Apple fired Advertising Platform Specialist Antonio Garcia Martinez two days ago, convicting him of insensitivity to women after cherry picking a few sentences from his universally acclaimed 5-year old book, Chaos Monkeys, and giving those sentences the least-charitable readings possible. Apple announced:
At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted. Behavior that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here.
In the meantime (as Matt Taibbi points out), Dr. Dre remains on Apple's board despite authoring "such classics as “Bitches Ain’t Shit” and “Lyrical Gangbang,” who is also the subject of such articles as “Here’s What’s Missing from Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up.” It sure helps to be a billionaire when you are hoping that your employer will stand up to the Woke mobs.
When she condemns Israel's killing of Palestinian civilians (including children), why is AOC attacking mayoral candidate Andrew Yang instead of attacking the high ranking Democrat leaders who determine and implement the unquestioningly pro-Israel U.S. policy: Biden, Harris Pelosi, Schumer & Blinken? Glenn Greenwald offers a lesson in modern political messaging and fund-raising.
AOC said nothing about the State Department's ongoing defense of Israel. She condemned none of her powerful colleagues in Congress who did the same. She refused to call on the Biden administration explicitly to change its policies or denounce Biden's fanaticism on this issue. Her only previous utterance was a mealy-mouthed, barely cogent tweet in which she randomly threw the Israel/Gaza conflict into a laundry list along with “paramilitary violence in Colombia” and “the detention of children on our own border and the militarization of US police departments” to say: “the United States must seriously assess its role in state violence and condition aid.”
So when she finally worked up the courage on Monday to single out a political official for public scolding and shaming on the issue of Israel, she decided that it should be Andrew Yang.
Linguistics Professor John McWhorter sat down with Bill Maher on a recent episode of Real Time to discuss "anti-racism." McWhorter describes himself as someone who is hearing things that don't make sense and his quest is to try to obsessively make sense of things like "anti-racism." The interview was as intense as it was fast-moving. Several take-aways:
A) "Anti-racism" condescends to people who identify as "black," infantilizing them.
B) There is a great diversity of thought among those who identify as black, almost two-thirds of whom are middle class (or even higher earning), the majority of whom do not live in ongoing fear of being harassed or shot by the police,
C) None of this is to suggest that there isn't still racism, which needs to be addressed.
D) Wokeness is a religion where "whiteness" functions as "original sin" that afflicts even babies, a religion where Robin DiAngelo's misguided book, White Fragility is mistakenly being treated as "research" instead of second-rate literature that advocates for victimization;
E) People pretend to "atone" for "white privilege" by posting on FB that they are "doing the work." This solves nothing.
F) White Fragility is not representative of "the general black view of things."
G) There is no one "black view" of things - Also, "'Yes we can't'" has never been the slogan for black America and it's not now."
H) In the religion of Wokeness, advocates pretend that "racism has never been worse" than today, even in the 1960's and even during the 1850's. These are palpable untruths to any person who knows even a tiny bit of history. "Why is it un-black to address degree?"
I) It is childish for anyone to shut down opposing views to protect themselves from never being told that they are wrong. This "cathartic" approach will never change anything. We need meaningful engagement.
J) Social media has everyone "peeing in their pants," afraid to defer even minimally from Woke orthodoxy, which is making "mendacity" ubiquitous.
K) The fear of being honest and the fear to even tell a joke is "becoming almost everywhere. The only exceptions are people who are "weird like us and you don't mind being hated. But most people are not going to have that disease, and so we are stuck where we are."
Check out this video of Joe Rogan clarifying his views on the COVID vaccines.
I'll focus on this excerpt at the 2:50 min mark
Here's the thing. These are not like planned statements. Let's be real clear. When I say something stupid, I’m not thinking about what I'm going to say before I say it. I'm just. saying it, right? I don't have an off-air and an on-air voice. I don't. I have me. This is it. I got through the fucking net and I'm swimming in open waters, okay? And that's just how I live. If you say you disagree with me, I probably disagree with me too. I disagree with me all the time.
This illustrates a big problem. Way too many of us are walking around thinking that we need to talk only in prepared statements that are approved by our tribe. This is abnormal and stifled conversation, unhealthy for civilization. We need to get back to the idea that conversation is a collaborative enterprise where we listen charitably and test each others' statements with the aim being that we can figure something out together, rather than trying to "win." Meaningful conversations are always somewhat messy works in progress. This is the HxA way.
We need to reset the dial so that our public conversations better resemble our private thoughts. Currently, many people are out there listening in order to harpoon you as though the only thing you uttered (out of 100 things) is that one clunky thing that offended them, ignoring that conversation and thinking are processes by which we should be incrementally working our way toward truth, together.
Thus, I appreciate what Joe Rogan said in this clip. When we have conversations, we should not reading prepared inner scripts. That would not be real conversation. There should be a lot of missteps, especially when we are grappling with complex issues. We should always be charitable listeners, giving the speaker their best foot forward (until and unless they exhibit bad faith). We should always be willing to point out where we agree with the others before criticizing the one thing we disagree with. That establishes trust and opens up a robust conversation where all participants come away with a changed understanding of the others or of the world. This approach exhibits basic decency--it is the approach marriage counselors urge in order to keep marriages healthy, as indicated by John Gottman. It applies to the rest of us too.
One last thing. There are a lot of people out there engaging in nasty sport rather than conversation. They are wearing their language police hats, demanding compliance with their own standards of political propriety. I often wonder how they talk with each other in the privacy of their own homes, however. Do they demand trigger warnings from each other in their living rooms? Do they jump on each other for failing to use the proper pronoun? I suspect that they freely and privately admit facts that they condemn in public.
We need to urge each other to see live-time public conversation as an opportunity to learn from each other and to freely admit our low confidence levels and ignorance of some of the things we'd like to believe. We need to speak in public much more like the way we think and converse privately.
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