framework for the elder to say "no you're not welcome, get your stupid conference off my land". It's a pantomime to salve the guilt of liberal whites and it's nauseating. ("see? The natives are so friendly they WANTED us here!", said every smug colonizer of the last millennium).
Expanded thoughts on the issue here https://fieldnotes.katrinagulliver.com/p/antidecolonial
Well, the elders choose which events to attend. If they're not there then it'll be an empty land acknowledgement from a non-Indigenous person.
So they can say no, just they're unlikely to do so at most events that they've agreed to open. Their absence at a large event should speak volumes... but it doesn't because the empty land acknowledgement seems to do the trick.
Interesting. I've never really unpacked that before. Perhaps they are objecting to many things by refusing them.
Or the organization didn't want to pony up for it. The welcome ceremony isn't free.
Right. I picture these corps doing land acknowledgments while fully prepared to arrest or maim anybody from the acknowledged groups stepping onto the property unauthorized. Fucking joke.
I work in an historically stuffy white field (ok it's academic publishing). We need to seek out "diverse" people to contribute to the product. It was recently brought up that Canada and Australia are good for this in part because people will not only put pronouns in their signatures, but will also indicate whether they identify as *settlers* or not. Sounds like they got the US beat.
That "settler scholar, here" stuff is so cringey and cultish, shameful.
I haven't seen that here in Australia, as of yet. I've no doubt some people are doing this, but it hasn't captured the public conscienceness to the same degree that pronouns have.
I listened to Josh Szeps on Sam Harris about this Voice thing the other day. I admit to being American and never having heard of Szeps or the issue before. He dispassionately laid out for and against arguments. Frankly the against arguments made more sense to me--how can you undo this once its done and who's to know in whose hands and under what regime such a thing would play out. Which is to say I hear you friend, but it sounds like Oz has it's own cray-cray idiosyncratic identity politics thing going on...
Szeps is doing a very good job of iron-manning the arguments for both sides, but the campaign over here and online turmoil have been directly out of the American playbook. The points Szeps is making are good... and are very rarely made by either of the official campaigns. Instead it's boiling down to, "If you don't vote yes, you're a racist," and, "Vote no BECAUSE you're a racist (wink)."
A lot of that has local flavour, but it's certainly aping a lot of American trends.
Uh, if you claim that Australian protests over police brutality toward dark-skinned folk are not "relevant" and "make no sense whatsoever," you're either cripplingly ignorant of your own country's affairs or trying to pull a snow job:
https://hir.harvard.edu/police-violence-australia-aboriginals/
Josh Szeps was on 5th Column talking about the referendum and pushed back against the claim that it was just imported US id pol.
It's not. It's a local issue entirely. The way it's being pushed is heavily influenced by identity politics.
It’s unfortunate that the FrigidWind Center to build a perpetual motion machine did not receive the same funding. It would have produced at least as much as Kendi.
I believed in the FWPMM!!! I won’t give up on that damn machine.
Dumb move by Elon, but you cannot make me believe that social media managers are pitiable or underpaid.
It’s an incredibly subtle point and Jesse brushed up against it but there’s a solution that’s superior to “defund the police” that isn’t just “hope for them to not become hyper aggressive and militarized”.
Break the police unions.
I don’t care how you do it. I don’t care how many political careers need to be sacrificed to achieve it. But do that and you’ve solved your problem. They work for us, they serve us, and you know why? Because we pay them. Their jobs exist because of our taxes. In what other employment relationship does the employee call all of the shots? We control the purse strings; it should be up to us how they behave, what equipment they possess, and who gets hired/fired/promoted.
Break the unions, remind the employees who they answer to, fire the low performers, keep the one who prove worthy of the job.
This argument is identical to the argument to break all unions, which strikes me as, uh, not a coincidence?
I think there are good arguments for removing discipline over use of force from the bargaining process-- it should not be up to some arbitrator whether a cop who shoots a homeless guy gets his gun and badge back-- but the idea that they shouldn't have the same rights as any other employee to negotiate over pay and benefits is corporatist claptrap.
