FWIW getting server errors on this did make me chuckle, because the publisher of Harper's Magazine has had a reputation for being a neo-Luddite when it comes to web publishing [0]:
> He described being trapped in a corridor in the early 2000s “by a small mob of what I can’t help but refer to as ‘young people.’ ” Those youths, he wrote, demanded that he open the magazine to online readers. What he told them was “essentially, forget it.” The web, to him, “wasn’t much more than a gigantic Xerox machine” designed to rob publishers and writers.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160112032957/https://www.nytim...
- 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...
"What, pray tell, is an outcome? When can the consequences of an action ever be fully accounted for?" (https://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-6/page-112-2/)
> a refusal to hold any sort of meaningful conversation
Hmm. I disagree. This is how you have meaningful conversations; you speak of your own experiences, and you ask people of theirs. I don't see this happen all that often. Mostly I see people, to put it harshly for clarity, dictating to others what those others' lived experiences were. AKA, speak for yourself, not for others. If you find yourself speaking for others, pause, and turn it into a question and ask those others.
I really do mean "this is HOW". As in, if you, the person reading this, does this practice, I would expect you to have a bunch of meaningful conversations where before you might not have. That's how it's worked for me. I'd be interested in hearing experiences to the contrary.
> We homeschool
Do you support maternity/paternity leave, or other societal support for more parents having more capacity to home-school?
That was good, but too late. It seemed like he mostly got "Ok, boomer" responses from his target.
So it seems rather ironic to write an article about 'political witchhunts' using someone who is claiming that Republicans are going to be systematically hunted down and murdered. I don't think the article was written in good faith at all.
[1] https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/127830983545328435...
Do you have any sources I can read on this? If anything, it seems the radical left actually left Badiou and his ilk behind for the Frankfurt School, and even then, I'm doubtful as to what that intellectual heritage means to your average "radical leftist" today. This is all beside the point, however - is there a recent (from the past 20 years) poll or anything similar surveying the "radical left" (which, mind you, includes anti-statists and anarcho-Communists) on their opinion of the Cultural Revolution? One of the largest "radical leftist" groups in the West is Antifa, but from what I know, it's hard to see any Maoism (or Maoist ideas) present in its members[0]. The Sino-Soviet split and the ascension of Deng liberalizing China has practically deadened Maoist ideology in the West. You'd have a better (but still somewhat shaky) case to say the radical left today draws from Stalinism instead (as opposed to Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, etc.).
>They have approved of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in the past
To what degree? In what numbers? For example, I can't name a single leftist journal which the majority of contributors could be aligned with Maoist views, never mind views supporting the Cultural Revolution. Even the Maoists I know of with some influence (e.g. Badiou) are critical of the cultural revolution.
>and for all we know, they continue to do so
So it's a superstition?
>The M.O. is certainly similar.
Which mainstream leftist organizations (mainstream enough to guide the course of the modern "radical left") approve of state-sanctioned murder and imprisonment of intellectuals?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States)#Ideolog...
"Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas."
The above comment (made by the lead singer at a concert in England) was all it took for them to receive death threats and get blacklisted by thousands of radio stations in the US.
Actually curious to hear what people on here think about this.
"The plight of Trotskyism had been even more bleak, reduced to eking out a semi-clandestine existence within the PCI. Neither of these fates par-ticularly appealed to the editors of Classe Operaia; nor, for that matter, did they show any great interest in the first murmurings of Italian Maoism. Their reasons for such diffidence, beyond the vagaries of sectarian politiCS, were rational enough, being based on the realisation that a new organisation unable to command the support of a large slice of the working class was doomed to failure. This lesson, moreover, had been reinforced for the Venetians by their unsuccessful attempts to build workplace committees outside the offiCial labour movement, a failure that led them temporarily to advance a more cautious approach to autonomous organisation. Both the Northerners and Romans, then, were initially united in rejecting what they called 'Trotskyist tactics' and 'Chinese dances' (Tronti 1966: 32), even if their motives for doing so were rather different." (from Storming Heaven by Steve Wright[0]).
