New research provides evidence that narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism — maladaptive personality traits known as the “Dark Triad” — are associated with overt displays of virtue and victimhood. The study suggests that people with dark personalities use these signals of “virtuous victimhood” to deceptively extract resources from others. The findings have been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
“Fortune and human imperfection assure that at some point in life everyone will experience suffering, disadvantage, or mistreatment,” wrote the authors of the new study. “When this happens, there will be some who face their burdens in silence, treating it as a private matter they must work out for themselves, and there will others who make a public spectacle of their sufferings, label themselves as victims, and demand compensation for their pain. This latter response is what interests us.”
I have enjoyed watching Jon Stewart over the years and looked forward to this conversation involving Jon Stewart and Andrew Sullivan. It was not what I expected. It was not a conversation at all. On these issues of race, Stewarts exhibits absolutely no sense of nuance, no curiosity regarding the statistical evidence pertaining to the issues and no interest in tamping down the shrill racist declarations of a second guest, a woman named Lisa Bond. I'd recommend that you watch two videos before reading further. The first is Stewart's introductory "comedy skit" regarding racism. The second involves the "conversation" with Andrew Sullivan.
Jon Stewart’s insistence that Americans had never robustly debated race before 2020 is also, well, deranged. Americans have been loudly debating it for centuries. There was something called a Civil War over it. His claim that white America has never done anything in defense of black Americans (until BLM showed up, of course) requires him to ignore more than 300,000 white men who gave their lives to defeat the slaveholding Confederacy. It requires Stewart to ignore the countless whites (often Jewish) who risked and gave their lives in the Civil Rights Movement. It requires him to erase the greatest president in American history. This glib dismissal of all white Americans throughout history, even those who risked everything to expand equality, is, when you come to think about it, obscene.
Stewart’s claim that whites never tried to ameliorate black suffering until now requires him to dismiss over $19 trillion of public funds spent in the long War on Poverty, focused especially on black Americans. That’s the equivalent of more than 140 Marshall Plans. As Samuel Kronen has shown, it requires the erasure from history of “the Food Stamp Act of 1964, the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, the Social Security Amendments of 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Social Security Amendments of 1962, and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and on and on.” To prove his point, Stewart has to pretend LBJ never existed. That’s how utterly lost he now is.
Stewart then used crude metrics of inequality to argue, Kendi-style, without any evidence, that the only thing that can possibly explain racial inequality today in America is still “white supremacy.” Other factors — concentrated poverty, insanely high rates of crime and violence, acute family breakdown, a teen culture that equates success with whiteness, lack of affordable childcare — went either unmentioned or openly mocked as self-evident expressions of bigotry. He then equated formal legal segregation with voluntary residential segregation, as if Jim Crow were still in force. And he straw-manned the countering argument thus: white America believes that African-Americans are “solely responsible for their community’s struggles.”
I don’t know anyone who believes that. I sure don’t. It’s much more complex than that. And it’s that complexity that some of us are insisting on — and that Stewart wants to dismiss out of hand in favor of his own Manichean moral preening. His final peroration ended thus: “America has always prioritized white comfort over black survival.” Note: always. There has been no real progress; white people have never actually listened to a black person; America is irredeemably racist. Those fucking white men, Lincoln and LBJ, never gave a shit.
What is stunningly obvious about Stewart's rant (and all Woke rants) is the lack of ideas for how to fix the problems they point to (and many of them are legitimate concerns). It's all theatrical virtue-signaling that refuses look at actually problems and solutions. For instance, what are some real-life changes we could implement that would actually result in inner-city minorities getting better math and reading skills? There is also a consistent refusal by these Woke performers to look at relevant data. Look what happened to Roland Fryer when he looked at real numbers and urged real solutions. Look at what happened to Steven Pinker.
For excellent analysis of Stewart's rant, see the [upcoming for non-subscribers] episode of The Fifth Column podcast "The Problem with Jon Stewart." Analysis begins about minute 23 and runs for an entire hour.
[Added April 3, 2022]
There are many Woke-inspired "conversations" like this and most of them are deficient and misleading in the same way. They talk a lot about average, as though every "black"* person is the average person, when that is wildly false. The "average" encompasses a wide distribution of people, many of whom are quite successful along with those who are struggling. In fact, 60% of "black" people are middle class or above. Why don't they discuss the many successful "black" people? And why don't they ask what the successful "black" people are doing that unsuccessful "black" people are not doing? And why don't they discuss what unsuccessful "black people are doing that unsuccessful "white" people are also doing? Such discussions simply don't help their narrative, which is that every "black" person in modern American is constantly victimized by racism perpetuated by every "white" person.
