John McWorter Draws a Line in the Sand When Ibram X. Kendi Publicly Labels his Ideas “Racist.”

One of the things I find most disturbing about "anti-racists" is their demand that you must either agree to everything they say or else you are a "racist." Popular authors Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo claim that if you are not an "anti-racist" you are a racist. There are only two options. Thus speak the anti-racists.  This false dilemma, this unjustified dichotomy, is just "because."

"Anti-racism" is not the opposite of racism, despite the misleading nomenclature. It is virulent new form of racism. To pull off this minor miracle of creativity, the "anti-racists" have invoked a new expansive definition of "racism" that has nothing to do with specific unfair attitudes or behavior of specific people. The "anti-racists" invoke a Manichean claim that it is OK to judge people as good and bad (respectively Blacks and whites) based on immutable physical appearance, just because. In doing this, they are dusting off that old disreputable idea that melanin should serve as a guilt barometer. This is something they have in common with racists of the Civil War and Jim Crow eras, although the new barometer is upside-down.

This "anti-racist" formula has worked all too well for the past several years. Well-meaning people who fervently disagree with this "anti-racist" claim, however, including the specific claim that "all white people are racist," are being held emotional hostage. They are afraid to speak up, to disagree in public places. It is truly bizarre to see so many people who disagree with these "anti-racist" claims who are afraid to speak up. I know this from numerous private conversations. It's starting to look like many religions, where the preachers preach at the flock and members of the flock merely nod their heads, even thought they know in every bone of their bodies that the Earth is not 6,000 years old, that virgins don't have babies and that (an example from my Catholic upbringing) eating the host is not literally eating bloody muscles and capillaries. Members of the flock sat in total silence when the NYT promoted claims that the American Revolution was primarily for the purpose of promoting slavery, a central claim of "The 1619 Project."

So this is where we are: the preachers are preaching and members of the flock keep sitting silently because they are afraid of going to "anti-racist" hell. For them, hell is what would happen is they were publicly called "racist."  Thus, members of the flock will sit in paralyzed silence, even when the anti-racists call all "white" people and their Black intellectual allies "racist" no matter how exemplary their lives have been. Isn't that weird? "White" people are already being called racists as a group merely by their skin color, yet they fear being called "racist" as individuals. And what drives this fear is, ironically, that they hate racism. This is stranger than any fiction any creative writer could concoct. These "anti-racist" threats of name-calling are successfully turning many people into Zombies (this reminds me of how many types of wasps sting and zombify other bugs to use as hatcheries). After getting stung by the threat of being called "racists," the fearful zombified flock is willing to sit in silence even when the "anti-racists" make patently false claims that no racial progress has occurred since 1619, since the Civil War or since the Civil Rights era.  They sit in silence while the "anti-racists" ridicule Martin Luther King's idea that we should not be judged by the color of our skin, but only by the content of character.

Once this creepy dynamic settled into place, anti-racists, such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, began getting free rides from individuals who knew better but who were afraid to speak out. More troublesome, the anti-racists' fact-free and oftentimes false diatribes also began getting luxury free rides from corporate HR departments, government agencies (and here) and many members of our sense-making institutions, including left-leaning legacy media. In addition to securing the silence of people who disagree under threat of being called names, the "anti-racists" employ another big weapon: the rage of Woke mobs who are willing to destroy the careers of anyone who dares to dissent (recent example).

Linguist John McWhorter has not been afraid to call out the anti-racists.  He has done this in many places, including his article in The Atlantic,  "The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility: The popular book aims to combat racism but talks down to Black people." McWorther, a professor of linguistics, has taken a lot of flack from the far left for repeatedly calling out that the Emperor Has No Clothes.

McWhorter had more than his fill, however, when Ibram X. Kendi recently and publicly called McWhorter's ideas "racist."  Kendi has made dozens of claims that should be vigorously scrutinized by academics, book reviewers and the general public, but he has been surfing on the waves of fearful silence. That silence meant that the normally unflappable McWhorter had to fend for himself.  He decided it was time to push back dramatically, in a public way. Hence these excerpts from the November 23, 2020 episode of The Glenn Show with Glenn Loury:

Continue ReadingJohn McWorter Draws a Line in the Sand When Ibram X. Kendi Publicly Labels his Ideas “Racist.”

Eric Weinstein Explains the Relevance of Schrodinger’s Cat to Abortion and other Issues with Limited Multiple Choice False “Solutions”

"The Portal," a newish podcast by Eric Weinstein, has become a favorite of mine. Eric has a knack for recasting commonly discussed social problems in head-wrenchingly new ways that suggest solutions. I invite you to listen to an episode or two. I think you'll be hooked too.