No, because “all unions” includes both public sector and private sector unions. The latter are fine(ish), but the former? Nah. You either get a monopoly over supply OR strong labor protections. It’s one or the other, you choose. Don’t like it? Maybe you’re not cut out for being a cop, try art school.
Okay, well, every civilized society disagrees with you, but don't let that deter you from spouting far-right talking points.
“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.
The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations.”
-Far-right talking points of the highly uncivilized Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Other policies that FDR's administration supported include such greatest hits as (off the top of my head) racial segregation of the military, so no, I do not feel in some way bound to conform to his view of things.
Or to logic or anything resembling reality. No, it’s all about the feels for your pet victim groups (the PC term being “marginalized groups”).
LOL, did you just get out of a coma? Take a look at the history of policing in this country, or in Canada, or <gestures at communist nations both current and historical> and tell me what exactly was “civilized” about the way they treated people.
TIL “far right” means “wanting to limit the state’s ability to leverage its monopoly on violence”. Someone tell the protesters from 2020 that they’re basically Chris Rufo!
Those kindergarten teachers sure are misusing their monopoly on violence!
Don't dump anti-union piss on my head and tell me it's raining.
The day that I can run this argument through chatGPT and have it say, “pretty weak; have you considered posting this on Reddit in 2006?” is the day I’ll believe that AI has not only arrived but is friendly.
What kind of school did you go to where kindergarten teachers choked unarmed people to death by the way? That must be the reason you’re trying to draw an equivalence between two dramatically different professions that have next to nothing in common other than public funding. It would be incredibly dumb to make such a facile connection otherwise, so I feel bad for your fellow schoolmates that you had to deal with that trauma.
Now, I’m a bit worried Chris Hansen is gonna bust into my den and expose me for trying to take advantage of an intellectual adolescent but let me spell it out for you: “he who pays the piper calls the tune”. There’s a reason that phrase has existed for ages: the person paying for something gets to define the terms of service. What you seem to want is for the piper to be paid and choose what tune to play while beating the shit out of people and violating constitutional rights. And why? Just because of some weird fetishization of labor.
This is a bit of a reductio ad Hitler but I doubt you can handle anything more subtle than a banal swipe at someone who’s the epitome of “far right” so: You know the people standing on guard towers in Dachau? They were working for a paycheck. They all lost their jobs abruptly in April 1945 during a hostile takeover of their office space, but I’m not too disappointed - because performing a task in exchange for money doesn’t make you special, and it doesn’t give you any kind of moral superiority.
I don’t care that cops work. So do washing machines. I don’t get to opt out of paying their salaries, so I should get to be choosy about whose labor I pay for. I wouldn’t pay a kindergarten teacher who choked kids out and planted sugar cookies on them; I don’t want to pay for bad cops either.
Yeah, those uncivilized Germans don’t allow their Beamters to strike. I went to Munich and they didn’t have paved roads or electricity, so it’s definitely a backward place.
Can we break the other public sector unions at the same time? Particularly, the teachers’ unions.
I’m down for flattening every public sector union.
The way you do this indirectly is by enabling school choice. Make them compete with every other provider, acknowledging that education is a commodity that private actors need to budget for to a degree that suits them, just like everything else. Public schools will either compete or fold, but at least they’ll have a chance. What they won’t have is a monopoly on supply, or an ability to raise prices without commensurate service improvements.
As someone who is in a public sector job and a union member, if you break the public sector union, then anyone who has a modicum of experience and knowledge will leave in droves. Our pay is already 20% below comparable private sector salaries, but the job stability and benefits make it an appealing trade off for a lot of people. And as someone who is disabled, I feel a lot safer knowing there’s a union that has my back.
The difference with a police union is that they do not care what lengths they have to go to, because those are the personalities that tend to make up police forces themselves. With my union, if I break the law in the course of my job, I’m on my own.
Police unions are a creature unto themselves, and even other union members tend not to like them.
>The difference with a police union is that they do not care what lengths they have to go to
Oh it is? Our school district had strike>pandemic>strike, all while their compensation has grown much faster than the general populations. Additionally a 5 day school week basically never happens now, to the extent the kids and parents are surprised if there is a full week of classes.
