The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity
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The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice’, ‘identity group politics’ and ‘intersectionalism’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology.
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As he wrote about the graph that results from this, the ‘woke stuff’ that Millennials and others are presently using ‘to tear apart millennia of oppression and /or civilization . . . was all made up about 20 minutes ago’.
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their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind)
Andrew Powell
Great book!
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It is why The New York Times decides to run a piece by a black author with the title: ‘Can my Children be Friends with White People?’
Andrew Powell
Ha! Ha! Ha!
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Rather than showing how we can all get along better, the lessons of the last decade appear to be exacerbating a sense that in fact we aren’t very good at living with each other.
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After slaying the dragon the brave warrior finds himself stalking the land looking for still more glorious fights. He needs his dragons. Eventually, after tiring himself out in pursuit of ever-smaller dragons he may eventually even be found swinging his sword at thin air, imagining it to contain dragons.
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As anyone who has lived under totalitarianism can attest, there is something demeaning and eventually soul-destroying about being expected to go along with claims you do not believe to be true and cannot hold to be true. If
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The manner in which people and movements behave at the point of victory can be the most revealing thing about them. Do you allow arguments that worked for you to work for others? Are reciprocity and tolerance principles or fig-leaves? Do those who have been censored go on to censor others when the ability is in their own hands?
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Do we insist that the other party has the darkest possible motives unless they fully satisfy us that their motivations are otherwise?
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In recent years the accepted opinion on gay rights in America, Britain and most other Western democracies has shifted unimaginably, and for the better. But it has moved so swiftly that it has also seen the replacement of one dogma with another.
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Those calling for equality will always include a contingent who mistake exhibitionism for activism, feeling that nobody is free or equal until they have the right to dress in puppy gear and be led on all fours by a ‘master’ down a public street.
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And it soon became clear that anyone who thought ‘Can two men just make a baby?’ received the reply ‘Why not? Bigot.’
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This censorious tone – the prim schoolmaster tone – is the same one Pink News unleashed with a straight face in 2018, with its list of ten ‘dos and don’ts’ for straight people on ‘how they should behave in gay bars’.
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The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.14
Andrew Powell
Lol!
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Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay
Andrew Powell
I love these guys. Read Theories.
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In 2018, with the addition of Helen Pluckrose, the same academics managed to get a paper published in a journal of ‘feminist geography’ titled ‘Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon’.
Andrew Powell
Love it! ;))
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Those who have gone through these tests recount that there are multiple questions on issues to do with diversity – sexual, racial and cultural – and that answering these questions ‘correctly’ is a prerequisite for getting a job.
Andrew Powell
No wonder that girl who's dad was the president of Google Taiwan was such a snob.
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The one overwhelming problem with this attitude is that it sacrifices truth in the pursuit of a political goal.
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at Melbourne University in Australia academics have pushed for ‘whiteness studies’ to be made a compulsory part of training in completely unconnected fields.
Andrew Powell
Lol!
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I am not interested in debate. I am interested only in dialectic, which does mean I listen to you and you listen to me.’
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‘That’s not appropriate,’
Andrew Powell
That’s what I hear said to white people at BLM protest and straight people at gay bars.
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‘Empathy is not necessary for you to understand that you are wrong. OK’,
Andrew Powell
What? 😂
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‘Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words – even provocative or repugnant ones – are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.’
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Martin Luther King Jr had written his letter from a Birmingham jail because he had been imprisoned for effectively violating speech codes.
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Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of ‘subjectivity vs. objectivity’ as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. The idea that there is a single truth – ‘the Truth’ – is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we ...more
Andrew Powell
Lol!
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When would be the appropriate moment for a white woman such as herself to go to see Black Panther?
Andrew Powell
Whenever she had time and wanted to.
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‘Dear Caucasians’, the publication lectured its online followers, ‘If you’re attending Thanksgiving with black families, remember that our Thanksgiving has nothing to do with the colonization and genocide of Native Americans. Ours is a semi-religious ritual based on food, family and sweet potato pie.’
Andrew Powell
So is ours. 😕
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‘What it’s like to take a vacation away from white people’.