The first 10 minutes of Episode 35 is a good example of how Weinstein reconceptualizes a problem. He begins by discussing the conundrum of Schrodinger's cat. Is it alive or dead? But not so fast! Why are there only two "solutions" offered? Especially where neither of these "solutions" captures the complexity of the situation? Weinstein offers his own interpretation of this "super-position" problem: Asking whether the cat is "alive or dead" improperly attempts to lock us into an over-simplistic binary, a false dilemma. This is not the end of Weinstein's thoughts on superposition, but only the beginning. He then turns his sights toward many thorny social problems, all of which tend to be (improperly) presented as having only two (or a few) possible answers. Take, for example, abortion. The following is a transcript I created of a part of Weinstein's discussion:

The Portal – Ep 35 May 21, 2020

Eric Weinstein:

I've come to believe that we are wasting our political lives on [ ] superposition questions. For example, let's see if we can solve the abortion debate problem right now on this podcast using superposition, as it is much easier than the abortion problem itself. The abortion debate problem is that everyone agrees that before fertilization there's no human life to worry about, and that after a baby is born, there's no question that it has a right to live. Yet pro-choice and pro-life activists insist on telling us that the developing embryo is either a mere bundle of cells suddenly becoming a life only when born or a full-fledged baby the moment the sperm enters the egg. You can guess my answer here. The question of "Is it a baby's life or a woman's choice?" is agreed upon by everyone before fertilization or following birth because the observable in question has the system as one of the two multiple choice answers in those two cases.

However, during the process of embryonic development, something miraculous is taking place that we simply don't understand scientifically. Somehow a non-sentient blastula becomes a baby by a process utterly opaque to science, which has yet has no mature theory of consciousness. The system in utero is a changing and progressing superposition tilted heavily towards not being a baby at the beginning and tilted heavily towards being one at the end of the pregnancy.

But the problem here is that we have allowed the activists rather than the embryologists and developmental biologists to hand us the "life versus choice" observable with its two terrible multiple choice options. If we had let the embryologists set the multiple choice question there would be at least 23 Carnegie stages for the embryo before you even get to fetal development. But instead of going forward from what we both know and don't know with high confidence about the system, we are instead permanently deranged by being stuck with "Schrodinger's Embryo" by the activists who insist on working backwards from their political objectives.

So does this somehow solve the abortion issue? Of course not. All it does is get us to see how ridiculously transparent we are in our politics that we would allow our society to be led by those activists who would shoehorn the central scientific miracle of human development into a nutty political binary of convenience. We don't even think to ask, Who are these people who have left us at each other's throats debating an inappropriate multiple choice question that can never be answered?

Well, in the spirit of The Portal, we are always looking for a way out of our perennial problems to try to find an exit. And I think that the technique here of teaching oneself to spot superposition problems in stalemated political systems brings a great deal of relief to those of us who find the perspective of naive activism a fairly impoverished worldview.

The activist mindset is always trying to remove nuanced selections that might better match our world's needs from among the multiple choice answers until it finds a comical binary. Do you support the war on drugs? Yes or no? Are you for or against immigration? Should men and women be treated equally? Should we embrace capitalism or choose socialism? Racism: systemic problem or convenient excuse? Is China a trading partner or a strategic rival? Has technology stagnated or is it in fact racing ahead at breakneck speed? Has feminism gone too far, or not far enough?

In all of these cases, there's an entire industry built around writing articles that involve replacing conversations that might progress towards answers and agreement with simple multiple choice political options that foreclose all hope. And in general, we can surmise when this has occurred because activism generally leaves a distinct signature where the true state of a system is best represented as a superposition of the last two remaining choices that bitterly divided us, handed us by activists.

So I will leave you with the following thought. The “principle of superposition” is not limited to quantum weirdness, and it may be governing your life at a level you have never considered. Think about where you are most divided from your loved ones politically. Then ask yourself "When I listen to the debates at my dinner table, am I hearing a set of multiple choice answers that sound like they were developed by scholars interested in understanding or by activists who were pushing for an outcome?" If the latter, think about whether you couldn't make more progress with those you love by recognizing that the truth is usually in some kind of a superposition of the last remaining answers pushed by the activists.

But you don't have to accept these middlebrow binaries, dilemmas and trilemmas. Instead, try asking a new question: If my loved ones and I trashed the terms of debate foisted upon us by strangers, activists and the news media, could we together fashion a list of multiple choice answers that we might agree contain an answer we all could live with and that better describes the true state of the system? I mean, do you really want open or closed borders? Do you really want to talk about psilocybin and heroin in the same breath? Do you really want to claim that there is no systemic effect oppression or that it governs every aspect of our lives? Before long, it is my hope that you will develop an intuition that many long-running stalemated discussions are really about having our lives shoehorned by others into inappropriate binaries that can only represent the state of our world as a superposition of inappropriate and simplistic answers that you never would have chosen for yourself.