School days get chiseled down each year. It is very clear the teachers are out for number 1 above all else, it is no different than the police at all.
Yes, unions do negotiate for the benefit of their members. That’s kind of their purpose. But generally speaking, teachers unions don’t argue that their members are above the law, as police unions often do. If a teacher assaults a student, they almost always go to jail, or at least are stripped of their license and aren’t allowed to teach anymore. Police unions are notorious for shuffling murderous cops around to help them avoid culpability.
Speaking of "not a coincidence."
https://web.archive.org/web/20200616184657/http://blog.chron.com/goplifer/2015/01/black-lives-matter-but-the-union-always-wins/
Want to crack down on police brutality? End their unions. The far leftists that hijacked the conversation during the 2020 BLM riots are incapable of thinking that a union could do wrong, so they went for defund because Reagan bad.
I was talking to another academic about Kendi's center. He said he has to account for every penny of an operating budget in the low five figures for his department, and he couldn't understand the complete lack of financial oversight. Does anyone understand better than I do what went on here?
My best guess, as someone who hasn't followed this story super closely, is that Kendi was perceived as too important and his donors as too substantial to second-guess, so Kendi was basically given carte blanche. Is that correct?
Peevishly, I want to add that all of the $43 million could have done a lot of good for disproportionately minority students, and been accounted for, if it had gone into existing first-gen scholarship funds and related programs that support first-gen students in completing their degrees.
But I suspect Kendi wouldn't have been interested in dumping money into existing programs that don't bring attention to his take on American life, and he probably wouldn't have gotten multimillion donations from tech luminaries for that project, either.
I’m a department chair at a state university. I need two budget officers to sign off on a $30 coffee/snacks expense for a faculty meeting. I’m trying to give away a $600 gift from a donor to some worthy students, and I need to triangulate between three different offices.
I can’t believe Kendi had absolutely no oversight over how he could use $42 million (or however many millions his center had after the University took their cut–he did not have a $42 mil budget.) I *can* believe that the people overseeing it were not asking too many questions about how the money was being spent.
Was there something about the way Kendi’s centre was set up & funded that meant there wasn’t the same kind of oversight there would be for a normal department?
I don’t doubt there are political reasons why people didn’t ask to many questions, but I also wonder if structurally it was in a position to go longer without anyone noticing?
Typically private money has fewer strings attached than public money. When I was in my PhD program we sometimes had food delivered to our meetings but we had to be very careful it was using our industry donations (which were very small in comparison) because NSF money strictly forbids this use case.
Thank makes sense and I wonder if both the emperor’s lack of clothes and financial improprieties would have been spotted a lot quicker if he’d been more heavily reliant on public money.
There’s no way he’d get that kind of a leash with public funding, it’s not so much that funding agencies aren’t super-woke (they all require impact statements full of social justice talk these days) but that they’re small-c conservative and wouldn’t give a huge research grant to someone without a proven research track record.
Yes, it’s an interesting phenomenon as whilst there’s probably plenty of blame to place on BU for allowing themselves to be associated with something so vacuous, it’s the private money of credulous fools that ultimately allowed him to set the whole thing up. That in term is driven by credulous medical a culture that’s allowed Kendi’s absurd ideas to permeate the culture largely unchallenged.
So much stupidity could be avoided if more people actually thought about this stuff critically.
Kendi says it himself, but not the way he thinks - people like him are held to a different standard.
Why did I read "carte blanche" in the Weeknd's voice from The Idol
Kendi and other race-baiters have fueled a racist cult. Literally a cult, as per John McWhorter and others. Violates the Establishment Clause: https://johnklar.substack.com/p/woke-theocracy-dominates-america
The idea that “we (well only some people) are born racist and you have to un-racist your way out of it” always struck me as very Catholic
Yes, it’s very much like the concept of original sin except they don’t have any redeeming grace on offer in the anti-racist religion. White people are irredeemably racist in this ideology.
Yes, maybe more Calvinist than Catholic. To be born white is to be predestined to damnation.
