The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

Yet when asked what words popped into respondents’ heads first when they heard the word ‘feminist’, the single most popular word that came to them – indeed to more than a quarter of respondents – was ‘bitchy’.

Perfect word for this book..

For three years between 2014 and 2017 academics in the UK carried out a study about the images of men that women found attractive. The results, published in Feminist Media Studies, discovered a disturbing trend. Newsweek summed up the shocking findings in a headline, ‘Men with muscles and money are more attractive to straight women and gay men – showing gender roles aren’t progressing.’40 Indeed. ‘Progress’ will only be achieved when women find men attractive who they don’t think are attractive. What could be unachievable in that?

All the rage – including the wild, destructive misandry, the double-think and the self-delusion – stem from this fact: that we are being not just asked, but expected, to radically alter our lives and societies on the basis of claims that our instincts all tell us cannot possibly be true.

Point

Today our societies seem always on that run, and always risking extraordinary shame over not just our own behaviour but the way in which we have treated others. Every day there is a new subject for hate and moral judgement.

Depends what triggered the crowd really.. Like BLM ..

the internet has allowed new forms of activism and bullying in the guise of social activism to become the tenor of the time. The urge to find people who can be accused of ‘wrong-think’ works because it rewards the bully.4 The social media companies encourage it because it is part of their business model. But rarely if ever do the people in the stampede try to work out why they are running in the direction they are.

Point

We have had to try to learn how to live in a world where at any moment we may be speaking to one other person or to millions around the world. The notion of private and public space has eroded. What we say in one place may be posted in another, not just for the whole world but for all time. And so we are having to find a way to speak and act online as though we may be speaking and acting in front of everyone – with the knowledge that if we slip up our error will be accessible everywhere and always.

the ferocious winds of the present do not come from academic philosophy or social science departments. They emanate from social media. It is there that assumptions are embedded. It is there that attempts to weigh up facts can be repackaged as moral transgressions or even acts of violence. Demands for social justice and intersectionality fit fairly well into this environment, for no matter how recherché the demand or cause, people can claim to be seeking to address them. Social media is a system of ideas that claims to be able to address everything, including every grievance. And it does so while encouraging people to focus almost limitlessly upon themselves – something which users of social media do not always need to be encouraged to do.

As anybody who has spent any time there will know, the political atmosphere in Silicon Valley is several degrees to the left of a liberal arts college.

Social justice activism is assumed – correctly – to be the default setting for all employees in the major companies and most of them, including Google, put applicants through tests to weed out anyone with the wrong ideological inclinations.

Would you hire Hitler though? Say yes I dare you.

Twitter has decided what does and does not constitute hateful conduct, and has decided that trans people need protecting from feminists, more than feminists need protecting from trans activists.

I wonder why this book doesn't cover those who deliberately call the wrong gender or name? That why anti-hate comes from no?

The purpose of using ‘Manifest, Observable, Behaviour’ is to remove personal values and beliefs when the team is reviewing content. It’s a review method that’s entirely based on observable facts. What has a camera seen. What has an audio device recorded. It doesn’t matter what your intentions are, your motivations, who you are, your identity, your ideology. The Trust and Safety team only looks at ‘Manifest, Observable, Behaviour’.

Unconscious bias training may be able to make us distrust our own instincts and may even show us how to rewire our pre-existing behaviour, attitudes and outlook. It may make us pay attention to our own privileges, check them against the privileges or disadvantages of others and then choose where we can legitimately place ourselves in any and all existing hierarchies. Paying attention to the intersections may make people more aware of when they need to be silent and when they may be allowed to speak. But all of these are only corrective measures. They cannot start us off from a place of greater fairness. They can only correct us once we are on our error-strewn way.

Reactive

And that is why the tech companies are putting so much of their faith in ‘Machine Learning Fairness’ (MLF). For Machine Learning Fairness doesn’t just take the whole process of judgement-making out of the hands of prejudiced, flawed, bigoted human beings. It does so by handing judgement over to the computers which it ensures cannot possibly learn from our own biases. It does this by building into the computers a set of attitudes and judgements that have probably never been held by any human being.