Andrew Powell
Lol!
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‘A couple of years ago I disagreed with a male colleague’s idea and he pulled me aside to tell me I was being aggressive. When I attempted to explain that the word aggressive is racially loaded he burst into tears.’
Andrew Powell
That sounds like the Ban Bossy campaign.
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the person who professes themselves most aggrieved gets the most attention.
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This was after a campus talk Owens had given at UCLA in which she castigated some people from the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement who were protesting against her and compared them with black students sitting in the front rows listening to her talk.
Andrew Powell
Would they have done the sae thing to a white speaker?
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What you’re seeing is victim mentality versus victor mentality.
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Consider for instance the reaction to the strange, and vaguely pitiful, case of Rachel Dolezal.
Andrew Powell
Lol!
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‘She’s taking on the ideas, the identities, the struggles. She’s identified with them. I bet a lot more black people would support Rachel Dolezal than would support, say, Clarence Thomas.’41 All of which suggested that ‘black’ was not to do with skin colour, or race. But only politics. So much so that a Caucasian wearing bronzer but holding the ‘right’ opinions was more black than a black Supreme Court Justice if that black Supreme Court Justice happens to be a conservative.
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But shortly before Cumberbatch’s interview the protocol had slightly shifted there. The new correct way to refer to ‘coloured people’ in January 2015 was as ‘people of colour’.
Andrew Powell
The People's Front of Judea vs The Judean People's Front!
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‘They were not human to me,’ writes Coates. ‘Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire.’54
Andrew Powell
Coates sounds like a racist.
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Lodge in a country with a very different history of race relations. When her book Why I’m no Longer Talking to White People about Race was first published in 2017 it immediately raised not only the same issues as Coates’s but received a comparable amount of plaudits and awards.
Andrew Powell
Lol!
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March 2019 Professor Robin DiAngelo of the University of Washington gave a speech at Boston University. DiAngelo specialises in ‘whiteness studies’ and has written a book, White Fragility.
Andrew Powell
Ha! Ha! Ha! DiAngelo is a joke!
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To her audience in Boston she also explained how white people who see people as individuals rather than by their skin colour are in fact ‘dangerous’.70 Meaning that it took only half a century for Martin Luther King’s vision to be exactly inverted.
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If it is the mob then we are in trouble.
Andrew Powell
Never apologize to the mob!
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Forgetting is not the same thing as forgiving,
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How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
Andrew Powell
Lol!
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If you are rich enough and famous enough, you can use PR people and the front cover of a men’s magazine to dress in a skirt and prostrate yourself before the swiftly moving dogmas of the age. Perhaps it is no wonder that an increasing number of people are persuaded that they should simply go along with those same dogmas. No questions allowed. No questions asked.
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Every age before this one has performed or permitted acts that to us are morally stupefying. So unless we have any reason to think we are more reasonable, morally better or wiser than at any time in the past, it is reasonable to assume there will be some things we are presently doing – possibly while flushed with moral virtue – that our descendants will whistle through their teeth at, and say ‘What the hell were they thinking?’ It
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During and after the ESPYs the American Football quarterback Brett Favre was lambasted first on social media and then in the rest of the media for not clapping Jenner enthusiastically enough.
Andrew Powell
Ha! Ha! Ha!
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one way Timothy had gone all the way around the oppression cycle. From woman, to trans, to white man and therefore to the personification
Andrew Powell
Lol!
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Consider a prominent male-to-female transsexual YouTuber like Blaire White, who on becoming a woman (prior to announcing a de-transition late in 2018, in order to father children) adopted the body type of a sort of teenage male fantasy pin-up woman: all prominent breasts, flicking hair and pouting lips.
Andrew Powell
I like Blaire White. I was wondering if this book would mention her.
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Nowhere in the world are the rights of trans people to attempt to live their lives the way they wish more protected
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The oppression matrix is not a great Rubik’s cube waiting for every square to be lined up by social scientists. It consists of a set of demands which do not work together, and certainly not at this pitch.
Andrew Powell
The Oppression Olympics.
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So here is another paradoxical, impossible demand. A person who chooses to be ridiculous without being ridiculed.
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