Protestants believe in original sin as well. Catholics believe it is redeemed through baptism, although people retain a tendency to sinfulness. Some Protestants are actually closer to the “whiteness” doctrine, believing that human sinfulness is innate and not avoidable through free will.
This is the Calvinist doctrine of Total Depravity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_depravity
Yes, that sounds much more like anti-racism, with Kendi in the role of god. Leave Catholics alone!
The conservative position is now that coercing students into Christian prayer with ostentatious public displays is not an establishment clause violation, erecting giant Latin crosses on public land is not an establishment clause violation, but being ideologically anti-racist is an establishment clause violation.
Okay.
I love Molly Frances’ writing on this topic: https://open.substack.com/pub/mollyfrances/p/in-defense-of-the-tumblr-girls-who?r=lqxm2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I don't think that being a true believer is a defense to fraud.
Consider Billy McFarland. He truly thought he was going to deliver an amazing music festival experience for his customers. However, he was flying by the seat of his pants, selling tickets to something that no rational observer would believe was actually going to happen as advertised. In the end, Fyre Festival became a byword for fraud.
Kendi, no matter his true believer status, sold something that he had no good reason to believe that he could deliver on.
Not to mention that true believers of all stripes commit all manner of atrocities around the world. Being a "true believer" is generally not a good thing.
Definitely, but it's still a different thing. Grifting is knowing deception. Being an idiot true believer is just a different phenomenon.
For sure.
I sometimes worry about what I am a "true believer" in. Like what fucked up things do I maybe sign onto thinking it's all for the good of mankind.
It can be. Fraud requires a lot of very specific elements, among which is making a representation that the defendant knows to be false at the time of the representation ("scienter," in the old Law French).
If I take donations thinking that I'm going to do x, but later change my mind and end up using them to do y, that may be a breach of contract, or even the tort of conversion, but it's probably not fraud.
On the email exchange Jesse was having, I disagree with the idea that you can be certain that the money wouldn’t have gone anywhere better.
Of course their are idiots who only give these sorts of sums to fashionable things and it’s really nothing more than virtue signalling. However, I think there’s also people who really think ‘I have a lot of money I’d like to do some good with it’ who if the intellectual climate wasn’t so bankrupt and people who should know better hadn’t elevated someone so intellectually vacuous, there’s a chance a actual serious ideas would have got more prominence and at least a chunk of the money may have gone in that direction rather than idiocy Kendi was pushing.
Yeah I actually suspect that the inverse is likely to be more true. We are one of the most charitable nations in the world, but even our resources have limits, and our charitable giving does not keep up with the demand. Kendi added demand to the list, and helped to make it a priority within multiple societies. I wouldn't be surprised if at least one of the more useful charities got less funding then previous years due to the redirection of the public interest.
I think even if you ring fenced it to just academic research, in a healthy intellectual climate someone like Roland Fryer would be a household name & having vast sums chucked at him, not a fraud like Kendi.
I tend to agree with John McWhorter that the real villains are the enablers who must have been able to read Kendi & see there was nothing there, yet for non intellectual reasons pretended the emperor was wearing a tailored suit.
If this leads to The Atlantic ditching him I will miss Kemele Foster reading sections out loud, as it always brought a laugh.
The Free Beacon article about the loan is insane and its clear its not just Kendi that was playing games with that money.
It doesn’t make me quite as mad as higher ed partnering with gambling websites to promote sports betting to their students but its close.
During the Kendi section - Katie and Jesse pointed out that even though Kendi tries to claim otherwise, currently it is clearly beneficial to be a member of an "under-represented" or "marginalized" group for selling books/ideas getting these positions.
They missed out on one of Kendi's accidental admissions that this is true - a couple years ago he actually deleted a tweet that basically showed he knows this is currently beneficial.
"Kendi, a humanities professor at Boston University, tweeted an article Friday by The Hill citing a study that found 34% of White students who applied to colleges and universities falsely claimed they were a racial minority on their application and that 77% of them were accepted."
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ibram-x-kendi-tweets-then-deletes-tweet-study-undermining-white-privilege-narrative