I thought he advocates being a conservative

For instance, if you search for Google’s own example (‘Physicists’) on their image search, there is not much that can be done about the lack of female physicists.

Maybe hence the reason of support and extra care for female physicists?

Each line presents the history of European art as consisting largely of portraits of black people. Of course this is interesting, and it is certainly ‘representative’ of what some people today might like to see. But it is not remotely representative of the past.

Maybe the past is not exactly perfect and we all need to do something about it as a society? When you search human being do you expect to see monkeys instead? Catch up already.. Christ..

The first photo for ‘Straight couples’ is a heterosexual black couple, the second is a lesbian couple with a child, the fourth a black gay couple and the fifth a lesbian couple. And that is just the first line. By the third line of ‘Straight couples’ the results are solely gay.

Point

Whereas a search for ‘White couple’ will throw up a mixed-race and mixed-race gay couple in the first five images and then a white couple who have given birth to black babies by using black embryos, a search for ‘Asian couple’ returns what the searcher actually asked for.

Point

Whereas somewhere in the coding there has been a very deliberate attempt to upset, throw, disorientate or enrage people who are searching for certain terms. It appears that Google wants to offer the service it prides itself as providing for some people, but not for anyone who might be searching for heteronormative or Caucasian couples; these people would obviously already be a problem and must be refused and frustrated in their attempts to access the type of material they are after.

Point

It seems that in order to strip computers of the sort of bias that human beings suffer from, they have been set off to create a new type of non-bias. Yet this turns up a skewed version of history plus a new layer of bias that has been deliberately injected into the system by people intent on attacking other people who they regard as having particular biases.

Point

If there was a genuine chance of diminishing racism, sexism or anti-gay sentiment, who would not wish to seize it with every tool and engine at their disposal? The one overwhelming problem with this attitude is that it sacrifices truth in the pursuit of a political goal.

Political goal?

Almost all media and political response to them is unequivocally condemning of racism exhibited by people pursuing white ethno-nationalism. Yet the greatest backsliding on Dr King’s dream has not come from there. It has come from people who almost certainly believe themselves to be pursuing the same path as that which Dr King outlined on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963.

Oxford University’s Research Encyclopedia describes whiteness studies as: A growing field of scholarship whose aim is to reveal the invisible structures that produce white supremacy and privilege. Critical Whiteness Studies presumes a certain condition of racism that is connected to white supremacy.

The aim of ‘whiteness studies’, as Applebaum proudly states, is that it is ‘committed to disrupting racism by problematizing whiteness’. This is to be done ‘as a corrective’. So whereas every other field of race studies is performed in a spirit of celebration the aim of this one must be to ‘problematize’ hundreds and hundreds of millions of people.

Citing W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 observation that the ‘colour line’ is the defining characteristic of American society, she writes that ‘Unless white people learn to acknowledge, rather than deny, how whites are complicit in racism, and until white people develop an awareness that critically questions the frames of truth and conceptions of the “good” through which they understand their social world, Du Bois’s insight will continue to ring true.’

One of the primary principles of anti-racism in recent decades was the idea of ‘colour-blindness’ – the idea of which Martin Luther King was dreaming in 1963. The idea that skin colour should become such an unimportant aspect of a person’s identity that it is possible to ignore it completely – to get beyond race – is perhaps the only solution available,

Just as women can be told that we live in a culture so rife with rape that it can fairly be described as a ‘rape culture’, so too people behave as though they live in a society teetering on the edge of Hitlerism. One oddity in both cases is that the most extreme claims are made in the places least likely to experience any such catastrophe.

Point

Strangely, it is at precisely such places that the most extreme claims are made, and the most extreme behaviour is found.

Point.main

‘One’s right to speak – or to be – must never be based on skin color.’

‘Debate means you are trying to win. Dialectic means you are using disagreement to discover what is true. I am not interested in debate. I am interested only in dialectic, which does mean I listen to you and you listen to me.’

‘I’ve been told several times that I’m not allowed to speak because I’m white. This school seems to focus so much on race that it is actually becoming more racist in a different sort of way.’