You're going to need a stronger case than saying that the West German movement was Maoist and therefore Antifa in the US and elsewhere today is Maoist too - especially when you contradict your own claim that by the 1980s they'd moved on to autonomism. Please provide an analysis of the prevalence of Maoism or Maoist ideas as it exists today within the mainstream American radical left.
[0] https://libcom.org/files/Wright%20S%20-%20Storming%20Heaven%...
I guess you think these are all examples of perfectly rational things to say that cannot be disputed, but let's just take "all lives matter". Sure, no one can disagree that "all lives matter", but saying this implies that you think this in response to "black lives matter" , and Pinker himself articulates the issue with this well:
"Linguists, of all people, should understand the difference between a trope or collocation, such as the slogan “All lives matter,” and the proposition that all lives matter. (Is someone prepared to argue that some lives don’t matter?) And linguists, of all people, should understand the difference between a turn in the context of a conversational exchange and a sentence that expresses an idea. It’s true that if someone were to retort “All lives matter” in direct response to “Black lives matter,’ they’d be making a statement that downplays the racism and other harms suffered by African Americans."
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/07/05/the-purity-posse-p...
Also an interview done with him a few weeks ago: https://www.city-journal.org/racism-is-an-empty-thesis
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.
A professional soccer player was fired because his wife made racist posts [1]. Not him, his wife. Of course, that is still something happening to a celebrity (even if a relatively minor one), but the precedent that a person can be fired because of something a family member said is chilling.
(Of course, given at-will employment, it was legal to fire him for this – being married to a person with shitty views is not a protected class – but, not everything legal should be socially acceptable, and firing someone simply because of their spouse's opinions should not be socially acceptable.)
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/jun/05/aleksandar-...
A centre-right candidate doesn't become "left" just because there's a far-right candidate. Maybe in the US that rhetoric works, but not in the EU.
What poll are you referring to where Macron's far-right opponent received 45%? Le Pen has 26% - less than Macron - from what I can see [0].
He's the more left candidate for purposes of this comparison, which is to compare where the U.S. is relative to France. So if Macron is to the right of Trump on muslim immigrants (and I think it's fair to say he is), and 45% of French support a candidate that is even further right, I think it's fair to say the U.S. is well to the left of France on the issue.
I was citing a head-to-head matchup in the second round: https://www.ft.com/content/6d8b9c7a-412c-11ea-a047-eae9bd51c...
> A recent Ifop opinion poll put Ms Le Pen narrowly ahead of Mr Macron for an assumed first round of the 2022 election, and within a few percentage points of victory in the second round (45 per cent to his 55 per cent)
Here is the Terry Crews stuff: https://twitter.com/i/events/1277983929966813191
In Christian circles there are several people who I am aware of: Samuel Sey, Voddie Baucham, David Shannon are a couple that come to mind. Specifically Sey, because he has a blog where he publishes stuff like this: https://slowtowrite.com/does-systemic-racism-exist/
Hey also posted a blog in June 2019 that asked why America's black/white disparities are also mirrored in Canada, and asking why those same disparities exist, given the difference in history and culture: https://slowtowrite.com/our-fathers-our-failures/
He has been called a fair number of slurs from "his people": https://twitter.com/SlowToWrite/status/1049674519458312192
The Wikipedia article on Sex Differences in Humans uses the terms man/woman and male/female interchangeably[1]. What little I've seen of the scientific literature follows this convention as well.
It's my experience that, across a broad swath of American society, that many people follow the old convention as well.
https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/america-is-in-the-grip...
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.
These people make concrete conjectures, such as "the capital gains tax preference" (which is nearly universal in the developed world and widely supported by economists) "is racist." And they make concrete policy proposals, such as the following (remember the author has previously defined the capital gains preference to be racist):
> [The anti-racist amendment] would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.
