Thomas Frank: Two Ways to do Liberalism
Thomas Frank, the author of What is the Matter with Kansas was on Bill Maher's show recently. He suggested that there are now two ways to do liberalism.
Glenn Loury and John McWhorter React to School District Dumbs Down the Math Curriculum in the name of “Equity.”
Glenn Loury and John McWhorter react to a recent decision of the Princeton School District to dumb down the math curriculum in the name of "equity." John McWhorter sums up the problem: In the view of some school administrators, "It is not authentically black to be nerdy."
Here is an article describing the problem: "Opinion: Princeton Public School parents express concerns about school district’s ‘new direction’"
Daryl Davis and Quay Hanna: The Best Strategy Against Racism is Conversation
New FAIR video featuring Daryl Davis and Quay Hanna. Let's not write off our fellow American, even proud racists. Daryl Davis says, "Take time to sit down with your adversaries. You will learn something from you and you will learn something from them."
Modern Day Religions
I agree with Zuby. As I see it, traditional religions were serving a purpose that was not fully appreciated. I'm not claiming that the religious claims touted by most traditional religions were true. The truth of such claims is not where the source of the power of a religion. It is more accurate to state the the falsity of the dogmatic claims underlie the power of a religion. I explain this in a five-part series of articles I titled "Mending Fences."
What happens when you take eliminate a popular institution? We're finding out as it is occurring, as described by Chesterson's Fence:
The principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
The most powerful social dynamic is our tendency to form tribes. Whenever people do this, they point to principles and beliefs, but there is no need for these principles or beliefs to be factually true to serve as the "reason" for the tribal affiliation. We often see this: the wackier the belief, the stronger the tribal ties, because proclaiming nonsensical things serves as a badge of tribal belonging.
John McWhorter has repeatedly made this point with regard to Wokeness. It is not like a religion. Rather, he says, it is a religion. “The reality is that what the Elect call problematic is what a Christian means by blasphemous.” The following excerpt is from the introduction of McWhorter's book, Woke Racism (2021):
My main aims will be:1. To argue that this new ideology is actually a religion in all but name, and that this explains why something so destructive and incoherent is so attractive to so many good people.
2. To explain why so many black people are attracted to a religion that treats us as simpletons.
3. To show that this religion is actively harmful to black people despite being intended as unprecedentedly “antiracist.”
4. To show that a pragmatic, effective, liberal, and even Democratic-friendly agenda for rescuing black America need not be founded on the tenets of this new religion.
5. To suggest ways to lessen the grip of this new religion on our public culture.
Citing Accurate Statistics Can be Harmful to Your Career: The Cases of Zac Kriegman and Roland Fryer
Zac Kriegman lost his job at Thomson Reuters for the sin of doing his job well. Citing accurate statistics collided with the prevailing Black Lives Matter narrative regarding the extent of police violence against unarmed blacks. Unfortunate for his career, Kriegman also concluded that the Ferguson Effect stemming from the BLM protests and riots has resulted in the deaths of thousands of black men.
[Please assume that wherever I use the terms "black" or "white" that I am using these terms in scare quotes. I am asking readers to make this assumption because I am convinced that concept of "race" is illusory and pernicious and should be eliminated from all discourse. I am quite aware that people come in various shapes and shades of skin color, but none of this is evidence supporting a belief in "race." I have been convinced that this is the proper course based on writings of Sheena Mason, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Zuby (and see here), Kmele Foster, Coleman Hughes, Angel Eduardo and Inaya Folarin Iman. In an earlier post, I characterized the belief in "race" to be as absurd as the belief in astrology.]
What follows is an excerpt from Kriegman's article at Common Sense, "I Criticized BLM. Then I Was Fired: The data about police shootings just didn't add up, but no one at Thomson Reuters wanted to hear it.":
I had been following the academic research on BLM for years (for example, here, here, here and here), and I had come to the conclusion that the claim upon which the whole movement rested—that police more readily shoot black people—was false.The data was unequivocal. It showed that, if anything, police were slightly less likely to use lethal force against black suspects than white ones.
Statistics from the most complete database of police shootings (compiled by The Washington Post) indicate that, over the last five years, police have fatally shot 39 percent more unarmed whites than blacks. Because there are roughly six times as many white Americans as black Americans, that figure should be closer to 600 percent, BLM activists (and their allies in legacy media) insist. The fact that it’s not—that there’s more than a 500-percentage point gap between reality and expectation—is, they say, evidence of the bias of police departments across the United States.
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