The creators would have done well to instead cast an Asian actor as the reborn Takeshi, avoiding the same controversy that plagued last year’s Ghost in the Shell. In that adaptation, Scarlett Johansson played an Asian woman’s consciousness inside a white android.

Like Matt Damen played a worrier who defended monsters in ancient China? Come on now.. Don't Leave things out.

In recent decades it had already become completely normal and acceptable for people of any race to play leading roles in Western theatre or film. This row was meant to be over. It is almost two decades since the actor Adrian Lester (who happens to be black) was cast as Henry V by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

If you can whitewash why can't they colour wash?

A talented star had been bullied into submission.

You mean white talented stars who couldn't whitewash no more?

Afoko at any rate drew a different lesson from her reduction of her male colleague to tears. ‘It reinforced a lesson I learned throughout my 20s: most of the time it’s not worth trying to explain racism or sexism at work. Just get your head down and get the job done as best you can.’

Interesting

One obvious way to try to stop this digging down and down on race and racial characteristics would be to keep trying to blur the edges, for example by making those aspects of race which are able to be communicated and shared into an experience open to all.

Finally something contructive

Aspects of a person’s or a people’s culture which others admire may for instance be shared so that a greater understanding can be found across any divides that do occur. That might be an ambition. But sadly a theory got there before that ambition could be fully realized.

Main point.

It originated in post-colonial studies with the idea that colonial powers had not just imposed their own culture on other countries but had also taken back aspects of those foreign cultures to their own countries.

Instead, the least benign reading possible came into play, which was that this cultural theft was the last insult of colonialism, and that having raped a country’s natural resources and subjected its people to foreign rule the colonial powers could not even leave the subject peoples with their own culture unmolested or unseized.

I am sorry but colonialism happened with a malicious intent.

It had arisen over whether or not non-Mexicans should have the right to wear sombrero hats and elsewhere over whether people who were not from Thailand should be allowed to cook or eat Thai food.

Point

‘Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived.’

If these labels are not identities, if being gay or disabled is not a part of who you are, then why are hundreds of people abused, shamed, and killed everyday because of them?

bad example

I can’t speak for the LGBTQI community, those who are neuro-different or people with disabilities, but that’s also the point. I don’t speak for them, and should allow for their voices and experiences to be heard and legitimised.

The central problem underneath all of this is a colossal confusion, a confusion caused not by a misunderstanding but by the fact that as societies we are trying to run several programmes at once.

Main

On the one hand there is the programme which declares the world to be a place where a well-lived life consists of appreciating something from every culture and indeed making it easier to access those cultures. On the other hand we are running another programme at the same time which declares that cultural boundaries may only be crossed under certain conditions.

Not only has this second programme not been finished, but the job of finishing writing it appears to be open to absolutely...

Underneath this is a matter of such explosive danger that it is perhaps no wonder it is kept deeply submerged. It is a question we do not ask because we have already decided what the answers cannot be. That question is whether race is a hardware or a software issue.

people could be as much a part of another culture or people as they liked, so long as they wanted to be and immersed themselves in it in a spirit of gratitude and love. There were caveats in the later twentieth century, such as a recognition that this path could only allow traffic to move in one direction. An Indian may become distinctly British but a white British man could not become an Indian. The boundaries of what is or is not possible here shift subtly but continuously.

They shifted in recent decades around attitudes towards inter-racial adoptions, and whether or not it was beneficial or appropriate for children of one racial background to be brought up by parents of a different race. But the problem for us is that this whole territory is on the move again. And the early signals this time are not just that they could shift anywhere but that they look like they are shifting in some of the worst imaginable directions.

It suggests that you are only a member of a recognized minority group so long as you accept the specific grievances, political grievances and resulting electoral platforms that other people have worked out for you. Step outside of these lines and you are not a person with the same characteristics you had before but who happens to think differently from some prescribed norm.

Point

You have the characteristics taken away from you. So Thiel is no longer gay once he endorses Trump. And Kanye West is no longer black when he does the same thing. This suggests that ‘black’ isn’t a skin colour, or a race – or at least not those things alone. It suggests that ‘black’ – like gay – is in fact a political ideology. This presumption goes so deep – and is so rarely mentioned – that it is generally simply assumed.

Interesting