*I am no longer going to use the terms "white" and "black" to refer to groups of people. The willingness to categorize people by "color" is the first step onto the slippery slope of racism. There is definitely racism in the U.S., but there is no such thing as "race." We can tamp down the former if we stop categorizing people (of any "color") in this crude, baseless and dangerous way. For more on my refusal to categorize people as colors, see this article on Dr. Sheena Mason and see this article holding that "race" has no more validity than astrology. When people ask for my astrological sign, I tell them that the are engaged in a nonsensical thinking. Same thing whenever people categorize each other by color or "race." Mason adheres to a theory of gracelessness, which she backs up with her own theory of gracelessness, which is a methodological and pedagogical interpretive and teaching framework for "how to analyze race and racism across time and place." She discusses her threory at length in the video below, starting at Min 14:
Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world. We believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share and build community through our stories.
Bullshit.
Six years of work by Chris Hedges. Youtube doesn't like it, so now it is gone.
The most vocal cheerleaders for this censorship are the liberal class. Terrified of the enraged crowds of QAnon conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists, gun-toting militias, and cult-like Trump supporters that grew out of the distortions of the money-drenched electoral system, neoliberalism, austerity, deindustrialization, predatory capitalism, and the collapse of social programs, they plead with the digital monopolies to make it all go away. They blame anyone but themselves. Democrats in the U.S. Congress have held hearings with the CEOs of social media companies pressuring them to do more to censor content. Banish the troglodytes. Then we will have social cohesion. Then life will go back to normal. Fake news. Harm reduction model. Information pollution. Information disorder. They have all sorts of Orwellian phrases to justify censorship. Meanwhile, they peddle their own fantasy that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It is a stunning inability to be remotely self-reflective or self-critical, and it is ominous as we move deeper and deeper into a state of political and social dysfunction.
What were my sins? I did not, like my former employer, The New York Times, sell you the lie of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, peddle conspiracy theories about Donald Trump being a Russian asset, put out a ten-part podcast called the Caliphate that was a hoax, or tell you that the contents on Hunter Biden’s laptop was “disinformation.” I did not prophesize that Joe Biden was the next FDR or that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election.
"The deplatforming of voices like mine, already blocked by commercial media and marginalized with algorithms, is coupled with the pernicious campaign to funnel people back into the arms of the establishment media such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. In the US, as Dorothy Parker once said about Katharine Hepburn’s emotional range as an actress, any policy discussion ranges from A to B. Step outside those lines and you are an outcast. This is the reason Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and I are on Substack.
It is perhaps telling that our greatest investigative journalist, Sy Hersh, who exposed the massacre of 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers at My Lai and the torture at Abu Ghraib, has trouble publishing in the United States. I would direct you to the interview I did with Sy about the decayed state of the American media, but it no longer exists on YouTube.
A culture of censorship—of shaming, shunning, and attempting to destroy people’s lives for ideological reasons—exists in America, and Americans have a name for it: cancel culture.
Let’s not abandon that name in a vain attempt to please the people most responsible for perpetuating the problem.
Who are these people? Here's one tell: You will not find them on the streets actually helping to improve the people they claim they care about. You will not find them in the kinds of colleges that most people attend. You won't find them inviting open-ended discussions with the people they disagree with.
Tara Henley tells us more about the Identitarian Left, whether you call them this or whether you call them Woke Moralists or Social Justice Warriors or whatever:
One term I’ve heard lately that’s helpful in unpacking the new left is “identitarian moralism.” This phrase captures the new left’s puritanical thrust and quasi-religious fervour, along with its festishization of identity, while also signaling its ability to shape-shift to take up the Twitter cause du jour, whether that happens to be pandemic public health policies or, this week, recasting Madeleine Albright as some sort of feminist icon. What remains consistent, across all fronts, is a strident illiberalism.
Let’s be clear: If you do not agree with the new left’s list of approved narratives, it one hundred percent expects you to keep your mouth shut (or, alternatively, to “do the work” of “listening and learning,” ideally on Instagram, so that you can be shunned and shamed in as public a manner as possible).
The goal of the new left is, in fact, explicitly to shut down debate of any ideas deemed “harmful,” so as not to perpetuate the harm. This unfortunately leads to an endless parade of bad faith arguments, since the goal is never to make sense or persuade people, but rather to bring discussions to an abrupt halt.
It also leaves a great number of people politically homeless.
It used to be that I was the one furthest to the left in any newsroom, occasionally causing strain in story meetings with my views on issues like the housing crisis. I am now easily the most conservative, frequently sparking tension by questioning identity politics. This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change.
To work at the CBC in the current climate is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon journalistic integrity.
It is to sign on, enthusiastically, to a radical political agenda that originated on Ivy League campuses in the United States and spread through American social media platforms that monetize outrage and stoke societal divisions. It is to pretend that the “woke” worldview is near universal — even if it is far from popular with those you know, and speak to, and interview, and read.
To work at the CBC now is to accept the idea that race is the most significant thing about a person, and that some races are more relevant to the public conversation than others. It is, in my newsroom, to fill out racial profile forms for every guest you book; to actively book more people of some races and less of others.
To work at the CBC is to submit to job interviews that are not about qualifications or experience — but instead demand the parroting of orthodoxies, the demonstration of fealty to dogma.
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