- John Carmack signal boosting[1] Sarah Downey's article "This PC witch-hunt is killing free speech, and we have to fight it"[2]
- The critical comments on the obligatory "BLM" post in r/askscience[3]
- Glenn Loury's response[4] to Brown University's letter to faculty/alumni about racial justice.
- The failure[5] of a group of folks to cancel Steven Pinker over accusations of racial insensitivity.
[1] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1279105937404579841
[2] https://medium.com/@sarahadowney/this-politically-correct-wi...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gvc7k9/black_li...
[4] https://www.city-journal.org/brown-university-letter-racism
[5] https://mobile.twitter.com/sapinker/status/12799365902367907...
The article he linked to was a little peculiar. As someone who's inclined to agree with the author about the First Amendment, the poorly thought out paragraph about racism - using a link to hate crime statistics to demonstrate the low numbers of "actual racists," but then making a remark like The statement “black lives matter” is easy to agree with if you’re a decent human being, which raises some questions about why we all have so many not-decent people (just indecent, not actual racists?) in our social media feeds - distracted from the overall message.
Or is it the New York Times’ claim that “nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery?” https://mobile.twitter.com/maragay/status/116140196616729805....
Or is it that we need to “disrupt the western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” as BLM’s website claims? https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/
Or is it that “institutions of white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism” are all equivalent evils that must be “abolished,” as BLM’s DC chapter proclaims? https://fee.org/articles/is-black-lives-matter-marxist-no-an...
Or is it—as the 1619 project claims and which is now being taught in schools—the supposed historical fact that capitalism is an outgrowth of plantation slavery? https://www.city-journal.org/1619-project-conspiracy-theory
Or is it applied Marxism?
> No doubt, the organization itself was quite radical from the very beginning. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors described herself and fellow co-founder Alicia Garza as “trained Marxists” in a recently resurfaced video from 2015.
Look at how much the debate has transformed within the last month. It started out with universal condemnation of a murder committed by the police in Minnesota. Now, we are talking about tearing town statues of Abraham Lincoln: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/education/2020/06/26/uw-... (“Students in the UW-Madison's Black student union are calling on university officials to remove the statue of the nation's 16th president.”) My high school, named after Thomas Jefferson, is thinking of renaming itself. We are debating whether the Constitution as a “pro-slavery document.”
I am pro-BLM. To me, it’s a matter of my faith, as well as my personal experience living in places like Baltimore and Philadelphia and realizing that Black people just aren’t getting a fair shake. I think people of every stripe can do something to help finish the job of reconstruction. Libertarians can pitch in to help end police abuse of minorities. Conservatives can help push forward school choice, which the majority of Black people support. Middle of the road people can agree that we need to undo the pro-confederacy monument building that happened during the KKK era.
But I also believe that our country rests on mostly admirable principles and history, and that Marxism is a recipe for suffering while capitalism is uplifting billions of people before our very eyes. I can hardly blame people who are skeptical when they are forced to chant a slogan that was coined by self-avowed Marxists. You can’t blame people for being cautious in their support of a movement that has under the same roof a majority of well-meaning people who simply want to eliminate police brutality and inequality, and a vocal minority of people who view those problems as an indictment of our entire country and it’s institutions. The far left, in characteristic fashion, has taken something most people could agree on, and pushed it further and further until normal people are forced to push back to keep society from crumbling beneath their feet. And that’s a tragedy for everyone, especially people who care about the core concept of fixing policing in America.
I think that's a false dichotomy; there's plenty of amazing Marxist literature, academic journals, etc. from well-meaning people. It's one thing to say that Marxists are misguided, but it's another thing to describe them in a situation as if they're against well-meaning moderates. It's possible for everyone to be well-meaning, and rather than assuming malice, perhaps it's a better idea to examine their point of view and arguments. I know I've taken the time to do that with right-libertarians and right-wingers online a few times.
Why do these intelligent people (tenured philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, even economists) think Marxism isn't a recipe for suffering? What do they have to say about capitalism, its advantages, and disadvantages? It's worth asking them and reading their modern point of views, which in the past fifteen years have changed a great deal already.
I'm a regular reader of Jacobin, so I have some idea of what modern Marxists think. (Though I won't say I'm well read on the subject.) But that's besides the point--I have no objection to Marxists participating in solving police brutality and inequality. I'm addressing the practice of socially coercing people to say "black lives matter." What ideas are you actually asking people to endorse? I think many, many people are happy to endorse that idea insofar as it means "the police shouldn't murder black people because of the color of their skin," or "black people shouldn't get the short end of the economic stick."
But the eponymous organization behind the slogan happens to be led by Marxists and has a Marxist and anti-Western platform. I think people are quite reasonably hesitant that what they're actually being asked to endorse is the platform and ideology of the organization. And I think it's perverse to insist on such endorsement under the banner of anti-racism.
I think you're quite severely overestimating both the number of people who are asking others to endorse Marxism when pressuring them to support their side in the current moment, and more to the point, the number of people who perceive themselves as being pressured to endorse Marxism in the current moment. There is some tangible benefit to both the far left and to the right for there to be a perception that that is what is going on, but I'm just not seeing it much IRL.
My extended social circle might not be representative of anything, but people are talking about cops murdering people, the behavior and misbehavior of protesters, whether vandalism during a protest is bad or somehow actually good for some reason (sigh), whether protesters deserve to suffer brutality at the hands of police (double sigh), whether racism is even a thing and whether whites are the REAL victims of racism (facepalm), whether events that are happening and are clearly documented on widely distributed video are really happening or whether that's just what "they" want us to think, and some other crazy stuff that I bet would sound familiar to you as well.
I think I'd actually feel a lot better about things if I were witnessing an argument about fringe political beliefs coming to the fore, rather than finding out how many people I know are overtly or covertly racist. That sounds a little negative but some demonstrably good things are happening as well, so... you take the bad with the good, I guess.
> I think I'd actually feel a lot better about things if I were witnessing an argument about fringe political beliefs coming to the fore, rather than finding out how many people I know are overtly or covertly racist.
That makes sense, but it's also sensible to ask whether hijacking a much-needed conversation about race and police brutality to push fringe, Marxist-inspired political views helps people and institutions become less racist. It's not even clear that 'Black Lives Matter', as an overtly organized and led social movement, is doing all that much to meaningfully improve Black lives.
The parent poster described himself in another comment as pro-BLM (his phrase), and I think he was making some slightly more subtle points.