Continue ReadingEric Weinstein Explains the Relevance of Schrodinger’s Cat to Abortion and other Issues with Limited Multiple Choice False “Solutions”

Journalist Christopher Rufo Discusses the Dangers of Critical Race Theory with Dave Rubin

Critical Race Theorists are getting their way in many institutions in the form of forced "training" for unwilling students and employees. CRT advocates are largely getting a free pass on this trend. Many people who have serious concerns about CRT's ideological foundation and tactics are afraid to speak up for fear of losing their jobs, for legitimate fear of being canceled in other ways or for a well-documented fear of being branded "insensitive" or "racist."

CRT advocates proudly embrace the idea that one can determine another person's character by simply noticing immutable characteristics such as skin color. In short, CRT advocates claim to be are fighting racism, but they do this by employing racism. CRT thus has a lot in common with astrology: both approaches assert that one can understand another person by reference to something purely accidental (whether it be a skin tone or a birth date). Both approaches lack scientific validity and CRT is setting the civil rights movement back by decades by trashing Martin Luther King's dream that we will one day judge each other by content of character. Unfortunately, CRT has gained critical mass in many schools, corporations and government offices, which now invite forced CRT indoctrination of their students and employees.

Christopher Rufo is a journalist who has declared war on this trend. He discusses CRT principles in this video, then bemoans the fact that thoughtful liberals are not able or willing to criticize the movement for fear of being called names or losing social status or employment:

15:31

Rubin: Do you sense that the liberals have any defense against this? I think this is where i have a bit of a difference with some of my friends in this where I think some of them still think the liberals have some defense mechanism against this. I simply don't believe that anymore. I think i it's either the conservatives and in a weird way, it's Trump or or bust. What do you think about that?

Rufo: Yeah, I 100% side with you. I think that what we've seen in Seattle and San Francisco and Los Angeles, that the kind of old-line liberals or the kind of moderate liberals really have no ability to push back or even restrain the most extreme progressive ideologues. That kind of experience in the last 10 years in these very liberal cities on the west coast is now being nationalized in our discourse and, frankly, Joe Biden is not going to offer any kind of restraint against this. It's completely naive and absurd to think so. It's also kind of naive and absurd to think that there's some great third party unity ticket that could fight against it. The kind of brass tacks of it is that dissident liberals, mainstream liberals--they have to to create an alliance with conservatives in order to stop this. I'm encouraging all of my friends on the center left to move over and forge an alliance at least on these critical issues with us within the conservative movement because the bottom line is really this uh kind of writing an op-ed no matter how good it is kind of appealing to civil discourse appealing to restraint, appealing to the center, is not going to change the minds of the fundamentalists who are running the kind of intellectual architecture of the left and they have to basically make the decision we are going to tactically align with conservatives to stop this.

Many of Rufo's conclusions align well with the opinions of many on the dark web, many of whom are now considered "dissident" liberals because they believe in traditional liberal values, but not the pernicious ideas of CRT. As far as defining "traditional liberal values," consider Jonathan Haidt's description:

I think young people are losing touch with some of the hard-won lessons of the past, so I’m not going to say “Oh, we have to just accept whatever morality is here.” I still am ultimately liberal in the sense that what I dream of is a society in which people are free to create lives that they want to live. They’re not forced to do things. They’re not shamed. There’s a minimum of conflict and we make room for each other. If we’re going to have a diverse society, we’ve really got to be tolerant and make room for each other. That’s my dream. I think in the last five or ten years, we’ve gotten really far from that.

For another lengthy and robust conversation regarding the danger of critical race theory, consider this Making Sense podcast, in which Sam Harris interviews John McWhorter: #217 - THE NEW RELIGION OF ANTI-RACISM. . Sam Harris has been a shining light on these issues of Wokeness for many months. Making Sense has a paywall, but I'd ask you to consider making the investment. If you can't afford it, write Sam an email and he'll give you free access for a year.

I'll end with this recent political development: Donald Trump "has just signed a full Executive Order abolishing critical race theory from the federal government, the military, and all federal contractors." This is an era of strange bedfellows. I can't think of a person I detest more than Donald Trump, yet I think this executive order is an appropriate step. Perhaps this order will provoke real and nuanced public conversations about the aspirations and dangers of CRT in lieu of institutional bullying and infinite varieties of ad hominem attacks in reply to sincere criticism. For more, see Rufo's article from yesterday (with the full executive order) here.

To clarify - Rufo and Rubin urge voting for Trump on this one issue. I have never voted for anyone based on one issue, and Trump's maliciousness, mendaciousness and corruption will keep me from voting for him even if I think he made one appropriate move on CRT.

