- 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.
Why is this problematic for you? They're not saying children don't need caregivers, or that families are bad. They're saying the American nuclear family has downsides compared to other models, notably the extended family model common in African and Asian cultures. What makes a nuclear family "nuclear" is that it's self-contained; it's practically by definition not intergenerational, the way many effective non-American families are. It's an especially resonant point given the amount of effort American culture put into making sure black nuclear families couldn't succeed.
I feel like criticism of the American nuclear family has been pretty much fair game for decades; it's not like BLM invented that concern.
Not the 'American' -> 'Western'. And that's just way of making the 'family' consistent with 'Colonialism' and 'White People' because it suits their bigotry. The nuclear family is pretty closely similar around the world, outside of mostly aboriginal communities. Obviously it's somewhat different in different places, with multi-generations under the same roof.
I view this as fundamentally antagonistic - it's 'making stuff up' to find supposedly powerful and inspiring words, 'defining the enemy' ever more as 'White People'.
It defines their struggle as not one to 'finish school and gain competence' but as merely against the forces of 'White people'.
Of course by most objective measures, nuclear families are good for society.
This is the inherent problem when we mix radicalism with 'good intentions' - they end up mestastisizing the 'grain of truth' (ie racism exists) into everything (ie everything is racist).
At very least English families have more in common with German families than German families do with Italian or Spanish families.
But it's moot: because family structure across civility is not fundamentally different with respect to the antagonising view of BLM.
Aside from some degree of intergenerational cohabitation, it's not that different in advanced countries.
The BLM statement with respect to family is unfounded bigotry, specifically created to concretise and define the image of their enemy.
It's very similar to Trump specifically trying to use the term 'Wuhan Virus' so as to invoke 'blame' for the virus on China. There is a 'kernel of truth' to complicity in China - in that China did some very bad things during the early phase of the pandemic, but that doesn't justify the use of this kind of language to blame them for the entirety of the problem. The language he uses here is to provoke - and to shift blame for the inadequacies of his own system, using crude language mapped onto an external group. When in doubt, use xenophobia.
BLM attacking the 'Western Family Unit' is shifting the narrative and denying any responsibility for a very foundational problem within the community - and that is >50% of Black children have little no relationship with at least one of their parents, and that rates are about double for Black families as they are for other groups [1]. Now - obviously it's a very complicated problem (i.e. incarceration etc.), but it's a lot easier to dismiss if you don't have to see it as a problem, rather, merely an oppressive measure by your villainous opponents.
The argument "The Black community has challenges at least partly due to the deep fragmentation of the family unit" can simply be dismissed and ignored with the radical, and ironically xenophobic statement: "The family unit is colonialist and racist".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_family_struct...