Musk Derangement Syndrome

Nellie Bowles, writing at Common Sense points out one of many deranged articles about Elon Musk, this one at the New York Times (image of the NYT headline below). Nellie's comments:

Pretty bad that baby Elon Musk didn’t solve apartheid: The Times has a new profile of Musk, who grew up in apartheid South Africa until he was 17, then emigrated to Canada so he wouldn’t have to serve in the military.

No matter, the Times’ effort is to smear him literally because he happened to be born into a country with a reprehensible government. Here’s what the reporter wrote: “Elon Musk grew up in a South Africa that saw the dangers of unchecked speech: Apartheid government propaganda fueled violence against Black people. Musk didn't experience that. He grew up in a bubble of white privilege.”

The word the Times was searching for to describe information flow in apartheid-era South Africa the exact opposite of “unchecked speech. It’s censorship. Newspapers blacked out their own columns in protest of government censorship. So determined are these writers to smear Musk and jam history into our modern language, they are literally rewriting apartheid as a problem of misinformation and too much free speech.

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The Long Tradition of Dividing People Into Good People and Bad People

Matt Taibbi, writing about Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States:

No matter how interesting a book he or she is able to write, any author who admits to looking out at the world and seeing only “victims and executioners” needs psychological help. Unfortunately, Zinn in this respect turned out to be a pioneer, presaging a generation of comic-book thinkers who understand things in binary terms, forever preoccupied with cramming people in neat categories of oppressors and oppressed.

Such mental habits are the fashion now and will definitely put you in a bind on Thanksgiving. How can I eat turkey and stuffing with a smile, when Columbus massacred the Arawaks? When the English forced the Wampanoags off their land and made many convert to Christianity? When Lincoln told Horace Greeley, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it”?

How? Maybe because you’re more than three years old, and don’t need fairy tales to be real in order to enjoy dinner with family and a football game?

Taibbi's article is "Thanksgiving is Awesome: In reply to the haters. Happy holiday, everyone."

On a more serious note, I read Zinn's book when I was a teenager and it was a much needed shock to my system, given that I had, to that point, been exposed to a steady stream of textbooks and teachers who argued American Exceptionalism. I agree with Taibbi that both of these approaches are simplistic.

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John McWhorter Discusses his New Book, Woke Racism

John McWhorter discusses his new book, Woke Racism, with Nick Gillespie of Reason. How did we get to the Woke Present? This is an hour-long discussion that draws repeatedly on history, connecting the dots from approximately the 1950s to the present.

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Caitlin Flanagan: What it’s Like to Turn 60 Years Old

Caitlin Flanagan is one of my favorite writers. She just turned 60 years old, which means that it's time to reminisce, celebrate and try to make deep sense of things.

[Y]ou have been on this Earth for a really, really long time. I have a photograph of myself at age 3, standing on the docks of Cork Harbor, about to sail to New York. When I look at the picture of that small child on her sturdy legs in the foggy past, I don’t feel any connection to her. The photograph looks like something I would discover after many days on Ancestry.com. It looks like a snapshot of my own great-aunt. There’s a reason the photograph looks like it’s from another time. Because it is from another time; it was taken more than half a century ago. How can I be in a photograph from that long ago? The math makes sense, but my own life doesn’t.

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