Continue ReadingJournalist Christopher Rufo Discusses the Dangers of Critical Race Theory with Dave Rubin

“Racist” Princeton’s Serious Legal Dilemma

From the Washington Examiner:

[Princeton] President Christopher Eisgruber published an open letter earlier this month claiming that "racism and the damage it does to people of color persist at Princeton" and that "racist assumptions" are "embedded in structures of the University itself."

According to a letter the Department of Education sent to Princeton that was obtained by the Washington Examiner, such an admission from Eisgruber raises concerns that Princeton has been receiving tens of millions of dollars of federal funds in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which declares that "no person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

Fascinating. Princeton has made a unambiguous statement that it has been thoroughly "racist" and that it continues to be "racist." The Department of Education responded by opening an investigation because this statement conflicts with many other claims Princeton made, in order to qualify for federal funding, that it was not racist. Now we'll see whether Princeton really meant what it said.  The Department of Education will demand evidence from Princeton in support of Princeton's admission. The National Examiner explains:

What the department seeks to obtain from its investigation is what evidence Princeton used in its determination that the university is racist, including all records regarding Eisgruber's letter and a "spreadsheet identifying each person who has, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, been excluded from participation in, been denied the benefits of, or been subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance as a result of the Princeton racism or 'damage' referenced in the President’s Letter." Eisgruber and a "designated corporate representative" must sit for interviews under oath, and Princeton must also respond to written questions regarding the matter.

What did Princeton mean when it admitted that the University was permeated with "racism." For reference, Merriam-Webster’s current entry on “racism” (as of August 7, 2020) gives three, related definitions:

D1. a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

D2. (a) a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles, (b) a political or social system founded on racism

D3. racial prejudice or discrimination

Perhaps Princeton was using the new Woke definition of "racism," but it might have put itself at serious financial and legal risk to use "racism" in this new highly-disputed sense.  Perhaps this is a good time to come to a careful consensus about what the vast majority of people mean when they use the term "racist." It's time to stop being 1) sloppy or 2) engaging in blithe virtue signalling when using such an important word. New Discourses discusses a controversy regarding the definition of "racism."  Here is an excerpt from that article at New Discourses:

When critical social justice theorists talk about “racism,” they describe it as a matter of a social system’s being organized in such a way that it creates and perpetuates racial inequalities regardless of the conscious beliefs, attitudes, or intentions of those who inhabit the system. Although they also make much of purported unconscious biases in the propagation of racism, even in systems, their criterion for diagnosing systemic racism is entirely consequentialist: “disparate impact” along racial lines is its sole necessary and sufficient condition. For example, in White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo asserts that “[b]y definition, racism is a deeply embedded historical system of institutional power (24), “a system of unequal institutional power,” (125) “a network of norms and actions that consistently create advantage for whites and disadvantage for people of color,” (27–28), “a far-reaching system that no longer depends [as per D2] on the good [or bad] intentions of individual actors; it becomes the default of the society and is reproduced automatically,” (21) i.e., without conscious intent. Journalist Radley Balko’s gloss on “systemic racism” captures the idea perfectly:

Of particular concern to some on the right is the term “systemic racism,” often wrongly interpreted as an accusation that everyone in the system is racist. In fact, systemic racism means almost the opposite. It means that we have systems and institutions that produce racially disparate outcomes, regardless of the intentions of the people who work within them.

In light of such statements, D2 would seem to fall short by failing to make a clean separation between human psychology (beliefs, intentions, etc.) and the quasi-mechanistic, or “automatic,” operations of social systems.

To be continued . . .

Continue Reading“Racist” Princeton’s Serious Legal Dilemma

New Rule at USC: Don’t Say Non-Offensive Words That Sound Like Offensive Words

This is an example of Daniel Kahneman's halo effect going beserk. If you are not stuck in a modern day intellectual silo, this article might sorely disappoint you: "If USC can punish Greg Patton, free speech on campus really is dead." Professor Patton did not say anything inappropriate. He said a word that sounded like another word that some students said offended them. To summarize, Patton didn't say an offensive word at all, but he is being punished for saying a Chinese phrase that, to the over-sensitive ears of some students, sounded like an offensive word. USC's conclusion is that saying a perfectly innocent Chinese phrase in the process of discussing business speech is the moral equivalent of saying a completely different English word with a totally different meaning.

Too many of us are being silent about stupidity in high places. USC is a prestigious and supposedly learned university that is acting deliberately, intentionally and perniciously with regard to Professor Greg Patton. This knee-jerk off-target administrative disciplinary action serves no legitimate purpose and chills speech in classroom filled with elite young adults who are not acting their age or educational level.

Continue ReadingNew Rule at USC: Don’t Say Non-Offensive Words That Sound Like Offensive Words