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Old 07-01-2020, 12:40 PM   #2280
Tyrone Slothrop
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Join Date: May 2004
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Re: Not everything is racist, or even has to do With race

Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield View Post
I listened to you, I read the book, and I buy systemic racism.

My complaint is with Adder and frivolous people like him who've abused those notions. He's dumb. People like him are dumb. I don't like the well-intentioned dumb any more than I like the nefarious dumb.

How is he dumb? Here, finally, he has explained why he thinks Taibbi's piece was racist:
"[T]he piece and the ideas it expressed were racist, in that it disparaged antiracist ideas and upheld racists ones."
"What he said had the inherent character of reinforcing existing racial hierarchies and dismissing attempts to dismantle them."
This "logic" asserts that anything that disparages antiracist ideas is racist. That necessarily means ALL antiracist ideas are beyond criticism. Obviously, this is moronic, as nothing can be beyond criticism.

Now to his second point, that Taibbi held up racist ideas. He of course does not explain that with specifics. He just declares Taibbi's criticisms as racist using his own subjective view that anything that criticizes antiracist ideas is racist. This takes "putting the rabbit in the hat" to levels I've never seen before.

This kind of thinking is, again, just fucking dumb. I struggle to even call it thinking. DiAngelo herself would likely bristle at the notion that she was beyond criticism.

Adder seems to have a binary view that there is racism and there is antiracism, and that anything that critiques antiracism must be racism. There is no ground in between. That's something one would expect to hear from a person who is mentally challenged.

He'll of course walk it back here by saying he was only talking about Taibbi, and now that he's pressed, he'll cherry pick some of what Taibbi said and j'accuse!-- he'll declare it racism. But that'll be bullshit. His history of overuse of the pejorative here renders his silliness - a silliness shared with loads of less than rigorous thinkers like him - bare:

He believes that what is said in favor of dismantling racism is beyond criticism and what criticizes it may automatically be dismissed as racism.

TL;DR: The Ends Justify the Means.

He said it. And it's pretty fucking dumb.
I kinda agree with Sebby here, although not about Adder being dumb. What Taibbi wrote about White Fragility is very similar to his reviews of Thomas Friedman books. IMO, Friedman deserves it, because of his sloppy thinking and writing. If an anti-racist author were similarly sloppy in his thinking or writing, would be racist to point that out? I don't think that Taibbi's review really engages with what they book is saying, though I haven't read the book so what do I know. But calling the piece "racist" without saying anything else is doing the same thing. It sounds like Adder's view is that the piece is racist because it is not helpful to the cause. Maybe that's arguable if you define terms in a certain way, but what's the reason to do that here? One wouldn't dismiss Taibbi's reviews of Friedman as anti-capitalist.
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Last edited by Tyrone Slothrop; 07-01-2020 at 02:00 PM..
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