Yes. [0] There are many examples. Jon Ronson wrote a book in 2015 called "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" that profiled, IIRC, a half of a dozen different people, just normal people, not celebrities, who were dragged publicly on Twitter and MSM and lost their jobs, etc...
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...
[1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jun/17/candace-ow...
People talked about whether the US should enter World War I for years before the German navy targeted US merchant vessels. After the decision to enter, speaking out against the militarization was grounds for arrest. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fiery-socialist-chall...
Well, Obama was a President, not a cult leader. I'm not sure he ever really believed his voters would obey him about anything.
Nonetheless, he was at least mentioning it negatively at least as far back as 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/09/president-obama-on...
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...
Also - that the vast majority of gun owners are 'very responsible' doesn't change the fact that as cops pull people over, there is a reasonable likelihood people will have weapons, which ratchets up the likelihood that someone, even in a 'good area' will do something bad. The likelihood is small, but enough to make a difference.
When I've been pulled over in the US, often the officer approaches and doesn't quite come to the side of the window, remains slightly out of sight, they might have one hand on the flashlight and seem to be quite concerned about visually inspecting inside the car as a precaution. In Canada, I don't really see this. I believe this is a function of the likelihood of weapons.
Also, America differs in citizens likelihood of doing something pretty outrageous when confronted with police. I'm not sure why this is, I guess a cultural attribute - but again, combine this with weapons, and it makes policing materially more dangerous.
Here's the data on high-speed chases in the US [1] and a 'high point' for high speed chases in the UK as a comparison. [2]
Here are the number of US police killed in the line of duty [3], it's quite a lot, and the number of UK police killed [4] (it amounts to about 1 per year).
A lot of guns, a propensity for more violent acts, I think really does shift the equilibrium.
Which doesn't justify excess violence by cops of course, but it's a different context.
[1] https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5906
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/09/05/police-pursuit-d...
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36748136
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_police_officer...
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbine
You may be confusing "assault rifle" and "assault weapon" which are different categories. The AR15 does usually qualify as an "assault weapon". The definition of assault weapon is looser, and includes a number of features (such as barrel shrouds and flash suppressors") the sole purpose of which is to make the gun safer to use, and have nothing to do with making them actually more dangerous.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_weapon
If you have different sources, feel free so share.
The literal firing of some nobody over accidentally making a gesture that looked like a "white power" symbol fits very nicely into the idea of "economic terrorism"[1]. The idea that anything you do in your life could be captured, taken out of context, and shared on the Internet and subject to the fury of a mob (and resulting in the loss of income, employability, and economic stability) is pretty terrifying.
What makes it terrorism is not simply that people are subjected to this treatment randomly (although that does happen too, and should not be discounted) but that there is an ideological agenda behind these attacks. The person who posted the picture from the linked article, those who shared it, and possibly even the company that fired him (though they could have just been cowards) all felt that they were contributing toward a righteous cause of fighting against bigotry.
Of course, even if the gesture was genuine the idea that bigots should not be able to even get jobs as repair technicians (assuming that they otherwise conduct themselves in a lawful manner) is baffling to me. There's no justice in going after people who are already relatively low on the social and economic hierarchy just because the believe repugnant things.
[1]https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
Generally speaking, it seems to me that much sloppy thinking in the current debate involves the mixture of the following basic errors:
1) Ignorance about biology. Evolutionary biology has been an exceptionally fertile section of science for the last decades, and provided deeper understandings on many biological phenomenon, including human behaviors. The accusers' understanding of biology (e.g. condemning it as "genetic determinism") is at least 50 years behind.
2) Poor understanding of the due process. Calling a random petition to condemn a person publicly is exactly a witch hunt. History proves that it's a very error-prone way to punish someone, and no civilized country accept it as a proper procedure anymore.
As to (2) I'd recommend everyone to read DJB's "The death of due process". It is very important, because it may be you (or your family) to be hung by lynch mobs next time.