Apparently, one can have a false opinion these days. Abigail Shrier explains in this Tweet Thread.
For the fallout, consider Shrier's additional tweets on this thread, including the following:
This is "progress" for San Francisco Board of Education." Per the article, it will cost $10,000 to rename each school. Excerpt from the NYT:
Following the unrest in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, which led to the killing of a protester by a white supremacist, the board moved in 2018 to establish a commission to evaluate renaming schools to “condemn any symbols of white supremacy and racism,” said Gabriela López, the board president.
The commission had decided that schools named after figures who fit the following criteria would be renamed: “engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
My question: How many of members of the SF BD of Educ thought this was a ridiculous idea, yet sat on their hands in silence, afraid to speak out?
Spot on. Tara Palmeri of Politico is getting blasted for saying something obviously true.
Saagar and Krystal nail it with their commentary.
"Normal" is unethical in a country that ostensibly values vigorous use of the First Amendment.
John McWhorter now has a Substack column and I have signed up to support his work. He recently expressed dismay that a particular group of people pretend that they don't understand this distinction: it is one thing to use a rude word as an epithet to hurt someone and an entirely different thing to refer to that word (in this case, the "N" word) by saying it or writing it in order to discuss that word. Woke mobs are doing everything in their power (including attempted cancellation) to characterize non-harmful uses of the "N" as "harmful to people in exactly the same way it hurts people to hurl the "N" word as an epithet.
McWhorter's position (with which I agree) is that this is all theater and power plays. No one is hurt when we discuss the "N" word and all of us know that. In fact, we should be able to freely discuss the use of that word by using the word. This Woke trip wire should be dismantled. What truly hurts us all is to pretend that use and reference are the same. Here's an excerpt from McWhorter's essay, "The N-word as slur vs. the N-word as a sequence of sounds: What makes the New York Times so comfortable making black people look dim?"
The idea that it is inherent to black American culture to fly to pieces at hearing the N-word used in reference is implausible at best, and slanderous at worst. But the second and more important is that insisting on this taboo makes it look like black people are numb to the difference between usage and reference, vague on the notion of meta, given to overgeneralization rather than to making distinctions.I would like to be the fly on the wall in the private living spaces of all of those people who claim that they are hurt even when someone uses the "N" word merely to refer to it or discuss it (e.g., to discuss the extent to which it is harmful). I smell the strong stench of hypocrisy wafting from the Woke mob. How long before it is a terrible thing to even write "the 'N' word" or "N*****" when merely attempting to discuss the word?
To wit, the get McNeil fired for using the N-word to refer to it makes black people look dumb. And not just to the Twitter trollers who will be nasty enough to actually write it down. Non-black people are thinking it nationwide and keeping it to themselves. Frankly, the illogic in this approach to the N-word is so obvious to anyone who does make distinctions that the only question is why people would not look on and guiltily wonder whether the idea that black people are less intellectually gifted is true.
Soon after George Floyd's death, thousands of people peacefully marched in American streets protesting police violence. As the sun went down in those cities, however, multitudes of people rioted and looted, causing more than $1 billion in damage.
The damage from riots and looting across the U.S. following the death of George Floyd is estimated to be the costliest in insurance history – between $1 billion and $2 billion. Insurance Information Institute (or Triple-I) compiles information from a company called Property Claim Services (PCS), which has tracked insurance claims related to civil disorder since 1950, and other databases.Yet we have millions of people in the U.S. and major newspapers who will not call $1 billion in damages "rioting" or "looting." That is a repeated phenomenon these days on both the political right and political left: people making strong arguments by ignoring contradictory evidence. This article focuses on denialism on the political left. My topic is police violence and race. It's important that we gather the facts, whether it be the existence of riots and of police violence, especially violence toward African American people. Many people would rather not look at actual crime statistics, however, and this has led to an untethered and dysfunctional conversation regarding police violence. Sam Harris experienced harsh pushback (and also praise) when he released a podcast titled, "Can We Pull Back From the Brink?" His "sin" is that his podcast contained actual crime statistics:
Again, cops kill around 1000 people every year in the United States. About 25 percent are black. About 50 percent are white. The data on police homicide are all over the place. The federal government does not have a single repository for data of this kind. But they have been pretty carefully tracked by outside sources, like the Washington Post, for the last 5 years. These ratios appear stable over time. Again, many of these killings are justifiable, we’re talking about career criminals who are often armed and, in many cases, trying to kill the cops. Those aren’t the cases we’re worried about. We’re worried about the unjustifiable homicides.
Now, some people will think that these numbers still represent an outrageous injustice. After all, African Americans are only 13 percent of the population. So, at most, they should be 13 percent of the victims of police violence, not 25 percent. Any departure from the baseline population must be due to racism.
Ok. Well, that sounds plausible, but consider a few more facts:
Blacks are 13 percent of the population, but they commit at least 50 percent of the murders and other violent crimes. If you have 13 percent of the population responsible for 50 percent of the murders—and in some cities committing 2/3rds of all violent crime—what percent of police attention should it attract? I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it’s not just 13 percent. Given that the overwhelming majority of their victims are black, I’m pretty sure that most black people wouldn’t set the dial at 13 percent either.