Quote:
Originally Posted by Adder
The distinction you are making exists only in your head.
Oh, and just to mess with your head, I don't think there are any non-racists.
|
Bollocks. That's exactly Kendi's point. You're anti-racist or you're racist.
Regarding what you think, I think I know why you think it. Or at least Paul Graham does:
In the last few years, many of us have noticed that the customs protecting free inquiry have been weakened. Some say we're overreacting — that they haven't been weakened very much, or that they've been weakened in the service of a greater good. The latter I'll dispose of immediately. When the conventional-minded get the upper hand, they always say it's in the service of a greater good. It just happens to be a different, incompatible greater good each time.
As for the former worry, that the independent-minded are being oversensitive, and that free inquiry hasn't been shut down that much, you can't judge that unless you are yourself independent-minded. You can't know how much of the space of ideas is being lopped off unless you have them, and only the independent-minded have the ones at the edges. Precisely because of this, they tend to be very sensitive to changes in how freely one can explore ideas. They're the canaries in this coalmine.
The conventional-minded say, as they always do, that they don't want to shut down the discussion of all ideas, just the bad ones.
http://www.paulgraham.com/conformism.html
Graham is trying to explain how herds of passive, easily led people get behind fashionable ideas that they think are "for the greater good" and seek to squelch dissent or critique of those ideas.
I think a point subsumed within that it is that a lot of people get behind these ideas and don't seek to squelch dissent, but instead seek to, as Steve Bannon would say, "flood the space." To poke holes in wokeism is to find ones self at odds with a huge number of people Who Are Really Invested In Insisting Its A Strong And Intellectually Defensible Movement.
They'll fight to the death on these points, creating an amusing paradox -- conventional herd thinking channeled into rhetoric of revolution and aggressive social change.
Pick your quadrant.
