I have often taken the position that Christopher Rufo takes during this interview. For me, a person's color tells me next to nothing (and usually nothing at all) about that person's history, experience, intelligence, passions, morality and admirability. It is my hope that, someday, we will all recognize that a person's "race" will be one of the least interesting things about them, except, perhaps when I am taking portrait photos, were a person's skin tone sometimes requires me to make adjustments to the lighting I use (see many of my portrait photos here for examples).
In this interview, Rufo refuses to by into any sort of racial ontology and insists that he wants to be evaluated as an individual. He disagrees that there are "black" versa "white" traits, qualities and aptitudes. I agree. And further, I would agree with Rufo (who writes often about these issues) that categorizing people by appearance divides us socially and breeds mistrust of each other. We are hurting each and disrupting our abilities to work efficiently to promote the general social welfare whenever we pretend that we are internally different based on external immutable characteristics. To do this is to invoke the logic of astrology and phrenology, with far far greater capacity to hurt innocent people.
John Staddon, an emeritus professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, was taken off the Society for Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology Division 6 listserv overseen by the APA.
. . .
The topic that appears to have gotten him removed was the suggestion that there are only two sexes. According to Staddon, what likely got him taken off was this post: “Hmm… Binary view of sex false? What is the evidence? Is there a Z chromosome?”
Insight-filled article by Ross Douthat of the NYT: "How Michel Foucault Lost the Left and Won the Right." When institutional sense-making power shift, tactics shift. Douthat persuasively identifies this shift. An excerpt:
The impulse to establish legitimacy and order informs a lot of action on the left these days. The idea that the left is relativistic belongs to an era when progressives were primarily defining themselves against white heteronormative Christian patriarchy, with Foucauldian acid as a solvent for the old regime. Nobody watching today’s progressivism at work would call it relativistic: Instead, the goal is increasingly to find new rules, new hierarchies, new moral categories to govern the post-Christian, post-patriarchal, post-cis-het world.
To this end, the categories of identity politics, originally embraced as liberative contrasts to older strictures, are increasingly used to structure a moral order of their own: to define who defers to whom, who can make sexual advances to whom and when, who speaks for which group, who gets special respect and who gets special scrutiny, what vocabulary is enlightened and which words are newly suspect, and what kind of guild rules and bureaucratic norms preside.
Meanwhile, conservatives, the emergent regime’s designated enemies, find themselves drawn to ideas that offer what Shullenberger calls a “systematic critique of the institutional structures by which modern power operates” — even when those ideas belong to their old relativist and postmodernist enemies.
This is a temptation I wish the right were better able to resist. Having conservatives turn Foucauldian to own the libs doesn’t seem worth the ironies — however rich and telling they may be.
I repeatedly encounter people who identify on the political left who insist that the Laptop found at a computer shop in October, 2020 was not Hunter Biden's laptop and that it was a Russian ploy to interfere with the U.S. Presidential election. The fact that these beliefs persist tells a sad story about the power the news media has to defraud its trusting audience.
This CBS Report from April 3, 2021 is recent confirmation of my belief that the laptop really was Hunter Biden's laptop. April 2021, long after the election was decided, was a politically convenient time and place for Hunter to deny that the laptop was his, but he didn't deny it. October, 2020, when the NY Post initially reported on the laptop, prior to the election, was also the perfect time for Hunter Biden to deny that it was his laptop, but he didn't deny it then either. He has never denied that it was his laptop. In fact, in the above CBS interview Hunter Biden stated that it is possible that it might have been his laptop. Watch the CBS video excerpt and observe Hunter Biden's demeanor. Is this the sort of person who would use his father's name to cut lucrative self-serving deals with foreign powers? Is that the sort of person who would write the emails found on the laptop. Seems apparent to me.
If this laptop and payoff had been about any of Trump's degenerate children, the media would have been all over it. The failure to cover this story is stunning jour - - - I almost wrote "journalistic malpractice," but it was far worse. It was an intentional and deliberate ongoing muti--news-outlet conspiracy to keep citizens from knowing something important that might affect their views on an upcoming election. Full disclosure: I voted for Biden and I was horrified by the thought that Trump might win a second term. There are more important principles at play, however, than the result of any one election. See Russell Brand's interview with Glenn Greenwald on this topic:
In the final months of the heated 2020 presidential race, The Post revealed a trove of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop that raised questions about his then-candidate father’s ties to his son’s foreign business ventures, including Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company linked to corruption.
The emails revealed that the younger Biden introduced a top Burisma executive to his father, then vice president, less than a year before the elder Biden admittedly pressured Ukrainian officials into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.
The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, a Burisma board adviser, sent Hunter on April 17, 2015.
An image of Hunter Biden found on the laptop at the center of The Post exposé
The water-damaged MacBook Pro — which bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation — was dropped off for repair at a Delaware computer shop in April 2019, but the individual who dropped it off never returned to pick it up.
. . .
In addition to his Ukrainian connections, other emails on the computer showed Hunter discussing potential business deals with China’s largest private energy company. One deal seemed to spark considerable interest with the younger Biden, who called it “interesting for me and my family.”
. ..
Hunter Biden’s position with the reportedly corrupt energy company — which paid him “as much as $50,000 per month” — “created an immediate potential conflict of interest” because his father was involved in US policy toward Ukraine, the report stated.
What do you get when you combine the complexity of the life-sustaining digestive process of mammals with the Internet's ever-churning entropic exploration into the far corners of informational state space? You get the "Four C's of Poop."
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