Re: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
 

I’m pretty sure it means “institutional racism isn’t a real thing.” But I could be wrong.

When you’re a fish, it’s pretty hard to understand why those porpoises have to keep going up to the surface instead of staying underwater all the time.

Re: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
 

It gave you the nine main points of the book. You've more than adequate intelligence to catch the drift of them while ignoring the blog author's editorializing.

Here's another article that works pretty much as a Cliff's Notes of the book: https://heterodoxacademy.org/coddlin...american-mind/

And I commented on your doing so because you do so so often it's almost a shock when you don't.

If conservatives have created a conservative media similar in influence to that of the mainstream media, and the mainstream media trends left, and the conservative media trends right, then there's equivalence.

You might say the mainstream media does not trend left. This is incorrect. Even mainstream media people will admit it does. And a cursory search of honest articles on the subject acknowledge the fact. (That the mainstream media pays enormous attention to Trump does not refute this. The attention it pays to him is almost exclusively in the form of criticism.)

You might say the right wing media has a disproportionate effect because it nakedly lies, while the mainstream media does not. There, you'd be correct. But the right wing media is much smaller than the mainstream media, so any enhanced influence it gains from peddling propaganda is met if not overcome by the mainstream's much broader reach. Also, the propaganda only works on the right wing base. It actually precludes the right wing media from gaining a bigger audience, as moderates and intellectually honest conservatives and independents find it distasteful.

It is ubiquitous. The extreme left and right are both refusing to live in a factual world.

Some people, apparently you included, think there's significant earnestness among the advocates of the extreme left (and perhaps the right). I think that applies to some of them, but not to the people who are shaping and pushing the agendas of these groups. They are gamers.

The usefulness of it was in describing both groups in total. Again, you seemed to be arguing there's a significant amount of earnestness behind the extreme left's anti-speech behaviors. I see very little of it. I see lying by refusing to allow any discussion that might refute their narrative and delusion (to earnestly align hard right or left, one has to be delusional).

If you use an ad hominem as the left and right do, you are trying to avoid having a discussion on merit for a reason. that reason is because you fear you may not be able to sustain your argument on the merits. You are precluding the uncovering of a weakness in your position. Perhaps that's not lying. Maybe there's another word for it. But it shares 99% of the same DNA with a lie.

I would not place Klein in the category of the extreme left. I believe he engages in some sophistry here and there, but I'd never lump him in with people who wish to live in their own narratives and ignore facts which they dislike.

My point there was simple. You asserted that the people who were seeking to squelch debate were merely "insisting [things be considered] in a broader context." The people on the right and left which Haidt assesses are not doing that. At all.

Sure. Political correctness demands that people not say certain things that, even though factual, are deemed hurtful, impolite, or would undo certain academic views of how society should be arranged. This precludes a full view of reality. Trump just flat out bullshits. His reality is not reality. But neither is the reality political correctness seeks to mold. In both cases, you're not seeing What Is Actual. That Trump's lies are truly in bad faith and more absurd than many PC lies doesn't change the fact: Both revel in the non-factual. In the end, bullshit's bullshit, however you get there. And it's all bad.

Re: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
 

My liver has another 15-20 in it.

And I'm not voting for Trump. And I don't like any D competitor I've yet seen.

Re: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
 

He acknowledged whites still have "some" institutional advantages, it's really just a question of what "some" means.

I mean, maybe he's just talking about advantages in jobs, education, housing, voting, healthcare, food, taxation, water, transportation, the military, government representation, athletics, public services, immigration and emigration, environmental quality, and a few other things. That's just "some" advantages, right?
.
To be fair, I do know some people who believe blacks get all the advantages, so even his "some" is better than some white people.

Re: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
 

I read some of the reviews of it after you posted about it last week and it sounded like a damn fine piece of writing. I'll order a copy to read after finishing House of Cards Season 6.

There's no way I can argue with the statistics you cite in those articles. I could take the cheap approach and cite a contrary finding, but I find the data in those articles pretty convincing. I also think I may have committed the sin of extrapolating from my own background. I grew up in a diverse neighborhood and strangely still live in one, and I see the diversity expanding. But YMMV. Living in the Mid-Atlantic is not living in Missouri. Sincerely, Indians, Asians, and people from of varied Middle Eastern descent have been and remain fixtures of the local communities I've known for so long, the idea of them as an "other" is just bizarre. And I think that experience is common to almost everyone I know. (I suspect it derives from having lived in areas populated with well off professionals.) I think I'm just lucky to have enjoyed diverse neighborhoods, and that perhaps gives me an unduly skeptical view of the issue of segregation.

My comment on varied cultures means that whites still dominate both in number and influence in my area, but are being overtaken by people of various non-white backgrounds.

God damn it.
 

Who are you and what have you done to Sebastian?

Re: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
 

Not sure what it means either, but it only makes sense if you assume the culture has been white, which has been pretty obviously not true for other people.

Re: God damn it.
 

Data's data.

I also have to consider, I grew up with Asian and Indian neighbors, in an isolated area where most of the original homeowners were successful Jews and Italians (the local Temple was a solid drive and a three iron away). My high school was also private and filled with Indian, Asian, and Middle Eastern kids.

I think my upbringing may have led me to downplay the prevalence of bigotry. Quite literally, we just never thought about it.

And I've been as oblivious about it since. I could see why this would frustrate people who've spent their entire lives dealing with it. Ultimately, however, I will probably always revert to the thinking I've followed on it from the start: Race/Sexual Persuasion/Ethnicity should be immaterial among enlightened people, and the ultimate fix for bigotry - which sadly won't occur until long after we're all dead - is people ignoring those categories and mixing adequately enough that they become something hardly recognizable. (And get rid of religion, which causes most ethnic bigotry.)

Re: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
 

I understand from the NY Times that we're finally starting to see some African American performers in Jazz get some attention out there.

Re: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
 

Thank you, that is much more useful.

I'm not sure why anyone thinks that book is important. It seems like an effort to spend a lot of time refuting arguments that aren't worth it for a problem that isn't much of a problem.

But they haven't.

It's astonishing and frightening that someone as smart as you would say this. But not surprising, since you recently you said that the mainstream media are doing the Democrats' bidding.

Just to scratch the surface, it is categorically not true that the mainstream media pays attention to Trump almost exclusively in the form of criticism. I wonder what planet you are on. To take a single recent example, the news has been dominated recently by Trump's hyping of a bunch of poor Hondurans walking in Mexico, a thousand miles from the US border, which has called an invasion. If all you mean is that you can find people in the media who have criticized Trump for this, that is correct, but that is not what you said.

There is no left-wing media that counterbalances the right-wing media.

As are you, when you say things like this.

Who is "shaping and pushing the agenda" of which "groups"? WTF are you talking about? This was a conversation about how you equate when conservatives respond to arguments they don't like with lies and lefties respond with accusations of bigotry. Now it's about the agendas of shadowy groups?

As Adder is my witness, there are a lot of people who earnestly believe that there is a lot of bigotry afoot in this country and who point it out when they think it's relevant. I see very little lying involved in that. I really don't know what you're talking about, and maybe you could provide a specific example that illustrates it.

If you believe that whenever someone on the left introduces the idea that bias is relevant to what is being discussed, that it's really a calculated lie to subvert the conversation and an ad hominem attack on the speaker, then what you are saying makes a lot of sense.

Of course, you don't believe that. You are now going to explain that you're really just talking about the extreme left, the unnamed nutballs who exercise an enormous influence on your understanding of reality and run amok on college campuses, crippling the fragile psyches of the next generation. You have a fertile imagination.

No, no one would. And that's my point. Your extreme left is a chimera without any influence.

If you define PC that way, sure, maybe that makes sense. If you define a bicycle as a gilled, scaled creature that swims in the water, then you can say crazy things about bicycles, too, that make sense by their own logic.

I'll give you an example. PC says that the term "redskin" should be avoided in favor of, say, "Native American." There's nothing about the term "redskin" that is in any way more "factual" than the term "Native American." Asking that people substitute one term for the other does not "preclude a full view of reality." It is true that it's an effort to use language in a way that is constitutive of how people think and behave, but you're really not engaging with the real arguments for PC, so it's not surprise that you end up saying silly things about it.

Re: God damn it.
 

I bet that's not true of your non-white friends.

But I know what you mean. It was a non-issue for us, so we didn't need to think about it. Which is why it's so important to listen when people tell you what the world is like for them.

Re: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
 

I mostly skimmed this exchange, but what are these truths that PC says you're not allowed to say?

Re: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
 

Fair enough.

The book actually discusses the phenomenon you mention above and I think we touched upon it with Ty the last time I posted about the concept awhile back (i.e., that there is an immense amount of racism in places that we associate with liberalism and diversity).

We tend to look at places where racism is out in the open as the only or major problem. DiAngelo points out that white people use the idea of living in a diverse city or working at a diverse company as a shield to avoid any real significant analysis of their own racism. It's part of the constant push back she gets when conducting a race seminar (and that every black person trying to discuss the impact of racism must endure) while trying to educate people on why the good/bad binary approach to racism doesn't work.*

She calls the defense mechanism "Color Celebrate." People talk about their experience working with black people or where they grew up or the diverse people in their families or their distant ancestry, etc. The idea that any of these things makes one immune from engaging in or benefiting from racism is, of course, silly. But the desire to only view one's experience set up solely against extremely hostile racism lets the person in Color Celebrate mode off the hook. They never end up acknowledging their own racism because they have convinced themselves they are a good person (when compared to an "actual" racist).

Anyway, I really like the book and I am going to bring her in to run a program at this firm.

TM

*The good/bad binary assumes that racism is something that only bad people do. It is an action that happens, not a fully-developed structure that benefits one set of people consistently. White people tend to think it only exists if someone is a bad person, which is why you get this huge disconnect when someone like that West Virginia county employee called Michelle Obama an ape in heels can claim to not be racist and why the first defense of such people by whites is, "She's not like that. She's a good person." Once you try to discuss race with any white person, they only hear, "You're a bad person," and switch off or argue about how good they are and then apply either a Color Blindness standard or the Color Celebrate standard discussed above.

Re: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
 

They'll tell you life is full of dirt.
And that women never really faint,
And that villains always blink their eyes.
And that children are the only ones who blush.
'Cause life is just to die.

Re: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
 

Agreed. DiAngelo is all over this too.

TM